A Long Strange Trip (48 page)

Stung by Ralph Gleason’s criticism of their role in Altamont, the Dead responded by producing, in just two weeks, one of their few topical songs, “New Speedway Boogie.” In Hunter’s words:

Who can deny? Who can deny?
it’s not just a change in style
One step done and another begun
in I wonder how many miles?

Spent a little time on the mountain
Spent a little time on the hill
Things went down we don’t understand
but I think in time we will . . .

One way or another
One way or another
this darkness got to give

Hunter, who had decided in advance that Altamont would be a mess and had instead gone to see the film
Easy Rider,
was profoundly antiviolence, and had been greatly disturbed, for instance, by the tone of the Airplane’s song “Volunteers.” Later, Hunter would say, “I wanted to stand back . . . There’s a better way. There has to be education, and the education has to come from the poets and musicians, because it has to touch the heart rather than the intellect, it has to get in there deeply. That was a decision. That was a conscious decision.”

Hopeful resignation was not chic in America in late ’69. Even Garcia found “New Speedway Boogie” “an overreaction” and “a little bit dire,” although he was firmly aware that a responsibility for the audience’s well-being was essential to performing. He had always been dubious about politics, but Altamont was the capper. “If a musical experience is forcibly transferred to a political plane,” he argued somewhat later, “it no longer has the thing that made it attractive . . . a musical experience [is] its own beginning and its own end. It threatens no one.” The critic Robert Christgau was fascinated by the Dead’s philosophical approach to the disaster. “I recognized how smoothly the Dead Americanized volatile intellectual imports like karma and eternal recurrence. Only within a culture as benign and abundant as that of Northern California could anything real and humane accompany such vast cosmic notions, but it did, and the Dead were its highest manifestation. They were not uncomplicated men, but within the controlled environment of the concert hall they generated a joyful noise that went beyond complications.” At Altamont, the Dead were “naive,” and Jagger was “probably something nastier. I would call it criminally ironic. Jerry Garcia’s serenity is religious, and smug; Jagger’s detachment is aesthetic, and jaded.”

“New Speedway Boogie” also spoke of running with the weight of gold, but that was not yet a Grateful Dead problem. Each member of the Rolling Stones earned approximately $425,000 for the tour, and while Jagger kept up with events from the largest suite at the elegant Hunting-ton Hotel on San Francisco’s Nob Hill, the band’s ever-loyal pianist and road manager, Ian “Stu” Stewart, flew to Switzerland with the cash.

Not long before Altamont, Garcia had given Robert Hunter a cassette. It was forty-five minutes of sizzling repetition, the band working through endless variations of what were clearly the changes to a major new song. Hunter set to work, and though it came along very well, it still took him the relatively lengthy time of two weeks to complete it. From the beginning it felt important and anthemic. For the first time, Hunter would write about the band itself, calling the song “Uncle John’s Band.” They first performed the song on December 4. It was very much a part of the dark atmosphere—even before Altamont—of 1969. It begins with a caution, and then an invitation set as a question:

Well, the first days are the hardest days,
don’t you worry anymore
When life looks like Easy Street
there is danger at your door
Think this through with me
Let me know your mind
Wo-oah, what I want to know
is are you kind?

Hunter would hate the rhyme of “kind” with “mind,” even though it was exactly right for the situation. The fragmented images of “Uncle John’s Band” are a storehouse of the American consciousness, ranging from a “buckdancer’s choice,” the buck-and-wing of the street performer, to a nod to Robert Frost in “fire and ice,” to the entire American Revolution and heroic dedication to freedom in the lines “Their walls are built of cannonballs / their motto is
Don’t Tread on Me,”
to the reference to the Bible and/or Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty” in “like the morning sun you come / like the wind you go.” It was a masterpiece for both Hunter and Garcia. On the same night the Dead premiered “Uncle John’s Band,” they also first played “Black Peter,” the fruits of Hunter’s multiple imagined deaths during the Big Dose that spring. A month before, they’d begun performing “Cumberland Blues,” an archetypal miner’s lament. “Cumberland” was so good, and so patently true, that a miner assumed that it was a traditional song stolen by these loathsome hippies, and rhetorically asked Hunter what the man who’d written the song would have thought at such a theft. It might have been the greatest compliment Hunter ever got.

Following a journey East to play New Year’s Eve in Boston, the last time they would celebrate the holiday away from home, and gigs in New York and the West Coast, the band flew to Hawaii early in the new year 1970 for dates in Honolulu. Hawaii was, of course, paradise, but they also had some old friends there, including Healy, who with Laird Grant had built a studio for Quicksilver on Oahu in an old World War II bunker, Opaelua Lodge. The Dead rented a house on the beach, Ken Goldfinger threw a serious party, and their visit was thoroughly pleasant. After the shows, McIntire, Ram Rod, Lesh, and Bear stayed on for a few days in Maui, then flew to San Francisco and on to New Orleans for the next gigs, with McIntire stopping only to go the office for some business files, and to the Airplane House on Fulton Street to get some weed. The Airplane had recently been busted in New Orleans, and Bill Thompson warned McIntire to be careful in the Big Easy. The afternoon the Dead arrived there, Pigpen came to McIntire to report a warning he’d gotten from a hotel security cop. Since Pigpen was paranoid about drugs in general and the police in particular, McIntire dismissed it with the comment “Pig, this guy just wants his hotel clean. Thanks, but don’t worry.”

That night, before their first show in New Orleans, they had a meeting that ended Tom Constanten’s membership in the band. It was, in T.C.’s words, “cordial” and a “mutual” decision, utterly without recriminations. T.C. was not enjoying himself and felt underamplified, so that “I never felt I had a secure platform to work from.” Because of his low volume, the drummers couldn’t hear him, and he felt that he at times became a pawn in the run-of-the-mill bickering wherein a complaint about T.C. could mean a complaint about his sponsors Phil and Jerry. Hunter found him “holier than thou” because of his devotion to Scientology, and his resulting refusal to take LSD alienated him from Owsley, among others. In any case, he was not fully a part of the Dead ethos. From the band’s point of view, he simply didn’t swing. His best contributions had come in studio situations, but in performance his classical background constantly betrayed itself. In the end, T.C. got an interesting offer to be composer and music director of
Tarot,
a play that was opening in New York, and he was happy to move on.

Their first show in New Orleans was a disappointment, and at least one observer thought that the opening act, Fleetwood Mac, had bested them. Afterward they gathered in McIntire and Weir’s room, where a young man had shown up with a pound of pot and a goodly quantity of hashish. As usual, there were plenty of strangers around, kids from the show who’d managed to get invited to the party. Kreutzmann and Hart visited a girlie show across the street, and on their way back to their rooms, Kreutzmann saw some men in the lobby and said, “Those guys are plainclothes cops.” Hart laughed the idea off, and they both went to the party room. McIntire began to clean the pot in a bureau drawer when he heard a key in the door and looked in shock at his roommate, Weir, as what appeared to be the entire New Orleans Police Department Narcotics Squad, led by Captain Clarence Girrusso, came through the door. Garcia had been out raving with some locals, and when he returned to the hotel, he saw two cops in his room going through his suitcase. He kept on walking and got nearly to the end of the corridor before one of them figured out who he was and said, “Hey, you—buddy.” Roommates T.C. and Pigpen had been out looking at antique weapons on Royal Street and were contemplating going to hear Earl “Fatha” Hines, who was the lounge act of their hotel, when the cops arrived at their room. Not only was their room clean, but the cop who came to their room was ex–air force, and he and T.C. began to chat about their times in the military. Pig and T.C. were not arrested.

The
New Orleans Times-Picayune
would report on those not so lucky: “Rock Musicians, ‘King of Acid’ Arrested.” Handcuffed to Bear during the paddy wagon ride to jail, Mickey Hart discovered that he had two pieces of ID in his coat, and one of them was for Summer Wind, “spiritual adviser to the Grateful Dead.” It cost him his peacoat, since the garment had his real name in the collar, but Mickey Hart was not officially arrested in New Orleans. The scene at the station was ludicrous. The cops were enjoying their high-profile bust, and especially liked staging a “walk of shame” for newspaper photographers. The Dead responded in kind. Few would have the temerity to play a practical joke on a cop, but Bob Weir was that man. While others distracted one cop, he slid behind him and handcuffed the officer to his desk with his own cuffs. After all, Weir reasoned, the cop did have the keys.

Bailed out, they played superbly at the show on Saturday night, February 1, and then on a rainy Sunday afternoon played a get-out-of-jail benefit for themselves with Fleetwood Mac opening. As the Dead edged into “Lovelight,” they were joined by various members of Fleetwood Mac, a relatively young band quite excited to be playing with veterans. Everyone from both bands had munched and sipped various electric cakes and beers, and the show assumed a certain jovial tone. Being the Dead, they’d invited the police who’d arrested them to come to the benefit, and being from New Orleans, the cops had taken them up on the offer. But the most elegantly apt visual of the night was Mick Fleetwood, all six feet nine inches of him, flying higher than anyone. He’d found an Out of Order sign on a broken soda machine and hung it around his neck as he looned about the stage.

Their bust on Bourbon Street had one major effect on the Dead, and that was the imminent loss of Bear as their sound mixer. Coming on top of his 1967 LSD arrest, he would find his ability to travel severely restricted, and eventually prohibited. The band had a somewhat easier time of it. Word of their plight reached Joe Smith, who put in a call to Jim Garrison, the district attorney of New Orleans who was already an American legend for his advocacy of a conspiracy theory in the assassination of President Kennedy. Joe let Jim know how much he admired Jim’s style, and mentioned that he wanted to contribute $50,000 to Jim’s reelection campaign. And oh, by the way, we have some friends in jail in New Orleans . . . Garrison took note, and mentioned that his police labs had analyzed the confiscated materials, “and we have some things we don’t even know what it is.” “Well,” said Joe, “I can promise you that the Dead won’t be back in New Orleans anytime soon.”

Although Ram Rod, Mickey Hart, and Rex Jackson had to return to have their charges dismissed, the price of the Dead’s Delta misadventure was mostly financial. The person who got the biggest shock was M.G. On February 1 she called the hotel to tell Jerry that she was going into labor with their first child, who would be born the next day and be named Annabelle. The hotel operator was extremely kind and sympathetic as she informed M.G. that her husband was down in the city jail at the moment, but promised that he’d call as soon as possible.

After a show in St. Louis, the Dead returned home to Chet Helms’s Family Dog on the Great Highway venue near the ocean to join Santana and the Airplane in filming one of their best early TV appearances, for the local public television station KQED. It was a high-quality show, even though the visuals of the jam were dominated by slow-motion shots of a woman’s breasts moving unfettered under her loose blouse as she danced.

If the bust or the loss of T.C. bothered anyone, it was hard to tell. Early in February they returned to New York for their sixth appearance at Fillmore East. Their opening act, the Allman Brothers Band, was extremely simpatico. The Allmans’ long jams were more concretely blues-based than the Dead’s music, but their explorations were consonant. The Dead’s show on February 13 would swiftly pass into legend, not least because the Fillmore East soundman made a secret basement tape of the performance that would come to serve as a keystone for all Dead tape collectors. It was utterly worthy. The brand-new material was rounding rapidly into exquisite shape, and “Dark Star” and the other extended material that night were loose, fluid, and magnificent. Serve the music, Garcia kept saying. Serve the music. Now the quality of the music was serving them.