The friendly (“-ish”) competition between us and the Allman Brothers carried through to the event itself. And yet, the memory that I’m most fond of and hold most dear from that whole weekend was jamming backstage with Jaimoe, one of the Allman’s drummers. We were just sitting in the dressing room, banging out rhythms, and that was a lot of fun for me. Jaimoe backed Otis Redding and Sam & Dave before becoming a founding member of the Allman Brothers, where he remains to this day. He’s a soulful drummer and just an incredible guy who is impossible not to like.
As for the show itself, it is a well-known fact that the Grateful Dead always blew the big ones. Watkins Glen was no exception. However, we still got a great night of music out of it—the night before. The show took place on a Saturday, but by Friday afternoon there were already about 90,000 people in front of the stage. I’ve heard others place that number closer to 200,000. Either way, the audience was already many times the size of any of our regular shows, and the show was still a full day away. The only duty we had on Friday was to do a soundcheck, and even that was somewhat optional. The Band soundchecked a couple of songs. The Allman Brothers soundchecked for a bit. Then, perhaps spurred on by our friendly rivalry, we decided to one-up both bands by turning our soundcheck into a full-on, two-set show. Naturally, without any of the pressure of the “official show” the next day, we really let loose and played a good one. There was an eighteen-minute free-form jam that eventually made it onto So Many Roads, one of our archival box sets. It’s good music, all right, and it still holds its own.
On the day of the actual show, we had to fly into the venue via helicopter because the roads were all backed up, like what happened at Woodstock. People left their cars on the side of the road and walked for miles to the gig. I remember looking down from the helicopter and seeing the most incredible impressionist painting, a Monet of heads, shoulders, tie-dyes, baseball caps, and backpacks, packed front to back. You couldn’t see the ground for the crowd. To this day, I’ve never seen anything else like that.
Nowadays at large music events and festivals, they have golf carts for artists and crews to get around, but back then they used little motor scooters. Early, during the day of our supposed “soundcheck,” I commandeered one of these scooters and, because the venue was an actual racetrack, I decided to do a lap. This was before the gates were opened. The scooter went maybe fifteen or eighteen miles an hour, something stupid like that, and it took forever just to do one lap. But I did it. And that’s when I first started to get a feel for the scale of the event and just how large it was.
During the Summer Jam itself, I watched the other bands play and I honestly thought the Allman Brothers played better on the big day than we did. As for the Band, well, they always sounded great.
I was friends with their drummer—the late, great Levon Helm. At some point, he invited me to his barn. I stayed there about a week and listened to the Band run through a lot of music. They were all so into it. They were never more than an arm’s length from their respective instruments and the music never stopped. Watching them work was as entertaining as watching them play live. They were hip behind the scenes.
In 1983, the Grateful Dead invited a newly-reformed—and Robbie Robertson–less—version of the Band to open for us at our New Year’s Eve show. I made a lot of phone calls to Levon throughout the fall, convincing him to sign on for that one. He finally said yes. That made me happy. The Band played some other really big nights with us as well. But Watkins Glen is the iconic show that everyone remembers. It’s historic.
Meanwhile, back in the Bay, we had a team of crack scientists and sound engineers who, under Owsley’s vision and Healy’s leadership, were trying to create the next advancement in live sound presentation, for the benefit of our audiences. They were working on the frontier of live sound. It can be said, accurately, that throughout our entire career, the Grateful Dead organization was responsible for some genuine innovations in concert sound (lighting, too). We had people on salary working on research and development for all of that stuff. Some of the ideas and practices that we came up with are now industry standards. For example: calibrating each individual venue. Our sound guys even sold various venues our sketches and diagnostics of their room’s acoustics.
All throughout 1973, we had our team working on a new beast of a sound system. After a beta test at a hometown show (Cow Palace, San Francisco, March 23, 1974) the Wall of Sound made its official debut in Reno, Nevada, on May 12. Fully assembled, the Wall measured something like forty feet high and almost eighty feet wide. That was the indoor version. Outdoors was bigger. We had more than 600 speakers. The Wall of Sound was Owsley’s brain, in material form. It was his dream, but it spawned a monster that rose from the dark lagoon of his unconscious mind. Owsley let it out of the cage so that it could sprawl out on the stage with us, night after night—a creature that was supercool to look at, but impossible to tame.
Because the sound reinforcement was coming from a wall behind us—instead of a traditional PA off to the sides and in the front—the system had to use deferential microphones in order to avoid feedback. Each singer had two microphones that were out of phase from one another. They would only sing into one of them. Any sound picked up by both microphones would be cancelled out by the other, thereby eliminating feedback and bleed. In theory, it works. Technically, it works. But in actual use, it just sounds terrible.
That afternoon in Reno, as I made the walk to the stage and saw this thing fully assembled, I had some concern about a safety issue. I was looking at this monumental edifice of speakers, this statue to hooliganism in the sound universe, and it was utter madness. Just madness. There weren’t any floor monitors. Everything that you heard, from vocals to the instruments, you heard from right there on stage, coming out of the Wall. It made a row of Marshall stacks look like cotton candy by comparison. Each instrument got its own stack of speakers, on each side of the stage. Phil even had a quadrophonic pickup system on his bass, which enabled him to direct each of his four bass strings, individually, into different speaker towers. The Wall’s center cluster was designated for vocals. We’re talking about two tons of speakers, suspended above the drums. As I walked to the stage that blustery day in Reno, the whole center section swayed significantly in the wind. Four thousand pounds of speakers, directly above my head. They were hung from one single winch and if something went wrong or if the speakers ever broke free, I would be as flat as a penny on a railroad track. Dust to dust. I insisted that they redesign the rigging with two additional winches, for extra insurance. Then, at my request, they rigged it from the corners instead of just the middle, to achieve greater stability and prevent it from swinging every time there was a gust of wind. It was a lot better that way, but still, it never stopped being disconcerting to look up and see all that weight above you, knowing that it was all assembled and disassembled on a daily basis, leaving much room for fault.
But even beyond that, there were just too many problems with such a cumbersome system. It was really hard to get with the sound. There was so much sound everywhere that the system wasn’t very accurate, and it frequently made things difficult for me. Our performances, however—throughout 1974—had many great moments. A lot of those Wall of Sound shows remain fan favorites.
As much as we played out during ’73 and ’74, we also played in—I mean, we recorded in the studio since, after all, we did own a record company now and record companies need product to survive. In August 1973, fresh from a two-night stand with the Band at Roosevelt Stadium in New Jersey—and with soil from Watkins Glen still on our sneakers—we booked about a month of studio time at the Record Plant in Sausalito, just a stone’s throw away from the heliport where we used to rehearse.
The Record Plant was decked out in a classic seventies style, with an array of different-sized pieces of wood covering the walls, just for effect. The studio itself was pretty nice and it was also convenient, being right down in Sausalito, near the boat harbor. None of us had that long a com
mute. Also—and this is pretty cool—the studio was right across the street from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model, which is an actual, miniature, hydraulic model of the entire San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta. It accurately simulates the tides and was created to study environmental impacts. It turns out, that’s the perfect thing to be looking at when you’re getting high, while taking a smoke break with your friends. We’d walk around its cavernous insides, which mimic the foothills around the Bay—again, the perfect playground for stoned musicians looking to get lost in another world. I have more memories about that than of the time spent inside the studio itself. We were there to record Wake of the Flood. Our first release on Grateful Dead Records and our first studio album since American Beauty.
In the three years between, we released a pair of live albums. First Europe ’72, and then, to fulfill our contract with Warner Brothers, we let Bear put together a live anthology—hence the nickname Bear’s Choice. The official title, History of the Grateful Dead, Volume One, reflects its unofficial intent as a tribute and send-off to Pigpen. A lot of later-generation fans got their first exposure to that chapter of our career through that album, as Pigpen soars through several rave-ups, back when he was still on top of his game. Owsley pulled the material exclusively from live tracks that he recorded during our February 1970 run at the Fillmore East.
Wake of the Flood was Keith’s coming out party and it had some great Jerry tunes on there, too—“Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo,” “Eyes of the World,” “Stella Blue,” “Here Comes Sunshine,” and a personal favorite, “Row Jimmy.”
Let’s talk about “Row Jimmy” for a moment. In the Spring of 1973, we were rehearsing out by Point Reyes, which is on the Pacific coastline near Stinson Beach. “Far west.” (This was before we set up our then-permanent space at Club Front). Jerry brought “Row Jimmy” into us one day, and it was really difficult to get a grip on it at first. It has a slow tempo, which makes it seem like it would be easy, but it calls for a slight reggae groove layered over a ballad. Rhythmically, the lengths aren’t traditional. They’re not just twos and fours. It’s deceiving. Basically, you have to play the song in half-time with a double-time bounce on top. It’s trickier than it sounds. But once I locked into it, “Row Jimmy” became one of the best songs in our repertoire. Looking back on it now, I have some regret that I didn’t take that song with me, into my offshoot bands after the Dead, because it’s such a good one. It deserves to be played. That’s the best track on that album.
Bobby’s “Weather Report Suite” is also on there, which was always more fun to play live than the studio version may indicate. Wake of the Flood was released on October 15, 1973.
Not too long after that, in April 1974—between the Wall of Sound’s test show at the Cow Palace and its debut in Reno a few weeks later—we went into CBS Studios in San Francisco to record what would become From the Mars Hotel. I remember recording that one because of a freaky circumstance surrounding it. The City of San Francisco had been placed on high alert, due to a string of ongoing, racially charged murders after dark.
Nicknamed the “Zebra killers,” an organized group of men, at large, were thought to be responsible for more than a dozen, execution-style murders during a six-month crime spree. The killers were targeting whites. Randomly. Residents panicked, tourists went elsewhere, and nightlife suffered. People were terrified to walk the streets at night. The SFPD launched an unprecedented dragnet, as they racially profiled more than 500 “suspects.” I remember hearing sirens constantly wailing in the distance, as I’d cross the Golden Gate Bridge, heading downtown to work … where the sirens became significantly louder.
From the Mars Hotel turned out all right. It’s a mixed bag. Again, the studio felt contrived. It couldn’t offer the freedom of playing something live, nor the satisfaction. You get it already, I know. But a big part of the process behind making a studio record involves post production. After you lay down your parts, you go in and doll the whole thing up. You beautify it with smoke and mirrors. It can sound cool in the end, but it’s not about being in the moment.
I don’t go back and listen to any of our studio albums. I listen to the jams—the “Dark Stars”—from the Europe ’72 box set. I listen to the Spring ’90 box set. My wife, Aimee, will play the archival releases whenever we get them in the mail from Rhino. The Dave’s Picks and whatnot. It’s fun to be able to relive those nights, once in a while.
But I don’t even own a copy of From the Mars Hotel. Not that it doesn’t have its merits. It has “Scarlet Begonias,” which is a great song. And it has “Loose Lucy,” “China Doll,” and “Unbroken Chain.” On the flip side, however, it has “Money, Money”—an easy contender for lamest song ever. At least, from our catalog.
One thing worth mentioning is that Mars Hotel was named after an actual flophouse in San Francisco. An image of the real Mars Hotel appears on the cover. The building was about a block away from the studio, so we saw it all the time on the coming or going, while we were recording the album. It’s since been demolished to make room for the Moscone Center—in a sign of the times, tech companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook now hold conferences on the same corner where the Mars Hotel once housed winos and junkies.
The hotel remains historically significant because Jack Kerouac wrote about some of the depraved nights he spent there, in his book Big Sur. Consequently, it was on the Beat Generation map before it was on Deadhead radar. That’s another one of those cool, synchronistic connections. The Mars Hotel was a genuinely seedy establishment and, thus, held a particular appeal. Jack liked it. So did Jerry. (The original Mars Hotel can be seen for a few seconds in a David Bowie video.)
And it is true that if you hold the album cover upside down in front of a mirror, the otherwise illegible subtitle reads, “Ugly Rumors.” It was originally supposed to be “Ugly Roomers,” a self-deprecating dig at ourselves, but we changed it to “rumors” out of respect to the boarders at the hotel. Rumor has it that former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair named his college band Ugly Rumours as a direct reference.
Despite our record label follies, our business arm was becoming so profitable that an entire cottage industry began sprouting up around us. Nowadays, that cottage industry has expanded to include everything from radio shows to annual festivals. All of it unaffiliated. But in the early ’70s, it started with our own friends and families. Sam Cutler branched off into his own booking agency (Out of Town Tours) and since we were always touring, it made sense that we’d spawn our own travel agency (Fly by Night Travel)—both of these businesses expanded to include a number of other client bands.
Susila opened up a shop called Kumquat Mae. They sold official merchandise including our records, the band shirts that Susila designed, and various other crafts. When she moved the store from San Anselmo to Mill Valley, the name changed to Rainbow Arbor. It was a heady shop and I was happy to see Susila thrive like that. I didn’t spend too much time in the store itself, but there was a bar down the street called Sweetwater—the original one—where Weir and I used to hang out all the time, when we weren’t on the road.
But we were usually on the road. And in some ways it began to feel like we peaked. The whole thing had gotten so big that the sheer size was beginning to take away from the overall experience, rather than add to it—for us, onstage, as well as for the audience, I think. I remember reading an interview with Jerry once where he said that he wanted to find an escape from the Grateful Dead because, for him, playing music in small clubs with small audiences was where it was at. There was no pressure, everything felt more personal and authentic, and the music was usually better. More alive and breathing than just regurgitated and rehearsed. You could explore the element of risk and danger so much easier in small rooms than in large stadiums, where nuances don’t always come across and whims are hard to justify. The stadium shows felt a little too safe by comparison. And safe equals boring.
We played a lot of shows in 1973
and 1974 and once we had the Wall of Sound with us, we weren’t just a traveling rock ’n’ roll circus; we were a traveling institution. Every show was as massive as our sound system insinuated. We had an arsenal of trucks, unimaginable electricity, and production demands at every venue, and we needed two individual stages, which leapfrogged each other on the road, to accommodate the Wall of Sound. While we played on stage in one venue, a second stage was already being set up at the next. For this, we had to have two different road crews. It was a whole thing. It was too much.
I’m not entirely sure where or when the idea of us taking a break—not a vacation but an actual hiatus—came up, or who first verbalized it and brought it to the table. It may have been one of the dyed-in-the-wool crew guys throwing in the towel or something like that that made us first think of it, then consider it … then agree to it.
I do know that, once the idea was put out there, Jerry became the biggest proponent of the hiatus. Maybe he’s the one who first hatched it. That would make a lot of sense to me. I think we all were probably going on automatic pilot at that time, and perhaps Jerry was able to get out of himself for a minute and see that. In my mind, everything was just fine; the band was really successful, we were playing at a certain level—people still listen to a lot of our music from that era. I didn’t think the Wall of Sound sounded great, but our interplay at some of those shows was phenomenal. At some point, though, that’s not enough. The creative drive gets stale and you need to refill those tanks or else find new vehicles to creativity altogether. In a band, as with most things, stagnation is just a step away from death.
Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead Page 21