A Long Strange Trip (66 page)

42

The Monster Revives (6/76–8/78)

The dragon breathed once more, and the Dead returned to the stage on June 3, 1976, at the Paramount Theater in Portland, Oregon. Appropriately enough, they began with a new song, “Might as Well,” Hunter’s tribute to the Great Train Ride of 1970. With two drummers again, they had actually given some conscious thought to what they should be up to musically, and it boiled down to simplicity. Though they would play “Cosmic Charley” and “St. Stephen” for some time, their general pattern was to play relatively simple material with authority rather than their most complex work, because their rehearsal time would be minimal. Lesh had preferred to stop singing rather than accept throat surgery, and so a number of tunes were put away for a while, including “Jack Straw,” “Candyman,” and “He’s Gone.” Garcia heard a tape of Kenny Loggins doing “Friend of the Devil” as a slow ballad, and transformed his own version into a dirge. Weir brought in the Reverend Gary Davis’s “Samson and Delilah” and a new tune he’d come up with during his Kingfish sojourn, “Lazy Lightning,” which combined 7/4 time, an R&B rhythm, and jazz chords.

Their first tour was in small theaters, with tickets sold directly to the Dead Head mailing list. Richard Loren and Bill Graham had never gotten along very well, not least because Bill continued to think of Loren as his former employee, and during the hiatus Richard and John Scher had developed a self-contained touring setup for the Jerry Garcia Band that included in-house catering courtesy of chef Sy Kosis, a solid production manager in Mo Morrison, good security, and a generally smooth style. Early in 1976, Scher came to Marin and sat on Weir’s floor for a four-hour band meeting. Garcia said, “John, explain to people how we tour,” and John outlined the virtues of keeping almost everything, especially catering, in-house. For the next nineteen years, Scher would handle Dead concerts east of the Rockies, with Bill Graham Presents continuing to work along the west coast. The first tour was a thundering success, even if it did take two squads of tactical police to keep the peace in front of Manhattan’s Beacon Theater. The legend of Heads trying to break in through a next-door basement by digging through the walls with knives was definitely apocryphal. The tour was marred only by an exceptionally egregious
People
magazine article, which the band had agreed to as a vehicle to promote
Diga.
What came out, thanks to an overly helpful record company source, focused almost exclusively on Garcia’s divorce from M.G. Simultaneously, the magazine covered rock and roll’s ascent into national politics. The gonzo drug king himself, Hunter Thompson, and Phil Walden, the head of Capricorn Records, were to be significant players in the nomination of Jimmy Carter as Democratic candidate for president, while the social event of the Democratic convention in Manhattan that bicentennial summer was the
Rolling Stone
party. Rock had come of age.

Two weeks after the small-theater tour ended in San Francisco, the Dead returned to the East Coast for two large outdoor dates, and it appeared that they had returned to business as usual. The summer ended in tragedy. Early in September, Rex Jackson was in the grip of a cocaine-fueled bender, and after several days of being tended by Mickey at the ranch, he’d worn out the drummer, who turned him over to Bear. On September 5, 1976, Rex was driving back to his home in Mill Valley from West Marin when his car went over the edge of the road, killing him in the crash. Rex was a special personality, the first crew member to accept a promotion to road manager. It was a considerable loss to the scene, robbing Cole, his son by Betty Cantor, and Cassidy, his daughter by Eileen Law, of their father, and the Dead family of a brother. Forty members of his extended family flew to Oregon for the funeral. Donna Jean Godchaux would write the song “Sunrise” for him.

The performance year peaked at Oakland Coliseum with two shows in mid-October with the Who. Hanging with the Who was fun. Garcia, Weir, and Keith Moon sat backstage together, and Garcia told Moon, “Congratulations on your fabulous record of trashing hotel rooms, man, it’s truly part of the tradition.” Weir interjected, “Is it true that you drove a rented car into a swimming pool?” Moon smirked,
“Rented?
That was my own bloody Rolls-Royce Silver Corniche,” then turned to Garcia and winked: “If you’ve got it, sink it.”

On the first day, the Dead choked, ultraconscious that the audience was not exclusively their own, and tried too hard. On the second day, they loosened up and it was a triumph, so much so that the Who dedicated their encore, “Shakin’ All Over,” to the Dead and their fans.

Having put the circus back on the road, the band’s other great need was to find a new record company. Even though their orientation, both aesthetically and economically, was to live performance, they shared the universal belief of American musical entertainers that a record company contract was essential. In a very few years, they would be able to challenge that assumption, but not yet. For the present, they were warily cynical. In an atypically cranky interview in 1970, Garcia had been asked his opinion of Warner Bros. and had griped, “Shitty. They have terrible distribution and they don’t sell records. That’s the only thing a record company is good for . . . They like to think they’re far out, but they’re not . . . A record company is a vampire. It’s really no fucking good. It’s an evil trip. It’s like bleeding musicians.” Later he calmed down and admitted, “I’m not really that far down on Warner Bros. because they’ve been OK to us. We’ve been a pretty weird band of fellows as far as relationships with artists and record companies. Warner Bros. has got some good people but I really don’t think that they know how to do it.”

Their search in 1976 would turn out to be pretty simple. “It wasn’t like a whole lot of people wanted us,” said Hart. Joe Smith had exited Warner Bros., and there was no inclination to return there. That left Clive Davis, who had signed the New Riders while at Columbia Records and made an offer for the Dead. In 1973 he had been ousted from Columbia in a pseudoscandal about petty cash that actually masked a corporate power struggle, and his breakfast date the next morning was with Jon McIntire, to whom he reflected, “There are people more powerful than me.” Davis had assumed leadership of Bell Records and changed the name to Arista, after a New York City high school honorary that he (and the Dead’s attorney, Hal Kant) had belonged to. It was a relatively small company in 1976, and the Dead gave it visibility. He attributed the Dead’s interest in Arista to a meeting he’d had with the band while they were planning for Grateful Dead Records. “I came up to San Francisco . . . [I said] I think you’re being naive—they were asking me questions about virginal [vinyl] discs, Good Humor trucks, offbeat, nontraditional, and it sounded good, but they were not aware of credit—so I, in a very, very factual way, not in any scoffing way, but treating them with respect that intelligent but misguided people deserve, I really made a very factual case for the warning signals they must consider and solve. The feedback was very positive over the next years.” Davis said that he was “touched” when the Dead called him in 1976, displaying a “faith and belief in a year-old company.”

At first sight, it was a relationship loaded with potential for disaster. Davis was hands-on, and the Dead were anything but open to guidance. A few years earlier, Jon McIntire had mused that if he’d driven his rental car through the front doors of Warner Bros., no one would have been surprised, since he represented a gang of lunatics and such behavior was almost expected. Later he’d used the word “apocalypse” in a conversation with Elliot Goldman at CBS, and Goldman had asked him what he meant. “. . . and I say I don’t think you really want to hear this right now.” “Yes, I do,’’ said Goldman. “So I started going on about the image of the apocalypse in visual art and literature . . . the crisis leading to the transformation.” In 1976, Hal Kant and Goldman, who had come to Arista with Davis, were able to go straight to business, and it was a fairly easy negotiation. It was a good deal for the Dead, though as Hal Kant recalled, “we were desperate, so the deal could have been better. It was supposed to be a five-year contract, and ended up as a twelve-year one [because of extensions on delivery of albums].” But it ended their relationship with United Artists and gave the band a fresh start with a record company.

Arista’s first hit was Barry Manilow’s song “Mandy,” and over the next twenty years, the company’s greatest triumphs would come in the pop world. Yet its relationship with the Dead turned out to be largely positive, in part because after their experience with running their own record company, they wanted someone, as then company treasurer Alan Trist put it, to “take all those headaches away.” Initially, Davis tried to make the kinds of specific musical suggestions he offered his other acts. In 1978 he wrote Richard Loren, “This might be an off-the-wall suggestion but I’ve come across a song that if restructured a little, could be a possible hit. Perhaps it’s too pop for The Dead but I thought I would submit it in any event to you for the group’s consideration . . . The song really would require strings, so once again I present this to you with some hesitancy. Since a hit single could add a million units to any Dead album, here’s the tape. If you feel it’s not in the Dead image, I understand.” Though it must have frustrated him when the Dead ignored his input, Davis concluded at length that the Dead, like their label mate Patti Smith, were visionaries that could not—and should not—be controlled. So even though Garcia sat at one of the meetings drawing a picture of a shark with Clive’s head on it, its teeth dripping blood, he kept his sketch pad to himself.

Davis’s primary demand was that the band use producers, and they did so for the next three albums, willing enough to get what Garcia called “fresh ears.” The first suggestion was Keith Olsen, who’d recently done a Fleetwood Mac album. It had a unified band sound and wasn’t overloaded with extras, so Phil pronounced himself willing. Weir liked Olsen’s style and was enthusiastically in favor. The rest of the band went along. As usual, the group had zero energy for the exhausting business of interviewing applicants. Olsen flew up to Marin and spent six hours talking with band members. At a second meeting the next day, he spent seven hours with Weir waiting for the rest of the band to show up. “Garcia never made it.” Olsen finally met Jerry the following week at the Burbank Studios, where he was working on
The Grateful Dead Movie.
The energy Garcia displayed at work excited both of them. Olsen was the first guy they talked to, and they grabbed him.

Early in 1977 they began work on the album that would be called
Terrapin Station,
and it would prove to be yet another Grateful Dead flawed masterpiece. Much of the material was brilliant. Weir’s main tune, “Estimated Prophet,” was one of his finest. Jamming in the studio, he came up with a 7/4 “carpet,” and “it freaked me,” he said. “I loved it.” Barlow was conveniently at hand, and they swiftly hammered a song into shape. Though not technically reggae, it had that feel. But no reggae band has a rhythm section that changed 7/4 into 14/8 to make it, as Kreutzmann put it, more “subtle.” The song’s subject, the prophet, was a takeoff on the crazed man-with-a-message who hangs out near every backstage door, what Barlow would call “a gonzo psychedelic derelict . . . but every once in a while, he’s standing in a shaft of light. It’s God’s shaft of light, it’s not just his; he’s not just brain-damaged.” There was a certain tension between Barlow and Weir, Barlow thinking Weir enjoyed complexity for complexity’s sake, Weir denying it. “I was just writing it because I wanted to hear it. I wasn’t trying to prove anything. I was just following my fingers.” But as Barlow remarked, “The tension [between himself and Weir] was perfectly attuned to the character we’re talking about, the utter madness.”

“Terrapin Station,” which would occupy side two of the album, was simply stupendous, and an eerily amazing example of simultaneous inspiration. One day that winter, Hunter had looked out on San Francisco Bay from his home on the shore at China Camp and seen a storm. The lightning flash on the water sent him to his table, where he began to write. His tale was universal and mythic, something he could have told a thousand years before around a fire pit. Derived from the English ballad “Lady of Carlisle,” which Hunter would also record in a solo project, “Terrapin” began with an invocation to the muse—“Let my inspiration flow / in token lines suggesting rhythm”—and went on to tell the story of the lady and the fan, and the two men who pursued her, a soldier and a sailor. He wrote for three days, producing one thousand words on eight pages.

As Hunter was madly scribbling away, Garcia was driving home from the East Bay to Marin, and halfway across the Richmond Bridge, within sight of Hunter’s home, he began to hear a song in his head. He raced home and got the chord changes down before he forgot them, and the next day went over to China Camp, where Hunter showed him his work. Of Hunter’s work, Garcia took the first page, half of the second page, and the last page. He fit the words to the music, showed it to the band, and had them work out their own parts. Very quickly, they had a new tune, if a majestic, rolling, near-symphony can be called a tune. Late in February they went to Southern California to try out some of the material and opened the first show with “Terrapin,” a version so good that Hunter got “about as close as I ever expect to get to feeling certain that we were doing what we were put here to do.” By April they were finished with the major recording. Thanks to higher percussion levels than usual and Olsen’s habit of selecting extremely unflattering takes for playback, the album sounded quite decent. With the Dead’s work done, Olsen flew to London, where he brought in Paul Buckmaster for an orchestral score that would complete the piece.

Meanwhile, and at very long last, Garcia was finishing
The Grateful
Dead Movie.
What had begun almost as a lark in 1974 was, in May 1977, approaching its end. It came at an extreme cost, both for Garcia personally and for the Dead as a whole. Eleven days before the “last shows,” he and Rakow had hired forty-six people to document them, including Leon Gast, Al Maysles, and Don Lenzer, who’d helped shoot
Woodstock.
There was no director. Occasionally, Gast would tell the cameramen who were shooting handheld to get off the stage so that the boom camera could get some shots that didn’t have cameras in them, but other than that, they were on their own. By the third night, the band had stopped noticing the lenses and the cameramen had synced into the rhythm of the Dead. Rakow informed an appalled Hal Kant that the movie budget was $125,000. Hal replied, “Ron, the amount of film you’re shooting here, four days and four crews, you will not be able to process the film—not editing, just processing—for $125,000. I don’t know what you’re paying your crews, but whatever you’re paying them, and then the whole postproduction—you have no budget here.”