“Occasionally you’d arrive at these cheap hotels and they wouldn’t know you were a bunch of longhairs until you got there, and they’d refuse to let you in,” Jon McIntire remembered. “That happened to us several times. First you’d try to be diplomatic and try to convince them to let you stay there. Usually I was successful at that. But sometimes I couldn’t do that and we’d have to scramble to find another place.”
“We’d walk into a Holiday Inn or someplace and they’d say, ‘Oh no you don’t, not here!’” Garcia recalled with a laugh. “We got that kind of reaction the first couple of years we were out. People weren’t used to seeing freaks back then. That was still a big novelty. That was fun for us ’cause it was the last chance you had to shock people, just by the way you looked, just by the way you were. You didn’t have to think about it or work at it at all. You could just walk down the street and people would go, ‘Oh my God!’ That was fun. We got in on the last of that probably.”
Of course the restaurateurs’ and moteliers’ fears were occasionally well-founded. As Weir put it in 1995, “We left some smoking craters of some Holiday Inns, I’ll say that. There were a lot of places that wouldn’t have us back.”
And while the Dead were unknown in many cities in the late ’60s, their reputation as free-spirited drug users preceded them in some areas. When the group arrived in Miami in the spring of 1969, for example, “the chief of police actually came onto our plane, asked who the road manager was and then told me, ‘We’re going to follow you everywhere you go,’” Reister says. “St. Louis was another bad town. The police showed up in force at the airport and introduced themselves. ‘We’re here. We’re gonna watch you sons of bitches. We want you out of town as soon as possible.’ They made it very clear they did not want us there. They thought we were going to get their daughters high and fuck ’em—and they were right,” he adds with a chuckle.
Mostly, though, life on the road for the Dead in the late ’60s was what it has always been for traveling musicians: tedious, uneventful; marking time between the gigs, which is where the band would really come alive and enjoy themselves. “Jerry was my roommate on the road, and he wasn’t much into the late-night party scene in those days in hotels on the road,” Reister says, “at least outside of the big cities on the East Coast. There was always more happening in New York or Boston, of course. But one of my favorite memories of Jerry is being in a motel somewhere, with him sitting on the edge of my bed watching Captain Kangaroo with no sound, playing scales on his guitar while I was on the phone to the next city or whatever. He was a marvelous guy; a great storyteller. Well-spoken, well-read, a lot of fun to travel with.”
As 1969 rolled along, both Warner Bros. and the band became increasingly concerned about the group’s precarious financial state. Though the group toured more in ’69 than in any previous year, they barely broke even on the road, and the album was costing an astronomical amount for that era—close to $100,000. Then, from out of nowhere, came Lenny Hart—Mickey’s dad—who had become a Christian fundamentalist preacher, full of fire-and-brimstone sermons and, strangely enough, a rap that convinced the Dead he could manage the group’s business affairs and sail the good ship Grateful Dead into calmer waters. “Lenny was a preacher and he preached the gospel of the band,” Hunter said. “He was dynamic and intelligent, and if he was a Jesus freak, then he could probably be trusted, so that was okay with the band.
“It was a signal moment: he asked us what we wanted. And we said it—we wanted to do this for the rest of our lives. It wasn’t supposed to be possible in rock; it was a teenage phenomenon. You lasted five years and it was over.”
“What we wanted to do was play music, and we didn’t want to have to be businessmen,” Garcia said. “We didn’t even want to decide; we just wanted to play. . . . It never occurred to us that there were options. It never even occurred to us that you could plan. We were truly coming from an unstructured space.”
Reister and Hunter were among a small group who say they never trusted Lenny Hart, and even warned the group against hiring him, but it would be several months before the wisdom of their position became apparent to everyone else.
“The band was always wishy-washy about these kind of things,” Reister says. “One of Garcia’s bad character defects is that he’d just go with the flow. Nobody wanted to hassle in those days, so they sometimes took the easy way out, which wasn’t always the smartest way.”
The Dead’s third album, Aoxomoxoa (a title concocted by cover artist Rick Griffin in consultation with Robert Hunter; the Dead’s original title for the record was Earthquake Country), appeared in record stores in late June 1969, after eight months of on-and-off recording and mixing sessions. Although the album contained nicely nuanced versions of Dead concert favorites like “Saint Stephen,” “China Cat Sunflower” and “Cosmic Charlie,” the record’s overall feel was quite different from a Dead show during this era. There was no jamming to speak of; three of the songs were driven by acoustic guitars; there was the peculiar and not particularly successful vocal experiment “What’s Become of the Baby”; and Weir and Pigpen had no lead vocals on the album—indeed, Pigpen does not appear on the record at all. The album was not a commercial success—though “Saint Stephen” did get some FM airplay—and the single release of “Dupree’s Diamond Blues,” backed with “Cosmic Charlie,” was an utter failure.
“I like that record personally, just for its weirdness really,” Garcia said a couple of years after the album came out. “The tapes were well-recorded, and the music is well-played and everything on it is really right. It’s just that it was our first adventure with sixteen-track and we tended to put too much on everything. We tended to use up every track, and then when we were mixing, we were all of us trying to mix. It came out mixed by committee. A lot of the music was just lost in the mix, a lot of what was really there.”
It’s telling that in late 1971 Garcia and Lesh went back into the studio and completely remixed the record, stripping away entire parts—like the otherworldy female backup vocals on “Mountains of the Moon” and the cute barbershop quartet–style vocal ending of “Doin’ That Rag”—and generally making a leaner, better-sounding album. (The CD version of the album is the remix, so in essence the original Aoxomoxoa is “lost.”)
The middle of 1969 found the group playing some of its most adventurous and challenging music, with long, beautifully developed versions of “Dark Star,” “That’s It for the Other One,” “The Eleven” and “Love Light” being commonplace, and songs like “Saint Stephen” and “China Cat” becoming more powerful and assured almost with each playing. By then, most of the material from Anthem of the Sun had either receded to the background or, in the case of both “New Potato Caboose” and “Born Cross-Eyed,” been dropped altogether, never to be played again by the Dead. The band’s approach—born of endless rehearsal during the Anthem era—of connecting tunes together continued to be a vital part of their operating ethos all the way up until Garcia’s death, but it’s fair to say that by mid-1969 there was very little collective composition going on. The band still rehearsed occasionally (though less and less as they toured more), but their sessions were no longer characterized by the sort of obsessive pursuit of the unknown that had characterized late ’67 and ’68, when they were discovering the raw power of the sextet and, in essence, beginning to forge their mature group sound. By the spring of ’69 it was also clear that Hunter and Garcia were becoming serious songwriters, and that Garcia was as interested in directing his energy toward becoming a craftsman in that area as he had been in honing his instrumental voice in earlier years. This was the beginning of the golden era of the Hunter-Garcia partnership and a gradual simplification of the Dead’s sound, as the duo moved away from the strange, often impenetrable imagery of their most psychedelic pieces into a somewhat simpler folk and country vein.
For Hunter, the epiphany that led him to pursue a new direction in his writing was hearing Music from Big Pink, the debut album
by the Band. The onetime backup group for Bob Dylan had fashioned an extraordinary record that tapped into many of the same Southern roots the Dead originally drew upon, and in guitarist Robbie Robertson the Band had a songwriter capable of spinning the group’s influences into something that was utterly new while still sounding familiar. And the Band’s eponymous second album (aka “the Brown Album” after the dominant color on the cover), released in 1969, was even more successful at depicting characters who inhabited some mythic dimension from America’s past yet seemed to speak clearly to a late-twentieth-century audience.
“I was very much impressed with the area Robertson was working in,” Hunter said. “I took it and moved it west, which is the area I’m familiar with, and thought, ‘Okay, how about modern ethnic?’ Regional, but not the South, because everyone was going back to the South for inspiration at that time.”
Hunter found that Garcia’s own tastes were moving in the same direction as his—that Jerry was more interested in writing songs like “Dupree’s Diamond Blues” (which would have fit nicely on either of the Band’s first two records) than “What’s Become of the Baby.” And it helped that beginning in late ’68 or early ’69 the two actually lived together: Garcia and Mountain Girl gave up their Larkspur cottage and, with Hunter and his girlfriend, Christie, moved into a wonderful house at the end of Larkspur’s redwood-studded Madrone Canyon, just a few blocks from Janis Joplin’s Baltimore Canyon house, as fate would have it. The house at 271 Madrone sat on an acre of land, had a creek running behind it, tall trees surrounding it and morning light that came through the branches in great golden shafts.
“I’d be sitting upstairs banging on my typewriter, picking up my guitar, singin’ something, then going back to the typewriter,” Hunter recalled. “Jerry would be downstairs practicing guitar, working things out. You could hear fine through the floors there, and by the time I’d come down with a sheet and slap it down in front of him, Jerry already knew how they should go! He probably had to suffer through my incorrect way of doing them,” he added with a chuckle.
“Hunter was up twenty-four hours a day, chain-smoking, and he’d come down in the morning and he’d have a stack of songs,” Mountain Girl says. “‘Wow, Hunter, these are fantastic.’ ‘Do you really think so?’ And he’d challenge Jerry to sit down right then and write a tune for it; or he might have already worked out some chord changes for it and Jerry would say, ‘Oh no, man, that’s not the way it should be; it should be like this.’ But to see Hunter walk out of his room in the morning with a stack of freshly minted tunes was pretty exciting. It was just incredible how fast those tunes fell together once they got on them. It was a tremendous time for everybody.”
The first three songs Hunter and Garcia produced in the Madrone house in the spring of 1969 were indicative of the direction their work was heading in this era:
“Dire Wolf,” which Hunter wrote one night after staying up late with M.G. watching the Sherlock Holmes film The Hound of the Baskervilles, told a tale of the struggle between man and nature, in which a settler in the snowy “timbers of Fennario,” after having a supper of “a bottle of red whiskey,” tempts fate by inviting a wolf into his isolated cabin and then playing a game of cards with the beast, presumably to determine the poor man’s ultimate fate—sort of a backwoods version of the chess game in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. In this case, the theme is much darker than the presentation. Garcia’s musical setting for Hunter’s story is light and folky—as if it might have come from the campfire sing-along mentioned in the last verse—even though the opening verse makes it clear that the narrator probably perishes (“I said my prayers and went to bed, that’s the last they saw of me”). The chorus is a plaintive “Don’t murder me / I beg of, you don’t murder me / Please don’t murder me,” which Garcia always seemed to sing with a sort of amused “poor sucker” tone in his voice.
In its first versions in the spring of 1969, “Casey Jones” was much more country-flavored than the song that ended up on Workingman’s Dead a year later, more like something that could have been lifted out of the repertoire of Buck Owens. Of course Buck Owens wasn’t about to sing a song with lyrics like these:
Driving that train, high on cocaine
Casey Jones you better watch your speed
Trouble ahead, trouble behind
And you know that notion just crossed my mind
Like “Dupree’s Diamond Blues,” the Hunter-Garcia “Casey Jones” put a new spin on an old story, and actually blended two different song streams from the oral tradition. As Garcia explained, “There’s a whole tradition of cocaine songs—‘Cocaine’s for horses, not for men / Doctors say it’ll kill you, but they don’t say when’; they have lyrics like that. Then there’s a whole group of ‘Casey Jones’ songs, so we thought it would be fun to combine these two traditional ideas and put them into one song.” It was more than coincidence that the song was written at a time when cocaine first started to turn up in the Dead’s scene with some regularity, though at first the white powder was regarded more as simply a pleasant pick-me-up to be enjoyed when it was around, rather than as an essential tool for surviving the rigors of the road, as it was viewed later. And while the straight media were scandalized by the song’s supposed glorification of cocaine—Hunter acknowledged he put cocaine in a “lightly romanticized context”—the lyrics reveal that it is a cautionary fable, not an endorsement of the drug. After all, Hunter’s Casey Jones character, like the real early-twentieth-century figure all the tradition’s songs are based upon—John Luther Jones of Cayce, Kentucky—dies in a train wreck.
“I always thought it’s a pretty good musical picture of what cocaine is like—a little bit evil, and hard-edged,” Garcia said. “And also that sing-songy thing, because that’s what it is, a sing-songy thing, a little melody that gets in your head.”
The third Hunter-Garcia song introduced that spring was the most hard-core country of them all, the exquisite, melancholy ballad “High Time.” Musically, the song could have come from any one of the top Nashville or Bakersfield writers of the day, but lyrically it was much more complex than it appeared on the surface, with its deft intermingling of past, present and future, anticipation and regret, clarity and confusion. Garcia once complained that he wasn’t a good enough singer to do the song justice; nevertheless, it became one of the group’s most successful live songs in mid-’69, a plaintive little Patsy Cline saloon break in the midst of the band’s nightly journeys through distant nebula and intricate psychedelic dreamscapes. The Dead in the second half of 1969 were really three bands in one—the jamming band that stretched in every conceivable musical direction in search of new sounds, new musical shapes and uncharted emotional terrain; the funky R&B machine that took over when Pigpen strutted the stage during the group’s extended workouts on “Love Light” and “Hard to Handle”; and the country band that sparkled on the short, punchy new Hunter-Garcia originals and Weir-sung tunes like John Phillips’s “Me and My Uncle” (actually a Dead staple since ’66), the traditional song “Slewfoot,” the Springfields’ “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” and Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried.”
The Dead’s turn toward country coincided with (but was not necessarily influenced by) a movement in that direction in rock music as a whole. Near the end of 1968 the Rolling Stones released Beggar’s Banquet, which contained a big dollop of country blues. The Byrds had ambled down a country road during Gram Parsons’s brief tenure with the band; he and Chris Hillman then split off from the Byrds to form the countrified Flying Burrito Brothers. Bob Dylan emerged from the symbolist forest he’d created on John Wesley Harding and simplified his sound to cut Nashville Skyline. Poco had risen out of the ashes of the original country-rock band, Buffalo Springfield, and immediately developed a strong hippie following. In mid-1969 another Springfield alumnus, Stephen Stills, got together with another ex-Byrd, David Crosby, and former Hollies singer Graham Nash to form the mainly acoustic trio Crosby, Stills and Nash. They recor
ded an album that fairly glistened with bright harmonies and warm, acoustic textures, and had a deep impact on many bands, the Dead included. In fact, Crosby and Stills spent a lot of time around the Dead scene during 1969, mainly at Mickey Hart’s ranch, and the band often credited those two with influencing them to spend more time working on their harmony singing, which had never been the band’s strong suit, to put it kindly.
“They had listened to us a lot,” Crosby said, “and they liked what happened when three-part harmony went over a good track. It’s very generous of them to credit us with it, but we never sat down with them in a room and said, ‘Okay, now, you sing this, you sing this.’ That never happened. Those guys are brilliant. They knew exactly what they were doing, and they evolved their own version of it. They just credited us to be nice.”
Of course Garcia had strong country inflections in both his singing and playing dating back to his folk and bluegrass days, but in March of 1969 he took it a step further when he bought a Zane-Beck (ZB) pedal steel guitar in Denver during the band’s spring tour. Garcia had owned a Fender pedal steel back in 1966, but at that point he found it too complicated to set up and too difficult to find time to learn how to play, so he sold his instrument to Banana (Lowell Levenger) of the Youngbloods. When the Dead returned to California after the tour, Garcia took the pedal steel to the band’s rehearsal hall in Novato and began teaching himself the rudiments of the instrument. Interestingly, in the mid-’60s and early ’70s there were a number of city-bred banjo pickers who took up pedal steel, including Eric Weissberg, Winnie Winston, Tony Trischka, Mayne Smith and, perhaps most notably, Bill Keith, who had been one of Garcia’s major banjo influences.
Garcia: An American Life Page 27