by David Browne
Other than prerecorded organ music, no songs filled the funeral home in the chapel in Corte Madera. The two hundred mourners assembled for the traditional Roman Catholic service were evenly divided between Pigpen’s family, all in suits and looking very straight, and the Dead and their extended family—a mélange of band and crew members, Hells Angels, leather jackets, and girls in belly-revealing midriffs and tie-dye. There would be no testimonials or speeches. Few in his family heard any of the classic Pig stories: the time his pressure cooker exploded and a goopy, inch-thick mix of rice and vegetables covered the walls or the time a stoned guy at one show began harassing Swanson in front of the stage, and Pig walked over and kicked him with his boot.
Following a round of Hail Marys, the priest intoned, “May he rest in peace and pass safely through the gates of death.” At one point Garcia leaned over to Rock Scully and said, “Don’t ever let them bury me in an open casket—this is just awful.” Garcia, who avoided funerals and was visibly affected, finally rose up to walk outside, and standing near the wide, two-lane avenue in the suburban neighborhood, he was approached by several reporters. “It was a good rap,” he told them. “But it was out of character. He wouldn’t have wanted it this way.” When it was finally over most of the entourage retreated to Weir’s house in Mill Valley for a riotous wake.
About ten days later Phil McKernan, Pigpen’s dad, wrote a forlorn, deeply heartfelt letter to the band, absolving them of their role in his son’s declining health. The typed letter thanked the band “for what which you all gave Ron that is beyond price and of far greater value than I ever gave him when he was with us in his younger days: you gave him (or, perhaps, he found with you) something which many of us never find: a purpose and meaning for life.” He told the Dead that he and Pigpen had met up (“after some years of ‘second-hand’ communication”) and that, to his surprise, Pigpen had forgiven his father years before. From his son, Phil said that he learned about forgiveness, “bearing physical suffering and mental anguish without complaint,” and “love of one’s work.” The fact that the father and son had grown closer, according to the letter, only made the missive more heartbreaking.
At his home studio in Novato, Hart, still in self-imposed exile (he didn’t attend the funeral either), began listening to the tapes Pigpen left behind to see whether an album could be made of them. But between the sound reverberating off the kitchen tile and what Hart calls “the forty versions of ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,’” the tapes didn’t yield much. “It was just him real drunk, having a good time,” Hart says. “We all thought, ‘Jesus, there could be some gems in here.’ But no.”
The Dead rarely took the stage at the times printed on their tickets, and thanks to the Wall of Sound, Reno was no exception. An hour and a half after the supposed start time the musicians finally emerged at Mackay Stadium to take their places, looking like stick fingers compared to the colossal columns of speakers behind them. By then a wind that had been threatening to pick up all day finally kicked in, and Scully watched as one of the hanging voice clusters above Kreutzmann began to shake and sway. It took a lot to unnerve the Dead’s unflappable drummer, but Kreutzmann looked up with what Scully thought was a rare concerned expression. Sharp-eyed Deadheads may have also noticed subtle changes in the band’s appearance. Weir’s ponytail was gone, chopped off the year before, and he’d begun dressing sharper; that night his white flared jeans were the band’s most visual component. Garcia had shaved off his beard, but Lesh now had one, which made him look older and heavier than he was.
Given the monstrous system they were taking out of the Bay Area for the first time, it was unintentionally fitting that the set began with Chuck Berry’s wry travelogue “Promised Land.” Instantly Lesh reveled in what he heard roaring above him. “It was a brilliant stroke,” says Lesh. “The sound was absolutely clear and coherent for a quarter-mile. And loud.” The system delivered a note fifty feet tall, which sailed over the heads of the band like a jet engine soaring overhead yet wasn’t brutally deafening to the musicians.
Not everyone on stage was so taken with the Owsley towering musical inferno. The system presented a new set of challenges to Donna Jean Godchaux, who by this point had been singing with the band for two years. Her presence was still a jolt to some Deadheads: “Not everybody in the audience was used to Donna, ever,” says Parish. “There were a lot of people going, ‘Why is she singing?’ The guys in the band liked it, though—it helped with the vocals.”
But from her first appearance with them at Winterland, she had found it difficult to find the right pitch onstage with the Dead. “I was a studio singer, never singing off-key,” she told Rolling Stone. “I was used to having headphones and being in a controlled environment. Then, all of a sudden, I went to being onstage with the Dead in Winterland. Everything was so loud onstage.” At Mackay Stadium the Wall of Sound presented her with a new stage monitor system and the inability to hear herself. As a result, her singing could often be—or sound—off-key. (Only in the oddball world of the Dead could its strongest singer, the one so talented she had shared studio time with Elvis, sound out of tune.) The Wall of Sound was almost as much of a shock as the night she’d walked onstage and saw that Garcia had done away with his iconic mustache and beard, exposing a chinless, less distinct face. (Godchaux’s own striking features, from her waist-long hair to her Southern-belle smile, offered fans something else to look at.)
As Donna Jean struggled to deal with the newly augmented amplification, the band dug into a set that included previews of a few new songs, “Ship of Fools” (Hunter’s veiled reference to the increasingly fractious Dead scene) and “U.S. Blues,” both part of an album that would be their second in a row for their own label. As early as 1969, just after the release of Aoxomoxoa, both band and management were starting to grow weary of Warner Brothers. Even though the label gave the Dead an almost unprecedented amount of creative leeway, especially after the disastrous collaborations with Dave Hassinger on their first two albums, the Dead weren’t feeling the love for Joe Smith or his company. They went along with all of the label’s creative marketing schemes, including a “Pipgen look-alike contest” in ads for their first three albums. “It was about ‘pay attention to the Grateful Dead,’” says Warners’ Stan Cornyn, who came up with the idea. “I thought of these weird-looking people, especially Pigpen—he was even hairier than in the picture. About a hundred people wrote in.” Cornyn says the band never complained about the ad.
During this time, the Dead were already considering a switch to Columbia and its boss, Clive Davis, yet they remained with Warners, especially after Lenny Hart absconded with their funds. Their irritation with the label became the topic of ongoing conversations. “Joe [Smith] must stop holding us back,” read notes from one discussion in 1971, which added that Warners should “broaden the base on [the] underground.” Over the course of fifteen hand-written yellow-pad pages, the band, with Scully leading the charge, rattled off their expectations for their corporate parent. Most significantly, they wanted advances on side projects to be raised from $35,000 to $50,000, which would include a solo album by Pigpen. The band felt sales of their albums were thirty to fifty thousand copies below what they should be and groused there was “nothing new in WB approach”; the label’s “response is too slow,” the notes concluded.
For their part, Warner Brothers was growing tired of the Dead and its chaotic operation. “We’d run our course with them,” says Smith. “They didn’t want anything to do with us. They didn’t want anything to do with anybody. They annoyed me so much. I’m seeing them sell out at concerts—why can’t I get something on tape that would carry through with that?” The Dead had enhanced the label’s reputation from the start, but by the time they’d packed up for the European tour in 1972, Warner/Reprise was now home to Neil Young, Van Morrison, Alice Cooper, and Black Sabbath, and it no longer needed the credibility boost provided by the Dead. Smith was also furious when Garcia released a side project—Hooteroll? w
ith keyboardist Howard Wales—on another label.
When word began circulating that the Dead may want to find another home, Smith wasn’t concerned. “I made no effort to hold onto them,” he says. “If James Taylor had said that, I would’ve fought like crazy. But the Dead weren’t that important to us in any way, other than they’d helped our image.” The Dead’s modest album sales and the fact that they hadn’t yet managed a major hit single also made them feel commercially expendable. Smith had also never fully warmed to the band on a personal level. The thought of spending generous amounts of time with the Dead was about as appealing to Smith as having a scalding-hot fork jabbed into his cheek. “The Dead once asked me, ‘Why don’t you invite me to your house?’” he says. “I said, ‘I don’t want you on my street!’”
“Who can (on exec level) keep us informed and take our case,” Scully had asked at one meeting. Although they would come to have mixed feelings about the results, neither he nor the band had to look far. They’d known Ron Rakow, a Wall Street stock trader who’d relocated to San Francisco, since the time he’d lent them money for a sound system. Rakow, who’d befriended Scully and Rifkin, had been in and around their community ever since, helping work out the deal for the short-lived Carousel Ballroom experiment (their first foray into a band-run business). A New Yorker, Rakow was the opposite of a Marin County hippie, and proudly so. “He talked a mile a minute, but he was really sharp, and he was accepted,” says Vicki Jensen. “He was part of the show. Rakow was supportive of them when they had hard times, and he was magical in his own way. He spun quite a thing.”
Sensing a new business opportunity, Rakow felt it was time for the Dead to take control of their music and destiny, and the answer lay in starting a record company of their own. Jefferson Airplane and the Beatles, among others, had launched their own labels, but each was distributed by another, larger company, which wouldn’t be the case with the Dead. Rakow typed out his “So What” papers, outlining a strategy for the band to make and promote their own records and also making the case against Warner Brothers. As part of his research he’d dropped into a bunch of record stores in towns where the band was playing in 1972 and wrote down the quantity of Dead LPs in each. He reported back to the band that more than eighteen stores didn’t have any at all. When Time magazine ran a story on the state and business of pop music in February 1973, Garcia, who hadn’t yet officially parted ways with Warners, was quoted as saying, “I resent being just another face in a corporate personality. There isn’t even a Warner ‘brother’ to talk to.”
In the Dead’s offices at Fifth and Lincoln in San Rafael, a house the band had rented several years before, Rakow’s do-it-yourself idea was greeted with some wariness. Cutler was opposed. “I viewed all of it with great skepticism,” he says. “Whomever had the loudest mouth and could persuade Jerry would get their hands on the wheel of the good ship Grateful Dead.” McIntire was also unsure. The other members of the band were dubious or indifferent to the record company plan. According to Lesh, no one in the band could stand the thought of dealing with all the minutiae that would be involved with any aspect of the record business.
Garcia would have little of that dissent; he was uncharacteristically irked at McIntire when he heard the manager was putting up roadblocks to the deal. Given the death of his father and its impact on his family, the idea of an in-house record company that would bond everyone together, with Rakow as requisite enforcer, appealed to Garcia. “We were so bad at business,” says Hart, “and Rakow seemed to know and care and wanted to do something. Brilliant, or semibrilliant, ideas.”
Rakow took Garcia to a preliminary meeting for a loan with First National Bank of Boston, which had previously invested in movie production. Both men charmed the employees. (When one of the executives said his daughter wanted to play clarinet in school, even though the head of the music department recommended violin, Garcia replied, “I have kids—any time they express any interest in anything, I let them do whatever they want to do.”) Briefly, the idea surfaced of distributing the records by way of ice cream trucks. “If somebody sent in a card and said, ‘Here’s $4, I want a new Dead album,’ we’d send them a receipt, and they’d flag down a Good Humor truck and give them a coupon and get a record,” explains Andy Leonard, the Barlow college friend and photographer (and new Weir acquaintance) who’d been hired at the label to help with distribution. “We’d pay the Good Humor trucks to carry twenty Dead albums a day. It wasn’t crazy talk. It was a delivery issue.” They never actually contacted Good Humor or any other such company, but according to Leonard the idea, which kicked around for a few weeks, wasn’t dismissed as quickly as legend has it. Rakow went as far to fly to New Jersey to discuss it with John Scher, an East Coast promoter who was increasingly becoming part of the Dead’s inner circle.
Once the First National Bank of Boston loan came through along with a cash infusion from Atlantic Records, which would handle the foreign distribution, Grateful Dead Records became a reality, and some of the first employees showed up for work in April 1973. (The deal wasn’t announced in the music trades until late August.) Pigpen had died only the month before, and his passing, says Steve Brown, “cast a pall over the company—we started under a cloud.”
The label was, naturally, unconventional; employees would recall going into meetings in Rakow’s upstairs office at Fifth and Lincoln and finding a Hells Angel or two sitting in. At the outset many were in awe of Rakow’s ability to set up the business. “In those days nobody lent money to rock bands,” says Mike (nicknamed Josh) Belardo, the KMPX DJ who had interviewed the band at Hart’s ranch in 1970 and later took a job at the label. Brown, one of Rakow’s first hires, witnessed for himself the way in which Rakow’s approach to business phone calls lit a fire under Garcia. “Rakow would have someone on the hook, doing the [aggressive] Bill Graham thing, and Jerry would be sitting back enjoying it,” says Brown. “He loved this alter-ego bad-boy thing. Jerry couldn’t bring himself to be that guy publicly or even privately, so watching someone else do it was fun for him.”
If the Dead had seen themselves as paragons of a new, looser society in the previous decade, the launch of Grateful Dead Records (and its sister label, Round, devoted to side and solo projects) was proof that they were adapting to altered times. A few years later, in 1976, Tom Wolfe would dub the seventies the “Me Decade,” and the Dead’s new venture unintentionally tapped into the emerging solipsism of the decade—the sense that after the dreams of the sixties had died, it was time to hunker down instead of tearing down the walls. Rather than rely on anyone else to help them through the malaise, they would do it all themselves. Even the title of Grateful Dead Records’ first release, Wake of the Flood, implied rebuilding after disaster. (According to a Garcia interview in Creem magazine at the time, the working title was We Are the Eyes of the World.)
Wake of the Flood came three long years after the Dead’s previous studio album, American Beauty, an eternity in that day and age. Recorded over the summer at the Record Plant in Sausalito and released in the fall, the album felt at times like a free-for-all: Weir’s three-part “Weather Report Suite,” a gorgeous composition blending an instrumental opener with alternately melancholic and rousing subsequent sections, was the most ambitious piece he’d ever attempted, and Keith Godchaux sang his first lead vocal on a Dead album (“Let Me Sing Your Blues Away”). The mood of the album was relaxed, not as airtight as that of American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead; if the band felt restricted in any way while working for Warner Brothers, Wake of the Flood signaled the pressure was off. Some of the songs—especially “Eyes of the World,” which swayed like a gentle island breeze, as well as parts of “Weather Report Suite”—felt ready to be opened up for jamming onstage. “Stella Blue,” the lyrics of which Hunter had written at the Chelsea Hotel three years before, contemplated “broken dreams and vanished years,” and Garcia set them to a languid melody that added an extra degree of ache to Hunter’s words.
The album was t
oo haphazard at times, especially in the sequencing: only the Dead would start such an important album in their career with a modest, slinky excursion like “Mississippi Halfstep Uptown Toodleloo,” and placing the ballads “Stella Blue” and “Row Jimmy” next to each other almost canceled out the power of each. The album would have been better served had it started with “Eyes of the World” or “Here Comes Sunshine,” a slow dazzle of a song with a chorus that sprouted open like flower petals.
As the initial release on an independent label run by people who’d never attempted such a thing, Wake of the Flood had its share of launch problems. Garcia told several different artists to devise cover art, then had Leonard deliver the bad news to the ones whose illustrations had been rejected. To acquire bags of virgin vinyl for pressings, Leonard had to risk life, limb, and potential jail time by driving a pickup truck into a particularly seedy part of Mexico. But the worst news was about to crash through their office doors. One day Leonard took a call from one distributor: the copies he’d received of Wake of the Flood sounded so bad, he said, that kids were bringing them back to the stores. Leonard thought it was a hustle—retailers wanting records sent to them for free—until he asked yet another grousing store owner to send him a copy of the supposedly flawed record. What arrived in the mail at the Dead office was a truly fake Wake: a cover that amounted to a mimeographed photo of the artwork and an LP with music that sounded as if it had been copied from a cassette, complete with hissing noises. They’d been bootlegged.