A Long Strange Trip (41 page)

For Belmont, New York was trouble because that’s when Rock came and the money went. “Always slightly left of dubious” in Belmont’s opinion, there was a “shiftiness about him that was always off-putting.” Oh, well.
Most
of the money got back to San Francisco.

The tour ended with two shows in Philadelphia. For a band in ruins only months before, a note on one of the tape boxes told of musicians having a creatively good time: “Show actually ended 5:38 A.M.” East Coast audiences, especially back at the Fillmore East, would come to expect the Dead to play all night.

23

Interlude: The Circus Is in Town (THE FIRST SET BEGINS)

February, Oakland Coliseum Arena

At production manager Robbie Taylor’s command, the house lights dim and the band strolls out onto the stage. It is the first show of the year, part of a three-day stay that will climax with Chinese New Year. They are absurdly rusty. Grateful Dead rehearsals in the eighties and nineties are rare and spotty, frequently consisting of one or two band members smoking dope with the crew in the lobby of the warehouse on Front Street, as other band members call in to the pay phone there and talk to crew member Steve Parish, who commands the room from his chair in front of the phone. Weir says he’s running late. Kreutzmann wants to know who’s there. Lesh says call him when everybody’s there. Brent and studio engineer John Cutler work on his monitor setup, and Jerry schmoozes about his dive trip to Hawaii. When the Dead hit the stage in Oakland, they’ve played no more than a couple of hours together since the New Year’s Eve show six weeks before, if that. And, of course, there is no song list prepared—this is an improvisational band not only in how it plays but in how it selects. If at times they are unable to remember lyrics or even the key of songs, the two lead vocalists, Weir and Garcia, can always remember who started the last show and, if it was a recent one, a fair proportion of what they played. After agreeing on which of the two will take the first song, and acceding to their choice—drummers get to complain, if not always vote—the only job that faces them is, as Ezra Pound said, to “make it new.”

The inevitable happens: Weir’s amp blows. Parish hurries out, and with Kidd on the other side of the amp with a flashlight, they confront the problem. Weir loves toys, both at home and in his equipment rack, and he has a very complex setup. It is so very complicated that Garcia, who has much less actual electrical power, is actually much louder. Weir would attribute this to Healy, the mixer, whom he has always suspected of coveting his job, but this does not presently concern Parish, who is on his knees in front of the setup. Weir is his despair. The band noodles, and as the minutes pass, the noodles grow into fragments of a song, sometimes the “Beer Barrel Polka,” or perhaps Miles Davis’s “So What.” Parish leaves, Weir shakes his head, Garcia keeps playing, Lesh screams, and Parish returns. Finally he’s done, and Weir rises from his knees and approaches his microphone.

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the circus is in town.” He gives a piercing blast on a whistle, Brent runs a little circus calliope run down the keyboard, the drummers rat-a-tat-tat, and at the board, Candace whispers into her headset, “ ‘Truckin’ ’—trust them to start the year with something weird. Preset 707.” The computerized Panaspots whirl red to white from the sides and flare out, the initial guitar riffs roar, and Weir begins the year: “Arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on main street / Chicago, New York, Detroit and it’s all on the same street / . . . Together—more or less in line / Just keep truckin’ on.” He gets in only a verse before he fluffs the first lyric, par for the course. In fact, he rarely if ever gets through this song perfectly. The audience loves the errors, correctly perceiving themselves all the more a part of the process for recognizing the mistake, and cherishing the utter normality of the band in its capacity for error. After all, this is not theater or a performance in any remotely conventional sense. This is the Dead sharing their lives with them and that means the whole package. Critics frequently find it lazy, but a fair judge will acknowledge that the usual rules do not entirely apply here.

“Truckin’ ” is their autobiography, the summation of a life spent performing, where there are only three places: home; New York, which is palpably distinguishable from anywhere else in the world by the amphetamine rush of Manhattan; and the road, which is everydamnwhereelse. Truckin’ was hippie slang for traveling, taken from twenties and thirties black dance slang, like Blind Boy Fuller’s “Truckin’ My Blues Away.” The song was almost a hit for the Dead when they put it out in 1970, and it is still one of their most popular tunes. Behind it is an entire world, a composite of sixties motel rooms that Garcia called as “interchangeable as Dixie cups,” and also more recent experiences, like the world’s finest hotel bathrooms, which happen to be located in the Four Seasons Hotel in New York, their home in the nineties. It is about the time that Rex Jackson hitched for help after the truck ran off the road in a Wyoming blizzard, and as his beard slowly froze, barely made it into town. It is about Brent Mydland going down the wrong jetway at San Francisco Airport and damn near starting a tour by flying to Hong Kong. It is about Healy, Lesh, and Steve Brown passing a baggie of pot behind their backs at a customs barricade in Switzerland, and getting away with it. It is about Weir, the most civil man around, melting down in Berlin and wrestling with a really rude fan.

Scrib stands behind Harry at the monitor console, watching the crowd surge ecstatically. Harry probably has the worst job in the Dead, because he is responsible for what the band will hear, and that is too painfully important. Someone always has to be at the board, Harry once told Scrib. “Yeah, you gotta cover the board,” Scrib agreed. Harry smiled. “Fuck no. The board’s fine. Somebody’s got to pay attention to the band.” But this time it’s the equipment that’s wrong, and the yellow light flashes on the communication headset connected to the soundboard. There’s a buzz in the system, and it’s going to plague them all night. “We are at the corner,” groans Healy, “of pain and burn.” Sound can form a wall and block other sounds, which will then be inaudible or come in funny in terms of direction or strength. Sound is tactile and three-dimensional, and just turning it up to the mythical 11 (dials generally run 1 to 10) doesn’t work here. There is a hum coming from Weir’s microphone, and Fuzzy, one of the Ultra Sound guys, disappears, digs up a new microphone cable, and replaces it. “We got no signal, we got no signal,” says Harry, and as Fuzzy rushes off, he grabs him and says, “See if you can cross the wires at the source.” They muddle through, but it will be several shows before they discover that their problem is in a snake, one of the heavy-duty cables that connect the soundboard to the stage. It has been crushed.

Sometimes there are people problems. Once the lighting crew spotted Allen Gross, a Dead Head who happened to be a union stagehand, watching the show from the front rail, and pulled him out of the audience. One of the spotlight operators had been dosed with LSD and had barricaded himself in the booth just below the ceiling. His work was not entirely reliable, and Candace was going crazy. “You know how to get through the ceiling and go through the trapdoor, and we don’t have anybody else to do that.” Allen went up, the dosee was led to a calm and quiet place, and Allen had to work that night.

Mid-March, Capitol Centre, Landover, Maryland

Back on the road: colds, labor troubles, fucked load-in and a down crew, snits, troubled logistics, power fluctuations that mess with the lighting system, weird sound in the hall or on the stage, police, lame local promoter (not usually more than once). The earliest road gigs were often promoted by hippies, and it was common for the band to be met by a VW van at the airport and to stay at someone’s home. One time in Cincinnati the entire band supposedly ended up in the same room at a college dormitory.

The band kicks off “Sugaree,” a Hunter-Garcia take on Elizabeth Cotten’s “Shake It Sugaree,” and tonight it’s soggy. There is the thinnest of margins between the rambling shuffle that this song demands and too damn slow, and tonight this song of love and betrayal goes nowhere for the first half. At the board, Healy is still building the sound in the mix. He starts with the rhythm section. He can hear the drums acoustically, and from there, “I sort of have to build the whole band on how I hear Phil.” And Phil is not convinced of anything tonight. He paces the length of his cord, from near Harry at the monitor board to his right. “Sugaree” is one of Garcia’s favorites, an early-in-the-show warm-up that usually ends with guitar fireworks. The singer is an outlaw, but he retains a fragment of faith: “Shake it up now, Sugaree / I’ll meet you at the Jubilee / If that Jubilee don’t come / Maybe I’ll meet you on the run.”

They try, and it’s still a shitty night. As Phil said, “Or there’s the one where nothing you can do makes any difference . . . I’ll try to play more, I’ll try to play less, I’ll try to spread out my registers, I’ll try playing one note.” Of course, anything that one tries consciously to do will almost certainly fail.

Late March, Knickerbocker Arena, Albany, New York

One of the last things any road warrior ever wants to hear is a limo/van driver saying, “I think the exit’s . . .” The classic version of the lost limo driver actually took place on a spring tour early in the 1990s. A run in D.C. ended, the band got onto the plane and landed in Detroit around 1 A.M. Two vans awaited, and the lead driver told the second driver to “follow me.” Scrib fell asleep on the back row and awoke dimly sensing that all was not right. He was in a van with Garcia, Weir, and Candace Brightman. Trying to be polite, he inquired of the driver, “Do you know where you’re going?” “Obviously not,” snapped Weir, who was stiff with fear—because they were in Ann Arbor, whose University of Michigan basketball team had, hours before, won the NCAA “March Madness” basketball tournament, and the driver had managed to drive to precisely the worst place in the world—the main drag of downtown Ann Arbor, where thousands of fans were whooping it up. Fortunately, the van had dark windows. Scrib looked at his itinerary, hopped carefully out of the van, handed a twenty to a cabdriver, and said, “Lead us, very slowly, to this address, please.”

Weir kicks off Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried,” and tonight it feels good. Though he’s a guy who spent exactly one summer on a ranch, Weir often affects a drawl, and he loves cowboy tunes sufficiently that there is one in almost every first set. The band’s treatment of them is extremely respectful, and they were mightily pleased when word filtered to them that Haggard likes their work. He is part of the America that they come from, the unglossy, authentic part. The audience joyfully kicks up its heels, while the “spinners”—a Dead Head subgroup who dance in a permanent neo-Sufi spin—pick up their pace. Ever since the Dead began to install speakers in the concourse area of shows, the spinners and other dancers haven’t seen the stage, happy just to hear and . . . spin.

Late March, the Omni, Atlanta

It’s late in the tour, and the mood has an edge. “I’m so horny,” Kreutzmann said yesterday, “I felt like I was playing with three drumsticks tonight.” Which inevitably recalls the stripper who managed to get onstage at a 1972 concert at American University and began talking with Kreutzmann. “Play a slow number so I can dance.” “You’re gonna dance?” “I’m gonna take my clothes off and dance.” “You can’t do that, they’ll bust you.” “That’s what I want.” She kept her clothes on, but the show proved no less exciting for that.

It’s highly appropriate that Weir follows this night’s “Mama Tried” with his own “Mexicali Blues.” It is a superb border town wastrel’s confession, and Weir has spent enough time charming sweet young things to make it authentic. “Laid back in an old saloon with a peso in my hand / Just watchin’ flies and children on the street . . . / And It’s three days’ ride from Bakersfield / And I don’t know why I came / I guess I came to keep from payin’ dues / So, instead, I’ve got a bottle and a girl who’s just fourteen / And a damned good case of the Mexicali Blues.” Naturally, the song changed a little in the leap from lyricist Barlow to Weir’s recording. In John’s head it was a slow and stately hangover ballad. He handed off the lyrics to Weir, who stuffed them in his pocket without comment. A year later, as Weir prepared for his first solo album,
Ace,
he took out the lyrics again, but what he heard was a Tex-Mex polka. The band plays it beautifully tonight, with the requisite bounce.

May, Shoreline Amphitheater

Garcia swings into “Ramble on Rose,” a bit of whimsy from Hunter that melds icons and a lover over a slow shuffle.

Just like Crazy Otto
Just like Wolfman Jack
Sitting plush with a royal flush
Aces back to back
Just like Mary Shelley
Just like Frankenstein
Clank your chains and count your change
Try to walk the line
Did you say your name was
Ramblin Rose?
Ramble on baby
Settle down easy
Ramble on Rose

Hunter stands at the side of the stage in one of his rare appearances at a show, smiling at the performance. He is a private and mysterious man, a regular drop-in at the office, but now in the late eighties and the nineties, a poet who has somewhat separated himself from the day-to-day life of the band. He is genuinely respected, if slightly aloof, and there is pleasure in Ram Rod’s demeanor, for instance, on seeing him.

Late May, Cal Expo Amphitheater, Sacramento

One of the year’s annual rites is the Dead’s Rex Foundation charity run, three late-spring shows in Sacramento. Although Dead Heads would gladly pay extra for charity, the band sees the donation as coming from themselves, not the audience, and the ticket price is standard. Actually, the shows do come with a bonus, because in the late eighties and after, the ten-thousand-capacity grass field is probably the band’s smallest venue. Benefits are one of the complications of every musician’s life. The nuns probably asked troubadours to work for free in 1210, and certainly every good cause of the sixties had the Dead playing. This was not always fun. There were various benefit concerts that dissolved into internecine warfare within the recipient organization, up to and including lawsuits and/or violence, most memorably at a couple of Native American events in the seventies. Finally, the Dead took over the process and created the Rex Foundation. The band plays, puts the profits in a pot, and gives it away in $5,000 or $10,000 increments.