A Long Strange Trip (26 page)

15

Before the Fall (1/30/67–5/31/67)

On January 30, 1967, the Dead flew to Los Angeles to begin recording their first album at RCA Studio A, because there wasn’t a professional quality studio at home. Their producer was Dave Hassinger, whom they had requested because he’d engineered the Stones’ “Satisfaction” and the Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow. Lacking any studio experience, and most probably due to first-time nerves, they were deferential and utterly cooperative with Hassinger and the RCA staff engineers. It was a mistake that they would never repeat. Weir later denied that they were intimidated, arguing they were simply respectful of experience. For him the problem with the first album was that the engineers were certain that the only way to record was to play quietly, and that didn’t work for the Dead. “It didn’t fill out the same way.” Everyone but Weir and Pigpen was taking Ritalin, a stimulant, and the drug was reflected in the speeded-up—and sometimes slowed-down— versions of their material. They certainly failed to take advantage of their artistic freedom, and instead hyperactively recorded the bulk of the album in four days and mixed it on the fifth. It was not surprising that only a few tunes came out well, and those were the longer ones where they could jam.

The album material was from their normal repertoire, including Weir on Jesse Fuller’s “Beat It on Down the Line,” and Pigpen’s take on H. G. Desmarais’s “Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl.” Pigpen’s tune was particularly rushed in the recording, and failed to capture the richness of his voice, although his harp playing was brilliant. The album version of the traditional “Cold Rain and Snow” showed the way they’d totally adapted someone else’s tune, changing the melody and the rhythm, but the sound of the recording did not do them justice. “Sitting on Top of the World” had first been a hit for the Mississippi Sheiks jug band, but the Dead’s version was taken from Bob Wills by way of Carl Perkins. The album was essentially live. Because it was recorded on four-track, there would be more than one instrument on each track, eliminating the possibility of dynamic changes among the instruments.

The album was redeemed partially by three really good takes. Their one original tune (tune by the band, lyrics by Garcia), “Cream Puff War,” came out well, with Garcia singing the Dylanesque piece with a certain nasty panache. “Your constant battles are getting to be a bore / So go somewhere else and continue your cream puff war.” And the two tunes on which they stretched out, “Morning Dew” and “Viola Lee Blues,” showed what the band could do. During “Viola Lee,” Hassinger was in the studio with the musicians, puffing on a cigar, sparks flying as he grew excited by their performance, but he reverted to standard music practice by telling them and the engineers to fade out. In one of the few challenges to Hassinger’s wisdom, Rifkin can be heard on the tape saying, “Let them play.”

When they returned home, Joe Smith called and told management, as record companies will, “We don’t hear a strong single here.” The band chorused in reply, “A strong single, sure.” They sat down and worked up a tune, and not a bad one, but then made the fatal error of being literal, writing a song about what was happening just outside their door on Haight Street. Sue Swanson had suggested “The Golden Road to Unlimited Devotion” as a name for the fan club she was in the process of organizing, and they lifted it to make a song title. They combined an archetypal dancing girl with the Haight scene and chorused, “Hey hey, come right away / Come and join the party every day.” Ironically, the sound of this track, recorded in San Francisco, was vastly superior to the sound of the material recorded in Los Angeles.

Perhaps it was his beautiful new lover that Garcia was writing and singing about in “Golden Road.” He had long admired Carolyn “Mountain Girl” or “M.G.” Adams, thinking her, his first wife Sara said, “a lot like a man in her competence and fearlessness.” After all, it was M.G. who dealt with much of the equipment at the acid tests, since she somehow managed to stay focused. At Watts she’d worn the red, white, and blue of Wonder Woman, and the outfit seemed perfectly apt. What neither Sara nor Jerry knew at the time was that she was pregnant, running to vomit every half hour or so. Late in 1966 M.G. left the Pranksters, and with Sunshine, her daughter by Kesey, she fetched up at 710. The house had just acquired a kilo of Acapulco Gold, she recalled, “the best dope you could ever dream of.” Encouraged by such hospitality, mother and child came to rest for a while. By the time the band went to L.A. to record, she and Jerry had become lovers and moved in together. As grounded and organized a woman as someone not entirely of this planet could be, M.G. was from the beginning a slightly larger-than-life presence with the Grateful Dead. “Everybody loved her,” Weir recalled. “Although not everybody knew what to do about her.”

A band is a very fragile social institution. Musicians tend toward artistic self-doubt, and their ability to have mature relationships is frequently handicapped. With its cult of celebrity, the very nature of rock and roll breeds ego of the negative sort, and the celebratory setting results in a dangerous and seemingly inevitable flirtation with drug and alcohol abuse. Setting aside issues of sexism and the generally male nature of rock and roll for the moment,
anyone
of either gender who becomes close, sexually or otherwise, to a band member is almost always viewed with suspicion by other band members.

When M.G. arrived, the band had already established what Weir would call “I won’t say hierarchy—our social dynamics.” It was based on seniority and included only the musicians, with a little room for Rock and Danny. None of the lovers/wives at that time—Florence, Vee, Brenda— had any known impact on band decisions. Then in waltzed M.G., who didn’t fit the criteria. She had plenty to say, and “she wasn’t about to be denied,” said Weir. His analysis was that she rapidly concluded that the group was too tight to interfere with. “She very quickly retreated, not by dint of any defeats. She just realized that these guys have enough work to do to get it together to do this or that, and they don’t need another opinion.” It was one thing to work directly on one’s partner and quite another to work on the whole band. It was Weir’s opinion that the Dead’s behavior was neither misogynistic nor even paternal, just tightly bound with each other. “Those five opinions, maybe Rock and Danny, was about all we could handle.” It was frequently too much for the women. Late the previous year, Tangerine had correctly concluded that the Dead had a greater claim on Rock than she did, and departed. Just as M.G. arrived, Brenda Kreutzmann did the same. “The band always came first, and I was always in competition with it.” Taking her daughter, Stacey, with her, Brenda returned to her childhood home. It was also significant that over the years the women in the scene generally treated each other with affection and respect. The legendary nastiness and infighting among the wives of so many bands had no place at 710 or after.

The Be-In had been an almost perfect day, but it had enormous consequences, quite a lot of them negative. Their cover was blown, and their sweet little neighborhood scene was about to be inundated, first by waves of media sweeping in to investigate the emerging story, and then by the children and tourists who heard the news. Inevitably, some of the reporters were quite dense, but not all of them. Michael Lydon, an ambitious Irish kid who’d gotten into Yale and then covered “Swinging London,” came to San Francisco in January for
Newsweek.
He arrived just in time for the Be-In and loved it, and then exercised the reporter’s right to talk to anyone, showing up at 710, where he found Garcia a reporter’s dream as a quote machine, but also a positive, encouraging individual, a real person. Garcia opined that if he could live life on his own terms, so could Lydon. When Michael muttered that his secret ambition was to play the harmonica, Garcia replied, “Whyn’t you try it, get yourself a harmonica.” The encouragement worked, and over time Lydon became a musician. Their talk would turn into another
Newsweek
piece, “Drop Outs with a Mission.” Confident that it would be positive, the Dead even posed for a picture.

Late in January Jann Wenner showed up to talk with Garcia. Their conversation focused on the local music scene, which had once been “underground,” said Garcia, and “now everybody in the world knows who we are.” Touching on
A Hard Day’s Night
, Dylan, and Allen Ginsberg, Garcia expressed approval of even the teenyboppers Wenner wanted him to mock, and spoke of “hoping . . . that the people on the scene will start using their creative resources instead of a formula that works.” And, of course, he talked about drugs, as he would be required to do for many years. “I don’t think LSD is where it’s at, but it’s a symptom of where it’s at . . . There is something spiritual in everything that’s going on these days, and especially in rock and roll . . . A dance is a kind of celebration of the mind and the body and the senses. Music might be the one thing the earth has in the expanses of the cosmos.”

The March issue of the San Francisco–based radical magazine
Ramparts,
with a cover picture of Mouse holding an elaborate silver pipe, featured Warren Hinckle’s synoptic “A Social History of the Hippies.”
Life
followed suit with a piece by Loudon Wainwright that concluded, “Those I met use the word ‘love’ a lot . . . It is a weapon of astonishing powers.” On February 21, a stunning new ingredient became visible in the Bay Area’s social brew. Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow, came to the Ram
parts
office in San Francisco that day for an interview. She was escorted by members of the Black Panthers, a new political group from Oakland. Since they were dressed in black pants, black leather jackets, and black berets, and were quite legally and highly visibly armed to the teeth, they caused a sensation. Police, reporters, and TV crews converged on the office, and as the Panthers exited, the leader of the group, Huey Newton, confronted a belligerent police officer. “Man, you gonna draw it? Go ahead and draw it, you big fat motherfucking pig.” The cop was seized with discretion, and the Panthers left without further incident. Newton and his partner Bobby Seale had written their manifesto, “What We Want/What We Believe” (“We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace”) while listening to Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” and had already become friendly with the Diggers. They would practice street theater with a vengeance.

The Dead played on, visiting the outskirts for paying gigs and doing benefits at the Fillmore. The Invisible Circus, a planned Digger event at San Francisco’s interracial Glide Church, was supposed to feature Pigpen on organ, but he couldn’t make it. One weeklong booking that spring meant something personal to Garcia. A friend of theirs had started a nightclub in the Mission District, not terribly far from where Jerry had grown up. “I walked past the place a million times,” he said. “Near the funeral homes, the mystery part of my neighborhood.” His mother came one night during the run, and it was sweet to have her at the show. She asked him how he got his guitar to sound like a horn, and he was pleased, though not surprised, by her perceptive ear. He’d always played with the saxophone in mind, but it was especially easy that week. The opening act was the Charles Lloyd Quartet, with Jack DeJohnette and Keith Jarrett.

On St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, Warner Bros. released
The Grateful
Dead.
They had left the album’s visual design to the band, which was wise though unheard-of, and the cover was a collage by Kelley that incorporated pictures by Herb Greene and Gene Anthony. In a display of intuitive good taste, the band vetoed Kelley/Mouse’s notion of putting a quotation, “In the land of the dark, the ship of the sun is drawn by the Grateful Dead,” across the top of the cover. Variously attributed to the Tibetan or Egyptian
Book of the Dead,
but seemingly a piece of Haight Street apocrypha, it had been floating around the neighborhood for a while. As part of their small
-c
communism, their publishing credits were all attributed to McGannahan Skjellyfetti, one of Pigpen’s private jokes, derived from a Kenneth Patchen poem. For the single, Warner’s released “Golden Road” backed by “Cream Puff War.” Three of the album’s reviews stood out. Gleason noted correctly that it wasn’t as good as the band live, as did the magazine
Crawdaddy!,
where Paul Williams said that “only ‘Viola Lee’ has any of the fantastic ‘this is happening now!’ quality of a good Dead performance.” In the
Village Voice,
Richard Goldstein was balanced and reasonable: “Straight, decent rhythm and blues . . . feels spontaneous; it sounds honest . . . leaderless cooperation you seldom find in rock and roll.”

As the album was being released, Garcia amiably participated in two more interviews, the first with his old banjo student Randy Groenke, then with Ralph Gleason. Perhaps because Groenke was an old friend, their talk was exceptionally revealing. The night before, the Dead’s equipment truck had been stolen, and Garcia’s refusal to fuss about the theft was an example of the detached wisdom millions would come to attribute to him. He dismissed concern as “pointless,” hoping that no one would have to go to jail, and speculated that “maybe there’s some sort of spiritual due that we paid because we’re being successful, that means that now somebody can steal our equipment and not feel guilty about it.” No guru, he came across as modest, rational, compassionate, and sober. Asked to define “hippie,” he replied, “somebody who’s turned on . . . who’s in forward motion, uh, they might have been called progressive at one time . . . creative energy at its best.” The Dead scene is “more inclusive than exclusive” and “has to do with integrity . . . The point is, we’re not trying to be famous or rich, we’re just trying to make our music as well as we can, and get it out.” As to the music scene, San Francisco was “just a good place to live,” while “we’re trying to change the whole atmosphere of music, the business part of it . . . by dealing with it on a more humanistic level because it’s a valuable commodity.”

As the conversation drifted into politics, Garcia stayed sane. “The war is an effort on the part of the establishment to keep the economic situation in the United States comparatively stable . . . would I go? I would not go. I am totally against war. I’m against it not on any religious principles, but just because I could never kill anybody. And I don’t expect that in the natural course of things I would ever be brought to a situation in my head where I would want to kill anybody, or where I’d actually be able to do it. I just don’t want to do it. It’s a sin. It might be the only ‘sin’ that there is. It’s like anti-life . . . I don’t feel like I’m any kind of subversive force, you know; I feel like an American, and I’m really ashamed of it, lately.” Groenke was obviously wrestling with his own attitude on the war and pursued the question, asking about the causes of the war, which Garcia attributed to the pursuit of power, which he found meaningless. “Like having lots of money, or having a huge corporation, or something like that, it all represents power, but the kind of power it is is illusory, it’s not real power, it’s worthless. If you’re gonna die, you’re gonna die, and all the things that you’ve done in terms of your power and your money are of absolutely no value.”