by David Browne
According to Barsin, Mydland had long felt a sense of isolation: growing up in the Delta, he lived in a boathouse on the water while his parents and sisters resided in the main home. He once told Barsin he was haunted by a memory of not receiving an Easter basket as a child, even though his sisters had been given them. Now that he was in the Dead, though, he was no longer alone. Old friends who’d played with him in high school bands began reaching out to him, and a salesman at a local musical instrument store heard he was in the Dead and slashed the price, from $8,000 to $4,000, of a baby grand piano that Mydland was eying. Yet there were early signs that Mydland could be beset by it all. At a party at one Dead show Bill Graham had a Native American tent set up backstage. Everyone congregated inside it, and both Dead family members and outsiders approached the generally shy Mydland. “He seemed almost catatonic at times,” Barsin says, “overwhelmed all of a sudden with the recognition.” He would have to learn, sooner rather than later, how to handle it all.
There would be more wee-wee to come. During the Radio City run, one of the Dead offspring was summoned into either a hotel room or backstage space. The almost-teenager thought something was wrong but was instead asked to urinate into some small plastic tips. From what the kid was told, the band had to take some type of drug test to satisfy the insurance requirements of the closed-circuit broadcast of the Halloween show. “God knows what they thought they were going to find, but someone thought it would be a good idea if I did the urine test,” says the now-grownup. “I peed into the cups and thought, ‘They’re never going to believe this is us.’” (Director Dell’Amico, who doesn’t recall the specifics of the story, says he can think of one instance in which a drug test might have been requested for those shows: “We could have realized we didn’t have enough insurance or an insurer could have asked for it. That’s how it could have happened.”)
The story, or tall tale, was pretty amusing, but other, chillier winds were beginning to blow in the Dead’s direction. At Radio City, members of the crew heard that a suspected dealer may have slipped backstage—through no one’s precise fault—and reportedly pummeled him. The story was indicative of everyone’s growing concern about Garcia’s increasing fondness for what Loren calls “basically speedballing. You do cocaine and then you smoke that stuff, [called] rat. It’s like a speedball.” By 1980, as opposed to 1977, everyone knew Garcia was dabbling in the Persian opiate. It was not hard to notice: his hair was longer and stringier (and sometimes downright weirder, as when he wore it in pigtails during one of the shows in Egypt). More troubling was the impact of his addiction on the band’s music. Garcia’s voice was starting to sound strained, and during the Go to Heaven sessions he was spending more time than before in the studio bathroom. The usual reasons were trotted out: the pressures of celebrity, fallout from the Rakow debacle, his messy personal life. To others it may simply have been boredom. Driving home from a studio one evening with Vicki Jensen, Garcia gazed out the window and talked about how many of his good times were over. “He said, ‘There’s nothing fun to do anymore,’” she says. “All the things everyone was doing weren’t happening anymore, like Playland [which closed in 1972] or free shows in the park. That stuck with me when he said that.”
Even those who’d escaped the scene were still affected. After their departure from the Dead, Keith and Donna Godchaux moved back to Alabama, where Donna had been born and raised, and they worked on cleaning themselves up after the previous eight years. They chilled by the Tennessee River, Keith began to relax, and the two formed the Heart of Gold Band, named after a line in “Scarlet Begonias.” On a late July morning in 1980 Keith Godchaux and Pollock were driving back to Courtenay Pollock’s house in San Geronimo, where the Godchauxs were staying while working on new music. To Pollock, Godchaux seemed at peace: “I’ve never been happy with my body,” he told Pollock, “but right at this moment I’m the happiest I’ve ever felt in my life.” Taking a longer route home so they could continue talking, their car came around a bend, and Pollock, who was driving, saw a rock truck in his lane and a propane tanker easing out of a driveway. On the other side of the road were kids playing ball. “There was nowhere to go, and I had a moment to make a decision,” Pollock says. “There were trees on my right and all this blockage on the road.”
Pollock heard Godchaux say, “Oh, Jesus,” before the car slammed into the back of the rock truck. Pollock was seriously injured and on life support for several days but recovered; Godchaux never regained consciousness from his coma and was pronounced dead on July 23.
By the first night at Radio City, October 22, the nerves of the theater’s owners were frayed. Deadheads had lined up around the block to buy tickets, preventing some Rockefeller Center employees from getting into the buildings. A minor stampede occurred when the ticket window opened. “The fans surrounded the place and took over,” says Dell’Amico, who was observing from the sidelines. “They’re doing drugs on the street. Management was freaking out.”
The Rockefeller Corporation decided to retaliate. By way of Loren and Scher, they ordered the band to stop selling a commemorative poster for the event. The move took everyone aback: no one had thought the artwork would be a problem. Dennis Larkins, Bill Graham’s stage designer and art director, had been assigned the task of illustrating a poster for the run of shows at the Warfield. He and Peter Barsotti, one of Graham’s right-hand men, settled on featuring “Sam and Samantha,” the iconic Dead male-and-female skeletons. The poster, which showed the skeletons leaning up against an illustration of the Warfield, was so well received that Larkins was told to design a similar one for the Radio City run. From “Sam” wearing an Uncle Sam top hat to the use of the skull-and-lightning “Steal Your Face” logo on the building, the poster was clever and witty, and the Dead signed off on it with no hesitation. “The figures weren’t intended to be threatening, more like benevolent guardians,” says Larkins. “They weren’t intended to imply the death of anything. It was Dead iconography.”
According to Rockefeller executives, though, no one cleared the illustration with them, and the corporation, possibly also irked by the Dead’s wrangling over production costs, struck back. Interpreting the skeletons as a death wish for the hall and claiming the facade was a copyrighted logo, the corporation insisted the poster “suggests the Music Hall’s impending death and is unpatriotic.” The Dead, rarely accustomed to pushback at this point in their career, were stunned. “Here we are, saving Radio City Music Hall from its demise,” says Loren, “and they’re suing us for doing it.” (Strangely, the slight damage inflicted on the interior stairwell wasn’t brought up, probably since the Dead had warned the Hall owners about the specifications of the recording console.)
After initially demanding the entire run of shows be canceled outright, Radio City allowed the Dead to simply stop the sale of the posters at the venue and have the entire print run destroyed. The music, though, would proceed—but without yet another big-showcase glitch. Gathering onstage with their acoustic and percussive instruments for the final night at Radio City, with an audience at movie theaters from Florida to Chicago watching them, they couldn’t start: something was wrong with Lesh’s bass. He would pluck, adjust, and start playing again, and still it didn’t sound right. Finally Garcia said, “We’re gonna start out with a little instrumental that doesn’t involve Phil,” and they launched into a vocal-less version of the title song of Weir’s Heaven Help the Fool album. Lesh wouldn’t fully join the rest until several songs into the set.
Backstage at the Warfield, before the first acoustic-set run-through at that venue, Dell’Amico witnessed band members wandering into Garcia’s dressing room and expressing wariness about playing without electricity for the first time in so long. “It seemed like everybody was skeptical about the acoustic thing—they all thought it was crazy,” says the director. “‘Why are we doing this?’ But it’s something Jerry wanted to do, and he was laughing.” (An Angel sitting somberly in the room also approached Garcia and passed al
ong a greeting from Sandy Alexander.)
Judging from the technical snafu at Radio City, maybe they had a right to be worried, but in the end the acoustic segment, only eight songs long, was charming and lovely; the arrangements lent “It Must Have Been the Roses” (a bittersweet ballad that had first appeared on Garcia’s 1976 solo album, Reflections, and had become a staple of the Dead’s repertoire) and “Ripple” an autumnal feel not heard in previous performances of those songs. “Cassidy” recaptured the strumming gallop of the version on Weir’s Ace. The plugged-in portion of the night started with “Jack Straw” and wound up with a mesmerizing electric version of “Uncle John’s Band”; Mydland’s vocal contributions, the way he returned the band to its three-male-voice harmonies of the Workingman’s Dead era, were particularly evident on those two songs.
During the third set out came the concert segment that came to be called Drums. Percussion interludes had become a part of the concert ritual since 1968: sometimes during “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks),” during the start of “The Other One,” or after “Truckin’.” By the spring of 1978 Kreutzmann and Hart were given a percussion-bonanza segment all their own; by year’s end it would often segue into Space. (The latter wouldn’t have a name until Dead Set, the two-LP live album from the electric part of the Radio City and Warfield shows, was released in 1981; Reckoning, the unplugged companion album, came out first.) The back-and-forth interplay between Kreutzmann and Hart during Drums, which also included a battery of percussion instruments, could be captivating, and Space would present the Dead at its wildest, most free-form and spaciest, Garcia’s guitar venturing into uncharted free-form territory in ways that recalled their early Acid Test shows. With those segments, Dead shows acquired even more breadth and adventurousness.
Another Kesey-like moment permeated the Halloween show at Radio City as well. In one live skit Davis pretended to drink the notorious acid-dosed urine backstage, and afterward he was seen wandering around onstage, even trying to climb the scaffolding, as Franken warned him, with an increasingly concerned tone, to be careful. Later Davis told Dell’Amico he actually had taken acid and was stumbling around onstage with good reason, but it’s doubtful anyone informed Radio City executives of that either.
In fact, it’s almost certain no one did. Once the shows were over the legal wrangling began. Radio City and the Dead haggled over who would pay the leftover production costs, which ultimately amounted to $146,000. Eventually Radio City filed a $1.2 million lawsuit against the Dead, largely on the grounds that its reputation had been damaged by Franken and Davis’s sketches during the Halloween video broadcast. “Despite the Music Hall’s strenuous and repeated objections, the band’s representatives refused to remove small portions of the tape that were potentially damaging to the Music Hall’s image and reputation and in violation of the standards mandated by the contract,” read Radio City’s filing. “Those objectionable portions either suggested that illicit drugs were being used in the Music Hall or were obscene, in bad taste or against good morals. For example, one segment, actually filmed in a San Francisco theater, reported to show men vomiting in a Music Hall restroom while another, also filmed in advance and without any reference to what was actually happening in the Music Hall, suggested that bad cocaine was being passed around the theater. . . . There is no doubt that the Music Hall was damaged by the simulcast.” And yes, the skit in which “urine laced with LSD being consumed on stage” was also brought up. In its reply the Dead’s legal team countered that “the Music Hall’s lawsuit to enjoin use of the offensive videotaped segments and damaging poster were unnecessary because the dispute could have been resolved.”
In the end the lawsuit was settled out of court, and everyone could claim one victory or another. Radio City Music Hall allowed the Dead to proceed with plans for a cable special of the show for Showtime, but thanks to the suit, the Dead wouldn’t be allowed to use the now-outlawed poster or any Radio City logos on either Reckoning or Dead Set. For the Dead the shows would hardly be moneymakers. According to their own paperwork, they only earned $32,000 after spending $13,500 on road expenses, $3,134 on limos and cabs, and other bits and pieces. But much like the Wall of Sound, it proved the lengths to which the band was willing to go to push the technological envelope, often at their own expense.
One final disaster was averted Halloween night. In a truck outside Dell’Amico smelled a horrid, burning stench. He normally kept his cool under such circumstances, but on one of the previous nights at Radio City all the gear onstage had blown out the venue’s huge brass electrical panel, never a good omen. Leaving the truck, Dell’Amico saw smoke on the street outside Radio City and briefly panicked. Luckily, the source turned out to be a tire fire in New Jersey that was so pungent it wafted over into Manhattan. Although they came close on several levels, the Dead hadn’t succeeded in destroying Radio City; if anything, they would make it acceptable for other major rock acts to play there over the next few decades. Once again, they laughed in the face of disaster and walked away untouched.
Weir and Lesh at Fantasy Studios, Berkeley, February 1984.
© DAVID GANS
CHAPTER 11
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, LATE FEBRUARY TO EARLY MARCH, 1984
Hart was seated in a lotus position, preparing to stretch out his back, when a bottle of wine sailed past his head. He wasn’t the intended target, but he was jolted nonetheless. It was that sort of day, that sort of week, that sort of era, in the ongoing saga of the Dead.
As work settings went, the band could have had it worse than Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. Home of the hits for everyone from Creedence Clearwater Revival to Journey, it was considered one of the Bay Area’s most quality studios, worth the $150 an hour its owners charged. Studio D, where the Dead had set up, was outfitted with wood-paneled walls and parquet floors; the lounge where Hart was chilling had the requisite sofas and amenities. Their jumble of gear—Garcia’s and Lesh’s custom-made guitars and basses, Weir’s graphite-neck guitar, Hart’s and Kreutzmann’s overwhelming collection of percussive instruments—were all in place. Outsiders and Dead haters—and by the middle of the eighties the culture had its share of the latter—may have seen them as anachronistic hippies, but the Dead were as ever up on technology and unafraid to use it. The array of instruments and effects loaded into Fantasy attested to that.
Starting on February 7 the Dead assembled to try something they hadn’t done in four years: make a new record. It had been mutually decided they needed to leave their comfort zone—Front Street, their rehearsal space and ad hoc studio—for a less distracting, more focused environment. You never knew what you would find at Front Street. One day a member of the crew looked up, counted the studs in the wall, and said, “Yeah, right about here.” He punched his hand through the sheet rock, reached inside, and pulled out a stash of crystal meth that, legend had it, Ken Kesey had dropped long ago and had fallen between the cracks.
Along with a new work space the Dead had a passel of new material to record. With its veiled reference to the notorious Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, where John Belushi fatally overdosed in 1982, Garcia and Hunter’s “West L.A. Fadeaway” could have easily been about the band’s longtime friend, even though Hunter’s lyrics circled around the matter. (Not long before he died Belushi popped into a Dead show in Los Angeles, sweating and looking disheveled and drugged up; even the Dead were shocked.) Even the song’s slow-rolling rhythm connoted sleaze. Weir and Barlow’s “My Brother Esau” could have been interpreted as their take on the Cain and Abel saga, although a few months after these sessions Weir would tell the New York Daily News that it was “our most political song,” calling it “an allegory about the treatment Vietnam veterans got when they returned home—though I’m sure it passes over a lot of people’s heads.” Another Weir-Barlow collaboration, an agitated rocker called “Throwing Stones,” was among their most pointed and pessimistic songs: a depiction of a planet that looked beautiful from space but deep down was rotting away fr
om lack of care, inept politicians, and pending darkness. Hunter and Garcia weren’t writing together as much as they once had, but they did turn out another new song, “Keep Your Day Job,” whose rollicking rhythm made it ideal for live shows. The fans weren’t as taken with the words: almost as soon as the song was premiered onstage, in 1982, the fans interpreted Hunter’s lyric as a call to not follow the band around on the road. (In fact, the song advocated supporting oneself while looking ahead to bigger, more fulfilling goals, but the title phrase tripped up the message.) In due time the outcry was so loud that the Dead dropped the song from their repertoire, but right now, at the beginning of the new album sessions, it was still on track to be included on the next record.
The Dead still equated working in a recording studio with something worse than a group root canal. “The recording process was very painful,” says Hart. “The spirit didn’t lie in the studio with no people. You’re playing for the walls. It wasn’t the Dead. There was a wild side of it that never came out in the studio.” But given that they’d been performing a few of those songs for several years, the sessions should have been a creative cakewalk. And they could take their time; although Arista was anxious for new product, no one was pressuring the band at that point.
And yet, two weeks in, they were stuck for more reasons than anyone cared to ponder. The frustration was starting to affect everyone, including Weir. Typically the most agreeable and even tempered member of the band, Weir was happy to open up his home to others, happy to hobnob with record company executives. Walking into the studio lounge that day, Weir seemingly couldn’t restrain his frustration. The problem wasn’t the drummer; it had to do with the fact that, though the band was scheduled to work, the only person Weir saw there was Hart. As Hart watched in the lounge, Weir frowned and grabbed a bottle of wine. (With the Dead, quality food and drink were never far away, especially by the eighties; starting with their 1976 tour, manager Richard Loren made sure they always had quality catering backstage at shows.) Hart was about ten feet away when suddenly Weir wailed the bottle like a baseball. Because some of the walls in the lounge were made of soft, porous materials, the bottle didn’t shatter, but it slammed into the wall and remained there.