by David Browne
Theories about what happened ran amok in the office: Was it one of the major labels trying to make the Dead look bad? Or was it something slightly more sinister? One source says the label was told in advance by shadowy figures in Brooklyn that any release on Grateful Dead Records would be bootlegged and that they would have no choice but to go along with it—but, at least, it wasn’t personal and the bootlegging would be limited. As if to prove the theory, the problem suddenly stopped and the fakes went away.
But in the ensuing chaos, which also included an unlikely-for-the-Dead visit from the FBI, the Dead lost a sizable chunk of money; they sold four hundred thousand copies of Wake of the Flood but could have sold even more without the bootlegs. “Here we are, a new fledgling company—we don’t have the budget for someone to steal 25 percent of our income,” says Belardo. “We almost didn’t survive.” Months later Leonard and McIntire, who were sharing a house in Bolinas, wound up with a box of Wake of the Flood fakes. They were so infuriated with the whole mess that they pulled out one of the ubiquitous guns that were part of the Dead world, set up the albums in a row outside, and blasted them to pieces. One of the shot-up Wake of the Flood bootlegs remained in Leonard’s possession for decades to come.
The mere fact that they were playing an outdoor stadium like Mackay was one sign of the Dead’s flourishing fan base. The record company was too young to be profitable, but the road was another, more financially rewarding story. Thanks to Cutler’s relentless schedule and brutal bargaining, the band had begun raking in more cash each year on the road. Throughout 1969 they earned a few thousand dollars a gig. By 1971 the fees had edged up to between $10,000 and $15,000 a show, the latter at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Connecticut. Some contracts called for three-hour performances; others, like the one at Yale, openly flaunted show times: “The Grateful Dead have the right to perform for any length of time that they feel is necessary,” it stated bluntly. In 1972 they grossed $78,000 at Dillon Stadium in Hartford, Connecticut, which meant they took home about $25,000, a huge cash influx for the time. The following year they were handed a $25,000 guarantee (plus 60 percent of the gross, average for the time) in Tempe, Arizona, and $30,000 for Denver.
Their file cabinets began to bulge with statements like the one tucked away in early 1973. For four shows they would be paid, after expenses, $22,262.42. Their tour riders, including one for that year, specified requests for “sufficient light refreshments for fifteen (15) persons . . . Budweiser beer, coca cola, doctor pepper [sic lower case], and fresh fruit juice,” along with “a grand or baby grand piano (preferably Steinway) tuned to A440 international pitch.” As Sally Romano remembers, “What the Dead wanted, the Dead got. We had a huge advantage—we could dictate the terms of the contracts 80 or 90 percent of the time.” Keith Godchaux might have been quiet and self-effacing, but he was also very particular about his pianos, as Cutler learned when he took Godchaux keyboard shopping in New York after the band hired him. “Keith wouldn’t say boo to a goose, but once you got to know him, he wasn’t so shy,” says Cutler. “He had his feisty side. He played twelve different pianos and picked the one he liked.”
By the time of the Reno show as well as subsequent gigs with the Wall of Sound, the coffers were still growing. In one month alone, March 1974, the Dead made a profit of $326,935, including $54,254 in gigs, $396,709 in royalties, and $17,379 in band earnings. Other barometers of the Dead’s growing commerce sprouted up around them. Thanks to a well-placed note on the inside of the 1971 live album, Grateful Dead, asking Deadheads to write in, they now had forty thousand names and addresses of fans who would receive newsletters with band news. It was a logical step up from the few hundred names that Sue Swanson and Connie Bonner Mosley had collected for the band’s first fan club mailing during the 710 Ashbury days. (“We thought, ‘150, wow!” says Bonner Mosley.) Grateful Dead Records employees like Brown began setting up booths at shows, giving away free posters and postcards and collecting more names and addresses. They would bypass the corporations and go directly to their fan base.
Because more product was needed to feed the record-company beast, the Dead started assembling at CBS Studios in San Francisco to make another album in early spring, 1974. (In the same Creem interview pegged to the release of Wake of the Flood from the year before, Garcia said the band already had two albums of material ready to go.) The loose-knit atmosphere of the Sausalito sessions for Wake of the Flood was out, replaced with a more professional undertaking that began with an in-house engineer, Roy Segal, who’d worked with fastidious record makers like Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Every day from 1 p.m. to 1 a.m. the Dead showed up for work and bore down, each session preceded by a full meal with wine, followed by cocaine later in the evening. “It felt more serious—it wasn’t just hanging,” says Brown. “They buckled down to get a hit album, hopefully.” Between takes they’d hang upstairs at the offices of American Zoetrope, where they heard talk of a new movie that the company’s owner, Francis Ford Coppola, was making about Vietnam, the film that would eventually become Apocalypse Now.
The signs that the Dead were serious about their business—or, at the very least, of knowing they had to sell records—were evident in the schedule: by April 30, just about a month after work had started, the album—From the Mars Hotel, in honor of a transient digs around the corner—was done. The album had the feel of a band that knew how vital it was to appeal to radio. Thanks no doubt to Segal, the tracks had the lightly buffed sheen of typical FM radio rock of the time. “U.S. Blues,” a wry comment on the state of the nation during the Richard Nixon years, was an appropriately bouncy opener, ready to serve in arenas and stadiums. “Scarlet Begonias,” Hunter’s ode to his new love, Maureen, whom he’d met in England, had a Latin-on-acid groove, and Lesh’s “Pride of Cucamonga” fit squarely into the truck-stop country-rock in vogue at the time. (Weir and Barlow’s “Money Money” also had an FM-boogie feel, but its seemingly antifeminist lyrics were so reviled that it was quickly ejected from their stage repertoire.) The band also took advantage of the enhanced studio wares to stretch out. Hunter and Garcia’s “China Doll,” which could be interpreted as a conversation between God and someone who commits suicide by gunshot, had a chilling harpsichord arrangement, and Lesh’s other contribution, the masterwork “Unbroken Chain,” with lyrics by his old friend Bobby Peterson, was an intricate, tempo-shifting tour de force that blended in Tibetan bells, synthesizer, and one of Donna Godchaux’s most sensuous harmonies.
As with any label, Grateful Dead Records hired people to talk up their records to disc jockeys and record stores, the industry networking that the band generally abhorred. Belardo was given the task of editing down “U.S. Blues” for the radio. Because he didn’t know how to do that, he asked a CBS engineer, who put a razor blade to the song, nipping and tucking to make it a bit shorter. The fact that no one in the Dead raised any objections to editing their art was, for Belardo, a telling indication that the band was trying to play ball with the suits. “Previously nobody would have let anybody do anything like that to their music,” says Belardo. “But then it was, ‘Well, this is what you gotta do if we’re gonna play in this league.’ I don’t think there was any excitement about it. It was, ‘Okay, we gotta go to the dentist.’”
To promote the finished album, Brown conceived a clever idea—sending out promotional bars of soap tied in to the hotel theme of the title. But there would be a twist: the soap would be the gag kind that turned one’s face black after a good scrub. When he heard the idea Garcia giggled; it appealed to his Mad magazine sensibility. Then they had second thoughts. It was all too easy to imagine an important radio executive using the soap and not being especially happy about it. In the end they dropped the idea; Garcia said he didn’t want to feel guilty if the joke backfired. They could still be the freewheeling Grateful Dead, but now only up to a point.
As Peter Rowan saw for himself, there were less conventional ways to gauge the way the Dead had become an institution. In early June 1
973 he and Garcia deplaned at Boston International Airport. Rowan, Garcia, and other members of Old and in the Way, Garcia’s current Dead offshoot band, had just grabbed their luggage from the carousel and were on their way to find a taxi into town. Just then Garcia paused. “Wait a minute,” he said, with a devilish grin. “I’ve gotta get Big Red.”
A Massachusetts native who’d logged time as a member of Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys, Rowan had met Garcia by way of mandolinist David Grisman. Grisman and Rowan had played together in a psychedelic folk band, Earth Opera, and Rowan had subsequently joined the more rock-oriented Seatrain. After he left Seatrain, Rowan—who’d met Garcia earlier thanks to his brothers Chris and Lorin’s group, the Rowan Brothers, whom Garcia had championed—moved to Stinson Beach, where he lived on the beach near his old friend Grisman. Having overdubbed mandolin on “Friend of the Devil” and “Ripple” on American Beauty, Grisman was peripherally connected to Garcia and the Dead world, so it wasn’t surprising when one day he invited Rowan up to Garcia and Mountain Girl’s hillside bungalow. “Jerry was standing in the garden in a T-shirt and jeans with a five-string banjo and a big grin on his face,” Rowan recalls. “God, what a welcome.” The jam sessions both outside and inside the house, accompanied by plenty of weed, eventually led to Garcia, Grisman, and Rowan forming a bluegrass band.
Garcia’s new side project was an outgrowth of his new living arrangements, and both were early signs that Garcia was seeking his own space apart from the Dead. With a population that numbered only in the hundreds and a far-from-anywhere ambience that made it amenable to alternative lifestyles, Stinson Beach, tucked away on the curvy Highway 1, was the escape Garcia yearned for at the time. Eventually other members of the scene, including Rakow and Candelario, lived there, but for Garcia, Stinson Beach was a retreat. “It was hard to find safe places to live when you’re a freak,” says Mountain Girl. “And Jerry liked that drive to Stinson. He said it was the only time he had to himself in his life. We needed a place where he could completely relax.”
Also aboard the formative acoustic band was John Kahn, a tall, funny, and multitalented bass player who’d met Garcia at jam sessions at the Matrix club in San Francisco. Born in Memphis but adopted by Los Angeles–based parents—his new father was a talent scout—Kahn had grown up around show-biz royalty; according to Linda Kahn, later his wife, young John Kahn was once babysat by Marilyn Monroe. Kahn, who developed a love of jazz in high school, was a very different bass player from Lesh, more rooted in blues and R&B, and he and Garcia clicked as friends, players, and movie fans. First with keyboardist Howard Wales, then with another keyboardist, Merl Saunders, they began a series of outside-Dead jam sessions at area clubs.
When Grisman and Rowan showed up, Kahn had no idea Garcia played banjo and was himself rusty on upright bass, but Kahn too was swept up in the casual energy of the new ensemble. Even though the musicians were all in their twenties, Garcia named it Old and in the Way, after a Grisman song. “We said, ‘Of course, that’s who we are!’” Rowan recalls. “That’s the irony and joke of it. We were useless characters and the only way we could survive was to play music.” First with Richard Greene and later Vassar Clements on fiddle, Old and in the Way went from a casual get-together to a performing and touring band, complete with Owsley tagging along to record shows. With Rowan handling lead vocals and frontman duties, Garcia was happy to play banjo and mostly sing harmonies on a repertoire that included Rowan’s originals, traditional folk and bluegrass songs, and even a startlingly fresh cover of the Stones’ “Wild Horses.” During future Old and in the Way gigs Garcia would scowl when fans yelled out the names of Dead songs.
At their debut, at the Lion’s Share club in San Anselmo in March 1973, Rowan received his initial taste of the cult of the Dead. After their first set the band walked back to the dressing room, still carrying their instruments; within the new band the rule was to keep playing and never put any of their instruments down. On the way backstage the musicians walked through a gauntlet of Deadheads—what Rowan recalls as “the most long-haired and bearded people you’ve ever seen in your life”—who were holding lit pipes and large joints. As Garcia passed them, they bowed in worship, and Garcia acknowledged them by stopping for a few quick hits of whatever was extended to him. “He seemed indomitable,” says Rowan. “He had a constitution of iron.”
Before a Dead show at RFK Stadium in Washington, DC, on June 10, Old and in the Way had flown into Boston for a set of their own at the Orpheum Theatre. When Garcia mentioned “Big Red,” Rowan looked back at the luggage carousel—where, seemingly out of nowhere, a large red bag had materialized as if by magic. No one recognized it; it wasn’t even tagged. “It had not been on the plane,” Rowan recalls. “It was put directly on the carousel by somebody.” Garcia grabbed it and, with the other band mates, made his way to their hotel, where other members of the Dead were waiting. Everyone gathered around the suitcase as it was cracked open, revealing a massive amount of quality pot. Along with the Dead, Old and in the Way grabbed plastic baggies and split up the booty. (The Dead weren’t always so welcoming to Garcia’s side players, as Rowan felt backstage at the RFK show: “It was kinda weird. It was like, ‘You’re not gonna take Jerry from us—he’s ours.’ They didn’t say that, but that’s the vibe I got.”)
Rowan, who’d never heard the word “sensimilla” until that day, lit up a joint from the luggage stash. He’d smoked his share, but this joint was something else entirely: strong and mind-numbingly overpowering. “It was like, ‘Oh, this is what the Grateful Dead smoke,’” he recalls. Where the luggage and its contents originated was never confirmed: rumors flew that a fan from either a local research lab (or even the government) sneaked it into the airport and onto that luggage carousel as a way to thank the Dead. That day Rowan learned another lesson about Garcia’s world. “That’s when I started to go, ‘This Grateful Dead thing is really big,’” he says. “There was always stuff like that. They were living large.”
“Do I see a guy from La Honda out there?” Lesh called out to the thousands in Reno, seemingly recognizing a familiar face amid the throng in front of him.
Even if it were true—a pal from the Kesey or Acid Test days near the front rows—those days never seemed further away than they did now. The Wall of Sound and the swelling fan base were indications, but so was the repertoire. The bulk of the set, that night and during other performances during this period, was largely culled from the previous few, post-Altamont years. In Reno “Sugaree” was taken at a sultry, turtle-race pace; Garcia took a solo on “Tennessee Jed” that dug deeper and hit lower notes before he made his way back to his signature high, sweet pitch. (At New Jersey’s Roosevelt Stadium in August an epic, nineteen-minute version of “Eyes of the World” showed how their collective musicianship could expand and swell like the roaring of the tides.) “China Cat Sunflower” and “The Other One” were played in Reno, but little else from the previous decade popped up. Now that Pigpen was buried, the band’s early days, when he was such a prominent part of their shows, had left with him.
Whether it was the wind, the just-out-of-the-box sound system, or incoming burnout, the music also had more than its share of frayed edges. There was a raw, jumpy “Beat It on Down the Line” and a careening but inspired “Truckin’” in which Weir forgot some of the lyrics. Garcia accidentally switched up a few of the lyrics to “U.S. Blues.” During “Greatest Story Ever Told,” one of the songs from Weir’s Ace album, Donna Godchaux’s voice wandered out of sync and out of tune as she grappled with the dual-microphone setup and the Wall of Sound itself.
The arrival of a new, more industrialized Dead led to inevitable casualties. In early 1974 Cutler parted ways with the band after a tense meeting. Cutler (who by then had launched his own booking agency, Out of Town Tours, to handle the Dead, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and other acts) claims the Dead wanted to avoid giving him a 10 percent cut by working with another party for half that rate. “That was just an excuse,”
he says. “I thought, ‘I’m not gonna do it, simple.’ I’d had enough. I was tired and I’d done my bit. I loved the band and the music, but I hated the politics—a bunch of hippies with nothing better to do than plot against one another rather than get on with the collective thing. There was more politics around the Dead than around the Stones.” Given all the managerial types in their midst, which by now included McIntire, Rakow, and Garcia’s then-solo manager, Richard Loren, the world inside the Dead was indeed beginning to grow tangled and territorial, and Cutler rubbed some the wrong way.
Owsley Stanley, too, was becoming increasingly out of place in the larger Dead operation. After the group bust in New Orleans in 1970 Owsley finally wound up in jail, and during that time he’d had only fitful interactions with the band. When he was locked up at Terminal Island, south of Los Angeles and near Long Beach, the Dead had rumbled in one day to play a concert in the prison’s library. Band and crew found a seemingly clean and healthy Owsley, who introduced them to his fellow cons and helped them, as always, set up the PA. (To Parish’s shock, no one at the prison searched the Dead’s trucks and gear; the crew was just waved into the compound despite being, in his words, “psychedelized up.”) As they were setting up, Owsley told Parish, “I’ve got to come back on the road with you,” but he still had to serve additional time at Lompac, a low-security federal prison northwest of Los Angeles, where friends smuggled in tapestries, décor, and cassette copies of the Europe ’72 shows. Owsley was finally released from prison in 1972 after serving two years in federal jails, and before long he was indeed back in the Dead’s employ.
While Owsley was in jail the band hadn’t been able to gauge how he was holding up. At Terminal Island Weir was so busy preparing for the show that Bear’s state of mind was hard to figure. “We got a little time with him, but I didn’t get a great hit on what it was like to be in prison,” he has said. “I was too busy getting the gig together.” But once Owsley was a free man the impact of incarceration became more apparent. To Mountain Girl Owsley was “completely changed, and not in a good way. He was dark and dour. He’d lost most of his sense of humor. Prison was hard on him.”