The Saunders-Garcia group was loose enough during this era that musicians came and went freely without there being a huge impact on the group’s overall sound. Bill Kreutzmann sometimes played drums instead of Bill Vitt, Tom Fogerty was in and out, and during March of 1972 Santana’s Armando Perazza played percussion. As Merl says of Perazza’s addition, “He fit right in. Our music didn’t change. It was just like adding a little pepper to it.” It was that way with nearly all of the support players who floated through Garcia’s bands over the years.
The group’s live repertoire was a mixture of the material on Heavy Turbulence and songs such as “That’s All Right Mama,” Motown tunes like Marvin Gaye’s “How Sweet It Is” and Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her,” J. J. Cale’s “After Midnight,” Dylan songs like “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” and Ray Charles’s “Lonely Avenue.” Every song the group played was an excuse to stretch out and jam—few songs clocked in at under ten minutes, and most were considerably longer. To the very end, Garcia’s solo bands always retained some of the flavor of the original Matrix and Keystone Korner jam sessions.
Not surprisingly, the more the band played, the bigger the following they attracted, even though they stuck to small clubs exclusively. As Merl put it, “The first few times we played, there would be between twenty and thirty people there and we’d split maybe fifty dollars between us at the end of the night. And that was fine. Jerry’s really the guy who taught me the value of money—it don’t mean a fuckin’ thing. Having fun is what’s important. Anyway, from there it got to be a couple of hundred people at every show, and eventually it was, ‘Hey, I just flew in from Boston to see you guys,’” he says with a laugh.
Garcia also found time to play a handful of shows on the East Coast in the winter of 1972 with Howard Wales’s new group, in part to help promote the record of jazz instrumental jams they’d made together during 1971, Hooteroll? Though he was billed only as a “special guest” on the tour, Garcia was obviously the main attraction for many of the fans who turned out for the shows, some of whom became disgruntled when Garcia only played on a few songs during each concert.
“I didn’t really go on the road that time to play,” Garcia said a couple of years later. “The thing was really misrepresented. I just wanted to get Howard out playing and the band had a nice thing going which really didn’t have much to do with me. I was just there fucking around.”
That experience probably influenced Garcia’s decision not to take his club band with Saunders out on tours beyond the West Coast. Hell, that band didn’t even have a name—usually they just went by “the Group.” “It’s like a low profile is more desirable to me,” Garcia explained. “The Dead and the Group are two different trips. And [the Group] has a lot less pressure associated with it because we haven’t made an effort to get famous at it. That’s one of the things that makes it possible. I couldn’t take the pressure of being a double celebrity. It’s a drag just being it once.”
* * *
The Dead’s highly anticipated Great Tour of Europe had first been planned in the spring of 1968 and was talked about every year after that. It finally became a reality in the spring of 1972—at last, the tour made economic sense for everyone involved. The Dead were out of the hole financially and could afford to take a few smaller paydays on their way to (they hoped) building a strong European fan base. Warner Bros., now suddenly in love with this band that actually sold a lot of records, had three albums to promote in Europe—“Skull and Roses,” Garcia and Weir’s Ace. And the Dead agreed to bring their sixteen-track recorder on the road and deliver another relatively inexpensive live album to Warner Bros., a plan that would justify sending more than forty people—band, crew, managers, office staff, wives and girlfriends—on a seven-week, twenty-two-concert working vacation.
“We hoped that we’d play to enough people every night to make it worth our while,” Phil Lesh said. “It turned out to be fairly successful, if I remember correctly. I mean, the halls weren’t sold out, but it wasn’t like some places we played in the States where we’d play in a basketball-sized arena and there’d be 300 people down front. Maybe we were trying to prove something to the few people that were interested enough to come see us.”
Actually, the tour was quite well attended, especially in England and Germany. The band’s first shows in cold and rainy London at the beginning of the tour were rapturously received by 8,000 British (and a few American) hippies each night, and warmly reviewed by the British rock press, which wasn’t nearly as hostile and jaded in those days as it is today. After a disappointing show in Newcastle, before what Weir called “the coldest, stiffest audience I’ve ever played for,” the Dead took an overnight ferry to the Continent, and that’s when the adventure really began. The entire Dead retinue traveled in two buses, one of which was designated the Bozo bus, the other the Bolo bus.
“The Bozo bus was for people who wanted to be tripping out and raving all the time,” Bob Hunter said. “The Bolo bus was people who preferred to sink totally into their own neuroses, or just sleep.”
The happy wanderers managed to smuggle quantities of pot, cocaine and LSD into Europe. Of course their reputation preceded them, so they were able to score dope on the road, too, much to everyone’s delight. Some folks took to wearing clown masks from time to time, just for absurdity’s sake—the band even wore them onstage once or twice. They were loose and wild on the road, yet their itinerary took them to luxury hotels, expensive restaurants and a few venues, such as Amsterdam’s Concertegebouw, that had hundreds of years of staid tradition behind them.
“We were something of an invasion,” Rock Scully said. “Because there were so many of us we could just take over a hotel or a restaurant. That’s the meaning of the big American shoe coming through the rainbow on the cover of Europe ’72. Most of the people had never been to Europe before, and it was also the longest Dead tour ever, so a group consciousness developed that tended to exclude the surroundings.” Which is a nice way of saying that the Dead family marauded through Europe like Huns, partying instead of pillaging.
Musically, the Europe tour was one of the Dead’s strongest ever. “We played great,” Phil said many years later. “Keith was just coming into his own, really. And I gotta say that Billy played like a young god on [that] tour. I mean, he was everywhere on the drums, and just kickin’ our butts every which way, which is what drummers live to do.”
The wide-open jamming tunes like “Dark Star,” “Truckin’,” “The Other One” and “Playing in the Band” went to spaces they’d never been to before, as the group fearlessly deconstructed rhythms and melodies, broke down familiar forms and then reassembled the individual components of their sound in fresh ways. With Keith banging out unusual, blocky chord clusters that sounded as if they were straight out of Sun Ra or Cecil Taylor, and Garcia sometimes riding his wah-wah pedal to create bizarre, growling crescendos, the Dead delved deeper into dissonance than ever before—the twenty-five-minute versions of “Dark Star” from 1969 sounded like mellifluous poetry compared with the edgy cacophony of so many of the 1972–74 versions. Still, the group never abandoned its fundamental lyricism. Out of the noisy chaos would eventually come form and consonance, and at this point the band was always able to play music of amazing delicacy as well.
Two new Hunter-Garcia songs were premiered on the European jaunt. “He’s Gone” was a slow shuffle Garcia composed just before the trip. “I remember working on it in a little apartment I had in in the city [San Francisco],” he said. “It’s when I was playing lots and lots of shows with Merl at the Keystone Korner. I had an apartment where I could hang out on nights I didn’t feel like driving all the way back to Stinson Beach.” Hunter said of his lyrics for the tune, “It was considerations of Lenny [Hart] that kicked off the [opening lines]”:
Rat in a drain ditch
Caught on a limb
You know better but I know him
Like I told you
What I said
Steal your face right off your head
“So the song started that way, but later on it became an anthem for Pigpen, and it’s changed through the years,” Hunter said. “These songs are amorphous that way. What I intend is not what a thing is in the end.”
“Me neither, for that matter,” Garcia added in the same joint interview. “We don’t create the meanings of the tunes ultimately. They re-create themselves each performance in the minds of everybody there.”
The other new Hunter-Garcia song was an unclassifiable slice of vintage Americana (old-timey rock?) called “Brown-Eyed Women,” which served up some colorful characters and vignettes from America’s not-too-distant past:
Delilah Jones was the mother of twins
Two times over and the rest was sins
Raised eight boys, only I turned bad
Didn’t get the lickings that the other ones had
Brown-eyed women and red grenadine
The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean
Sound of the thunder with the rain pouring down
And it looks like the old man’s getting on
While he was in Europe Garcia also put music to a set of lyrics that Hunter had written in New York’s Chelsea Hotel in mid-1970. “Stella Blue,” which debuted at the Dead’s first concert after the European tour—a June show at the Hollywood Bowl—is one of the duo’s most powerful ballads, with music that sounds almost as if it could be from the songbook of Billy Strayhorn, and lyrics filled with a world-weary loneliness and melancholy; a “brittle pathos,” as Garcia once described it:
All the years combine
They melt into a dream
A broken angel sings
From a guitar
In the end there’s just a song
Comes crying like the wind
Through all the broken dreams
And vanished years
Stella Blue
Garcia said that “Stella Blue” was “a good example of a song I sang before I understood it. I understood some sense of what the lyrics were about, but I didn’t get into the pathos of it. . . . Originally I was taken with the construction of it, which is extremely clever, if I do say so myself. I was proud of it as a composer—‘Hey, this is a slick song! This sucker has a very slippery harmonic thing that works nicely.’ That’s what I liked about it. It wasn’t until later that I started to find other stuff in there.”
The song managed to stay fresh and vital until the end; in fact, it became more powerful and Garcia sang it with greater conviction as the years went by. In a way, it was a song about the end of life and was better suited to the tired and broken Garcia of fifty than the strong, confident man of thirty who first sang it.
Pigpen was still three years shy of his thirtieth birthday when he played what turned out to be his final show with the Grateful Dead—that same Hollywood Bowl concert three weeks after the end of the European tour. The trip to Europe had been hard on him, even though he conscientiously avoided booze the entire time, which was no easy feat in Germany and France.
“When they came back from Europe, the rest of the band would go on tours,” Eileen Law said. “Keith went out and Pig stayed home. Pig would call the office—it was just a skeleton crew—and he was really having a hard time with the band on the road and him being out of that. He would call and just want to talk. We all felt really bad for him because here was this person that I once thought was a Hell’s Angel, and now he was this little thin person. It was like seeing someone get cancer and then just deteriorate. He had this thin, thin face, but he’d still have his little hat on.”
The Dead kept on rolling along without Pigpen, though at most stops on their tours in 1972 Weir or Lesh would mention from the stage that Pigpen was sick back in California and “we’ll all send your best wishes back to him,” or words to that effect.
* * *
By the middle of 1972 the Dead had pretty much decided to leave Warner Bros. Records and explore the possibility of starting their own independent label. This is something the bandmembers, and Garcia in particular, had been thinking about for years, but it was Ron Rakow, an associate of the group’s since the Haight-Ashbury days, who came up with the plan to make the dream a reality.
The problem with Warners, as Rakow and the Dead saw it, wasn’t just that it was a straight company. They believed the label was inefficient at marketing the Dead’s records, and that a group with such a devoted nonmainstream following would be better served by specialized promotional methods that were beyond the grasp of a conventional record company. And Warner Bros. was even considered the hippest of the major labels in the late ’60s and early ’70s—the company was home to such idiosyncratic artists as Frank Zappa, Neil Young, Ry Cooder, Randy Newman and Joni Mitchell.
On July 4, 1972, at a meeting at Billy Kreutzmann’s house, Rakow presented the band with a ninety-two-page document called “The So-What Papers,” outlining his findings about the feasibility of the Dead starting their own record company. Rakow was nothing if not an enterprising schemer. For instance, his original vision was that the Dead would get the capital to launch their label from the Minority Enterprise Small Business Investment Company Act (MESBIC). “I had hippies declared a minority,” Rakow says. “They were going to give us the money.”
In October 1972 Alan Trist, Garcia’s buddy from the early Palo Alto days, who’d come back to America from England in the fall of 1970 and stepped into the Dead’s somewhat amorphous management structure, presented the group with a summary and analysis of different options facing the band. These included Rakow’s plan for total independence from the straight music industry by setting up a Dead-controlled franchise distribution and mail-order system; a scenario favored by Owsley to have Deadheads buy an annual “subscription” to the Dead’s records; and, the most conservative option, starting a custom label within a major record company, along the lines of the Beatles’ Apple Records or the Jefferson Airplane’s Grunt Records.
In the end, the band decided to take the big step and go completely independent, which is the option Garcia favored strongly from the beginning. Rakow finagled a deal with Atlantic Records boss Jerry Wexler, selling the foreign distribution rights for the Dead’s albums for the $300,000 that was needed to start the company. By the spring of 1973 a company structure was in place, with Rakow installed as president of the fledgling label.
But before any of that could happen, the Dead still had to fulfill contractual obligations to Warner Bros. In the late fall of 1972 Warners put out the three-record live set Europe ’72 (the group’s third live album in four years), and it raced up the Billboard charts to number 24 in a matter of weeks, easily justifying the tremendous expense of the tour for Warners. The album’s six sides painted an even better picture of what the Dead were all about than “Skull and Roses” had. There were old and recent concert favorites like “Morning Dew,” “Cumberland Blues,” “Sugar Magnolia,” “China Cat Sunflower” > “I Know You Rider” and “Truckin’”; two long, spacey jams; Garcia’s cover version of Hank Williams’s “You Win Again”; and nearly an album’s worth of previously unrecorded tunes—“Ramble On Rose,” “Tennessee Jed,” “Mr. Charlie” (a rollicking Hunter-Pigpen song), “Jack Straw,” “He’s Gone” and “Brown-Eyed Women.”
The band saved themselves a lot of time and money by putting new songs on both “Skull and Roses” and Europe ’72, but in later years both Hunter and Garcia said they were sorry the band never tackled those songs in the studio. “To me, all that material was sort of the kicker follow-up album to American Beauty,” Hunter said. “Instead we put out this three-album package that sounds wonderful, but it spread out the material so much we never got a chance to hear what those songs would have sounded like as a package. I personally would’ve liked to hear those songs on an album of their own.”
Another new Hunter-Garcia song that would have fit perfectly on that mythical studio album was “Mississippi Half-
Step Uptown Toodleoo,” which the Dead first played in the summer of 1972. It was a playful country-flavored song that felt like an old-time fiddle tune with a dash of early jazz thrown in—Duke Ellington had cut a song called “East St. Louis Toodleoo” with his group in 1926. Lyrically, the song offered an intriguing pastiche of allusions and metaphors, from Bible figures to gambling to seamen’s lore. Once again, the main character is a troublemaker on the move, cursed by destiny and fate:
On the day that I was born
Daddy sat down and cried
I had the mark just as plain as day
Which could not be denied
They say that Cain caught Abel
Rolling loaded dice,
Ace of spades behind his ear
And him not thinking twice
Songs like this wouldn’t have had the kind of resonance they did if Hunter hadn’t been able to somehow connect them to Garcia’s real-life persona. Hunter was able to write songs for Garcia that weren’t usually autobiographical, yet attitudinally they fit him to a tee. Garcia could play the reprobate in these songs because that’s how he viewed himself to a degree—a fuckup who’d succeeded against all odds.
Still, Garcia once noted, “I don’t really very often relate to the characters in the songs. I don’t feel like ‘Okay, now this is me singing this song.’ . . . Actually, I relate better to Dylan songs more often than not. Sometimes I feel like I’m right in those songs; that is to say, that it’s me speaking. . . . That rarely happens to me with Hunter’s songs, but something else happens to me with Hunter’s songs that I think is more special. And that’s the thing of them coming from a world—some kind of mythos or alternate universe that’s got a lot of interesting stuff in it. And I feel like I’m in that world and of it somehow; or at least I know it when I see it, and I feel like I have something to say about it and I’m participating in it, but in a different sort of way. It’s participating in the mythos.”
Garcia: An American Life Page 37