It’s probably going too far to say that the shows themselves were anticlimactic, but nearly everyone agreed that the Dead had played much better. The band was hampered by a number of factors. Bill Kreutzmann cracked a bone in his wrist in a fall from a horse and could only play with one arm. (“When asked by the Egyptian press what it was like playing with one arm, Billy said, ‘In the land of the limbless, a one-armed drummer is king,’” Trist notes with a laugh.) The piano tuner who was supposed to go to Egypt with the band backed out at the last minute, so Keith’s piano was horribly out of tune all three nights. John Kahn severely sprained his ankle in a tumble down the stairs of the recording truck, and then he and Garcia spent much of the time doped up on prescription pain medication, since there was no Persian to be found there. “John and Jerry were taking these painkillers and snoozing their way through Egypt basically,” M.G. says. “That’s when I really began to associate snoozing with drug use. That had never been a problem before, but the long snoozes got longer and longer and more and more frequent.”
“Jerry wasn’t in the best of spirits; he was having some difficulties with things,” Richard Loren says. “The Dead are a collective and they’re not going to put on a great show if they’re not all feeling good. They were happy to be there and everything was wonderful there, but there was a lot of personal angst and anxieties going on amongst themselves.”
“Jerry was definitely going through something, but I couldn’t tell you what it was,” John Kahn corroborated. “Even though I spent a lot of time with him, sometimes he’d shut me out, just like he shut out other people, and he just wouldn’t talk about stuff. I didn’t push him; I figured when he wanted to talk about something he would. The rest of the time I gave him his space, which is one reason I think he liked to hang out with me.
“I know he wasn’t entirely happy with how Shakedown Street was going. I know he was unhappy with certain things about the Grateful Dead at that time—Keith was kind of out of it; Jerry and Phil were kind of distant in that period. I think there was also some weird fallout in his personal life—the thing with Deborah was over and here he was in Egypt, and M.G. was there, but not really ‘with’ him. It was a little weird, but even so, I think he would tell you he had a great time. Everyone did. We talked about little things that happened on that trip for years. We even talked about it a little the last time I saw him, just before he died.”
The concerts attracted 1,000 to 1,500 people a night. About half were Americans and Europeans, half Egyptians. Madame Sadat and a number of other government dignitaries were on hand for the first night’s performance. Each concert opened with a set by Hamza el-Din, a Nubian friend of the Dead’s who had been a sort of one-person ambassador for traditional Egyptian music in America since the ’60s, well-known in world music circles years before his association with the Dead. At the shows, Hamza was joined by a small troupe of Nubian friends playing ouds and tars (a tar is a deeply resonant single-membrane hand drum that looks like a giant tambourine), singing and clapping their hands rhythmically in a set of Egyptian folk songs. Then the Dead came out and joined forces with the Nubians on a rhythmic improv, with Garcia’s guitar singing sweetly above the clapping and drumming. The first night that cross-cultural jam eventually segued into the Dead playing “Not Fade Away.” The second night it was “Deal.” The third night it was “Fire on the Mountain.” Otherwise, the Dead played the same kind of material they played in San Francisco and Des Moines and Boston: cowboy tunes, Chuck Berry rock ’n’ roll, “Stella Blue” and “Terrapin,” “The Other One” and “Shakedown Street.”
The final night was the magic night. The concert coincided with a total eclipse of the full moon, and nearly everyone in the Dead’s extended family decided to throw caution to the wind and trip for the occasion. Kesey had brought a Murine eyedrop bottle filled with liquid LSD, and he nearly emptied it that night putting drops on eager tongues.
“Take a perfect setting,” Garcia said later. “What could be better? What could be more amazing? A total eclipse, a full moon, the Great Pyramid; everything perfect and we went and played shitty. It didn’t really matter. We had a wonderful time, man, we really did. We got a lot out of it. We got off like bandits. It was great.”
“Maybe the whole thing was just a little overwhelming,” Donna Godchaux observed in the mid-’80s. “Our expectations were so high I think we were a little disappointed we weren’t ‘beamed up’ or something. It’s definitely something I’ll never forget, a real highlight in my life.”
To the dismay of their British fans, the Dead abruptly canceled the shows they’d scheduled for London’s Rainbow Theatre following the Egypt trip, in order to finish Shakedown Street and have it come out before their November U.S. tour. Back in America, Garcia listened to the multitrack tapes of the Egypt shows and his worst fears were confirmed: the performances weren’t good enough to put out as an album. The Egypt trip had cost about half a million dollars, and there was no “product” to show for it.
Since Lowell George was not available to work on overdubs or mixing for Shakedown Street, Garcia brought in John Kahn to help the band finish the album, but “nobody seemed to be that into it,” Kahn said. “They just wanted it to be done. It was a horrible experience; a pain in the ass doing it. They’re all so difficult. There are so many of them and they have pretty much an equal voice. You have Mickey making sure that every track is filled with some kind of percussion sound, and at the same time you’re having to make sure everyone else gets heard, too. It was just tedious; it was real hard work. I ended up playing a lot of the keyboards on it because Keith would ditch the sessions a lot. I was down in L.A. when they were doing Terrapin Station and I remember he missed a lot of those sessions, too. I ended up playing most of the Hammond organ on Shakedown Street—that’s me on ‘I Need a Miracle’ and ‘Good Lovin’.’ But everybody seemed kind of scattered then, including Jerry.”
By this time, Jerry, Mountain Girl and the kids were living in a house in Inverness, a remote but beautiful little community by the sea in west Marin. M.G. had bought a small business, the Foggy Mountain Bakery, to occupy some of her time, and Jerry was spending endless days and nights at the studio. According to M.G., after the Egypt trip Garcia’s drug use began to escalate noticeably. “That was when I really saw that he was into something that was addictive and weird,” she says. “He was smoking this stuff on tin foil, and that was the first time I caught on that something was wrong. He told me it was opium, so it was okay. I said, ‘I don’t really like opium much; it makes me dizzy.’ It’s fine if you want to get to sleep, but I had to do the dishes and keep the house together and all this other stuff.
“I tried [the Persian] one time by accident, Jerry had left a bunch of this stuff around the house and I didn’t really know what it was. He left some out on the tin foil and I smoked it and I passed out and threw up the whole thing! I said, ‘Wait a minute, this is not opium! I know opium and this isn’t it.’ So I confronted him about it. I was really, really upset. And he admitted he was strung out. And I ranted a bit and he stalked away. Basically I told him he had to choose between that and us; our scene. And that scared him. A couple of days later he came back and said he was going to kick; that he was kicking. I didn’t know what to do. I had to go to work. I didn’t know anything about kicking. I didn’t want to call Synanon or some place like that. I couldn’t think what to do or who to call. So he kind of gruffed around the house for a couple of days and then split again.”
Shakedown Street was completed in time to hit the stores in the beginning of November, as hoped. A single of “Good Lovin’” backed with “Stagger Lee” was released but didn’t sell many copies. The album itself sold fairly well—actually, better than Terrapin Station had initially—and both the title song and “I Need a Miracle” became popular songs on FM radio for a while.
The band’s tour kicked off on a high note with an appearance on Saturday Night Live before the largest viewing audience they’d ever played fo
r—an estimated fifteen million viewers. Garcia had long proclaimed his distaste for playing on television, which he once said was “just the wrong form for the Grateful Dead. I mean, it’s about enough time for us to tune up. Also television is kind of reductive. The band playing on television seems reduced. It doesn’t come through.” Nevertheless, Saturday Night Live in 1978 was much hipper than “regular” TV, with some cast members and writers nearly as enamored with pot and cocaine as the Grateful Dead, and it was probably the most popular program on television with the Dead’s core demographic audience. The group played three songs on the show—“Casey Jones,” appropriately enough, and a medley of “I Need a Miracle” and “Good Lovin’.” Outwardly they seemed to be having a ball on the show, and Garcia in particular seemed to play to the cameras more than the others. He might not have liked television (though that is debatable), but he understood its power and he almost always played well on TV.
The rest of the tour, which stretched from the second week of November 1978 all the way to mid-February 1979 with just a few short breaks, was reasonably solid musically, but fraught with personal crises. In late November Garcia came down with a severe case of bronchitis, no doubt exacerbated by smoking Persian and freebasing cocaine (not to mention his usual chain-smoking of unfiltered cigarettes), and he was hospitalized for a couple of days. Keith was barely a factor onstage at this point, and offstage he could be surly and even more uncommunicative than usual.
“Keith’s and my personal life then was so horrible,” Donna recalled, “and in the band as a whole the feeling was, ‘The music stinks. Every concert stinks.’ Things got to a point where on every conceivable level things were so bad I went to the road manager and said, ‘I’ve gotta go home.’ And I did. I left and missed the last couple of dates [in Buffalo and Detroit in January 1979]. Then Keith and I did one more tour, discussing all along the way how we could get out of it. It was horrible, because we weren’t quitters.”
At the same time, the band was wondering how they could relieve the Godchauxs of their duties. Keith had been a problem for a long time, and Donna, though obviously talented, had trouble hearing herself onstage amid the loud instruments and frequently sang off-key. There was no way one could be fired and the other retained, so it was decided both had to go.
According to Donna, “What happened was after I left that tour, then Keith and I decided we wanted to get out and start our own group or do something else—anything else. So we played that benefit concert at the Oakland Coliseum [February 17, 1979’s Rock for Life benefit to end environmental cancer], and then a few days later there was a meeting at our house and it was brought up whether we should stay in the band anymore. So we discussed it, as a band, and we mutually decided we would leave. I’ll tell you, I instantly felt like about a billion pounds had been lifted off me.” Tragically, Keith was killed in an automobile accident a year and a half later.
By the time Keith and Donna left the Dead, the group had already decided on a replacement: Brent Mydland, who was the keyboardist and backup singer in Bob Weir’s solo band. Brent recalled, “Bob gave me a call one night out of the blue and said, ‘Would you be interested in being in the Dead? It’s not for sure, but Keith and Donna might be leaving soon, so you ought to check out some of this stuff,’ and he gave me a list of some tunes to listen to—fifteen or twenty songs.
“I knew quite a few of them. I’d liked the Grateful Dead when I was younger, though I kind of lost track of them in the early ’70s. In fact, when I first met Bobby, I didn’t even know the Dead were still together.”
Brent and the Dead had about two weeks of rehearsals at Club Front before their first gig together at San Jose’s Spartan Stadium on April 22, 1979. Sitting behind a Hammond B-3 organ with his long blond hair and bushy beard, Brent looked a lot like the young Gregg Allman. It was immediately apparent that he was a much more physical player than Keith—he really threw himself into his playing—and because he played a broader range of keyboards, he drew from a wider sonic palette than his predecessor. Whereas Keith had always been an acoustic piano man first and foremost (with occasional periods of investigating the Fender Rhodes electric piano), Brent’s heart was in the B-3, and he was also adept at synthesizer. Coming into a band that was already fourteen years old, with the kind of history the Dead had, must have been intimidating, but Brent was a quick study and a reasonably confident player.
“What we wanted was a keyboard player who wasn’t a pianist,” Garcia explained in early 1981. “The whole thing was that with piano, guitars, bass and drums, what you’ve got is an all-percussion band. What we wanted was a keyboard to provide color and sustain and some of those qualities that guitars don’t provide, and Brent has been real good at that. He’s been adding a lot of texture and color and he’s also a fine singer, probably the best of all of us, so our trio singing is real nice.”
Indeed, the most noticeable change when Brent came into the Dead was the improvement in the band’s vocal quality. Garcia was always the surest, most pitch-conscious singer in the group, while Weir and Donna tended to slide around notes, which made for some awkward harmony blends. But Brent’s craggy tenor was steady enough to nail the high end in a harmony, and combined with Garcia’s vocal, it set up an easy pocket for Weir to slip his part into. Garcia seemed visibly elated and energized by the band’s new vocal power. Songs with prominent three-part harmonies like “I Know You Rider,” “The Wheel,” “Mississippi Half-Step,” “Eyes of the World” and “Truckin’” sounded better than they had in a while, and the vocal combination of Brent and Bob on songs like “Mexicali Blues,” “Playing in the Band” and “Cassidy” brought out new subtleties in those tunes.
The first tour by the new band in the spring of 1979 was very well received by Deadheads. Not surprisingly, some of the jamming was a bit tentative, as Brent adjusted to his role and the band got used to him, but it caused only a minor disruption in the band’s evolution.
The other exciting development on that tour was the addition of “the Beast,” a massive new setup of drums behind Mickey and Billy. The Beast had evolved out of Mickey’s work on the soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola’s moody, impressionist Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now. When Coppola asked the drummer to contribute an all-percussion score that could be used in different parts of the film, Mickey collected dozens of drums and percussion devices and even had some new drums built to be able to convey the feeling of the jungle and the horrors of war. There were other influences affecting the drum solos around the same time, too: Mickey studied Japanese taiko drumming with a troupe called On-Deko-Za, and he brought some of that music’s precision and articulation into his solos; Billy began playing the African talking drum regularly; and Mickey brought the Egyptian tar into his arsenal. Over the next few years, the drum solo became more exotic and compelling as Mickey introduced instruments with distinctive and unusual timbres, such as the marimbalike African balafon, a one-stringed South American drone instrument called the berimbau, and resonant bronze Tibetan bowls that ring like temple bells when flicked lightly with a fingertip.
Garcia’s ongoing involvement with heroin and cocaine was exacerbated by the return, shortly after the Egypt trip, of Rock Scully. The onetime Grateful Dead manager had drifted off during the band’s performing hiatus (and even spent time in prison for drug possession), but had now finagled a position as the press liaison for the group, and in no time was back in the thick of things. Garcia moved into a downstairs bedroom in the house at 84 Hepburn Heights in San Rafael where Scully and his wife, Nikki, lived, and he and Scully became partners in Persian; indeed, Scully became one of Garcia’s main procurers.
John Kahn was also wrapped up in this increasingly dark circle of coke and Persian users. Like Garcia, though, he continued to be quite productive musically. In December 1978 he formed a group called Reconstruction around Garcia and a quartet of jazz players—drummer Gaylord Birch, reeds player Ron Stallings, trombonist Ed Neumeister and organist Merl Saunders.
; “Reconstruction was going to be a band that would do more jazz, explore that avenue on a deeper level than the old Merl and Jerry thing,” Kahn recalled. “It was supposed to be a thing where if Jerry was going to play in the band, which he ended up doing, we could still do work when he was out of town with the Grateful Dead. That was the point. In which case we’d have another guitar player. It was supposed to be something I could do when Jerry was away with the Grateful Dead, which seemed to be more and more of the time. I actually did it a few times—I did some gigs with Jerry Miller of Moby Grape. He was a really good guy and a great player. I wasn’t really planning on Jerry being in the band originally, and then when he was in the band it sort of changed everything from what the plan was. Then, when he left for Grateful Dead tours, we were never able to really get anywhere because everyone expected to see Jerry in there. But it was fun for a while; we had some nice gigs. It was fun making Jerry play those real difficult songs. The horn players used to make fun of Jerry and me for being late or taking drugs or whatever—the same old stuff—and then I’d listen to tapes and we were the only ones who could play the songs right!”
The group had a different repertoire from any of Garcia’s other solo ventures. While there were some holdovers from the Jerry Garcia Band, like “Someday Baby,” the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence” and “That’s What Love Will Make You Do,” many of the tunes were new to Garcia including “Soul Roach,” “L-O-V-E,” “Get Up and Dance” and other songs brought in by Merl Saunders. And this time out there were four soloists in the band: the two horn players, Merl and Garcia.
The approach was to play jazz and rock together but still be danceable,” Merl comments. “It was a great band for a while. Jerry liked that it gave him a totally new structure to work with, with these great horn players and a different set of tunes. These were really excellent musicians. And because they came from outside the Grateful Dead world, they related to Jerry as just another player, not a ‘star.’”
Garcia: An American Life Page 48