“I would say that it’s musically the most adventurous album we’ve done in a pretty long time,” Garcia remarked in an interview during the making of the album. “Our development [historically] has been to synthesize various forms, like playing jazz, playing country and western, playing rhythm and blues and forming combinations of those genres and styles within what we’re doing, within our instrumentation. Now we’re working on creating styles rather than just being eclectic or synthesizing other styles. Thus, it’s a little bit more difficult, and considerably more experimental. It’s still questionable as to whether the things will be successful musically, but we’re sort of into defining new spaces for ourselves musically to go to.”
As Phil noted after the album was released, “We wanted to free ourselves from our own clichés, to search for new tonalities, new structures and modalities. I think we succeeded.”
Because the band was recording at Weir’s house, they didn’t have to worry about paying for studio time or hurrying because some other group had a session booked. They were able to dig in and work as long as their stamina (aided by copious amounts of cocaine) allowed—at one point, according to Garcia, they worked fifty hours straight. Of course even recording in a home studio isn’t exactly free: tape expenses alone ran into many thousands of dollars. But whereas with Wake of the Flood and Mars Hotel the group rehearsed outside the studio so they could then go in and get good, strong takes right away, the whole point of the Blues for Allah experiment was to allow the entire process of musical evolution—from germination to tracking to overdubbing—to occur in the studio environment in a natural way, at its own speed, without the meter running, so to speak.
* * *
At the same time that the Blues for Allah sessions were taking place in the winter of 1975, four other albums were being readied for release on Round Records, and Garcia played on all of them.
Keith and Donna was the first album by the Godchauxs, and it was literally a homegrown product—“Almost all of it was recorded at our house in Stinson Beach,” Donna says. “Bob Matthews brought in a Neve board [recording console] and we had our nine-foot Steinway there and we had our whole living room set up as a recording studio for a while. Jerry was just a couple of minutes away, so it was real easy to get together and work on it.”
Keith and Donna wrote almost all the songs on the album—except “Showboat,” written by Keith’s younger brother Brian, and the rather torpid cover of “River Deep, Mountain High”—and it reflected their passion for gospel music and good-time rock ’n’ roll. Naturally Keith’s keyboard work infused every track, but Garcia was actually the principal soloist and colorist. He played his guitar through several distinctive pedal effects, and on “Every Song I Sing” he laid down his longest slide guitar solo on any studio album. Garcia’s singing was also prominent on a pair of songs that hearkened back to the spirit of the great black gospel groups of the ’40s and ’50s: “Showboat,” sung by Keith, was written in the style of an old Golden Gate Quartet or Swan Silvertones number; and the traditional spiritual “Who Was John” found Keith, Donna and Garcia harmonizing quite effectively a cappella.
“There was a period there when Garcia and Keith and I just spent hours and hours and hours listening to tons of different albums of old gospel music—Dorothy Love Coates and the Blind Boys of Alabama; real funky, real spiritual gospel music,” Donna says. “We did that for a long time, and ‘Who Was John’ came out of that, though I can’t remember who did that before us. We were just in that world all the time for a while. Jerry loved those kind of harmonies.”
Old and in the Way was a live album by the defunct group, recorded in October 1973 at the Boarding House by Owsley. Garcia sang lead on two cuts—“Pig in a Pen” and the traditional bluegrass spiritual “White Dove”—and played banjo and sang baritone harmony throughout. The album went on to become a surprise best-seller in the bluegrass community (as well as among Deadheads), which was ironic since Garcia had never been able to sustain a commercially successful bluegrass band in the days when he was more serious about it—Old and in the Way was never more than a sideline for him.
Garcia produced, arranged and played electric and acoustic guitars, pedal steel and various keyboards on Robert Hunter’s slicker and more focused second effort, Tiger Rose. “I like Garcia’s arrangements and production on it, and I like the songs,” Hunter said in 1984. “The only thing I can’t stand is the vocals on it. I played it for the first time in years the other day and I was horrified.” So much so that in 1988 he recut all the lead vocals on the album. In addition to Garcia, the album featured an impressive roster of friends, including Mickey Hart, David Freiberg, Starship keyboardist Pete Sears, David Grisman and New Riders bassist Dave Torbert.
Phil Lesh and Ned Lagin were the driving forces behind Seastones, an ambitious and altogether difficult album of electronically treated instrumental and vocal performances. Along with Garcia, the album also featured Grace Slick, David Crosby, David Freiberg, Mickey Hart and Spencer Dryden (the usual suspects), but most of the record was a soft, subtle electronic wash with barely distinguishable parts—sort of a cross between a Grateful Dead “space” jam and the proto–New Age experiments of Brian Eno and Harold Budd. The thirty-six-minute piece that came out as Seastones was recorded in February 1975. The CD version, released in 1990, contains a second, even more challenging composition that was recorded in November 1975.
Though the Dead were still “in retirement,” in mid-March 1975 Bill Graham coaxed the band into performing at a huge, star-studded benefit concert at Kezar Stadium for the San Francisco Public Schools’ cash-strapped sports and music programs. The Dead, billed as Jerry Garcia and Friends, shared the bill with some heavy company—Bob Dylan with Neil Young and three members of the Band, Santana, Jefferson Starship (in one of their first local appearances since the Jefferson Airplane’s demise), Tower of Power, the Doobie Brothers (who were hugely popular in the Bay Area at the time), Joan Baez and a few others. Not bad for five bucks at the gate. Marlon Brando spoke, various local sports heroes were introduced, to appreciative applause, and the Grateful Dead played the strangest set of music imaginable, stunning even their most ardent fans with their odd and thoroughly spacey presentation.
They opened their forty-minute segment with an instrumental version of the tune that would later acquire lyrics and be named “Blues for Allah.” It was built around a slow, strange, ominous-sounding sequence of notes which then led to other related progressions that were filled with a sort of lumbering drama that fell somewhere between being genuinely fascinating and actually kind of nerve-grating. Much of the mostly non-Deadhead audience didn’t know what had hit them—could this really be San Francisco’s original good-time party band?—and sort of stood and sat around looking puzzled and bored. That tune then led into another instrumental, written by Phil, called “Stronger Than Dirt,” that had some interesting tempo changes and a Latin feel in places—it’s one of the jazziest pieces the Dead ever recorded. That piece was split in two by a drum solo by Mickey and Billy—a clear signal that Mickey had come back into the fold—and eventually wound up back at the “Blues for Allah” theme again. The band left the stage to light applause, then returned and played “Johnny B. Goode,” which couldn’t have been more different from what they had just played—but was exactly what the crowd wanted to hear. All in all it was a rather peculiar afternoon for the Dead in their first appearance since their hiatus began. They certainly couldn’t be accused of pandering; quite the opposite.
Garcia spent the first three weeks of April on an extensive tour of the East Coast (and three shows in the Midwest) with the Legion of Mary, which now included Ron Tutt on drums, replacing Paul Humphrey. “Ron Tutt was the Rolls-Royce of drummers,” Merl Saunders says. “He said that he didn’t know how to play jazz but I thought he could play anything.”
At first, playing in theaters and clubs with the Legion of Mary was a nice change of pace for Garcia after the last couple of years of hug
e gigs with the Grateful Dead. But after a while even that scene got to be fairly crazed. Merl Saunders says that crowds of people approached Garcia wherever he went, which started to wear on him. Eventually Garcia just holed up in his hotel room when he wasn’t onstage.
“I’m a person who really likes to be connected to people,” Saunders explains. “Jerry liked people, too, but he also sometimes became very distant, and other times he’d be very spacey. He would also sometimes get very angry. You could never tell this when he was playing, because he seemed to always be happy when he was playing, but offstage he’d go through these dramatic changes, like getting in the limo: ‘Fuck it. In the car, Merl! Roll up that window! Driver, just drive right through the crowd!’ And I’m like, ‘Hey man! Cool it!’ It bugged him that these people wouldn’t give him his space. It became very annoying to him. The people were always well-meaning and all, but he just didn’t want to have to deal with it a lot of times. He wanted to play his music and then just be himself. Some days he accepted it, some days he didn’t. Some days he had the bullies [his road crew] in front of him to keep people away from him.”
The Grateful Dead resumed work on Blues for Allah at Weir’s studio in early May and continued until the beginning of July. In the middle of that period, the Grateful Dead played their second concert since their “retirement,” a benefit concert at Winterland to raise money for the family of San Francisco poster artist Bob Fried, who had died that spring. The top-billed act at “The Bob Fried Memorial Boogie” was supposed to be Jerry Garcia and Friends, but everyone there knew who was really playing that night, and the place was electric with anticipation. There were opening sets by Keith and Donna’s band (which included Garcia) and Kingfish, a rock/R&B band featuring Weir, Dave Torbert and an excellent guitarist in the Garcia mold named Robbie Hodinott. Then the Dead came out and opened up with a new Hunter-Garcia song called “Crazy Fingers.” Garcia said that in his original setting the song was almost heavy metal, but by the time it reached the concert stage it had been transformed into a floating, lyrical, slow reggae tune that perfectly matched the feeling of the words, which Hunter described as “a collection of haiku-style verses, mostly seventeen syllables, some more successful than others, with no connecting link other than similarity of mood.”
Your rain falls like crazy fingers
Peals of fragile thunder keeping time
Recall the days that still are to come
Some sing blue
The band ended their first set with a sequence of three new songs that were linked to one another—“Help on the Way” (by Hunter-Garcia, though at this Winterland show it was played without vocals), an intricate instrumental connector by the whole band called “Slipknot” and Hunter-Garcia-Kreutzmann’s “Franklin’s Tower.”
“Help on the Way” was written around one of the jazziest progressions Garcia had ever conceived. It was a little sharp-edged and dissonant, and Hunter’s dramatic lyrics matched the urgency of the music:
Paradise waits
On the crest of a wave
Her angels in flame
She has no pain
Like a child she is pure
She is not to blame
Poised for flight
Wings spread bright
Spring from night
Into the sun
Don’t stop to run
She can fly like a lie
She can’t be outdone
“Slipknot” opened and closed with a spidery unison line that had a slightly bebopish feeling, but in the middle it opened up to a jam that ascended noisily in steps and then cruised to other plateaus before finding its way back to the unison line and then falling into “Franklin’s Tower,” which bounced along happily like a spry bluegrass tune on a chord sequence that Garcia admitted he’d purloined from the “colored girls” section of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” The verses consisted of couplets that were rich in metaphor.
Some come to laugh their past away
Some come to make it just one more day
Whichever way your pleasure tends
If you plant ice, you’re gonna harvest wind
Roll away the dew
Roll away the dew
The song “Blues for Allah” eventually became a three-part suite in the studio, and it “was a bitch to do,” Garcia said. “When we got toward the end of the album, we had some time restrictions and we started working pretty fast. But up until then we’d been pretty leisurely about it. That song was another totally experimental thing. In terms of the melody and the phrasing and all, it was not of this world. It’s not in any key and it’s not in any time. And all the line lengths are different.”
Most of the nearly thirteen-minute “Blues for Allah” suite was instrumental, and the middle section, entitled “Sand Castles and Glass Camels,” contained some of the freest playing the Dead ever did in the studio. The Lesh instrumental introduced at Kezar in March was fleshed out and tightened up to become something called “King Solomon’s Marbles,” and Weir had two songs on the record, a delicate guitar instrumental called “Sage and Spirit” (named for Rock Scully’s daughters) and “The Music Never Stopped,” a gospel-tinged rocker with John Barlow lyrics that seemed to be about the Dead themselves:
There’s a band out on the highway
They’re high-steppin’ into town
It’s a rainbow filled with sound
It’s fireworks, calliopes and clowns
Everybody’s dancin’
The album as a whole had an intimate feeling to it, and though it took a long time for the tunes to emerge from the jams and become songs, the finished record sounds remarkably like performances of the songs rather than some layered studio product. Dan Healy engineered the disc and managed to capture the interaction between the players in a more immediate and obvious way than some of their studio records had. If the record was lacking anything, it was the warmth and confidence that the band drew from playing songs in front of people for a while before recording them.
While the band was finishing up Blues for Allah, Garcia was also putting in long hours in Mill Valley overseeing the construction of the Grateful Dead movie, working closely with Susan Crutcher to determine the shape of the behemoth. “It was fascinating to see what six camera people were doing at the same moment at the same point of a song,” Crutcher says of the process of viewing the unedited footage. “We had great camera people so it was almost all really high-quality work. A few of them had never seen a Dead show, so that was quite an experience for them. Since we had five nights of concerts, we had a couple of versions of some favorite songs, and then we had a lot of one-version songs—like ‘Uncle John’s Band’ we had only one version of, which didn’t make it because Jerry’s view was that even if something was very strong visually, if he wasn’t completely happy with it musically, he didn’t want to use it. It also took him a while to get used to looking at himself on camera. But actually he was good about that; a lot better than a lot of people I’ve worked with. He was more concerned with his playing.”
Crutcher says that Garcia was perhaps most fascinated by the hours of Deadhead footage, since it gave him a glimpse of something he’d never seen—his fans before, during and after a show. “There was so much funny and weird stuff,” she notes. “We named everybody: There was ‘Moosegirl,’ the girl who makes that noise that sounds like a moose call. There was ‘Iggy,’ who recites this poem in the movie—‘Mama Hated Diesels So Bad.’ We had names for the dancers. It was fun, because it personalized it for us, and we got to know them. Jerry loved that part of it.”
Garcia’s creative juices were certainly flowing in mid-1975, but his personal life was in a shambles. “He was gone more than he should have been during that period when he was working a lot on the movie,” Mountain Girl says. “I’d go over there to the movie house and people just didn’t talk to me; literally didn’t talk to me. The vibe was very cool. I had no idea about Deborah or any of that stuff. They all knew and they weren’t
sure if I knew or not. Nobody had told them. So there was a weird vibe and I didn’t go over there much. Plus the kids couldn’t really hang out there because there was film and equipment all over the place.”
“It was a little awkward for me,” Crutcher says, “because Deborah was Jerry’s girlfriend but he was still [living] with Mountain Girl. Mountain Girl would come over and put rock salt in the corners of all the rooms to eliminate the evil spirits, and that kind of thing. I think it was a sort of magic thing. It was her way of saying that she knew, without confronting anybody. Then ultimately she did, of course.”
Then, M.G. says, “Jerry just kind of vanished with no explanation. I found out where he was and I ran into him. It was very upsetting. Then he came back for a while and he was kind of going back and forth.” What was his explanation? “He needed some space. That was actually possible. Home life was getting a little crowded. We had three kids in a two-bedroom house. And I was stubborn. I just stuck to my spot and waited for him to show back up again. I didn’t chase him over the hill. A couple of times I sort of chased him down and tried to talk to him, but he was evasive. But then he’d show up at the door and spend some time. He seemed to think he could have it both ways. And he got away with it for a long time.
“I think it was a terrible strain on everybody. I couldn’t believe it; it was a nightmare. It was also difficult to find out that everybody knew and hadn’t told me.”
Garcia: An American Life Page 42