A Long Strange Trip (50 page)

Altogether, it was an interesting experience for Miles, who actually preferred the larger halls of rock to smoky jazz nightclubs, but who’d discovered the technical ignorance of most rock musicians: “They didn’t study it, couldn’t play different styles—and don’t even talk about reading music.” Then he met Jerry Garcia. They “hit it off great, talking about music—what they liked and what I liked—and I think we all learned something, grew some. Jerry Garcia liked jazz, and I found out that he loved my music and had been listening to it for a long time. He loved other jazz musicians, too, like Ornette Coleman and Bill Evans.” It was a wonderful experience for Garcia as well. After all, Miles was a hero and true teacher. Years later Garcia would say he learned from Davis’s music the concept of “open playing. I got part of that from Miles, especially the silences. The holes. Nobody plays better holes than Miles, from a musician’s point of view, anyway. In Indian music they have what you call ‘the unstruck,’ which is the note you don’t play. That has as much value as the stuff you do play.”

On May 1, 1970, in the appropriately obscure college town of Alfred, New York, the Dead began a new phase of their touring career, a series of shows called “An Evening with the Grateful Dead.” With variations over the next year or so, the show would include an opening set from the New Riders of the Purple Sage, an acoustic Dead set, and two electric Dead sets. Garcia and Hart would play through all of it, sometimes more than five hours of music. Along with
Workingman’s Dead
and the next album, this presentation of the Dead as a full-bore experience would fully establish them, after five years, as a commercially viable band. The ticket buyer certainly got value for money. In fact, the “Evening with” setup proved its worth almost instantly. The second show, on May 2 at Harpur College, was simply staggering, a concert with so much quality in so many different styles that it became deservedly legendary. Their psychedelic explorations continued; the Dead had simply added other options to their playing. They had become what Garcia liked to term a full-range band. Over the next two decades they would play nearly 500 different songs, of which roughly 150 were originals. Those 350 cover tunes would span a large portion of American music, to a level unmatched by any other band.

And so their repertoire would include basic rock and roll (Chuck Berry, Rolling Stones), blues (Pigpen’s entire repertoire), jug band music (“Beat It on Down the Line,” “Viola Lee Blues”), folk (“Peggy-O,” “Cold Rain and Snow”), Stax-Volt (“Midnight Hour”), rhythm and blues (“Lovelight”), rockabilly (“Big River”), country-western (“Mama Tried”), gospel (“Samson and Delilah,” “We Bid You Goodnight”), sixties garage rock (“Gloria’’), calypso (“Man Smart, Woman Smarter”), western swing (“Don’t Ease Me In”), and New Orleans (“Iko Iko”). A bystander once remarked to Garcia that the one major missing element from the Dead’s song repertoire was formal jazz, and that they should do at least one Duke Ellington song, just to know they’d done it. Garcia agreed, and said that he actually wanted to do Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” and someday he’d get around to working it up. It was one of those good ideas that he never quite got to.

The band’s playing levels stayed high, but the atmosphere of the world around them grew very dark. On May 3 they played a free show at the alma mater of Weir’s prep school friend John Barlow, Wesleyan College in Middletown, Connecticut. Forty miles down the road in New Haven, various Black Panthers were on trial. One of the prime leaders of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale, had last been seen shackled and gagged in the trial of the Chicago Eight. His refusal to cooperate with what could only be termed a Kafkaesque trial had resulted in his case being severed from the other seven. In February 1970 the Chicago verdicts came in, with the jury finding no evidence of conspiracy, although five of the seven were found guilty of intending to create a riot. The draconian contempt citations meted out to the lawyers caused an uproar. Most of this uproar was taking place on college campuses, which in the sixties had moved to a central place in American culture—in 1960, 27 million Americans were young (fourteen to twenty-four), and of them a fifth went to college. In 1970, there were 40 million young Americans, and half of them were in college. That May college students and Black Panthers had essentially shut down New Haven. The protests centered on Seale’s continued incarceration, but his former codefendants from the Chicago conspiracy trial came to New Haven in May to take part. It was an extraordinary time, and the effects were felt up the road in Middletown. At Wesleyan the stage and the gig were controlled by the African American student community in consort with various Panthers. Roadie Sonny Heard, not known for his liberal racial views, objected, but reconsidered the situation at the point of a .38 being shoved into his stomach. As one bystander recalled, Kreutzmann was hassled by some of the students, and Cutler, after telling them not to turn on the sound system, gave in. America was a rough place in May 1970, and it was about to get even rougher.

The next day, May 4, began as an ordinary spring day. President Nixon had ordered American troops to invade the putatively neutral country of Cambodia, and students across the nation protested. In the afternoon, members of Troop G, the 107th Armored Cavalry Regiment of the National Guard, were on duty at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. James Rhodes, the state’s law-and-order governor, had ordered them onto the campus based on “intelligence” that there were “outside agitators” at Kent. Kent’s president, who knew that there were no outside agitators, but who had already authorized the guard to disperse demonstrations, sat down to his second martini. One of the men in Troop G was injured, and his colleagues responded by opening fire on the demonstrators, killing four. Two of the dead were a hundred yards away; two were passersby, about four hundred feet away. Nine more people were injured, including a man 240 yards away, shot in the back of the neck. Mary Vecchio, a fourteen-year-old runaway, knelt over one man’s body and was photographed in the act of screaming, an image that would win a Pulitzer Prize and define the day. Within three days 437 colleges were out on strike. On May 14, two more students were killed as a result of protests—they were black, so there was little public notice—at Jackson State in Mississippi. On May 8, conservative construction workers, dubbed “hard hats,” beat young people demonstrating against the war on Wall Street, earning verbal applause from the president of the United States. Fifty-eight percent of the American people supported the National Guard’s actions.

The Dead were as appalled as most young Americans, and while they continued to avoid the question of direct politics, they made their feelings plain when Bob Weir silk-screened the idealized red fist logo that symbolized that spring onto Mickey’s and Billy’s bass-drum heads. The Dead’s job was to play music, and so on the sixth, still in shock, they played a free show outdoors on a plaza for the striking students at MIT, followed by a regular gig at the Dupont Gymnasium there the next night. During their visit to Cambridge they also encountered Ned Lagin, an MIT student studying hard science on that side of the Charles, and jazz piano at Berklee College on the Boston side of the river. He’d been fascinated by a gig of the Dead’s the previous fall, and had written a letter to Garcia. He’d never gotten a reply, but members of the band sought him out during their visit and struck up a friendship that would blossom in the future. A few nights later the Dead got to Atlanta, where they shared a stage with the Hampton Grease Band and the Allman Brothers in what the local underground paper called “one of the great musical/sensual experiences the Atlanta hip community has ever had.”

Late in May Warner Bros. sent the Dead off on a promotional visit to England, a one-shot gig that would establish their legend and build future demand. The single performance was at the Hollywood Festival, at a farm in Newcastle-Under-Lyme. It was “cold as a whore’s good-bye,” said Weir, a stereotypically rainy English day. The band spent most of its performance fussed by amplifier problems, but late in the show, Lesh said, “all of a sudden this jet plane bifurcates the sky at the high point of ‘Dark Star,’ this vapor trail,” and everything mutated in an instant. By the end of the show, wrote an English critic, “the hillside of people was on its feet, the more insatiable begging for more . . . Even the pop weeklies . . . had to admit . . . [the Dead] commanded respect simply through their style, their approach and the nature of their music.” They charmed the Brits, too. Pigpen reassured them, “Oh, we’ve got past the stage of thoughts of breaking up. What usually happens is that we go into town, to a saloon, shoot some pool or play cards. Then we accuse one another of cheating and start fighting.”

Workingman’s Dead
came out on June 26, and from music to packaging, it was just right. Alton Kelley had taken them down to a corner in San Francisco’s working-class Mission District. It was a blisteringly hot day, and the band was in its usual awful humor when required to pose for pictures. Kreutzmann grew so irritated that he refused to cooperate any longer and went and sat in the doorway, ready to hop the next bus out of there. Miraculously, Kelley’s little Brownie camera captured the moment, and it worked. On the back of the album were Mouse’s romantic airbrush drawings of the six players. Naturally, there were complications.
Working-man’s
was Robert Hunter’s coming-out party, and so he was included on the cover. But he was typically ambivalent. “I was a little frightened about what had been wrought there, and I wasn’t sure how soon it might turn nasty. And I very much kept myself out of the public eye.” On the other hand, he was highly irritated that he “didn’t get a
glamour shot
on the back like everybody else,” he recalled with a laugh. “And I said, ‘Right, that’s the last picture you’re going to get of me!’ It was simple spite.”

A far more important complication in the album’s release stemmed from the fact that the single “Uncle John’s Band” contained the dreaded word “goddamn,” which had to be excised for radio play, or “hacked to ribbons,” from the Dead’s point of view. Promotion was difficult, since Garcia and Weir refused to do a radio promo tour for no particular reason other than they didn’t feel like it. Hunter and McIntire substituted, which was effective only to a point. McIntire recalled how much he believed in the music, that it was the Dead’s chance to “become big in a way that was consistent with the G.D. way of living. It would be our music that carried us.” Hunter also toured radio stations, and naturally fell into a classic bit of Grateful Dead synchronicity. Arriving at WBCN, the hip Boston FM station, he did his interview and then was arm-twisted to play “Uncle John’s Band.” This particular visit preceded the official album release day, and he’d been firmly instructed not to offend all the other stations by playing anything, but after all, it couldn’t be that big a deal . . . Just as they were about to play the tune, WBCN’s antenna was struck by lightning and the station went off the air. With that sort of a cosmic message, it was easy for Hunter to refuse to play the song when the station resumed broadcasting.

In the long run,
Workingman’s Dead
was going to have a profoundly positive effect on the band’s touring fortunes, but it would take a while. Their gig in Memphis the week before the album came out was more typical of their middle-American shows at that time. A local underground newspaper reporter sat with Garcia backstage talking about the local police, about whom Garcia said, “When we first came here, we thought there was something horrible happening, or that somebody was getting beaten up or something . . . And then we suddenly realized that’s just the way they are.” Surly and generally uncooperative because of the atmosphere, Garcia dismissed the reporter’s questions about the acid tests (“We’re just waiting for everybody else to get high”), the Woodstock movie, and what he expected to play that night: “We don’t have any plans. We’ll do anything that we like. There’s no reason to restrict yourself. A plan is only something to deviate from and none of us have the kind of minds that are capable of planning, anyway.”

Their opening act that night was Country Joe and the Fish, who had been warned that if the kids left their chairs to dance, they’d be arrested. After playing a deliberately lethargic set, they were still called back for an encore, and despite a glacial pace, they watched in horror as a kid started dancing. They exited the stage briskly, leaving it to the Dead. Sam Cutler approached Garcia and warned him of the night’s policy, and the interviewer interjected, “They do it. Sly came here and there was one section of people dancing. The police cut their power.” The band played, the kids stayed mostly in their seats, and they struggled to a generally unsatisfactory conclusion, confirming what Garcia had told a fan earlier. The young man had remarked that it was too bad there was such a small audience that night. “We’re used to it,” Garcia replied. “We’ve played a lot of flops . . . That’s where it’s at in the South.”

The entire continent, however, was not like Memphis, and a grand adventure awaited them. Thor Eaton was an heir to a Canadian mercantile fortune, and he’d concocted a marvelous scheme—a mobile, trans-Canadian festival with the musicians traveling by private train. Faint echoes of
Murder on the Orient Express
reverberated, and the idea was an instant hit with the musicians, who came to include the Dead, Janis Joplin, Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, the Band, Mountain, and Buddy Guy. The tour was to begin on June 25 in Montreal and end ten days later in Vancouver. It was a fabulous idea, but it was cursed with endless snarls. The first show, in Montreal, was canceled when city officials feared a possible disruption of the locally important celebration of St. Jean Baptiste Day.

As the festival arrived in Toronto, it became enmeshed in local countercultural politics. Tickets were eight dollars, which although relatively high for the era, covered ten major acts; the Dead for eighty cents seemed reasonable. To the students of Rochdale College, an eighteen-story government-subsidized student housing project, this was a rip-off. In the wake of Kent State, they had formed the May Fourth Movement, or M4M, and they issued a statement: “We demand that Transcontinental (Rip-off) Express be free for everyone and all tickets be refunded; there be free food, dope and music . . . with no cops. Failing these totally reasonable and just demands, we demand that twenty per cent of the gate receipts be returned to the community.”