A Long Strange Trip (52 page)

Just before the Dead’s first set on October 4, a horrible rumor spread through the backstage, a rumor that proved to be sadly true. Three hundred miles south, alone with some heroin, Janis Joplin had died. Mickey suggested to Garcia that they dedicate the set to Janis, but Garcia demurred. “Let’s not bum ’em out. They’ll know soon enough.” Backstage there was a dead silence for about thirty seconds, and then the futile talk of denial, and when the truth was established, a grim attempt to party past various metaphorical graveyards. The Dead had last seen her in July, when she’d come onstage at a show in San Rafael to share a lewd and lascivious “Lovelight” with Pigpen. McIntire found it a peculiar performance, and felt she was drunkenly trying to upstage Garcia rather than show exuberance. Chet Helms, the man who’d brought Janis to San Francisco and Big Brother only four years before, had been profoundly disturbed by her behavior that night. She seemed cadaverous to him, like some reptilian William S. Burroughs character, and her death did not surprise him. “Comfort is made of compromises, and Janis would have no part of its nasty cycle,” wrote one of her biographers. “The paralysis of Kozmical despair seemed to be at the very center of her everyday life.”

On October 10, the Dead were back in New York, this time to start a college tour that would be chaotic, insanely long, and critical in establishing them commercially outside San Francisco and Fillmore East. Ron Rainey was a young man who’d progressed from setting up college shows to working at the booking agency Ashley Famous (later International Famous, IF) and had become the Dead’s new agent. Sent to a New York Dead gig to get Garcia to sign some contracts, he was happy to take the beer he was handed, and later found himself being allowed to play tambourine with the New Riders. “They took care of business and had great fun at my expense,” he said. Having passed the test, and being the youngest guy at IF, he entered training on how to be an agent for the Dead. “Get the money” was the agent’s credo, but the Dead were “concerned with things I hadn’t come to yet.” “How can you give me a contract,” asked McIntire, “without the promoter’s home phone number?” “I got trained to cover every detail. He was patient with me, but strict. He trained me how to do this, but his way.” In the fall of 1970 the action in rock was shifting from the ballrooms to colleges, because “colleges had budgets,” and Ron took the Dead to campus.

The fall tour began at an auditorium at Queens College, Flushing. From the beginning, crowd control was a problem at colleges. At Queens, there were break-ins, people outside calling for a free concert, and people inside blowing police whistles. The college paper quoted the head of campus security as saying the band left early, because “they were afraid of the audience.” A subsequent interview with Garcia disposed of that notion, but the growth in the band’s popularity was inescapable. “Yeah,” said Garcia, “it’s too weird after all this time.” When told of the frenzy that was producing all-night ticket-buying vigils in front of the Fillmore East, Garcia would reply, not for the last time, “that doesn’t mean I oughta carry around the responsibility of being that guy that dispenses our music.”

“Are the Grateful Dead devils or angels?” asked the Queens College paper, which attributed to the band “the ability to drive people to peculiar heights of ecstatic frenzy . . . their whole beings absorbed, taken over.” “Last night was a free zone,” said the University of Pennsylvania paper, “reality suspended, the law flagrantly violated. The Grateful Dead was the cause of it all.” They toured out into the Midwest, and for Halloween came back to where they’d started on the East Coast three years before, at Stony Brook, a totally chaotic show which included a bomb threat. The gym was cleared, the audience exited, and two thousand additional people reentered. Scheduled for two shows, they played until midnight for the first show, and the turnover was anything but graceful. As well, the sound was mixed by students—it was a low-budget tour, without the Dead’s own sound system—and they were not ready for the Grateful Dead. Even that most civil of rhythm guitarists could bark, “Hey, man, turn the microphones up, leave ’em right there. Don’t touch the fuckin’ things. Don’t touch the fuckin’ things, man, ’cause you don’t know what you’re doing.” Pigpen was even more pithy. “Mister Soundman, sir, can I have a little more main in the monitor if it’s at all possible? If I don’t get it the way I want it, I’m going to rip off your head and shit in it.”

The sound guy wasn’t the only person intimidated by the Dead. As Sam Cutler wrote later, “the people who lead bands from relative obscurity to ‘mega popularity’ . . . are NOT usually very nice people!! . . . Nowadays managers are diplomats, in my day they were aggressive bastards who got what they needed for their band, come what may.” At least twice on this tour, students on the concert committee would report that the aggression included the sight of a gun, something Cutler flatly denied. “They’re mad. I have NEVER carried a weapon in my life other than a sharp and incisive mind.” He was contradicted by a band insider who recalled comparing his own pistol, which Sam had noticed, with Sam’s. The business was a rough one at times. For instance, a show scheduled for November 15 in Albany, New York, produced a headline in the local underground paper, “Ungrateful Dead Rip Off Tri-Cities,” and an article that asserted that the Dead “walked out of the Washington Avenue Armory Sunday night with $7,500 cash in their pockets without ever appearing onstage.” Of course, the reporter’s only basis for this notion was that Cutler had carried a satchel when he left. The local promoter, George Freije, had booked the Dead at the last second after Delaney and Bonnie had canceled. It was the Dead’s eleventh night of gigs in a row, but work was work. When a bomb threat cleared the hall, the band left. Twenty years later the same reporter concluded that the threat was in fact an excuse for the promoter to end the show early, and since the Dead never saw any money, their departure was in order.

It was the tour that wouldn’t end. The next night, a Monday, they joined what was left of Jefferson Airplane—Grace Slick was pregnant and a no-show, Marty Balin had essentially left the band—for a night of jams at Fillmore East that included members of Traffic. A few nights later Jorma Kaukonen stopped on his way to visit his family at the U.S. embassy in Ottawa and jammed with the Dead in Rochester. Because they liked Boston, Weir and Garcia demonstrated their appreciation by joining Duane Allman at the WBCN studios after their show there and jammed with him. At too long last, the Dead finished the tour on November 29 at a club in Ohio.

That week
American Beauty
landed in the record stores. “Truckin’ ” was the single, and actually reached no. 64 on the charts, although Warner Bros.’ editing job was singularly inept. Kelley’s cover, on the other hand, was superb. On being told the title, he’d naturally thought of a rose, and then etched the rose into a mirror backward. The flame lettering could be read as “American Reality” as well as “Beauty,” an unexpected but entirely welcome double message. Originally, there was to have been a photo of the band on the back cover that would have included some members holding guns, but Hunter protested. One loud no was a veto, so they used a picture of Kelley’s cluttered bedroom table.

As the year wound down, their tour schedule eased slightly, although they performed 120 shows in 1970, their most active year ever documented. What few shows they played late in the year were in the Bay Area. Mostly, they relaxed. Of course, relaxation for Garcia meant hanging out and playing. And he could partake of a unique situation that was then conveniently at hand. From the time of recording
American Beauty
until the following March, the Dead, the Airplane, Santana, and CS&N were more or less continuously in residence at Heider’s, and for more than six months some of the best music in America was being made there. It was a three-room musical circus, and when one take was done, there was always the possibility of something fun happening next door. The previous year, Garcia had played pedal steel on “Teach Your Children,” the lead song on CSNY’s Déjà Vu. Santana’s epic Abraxas had been released in October 1970, and in December RCA put out
Blows Against the Empire,
Paul Kantner’s science-fiction fantasy project, featuring Grace Slick, Jack Casady, Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, David Crosby, and Graham Nash. In the course of the fall and winter, David Crosby’s
If I Could Only Remember
My Name,
released in March 1971, and Graham Nash’s
Songs for Beginners,
released in June, drew on the same group of musicians. It could only have happened in San Francisco, said Crosby, for nowhere else did you have the “degree of talent that was willing to be that free with itself, that willing to be that unself-conscious or that undefensive.” Only at Heider’s could you find so many fearless musicians, “especially Garcia.” Because “the weirder you got,” said Crosby, “the happier he got.”

One consequence of
American Beauty
was the return of Alan Trist, Garcia and Hunter’s buddy from 1961 Palo Alto. When he’d left California, he’d attended Cambridge, eventually marrying Robert Hunter’s friend from the same Palo Alto circle, Christie Bourne. Through the sixties, Christie maintained a close friendship with both men, which kept the connection alive. After the Hollywood Festival show in 1970, Alan had gotten together with Hunter and McIntire, and eventually Jon had offered him the job of running Ice Nine, the Dead’s music publishing firm. Alan faced an interesting quandary. He was then working with the Tavistock Institute, which studied social change, and now he had the opportunity to live it. McIntire had impressed him deeply with an energy that was clearly and consciously oriented toward positiveness and the pursuit of quality, and so his decision was not terribly difficult. The Dead won, and late in November, as
American Beauty
was released, he moved to the Bay Area and joined the office staff at 5th and Lincoln.

McIntire’s motivations for the job offer were complex and significant. Jon felt that as a social anthropologist, Alan might be able to help the band look at its internal processes, become more conscious of them, and learn from them. The Tavistock was anti-ideological; the Dead were anti-dogmatic. McIntire thought Alan might help make the Dead “more wholesome in our dealings with ourselves. I was trying to harken the scene back to the heart and roots of 710, the kind of care that everyone took for each other, the kind of openness that everyone had for each other.” Hunter’s fundamental question in “Uncle John’s Band” was “Are you kind?” McIntire’s job, with Trist’s help, was to try to make that attitude live outside the song.

At Christmas Columbia released the eponymously titled first New Riders of the Purple Sage album, so that wing was prospering. The Dead ended the year at Winterland, where each of the balloons that dropped from the ceiling at midnight had a beautifully engraved card with an attached barrel of Orange Sunshine LSD. That the band had even survived through 1970 was, on reflection, a little miraculous. That they had prevailed was just good old Grateful Dead dumbshit synchronicity. For once, the joke was theirs.

33

Interlude/Intermission II: Uncle John’s Children

As the house lights come up, the tapers change batteries, flip tapes or insert fresh blanks, and tend to their housekeeping. They are an inter-esting bunch, one of a number of self-created subgroups within the larger Dead Head culture, of particular importance because their labors produce the sacred talismans that unite the tribe as a whole. Their dean is Barry Glassberg, who attended 352 shows, made 310 tapes, and—when it was an unsanctioned activity—was caught fewer than twenty times, because he wore a suit, carried a briefcase, and put his tape deck in a hollowed-out medical journal. The tapers are extremely serious. The Dead, wrote taper Dan Hupert, “is a compilation, every night, of every show that went before . . . without a tape, what they played in Laguna in ’68 is nothing more than past history. With it, however, it becomes a part of my present . . . If you see two shows a year, or five, or seven, they are individual concert experiences. If you see twenty-five and listen to tapes of most of the others, it is no longer an individual experience or a set of them. It is a continuing process. Each tour has its own momentum, its own inner logic and cohesiveness. And each is quite clearly, if you look at it at all closely, the result of the time and place and of all the shows and tours in all the years that went before it.”

The band’s decision to allow taping, said John Barlow, was “one of the most enlightened, practical, smart things that anybody ever did. I think it is probably the single most important reason that we have the popularity that we have . . . [Tapes are the] article of currency for this economy, our psychic economy to say the least . . . And by the proliferation of tapes, that formed the basis of a culture and something weirdly like a religion . . . A lot of what we are selling is community. That is our main product, it’s not music.” That community was actually a collection of families, for Dead Heads almost invariably find themselves a member of a small group as a practical response to the various logistical requirements of touring. The solitary Dead Head is a rarity.

The community was a collaboration between the fans and the Dead, who gave the Dead Heads their name, symbols and motifs to share such as the various logos, and a commitment demonstrated by constant performing, outstanding sound, and the lowest possible ticket prices. Because the band dressed and acted like the audience, because there was no “show,” the audience correctly perceived them as people like themselves who happened to be able to play—equal partners in a psychic quest. The Dead then displayed music and values that were just strange enough to invite a stigma that the Heads could share. It was not a coincidence that the subculture exploded in size during the Reagan administration, when anything odd or liberal was swept away in a sea of greed.

Indeed, by the eighties and nineties the Dead Head subculture, a community, tribe, family, and traveling circus, was, as Garcia put it, the “last adventure.” Like the Dead, the Dead Heads were quintessentially American, heirs to Daniel Boone and Huck Finn, who lit out for the frontier when things got too “sivilized.” The Dead Heads’ frontier is within as well as on the road, but they were no less pioneers for that. The Dead Heads had only one thing absolutely in common: each one had experienced some inner click of affinity, some overwhelming sense of “here I belong,” when confronted by the Dead, its music and scene. It was the recognition of an essentially spiritual experience that bound them together. They found a faith in the pursuit of transcendence, as initiated by psychedelics and music, and shared antiauthoritarian values that placed a premium on tolerance. After that, each person’s role within the culture was improvised, in the same way as the music was played. The parking lot denizens who attended every show and dressed solely in tie-dye were extreme and attracted the media attention, though they were a tiny fraction of the whole. But all Dead Heads shared the faith of the pilgrim. In a cynical age, that made them highly vulnerable to mockery: “How many Dead Heads does it take to screw in a lightbulb? One to change it, fifty to tape it, fifty thousand to follow it around after it burns out.” They were white, slightly more likely to be male, and mostly middle-class, although large outposts of Dead Heads were to be found at upper-class prep schools.

Dead Heads ranged from the young and unformed to Owen Chamberlain, a Nobel laureate in physics who enjoyed sitting between the two drummers, he said, “because it gives me interesting ideas.” One of the great athletes of his era, Bill Walton, recognized the profound affinity of improvisation on the basketball court and the concert stage, and became one of the band’s favorite Dead Heads. The artist Keith Haring recognized the invigorating energy of the concerts. So did Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who exchanged his normal pinstripes for tie-dye and shorts at shows and then danced up a storm. Unfortunately, he could not fully escape his role, which led to one of the more surreal conversations ever held onstage. As the opening act performed at a 1993 RFK Stadium concert in Washington, a runner brought Scrib a message for Senator Leahy which had been called into the stadium offices from the White House. The senator requested a phone, which Robbie Taylor provided, and returned the call, to Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Christopher informed the senator, who was chairman of a Foreign Operations Subcommittee, that reprisals were about to go forward against Saddam Hussein, and then went on to remark that the radio was on rather loud where the senator was. “No, that’s Sting.” There was silence. “Sting, the musician.” Silence. “He’s opening for the Grateful Dead.” A very deep silence ensued, until Christopher replied, “Would you have time for the president?”

Undoubtedly, the Dead Head who got “it” at the most profoundly scholarly level was the great mythologist Joseph Campbell. Campbell had no interest in or contact with popular culture, having seen two movies. He didn’t read a newspaper and hadn’t been to a pop concert in decades. The head of the Bay Area Jungian Institute lived next door to Weir, and Bobby was delighted to have Campbell as a dinner guest. Garcia had been a Campbell fan since reading
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans
Wake,
Mickey since encountering
The Way of the Animal Powers,
and they were delighted to join in. Soon after, Campbell came to a Dead show and was enthralled. “I just didn’t know anything like that existed,” he told his associate Sam Keane. “This was a real Dionysian Festival.” He’d always argued that the great mythic patterns endured in contemporary life, but the evidence before him was thrilling. After the concert he wrote to the band members, whom he identified as “magicians,” that he felt “in immediate accord” with their art. To Campbell, a Dead concert was “25,000 people tied at the heart,” and the “antidote for the atom bomb.” Given Campbell’s right-wing political views, Keane found it doubly surprising that the Dead “got through his barriers . . . The spirit of the thing, a community, a celebrating community, and it was a pretty orderly community, it was really pretty sweet—whether he liked the music or not wasn’t quite the issue—it produced a kind of benevolent frenzy I guess you would say . . . It was very important to him . . . he mentioned it frequently.” Such validation from a wise elder of the race was a very rich reward for the musicians.

Phil Lesh had often remarked that “everywhere we play is church,” in the sense that the act of playing was a form of devotion. It is difficult in America for the average person to associate celebration and religion, but Dead Heads have no such problem. “The great thing about the Dead,” explained one disciple, “is . . . like, you can have these wicked cosmic thoughts and dance at the same time. Really spiritual and really sensual.” There were also the social bonds of ritual, the waiting in line, choosing where in a general-admission show one customarily sits, the rolling of joints, and so forth. “There is something religious about our thing,” remarked Garcia. “The desire on our fans’ part is to have some high moments in your life, some mystery.”

Dead Heads were not paragons. Like all fans, a word derived from the same root as “fanatic,” they could become tediously obsessed with the object of their joy, and while there were far worse forms of competition than being “Deader than thou,” it still led at times to what one person called “obnoxious religious bliss.” Their frequent unwillingness to listen to fine opening musicians indicated a self-limiting deliberate cultivation of ignorance. An even more annoying example of obliviousness came with every performance of “Black Muddy River.” Night after night, Garcia would depict the agonizing “dark night of the soul” as he sang, “When it seems like the night will last forever,” and some Dead Heads would choose to cheer it as a reference to an unending party. More, the Dead Heads’ adoption of a uniform—tie-dye in all its manifestations—invited, demanded, stereotyping.

At its worst, the faith could slide into rank superstition, as when rumors of the band’s imminent demise swept the Dead world after they began playing the Rolling Stones’ song “The Last Time.” Watching a stoned zombie ignore his/her own child while under the influence of drugs was a depressing sight. There was also the pathology that Barlow and Weir depicted in “Estimated Prophet,” or in the following letter to Garcia:

Dear Jerry:

. . . Please read my letter to you. I think you will find it very interesting, if not the truth . . . I am the young man who helped turn some very confused and potentially destructive psychic energy around at two of your recent concerts . . . In both incidences there was a great deal of weirdness emating
[sic]
from Bob Weir and the entire Bill Graham production of your concert . . . I am positive that you personally were acknowledging my presence in the audience this past December.

Thankfully, this sort of lost-in-the-ozone stasis was not terribly common. More often, they would agree with the fan who wrote,

The Grateful Dead represents the high water mark of civilization, as far as humanity has come towards establishing universal consciousness. Like unravelling the DNA helix or hearing the echoes of the big bang, their work pushes back the frontiers of knowledge; the shining resonance of the music of the spheres is clearly heard, the voice of a higher consciousness.

The band recognized the bond, and within human limits, respected it mightily. As Garcia said, he’d “never experienced the click of great music without an audience . . . We exist by their grace.” “What I’m talking about,” said Kreutzmann, “is, when it’s really happening, the audience is as much the band as the band is the audience. There is no difference. The audience should be paid—they contribute as much.”

The band definitely paid attention to its audience, both in the whole and in the particular. Early in the 1980s there was a string of three or four shows in which an extremely large fellow occupied the same seat in the front row. Since the seats were reserved, the question arose as to how he’d acquired such fine tickets. About the third night, at the break, Scrib ran into Mickey, Billy, and Bobby, who were discussing the guy. Kreutzmann had briefly observed a bright blue flame around him and concluded that the guy was smoking freebase, which enraged him. Mickey was in agreement with his brother drummer. Weir went along. When he found himself in Parish’s corner a little later getting Garcia to sign some things, Scrib asked Jerry if he’d noticed the man. Garcia had indeed noticed him, had noticed details of his dancing style and how it connected with the flow of the music. Parish commented that the hostility to the guy had to do with his size—both men liked the guy’s vibe. They had also somehow discovered that he was a ticket broker, which explained his source of tickets. Out of pure curiosity, Scrib polled Lesh, who remarked that he had no attitude on the guy personally, but tended to grow sick of always seeing the same people night after night.

Just as the band has its ultimate bumper sticker (“There Is Nothing Like a Grateful Dead Concert”), so do the Dead Heads: “We Are Everywhere.” There was the pilot who saved Mickey Hart from arrest after a scuffle with a flight attendant by pulling one of Bear’s gold Dead logo necklaces from his shirt and saying, “Mickey, you’re responsible for getting me kicked out of my house when I was sixteen years old. Thank you so much.” In 1973 one of the pilots of “Looking Glass,” the permanently circling airplane that is the alternative headquarters for the U.S. military in case of all-out war, was a Dead Head named John Babuini. As he flew quadrants around the United States, he would call a Dead Head buddy, who would patch him into his home stereo over the phone lines. When the Strategic Air Command saw Babuini’s phone bills, they ran a security check. Both Babuini and his friend passed, and John served his nation with “Dark Star” in his ears.

Being a Dead Head is about faith: faith in synchronicity, faith in joy. On the first (Friday) night of a three-show run at Shoreline Amphitheatre, a few miles south of San Francisco, an extremely pregnant lady named Robin Kraft sat in the front row making jokes about how one good sonic boom from Lesh might cause her to give birth to her child, already named Stella Blue Kraft. Robin was not in her seat on Saturday, having gone into labor. It was a long, long birth process, but finally, on Sunday, her baby was born—just as the band began to play “Stella Blue.” Of such events is faith derived.