A Long Strange Trip (72 page)

The Dead also still managed to get into trouble. As they were leaving the stage in San Diego a couple of weeks later, several police officers were engaged in beating a young man they’d arrested for drug possession. Hart inquired if it took all six of them to do the job and was immediately arrested and placed in a choke hold, which with his old judo training he turned around before enough additional police arrived to arrest the man they called Bruce Lee. Weir protested and swiftly joined the booking process. Then Danny Rifkin rounded the corner, saying, “No, you don’t understand. This is our show.” This earned him a charge of participation in a riot, interference with police, and assault on police. In addition to incitement and assault charges for Hart and Weir, Weir and Rifkin were accused of “lynching,” trying to remove a prisoner from custody. Not surprisingly, all charges against the band ended up being dismissed, although the SDPD’s score versus the audience was somewhat higher.

On August 31, 1980, Bill Graham Presents ran a full-page advertisement in the
San Francisco Chronicle
’s entertainment section that depicted a male and female skeleton crowned with roses, with the caption “They’re Not the Best at What They Do, They’re the Only Ones Who Do What They Do.” It listed twelve dates (three were added later) in late September and October at San Francisco’s intimate (2,400 seats) Warfield Theater. It did not mention the name of the band, and of course it didn’t need to; all of the shows sold out immediately. Only a few months late, the Dead had decided to celebrate their anniversary, make a live album, and use some of their newfound
SNL
friends and production techniques for a long run at two venues, first at the Warfield and then at Radio City Music Hall, ending on Halloween night with a closed-circuit television broadcast. There would be three sets, an opening acoustic hour plus the normal two electric sequences, and for Halloween, there would be skits written by Franken and Davis that spoofed the Jerry Lewis muscular dystrophy telethon. The Dead’s telethon would also feature a “Jerry’s kid,” but the donations would buy him a dose of LSD and a ticket to the next concert. The Warfield run kicked off on September 25, and it was an extraordinary three weeks, with two people in particular getting the chance to shine: Dan Healy and Bill Graham.

With so many shows, Graham had an opportunity to go wild as a promoter, and he did. The lobby was magnificently decorated with a treasure trove of memorabilia from his own and the Dead’s collections. At his suggestion the sound crew placed speakers in the lobby so that those who wanted to dance could do so without standing in front of those who wanted to see from their seats. Every day he would dictate a critique of the previous night’s performance—not the Dead’s, but BGP’s:

. . . right slide projector did not work for first five minutes of intermission . . . glad to see that no one, not one, stood on their seats . . . food prices seem to be somewhat high, especially sandwiches . . . you see we have sufficient time and opportunity to gradually perfect the environment . . . early Saturday evening I came down the main steps from upstairs lobby, and it felt as if I were the operator of a Mississippi River gambling boat . . . the most important piece of work this company has ever done . . . Also, I want some lobby visual changes to appear after each off date . . . Make a sign for the water fountain in the rear on the main floor. Present sign not acceptable . . . Mr. Lesh has requested
hand towels larger than the ones presently available
to him. I must say, simply based on the amicable manner in which the request was put forth, I see no reason when we don’t attempt to comply with his simple wish. The only thing to be determined at this point is size, color and whether these are on consignment, a gift, or a sale.

In truth, the band’s contribution to the party was at a very good but not superior level. Brent was still being integrated, and their musical tendency was to play relatively safe. The acoustic set, the first in a decade, had been rehearsed only two or three times for half an hour or so, and Garcia’s acoustic touch at the beginning of the run was atrocious. But Healy and his (relatively) new henchmen, Don Pearson and John Meyer, overcame that by assembling a sound system and team that took live recording to a new level. Meyer, the man who would supply them with speakers for the next decade and more, was a Berkeley kid who’d worked for Steve Miller and then McCune Audio, the first of the Bay Area’s sound companies. In 1974 he’d gone to Switzerland’s Institute for Advanced Musical Studies, testing fifteen-ply Finnish birch and other esoterica to take speakers to a new level. By 1980 he had created the Ultramonitor, a quantum advance in the essential problem of high-volume music, that of helping the musicians to hear themselves while playing. Meyer focused on linearity— “what you put in, you get out”—to produce a sound that was as transparent and nondistorting as possible. To that point, loudspeakers like JBL and Marshall had been made for guitars and were nonlinear; they had a sound, which is to say they had a recognizable distortion. Unlike almost everyone else in rock, the Dead cared about dynamic range, playing both very quietly and very loudly. Since most bands simply wanted to turn it up to the mythical 11, the Dead were actually working in a territory that would be occupied by classical musicians.

Meyer built ’em; Pearson and his partner, Howard Danchik, brought them to Healy. Although he’d started as a photographer, Pearson had hooked up with Danchik, a Washington, D.C., high school friend of Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen, and they’d all ended up working together for Hot Tuna. At the Warfield, Wizard and Pearson acted as engineers for Bob, Betty, and Healy, and were utterly necessary. There was so much tape being pulled at the Warfield that they needed a database just to keep track of what would turn out to be eight hundred reels. Healy had placed microphones at various layers out from the stage, with the goal of creating an aural hologram. The results were
Dead Reckoning,
an acoustic double album, and
Dead Set,
an electric album.

The fall was an adventure in more ways than one. Though they had sent blueprints of the Neve recording console ahead to Radio City Music Hall, someone at Radio City goofed, and when they arrived, they found that they could not get the console into the allotted room. Mickey Hart, observing, shouted, “Take the doorjamb out,” and sledgehammers removed two inches of a national landmark. This was not their last problem with Radio City. Bill Graham’s stage manager, Peter Barsotti, and his friend Dennis Larkin, had designed a wonderful poster in San Francisco that had one of the rose-crowned skeletons leaning on a depiction of the Warfield. Then they added a second poster of the skeletons with Radio City. In a remarkable display of noncommunication, Radio City’s management became convinced that the poster was in fact a secret insult to the venerable theater that suggested the hall’s “impending death,” and filed a $1.2-million suit against the band. The suit was dropped when Radio City came to understand that this was not the point and the band agreed not to use the poster at that time.

Two images from the fall’s run resonated afterward. One was the Associated Press photograph of the line that sprang up around Radio City Music Hall three days before tickets went on sale, a line that literally encircled NBC’s offices at Rockefeller Center. The media coverage of that line and the Dead Head phenomenon was enormous. The second image was provided by Bill Graham. When the Dead left the stage after their last set at the Warfield, they returned for their encore to find a small table with glasses and champagne in a silver bucket. Garcia went over to the table, did a take, cocked his eye, and picked up a glass. As he did so, super trouper spotlights splayed over the audience, revealing each member with a raised glass of his or her own toasting the band, as a garland of roses hung off the balcony along with a sign that read, “Thank You.” It was a classic moment.

46

Interlude: Beyond the Zone

(END OF SECOND SET)

December, McNichols Arena, Denver

Garcia wheezes in the mile-high air as he walks from the van to the stage, and agrees that, on the road, to quote Gilda Radner’s Roseanne Roseannadanna character, “It’s always something.” The definition of boredom for Scrib will, to the day of his death, be one endless hot summer Sunday in Cincinnati, in a cheap hotel with nonfunctioning air-conditioning, where the only two movies in walking distance were
Rambo
and something worse, where his TV got two stations and the radio sucked. By contrast, almost every member of the Dead tour will define terror as the flight to—was it Milwaukee?—where the sky was solid lightning for virtually the length of their journey, and no one was ever quite sure how they survived.

As the last notes of Hart’s Beam solo bounce off the back wall, Garcia and Weir contemplate the evening’s performance of “Space.” It is the direct musical heir to the acid tests, with roots in Ornette Coleman and Charles Ives, a place where something truly original will be played once and only once. There are no rules. On occasion, and usually in the form of a joke, Garcia and Weir will give a name to the upcoming jam, but the mandate is simply to make it new. In Las Vegas once, Healy contributed the sampled sound of slot machines. Another time, they miked a Harley motorcycle, and Parish sat in on throttle. Train whistles have been popular, as was the sound of frying bacon—until a furious Mickey poured the contents of the frying pan, which had been plugged into Garcia’s twin reverb amp, all over Garcia’s amp when the pan wasn’t hot enough to produce a sizzle. Ram Rod cleaned up the mess and then announced, “That’s the end of bacon.” In Baltimore one year, Lesh honored Poe by improvising a rant on “The Raven.”

Tonight, Panaspots sheet the front of the stage, leaving the guitarists in darkness. As Garcia tunes in the shadows, a very straight visiting couple passes behind his amp and gives him a big thumbs-up. He never sees them as he steps out to his spot. His hands flutter like insect wings up the neck of his guitar, but his body never moves. Weir bangs his guitar with his slide, Lesh leaps into a lead, and Garcia follows him in some dissonant progression. His note line flutters and races, darting first like a butterfly, then starts a riff that repeats and rises. Then he doubles the riff with a digital delay that allows him to play harmony with himself. Weir falls in with a second harmony sweeping behind him. Candace blackens Garcia’s face, makes it a dark hole, then gives him a halo. They take every musical chance, fall to pieces, and then come back and reassemble. It’s not rhythmic, nor really attached to any Western musical norm.

In the midst of chaos, Weir begins a figure, a rhythmic extract of Miles Davis’s
Sketches of Spain
that the band has played dozens of times since 1968 and never bothered to name. The Dead Heads call it “Acid Bolero” or “Spanish Jam,” and it is stately, classic, and heavy, leading straight into their masterpiece for improvisation, “The Other One.” Still in his digital delay, Garcia picks up the beat of “The Other One,” their supremely spooky-weird reification of the Bo Diddley beat. Extended and pushed in those weeks of inspiration in the fall of 1967 into a psychedelic musical wavelength that patrols the downside of the psyche, it pauses and shifts, each musician acknowledging the riff in his own way. Garcia leads, defining quest, exploration, and change, the song a demand to find out what’s possible in a tune you can dance like crazy to. Brent piles up the synth chords, Garcia charges, Lesh pounds, Kreutzmann and Hart stroke the pulse, it repeats, repeats not incrementally but exponentially, the guitar riding a mountain ridge of screaming upper register notes at the top that unites an entire slabbed mountain of melody that settles into Weir’s first verse, then another break, and then the second verse: “The bus came by and I got on / that’s when it all began / There was cowboy Neal at the wheel / of the bus to never-ever land.”

And the audience sings along, screaming now, for this is what the Dead is all about—a voyage, a search, a quest, perhaps sacrifice and martyrdom. This isn’t the entertainment business, pal. “We’re in the transportation business,” said Hart. “We move minds.” Sound is made into something solid and real, tactile as a punch in the face, architectural designs evanescent but no less distinct, cloud-capped peaks and rainbows, human cries and a voice torn by Healy’s octave splitter into a triple echoing blast.

December, Compton Terrace, Phoenix

An Ultra guy scoots by, yelling “Tape, tape.” Someone throws him a roll of gaffer’s tape, and he fixes Brent’s microphone control box, which is slipping. The band goes into “Throwing Stones,” one of Weir’s typically eccentric compositions, one that—most unusual in Western music—begins on a dominant chord, and thus is balanced with a jam in the middle from the Bahamian tune “Bye and Bye.” Weir slashes chords on every third beat; they come to fullness, crescendo, then into a slinking, insinuatingly quiet riff. Brent picks up the lead, and Weir steps to the microphone:

And the current fashion sets the pace
Lose your step, fall out of grace.
And the radical, he rant and rage,
Singing someone’s got to turn the page.
And the rich man in his summer home,
Singing just leave well enough alone.
But his pants are down, his cover’s blown . . .

And the politicians throwing stones
So the kids they dance
And shake their bones,
And it’s all too clear we’re on our own.
Singing ashes, ashes, all fall down.
Ashes, ashes, all fall down . . .

December, Oakland Coliseum

As the show nears its end, tour manager Cameron Sears paces behind the stage. Settlement is done, and the band has been paid. The vans are moving into position behind the stage. Onstage they have reached the “Garcia weeper” slot. Though open to variation, the drums are generally followed by a Weir rave-up, then a Garcia ballad—“Stella Blue,” “Black Peter,” various others—and then a Weir rocker to close the show. Because it is a good night, Garcia slides from “Stones” into
the
great closer, “Morning Dew.” Written by Bonnie Dobson in 1961 after seeing
On the Beach,
it is a postapocalyptic conversation between the last man and last woman on earth. Laird Grant had come across the song on a Fred Neil album late in 1966 and brought it to Garcia. What the Dead would do with it over the next decades would be an ultimate example of postmodernist deconstruction. The Dead’s “Dew” is a simple folk tune exploded into structural basrelief like a DNA double helix diagram, enlarged, highlighted, colored, texturized, and thrown in the audience’s face, equalized, blown up until it rips out brain cells, so slowed down and clarified that you can see every pattern, every possibility, and watch the band choose among them.

“Walk me out in the morning dew, my honey . . .”

The sound seems a little ragged, and Parish, a slight smile of satisfied comprehension on his lips, calls over Ram Rod, picks up a power drill and a new speaker for Garcia’s rack, and with Ram Rod behind and himself in front, replaces the blown speaker in about forty-five seconds. The sound is now pure and sweet, and he swaggers slightly as he returns to his cave. “You have to completely surrender,” to play a ballad, said Kreutzmann, and they do. It builds and builds, and they play the variations like a waltz of light beams, first Garcia and Lesh playing counterleads with Brent and Bobby on rhythm chords, then Garcia and Brent take the lead, Phil and Bobby support, and then Garcia and Weir . . . like some kind of liquid gear assembly that can move in four directions simultaneously. Garcia’s guitar simply squeeezes out the lead, the same sure descent but with overtones of pathos and majesty, repetition for the gods, and then they send it
up
one more time and then speed it up and split it into a shimmering waterfall glissando of grace notes, tears from the goddess muse. And a little shitty feedback, too. There is a death samba at the end of the second verse, slow, Zen playing, the statement of sanity as the one ideal, notes like quicksilver fill every available sonic space, all six at once, existential final statement/question, and Garcia’s voice is exactly right as he sings “I thought I heard a baby cry this morning,” sings it for the family’s dead children, and the ones to be born, and they come to the final jam, his guitar bucks, moans, and dances, the scales start, like tap-dancing up a frozen waterfall, and suddenly Garcia hits a note like a dentist’s drill bursting straight down to the nerve, the true note impossibly painful and alive, the audible edge, and six streams of music pour into one, edging into each other, coalescing with each other, a dance of six patterns and all the possibilities of meaning, reflection, refraction, and acceptance, all the way to a love supreme at our hearts.

Garcia croaks out the last line, “I guess it doesn’t matter, anyway,” and twenty thousand people know that he’s right.