Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

by Bill Kreutzmann

  We would’ve all been able to celebrate the victory and take part in the spoils, but just at that moment, there was a loud knock on my door. I opened it and saw two rows of gentlemen facing me. The first row was the local heat and the next row was the Secret Service. McGovern’s men had really been freaked out and dove for cover and had reached for their guns and all of that, so now they were trying to get to the bottom of it. “Are you guys lighting firecrackers?” “No.” I was leaning with my left hand up against the wall and when I went to move, I had so much gunpowder on my hand that it left a perfect imprint on the wall. The cops laughed—they had never seen anything so incriminating.

  I reminded the McGovern party that they had asked us to endorse them or support them or maybe even play for them in Washington, and I played that card: “You’re not going to be mean to us now, are you?” That must’ve worked, because they just made Keith and me go to a different hotel. There was one right across the street, so it was fine. But they only moved the two of us. It was like they thought we were the most contagious, or the instigators or something. A bunch of troublemakers. Two of them.

  Also: I may have gotten into some kind of thing at the front desk, which contributed to being kicked out of the first hotel. But that’s just going by eyewitness reports; I must’ve blacked that part out.

  When we checked into the new hotel, I was still wired and going nuts and probably still something of a liability. But then I turned on the radio and it happened to be tuned to the most incredible jazz station and I started blasting it. Even though the music was really outrageous, it had a calming effect on me. It put me into this blissed-out state of being; after all that excitement, I had found inner peace and I was really thankful for that. Nobody was hurt that night, and nothing got too damaged, except maybe the manhood of some of the Secret Service agents who ran for cover.

  So, yeah, pranks: we loved them and we managed to pull a couple of them off, in our time. We also loved guns and explosions and all of those things—I remember Pigpen and I had pellet guns at one point and we’d “borrow” the hotel’s phone books and set them up across the room and take target practice. We’d completely decimate the books, and that was how Pigpen and I would keep each other entertained during downtime. They were just pellet guns and we didn’t shoot them at each other and we didn’t rob banks or anything. Good clean fun.

  But where were we in this tale? Back to the beginning of 1969, following the “Playboy Acid Test.” We got our hands on the latest in recording technology—a sixteen-track recorder (which, of course, is antiquated these days)—and we hauled it up the steps of the Avalon, and later the Fillmore West, and we became the first band ever to make a live sixteen-track recording. We weren’t trying to make history; we were just trying to record a live album. We released it toward the end of the year, on November 10, 1969, as Live/Dead. It was our first live release and it remains one of our best-loved albums. Its appeal was that it took great “you-had-to-be-there” live versions of songs like “Dark Star” and “The Eleven” and put them right in people’s living rooms. Studio versions could never do those songs justice, but advances in live recording (some of which were at our own hands) meant that we could bring the live Dead experience to vinyl.

  That said, I didn’t even remember what the cover of Live/Dead looked like until I started digging through everything for this book. I didn’t have much to do with the whole process behind it, since it was live—I just played my heart out at those shows and that was that.

  But we were also recording a lot in the studio during that same time period, working on our third studio release, entitled Aoxomoxoa, which doesn’t mean anything—it’s just a cool palindrome. People have surmised over the years that you could read the “Grateful Dead” lettering on the front cover as “We Ate the Acid” which, I suppose, is true enough, if you look at it just right. Was that intentional? I’m not telling. But I will say that, despite rumors, that’s not a five-year-old Courtney Love on the back cover in the group photo. That’s my daughter, Stacy.

  The recording of Aoxomoxoa was notable for several reasons. First, the sixteen-track technology came along only after we did our initial recording using an eight-track at the end of 1968. But when the studio procured one of the first sixteen-track recorders in the world (the same one we used for Live/Dead), the decision was made to toss everything we had already done and record it all again. From scratch. This time we could go deeper and experiment with things no other band had done yet. Being able to utilize twice as many tracks essentially doubled the possibilities of what we could do with each song. The end result was dense and cumbersome in places, and all that studio time cost us a fortune, but we were experimenting on the sonic frontier, exploiting cutting-edge technology.

  Mostly, what I remember about those sessions, is this: We took pinhead doses of STP to use as speed during the recording, and then we brought nitrous oxide tanks into the control room during the mixing process. We called those sessions the Barbed Wire Whipping Party. (We recorded a song of the same name, with words by Robert Hunter, but it never made the final album.)

  The real-life Barbed Wire Whipping Party was at Pacific High Studios in San Francisco. When you’re mixing down tracks while sucking nitrous oxide, it’s like anything else: You think you’re driving great until you wake up, wrapped around a tree. But at least we all had a lot of fun with that one, which wasn’t exactly typical of our studio experiences. We spent an excessive amount of money on Aoxomoxoa, because we basically recorded the same album twice and then spent countless hours in production. Once again, Warner Brothers wasn’t happy with us, or with the enormous debt that we accrued with them, but whatever. It was worth it in the end. Aoxomoxoa came out on June 20, 1969, and it eventually went gold. It only took about twenty-nine years.

  My son Justin was born ten days before Aoxomoxoa hit the shelves, on June 10, 1969. “Just in” time to go to Woodstock. There’s actually a shot of him, in Susila’s arms, getting off the helicopter, backstage, in the Woodstock movie. The Grateful Dead didn’t make it into the documentary, but Justin did. Which was prescient, considering that he now directs music documentaries and concert videos. We’ll get to Woodstock, but my son comes first.

  In advance of Justin’s arrival, Susila and I decided to get married. I took her to Reno, but unlike my previous marriage there, this one was legit. We were living on Benton Lane in Novato, at a tumbledown shack of a place, on a hill, just across town from Mickey’s ranch. We moved there because we got kicked out of the Lucas Valley house following the pot bust. Like Mickey’s ranch, our place was technically outside the town limits, which means it was unincorporated, which means the local police didn’t have jurisdiction over it, which means we could shoot rifles there and go crazy. A highway patrolman owned the property next door and would shoot solid steel bullets clear through oak trees, despite the Geneva Convention (which had banned solid steel bullets). Needless to say, we left him alone and he afforded us the same luxury. Susila has said that this was during my cowboy phase, when it was all dynamite, horses, dogs—and baby.

  About that baby: When Susila started going into labor, I went into a high state of panic. We went to a hospital in Novato but they wouldn’t let me into the delivery room with Susila. They said, “Husbands aren’t allowed in.” I said “Bullshit!” and Susila said “Bullshit!” and we got into an ambulance and we hightailed it to San Francisco and went straight into French Hospital.

  I’d been hitting a little bit of the Jack Daniels to help my nerves. I got in there and they washed me up and put the gown on, and they put Susila in the stirrups and the whole thing, and you see a little head sticking out, just a teeny bit, and you watch a little more of the head come out, see some blond hair, and these eyes, the cheeks, the chin, the neck. Like most men, I really wanted a son. So, when his dick popped out I went, “Yeah! A boy!” The doctor looked at me like, “Would you be quiet please?” but I wouldn’t—I was a little drunk and I was just yelling up a storm. I was so
excited at the birth that the doctor wiped him up but before he even cut the umbilical cord, he handed him to me, and it shut me up, because I was holding this child that was still connected to his mother, and I was just blown away. And that’s Justin.

  We left home in such a rush that we didn’t take anything with us, and Susila got into the ambulance after the first hospital wearing only a sheet. I must’ve forgotten to grab her clothes, because she didn’t have anything to change into when we left French Hospital. She had to borrow clothes from someone. She was mad at me about that one, and it was really embarrassing for her, I’m afraid. But it was also just really exciting for both of us, to have a son, and it still is to this day.

  About two months after Justin’s birth, we took our first family trip—to Woodstock. August 15 to 17, 1969. It wasn’t really a vacation because Daddy had to work. Just like at Monterey Pop and all the other big shows, the Grateful Dead blew it. We didn’t play that well. Because of rain and problems with grounding, we were getting electrocuted on stage—Bobby especially—and Bear had his usual delays with getting the sound just right. Meanwhile, the sound on stage was damn near impossible to work with. We couldn’t hear each other. In the end, I don’t even remember what songs we played. It wasn’t a memorable performance.

  I took a tiny speck of STP before the gig, for energy, and I think most of us took acid before our set—no surprises, there. If you weren’t at Woodstock, then you’ve at least read about it, so you have some idea of what it was all about. Three days of peace, love, and music. Some of the other artists included Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, The Band, Santana, Sly & the Family Stone, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. You can watch some of those bands give the performance of their lives in the theatrical documentary, but—once again—we declined to sign the release forms and passed on being included in the film. For the Grateful Dead, our performance was anticlimactic, although it was still thrilling to be a part of it.

  The one memory that really sticks out, oddly, is when we tried to get out of there. We helicoptered in from our nearby hotel. But when we went to leave, it was after dark, so they had us load up into a vehicle. Then they drove us out—through the middle of the fucking crowd. It was like trying to part a sea of people half a million strong. Quite literally. I’d never seen that many people in one place in my life and I got freaked out. Afterward, I realized it was all fine. The Deadhead community didn’t fully exist just yet, but these people acted just like the Deadheads did later. It was part of the same continuum. They were just incredibly gentle and kind to each other and that’s really what made Woodstock so beautiful and historically significant. It was the best of everything that the Haight-Ashbury scene had once promised, but this was on a national scale. With the world watching. And the scene really shone through. Strangers were stopping strangers just to shake their hands.

  And then came Altamont. Four months later. The two historic events are often juxtaposed against each other because, as people are quick to point out, they were somehow related (Altamont was even nicknamed “Woodstock West,” though it didn’t stick). But if the two were siblings, then Altamont had to be Woodstock’s evil twin—there was light and then dark, good versus evil, and it all played out in extremes at these two festivals. Woodstock was the culmination of the entire hippie movement. Altamont was its death. As if to punctuate this, the festival took place on December 6, 1969. There went the ’60s. Wave good-bye.

  Earlier that fall, the Rolling Stones came to the United States for what may have been America’s first real rock ’n’ roll arena tour. People have called it that, anyway. Ticket prices were outrageous—$7 or $8 at the high end. The shows were reportedly electrifying. And the Rolling Stones were every bit the first real rock stars. They weren’t outlaw cowboys like the Grateful Dead, or pop-culture gods like the Beatles. They were rock stars.

  The Stones reached out to us because they wanted to stage a free concert in San Francisco as the tour closer, and they knew that was our domain. We agreed to play it with them, and help them organize it, but things got fuzzy from there. They sent ahead their road manager, Sam Cutler, and we had a meeting at Mickey’s ranch.

  I’m going to say a few words about Cutler here because, in the wake of Altamont, the Rolling Stones kind of disowned him—and the Grateful Dead adopted him. He was a smooth talker, a natural salesman, and he could wriggle his way in and out of stuff with a certain elegance. Being a road manager demanded all of those things—the street hustle and the handshake charm—so he was good at his job. He was also good at shaking people down, when necessary, and he wasn’t the type to back down. If you can hang with the Rolling Stones, then you’ve got your chops in that department, and you can hang with the Grateful Dead for sure. We trusted him, we liked him, and we still do. But, being from England, he didn’t always understand American pronunciation, and that was sometimes amusing. “Hey, want to go play in Ar … Kansas?” “No, Sam, you mean Arkansas.”

  Anyway, we had meetings about the free concert with the Rolling Stones in the weeks leading up to it, and in some ways, part of the problem was that nobody was particularly in charge. Cutler—and, by extension, the Rolling Stones—called some of the shots. Rock Scully—and, by extension, the Grateful Dead—called some of the shots. Ram Rod and some other people who worked for the Dead were working that Stones tour, so there seemed to be this natural feeling of collaboration, even though the two bands represented two very different camps. The Rolling Stones thought, “Hey, we’ll let the Dead put this together, because that’s what they do, and we’ll come and headline.” Alternately, we looked at it as a way to share a bill with the Rolling Stones—and we saw it as their thing. They were headlining. It was their deal; we were more like guests than hosts.

  During one of the meetings at Mickey’s ranch, we were eating dinner in his barn—Jerry, Phil, most of the band—and these three skunks snuck in under the table. I had my Great Dane with me, lying down in the corner, and I saw him raise his eyes, lift his head, and start to growl, like he was about to pounce. I jumped on him as fast as I could to shut him up because if those skunks—they were civet cats, more specifically—fired off, then the whole barn would’ve stunk too much to discuss Altamont. Meeting adjourned. But I sat with the dog, and the skunks looked around, sniffed our feet, and left. Everybody has a “bad omen” story about Altamont and that was mine. The astrology was all off. All signs were bad news.

  When Mick Jagger announced at a high-profile press conference that the Stones were going to close their tour by throwing a free concert in Golden Gate Park, that’s when things really started to come undone. He knew that he wasn’t supposed to announce it in advance like that. The stealth element was one of the ways we were able to pull these free gigs off. The publicity meant that now we wouldn’t be able to secure the proper permits to hold it in the park after all. We had to move it outside the San Francisco city limits. We found a place in Marin called Sears Point. A racetrack. It was a rather good location but the Rolling Stones and the company that operated Sears Point played politics and, ultimately, that site had to be scratched. Two days before the show. After an insane scramble, Scully was able to make arrangements with Altamont Speedway, which was located on a desolate stretch in Alameda County—the East Bay, past Oakland, about an hour outside San Francisco. Despite its proximity, the scene in the East Bay was significantly different from what was happening in San Francisco. It was a lot edgier, a lot tougher.

  On the speedway, the stage was set up only three feet off the ground. With 300,000 people streaming in for a show—on a site that was built for significantly smaller crowds—we needed some kind of security to guard the stage. Nobody hired security. After all, it was a free show. But some members of the Hells Angels had a good relationship with the Dead and at our free shows before this, they would help out by making sure nobody fucked with the generators. Stuff like that. Nobody hired the Hells Angels to work security at Altamont. But som
ehow a loose kind of deal was struck with them where they would do things like make sure nobody rushed the stage in exchange for free beer for the day. Easy. Who made that call? Fingers point in all directions but at the end of the day, it doesn’t even matter. It doesn’t work like that. Everyone approved it, or allowed it, one way or the other. Either we’re all to blame or else nobody’s to blame.

  Yes, concerns were raised about that decision and bigger concerns were raised about the facilities and the staging, but in the end, the desire to make this show happen, even in the face of all this adversity, clouded people’s judgments. Objections became nothing more than duly noted asterisks in the fine print.

  The whole gig was just bad juju, man. They were flying bands in via helicopter, so we went to the heliport in Sausalito—the same one we used to practice at—and at one point, as Jerry and I were waiting around, Mick Jagger showed up and he was trying to figure out the score and we were just trying to get to the site and something was off, even then. You can YouTube the footage of all of us there making small talk. Jagger was gracious but there was some kind of charged energy that was just awkward. It was all disorganized and chaotic.

  On the ground at the racetrack, it was a grim and grizzly mess. The crowd up front was crazed and they were encroaching upon the stage, or being pushed up on it by the sheer volume of people behind them, hundreds of thousands strong. The bikers were beating them back. But, like, really beating them. Overzealously. They had their bikes out with them and they were protecting those too, of course, but people were stumbling on them or trying to climb over them to get a better viewing position. The bikers started using pool cues as weapons, and some had their knives out. I don’t know—it was just a bad scene.