Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  “Jerry worked real hard at playing the banjo,” Vassar Clements says. “Anything he tried he worked hard at. And the way it was with him, if he didn’t feel pretty sure of himself, he wouldn’t go out and play. What I liked about his playing is that it was different. You could tell he wasn’t a guy who’d been playing banjo all his life, but the groove was always there and he had good ideas. It sounded great to me.”

  Old and in the Way played sporadically through 1973 in between Grateful Dead tours, and even cut an album at Mickey Hart’s studio, though it was never released. “We weren’t too happy with it,” Grisman said. “It was kind of rushed. It didn’t seem to equal what we were doing live.” A live album recorded by Owsley at the Boarding House club in San Francisco came out in 1975 and went on to become one of the best-selling bluegrass albums of all time. But by the time that record was released the group had long since disbanded, a victim of squabbling between Rowan and Grisman and the difficulty of trying to work around Garcia’s always hectic schedule.

  Garcia’s memories of the group were nearly all positive, and shortly before he died he even talked about getting the band together again. “We were supposed to go out on a tour in the fall of ’95,” Clements says wistfully, adding, “Shoot, I wish he’d lived to be a hundred and twenty.”

  “Playing with Old and in the Way was like playing in the bluegrass band I’d always wanted to play in,” Garcia said. “It was such a great band and I was flattered to be in such fast company. I was only sorry my banjo chops were never what they had been when I was playing continually, though they were smoothing out near the end.”

  To give a sense of the double life Garcia was leading in those days, on May 18, 1973, Old and in the Way played a show at a small Palo Alto club called Homer’s Warehouse, and then two days later he strapped on his electric guitar to play with the Grateful Dead in front of 40,000 people at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco—the Dead’s first big stadium show. Four nights later he was back playing banjo with Old and in the Way at the Ash Grove in L.A., followed by one-nighters in Boston and Passaic, New Jersey, before joining the Dead in Washington, D.C., for two enormous gigs at RFK Stadium with co-headliners the Allman Brothers Band.

  The Dead and the Allmans had been friends and mutual admirers for several years. The Macon, Georgia–based Allmans cited the early Grateful Dead—particularly the Anthem of the Sun–era band—as one of their influences. Indeed, that album was the source of the Allmans’ famous “Mountain Jam”: the theme from Donovan’s “There Is a Mountain” appeared in the middle of the jam on “Alligator” on Anthem. The Allmans had the same instrumental lineup as the 1968 Dead—including two drummers—and like the Dead the Allmans had paid dues in the psychedelic world, tripping and jamming for hours on end. But whereas much of the Dead’s music had been informed by country sources, the Allmans drew more from blues and R&B. The group’s distinctive sound came from the blending of Duane Allman’s and Dickey Betts’s guitar styles with Gregg Allman’s sturdy B-3 work and a relentless powerhouse rhythm section. Their music never had the loose, slippery, unpredictable quality that the Dead had in spades, but what they did have was the ability to play incredibly complex, bebop-inspired unison lines that exploded into jams which invariably led to other fiery crescendos. These guys had serious chops, but the veneer was still that of a simple electric blues band.

  The Dead and the Allmans had shared a bill at the Fillmore East in February 1970, and then in April 1971 Duane played slide on three songs with the Dead during the group’s final series at the Fillmore East. Tragically, in October of that year Duane was killed in a motorcycle accident. But the Allman Brothers had so much momentum following the release of their incendiary live album At Fillmore East that they were able to stay together and actually increase their following on subsequent tours. In July 1972 Dickey Betts, bassist Berry Oakley and drummer Jaimoe joined the Dead for a few songs at Dillon Stadium in Hartford, Connecticut, and the following night Garcia, Weir and Kreutzmann returned the favor by jamming with the Allmans at Gaelic Park in the Bronx. By 1973 the Dead and the Allmans were the most popular touring bands in the country, and really the last true-blue proponents of the Big Jam left in American rock ’n’ roll.

  So there was history and momentum going into the June RFK concerts, which attracted 110,000 people over two days (okay, it was a lot of the same people twice). The Allmans headlined the first of the two shows, both of which were played in sweltering heat and crippling humidity. The second day the order was reversed and the Dead closed the show with a three-set extravaganza, the last featuring the Dead and Allmans together for a set of rock ’n’ roll tunes that included “That’s All Right Mama,” “Not Fade Away,” “Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad,” “The Promised Land” and “Johnny B. Goode.”

  But the RFK shows were really just a taste of what was yet to come. A month and a half later, the Dead, the Allman Brothers and the Band drew 600,000 people to a concert at the Grand Prix Racecourse in Watkins Glen, New York, in the beautiful Finger Lakes region.

  The promoters had expected a crowd of about 150,000 to show up—just a few thousand more than typically came to see the annual United States Grand Prix race there—but there were that many people camped outside the gates two days before the show. Bill Graham, who had been hired to stage the concert, persuaded the promoters to open the gates four hours earlier than planned, and by midday Friday—a day before showtime—the area was packed nearly half a mile from the stage, while hundreds of thousands more streamed toward the site on foot, since traffic was backed up for twenty miles in every direction. As had happened at Woodstock and virtually every other humongous festival, tickets eventually stopped being collected and then the masses really poured into the area. The early arrivers were rewarded for enduring a torrential downpour the night before the gates opened—the Dead played two short sets as a “sound check,” the Allmans played for ninety minutes, the Band an hour. There were people in the woods and covering the hillsides for miles around, and most didn’t seem particularly concerned that the sound couldn’t possibly travel to the far reaches. They just wanted to be there. Dan Healy arranged to have the concert broadcast on a frequency that could be picked up by radios within a few miles of the site. It was a mellow crowd, content to hang out and party with each other for the most part.

  Most agreed that the Dead’s two sets on Saturday afternoon were not their best—not in any way bad like at Woodstock, but not as consistently powerful as most of their 1973 shows, including the RFK concerts. At least this time the Dead missed the rains, which nearly washed away the Band during their set. The day really belonged to the Allman Brothers, whose music had more of the grand sweep needed to communicate to people half a mile away. There was another nice Dead-Allmans jam session at the conclusion of the Allmans’ set around 2:30 Sunday morning, and the thousands who could actually hear the music seemed to enjoy it thoroughly. There were a few drug arrests, the usual scattering of bum trips and overdoses, and several highway fatalities miles from the site before and after the concert, but considering the size of the crowd and the scarcity of food and other amenities, things went extremely well. It helped that it was only a one-day event.

  Garcia didn’t have much time to savor the triumph of Watkins Glen. In fact, he helicoptered directly from the concert site to Mount Holly, New Jersey, where he was facing charges stemming from a March 29 bust on the New Jersey Turnpike. Garcia and his passenger, Bob Hunter, had been driving from a gig in Baltimore to one two nights later in Springfield, Massachusetts, in a rented 1973 Chevrolet when they were pulled over because Garcia was driving 71 mph in a 60 mph zone. A search of Garcia’s briefcase (which he opened to retrieve his driver’s license) turned up small quantities of pot, LSD and cocaine, so Garcia was arrested and later released on $2,000 bail. Hunter was not charged.

  If Garcia was worried when he went to court following the Watkins Glen show, it didn’t show. He cheerfully signed autographs for well-wishers in the courtroom and ch
atted amiably with reporters on the scene. Probation officials at the hearing described Garcia as “a very likeable person,” and one county official revealed that the state trooper who had arrested Garcia had said, “He was such a nice guy, we hated to bust him.” After an attorney for Garcia presented a psychiatrist’s report stating that Garcia was not addicted to drugs, was “a good family man and a creative individual,” the Burlington County court judge gave Garcia a suspended one-year sentence, with the charges to be dropped after that period provided Garcia was not named in another criminal offense. Two days later Garcia was back with the Dead for two sold-out shows at Roosevelt Stadium (with the Band opening), the second of which fell on Garcia’s thirty-first birthday.

  The Grateful Dead spent most of August ensconced in the Record Plant, a cushy state-of-the-art recording studio in Sausalito, recording Wake of the Flood, their first album for Grateful Dead Records. Four of the seven Hunter-Garcia songs introduced in February made it onto the record: “Here Comes Sunshine,” “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodleoo,” “Row Jimmy” and “Eyes of the World,” plus the earlier “Stella Blue.” Keith Godchaux sang lead on an R&B/gospel-tinged song he and Hunter wrote called “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” (it would be Keith’s only vocal appearance on a Dead record), and Weir contributed the three-part “Weather Report Suite,” featuring sections co-written with folk songwriter Eric Anderson and John Barlow. The Weir-Barlow section in particular, “Let It Grow,” showed perhaps the greatest compositional sophistication of any Weir tune to date, mixing Spanish-influenced passages with furiously fast jamming and dynamic shifts that took the piece from thundering stepped riffs to a soft, graceful lilt within a matter of seconds.

  With the exception of Keith’s song, all of the tunes had been road tested, so recording them was mainly a matter of engineers Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor getting good performances on tape. A few songs featured outside players: Vassar Clements’s fiddle snaked through “Mississippi Half-Step”; a small horn section added peppery blasts to “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” and “Let It Grow”; Doug Sahm, former leader of the Sir Douglas Quintet, played twelve-string on a track; and helping on background vocals was a singer named Sarah Fulcher, who had also had a brief tenure with the Saunders-Garcia group earlier in the year.

  On the Dead’s September East Coast swing following the completion of the album, two of the horn players on the record—saxophonist Martin Fierro and trumpeter Joe Ellis, both from Doug Sahm’s band, who opened every show on the tour except one—joined the Dead for a couple of numbers at each concert, to mainly negative reviews from the Deadheads. “To be honest, the fans didn’t like the horns, so the Dead finally said, ‘Fuck it!’” Fierro says good-naturedly. “But we had a great time; it was wonderful. We rehearsed, but we didn’t have written arrangements. We had head arrangements. And sometimes it sounded pretty good and sometimes it was a little rough.” After this tour, Fierro started dropping in regularly with the Saunders-Garcia group, too.

  Wake of the Flood was released in mid-October through a network of independent record distributors. As in the later Warners days, the band sold about 450,000 copies in the first four months and after that sales tapered off rapidly. “I think some people believed that we were going to instantly go out and sell a million copies of our record because Warner Bros. had done such a lousy job and now we were in control,” Ron Rakow says. “Then, when it didn’t sell a million copies some people thought I was fucking with them. See, there was this attitude in the Dead that the record company is for fucking with. I thought it was just because it was Warner Bros., but once I became the record company, I found out it was whoever had the gig. So some people in the band didn’t believe our fans were buying it quickly and that there were only that many of them, which was Garcia’s theory, and what Warner Bros. always said. So when the same thing happened to us they thought I was fucking with them.”

  Even if sales weren’t up dramatically, the amount of money the band made from album sales was. “We were making about thirty-three cents an album” with Warners, Rakow told the Wall Street Journal in 1974. “Now we make about a dollar twenty-two an album.”

  By controlling every aspect of an album’s production, manufacturing and distribution, Rakow was also able to devise creative ways to make and save money for the band. For example, when Wake of the Flood came out, Rakow learned that the price for printing two million covers was only five thousand dollars more than printing the million they actually needed, so he ordered the extra covers made. “Then, a few years later, when we needed money,” Rakow relates, “I ordered the records to fill the covers from our pressing plant in Santa Maria at a special rate. I had the records drilled as cutouts [overstock] before they were even shrink-wrapped, and then I sold them all to a cutout operation in Philadelphia for ninety-five cents apiece and made five hundred thousand dollars in one day. They sold them in stores for two dollars apiece, so in the end almost two million copies of Wake of the Flood were sold.”

  According to Rakow, Garcia was fascinated by these kinds of financial machinations. “I’ve heard people say that Jerry was impressed with me because I had Wall Street experience. That’s bullshit. Jerry wouldn’t know Wall Street if it fell on him. He never owned a stock in his life, at least when I knew him. But I regarded business as an art form and a game and he loved that, and that’s why I intrigued him. We weren’t just doing a business; it was a way to employ people—our friends. It was to answer a question that we asked ourselves often: ‘Who are we and what are we? Are we dessert on an already maggot-ridden, decadent capitalist table, or are we appetizers on the banquet of the new form?’ I phrased it one time stoned on acid, and we asked it to ourselves over and over and over for ten years.”

  Not everyone in the Dead organization was thrilled with Rakow’s crafty gamesmanship or the strong influence he apparently had over Garcia. Rakow was a schemer and a dealmaker—he bragged about his exploits—and a couple of bandmembers were privately nervous about where Rakow might lead them. Dave Parker, who had helped lead the band out of their financial hole and handled some of their day-to-day business affairs, was among those who were suspicious.

  “Rakow was very sharp and very adept at getting people’s confidence,” he says. “He became close to Jerry and things took a different direction after that. I can’t say I was comfortable with it.

  “Jerry was always willing to go along and trust somebody who maybe other people wouldn’t have trusted. You know how it is in the rock ’n’ roll world—there are all sorts of characters. A good rap was presented to Garcia, he was sold on it and he made the decision to trust that it was going to happen and happen right.”

  “Rakow had lots of great energy for a lot of things, and then terrible energy for other stuff; it was a strange, unpredictable mixture,” Mountain Girl says. “But it was energy that the group seemed to need—that Pranksteresque business. He was utilitarian, practical, but crazy. He seemed harmless at the time. He was an element, a character, another escapee from New York.”

  The Dead played its final shows of 1973 in mid-December (it was one of the few years the group didn’t play on New Year’s Eve), and shortly after returning to California, Garcia began work on his second solo album, which would be one of the first releases on a new Grateful Dead subsidiary label, called Round Records, designed to put out solo projects by the bandmembers. (Rakow says the reason the Dead’s record companies had such “lame, unimaginative” names was “nobody could ever agree on anything. ‘Okay, records are round.’ That they agreed on.”) Whereas Grateful Dead Records was a partnership involving ten people—the six bandmembers, Rakow, Jon McIntire, Rock Scully and Alan Trist—Round was owned entirely by Garcia and Rakow because “some of the Dead don’t want a risk,” Rakow told Rolling Stone at the time. “Garcia likes risks, likes worries, so he can always be on the edge.”

  The approach Garcia took on his second album was the polar opposite of the way he’d made the first one: he put it almost entirely i
n the hands of John Kahn, allowing his friend to help choose material and select the musicians who would be on the record. “He was game to try something different,” Kahn said, “and it was almost like he didn’t want to be the boss on it.

  “We picked out the songs together. I would present him with a bunch of ideas, he’d take the ones he liked and work on those. It was mainly stuff that he wouldn’t ordinarily have thought of, and I think that was part of the challenge for him—to try something that was really new to him, he chose [Irving Berlin’s] ‘Russian Lullaby.’ He had a record of Oscar Aleman doing it in this weird guitar trio. Jerry told me it was Hitler’s favorite song.”

  A few of the songs the pair chose included Smokey Robinson’s “When the Hunter Gets Captured by the Game,” Chuck Berry’s “Let It Rock,” the Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” Van Morrison’s “He Ain’t Give You None,” Dr. John’s “What Goes Around,” Peter Rowan’s “Mississippi Moon” and a Hunter-Kahn original called “Midnight Town.” It was a very broad range of styles, and Kahn “cast” every song differently. Several songs had horn arrangements, “Mississippi Moon” utilized a full string section, and on a few tunes Kahn brought in the ace L.A. session guitarist Larry Carlton to play rhythm guitar. Merl Saunders appeared on several cuts, Richard Greene fiddled on two, and this was the record where Garcia and Kahn first encountered Ron Tutt, Elvis Presley’s outstanding drummer, who joined Garcia’s solo group later.

  While the various bandmembers were engaged in solo pursuits of one kind or another at the beginning of 1974, the Dead’s sound wizards were busy developing the famous “Wall of Sound”—a sound reinforcement system larger than any ever built before, expressly designed to deliver clean, loud audio in large venues such as stadiums and basketball arenas. It was the culmination of theories that the Dead’s technical gurus had been exploring and refining for years. As Dan Healy put it, “We became used to a quality of sound that was just not attainable via rental systems. We realized that if we didn’t do it ourselves, it wouldn’t sound good. We thought, ‘For the prices we’re paying to rent equipment that sounds shitty, we could develop our own stuff,’ so we did.”