“So I went down there and it was a lot of fun,” Kahn said. “I met Garcia and we became friends right away. Of course I’d heard the Dead quite a bit, but I can’t say I was really a fan or anything. I’d been around them some. I lived in the Haight and was at their house a couple of times. But I didn’t know their music very well and I didn’t know much about how Garcia played. I didn’t know what kind of music he and Wales would be playing down at the Matrix when I went down. And I still don’t know! It was kind of a weird jazz with these other influences—it was mainly Howard’s music, all instrumental.
“We played Monday nights there for a while, and for the longest time, hardly anybody would show up,” Kahn continued. “We’d get ten people and split ten dollars four ways at the end of the night. We played there for something like six months but people just didn’t seem interested, or maybe they didn’t even know about it. After a while people did start to come. It got to be . . . ‘crowded’ might be stretching things a bit—and this place was the size of a living room. Maybe even ‘full’ isn’t accurate. Let’s say ‘not empty.’”
For Garcia, the attraction was being able to play in a more relaxed context than the Grateful Dead offered, and a chance to branch out in directions he’d never pursued before. Wales was a serious player, and Garcia had to work hard to follow him. “[Kahn] and I would plug in and play with Howard and spend all night muttering to each other, ‘What key are we in?’” Garcia said. “Howard was so incredible, and we were just hanging on for dear life. For some reason Howard enjoyed playing with us, but we were just keeping up. Howard was so outside. For both of us that was a wonderful experience. . . . Playing with Howard did more for my ears than anybody I ever played with because he was so extended and so different. His approach was all extensions and very keyboardistic; not guitaristic.”
Sometime in April 1970, a few songs from Workingman’s Dead filtered out to FM radio stations in advance of the album’s release, and the response was both immediate and enthusiastic—the Dead had a bona fide hit on their hands. “Uncle John’s Band” and “Casey Jones” were the tracks that made the initial splash—they were many people’s introduction to the music of the Grateful Dead. By 1970, most young people who liked rock ’n’ roll were at least aware of the Grateful Dead—they were more famous than they were popular—though they hadn’t sold many records or appeared on any of the big television programs that showcased rock bands, such as The Ed Sullivan Show or the much hipper Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. (In mid-1969 the Dead had gotten their only major national TV exposure when they played “Saint Stephen” and “Mountains of the Moon” on Hugh Hefner’s Playboy After Dark, amid buxom women in miniskirts and young men who looked as if they’d learned about hip fashion from watching The Mod Squad. In grand Prankster tradition, someone from the Dead crew dosed many of the drinks on the faux bachelor pad set with LSD, leading to some strange times for the “party” guests after the taping was done.) The Dead were known far and wide as the band that just might play all night when they came to your town or college campus; the band that had been at Monterey and Woodstock (and Altamont); the band that was the living embodiment of that undefinable yet still compelling San Francisco spirit of the late ’60s—high times, free concerts, a sense of family. And now they had a record filled with these catchy, instantly accessible songs that anyone could sing along with without having to wade through lengthy guitar solos and feedback.
The album contained only eight songs—“Uncle John’s Band,” “High Time,” “Dire Wolf,” “New Speedway Boogie,” “Cumberland Blues,” “Black Peter,” “Easy Wind” and “Casey Jones.” But each song was its own world, with a distinct tone and texture, and the cumulative effect of the tunes was powerful indeed. Hunter had drawn flesh-and-blood characters who possessed feelings and frailties anyone could relate to. The great paradox of Workingman’s Dead is that lyrically it’s a very dark record—filled with death, despair and hopelessness—yet the music is uplifting, even joyful. (In this way it shared a common characteristic of many bluegrass recordings.) It’s an album full of images of man’s insignificance in the face of nature’s power and mysteries, while at the same time it celebrates the dignity and humanity of the poor beleaguered souls who populate Hunter’s universe. There’s something vaguely familiar about the music, but it never quite falls into any definable style.
“The album was a tremendous joy,” Garcia commented. “Being able to do that was extremely positive in the midst of all this adverse stuff that was happening [with Lenny Hart]. It definitely was an upper. We were getting far into our own thing, without really a gallery to play to, or an audience to interact with. It’s just us, bouncing off each other. It was the first record that we made together as a group, all of us. Everybody contributed beautifully and it came off really nicely. That was also our first really together effort at having our songs be groovy and everything; the whole thing.”
Though the record was unquestionably a group effort, Garcia was clearly the dominant figure on the album—he co-wrote seven of the eight songs, sang lead on five and shared the lead with Weir and Lesh on two others. Coming on the heels of Aoxomoxoa, where Garcia was the main singer and songwriter, and Live Dead, which showed off his instrumental prowess (as well as the other players’, but the lead guitarist usually gets more of the glory), Workingman’s Dead affirmed the popular perception of Garcia as the de facto leader of the group. He was the personable storyteller onstage, rarely speaking, but singing Hunter’s tales in a plaintive tenor that seemed to owe more to bluegrass great Ralph Stanley than to any pop singers; and offstage, Garcia was the thoughtful, funny and usually articulate spokesperson for the band, doing most of the press interviews, which became more numerous after the surprising success of Workingman’s Dead. In a sense, Garcia’s stage persona was a figment of Robert Hunter’s imagination. But it could also be argued that the reason Garcia could sing Hunter’s lyrics so convincingly and surround those words with music that matched the sentiments of the songs so beautifully was that he and Hunter fundamentally agreed about so many things that Hunter could truly function as Garcia’s poetic alter ego. Hunter voluntarily subsumed some of his own ego to give a voice to Garcia:
“I have to smile when someone, with the best of intentions, tells me I’m as much a part of the band as any of the musicians,” Hunter mused a year after Garcia’s death. “Ever hear of lost-wax casting? The wax mold is melted away leaving only the casting. That is, I found through long experience, the proper stance for a writer of words in a musical situation. If you think of the writer when the singer is singing, something is wrong with the words.”
Warner Bros. Records was understandably excited by the overwhelmingly positive response to Workingman’s Dead when the album was released in May, and they tried to boost the record’s fortunes by releasing a single version of “Uncle John’s Band” to AM radio stations. There were a couple of problems with that choice, however. At four minutes and thirty seconds, the song was too long for most AM stations. And, even worse, there was a troublesome word in the third verse: “Goddamn, well I declare / Have you seen the like?” Warner Bros. engineers awkwardly deleted the offending phrase and also eliminated one chorus and truncated another in an effort to make the single more radio-friendly.
“I gave them instructions on how to properly edit it,” an exasperated Garcia said in late 1970, “and they garbled it so completely and we didn’t get a chance to hear it until way late, and it was—oh fuck, what an atrocity!” In the same interview, Garcia admitted his ambivalence about striving for a hit: “It would be nice to have a single, but a hit single usually means twelve-year-old audiences.”
“Uncle John’s Band” stayed on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for seven weeks in the summer of 1970, making it to as high as number 69, which sounds fairly impressive but probably is more a reflection of Warner Bros. promo men doggedly “working” the record than actual sales. The unclipped album version received much more airplay than the single, and t
he feared influx of twelve-year-olds never materialized.
The Dead also ran into trouble on the radio with “Casey Jones,” because of the song’s repeated references to cocaine. Actually, cocaine was barely a factor in the underground at the time—it was rarely seen outside of rock ’n’ roll backstages, and even there it wasn’t nearly as common as it would become in the mid- and late ’70s. But drug references of any kind in songs—even cautionary ones like this one was meant to be—were considered to be endorsements of drug abuse by the virulently anti-hippie Nixon White House, and many radio stations chose not to play “Casey Jones,” fearing retaliation by reactionary minions from the FCC. This wasn’t exactly news: There were countless songs in the late ’60s that drew fire from government and church leaders for allegedly promoting drugs, including such mainstream favorites as the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High,” the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends” and Donovan’s scandalous “Mellow Yellow” (“E-lec-trical banana, is gonna be a sudden craze”). As is usually the case with these sorts of controversies, the notoriety associated with the attempts to censor “Casey Jones” probably ended up helping the Dead rather than hurting them. After all, being a thorn in the side of Nixon was a badge of honor in the counterculture, and anything that shook up the straight, pro–Vietnam War “establishment” was regarded as a noble act of counterinsurgency.
Not that the Dead ever endorsed any particular political agenda or had any real interest in confronting the status quo. The group’s “political statement,” such as it was, was an extension of the Beat imperative to live an honest and soulful life free of the unreasonable dictates of disapproving moralists—“Here’s who we are. This is how we’re going to live our lives. Join us, or leave us alone.” The Dead’s staunch apoliticism actually put them in a weird position in the counterculture. Although the band had impeccable “underground” credentials because of their lifestyle, they refused to support the radical Left’s ideology and confrontational protest methods, and so were dismissed by some for being spaced-out hedonists. True enough from one point of view, yet from another the Dead’s whole enterprise could be seen as even more radical.
“On the West Coast it’s already so crazy you can’t believe it, with courtroom bombings and all that going on,” Garcia said in 1970. “But, see, everybody’s had a chance to look at it, step away from it, and that isn’t it—fighting and hassling and bloodletting and killings and all that shit; that ain’t it. Whatever life’s about, that’s not it.
“I think everybody should take one step backwards and two steps sideways, and let the whole thing collapse. Nobody vote, nobody work—let it collapse. You don’t have to break things and fuck things up and kill people and make all those people uptight.”
In another interview, from early 1971, Garcia noted, “Everything is going to pieces on the one hand, and everything is coming together on the other hand. I think that the revolution is over, and what’s left is mop-up action. It’s a matter of the news getting out to everybody else. I think that the important changes have already happened—changes in consciousness.”
Music, he believed, was also an agent in the changes happening in the culture. “It could be that music is one of those things left that isn’t completely devoid of meaning. Talk—like politics—has been made meaningless by the endless repetition of lies. There is no longer any substance in it. You listen to a politician making a speech, and it’s like hearing nothing. Whereas music is unmistakably music. The thing about music is that nobody listens to it unless it’s real. . . . Music goes back before language does. And music is like the key to a whole spiritual existence which this society doesn’t even talk about. We know it’s there. The Grateful Dead plays at the religious services of the new age. Everybody gets high, and that’s what it’s about really. Getting high is a lot more real than listening to a politician. You can think that geting high actually did happen—that you danced and got sweaty, and carried on. It really did happen. I know when it happens. I know when it happens every time.”
Despite their dislike of any sort of organized political activity, the Dead occasionally turned up unannounced at events that had political overtones. On May 6, 1970, they played a free concert in Kresge Plaza at MIT to show their support for a nationwide campus strike protesting the killing by National Guard troops of four protesters at Kent State University in Ohio. The group also expressed some admiration for the Oakland-based Black Panther Party, whom Garcia described in the fall of 1970 as “righteous. They have a rhetoric trip going on, but what they’re doing is actual, practical things. They’ve got a free breakfast trip, and they’re starting a free shoes thing—they’re starting shoe factories and stuff like that. . . . We don’t have any affiliations with any specific organizations, but if there’s a righteous [benefit to play], no matter who’s doing it, we’ll do it. If it avoids bureaucracy and bullshit and goes right to something, we’ll do it. That’s the sort of thing we’re interested in.” (Garcia’s support for the Panthers cooled significantly as the radical group’s posturing became increasingly militant.)
* * *
Ever since the Dead’s planned European tour in the spring of 1968 had fallen apart, the group had been looking for ways to go overseas, and for a while it looked as though they might be able to ride the success of Workingman’s Dead across the Atlantic. As the New Riders’ David Nelson said, “Originally, Sam Cutler was telling us that he was setting up this big tour of Europe. It was going to be the Dead, the New Riders, the Jefferson Airplane, any good San Francisco bands he could get, and we were all going to go over on a big ocean liner; it would be a big party boat. There were all these meetings, like a big one at Jerry’s house in Larkspur where we all talked about getting passport photos taken and all. There were all sorts of changes, though, and it ended up being all these bands going across Canada on a train. We were disappointed we didn’t get to go to Europe then, but the train was just fabulous. It couldn’t have been any better.”
The “Festival Express” train trip in late June and early July 1970 was definitely a career high point for the Dead, though it lasted less than a week. In its own way it was as special as their trip to Europe two years later, or even their trek to the Great Pyramid in the fall of 1978. The concept was simple: put a bunch of bands on a train and roll across Canada, playing twelve-hour festivals in a few key cities. On this rollicking journey the Dead were in splendid company; among the performers joining them were the New Riders, Janis Joplin’s Full-Tilt Boogie Band, the Band, Mountain, Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, Chicago bluesman Buddy Guy, folksingers Tom Rush and Eric Anderson, and Ian and Sylvia’s country-folk band, Great Speckled Bird. The twelve-coach train had a tiny sleeping compartment for each person on board, a dining car, a lounge and two club cars that were filled with amplifiers and musical instruments for impromtu jam sessions. In the original vision of the Festival Express there were to be five stops on a trip that was supposed to end in Vancouver, but due to financial and logistical problems the Express ended in Calgary, on the east side of the snowcapped Canadian Rockies, and the musicians went their separate ways from there.
The week started out on a down note. In Toronto, a coalition of students and street people calling themselves the May 4th Movement (or M4M), after the date of the Kent State killings, threatened to disrupt the festival, which they called the Rip-off Express. In a letter to the Canadian organizers of the train trip, the M4M’s leaders wrote, “We demand that the Transcontinental (Rip-off) Express be free for everyone and all tickets be refunded; there be free food, dope and music for all the people there, with no cops. Failing these totally reasonable and just demands, we demand that 20 percent of the gate receipts be returned to the community. . . .”
The first show, at the Canadian National Exhibition Hall in Toronto, was marred by a violent assault by nearly 2,500 people trying to break into the concert, resulting in numerous injuries and arrests. According to David Dalton and Jonathan Cott’s detailed account of the trip in
Rolling Stone, “Jerry Garcia had helped cool things down by setting up a free festival at nearby Coronation Park, where the Dead, Purple Sage, Ian and Sylvia, James and the Good Brothers, and the People’s Revolutionary Concert Band played to 4,000 kids the first day and 500 the second day.” The first day’s performance at the CNE was also marred by a stream of people climbing onto the stage and trying to make political announcements. At one point, Dalton and Cott wrote, “a kid came onstage and pointed to each member of the Dead and shouted, ‘You’re all phonies—you and you and you . . .’”
The M4M’s campaign against the festival, and the attendant fear of violence, kept the crowds lower than expected in Toronto, and probably affected attendance at the other stops as well. But once the train left Toronto Coach Yard heading west, the party began in earnest. Because the Canadian border customs inspections were so rigorous, the musicians were afraid to bring dope into the country, so this trip was fueled by alcohol, lots of it.
“The train ride across Canada was just like one crazy party,” John Dawson said. “I remember the times on the train a lot more than I remember the shows. It was just crazy. I remember that the only time I ever saw Garcia smashed on tequila was on that trip. It was a rare occasion indeed. We all got completely smashed on Cuervo Gold, and then he and Janis Joplin and me and Rick Danko and a couple of other people broke out our guitars and sang ‘No More Cane on the Brazos’ [a venerable Texas blues/worksong] until three or four in the morning as this train sped across Canada. Danko kept making up verse after verse. He just couldn’t be stopped. Garcia and I were falling all over the place laughing.”
Garcia: An American Life Page 31