We had a horse in the pasture—a large, quarter horse—that I had to bring into the stable. It was my horse, so I went and put the halter on her, but we were on a hill and it was a real skittish horse to begin with. In my altered state, I jumped on her back and she threw me—she reared back, lifted her front legs, and threw me off into the air, down the hill. I was in full flight. I paddled backward as fast as I could, trying to fly. Actually, I was just trying to get my feet under me before I hit the ground, because it was on a slope and was a longer fall than just off the top of the horse. There was no way to straighten out. No way to get my balance. To avoid landing on the small of my back, I managed to get my left hand down under me, but my full weight and the force of impact was too much for it. I broke my wrist. At first, I was in denial. “Oh, come on, it’s just a sprain.” But it swelled up and the pain became so bad that I had to go and see a doctor in Fort Bragg immediately.
The doctor confirmed that it was broken—he didn’t even need to X-ray it to tell me that much—and he wanted to put a fiberglass cast on it. But I had shows at Red Rocks, Giants Stadium, and Egypt all coming up. A cast? No can do. So the doctor just wrapped it up, gave me some painkillers, and off I went.
The next day, Shelley and I drove down to San Rafael to begin our crazy adventure. We went to meet the band at Front Street. I knew that it wasn’t going to be pretty when the guys found out about my wrist. I thought that maybe if I just wrapped a T-shirt around it and pretended that it was casual, maybe nobody would notice. Well, I don’t think I made it more than ten feet inside Front Street when Jerry called me out: “Hey Billy, why are you hiding your wrist?” “Oh, man.…” Everyone standing around, in unison, went, “What have you done, now?” I pulled it out and gave the story. I knew this was going to be the start of a long, hard, strange trip. It was already going to be long and strange. But now it was going to be hard, too.
I couldn’t use my left hand to play the drums—if I just touched the drum with a stick, it sent a sharp pain up my entire left arm. So I learned fast how to play one-handed and it became a positive experience in the end because I had to learn how to separate the bass drum and the hits from my right hand. So it became, in a strange way, a forced drum lesson. It was a teaching tool. It taught me how to play the snare beats with my right hand and not come down all the time with my bass drum, which is a habit that drummers get into—hitting the bass drum and the cymbal at the same time. It’s really productive to learn how to hit them on opposite beats, break them up and know how to keep them separate when you want to. The technical term for that, among drummers, is independence. The uniqueness of it wore off fast, but at least I was able to get something out of it.
When we flew to Denver to play Red Rocks, a doctor convinced me to put a fiberglass cast on it because every time I moved my wrist, no matter how slightly, it would shoot a lightning bolt of pain all the way up to my shoulder. So I put the cast on and for those Red Rocks shows, I still couldn’t use that hand for anything. But by the time we got to Egypt, it had healed enough that it didn’t hurt anymore. It was still in the cast, and it was frustrating for me to have to listen to so much music without being able to play more than I could.
When they molded the cast for me, I told them to leave a space so I could hold a drumstick in there. The doctor said, “I’m not sure you’re going to be able to play without it hurting, but we can go ahead and try that.” It didn’t work. It was fool’s folly trying to get a cast that would hold a stick.
It started to feel better when we got to New Jersey. We played Giants Stadium, which, as many of you will remember, was a massive football stadium at the Meadowlands Complex, just outside of New York. Home of the New York Giants NFL team for many years. Almost as famous as the Garden. We headlined more than a dozen shows there throughout our career, but this was our Giants Stadium debut. I think we booked it mostly to help finance our trip to Egypt. Help offset some of that massive cost, anyway.
At the Giants Stadium gig, during the drum solo, I stood up and went to play these really big drums behind Mickey and me that we used for that part of the show. I started using the cast as a beater and it worked great. It didn’t hurt. I couldn’t play superfast or anything, but it didn’t matter to me—I could use both hands now and use my cast as part of my instrument. When the audience saw the close-up of that on the video screen, they went nuts. Mickey got very, very excited—not in the good way—when I started doing that, for some reason. He insisted that I stop immediately. He started yelling, right over our solo, “If you don’t cut that right now, I’m going to walk off.” I probably stopped. He was just worried about me, that’s all.
I still had to keep the cast on when we got to Egypt, so I wasn’t able to play the full-on drum set. That’s honestly not the only reason that parts of those shows were so lackluster … but perhaps it had something to do with it. In all fairness, the sluggish dream-state that hash puts you in probably played a part in all that, too, and that was a high that everyone seemed to be riding.
* * *
I’d like to back up for a moment and talk about Red Rocks. We played our first pair of shows at that incredible venue earlier that summer, on July 7 and 8. We returned at the end of August for the two shows when my wrist was broken. Of note, all four shows were consecutive. We didn’t play anywhere else in the six weeks in between.
Red Rocks is one of the most mystical places that I’ve ever been, much less played music. The only venue in America that can really compete is a newer place in Oregon called Horning’s Hideout. That place is a different kind of far-out, though; you’re surrounded by trees and away from the city. The Gorge Amphitheater in Washington is a power spot as well, but it has its challenges with wind issues when you’re in the drummer’s stool on that stage. And it gets really cold there when the sun goes down.
Red Rocks is mystical, though. It’s at 6,450 feet elevation, so when you come from sea level like I always did, you get a little buzzed in the weirdest of ways. When you get up to that altitude, the thickness of the lower register just goes away. It takes more energy, more air, to produce really full sounding bass notes—so when you’re up in thin air, you get less bass.
Being able to play music at Red Rocks was a privilege and the fact that an amphitheater even exists there is like some kind of miracle. And I saw more kids looking for miracles there than anywhere else. The kids used to climb the rocks on the sides and it would scare the shit out of us because we were concerned about their safety. It was dangerous enough trying to climb those rocks during the day, but at nighttime, you couldn’t really climb down safely because you couldn’t see. It’s one of the wildest venues I’ve ever seen. Playing in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco was really far-out, but there’s just something about Red Rocks that makes it special. Very. And even with the altitude challenges, it sounds great in there. A natural amphitheater carved out of rock, high above Denver, in the Rocky Mountains? Yes, please.
I also want to back up and talk about Shelley for a second. After Susila and I divorced, I was living as a bachelor at my Comptche ranch for a short period of time. Shelley used to hang out with some of my music friends, at a bar in Mendocino that I used to go to a lot and play music. Someone told her I was coming down one night, and she made it a point to stay. We hit it off the moment we first met. In fact, I had a couple of gigs scheduled with some local guys—just some low-key extracurricular stuff for fun—and I remember driving back to Mendocino, thinking, “I can’t wait to see her again.” Once you have those thoughts, you know that you’re in it.
The thing that really sewed us up as a couple, though, is kind of a funny story, involving LSD. Shelley was a schoolteacher in the town of Mendocino, right on the coast, and I was out at the Comptche ranch, fifteen miles away. I was all excited that she was going to come visit. It was going to be a date and I was going to cook for her. I was all nervous. When she got there, she was tired from teaching all day and decided she needed to shower before we could hang out. Afterw
ard, she came downstairs and we started playing backgammon. I taught her the game at some point before this, and she was generally a fast learner. This time, however, she started making up moves that just don’t exist. But they really should. Special feature moves. Fifth dimension moves. The kind of moves you might come up with if you were high on acid.
She looked at me and started blinking her right eye and asked, “Was that Murine in your shaving kit expired or something? I put it in my eye and it really burned.” I went, “Oh shit! That wasn’t old Murine at all! That was brand-new acid!” I didn’t know what to do, so I called Ken Kesey and laid out the situation. “Hey Ken, funniest thing happened … Shelley accidentally put LSD in her right eye.” He didn’t miss a beat: “Right on, Bill. Put it in your left eye and have a good time. Bye.”
Shelley got as high as could be and just rolled with it. We ended up having a grand old time. I remember waking up, after we finally slept, and the whole floor was covered with vinyl records from the night before. I had played DJ but I didn’t put any of the albums back in their sleeves. It was just next one, next one, next one. We had such a fun time, tripping by ourselves inside the house, that it really launched and solidified our relationship.
What broke our relationship, fifteen years later, was cocaine. It also hurt the Grateful Dead. And a lot of other relationships, both within my circle and without. Cocaine has its place … but it’s a detrimental drug, make no mistake.
I don’t remember when Shelley and I got married, exactly. I’m thinking it was sometime just before Egypt. So, 1978. But maybe 1977. I was doing a lot of drugs back then and some things just run together. I’m not even sure if I had a best man for the ceremony, but the wedding was at the Comptche ranch and I know that it was an extremely hot day because the cake started to melt and fall over, so we had to serve it up to everyone really fast. I was on tour right before then and had to drive all the way back from the airport in San Francisco the night before and go straight to all the rehearsal dinner stuff. Bobby and Mickey had to do pretty much the same thing, because they made it up there for the ceremony. So did Bill Walton, who complained and gave me a ration of shit because there is no short cut to Comptche—it’s a long haul no matter where you’re coming from and the second half of the journey is all on winding country roads through Mendocino County. It’s a trek.
One of the many wonderful gifts to come from my fifteen years with Shelley was that she got me into scuba diving, which changed my life and has been a passion of mine ever since. Shelley got certified while I was on tour, and when I heard her excitement about the underwater world, I decided that it was something I needed to check out. So I did, in Laredo, Mexico, when I recklessly went sixty feet under the water for my first time, without certification or instruction. I took Jerry on his first dive, too, and it changed his life as well. But now we’re talking about stuff that happened in the late-’80s. We’ll get there. First, I have a couple really good John Belushi stories to tell, stemming from the Grateful Dead’s first performance on Saturday Night Live.
15
At some point in 1975, during the Grateful Dead’s hiatus, something happened that would forever change late-night television: Saturday Night Live. Groundbreaking in its unflinching use of satire and the unapologetic way that it made fun of sensitive current events—on live television, for a national audience—NBC’s new sketch comedy show became an instant smash, and its cast (which, during that inaugural season, included John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, and Gilda Radner) became instant SNL stars. I became an instant fan. I never watched much television, but I used to love to get stoned and turn on SNL. They had those fake commercials that would get me every time. I just loved that.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, one of SNL’s top writers, Tom Davis, was a Deadhead. At some point, after Davis and I became friends, I congratulated him on winning an Emmy Award. It was for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Variety or Music Special—specifically, for his work on NBC’s December 8, 1977, Paul Simon Special.
I looked at him and said, “You know, I never had an Emmy.” Without missing a beat, he said, “You know, I never had a gold record.” The logical conclusion was that we should fix that by trading awards. Tit for tat. We were just being silly, but we went with it. So on the bookshelf in my living room now, I have an Emmy Award for an NBC special. And, somewhere, Davis was able to hang a gold album for American Beauty.
I should also mention, as a footnote, that Davis’s writing and acting partner was Al Franken, who is now a U.S. senator (D.) for Minnesota—and a Deadhead. “We are everywhere.”
It may not be immediately obvious, but there are some undeniable parallels—or, at least, similarities—between the Grateful Dead and SNL. We both constantly took great risks, which sometimes led to train wrecks but also led us to unprecedented triumphs. We both were seen as renegade heroes of counterculture, rebellious artists that prided ourselves on challenging the status quo. We both were underdogs from the underground that somehow managed to embed ourselves in at least one home in just about any given neighborhood in America. And, behind the scenes, both the cast of SNL and the band members of the Grateful Dead were legendary party animals, ravenous for drugs and danger … and dangerous drugs. It seemed like both camps would get along.
Still, it was a bit of a shock—and a total thrill—when I found out that we were invited to be the musical guests for one of the episodes. Not everyone in the band shared my enthusiasm. Jerry wasn’t into it. I’m not sure that Phil was, either. They had their reasons, whatever they were, but Mickey sided with me and we managed to convince them to do it. We ended up playing SNL twice over the next couple of years, but our debut was on November 11, 1978, with Buck Henry hosting. We performed “Casey Jones,” “I Need a Miracle,” and “Good Loving” and we actually managed to pull it off, bucking the trend of us messing up the big ones.
For me, the best part was getting to have a cameo in one of the comedy sketches with my favorite cast member: John Belushi. I had the simplest part. I played “Cliff Morton from Bakersfield,” and I got to drink Budweiser on live national TV. People ask me and, yes, it was real Budweiser. Still didn’t calm my nerves. But the sketch worked and the audience laughed. It didn’t launch my career in comedy, per se, but it did lead to a fantastic and treasured friendship with Belushi that would get us into some wild adventures in the days to come. Belushi died in 1982, darn it, but boy did we ever have high times ’til then.
I hung out with Belushi whenever I could, especially when the band had shows in New York. We’d kick it at his place, or his office, or wherever we could find trouble. I have many different memories of John Belushi, but the one I’m about to tell you is my absolute favorite.
The Grateful Dead had a three-night stand at the Capitol Theater—not the restored one in Port Chester, New York, where we played a number of historic shows as well, but the one on the other side of the city, in Passaic, New Jersey—beginning on March 30, 1980. We weren’t on tour, and I think we probably booked the gigs as a stand-alone run because we were going to be in New York anyway, for our second appearance on SNL, on April 5, 1980.
By that point, Belushi had already left the cast of SNL to concentrate on film. But we decided to pull off some real life “sketchy comedy,” so I met up with him a few days before the shows and we immediately started getting into trouble. And trouble with Belushi almost always meant cocaine. We went on a bit of a bender, just raving the nights away. The day before our opening night, he really wanted me to hear this demo tape of a radio sketch that he was working on for a National Lampoon show. The setup was that he played a drugged-out hitchhiker who was trying to get to a Grateful Dead concert to see Pigpen play with Janis Joplin. He wasn’t aware that the year was 1980. It was a classic Belushi sketch. All in the delivery, perhaps.
He insisted that we go down to the studio so that we could listen to the playback. But when we got there, the producer was busy in the control room and we had to wait. As you kn
ow by now, “waiting”—for either of us—meant imminent trouble. Belushi waltzed right into the main recording room and started stuffing all these expensive microphones into all of his pockets until he was just overflowing with them in a really cartoonish way. “See how easy it is, Billy? Want a brand-new microphone?” He put them back, but not until after I had a good laugh. Pure slapstick.
After that, we went back to Belushi’s office and continued to party. In between blowing lines of cocaine were fits of laughter. Suddenly, I realized that it was approaching afternoon—on the day of the show! We had been raving until the night had passed back into the day. I started getting paranoid. How would I have enough energy to make it through the show? This was night one and I owed the audience my best. I needed to get some sleep and drag my ass over to soundcheck somehow.
But Belushi had a different idea. He took me to a Russian bathhouse that, in those days, were popular places for men to go and get massages and rejuvenate, kind of like what spas are for women nowadays. Belushi was a regular at a few of them in the city. When we got there, he slipped the door guy a twenty-dollar bill and they chatted about nothing for a few minutes. New York City loved John Belushi because of things like that. That’s just who he was.
The doorman led us inside, and I remember it being a real solemn place, with some kind of heaviness in the air that I couldn’t put my finger on. It wasn’t quite my scene and I wasn’t totally comfortable with it. In keeping with the custom, we stashed our clothes in lockers and put on robes, then walked down a long flight of stairs to a huge, subterranean area that must have been the size of four basketball courts. It was dark and dingy down there and we went into a giant steam room that was encased in glass. There were old immigrants who were talking quietly among themselves, in near whispers, like they were conspiring or something. We lay down on massage tables and then guys started rubbing eucalyptus boughs on our backs. It just didn’t feel right to me, so I got up to leave: “I’m out of here, John. It’s just not my thing.” But Belushi wasn’t going to let me off that easy: “Relax, Bill. Lay down. Trust me.”
Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead Page 26