Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  “We were into a much more relaxed thing about that time,” he said in another interview. “And we were also out of our pretentious thing. We weren’t feeling so much like an experimental music group, but were feeling more like a good old band.”

  That’s when they were playing music. Offstage, there were big problems. There was the New Orleans bust hanging over their heads—jail was not inconceivable—and while they were recording Workingman’s Dead they discovered that Lenny Hart had been stealing from them.

  Road manager Jonathan Reister says he was the first to raise the red flag about Lenny, but that his warnings had been ignored and, in fact, others had sided with Mickey’s father, ultimately leading to Reister’s departure from the Dead scene. Still, the band recognized that the financial end of the operation was in such disarray that they needed some help from the outside. Well, sort of “outside”: Dave Parker and his wife, Bonnie, friends of the the band from the Palo Alto days, had hooked up with Garcia again in December 1969, and even stayed with Jerry and Mountain Girl in Larkspur for a couple of weeks. Bonnie had accounting experience and David was a bright guy, so when suspicions arose about Lenny, Garcia hired them to work for the Dead. Around the same time, the Dead hired the Stones’ road manager, Sam Cutler, to replace Jonathan Reister, and he, too, was involved in the investigation of Lenny Hart’s financial shenanigans.

  The Parkers’ first order of business was to establish the Dead’s true financial status, which was difficult because Lenny Hart would not cooperate with them. “Coming in, there was a feeling of suspicion that something was not quite right, but people didn’t know for sure,” Parker says. “I was starting from a set of books that Lenny Hart had kept in pencil, so it was very convenient to erase and change things. We had to struggle and scuffle just to get the books from him in order to start doing the job. He was reluctant to give them up. The bank account was practically empty and here was this dubious set of books. So finally I went to a lawyer and an accountant. Some suspicious entries were found and it actually resulted in an embezzlement charge [later].”

  When it became clear that Lenny had doctored the books and taken an estimated $70,000 to $100,000 from the band, they confronted him with the information and Hart promised to pay back the money. Instead, after putting down $10,000, he disappeared, but not before stealing more of the group’s money. “When he ran off on us,” Rock Scully said, “he’d just gone to L.A. with Garcia to negotiate for music in Zabriskie Point [Michelangelo Antonioni’s muddled “youth” film]. Well, he just took the check and split. We found out he had eleven accounts spread out through California.”

  The theft put the Dead in an even more precarious financial position. Dave Parker remembers that “there was no money to buy plane tickets for the next gig, so we had to borrow that from the booking agent so they could even get out to start earning some money. It was quite a blow coming just after the bust and having it be not just a manager, but Mickey’s father.”

  We’ll probably never know the true extent of the psychic damage Lenny’s grand larceny had on his son, but it’s probably not a coincidence that at the end of 1970 Mickey dropped out of the group for the next five years. “Mickey was dismayed,” Garcia said. “He’d never expected anything like that, of course. He knew his father had been into shady trips before, but he thought he was reformed, just like we all did. He was really shocked, and he was right with us about our decision to get rid of Lenny.”

  In retrospect, it’s remarkable the Dead could keep their minds on playing music during this weird time, but as Mickey himself pointed out, the band’s business problems were a distraction “only when we came off the road. Not when we were out there, certainly, because we were flyin’. When the music’s going, all is well. When the music stops and you come home, that’s when art meets reality.”

  * * *

  In December 1969 the band had experimented at a few shows by opening their concerts with a short set played on acoustic instruments, and in the winter and spring of 1970 this concept was expanded. This proved to be a format that was suitable not just for some of the band’s new acoustic guitar–based songs, like “Dire Wolf,” “Uncle John’s Band” and “Black Peter,” but also for a wide range of cover tunes, from traditional pieces like “Little Sadie,” “Deep Elem Blues” and “I Know You Rider” (which the Dead also played electric, connected to “China Cat Sunflower”) to numbers like the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie” and Jesse Fuller’s “The Monkey and the Engineer.” The sets were loose enough that sometimes only Garcia and Weir would play on a tune. Other times they’d be joined by Lesh on bass, or Pigpen might sing a song like Lightnin’ Hopkins’s “Katie Mae” solo, with just his own guitar accompaniment. It was almost like sitting around a living room with the musicians—they’d joke around between songs, banter with the audience, play whatever struck their fancy.

  Garcia introduced two new songs in the acoustic sets during this period. “Candyman” was another Hunter-Garcia variation on a familiar song theme—there were sexually suggestive “Candyman” songs in the blues tradition dating back to the nineteenth century, and Mississippi John Hurt had a popular fingerpicking song by that name in the late ’20s, which he revived when he was rediscovered in the early ’60s. The music for Garcia’s “Candyman” sounded as if it had been pulled off a piano roll from some dusty, smoke-filled Western saloon, and Hunter’s words matched that mood perfectly:

  Come all you pretty women

  With your hair hanging down

  Open up your windows ’cause

  The Candyman’s in town.

  Come on, boys, and gamble

  Roll those laughing bones

  Seven come eleven, boys

  I’ll take your money home

  The other song was one that Hunter had actually started writing with John Dawson and intended for the New Riders of the Purple Sage. “Friend of the Devil” was a brisk little bluegrass-flavored tune about a desperado on the lam (“trailed by twenty hounds”) who borrows twenty dollars from the devil, only to have the devil take it back later, leaving our hero (?) still running from the law, crying his lonely nights away as he dreams of both his “sweet Anne Marie” and the prospect of a life behind bars. As Dawson recalls, “Hunter came over to our house with the germ of the idea that became ‘Friend of the Devil.’ He had that great opening guitar part, but that’s as far as he’d gotten. I came up with the melody for the hook: ‘Set out runnin’ but I take my time / Friend of the Devil is a friend of mine / If I get home before daylight / I just might get some sleep tonight.’ We thought we had a complete song. But he took it back home to Garcia’s house, where he was also living, and played it for Jerry and said, ‘Well, what do you think?’ Jerry said, ‘It’s nice, but it needs a bridge,’ so Hunter got busy and scribbled out some more words and Jerry wrote the bridge. Garcia ended up liking the song so much that he immediately put it in their set. That was fine with me, because he sang it well and the song I’d helped write had grown up and found a nice home.”

  That spring, the Dead and the New Riders went on their first East Coast tour together, and it was a tremendous success from every standpoint. First of all, because the Dead were traveling with their own opening act, they were able to play concerts with no other group on the bill, so they could play longer sets and not have to worry about clearing another group’s equipment from the stage before they went on.

  “That first tour was fabulous,” Dawson says. “We had a built-in friendly crowd waiting for us—‘Wow, what’s this new thing that Garcia’s up to?’ When Alanna [Dawson’s wife of many years] was first getting into it, she asked somebody, ‘So who are the New Riders?’ And the guy told her, ‘Oh, they’re the guys who come on before the Dead and make everybody feel good.’ I’ll take that. That’s great. That kind of sums it up. We were there to get people goin’ and feelin’ good, and then the Grateful Dead could go ahead and do their weirdness and all that.”

  There was definitely something w
arm and reassuring about the New Riders in the early days. Part of it really was just the sight of Garcia sitting at the pedal steel, picking out melodies that were sweet as molasses, and Phil thundering beneath the songs, playing simpler but still distinctive bass lines. But David Nelson was also a master of twangy Bakersfield-style electric guitar, and Dawson—or Marmaduke, as he was called—was a genial and engaging frontman in his cowboy hat and boots, kind of a Marin hippie on the range. And Dawson’s early songs were catchy and compelling, from his bouncy ode to dope smuggling, “Henry,” to mooning love ballads like “All I Ever Wanted” and “Portland Woman,” to his grand saga of treachery and disaster, “Dirty Business,” which featured Garcia playing wonderfully distorted pedal steel. The Riders also played some neat cover tunes, like “Truck Driving Man” and their usual set-closer, a countrified but still rocking version of the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women.” The band particularly struck a chord on the East Coast, which was fast becoming the Dead’s most lucrative market.

  “I guess we represented something to East Coast people that was missing from their lives,” Dawson suggests. “Maybe some of it was our disregard for the harsh realities of day-to-day life, which are always right in your face in the East, especially in New York City. Here we were coming in with a devil-may-care attitude and all those guys [in the audience] were having to work for a living, having to do the day-to-day grind and worry about what’s happening on the FDR [Drive] or what’s happening on the West Side [Highway]. We were high and obviously having a great time and doing what we liked and playing this stuff that everybody had sort of heard before, but it didn’t sound like that crap that was on the radio. It was familiar but still different and new.”

  From the second half of 1969 all the way through 1970, Garcia lent his unique pedal steel touch to a number of different albums that were recorded in the Bay Area. His steel appeared on a song called “The Farm” on the Jefferson Airplane’s superb record Volunteers. He played on a few tracks by a group called Lamb, one song on It’s a Beautiful Day’s Marrying Maiden album and one on the Kansas City–based duo Brewer and Shipley’s Tarkio. (Contrary to popular myth at the time, Garcia did not play on their hit “One Toke Over the Line.”) And in early 1970 he laid down what is probably, to this day, his most-heard solo—the steel break in “Teach Your Children,” on Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s mega-selling Déjà Vu album.

  Around the same time that CSNY were finishing up their album, the Airplane’s Paul Kantner was busy at Heider’s working on what would become his first solo album, Blows Against the Empire, and he enlisted Garcia to play steel and some electric guitar on several songs.

  “Jerry was doing a lot of pedal steel for people around that time, experimenting, and so we let him be on it; he was overjoyed,” Kantner says. “So he went in and just experimented with sounds, seeing what kind of sounds he could get out of it, running it through various pedals and echoes and delays. We gave him a free hand, which made him happy. Before that he’d pretty much just been doing country licks on the steel, and this gave him the opportunity to get a little weirder, which he always appreciated.”

  Blows Against the Empire was one of the most interesting records to come out of San Francisco in that era, more a work of modern folk music than a rock ’n’ roll album, and the first of several Bay Area projects that used members of several of the top local groups as a “cast” of players, rather than featuring a fixed band. From the Airplane, there was Kantner, Slick, Jack Casady (playing perhaps the most sonically intense bass lines of his career) and drummer Joey Covington. From the Dead, Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart appeared on various tracks. Graham Nash and David Crosby sang backup vocals, and Crosby also helped write a couple of tunes. Quicksilver’s David Freiberg began his long musical association with Kantner and Slick at these sessions; he later played in the Jefferson Starship with them. It was a vibrant and uplifting record that unabashedly celebrated hippie idealism through an elaborate science fiction fantasy story.

  “It’s about us—me and Jerry Garcia and David Crosby—stealing a starship; hijacking a spaceship, going where whoever comes along wants to go,” Kantner said in 1970. “It’d be the rock ’n’ roll groups—us, the Dead, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Quicksilver—being part of the plan to take all the millions that they earn from rock ’n’ roll, buying an island in the Pacific or somewhere and setting Owsley up with a lot of bread and a lot of equipment. . . . If you gave him $50 billion and an island and a machine shop, he’d have the starship together in less than a year.” In Kantner’s vividly told tale, hippies escape from Earth to live idyllically in the outer reaches of the galaxy, where they tend hydroponic gardens, enjoy free music, take acid and make love, merging blissfully with the universe.

  Derided by some as stoned hippie ravings run amok, Blows Against the Empire was nonetheless embraced by freaks from coast to coast, and it was certainly more compelling than the Airplane’s rather disjointed next album, Bark, made without Marty Balin.

  Garcia’s playing on the record is both imaginative and impeccably tasteful throughout, from the aching cry of his steel on “Have You Seen the Stars Tonite?” which beautifully evokes the feeling of a starcruiser drifting through limitless space, to the round but wiry tones of his electric guitar work dancing spryly all through “Starship.” Garcia also received a co-writing credit (with Kantner, Mickey Hart and Phil Sawyer) on a noisy instrumental interlude called “XM,” which simulates the sound of a rocket blasting off using feedback, white noise, distorted gongs and multiple Garcia pedal steel tracks drenched in crackling fuzz and distortion.

  As if playing gigs with the Dead and the New Riders and working in the studio with virtually anyone who asked wasn’t enough, Garcia also managed to find the time to bop down regularly to the Matrix club to jam with a local keyboardist named Howard Wales and drummer Bill Vitt.

  Wales was a Wisconsin native who had played and toured mainly with R&B performers like Ronnie Hawkins, Little Anthony and the Imperials, the Four Tops, the Coasters, Freddy King and James Brown. He’d jammed with rockers like Harvey Mandel and Jimi Hendrix, and when he moved to the Bay Area in 1968 he formed a moderately popular band called A.B. Skhy. Along the way Wales absorbed quite a bit of jazz, too, and he was one of the first rock/R&B keyboardists to try blending the different styles into something new. Certainly, jazz-fusion, as it became known, was in the air in 1970—that was the year of Miles Davis’s seminal Bitches Brew band, who opened for the Dead at the Fillmore in April and were so hot the Dead felt positively humbled.

  Vitt was another seasoned pro with a background that included a three-year stretch as a session drummer in the highly competitive Los Angeles studio scene in the mid-’60s, and a stint playing with Michael Bloomfield after the guitarist’s group the Electric Flag broke up.

  “Originally it was Howard and me playing at the Matrix on Fillmore, just the two of us, very informally,” Vitt says. “Then we added a couple of pieces and Jerry was one of the guys. It was a neat little club. It was all listening; nobody danced. Howard had known Jerry before, so he started coming down and jamming with us, and it got to be a regular thing for a while.”

  “The Matrix was always like a king-sized jam session,” Wales adds. “We had all sorts of people coming in and out—Elvin Bishop, Harvey Mandel and Jerry, of course; anybody who was around there came down to play. Mostly it was just jamming and free-form spontaneity. And there were some incredible nights there. Later it solidified and we played more of my own material, but in the beginning it was real loose.”

  Sometimes Wales, Garcia and Vitt played as a trio, other times a bassist would sit in; the first bassist Vitt brought down to work with the group was a symphony player named Richard Favis. When he dropped out, he was replaced by another Bloomfield band alumnus named John Kahn, who would become one of Jerry’s closest musical partners over the next twenty-five years.

  The lanky, laconic Kahn had been raised in Beverly Hills, the son of a respected Hollyw
ood talent agent who died when John was five. Kahn’s mother stayed in the business and became a successful agent herself, so John was brought up around the movies. “I remember spending a lot of time around the 20th Century-Fox lot as a kid,” Kahn said. “It was pretty boring, actually. But one thing that came out of it was Marilyn Monroe baby-sat for me a couple of times. That was cool.”

  He studied piano and music theory while he was still in grade school, and in high school he added rock ’n’ roll guitar to his arsenal. “But then I got heavily into listening to jazz and all of a sudden all I wanted to do was be a jazz string bass player and listen to jazz records all the time,” he said. “I loved Scotty La Faro and the Bill Evans Trio, and I also listened to a lot of Ornette Coleman and Coltrane. So I took up the string bass and studied classical music quite a bit.”

  After high school, Kahn attended the University of Southern California for a semester, then transferred to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in late 1966. Gradually Kahn became somewhat disenchanted with jazz, and he started drifting into the rock ’n’ roll world that was exploding all around him. In 1967 a roommate offered him a job as bassist in a rock cover band, so Kahn traded in his electric guitar for an electric bass, and he emulated the great R&B and blues players of the day—James Jamerson, Hamp Simmons (of Bobby “Blue” Bland’s band), Duck Dunn and Chuck Rainey, to name a few. “Another guy who influenced me was Paul McCartney,” he said. Over the next couple of years Kahn played in several different groups, including two that he led, Memory Pain and the Tits and Ass Rhythm and Blues Band. He met and jammed with Steve Miller and Michael Bloomfield during this period, and, suddenly brimming with confidence, he went to Chicago to try to land a job with Paul Butterfield’s band. When that fell through Kahn returned to San Francisco and started playing with Bloomfield and doing session work in studios around town. It was Bill Vitt who invited Kahn down to the Matrix for one of Wales’s Monday night jam sessions.