A Long Strange Trip (71 page)

One of their most spectacular tiffs took place in the parking lot of Front Street, where they decided to play bumper cars with their BMWs. “I totaled both of them,” she said. Her behavior was more spectacular than Keith’s, but the pain was the same. A man of limited emotional resources, he simply drowned his torment in drugs. Too sensitive to handle life on the road, he also became a scapegoat. “People would see him doing things they were doing,” said Donna, “and put it all on him.” Given the Dead’s eternal rule of noninterference, the situation had festered for months. Garcia would simply moan, “Oh fuck, oh fuck,” said Loren. “Keith was just strung out, nodding, wrecking hotel rooms, and being really crazed.” It was painful to watch them, and it would get worse when they tried to get the rest of the band to take sides. As Hart put it, “The music became secondary to the soap opera that was going on.”

Finally, late in January 1979 in Buffalo, reality penetrated the haze. On the day that Sex Pistols member Sid Vicious died of an overdose, Donna Jean looked at her life. “Rock and Keith were doing smack, but everybody was doing something. My marriage was a travesty, Zion had no homelife, the band—after every show, one clique would be getting together to bad-mouth another clique . . . every week somebody was getting fired. It was all exactly the opposite of what it’s supposed to be about. I said to myself, ‘This is hell.’ So I called Robbie Taylor on the phone and said, ‘Get me my ticket, I’m leaving. This is it, I can’t handle this anymore. This is jive.’ ” With two days remaining in the tour, Donna Jean flew home. “When Keith got home, we talked and I said, ‘How do we get out of this?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know, but it’s going to kill us. It’s a monster, and it’s malignant.’ ”

Donna Jean concluded, “As a whole, in general, the Grateful Dead is not benign.” Certainly not to its band members. It is a full-range experience, as Garcia was wont to say, with the good and the bad in perhaps equal measure. It is a world of theater and illusion, and there’s plenty of evil around. Good or bad, it consumes. Keith and Donna had had enough. In February there was a band meeting at their house, and the message from the band was simple: “It’s not working out.” There was no argument. “You’re right, it’s not working out.” “Everybody agreed perfectly,” recalled Donna. “A million pounds lifted off of me.”

The previous October Garcia had played some Garcia Band shows with the Bob Weir Band, and he’d listened carefully to Weir’s keyboard player, Brent Mydland. As Keith sank deeper into the abyss, Garcia suggested to Weir that he send Dead tapes to Brent to study as a potential replacement. On March 1, Keith resigned from the band’s board of directors, and Brent became the new Dead keyboard player. Brent was a solid player and a fine harmony vocalist, and his musical contributions would be excellent. His lead voice bore an aesthetically inappropriate resemblance to that of the Doobie Brothers’ Michael McDonald, but a few years of booze and stress would roughen it into something much more suitable to the Dead. Unfortunately, in his lack of self-esteem, emotional blockage, and paucity of resources for coping with stress, Brent bore an eerie resemblance to Keith. Neither he nor Keith read, so neither had access to any sort of intellectual understanding that might help them cope with the hard, dangerous life of the Dead. And just as Keith’s bond with Donna ended up satisfying neither of them at the end of their stay in the Dead, Brent’s marriage to a lovely but extremely young woman, Lisa Sullivan, would lead to a marriage as raddled with confusion and pain as that of the Godchaux. Born in 1952, Brent had grown up in suburban Contra Costa County. After early classical piano training, he began to absorb rock, including Pigpen, then Jimmy Smith, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea. After a stint with a group called Batdorf and Rodney and a spell with an Arista band called Silver, he’d ended up with Weir. It would all prove to be too much too soon for him.

Mydland made his debut on April 22 at Spartan Stadium in San Jose, and as he learned the repertoire, the band began to add new material. “Althea” was a Hunter-Garcia love song that sounded the cautionary note of a man in his thirties, a certain weariness.

Ain’t nobody messin’ with you but you
your friends are getting most concerned—
loose with the truth
maybe it’s your fire
but baby . . . don’t get burned . . .
Can’t talk to me without talking to you
We’re guilty of the same old thing
Talking a lot about less and less
And forgetting the love we bring

Perhaps it is facile to see in this a message from Hunter to Garcia, but it is certainly tempting. At any rate, it was a song that, with all the rest of the material from what would be called
Go to Heaven,
would be considerably overplayed in the early 1980s. The Dead, said Weir, got stuck. His own “Lost Sailor,” which Garcia grumbled was simply “Weather Report Suite” run through a blender, was another of the 1979 songs that would be overplayed, partly because integrating the new band member necessitated some repetition, and partly because the band as a whole . . . was stuck. The year’s musical highlight was a side effect of technology. In August they played two nights at the new version of Winterland, Oakland Auditorium (later renamed Henry Kaiser Auditorium), a venerable hall that had over the years housed Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, a Jack Dempsey fight, and an Elvis Presley performance. It was worn, funky, and comfortable, and would be a good home to the band for a number of years.

The shows were the occasion of major new experiments in sound equipment and design by Healy and his new allies, former members of the Airplane/Hot Tuna/Jefferson Starship sound crew who would form a company called Ultra Sound, and a speaker designer named John Meyer. One of Healy’s other new associates was monitor mixer Harry Popick, who’d begun working for the Garcia Band during the hiatus. “We tried so many experiments,” said Harry, “so much equipment, in so many configurations . . . one night I might have one speaker cabinet in front of each person with everybody’s voice, the next night I might have three cabinets, each person in a different cabinet . . . Nobody was chicken. Nobody ever fell into a groove ’cause that wasn’t good enough, especially for the performers.” That August they began adding the first Meyer gear, the sub-woofers, and the result was awesome. The Dead Heads would nickname it Lesh’s “Earthquake” feedback, because the sound was so dense—not necessarily all that loud—but so tactile, so palpable, that it was possible to watch it roll through the audience simply by observing the physical reactions of each row.

That New Year’s Eve the sound experiments peaked. They combined equipment from several different sound companies with Ultra’s crossovers and got a five-way time-corrected stereo image that was perfect, among the best sound systems ever. Alas, it could not travel, and they would spend the next decade and more trying to give it wheels. The five show run in the last week of 1979 also established Oakland Auditorium as the new home for the Dead and especially Dead Heads. On the first night of the run, Bob Barsotti of Bill Graham Presents made a casual but far-reaching decision. There was a small park in front of the auditorium, and he permitted a number of Dead Heads to sleep there. By the end of the week they numbered in the hundreds. Over the next few years, camping at shows would become a tradition, establishing an ever more intimate relationship between Dead Heads and concerts. As Bill Graham welcomed in the new decade by soaring over the audience in a butterfly suit, two things would be retroactively clear: Dan Healy and company’s labors with the sound system, and the development of the subculture that was the Dead Heads, would be the most creative aspects of the Dead world in the eighties. The band would play on, the sound track to an evolving world, part of a general phenomenon called California-ization.

By late in the 1970s, the economic energy of the United States had begun to shift from East Coast (“rust belt”) cars and steel to California, home of the space industry, and then to the microtechnology and bioengineering of the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley. California had what Americans wanted—from hot tubs to food styles. Considered as a separate country, the state was the eighth largest industrial power in the world, with a growth rate during the decade that was four times the national average. It was the rootless social future, where divorce rates were 20 percent higher and affiliation with traditional religions was dramatically lower. It was the home of U.S. music and television, and that made it the center of the American dream—or nightmare, your choice. One fundamental change, the development of the personal computer, originated with the Home-brew Computer Club, whose members included Stephen Wozniak and Steven Jobs, a club with no dues, no rites, no bylaws. It most closely resembled one of the Stephen Gaskin–led discussion groups at the Family Dog on the Great Highway, but its technological focus and open sharing produced Apple computers. And out of the same sixties ambience came an emerging scientific theory, best stated in Fritjof Capra’s
Tao of Physics,
which made the psychedelic experience and quantum physics make sense together.

Wierdly enough, the Dead were at the center of that sociointellectual shift to the postmodern. Writing in
New West
around this time, Charlie Haas pinned the Dead phenomenon perfectly. “It is no coincidence that the Dead’s repertoire is so threaded with spookadelic images of disaster and treachery, that so many of the songs portray the universe as a tumble-down casino in which all the games are fixed . . . The common ground between the Dead and the young Heads is the belief that the way to meet an impossible circumstance is with voluntary craziness . . . It is the kids’ best guess that they have been born into the sudden-death overtime of Western Civ . . . And if the whole situation is irretrievably warped . . . it becomes incumbent upon the human to warp himself
into
shape.”

The Dead mostly stayed warped. As 1980 passed, they were in their second year of working on material for
Go to Heaven.
As John Barlow put it, “They came together over a long period of time and they kept seeming like they
were
together and then they
weren’t.
And the GD were in the studio for, Jesus, two years, and they had the same amount of material two weeks before they finished as they did two years before . . . doing overdubs like demented people. And I just lost all faith in it.” The lead Hunter-Garcia tune, “Alabama Getaway,” was an up-tempo version of “Dupree’s Diamond Blues” for the eighties. “Feel Like a Stranger” was one of Weir’s superior tunes, but the lyrics caused strife. Weir had visited a Marin County singles bar where Huey Lewis, then just short of becoming famous, was the leader of the house band, and had come away with a meditation on casual sex, early-eighties style. He and Barlow came to disagree over the lyrics. Said Weir, “[Barlow] was trying to throw in highfalutin’ concepts and stuff like that, trying to crowbar them into a song which didn’t want ’em—and he uttered the line ‘If there’s one literate man left in America, I’m writing for him,’ at which point I bolted, ran upstairs, locked myself in the bathroom. John kicked his way through the door and we went to the mats out in the hall for a little while.”

“Saint of Circumstance” was an interesting musical take on Stax-Volt rhythms and changes, although the phrase “I’m gonna go for it for sure” was a cliché on the day it was first uttered. “Far From Me” and “Easy to Love You,” Brent’s two contributions, with lyrics by Barlow, were fairly commercial love songs, and it was no surprise that Clive Davis was perplexed at hearing them in the context of the Dead. In fact, Brent even changed things in “Easy to Love You” to please Clive. According to Lesh, Davis interfered even more deeply. “Clive Davis actually went round the producer and made edits! . . . I think
[Go to Heaven]
is dogshit, I hate producers, if I ever have to work with one again I’ll probably kill myself.” Complete with a cover that portrayed them in white disco suits, the album was released late in April and actually enjoyed good sales, spending twenty-one weeks on the charts and going to no. 23. Most reviews were negative, from
Playboy
’s “Mediocrity on the march” to
Rolling Stone
’s “uninspired fluff.”

Discounting any motions to the contrary, the Dead were still capable of splendid doofusness. Despite considerable advance promotion of their June 7 and 8 shows in Boulder, Colorado, as a celebration of their fifteenth anniversary, the band was blissfully unaware of the significance of the date, and played an utterly conventional show on the seventh. After a postshow reminder, they managed a special song sequence—“Playing in the Band” into “Uncle John’s Band”—to open the next day’s show.

They were also still righteously in touch with whatever peculiar ethos it was that made them who they were. On June 12, in Portland, Oregon, they played “Fire on the Mountain” early in the second set, and as they played, Mount St. Helens erupted. “It was like I didn’t know it was going to happen,” said Kreutzmann, “but I knew it was gonna happen . . . We did ‘Fire’ and it felt great. I just loved it. After the song, during drums, somebody came onstage and said, ‘Hey, the volcano erupted at 9:18, while you were playing ‘Fire.’ ” After the show, Weir “went to my room, opened a window, and it went off again. I ended up in Rifkin’s room, listening to calls about trucks and logistics, watching
Alien
on the tube. It was surreal.” As one Dead Head put it upon leaving the hall that night, “We do not want to be on the wrong side of a Dead concert under any circumstances,” and proceeded to drive through a rain of ash and mud up Interstate 5, using his left hand to clear the windshield, going from a crawl to, at times, a dead stop in zero visibility conditions. He got through.

From there, the band went on another adventure, three shows in a high school in Anchorage, Alaska, which paid for a week in Hawaii using triangle tickets. Thanks to a free supply of bush planes available to the traveling party, at least some of the gang enjoyed exploring Alaska. Mickey Hart seized on the occasion as an opportunity for MERT to go into action, taking three eleven-year-old boys—Justin Kreutzmann, Rudson Shurtliff (Ram Rod and Frances’s son), and Creek Hart—as his crew. Each signed the MERT pledge—“Record more than you erase”—and crossed the Arctic Circle to record Inuit music, fish in the Bering Strait, and acquire Eskimo hoop drums, which would become part of Dead percussion in the coming years.