A Long Strange Trip (57 page)

37

Bozos Abroad

(3/72–12/72)

The Dead would return from their first tour of Europe with the tapes of what would be their third live album, and in designing the cover, Kelley and Mouse at first suggested calling it Over There, using a military patch with a lightning bolt. When that didn’t fly, they came up with a takeoff on National Geographic, wrapping the familiar yellow border around a picture of the band debarking from an airplane. The staid publication’s lawyers proved underwhelmed by the idea, so Kelley went to Plan C. The final back cover was the “Rainbow Foot,” a logo he’d already done for the Dead’s and Sam Cutler’s new booking agency, Out of Town Tours, which showed a hippie’s colorfully clad foot stepping across the ocean. For the front cover, he thought of a story he’d once told at a party, in which a spastic child wins the prize, an ice cream cone, and proudly brings it to the middle of his forehead. Since Kelley was in approximately that condition at the time of the telling, it seemed screamingly funny. And since the band members thought of themselves as precisely that sort of doofus half the time anyway, especially when encountering Europe, the parent of our crude American civilization, the “Ice Cream Kid” became their cover.

The band’s two previous forays to Europe had been so brief as to barely count; this was the real deal. Early in 1971,
Billboard
had reported a fantasy Alan Trist had conjured up in the wake of the great train ride, in which the Dead and family would travel England and Holland on barges, using one as the stage. In 1972, Sam Cutler used a more conventional approach to organize a two-month tour. Once the basics were set, he tackled the final and thorniest question at one of the usual giant family meetings: who gets to go? After the usual emotional storm of personal needs and desires versus business capability, Garcia said the only thing possible: “Fuck it. Everybody goes.” The family cheered. Europe, here we come. As Rock later put it, “Look out, Ye Ancient Fingernails, the barbarians are coming. Open the gates! Saracens with 5,000-watt amps will soon be storming the Bastille. Not that the Dead are
just
another band of uncouth rowdies, motel-demolishing loons, or shark-copulating deviates on the road (boorish
Schweineri
like Grand Funk or satanic deviates like Led Zeppelin). Our crusade is basically, uh . . . molecular!”

On April 1, the Day of Fools, forty-nine people, among them seven musicians, ten crew, five staff, seventeen assorted friends, wives, girlfriends, and children—Garcia, Weir, Kreutzmann, and the Godchaux had partners, Lesh and Pigpen were single—flew to London, landing on April 2, Easter Sunday. They brought themselves and fifteen tons of instruments, a sound system, and a sixteen-track recording system which they would install in a truck as a mobile studio. There was also lighting gear and their first traveling lighting designer, a woman named Candace Brightman whom they’d met at the Capitol in Port Chester. She’d gone to work a show in Buffalo because she wanted to see John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, and the opening act was Jerry Garcia and Howard Wales. Impressed with her work, Garcia asked her to join them for the tour of Europe. He also hinted, “Y ’know, a lot of people work for us for free.” Candace drawled, “That’s interesting.” The Dead’s 1972 extravaganza in Europe was—but of course!—not your average tour, and was really as much vacation as work. What would be astonishing was that the Dead would maintain a phenomenally high level of performance quality while doing only twenty-two gigs in two months.

They were scheduled to open at the Rainbow Theater in London with the New Riders, who were also in Europe although traveling separately, when, shortly before the Dead left San Francisco, the Rainbow went bankrupt. They tried to book another theater, but it didn’t work out, and with ten days to go to the first show, Rock flew ahead to London to evaluate a venue called the Wembley Empire Pool, where a badminton match was in progress. Despite the last-second argle-bargle, they pulled off the Wembley gig and pretty much all the rest of the tour. Though they didn’t always sell out, they did reasonably well, and there were no economic disasters. Wembley was a hard place to start, though. The building was godawful cold, and London has a species of bureaucrat that at times made even their Parisian brethren look generous. Preparing the “carnet,” a list of every item of equipment that was required for them to pass through the customs of a then distinctly ununified Europe, was less than fun.

The body heat from the audience helped, and their first show was tolerable; the second was superb. The local press noted the emergence of Weir as a co–front man and the decline of Pigpen’s presence. Though Pig had rejoined the band, it was probably a bad decision, medically speaking. He was still frail, and the long, inspired raves of the sixties were pretty much gone. Before the tour, he’d come to 5th and Lincoln and helped the staff staple the tour itineraries, and in Europe he frequently baby-sat Ram Rod and Frances’s son, Rudson. Jim Furman, an Alembic technical assistant, had breakfast with Pigpen several times, since few others made it up that early, and was pleased he did. Furman found him much more intelligent than his image. He had quit drinking, and now “my only vices are smoking cigarettes and pestering the wenches.”

Another new member of the tour was Dennis Leonard, an Alembic employee more commonly called Wizard. In the fall of 1971 Wizard had walked into Alembic, and though he had only a minimal background in electronics, he soon became so proficient that Alembic found it easy to send him out to assist with recording. Bob Matthews would mix the house sound, Betty Cantor would make an initial rough two-track mix in the truck from the sixteen tracks they were recording and make sure it sounded okay, Furman would fix things, and Wizard would watch the recording console for red lights. They had a black-and-white TV monitor that displayed the stage, which made them pretty advanced, but at least one of their pieces of equipment was quite useless. In front of Garcia’s monitor were three lights that went green-yellow-red to warn him of an impending tape reel change, when he would presumably stop playing. In twenty-two shows he never paid the slightest attention to it.

The tour’s first days in London involved a great deal of talking with the press, and much of it was tedious. Stereotypes don’t improve when they cross the ocean, and as a foreigner, Garcia didn’t feel that he could goof on the press with quite the ease he could manage at home. The one relief in the ink-stained sea was a French hippie who asked him to draw a picture of an elephant in his book, “the neatest thing anybody ever asked me to do.” Otherwise, he kept it straight. Discussing the band’s material, Garcia told one reporter, “There’s a sort of peak optimum, and right now we’re at one of those peaks. We’ve got a lot of brand new material . . . that we’ve never recorded, in fact that’s why we’re recording these tours.” He discussed the Dead method of playing: “We remember how to play, each time, by starting with simple things, moving into more complex things, and then finally after having built a kind of platform, then we sort of jump off it . . . a kind of continuity—from off the street to outer space, so to speak.” And back again? asked the reporter. “Sometimes, but then sometimes we just hang out there.”

And he discoursed on the notion of having their own record company, already the subject of much talk. It wasn’t “going to be a record company in the standard sense in that it’s not going to be designed for profit, it’s going to be designed to sell our records in a way compatible with the way we run our scene.” “It would be like families here and there, who would be like distributing our records, selling them . . . they might be sold [only] in health food stores and head shops . . . We’re looking to totally break away from that thing, we’re not interested in competing with the rest of the record world, we’re not interested in playing that game at all.”

In London they stayed at the Kensington Hotel, which, said Alan Trist, “held their madness in its middle-class velvet glove,” and the reporters who descended on them had to cope with the cross-fire raps of band members, managers, equipment crew (“quippies”), and whoever else was around. There was time for manifold pleasant pursuits aside from music, including softball and baseball in Kensington Gardens, a stoned afternoon in the country gardens of a stately house in Kent, or even more esoteric inquiries. Alan Trist had begun one line of interest by reading and sharing a book by Francis Yates called
The Art of Memory,
which described using visualization of medieval buildings as a mnemonic aid. This had led to RILKO (Research into Lost Knowledge Organization), which Alan and Phil had joined. RILKO led to Robert Fludd, a fifteenth-century alchemist, and Fludd to Fulcanelli, his intellectual heir in the twentieth century and author of
Mystery of the Cathedrals.
But their main teacher was Jean Michel, also known as John Michell, who was the contemporary father of geomancy, the study of ley lines, lines of magnetism and power on earth. Ley lines form a grid on the earth that connects megalithic power spots like the ancient stone circles. It was upon these sites that old English churches were frequently built, which was how early Christianity co-opted the ancient Druidic/goddess religion. There was a store connected to one of Michell’s major sources in Soho, and Alan, Phil, and Jerry went there after visiting him. Their next step was to rent a car and go to the most important of all English power spots, Stonehenge, and the surrounding Salisbury Plain, the legendary home of Avalon, the burial place of King Arthur. Stonehenge overwhelmed Lesh, and instilled in him a lifelong intellectual curiosity about geomancy. It “clarified my whole idea of trying to put our music into a place, how it would change. How it could be different. And the whole concept of places of power . . . so much consciousness poured into it, that it still vibrates.”

The tour truly began when they left London. Two buses pulled up to the Kensington Hotel, driven by a Brit named Mick and Sven, a Swede. Sven smoked a pipe, was bald and very stolid and quiet, and spoke almost no English, but somehow he and Mick managed to get on delightfully. They had radios, and flashing quartz beacons on top of the buses to find each other, and their expertise made the journey work. On April 10, the tour left London for the next gig, at a venue called City Hall in Newcastle, and something funny, philosophical, creative, and Grateful Dead happened. Their buses were open to the world outside, and as they went along, people in the street would see longhairs inside and point. Naturally, the Dead’s response, said Trist, was to give them “a real freak show, a circus, with clowns.” Anticipating just such an eventuality, roadies Steve Parish and Sparky Raizene had gone to the joke shop on 42nd Street in New York before leaving for Europe and purchased an enormous bag full of masks—Bozo masks and fright wigs, an old man, a Martian, a dog’s head. That was step one. Step two: Their traveling party consisted of two buses and a considerable number of intermittently bored people. By and large, bus one had the band, and bus two the crew—except that Steve and Kidd came over to bus one, where, M.G. recalled, they “made it a point to sit directly behind me and Jer for the rest of the tour. Those guys tortured me to death. Kidd would say this horrible stuff in my ear . . . how this one had cut his throat . . . the two of them would just get off on this hysterical kid stuff, very funny at the same time.”

As the buses pushed north into Britain, Hunter ruminated on the Bozo masks, and on the Firesign Theater’s classic comedy album title,
I
Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus.
And in the long quiet spaces of small English roads he gave birth to “hypnocracy,” the classic Grateful Dead joke. Willy Legate would describe it later: “. . . buses which came to be known as the Bolo Bus and the Bozo Bus. The Bolo Bus had a john in it and its seats faced forward. The Bozo had a refrigerator and some of its seats were installed facing back, to accommodate four tables. And to look back. The subtle difference in character and import and atmosphere between the two omnibuses was so profoundly hidden and enigmatic that you could never possibly understand it. The Bozos wore masks, and the Bolos showed their faces . . . One St. Dilbert defected from the Bozos and lived for a season with the Bolos . . . it came to be said that he was a true hypnocratic missionary to Bololand. And to look back, it appears evident that Bozo and Bolo knew themselves each the other’s raison d’être.”

In fact, the Bozo bus was generally occupied by band members and was the more active bus, with people raving in conversation, while the Bolo bus was largely crew, plus Phil and those who were more inclined to nap. Hypnocracy was a Bozo enterprise, “the hoi polloi,” sniffed Kidd. It was essentially a language joke, “surrealism as metaphor.” It began with the word “technocracy,” which entered their lives because one of the odder people in Garcia’s acquaintance had been a member of this political fringe group from the 1930s, moved through philosophy, and ended up in humor. “In the sea of hypnocracy the shore is just another wave.” Like technocracy, hypnocracy was, Trist explained, “a utopian philosophy that almost could have been,” but didn’t quite complete itself, and died when the tour ended and the buses went back to their garage.

“Is hypnocracy not the aspiration to know what it is?” asked Willy Legate. Yet, wrote Charles Perry of
Rolling Stone,
who investigated hypnocracy in depth, “it’s considered bad form to ask. ‘It’s for me to know and you to find out,’ said Garcia. ‘I used to know,’ said Frankie Weir, adding that it depended on whether you asked a Bolo or a Bozo. When asked the meaning of Hypnocracy, St. Dilbert replied, ‘Is not Hypnocracy no other than the aspiration to discover the meaning of Hypnocracy? Say, have you heard the one about the yellow dog yet?’ ” “Perhaps—one must be tentative when speculating about deep matters,” wrote Perry, “it has something to do with the Acid Test legacy of psychedelic faith, the sense that the unexpected and inexplicable are truth on the hoof and when it comes down to it all you can do is run along. And philosophic meditation on the doofo may be inevitable when you’re in a scene that runs on the karass principle rather than on some narrow-minded program of eliminating fuck ups.”