Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  Shortly after Joplin’s death, Garcia commented, “It was just an accident, a dumb fucking accident. [Accidents] happen to everybody—driving a car or walking down a flight of stairs. You see, the payoff for life is death. You die at the end of your life, and it’s always appropriate in the sense that no matter how you die, that’s it, you’re dead. So it really doesn’t matter how or when; that’s not part of the statement. The statement was the life, the death was the close. I’d describe Janis’s life as a good one because she went out when she was happy. She was happy with her new band, happy with her material, she was happy with what she was doing. She was singing better than ever.”

  Though of course Garcia felt personally sad to see his old friend die, he said that “Janis would’ve preferred for people to be partying rather than for it be a downer. I can dig that.”

  The Dead put the finishing touches on American Beauty in late September and early October 1970. Though the basic tracks were cut live, there were a number of instrumental overdubs by the band—electric and pedal steel guitars, piano parts by Garcia and Lesh—and several guest musicians helped out: Howard Wales played organ on “Truckin’” and “Candyman,” and piano on “Brokedown Palace”; a friend of Phil’s named Ned Lagin contributed piano to “Candyman”; David Nelson played electric guitar on “Box of Rain,” and the bass on that track was by the man who replaced Phil Lesh as bassist in the New Riders at the end of 1970, David Torbert. This record also marked the first real collaboration between Garcia and David Grisman—his mandolin brightened up two songs, “Ripple” and “Friend of the Devil.”

  “I was in this [East Coast–based] band, Earth Opera, that was just about on its last legs,” Grisman said, “and I came to visit a friend in San Francisco, and I just bumped into Jerry at a baseball game in Fairfax, and he said, ‘Hey, you wanna play on this record we’re doing?’ So I did that session, and I just fell in love with California. I’d never really hung out in San Francisco before, and I figured, ‘Wow, I’ve been out here a day and I got hired to be on a record!’ This is the land of opportunity!”

  “Some records sort of assemble themselves,” comments engineer Steve Barncard, who ended up with a co-production credit on the album. “You do a take and everybody says, ‘Yeah, that’s it. Let’s move on,’ and everything falls into place. American Beauty was that way. It was a lot of fun; it was like no pain. Even on the vocals, which was supposed to be their weak area, they were brilliant. They walked in and just did it. People don’t believe me when I say this.”

  When American Beauty was released in November, Workingman’s Dead had only been out about six months, and progressive FM radio stations were still playing a number of different cuts from it. Then all of a sudden there was a new Dead record to play, and “Truckin’,” “Sugar Magnolia,” “Friend of the Devil” and “Ripple” became instant radio favorites. If you liked rock ’n’ roll in 1970, but didn’t like the Dead, you were out of luck, because they were inescapable that summer and fall.

  The Dead and the New Riders went on an extensive tour of the Midwest and the Northeast through most of October and November, mainly playing theaters and colleges, large and small. The Dead and colleges were a natural fit in this era: the band was popular enough to draw a good-sized crowd, but not so big that they couldn’t play a gymnasium or theater on most campuses; student activities groups had decent budgets and a mandate to book the coolest groups they could; and colleges were filled with kids hungry for action and excitement of every variety. Who knows how many thousands of people had their first significant music, drug and sex experiences in college, safely distant from the protective and watchful gaze of Mom and Dad? As Phil Lesh said in 1970, “Colleges are like islands in the midst of occupied territory, although some of them are occupied territory. But some of them are about the only free ground there is.”

  Certainly the Dead’s reputation as rock ’n’ roll outlaws from the Wild West preceded them wherever they went, but their ubiquity on the radio lent them credibility outside of counterculture circles, too. Though together just five years, they were already widely known as “the good ol’ Grateful Dead,” their image that of high-spirited renegades who left parties in their wake wherever they went. It’s not surprising that this scared a number of promoters and local law enforcement officials. In some cities and venues, Dead shows were wide-open, anarchic fun where just about anything was allowed inside. In other cities, security forces wouldn’t let the crowd stand up and dance and would leave the auditorium lights on for the entire show so they could keep an eye on everyone, much to the Dead’s displeasure.

  In a way, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty were stalking horses for a very different-sounding touring band. Yes, the Dead usually played material from those two albums at their shows, but by no means did they suddenly turn into a group that simply regurgitated its hits, such as they were, onstage. There was still jamming galore at Dead shows, and songs like “Dark Star,” “Love Light,” “Saint Stephen” and “That’s It for the Other One” continued to occupy important slots in the repertoire. Actually, in the case of that last tune, Garcia finally dropped his “Cryptical Envelopment” section, and the band would just charge straight into Weir’s segment of the song (“Spanish lady comes to me . . .”), which became known as “The Other One.”

  Some old-time Dead fans didn’t care for the band’s turn to shorter, more country-oriented material, and stopped coming to hear the group—for them, the Dead remained frozen in time as the unpredictable fire-breathing acid band that had made Anthem of the Sun and Live Dead. But by and large the psychedelic veterans accepted this “new” Dead as a natural progression, and the more recent acidheads certainly weren’t complaining; the band still visited deep spaces, and there was a new layer of meaning with Hunter’s intriguing and quotable lyrics spilling out of the songs and jams. Hunter unleashed a flood of characters, images and feelings that added depth and weight to the Grateful Dead experience. With or without the New Riders on the bill, a Dead concert was considered the perfect setting for psychedelic adventures—long enough to contain the peak hours of an LSD, mescaline or mushroom trip; varied and unpredictable enough to be both constantly entertaining and profound; safe enough an environment that trippers could completely let go, knowing that the band was in control and that by night’s end everybody in the gym or theater would be dancing deliriously to some good-time rock ’n’ roll tunes. But whereas the 1968 Grateful Dead sound had been so dense, twisted and spacey that it didn’t attract many fans who weren’t into psychedelics or pot, anyone could dig the 1970 band. And that, as it turned out, began to cause problems for the group.

  It wasn’t just the drunk frat boys at every show who screamed out loud and long for their favorite songs—“‘Caaaasey Joooones’!” “Play ‘Truckin’’!”—not understanding that the Dead would play what they felt like playing and never took requests. Crowds became louder and ruder for a while but didn’t fundamentally change the experience of the show. The real trouble came from a rowdy and frustrated element that, unable to get tickets for sold-out concerts, crashed the gates and clashed with security guards and police—or tried to figure out ingenious ways to break or sneak into shows through windows, doors and rooftops. Some defended this activity under the old “music should be free and belong to the people, so let us in” theory, but mostly it was just kids trying to get something for nothing, acting like jerks. The Dead’s November 1970 tour was plagued by bad incidents outside their shows, and the band was understandably horrified at this turn of events.

  Even Garcia, famous for being Mr. Good Vibes in his dealings with the press, could not contain his anger. A Long Island entertainment magazine called Good Times interviewed Garcia the day after a show at Queens College where there had been a rush on the doors, and he was not in a good mood: “Last night, if that’s an example of what it’s going to be like, I’d just as soon fuckin’ retire, man. I don’t want to make any performances when there’s that kind of shit going on;
I really don’t.”

  But Garcia was also distraught about the way he personally was being treated on the East Coast now that the Dead were suddenly more popular. He had become—gasp!—a celebrity, hounded by fans every time he left his hotel room, outside gigs, backstage, everywhere. “I liked it when you could just be a musician,” he told Good Times. “It’s like being an artist or craftsman. Nobody mobs a cat that makes nice leather clothes or a guy that does woodwork. Why the fuck should they mob musicians? I mean, it’s weird.

  “I don’t really have anything to say, you know? I mean, that’s why I play. I like to avoid adding to that celebrity bullshit. I would rather be playing good music and getting off that way than having to go on all the celebrity trips.”

  Back in the Bay Area, where, as Garcia put it, he was still “just another freak,” there were a few changes afoot. “The lady who owned the Larkspur house put it on the market for $45,000, which to us seemed like an astronomical sum,” Mountain Girl says, “so we didn’t even think about buying it until it was too late. I think it was Hunter who finally suggested we buy it, so I called the landlady and said we’d like to buy it, and she told us she’d just sold it the previous day. That was my first lesson in the ‘one that got away.’ It would sell for $500,000 easy now.

  “So we looked and looked and looked for a new place and there were already hippies in all the houses and people didn’t want to rent to us—‘Forget it!’ Then we finally found this place in Novato that had been trashed by the previous renters, so we promised we’d clean it up. So we did and we moved in there for a few months and it was pretty bad; it had some bad karma.”

  The upside of this new rental was that it was located right down the hill from David Freiberg’s house in a rural part of Novato, so at least they had a neighbor they liked and could trust. Freiberg says that during this period he and Garcia often drove out to Paul Kantner and Grace Slick’s house on the beach in Bolinas, in northwestern Marin County, to get high, hang out and play music.

  Another change in Garcia’s life around this time came when he started jamming regularly with keyboardist Merl Saunders, first at the Matrix, then at a club in San Francisco called the Keystone Korner. Actually, this was an outgrowth of the Monday night jams with Howard Wales—somewhere along the line, Wales dropped out, and his spot was filled by Saunders. Garcia still played gigs with Wales from time to time, and he helped Wales make a record called Hooteroll? which came out in late 1971, but once the quartet of Garcia, Saunders, John Kahn and Bill Vitt got together, that group became Garcia’s main musical focus outside of the Dead.

  Saunders was several years older than the other guys in the quartet and was already a journeyman musician with extensive experience playing R&B, jazz, blues and standards by the time he hooked up with Garcia. “The chemistry between us was instant,” Merl says. “I’d hear Jerry playing and the music was going one way and I’d hear him sort of drifting off in this other much cooler direction, so I’d be right there with him, and we’d sort of smile at each other, like, ‘Hey, this is happenin’.’ If there’s two people going one way, even if it’s not the regular way, then there’s no mistake. And John Kahn was following along with us, too.”

  In Saunders’s memory, his first couple of Matrix gigs with Garcia and Vitt were without John Kahn and very loose. But once the quartet started playing together regularly at the Keystone Korner and the New Monk in Berkeley (later renamed the Keystone Berkeley), the music began to go in all sorts of interesting directions. Whereas the gig with Howard Wales was almost completely free-form and all instrumental, the quartet with Merl jammed out on some of his own funk-oriented original songs, Motown and R&B tunes (usually sung by Garcia) and jazz standards, which were something new for Garcia.

  “That required a whole lot of quick education for me, and Merl was responsible for that,” Garcia said. “He really helped me improve myself on a level of harmonic understanding. Playing with him required a whole different style from three-chord rock ’n’ roll or even ten-chord rock ’n’ roll; it was a whole different thing. But what I was able to bring to that situation was the ability to use odd-length runs in conventional formats. I was able to use ideas that were rhythmically uneven because of working in odd time signatures so much with the Dead.”

  Garcia said that working with Merl also taught him a great deal about musical structure: “He filled me in on all those years of things I didn’t do. I’d never played any standards; I’d never played in dance bands. I never had any approach to the world of regular, straight music. He knows all the standards, and he taught me how bebop works. He taught me music. Between the combination of Howard and Merl, that’s where I really learned music. Before it was sort of, ‘Okay, where do I plug in?’ I picked up the adult version of a music attitude from those guys.”

  In December 1970 Garcia also played several Bay Area club shows in another quartet, this one featuring Phil and Mickey from the Dead as well as David Crosby, who was busy in the fall of 1970 and winter of 1971 working on his first solo album at Wally Heider’s, with Steve Barncard engineering. Like Paul Kantner’s Blows Against the Empire, Crosby’s album, entitled If I Could Only Remember My Name, was a Bay Area all-stars project that featured most of the Dead and the Jefferson Airplane, David Freiberg, Graham Nash and Neil Young, keyboardist Gregg Rolie and drummer Michael Shrieve from Santana, and Crosby’s onetime love Joni Mitchell. In the stoned fantasies of Crosby, Kantner and Garcia, some form of this loose “supergroup”—dubbed the Planet Earth Rock ’n’ Roll Orchestra in a moment of Kantnerian grandiosity—would continue to make other records and perhaps even tour together. Night after night, different combinations of players would go into Heider’s and jam, just to see what might come of it. Sometimes the musicians would work on specific songs of Crosby’s, but they also tackled new songs by the others, a Hunter-Garcia tune called “Loser” among them. Crosby and Garcia also spent hours in the studio jamming on acoustic guitars together—Crosby said they developed a game called “bong-hit telepathy,” in which they would toke pot from a water pipe and then immediately improvise on their guitars—to sometimes inspired, sometimes fruitless results.

  The album that came out of the hundreds of hours of jamming and goofing around is surprisingly cohesive, considering how unwieldy it could have been. There’s a pleasing, mellow consistency to much of the record, and a wonderful feeling of spaciousness and sonic depth to the production, with layers of glistening six- and twelve-string acoustic guitars and sumptuous vocal harmonies dominating a series of dreamlike soundscapes. There’s a bit of flashy electric interplay on “Cowboy Movie” and “What Are Their Names” (a song credited to Crosby, Garcia, Lesh, Michael Shrieve and Neil Young), and the gorgeous song “Laughing” contains what is perhaps Garcia’s most evocative recorded pedal steel guitar performance. Garcia also rips through an intense electric guitar solo on the otherwise placid “Song With No Words (Tree With No Leaves).” Crosby’s record, like Blows Against the Empire before it, was attacked by some for its loose hippie vibe when it was released in mid-1971, but those critics overlooked the care that went into its construction and the amazing presence of all the instruments and voices. It was beautifully recorded by Barncard, and despite the lengthy roster of players, it never sounded cluttered for a second.

  In Rolling Stone’s 1970 year-end issue, the editors named the Grateful Dead “Band of the Year” and also, with tongue partly in cheek, called Garcia the year’s “Working-Class Hero.” They included a picture of him standing in front of an old Bentley he owned, a big smile on his face. Actually, the Dead were working-class heroes then—famous for delivering long concerts, playing benefits and free shows (though not many of the latter after Altamont), supporting a large cooperative family scene and keeping ticket prices reasonable. Salaries were still quite low: about $125 a week for band, crew and office staff, but no one seemed to be lacking. There was food on the table, dope in the stash jar, cars to drive, enough money to buy new instruments and equipment,
and the promise of selling even more records and playing larger venues.

  Nineteen seventy was the year the Dead finally broke through to a wider audience and established themselves as the quintessential American rock ’n’ roll band—steeped in traditional Americana while forging their own distinctive, electrically charged and powered amalgam. They were “Dark Star” and “Ripple”; Charlie Monroe’s “Rosalie McFall” and Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away”; the trippy playfulness of “China Cat Sunflower” and the earthy melancholy of “High Time”; the acid band in cowboy clothing.

  But there was trouble bubbling just below the surface. The Lenny Hart affair had been devastating to Mickey. As he wrote in his autobiography, “I didn’t want to play, didn’t want to go out on the road. Confused, unbalanced, I wanted to flee and hide, bury my head and cry. I stopped touring with the Grateful Dead in 1971 and went to ground in the Barn. . . . The band didn’t blame me for Lenny’s thievery; they made that clear. They even kept paying me, treating my departure as a leave of absence that would end whenever I managed to pin to the ground the demons I was wrestling. Whenever I was ready, I was welcome back.”

  The formal departure occurred after a February 1971 concert at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, where, as was often the case at the Capitol, members of Mickey’s mother’s family, the Tessels, could be spotted sitting in folding chairs on the side of the stage. When during the Capitol series Bob Weir was asked by a writer from the Harvard Independent about Hart’s departure midway through the series, he was vague and evasive: “He’s in Long Island at his parents’ house; he’s under the weather or something, I’m not sure what.”

  And so, for the first time since the fall of 1967, the Dead were a quintet again. Actually, because Pigpen didn’t play as much organ in the early ’70s as he did in the pre-T.C. era, opting instead to play congas or cowbell or nothing at all for long stretches during a show, the group was sometimes a de facto quartet during the first nine months of 1971, a very different-sounding (but no less interesting) Grateful Dead. Bill Kreutzmann probably had to make the biggest musical adjustment in response to Mickey’s bowing out. The two had been a single eight-limbed rhythm monster for more than three years, and together had been responsible for laying down the foundation for countless big jams. But on some of the lighter country-oriented material the band had started playing in the second half of 1969 and in 1970, two drummers occasionally felt like more percussion than was needed. Kreutzmann frankly believed “at the end of that period [Mickey and I] weren’t gelling that much. It’s hard to explain what was going on. Those were real complicated times for him and real private times.” With just one drummer, Kreutzmann said, “I had the sense that the music became a little more clear. The rhythms and the grooves had a clarity you can hear on tapes from that period.”