A Long Strange Trip (51 page)

When festival organizers rejected the demands, the June 27 show at CNE Stadium, Toronto, became a magnet for gate-crashers, and at least 2,500 showed up, chanting “Make it free, rip it off. Save the trouble, let us in.” By the end of the afternoon, perhaps one hundred had broken in. The Toronto police were represented by John Sagar, a member of the force’s so-called Mod Squad, and despite ten injured police, there were only twenty-seven arrests for breaking in, and only four drug arrests. The crowd’s violence, however, so appalled Garcia that when he implored them to calm down, he almost, against all his personal inclinations, slid sideways into making a value judgment and criticizing the M4M protesters. After a day consumed by negotiations, he and a police inspector arranged a free concert the next day as a way of defusing the situation. The Dead, the New Riders, Ian and Sylvia, and James and the Good Brothers played for about two thousand in Coronation Park.

With a first show like that, the festival seemed doomed. But the party was about to start. On the twenty-ninth, 140 musicians and associates boarded the Festival Express, which included twelve cars, two bar cars, and a formal, elegant dining car complete with nine waiters, white linen, and old silver. The sleeping cars had names like Etoile and Valparaiso, and each compartment had a picture window, bed, couch, toilet, washbasin, jump seat, clothes closet, air conditioner, and cupboard, all in tiny but perfect proportion. The compartments were so small, in fact, that one had to get into bed from the corridor, not always easy when drunk at 4 A.M. As they boarded, the atmosphere was “cautious, almost morosely quiet,” said one observer, with “overtones of the first day of summer camp.” One non–summer camp problem was that they’d anticipated marijuana from the promoter in order to make their border crossings smooth, and he had reneged. The Dead looked like cowboys, with boots, sheath knives, and shirts from Miller’s Western Store in Denver. Then Leslie West and Felix Pappalardi of Mountain pulled out guitars, Garcia, Delaney, and Delaney’s bass player Kenny Gradney followed suit, and the party began, presided over by the queen spirit, Janis. Hunter, of course, got a song— “Might as Well”—out of it: “Great north special were you on board? / Can’t find a ride like that no more . . . Never had such a good time / In my life before . . . One long party from start to end I’d like to / take that ride again.”

They set out from Toronto and passed English-sounding towns like Islington, Tottenham, Bayswater, and Bethnal, then French trapper posts like Foleyet, Lainaune, Girouxville, La Broquerie, Paqwa, Penequani, Ophir, Snakesbreath, Decimal, and Malachi. They rolled through what
Rolling Stone
writer David Dalton saw as an “infinity of lakes and river cut into a wilderness of birch trees,” singing all the way. At one point Garcia looked out from his berth and gaped at a large black bear scratching its back on one of those birch trees. The party picked up steam, and the Dead blew off a scheduled gig in Chicago—Garcia said it was the only time they ever did such a thing—and then invited various family members from home to join them toward the end of the ride. It got wilder. Lesh looked out of his room once to see Garcia and the Band’s Rick Danko on their knees in the corridor, crawling drunkenly back to their compartments. Garcia was not really a drinker, so this was a grand exception, especially unforgettable because he looked up through a whiskey haze at the sky that night and saw the northern lights for the first time. Janis Joplin had chosen young Marmaduke Dawson as her companion for the ride, and late of an evening, her pre-orgasmic yowl of “Daddy, daddy, daddy” would ring through the train. Country-western replaced the blues, and Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, and Kris Kristofferson songs, especially “Me and Bobby McGee,” drifted mournfully through the cars, Janis singing with Garcia picking out steel guitar behind her. Delaney taught Garcia “Going Down the Road Feelin’ Bad,” a traditional tune that Woody Guthrie had recorded, and a few months later it would enter the Dead’s repertoire.

They played in Winnipeg, where a hundred demonstrators showed up to chant “Make it free” and were largely ignored. Unfortunately for the festival organizers, only about four thousand ticket buyers appeared as well. By Saskatoon they’d nearly run out of booze, which would have been dire, so they passed the hat, and Janis’s road manager, John Cooke, the son of the distinguished writer Alistair Cooke, bought out the town liquor store, including a gallon bottle of Canadian Club whiskey that would be a dead soldier by dawn. At the drunkest moments, the Beatles’ “I’ve Just Seen a Face” became the theme song, and its chorus of “Fah-ling, yes I’m faaaah-lll-iing” would circulate endlessly, like a musical Möbius band. “If I could remember how it began,” said Weir, “maybe we could find an ending or we could just go on singing this all night.”

The Vancouver gig was canceled, so they knew that Calgary was the end, and the last party was a winner. “I got the Dead drunk,” cackled Janis, and Garcia wobbled out onto the tracks, groaning, “I promise never to drink again, Your Honor!” The Dead got their revenge, dosing Janis’s birthday cake, a treat shared by a good part of the Calgary Police Department, occasioning an early shift change.

Five days later the Dead were back at the Fillmore East, the one place at that point where they could reliably make enough money to continue recovering from Lenny. It was the fourth of their six visits there that year.

32

An American Beauty

(8/4/70–12/31/70)

Woodstock, the movie, had opened on May 1, and it was extraordinary. The rock and roll hippies led by Michael Wadleigh had used a new level of technology that started with special cameras and the cinema verité style to document the creation, for one blissful weekend, of a separate nation, a pilgrimage, in Joni Mitchell’s words, “back to the Garden.” Just as important, they had protected their artistic vision from their corporate sponsors at Warner’s, and what was on the screen would touch the hearts of more young Americans than could ever have actually found Yasgur’s farm. The film won an Oscar and became the highest-grossing documentary of all time. The Dead were absent. Given their low opinion of their performance, they would never have signed the release, but that never even became an issue.
Wood-stock
’s editors, including the Dead fan Martin Scorsese, couldn’t find any footage sufficiently well lit to be usable. The Dead were quite literally in the dark.

The film had various side effects, one of which was giving Tom Donahue an idea for a documentary film on the music/youth scene. He convinced the film end of Warner Bros., then enjoying the cash flow of
Woodstock,
to finance it. To be called the
Medicine Ball Caravan,
the movie would follow a band across the United States, stopping four or five times for concert encampments. No doubt someone at Warner Bros. called it “Woodstock on wheels.” With Donahue in charge and able to call in old favors with band members who couldn’t say no, it briefly seemed like a scheme that was crazy enough to be feasible. There were, however, several negatives. The caravan would live in tepees, and as McIntire noted, “I had Phil Lesh and Bill Kreutzmann, who were not guys who would be willing to rough it.” Donahue was always longer on inspiration than detail, and the event seemed “appallingly organized” to Cutler, who recalled, “The energy that was supposed to be developing behind it never came into fruition.” In the end it was somebody else’s movie, and the Dead didn’t really feel comfortable. As the August 4 departure date closed in, McIntire began to discern mixed messages from the different Warner representatives with whom he was negotiating. Finally, late on the night of August 3, he pulled the plug. Alembic, which had been hired to provide the sound system, remained involved, so mixers Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor and the sound crew went off with the Caravan.

For Weir, the cancellation was a special blessing. He was living at 2200 Nicasio Valley Road in western Marin County at a putative horse ranch called Rukka Rukka, after a crew joke referring to women’s derrieres. It was a striking location, with a hill rising steeply behind the house to provide a wonderful setting, but the ranch was, said Weir, a “rich man’s hobby for folks who weren’t rich,” and although they had as many as a dozen horses, it was not a galloping success as a ranch. This was a particular concern for the neighbors, who raised fine Arabians and did not welcome the advances of such horses as Rukka Rukka’s Apache Chipper, a less than well bred animal that would periodically escape. Along with his lover, Frankie, and crew members Rex Jackson and Sonny Heard, Weir shared Rukka Rukka with a young woman in their scene named Eileen Law, now nine months pregnant. She had already had one false alarm, and instead of going into San Francisco a second time at the onset of labor pains, she moved from her tent in the back to Weir and Frankie’s bed to give birth. Weir’s compositional dry spell had ended, and he had already written two new songs that year, “Truckin’ ” and “Sugar Magnolia.” As Eileen’s long day passed, he sat on the couch strumming his guitar and worked on another new song, which would share the name Eileen had chosen for her baby, Cassidy, the daughter of Rex Jackson.

Two weeks later the Dead played a weekend at Fillmore West, and once again they had a flock of new songs to introduce. Flush with the success of
Workingman’s Dead,
Hunter had visited England in June, staying at his old friend Alan Trist’s flat on Devonshire Terrace near Hyde Park. Ecstatic to be in the land of Shakespeare, Robin Hood, and Peter Pan, and fueled by the sight and taste of a full case of retsina (a resinate Greek wine) in a corner of the flat, he took in the sunny, lovely day and sat down to write, producing the lyrics to three songs in an hour and a half, including “Ripple” and “Brokedown Palace.” That same month, on the train ride somewhere near Saskatoon, Garcia had fooled around with Weir’s new, custom-made guitar, and a song had fallen out. The next time he saw Hunter, Robert had said, “Here, I have a couple of songs I’d like you to look at.” One was “Ripple,” and lyric met tune with a perfect flow. It was a marvelous and an unlikely song, a hymn that was almost too spiritual for Garcia to be able to sing. “One more word and I couldn’t sing it,” he said. “When I sing that song there’s a moment when I say to myself, ‘Am I really a Presbyterian minister?’ ”

If my words did glow
with the gold of sunshine
and my tunes were played
on the harp unstrung
would you hear my voice
come through the music
would you hold it near
as it were your own?

The words do glow with sunshine; the song is positively lambent with grace. There is faith—“there is a fountain / that was not made / by the hands of man”—but it is not sappy. “There is a road, no simple highway,” but it is solitary. There are no promises except for the haiku that makes up the bridge:

Ripple in still water
when there is no pebble tossed
nor wind to blow

“Brokedown Palace” is a death song, but a death that is part of the peace that passeth all understanding. It is the death of the old and accomplished, an ending of dignity and serenity. These songs joined “Attics of My Life,” a cantata set by Lesh that had Hunter at his best, although the band simply could not sing it consistently enough onstage to make it work.

In the attics of my life
Full of cloudy dreams unreal
Full of tastes no tongue can know
And lights no eye can see
When there was no ear to hear
You sang to me

Garcia was twenty-eight, and Lesh was thirty. They had reached both the fullness of their talent and the age of the inevitable deaths that accompany adulthood, the rituals of succeeding generations. Late in August Jerry’s mother, Bobbie, put her little dog in her car and set off from her home on Twin Peaks, the mountain at the center of the city, to take it for a walk. On the way it became entangled between the gas and brake pedals, causing the car to go off the road and down the nearly vertical hillside, where it finally impaled itself on a cypress tree. When he learned of the accident, Jerry went to get his brother, Tiff, who was living in the mountains near Santa Cruz. They returned to visit Bobbie at San Francisco General Hospital, where she had resumed working as a nurse a couple of years before. It was in the Mission District, only a couple of miles from Harrington Street. Bobbie was conscious, but on a respirator and unable to talk, although she could communicate by writing. She would survive for a month after the accident, and day after day, the Garcia boys and their wives came to visit. Jerry was no more emotionally open at twenty-eight than he had been as a teen, and the fact that he had never properly reconciled with her would gnaw at him for the rest of his life. Because of Bobbie’s remarriages, the Garcias would not permit her to be buried with Jose. Jerry hadn’t liked Wally Matusiewicz in life, and he didn’t like seeing his mother next to him in death. There would be no peace or closure for him when Bobbie died, only a change in his pain.

At exactly the same time, Phil’s father, Frank, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Phil had been working on a song, and he handed Hunter a tape that Robert recalled had “every vocal nuance” except the words. Hunter listened to the tape, and before he was through it the first time he was writing words. He “heated the lyrics up” on the second listen, and “Box of Rain” was complete. Mr. Lesh was in a nursing home on the other side of the Berkeley hills, in Livermore, and as Phil drove out each day to visit him, he would sing “Box of Rain” and cry the sweet tears that come when you truly cherish someone you must lose.

The time that had opened up for the Dead because of their withdrawal from the Medicine Ball Caravan sent them to the studio. They’d made a stab at working at Pacific Recording in San Mateo, but that had washed out, and without their regular engineers, Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor, who were off with the Caravan, they went to take a look at Wally Heider’s, the first high-quality studio in San Francisco. Heider’s had opened in April 1969 and had already been the birthplace of the Airplane album
Volunteers,
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s
Déjà Vu,
and the many hits of Creedence Clearwater Revival. The combination of the studio and Steve Barncard, the engineer who came with it, was irresistible. Between August 6 and September 16 the Dead recorded yet another album, which they would call
American Beauty;
after his lover, Christie, suggested “big full fat American Beauty rose,” Hunter wisely edited it down. It was another masterpiece, perhaps their best studio album ever. The songs were not only exquisite, their performances were illuminated by an inner light born of sorrow, as well as the light born of psilocybin mushrooms, which Rock’s lover, Nicki, was doling out to the band during the recording process. They all set up in the same room, without baffles, so the album was essentially recorded live. Since a good portion of the greater scene was away, distractions were few and the studio’s atmosphere was quiet and industrious.

As with
Workingman’s,
there was little experimentation; they were there to support the text. The only difficulty, in Weir’s memory, was Hunter’s nerves, which came to be called Hunteritis. “You can’t do it that way! What are you trying to do to my song?” Eventually, Weir asked him to step out so he could finish “Sugar Magnolia.” In his polite, aw-shucks decent way, Bob Weir was at least as stubborn as Hunter, and completely unwilling to follow the Hunter system of “one man writes the words, one man sings them.” They were destined to lock horns, and so they did. The line about “jumps like a Willys in four-wheel drive” was in fact written by Weir, and Hunter didn’t appreciate the assistance. Nonetheless, he supplied the “Sunshine Daydream” coda on demand, and it put the perfect finishing touch on a superb song.

Barncard did a lovely job of making their harmony singing sound great. With three microphones and two passes each, there were six vocal tracks on each tune. This required a mix team, with two mixers and a person behind each of them to lean over their shoulder to push mute buttons, EQ (equalization), or whatever. It had a more human sound than later, all-automated mixing, and it was gorgeous in its simplicity. Everything worked.

On a day off that month, the Dead played softball with the Airplane in Fairfax, and whom should Garcia spot down the first base line but his old pal David Grisman, newly arrived in the Bay Area. “Hey, man, I got a recording gig for you.” The next day, Grisman limbered up his mandolin at Heider’s, listened to “Ripple” once or twice, took two or three takes, and, in Barncard’s words, “ripped our heart out.” He also contributed to “Friend of the Devil.” Ned Lagin got off a Greyhound bus from Boston and went to Heider’s, where he and Garcia were the first ones in. “Good,” Jerry said. “You can play on our record.” For a finale they brought in office staff, friends, and neighbors and conducted a candlelit chorus of about thirty sitting on the floor, some in tune and some not, just like a church service almost anywhere, to finish off “Ripple.”

On September 16, the Dead flew to New York for gigs at the Fillmore East, and it turned out to be a thoroughly wonderful plane flight. Their fellow passengers included Ray Charles, who played chess with Sam Cutler and beat him, and a gaggle of Greek people on their way to visit their homeland. As the Greeks began dancing up and down the aisle, the Dead focused on yet another passenger, Huey Newton, the charismatic head of the Black Panther Party. Natural-born skeptics, the Dead knew that the media image of the Panthers was not to be trusted, and they were delighted to sit and rave with an intelligent and personable man. Six miles in the air, the conversation was good and the vibes even better. Interestingly, their encounter was documented in their FBI file just twelve days later.

The shows at the Fillmore East were not only successful, with
Cashbox
reporting that their “impact on the audience was absolutely phenomenal, and their popularity continues to grow with every performance,” but also made musically exceptional by the presence of David Grisman. The run’s good mood was interrupted on September 18, when word reached them of Jimi Hendrix’s death in London. They dedicated a set to him, but it was not satisfying. “I never saw him,” Garcia said, “without a half-dozen weird people hanging around him—vampires and shit.” The Dead’s own profound relationship with “the family” of crew, staff, and friends was their proof against rock angst, and they knew it. But it was still sad to see those who couldn’t survive the vampires. Hendrix’s loss was all the more poignant because they’d never jammed with him; on the one occasion that he’d come to a show, ax in hand, the Dead had gotten so high on LSD and so deep in their music that when Mickey Hart finally remembered to signal for him to join them, it was hours later and he’d departed.

Returning home, they joined Quicksilver and Jefferson Airplane for two shows on October 4 and 5 at Winterland, working not for Bill Graham but for his former house manager, Paul Barratta. Barratta’s challenge to Graham failed in short order, but this run was distinctive. In addition to putting the old “big three” of San Francisco bands together, the shows had Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady’s blues band, Hot Tuna, a live TV broadcast on the public station KQED, and the first quadraphonic radio broadcast in history, combining two stereo FM stations, KQED and KSAN. Winterland was packed, and thousands were turned away. Hot Tuna opened. Quicksilver’s sets included a five-piece horn section, and they were such a mess that they were John Cipollina’s last with the band he’d helped begin.