Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  Reconstruction stayed together for only nine months, and except for three shows in Denver in April 1979, they never left the Bay Area. Merl believes that Garcia’s increasing drug dependence played a role in the dissolution of the band. “He seemed pretty clean at first,” he says, “but then I saw him start to slip, and then there was a night when he didn’t show up for a gig, which was done purposely, I think. It was sabotaged. [Saunders won’t say by whom.] They didn’t tell him there was a gig to get to. And shortly after that he and John started a different group and I sort of lost touch with him.”

  In mid-1979 the Grateful Dead returned to Club Front to begin recording Go to Heaven, their first album since Brent Mydland joined the band. Though no one in the group had been particularly happy, in retrospect, with either Terrapin Station or Shakedown Street, they agreed once again to enlist an outside producer. They remained convinced that with the right producer they might actually turn out a bona fide hit single. As the years went on Garcia seemed increasingly unwilling to shoulder the responsibility for running the Dead’s recording sessions, so they looked outside their ranks for a firm but sympathetic hand. This time they settled on a British producer who’d already struck gold and platinum working in America—Gary Lyons, who was best known for working with the hard rock group Foreigner.

  “I guess I was considered sort of a hot producer at the time,” Lyons says, “and the Dead had the reputation as being the Bermuda Triangle for producers.”

  Garcia had only three original tunes to offer for the sessions. His songwriting output had been on the decline since he started smoking Persian regularly, the Cats Under the Stars material in 1977 being his most recent burst of solid collaboration with Hunter.

  “Alabama Getaway” was a rare rock ’n’ roll tune from Garcia, a catchy bit of Chuck Berry–inspired riffing, with lyrics that sounded as if they could’ve been matched to an old prison blues.

  “Althea” was back in the vein of other Garcia midtempo shuffles, but lyrically it was something new—a sly evocation of a powerful woman; “the helpful lady, big sister kind of,” Garcia said. “Minerva,” Hunter suggested, referring to the Roman goddess of wisdom, invention and martial prowess. In the song, Garcia’s character looks to Althea for advice:

  I told Althea I was feeling lost

  Lacking in some direction

  Althea told me upon scrutiny

  That my back might need protection

  I told Althea that treachery

  Was tearing me limb from limb

  Althea told me: “Now cool down boy—

  Settle back easy, Jim”

  Althea continues to outline the faults of the main character, who is “loose with the truth” and “honest to the point of recklessness / self-centered in the extreme.” But in a clever twist at the end, the singer reveals his true colors:

  I told Althea

  I’m a roving sign—

  That I was born to be a bachelor

  Althea told me: “Okay, that’s fine”

  So now I’m trying to catch her

  The band cut basic tracks on a third Hunter-Garcia tune called “What’ll You Raise,” which was overflowing with gambling metaphors, but Garcia said, “I wasn’t too happy with it. It was too much like what we’ve done and so I dumped it.” He did have one other lead vocal on the album: a lively rearrangement of one of the group’s oldest cover songs, “Don’t Ease Me In,” the A side of the Warlocks’ first single in 1965.

  Go to Heaven was the first Grateful Dead album since Anthem of the Sun to contain more original songs written by Weir than Garcia. And Weir’s three new tunes, all with lyrics by John Barlow, showed his continuing maturity as a songwriter. “Lost Sailor” was an odd but appealing ballad about confusion and wanderlust, filled with unusual, clashing chords. The lost sailor’s dilemma was resolved in the rollicking, optimistic “Saint of Circumstance” (the two songs were connected in performance for many years), which concluded with an anthemic sing-along that seemed to speak for both the Dead and their fans: “I sure don’t know what I’m going for / But I’m gonna go for it for sure.” The third Weir-Barlow song, “Feel Like a Stranger,” was very much a song of the ’70s—an emotionally icy funk tune about lust and alienation on the disco floor. (Some have also suggested that “Feel Like a Stranger” reflected some of Weir’s alienation during this period, when Garcia was increasingly withdrawn.)

  “When I first started working with them on the record,” Gary Lyons remembers, “they had the songs but they hadn’t had the chance to develop them much onstage at that point, which I gather is not the way they generally worked. So they’d come in and everybody would have all sorts of suggestions for tempos and feel. Jerry more or less had his things worked out, so it became a question of capturing that magical moment, which was not easy—‘Althea’ was a tune we must have recorded a hundred times. We’d do it ten or fifteen times and then go on to another song, and come back to it later or the next day or whatever. Eventually it fell into place and it came out quite nicely.

  “Jerry always had a good idea of what he wanted on a song. With Jerry’s main tunes on that album, ‘Alabama Getaway’ and ‘Althea,’ the band was riding on Jerry’s rhythm completely, so it had to be right in the groove or it wouldn’t work. Otherwise it sounded very sloppy. Sometimes in the studio it took a while to get that groove, but when he heard it he knew it right away.”

  As with both Terrapin Station and Shakedown Street, eventually work on Go to Heaven bogged down. During their fall 1979 East Coast tour the Dead found themselves working on overdubs for the record at New York’s Media Sound studios during the day and then playing at Madison Square Garden or Nassau Coliseum at night, in an attempt to meet Clive Davis’s pre-Christmas deadline. Despite the heroic effort, they missed that deadline and the record was finally released in April 1980.

  The album itself was a mixed bag—technically well-recorded and -mixed but curiously uninvolving. All of the songs on the record would develop more as they were played in concert over the next few years, particularly Weir’s songs, which were a bit stiff on the record. Actually, this was typical of Weir’s material through the years—his songs evolved much more slowly than Garcia’s did. They were also much more difficult to play, with strange tempo shifts, peculiar instrumental voicings and sometimes elusive melodies. (Those were their strengths, too, and why Garcia liked them so much from a player’s perspective.) Garcia rarely strayed far from his folk, country and R&B roots in his writing, though he certainly created his own oeuvre from those strains. Weir’s writing was always quirkier and less tied to specific genres; more purely “original,” for what that’s worth.

  * * *

  On June 7 and 8, 1980, the band marked their fifteenth anniversary (which they measured from the week in June 1965 when Phil moved to Palo Alto to join the Warlocks) with a pair of concerts at Folsom Field in Boulder, Colorado, long a hotbed of Deadhead activity. Then, after a few shows in the Pacific Northwest, the Dead flew up to Anchorage, Alaska, for three concerts in a high school auditorium. At first there was a notion to go to Japan after the Alaska shows, but it was financially prohibitive and there were serious concerns that Garcia might end up in a Japanese jail if he didn’t stop using drugs—which was not likely. Most of the band and entourage took advantage of their time in Alaska to check out the state’s natural splendor, and Mickey even went on a little recording expedition in the northern part of the state, looking for native drummers as he had in Egypt. Garcia, however, stayed in his room the whole time; “He didn’t do anything,” Richard Loren says, disappointment in his voice. The concerts themselves were generally quite good, and the third show had a special vibe because it took place on the night of the summer solstice, when the sun shines for twenty-four hours in Alaska.

  When Bill Graham heard that the Dead had celebrated their fifteenth anniversary with shows in Colorado, he approached the band about doing something special to mark the occasion in the Bay Area, too. They settled on an exte
nded series of shows at the relatively intimate 2,000-seat Warfield Theater. It started out as nine concerts, but eventually stretched to fifteen.

  Around the same time, the Dead decided that their next album for Arista would be a live one—their first since the early ’70s—and that at the Warfield they would not only play (and record) their standard two electric sets each night, but a full acoustic set as well (for the first time since 1970). The band also booked this three-set extravaganza for two nights in New Orleans following the Warfield series, and then for eight nights (also recorded) at New York’s 8,000-seat art deco showplace Radio City Music Hall, with the final concert on Halloween night. Upping the ante, the Dead, at the suggestion of Richard Loren and concert producer John Scher, decided to televise the Halloween show live to sixteen East Coast and Midwest theaters that would be specially equipped with rock ’n’ roll sound systems. This was the first rock ’n’ roll closed-circuit telecast of this sort.

  “We thought that on the East Coast, where we have a problem of sort of too large of an audience, maybe it would be a good way for us to be able to play fifteen places in one night, and maybe there would be something to that,” Garcia said. “It was really an experimental idea top to bottom. . . . We did it mostly as a gesture to our audience to see if there wasn’t something we could do apart from living on the road—something that would maybe allow us to be a little bit more selective—and also to see if the experience would have any value to the concertgoer. So it was an interesting experience for us, and it paid for itself.”

  To direct the live telecast, make a separate Showtime cable TV special (Live Dead!) and, later, a commercial video (Dead Ahead) edited from videotapes of the last three shows of the Radio City series, the Dead hired Len Dell’Amico, a graduate of New York University’s prestigious School of Film and Television. Dell’Amico came to the project with extensive experience directing live music video shoots for John Scher’s company—in fact, Dell’Amico first shot the Dead for Scher in 1976, and he was also the director of a 1978 Capitol Theater telecast during which Garcia was so sick he could barely sing. But Dell’Amico didn’t actually meet Garcia, whom the director described as “the point man on all things visual” in the Grateful Dead, until he was flown out to the Bay Area in late September 1980 to discuss the Radio City telecast, a little more than a month away.

  At the time of their meeting, almost nothing had been conceptualized about what the telecast would consist of besides the concert itself. After all, there was lots of nonmusic airtime to fill: the pre-show and then two thirty-minute-plus breaks between sets. “When I got there,” Dell’Amico says, “we had zero, and when I left a week later we had brought [Saturday Night Live writer-comedians] Franken and Davis out, wrote the comedy out, rehearsed it and shot it. Money was no object whatsoever, which was alarming. I mean, to shoot all the comedy just to see if it would work? And then redo it all at Radio City? At Radio City, the union bill alone was several hundred thousand dollars, which in today’s dollars would probably be about half a million.”

  The choice of Al Franken and Tom Davis as hosts for the telecast turned out to be perfect. They were already famous for their dark, deadpan, politically and culturally hip humor, and they loved the Dead to boot. The band appeared in various backstage skits that were shown during the set breaks at the concert. The supposed theme of the night was a telethon to raise money for “Jerry’s Kids”—a takeoff on Jerry Lewis’s annual muscular dystrophy fund-raising event—with down-and-out hippies vying for our sympathy and pledge dollars. In one segment, Garcia—looking at once nervous, bemused and a little coked up—tried to auction off his missing finger, which he presented to the TV cameras in a nice little box. At another point, Davis went up to Garcia and in his endearing/annoying way asked the guitarist if he had any cocaine. Steve Parish played his tough roadie role to the hilt, throwing Davis to the ground. And in one of the evening’s best skits, Davis interviewed former secretary of state Henry Kissinger (actually, Franken in a superb $2,000 makeup job) about his love of the Grateful Dead. All goes well until Davis is shocked to discover that Kissinger is secretly recording the concert with equipment he’d smuggled in. Franken and Davis also got the closed-circuit audience involved in the fun by periodically mentioning incidents that were reportedly happening in the different closed-circuit theaters.

  All in all, the comedy part of the event showed conclusively that the Dead had a sense of humor about themselves, and that they were also on the same wavelength as their audience and understood who they were—of course that was evident from the Dead movie as well. The stoned, tripping, Halloween-costumed crowds at Radio City and watching the telecast live in theaters cheered wildly for every routine, no matter how bad the acting by the bandmembers, who seemed to thoroughly enjoy poking holes in their own myth. (The show turned out to be educational, too. Quiz question posed to Deadhead: “Who dosed President John F. Kennedy?” Correct answer: “Lee Harvey Owsley.”)

  The Halloween telecast was the wild capper to the Dead’s twenty-five-show run of three-set concerts celebrating their fifteenth anniversary. But what was most thrilling for the thousands of fans lucky enough to get tickets for the shows was the opportunity to see the Dead in more intimate surroundings. Not that Radio City is like Carnegie Hall, but since the Fillmore East days the Dead had played in the New York area primarily in stadiums and arenas. And Radio City was a trip in itself.

  The great musical treat was the acoustic sets, which were much more interesting than their 1970 counterparts. Unlike the ’70 sets, which were mostly just Garcia and Weir playing as a duet, with an occasional appearance by Lesh or Pigpen, the ’80 acoustic sets involved the entire band playing in close proximity onstage. Brent played mainly acoustic piano, the drummers played small kits or little percussion instruments and Phil’s bass was turned down in proportion to the level of Weir’s and Garcia’s guitar volume. The repertoire for this remarkable acoustic ensemble was typically eclectic and came from “our collective musical background,” as Garcia put it. It included old and more recent folk, country and blues tunes, such as George Jones’s “The Race Is On,” Elizabeth Cotten’s “Oh Babe It Ain’t No Lie,” the Memphis Jug Band’s “On the Road Again,” “Deep Elem Blues” from Texas in the ’20s and Jesse Fuller’s “The Monkey and the Engineer.”

  The real revelation of the acoustic sets, though, was the Grateful Dead tunes, most of which had never been played acoustically before. “China Doll,” with Brent on harpsichord, was imbued with a fragility that made the song extra-chilling. “It Must’ve Been the Roses” and “To Lay Me Down” allowed Garcia, Mydland and Weir to flex their vocal chops and explore the delicacy of the melodies. The surprising power of jamming tunes like “Bird Song” and “Cassidy” demonstrated that the band’s deft interplay did not require loud electric instruments. In fact, the relationship between the instruments sounded virtually the same as in the electric band, stripped down to a more elemental level.

  Every acoustic set ended with “Ripple,” which the band hadn’t played since 1971. Just about everyone in the theaters would sing along on the song, which just ten years after it was written somehow felt ageless, as old and wise as the disparate songs the Dead had plucked from long-gone pickers and singers. It was quite moving to hear Garcia sing “Ripple”—a slight smile peeking through his beard, which was just beginning to show flecks of gray then—because in that setting the song seemed like an affirmative and empathetic transmission from his soul to every person in the audience.

  “[Playing an acoustic set] was a nice way to start the show,” Garcia noted. “It kind of changed the emotional paper of the show, since the acoustic set we did had a real intimate quality; it wasn’t a high-energy thing. It was a kind of relaxing and intimate experience for both us and for the audience.”

  Some of the electric sets were a tad subdued, compared to the tours directly before and after the three-set shows, but no one was complaining—everyone knew that the Warfield, New Orleans and Rad
io City series were rare and special events. The band knew it, too, and stayed relaxed but focused throughout the month-plus of marathon shows. Garcia was definitely in the best condition he’d been in for quite a while, both physically and mentally, and this burst of positivity carried through a fine three-set affair New Year’s Eve at the 7,500-seat Oakland Auditorium (the de facto successor to Winterland, which closed after New Year’s Eve 1978) and into the first part of 1981, when Garcia and Len Dell’Amico worked on the Dead Ahead video together.

  “At the time of Dead Ahead, as everyone pointed out to me much later,” Dell’Amico says, “Jerry had gotten himself into a very healthy position, apparently for the sake of doing this project. So I came away from it with a distorted view because he was so acute and in such good shape. I couldn’t imagine him not being in good shape.”

  During that fall of 1980 the mood of the band and the crowds seemed so high it was easy to forget that there was an insidious malaise creeping across the Dead’s world, and that Garcia’s drug dependency was only arrested, not stopped. Darker days were still to come.

  CHAPTER 17

  This Darkness Got to Give

  ifteen years is the chronological middle of the Grateful Dead’s performing career, but there would be few radical musical developments in the group’s sound after that point, and the basic format of a Dead show would never change again.

  First sets consisted mainly of shorter songs with relatively fixed arrangements—Weir-sung cowboy tunes and blues, lighter Garcia numbers like “Bertha,” “Sugaree,” “Tennessee Jed,” “Dire Wolf” and “Ramble On Rose”—and one or perhaps two extended numbers toward the end of the set, but rarely anything that matched the long, exploratory versions of “Playing in the Band,” “Here Comes Sunshine” and “Scarlet Begonias” that had graced many a first set in the early ’70s. With the exception of “Bird Song,” most of the so-called first-set tunes that opened to extensive improvisation were Weir’s: “Cassidy,” “Feel Like a Stranger,” “Let It Grow,” “The Music Never Stopped,” “Lazy Lightning” >