by David Browne
Most importantly, their music was expanding in scope and power. Less than a week before this February recording session the band had returned to New York’s Fillmore East, a former vaudeville hall that promoter Bill Graham, both the Dead’s champion and sometimes adversary, had transformed into the city’s leading rock ’n’ roll theater, its counterculture church. In 1967 Time magazine had dubbed the Dead’s music “acid rock,” but as those seminal Fillmore shows revealed, that description was now as outmoded as their previous band name, the Warlocks. At the Fillmore they could play one of their own dirgy country ballads, “High Time,” or a lanky, vampy cover of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street.” They could strip it down, strumming an acoustic version of the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up, Little Susie” or Lightnin’ Hopkins’s “Katie Mae,” the latter a showcase for Pigpen’s country blues side. (Decades later “unplugged” segments at concerts would be de rigueur; in 1970 the changeover was almost unheard of.) They could also dive into “Dark Star,” which sounded like nothing else in rock ’n’ roll at that moment: its lilting, dainty melody gradually whipped itself into a group whirlwind, collapsed into itself, stripped down to bits of feedback and drums, and then began rebuilding, instrument by instrument, finally finishing one night just nineteen seconds shy of a half-hour.
During the same shows, the drummers would get ample time for tribal duets during “Alligator,” and Lesh was rarely as unobtrusive as bass players were in more traditionally minded bands; from time to time his bass would pop like a gopher sticking its head up from different parts of a lawn. (It was almost as if he were taking solos while the others were still playing.) During “China Cat Sunflower” Garcia’s guitar danced a sweet jig around the melody; other times, reflecting his own mood swings, his playing could be testy and terse. By the end of each night it was clear the Dead weren’t just West Coast weirdoes; their repertoire made them the most eclectic, fearsome, and versatile American rock band of its time, perhaps ever.
As Fillmore East manager Kip Cohen saw for himself, the scene wasn’t merely about the music; the Dead were beginning to symbolize a new lifestyle paradigm. The Dead had first played the venue in June 1968, and with each run since, they’d attracted larger, more impassioned crowds. To Cohen, many of them seemed like kids from Connecticut suburbs who’d ventured into the nasty big city to see the Dead and get wasted. When the sets ended, often in the early morning hours, the Fillmore staff found itself with “a roomful of people freaking out on acid,” Cohen says, and the staff did what it could to make sure the kids wound up on the right train home or had a place in town to crash. Those fans were an early sign that the Dead were on the verge of transforming from a cult band to a larger, more national one. Indeed, in 1970 they were preparing to play the most shows—about 150—they would ever do in a year by that point. That number meant more travel, more employees, and more temptations once they were out on the road, but during that early period no one yet knew how it would all impact them.
Sam Cutler, who popped into the Pacific High sessions now and then, should have been accustomed to rock ’n’ roll madness. He himself was a road-dog buccaneer; with his thin face and mustache, he looked like Captain Hook after a visit to a leather-jacket emporium. Cutler had worked for the Rolling Stones the year before, helping shepherd them around America on the band’s first tour of the States in four years. Starting in January 1970, he’d begun a new job, tour manager for the Dead, a task that also involved plenty of opportunity to hang with what he first thought were a group of loosey-goosey West Coast hippies.
About two years earlier most of the Dead had fled the Haight (or “Hashbury,” as the New York Times Magazine had dubbed their former neighborhood) for Marin County, just north of San Francisco. They relished the sprawling area’s meandering, tree-shrouded streets, which looked like paths running through Muir Woods, and one by one they settled into various ramshackle houses, ranches, and quasi-communes in towns like Novato and Larkspur. In the privacy of the Marin woods they could do whatever they wanted, or at least close enough to it. Cutler witnessed that for himself during one of his early visits to Hart’s Novato ranch. A television had been dragged out of the house and, with long extension cords, had been set up in a dry creek, and one hundred rounds had been loaded into various guns. With the TV on, there suddenly was Ronald Reagan, the actor turned politician who was now the governor of their state, the man who embodied everything the Dead despised about the straight world. Normally they’d shoot up concrete blocks or records, but now they took aim at Reagan’s image on the small screen and let loose. Cutler estimates they fired off “about three hundred times,” obliterating the set once and for all. Other times the victims were sales plaques their label, Warner Brothers, had presented to the band.
For a time Weir was living in what he would later call a “self-imposed dustbowl of a ranch” in Nicasio in western Marin County. Named Rukka Rukka, it was home as well to Weir’s girlfriend, Frankie (soon to take his last name even though they weren’t married), and various members of the Dead’s crew, along with random wandering chickens and horses. Tales of the origins of the ranch’s name were appropriately bawdy: according to one account, someone they’d known at another hangout would chase after women, squeeze their breasts, and say, “Rukka, rukka!” The Dead thought the story was hilarious, and the name stuck.
Even more than their music, Hart’s ranch became a symbol of the way the Dead could build their own remote community outside the normal confines of society. Whoever had found it first—either manager Rock Scully or road manager Jonathan Riester—Hart was now the overseer of the rambling thirty-two-acre property tucked away beyond a wooden entry gate nearly hidden by trees. Dubbed Hart’s Delight by some, it became the go-to place for the band, friends, roadies, and their increasingly expanding family unit to congregate, get high, and record music. With its large barn (soon filled with recording gear), horses, working water pump, and occasional displays of excitable-boy gunfire, the ranch felt like something straight out of the previous century—though with a few contemporary twists. Mike (nicknamed Josh) Belardo, an afternoon-drive DJ for KMPX in San Francisco, ventured onto the ranch one day to interview the band and had his mind blown even without hallucinogens. “Everybody’s walking around stoned, and the chicks are naked,” he recalls. “Topless women. Horses. It was unbelievable.” Hart had a beloved Arabian white horse named Snorter, a name that took on additional meaning when Snorter would be dosed now and then—“Oh, there were many times with something or another,” Hart admits. The horse didn’t seem all that affected while under the influence, even dodging a herd of trampling cows once during a ride.
Unlawful activity wasn’t always tolerated at Hart’s Delight. They’d already been burned by the law at least once, not to mention driven out of the Haight by a tidal wave of tourism, drugs, and increasing police scrutiny. When Hart learned that certain people living on the ranch were expert pickpockets, he scolded them. “They would come home with things, wallets and stuff,” he recalls, “and I’d say, ‘First, if you’re gonna live here, that’s not the right thing to do, and second, it will bring the heat on the Dead.’” After all their busts, “under the radar” was the operative phrase.
Among those living at the ranch were Rhonda, Sherry, and Vicki Jensen, three sisters who moved onto the ranch after their previous home had burned down. The sisters cleaned, swept floors, prepared breakfast for anyone who crashed there, and fed horses: “It made the music work,” says Vicki, “and that was the inspiration to do it.” The only irksome part of the job involved the women the road crew would bring to the ranch. The Jensen girls had to pick out which horses the girls would ride—and, just as important, find ways to keep the women busy once the roadies left for somewhere or someone else. “They’d just sit there and think that looking pretty was enough,” Vicki says with a laugh. “I used to tell them, ‘You need to join in and help out here!’”
At Hart’s ranch the Dead and their extended family were able to live o
ut their fantasies as cowboys and outliers who played by their own rules without worrying about societal norms. Even the local police were skittish about stopping by. The fantasy did have its learning curve, like the day Garcia went riding on a horse whose cinch hadn’t been tightened. As his girlfriend, Carolyn Adams, otherwise known as Mountain Girl, watched, Garcia fell off and broke a few ribs. “First and last time he was on a horse,” she recalls. “He didn’t like horses after that.” Sometimes even the fantasies had limits.
“Dire Wolf,” the song they were scheduled to start recording that February night at Pacific High, was symbolic in and of itself. If Hart’s ranch was the Dead’s almost-anything-goes headquarters, the Garcia and Mountain Girl house on Madrone Avenue in Larkspur was its creative hub. Set on a flat acre with sizable redwood trees and a creek out back, the house was far from ostentatious. Garcia had moved in first with Mountain Girl, who was now, in the parlance of the times, Garcia’s “old lady.” MG, as everyone called her, already had a child with writer Ken Kesey and in 1969 had given birth to Garcia’s daughter, Annabelle. The two weren’t technically wed, as both had been married before and hadn’t yet obtained divorces, but no one seemed to mind.
One day Garcia brought up the idea of a new roommate: “I want my friend Bob Hunter to move in,” he told Mountain Girl, who hadn’t even met Hunter yet but knew his history with Garcia: the two men, who both could flash wide, welcoming grins, had met in the early days of the Palo Alto folk and literary scene nearly a decade before, living in adjacent cars when they were homeless, and had put their friendship through its share of inspired highs and head-butting lows. With his bookish glasses and brain-of-a-poet intensity, Hunter could be as bristly and intense as Garcia could seem affable and casual. After going their separate ways in the middle of the sixties they’d reconvened when Garcia asked Hunter to sign up as the Dead’s resident lyricist.
Along with their respective girlfriends, Hunter and Garcia were now roommates in Larkspur, and one night they and Mountain Girl were watching one of the original black-and-white Sherlock Holmes movies, The Hound of the Baskervilles. As Hunter would later recall, they all pondered what a “ghostly hound” would look like, and the phrase “dire wolf” emerged. Just the thought of a big wolf called Dire was enough to inspire Hunter, who began writing lyrics, and in no time they had a song.
Financially, life at the house on Madrone could be a daily survival challenge. Although the Dead were technically rock stars, they didn’t have the cash flow that went with that job. Their rent was an affordable several hundred dollars a month, but Garcia and Mountain Girl relied on welfare and food handouts courtesy of the WIC (Women, Infants and Children) program and often settled for meals of peanut butter, honey, and sacks of rice. Other relationships in the generally fraught Dead world were on fairly steady ground. With his second wife, Susila, Kreutzmann had just welcomed a baby boy, William Justin, who came to be known simply as Justin. (Kreutzmann already had a daughter, Stacy, from his first marriage.) Weir had settled into a relationship with Frankie, a sparkplug who’d been a dancer for the TV shows Hullabaloo and Shindig! and briefly an employee of the Beatles’ Apple Records. Pigpen was into the third year of his relationship with Veronica “Vee” Barnard.
As soon as Hunter moved in during the first months of 1969 Mountain Girl saw how intense he could be: she would sometimes look outside and see Hunter using an axe handle to thwack away at a car tire dangling from an apple tree. “Bob had a pretty high need to release his physical energy,” she says. “He had a lot of juice.” Yet the two men complemented each other creatively and temperamentally. Garcia never relished the idea of spending hours working on lyrics; Hunter loved nothing better, even if it meant staying up all night. Mountain Girl recalls “a lot of wine and playing guitars until two in the morning.” Many days, she says, Hunter would bound into the kitchen during breakfast, carrying a stack of papers: “I’ve got a bunch of new ones for ya!” Garcia might flash a vaguely irritated look, as if irked by his meal being interrupted, but would then start sifting through the poems: “Like this one. Like that one,” he’d say. In five minutes Garcia would select up to a dozen lyrics, and soon he’d have the melodies to match.
In June 1970, a few months after the “Dire Wolf” session, Hunter beheld a particularly arresting example of the way he and Garcia collaborated. The Dead, along with Delaney and Bonnie, the Band, Janis Joplin, Ian and Sylvia, and others, embarked on a wild tour of Canada by private train. Everyone was partying and playing music even when they weren’t on stage, so much so that the train had to periodically stop so more liquor could be bought. During one stop Garcia sat on the tracks, grabbed Hunter’s latest lyrics—for “Ripple”—and worked out a melody. For decades to come this would remain one of Hunter’s most cherished memories of a time when their creativity seemed as unstoppable as a locomotive.
The Dead’s world could be a constant lurch between light and dark, and nothing captured the latter mood better than another song that took shape during the same sessions as “Dire Wolf.” If “Dire Wolf” was a merry, if dark-humored, stroll, “New Speedway Boogie” snarled; Garcia’s guitar poked at the melody, and his voice was a little frazzled around the edges at times. The song was testy and aptly so: it documented a moment when the darkness threatened to overshadow them.
The speedway in question was Altamont, where the Dead had been scheduled to play in December 1969 as part of a mammoth free concert with a formidable lineup: the Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The Dead and Stones’ camps had been in discussion about doing some sort of free show, somewhere, and the end result, after two venue cancellations, was at Altamont. (As Scully would later write, “We actually talk[ed] the Stones into doing a free concert in Golden Gate Park,” the original site until the city of San Francisco nixed the idea and the speedway became the organizers’ last resort.) The day-long show was ostensibly a way to celebrate the end of the Stones’ American tour, give them a filmed finale for their in-progress concert movie, Gimme Shelter—and help them ward off accusations of high ticket prices by presenting one concert for free. The Dead weren’t just scheduled to perform the show but also supplied their PA system and crew, who helped set up the recording gear and speakers. One of Hart’s ranch mates was in a truck backstage rolling hundreds of joints for Keith Richards and anyone else who wanted one.
Even when the music finally started up, the vibe felt sour. Chris Hillman, the former Byrds bass player then in the Flying Burrito Brothers, walked through the crowd to the stage to play his set, stumbling over participants who already seemed wasted. Arriving at the stage, he was stopped by a Hells Angel, who asked who he was and almost didn’t let him up. At the airport Sue Swanson, a longtime friend and fan of the Dead’s, saw fear in the faces of other musicians who’d played and were on their way out. “Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were there with their big coats on,” she recalls. “The looks on everyone’s faces were just very serious. Everyone wanted the hell out of there.”
The Dead had forged an alliance of sorts with the Angels several years before, during the early, untroubled days hanging with band friend Kesey in the Palo Alto hills. Some in the band weren’t rattled by the sight of tattooed, hairy, and burly Angels backstage; others were less pleased, though there wasn’t much they could do about it. As much as anything, that relationship between these two seemingly dissimilar camps spelled out the growing duality in the Dead’s world: a seemingly sunny gentility with an undercurrent of hardened swagger that wasn’t remotely for the faint of heart. A reporter covering a 1970 show noticed that Garcia’s case sported a sticker that read, “Blackjack Garcia, the baddest fucking guitarist in the world.” For all the field-of-flowers beauty of their music, the world of the Dead was unsentimental and demanding; to survive, one had to adapt and hold on tight.
At a Fillmore East show that January stagehand (and future movie director) Allan Arkush, an NYU student who worked part time at the
theater, heard a knock on the backstage door, and he and a few other employees found themselves confronting a bunch of Hells Angels from the nearby Lower East Side chapter. The Angels name-dropped one of the Dead’s road crew—Lawrence Shurtliff, otherwise known as “Ram Rod,” a muscular, wiry man with old-sage eyes and strong-silent-type demeanor. But even if the Angels hadn’t been on the guest list, Arkush and his fellow Fillmore employees wouldn’t have dared turn them away. That night they had come bearing gifts. As Arkush watched in astonishment, the Angels began lugging nitrous oxide tanks to the dressing rooms, no easy feat given that each one probably weighed about two hundred pounds and had to be dragged up several flights of stairs. A short while later Arkush popped his head into one of the dressing rooms to alert the band that showtime had arrived. What he saw—everyone sucking on nitrous tubes—was so cartoonish it was almost funny. The band happily stumbled their way down to the stage, took their places with their instruments, and waited; Graham had arranged for Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” best known in 1970 as the theme song to the sci-fi sensation 2001: A Space Odyssey, to blast out of the speakers before the show started. When it finished, the Dead just stood there, gazing up at a screen and giggling in a nitrous haze. To make his guitar sound like it too was laughing, Garcia began stroking the strings.
By the time the Dead were helicoptered onto the Altamont site the festivities were no longer festive. After the Airplane’s Grace Slick had mentioned to Mick Jagger the role the Angels had played in security for Airplane shows, the Angels had been recruited for Altamont; whether it would be for security or to hang out in front of the stage and protect generators (as Angels had done at so many free area shows before) would be debated for years. Fights broke out early, and it became clear that some of the instigators weren’t Angels but so-called “prospects,” not full-on Angels. It didn’t help that many in the crowd upfront were wasted. The uniformed local cops on hand were cowering at the idea of dealing with the Angels. As soon as they arrived on site the Dead were informed that an Angel had punched out Airplane singer Marty Balin. (Vicki Jensen, backstage with the crew, saw Balin come flying through the back of the stage after he’d dared to stand up to Angels beating on someone in the audience. “I’m sorry, man,” one Angel was overheard saying, “but you don’t say ‘fuck you’ to an Angel.”) Walking through the dusty air and sun-scorched crowd on their way toward the stage, Lesh and Garcia saw dazed fans sprawled all over, and Lesh accidentally hit Garcia on the head with the back of his bass. It was that kind of day.