Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

“Supplication” and the combination of “Lost Sailor” and “Saint of Circumstance.” Garcia had a handful of knock-’em-dead set-enders like “Deal,” “China Cat Sunflower” > “I Know You Rider” and “Might As Well,” but he always saved most of his heavier material for the second set. First sets were usually about ten songs and a little over an hour, a far cry from the marathon fourteen- to seventeen-song first sets that were common in 1972–’74. Garcia often talked of the first set as being a “warm-up” for the second set. That became increasingly true in the early ’80s.

  The structure of the second set became fairly fixed as well, though certainly there was tremendous variation within the formula. The set-opener was usually an untempo tune like “Samson and Delilah,” “Shakedown Street” or various combinations that lent themselves to jamming, like “Scarlet Begonias” > “Fire on the Mountain” and “Feel Like a Stranger” > “Franklin’s Tower.” (“Help on the Way” and “Slipknot” had been dropped in the fall of 1977.) With “Dark Star” essentially out of the repertoire since 1974 (save for two versions in 1979 and one each in 1978 and 1981), “Playing in the Band” was the most open-ended song the Dead performed with any regularity. By 1981 the song appeared only in the first half of a second set, with a reprise of the tune often coming near the end of the set. Songs like “Estimated Prophet,” “Eyes of the World,” “Ship of Fools,” “He’s Gone” and “Terrapin” were slotted in the first half of the second set as well.

  Four or five songs into the second set, usually at the end of a jam, the guitarists and Brent would leave the stage and the drummers would take over for an extended percussion workout. Then, when Garcia and Weir returned, Mickey and Billy would slip away and the two guitarists would engage in some free-form sonic weirdness colloquially known as “space.” The other bandmembers would eventually return, and out of the often cacophonous but sometimes amazingly lyrical “space jam” would emerge a riff or a theme or a beat that would slowly blossom (or on occasion explode) into songs like “The Wheel,” “The Other One” or “Not Fade Away.” Then, typically, Garcia would bring the energy down again for one of his powerful ballads—“Wharf Rat,” “Black Peter,” “Stella Blue”—before Weir whipped everyone into a frenzy one last time with some high-octane rocker like “Sugar Magnolia,” “Around and Around,” “Good Lovin’” or “One More Saturday Night.” The encore was usually something fast and simple: “U.S. Blues,” “Don’t Ease Me In” or the band’s clunky but fun version of the Stones’ “Satisfaction.” If Garcia was feeling introspective, he might close with “Brokedown Palace” or Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”—songs that sent the crowd home floating instead of charged up. Second sets were usually close to an hour and a half, though about a third of that time was taken up by “drums” and “space” rather than conventional songs.

  The band’s repertoire was extensive enough that they could play three consecutive shows without repeating a song if they were so inclined (though they tended to repeat their newer material more often). And though the format was more fixed than it had been previously, there was actually more variety to the sets than there had been in 1976–78, when fewer songs were in the rotation.

  While Garcia and Weir, the lead vocalists, seemed content with the state of affairs in the band in 1980, the ever-critical Phil Lesh told a writer he felt the Grateful Dead were “in a holding pattern. We’re still at the same altitude, but we’re circling.” He noted that he was “kind of bored writing for the Grateful Dead. That period around Live Dead, when the music was a little more complex, was the peak for me.” But he added, “I’m not bored being in the Grateful Dead. To me the Grateful Dead is life—the life of the spirit, and the life of the mind, as opposed to standing in line and marking time in the twentieth century.”

  “The whole thing with the Grateful Dead is a challenge to get something new happening, even when you don’t feel like doing anything new or feel anything new lurking around the corner,” Weir said in 1981. “To find something new in either a given treatment of a particular song or some totally new unexplored territory in one of our jams or something. We actually try to go for that every night, and to be together enough and responsive enough to do that sort of stuff, you have to really keep your wits fairly sharp and your chops together. And the band has to be a working, functioning unit. You always have to work at that, like they say you always have to work at making a marriage work. It’s a whole lot like being married.”

  The fundamental musical relationships in the band had not changed significantly through the years, though each player went through periods of greater and lesser commitment to the group, as happens with every band. However, their collective musical vocabulary seemed to broaden a bit more every year as they developed as players both together and apart. Beginning with the introduction of the Beast, Hart and Kreutzmann took the concept of a drum solo places no one had ever been. And by the early ’80s Weir had evolved into an extraordinarily inventive and colorful guitarist, so much more than his inadequate “rhythm guitar” label suggested. Weir will probably never receive the credit he deserves for being a truly outstanding and original guitarist because he toiled in Jerry’s immense shadow. By the late ’70s, however, he was clearly stepping out as a player and a songwriter and it’s not exaggerating to say that his emergence helped the band immeasurably during periods when Garcia was not at his best.

  * * *

  By 1980–81 hippies were almost as scarce in America as they had been in 1965–66. Most of the original flower children had long since grown up and landed jobs in straight society. Long hair on boys and men was more common among Southern rednecks than Northeastern city-dwellers, and more common among fans of hard rock than any other musical genre. With the punk/new wave movement had come short hair, black clothes, skinny ties and a dislike of hippies. Yet the Dead’s following continued to grow slowly each year, as friends turned other friends on to the band through live tapes or by taking them to concerts. Grateful Dead shows became just about the only place outside of Haight-Ashbury and Santa Cruz where tie-dyed clothing was common. And though the percentage of longhaired guys at Dead shows wasn’t as high as it was in the mid-’70s (when even some television news anchormen had longish hair and sideburns), it was still much greater than at any other kind of concert except hard-core reggae shows, which always attracted lots of hippies.

  “The crowds haven’t changed that much,” Garcia said in 1981. “Really, we’ve changed more than the crowds have, I would say. But 1980 and 1981 is definitely this time, now historically, and the ’60s were the ’60s. There are those kinds of differences—just the differences of the world at large. But in terms of people and why they come to our shows and what the audience is about and what the music is about, what the whole event is about, I think that situation has stayed pretty much the same. People are coming basically for the same sort of experience. And that’s kind of a nice thing. It’s an ongoing thing. We’ve seen our audience get younger, or maybe what it really means is we’ve gotten older. Our audience has maybe stayed the same age as when we started; maybe it’s gotten a few years younger.”

  Since the late ’70s the number of college-age Deadheads who followed the band from city to city for part or all of a tour—usually staying in cheap motels or crashing with friends—had been increasing every year. In fact, it became something of a rite of passage for kids and young adults to be able to master the logistical, financial and pharmacological demands of partying for an entire tour. The close bonds among Deadheads that were formed on long, sometimes uncomfortable road trips added to the already strong communal feeling of the concerts, as the same Heads would see each other in different locations, months or years apart.

  Another interesting phenomenon that became much more noticeable in the early ’80s was the number of older Deadheads, many of them successful professionals, who went on tour with the Dead, often staying in luxury hotels and eating in fine restaurants along the way. For these white-collar Deadheads, going
to shows became a way to get in touch with a freer, looser, some might say more authentic version of themselves. By the late ’80s there were thousands of people in this category who found ways to juggle their busy work schedule to periodically take a week’s vacation away from the law firm or computer company or hospital to follow a Dead tour to a few cities. They’d go back to their workplaces tired but with their souls enriched and their spirits replenished, and most of them firmly believed it made them better, happier workers.

  If Grateful Dead shows were among the few remaining bastions of hippies and ex-hippies in the early ’80s, they were also integral to the survival of the psychedelic drug culture. Pot and psychedelics remained by far the most common consciousness-altering substances at Dead shows, though cocaine and, to a much lesser degree, heroin made inroads in some segments of Deadhead society, and dealers could usually be found easily near any tour stop. It was not a coincidence that after the Dead played a show in New Haven or Des Moines or Salt Lake City the local drug undergrounds in those communities were at their most active. In the early ’80s this was not really a problem in most cities, because the number of people using psychedelics was relatively small, mainly confined to those who already had some experience with those kinds of drugs and had, in a sense, been socialized in the generally safe and supportive Grateful Dead show environment. But in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when the scene surrounding Dead shows got so big that every concert attracted thousands of people—including many non-Deadheads—who hung around the bizarre bazaar outside the venues, the volume of drugs and attendant negative drug-related incidents in cities along the Dead’s tour route became alarmingly high. The early ’80s look positively quaint in comparison.

  “What fascinates me is how Deadheads improvised a tradition around psychedelics and created a grassroots and extremely homey and unpretentious way of getting tens of thousands of people at a time off on pychedelics,” says Steve Silberman, author of Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads. “There were those shows in the ’70s and the ’80s, especially a Saturday night, when you’d walk around and it seemed like everyone was tripping; if not everyone, maybe two-thirds or three-quarters. And to think there’s that much intense experience going on with no chaperone—Mom’s not around, and they’re not passing out copies of Leary’s books in the hallways.

  “I think it’s too contrived to say that going to Dead shows became some sort of an ersatz peyote ritual for kids,” Silberman continues. “But another ancient archetype they reiterated was something more like a kid going off into the wilderness, and because there isn’t much real wilderness anymore, the ‘wilderness’ could be hitchhiking from one town to another with very little money in your wallet, sleeping on the floor of a motel with twelve other people you just met, having sex with someone you just met, getting a ticket somehow—bartering, whatever. A lot of the kids who were doing that were children of relative privilege, so to leave a zone where they were assured of physical comfort to enter a zone where there really were wolves—DEA agents and people with really weird or even bad vibes—was quite a step.

  “Deadheads gave each other a tremendous amount of freedom of literal physical movement and deportment and that ended up being a very good thing for the psychedelic experience, because if you needed to lie down on your back, even though it was a concert, even though the show was going on, it was okay if you weren’t engaged in the spectacle. The spectacle was you and all of us and wherever you were at. There was a tremendous amount of tolerance for people who were in different places than you psychically.”

  Musically, too, it could be argued that the Grateful Dead had been born of and designed for the psychedelic experience. Garcia said as much: “Our second half [the second set] definitely has a shape which, if not directly, at least partially is inspired by the psychedelic experience as a waveform: The second half for us is the thing of taking chances and going all to pieces and then coming back and reassembling. You might lose a few pieces, but you don’t despair about seeing yourself go completely to pieces; you let it go.”

  “The secret that ties Grateful Dead music to psychedelics,” Silberman says, “is when you take psychedelics, when you start and you’re sober, you’re starting in a familiar place—your ordinary mind. Then, as the psychedelic comes on, you leave the realm of familiar thought and familiar experience, and you go to a place where there are all these other less familiar, chaotic experiences. Well, the music would parallel what your mind was doing. It would start in a familiar place, with lyrics and a melody, then it would get more and more open to the winds of inspiration and the winds of chaos. Then, at the most extreme point of out-there-ness, Mickey and Billy would play the oldest instruments on earth, so you would hear the drums that are the traditional accompaniment to psychedelic experience on planet Earth. You would hear these instruments that spoke to the earliest roots of humanity and the roots of performance in shamanistic experience; the roots of rhythm and the roots of collective ritual.

  “So in the middle of this chaos, you’re presented with this ancient signpost, and then you would come back from there, after being, you could say, primitivized or stripped of the random programming of contemporary culture—you momentarily forget the sitcom you watched the night before, and your job—and you’d be returned to this primordial human state. Then you would journey back through chaos [“space”] to some statement of philosophical reflection—‘The Wheel,’ ‘Stella Blue.’ They seem to offer you a plateau from which you can observe everything else. They seem to occur in the stillpoint of the turning world, so you can inhabit them with Jerry for a while and look out at the wheels of fate, which included your future and your past and maybe even your death. And it would also make you aware of the ephemeral nature of all the people in the room with you, including the band.”

  “You’d laugh and you’d cry and you’d dance and you’d sing and you’d be terrified and you’d feel, ‘Oh my god, what’s coming next?’” says Peter Toluzzi, a keen observer of the latter-day Dead. “You’d feel awe, you’d feel that great rescued feeling that no matter how far out you were taken, you were always brought home and put back together pretty decently. So it became known as a safe place to let go and just allow your emotions to go through their flow. And I think that’s a very cleansing experience emotionally, even more than mentally. After a while people learned that they could do this and it became a safe, comfortable avenue that provided the stimulus for a familiar enough path that you could have variations on this experience again and again. And each time it would be personally revelatory in a different way, just as the music was different every time, too.”

  Mickey Hart said that the Grateful Dead weren’t in the music business, they were in the transportation business. And it’s true that for many Deadheads, the band was a medium that facilitated experiencing other planes of consciousness and tapping into deep, spiritual wells that were usually the province of organized religion in this country. Psychedelics and even pot intensified the experience, but thousands upon thousands of fans “got” the cosmic connection without drugs, too. It’s been simplistically stated by some that the Grateful Dead were LSD—that the way their sets unfolded and the places the music went and the messages the lyrics proferred were so imbued with lessons learned on the psychedelic edge that the experience went beyond mere metaphor and became the real thing. This much is certain: the Grateful Dead got people high whether those people were on drugs or not. Certainly the musicians recognized this from day one and played into it, because Dead shows were their spiritual launchpad, too.

  “I’ve always felt from the very beginning—even before the Acid Tests,” Phil said in 1982, “that we could do something that was not necessarily extramusical but something where music would be only the first step. Something even close to religion—not in the sense of that ‘The Beatles are more popular than Jesus’ [John Lennon’s controversial 1965 remark], but in the sense of actually communing. We used to say that every place we play is church. Now it’s not
quite so all-encompassing; it’s not quite so automatic. . . . The core of followers is not the reason it feels like church. It’s that other thing, ‘it.’”

  “In primitive cultures that state of the shaman is a desirable state,” Garcia noted. “In our society, we are somehow trying to not have that. That’s a real problem. We need the visions. A lot of what we do is already metaphors for that—movies, television, all that stuff. We want to see other worlds. Music is one of the oldest versions of it.

  “In a sense, the Grateful Dead experience is that metaphor, too. It’s like, ‘Here’s the ritual that we have been missing in our lives.’ We don’t go to church anymore. We don’t have celebrations anymore. The magic has even been taken out of the Catholic Mass. English? Sorry, it doesn’t have that boom—it doesn’t have that scare.”

  For a fairly sizable segment of Deadheads, however, the Grateful Dead were simply a supreme kick-out-the-jams party band that played some terrifically involving rock ’n’ roll. Some people weren’t interested in the existential tenderness of “Stella Blue”; didn’t want to hear twelve minutes of jamming after the song part of “Playing in the Band” had evaporated; and used the always challenging, constantly unpredictable “drums and space” section of the show as a time to hit the snack bar or the bathroom. It didn’t mean they weren’t true Deadheads; rather, it showed the range and power of the Dead experience. And the group was always more than willing to be the party band for those fans. It was part of who they were, too. As Garcia put it in 1980, playing in the Grateful Dead was “sort of like being New Year’s Eve; every place you go there’s a big party. But five New Year’s Eves a week is kind of a lot,” he chuckled, “so I try to lead a pretty sane life on the road. I don’t party every night or anything like that.”