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

by Bill Kreutzmann

  I took her and held her with my left arm and I started leaning way over the left gunnel, using her as a balance to keep the boat from tipping over. That’s the only thing I did. We’d fill with water and start to tilt and I’d climb over the side, holding Shelley, until the weight would balance out and drain the water out, and we kept doing this for a while. Shelley is still screaming, the guide can’t get back to start the motor, he broke one of the oars trying to push us off from the rocks, and I start studying the river downstream—“Okay, if we go swimming, where are we getting out? What’s the closest departure place? What course should we aim for? What do we need to look out for?” and I was going over the training in my head—always float with your boots downstream. There was no easy way out of the river; rock walls lined the side for a ways down river.

  I could see the other boat, at this point hundreds of yards downstream. While our boat was tipping and being washed by falling water, all the loose stuff in the boat—sandwiches, supplies, clothing—all fell out and were now floating down the river. Our friends ahead of us watched our stuff float on by. They were thinking, “Oh no. Where are they? What happened?”

  I finally just said fuck it, and started cracking really bad jokes (“Well, now we know what it feels like to be salmon!”) and doing my best to just stay calm. It got really quiet all of the sudden and I said something that I used to say whenever I was in a real jam with nature: “Rolling Thunder,” I said, “Help me out.”

  We suddenly broke free of the reversal and backed out horizontally to the flow. Without the motor, without us paddling, nothing. It just happened. The guide looked at me and said, “What the fuck was that?” But that’s how water is. It’s like that. It has that kind of magic to it.

  We were safe—drenched but safe. It was freezing cold that time of year, summer in Alaska, and we pulled out of the river where our friends had stopped, and we started drying off and telling them what happened.

  I remember that I had a little vial of cocaine, just about a gram, that someone had given me as a gift. I was just praying it was unharmed. I pretended I had to take a leak and went up the hill and, sure enough, it was fine. I figured I might as well test it out to see if it still worked. It did. That was my reward. I did a few big boy bumps and went back to the group and enjoyed the rest of the day. I was so wired, not just from the cocaine but from the whole ordeal. Adrenaline. When you’re in a situation like that, there’s no guaranteed outcome, only guaranteed risks.

  We had to fly in a float plane to get home, taking off in rather dangerous conditions on the lake that served as our runway—we had to fight waves and weather, making take-off sketchier than you’d care to have it. But we managed to get out of there.

  The whole adventure had a pretty significant effect on me once I had time to process it. When we finally got back to the hotel and had dinner, word had already spread about what happened and people kept coming up to me and telling me that they were glad we were safe. Lots of things can scare me, and I’m terrified of more than I might admit. But I wasn’t afraid that day. Quite the opposite. I liked the adrenaline rush.

  As for saying the prayer to Rolling Thunder, it helped me remember that surrender is sometimes your only way out. You can’t fight a current or a riptide or a river rapid. You have to surrender to those things, instead. I took care of Shelley, took care of balancing the boat, made jokes, and then sent Rolling Thunder a message. All of that helped.

  Another trip we did up in Alaska was ride a float plane over a glacier. This must’ve been before the run of shows because we were staying in Fairbanks. Shelley and I got on a float plane and they don’t go all that fast or all that high, but they’re the safest planes in the world. It was simply incredible. The pilot took us over a glacier—with everything that’s happening to the environment, that glacier is probably not quite the same today and might not even be there tomorrow. But when we went over it, it was heart-stopping gorgeous. I can still vividly recall the color turquoise that was buried deep within it. It was the prettiest color of anything.

  It’s like when you’re surfing and you watch the top of a wave and it transforms into something translucent and you can look through it and see all these magnificent greens and breathtaking blues, all in different hues, while the foam forms on top and all the colors cascade down. It looked like that. Our pilot flew us to this lake and we landed on it and it was smoother than any landing I’ve ever experienced on a runway. We were gliding across the water, barely touching the earth. Floating gracefully.

  As for the three-nighter in Anchorage, the only thing I remember about those shows is that they were in a high school gymnasium which, believe it or not, is not the ideal place for a rock concert. For one thing, the room was sonically unsound—it was one big echo chamber. There was nothing to soak up the sound and the back wall was terribly close to the stage. Every time I hit a drum, I’d get a report back. Every beat bounced back. With two drummers going full-throttle, it was an acoustical nightmare. All told, those gigs couldn’t have been that great. But the adventure sure was fun.

  Our flights to Alaska were part of a triangle fare, which meant that on one ticket we could fly from San Francisco to Alaska and then on to Hawaii before returning home. I had been to Hawaii once, maybe twice, before but it was fun to go there with the band. We weren’t there to play music; we were there to play around. Goof off. It was recess and we had about a week before our next run of shows, down in Southern California. So we went to the island of Oahu for the week and we stayed somewhere not too far from Diamond Head, which is a volcanic tuff cone that’s part of the Honolulu Volcanic Series.

  We were all hyperaware of the volcano because of a crazy experience that we had just a couple weeks earlier in Portland, Oregon. We did a show there on June 12 and, about halfway through “Fire on the Mountain,” Mount St. Helens started erupting. The synchronicity was classic Grateful Dead.

  The volcano, which was slightly more than fifty miles from the venue, had a devastating eruption just a month earlier. May 18, 1980. That one was the big one, the one you know about—it was the most catastrophic volcanic event in United States history. People died. Animals were killed. Homes, bridges, railroads, and highways were destroyed.

  When we played Portland on June 12, it was still in the news, still current. It was the aftermath of a natural disaster. During our second set inside the coliseum, Mount St. Helens had a second set of her own—another eruption. This one was the second of two smaller eruptions, and neither caused nearly as much damage as the main event. We had no idea what was going on until after the gig. While an actual volcano was erupting outside, Jerry was singing, “Almost ablaze still you don’t feel the heat / It takes all you got just to stay on the beat.… Fire! Fire on the mountain!”

  I remember leaving the venue and I was still in that hallucinatory space, that imagination zone, that you find yourself blissfully inside of when you play music for a few hours. Especially improvisational music. Grateful Dead music. It’s a trance state and it takes a little while after the show sometimes for reality to come back into focus. So, when we went outside, I looked up at the sky and exclaimed, “My God, it’s snowing!” Granted, it was summertime. But my mind was still elsewhere. I was an innocent. One of the snowflakes got into Shelley’s eyes and that snapped me out of it—it was ash. People were screwing around in it like schoolchildren. All you could see was this gray ash flying around and landing on everything, blanketing everything—to my credit, it wasn’t too unlike snow after all. There must’ve been an inch on the ground.

  In the morning we had an “ash delay” before getting on the road to our next gig, just up the way in Seattle. Before leaving, Shelley wanted to buy a bottle of ash that they were selling in the gift shop, taken from the bigger eruption in May. I gave her a look and said, “Shelley, empty out a glass and just go outside.” We both laughed. It was everywhere.

  I know there are energies in music and that everything is connected, but sometimes something happen
s that demonstrates that in an undeniable and also beautiful way. That was one of them.

  Between Mount St. Helens erupting, exploring the Alaskan landscape, and frolicking around Hawaii—after crisscrossing the mainland for a couple months, passing through Colorado and Arizona, Maine and upstate New York, Georgia and Virginia, I was more and more in tune to the real sense of the sacred in nature. Wherever we went, there were natural wonders. The rivers, the mountains, the coastlines, the trees, the lakes, the birds, the fish, all of it—natural wonders that I really felt connected to. More and more, the more I saw. The earth is an incredible place, one of a kind, really, and with an appreciation for it comes the understanding that it needs to be protected. The earth is not permanent but here we are, doing so much permanent damage to it. I saw the tar sands in Canada, the logging in the Northwest, the pollution in the big cities, the constant construction taking place all across the continent—across the whole world, in fact—and it was beginning to break my heart. I think that’s when I first became aware of my own environmentalism. That’s when I became aware that it was an issue and that I needed to take an active stand with it. There wasn’t a “eureka” moment—it’s just something that happened over time, after seeing all this stuff. I’m sure it dates back to my days with Rolling Thunder, too.

  Back in the land of the Dead, we decided to shake things up with our live shows just to keep things interesting and to keep covering new ground. In 1980 we were celebrating our fifteenth anniversary, so we put on fifteen shows (that was a coincidence, actually, but let’s roll with it) at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco. The Warfield only holds around 2,300 people, which means that all fifteen shows sold out immediately. The venue is located right on Market Street, not too far down the road from where the Carousel Ballroom (aka the Fillmore West) used to be and right along the path of Phil’s old mailman route.

  These were our first shows in the building and we would return for five more over the next few years but, overall, the place was too small for us by 1980. However, the Warfield became the home venue for the Jerry Garcia Band for many years and, to this day, his name adorns the door to one of the dressing rooms.

  Bill Graham produced those shows and the three-week run was one of his crowning achievements. For us, it was an opportunity to experiment with a three-set format: one acoustic set followed by two electric.

  We had a hidden motive behind the move: We were all a bit disenfranchised with recording studio albums after Go to Heaven, despite the fact that it did reach something like twenty-three on the pop charts. We were over it. Done. For a while, anyway. “A while” ended up being seven years. In the music biz, seven years is the equivalent of several lifetimes. It’s like seven dog years.

  But we weren’t out of the game entirely—we wanted to release live albums. Starting with two off the bat: one acoustic, one electric. Hence, the fifteen-night run at the Warfield, followed by another eight nights at Radio City Music Hall in New York at the end of October. The Radio City run ended on Halloween with a show that was telecast and which featured sketches by some of our Saturday Night Live friends.

  The Warfield run had a pretty comedic end as well—when we filed backstage after the second set, Bill Graham placed a table onstage with a bucket of champagne and some glasses. We noticed it when we came back for the encore, of course, but we weren’t sure why it was there. Ever curious, Jerry went over and, almost hesitantly, picked up one of the champagne glasses. That’s when house lights revealed everyone in the audience raising a champagne glass to toast the band, while a “Thank You” banner hung from the balcony.

  It was Bill Graham at his finest. Although, so was this: he came running up to Mickey and me after one of the nights and, in a flurry of excitement, told us that he had been in the bathroom, taking a crap during the drum solo, when a couple pieces of marble fell on him. “You guys beat the drums so hard, that it knocked the marble right off the wall!” We laughed. “That’s what you get for going into the bathroom during the show, Bill.”

  About a month later, he presented special plaques to Mickey and me that he had commissioned, with pieces of the marble on it, commemorating the event. It had the date and the venue engraved in bronze and all of that.

  The fact that we could blow marble right off walls was a testament to our sound system as much as anything. But that plaque remains one of the only awards I ever earned that I give a damn about. Gold albums, platinum albums; that’s just the industry patting itself on the back and the record label showing off how much money you made them. Jerry had that point of view and, once he pointed it out to me, I did too. But a physical piece of marble that you made fall off the wall of a building because you were playing your drums so hard? Now, that’s an award!

  As for recording those shows, we got Reckoning, a double-live album culled from the acoustic sets, and Dead Set, the electric counterpart, out of it. The obvious benefit of doing that was that we were able to release two albums over the following year, 1981, without having to go back into the studio and frustrate ourselves again. Made sense.

  Another feather in our cap: Just two months after fifteen sold-out nights at the Warfield, we closed out the year with a five-night run across the bridge at the arena in Oakland. It was the end of 1980, fifteen years into our career, and our popularity was only beginning to explode.

  The beginning of the 1980s were good to us, from a career standpoint: we established camping at our shows, in the lawns and parking lots around the venue. Those tent cities made Grateful Dead shows feel like even more of an interactive event—a special happening—more than just a concert. And it helped cultivate our own counterculture that, at this point, had long-since splintered off from the hippie revolution of the 1960s. As a movement, hippies were dead. But Deadheads were very much alive.

  We also established our own in-house ticketing system. We figured if other people could make money from selling our tickets, then we could, too. We wanted to do as many things under our own roof as possible, just to keep it one big family. Above all else, it was a service to our fans, really. This separated us even further from “every other band,” and really highlighted the fact that we had become our own community. Now Deadheads didn’t need to line up at the local mall all night to get tickets from a TicketMaster outlet. Instead, they could send mail-order forms to us directly, through their local post office.

  After doing battle with TicketMaster, on behalf of the fans, we were able to get a sizable portion of the tickets to sell ourselves. About half the house. Sounds like only half a victory but it was actually groundbreaking at the time and less than a handful of bands enjoy that kind of deal even today. We made the tickets themselves look fancy, knowing that fans would hold on to them as keepsakes.

  We founded the Rex Foundation sometime during 1983. The Rex Foundation was—and still very much is—our own nonprofit organization. This way, rather than saying yes to one benefit gig and no to countless others, we could instead play a certain number of benefit shows every year, give all the profits to the Rex Foundation, and have a committee divvy up the money, funneling funds and granting grants to various causes and projects that were agreed upon by consensus. It was a much more efficient and effective way of donating money to all the things we believed in.

  We named the Rex Foundation in memory of Rex Jackson, one of our most beloved roadies and road managers, who died in a car wreck in 1976, darn it.

  The way I remember it, the idea for the Rex Foundation came partially out of a board meeting at Fifth and Lincoln where we were talking about our kids’ educations. I had Justin on my mind. Jerry had his kids. Some of our employees had children. We wanted to start a Grateful Dead school that would serve their education but also work as a nonprofit. Turns out, that’s not so easy to do.

  Out of those talks and that line of thinking, Danny Rifkin decided that we should take all the potential money from playing benefits and direct it toward good causes and also good people who were coming to us with solid ideas for sta
rt-up nonprofits and other creative endeavors. Having our very own charitable arm was yet another expression of our self-enclosed community.

  Meanwhile, the band wasn’t always feeling the communal vibe within our ranks. We had begun to build resentments and alliances and we were no longer the band of brothers always striving for a group mind. This translated to the stage often enough, although just as often, the music broke through and united us—all of us, fans included—for a few hours each night. Then, after the show, we would all go our separate ways, sometimes without so much as saying good-bye to each other or, you know, “Good show.”

  We did one show as Joan Baez’s backup band (that was a favor to Mickey, since he was shacking up with her at the time). At our New Year’s Eve 1982 show, at the Oakland Auditorium Arena, we backed the great Etta James—with the Tower of Power horn section backing us—for an entire set.