A Long Strange Trip (54 page)

After busing around Pennsylvania, the tour stopped at Wallace Wade Stadium at Duke University in North Carolina, one of their first shows in the South since New Orleans. Eric Greenspan was the student responsible for booking the show, which included the Dead, the Beach Boys, and the Butterfield Blues Band. It was his first large outdoor event, and he was ill prepared. The stage was low and had no roof, the security barricade was a rope, and there were no trailers for dressing rooms. The weather forecast was for rain. Having just seen the Rolling Stones’ Altamont movie,
Gimme Shelter,
Greenspan met with Sam Cutler the day before the show. Thinking to propitiate this legend, Greenspan offered Cutler a gram of hashish. When Sam simply tossed it back like an aspirin tablet, Eric realized that he was in deeply over his head, and then listened as Sam pointed out the requirements outlined in the contract, which are called riders, and the various ways in which he had failed to deliver. “We knew nothing from riders,” Eric recalled.

The sun was bright as the gig day dawned, and Eric stood on his little stage as Cutler and Garcia drove up and Cutler revved up for some more ass chewing. Finally, Jerry cut him off with a grin. “Sam, give it a rest. We’ll play.” Among other chores that day, Eric took Candelario to the store, where he bought fifteen pairs of Converse sneakers, and swapped them around so that everyone had two colors. Eric also sampled Kidd’s electric Visine bottle, and although there were only seven thousand kids in a fifty-thousand-seat stadium—there had been no advertising or off-campus sales—or perhaps because there were only seven thousand kids, it was a blissful day that established the Dead in North Carolina forever.

From Carolina they returned to New York for five nights at Fillmore East. On their arrival they learned what Bill Graham would only announce on the morning of the last show: that he was closing the building in June. His resignation, reported
Rolling Stone,
was “a great document, a brilliant combination of bitterness, bullshit, self-pity, candid revelations and his coach-like brand of big ball pontification. He attacked greedy artists, greedy agents, greedy fans, rock festivals and mediocre talent. And of course, the abusive press.”

Graham’s announcement lent the Dead’s last stand a special poignancy and power. This was where they had established themselves as a functioning commercial act. In just six years of existence, they had traveled far, and already they were leaving things behind. Duane Allman dropped by one night and T.C. sat in for a dosed Pigpen on another. Having met the Beach Boys at Duke, the Dead had invited them to join the party, and partway into a set, Garcia announced that “another famous California group” would join them. As the Boys sang “Help Me, Rhonda,” members of the crew called John Hagen’s pregnant wife, Rhonda, back home, and discovered that she was giving birth to their son, all alone.

Back in San Francisco, the band’s rising popularity and Cutler’s more systematic booking policies had resulted in something no one had ever expected—free time. The years when they would take any gig were behind them, which pleased everyone except Garcia, the music addict. He wanted to play five nights a week, and with the Dead easing back, he had to find other ways to stay busy. In the summer of 1970, he had taken up with an eccentric, gifted keyboardist named Howard Wales and effectively began a career outside the Grateful Dead. Wales was a midwesterner who had played piano since the age of four, and in the sixties he had gone from playing in Mafia joints on Chicago’s Rush Street, to backing Jerry’s old hero Freddie King, to a band that dyed its hair green and wore space suits, to the band Sugarloaf, which had a big hit with “Green-Eyed Lady.” After emigrating to San Francisco, he landed a gig at the Matrix organizing a regular jam on Monday nights. Late in the spring of 1970 Garcia began to sit in regularly, soon joined by John Kahn, a bass player then working with Mike Bloomfield. There was almost no audience, and they didn’t have songs, either. “We didn’t play anything very basic at all,” said Kahn. “It didn’t sound like any music you would be used to.” “Howard would just play through tremendously extended changes,” said Garcia. “It developed my ear . . . so outside and totally unpredictable.” Later, Garcia would add, “John and I played for a year before we even really talked to each other. ‘Hey what’s doing man?’ and then plug in and spend all night muttering to each other, ‘What key are we in?’ ” Even Wales would describe their music as musical adventures, “free-form jams . . . I generally induced certain phrasings and stuff that basically would incorporate sort of a composition of a song, but the thing is, it started at one place and ended up in other places.”

“What happened was,” said Kahn, “we went there one night, and really out of nowhere the place was packed . . . Howard freaked. It got to be too much of a scene. Since it was fun, we decided to get another keyboard guy, and I knew Merl [Saunders]. Vince Guaraldi played for a while. With Merl, we started to learn songs, and developed.” By May 1971 the quartet was Jerry, John, Bill Vitt on drums, and Merl. Merl Washington (Saunders was an adopted stage name) was a San Franciscan raised in the fifties just four blocks from 710 at the corner of Ashbury and Page. A classmate of Johnny Mathis at Polytechnic High School, he had grown up listening to Erroll Garner and Jimmy Smith, and after serving in the army from 1953 to 1957, he had worked with Oscar Brown on the play
Big Time Buck White,
backed Dinah Washington, and jammed with Miles Davis.

Having explored music from Wales’s completely “outside” perspective, Garcia now began to learn standards and structure from Merl. Early in 1971 Jerry and Merl ran across a man named Freddie Herrera, who in 1969 had opened a club in North Beach called the Keystone Korner (as in Keystone Kops, because it was next door to the police station). One day early on, Nick Gravenites wandered in and remarked that the place needed music and he had some friends. They turned out to be the bulk of the recently disbanded Electric Flag, including Mike Bloomfield, and they kept the club going for a while. Garcia and Saunders followed them, and Freddie Herrera became a permanent part of Jerry’s musical family. The Korner made little money, and in the beginning the quartet’s take was no more than $180 a night. A year or two later Herrera moved his operation to Berkeley and changed the club’s name to the Keystone Berkeley. Both clubs were small and funky, just the way Garcia liked it. He would arrive at the club around three in the afternoon. From the start, Parish was his roadie for club gigs, since Ram Rod, like the rest of the Dead, was grateful for a little downtime, and was glad to bring Parish into the mix. Parish’s original salary was five dollars per show, plus pot. Garcia would sit and run scales as the afternoon passed, stories would be told and joints rolled and smoked, and he and Parish bonded. Occasionally, Jerry would say, “Go out and bring me somebody weird,” and Parish would find a street crazy who would be suitably entertaining. So was the music. “I played big fat chords and did a lot of that walking-style chord shifting,” Garcia told a friend. “My style is much more conventional, in a way, with [Merl], and it’s very satisfying for me to play and hear myself as a conventional player.”

After taking most of May 1971 off, the Dead played two Memorial Day weekend shows at Winterland. Perhaps they should have stayed on vacation. Too many people had spiked the garbage cans full of Kool-Aid that went out into the audience. It was a hot, hot night, and too many people drank too much; thirty people ended up at the Mount Zion Hospital emergency room, although none were hospitalized overnight. Graham’s new stage manager, Patrick Stansfield, a theater professional who’d recently worked at the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Minneapolis, later said that when he pulled out of Winterland around six the next morning, he saw kids still plastered against the walls across the street like “starfish,” some bleeding at the ears and nose. Some bigwig’s daughter was injured, and city police chief Al Nelder suggested to the press that Bill’s permit be revoked for his “failure to protect his patrons.” Bitter over the flap, Graham responded by declaring that he was closing Fillmore West as well as Fillmore East, with a final show to come on July 4.

June passed quietly, and around the middle of the month Weir stopped by 5th and Lincoln, where Jerry sat talking with Jon McIntire. Garcia and McIntire looked at him with an odd expression until he asked, “What?” Garcia asked him, “You bored? You bored yet? How’d you like to go to France this weekend?” Well, sure. There was no money to be made, but their expenses would be paid to fly to France and play for a festival on the outskirts of Paris. Why not? Jean Bouquin was a fashion designer with a chic boutique that sold overpriced blue jeans in the exclusive St. Germain district of Paris, and he wanted to be France’s minister of youth. Part of his campaign was to throw a rock festival, which translated as “Free Freedom Three Days,” at a movie set, Strawberry Studios, in the town of Hérouville, near Auvers, the burial place of Vincent van Gogh. The studio was in a chateau owned by Michel Magne.

Upon their arrival, the Dead discovered that the festival had been rained out, and after a couple of days of killing time with fine wine and games of tennis at the 450-year-old chateau—the doors were noticeably lower than contemporary people required—they decided to throw a party, and invited the townspeople of Hérouville. On the solstice, June 21, the weather cleared and they set up in back of the chateau near the pool, which the children of Hérouville had encircled with hundreds of candles. As Lesh recalled it, their guests included “the police chief, the fire chief, and the mayor . . . Magne was pointing out all this little kinky shit in the locals, man
. . . No
Dead Heads—it was just boogie down . . . a little acid being passed around, not too much, just right, and of course, the Light Sound Dimension [light show] was there, Bill Ham . . . they played too. We did our set, and they did their set. And they were great—we were all getting real high by that time,” Lesh said, laughing. “It was outdoors at the chateau, right around the swimming pool . . . the classic garden party with the G.D. and the LSD. Talk about a piece of San Francisco transplanted into the heart of France . . .”Topped off with a round of dunkings in the pool begun by the police chief—Weir exacted the Dead’s revenge, of course, dunking him back—it was among the best parties the Dead had ever enjoyed.

They loaded out in a false dawn, then went to Orly Airport and checked the equipment. But their tickets were held hostage while they awaited a freight document. Rosie McGee, who was working as McIntire’s interpreter, was dealing with supervisors who represented two airlines, the airport, and the French government, all of them shouting at once. Winding down from the fun, the band stood a few yards away. Finally, Rosie had an inspiration. “Monsieur,
look
at those guys over there. I can’t say WHAT they’ll do if they don’t get on SOME airplane
immediately.
Do YOU want to be PERSONALLY responsible for an international incident, right here, and right now?” The band members responded suitably to their cue, flipping middle digits and growling audibly, and the boarding passes materialized. They flew to New York, waited, flew to San Francisco and got to Marin, and Bob Matthews suddenly realized that he’d been in daylight for about twenty-five hours. When Rosie awoke on the morning after their return, it was one week exactly since McIntire’s first call to her about the jaunt, and she wondered if she’d dreamed it all.

One very real dream died that month as well. The Haight-Ashbury was a ruin, and the notion of a counterculture was essentially dead, but there were holdouts here and there, and ideas don’t die even when they don’t flourish. In June Peter Coyote visited Gary Snyder, who was part of a healthy alternative community in the San Juan Ridge area of Northern California. Peter had the notion of such places serving as way stations for countercultural caravans, since much of what seemed to be hippie life at this point was mobile. More interested in protecting his own community than promoting an abstraction, Gary rejected the notion. “He told us that the people in their area were committing themselves to articulating a sense of place and understanding its species diversity,” wrote Coyote later. “They planned to be there for the long haul, to serve as its guardians. They had reservations about travelers. Furthermore, he added, they didn’t need much.” Freeman House commented, “We Diggers were building a culture, we weren’t building a life.”

On July 2, the Dead played their last show at the Fillmore West, and although they played so poorly they asked not to be in Graham’s film
Last
Days of the Fillmore
(their resistance drove Graham crazy, until eventually they relented and allowed him to have one song), they did realize one ambition, which was to get Bill Graham high on LSD. It was fun for him, too. When he realized the source of his giddiness, he looked at the band and cracked up. Someone handed him a stick, Bill hit the gong, and in “one of the dozen great nights of my life,” he conducted the Dead “and probably lovingly made an ass of myself.”

Everything changed, and nothing changed. In the ensuing years Bill Graham produced more shows than ever before, using various halls instead of just one. The Dead stopped breaking out the garbage cans of dosed Kool-Aid, but the audience members remained as bright-eyed as ever, their faith in the dream unbroken.

35

Dealing Solo Aces and the New Guy (7/71–3/72)

The first town on the Pacific coast north of San Francisco is called Stinson Beach. It is only twenty miles from the city, but they are hard ones, a dizzying succession of hairpin turns, and the town is tiny. Five miles farther north is the hippie enclave of Bolinas, where the sign on Highway 1 that identifies the town is routinely stolen by locals in the hope that tourists will miss the turn. Stinson was less polarized than Bolinas and had more connection with the outside world, but only slightly. There were no police in Stinson in 1971, although its fire marshal, Collen White, had once been involved with the CIA’s LSD program. There was a water tower on the road to Stinson someone had decorated with the word “Seek,” and Garcia felt good about that. He and M.G. had been happy with their home in Madrone Canyon in Larkspur, but it had been sold out from under them, and the same thing happened to them with another house.

Late in June M.G. found a place in Stinson called Sans Souci, “Without Care.” It was isolated at the top of the hill and backed by county reserve land, which made it a fine place for a neighboring pot patch, and it had a swimming pool. The panoramic ocean view was beyond spectacular. The price was $60,000, and the deal called for a $20,000 down payment. That was roughly Jerry’s annual income at the time, and the Garcias certainly didn’t have any significant savings. The only way to get that kind of money was for him to do a solo album, with the added bonus that he could cut in Kreutzmann and Ram Rod toward the same end. “Being able to move in and get solid,” he told an interviewer, “that’s what that record was about for me, really, to be respectable and so forth, which is laughable but . . . that’s why it ends with ‘Wheel’ and starts with ‘Deal’—it’s wheeling and dealing to get a house. Basically that’s the truth of it.” He went on to dismiss the project as “idiosyncratic.” “I don’t intend to follow it with a career as a solo performer or anything like that.”

There were other elements operating in these decisions. Part of coming to Stinson Beach and of making the solo album was to clear a modest space, both socially and musically, between himself and the Grateful Dead. The distance from 5th and Lincoln cut down the mental as well as physical traffic, and there were musical directions he wanted to follow in the studio that didn’t seem appropriate for the Dead. On the twenty-eighth of the thirty days they were allowed to produce the down payment, M.G. flew to Los Angeles, got the advance check from Warner Bros., and delivered it to the rather shocked owners. Sans Souci was theirs.

They were not exactly isolated. Jon McIntire and Alan Trist lived in Bolinas, and Jerry’s old buddy David Grisman was down the hill in Stinson. Laird Grant and Willy Legate were around. Before long, Parish and Ron Rakow would move over the hill into Stinson. And of course, there were new people.

Sue Stephens was a sometime X-ray technician who would, for a time, supplement her unemployment checks by cleaning house for Jerry and M.G., among others. The pay was sometimes M.G.’s excellent home-grown, and life was good. “Keep my mouth shut, clean, and leave” was Sue’s motto, and she became a trusted friend. Goldie Rush was another Stinsonite. She was baby-sitting for some of the Garcias’ neighbors and had to visit Sans Souci to report that five-year-old Sunshine was stealing from her charges. She, M.G., and Jerry ended up in a long, hilarious conversation on various offenses from their respective childhoods, and she fell into their scene. In the long run, she grew especially close to M.G., and later to McIntire. “There was always a good meal, a good joint, good music, and a great conversation going on up there.”

David Grisman’s business partner was a man named Richard Loren. Together they managed a group called the Rowan Brothers, and David also produced them. One day in the summer of 1971 soon after moving to Stinson, Jerry went down to the Rowans’s studio to check them out, and the gardener, Sue Stephens’s boyfriend Fred, frostily told him it was a closed session. Later, Fred explained that he’d assumed Jerry was a local pot dealer, since he seemed to have fine weed. Garcia genially allowed that he’d be happy to wait, and Grisman eventually came out and made introductions. Over time, Loren and Garcia became particularly friendly.

Richard had been a theater manager and then a booking agent with the Agency for the Performing Arts (APA). He was one of the APA’s earliest rock agents, and soon he was working with the Jefferson Airplane and the Doors, which gave him the dubious honor of being the man to bail out Jim Morrison when he was arrested in New Haven after a scuffle with police. In 1968 he quit the agency and moved to Europe for a time, and on his return to New York in 1970 he and Grisman formed Hieronymous Music to manage the Rowans. One night that year Grisman went to Fillmore East to hang out with Garcia, bringing along Richard to introduce him to Jerry. Loren got to talking about the book
Morning of the
Magicians,
a study of the occult and other forms of strangeness. Since this was one of both his and Jerry’s favorite subjects, they connected. Jerry asked what he and Grisman were up to, and suggested that San Francisco had a healthy club scene for the Rowans. That fall of 1970 the Hieronymous bunch moved out to the Bay Area, and by the summer of 1971 the Rowans had signed with Columbia. Over the course of the year, as Garcia came to play more and more regularly with Merl Saunders, he asked Richard to manage his non–Grateful Dead business affairs, which, of course, made waves at 5th and Lincoln, all outsiders being viewed with some doubt.

Early in July Garcia went to Wally Heider’s to begin recording an album that would be called, with impeccable accuracy and zero flair,
Garcia.
His first decision was to play all the instruments except the drums himself, which made it an exceptionally efficient process. The origins of that decision lay in his two previous experiences in recording away from the Grateful Dead. Early in 1970 he had been hired to record solo for Michelangelo Antonioni’s film about youthful resistance to the mainstream culture,
Zabriskie Point.
It had been a frustrating experience. Still very much a cinephile, Garcia had admired Antonioni’s
Eclipse
and had studied him. He was flattered to be asked and found the director a pleasure to work with. The experience of sitting alone on a soundstage at MGM where Gene Kelly had danced and
The Wizard of Oz
had been shot gave him the shivers. Antonioni described to him in a strange stammer the emotions he wanted communicated, ranging from sad to cheerful to scary, and as the film splashed across a giant screen, Garcia played. The frustration entered in after a few takes, when Antonioni pronounced himself delighted, but Garcia felt that he was just beginning to understand what he was there for. Antonioni might well have been right about Garcia’s “Love Theme”—it was achingly beautiful and worked incredibly well in the film—but it left Jerry forlorn. This would happen again, later that spring of 1970, when he played pedal steel on Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Teach Your Children.” After the second take, just as he was warming up, Crosby told Jerry, “That was great. Have a snort.” And that was the end of the session.

With
Garcia,
Jerry was in control. The only people in the studio were the recording team of Bob and Betty, Ram Rod the guitar roadie, Kreutzmann the drummer, and Hunter the lyricist. They put a sign on the door that read “Anita Bryant sessions” and became effectively invisible, the reverse of the Kantner/Crosby/Nash hangout albums. What would become side one of the album was made up of relatively conventional songs: “Deal,” “Bird Song,” “Sugaree,” and “Loser.” “Deal” mixes romance and good card-playing advice: “Goes to show you don’t ever know / Watch each card you play / and play it slow / Wait until your deal come round / Don’t you let that deal go down.” “Loser” is also about a gambler, but a deluded one, the quintessential victim of his own optimism. “Bird Song” is an exquisite meditation on a woman, and in “Sugaree” a ne’er-do-well denies an old love. The songs were lyrically and musically strong, and would be standards in Garcia’s repertoire from that time on.

Side two of the album was more experimental. Garcia began by laying out the entire side musically, although one section, “To Lay Me Down,” was already a fully formed song. “To Lay Me Down” was the first song he’d composed at a piano, and it has a certain gospel feel. It is a love song, but tinged with sorrow, for it is a lost love. “to lie with you / with our dreams / entwined together / To lie beside you / my love still sleeping / to tell sweet lies / one last time / and say goodnight.” In the actual recording of the album, he played piano throughout side two, and then went back and overdubbed. The side two closer, “The Wheel,” had a wonderful birth. Garcia and Kreutzmann were jamming, and out of an inchoate sea of notes, a pattern emerged, a chord, then a set of changes, then a chorus, and then a song. Hunter was sitting in the corner listening very carefully. By the end of the night he had a rough set of lyrics, and by the next day they were polished. It is a gospel hymn as much as anything—“Small wheel turn by the fire and rod / Big wheel turn by the grace of God / Every time that wheel turn round / Bound to cover just a little more ground”—and it turned into a gracefully effective rock song in performance.

Garcia’s work pleased almost everyone but Rock Scully, who had to sell the album. As Scully pointed out, the most radio-friendly cuts, like “The Wheel” and “To Lay Me Down,” were surrounded by what he called “Insect Fear craziness” like “Eep Hour,” bizarro
musique concrète
sound collages that the average citizen was not going to grasp, with razor-thin gaps in between, breaks so thin that a disc jockey in a hurry couldn’t cue up the song, which meant he wouldn’t play it. Garcia didn’t care about sales, so Rock could only groan.

Having recorded and mixed the album in three weeks, Garcia returned to the Grateful Dead in August. As usual, there was plenty to keep everyone occupied. On July 26 Lenny Hart had been found by a private detective and arrested in San Diego. He claimed to be studying to be a minister in the Assembly of God, although the local pastor denied that he was even a parishioner. Portraying himself as a naif dazzled by rock and roll, Lenny claimed to be a financial virgin in a new world where everyone was ripping off each other, and “I just succumbed to the temptation to take my share.” The Dead did not press charges, although they did sue for the return of their money, and recovered $55,000. The district attorney pursued criminal embezzlement charges, and Lenny was convicted and sentenced to six months in jail. Joe Smith attended the trial, and Lenny told him, “The Lord has forgiven me. I hope the boys do.” “Lenny,” Joe replied, “the Lord didn’t lose seventy-five big ones.” Busy building a studio at the ranch, Mickey found out about Lenny’s arrest only by reading the
Chronicle.

His was not the only building plan in the works, although it would be the only successful one. That summer an idea circulated around the office for a project called Deadpatch, a home for the Grateful Dead. In a charming blend of Cantabrigian social science and stoned hippie rave, Alan Trist drew up some notes, beginning from the “100 percent level of concept/bossness/fantasy, in terms of facilities, materials, and equipment, and then work backwards to the immediately pragmatic.” He postulated needs that began with a rehearsal hall, led to a recording studio, then an office, then perhaps living space, and ended with a rocket launchpad. His report noted that “we all like to work and hangout together, there may (or not) be conflict between making music, doing business and hanging out. Personally I see them as inseparable . . . difficulties can be avoided by the right . . . design.” John Cipollina’s father had found them a bit of land on Lucas Valley Road in West Marin, and they managed to put a hold on it for a while, but since they had no financial resources, the idea was, in Alan’s English slang, “a definite nonstarter.” If a real desire had been there, such a handicap might have been overcome. But Garcia—and to a man the band agreed with him—did not want to have to deal with much beyond the tuning of his guitar. A home for his family, fine. But to the end of his days, he held a consistent Thoreauvian view that perceived possessions as a weight.

That summer Jann Wenner and Yale law professor Charles Reich came to talk with Garcia for a two-part cover story in
Rolling Stone
that would eventually be published in book form as
Garcia: Signpost to New
Space.
Reich, the author of
The Greening of America,
was a good-hearted romantic who idolized the youth culture, but was not terribly sophisticated. A repressed and closeted gay man, Reich seized on the freedom of the San Francisco scene, and his visits to Sans Souci were heavenly for him. In person, he was bumbling and innocent. Wenner asked the historical questions, and Garcia ran down the lore. Philosophy was Charles’s angle, especially the social philosophy of making life more satisfying. Garcia obliged. “The question is, can we do it and stay high?” Charming, thoughtful, and a man who authentically enjoyed conversation, Garcia tried to educate the overly respectful Reich.

In part two of the book, “A Stoned Sunday Rap,” Jerry brought out one of his favorite esoteric works,
The Book of Urantia,
and chatted about “the twelve principles of information, that’s the whole basis of alchemy, and one of the things is polarity . . . gender, that’s another one.” He had to be careful with Reich’s feelings. He pinched his nose after a snort of cocaine and Reich thought he was miming a bad smell in reference to Charles’s remarks. Mostly, Jerry tried to be encouraging. “It’s cool with me for life or death, either one is okay . . . but I’ve made my pitch, I’ve put my stand in for the life cycle, that’s the thing . . . Look man, here we are, we’re on the edge, and we can make it. So can you, give it a try.” Charles went home dazzled. Jerry went off to the Keystone to play.

By the end of summer, the live recordings the Dead had made in April were ready for release, and they were good ones, reflecting a lean sound born of a single drummer and virtually no keyboards, although on three songs, Jerry brought in his club partner Merl Saunders to overdub organ parts. It was an energy-packed double album filled with first-rate, vital, accessible rock: “Bertha,” Noah Lewis’s “Big Railroad Blues,” Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” a new original called “Wharf Rat,” and a smoking jam of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” combined with the tune Jerry had learned from Delaney Bramlett on the trans-Canadian train, “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad.”