“Saint Stephen” was the first song the band tackled when they went into Pacific Recording in San Mateo in early September to begin work on their album. Armed with their extensive studio experience making Anthem of the Sun, the Dead were determined to take their time and make a record that was a true studio creation rather than something that reflected the way the group played live. Bob Matthews was elevated to chief engineer for the project, which, like Anthem, ended up sprawling over many months in between Dead tours. In fact, a few months into the project, Matthews was able to get a hold of the first sixteen-track tape recorder made by the Ampex Corporation (based on the Peninsula), and the original eight-track tapes that had been made on a few songs were transferred to sixteen-track and then added to. Now, in the case of the Grateful Dead, doubling the number of available tracks wasn’t necessarily a good thing, because they took the increased tape capacity as a challenge to experiment even more in the studio, which meant everything took longer than expected. It didn’t help, either, that the band was dabbling in all sorts of mind-altering drugs in the studio just to see how they affected their work. Besides the standard pot and LSD, Garcia said they sometimes sipped beverages laced with the powerful hallucinogen STP in the studio—“which made it a little weird; in fact, very weird,” he said—and brought in tanks of nitrous oxide (laughing gas), a drug noted for the way it colors aural perception.
One track the band worked on that fall, Hunter and Garcia’s “What’s Become of the Baby,” was recorded and mixed in part on nitrous oxide, and the finished song actually has some of the character of a nitrous experience, with its slow, surreal, electronically treated Garcia vocal floating eerily above a ghostly wash of feedback, reverb-laden gongs and other completely indistinguishable instruments. It’s a truly odd number—essentially just voice and electronics—and light-years from Garcia’s original conception of the song as “baroque. . . . The original setting I’d worked out was really like one of those song forms from the New York Pro Musica.” Later, though, “I had a desire to make it much weirder than that and I didn’t know how to do it. . . . I had something specific in mind, but simply couldn’t execute it because I didn’t have the tools. It’s too bad, because it’s an incredible lyric and I feel I threw the song away somewhat.”
It’s true that Garcia’s sonic experiments did ultimately obfuscate some of Hunter’s best late-’60s lyrics, which were filled with exotic psychedelic pictures and a strong metaphorical undercurrent that could easily be interpreted as being about lost innocence and the vanished promise of the acid culture’s golden days:
Scheherezade gathering stories to tell
From primal gold fantasy petals that fall
But where is the child
Who played with the sunshine
And chased the cloud sheep
To the regions of rhyme?
There were strange goings-on outside the recording studio, too. In September and October 1968, three years into their history, the Grateful Dead faced a crisis that nearly derailed the group. Garcia and Lesh determined that Weir and Pigpen weren’t pulling their weight musically in the band, weren’t in tune with the more complex compositions the band was writing and, according to Rock Scully, “Jerry kind of put it on me to fire them. It was a totally musical decision. Bobby wasn’t progressing—he was still playing the electric guitar like an acoustic guitar, and Jerry was trying to get him to loosen up and be a rhythm guitar player. Bobby was still a student, but not listening.” Bobby had nearly been fired in the fall of 1967, and as Jonathan Reister, their road manager beginning in mid-1968, says, “Bobby was our little juvenile delinquent. Most of the band fights were about his guitar playing.”
As for Pigpen, Scully said, “I don’t think that Pig, without being high on LSD, could quite understand the direction the music was taking. And their music did change a lot in that period. Jerry spent a lot of time trying to describe and explain where he thought the music was going, and so did Phil. Phil was a very high dude in those days. Now he’s considered a genius, but in those days he was just this weird ex–postal worker who’d just taken up the bass but had some really neat ideas musically. He was willing to push that envelope.
“But if the firing had to happen, it happened at a good time, because we were just sort of doodling in the studio. We weren’t making any money. We didn’t have any gigs booked, so there was really no loss, except emotionally. I was against it, but Jerry put it on me as the manager to do it. Phil was behind it and so was Kreutzmann. But to fire nearly half your unit . . .”
Scully said that Pigpen took the firing hard, but in Garcia’s rosier memory, “we never actually let him go; we just didn’t want him playing keyboard, because he just didn’t know what to do on the kind of material we were writing. It seemed like we were heading some [musical] place in a big way and Pigpen just wasn’t open to it.”
No one seems to remember exactly how long Weir and Pigpen were out of the band. Weir suggested it was “a couple of months,” but using Deadbase’s show list as a guide, it appears there was never a period of more than two weeks between Dead shows at any time during September or October 1968, so it couldn’t have been too long. “It didn’t take,” Garcia noted with a laugh. “We fired them, all right, but they just kept coming back.”
Nevertheless, during October the Dead minus Weir and Pigpen played a loose series of jam nights at the Matrix club as Mickey and the Hartbeats, and invited a variety of musicians down to play with them, including Elvin Bishop, Paul Butterfield, Jack Casady and Spencer Dryden. Though a few of the jams that came out of these evenings were centered on some of the Dead’s most open-ended material, like “Dark Star” and “The Eleven,” mostly the musicians stuck to blues tunes and various progressions that gave everyone plenty of room to blow.
The Weir problem evidently took care of itself over time—he rededicated himself to his instrument to the satisfaction of his detractors. To get around the problem of Pigpen’s limited skills as a musician, the Dead hired Tom Constanten to play keyboards beginning in November 1968. “Pigpen was relegated to the congas at that point,” said Jon McIntire, who was brought on board to help road manager Jonathan Reister in the summer of ’68, “and it was really humiliating and he was really hurt, but he couldn’t show it, couldn’t talk about it. He never came up to me and said, ‘I can’t stand what they’re doing to me,’ or anything like that. I bet he didn’t say it to anyone; I don’t even know if he said it to himself—maybe when he went for the bottle the first time after it happened he said it to himself.”
Constanten was even more a stranger to the rock world before he joined the Grateful Dead than his friend Phil Lesh had been. You’ll recall that Phil and T.C. took music classes together at UC Berkeley (although T.C. originally enrolled there to study astrophysics) and that they studied with Luciano Berio at Mills College in Oakland, and then T.C. continued working under Berio’s tutelage in Europe. Later, on Berio’s recommendation, T.C. hooked up with another well-known avant-garde composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, in Darmstadt, Germany, and in Brussels he studied with Henri Pousseur. Upon returning to the U.S. in the mid-’60s, T.C. enlisted in the air force as a way to avoid being drafted into the army. Though he regarded his stint in the military “like a bullshit job with a silly suit,” at least it gave him time to compose—indeed, T.C. was very prolific during his time in the military, and a few of his orchestral works were performed by the Las Vegas Symphony Orchestra.
On his furloughs T.C. would often go to the Bay Area, where Phil was playing first with a crazy electric blues group called the Warlocks, and then with the Grateful Dead. Not surprisingly, hanging out in the Dead scene brought T.C. in contact with the psychedelic underground, and he was personally responsible for bringing quite a bit of LSD to his hometown of Las Vegas. He was still a short-haired serviceman when he worked with the Dead on Anthem of the Sun in the fall of 1967 and winter of ’68.
Constanten was discharged from the air force on November 22, 1968, a
fter serving three and a half years, and he immediately took the group up on its earlier invitation to join the band on the road. He flew to Ohio the next day and played his first gig with them on November 23 at Ohio University in Athens. Although he hadn’t had a chance to rehearse with the band, “I’d heard the albums, I knew the changes and knew I could land on my feet in improvisatory situations.” Immediately the Dead’s jams took on a new richness with the addition of T.C.’s organ work, though he felt his playing was tentative at first.
T.C. said that he felt hampered by having to play the same cheesy-sounding Vox Continental organ that Pigpen usually took on the road: “I didn’t like the sound it put out at all. There was something about the Continental in that particular band that grated. The Dead’s guitars were these strands of gold and filaments of light, but the Vox was like a hunk of chrome. I had terribly mixed emotions about everything I was playing because the sound didn’t please me. After a bit of moving, shaking and agitating, I convinced them to let me play a Hammond B-3, which I was able to enjoy a bit more.”
(Garcia changed his axe at some point in 1968, too, retiring his Guild Starfire and picking up the warmer-sounding Gibson SG Les Paul model. In ’69 he switched back and forth between that guitar and a regular Gibson Les Paul.)
In January 1969 the group returned to Pacific Recording to cut tracks for “China Cat Sunflower” and two new Hunter-Garcia songs, “Mountains of the Moon” and “Dupree’s Diamond Blues,” both of which Garcia decided to put in settings dominated by acoustic guitars. That’s about all those two songs have in common, however—they couldn’t be farther apart lyrically and in terms of the mood each creates.
With its flowery T.C. harpsichord line, “Mountains of the Moon” sounds like a throwback to an earlier age; it’s practically a minuet. And Hunter’s lyrics paint a picture of a mythical world far removed from our own:
Twenty degrees of solitude
Twenty degrees in all
All the dancing kings and wives
Assembled in the hall
Lost is a long and lonely time
Fairy Sybil flying
All along the all along the
Mountains of the moon
“That song turned out nicely,” Garcia said. “I don’t know what made me think I could do a song like that, but something at the time made me think I could do it.”
Hunter once said that “Dupree’s Diamond Blues” was the only song he ever wrote drunk, but that’s not to suggest that lyrically it’s sloppy or anything less than clever. “Dupree’s” was the first of a handful of songs that Hunter and Garcia wrote together where they essentially plucked stories out of the folk/blues tradition and reworked the themes in their own way. In this case, there were already a number of songs, dating back to the ’20s, that told the (true) story of Frank DuPre, who in December 1921 robbed an Atlanta jewelry store to get a diamond ring for his girlfriend and killed a policeman while escaping the scene. The dapper DuPre was hanged in September 1922, and he instantly became the subject of various songs in both white and black folk music circles. “Hunter and I always had this thing where we liked to muddy the folk tradition by adding our own songs to the tradition,” Garcia said. “It’s the thing of taking a well-founded tradition and putting in something that’s totally looped. So that’s Hunter’s version of that [song]. Originally, it’s one of those cautionary tales; one of those ‘Don’t take your gun to town’–type tunes. So Hunter elaborated on that in a playful way.”
At concerts during the winter and spring of 1969, the band sometimes paired “Dupree’s” and “Mountain of the Moon” at the beginning of their second set, with Garcia and Weir playing acoustic guitars onstage for the first time in the Dead’s history. Then, more often than not, those songs gave way to “Dark Star,” as the set would leave the warm, homey acoustic plane for more remote galactic destinations. The band loved to set up those kinds of juxtapositions—acoustic into electric music, country tunes coming out of space jams or an out-of-control, high-energy romp like “The Eleven” abruptly followed by a slow blues tune like “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” which Garcia sang and played with such unbridled passion in the late ’60s.
A third acoustic tune Hunter and Garcia wrote around this time was a wispy ballad called “Rosemary,” which, according to T.C., Garcia brought into the studio as a completed four-track tape. It’s just a Garcia vocal (altered by running the signal through a Leslie organ cabinet to give it a weird, treated quality) and two fingerpicked acoustic guitars, double-tracked by Garcia; there’s no bass, drums or keyboards. The band never performed the song in concert, and there’s no evidence the other members of the group ever played it at all. Lyrically, “Rosemary” feels almost fragmentary, as if it’s just a part of some larger song.
The band worked up a couple of new electric Hunter-Garcia songs in the studio in the winter of ’69, too. “Doin’ That Rag” was a curious, quirky, lighthearted little number with a hint of a jug band feel in places. With its succession of quick tempo changes between verse and chorus and even within each chorus, it was a fairly difficult tune for the band to perform live. That’s one reason Garcia only played the song for a few months in ’69; he also once said he had a tough time getting into the lyrics, which do lean toward the cryptic and inaccessible:
Sitting in Mangrove Valley chasing light beams
Everything wanders from maybe to Z
Baby, baby, pretty young on Tuesday
Old like a rum-drinking demon at tea
“Cosmic Charlie” was a more successful song all the way around, a loping midtempo number with unison lead vocals by Garcia and Weir and a screaming Garcia slide guitar line that weaves through the entire song and is so on the money that it prompts the question: Why didn’t Garcia play slide guitar more during his career? He also plays a fingerpicking acoustic guitar line that gives the blues-based tune a dash of Mississippi John Hurt or Reverend Gary Davis feeling. Hunter’s words seem to be, at least in part, a gentle, mocking put-down of undirected, “cosmic” hippie types:
Cosmic Charlie, how do you do?
Truckin’ in style along the avenue
Dumdeedumdee doodley doo
Go on home, your mama’s calling you . . .
Say you’ll come back when you can
Whenever your airplane happens to land
Maybe I’ll be back here, too
It all depends on what’s with you
Garcia admitted that in many of the songs he and Hunter wrote in 1968, “we were both being more or less obscure, and there are lots of levels on the verbal plane in terms of the lyrics being very far-out; too far-out, really, for most people.” He also complained that some of the music he composed during that period was unnecessarily complicated and difficult to sing. Of “Cosmic Charlie,” for instance, he noted, “It doesn’t have any room to breathe” and “trying to sing that song and play it at the same time is almost impossible.” “Cosmic Charlie” was not performed very often (the final version was in 1976), but it was always a fan favorite—during the ’80s and ’90s a group calling itself the Cosmic Charlie Campaign wrote letters and circulated petitions in a futile effort to get the band to play the song again.
In the winter of 1968–69 the Dead started to venture more regularly outside of California. In November and December of 1968 they hit three cities in Ohio, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and Louisville on one swing, and Houston and Miami on another before closing the year as headliners for “The Fillmore Scene at Winterland” New Year’s Eve bash that also included Quicksilver and two of the best “second-generation” San Francisco rock bands, Santana and It’s a Beautiful Day. Then, after working more on their third album during the first three weeks of 1969, the band hit the road again, playing Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, New York City (opening for Janis Joplin at the Fillmore East) and Philadelphia—a grueling two-week trek across frozen tundra to snowbound cities that earned little money at most stops. Looking back from a time when r
ock tours gross millions of dollars and top bands routinely stay in luxury hotels, it’s sometimes difficult to picture an era when there really wasn’t a touring “industry” in rock, and bands had to continually scramble to find airplane flights, hotels to stay in and places to play.
“I got kicked off seven national airlines for holding up flights so that two hundred people missed their connections; things like that,” says Jonathan Reister. “We were sometimes checking in two hundred or three hundred pieces of equipment as extra baggage. I’d have thirteen, fourteen, fifteen tickets [for the band, managers and crew] and I’d check in the equipment as extra baggage for each of us. It took forever, and sometimes it also made the plane heavier than it should have been.”
Typically, the entire band and crew would travel from place to place using Rock Scully’s American Express card as their collateral, whether Scully was there or not. “That was the only credit card we had and we owed $10,000 on it all the time—that was our limit,” Reister says. “I was sending money back from the road all the time just to keep the card open for another day or another week. Everything was a hustle—not that we were burning people, just that we never had quite the right cards or documentation, and of course we looked outrageous. I finally told the band, ‘Look, don’t come anywhere near me when I’m getting the car; don’t come to the rental desk with me.’ Which, of course, Weir loved to do, and then he’d act weird. Jerry really stood out a lot in those days, too, because he used to wear this brightly colored serape and he had a big natural, and people had never seen anything like that in Nebraska. It was like walking with an apparition. I always had short hair and a cowboy hat, but everyone would stare at Jerry.”
Garcia: An American Life Page 26