And the songs were open-ended enough for the audience to enter into that world and imagine that it was also their strange universe of real and imagined people, places, feelings and dreams.
CHAPTER 13
Line Up a Long Shot, Maybe Try It Two Times
tarting an independent record company was a gamble, but at least it was a bold move taken from a position of strength. All through 1972 the Dead’s popularity was rising. Though they still performed mainly at 2,500- to 3,500-seat theaters, they were increasingly booking civic auditoriums, small stadiums, college sports venues and professional basketball and hockey arenas. In the New York area, where ticket demand was always intense, they now played just across the Hudson River in Roosevelt Stadium, a decaying minor-league baseball park in Jersey City that could accommodate 23,000 fans. In Philadelphia, also rabid Dead territory, the band played its first show at the 17,000-seat Spectrum in September 1972.
Garcia viewed the Dead’s steady rise in popularity with some measure of alarm. It’s not that he didn’t want his work to be enjoyed by large numbers of people; on the contrary, he was proud that the Dead had been able to amass such a following without consciously making concessions to mainstream commerciality. But playing in larger places made it more difficult to feel as if he was connecting with everyone in the audience. The Acid Tests and psychedelic nights at the Fillmore Auditorium had been models of how high a band and crowd could get together. Playing a 20,000-seat venue made the energy exchange between group and audience completely different. As Garcia noted in the early ’70s, “A lot of times people who don’t know how to get it on way outnumber the people who do know how to get it on.” But Garcia also recognized that with a big crowd you also have even greater potential to get the big rush—when everyone is locked in on the same wavelength as the band, and the room becomes a single, undulating celebratory organism.
To their credit, the Dead did everything they could to make the experience of going to large concerts more pleasant for the audience. The band had always invested lots of time and money into developing loud and clear sound systems. It had been part of Owsley’s original vision for the band, and the mantle had been taken up by Dan Healy, Bob Matthews and everyone who was a part of the group’s technical support staff. In the late ’60s, it even led to the formation of a separate sound entity, Alembic, which was dedicated to producing outstanding sound reinforcement systems, recording electronics and musical instruments. The loose group of hi-fi wizards took its name from the world of alchemy (one of Owsley’s areas of interest)—an alembic is an instrument used to refine, purify and transform. The Dead helped support the Alembic technical brain trust and workshop, and in return got a sound system that was the envy of everyone in the touring music industry and which allowed the band to feel good about playing the occasional monster gig.
The larger sound systems the Dead introduced in the early ’70s required a bigger road crew to move and assemble the mountains of equipment, which put even more financial pressure on the band to play bigger shows. By the end of 1972 the Grateful Dead “family” was more than seventy-five people, with about thirty on the payroll, and playing in 2,500-seat halls wasn’t going to bring in enough money to cover a group that big. In this regard it became the typical American success story, and it led to some of the usual pitfalls: earning more money encouraged people to buy homes and better cars, which led to mortgages and term payments that had to be maintained month after month. Not that anyone in the scene was living ostentatiously—these people were still on the lower end of the economic scale in Marin, and, considering the Dead’s popularity, on the lower end of the economic scale in big-time rock ’n’ roll, too.
If anyone in the organization had a plan that was going to make the scene cooler or more efficient in some way, he or she could usually get the money to try to implement that idea. However, nothing happened unless all the bandmembers agreed that it should. If one person in the band really didn’t like an idea, he could block it. And the band also listened carefully to the opinions of the road crew, so if one of them or a couple of them were strongly against something, a member of the band might join them and defeat a proposal. That said, though, everyone in the organization generally gave one another latitude for their ideas to blossom. Indeed, the major upside of success was the freedom to try new things and increase their autonomy in the music business. So at the same time the record company was starting up and development money was being funneled to Alembic, the Dead also sunk some money into starting their own booking and travel agencies in an audacious attempt to control nearly every aspect of their working life. And for a few years it worked.
Garcia, says Alan Trist, had strong opinions on how to conduct the business of the Grateful Dead. “He said, ‘Okay, let’s not fall into the traps that are out there.’ So one response is to have your own people around you, and that’s an aspect of the social and business world of the Dead that was consistently upheld by Jerry. And that was a real necessary protection against what the world would do to you otherwise. He was constantly making sure that business decisions and strategies were righteous, in the old sense of that word. So instead of pursuing a path that would make more money and doing all the things it was possible for them to do along that road, they chose to go in the opposite direction, because it was clear they were not going to buy into that culture of money and fame and fortune in the traditional way. They rejected the easy options, and to me that was an extremely attractive and courageous way to go.”
At the Dead’s first show of 1973, in Stanford University’s Maples Pavilion, the band unveiled seven new Hunter-Garcia songs, the biggest batch they’d ever introduced at once. The songs were all over the map musically and lyrically, and none of them much resembled any songs the two had written before. Generally speaking, they were less folk- and country-influenced.
Two of the new songs—“They Love Each Other” and “Row Jimmy”—showed Garcia’s infatuation with reggae, the spirited, highly rhythmic Jamaican music form that got its first wide American exposure through the soundtrack album for the 1972 film The Harder They Come, featuring Jimmy Cliff, Toots and the Maytals, Desmond Dekker and others. Garcia liked the title song so much that he began playing it with his solo band in mid-’73. And he was sufficiently intrigued by reggae that he attended one of the first American appearances by Bob Marley and the Wailers—then virtually unknown outside Jamaica—in a small Bay Area club later that year. Typical of Garcia, when he decided to borrow from the idiom in his own songs, he modified it considerably. “They Love Each Other,” a sprightly paean to the glories of a blissful romantic union, added some interesting little rhythmic tricks within the basic beat. “Row Jimmy,” with dreamy and obtuse Hunter lyrics, slowed down a reggae beat to the point where each component note and counter-rhythm was clearly discernible and the tune as a whole moved along like a lazy river.
The humorous R&B-flavored romp called “Loose Lucy” found Garcia in an unusual role—accused cad and submissive plaything of the intimidating title character. “Wave That Flag” was also a lighthearted number, a fast shuffle consisting of several stanzas of short, playful, seemingly unconnected rhymes that Garcia had great difficulty remembering in the correct order—not that it mattered to the overall feeling of the tune, where the rhythm of the words was as important as their literal meaning. This is the song that, a year later, was tightened up lyrically to become the much more successful “U.S. Blues.”
Garcia admitted that “Here Comes Sunshine” was inspired by songs from the Beatles’ Abbey Road album such as “Sun King” and “Here Comes the Sun.” This was particularly evident on the choruses, which taxed the group’s harmony chops to the limit. But even the main motif, a lilting melodic line with a cadence almost like a music box, owed something to “Here Comes the Sun.” Hunter’s elliptical words were inspired by childhood memories, as he later noted in his book of lyrics: “Remembering the great Vanport, Washington, flood of 1949; living in other people’s homes; a family abandoned by father
; second grade.” Yet the tone of the lyrics was actually optimistic, and Garcia’s music was so buoyant and affirmative that the song always felt like a joyous celebration of life, as well as perhaps a message to the Dead:
Line up a long shot
Maybe try it two times
Maybe more
Good to know
You got shoes
To wear
When you find the floor
Why hold out for more?
Here comes sunshine
. . . Here comes sunshine!
This song opened up to jamming easily. It provided a mellow framework to work within, and the band usually managed to stretch out quite far within the groove, slowly building crescendos piece by piece without straying too far from the main melodic figure.
Hunter said his original title for the haunting ballad “China Doll” was “The Suicide Song,” and a look at the first two verses shows why:
A pistol shot at five o’clock
The bells of heaven ring
Tell me what you done it for
“No, I won’t tell you a thing
“Yesterday I begged you
Before I hit the ground—
All I leave behind me
Is only what I’ve found . . .”
“It’s almost like a ghost voice: ‘Tell me what you done it for / No I won’t tell you a thing,’” Hunter said. “It’s a little dialogue like that. I think it’s a terrifying song. And then it’s also got some affirmation of how it can be mended somehow. There’s a bit of metaphysical content in there which I leave open, not that I subscribe or don’t subscribe to it. At the time it resonated right. The song is eerie and very, very beautiful the way Garcia handles it.”
Perhaps the most instantly popular of the seven new Hunter-Garcia tunes was “Eyes of the World,” a fresh, breezy, wide-open song with a distinctive samba feel. “It was kind of a Brazilian thing,” Garcia said, and indeed, it almost sounded like some jazzy horn number you might hear being played by an orchestre tropicale in a seaside Rio nightclub. The song became one of the Dead’s liveliest jamming tunes, offering the band lots of room between verses, and also many different possibilities for connecting it to other tunes, since it had no formal ending—after the final chorus the band usually played around the central riff for a while longer, then Garcia or Lesh would signal a key change at some point and it would slip off in another direction, sometimes coming back to an “Eyes” riff, other times leading to a different song or groove. “Eyes” was another song Garcia never tired of. Though it went through small changes over the years, usually related to tempo, its essence remained unchanged.
After a very successful eight-show tour of the Midwest, where the smallest hall the band played had 7,500 seats, the Dead returned to the Bay Area for a couple of weeks in advance of an East Coast tour of basketball arenas, including three consecutive nights at the 17,000-seat Nassau Coliseum (on Long Island) and concerts at the cavernous Boston Garden and the Philadelphia Spectrum. It was hard to believe that two years earlier the band had been playing the relatively tiny Boston Music Hall (drawing so many people outside that there was a near-riot).
On the night of March 8, a week before the tour, Pigpen was found dead in his Corte Madera apartment, a victim of what the Marin County coroner ruled a “massive gastrointestinal hemorrhage.” His liver showed acute signs of disease and his spleen was also enlarged. Though Pigpen had been sick for a long time, his death still stunned nearly everyone close to him. “It was very shocking and very sad, and so untimely,” said Sue Swanson. “I mean almost nobody was even thirty at that point, so to lose someone was almost unthinkable.”
“When he went to the hospital in ’71 and we all gave him blood,” Garcia said years later, “they were saying, ‘That’s it, he’s not going to make it,’ so in effect we went through it—we went through the pain. Then he came out of it for a while and it was great. And actually I thought he was doing pretty good. When he died he just snuck away. I guess the stress on his system was just too much for him.”
On March 12 a traditional Catholic funeral at a mortuary in Corte Madera was attended by about two hundred people, including the whole McKernan clan, members of the Dead family and various Merry Pranksters and Hell’s Angels. Pigpen was laid out in an open coffin, wearing his trademark leather jacket and a cowboy shirt, his hat on the pillow. “It was a bummer,” Garcia commented the next day. “They had an Irish Catholic priest to say kind words, but it was for the straights.”
“I just remember the funeral as totally depressing,” Rock Scully said. “I was just totally brought down. I’d never seen Jerry more unhappy, ever. God, he was devastated; we all were.”
“It was pretty sad,” Laird Grant said. “There are a lot of funerals you go to and you feel okay about it—the guy’s been dying for six months and everyone expects it—but with Pigpen it was sort of like: Okay, here’s this one. Hang on to your hats, kids! You ain’t seen shit yet! Here goes Pigpen. Now what happens?”
What happened was the Dead went out on that East Coast tour two days after the funeral. “We’d been getting used to it [Pigpen’s absence] all along, so it wasn’t a sudden change when he died,” Weir said. “It was a very gradual change that became formal when he wasn’t here anymore at all.”
“Still, after he died you’d go out there [onstage] and it’d be like, ‘Where’s Pig?’” Garcia noted. “And we missed all those songs. It was like operating with a broken leg. So we went to our next strong suit, which was kind of a country feel; the American mythos, the Hunter songs. And our other strong suit was our [musical] weirdness. So we went with our strong suits that didn’t involve Pigpen.”
On the third night of the East Coast tour, at Nassau Coliseum, the Dead played “He’s Gone” as the second song of the night, and many in the audience took it to be a memorial to Pigpen and lit matches to honor his memory. It’s a ritual that was repeated in other cities that year, too. Even though the Dead had thousands of new fans in 1973 who had never seen Pigpen perform, his legend loomed large and the affection that everyone in the Dead scene felt for him was well-known.
“It’s hard to say what it was about him that people really loved,” Garcia said in 1988. “But they loved him a lot. I know I loved him a lot, and I couldn’t begin to tell you why. He was a lovable person. Really, it hasn’t felt right since Pigpen’s been gone, but on the other hand he’s always been around a little, too. He hasn’t been entirely gone. He’s right around.”
Ronald C. McKernan’s gravestone at Alta Mesa cemetery in Palo Alto reads: “Pigpen was and is now forever one of the Grateful Dead.”
* * *
While the Dead’s following seemed to grow with each passing month, Garcia continued his low-key involvement with his club group, and in the winter and spring of 1973 he also plunged into a new side project—a bluegrass group called Old and in the Way, featuring Garcia on banjo and vocals, John Kahn on string bass, David Grisman on mandolin and vocals, fiddler Richard Greene and guitarist-singer Peter Rowan, the older brother of Chris and Lorin Rowan.
“Old and in the Way was basically David Grisman’s trip,” John Kahn recalled. “There was no fiddle player in the group at first. It was me, Peter Rowan, Grisman and Jerry. We’d get together and play at Jerry’s house in Stinson Beach, or at my house in Forest Knolls, and then we started playing some real small gigs informally, like at the bar in Stinson Beach. It was this tiny place and the audience was louder than the band. It was all these big hippies dancing with these big hiking boots with the big flaps bouncing up and down. They’d start clapping and you couldn’t hear us at all. Even we couldn’t hear us!”
“You know Jerry—if he thinks something is worth doing, he’ll just take it out there right away, which is good,” Grisman said. “He said, ‘Let’s play some gigs!’ and he had the gigs lined up! We started playing in clubs and then he booked a tour. It was a real informal thing.”
Richard Greene came on board at a benefit concert
at the Stinson Beach firehouse and played fiddle for the first few months the group was together. An alumnus of Bill Monroe’s group, and later the progressive-rock band Seatrain, which also included Peter Rowan, Greene hadn’t played with Garcia since the mid-’60s.
“When I played in Old and in the Way I got to see more of the ‘star’ Garcia,” he says. “Not that he acted that way; but in terms of how people in the audience related to him. Do you know about the checks in the glove compartment of his car? He was just like he was in the ’60s when I knew him, only now it’s the ’70s and he’s getting rich and famous and everything. Jerry was receiving a lot of money from all sorts of sources and he’d get a check and just throw it in the glove compartment of his car, and eventually, thousands of dollars were sitting in there that he completely forgot about. He just didn’t pay attention to money; he was a true hippie in that way. That was symbolic for me.”
Greene was living in Los Angeles the whole time he was with the group and was in the process of launching his own band, the Zone, so eventually he dropped out of the band and was replaced by Vassar Clements, another veteran of Bill Monroe’s band (as well as groups with Earl Scruggs, Jim and Jesse McReynolds and John Hartford), and widely regarded as one of the best fiddlers anywhere. “I thought he was the best of all of us,” John Kahn commented, “and easily one of the best players I’ve ever worked with. He could’ve played jazz with Coltrane. He could play anything.”
Much of the group’s repertoire came from traditional bluegrass— Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Jim and Jesse, et al. But Old and in the Way also incorporated a handful of excellent original tunes by Grisman, Clements, Peter Rowan—the ostensible lead singer in the group and author of “Midnight Moonlight,” “Panama Red,” “Land of the Navajo” and “Lonesome L.A. Cowboy”—and even a few pop songs rearranged bluegrass-style by Garcia, such as the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses” and the Platters’ ’50s hit “The Great Pretender.” In Grisman and Clements the band had two exceptionally good soloists, and though Garcia was no longer the red-hot five-string banjo picker he had been in the mid-’60s, he brought his characteristic spunk and good taste to everything he played on the instrument.
Garcia: An American Life Page 38