Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  Five of the six conventional songs were previously unrecorded Hunter-Garcia gems from the Dead’s live repertoire: “Deal,” “Loser,” “Bird Song,” “To Lay Me Down” and a loping number called “Sugaree” that was first played by the Grateful Dead at the end of July 1971. “Sugaree” was one of the first tunes written by Garcia that was specifically designed to open up to jamming within its fixed rhythmic structure between each verse. Its easy pace let Garcia explore different approaches to structuring his melodic solos—sometimes he’d etch a line with searing, evenly spaced notes; other times he’d break into a double-time attack that worked nicely against the regular time the rest of the band played. Garcia seemed to delight in the predicament presented in the story—his character is trying hard to disassociate himself from Sugaree, who is obviously in a heap o’ trouble:

  When they come to take you down

  When they bring that wagon ’round

  When they come to call on you

  And drag your poor body down

  Just one thing I ask of you

  Just one thing for me

  Please forget you knew my name

  My darling Sugaree

  Shake it, shake it, Sugaree

  Just don’t tell them that you know me

  The sixth new Hunter-Garcia song on the album, “The Wheel,” spontaneously appeared in the studio one day: “Actually, it was one time through on the piano,” Garcia said. “I was playing the piano and I didn’t even know what I was doing. Now, the way I approached that side of the album [side two] is that I sat down at the piano—which I don’t play—and Billy sat down at the drums, which he does play. So at least one of us knew what he was doing! And I just played. When I’d get an idea, I’d elaborate on it and then go back and overdub stuff on it. But that side was really almost all one continuous performance, pretty much. When a song would come up in there, or just a progression, we’d play with it and I’d work it through a few more times. And ‘The Wheel’ came out of that. It wasn’t written, I didn’t have anything in mind, I hadn’t sketched it out.”

  “The way ‘The Wheel’ happened was he and Kreutzmann were just jamming,” Bob Matthews remembers. “They were out screwing around and I said, ‘Hit the machine’ [i.e., turn on the recorder] and they were just getting into this groove. ‘Hey Bob, you didn’t record that, did you?’ ‘Yes, I did.’ They came into the control room and listened to it and we all said, ‘Hey, there’s a good groove there.’ And as we were playing it back and doing some of the overdubs, Hunter was there and he had a big piece of paper and he was writing on it up on the wall. He was writing words while we were listening to one of the playbacks and it turned out to be perfect. It was ‘The Wheel.’ That song really came from nowhere and just happened like that.”

  Garcia’s music for “The Wheel” almost sounded as if it could have been a country reel, complete with fiddlers sawing away and some old farmer blowing into a moonshine jug. But his approach was much more languorous, with pedal steel crying in the background beneath a steady acoustic guitar rhythm track. Still, the tune had an interesting natural momentum that swung one verse into the next and kept things rolling. The wheel as a metaphor turns up in many different religious traditions: Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Christian; a nice ecumenical image that is actually one of Hunter’s more easily grasped notions:

  The wheel is turning

  And you can’t slow down

  You can’t let go

  And you can’t hold on

  You can’t go back

  And you can’t stand still

  If the thunder don’t get you

  Then the lightning will

  Won’t you try just a litle bit harder?

  Couldn’t you try just a little bit more?

  The remaining compositions on Garcia’s solo album were instrumental interludes of varying degrees of weirdness. “Late for Supper” and “Spidergawd” were both ambitious, dissonant collages that mixed natural instruments with electronically treated sounds and, in the case of the latter tune, a confusing swirl of taped voices from radio and/or TV broadcasts. “An Odd Little Place” was an odd little minute-and-a-half piano and drums duet that served as a transitional segment between “To Lay Me Down” and “The Wheel.” “Eep Hour” was the most fully developed instrumental, with its mesmerizing series of chord progressions that Garcia rolled through repeatedly on a series of instruments he stacked to masterful effect: acoustic guitars, piano, organ, fuzzed electric guitar and pedal steel guitar, in addition to bass and drums.

  All in all the record was a fine showcase for Garcia’s diverse talents. He never sang better than he did on that album; it gave his fans a chance to hear the kinds of bass and rhythm guitar ideas he had away from the influence of Lesh and Weir (Garcia was much more conservative than either of his bandmates); and side two of the album served up some of his prettiest and most innovative steel playing.

  One reason Garcia had the time to work on so many projects outside the Grateful Dead in 1971 was that the band played only half as many shows that year as they had in 1969 and 1970. “We don’t work all that much,” Garcia said in late 1970, “because mainly we’re into staying high and digging it—enjoying what we’re doing. And to work all the time is to make yourself hate it. So we try to balance out the schedule.”

  What allowed the Dead to play fewer shows was their increased popularity, which led to bigger paydays in larger venues. During 1971 two of the band’s most reliable small concert halls, the Fillmore East and Fillmore West, were closed by Bill Graham, who complained that top bands had priced themselves out of venues that size and could only make the money they demanded in larger places. And though the Dead still didn’t charge Graham and other promoters as much as most comparable acts—mainly because they wanted to keep ticket prices low for their fans—they did start to play more shows in bigger facilities. In San Francisco the 5,000-seat Winterland became their new home, and on the East Coast, where demand far exceeded the number of tickets available for Dead shows in theaters, they began to experiment with big outdoor shows in places like Gaelic Park in the Bronx and the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Connecticut, where the Dead played a concert to 10,000 fans packed into one end of the giant football stadium.

  After having put out two studio albums in quick succession, the band next released a live double album (just two years after Live Dead) featuring the post–Mickey Hart quintet recorded on the East Coast and at Winterland in the spring of 1971. Three of the group’s new originals appeared on the record—“Bertha,” “Wharf Rat” and a promising Hunter-Weir-Hart tune in 10/4 time called “Playing in the Band.” The rest of the album consisted of a spacey and varied side-long version of “The Other One” and a slew of covers that showed the breadth of the band’s interests and influences: “Big Railroad Blues”; John Phillips’s zippy tale of gambling treachery, “Me and My Uncle,” sung by Weir; Pigpen’s steady version of Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man”; “Me and Bobby McGee,” which, as sung by Weir and the band, served as a nice tribute to Janis Joplin (who had a posthumous number 1 hit with the song in 1971); Chuck Berry’s classic rocker “Johnny B. Goode,” also sung by Weir; and the group’s big, exhilarating showstopper that year—the combination of “Not Fade Away” and “Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad,” both transformed by the Dead into sing-along anthems.

  Warner Bros. executives were thrilled when the Dead informed them that the band would be delivering masters for a live album. American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead were still selling briskly, and quite a few of the Dead’s newer fans had dipped back into the band’s catalog and bought copies of the first four pre–Workingman’s Dead albums. There was only one problem for Joe Smith and the high muckety-mucks in Burbank—the album title.

  “I was the one who called Joe Smith and said, ‘Joe, are you sitting down? The band has told me the next album is going to be called Skullfuck,’” Jon McIntire remembered. “You see, in our contract we had total artistic control, so we actually had the right t
o do it. Well, Joe came unglued. He just came apart! ‘You can’t do this to me!’ ‘It’s not me, Joe, it’s all of us. We’re all doing it to you!’”

  “They were horrified! They were shocked!” Garcia said years later. “They fully believed we were going to do something awful if they didn’t [let us call it Skullfuck], so we finally backed down, but it was more a joke on our part. Aesthetically, it would have been so perfect. It was really a perfect name for that record.”

  In the end, the album was simply titled Grateful Dead, and the gatefold cover was adorned with a slick, colorful version of the old skeleton-and-roses design from the classic 1966 Avalon Ballroom poster, updated by artist Alton Kelley. Through the years, Deadheads have invariably referred to the album as either “Skull and Roses” (after Kelley’s round logo for the band, adapted from the larger piece around the same time) or Skullfuck, so in popular terms the Dead almost got their way.

  Garcia, for one, was very happy with the record. “It’s us, man,” he said right after the record was released. “It’s the prototype Grateful Dead; basic unit. Each one of those tracks is the total picture, a good example of what the Grateful Dead really is, musically. Rather than, ‘This record has sort of a country, light acoustic sound,’ and so on. For a year we were a light acoustic band, in somebody’s head. The new album is enough of an overview so people can see we’re like a regular shoot-’em-up saloon band. That’s more what we are like. The tracks all illustrate that nicely. They’re hot.”

  The band’s ever-expanding fan base evidently agreed: Grateful Dead became the first Dead album to be awarded a gold record (normally representing 500,000 units sold, but only requiring 250,000 copies for a double LP like this one). It was on the inside gatefold of that album that the Dead blared a clarion call to their fans. DEAD FREAKS UNITE, it said in big, bold letters right next to Bob Seideman’s serious photo-portrait of the quintet. “Who are you? Where are you? Send us your name and address and we’ll keep you informed.”

  Within weeks of the album’s coming out, the Dead’s office—an old wood shingle house in downtown San Rafael—was flooded with hundreds, then thousands of letters from their fans, who were just beginning to be known by the appellation that stuck with them for the rest of the group’s history: Deadheads. Initially, Mary Ann Mayer, a woman in the Dead office, was in charge of getting the band’s mailing list together, but by early 1972 the volume of mail pouring in was so large that a second person was hired to help—Eileen Law, who had been on the fringes of the scene since the Haight-Ashbury days. Eileen eventually took over the operation and still maintains it today.

  By the time the band’s loose fan club, called “Dead Heads,” began, the Dead already knew that their following was unique in the rock world. “At home, there’s always been a certain group of people that don’t ever miss a show anyplace we go on the West Coast,” Garcia said in 1970. “You know—every show. That’s the kind of fans we have. It’s kind of like symphony fans: they go to see whether or not we get it on, and shit like that. I mean, they know all our trips. And with us it’s sort of a thing where we have all the elements, but it’s only in special situations where it all works and everything is right. And that doesn’t happen all that often.”

  Garcia often talked about the extreme variability of the Grateful Dead concert experience, and he was a harsher critic of the group than most fans were. Certainly there were some shows when the Dead “got it on” more than others, but if it had been as hit-or-miss as Garcia believed, they wouldn’t have developed the sort of fanatical following they did in nearly every city they played repeatedly. The fact that shows were so different from one another was part of the group’s appeal. Most rock bands developed a show with a fairly fixed song list that they would play basically the same way each night for an entire tour, and then over the years they would make small variations in that show. But Grateful Dead shows could be radically different from night to night because the band’s governing aesthetic was to not repeat themselves, and to always be on the lookout for new ways to play their songs.

  They also constantly introduced new material into their repertoire and made a point of playing it with the same conviction as their well-known songs. Typically in rock ’n’ roll a band might highlight a few songs from their new album on a tour designed to support that record, but by the next tour they’d drop all the new songs except for the ones that were considered hits. Not so with the Dead. They usually introduced new songs months before they recorded them, and they kept playing them based on their own whims—whether the songs were working for them as a group or not. They rarely made concessions to a song’s popularity—there was never a guarantee they’d play their radio hits at a given show—and by the early ’70s they had so many different songs to choose from that it usually took going to a couple of shows in a row to see the full range of the Dead’s material. (It wasn’t until quite a bit later that the Dead consciously tried to avoid repeating any songs for three or four nights.)

  By the Dead’s second trip to New York in 1967, they discovered that they had supporters there who were coming to see them several nights in a row, and even a hearty few who followed them to other East Coast cities. Once they started playing the Fillmore East regularly, that venue became a mecca for Deadheads. It was one place the Dead always played well, so fans would go on multiple nights. And then, from 1969 to 1971, the band played so many colleges in the Northeast that were close to each other that people began traveling along with the tour. It was no big deal for students to cut a few days of classes and go from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, one night, to Allegheny College in Meadsville the next night; Princeton, New Jersey, two nights later and the State University of New York at Cortland the night after that. For many people, seeing the band in new places became part of the adventure of being a Deadhead. If the shows were the sacrament for Deadheads—rich and full of blissful, transcendent musical moments that moved the body and enriched the soul—then getting to the shows, buying tickets, finding a place to crash and people to hang out with was part of the pilgrimage.

  When the Dead started Dead Heads (the fan club) they were inundated by long, thoughtful letters from people articulating what the Dead experience meant to them, as well as poetry and artwork inspired by the Dead. The band responded by creating a fanciful (nameless) newsletter that they sent out to their ever-growing mailing list every few months (irregularly, of course). Hunter and Garcia were the guiding lights of the newsletter, which in addition to providing information about upcoming projects and tours also contained bits of Hunter’s poetry (usually commenting obliquely on the state of things in the Dead’s world) and surreal doodles by the two of them. The Dead Heads newsletter even had its own resident Zen-clown character, St. Dilbert the Arch, a Hunter creation who was the subject of a series of barely fathomable parables allegedly designed to elucidate an anarchic pseudophilosophy called Hypnocracy:

  When asked the meaning of life, St. Dilbert is said to have replied, “Ask rather the meaning of hypnocracy.” When asked the meaning of hypnocracy, St. Dilbert replied, “Is not hypnocracy no other than the quest to discover the meaning of hypnocracy? Say, have you heard the one about the yellow dog yet?”

  And if that wasn’t clear enough, there was always the explanation from another one of the newsletters:

  Hypnocracy for the Dozens

  watch for it

  don’t miss it

  it’s comintagetcha

  it’s gone

  What was it?

  Was what?

  Hm?

  Ah!

  Oh—mmhmm.

  But mostly the Dead Heads newsletter was a communiqué between the Dead and their fans that spoke honestly about the big issues the band faced in the early ’70s—the growth of their fan base, the move into larger venues, the group’s increasing overhead. The newsletters talked to the Deadheads as if they were family—even detailing how the organization’s income was spent, for example—and this made the bond b
etween band and fans even stronger and more intimate.

  “We hope you will continue to turn us on to what’s happening where you are and where you’re at,” an early 1972 newsletter concluded. “Thank you all for all the far-out letters and drawings you’ve sent us; we’ve all really enjoyed them, and we hope to hear from you again. Don’t give up on us; we will be in touch with you again, but we can’t promise when. Take care, have fun, stay high—The Grateful Dead.”

  Twenty-seven years later, the letters and drawings still flow into the Dead’s San Rafael post office box. And the occasional newsletter, now called The Grateful Dead Almanac, is still published and mailed to every Deadhead on the mailing list.

  CHAPTER 12

  Wait Until That Deal Come ’Round

  igpen’s role in the Grateful Dead had been gradually diminishing through the years, to the point where he usually sang only two or three songs each show, and maybe added a little organ and percussion when he felt like it. Still, Pig-sung tunes like “Love Light,” “Good Lovin’” and Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle” were always popular with the crowd, and the jams in those songs gave the band a chance to thoroughly explore their R&B side—an important part of their roots but somewhat subsumed by the country influences in the early ’70s. During parts of 1970 Pigpen’s health had been shaky, but in the middle of 1971 he actually became desperately ill with what doctors diagnosed as advanced liver disease. His years of drinking cheap sweet wines had finally caught up with him, and at twenty-five he was in perilously poor shape.