So Many Roads

by David Browne

  Not surprisingly given the match of producer and artist, the recording didn’t start promisingly. Over the course of the first month the band insisted on playing simultaneously, but to Olsen, the result was a mess. Lesh’s bass would often go out of tune. Keith Godchaux was mostly asleep on a couch in the studio; he’d wake up, play his part, and pass out again. Olsen felt the band had nothing usable after the first few weeks, and the band grew tired of hearing the producer’s refrain—“not good enough.”

  Olsen, perplexed or frustrated himself, estimates that 25 percent of his time was devoted to rounding up the band: just when a few of them were ready to get to work, others would wander off. And even when he managed to gather them together, they didn’t always stay in the same room for long. “Then it was, ‘We’ve all gotta go to the bathroom’ or this and that,” says Olsen. “They would just drift. It was just taking forever.” With the Dead’s first round of 1977 concerts coming up fast, Parish and Ram Rod seized the moment and took control. One night in February the band bogged down in percussion overdubs. The roadies came up with a novel idea: nail the studio door shut. “We were under the gun, and it was taking so long for those overdubs,” says Parish. “It was a joke, but it kept the guys in there, and they couldn’t get out. It was a symbolic nailing that really worked.” (Hart thinks they also hammered it closed because drummer and singer Buddy Miles, working in an adjacent studio, was stealing cymbals when the Dead weren’t around.)

  Gradually the project began to mesh. To Hart, Olsen was “too small to hit,” so the drummer, among the most particular of the Dead in terms of sonic tweaking, let the producer have his way just enough. Olsen was impressed with Garcia’s seemingly endless concepts for arrangements and guitar parts: “Jerry would have twenty ideas for everyone. He’d say, ‘I got a bunch of ideas,’ and we’d do them all.” Godchaux’s “Sunrise,” a languorous ballad, required yet another musical pivot on the Dead’s part; the soft-rock rhythm and feel of the song didn’t come naturally to the band. Visiting Sound City one day, Allan Arkush—who recalls seeing a very young Annabelle running around and Garcia so wrapped up in album production that he didn’t have time to play with her—heard “Terrapin Station Part 1” played back over the sound system and was impressed with how vast and far reaching it was.

  In a strange way the finished album, Terrapin Station, was even odder than Anthem of the Sun: the sound of the Dead with some of its rough edges sanded down. They finally got around to cutting a studio version of “Dancin’ in the Streets,” the Martha and the Vandellas hit (usually called “Dancing in the Street”) they’d been performing since the Pigpen days, but the song had been lent a disco beat fitting for the times. Within the band the reaction to the finished work was mixed. With tempered enthusiasm, Lesh later called the album “a fairly successful effort” that “varied wildly in terms of material.” Hart lost it when Olsen overdubbed strings over one of his parts in “Terrapin Station Part 1” without telling him. “I wanted to strangle Keith,” Hart says. “He took out all the timbales and put on those stupid strings. He thought the strings would supersede a beautiful unison part by me and Garcia. I couldn’t believe it. After that we never really trusted Keith again. He tried to put a dress on the Dead, and it didn’t fit.”

  At the Novato house of his Jefferson Starship friend David Freiberg, Garcia played a test pressing of the album for Betty Cantor. The two had a close, jocular rapport that allowed her to amiably bust Garcia’s chops (she also regularly cut his hair during this time), and the production on “Terrapin Station Part 1,” particularly the orchestration, gave her a perfect opportunity to rib her friend: “Oh, that’s something Keith [Olsen] put on,” Garcia said, less than excitedly. “I don’t know.”

  Garcia began “making excuses,” she recalls, and Cantor replied, “That ain’t gonna fly with me, dear!” she said. To her, Garcia didn’t seem all that happy with the finished album, but, she says, “He was trying to rationalize it somehow.”

  How the album would fare in the marketplace was another matter. When Olsen sent an early copy to Davis, the Arista boss labeled it, says Olsen, “a good compromise.” (Davis, Olsen says, also instructed Olsen to make Weir’s first Arista solo album, Heaven Help the Fool, more commercial than Terrapin Station, and starting with a Richard Avedon glam-boy cover photo, they did just that.) The Dead didn’t have much time to sit and ponder what they’d just done. Once the album was in the can they would see how all the task-master studio work would pay off on the road, where the Dead always felt more at home and their songs always sprung to life.

  May 8, 1977, started as a warm spring afternoon but turned into a chilly night, and several inches of snow blanketed the campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The late-spring flurries didn’t keep away five thousand Deadheads who crammed into Barton Hall, the school’s field house. “All right now,” a newly bearded Weir told them about halfway through the show. “We’re gonna play everybody’s favorite fun game—‘Move Back.’ Now, when I tell you to take a step back, everybody take one step back.” Weir had to say it a few times, and bit by bit the fans shuffled toward the rear to alleviate the crush at the front of the stage. At least one other potentially hazardous crowd issue loomed. Arriving at the show from his Jersey office, Scher had to recruit security to make sure stoned Deadheads didn’t accidentally plunge into one of several waterfall-like gorges that are part of the school’s exquisite campus. “If you were too fucked up and walked off the edge of the gorge,” recalls Scher, “you were dead.” As a result of that last-minute chore, Scher missed the first twenty minutes of the show.

  But once the playing began, little was amiss. All the hours the Dead had logged in the studio with a chart-minded producer had transformed the band into a monstrously strong unit. At Barton Hall “Morning Dew” was even more cathartic than before, “Deal” had an extra bit of strut in its step, and “New Minglewood Blues” growled. The relentless pace that Kreutzmann and Hart had been put through by Olsen resulted in tight, synchronized beats that gave the songs the firmest of backbones.

  Later, beloved Dead archivist Dick Latvala would scribble excited notes on tape boxes of each show, especially Barton Hall. But that performance was just one of many highlights of an inordinately smooth-running group of shows. “That was just a magic year,” says Parish. “All the gears meshed together for us at that time.” Over the course of two tours, an Eastern-rooted swing in the spring and a Western and Midwestern trek in the fall, the Dead played some of the sharpest, most consistently enjoyable shows of their career. Whether in college gyms, theaters, or arenas, they’d rarely sounded so well oiled, playing what Donna Godchaux called “regular shows like regular people did.” At the on-campus coliseum at the University of Alabama they dug into a slow, mournful “High Time” and added dramatic flourishes to “Looks Like Rain.” A beautifully burnished “Wharf Rat” in Hartford showed how they’d matured as a band without losing their loose and easy charm. During a particularly strong “Sugaree” in St. Paul, Garcia discharged a wild flurry of notes.

  Fans also heard a new combination introduced onstage early in the year: “Scarlet Begonias” segueing into “Fire on the Mountain,” written during a jam at Hart’s studio as Hunter watched a blaze up in the hills that threatened to creep down. (The band cut a version of the song with Olsen for Terrapin Station, but no one was satisfied, so it was held for their next record.) They busted out a new cover, the festive New Orleans stomp “Iko Iko,” which would become an almost permanent part of their repertoire. “We had all this new material that everyone was excited about playing,” Donna Godchaux told Rolling Stone, “and everyone wanted to say, ‘All right, this is the time to really make a statement and not just be a psychedelic weirdo hippie band.’ And some of the other songs were more song oriented than jam oriented.”

  At New York’s Palladium, a smaller venue that allowed them to work out some of the kinks in their set in the spring, “The Music Never Stopped” had especially crisper, more sy
nchronized rhythms from Hart and Kreutzmann. Garcia sang the traditional ballad “Peggy-O” with heart-tugging sweetness and ripped off a solo in “Comes a Time” that burst with soulful, laser-beam intensity. The band embarked on “Terrapin Station Part 1,” navigating its prog-like twists and turns with grace and nimbleness. Cantor, who sat by the side of the stage each night and recorded all the shows, heard a difference between 1977 and the previous year. “In 1976 it was seat of the pants,” she says, “but in 1977, it got tight.”

  Moments of Dead craziness still abounded, of course. In Chicago Kreutzmann and Hart dressed up as doctors before they took the stage, with Donna Godchaux acting as a nurse, before the band played “Good Lovin’.” (“I don’t like this—what’s going on?” Garcia said nervously before they started.) At the Palladium Hells Angels rode their hogs right into the band’s dressing rooms, and one club member proudly brandished a knife and demanded they play “Truckin’.” The bond between some of the Dead and the Angels remained amicable. Garcia was friendly with Sandy Alexander, who ran the club’s New York City chapter, and their relationship nearly saved Garcia’s life one night in the seventies. During a New York run an unhinged pimp sneaked into Garcia’s hotel room and held a pistol on him; someone calling himself Garcia had been messing up some of the pimp’s women. A rescue call went out to Alexander, who showed up with club members; before anyone could even remotely entertain the idea of calling the police, the Angels had located the imposter and brought him to the hotel, where he was dangled outside by his ankles. “I saw him once, when he was out the window,” says one Dead employee. “They had to do what they had to do. Some things had to be dealt with.”

  Less burly guests also made it backstage at the Palladium. The Dead had befriended members of the Saturday Night Live cast, another group of nonconformist pop-culture rebels, and one night John Belushi appeared backstage, popping into Garcia’s room to share some weed. Belushi also asked Cantor whether she wanted an impromptu tour of NBC right before she began taping the show. (“I said, ‘I’m actually kind of busy right now, but thanks for the invite!’” she recalls.) SNL writers—and noted Deadheads—Al Franken and Tom Davis were also spotted wandering about; these would be far from their first or last Dead shows.

  The Dead weren’t quite mainstream, but something about them in 1977 felt almost acceptable to the nonconverts. When they arrived at the University of Alabama, marking their first-ever visit to a state not known for being friendly to long-hairs, the school’s football team helped the Dead crew set up. “Female hospitality was wonderful,” says Parish. “The girls on those tours in the South were incredible, man. Unbelievable. They were like sexual goddesses. They loved us, and we loved them.” Most importantly Parish says of the band and crew, “We were still tight and had each other.”

  The Dead arrived at Raceway Park in a variety of physical and mental conditions, not all of them encouraging. Lesh was feeling better now that they’d returned to the road. “That fear had been assuaged,” he says, but his life still felt out of sorts. He had started drinking more heavily and, tellingly, had married a woman he’d met in a bar. The post-hiatus Dead also rattled him in ways he couldn’t ascertain. “When we came back after the break, it just was never the same, on some mysterious level,” he says. “We hadn’t evolved together. We’d evolved individually and separately. We had to get to know each other all over again, and, sadly, I don’t think that ever really happened. We were all different people.” Thanks to a daily breakfast consisting largely of beer, he’d put on an additional thirty pounds, and his vocal cords had strained, reducing his singing contributions to the band. “I lost my high notes, so I couldn’t sing the high harmonies anymore,” Lesh says. “Too much alcohol, advancing age. I don’t know. Even after I quit they never came back.”

  For his part, Garcia rarely drank; one of the few times anyone saw him inebriated was on the Festival Express tour in 1970. But Garcia was increasingly besieged on numerous fronts, and his need to alleviate stress was growing. That year he endured a messy breakup with Koons. (Inspired by Loren, Garcia had started carrying around a briefcase for his paperwork and, naturally, stash.) Garcia was also feeling guilty about the debacle of Grateful Dead Records and having not only brought Rakow into the fold but also stood up for him during the entire chaotic ride. It was as if he’d been entrusted to run the family but had let it run amuck.

  To add to his workload, Garcia was also spending innumerable hours working on a movie built around footage shot at the semifarewell Winterland shows in 1974. Gary Gutierrez, a young animator who’d worked on public-television kids’ shows like Sesame Street and The Electric Company, was hired and had begun working on the segments in the beginning of the movie. One idea, to feature Uncle Sam skeletons in time for the US Bicentennial in 1976, soon became outdated when the project stretched into the following year. The movie went way over budget, and Garcia, Loren, and promoter Scher came up with an idea to rent out movie theaters rather than work with an official distributor and pay for expensive multiple prints. “We didn’t have the money or inclination to do that,” says Scher, “so we went to each of the big cities we knew were giant, found the best theaters, rented them out, and brought in a concert-level PA.” When The Grateful Dead Movie made its long-overdue premiere at the Ziegfeld Theatre in Manhattan in June 1977, everyone dressed up: Donna Jean as Scarlett O’Hara, for instance. Deadheads who’d lined up around the block gave the band a standing ovation as they walked in and took their seats. At a hotel party after, Garcia played tic-tac-toe with Clive Davis, and a friend of the band watched as a female Deadhead barged in on Garcia and said, “Sign my arm!”

  One of the few pieces of overt direction Garcia gave to Gutierrez was about the use of various bits of Dead imagery and iconography. “He said, ‘We have a lot of artwork that expresses the idea of chance,’” Gutierrez says, “and he said he would like it to be about how, in life, things change directions this way or that way. He wanted to express the unpredictable randomness of life. I specifically remember him saying that.” Even with a successful career as a rock star, Garcia’s sense of fatalism had never deserted him.

  The movie would be an invaluable document of the Dead onstage, but the workload, combined with everything he was juggling in his personal life, was proving to be too much for Garcia. Increasingly his affable, approachable image began working against him: anyone who needed a favor or a financial handout seemed to visit him backstage. “He had guys hounding him to do free shows,” says Candelario. “They didn’t come by to say, ‘Hi, what’s going on?’ They came to tell him he needed to do a benefit concert or whatever. It was a hustle. He had all those kinds of things pounding on him. He wanted to be in that place where he could go in and turn the light off and just be quiet. Finally you can relax and take some time for yourself.”

  To reach that place, Garcia began turning to a strong Persian opiate that could be smoked rather than injected. Although some in the organization connected Garcia’s alarming new habit to the fall of Grateful Dead Records, he had begun dabbling in heroin before that collapse. One Dead employee recalls seeing Garcia and one of the band’s colleagues visit a brothel in 1974 so they could do heroin without any band interruptions; Parish first saw Garcia partake of the drug in the winter of 1975. “As far as I know, he started before the Rakow thing,” says Lesh. “That was another reason I didn’t think the band was going to start up again.”

  Sources differ as to who brought the drug into the Dead’s camp: one recalls an outsider who would occasionally worked for their business. Garcia told Hart his connection was the son of an ambassador to a Middle Eastern country, who was using his diplomatic immunity to easily bring the drug into the states. For the time being, though, Garcia’s habit wasn’t debilitating, so it rarely set off alarm bells within the Dead camp. Given the consistently brawny level of Garcia’s playing and singing, especially in 1977, there was no reason for anyone to suspect anything was derailing. “In those days his music wasn’t to
uched by any drugs in a negative way,” says Parish. “He couldn’t play or work enough in 1977. He was still functioning completely in those days.” As Loren comments, “I’m just speculating, but I think it made him feel good, and when he felt good, he played well.”

  During a typical year band members would be home less than three months a year—a few days here and there before they were gone again on another leg of roadwork. By now Bill and Susila Kreutzmann’s son, Justin, had grown accustomed to only seeing his father from time to time when he wasn’t on the road. “He’d be home, and we’d have an attachment,” says Justin, “and then he’d go away again, and that would be sad.” Kreutzmann wanted his son to follow in his creative footsteps, to the point at which he bought Justin a Sonor drum kit for his bedroom. Justin wasn’t all that interested—from an early age he was more intrigued with filmmaking than musicianship—and began noticing that, bit by bit, his drum kit would be missing a floor tom or cymbal. As it turned out, his father apparently needed them for his own drums, and Justin didn’t seem to mind the missing pieces; the fact that his father had bought him a drum set to begin with was reaffirming enough of their bond.

  Other members of the organization were dealing with loss in different ways. After more than five years Bob and Frankie’s relationship was coming apart just as Garcia and Mountain Girl’s had. Frankie was more than capable of standing up for herself, drinking and playing pool and poker along with any man on the scene. “I think she got bored,” says Cagwin. “She called it the ‘Marin Spin’—the same things that happen always keep happening.” Frankie—and Weir as well—was turned off by the excessive drugging of some of the others in Kingfish. In the early months of 1976 Frankie moved out of her and Weir’s Mill Valley home. “It wasn’t a big dramatic scene,” Kelly recalls. “It was all very calm, which was nice. I sensed they were both ready to go their own ways.”