A Long Strange Trip (49 page)

30

Interlude/Intermission: “Waits Backstage While I Sing to You” (1980s)

August, Greek Theater, Berkeley

As the first set ends, the crowd noise registers 110 decibels on the meter at the monitor mixing board onstage. Cranky, Garcia stomps muttering down the stairs to his dressing room, only to discover that he has been locked out. Weir passes by, and Garcia barks, “Where are those drummers? I want to kill both of them.” Weir turns to Lesh and says something inaudible, and gets the reply “So I’ll turn down my bass, but I can hardly hear myself onstage as it is. I’ll have to stand right next to the speakers.” A stream of friends and family members trails in their wake down the stairs.

The Dead have always had more people backstage than any other band. In the nineties the band gave away on the order of $600,000 a year in free tickets to their guests. Some of those tickets went to the usual sycophantic gaggle that surrounds each successful musical group. But if there was one element other than sustained musical genius that nurtured the band for so long, it was the cocoon of good and decent friends, the family, that accompanied them. Everything that happens to a family has happened to the Grateful Dead. Marriages and divorces, car accidents, deaths, arrests, graduations, pregnancies, lawsuits, mortgage payments, wayward children, braces, glasses, new cars, high school athletics. “My relationship with the Grateful Dead family,” said Garcia, “is way closer than with any of my blood relatives. I only see my brother because he works in the Grateful Dead community. You know? Otherwise I would never see him.”

For Weir, it is a family modeled after an old-style multigenerational extremely nonnuclear family, with Neal Cassady as the original and forever paterfamilias. “We’re all siblings,” said Weir, “we’re all underlings to this guy Neal Cassady. He had a guiding hand, though it was . . . good and strange.” For good and bad, the message of the Dead’s experience in making music is that magic can’t happen by intention, that what Weir called “noninterference . . . dynamic benign neglect” is the method they learned from it all. That benign neglect often applied as well to the band members’ nuclear families, the children who grew up seeing not so much of their fathers, and the wives ditto. “GD music has been a cruel and jealous mistress,” said Weir, “for most of us,
period.”

Taking a look backstage in the middle eighties, for instance, one might see M.G., then amicably separated from Garcia. She spends most of her time with her daughters near Eugene, Oregon. Jill Lesh had been a waitress at the Station Cafe in San Rafael, only a few blocks from the Dead’s office, and after a long period of friendly chatter, Lesh had asked her for her phone number. He had to work for her attention; she’d given him the number at the café. Eventually, they married, and now she sits backstage reading the libretto to the opera
Lulu,
which they’ll be seeing soon. Kreutzmann lives with his wife, Shelly, on a ranch 150 miles north of San Francisco, raising horses and dogs. On their first date, she asked him if he had any eyedrops for her contact lenses. He went to his bathroom cabinet, took out a Murine bottle with LSD, took some, and asked, “Is this going to be okay?” A voice came back, “Everything’s going to be fine, don’t worry.” “That voice,” Bill said, “was not coming from me, I was just receiving it,” and he said to himself, “You were allowed to see the future this time, Billy. Don’t distrust it.” Then he handed Shelly the bottle.

Also backstage is Florence Nathan, now known as Rosie McGee. Romantically coupled with Phil Lesh for several years in the late sixties, she decided by the early seventies that her name had become “Florence, Phil’s Old Lady,” and changed it to Rosie McGee, in tribute to the Dead’s iconic flower and Kris Kristofferson’s song “Me and Bobby McGee.” It would be ridiculous to suggest that the Dead is a bastion of feminist liberation, but it is also relevant to remember that Rosie was quite comfortable working for Alembic and later the Dead’s travel agency long after her separation from Lesh. “I dug that there was more between me and the Grateful Dead than just me and Phil Lesh.”

Asked once about his personal highest take on women, Garcia remarked that “it’s a kind of angelic archetype. Those girls always have sort of a golden, giving aura, which is representative of safety and nurturing. Not a Mother Earth type of thing. It’s like inspiration to an artist.” This contrasts sharply with the band trucker who once said, quite sincerely, “I love the sight of spandex in the morning,” or of the woman who once sent a band member a picture of herself engaged in intimacies with a German shepherd.

A certain form of trickery between the sexes is deemed acceptable. Ron Rakow observed a young hotel coffee shop waitress smile at Garcia one day, and the next day Ron handed her a note that read, “Rakow— Take Dolores [her name tag; her real name was Emily Craig] to dinner— Garcia.” It was, of course, forged, but by the time all was said and done, Emily had married Rakow. Later she worked on film projects with Garcia. Sue Klein was a Dead fan who sent Garcia a funny card, “a lunar passport,” and ended up sitting between him and Weir in a hotel hospitality suite. Hospitality suites are commonly referred to as hostility suites, since they are (a) prowling grounds for flesh and/or (b) a place to find a cold beer at three in the morning. She found Garcia “gentlemanly,” and after a while stopped thinking of him as anything but an exceptionally humorous guy. But the atmosphere of the party room, in which everyone else was watching Garcia, weighed upon her, and she came to realize how brave it was of him to even be there. If he leaned forward to talk to her, the room leaned forward. Parish came in to ask Garcia about something, and the audience’s heads followed the two of them, swiveling as though at a tennis match. Even the rather well-known women members of
Saturday Night
Live,
Gilda Radner and Laraine Newman, acted awestruck around him, and when a particularly spaced-out young lady gave him a cake, he was especially kind to her. “Being around people like that,” he said, “is like being around antique furniture. Imagine how much energy it must take to be that vulnerable.”

But Frankie Weir’s story—though they never married, she adopted the name—might well be the archetype, for at the end it has much more to do with her and the Grateful Dead than sex or romance. Frankie was the woman Weir had in mind when singing “Sugar Magnolia,” and when their relationship ended, it would be twenty years before he committed himself to another woman. Funny, bawdy, a high-energy dancer, Frankie had been a finalist on
American Bandstand
and worked at the Peppermint Lounge in New York, then on the TV shows
Hullaballoo
and
Shindig.
Following her first Grateful Dead show in 1968, she ended the night at a jam with Mickey. Afterward, she and Hart walked around Washington Square, and Hart persuaded her to run away with the Grateful Dead. They had not kissed or even touched, but something made her say yes. She went home to bed, and was awakened the next morning by Ram Rod, Jackson, and Hagen, who were there to pick her up and give her a ride in the truck to the next show, in Virginia. “I wasn’t packed, I didn’t have anything ready, not even my fake eyelashes were on and I wore two pair—I was naked without them—and was told abruptly that they really didn’t have time to wait for Hart’s honey, weekend honey, because you know, here today, gone tomorrow. ‘Hey look, lady, you’re either coming or you’re not.’ All of a sudden there was some sort of adventure that just went hohohoho—I left my clothes, false eyelashes, I might have grabbed a toothbrush, a coat and what I had on, not even a change of clothes. I got into the truck and we drove away.”

31

Might as Well Work (3/70–7/70)

The Hunter-Garcia songs that had been gestating over the past few months, most popularly “Uncle John’s Band” and “Casey Jones,” had evolved beautifully, and the band set to work re-cording them. Though Live Dead had lessened their debt to Warner Bros., the stakes were desperately high, and they were in no financial position to be elaborate in the making of the album. Nor did the material call for it. Garcia thought of this version of the Dead as a wing of the Buck Owens/Merle Haggard/Bakersfield school of country-western. With Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor producing, they went into Pacific High Recording, a tiny room half a block behind Fillmore West, and rehearsed for a week. Then Matthews took the best song versions and spliced them into an album sequence. The band rehearsed for another week, and they prepared to go back to the studio to lay down final versions.

Their work was briefly interrupted by a spot of unpleasant internal business when the frayed ends of Lenny Hart’s reign as manager finally unraveled. As the Dead had been busted in New Orleans, he’d been in the process of moving their office from Novato to the Family Dog on the Great Highway (FDGH), with Lenny to become manager of the FDGH as well as the Dead, and with Gail Turner to be the FDGH secretary as well as Lenny’s. The idea of sharing space with the Dead appealed to Chet Helms, but it became evident to him and Gail that the numbers weren’t adding up and that there had to be at least two sets of books. Before anyone in the band even knew, Lenny moved the office back to Novato. But early in March, Chet and Gail sat down with Ram Rod, McIntire, and Rock to talk things over. All of this only served to confirm the deep suspicions that had been generated by the repossession of Pigpen’s organ the previous fall.

As the band settled down to recording its new album, which with its stripped-down approach would appropriately be called
Workingman’s
Dead
(driving back from a session one night, Garcia had remarked that the songs seemed to be about working people, “kind of the Workingman’s Dead”), the dime finally dropped on Lenny. Earlier in the year Garcia had worked on the sound track of a film by Michelangelo Antonioni,
Zabriskie Point,
and the check for his contribution was due—in fact, overdue. M.G., as Gail Turner would put it, was “beside herself” waiting for it, because the Garcias’ much-loved home in Madrone Canyon was up for sale, and they hoped to buy it and avoid being forced to move. Every day she would call Gail, and finally in mid-March there came the day when Gail replied that yes, it had arrived. But when M.G. got to the office, Lenny said there was no check. The two women did the natural thing, and called Ram Rod. There was a meeting, and Rod finally said of Lenny, “It’s him or me.” Garcia responded with the obvious: “Lenny, Ram Rod says it’s you or him, and we know we can’t do without him.” As a sop to the honor of a band member’s father, Mickey and Phil told McIntire that Lenny could have a week to get the books in order, then went off to talk with Lenny. When he refused to show them the books, Mickey was taken aback, realizing instantly that Lenny was guilty. His own father . . . They left, and within an hour Lenny and the files were gone to Mexico, along with his lover, who’d worked in a local bank and helped his depredations.

Lenny’s treason mostly affected Mickey, who was completely devastated. “Everything turned black for me. It was more than I could bear. I was almost suicidal.” Mickey got nothing but support from his band brothers, but he had been dishonored and unmanned. Garcia asked Sam Cutler, who’d been staying with him while recovering from Altamont, to look into things, and with the help of the well-known San Francisco detective Hal Lipset, they learned that Lenny had been stealing from the beginning. He’d opened an account in Lake Tahoe called the Sunshine Account, which was supposed to contain money for tax payments. Pigpen was a frugal soul, and would always have some of his pay set aside in savings. Lenny loved giving advances on pay—the band member would sign, and when he paid back his advance, it would be diverted into the Sunshine Account. In the end Lenny made off with about $155,000, leaving the band essentially penniless, so broke that Kreutzmann briefly resumed poaching deer for the pot to feed his family. Except for Mickey’s agony, it scarcely mattered. It was, after all, only money. There was plenty of loose talk about sending the Hell’s Angels after Lenny or perhaps arranging for a psychedelic assassination, but in the end they would not even press charges. “Karma’ll get him,” said Garcia, and everyone came to agree. They were as tightly knit a band of brother musicians as one could imagine, and they pressed forward. Their reaction to treachery was to close ranks and get serious about their work, and with the help of cocaine, then just entering the band’s life, they worked very hard indeed. Loose Bruce Baxter, their wealthy friend, had showed up with a large baggie full of the powder. At first it seemed a benign stimulant, a luxurious assistant that provoked conversation or the energy for hard work. As the years went by, it would prove to have other, less pleasant facets, and they would experience all of them.

However lunatic events might appear, the music was utterly sane. They went into Pacific High to record
Workingman’s Dead,
and in about three weeks they had an album made up of “Uncle John’s Band,” “High Time,” “Dire Wolf,” “New Speedway Boogie,” “Cumberland Blues,” “Black Peter,” “Easy Wind,” and “Casey Jones.” The combination of great material and minimalism in the recording process produced a stunningly good series of tracks. In the absence of experimentation, the band could work together and record nearly live. There was a great joy, said Garcia, in just being “a good old band,” without pretension or self-indulgence. Hunter sat glowing in the corner as he watched them at work. The absence of a primary keyboard player mattered not at all. Always an ensemble player, Kreutzmann was more than happy for the drums to be more supportive and less up-front. Garcia’s voice suited the material perfectly, and Lesh and Weir served admirably as harmonists.

Joe Smith was in for a pleasant shock. Down in Los Angeles he got the first tape and put it on, expecting “Psychedelic Opus #6.” At first he was confused, half thinking that it was a joke. Then he broke into an ecstatic smile, running into the corridor to grab people—“We got a single! We got a single!” The same thing would happen somewhat later in the spring when Jerry and Bobby went down to the
Rolling Stone
offices. Everyone gathered in Jann Wenner’s office, and the new album blew the staff away with its effortless accessibility.

The business response to Lenny’s financial piracy was a considerable restructuring of the band’s management. A sometime source of inspiration but a man lacking in day-to-day reliability, Rock Scully found his impact considerably trimmed. Although he continued to serve the band, he was not only not the manager but also not on the payroll, instead slipping into a promotional role paid for by the record company, a pattern he would follow for the next decade. At Garcia’s suggestion the band established a tripartite management. Jon McIntire was the band manager, which primarily meant he dealt with the record company, the office, and individual needs. Sam Cutler became the road manager and dealt with their booking agent. And Dave Parker, once the washboard player in Mother McCree’s, came in with his wife, Bonnie, on a two-workers-on-one-salary deal to take care of the books. It was an effective, though by no means perfect, setup. David and Bonnie were honest and competent employees, but they were family, which meant that they were no more able than Rock to say no to the random demand for a new piece of equipment or almost anything else.

Sam Cutler would prove to be a superb road manager, but he was divisive. There was a wheeler-dealer bad-boy feeling to him that appealed to Garcia in much the same way that Rakow had. Cutler didn’t care for McIntire and undermined him with the crew, which was not difficult. Jon was intellectual, arty, occasionally pretentious, inclined toward hypochondria, utterly nonathletic, and gay. These were distinctly not the crew’s preferences, and as de facto band members, their feelings would always have a major impact. Also, Jon was not a trained businessman or a deal-maker. Sam got them the deals and the money. But as a diplomat and mediator within the band, and in dealing with the record company, Jon was brilliant. It would help that
Workingman’s Dead
was a more accessible album than its predecessors, but McIntire brought the right style to the process. Tall, slender, blond, and regal-featured—“I’m a direct descendant of King John,” he’d been known to proclaim—he was also a psychedelic brother, philosophically and morally committed to the Grateful Dead quest, but in more control than most in their scene. Cutler would snipe that John was charming but “shallow,” and depict himself as not charming—though he had certainly charmed Garcia—but an effective leader. He likened the job of road managing to leading a wagon train through hostile territory, where someone must lead, “in the face of pleasure, danger, whatever it is. That’s not necessarily the most popular position to be in.”

Late in March David Parker found a brown shingle house on the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Lincoln Street in San Rafael, a small city about fifteen miles north of San Francisco. They picked Jon as the most presentable, sent him to woo the owners, and on April 1, 1970, the Dead’s management signed a lease. Fifth and Lincoln, as it customarily was called, was a house, not an office building, and it became and remained their business home, with a kitchen, which had its own entrance, and a kitchen table for a “conference room.” Anyone who came to the front door was a newcomer. They acquired some stationery, which initially featured a skull with a Viking helmet, and a post office box, 1073, that they would keep for decades. After considerable effort, McIntire enticed the fabulously competent Dale Franklin away from the Fillmore East, and she joined them at 5th and Lincoln as his assistant. One of his other early actions was to put Hunter on the regular payroll, at forty dollars a week.

Early spring 1970 was a mélange of shows and new songs. In mid-March the Dead set off on tour, accompanied for the first time by Hunter, who had concluded that the band needed a road song, and that he needed to see the road to write the song. His first stop was a hilarious one. On St. Patrick’s Day the band played a benefit for the Buffalo Philharmonic, which was directed by Phil’s acquaintance, a colleague of Luciano Berio’s, Lukas Foss. The Dead, a local rock band, and members of the orchestra played an improvisational piece that involved having the orchestra members stand up, flap their arms, and make strange noises. Since the snow in Buffalo was “up to our shoulders,” as Hunter recalled it, it was a place where you had to “mellow slow,” and so began his road song. Later in the tour they reached Florida, and Hunter sprang the verses of “Truckin’ ” on the band. Pigpen was elsewhere, doubtless romancing a fair maiden, and the drummers were up to something. But Weir, Lesh, and Garcia joined Hunter, and the four of them sat around the swimming pool with acoustic guitars and worked up the song.

The week before, at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, Hunter had written the lyrics to “Stella Blue,” a song that would not be completed for a couple of years. Around this time he also wrote “No Place Here,” which would never be recorded but would instead serve as his lyric bank, being cannibalized for elements to at least four songs in the next couple of years. He was also partway into a major song cycle to be called “Eagle Mall” when Garcia reminded him, “Look, Hunter, we’re a goddamn dance band, for Christ’s sake! At least write something with a beat!” Songs were called for, and songs came forth. In late February they first performed “Friend of the Devil,” which Hunter had written during early New Riders sessions—he was the New Riders’ bass player for about twenty minutes—with John Dawson and David Nelson. Garcia added the bridge, and a staple of the repertoire was born, an up-tempo fugitive’s tale of the American West with a bluegrass feel. “Candyman” followed in short order, an even less specific tale of gamblers and the ladies who love them—and candy, in all its metaphorical forms: drugs, booze, jewelry, all the objects of desire.

In the middle of April they played a weekend at the Fillmore West that would be memorable for a feeling of utter silliness induced by following their opening act. Going on after hearing Miles Davis and the Bitches Brew band was, as Garcia put it, “ridiculous.” “I don’t ever want to hear anyone snivel about following
anyone,”
said Lesh. “Because I got the
one
man, right there. Made me feel so dumb. I thought, ‘What the fuck am I doing here, why aren’t I at home digesting what I just heard?’ ” Stimulated by Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, and James Brown, Miles had recorded
Bitches
Brew,
a landmark statement of jazz-rock fusion. Miles’s record company president, Columbia’s Clive Davis, then suggested that he expand his audience and play some rock venues, and introduced Miles to Bill Graham. In March Miles opened for Steve Miller at the Fillmore East, but Miles’s low opinion of Miller created complications. Miller “didn’t have shit going for him,” wrote Miles, “so I’m pissed because I got to open for this non-playing motherfucker just because he had one or two sorry-ass records out. So I would come late and
he
would have to go on first, and then when we got there, we just smoked the motherfucking place and everybody dug it, including Bill [Graham]!”

Miles enjoyed his shows with the Dead at Fillmore West much more. The Dead had asked for the privilege of playing with Miles. Being a Dead audience, it was a stoned audience. “The place was packed with these real spacy, high white people,” Miles continued, “and when we first started playing, people were walking around and talking. But after a while, they all got quiet and really got into the music. I played a little of something like
Sketches of Spain
and then we went into the
Bitches Brew
shit and that really blew them out.” The Dead stood on the side of the stage, slack-jawed, watching Miles and Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, Chick Corea, Stephen Grossman, and Airto Moreira make magic. As Ralph Gleason wrote, “it was sorcery and it worked.” “Totally embarrassed” to be asked to follow, Kreutzmann recalled that “we played really free, loose,” afterward, “but I couldn’t get Miles out of my ears.” Mickey, naturally, would primarily recall his fellow percussionist Airto “crawling around on the floor foraging for instruments. I was really high, and he turned into some kind of animal, foraging for percussion sounds. I’d never seen percussion played like that. He was playing the floor.”