There was nothing wrong with that, though; if anything, it just kept us honest. We were a jam band—we were made for the job. And we were headlining stadiums with our hero. Nothing beats that. A couple years later, we released a live compilation of the tour’s highlights, called Dylan & the Dead. That’s a better prize than any trophy. (And I’m happy to see that Dylan is going strong these days, and is still just as eccentric.)
Overall, 1987 was a great period for us. We were enthusiastic again and more focused than we had been in years. Things were good in GD-land. Two days after the launch of the Dylan tour, we released a new studio album, entitled In the Dark. It would become our bestselling album, redefining us for an entirely new generation that wasn’t there for the Pigpen—or even the Godchaux—years. We had a whole incoming class of new recruits. This would spell trouble for us down the line as we were rapidly approaching a level of popularity that would prove to be simply unsustainable. But for the moment, we were riding the wave and enjoying the ride.
The band was in great spirits for the recording of In the Dark. If you ever want to resubscribe to the good life, try recovering from a coma. It will put the spring back in your step. Some band members were sober during this period; I was not. But we were all in high spirits.
It had been seven years since our previous studio album and a large part of that was that we were frustrated with the process. Hours upon hours spent re-recording the same bit, over and over again, in a soundproof room, while a producer tells you to take it from the top—“although this time with a little more feeling.” It just wasn’t our thing. And recording at Front Street wasn’t the solution that we were looking for. So we stopped recording albums for a while. Besides, many of our fans didn’t even bother to buy them. We were always a live band.
And that’s where the “a-ha” moment came from. In January 1987, we rented out a 2,000-seat theater—the Marin Veterans Memorial Auditorium in San Rafael—and set up shop almost as if we were playing a live concert. It worked. It didn’t feel like a studio, because when you looked out, you saw seats. It was only about five miles from Front Street but, in terms of recording an album, it was a world apart.
In the spirit of shaking things up from our previous disappointments, we decided to keep this one in-house—we had tried a number of producers but none of them quite got us the way we got ourselves. The only outside producer who ever got a second chance with us was our first guy, David Hassinger, and he ended up quitting the second time around because he didn’t like the sound of “thick air.”
That’s okay. Our best studio albums were largely the ones that we produced ourselves, using our own guys in the control room, before the Arista contract called for otherwise. The production credit for In the Dark goes to Mister Jerry Garcia and our longtime sound engineer, John Cutler. We were done with hiring outsiders.
We ran all the electric instruments through amplifiers in the basement, in isolation rooms, and kept the drums bright and loud on stage. Everything was fed to a recording truck parked outside the venue. Everybody played their parts in real time, together. When we took breaks, we’d go into the wings by the stage door and sit there and talk about what we’d just done. Talking about the music, then going right out to play the music, then talking about it some more was something that we really should’ve done more often—the analysis served the songs and the camaraderie served the band. It really put us in a good spot.
We were able to record the basic tracks in just a couple of weeks. No doubt, just like Workingman’s Dead, the expeditiousness of In the Dark certainly contributed to its farm-fresh quality. Hell, we even had time to spare. So—in that classic Grateful Dead spirit—we experimented and fumbled around in the dark, hoping to stumble into happy accidents. That’s not a metaphor; we did that literally. Mickey decided it would be a fun exercise, so we turned off the lights in the middle of a jam and things got … incredibly weird. In the end, the experiment didn’t work but it did pay off by giving us the idea for the album title.
In the Dark peaked at No. 6 on the charts and “Touch of Grey” became our first Top Ten single (reaching No. 9—which still counts), thanks in no small part to MTV playing the video. Our previous studio album, Go to Heaven, was released in 1980. MTV didn’t exist yet. But by 1987, sure enough, it had changed the entire game. If you didn’t have a video, you didn’t have a hit. Now that we had a promising single, it was time for us to dabble.
We hired director Gary Gutierrez, who worked special effects on The Right Stuff and The Running Man. We knew him because he created the animated sequences for The Grateful Dead Movie. Which meant Jerry loved him. And we loved his treatment for the song: playing off of the fact that our graphics and logos frequently revolved around images of skulls and/or skeletons, Gutierrez created skeleton marionettes that resembled the frames of each respective band member. They were built to scale. Mine even had a mustache. The puppeteers attended one of our concerts, in advance of the video shoot, to study our individual, idiosyncratic movements and mannerisms on stage.
We filmed the video down by Monterey, California (“Somewhere near Salinas…”), during a two-night stand that we had scheduled at Laguna Seca, an outdoor venue on the same property as the famed raceway of the same name. Deadheads were camped out, on site, anyway, so we literally had a captive audience. After the first show, all we had to do was tell them they could be extras in our first video, and they came streaming back onto the concert field.
The video is supposed to be a live performance, but performed by our skeletons. Even in the final version, you can still see the strings attached to the skeletons, revealing that they’re actually just marionettes. That transparency made it charming. At some point during the song, the skeletons transform into the flesh-and-blood band members. Toward the end, a quick, often overlooked, shot hints that it’s the puppeteers who are actually the skeletons, manipulating the band’s movements. It was an unexpected heavy hitter on MTV.
My son Justin, who was now seventeen, came down for the shoot. He had taken an interest in filmmaking, so he shot a bunch of behind-the-scenes footage and B-roll and created a thirty-minute documentary. We released it as an official home video—back in the days of VHS—entitled Dead Ringers: The Making of Touch of Grey. I was a proud papa.
The success of “Touch of Grey” took everyone by surprise because gray-haired rockers from the 1960s didn’t exactly fit in with the generation that MTV catered to. The kids that wanted their MTV in 1987 wanted hair metal and power ballads, or pop stars and dance tracks. It was a different demographic. Suddenly, “Touch of Grey” could be seen in the same block as videos from Bon Jovi, Madonna, and U2. It was strange to find ourselves in such company, but, then again, ours was always a long, strange trip.
Naturally, the fact that “Touch of Grey” became one of MTV’s most-played videos of the entire year only encouraged us to make more of them. So, for the rest of our recording career, we filmed music videos to accompany the singles. None of them ever came close to replicating the success of “Touch of Grey,” though.
The next video from In the Dark was for “Hell in a Bucket,” a Weir/Barlow tune. That song to me was always a bit of a joke—it was almost a carny tune, if you know what I mean. But it was a fun video to make and, I hope, a fun video to watch.
For the shoot, we rented out a bar called New George’s, which was located at 840 Fourth Street in San Rafael, just around the corner from our offices at Fifth and Lincoln. It’s still there, although it’s now just called “George’s”—no longer “new,” I guess. It was a rowdy bar at the time, so we took it over for a night and filled it with fake bikers and staged a few bar fights. All the women in our clan—including Shelley—dressed up in high heels and all this makeup, and some of the crew dressed as riffraff, which wasn’t necessarily a stretch. The song has a verse that seems like it could be talking about S&M, so there was a scene with Bobby … oh, never mind. Just YouTube it.
The street scenes were filmed right on Fourth
Street—the heart of town. Mickey and I were in the front seat of a Cadillac, wearing devil costumes and acting rather animated. I guess we were supposed to be escorting Bobby to hell, as the song would suggest. Mickey rode shotgun, which meant I was behind the wheel. I wasn’t actually driving, of course—the car was hooked up to a tow truck and they positioned the camera so it only looked like I was driving the thing through the streets. I kept on forgetting I was in the driver’s seat; they had to remind me a few times, “Hey, Billy, hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, and make some turns, will ya?” That was fun.
Bobby was in the backseat, lip-synching the lyrics. There was an actress back there with him—his temptress, as it were—and a duck. I’m not sure who came up with the duck idea, or why, but it was a real, honest-to-God duck all right. There’s a lyric in the song that goes: “You imagine me sipping champagne from your boot,” which basically means, like, you want me to kiss your feet. Well, to illustrate the lyric, Bobby was holding a glass of champagne and, what do you know, the duck starts drinking it. You can see some of that in the final cut. Bobby felt compelled to keep the champagne flowing and before we knew it, we had a drunk duck on our hands. He got pretty hammered. I think it’s safe for me to talk about this, now; I mean, he looked like he was over twenty-one—in duck years, at least. We showed him a good time and let him cruise around town with us. It’s not like we were smoking quack with him or anything.
We made a third video, for “Throwing Stones,” but I wasn’t there when they filmed it and the band had to use a stunt double. It wasn’t playing hooky, I wasn’t hungover, and I didn’t call in sick. I was in court in San Rafael, defending myself in a civil lawsuit. I had gotten into some kind of scuffle with a musician named Matt Kelly, that ended with me trying to kick him in the balls. I certainly wanted to. But he blocked it and, in the end, it should’ve been no big deal. Dust off, walk away. Like a man. Instead, Kelly faked injury and said that I crushed his nuts and that he’d never be able to use his dick again. As if the world should be so lucky.
Matt Kelly is a friend of Bobby’s from childhood, and they played in a few bands over the years: Kingfish, Bobby & the Midnites, and an early edition of Ratdog. Kelly sat in with the Grateful Dead more than a dozen times and even played harmonica on a few studio tracks with us.
Kelly wouldn’t pay me for a side gig that he hired me for, even though he had the money. That’s where the altercation began. The lawsuit wasn’t about being kicked in the balls. This was about more than that. Grudges. Sour grapes. But the attempted swift kick to the groin was enough for Kelly to sue me for $600,000 on the grounds that he would never be able to have children as a direct result. During the trial, we had to say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning while looking at a large drawing of a pair of testicles. The two things were unrelated.
My son Justin saved the day. He was at Bobby’s fortieth birthday party in Mill Valley and saw Kelly take home a girl that night. A stripper. The one that came out of the cake. The Defense called her to the stand and, sure enough, she told the court—under oath—that Kelly certainly had no problem with his dick on the night of the party. No complaints. No sign of discomfort. And that was that. Needless to say, he didn’t get his full $600,000.
Anyway, after my nonappearance in the “Throwing Stones” video, we went back to using Gutierrez as our director. We made videos for some of the songs from our following album, but nothing came close to the success of “Touch of Grey.” That’s the one where the lightning struck.
With the commercial success of In the Dark, we were the same band that we used to be—only, somehow, even bigger. We were in the middle of a sold-out, five-night run at Madison Square Garden when Clive Davis came backstage to present us with the plaques celebrating In the Dark’s platinum status. (A gold album means you sold 500,000 copies, and platinum means you sold a million.) This wasn’t our first platinum album, and we already had our share of gold—but it was our first to sell that well right after it dropped.
As I already said in the previous chapter, these plated-record awards stopped impressing me once Jerry pointed out that they really were just indicators for how much money you made the record company. They didn’t qualify your talent or speak to the actual quality of the music. Thus, it was hard to look at them as “awards.”
When we got maybe our third gold record—I forget now which one it was, specifically—we decided to take apart the plaque to see if the actual record would play. We unscrewed the back, took the glass off the top, and put the gold-plated album on a turntable. It played, all right. Even with the gold plating. But it wasn’t our album. It wasn’t Live/Dead or Workingman’s Dead or whatever it was supposed to be. It was a Johnny Cash album. Johnny Cash!
The funny thing about that, aside from the obvious, is that Cash wasn’t even at the same record company as us. It had our label on it, but it was his record. I think we probably crunched the plaque back together and went on with our business, but we had an honest laugh over that one. We didn’t take it to heart and, besides—we were all Johnny Cash fans.
To this day, I’m not sure where most of my gold or platinum albums are. I don’t have them hanging anywhere. I’m thinking they’re probably in my storage unit in Northern California, but some of them may be in my garage or in a box somewhere around my property in Hawaii. I have my Grammy Award on my living room bookshelf—as a bookend—along with my Rock and Roll Hall of Fame trophy. And, although it’s in slight disrepair, I keep that Emmy Award from Tom Davis that I already told you about atop that bookshelf, too. But gold or platinum records don’t exactly make good bookends and you can certainly find better art for your walls.
Amidst all this success, the band wasn’t changing but we were evolving. Our whole trip was that we never played the same concert twice, and in order to do that we had to constantly seek new ground. One major evolution was the introduction of MIDI to our toolbox, thanks to a guy named Bob Bralove. He programmed keyboard software for Stevie Wonder before we hired him as a sound technician. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface and it was the bridge between physical instruments and computerized sounds. Under Bralove’s direction, supervision, and programming, MIDI made a significant impact on our live sound. You could argue that, by 1988, we were the first real jamtronica band. Well … if not the first, certainly on the forefront. In our own little corner.
Phil and Ned Lagin had begun experimenting with electronic music way earlier, in the 1970s, but it was still a new concept in rock ’n’ roll. Of course, rock ’n’ roll itself was sprung from the birth of electric instruments, but, now, instruments were actually becoming computerized. It was the great frontier. We were a long way away from all the “MacBook musicians” of today—back then, electronic music was still a lot more physical. We played the notes with our own hands, but the sounds coming out of the amplifiers were electronically manipulated. With MIDI, we could replicate the sound of a flute, or a wind chime, or birds, just by playing our normal instruments—which were patched in to computerized controllers where we could, ultimately, decide on the sound that would come out of the speakers. Jerry and Brent really dove into it and experimented. Mickey and I started tinkering around with electronic drums and triggers and all of that, and Bralove’s influence could be heard loud and clear in the “Drums” and “Space” segments of our shows, where we were encouraged to take such risks and go off the deep end. We didn’t really go hog wild with it until years later, in the post-GD era, when we toured as the Rhythm Devils. That’s still to come.
On the other end of the spectrum, we started incorporating more New Orleans music into our repertoire, which really pleased me tremendously. Brent started singing a New Orleans classic called “Hey Pocky Way,” and it fit right in with songs like “Iko Iko” and “Man Smart (Woman Smarter)” that were already in our rotation.
The Neville Brothers opened up for us on New Year’s Eve, 1985, and we invited them back at least half a dozen times over the next couple of years, inclu
ding the following two New Year’s shows. We usually had them sit in with us as well, sometimes for the better part of an entire set. I wish I could think of who first had the idea to invite the Neville Brothers to come join us, but it was brilliant and I’d like to thank them, whoever they are.
I always lamented, at least a little bit, the fact that the Grateful Dead didn’t play more New Orleans music, so whenever we had a chance to play those songs—or play with the Neville Brothers—it was just over the top for me. “Pocky Way” is a classic New Orleans Indian march, whereas “Iko Iko” has more of a Bo Diddley feel. Everyone plays those songs a little differently, but they always seem to work.
Take a ride through New Orleans funk and all roads will lead you back to the Meters. More than twenty years after I first started playing “Hey Pocky Way” with the Grateful Dead, I brought it to a rehearsal with my band 7 Walkers. We had George Porter Jr.—an original member of the Meters—on bass. He stopped us and said, “No, man, you’re doing it the way the Neville Brothers did it! Here’s the real way…” There was no arguing with George about that one, since he wrote the bass line.
I used to listen to as much New Orleans music as possible. Whenever a new record came out, I’d grab it immediately. I would go home and study the drum parts, because New Orleans music has a different level of syncopation to it that just makes it furiously attractive to me. I get a certain enjoyment out of playing that style of music that I don’t quite get from anything else.
It’s in my blood. Literally. I haven’t really talked about this too much, ever, but my mom was from New Orleans. My grandparents on her side were all from there, too. So I think that the music from there probably resonated with me on deep, subconscious levels and it gave me an underlying love for those rhythms.
After my parents divorced, my mom went back to that area of the country. She moved to Biloxi, Mississippi, about ninety miles outside of New Orleans. We used to vacation there when I was a kid. It was a beach town before it was a casino town and that’s the way I’ll always remember it. I bought my mom a house in Biloxi but I didn’t get many chances to visit. I was a working musician.
Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead Page 31