by David Browne
Sitting with her recording gear by the side of the stage each night, Cantor diligently recorded every gig on the 1977 tour. But she was also grieving over the loss of her husband. In September 1976 her partner, Rex Jackson, died after his car ran off the road near Mill Valley; he and Cantor had married in 1973 and had a son, Cole. (Donna Godchaux’s “Sunrise” was partly inspired by Rex’s memorial service.) The news was devastating to the community, and work became Cantor’s outlet for coping with her grief. “I thought, ‘I want to be here,’” she says of the road. “I was keeping busy. That’s what saved my soul. Being creative kept me from getting depressed.”
The band members in the worst physical shape, though, were Hart and Donna Godchaux. In an early morning in June Hart and his friend Rhonda Jensen, who’d come to live on his ranch with her sister Vicki at the end of the sixties, were returning from a concert to the nearby house of a friend in Half Moon Bay. Pulling up the dirt and gravel driveway, Hart punched the engine on his Porsche too hard, making the car swing out in the back. Because there was no guard rail, the car tumbled over the ravine next to the driveway, an incline so steep it was used for dumping trash. The car was caught in eucalyptus trees whose limbs looked like arms bent at the elbow, but the vehicle still slid down, and Hart was terribly bashed up. Climbing out of the wreck, Jensen told Hart not to move and ran to the house to tell everyone about the accident.
Firemen and police showed up soon, but some began debating how to rescue the car from its dangling tangle. “That’s one of the Grateful Dead in there!” someone shouted in exasperation, snapping the emergency crew to attention. After the car was secured, Hart was pulled out and taken to a nearby hospital with a broken collarbone, smashed ribs, a broken arm, and other injuries; one of his ears was dangling by a piece of skin, causing a female friend visiting him to faint at the sight. The doctors didn’t make any promises to visiting friends, but Brandelius told them proudly that her boyfriend was a “tough fucker.” Making a rare trip to the hospital, Garcia looked at Hart and cracked, “You look like shit!” Hells Angels smuggled pot into Hart’s room to ease the pain. Hart began a long, tedious physical rehab, which took six weeks and forced the cancellation of at least a few Dead shows just as Terrapin Station was about to be released in late July. The Dead’s coffers still took a major hit.
Showing up at a band meeting at Fifth and Lincoln during this time, Donna Godchaux heard the band was planning to do a huge outdoor show in New Jersey. At first she balked for her own health-connected reasons. That summer she’d had an operation of her own and informed everyone it might be physically impossible for her to do the show: her stitches were still mending, and her doctor had warned her against even walking across the street. Garcia hung his head and said, “Well, I guess we just can’t do it, because she sings on all the songs.” With no arm twisting, Godchaux then changed her mind for the good of the band and began making arrangements to transport herself to Jersey by helicopter, limousine, and wheelchair; on site someone would have to physically carry her onto the stage and place her in a chair.
After opening sets by the New Riders of the Purple Sage and the Marshall Tucker Band, the Dead ambled onto the stage. They looked a bit older and chunkier than the last time fans had seen them; Kreutzmann now had wisps of gray sticking out of the side of his head. They also looked like they could have come from several different bands: Garcia’s standard black T-shirt contrasted sharply with Weir’s white slacks and aviator glasses. Half of the band looked as if they were conceding to the fashion trends of the seventies, and the other half seemed to be actively rebelling against them.
The show was adequate but not nearly as momentous as those that came right before and after that year. Self-conscious about his injury, Hart felt as if everyone in the crowd was watching him and his recovering shoulder. With the band’s blessing, he played lighter than usual so he could cruise through the set. In his usual way he overdid it, and his shoulder began to ache. As often happened, Donna Godchaux couldn’t hear very well and was further hampered by her own surgery, relegated to a chair near Lesh during most of the show. “It was like an out-patient clinic on stage,” says Hart. “We weren’t in the groove. We were stale. But we made it through. We did the best we could under the circumstances.”
The circumstances around Terrapin Station were similarly wobbly. Despite its radio-friendly aura, the album wasn’t proving to be the breakout hit everyone had hoped. Deadheads were deeply divided about the record, which only clawed its way to number twenty-eight on the Billboard album chart. Despite all the work put into it and its groundbreaking title suite, Terrapin Station became their lowest-charting album since 1970.
Yet the number of people who’d driven, walked, and shimmied their way between boxcars at Raceway Park told another story. When Scher double-checked the box office, he discovered they’d sold a staggering 102,000 tickets, more than double his estimate. The Dead had played before oceans of people before, at Woodstock and, in 1973, at Watkins Glen, the New York festival at which about 600,000 people showed up to hear them, the Allman Brothers Band, and the Band. Yet those were multi-act festivals, whereas Raceway Park was a Dead show (with two opening acts). The show was the most vivid demonstration yet that the Dead weren’t just a large cult band but rather a phenomenon that couldn’t be denied. “It said, ‘We’re a big band,’” Loren says. “It said, ‘Yeah, the Allman Brothers, they’re big, but they’re not the Grateful Dead.’ A lot of the industry stood up and said, ‘100,000 people at a Dead show—that’s unbelievable!’ And these weren’t repeat [customers]—it was only for one show, not four. It wasn’t the same people going over and over. And they didn’t come to see Marshall Tucker.” By then Deadheads were beginning to snap up tickets to multiple shows in the same cities, a development largely new to rock ’n’ roll. Why would anyone want to see a band two nights in a row? It made little sense to those outside the community, but Deadheads knew how much the sets could change, even how the lengths of certain songs could vary show to show.
After the encore, an eleven-minute run-through of “Terrapin Station Part 1,” they couldn’t wait to return to their air-conditioned Manhattan hotel rooms. But everyone came away with one clear lesson: they could dismantle the band for a while. They could return, as they had the year before, without a new studio album to promote. They could make an album that would leave the fans ambivalent. They could force their fans to walk miles in the heat and then wait hours in the body-fluid-depleting sun to see them play. And when they did perform, as at Raceway Park, they could do it with two of their members physically incapacitated, hampering the music along the way.
Onstage and off, they could screw up as much as they wanted, yet none of it seemed to matter. The fans still adored them and would cut them enormous amounts of slack merely for the opportunity to see them play. The experience, the gathering, was as much the point as the performance. Just after Raceway Park Arista ran an ad in Rolling Stone with photos from the show and the copy, “A New Dead Era Is Upon Us.” Even if they didn’t realize it at the time, the era arrived with many new lessons.
Unplugged at Radio City Music Hall in New York, with Brent Mydland, far right.
© BOB MINKIN
CHAPTER 10
NEW YORK CITY, OCTOBER 31, 1980
Even the union workers agreed: part of the wall had to go. After all, the Dead had a slew of shows about to begin, and their damn recording consoles had to be installed. If it meant a portion of a stairwell had to be removed—in a building that had just been given landmark status by the city of New York—so be it. On the occasion of the Dead’s fifteenth anniversary, nothing and no one could stand in their way, not even Radio City Music Hall.
Just over a week before, the load-in had begun for the Dead’s eight-night stand at the six-thousand-seat venue. On many levels the sight would have been unimaginable several years before. The venerable midtown building had opened its doors nearly fifty years before, in 1932, and by 1980 any tourist who came throug
h the city seemed to be legally required to attend Radio City Music Hall’s Christmas and Easter shows with the Rockettes or see one of the family-themed movies it hosted. But by the late seventies, with New York City in fiscal freefall, Radio City’s future was suddenly shaky; movie attendance dropped, and plans to convert it into an office building or parking lot loomed. Thankfully the interior of the building was granted landmark status in 1978, and its famed art-deco lobby and other interior design elements were refreshed for $5 million. During talks to save the building the idea of booking pop acts came up, and by the fall of 1980 Radio City Music Hall had presented one major pop star, Linda Ronstadt. Now it would host an entirely different kind of beast, the Grateful Dead, who were about to settle in for eight nights, October 22 to 31 (with the nights of October 24 and 28 off).
The band’s clout became evident right away, when Deadheads converged upon Rockefeller Center, some camping out, and snapped up almost thirty-six thousand tickets priced between $12.50 and $15.00. In an ambitious move that recalled the special screenings of The Grateful Dead Movie, the last night, Halloween, would be broadcast live by a closed-circuit feed to fourteen movie theaters around the country; in addition, all the anniversary shows, both at Radio City and preceding ones at the Warfield in San Francisco, would be recorded for a live album or two. The entire undertaking felt like an event, especially when word trickled out that the band would be playing its first acoustic set in a decade, complete with their fairly new keyboard player.
To accommodate the recording the Dead needed two hefty Neve recording consoles, one rented and the other shipped out from their Front Street home base. Both had to be hauled up a flight of stairs to reach Plaza Sound, the studio that sat atop Radio City (and where punk bands like Blondie and the Ramones had recorded). The Dead’s office had sent paperwork ahead of time to make sure the consoles would be able to make it into the building, but when the time came to install them, a problem arose: the consoles couldn’t quite clear the stairwell. After some head-scratching, one of the union workers at the venue, with Hart’s urging, said, “Oh, fuck it—we’ve gotta get this thing up here.” With that they grabbed a sledgehammer and took down a few inches of the stairwell wall.
Promoter John Scher had no idea the “renovation” was happening until he heard from Betty Cantor, who would be recording the shows, and the thought of physical damage to the interior of a New York landmark rattled even Scher, who thought he’d seen it all with the Dead. “I remember Betty telling me after they’d already done it, after the fact,” Scher says. “I was basically shitting in my pants until the shows were over.” It wouldn’t be the first time the Dead would encounter some pushback in their career, but this victory was significant. “I had no second thoughts about that,” says Hart. “It was the thing to do. Nothing stops the Grateful Dead. Onward into the fog.” They’d already made it to fifteen years despite adversity, busts, deaths, and fallow periods, and no one was about to let a bit of concrete stand in their way.
By then the bright memories of 1977 were starting to dim. Beginning the following year, the self-control and efficiency that had marked the previous year was beginning to slip out of the Dead’s grasp, and the grind of touring was starting to wear them down. “When I first came along people were doing a little bit of everything,” says Courtenay Pollock, the tie-dye artist now fully immersed in the Dead world on and off the road. “But with the demands of these tours, people started jacking themselves to keep up the pace.”
Culturally the Dead were also now out of sorts. Thanks to the rise of punk rock and disco, the Dead, although only in their thirties, were now ensnared in what amounted to a sixties backlash; anything that even vaguely reeked of patchouli oil and weed was newly reviled or mocked. Even the country’s hip, Dylan-quoting president, Jimmy Carter—who’d been elected in 1976, the same year the Dead returned to the road—was beginning to stumble. In the next election, a month after the Radio City Music Hall shows would wrap up, the country would embrace Ronald Reagan, a symbolic gesture of political and cultural change.
Eager to simplify themselves—and rejecting a return to the buffed sonics of Terrapin Station—the Dead hired Lowell George of Little Feat to produce their next album. The hookup sounded ideal: George had his feet planted firmly in American roots music, and the band could relate to him (and his funky, cutting-razor slide guitar) more than they could Keith Olsen. For extra comfort, the sessions wouldn’t be held in Los Angeles but at Front Street, the Dead’s warehouse in San Rafael. Although the band had been renting it for a few years, Garcia had used Front Street the previous year to record his Jerry Garcia Band (or JGB) album Cats Under the Stars. Maria Muldaur, the sexy-voiced former jug-band singer who’d had a hit with “Midnight at the Oasis” in 1974, sang on several tracks on the album, thanks to her relationship with John Kahn, Garcia’s buddy and favorite non-Dead bass player. “Jerry and John were like spiritual brothers,” says Muldaur. “It was musical, and it was something beyond that. Jerry respected John and the knowledge he had of other kinds of music. He liked his sensibility. They had this intuitive connection.”
Kahn and Muldaur had been a couple since 1974, and now, years later, Muldaur was witnessing the craziness at Front Street for herself: recording sessions that started after midnight and were fueled by coke and wine. (Because she had a young daughter and woke up early each day, Muldaur took to carting along an espresso machine to help keep her awake late at night: “I called it Italian cocaine.”) Yet Garcia’s side band, which had started in 1975 during the Dead’s hiatus and was now more or less known as the Jerry Garcia Band, was by now a legitimate and flourishing concern. With players that included Kahn, Elvis drummer Ron Tutt, and Keith and Donna Godchaux, with others to follow, the JGB allowed Garcia to revel in different rhythms and repertoire than the Dead. (Don’t Let Go, a live album recorded in 1976 but released much later, was a prime example of the group’s loose, funky Marin swing.) The sessions at Front Street for what would be Garcia’s fourth studio solo album were especially productive. From Garcia’s biting guitar on the pumped “Rhapsody in Red” to the enchanting story-song “Rubin and Cherise,” about a love triangle set in New Orleans, the album featured some of Garcia’s best outside-Dead work, and he would be justly proud of it for years after. Its lack of commercial success would also be devastating to him.
Months later at the same place, work on the Dead’s new album, Shakedown Street, would prove far less satisfying. It was George’s idea to tape the band at their rehearsal space, and with him they finally recorded “Good Lovin’,” one of Pigpen’s showcases, now with Weir singing lead. George did return the band to its dance-band roots with a modern twist; the title song leapt into a disco pool even more so than their cover of “Dancin’ in the Streets” on Terrapin Station, and Weir and Barlow’s “I Need a Miracle” roared in ways the Dead hadn’t done in the studio before. With his white overalls, genial manner, and love of American music, George was seemingly a natural match for them. But the material was patchy, and the party atmosphere at Club Front wasn’t helping; George was no stranger to cocaine, and he and some of the band members (and crew) indulged themselves regularly. “A lovely guy, but he was screaming on coke the whole time,” says Hart. “He was killing himself. And, again, it was a desperation move. Nobody in their right mind would want to be the producer of the Grateful Dead. It’s a death sentence. No one can handle that. They always crack up.”
After school Justin Kreutzmann would show up to watch his dad work and, he says, “Everyone would still be up from the night before. Everyone was so unhealthy and the combination of Lowell and the Dead wasn’t doing anyone any good.” Weir invited his old friend and former Kingfish partner Matthew Kelly to play harmonica on “I Need a Miracle”; when Kelly showed up, George immediately lectured him. “Lowell came up to me and said, ‘I don’t allow any drugs at my recording sessions,’” says Kelly. “Which was ironic and somewhat hypocritical. Everyone was using them.”
In the midst of
that work one of their grandest adventures was taking shape. Thanks largely to their manager and booker, Richard Loren, they would be heading for Egypt for three nights of concerts in September 1978. The trip involved all manner of paperwork and diplomatic massaging, including trips by Loren, Lesh, and Alan Trist (now a longtime band employee) to Egypt and Washington, DC. Eventually they arranged it so the trip would be a fundraiser for two Egyptian charities (as opposed to a State Department–sanctioned trip that might raise eyebrows), and their dream of playing their most celestial music at the foot of the Pyramids became a reality.
In typically untidy Dead style they almost didn’t make the trip. To raise additional funds (in part to help pay for all the friends and family who’d be joining them), they played a show at Giants Stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands area outside of Manhattan. Because Shakedown Street wasn’t completely finished (George had to leave the drawn-out sessions to return to his band and upcoming solo album), a few of them flew back to Front Street after the show for last-minute tweaks. Before anyone knew it, the whole band was back. “It was, ‘Well, if he’s coming back to fix this part, then I’m coming back too,’” says a Dead employee of the time. “They all snuck back.” As a result, office worker Sue Stephens had to hustle and buy last-minute tickets from San Francisco to Egypt and make sure the band made it to the airport on time. By then a first plane, filled with Mountain Girl and various Merry Pranksters like Kesey and Ken Babbs, had already arrived.