A Long Strange Trip (63 page)

Anything can happen. On another night, perhaps they could stage one of their famous musical arguments about which song to play and change their (group) mind three times in as many bars of music. But tonight their decision-making, as well as their playing, is in perfect unity, with perfect rhythm, so that every riff has an overwhelming power, chords stacked like mighty walls, energy exactly expressed, synchronization, not synchronicity, although they can be contiguous. The jam out of the song trails quietly away, and the guitarists and Mydland leave the stage to the drummers.

40

The Wall (1/74–10/20/74)

The new year began explosively. The minutes of a mid-January band meeting noted that Out of Town Tours was “taking a vacation until May,” a fudging of the truth that only served to em-phasize the importance of what had happened: Sam Cutler had been fired. His efficient harnessing of the energy from
Workingman’s Dead
and
American Beauty
had increased the band’s draw enormously, but he had made few friends. There was always the impression that he regarded the Dead as a squirming puppy that needed to be dragged up by the scruff of its neck to purebred levels, that it needed improving and change, that it needed to make lots more money. His associate, Chesley Millikin, felt that Cutler had been sabotaged, that he had “tremendous energy, and should have been left to do his job if he hadn’t been stabbed in the back by Miss
[sic]
McIntire and Richard Loren and those fuckers . . . and Jerry was nonconfrontational and wouldn’t stand up for him.”

Sam, on the other hand, pointed at Rakow and the record company, which he said he opposed. “I thought it was a dumb move, a Rakow scam. And I said so. It was a fantasy that wasn’t worth pursuing.” Rakow and Loren, whom Lesh would call the “Stinson Beach Mafia,” had moved to West Marin, and there were dark suspicions as to their influence. “Cutler’s getting far too much money for what he’s doing.” Sam’s reply was that “OOT was charging 10 percent, I wasn’t getting 10 percent, I was getting a salary of $200 a week.” Loren suggested later that Cutler’s downfall was the sound system, which by now had grown so large and costly that it required huge gigs to pay for itself. Richard said that he respected Sam, “not necessarily his character, ’cause he was kinda shady . . . but he really understood the business of booking, like nobody else that had worked for the Grateful Dead.” What also crippled Cutler was the feeling that money earned by the Dead was being spent on offices, secretaries, and a big scene at OOT, a competition for economic power guaranteed to raise band eyebrows.

Came January 14, and Cutler knew what was about to happen; he was to be the sacrificial lamb, and he pointed the finger at the reluctant leader, Garcia. “If I’d had a gun,” he wrote, “I would have shot the miserable sod and put him out of his misery then and there! I said ONE word, ‘okay’ and left . . . To have that spineless and easily influenced man tell me what he told me (in public!) when I was effectively ‘fired’ was the most humiliating thing that has EVER happened to me in my life, and I said not a word in reply. BUT, I never forgave him, and I never will. It was the act of a moral coward.”

Shortly after the meeting, Rita Gentry received an ominous visit from a Hell’s Angel who told her that it would be inadvisable for her to attempt to work for the Dead—any other band, but not the Dead. Taking the message quite seriously, she went to work for the New Riders.

It must have been a considerable relief for Garcia to turn from internal politics to music, specifically the recording of his second solo album. Again called
Garcia,
it was nicknamed
Compliments
when a sampler entitled “Compliments of Garcia” was mailed to Dead Heads. Motivated largely because Grateful Dead Records needed product in the pipeline, Garcia went into the project thinking of himself as a studio vocalist, letting his producer, John Kahn, choose much of the material, none of which was original. Instead, Garcia covered Chuck Berry, Smokey Robinson, Van Morrison, Mac Rebennack, aka Dr. John, Jagger-Richards, and even Irving Berlin. It was not a bad album, but it lacked the punch of his first solo work and the style of its immediate inspiration, thirties jazz guitarist Oscar Alemán, a musician whose work absorbed Garcia at the time.

Except for some band meetings, January had become a time for personal projects. Weir was away writing, Lesh was in Hawaii, and Garcia was working on his album. The meetings covered a lot of ground. Deadpatch, Alan Trist’s vision of a homesite for the band, which at this time would have required an additional $100,000 to finance, was given the coup de grâce. The next gigs, in February, would generate funds for a down payment for Keith and Donna’s new home, a computer for musical experiments Phil Lesh and Ned Lagin were conducting, and a donation to old KSAN friend Milan Melvin’s program for Napa schools. The band made one other decision, and it determined the best part of their next year. They approved building a modular unit, a cluster of speakers at the center of the system, that would replace the individual cabinets. It was the final element in building the Wall of Sound.

Late in February they played three nights at Winterland, among other things debuting “Ship of Fools” and “U.S. Blues” in its final form. Both reflected the political atmosphere of 1974, in which the specter of a modern-day presidential impeachment was no longer a fantasy, but an emerging reality.

Saw your first ship sink and drown
from rocking of the boat
and all that could not sink or swim
was just left there to float
I won’t leave you drifting down
but
woah
it makes me wild
with thirty years upon my head
to have you call me child

Of course, “Ship of Fools”—the title, at least—could easily represent the Grateful Dead without Pigpen.

On March 22 the crew went into the Cow Palace in San Francisco and set up the Wall for the next day’s “Sound Test.” The Wall of Sound was not merely a sound system, it was an electronic sculpture. To walk into a facility for a Dead concert that year was to see something like the pylon on the moon in Stanley Kubrick’s
2001,
something so grand, so elegant, so utterly preposterous, that words simply failed. The Wall was 604 speakers (88 JBL fifteen-inch, 174 JBL twelve-inch, 288 JBL five-inch, and fifty-four Electro Voice tweeters), using 26,400 watts of power from fifty-five McIntosh 2300s. The music came through nine separate channels, through a differential summing amp, to a four-way crossover network, then to the power amps, the speakers, and out into the hall. There is a standard joke in rock and roll about turning an amp up to 11, given that all amp dials are calibrated to 10. With the Wall, there was so much power available that the musicians generally turned things up to 2. It was, in Lesh’s words, “Like piloting a flying saucer. Or riding your own soundwave.” Because they were only turned up to 2, there was no distortion. In fact, Healy said, no two sounds went through any one speaker, so that it was “the ultimate derivation of IM [intermodulation] cleanliness.” Alembic’s notes modestly stated that it had “quite an acceptable sound at a quarter of a mile without wind and an extremely fine sound up to 500 to 600 feet, where it begins to be injured by wind.” Healy estimated that the system had cost $350,000 and was the product of eight years of experimentation. Later, Garcia pointed out that the Wall in fact represented a “physical model of the
size
of the sound” they were creating. The bottom note of a bass was thirty-two feet tall, and that was what the Wall produced. It was brilliant, but not terribly efficient. It required too much power, both electrical and logistical, to function in the real world.

The band took a day off, and on March 25 went into CBS studios on Folsom Street in San Francisco to record a new album. It would be called
Grateful Dead From the Mars Hotel,
in tribute to the shabby building of that name that had thus far escaped an urban-renewal holocaust in the studio’s neighborhood. Though no one in the band realized it at the time, it was interestingly synchronistic that the Mars Hotel had been one of Jack Kerouac’s favorite wino flophouses. The album was another exercise in Grateful Dead reactionism, the pendulum swinging yet again.
Wake
had been in-house and conceptual, a fine whole that lacked the final soupçon of energy and drive to make it great.
Mars
would be a slick-sounding album of stand-alone songs, recorded by Roy Seigel, an outstanding CBS producer. It was highly professional, but not inspired Grateful Dead. Lesh and Lagin’s electronics research had produced the gorgeous synthesizer sounds in “Unbroken Chain,” a terrific song that Lesh would not perform until twenty-one years later, both because he was dissatisfied with the recorded version and because his voice was shot. He also contributed a country rocker, “Pride of Cucamonga.” Garcia and Hunter brought in “China Doll,” “U.S. Blues,” “Ship of Fools,” and “Loose Lucy,” but the jewel of the album was “Scarlet Begonias,” a masterpiece. “Scarlet” had a Caribbean feel that Garcia would later relate to Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” It was an acoustic song done electrically, and it invited opening up in the classic Dead manner. Hunter was then living in England, and his lyrics echoed the British nursery rhyme “Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross”: “To see a fine lady upon a white horse / With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes / She shall have music wherever she goes.” Whether it was Queen Elizabeth or Lady Godiva, the lady with the flowers was one of Hunter’s most exquisitely romantic objects of desire, a quest destined to fail.

Well there ain’t nothing wrong
with the way she moves
Scarlet begonias or a
touch of the blues
And there’s nothing wrong with
the love that’s in her eye
I had to learn the hard way
to let her pass by—
let her pass by

Weir’s contribution was not well received. Barlow had written a take on Mose Allison he called “Finance Blues” and Weir called “Money Money,” which both of them thought of as a humorous wink on the ancient grumble of men and the price of their ladies’ tastes. Weir thought of it as a joke, but the rest of the band and most Dead Heads saw it as hard-edged, and borderline mean. It would not stay in the repertoire for very long.

In May the band set out on the road, and it was like an invasion force. “The bigger we got,” reflected Joe Winslow later, “the more powerful, but the more headaches. I was really rude a lot.” It had been possible to be stoned and be one with the audience in a small theater, but in a big show ten feet above the audience, the stage became an island. The Wall required two stages, which leapfrogged each other, alternating shows, so that as one was being set up, the other was traveling to the next show. Inside stages were 76 feet wide by 30 deep, and outside they were 104 feet by 40. Ten feet above the ground was a floor of one-inch plywood, bolted, nailed, and tied to the scaffolding, because it could rise and fall as much as a foot from the sound pressure. Typically, the caravan included six band members, ten crew/sound guys, four people for lights, seven for staging and trucking, and three for road management. There were up to four trucks, which hauled around seventy-five tons of equipment.

The setup was so elaborate that the contract rider for that year was simply called “The Book,” and included eleven realms of information, including 1. Stage and related structures. 2. Electrical requirements (600 amperes at 120 volts minimum for sound, 600 amps for lights). Grounding: “When in doubt, assure a supply of large wire and wait for us.” There was also a lecture on quality of electricity, complete with Ohm’s law. Security: “[Guards] should not confuse exuberance with malice, and . . . should realize that taking a certain amount of shit from an occasional wise guy is precisely what they’re paid for . . . GD audiences, as a rule, react well to reason and requests, and badly to arbitrary authority.” Their first show, outdoors on May 12 in Reno, was scary. A heavy wind, known locally as the Washoe zephyr, blew off the Sierra Nevada, swinging the twelve-hundred-pound center sound cluster like a child’s balloon above Kreutzmann’s head. The zephyr pushed hundred-pound McIntosh 2300 cases around like toys. Wheeled instrument cases wouldn’t stay still. Somehow they managed to get through it.

The record company released
Mars Hotel
on June 10, with superb packaging by Kelley and Mouse. The front cover was a photo of the hotel at sunrise taken with an architectural camera, then manipulated by the artists. The back cover was also heavily embellished, beginning as a photograph of the band sitting in another seedy establishment, the Cadillac Hotel, where Garcia had lived for a few weeks some thirteen years before. They wanted to subtitle the album “Ugly Roomers,” referring to the band, but it occurred to them that this might reflect poorly on the actual last residents of the Mars Hotel, so the slogan became “Ugly Rumours.” This was shortly to be a self-fulfilling prophecy of the finest kind.

By now the record company had found its way, and the mailing list would get considerable use that spring and summer. A letter from Rakow, under the nom de guerre Anton Round, went out to the list in May along with many different samplers of upcoming albums:

Dear Guerrilla:

. . . The question for us is, can you joyously and systematically make sure, by repeated gentle mentions and phone calls, that every record dealer knows that our records have to be in plain view.

The letter noted that the record company would have a booth at upcoming gigs

to give info and stuff away, get our minds blown, and blow some . . . Remember you gorillas are our guerrillas and we love ya, but we only want you to do stuff if you dig it. Dig it? . . . P.S. There’ll be an ugly rumour in your life soon . . . WHAT TO DO: 1. Nothing unless it’s fun. 2. Call stores, see stuff is there, neatly arranged. 4. Put up the posters, stickers, and handbills. 5. Call radio stations, etc. 6. Whatever you can think up that’s fun for you and fun for other folks, too.

It was never clear how many Dead Heads got involved, although their response to various requests for information was substantial. By mid-August the album had sold 258,000 copies, but reviews were generally mediocre.
Rolling Stone
dismissed it as “moribund.”

It would be a peculiar summer. Late in June the Dead played at the Miami Jai-Alai Fronton. Lesh had been working with Ned Lagin on what would eventually be called
Seastones,
an entirely abstract album of electronic music that combined white or pink noise with bleepborp sounds. Lagin had degrees in both molecular biology and music from MIT, and they intimidated Lesh. Their collaboration had almost nothing to do with music, but rather the physiological effects of sound. “The way they describe it,” said Garcia, “is ‘recorded drugs, electronic drugs’ . . . When they play it live and it’s real loud, you hear these incredible things—subharmonic thumpings below fourteen, fifteen cycles, below what the ear can register as pitch, and it starts to turn into a physical thing . . . And they have super high-frequency things that sound as if they’re originating inside your head.” For Lesh, Lagin’s synthesizer presented Ned with “a virtually infinite range of sounds and music that he can play, and I’ve got a very limited range . . . there’s no possible way that one guy with two pedals and a ring modulator can possibly compete with an entire computer/synthesizer system.”