A Long Strange Trip (56 page)

In conventional rock and roll practice, songwriting is an object of sometimes vicious competition, since the songwriter makes more money, and in many ways artistically controls the band. As usual, the Dead were different; there was a certain amount of gentle pressure on Weir to write songs. The band, said John Barlow, “wanted to see Bobby get some creative expression. Garcia, for instance, had always been really enthusiastic about Weir’s taking a major role in all that.” Late in 1971, with studio time for his first solo album reserved for late January, Weir took stock. He had three and a half songs—“One More Saturday Night,” “Playing in the Band,” “Mexicali Blues,” and the rhythm guitar part to “Cassidy.” There being a considerable gap between songs completed and songs necessary, he called Barlow and said, “We gotta do something.”

Early in January 1972, Weir and his malamute, Moondog, drove to Wyoming, and once at Barlow’s ranch, settled in at a cabin which was isolated even by Bar Cross standards. On his first night, he discovered that he had a non-rent-paying co-tenant, namely a ghost. Moondog was quite literally scared “shitless” by the ghost, and Weir was not too crazy about it, either. This was the Grateful Dead cowboy period, and Weir was a manly man, but . . . The ghost manifested itself at the bottom of his bed in the middle of the night, and it was impossible for Weir to open his eyes. He quickly turned to a spiritual expert. Late in the night, Weir called Rolling Thunder, his Native American shaman friend, for advice. After he explained his situation, Rolling Thunder said gather this herb and that—no, no, replied Weir, I need
immediate
help. In that case, Rolling Thunder advised, smear charcoal on your face. So Weir burned kitchen matches, ground them up, applied them to his face, and went to sleep. He forgot about his “makeup,” which drew an interesting reaction from Barlow the next morning.

The ghost abated, although the snows did not. Over their three weeks of writing, Barlow had to keep about eight hundred cows fed, hitching up four huge Belgian horses to a sled containing ten tons of hay. They set to work on the songs with what Barlow thought was a random approach but the zeal of newcomers. “I wrote a lot of words,” said Weir. “He wrote a lot of words and I wrote a lot of melody,” rejoined Barlow. “Oftentimes it was like the lost-wax treatment. You can’t write lyrics without a melody. And since what he would give me was a rhythm guitar part, then I had to come up with some kind of melody. And sometimes that stayed and sometimes that didn’t.” Weir: “It almost never stayed because melodies never stay.” Barlow: “In Grateful Dead songs they’re a moving target.” They began with “Black-Throated Wind,” for which Barlow had actually written a line—“Ah mother American night I’m lost in the light, I’m drowning in you”—in Nepal two years before. Weir took the rhythm from New Orleans songwriter Allen Toussaint, and by the time he left the Bar Cross, he had two verses and the chorus, which seemed enough. When he got home he became entirely stuck, until Alan Trist took him home and told him he couldn’t leave until the song was done.

One of the decorations at the cabin was a Wyeth engraving of an Indian on a horse with his hands out. Well lubricated on Wild Turkey one night, Weir looked at it and said to Barlow, “You know what he’s saying, don’t you?” “What?” “Looks like rain.” When it finally came together, “Cassidy” came together perfectly. Having rejected Hunter’s “Blood Red Diamonds,” Weir also rejected Barlow’s first take, written the previous fall. Barlow had been in a dark mood, born of, among other things, the war in Vietnam, and an experience he’d had in a café in Rawlins, Wyoming, where as a longhair he’d asked for lamb chops and been served a skinned lamb’s head, eyes intact, in a pool of blood. His first version of “Cassidy” included lines like “ten pound rat in a trashcan, nuclear war neanderthal man.” “I thought it was a little heavy-handed for the melody,” observed Weir. At the Bar Cross, Barlow connected the now toddling Cassidy with Neal Cassady and produced a gem.

Weir returned to San Francisco and began recording at Heider’s, at first with Kreutzmann and Dave Torbert of the New Riders. Then Rock Scully showed up, and suavely convinced him that the simple solution for his musical needs and the Dead’s relationship with Warner Bros. was to let the Dead back him on his solo album. Since Phil and Jerry were working with Crosby in the room next door at Heider’s, it really was simple. And the truth was that Weir had no time. He had only two and a half weeks to record and mix the album, and, recalled Barlow, “many of the songs had not yet been written. A certain amount of very limited studio time had been bought and not all the songs had been written and those that had been were so incomplete that, for example, I mean there was one song, I can’t remember which one it was, where I’d written twice as much in the way of lyrics than there should have been, and they just slashed half the lyrics, on the spot. I mean, they were just gone. And I remember Garcia saying, ‘Hey listen, we’re in a hurry here.’ ” It was Weir’s first session as boss, and it worked remarkably well, considering the radical change in roles. As the songwriter, etiquette demanded that everyone defer to him, and they did. But as Barlow pointed out, it was also “one of those moments where Garcia was really at his best. He was being a paterfamilias, he was being the Dutch uncle, he was being the guy who understood how it all went down really and he really was being wonderful. He was being incredibly facilitative . . . he understood something important, which was that if it was just gonna be him and Hunter, it was going to be a monoculture. As juvenile or puerile or whatever that I could be, the whole deal was going to be a lot more interesting if we were part of the mix.”

By late in February they had one song left to write, but John had a big problem. “I had to leave because my father had died and I had one song to write, which ended up being ‘Walk in the Sunshine,’ probably the worst song we ever wrote. Frankie Weir kept me up all night making me take drugs and just write anything, so I came up with ‘Walk in the Sunshine.’ ’’ Convinced that Weir would never accept it, Barlow decided that the only way he could get out of town was to write an even worse song, and he did so. Having just read Pär Lagerkvist’s The Dwarf, he began, “I’m just a small man / I’m not a tall man.” Sometimes, just finishing is a triumph.

Late in March the Dead set out on tour again, beginning in New York with seven shows at the Academy of Music. The week before they arrived, Francis Coppola’s masterpiece
The Godfather
had opened in New York City in the middle of a blizzard, and Garcia and most of the band would see it repeatedly. In six months, it would be the biggest-grossing film of its time. The Dead would get to know Coppola, their fellow San Franciscan, better in the future. One of their nights at the Academy was a benefit for the Hell’s Angels of New York, in which they backed up Bo Diddley and watched besotted Hell’s Angels, as M.G. put it, stack up in the doorway like “rhinos.”

When the Dead were done in New York, they boarded a plane and headed east for their first tour of Europe.

36

Interlude: The Home Front: Money and Management

(1980s AND BEYOND)

The shingled house at the corner of 5th Avenue and Lincoln Street in San Rafael, fifteen miles north of San Francisco, is a deceptively calm-looking place. As 10 A.M. approaches, the parking lot fills up with the band’s BMWs or the Japanese cars of the women who staff the office. The crew members drive American cars, but don’t usually stray from the studio, a mile away in an industrial neighborhood. A sign tacked up on the side of the individual mail slots asks, “Do you want to talk to the man in charge, or the woman who knows what’s going on?” ’Twas ever thus. The Dead are sexist, but they trust women to guard their money, and that is the primary function of 5th and Lincoln. Except for the occasional meeting, the band generally gathers at the studio. Phil comes in daily for his mail, but only Garcia spends any time in the office, although less and less as the years go by. He sits at the kitchen table sipping coffee and bullshitting with studio engineer John Cutler or whoever walks by. Those with business to transact line up and hand him things—contracts to sign, mail or music or videotapes to consider. Most of it he forgets and leaves behind on the kitchen table when he departs. Fifth and Lincoln has a pleasant atmosphere, not because of the decorations—aside from the originals of the
Workingman’s Dead
back cover portraits and a wonderful cartoon of Goofy with a dose in his hand, there aren’t any—but because of the women who work there, Eileen Law and Janet Soto in particular.

Janet is a bookkeeper and has worked for the Dead off and on since 1969, when she began at the Shady Management office on Union Street. A beautiful Mexican Native American Italian, she was raised in a large family in the town of Cambria, south of Big Sur next to Hearst Castle, before attending S.F. State and falling into the Dead’s scene. She jokes that she and Eileen must have been sisters in a previous lifetime, and though Janet can be gruff, her relationship with Eileen is sweet, and sets a tone for the whole office. Eileen runs the Dead Head mailing list—she is the spiritual mother of all Dead Heads, their most direct link to the band—opens the mail, deals with the guest list at home shows, does fifty other things, and generally occupies the same essential moral position as Ram Rod does on the crew. She is a genuinely lovely human being. She grew up on the Russian River in a town called Guerneville, worked at an insurance company in San Francisco after graduating from high school in 1964, and first came around 710 Ashbury Street with her friend Vee. After living with a sometime Dead crew member named Slade at the Digger commune in Olema, she moved to Mickey’s ranch in Novato, one of many people who lived there in every available space. “It took seniority to get a room,” she said. Eventually, she lived at Rukka Rukka ranch in Marin with Weir and others, where she gave birth to her daughter Cassidy, who is also part of the 5th and Lincoln staff. In 1972 Eileen came by the office to help work on the Dead Head mailing list, and except during the mid-seventies hiatus in touring, she’s been at it ever since.

Janet’s in the right-front ground-floor office. Eileen and Cassidy are at the top of the stairs. Bonnie Parker, the senior number cruncher, is next to Janet. In 1986 Bonnie was succeeded by Nancy Mallonee, a CPA who is the first office employee with formal credentials. Scrib comes in once or twice a week and works in the “interview room” off the kitchen. Between the kitchen and Nancy’s and Janet’s offices are a couple of rooms occupied at various times by Annette Flowers, who worked with the Dead’s music publishing business, Ice Nine, and Basia Raizene (ex-wife of crew member Sparky), Suzanne Gottlieb, and Mary Jo Meinolf, all of whom deal with money and numbers.

Past Eileen’s second-floor office is a middle room where Alan Trist runs Ice Nine—the name was taken from Kurt Vonnegut’s
Cat’s Cradle—
and then comes the last room, where the headaches are. It’s the large room where first Richard Loren, then Danny Rifkin, then Jon McIntire, and eventually Cameron Sears worked as manager. Actually, the band manages itself. Except for Loren, who received a percentage as a booking agent, these men were salaried employees rather than managers, who receive a percentage. The truth is, the band is quite unmanageable. Once in the 1990s there was a calm, sober band meeting in which everyone agreed that the band should never travel on gig days, because staying that extra night, say, in New York, and then flying down to Atlanta or Carolina on the morning of the show inevitably resulted in a bad show. On the very next tour, this rule was violated twice.

Consider the beginning of Cameron Sears’s career. In 1987, Jon McIntire was manager and decided that he needed an assistant. Jon had met Cameron, an environmental lobbyist and white-water rafting river guide, in the course of some river outings Cameron had put together for office staff, and concluded that anyone who could shepherd people down a river could do the same for a band. Jon got the band’s approval for the hire just before a jaunt to Ventura, where Jon fell sick. Cameron met the various band members for the first time when he gave them the half-hour time call onstage. This worked until he got to Kreutzmann, whose nicest comment was “Don’t talk to me.” When Brent Mydland trashed his room after the show, Sears had more work to do. It is one of the twists of the Dead’s karma that Sears went on to have a fruitful career with the band, despite, as he put it, a management situation in which “there are always twenty burners going, they’re all boiling over, and no one wants to turn any of them down.”

Willy Legate once meditated on the business aspects of the Dead: “Having been born into a world of rather curious values, values apparently unrelated to the direct experience of human truths, [the Dead] pursue a direction of self-determination in as many ways as interestingly possible, believing that this course will best aid a continuation of integrity and meaning in their music and other life spaces. This has meant that their business activity seeks to be in control of as many areas as become possible, employing their own people to do the work that would otherwise be farmed out to straight business. Thus there is the possibility that the message in the music can be reflected in the manner and purpose of conducting the business necessary to get the music heard.”

In a sour moment, Rock Scully reviewed his career and composed “Rock Scully’s Ground Rules for Conducting Bad Business, Progressive Rock Category.” Some of the rules included “1. Make no move to copyright or otherwise own your band’s name . . . 3. Do not include your name in any contracts with the record co. . . . 7. Whenever poss. get record co. to pay your salary (and for your sec. too). 8. Never take any % of any gig monies . . . 10. Always allow the band unltd. spending of co. monies for equipt., engineers, research and development, deployment of expensive gear to bands homes and to equipt. men’s living rms.” His plaint concluded that when the money vanished, the poor manager would take the blame, and a band member, usually a drummer, “will want to know what it is you do for them anyway?”

What Rock called bad business was really just the band managing itself, paying a salary to the “manager.” By the 1980s Rock was a “manager” who wore sunglasses to the breakfast table. Setting up an interview with him involved, wrote one reporter, “almost-daily telephone calls that went like this: / Hi Rock / Hi, how ya doing? / Fine. Can we get together today? / Sure, call me in an hour at the office. Bye. / Two hours later he wouldn’t have made it to the office yet. Three hours later: / Hi Rock / Hi, how ya doing? / Fine, can we get together? / Hey, yeah, we’ll get it together. Check in with me tonight. / And so on for weeks at a time.” In sharp contrast is the more mainstream attitude of the manager of Styx, a highly successful, utterly faceless band that had hugely effective advertising and promotion. He saw himself “not merely as the manager of a rock band, but as executive vice president of a large-volume retail operation.”

In the long run, Danny Rifkin’s moral authority had a longer influence on the Dead than Rock’s rakish inspiration, but the man who would best define the band’s management in terms of quality and understanding of the band’s mission was Jon McIntire. Clive Davis, with whom Jon dealt as the New Riders manager in the early seventies, and then with the Dead in the eighties, found him “very organized, very professional, copious notes, focused.” Lyricist John Barlow said of McIntire that he “recognized that it took a gentleman to manage barbarism.” Jon represented the pursuit of excellence as against the piratical quest for size, glamour, and cash advocated by his rival, the road manager, Sam Cutler. Sam was a gloriously good pirate, who was convinced that the Dead would succeed, as Barlow put it, once it put away “sentiment.” Though different, Jon’s ego was not terribly smaller than Sam’s; as promoter Dave Williams once put it, Jon could be difficult because “he had an ego like he was one of the artists.” When security would not permit him to enter the front door of a show without a ticket, he grew so angry that the building manager finally asked what it would take to fix the situation. “Pheasant under glass and a good bottle of wine” was the answer, and they served him.

The hidden ace of Grateful Dead management was a man few outside the business had ever heard of, the band’s attorney from 1971 on, Hal Kant. A world champion poker player—he won with $1 million on the table for the last hand—a collector of Joseph Conrad first editions, a Ring Cycle enthusiast, a painter, and a former clinical psychologist, Kant was a complex, gifted, and highly civilized man who was a fundamental stabilizing force within the band because, as he put it, his ultimate role with the band was that of ombudsman. Because he saw his work for the Dead as something of a lark, a hobby that he didn’t worry about terribly much, he supplied a detachment that worked very well. In contrast, wrote record industry critic Frederic Dannen, “There is scarcely one music lawyer of prominence who does not also do legal work for the label, often on retainer. Conflicts of interest that would scandalize most businesses are commonplace in the music field.” The Dead were Kant’s only music business clients.

He was born in Queens in 1931 and raised in the Bronx, and after two years at CCNY, he got as far from New York as possible—“I’d heard of America, but I’d never seen it”—by finishing college at the University of Washington. Afterward he got a master’s degree in psychology from Penn State, which doubtless stood him in good stead in dealing with the Dead, and after serving time in the army, decided to get his career going by attending law school. After graduating from Harvard, he joined a small Beverly Hills law firm that happened to be next door to the William Morris Agency, and eventually began to add entertainment clients to his list. One day late in the 1960s, a “charming psychopath” friend of his from graduate school brought to Hal’s home another charming rogue, Chesley Millikin. Chesley was quite taken by Hal, and was a close friend of Rock Scully’s, so when the band sought an attorney in 1971, Hal’s name came up. “Jon [McIntire] asked me,” Kant said, “not to represent any other band if I represented them. Since I was doing TV and film and corporate work at the time and not representing other bands, music didn’t matter to me,” so it was easy to agree to McIntire’s request. He settled into his relationship with the Dead.

In 1975, Kant decided to give up his law practice and write, having already been one of the authors of the report produced by the U.S. Commission on Pornography and Obscenity, but he decided to keep the Dead as clients, because “they were entertaining.” Having no career aspirations for himself, “it was easy to help the Dead not have theirs.” He had established a number of precedents that would be important in the long run. He charged a rate commensurate with top-class lawyers, but never took a percentage, and in fact, “I kept them from paying anybody percentages the whole time,” whether it was the conventional 5 percent to the attorney, 10 percent to the agent, 15 to 25 percent to the manager, or 3 percent to the accountant. Kant didn’t even get a serious retainer until the 1980s. First he got the band to reorganize as a corporation, which would help over the years, and then he tried to get his clients what they wanted. He generally succeeded.

He saw the often-rowdy band meetings as effective democracy. “The insanity of those meetings had a certain beneficial effect, because you heard every point of view . . . Once [ Jerry] made up his mind, that pretty well decided it—so you did get a decision . . . I don’t remember a vote—if they can’t turn around a dissenter, they don’t do it—and therefore, when they do do something, they have everybody behind it. It means they don’t do anything reluctantly . . . One of the lucky things for the band was they had me for their lawyer because I didn’t live in San Francisco, I didn’t hang out with them, they were not an important client to me financially, so I could be very independent . . . I didn’t know I was supposed to be intimidated by Garcia, I didn’t know the mythology around him, or anything.”

The Dead’s last contract with Arista, in 1988, earned them a higher royalty rate than Madonna or Michael Jackson, but Hal was proudest of its brevity: it came in at under five pages. But that wasn’t what made him important to the Dead. They actually listened to him, even when they wouldn’t listen to each other or anybody else. Even Garcia, who could imitate stone walls in his ability not to listen, usually responded to Kant. Early in the 1990s Ben & Jerry’s ice cream produced a new flavor, Cherry Garcia. Despite a well-deserved reputation for ethical behavior, they did so without even discussing the idea with Garcia, then went so far as to approach the Dead’s publicist to discuss promotion. Scrib went bananas, berating a marketing person who, of course, had no notion of what he was talking about. “You’re stealing the man’s name,” he raved. When asked about it, Garcia replied, “At least they’re not naming a motor oil after me, man,” and refused to lift a finger. “Besides, it’s good ice cream.” Garcia’s personal manager, Steve Parish, was equally unconcerned. “If Jerry doesn’t care, I don’t care.” Finally, Scrib thought to call Kant, who told Garcia, “They
will
name a motor oil after you if you don’t confront this, Jerry. You’ll have no control over your name at all.” Finally, Garcia shrugged, “If it bothers you, go ahead.” In the next few years, Jerry would have no problems in spending the large sum of money he’d earn thanks to the letter Kant wrote. Sometimes it’s smart to listen to your attorney.