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

by Bill Kreutzmann

  When Cutler was running the game for us, it wasn’t unusual for him to be in control of the band’s master stash, doling it out to us as needed. I’m sure he’ll deny that charge, but it doesn’t matter. The proof, with this one, is in the pudding—it was his rental car. He gave it to us. And there it was.

  Susila put it in her purse and dumped it in the first garbage can we could find, inside the airport. I was all nerves until then. We weren’t even halfway through our first big tour of Europe; getting popped for smuggling that much weight wouldn’t have ended well. It would’ve been heavy.

  Remember, I stayed away from cocaine that tour. I had rewired myself to be against it for the season. So to be stuck with the devil in a package as we were about to go through airport security in a foreign country, while still tripping—really freaked me the fuck out. I recognized the irony of the situation, given all the coke that I shoveled up my nose before this, but no bandit wants to be busted by the bank that they didn’t hit.

  Disasters averted, we made it to Southern France with seconds to spare. We sprinted into the F1 race in Monaco as if we were in the race ourselves. That’s when the day’s biggest challenge presented itself: fighting with Spaniards and getting into elbow wars with the general admission masses, as we struggled to maintain a decent position along the fence, just so we could glimpse those fucking cars for two seconds at a time as they flew by. And every time they did, we instinctively shouted, “Yeah!”

  The Bozos and the Bolos continued on down the road. We didn’t take any other field trips like that—at least, I didn’t—during Europe ’72, but most of the cities we stopped in were brand new to us. It was automatic sightseeing, just by virtue of us being there. The Bozos and the Bolos. The biggest deal was just trying to find food—most of the restaurants along the way kept weird hours compared to American eateries. And by weird, I mean … horribly inconvenient.

  After the tour, we released a live album called Europe ’72—a compilation of some of our hottest moments during that tour. It was slimmed down to fit on three vinyls (and, eventually, two CDs). But the entire tour was hot. So, in 2011, Rhino Records released a box set containing all twenty-two shows on CD—it takes up seventy-three discs. I went back and listened to them and it’s really one of our best tours, ever. The recordings don’t lie. My own playing was solid throughout the entire tour and I’d like to thank the wise man on my left shoulder for that one. His persistent voice wouldn’t shut up, as he insisted that I keep my nose clean for the journey. I did that, and I was able to have as much fun as any other Bozo. And ten times as much as any Bolo, that’s for sure.

  I loved being the only drummer in the band. And with Keith now on keyboards, I was getting high off the music. Keith really complemented Jerry and that worked out incredibly well—the music was able to get really, really out there. Just the way I like it.

  A year before, in 1971, we explored Americana through Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty. But playing American folk songs in Europe was less exciting to us than the idea of test driving our old Acid Test vehicles in front of European audiences. Europe had a lot of moments that we were able to stretch to infinity. That tour was really sponsored by “The Other One” and “Dark Star.”

  As for the cowboy songs, like “Me and My Uncle,” “El Paso” and the others, well, they were a laugh for me. I played them, but I didn’t take them seriously. They were in cut time. Real easy to play on autopilot. Whereas with the other ones, like “The Other One,” you could get out of yourself and even forget what song you were playing because you were that free. When that happened, I knew it was right. We were able to tap back into our group mind for excursions where we could do anything that we could think of, on the spot, the moment we thought of it. Our imagination was our only limitation. Any experimental idea that we could think to play, we played. And we made it work. I love the songs that let us do that. They’re the best. The cowboy songs were almost tongue-in-cheek by comparison. At least for me.

  We continued to tour Europe from time to time, for the rest of our career, but none of those tours matched Europe ’72. That was the big one. As it was happening, we knew we’d be talking about it for years to come and, sure enough, here we are.

  * * *

  Well … okay … so, there is one story from our Europe ’74 tour that stands out. I remember the night, but not the tour. Isn’t that crazy? As I look at the tour dates—September 9 through 21, 1974—not much rings a bell. We played three nights in London; a one-off in Munich, Germany; and then three nights in France. That’s a short tour and it was scaled down considerably from the extravagance of 1972. That must have been a business decision—it costs a lot of money to bring everyone you know on a six-week European vacation. For the Europe ’74 tour, we weren’t in buses. We rented cars. I drove a Mercedes but I’m not even sure who rode shotgun. We’re talking about twelve days, once upon a time, in a land far, far away.

  There were no Bozos or Bolos that tour, but I insisted on being a bozo anyway, I guess. The tour wrapped up with a two-night stand in Paris and, after one of those nights, I decided to go out partying with some people that I didn’t know very well. Locals, I think. They were at the gig but they weren’t from our scene and I didn’t speak much French. They weren’t really friends.

  Regardless, they took me to this club, a speakeasy with no name on it. It was one of those things where they knocked on the door and it slid open, and they must’ve known the password or something because we were let in. All the tables were low and there was a dance floor over to the side. We were seated but instead of bringing us drinks, they brought us fifths of booze. Bottle service, I guess, is what that’s called now. There was already a big bottle of rum on the table that I quickly got into. Oh, and I was really high on acid. Are you surprised?

  The thing about acid is that you can drink and drink on it and not realize how drunk you are until hours later, because your brain is more concerned with the fact that you’re on acid. Those two intoxicants fight for attention from your head, and the acid wins, every time. So, I must’ve been really drunk and I certainly was really spun, and I decided that it would be a good idea for me to get up and dance. But I couldn’t dance. I started falling down. It was embarrassing—I wasn’t trying to make a scene, but it was pretty obvious that the Ugly American was getting a little too ugly.

  The people who brought me there disowned me, or at least distanced themselves: “We don’t really know him.” Someone showed me the door. “Fine.” I went outside for some fresh air. The door shut behind me and I started walking down the street. But, when I tried to come back, I couldn’t find the club. It didn’t have a sign and I hadn’t thought to log any landmarks. Maybe it was the acid, maybe it was the booze, but the fuck if I knew where I was.

  They wouldn’t have let me back inside, anyway. So instead I was on the street, by myself, and probably more of a mess than I’d care to admit. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I didn’t know the name of the hotel where I was staying. I didn’t know where I was and I didn’t know where I was going. And I was high on acid and drunk on rum. Speech was becoming difficult. Not that it mattered—I couldn’t speak the language anyway.

  What do you do in that kind of situation? Well … I knew if I could hot-wire something that I could find my way back to the hotel eventually. Retrace my steps. I saw a moped leaning against a storefront, so I decided to test my little plan. I couldn’t get it to start, though. I was so stoned that there was just no way I was going to be able to hot-wire anything, much less drive it. I started to get really frustrated. “Okay,” I thought, “I need to get some attention. I don’t care if it’s from the cops. Hell, I’ll get a policeman to come. I don’t give a shit.”

  I lifted the moped up and crashed it into the store’s front window. It made a horrible noise. But then, silence. Not a dog barking, not a rat scurrying, nothing. Something was weird. I mean, something, not just me, not just the acid. I had just smashed a window with a fucking mo
ped for chrissakes and it went totally unnoticed by the universe. That didn’t seem right to me.

  I started walking. Finally, a car came down the street. Yes! Something! A big, black Mercedes. As it passed me, I slapped the trunk with an open hand, as hard as I could. The car stopped. Then it backed up a few feet. Then the driver got out. Oh fuck. The guy was twice my size and he was not amused. I didn’t know if he spoke any English and I didn’t really care to find out. He must’ve been a good twenty, thirty yards from me. I was just standing there on the sidewalk. He started walking toward me. I didn’t know what to do next, but I remembered some book I read about New York gangs where they would rip the antennas off cars and use them for street fighting. A makeshift weapon. So I did the most obvious thing I could think of: I ripped the antenna off a parked car on the street—it broke off easy—and I started advancing toward the guy with this antenna in my hand. I must have looked a lot scarier than I felt inside, or else maybe I looked just about as crazed as I felt. Miraculously, the guy turned around and ran back to his car. I couldn’t believe it. What luck. In truth, he could’ve ripped my head off and beat me all to hell. Easily. And I knew that.

  I didn’t really have a plan in mind, so I just turned around and started walking in the other direction. A new start. I probably walked right past the speakeasy, which I never could find. I ended up at an intersection where I managed to flag down a taxi. Finally. I told the driver that I had no idea where my hotel was, or what it was even called, but I held up my key. He recognized it. Everything was about to turn out fine.

  “What have you been doing tonight?” he asked me. I decided to be honest. “I’m the drummer from the Grateful Dead and I’m totally lost right now.” I’ll never forget his response: “Well, I don’t like the Grateful Dead very much. But I’ll take you to your hotel.” Classic.

  The next day, student riots erupted in that neighborhood. It was on the Left Bank of Paris. The hip section of town. The theory is that all the cops and all the students were busy preparing for a big showdown, so nobody was out on the streets the night before. It probably wasn’t very safe. There could’ve been people like me out there. Or the guy in the big, black Mercedes. That’s one of those things, though, where—without even realizing how much luck was involved—I probably escaped with my life. Thank you, student rioters. Thank you, streets of Paris.

  The only other thing I took from that tour is the sweet memory of a girl I met in a hotel bar at one of our stops. I don’t remember the hotel. I don’t even remember the country. But I remember going to the lobby bar and seeing this stunning lady there, sitting all by herself. There wasn’t a guy within ten feet. Everybody at the bar was wrapped up in something else. I made a beeline for her and it may have been the smartest thing I did that entire tour. It was certainly a lot smarter than smashing a moped through a window. After chatting it up at the bar for a while, we went upstairs to my room where she immediately made her intentions clear. They weren’t what I had in mind at first, but I went with it: “I want to take a bath with you,” she said. Then she got out her lipstick and asked me to paint her body while we were in the tub. I had never painted a naked body before, but it didn’t take me long to get the hang of it. I started painting her boobs and stuff and it was great. I felt like Monet in a sea of water lilies. We made love in the bathtub, then in the bed, and then in the morning she just got up and left. I missed her for days after that. But at least we had that one night because, otherwise, it would’ve been just another tour.

  12

  When we came back from that first Europe tour—in 1972—we were riding the crest of a wave that, like all waves, we knew would break and tumble before rolling back out to sea. But for the moment, we were poised for flight, wings spread bright, that whole thing. We were full force and tits deep, hitting grand slams wherever we went, even though we had to keep making slight adjustments to the roster. Pigpen had been on and off sick leave for a while by this point. He was on active duty in Europe—some nights more-so than others—but when we returned home, he needed rest and recovery. He did come down to Los Angeles with us for a one-off at the Hollywood Bowl on June 17, but that night would be the last time Pigpen performed live with the Grateful Dead.

  We toured heavily for the rest of the year. We were down to one drummer and one keyboardist. The audiences embraced Keith as the new piano player. Nobody forgot about Pigpen, but we had changed so much as a band since our beginnings, seven years earlier, that long-term fans were used to a certain amount of fluidity. It was a physical manifestation of the very ideals expressed in our music, which embraced an improvisational nature. So Pigpen’s absence left us with a hole in our hearts, but not in our sound.

  Pigpen had been living all alone in the small community town of Corte Madera, a Marin County nook that’s nestled between Mill Valley (where I was living) and San Rafael (where we had band headquarters). So he was close by. Susila and I would go visit him sometimes. It was obvious how sick he was. He was really sick.

  On March 8, 1973, I was at home with Susila when I got the call. It was one of our managers, Jon McIntire. Pigpen was dead. Something about a gastrointestinal hemorrhage. Bleeding. Complications. And so on. Unfortunately, it didn’t come as the biggest surprise.

  Let me restate that: Death is always a surprise. Your mind never gets accustomed to those phone calls and your body never adapts to handling that kind of news. It’s always a shock, even when you know it’s coming. I think I knew it was coming. “But still.…” I can’t recall the actual funeral or the large, informal gathering that Bobby had at his house afterward. I was in mourning. We all were.

  Pigpen’s death was juxtaposed against the backdrop of the Grateful Dead’s rising success. There weren’t exactly any windfalls or anything coming down in big, giant amounts, but money started coming in steady, at least. Susila and I bought a house in Mill Valley right before the Europe ’72 tour, and we decorated it with nice things. And I didn’t have to drive the band around in a station wagon anymore—we could all afford cars.

  In fact, I went out and bought an Alfa Romeo 1750 GTV, a fancy Italian sports car that had a lot of class to it. I loved that car. One day, probably in 1973, I was washing it and got a minor injury on my hand that required stitches. The band put me on the injured reserve list for a few weeks, so I split for the Southwest with Susila, just for kicks. Arizona and thereabouts. We picked up a bunch of decorations for our new house and smuggled a cactus or two back with us, but overall, there was nothing to it. The point is that we never made big plans for bigger getaways. The only vacations we took were impromptu and usually happened by default. I played music for a living, which meant that I had fun for a living. I never even thought about going on vacation because I loved my job too much. All that any of us in the band wanted to do was to play music, so why not play music all the time? And that’s exactly what we did.

  Business was booming but the bigger it got, the less I paid attention to it. I paid attention to the beat, to the rhythm, to the music. Meanwhile, our managers had managers. As always, we had people around us who tried to hatch crackpot schemes, and because we were the Grateful Dead, we listened to all of them and even agreed to give some of them a shot. One such endeavor that gets brought up a lot in books and stuff was launching our own record label, Grateful Dead Records, and its subsidiary, Round Records. That was a Ron Rakow production, I’m afraid, and he did the same thing with it that he did with the Carousel Ballroom—he took an airship the size of the Hindenburg and brought it to a similar, fiery fate. It ended in smoke and ashes.

  Really, the only thing worth remembering in regard to our record label was the crackpot proposal for distribution: we briefly kicked around the idea of selling our albums exclusively from ice cream trucks. We must’ve been really high when we entertained that one—like, Cheech & Chong high. The plan went “up in smoke.” So you can see why maybe giving us control over our own record label wasn’t the most prudent idea … even if it did lead to some “nice drea
ms” and laughs along the way.

  The truth is that the record companies, in those days, were so powerful and so locked into the machine of industry, that launching an independent, band-operated label would’ve been damn near impossible for anybody to do with any kind of real success. Nowadays, the rules of the game have been so radically changed by digital distribution that running your own label is a hell of a lot easier. But, back then, we would’ve been better off selling actual ice cream from those trucks.

  Talking of bad business decisions, our lawyer, Hal Kant, convinced us at some point to sign a contract that activated a Last Man Standing policy. I don’t know if anybody’s ever talked about this before, but the idea behind the Last Man Standing was that the last living member of the Grateful Dead would get everything. Under that policy, when a musician died, his rightful royalties wouldn’t go to his estate; instead it would be put back in the pot until, eventually, there was only one man left standing. And that person would get it all. Now, how do I say this? Let’s start with: “What the fuck kind of idea is that?” We’ve since changed it and made it fair for the families, but over the years there’s been some black humor about that policy. (The Grateful Dead’s licensing arm, Ice Nine Publishing, still has an active version of the Last Man Standing clause.)

  * * *

  We made some questionable business decisions and we couldn’t sell records, but we sure could sell tickets. We sold around 150,000 tickets for a single show at a racetrack in Watkins Glen, New York, on July, 28, 1973. Yes, and more than 600,000 people ended up coming out for it. The lineup was just us, the Allman Brothers, and the Band. That show, called the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen, made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for what, at the time, was the largest audience ever assembled at a rock concert. In fact, that record may still hold today, at least in the U.S., and some have even proposed that it was the largest gathering in American history. Originally, the bill was supposed to just be the Dead and the Allmans, but our respective camps fought with the promoter over which band would get headliner status. The solution was that both bands would co-headline and they’d add a third, “support” act.