I had heard stories about various first experiences with this drug, but none more potentially embarrassing than the one about the guy who smokes a joint and then spends the whole evening complaining about how he’s not high. Over and over again, loudly: “This stuff’s no good; it’s not working.”
this music was so dense that it rewarded repeated listenings handsomely.
(One of his former students became my older son’s fifth-grade teacher, who told the story about Jerry being so discouraged by this particular student’s lack of progress that he excused himself to use the restroom, climbed out the window, and never returned. Patience was never one of Jerry’s virtues.)
That night confirmed, in spades, my earlier suspicions that improvised music could reach the heights and depths of the finest classical music, and transcend time and space.
bluegrass, the bebop of country music;
His banjo playing was a revelation to me—since I hadn’t heard any bluegrass, my idea of the banjo was pretty much strummity-strum; there was Jerry, playing the most exhilarating stream of runs up and down the fret board, popping the notes out like tiny rivets, all at amazing speed and with crystalline clarity. He would walk around the Château in the afternoon playing the most astonishing shit—and he never seemed to repeat himself.
If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well,” my dad always told me; Neal was the living embodiment of that maxim).
Fragments of music and speech flash by, interwoven with the rhythm of Neal’s voice (it wasn’t necessary for anyone to answer—Neal could hold up your end of the conversation as well as you could);
the real fun came at the reception, as the maids of honor and all of Sara’s well-dressed friends and family hit the bar, slugging champagne as if it was the last day before Prohibition. Meanwhile, all of Jerry’s scuzzy beatnik friends, myself included, descended on the heavily laden food tables like a plague of locusts of biblical proportions: Free food! And lots of it! The social polarity of the time was never so clearly delineated: The upper class drinks, the proletariat scuffles for bread.
at one point in the film there’s a scene where the Beatles are performing for TV before an audience composed entirely of young girls. The audience in the theater was screaming at the Beatles and at the audience in the film screaming at the Beatles. When I walked out of that theater, I felt as if I’d been granted a vision, a vision of, of… I didn’t know for sure, but the first thing I did when I got home was to take a shower and comb my hair forward over my forehead,
It turns out that someone has written a letter of complaint to the postmaster general—of the United States!—about my hair!
Tom Purvis (who also gave me a very sound piece of advice: Never play an open string unless you really mean it),
I didn’t know or care if this trip would last more than a week—I was going to give it all I had while it lasted.
Now I needed to become the foundation, along with the drummer, of the unfolding of time through which music manifests out of silence. In some ways, that role is more interesting than the lead voice, because the bassist cogenerates not only rhythm, but the nature and the rate of harmonic motion,2 so that the archetypal character of the music is clearly defined.
When I heard Jack Casady with Jefferson Airplane the next year, playing lead and bass at the same time, it confirmed my instinct: Play what’s right for the context.
The hardest part was singing and playing at the same time.
To sing accurately, expressively, and in tune while complementing the vocal line with rhythmic accents and keeping the groove flowing is truly a black art.
The tricky part was learning the harmonic implications of the “turnarounds”—the altered cadences that take place over a nominal tonic chord. I started out just playing the root notes, but as we went through the tune, Pig would emphasize the upcoming deviations with a look or a nod, and soon I was able to figure them out.
We played for about seven hours that first day.
I found myself looking forward intensely to each day’s work, knowing that I could always make my part better, or more interesting, or more expressive of the tune itself.
it was the most exciting musical challenge I’d ever faced, including composing for orchestras—I had to play new ideas without thinking, based solely upon context and expressive intent, and there was no space for reflection or revision.
After playing a wrong note, for instance, I would quickly resolve it to a proper note—but then I took to repeating my mistakes (a simple matter, since the music was built out of repeating modules, or strophes) in order to resolve them differently each time. I soon began to see the dissonances caused by wrong notes, or right notes in the wrong place, as opportunities rather than liabilities—new ways to create tension and release, the lifeblood of music.
For more than two months we played together every day, and I can’t exaggerate the importance of this experience
I soon reached a saturation point with the prevalent style of bass playing, which was to stick to the root and always play on the downbeat. (The old joke goes: What’s the bass player thinking? EEEE, DDDD, AAAAAAAA, repeated ad infinitum.)
I wanted to play in a way that heightened the beats by omission, as it were, by playing around them, in a way that added harmonic motion to the somewhat static chord progressions of the songs we were playing then.
I wanted to play in a way that moved melodically but much more slowly than the lead melodies
the general consensus was that we’d never evolve very far if we just kept covering other people’s stuff.
I walk up and shake his hand. “So you’re Owsley,” I say. “I feel as if I’ve known you through many lifetimes.” “You have,” he replies, “and you will through many more to come.”
This warehouse was probably the scuzziest place I ever had to play. There was all kinds of description-defying debris lying about (mostly in the corners, thank goodness). High windows let through brown light, even in the middle of the day. The concrete floors, walls, ceiling, and pillars were all painted with a faded hepatitis yellow, which reminded me of descriptions I’d read of the color of mustard gas. All in all, a rather poisonous atmosphere in which to attempt the transcendent, and it became apparent early on that this would not be an ecstatic experience.
While on the train, we took smoke breaks in the only place where we could have a little privacy: the open vestibule between the cars. At one point, we were standing out there entranced by the rhythm of the wheels clickety-clacking over the welds in the rails; Billy and I looked at each other and just knew—we simultaneously burst out, “We can play this!” “This” later turned into “Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks),”
Sometime in the fall of ’66, we moved from Lagunitas into 710 Ashbury Street in San Francisco,
As Jerry’s roommate, I was reintroduced every night to one of the great stentorian snores of our time: immense, turbulent, Druidic; rising to a climax, subsiding; then, one last huge percussive gahznrmpf! and a whistling diminuendo.
I always rode shotgun, because I could call it when Billy and I left our place. I had to be careful though; more than once I forgot to call “spot back” when I got out to let Pig in, and he grabbed the seat from me. You always had to watch out for Pig when riding in a car:
we also developed a methodology that would serve us well over the years: allowing the music to evolve to maturity in live performance before attempting to record it. We were able to develop our music to such a level of sophistication so quickly because since the beginning we had done our best to play together every day, no matter for how long; by this time, almost two years on, it was starting to pay off.
If I slept at all that night, I must have dreamed it.
we did refuse to be filmed, mainly because we couldn’t get straight answers about where the festival profit would go and who was going to own the film.
I should have known something was up when I wandered into their dressing room by accident and found them all red-faced and raving—in a completely incomprehensible dialect, unrecognizable as English. I thought at first they’d been dosed, but later found out they were all blind drunk. That didn’t stop them from going out and blowing the roof off the Monterey arena; they rocked the house down and ripped their gear to shreds. The crowd went nuts.
This was the inauguration of the Grateful Dead tradition of always blowing the Big Ones.
Alas, it was like trying to hold back the tide with beach toys—there were just too many, and the indifference or outright hostility evinced by the city establishment virtually sealed the fate of the Haight-Ashbury communal experiment. If we’d only had eyes to see, the whole Summer of Love catastrophe could have been read as a metaphor for the Grateful Dead’s future: the influx of hard drugs, the increasing isolation from and indifference to one another, the resultant failure of communication and shared responsibility.
The review of our first night still cracks me up: “five simian men, presumably reeking with San Francisco authenticity… not volume, but noise… a jet taking off in your inner ear, while the mad doctor is perversely scraping your nerves to shreds.”
All the while Bill Graham is standing behind the amps, screaming, “Don’t play so good!”
On a lighter note, I did find time to enjoy a very pleasant dinner date with a young woman whom I’d met when she came to 710 Ashbury to take pictures of the band. Her name was Linda Eastman, and she too was on her way to London, where she would eventually meet and marry Paul McCartney. Oh well, at least she married another bass player.
It’s a shame that the institution of the spontaneous free concert has fallen prey to economic realities; it was one of the most satisfying manifestations of our collective transformation program. We’d show up at the park, or the local band shell, wherever, set up our gear, and play to whoever was there.
this?” “No! You know [hands waving descriptively]… the
Our improvisational philosophies such as “There are no mistakes, only opportunities” and “The one [downbeat] is always where it seems to be” began with this type of discovery.
I know from the first chord that it’s going to be a good night,
Most of the time, we don’t use a set list—usually whoever wants to sing a song will call it—so Pig calls “Schoolgirl” and we go from there.
It’s easy to forget, at this remove, that many of the tools we take for granted today in electric music didn’t exist in 1969. Back then, they occasionally had to be cobbled together on the spot.
The attitude of the Grateful Dead was always If it won’t work, throw money at it, even if we were broke.
Meanwhile, our new manager Lenny hadn’t been idle: He was trying to persuade us to star in a really bad movie as psychedelic cowboys
Now we had three main areas of attraction that we could dance around and between as we chose: mossy-tooth blues and flag-waving R & B (“King Bee,” “Midnight Hour,” “Caution”); mythical/legendary alternate-America (“Dire Wolf,” “Dupree’s,” “Cosmic Charley”); and visionary/poetic (“Dark Star,” “The Other One,” “Morning Dew”)—all woven together by flat-out free jamming, which could contain elements of all three simultaneously.
The Mud People continued to materialize at many more outdoor festivals and concerts on the East Coast and in the Midwest over the next few years; all it took was a little rain and enough acid.
I manage to plug in my bass without loosing any demons, and out of the hum comes a sharp burst of static: then, “Roger, Charlie Tango, [static] I’m landing now”—the command radio signals from the chopper fleet are homing on my pickups and playing through my speakers.
After the usual fingerprinting, mug shots, etc., we’re individually taken to the jail area and put in cells—but not before the ever-irrepressible Bob Weir somehow manages to handcuff one of the attending officers to his own chair.
Every day I drove from Marin down to San Mateo, listening to the rough basic tracks we’d already made and happily singing along, learning my parts as I went.
All of the artists involved—the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, the Band, Traffic, Ian & Sylvia, Buddy Guy, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Delaney & Bonnie, and Mountain, among others—were of that generation that still considered trains as magnets of adventure and romance, much of our music celebrating the “high lonesome sound” of train whistles in the night. Riding the rails, like running away with the circus, was a reasonable alternative to the nine-to-five gray-flannel treadmill that had consumed the majority of our contemporaries. The train spoke of freedom, of mythical journeys and heroic quests “across the immense and lonely visage of America.… [The train] making its great monotone that is the sound of suspended time.”
I don’t remember who it was that broke out the first guitar, but suddenly both bar cars seemed to extrude amps and instruments from the very walls, and before we’d cleared the Toronto city limits, the monumental, historic, never-ending transcontinental jam was under way.
the announcement was made: We’re running out of booze! Thank all that’s holy there was no emergency cord on that train. I can just see the whole thing coming to a screeching halt—sparks flying from the rails as the huge train slides to a standstill in the middle of nowhere, without a liquor store in sight, or for a hundred miles. We agreed upon a plan. “When is your next stop?” “We don’t have another stop until Calgary.” “You do now. What’s the nearest big city?” “Uh—Saskatoon.” “How far?” “Two hours.” “OK—Saskatoon it is. Pass the hat!” And the hat was passed—garnering some eight hundred dollars in donations to the cause. That doesn’t seem like enough to buy out an entire liquor store these days, but back then, if it was a small liquor store.…
A three-gallon bottle of Canadian Club blended whiskey is installed on a makeshift altar in the “country” car. The bottle comes equipped with a pump dispenser; during the course of the night many on the train (including, in spite of my protestations, myself ) will come to kneel in front of the sacred spout to solemnly receive at least one ritual libation (accompanied of course by much whooping and yodeling).
Dad was a guy who worked hard all his life, and the way I saw it, he didn’t have much to show for it.
I sat there with tears running down my cheeks, totally blown away by the intensity of my own feelings. I’d never realized before in my adult life how much I loved this man, and never have I loved him more than at that moment.
My mom managed to tell me, between bursts of tears, that he went peacefully in his sleep, and that his last words were “What are we waiting for—let’s get this show on the road.” Let’s get this show on the road! If Dad had a tombstone, that’s what I’d want to see engraved on it.
We played long shows, so those who were tripping could peak and return; the music wove a web between the poles of dragon’s-breath wrathful-deity space jamming and simple tunes telling stories full of weird characters and situations out of American legend, and it generally resolved in the end to raucous, shake-your-bones-and-dance rock ’n’ roll fireworks.
It’s not surprising that the band became more popular outside the big urban areas (Boston, Philly, New York); we were offering something rarely available in the button-down culture of the time (or anytime since, for that matter)—a chance to take a chance, to go on an adventure of sorts with a large group of one’s peers, and to return to reflect and to tell the tale the next morning.
sixteen-year-old girl on his lap with a distinctly nonavuncular
His mantra—“Always record more than you erase”—was wood-burned into the top frame of the control-room window, along with the First Law of Rock ’n’ Roll: “Lay it down dirty and play it back clean.”
Marina was so used to instant service that when we got to our hotel in London, she mistook Garcia for a bellboy—and imperiously ordered him to bring her luggage in from the bus. Jerry, all-around good guy that he was, never even blinked, and we all cracked up at the sight of him staggering into the lobby loaded down with matching Louis Vuitton suitcases.
Jerry, M.G., and I found ourselves treading as we climbed laboriously toward the top. The path was very steep; at each doubling back of the maze, one of us would cut corners and climb up to the next level, laughing at the irony of yet again taking shortcuts to spiritual awareness. It’s said that in olden times pilgrims would dance and sing their way up this path as a penitential meditation; it’s pretty difficult, especially for out-of-shape hippies, to emulate that degree of commitment.
Back to Geneva, fly to London (with Keith Richards in the seat next to me; we talk mostly about what a drag commercial air travel is),
Bear and Ron Wickersham came up with the concept of “noising” the venue before the show: a process by which noise with a specific frequency content (so-called white noise) would be blasted from the PA into the room; special microphones and frequency analyzers would read the peaks and valleys and determine what frequencies were favored or hindered by the acoustics of the room. That known, it should be a simple matter to determine which frequencies should be boosted and which cut in order to render the room musically transparent
If there ever was a Grateful Dead “business plan,” it consisted solely of an attitude. Although we had to be a “business” in order to survive and continue to make music together, we were not buying into the traditional pop music culture of fame and fortune, hit tunes, touring behind albums, etc. Therefore, we were constantly besieged with business plans from employees and friends.
Rakow led them around raving about his latest idea, the obsolescence of vinyl records in relation to the new “holographic” technology he was investigating. The music would be encoded, somehow, onto a pyramid-shaped object, made of a material that hadn’t been invented yet, and read by—a laser!
We’d learned to break in the material at shows (under fire, as it were), rather than try to work it out at rehearsals, or in the studio at tremendous expense.
Simple, elegant—and practical, especially if you had nothing better to do with your money.
Ah, impetuous youth—where is thy sting? Right in the wallet, mate.
Boston). We now employed twice as many stage crew and truckers as before, meaning we had to play larger venues, sell more tickets, and play more often to be able
If there’s one lesson I learned during the worst of this period, it’s “never marry someone you meet in a bar.”
If Mickey had been born a Native American, his name would have been “Pushing-the-envelope.”
When Mickey heard that, he went totally orbital, calling Bill at 5:30 a.m. and screaming into the phone, “Fuck you, Bill! Just fuck you!” until he was gasping for breath—then in a complete about-face, crooned, “Bill! You still there?” “Yeah, I’m here.” “Let’s go out for breakfast.” “OK”—and off they went, old buddies,
Even if there were a culture in which there were no professional musicians, everyone would make music as well as they could anyway, without thinking of personal recompense, because music is ambrosia for the soul.
The volcano had literally blown its top just at the time we were flaming our way through “Fire on the Mountain.”
Hell is other people, says Sartre the existentialist. Not so, says Phil the psychonaut.
Even though everyone was playing individually as well as ever, none of us was really listening to one another much, only to our own frying brain cells. I was as much a part of the problem as anyone, falling into a stupefying cycle of booze and coke abuse: wake up with a hangover—have a line. Getting a little edgy—have a drink to smooth it out. Things start getting blurry—have a line or two to sharpen up the focus. Et cetera, ad infinitum. Kiss the once mighty group mind good-bye.
Incidentally, we were earning more as our popularity grew and we played larger and larger venues. Not that those earnings meant anything to the individual band members; it was mostly numbers on paper, since the band drew what was basically a maintenance salary, and all the rest went into the pot—for crew and management salaries, equipment expenses, etc.—to keep the trip going.
every time I walked out on that stage I knew in my heart that the infinite potential present in that moment was available
That remained my goal—to walk out every night and play as if life itself depended on my every note, to wrest meaning from the jaws of entropy and decay, and to transform every place we played into a shrine of expanded consciousness.
I could entwine with Jerry and entrain with Mickey, and still have room to respond to Brent’s interjections. It’s not a question of dividing one’s self: There is no self. There is only music.
As the number of tourheads grew, so did a support system of vendors and merchandisers, some of whom were earning their way from show to show by selling food, drink, posters, homemade stickers, or T-shirts in the parking lot before the show. Eventually, there was a vending area, with the population of a small town, at every venue. Affectionately dubbed “Shakedown Street” by the Heads, it became as much of an attraction to locals as the show itself.
The music wasn’t, however, the only reason these folks came to our shows. The magnetism and drawing power of a large group of like-minded people can’t be ignored. People came to our shows as if they were attending a family reunion. Their commitment was as much to each other as it was to the music.
Jean-Pierre told the story of the only time Bill ever visited his hideout. “I’m always telling him, come over, come over! So he finally comes over. I pick him up, take him to the house, he stays up all night talking business on the phone, and takes the morning flight back to New York. Without sleeping!”
The fall ’84 tour was our first as a married couple, and for me, the highlight was the night in Augusta, Maine, when Jerry, during the old folk ballad “Jackaro,” turned to me as he sang the line “this couple they got married, so well they did agree” and, with a big grin on his face, actually winked at me.
Mickey and Bob came for a couple of nights each, as did our old friend Bear, who spent the entire time lurching between trying to read his pocket libretto (with his special Eagle Scout Flashlight and Magnifying Glass) and trying to pick up Betsy Cohen, a friend of Bob’s and a Stanford physics professor.
Siegfried is singing about his lost mother, from behind me there comes a sound—part chainsaw, part the rooting of a wild boar searching for truffles. Oops—Jerry has fallen asleep and begun to snore. Mickey leaps to the rescue, jabbing him repeatedly with a salad fork while shaking his shoulders and urging him, half-asleep, back to the foyer. The occupants of the boxes on either side of us return their attention to the stage. I wonder fitfully if the snore was heard in the pit.
It only remained to make sure that Bob gave us a set list each show before we went on stage. Lotsa luck. At least twice Bob, that prankster, threw in a song we hadn’t rehearsed. Playing with Bob really kept us on our toes, too; he was fully capable of deviating radically from the set list, and more than once left us slack-jawed in confusion as he switched songs in midstream. That seemed like poetic justice for a band that took pride in its flexibility and in not using a set list.
By inventing symptoms, telling other doctors he felt fat, or skinny, he had accumulated an Alice-in-Wonderland stash of pills.
As Jerry isolated himself, the glue that held us all together began to dissolve. We were each more strongly connected to him than to each other, and now, offstage, we began to lead very separate lives.
In a bit of all-American imagery, when Jill went into labor we drove the thirty miles to the hospital in San Rafael at speeds up to ninety miles per hour. I was actually hoping to be pulled over so I could utter the immortal words “Officer—my wife’s having a baby!”
Barney would strap on my spare bass and take the stage, miming the motions of playing, while I would hide behind my speaker stack and play the song from there. The band took the stage, tuned up, and Jerry kicked the band into “Iko Iko.” Barney and I did the old switcheroo at the last minute, and when Jerry looked over and saw that ugly purple dinosaur playing bass in his band (mind you, he could hear what was unmistakably my playing), the expression on his face was that of a man who didn’t believe what he was seeing—a very rare situation for him.
Some excellent examples of this type of musical exploration can be found on our album Infrared Roses:
my favorite was a flute sound that when played in the very low register virtually defined the term “sub-contrabass piccolo.”
But I still couldn’t pull the emergency cord and bring the train to a halt, knowing that even a six-month break would mean the layoff of most of our longtime employees, who depended on the band for their livelihood: house payments, medical insurance, etc. In the end nothing changed. We took the path of least resistance and kept touring.
It was fitting of Bill to go out in such a spectacular blaze of glory—according to witnesses, the crash lit up the sky, and it plunged two counties into darkness.
Had it not been for Bill, the San Francisco music scene would have taken a vastly different shape, and rock music itself might have had far less of an impact on global culture.
Jerry was the kind of guy who had to get scared shitless to give up all his favorite junk foods and take up exercise
Jill and I would visit him while he recuperated at his fine new home. We cracked up when he showed us his closet; a large walk-in with a dresser in the middle and acres of hanging space—completely empty except for his neatly hung collection of seven or eight black T-shirts.
soon after our arrival I was walking along the path at Kaanapali and spotted Jerry walking alone in a Windbreaker and a floppy hat. I snuck up behind him, tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Hey, man, aren’t you a rock star?” and he replied, laughing, “No, over here I’m just another elderly gentleman.”
The reception was held at the Tiburon Yacht Club, and for me it was like a flashback to Jerry’s first wedding in Palo Alto so many years before: Most of his friends and bandmates had gone through their heavy-drinking periods, or rehab, by that time, and could be found clustered around the food tables or on the dance floor (where I managed to make a spectacle of myself and embarrass my wife with my strange birdlike dance, completely without the assistance of alcohol), while most of the drinking was done by the bride’s family and friends.
The piece came off rather well, I thought, except for a miscommunication a few pages in; I’d gestured to the tuba player to play softer, but he said after the concert that he thought I was just “waving hello.”
“Hey, man, why didn’t you tell anybody about this? I had to read it in the paper. You know, they played better for you than they did for their regular guy.” (Kent had done a short piece with the orchestra earlier in the program.) “Jerry,” I replied, a little embarrassed at such extravagant praise, “give Stravinsky a little credit, will ya?” “OK, OK, but still…,”
Jerry and Hunter had brought several songs in during our most recent flurry of serious rehearsals, and they were as fine as anything the pair had ever done. “Days Between” and “So Many Roads” stand out for me, because they seem to be almost a matched pair. In a sense, these two songs seem to encompass Jerry’s life from a poetic perspective, and I suspect that Hunter may have written these lyrics as a loving tribute.
The death threat did seem to bring back some of Jerry’s sense of humor; in the first set he sang his song “Dire Wolf,” including the refrain “Please, don’t murder me.”
Even though, like most of us, he didn’t suffer fools gladly, there was room there for just about every-damn-body.