A Long Strange Trip (33 page)

They had the material, and they had a fundamental approach, which mixed the implicit access to polyrhythms created by having two drummers with a unique musical foundation propounded by a bass player who contributed not a simple tonic bottom end but was instead, through counterpoint, a harmonic coleader. Over the next year, in the playing of “The Other One” and “Dark Star,” Lesh and Garcia would lead the band through explorations that rock and roll had never imagined, a four-handed guitar-and-bass-as-one-instrument that was something altogether new. In the course of the fall’s shows, the six of them took their new material and became the Grateful Dead. Playing together night after night while high as could be, they quite often found themselves in a state of grace, and they discovered that they were on a mission from God, serving the universe and evolution. They came to realize that the Dead was far bigger than the sum of six souls, and in fact had become a beast quite separate from them as individuals. As one of their best critics, Michael Lydon, noted somewhat later, “Certainly they are the weirdest [band], black satanic weird and white archangel weird. As weird as anything you can imagine, like some horror comic monster who, besides being green and slimy, happens also to have seven different heads, a 190 IQ, countless decibels of liquid fire noise communication, and is coming right down to where you are to gobble you up.” And in playing they found faith. They were still painfully human, often inept, and certainly torn by their human frailty. But in the background, always, there was a shining faith. Six charmingly demented loons had been touched by the divine. Clearly, God has a sense of humor.

Their visit to Los Angeles contained one splendidly goofy moment. They joined members of the Jefferson Airplane and met the Beatles’ own guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He remarked in passing that they should be called the Eternal Lives, but the band just smiled. After he spoke on transcendental meditation for a while, Rifkin remarked, “That sounds like what we’re doing anyway.” “No, not
any
way,” chirped the Maharishi. “Only through transcendental meditation.” Touché, thought Danny, a fairly quick response. But he and the band lost all respect when the time came for them to be given the secret mantra and the Maharishi spoke only to the band, relegating the rest of the entourage to an assistant.

In mid-December they played again at the Shrine, performing “Dark Star” in public for the first time, and then headed east to New York, in part to gig, but primarily to record. They had purchased a Dodge Metro van for the equipment, along with Rakow’s International Harvester, and Healy wired the vehicles with CB radios, which would help when the brand-new Metro ground to a halt—in the Sierras, then in Salt Lake City—and when one vehicle was pulled over in Nebraska and the other vehicle pulled up behind the cop car. They were psychedelic guerrillas sneaking through mid-America, and it was good to have a link to friends—that very week, Jim Morrison was arrested in New Haven after bad-mouthing the police from the stage, and Otis Redding’s plane went down over Wisconsin the next day, killing all aboard. Rifkin had asked Zonker, a Prankster, to drive the truck cross-country, as he had in June, but Zonk canceled with a promise to send a substitute. Early in December, a short, muscular hippie showed up at 710 and said, “I hear you’re looking for a good man.” He introduced himself to Rifkin as Larry and asked if he could bring his old lady, Patticake, and that was fine. How about my friend Hagen? Sure. The three of them moved into the attic and made preparations for the trip to New York.

Larry Shurtliff was the last essential piece in the early Dead’s evolution. Born in Montana and the product of eastern Oregon ranch country, he’d already passed through a variety of lives, winning a blue ribbon in beef judging as a sixteen-year-old and spending time as a Mormon practitioner, then ending up as the proprietor of a midnight auto supply company in Hermiston, Oregon. His buddy John Hagen brought him to hang out with John’s brother Mike’s friends, who happened to be called the Merry Pranksters, and in the summer of 1966 Larry and John had gone to Mexico, where among other things he first experienced LSD in the cozy confines of a Mexican jail. Another day, the Pranksters were faced with the chore of fitting seven people into a VW Bug. When Kesey asked for somebody to ramrod the process, Larry proclaimed, “I am Ramon Rodriguez Rodriguez, famous Mexican guide.” Ramon Rodriguez Rodriguez instantly became “Ram Rod,” because that’s what he was. He’d spent enough time riding shotgun with Neal—“More bennies, Rod”—to be far from straight, but he was still a rock, the quiet, honest man who over the next years would become an internal balance for the band.

After a brief stay at New York’s Chelsea Hotel, where Kreutzmann came back to his room to find thieves rifling through his belongings, they moved out to another “pink house,” this time the Englewood, New Jersey, home of Weir’s friend Mark Dronge, the son of the owner of Guild Guitars. Phil’s lover, Florence, would cherish one memory of the house in particular: Pigpen in a black leather fleece-lined coat and boots—and nothing else—going happily bananas over his first sight of snow about three o’clock one morning. Mostly, they worked hard. In the evening they recorded at Olmstead Studios on 48th Street, the home of the Lovin’ Spoonful, and from midnight to 6 A.M. at Century Studios on 52nd. They were still approaching the recording process in a fairly conventional manner, but these were eight-track studios, and they had a great deal to learn. Their producer, Dave Hassinger, smoked his cigars and tried to stay patient, but it was clear that this album was not coming together in any “normal” way. Just the opposite. The Dead dismissed as irrelevant the received notions of music and how to record it that the record companies and their engineers had developed. It was the band’s job, thought Weir, to ignore that.

The end came when they were working on “Born Cross-Eyed.” The song was intrinsically odd, because it began on the second beat; although there was a “one,” they disregarded it. Consequently, everything was off. As Hassinger told the story, he got along well with everyone in the band except Phil, who was difficult and demanding. Dave wanted the band to sing as a group to cover individual weaknesses, a notion the band apparently rejected. After the recording sessions in New York, Hassinger went back to Los Angeles and talked with Joe Smith, and they agreed that he’d had enough. The Dead would recall their separation differently. At one point in the session, Weir asked what it would be like to record with “thick air.” Years later he would understand exactly what he meant and how to produce it—namely, the feel of a hot, humid summer night, created with an audio compressor, which literally thickened the sound. But Weir wasn’t all that great at explaining. “Thick air? He wants thick air?” groaned Hassinger, throwing up his hands and leaving in frustration.

Whatever the precise scenario, Hassinger absented himself from the sessions, and the band was set free—and momentarily adrift. As usual, there was simultaneously plenty of other drama going on in their lives. Weir, having promised for weeks the imminent delivery of the lyrics to “Born Cross-Eyed,” was now forced to confess that he still hadn’t written them. Then Bob Matthews, the crew chief, decided that he did not like the intense new drummer, Mickey Hart, and refused to work for him. One day in New York, Sue Swanson came to Ram Rod and said, “Matthews is fired. You’re our new equipment manager.” “What?” New York City itself was a considerable challenge to the San Franciscans. Kreutzmann and Healy went to return some rented equipment, and their long hair triggered a distinctly unpleasant reaction from the shop manager, who refused to let them unload. Bill began dumping equipment into the snow at the rear of the building, with Dan holding the enraged manager off with his feet. The gentleman left, then returned with a fire ax. They split, circled the block, returned, kicked out the remainder of the gear, and fled.

Between recording sessions, they worked some shows, to varying success, in New York and for one weekend in Boston. Warner Bros. had sent them to their first agent, a man at Universal Attractions named Marty Otelsberg, and he had booked them their first shows in Boston, at the Psychedelic Supermarket, on the parking level of an office building on Boylston Street. Though he’d gotten them a new, higher rate of $2,500 (minus 10 percent), the concrete venue was an acoustic nightmare. The band organized a couple of shows on their own just before Christmas at New York City’s Palm Gardens with the Group Image, and it was fun to be back with hippies. In fact, it was the most successful Group Image show ever. After Christmas the Dead did another do-it-yourself show at the Village Theater, the old Loew’s Commodore, on 2nd Avenue. The building was essentially a wreck, and snow actually came through a hole in the roof while they were playing. It was so ungodly cold that the drummers played in gloves and people built a bonfire on the floor in front of the stage. Paul Kantner stopped by with a stash of Ice Bag, excellent pot so called because of its packaging. The weed helped, but it was still an odd little gig.

They flew home, and as the year ended, most of them wolfed down some pot pound cake and fell asleep. Mickey and Bobby went to Winterland that night, and as midnight approached, Weir took the pack of Pall Malls out of his drummer buddy’s pocket, looked at him with tears in his eyes, said, “You’re killing yourself,” and crushed the pack under his heel. Moved by his friend’s sincerity, Hart never smoked another cigarette. Despite his generally healthy regimen, Weir was a smoker and, ironically, remained one. Kreutzmann, Ram Rod, and Matthews were still driving the equipment truck back across the country, and December 31 found them in a motel in Omaha, where they celebrated the new year by splitting a pint of bourbon.

Sitting on Rifkin and Scully’s desk was a letter from Joe Smith, dated December 27. Joe noted that the New York tapes were being sent and that the album was planned for a February release, which meant that art was needed “almost immediately.” There was “no time for delays or indecision as we must have the package on the market as quickly as possible.” The recording in New York had been “very difficult. Lack of preparation, direction and cooperation . . . have made this album the most unreasonable project with which we have ever involved ourselves . . . Your group has many problems . . . It’s apparent that nobody in your organization has enough influence over Phil Lesh to evoke anything resembling normal behavior.” They were “branded as an undesireable [sic]” group in the L.A. studios, and in New York they’d run through engineers “like a steam-roller.” It was all due to a “lack of professionalism.” Joe harumphed in closing, “Now let’s get the album out on the streets without anymore
[sic]
fun and games.”

As the new year 1968 dawned, the Dead copyedited Joe’s grammar and punctuation, graded the letter, and sent him an edited copy with corrections, but did not worry too much about his deadline. Warner Bros. thought it had experienced the ultimate in abuse from an artist after their treatment at the hands of Albert Grossman and Peter, Paul and Mary, but this was something new. It was true that Lesh was impatient, sometimes much more intelligent than those around him for comfort, and sometimes difficult. Garcia would say of Phil and Bill Graham’s relationship, “Oh, boy. Phil used to just jump all over Bill and Bill would scream at him and I mean they would get into some
shit.
Because Phil has a little of that beatnik attitude. ‘Fuck
you,
man!’ You know?
Fuck you!
He’s got a little of that edge . . . And when he was younger, he was a short-fuser. It didn’t really matter what it was about. Usually, it was just personalities.”

But the delays and changes in the recording of the new album were neither wanton nor willful. They were the consequence of experimentation and self-education. School was in session, and the students had taken over the classroom. Real education was in progress, and Joe Smith was paying for it—after all, their contract allowed them unlimited studio time, and they would take the contract, like so many other things, to the limit. In New York, the band had met and agreed that Dan Healy could handle the job of replacing Hassinger, and they all began to talk. The first thing they’d recorded was “Cryptical Envelopment,” which sounded unusual because they’d run Garcia’s voice through a Leslie, a rotating speaker made for Hammond organs. By the time Hassinger had left, they had perhaps a third of an album recorded, including “New Potato Caboose,” part of “The Other One,” “Born Cross-Eyed,” and “Alligator.” Now Phil suggested overlaying tapes of live Grateful Dead music with the studio versions to create many Grateful Deads, with the music opening up, poetically speaking, into waves of energy like a lotus coming out of the void. By the end of the meeting, they had at least a dim notion of where they were going.

It was good for Joe Smith’s nerves that he remained ignorant of their plans.

19

Interlude: Purifying the Elements (SETTING THE STAGE)

Michael “Fish” Fischer is hauling ass. He is herding the Dead’s own white Peterbilt tractor, and storms have made him a little late, although the 425 horses of Caterpillar motor under the hood and fifteen-speed overdrive at his touch mean that he can do 100 mph, and he’ll soon make up the time. The forty-eight-foot Great Dane trailer behind him is packed with the tools of the Dead’s trade, and they are, with office and studio equipment, pretty much all the band collectively owns. The tape deck is turned up to ten with the truckers’ national anthem, “The Bandit’s Tune,” as he reaches for the last gear.

Along with gaffer’s tape, guitar strings, and batteries, trucks are a fundamental element in the structure of rock and roll. Somehow, in all their years of touring the United States, the Dead never lost a show to a lack of equipment, and it was not always easy. On one occasion in Virginia, Paul Roehlk, Fish’s predecessor, was seriously late, and in a scene stolen from the movie
Smokey and the Bandit,
Dead Heads on the interstate recognized the truck and formed a convoy that allowed him to cruise past the police and make it to Richmond on time. Before a Boston show in 1973, the truck foundered in snow out on the Massachusetts Turnpike, and it took a Sikorsky Sky Crane helicopter to pull it out. The truck arrived at the theater at 5 P.M., and the band and crew managed to put on a show that night, though it began around midnight. Then there was the time that a rookie driver burned out his truck’s brakes in the Sierra Nevada and had his life and his load saved by Bill “Kidd” Candelario, who was driving the truck behind him. Candelario managed to get his own rig in front of the first one and gradually slowed down until they both could come to a halt. No equipment, no show.

The setup of the equipment is a combination of engineering and art. It is a ballet, a construction project, and a feat of diplomacy. And it is usually a very long day.

7 A.M. The smell of frying bacon drifts through the backstage area as the guys in the catering crew begin their
very
long day. First in to work, they’ll be the last out, finishing around 2 A.M. Nicknamed the Binky Boys by production manager Robbie Taylor, John Markward, David Miller, and chef Jim Voss prove that Napoleon was right: this army travels on its collective stomach.

8 A.M. Load-in, the setup of the stage equipment, sound system, and lighting, is a drama all its own. Every venue and the resulting access to the stage are slightly different, and the way things go into (and thus come out of) the truck vary. The various crews’ workday consists of putting a puzzle together, and it’s a new puzzle at each load-in. As the trucks open, the riggers clamber around the ceiling like monkeys, setting the points, the hooks from which the sound and lights will hang. At one venue, refrigeration units in the ceiling make a normal hang impossible, and they work around them, offsetting the points with a bridle. Another theater has a Bauhaus pressed-wood roof, all swoops and arcs, and there are no points at all; the speakers must be stacked on the floor.

Access to the stage is frequently problematic. In Edinburgh, Scotland, the crew had to load equipment into a gondola, to be hoisted six floors up to the stage. Red Rocks, the marvelous natural amphitheater above Denver on the edge of the Rocky Mountains, is deeply flawed from the production point of view because a normal truck can’t negotiate the road. So every piece of equipment is pulled out of the trailers and put into smaller “bobtail” trucks, which then go to the stage. In the trade, this is known as a fucked load-in.

9 A.M. With the points set, the lighting crew hauls out the elements of the truss, assembles it, and winches it up to the ceiling. Through the 1980s, the Dead’s lighting setup is fairly minimal. The Dead use around ten points for sound and lights. Van Halen, by contrast, uses as many as forty-five points, mostly for lights. The Dead’s rented setup has 180 lamps and eighteen Panaspots, which not only change colors but move in almost any imaginable way, sending the ever-changing shape of the beam in every direction, including out into the audience. The lighting crew, or “squints” (sound crew members are “squeaks”), will work through the day, first checking each lamp—on one tour a minimum of four per night were fried by a short circuit in the truss—and then, when Candace Brightman, the lighting director (L.D.) arrives, focusing them.

Since 1980, the Dead have used a sound system based on Meyer Sound Lab (MSL) speakers owned by Ultra Sound, the company run by Don Pearson and Howard Danchik, who began their career with the Jefferson Airplane, along with trucker Mike Fischer. The speakers are hung from the ceiling in two large arrays. The sound team uses Auto CAD (computer-aided design), an architectural drafting system, to determine rigging points before they even get to the hall, and the points are set from a stake on the front lip of the stage, with surveyor’s tools to get it right. This is not the only area in which attention to detail is carried to extreme lengths. Every rock band has laminates to identify those with backstage access, but only Robbie Taylor and the Dead change them four times a year, spending tens of thousands of dollars on elaborate new original artwork rather than recycle some obvious logo. No other production manager would care so much; no other band would spend the money.

12:30 P.M. On the bus out to the venue, the Dead’s crew observes the day and harasses Crazy Eddie the bus driver, because he’s gotten lost. Stage manager and dominant crew personality Steve Parish is annoyed today—this is not unusual—with Harry Popick, the monitor mixer, because last night Popick skipped out on helping to load the truck. Ram Rod naps and Billy Grillo sits quietly. Candelario listens to Tina Turner.

1 P.M. The lights and speakers are now hanging from the ceiling, and the stage is empty. The crew arrives, Fish’s truck opens, and under the direction of Taylor and Parish, encouraged by a stream of obscene, hilarious, and occasionally downright idiotic sounding instructions, local stagehands begin pushing boxes up the ramp to the stage. Popick takes a worn Persian-style carpet, which is synthetic, not because the Dead are cheap, but because an organic carpet would hold static electricity, and centers it on the stage. “I lay that rug down and I stand where I know Bobby will stand and look at the P.A. cabinet and how many speakers I can see the fronts of or how far away it is or how high up or close or whatever. Everything you do and anything you do affects the other things.” It takes about half an hour to empty the truck.

1:25 P.M. Because the crew has been coming to these halls for many years, every show is a reunion of the Dead’s crew and local stagehands. Steve Parish is something of a legend to them, and they surround him as he jokes with the local tough-guy IA (International Alliance of Theatrical and Stagecraft Employees) members while hauling out cables to connect up Garcia’s stage setup. Kidd is cranky, and rags on John Markward because he didn’t get tartar sauce with his fried clams. Scrib sets down a cup in the wrong place, and Kidd barks, “Not only are you a spy, but you’re doing things wrong.”

1:41 P.M. The stage is filled with equipment. Behind it, the Baryshnikov of forklift operators is now taking empty cases down off the stage and stacking them to the side with balletic grace.

2 P.M. Out of their cases, the drums sit lonely on the riser, waiting for their hardware and microphones. Lines snake everywhere. Kidd straps Lesh’s personal control board on top of a speaker. Parish selects the smartest local stagehand and tells Robbie to assign him to the stage for the night.

2:12 P.M. Rolling cabinets fly open and hardware pours out. One cabinet breaks open to reveal what looks like a telephone switchboard—plugs, hundreds of them. Scrib walks past Ram Rod, who is assembling the drums, and asks, “Can I help?” With a small smile, Rod replies, “Just don’t laugh.”

2:26 P.M. Plugs and wires begin to connect up. A forest of microphone stands sprouts in a corner, awaiting placement. Steve waves a bullhorn behind a cabinet, producing feedback.

3 P.M. Ken Viola is the head of security for the band’s tour coordinator, Metropolitan Entertainment, and he travels with the Dead. He is not a bodyguard—the Dead have never felt the need—but a teacher/diplomat, trying to educate and lead the locals. Since every police force and security organization thinks it knows how to handle things, his impossible job is to pressure them into approximating Dead standards. Viola orders the parking lot opened, and immediately he or his assistants have to make sure that it gets done right. There was the time at Star Lake near Pittsburgh in which the parking supervisor lined up all the cars against the outside fence, considerately, if not very intelligently, providing a ladder for gate-crashers to climb on. They didn’t stop to thank him, but they certainly used them, denting hundreds of hoods. Evidently not good at learning from his mistakes, he parked the cars the same way the next day.

Minutes after the first cars enter the lot, and despite security’s best efforts to herd them together, the vendors have established turf. Tailgates drop, grills come out, and pretty soon, Dead Heads have their choice of basic burritos, grilled cheese with tomato on honey whole wheat, tofu dogs, or Psychedelic Fruit Bobs spiked with Everclear and rum. One food vendor has a van with two deep fryers, a two-door commercial refrigerator, and professional workspace. Others make do with a hibachi. For many Dead Heads, vendors or not, the vehicle of choice is the VW microbus, which a writer for
Car and Driver
called the ultimate “negative status symbol.” “Plain as a brick, simple as a lawnmower, slow as glue, cheap to buy, cheap to run, and cheap to fix.” Supposedly, sales of the bus peaked in 1969 at 65,000, but at times it seems that there are that many in any given Dead parking lot.

Dead Heads begin to line up at the doors of the arena. “Old hippies never die,” reads one bumper sticker, “they just wait in line to see the Dead.” Local cops eye them suspiciously, much as Roman soldiers did the barbarians of fifteen hundred years before. The Romans/cops are clean-shaven, their hair cut. The hippies’ hair, as historian Thomas Cahill wrote of the barbarians, is “uncut, vilely dressed with oil, braided into abhorrent shapes. Their bodies are distorted by ornament and discolored by paint . . . There is no discipline among them: they bellow at each other and race about in chaos. They are dirty, and they stink.”

The hippies talk, smoke, trade tapes, tell stories. They see old friends and jump up for hugs, scream with joy when they recognize someone, catch up on the latest doings. The combined impact of a love for the powerful shows and psychedelics makes relationships blossom quickly and then endure. The line has become a party, a religious pilgrimage on its way to a Dionysian orgy.

3:10 P.M. Heading to the dressing rooms to take a leak, Ram Rod runs into the house electrician, an elderly gentleman with the smile of a saint. There is an almost palpable glow about the man, and even the most cynical crew member says hello.

Candace Brightman stands at center stage and begins to focus the lights. Kidd clangs on the keyboard, picking the exact high chord that will shatter her ears as she stands in line with the Leslies, the Hammond organ speakers. One of life’s mysteries is her capacity to ignore the crew’s abuse, but for more than twenty years she’s been the only every-time woman on the production scene. Perhaps it was the way she started that makes anything possible. She’d gone to the Anderson Theater in New York City to apply for a job as cashier, met Chip Monck, mentioned her still-limited theatrical background, and was invited to assist him in lighting. On her first night, still wearing a white blouse and panty hose from her day job at Bloomingdale’s, she arrived at the booth to find Monck among the missing and the show about to begin. Not entirely sure of the difference between a circuit breaker and a dimmer switch, she grabbed one in panic, and exactly on the first note, the stage flooded in red. She looked like a genius. Things got both easier and harder after that.

As the microphones are plugged in, Harry Popick talks to Dan Healy and Howard Danchik at the soundboard. “I just turned off the woofers to hear what the room sounds like—it sounds like it carries a lot of flows.” Howard: “You’re all over the place today, man, a third higher.” Harry frets, “There’s really terrible stuff going on here. Can you punch up Don’s twelve-pack?”

3:30 P.M. Billy Grillo sits in his cubicle behind Kreutzmann’s setup weighing drumsticks on an Ohaus triple-beam scale. They vary remarkably, and he and Ram Rod have to make sure they weigh true. He’s already checked all the drumheads for wear. One set has endured around eighty shows, but most heads are changed every four to five shows.

As he does every day, Parish changes Weir’s and Garcia’s guitar strings, the delicacy of his motions contrasting with his huge size and verbal thunder. Afterward he wipes the guitars down with denatured alcohol. At the same time, Robbie Taylor brings Brent’s Hammond B-3 organ to a fine gloss with furniture polish.

Out by the truck ramp at the rear of the arena, Marion and George, the Dead’s merchandising crew, unload cartons of T-shirts for sale that night.