by David Browne
During their first few years on the road Dead tours were haphazardly organized. “The band would get a call and say, ‘Can you make it to Florida in a day?’” Candelario says. “The shows were eight hundred miles apart. And even if we drove seventy miles an hour, we’d barely get there. One guy would drive until he couldn’t stay awake, and the next guy would step up. We daisy-chained ourselves across America.” For the passengers, the brutal drives were helped greatly by regular quantities of Owsley’s acid, and the hard labor came with rewards: once a month each crew member would find a bag with three to four ounces of premium weed tucked inside his cubby at the Dead’s office.
Around the country promoters learned to both respect and fear the crew—and to interfere at their own peril. At the first show he worked on with the band Connecticut promoter Jim Koplik was told he shouldn’t drink anything backstage; he never knew if and when he would be dosed. Koplik reached for a can of Pepsi and inspected the top. Finding it untampered with, he popped it open and chugged some of it down. Within a minute he felt like he was in an elevator descending a hundred miles an hour. One of the crew had punctured the can with the tiniest of holes and dropped Owsley acid into it. “I thought I was real smart,” he says, “but they figured it out.” At a later show Koplik approached one of the crew onstage and introduced himself. Not believing Koplik was the promoter, the crew member picked him up and hurled him off the stage. Thanks to a recent rainfall, the grass was wet, so Koplik avoided serious injury. When Bill Graham dragged Koplik back onto the stage and verified who he was, the crewman smiled and made a joke, and Koplik knew he had to accept the situation and not protest any further. “I was really pissed at first, but I was smart,” he says. “I wasn’t going after that guy.”
Europe presented a different set of challenges for the crew—twenty-two shows, starting at Wembley in London, followed by stops in Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Paris, Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Munich, and other cities before winding their way back to London on May 26 for four nights at the Lyceum. When it came time to load in, the centuries-old theaters and buildings where the band would be playing offered challenges unto themselves; sometimes the entrance to a theater might be a small alleyway. The first planned show, at the Rainbow in London, had to be hastily rescheduled when the venue closed before they arrived; fortunately the Wembley Empire Pool, the original name for what became the Wembley Arena, was available, and the band pulled in about four thousand ticket holders for each of their two shows.
From the start at Wembley the crew made its presence known to any rambunctious Brits who were looking for trouble. According to Cutler, a few dozen rowdies started getting too boisterous, and two crew members decided to fend them off (and protect the band’s gear). In what looked like a bad action movie—but for real—kids would come at them, the roadies knocking them down one way or another before another wave would come. As Cutler, who was watching, recalls, “It went from skirmish to localized battle.” To pacify the fans, Cutler distributed what he calls “liberal amounts of hash” to them. In Copenhagen for a TV broadcast an announcer preparing to introduce the band to the live audience decided he needed to stand atop a garbage can to be seen. To the crew’s horror, he emptied the bin filled with half-empty bottles and papers right on the stage. “He turned it over and milk and orange juice and water leaked out all over our cables,” Parish says. “That was disrespectful to the max, man.” Parish yanked him off the garbage can just as the live broadcast began (“I didn’t have to hit him—he was scared enough of me”) and the show started. Inside the recording truck Cutler told the stunned director, “You can’t do that, man. You do that at your own peril.”
On one of the two buses that plowed through Europe—one for “bolos” and one for “bozos”—Garcia would often hang with Parish and Candelario; Parish in particular was a one-man comic relief and raconteur. Even when they weren’t working the crew could raise hell to new levels. One night Cutler awoke in a brothel in Munich (or possibly Hamburg, depending on the source) and heard yelling and screaming. Running out of his room and leaving behind his companion, he saw a naked Parish standing at the top of the stairs, holding aloft a fire extinguisher and preparing to bash in the head of the bouncer-type running toward him. (In his memoir, Home Before Dark, Parish recalls this incident as taking place during the band’s second European tour two years later, but Cutler wasn’t part of that expedition, so some confusion lingers.) “Come on, Hans, you motherfucker!” Parish yelled, promptly smashing the bouncer in the head with the extinguisher. The Dead crew ran out of the place before he’d woken up. It was, Cutler recalls, “a bit hairy.”
Unintentionally the crew embodied the way the culture around the Dead had changed since the band had grown from being a local San Francisco cluster to a touring beast. Band and crew alike had to be toughened up to endure the endless road trips. Whatever cozy vibes existed in the original community—and some in it would argue there weren’t many to begin with—were soon replaced by a more rugged, more aggressive atmosphere, the culture of the rock ’n’ roll road, and the changeover rattled more than a few. “The more effete section of the Dead musical community would roll their eyes and sigh deeply,” says Cutler. “But Bill and Jerry were used to hanging out with Hells Angels. Someone punches someone—big fucking deal.” When the band was in Paris Hunter jotted down what he dubbed “The Ten Commandments of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” a sarcastic list of the outrages and bullying he was witnessing. The list included “Suck up to the Top Cats,” “Do not work for common interest, only factional interests,” “Make devastating judgments on persons and situations without adequate information,” and, most cutting, “Destroy yourself physically and morally and insist that all true brothers do likewise as an expression of unity.”
In Paris the paper found its way tacked onto a wall backstage, and some were less than thrilled with what they read. “What the fuck is this?” one of the crew barked, irked by its insinuations. According to Mountain Girl, people would add to the list, but the message was the same: far from home, the dynamics within the Dead were adapting to a new era.
By the time they’d reached the Lyceum, nearly two months after they’d flown over, they had plenty of other tales to tell. They’d made their way around Europe by way of bus rides through the British and French countrysides and ferries to Sweden. If they’d wanted to relay any of those escapades to their audience—which, of course, they didn’t—they would have had many to share. They could have talked about the night in Paris when the band was followed back to its hotel by someone Lesh recalls as “this guy in a perfectly lovely lavender jacket, complaining we didn’t play for free for the people.” The crew dumped some room-service chocolate ice cream on him and he went away—but probably returned, since their equipment truck couldn’t start up the next morning. (They assumed he poured water or some other liquid into the tank.) Because the truck was out of commission, the gear didn’t arrive at the next scheduled show, in Lille.
At the hotel Garcia suggested they tell the audience, but, never fond of confrontation, bowed out of doing it himself. Weir and Lesh decided to handle it. Soon after, Weir returned to the hotel, harried and with a big rip in his jeans: the crowd had been less than happy to hear the news, and musicians and crew alike had to dash out of a window in the dressing room. Cutler hoisted Susila Kreutzmann and Donna Godchaux, who by now had joined the band as its first female singer, out the window and into Jackson’s awaiting arms.
The stories could be funny as well, like the night in one country or another when a contingent of the Dead emerged from a side street and found themselves swept into a parade. “We all stuck our heads out the window,” says Cantor-Jackson. “The crowd was all pointing at us. We were probably the weirdest thing they saw. We were the best float in the parade.” Or the night in Lille when Cutler was dosed and wandered off by himself into a strange nearby town. Lesh’s favorite memory would be the make-up show for the cancelled performance in Lille. “A beautiful sunny day, mothers
with strollers and workers taking time out for lunch, the light in France,” he says. “Everything was just glowing. I’d had only one hour of sleep. But it was one of the most magical experiences of my whole life. The irony was delicious.”
As their buses approached whatever country they were about to enter, a knowing cry regularly went out: “Border coming up!” Bus windows would be pushed open and several dozen hash pipes would fly out. (As a result, the crew would have another job: procuring new pipes in each new country.) Crossing from Denmark into Germany, the bus driver informed his high-as-many-kites passengers that the customs cops thought the bus “smells of hashish.” They were right; they’d scored a pile of it in England. As customs inspectors boarded the vehicles, Cutler walked up and down the aisles spraying ozium (used in hospitals to instantly eradicate the odor of vomit) to disperse the smell. The customs police never found anything, largely because they failed to look behind the curtains in the windows where the hash had been stashed. Cutler did his best not to laugh or appear freaked out.
As Cutler was always reminded, something always needed to be attended to within the Dead, whether he wanted to or not. In Hamburg Cutler was talking with the head of the hotel when, outside the office window, a mirror came flying by and smashed onto the ground. They’d heard the mirror, hanging in an elevator, was the last relic from the original hotel in Berlin that had been bombed by the Americans. The manager called in Cutler: “You are animals!” he scolded. As Cutler was pulling out bills to pay for the damage, a television set came smashing down onto the ground outside the manager’s office, with what Cutler recalls as “the biggest fucking bang you’ve ever heard.” (The TV had apparently been in the room of one of the crew.) In the middle of the night the band was summarily kicked out of their hotel and forced to find another.
Along with their gear—and whatever was stashed away in it—the Dead also brought along a truckload of material written during the previous two years. By now both Weir and Garcia had made albums on their own: Weir’s rushed Ace, finished early in 1972, featured a slew of songs he’d written with John Perry Barlow, while Garcia’s Garcia, cut the previous summer, blended a spunky, lean set of songs with Hunter—the swinging “Deal” and “Sugaree,” the doom-laden “Loser”—with a side of musique concrete experimentation and sound effects. “I’m doing it to be completely self-indulgent—musically,” Garcia told Rolling Stone right before he began cutting the album. “I’m just going on a trip. I have a curiosity to see what I can do, and I’ve got a desire to go on trips which are too weird for me to want to put anybody else I know through. And also to pay for this house!” Garcia wasn’t kidding about the latter: Warner Brothers had advanced him $20,000 for the record, and Garcia did use that cash infusion to buy a home for himself, Mountain Girl, and their two children (Annabelle and Sunshine, her daughter with Kesey) in the cozy coastal town of Stinson Beach. With only a small team—Hunter, Kreutzmann, Ram Rod, and engineers Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor—Garcia hunkered down again at Heider’s San Francisco studio and banged out the album in a few weeks. To deter outsiders, a joke sign announcing “Closed Session—Anita Bryant” was taped onto the studio door. (Bryant was the fervent antigay singer, beauty-pageant winner, and orange juice spokesperson.)
Weir’s Ace, recorded with backup from the Dead, was effectively Weir’s coming-out statement as his own singer and songwriter. Thanks to a trip to Barlow’s Wyoming ranch before the sessions, Weir wound up with a record’s worth of songs—along with the earlier “Sugar Magnolia,” the best he’d written up to that point. (The gorgeous, high-plains ache of “Looks Like Rain” would be the most openly emotional ballad anyone in the Dead would write for some time.) A few of its songs made their way into the European set. “Black Throated Wind” had a humid-swamp groove inspired by Allen Toussaint (but also reminiscent of Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie”). The sets would also include a few of Garcia’s solo tracks along with a batch of sturdy new Hunter and Garcia songs that picked up where the Americana feel of the band’s last two studio albums had left off. “Jack Straw,” an Old West murder tale, found Garcia and Weir swapping lead vocals; “He’s Gone” was the band’s kiss-off to Lenny Hart. Steeped in alcohol and pre–World War II America, “Brown-Eyed Women” (incorrectly spelled “Woman” when it was first released on an eventual album, Europe ’72) had a frisky skip to it. To fans hearing them for the first time—like young British Deadhead Alex Allen, who attended all four nights at the Lyceum—the new songs were “a revelation.”
By the time the Dead had settled into their four-night stand at the Lyceum they’d been working out the new material for at least two months. They were exhausted but wore the songs like one of the comfortable ponchos Garcia often donned back home. Throughout Europe and into the Lyceum the music had a jaunty, juiced-up lightness, expansive as rolling hills yet planted firmly on the ground. On the older songs at the Lyceum Garcia made his guitar do whiplash spins in “Cumberland Blues,” Weir contributing what amounted to a cross between rhythm guitar strums and finger-picking. Many examples of the glorious interplay between the musicians were heard: Lesh’s deep, rumbly bass taking over the lead from Garcia in “I Know You Rider,” Godchaux reveling in a solo in “Good Lovin’” and Garcia effortlessly picking it up from him. In essence their instruments were having long, more intricate conversations with each other. During “He’s Gone,” which debuted in Copenhagen, the band elongated its loping groove to over nine minutes, as if they were savoring every second of Lenny Hart’s absence from their lives.
The night at the Lyceum was filled with those sorts of small miracles, starting with Garcia’s guitar: the moment notes spiraled upward in “China Cat Sunflower” or broke through the fog all mournful and bittersweet in “Morning Dew.” The latter bore little resemblance to the version on their first album five years before; with almost each show it blossomed into a beautiful, enveloping church of sound, making its post-nuclear-nightmare lyrics even more potent. Still coming to terms with the hugeness of the Dead operation and sometimes struggling to hear herself over the sound system, Donna Jean Godchaux still managed to add warm harmonies to a dirge-like version of Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home” that, more than ever, made the song feel like a long, slow walk to Death Row. Now alone in the rhythm department, Kreutzmann more than delivered, pushing along the songs and lending them a sinewy crackle that the dual-drum lineup didn’t always have.
The previous year at Hart’s ranch Hunter had heard the sound of a pump and wrote lyrics to match the rhythm. It eventually turned into what amounted to a party song, “Playing in the Band,” with music largely composed by Hart with Weir. It had already appeared on the live album Grateful Dead the year before, and Weir had recorded it with the others on Ace, but in Europe it became a showcase for the band’s improvisatory splendor. The song’s introduction—a sweet, celestial mix of piano and guitar that, if hummed, almost sounded like something out of Aaron Copland—never changed much. At the Lyceum, once the band had dug into the first verses and chorus, the journey began. Four minutes in, the feel and groove became slower and chimier, more like the Byrds than the Dead, but that change didn’t last long; a minute later Lesh’s bass began playing competing notes to Garcia’s guitar, giving the jam an entirely different feel. The jazz feel continued when Garcia introduced a mellower tone akin to that of guitarist Jim Hall, but that mood switched soon enough; Kreutzmann picked it up and firmed up the rhythm around the fourteen-minute mark until, finally, the song’s signature chord changes returned. Throughout the performance they were exploding, prodding, pushing each other, kicking back, retreating, and moving forward. They’d taken themselves and their audience into more areas of music than most bands attempted in an entire career. When the song finally ended, at one second after eighteen minutes, they’d found a way in, out, and back to each other.
By the time the show was over and Cutler had stepped outside the Lyceum, midnight was becoming a hazy memory. The show should have ended long bef
ore, but no one was going to stop them or ask their crew to cut the power. “People would come on stage and say, ‘The show’s gotta end,’ and the band would just keep playing,” Cutler recalls. “You couldn’t just turn the power off. It’d be a fucking brave man who tried.” By then the ushers in their red-jacket tuxedos wouldn’t have been able to stop them anyway; they’d been dosed too, and their shirts and jackets were long gone. So was Cutler’s mother, who complained that the music was too loud and left early. (She was also baffled and confused when Cutler introduced her to Garcia, and Garcia cracked, “I didn’t know you had a mother!”) The floor was scattered with promotional goodies from booths inside the hall that Warner Brothers and Columbia, the respective labels of the Dead and the New Riders, had set up.
The Dead returned home with quality tapes of some of their finest performances and began the painstaking process of converting the recordings into an album. They probably should have made a studio album featuring the new songs. (And imagine how titanic the results would have been if the songs included the best of Garcia, Ace, and the new material played in Europe.) The year before, they’d already released a live album, Grateful Dead, a two-record set with two terrific new Hunter and Garcia songs, “Wharf Rat” (a gorgeous dirge about a boozer on a dock) and “Bertha” (inspired by a mechanical fan in the Dead office that would move across the floor when turned on, becoming a symbol for unwanted visitors). The album had other highlights—a swirling, potent eighteen-minute “The Other One” and a version of another jug-band favorite, “Big Railroad Blues,” that had a direct, train-on-the-tracks power—but it also felt haphazard, with too many covers. But in an irony that could only happen with the Dead, the album, commonly known as “Skull and Roses” for its cover art, became their first gold-certified (five hundred thousand copies) album. The sales helped compensate for the band’s initial meeting about it with Warners, in a conference room at the Burbank office, when they insisted on calling the album Skull Fuck. “I said, ‘You worked so hard, and if we call it that, we’ll only sell it in headshops, and we won’t get paid for it,’” says Smith, who says he called retail stores and a district attorney to confirm that use of the “F” word on the cover would result in “arrests and all this.” (Others think the band was once again testing Warner Brothers and had no genuine interest in naming the album Skull Fuck.)