by David Browne
Yet the advantages of having Hunter at their disposal became immediately clear. After hitchhiking his way back to San Francisco, with a lengthy stop along the way in Colorado, Hunter—in one of the Dead’s most enduring and mythical stories—found himself listening to the Dead practice for a show at a dance hall in the small nearby town of Rio Nido and scribbled down a verse inspired by T.S. Eliot. Later, sitting on a bench in the Panhandle section of San Francisco, he continued working on the lyric, which proved a game-changer for him and the band. “I remember Hunter bringing it to us at 710 and me going, ‘Whoa, where’s this gonna go?’” says Scully of watching Hunter and Garcia piece it together. “I’m looking over their shoulder and going, ‘Oh my God—what kind of freak stuff is this?’” The song had verses and a chorus, but the similarity to conventional rock ’n’ roll ended there. Like the melody that was developing around it, it was spacey and spacious, meandering and lovely, so open-ended it could go anywhere—much like the elliptical lyrics themselves. Called “Dark Star,” the song was recorded in a studio and released as a single in 1968, but the record, barely three minutes long, was like a charcoal sketch of a painting that wasn’t yet finished.
“Dark Star” was one of a handful of songs Garcia and Hunter began writing during this period. Having entertained visions of becoming a novelist, Hunter now realized he’d found both a direction for his life and an outlet for his lofty literary goals. “You’d see Hunter standing over in the corner,” Hart recalls. “He had this little dance he’d do. He had one foot off the ground, and he’d be writing in his notebooks. He was communing with the music. And all of a sudden we had songs.” About a week after the Family Dog on the Great Highway gig they would release a two-record set of live performances, Live/Dead, that would include two of those collaborations—“Dark Star” and “St. Stephen”—in drawn-out, largely improvised renditions that made the studio takes seem precise and already outdated. “We’d leave the songs behind and go into a different place,” says Hart of this period. “Sometimes we might come back to that place and sometimes we might not. We rarely talked about it. It just happened.”
It was happening again tonight. Seven minutes into “Dark Star,” they still seemed to be working their way toward something, Garcia’s dots-and-dashes notes as much Morse code as rock ’n’ roll. Finally, around nine and a half minutes in, Garcia began to sing. His voice pushed into an upper register, as if he were trying to match the sweetened tone of his guitar. They’d reached one mountain; now it was time to scale a few more.
In the months after the bust at 710 Ashbury, fleeing the Haight became as pressing as earning a living. “Behind all the publicity and all that shit, the tourists started coming and the out-of-town kids and all that kind of stuff,” Garcia bemoaned to Rolling Stone writer Michael Lydon a short time later. “And pretty soon there was a big traffic problem on the street. And all of a sudden it was a political trip. And who needs it?” He added that most of his friends were heading out of town anyway, and, in a comment that would presage the band’s future, he said their community “is larger than Haight Ashbury.”
All signs pointed to the six hundred square miles on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge known as Marin County. History itself was a lure: named after a chief of the Licatiut Native American tribe who’d long ago vanquished the Spanish, the area had defiance in its blood. One of the earliest histories of Marin, written in 1880, described it as “one interminable mass of hills of varying altitude,” culminating in the three-thousand-foot-high glory of Mount Tamalpais. The area implied space, privacy, somewhat warmer weather, and distance from San Francisco cops, all of which appealed to the Dead and their community at that moment. “Some friends came in one day, and they were always in shorts and T-shirts, and we were always in sweaters,” says Bill “Kidd” Candelario, who’d become part of the Dead’s crew the year before. “We were like, ‘Where you guys from?’ and they said, ‘We’re from Marin.’ The next week we drove up, and after that we were always there.”
Garcia and Mountain Girl were among the first to kiss the Haight good-bye, landing an apartment in another part of town before heading north. Eventually almost everyone else rented houses or semi-abandoned ranches in the Marin area: Lesh and his girlfriend, Rosie McGee, in what Lesh calls a “little shack” in Fairfax, and Kreutzmann and his girlfriend, Susila, in Novato. Weir, Hart, Hart’s girlfriend (but not wife) Frankie, and 710 regular Sue Swanson initially shared a house in Novato, but by early 1969 Hart had settled into his own Novato ranch, the one sometimes called Hart’s Delight, and Garcia and Mountain Girl had taken root in their home in Larkspur. Only Pigpen stayed behind in San Francisco, almost as if he were subconsciously hoping the scene—and the music the band was playing—would remain the way it was, untouched by the Dead’s growing improvisational fervor and the psychedelics Pigpen himself disdained. Eventually he too gave in to the Marin scene, finding a place in Novato to live with his girlfriend, Veronica. Even then his life didn’t get any easier: in 1968 Veronica (also known as Vee) had a stroke. Desperate to find someone who would help, Pigpen called around looking for Scully, and Sue Swanson wound up taking the call. “Please, pray for Veronica,” he told Swanson, and the worry in his voice and his use of “pray”—“not a word we used much,” she recalls—was downright terrifying. It was one of the few moments anyone recalled when he seemed so vulnerable.
Frankie Hart, a petite but feisty new addition to the Dead family, was the type of free but strong-willed spirit now regularly winding up in their community. Born Judy Louise Doop, she told Dead biographer Dennis McNally that she’d been adopted not once but three times, and strangely enough, the last family to do so had been named Hart. Growing up in San Luis Obispo, she’d won a dance contest in high school and eventually made her way to New York, go-go dancing (with clothes, she proudly pointed out later) at clubs like the Peppermint Lounge; she also began dating a member of the Rascals, New York’s preeminent white R&B band. Small and lithe, with a slender dancer’s body, Frankie first saw the Dead play at the Electric Circus in New York. Although she hadn’t been initially impressed with their music, she was captivated by Hart. The attraction being mutual, he invited her to their next show, in Virginia (“drop out or drop in,” he told her), and she followed them back to San Francisco. She’d already been married—to a singer and pianist named Charlie Azzara—but after their divorce she’d gone back to calling herself “Frankie Hart” when she applied for a cabaret license to be a dancer. Admittedly impulsive, she left Hart for a period, moved to Oregon, and landed a job in the Beatles’ Apple headquarters in London by way of their California-based publicist, Derek Taylor. There she took George Harrison’s phone messages and heard plenty of gossip about the increasing friction between the Beatles.
By late 1969 Frankie and Weir had hooked up once she heard he was available. Her first-ever nude bathing took place with him when the band played a discombobulated, wiring-challenged set at Woodstock that August (one that, as with Monterey Pop, wouldn’t end up in the film of the event). Some of the women in the Dead scene didn’t know what to make of Frankie at first. “She was a mysterious gal,” says Mountain Girl. “Nobody could quite figure her out. She was able to move through social situations with a lot of grace without revealing much about herself.” Still, the consensus was that she became a stabilizing influence on Weir. “She was good for Bobby in a lot of ways,” says Swanson. “He was going through that period when he was doing his macrobiotic, when he was pretty spacey because of the diet. She brought him out of that and brought him back.” In due time a British tie-dye artist, Courtenay Pollock, made his way to the West Coast and moved into the ranch dubbed Rukka Rukka at Frankie and Weir’s invitation. With her ever-present nose ring, Frankie was, to Pollock, “hip, cool, and connected”; she not only helped install him as the Dead’s official tie-dye artist (his creations would soon grace the front of their amplifiers) but introduced him to other nearby bands.
In late 1967, shortly before
the treks north began, the Dead started the process of making a second album, once again in Los Angeles. This time, though, the music wasn’t coming together as fast as it had on The Grateful Dead. The songs were freakier, weirder, and at times more mannered than those on the first album, and not surprisingly, the initial sessions, again with producer Dave Hassinger, yielded “only fragments,” says Lesh, who openly pressed for more and more console-blowing experimentation. Helping his cause was his former roommate and music-college pal Tom Constanten. Although he’d joined the Air Force in 1965, Constanten never lost interest in music, and after being sent tapes of the Dead’s new songs, he used a furlough break to drive to LA from Las Vegas, where he was stationed. “They wanted my bizarre avant-garde stuff,” Constanten says, and he was more than happy to oblige. In the studio, as Hassigner watched, Constanten—or TC, as he came to be known—would insert small 10-cent coins from the Netherlands into the strings of a piano to attain a cowbell-like sound or put a gyroscope on the piano to make a clattering noise.
Work eventually shifted to a studio in New York, which famously proved to be Hassinger’s last stand. The producer grew particularly agitated when it came to the band’s vocals, which rarely achieved pitch perfection. “Nobody could sing the thing,” Hassinger told Garcia biographer Blair Jackson. “And at that point they were experimenting too much in my opinion. They didn’t know what the hell they were looking for.” When Weir suggested they try to imitate the sound of “heavy air,” Hassinger had finally had enough. As Lesh recalls with a laugh, “Hassinger literally threw up his hands and walked out, mumbling.” Adds Constanten, “Hassinger was proud of the recordings he’d made [with other bands], which were very doctrinaire. These were not like that. He had the same mentality as Joe Smith, that we were uncivilized, unwashed ruffians.”
The incident wasn’t so amusing to Warner Brothers, especially when Hassinger called label head Smith to tell him he didn’t want anything more to do with the Dead after spending plentiful (and plenty unproductive) amounts of studio time on the new record. “It was terrible—they were so undisciplined,” says Smith, who was already experiencing buyer’s remorse a year after signing the band. “You’re in the studio and the clock’s running. If you want to do this at home, go home and fuck around. But don’t do this at a recording session with all the equipment and engineers.” Smith was so exasperated that he did something he’d never done up to that point in his career: he wrote a letter to the band expressing his outrage about what he called their “lack of professionalism.” “Your group has many problems,” he wrote. In the letter, addressed to Rifkin and sent to 710 Ashbury, Smith was particularly displeased with Lesh: “It’s apparent that nobody in your organization has enough influence over Phil Lesh to evoke anything resembling normal behavior. You are now branded as an undesirable group in almost every recording studio in Los Angeles. . . . You guys ran through engineers like a steamroller.” The group responded by scrawling “Fuck You” over the first page of the letter, which irked Smith even more.
The Dead were now without a producer and had only portions of an album, but from the near debacle came inspiration. They resumed work with a fresh and knottier twist: “The idea dawned on us: ‘Well, are we a live band or not?’” Lesh recalls. “‘Let’s take live footage and mix it and fuse with those studio sessions and create a tapestry or collage.’ Which was so ideal, so avant-garde.” The resulting album would blend live and studio recordings within the same song—especially “Alligator,” where the sound of Pigpen onstage, urging the audience to dance, would be combined with studio takes.
Anthem of the Sun, as the album was called, shaped up to be one of the strangest and most singular rock albums of the time, a swirling, in-and-out-of-focus tapestry that would be the closest the band ever came to capturing its early, feed-your-head live shows in a studio. Guitars evoked Renaissance fairs or wrapped themselves around songs like snakes. Tempos shifted. Moments of languid beauty would collide with snippets of squalor, including noises that evoked the sound of car engines turning over. (“New Potato Caboose,” home to the latter sounds, was also the only time Constanten would remember sharing an organ with Pigpen in the studio: TC played the high notes, Pigpen the lower ones.) Few albums of the time would dare open with a seven-minute-long track like “That’s It for the Other One,” a group collaboration that incorporated lead vocals from both Garcia and Weir and lyrics that referenced Neal Cassady and an exotic woman Weir had bedded. The song was an example of the collaborative spirit that ran through the album, with Garcia even writing some lyrics. “None of the songs were written completely solo,” says Lesh. “That was a true collaboration in every sense. I never had as much fun in the studio as I did on that one. Everything just happened at the right time.” It would remain Lesh’s favorite Dead album.
Even though they eventually finished the album, releasing it in July 1968, drama was never terribly far away. Warner Brothers’ Cornyn recalls a meeting with the band during the Los Angeles sessions at which some of them complained about one of their two drummers. When Cornyn said, “Well, we’ve got a lot of drummers here in this town,” the band simply stared at him with no response. He wasn’t sure whether they were just airing their differences or thought he was asking something preposterous.
One of the first signs that the Dead’s world was becoming a tribal survival course came during the New York sessions for Anthem of the Sun. Bob Matthews, whose expertise with recording gear had given him a vital role in the organization, openly expressed his unhappiness about working with Hart, refusing to set up his drums one day. “I didn’t think he belonged in the band,” Matthews says. “Billy is a phenomenal drummer. He’s more than one drummer. So I was making a statement I had no right to make. Phil said to me, ‘Bob, what’s going on? We’re asking you to set this guy up.’ And I said, ‘No, I can’t do it, man—I feel very strongly about this.’” The band had no choice but to fire Matthews and send him on a plane back to the Bay Area. In their pursuit of the best possible music, the fuzzy community atmosphere would only go so far.
It didn’t take long for Garcia to finish singing the first verse of “Dark Star,” but words weren’t the point. As they arrived at the eleventh minute, the instrumental interplay again took over, with Lesh’s bass now wrestling for control of the song. In the way Garcia would take command but then retreat back into the song’s haze, “Dark Star” spoke volumes of the band’s peculiar dynamic, the way Garcia didn’t always want to lead. But Lesh wouldn’t be steering “Dark Star” for long. In fact, no one would. Moments later the song essentially crumbled to nothing and the instruments largely dropped out, leaving little but an increasingly diminishing hum of feedback and then, finally, silence. At twelve minutes all that could be heard were dribs and drabs of organ and a dollop of bass. The music was no longer jazz or rock but a variation of new-music minimalism, to the point where, at twelve minutes and forty-five seconds, no one was playing at all.
Eventually the organ—manned by Constanten, now a full-on member of the band—began stirring, like a vampire from a coffin, soon joined by Garcia’s counterpoint guitar. The tone shifted from the languorous beauty of the introduction and the deadening tones of the midsection to music that hinted at horror-film soundtracks, building to a crescendo coupled, at fourteen minutes, with splashes of cymbals and elbow-nudging percussion. Garcia’s and Weir’s guitars locked in together, Garcia zipping up and down the fret board as if playing scales (something he would do almost every night before shows, even arriving at the venues early to work on his fingering). Kreutzmann and Hart began thumping and pounding more, with cymbals or sticks. Everyone was finally together, but the music itself was in freefall. The original melody had long been annihilated, sacrificed at the altar of wherever they were going with their instruments that night.
Many times during the last two years the transition from R&B and blues covers and zippy originals like “The Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion)” to their on-the-fly jams was easier for
some in the band than for others. By the middle of 1968 Pigpen, the most traditionally minded musician of the bunch, was already grappling with the band’s increasingly improvisational focus, and Weir’s guitar chops were uneven and still a work in progress. For Garcia and Lesh the situation was growing increasingly frustrating, exacerbated by the drawn-out recording of Anthem of the Sun that put everyone’s skills under a powerful microscope. “Jerry said he was mad at Bob and Pig,” Scully recalls of the early months of 1968, after Anthem of the Sun had been wrapped up. “Danny and I decided to ignore it. They didn’t know what they were talking about.”
But the interpersonal relationships within the band were becoming tangled. Lesh could be particularly assertive and edgy in his drive for perfection, to the point where the band sat him down one day and told him to pull back on his grousing. (Lesh and Weir had a complex rapport, starting with their differences in age—Lesh was a seasoned twenty-eight, Weir still an impressionable twenty—and widely varying musical abilities at the time.) Lesh’s approach to bass also required the other players to compensate for the lack of solid bottom. “Phil wasn’t fulfilling the role of a standard bass player,” says Hart. “He was putting the one on the sixteenth note off the beat, instead of putting it on the beat where we could get into a groove, so Bill and I had a rhythmic problem with Phil. He was taking his liberties, and we had to concentrate on keeping it together. There were all these interrelated musical things that were rising because we were into new musical space. It was the growing pains of us becoming the Dead.”