Grateful Dead – A Touch of Grey

1

2

GRATEFUL DEAD

A Journey Along the Golden Road The Grateful Dead were formed in Palo Alto, California in 1965 and from this year on the music scene was never the same. Famous for their wild extended solos and onstage freak-outs, the Grateful Dead fused just about every genre they encountered within their unique sound. Combining elements of psychedelia, bluegrass, rock, country, gospel, blues and a hefty dose of folk, they were the quintessential jam band.

The Grateful Dead enjoyed enormous success, they have sold over thirty-five million albums, been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and have drawn enormous crowds at every stage of their fifty year career.

What really made the Grateful Dead distinctive was their incredibly unique sound. Not content to be labelled simply as a hippie rock group, the group was actually incredibly tech savvy. They knew exactly the sound they wanted to create and were willing to even make their own equipment in order to get it.

This drive and determination was exemplified when the Grateful Dead released In the Dark on 6 July 1987. This was the band’s twelfth studio album and represented a major chapter in the history of the Grateful Dead as it was their first studio album in seven years. Their 1980 release Go to Heaven had been critically panned and was coolly received; even by the most dedicated of Deadheads. Fortunately, In the Dark rejuvenated the fortunes of the Grateful Dead and became a huge chart success. This ushered in a brand new era for the band, and it is this album and momentous period that we will examine here.

First, a little about the band themselves…

The Sixties It was a long road to 1987 for the Grateful Dead, who first germinated when Jerry Garcia assembled a band with his coworkers at the Menlo Park music store where he taught. The assembled miscreants were Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan (organ, vocals, harmonic and later percussion), Bob Weir (guitar, vocals), Bill Kreutzmann (drums, percussion), and of course, Garcia himself (guitar, vocals).

This formation went by the name Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, but by 1965 they had transformed into (the more fearsome sounding) Warlocks. At this point the band also enlisted the talents of Phil Lesh (bass, vocals).

Sadly for the Warlocks this moniker had already been claimed by another band, and they were forced to pick out another. But how to make such an important decision? According to Phil Lesh, the method Jerry Garcia decided on was to choose at random from a dictionary, whilst high on the psychedelic DMT. As Phil recalled, Jerry Garcia picked up an old Britannica World Language Dictionary and ‘In that silvery elf-voice he said to me, “Hey, man, how about the Grateful Dead?”’ The definition there was ‘the soul of a dead person, or his angel, showing gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged their burial’. This folk-tale appears in many cultures, and usually involves a kind of karmic repayment for the protagonist – a suitably ‘out there’ concept for a wonderfully ‘out there’ band.

This new name was debuted at author Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’s first public Acid Test in December 1965. These Acid Tests are considered to be the beginning of the hippie movement, and as the ‘house band’ for such events the Grateful Dead were at the forefront of it all. It was at these happenings that the band found an unusual, yet appropriate patron in psychedelic chemist and sound engineer Augustus Owsley Stanley III (also known as Bear).

Stanley became a patron of the band, putting portions of his profits toward the Grateful Dead’s development. It is fitting that funds raised through psychedelic chemistry allowed the band to grow, as psychedelics became an large part of the band’s image and mythos.

Nowadays, no other band is as closely connected to the psychedelic molecule LSD-25 as the Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia expressed his 3

views on the subject of drug-taking to journalist Mary Eisenhart, in 1987, when interviewed whilst working on the music video for Throwing Stones. Portions of this interview appeared in the December 1987 issue of BAM magazine, however the full piece is an exhaustive and fascinating look into the world of the Grateful Dead during the late eighties and is well worth a read for any Deadheads. For our part, we have extracted select portions, and included them here; unless otherwise specified, all Jerry Garcia quotes are taken from that interview.

Jerry Garcia: ‘For us, the very first acid trips, the very first excursions into psychedelia was – whatever there is, there’s more than we’ve been allowed to believe. Whatever there is. We don’t know what it is, we can’t describe it, we just suspect its existence, but we know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that there’s more than anybody ever let on. We know that.

‘Once you’ve had that experience, or an experience like it, there’s no going back. I mean, you can go back if you insist upon really blinding yourself, and refusing to look at what your eyes have seen, but for me there never was any going back. That was it.

Once opened, I haven’t been able to shut ‘em, you know?

‘And for me there’s still more material than twenty lifetimes that I can use up. I mean, I’m way out the top end, you know what I mean? This lifetime has led me JERRY so far past my own expectations on every level that it would be so mean-spirited of me to criticise any level of life at this point.

‘I think there are a lot of people who are similarly convinced, and they don’t need any convincing or anything like that… they’re going along with what’s there, because they know that force only leads to force. You can’t fight things by fighting them, some things you can win by just surviving.

‘An old friend of mine once said, “Yeah, the revolution is over, it was over the first day, the rest of it is a clean-up operation.” All this is a clean-up operation. It may go on for another fifty years, but I believe that the battle is over. The victory is won. It’s done. It’s over. ‘…this is not something that I can say unqualified for everybody in the world. This is one of those things that everybody has to see with their own eyes. You can’t experience enlightenment for somebody.

Everybody has to view it how they will.

‘I don’t believe that psychedelics are absolutely necessary, but I think they’re surely helpful, at some point in your life when you really feel that there’s got to be more than this drab, dull bullshit. They were helpful.

‘I think it’s too bad that everybody’s decided to turn on drugs, I don’t think drugs are the problem. Crime is the problem. Cops are the problem. Money’s the problem. But drugs are just drugs. Some of them are better for you than others.

‘As far as life and death is concerned, and drug-taking and all that stuff, they ran a little thing last night of all the people who’ve died in rock ’n’ roll in that BBC show, and it’s like – the ones I knew were not suicides, they were just people who fucked up. They didn’t mean to die any more than somebody in their car who puts their foot down and the car goes out of control and they end-over-end and they’re dead.

‘Death comes at you no matter what you do in this life, and to equate drugs with death is a facile comparison. It’s like equating – sure, equate poison with death.

I mean, whatever kills you kills you, and your death is authentic no matter how you die. So I’ve always thought that was a cheap argument. My feeling about all that stuff is on record. I’m on record. ‘…as far as I’m concerned, it’s like I say, drugs are not the problem. Other stuff is the GARCIA problem. If we had any nerve at all, if we had any real balls as a society, or whatever you need, whatever quality you need, real character, we would make an effort to really address the wrongs in this society, righteously. Deal with them, okay, what’s really wrong here.’

Many would have assumed that the strong association with drug culture would have put off major record labels, particularly in the conservative America of the 1960s. However, the innovation and popularity of the Grateful Dead was undeniable, and they were signed to Warner Brothers in late 1966. Their self-titled debut was released in March 1967, which, unlike later material, consisted mainly of cover songs with only one extended jam.

The Grateful Dead now began working on expanding their live shows, it was from these incredible spectacles that their most ambitious songs were born. As their public performances gained

‘I don’t believe that psychedelics are absolutely necessary, but I think they’re surely helpful, at some point in your life when you really feel that there’s got to be more than this drab, dull bullshit.

They were helpful.’

4

nuance and depth, so did their songwriting and studio work. Their next release, 1968’s Anthem of the Sun was a prime example of this.

The album saw the Grateful Dead experimenting with sound, using the studio itself as an instrument. These innovations continued on 1969’s Aoxomoxa, with an expanded sound and line-up.

Although the line-up for the Grateful Dead has always been fluid, there are many key members that shaped the future of the band. One such member is Robert Hunter, who joined as a full-time collaborator in 1967. He was joined shortly after by Mickey Hart, and by Tom Constanten a year later. Constanten only stayed with the band for twelve months, but played an integral role in creating the classic live album 1969’s Live/Dead. This album played a key part in exposing the Grateful Dead to the masses, as their true forte has always lain in performance. There are very few bands indeed that can rival the Grateful Dead in the live arena, and once the public heard Live/Dead they were hooked.

The Grateful Dead next released Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty in 1970. The albums were recorded back-to-back using a similar style, and eschewed the psychedelic experimentation of previous albums in favour of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s Americana-styled song crafting. This was a truly prolific time in the Grateful Dead’s career, with both albums receiving high critical acclaim and featuring tracks that formed the core of the band’s classic songbook.

The Seventies The 1970s ushered in a decade of near-constant change for the Grateful Dead. Their sets, performance styles and even personnel were in a state of constant metamorphosis.

In early 1971, Mickey Hart took an indefinite leave of absence from the Grateful Dead. This came in the wake of revelations that his father embezzled $70,000 from the band during a brief stint as manager. In his 2015 memoir, Kreutzmann divulged that Hart’s use of hard drugs had accelerated in the wake of the embezzlement, which also contributed to his departure: ‘Mickey wasn’t able to play at the level he was capable of and it was beginning to affect our performances. He was getting really spacey and just getting so far out there that he wasn’t able to deliver the music. It became impossible for me to play with him. It wasn’t out of anger or meanness, but we had to address it and deal with it. So our brother Mickey left the band and retreated to his ranch in Novato and it really strained our relationship for a while, sad to say.’

Later that year, Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan was also forced to leave the Grateful Dead due to health issues. He was suffering from

problems related to alcoholism, but in the early 1970s he also began to experience symptoms of congenital primary biliary cholangitis, a rare autoimmune disease. After he was hospitalised in August 1971, doctors sadly requested that he cease touring indefinitely.

Thankfully there was always a vast pool of musicians keen to join the Grateful Dead, and new talent was often closer at hand than the band realised. Keith Godchaux, a keen fan of the band, and friend of one of their sound engineers, joined the ensemble after blowing the Grateful Dead away in practice jams during 1971.

Bill Kreutzamnn recalled first seeing Godchaux play reminiscing, ‘Around the same time that Pigpen entered the hospital, Jerry gave me a call telling me to get my ass down to the rehearsal space. He said there was a guy down there with him that I simply had to hear.

Nobody else from the band was around, but almost immediately after I arrived, I knew that Jerry was right – this guy could really play piano.’

This natural talent combined with a love of the Grateful Dead’s music made Godchaux a natural choice, but Godchaux revealed that it was actually his wife that was the Deadhead of the partnership.

‘I first saw [the Grateful Dead] play with a bunch of my old lady’s friends who were real Grateful Dead freaks. I went to a concert with them and saw something I didn’t know could be really happening…

It was not like a mind-blowing far out, just a beautiful far out. Not exactly a choir of angels but some incredibly holy, pure and beautiful spiritual light. From then on, I was super turned-on that such a thing existed. This was about a year and a half ago, when I first met Donna… I knew I was related to them.’

Fittingly, Donna also joined the Grateful Dead some months later, providing vocals. Donna possessed a well honed talent, as she was previously a Muscle Shoals session singer who’d sung on hits by Elvis Presley, amongst others.

In late 1971 the Grateful Dead were operating as a one-drummer quintet, and had taken a new direction with their improvisations.

They were experimenting with a laid-back Marin County swing style when Pigpen rejoined the band in December 1971 to supplement Godchaux on harmonica, percussion and organ.

Pigpen’s performance over this time is divisive; Garcia biographer Blair Jackson has lauded the quality and frequency of his instrumental contributions, yet manager Rock Scully alleged that McKernan was not coping, and even passed out in front of his Hammond organ at a show during this period.

Nonetheless, he contributed to each performance on the much lauded 1972 tour of Europe and resulting live album. Sadly, his health soon deteriorated again to the point where he could no longer continue to perform and Pigpen made his final concert appearance on 17 June 1972, at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.

5

As an original member and well-loved character, it was with great sadness that the Grateful Dead learnt of Pigpen’s death by gastrointestinal haemorrhage in March 1973. Some have said that it marked the end of an era for the Grateful Dead, and it seemed that Jerry Garcia was inclined to agree when he spoke at the funeral saying ‘After Pigpen’s death we all knew this was the end of the original Grateful Dead’.

One of the transitions that the Grateful Dead underwent at this time was splitting from Warner Brothers to establish their own independent companies – the band’s Grateful Dead Records, and the Garcia co-owned Round Records.

As the Grateful Dead told fans in 1973, they originally deemed that establishing their own label would allow them a greater degree of control over all aspects of their music. They even mentioned that they hoped to distribute their albums via ice cream trucks stationed outside concert venues (although sadly this dream was never materialised).

Grateful Dead Records based themselves in San Rafael, and began building a small business empire. This eventually included a travel agency, publishing company and a temporary store. Despite their mounting fiscal obligations, the band were determined to remain firmly rooted in the counter-culture of the time and declared that their fans would remain ‘part of our eyes, ears and feet on the ground to keep the scene straight locally’.

The Dead’s new endeavour was big news, and gained extensive coverage in the media. The following article detailing the Dead’s new label appeared in the Berkeley Barb in November 1973: ‘…The first record on the new label is the Grateful Dead’s first studio release since 1970. It’s titled Wake of the Flood, and its release marks an unprecedented move in the record industry.

‘In the past, many major rock groups have formed their own labels. The Jefferson Airplane’s Grunt, the Moody Blues’ Threshold, the Beatles’ Apple, and Rolling Stone Records all meant the groups were gaining more artistic freedom and typically receiving a higher royalty rate. However the majority of standard record industry trips, including distribution, were still handled by a major label: Grunt by RCA, Apple by Capitol, etc.

‘The Grateful Dead, with a staff of eight, and an abundance of enthusiasm, have taken on this monstrous task. Having sold more than three million dollars worth of albums during the last year, the Grateful Dead are in as good a position as any to tackle the record business.

‘For over a year now, the Dead have financed an in-depth study of how to put a professional operation together, and just to prove what good guys they are, offer the ninety-three-page printed results to anyone interested.

6

‘Distribution, probably the most essential step in having a successful record, is being handled by eighteen independent distributors throughout the United States, on the theory that these people, having built their own businesses, will give the record better distribution than Warner Bros. could. As an added incentive, Wake of the Flood is being sold to these distributors at twenty cents less than most records.

‘A great effort was made to ensure high quality standards on Wake of the Flood. At the two plants where the LP was pressed, Grateful Dead Records had a representative standing right there to assure the ‘stamper’ was changed regularly. The ‘stamper’ is the mould from which vinyl records are pressed. It is the last step in a long production process.

‘It follows then, the fewer LPs released from one ‘stamper’ the higher the quality. Listening to Wake of the Flood, you can hear the difference, but the Grateful Dead aren’t really pleased. Speaking from the Marin County office of Grateful Dead Records, Ron Rakow stressed, ‘Almost every record I’ve heard recently didn’t come up to our standards. We were only moderately successful in securing higher quality. We fought for higher quality than we got.’

It was not just in physical production that the Grateful Dead sought control and quality – they also saw no reason why the limitations of sound systems should be dictated to them. The band had always taken a keen interest in experimenting with equipment and systems, but their most famous innovation arrived in 1973 when the Grateful Dead unleashed their Wall of Sound technology on an awestruck crowd.

This behemoth was capable of projecting the sound of the Dead half a mile without suffering distortion. It has even been said that it was their enormous sound system that prompted Bob Cohen of the Avalon Ballroom to create noise-cancelling technology that was later sold to NASA. The Grateful Dead’s innovations, from monitor systems to (sometimes literal) guitar hacks, transformed the technology of rock and roll. It was clear that they were pushing the limits of what was possible sonically, and this inspired their contemporaries to do the same. Jerry Garcia often happily acknowledged this fact, and enthused that everything the Dead became famous for were things you weren’t traditionally supposed to be able to ‘get away with’: ‘We’re here to say that you can get away with it, and that in fact this is the place you can get away with it at. This is the place… if it works here it can work anywhere.

‘I mean, we’re buying into that. We’re basically Americans, and we like America, we like the thing about being able to express outrageous amounts of freedom, and all of those things, and knowing that there’s

‘When I heard Grateful Dead’s music, I knew that it was the most powerful force on the planet.’

MICKEY HART

7

all kinds of stuff that goes along with it… you don’t get something for nothing, things are still – there’s still cause and effect relationships.

Life has its ups and downs and all the rest of that stuff, but even so, it’s mostly out the other end, you know, it’s mostly free space.’

Despite this love for the ‘land of the free’ the Grateful Dead steered away from Americana for 1973’s Wake of the Flood. This was the band’s first studio album in nearly three years, and the absence of Pigpen’s love for classic American blues was notable. Instead the Grateful Dead leaned more into Keith Godchaux’s penchants for modal jazz and bebop.

The album was well-received, reaching No. 18 in the US charts and their new direction continued onto the 1974 follow-up From the Mars Hotel. Once again, the album enjoyed a warm reaction from fans and critics, with Robert Christgau of Village Voice observing that the album was: ‘Brighter and more up-tempo than Wake of the Flood (which is not to claim it’s “high energy”), with almost as many memorable tunes as American Beauty.’

Of course, with the Grateful Dead’s level of experimentation there was bound to be a lot of variation in the music. One never quite knew what to expect from a Grateful Dead release. Many listeners found themselves totally in love one track, only to be left bewildered by the next. As Jerry Garcia put it, ‘The Grateful Dead is not anybody’s idea of how a band or music should be. It’s a combination of really divergent viewpoints. Everyone in the band is quite different from everyone else. And what happens musically is different from what any one person would do… The Grateful Dead had always had that thing of dissonance. It’s not always consonant. Sometimes it’s dissonant. Sometimes it’s really ugly sounding and just drives you crazy.’

It was this unwillingness to compromise, paired with a thirst for progress and an unparalleled live act that made the Grateful Dead quite so popular. In fact the Dead may have the most dedicated fans in all of rock, boasting an army of loyal ‘Deadheads’.

This term first appeared in print on the sleeve of the live album Grateful Dead (Skull & Roses) in 1971. There, a note read: DEAD FREAKS UNITE: Who are you? Where are you? How are you?

Send us your name and address and we’ll keep you informed.

Dead Heads, P.O. Box 1065, San Rafael, California 94901.

The fan’s love for the Grateful Dead was certainly reciprocated, with Jerry Garcia extolling, ‘Nobody else in the rock world has fans like the Deadheads in terms of the depth of the culture. Very few people, relatively speaking, follow Bruce Springsteen around the country, go to lots of shows, get into Bruce as a way of life. It’s an anomaly if somebody gets into Bruce as a way of life, and if a Deadhead does it, well, that’s what Deadheads do.’

8

It was partially the Grateful Dead’s fluid performance style that germinated the Deadhead craze. With a strong foundation of improvisation and a varied song selection, the band were able to create a rotation of songs that were cycled every three to five performances.

The fact that you could attend multiple concerts in a row and hear completely different sets each time lead many fans to hit the road in the hopes of catching their favourite numbers. This became a symbiotic relationship, as the large number of traveling fans enabled the Grateful Dead to arrange multiple shows at each venue whilst touring, knowing the performances would be mostly sold out.

The media began to take notice and in 1971, Robert Christgau attended a show Grateful Dead show noting ‘how many “regulars” seemed to be in attendance, and how, from the way they compared notes, they’d obviously made a determined effort to see as many shows as possible.’

It was an undeniable phenomenon, and of course, it was not just the song rotation that drew fans to the Grateful Dead’s concerts.

When considering what bound fans to the Dead over other bands Jerry Garcia mused, ‘For me it’s easier to believe a group than it is a person. It takes the weight off that one person, you know what I mean? That’s part of it, I think. That’s certainly one of the things that makes the Grateful Dead interesting, from my point of view, is that it’s a group of people.

And the dynamics of the group part is the part that I trust. For me that’s real helpful.’

In his autobiography, Phil Lesh touched upon the roots of the Deadhead phenomenon and asserted, ‘The unique organicity of our music reflects the fact that each of us consciously personalised his playing: to fit with what others were playing and to fit with who each man was as an individual, allowing us to meld our consciousnesses together in the unity of a group mind.’

Jerry Garcia biographer Blair Jackson once explained the appeal of the Grateful Dead by stating ‘for many Deadheads, the band was a medium that facilitated experiencing other planes of consciousness and tapping into deep, spiritual wells that were usually the province of organised religion… [they] got people high whether those people were on drugs or not.’

Perhaps rock producer and Deadhead Bill Graham put the reason for the band’s popularity most succinctly when he stated, ‘They’re not the best at what they do. They’re the only ones that do what they do.’

Whatever the reason, the Deadhead craze reached a point where keen fans even began to sell tie-dye T-shirts, veggie burritos and other items at Grateful Dead concerts. This income enabled them to follow the band for the duration of a tour, and generated a miniature travelling society that even used their own idioms and slang.

One key member of this society was long-time friend of the band, Eileen Law. Law joined the promotion team in 1971 and revolutionised the band’s mailing list, swelling subscriber numbers from 350 to an astonishing 40,000 in only a few years. The newsletter became a key part of the band’s interaction with fans, and subscribers often had their loyalty rewarded with surprise freebies. Today the newsletter lives on in the form of dead.net, one of the most comprehensive and meticulously maintained band websites around. It is a veritable encyclopedia of everything related to the Grateful Dead, and mirrors the spirit in which the band always interacted with fans.

The deep respect that the Grateful Dead hold for their community forms an intrinsic part of what Deadheads term the ‘X Factor’ – the intangible element that separates the Dead from the pack. It is certainly one of the reasons that new generations have always found themselves inexorably drawn to the Grateful Dead’s music. Over five decades since the band’s formation their audience is still growing, and they retain an important spot in cultural history. When contemplating their, seemingly timeless, appeal, Jerry Garcia noted, ‘I just think that there’s a certain kind of kid for whom we say something. And it’s been that same person in each generation.

Back when we started it was the people who were our age, and we’ve been picking them up younger and younger every decade.

JERRY ‘There’s a lot of that stuff with people bringing their kids, kids bringing their parents, people bringing their grandparents – I mean, it’s gotten to be really stretched out now. It was never my intention to say, this is the demographic of our audience. I was delighted the first time that people didn’t leave. Everything above and beyond that is pure gravy. So when anybody likes it for any reason, great. ‘…We are in reality a group of misfits, crazy people, who have voluntarily come together to work this stuff out and do the best we can and try to be as fair as we possibly can with each other, and just struggle through life. And we want to do it our way, we don’t want to do it that way.’

One of those ways was encouraging Grateful Dead audiences to record shows and trade tapes. At the time this was highly unusual, yet the tapes acted as the best free promotion available, allowing

Deadheads to turn others onto the band’s music with ease. The fans themselves became the band’s best marketers, and created an insidious growth in popularity that other acts could only dream of.

With improvements in technology, this taping increased throughout the early 1980s, to the extent that there was even a special section for fans to record from at Grateful Dead shows. In 1982, Garcia was asked whether he supported the taping of shows, and he replied, ‘When we are done with it [the concerts], they can have it.’

The popularity of the fans’ tapes was such that in 1971, the Deadhead Les Kippel started the First Free Underground Grateful Dead Tape Exchange. The aim of this endeavour was to preserve the heritage of the Grateful Dead’s concert history by exchanging tapes made by audience members. Thanks to efforts of fans such as Kippel, a vast amount of these tapes still survive and are available online to this day.

Although many Deadheads engaged in constructive projects supporting the band, there were those that channelled their fervour for the Grateful Dead in some questionable manners.

At Grateful Dead concerts it was commonplace to see young men and women, often in patchwork robes. In a trance-like state, with arms outspread, they would spin in circles (earning themselves the inventive nickname ‘Spinners’). Lead by Joseph Lian III, this group travelled on a distinctive Peacemaker bus – the GARCIA Lambourgini of hippie busses – and followed the Grateful Dead from town to town.

The Church of Unlimited Devotion, as they later called themselves, were known to worship Jerry Garcia as a deity, believing his guitar a channel for God. The Church asserted that by spinning whilst listening to Jerry’s guitar-work, they were able to transcend.

Whilst originally considered harmless, if a little creepy (as Gracia said ‘I’ll put up with it until they come for me with the cross and nails’) the group soon developed a reputation for attempts at surreptitious indoctrination.

The Church was later dissolved in 1992, after expelling their leader over allegations of abuse and intimidation.

Although most fan’s took the matter significantly less seriously, in the 1970s it was not uncommon to hear Deadheads eulogising Garcia’s

‘The Grateful Dead is not anybody’s idea of how a band or music should be. It’s a combination of really divergent viewpoints. Everyone in the band is quite different from everyone else. And what happens musically is different from what any one person would do…’

9

‘When we get onstage, what we really want to happen is, we want to be transformed from ordinary players into extraordinary ones, like forces of a larger consciousness. And the audience wants to be transformed from whatever ordinary reality they may be in to something a little wider, something that enlarges them.’

JERRY GARCIA

10

‘power’. When asked how he dealt with the ‘Jerry-Is-God’ quotient, Garcia replied with a laugh: ‘I ignore ‘em. I know better, you know?

‘I mean, no matter who you are, you know yourself for the asshole that you are, you know yourself for the person who makes mistakes, and that’s capable of being really stupid. And doing stupid things, you know what I mean?

‘On this earth, nobody is perfect, as far as I know. And – I’m right there with everybody else, you know what I mean?

‘I mean, you’d have to – I don’t know who you’d have to be to believe that kind of stuff about yourself, to believe that you were somehow special. But it wouldn’t work in my house, that’s all I can say. My kids would never let me get away with it. So far it hasn’t been a problem.

‘If I start believing that kind of stuff, everybody’s going to just turn around and walk away from me. “Come on, Garcia!” You know.

And with my friends, nobody would let me get away with it, not for a minute. That’s the strength of having a group.’

Sadly, even the strongest group needs a break sometimes, and late 1974 found the Grateful Dead overwhelmed and exhausted. Their intense touring schedule compounded the mental strain of their high performance standards, forcing the band to announce their indefinite hiatus from live shows.

Thankfully for fans, the Grateful Dead performed a series of five farewell concerts at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco in October 1974. Present was the band’s famous Wall of Sound, and over the course of the five nights, the crowd were treated to new collaborations with experimental composer Ned Lagin. The performances also featured the reappearance of Mickey Hart, who had not appeared live since 1971. The shows were filmed, including the spectacular finale that the Grateful Dead dubbed ‘The Last One’ and the footage was compiled to form The Grateful Dead Movie.

Directed by Jerry Garcia, the film was eventually released in 1977, but a delay in production meant that the movie was somewhat outdated by that time. Despite missing the mark in terms of timing, the film itself is an incredible snapshot of the Dead, their fans and their unparalleled concert experience.

Drummer Bill Kreutzmann justified the delay in releasing The Grateful Dead Movie recalling, ‘Producing that thing really consumed Jerry’s time, on a day-to-day basis, throughout the hiatus What are you going to do in that situation? Say, “Okay, you can only have this much money and if the thing’s not complete, who cares, wrap it up?” Or are you going to find more money for it and let it become a really worthy project that your band leader and good friend really believes in?

‘As Jerry had known all along, it captured and defined our identity, since it had the visual element to go along with the music,

the animation to go along with the interviews, and the B roll that really showed viewers with their own eyes the circus that was a Grateful Dead show in San Francisco circa 1974.

‘The part of the movie that ate up the biggest slice of the budget and took the most amount of work – the animated sequence in the beginning – is my favourite part. Back then, animation was all done by hand, frame by frame.’

The aforementioned opening sequence actually cost roughly the same to create as the entire rest of the film. This financial burden nearly crippled the Grateful Dead’s businesses, forcing them to take out loans and sign a distribution deal with United Artist Records to cover the cost. Using their own label, the Grateful Dead members also released five albums from other projects they were involved in, keen to keep The Grateful Dead Movie and the Grateful Dead label afloat.

Shortly after the conclusion of the Winterland Ballroom shows, the Grateful Dead entered the studio. Beginning work on Blues for Allah in February 1975, the band chose to deviate from their usual recording routine by using Bob Weir’s new home studio, Ace’s, in Mill Valley, California. It was also decided that the Dead would develop the tracks in the studio; this was a huge departure for the band, as Grateful Dead numbers typically had a gestation period of years, being honed and refined onstage. Garcia explained, ‘We’re working on creating styles, rather than just being eclectic or synthesising other styles. Thus, it’s a little bit more difficult, and considerably more experimental.’

The result was an album that eschewed much of the Grateful Dead’s blues influence in favour of a jazzy, country-rock feel. This was a product of greater creative involvement in the writing process from the band, as Jerry was able to take a back-seat. Bassist Phil Lesh recalled ‘Jerry brought in a strange, almost atonal melodic entity that would evolve into the title song and sequence for the album, and I had sketched out a little Latin-flavored, seven-beat instrumental number inspired by Shelley’s poem Ozymandias called King Solomon’s Marbles. Besides Crazy Fingers, his marvellous essay in smoky ambiguity, Jerry also contributed a triptych of already written tunes (Help on the Way, Slipknot and Franklin’s Tower) that would become, in live performance, one of our finest exploratory vehicles.

Bob had a beautiful guitar instrumental, Sage and Spirit, and one of his stompin’-est self-congratulatory rockers, Music Never Stopped, to round out the album.’

Unfortunately the critics were less enthusiastic, and the album received a lukewarm reaction upon its release. The numbers were generally considered solid, but lacking in direction and even Robert Christgau (usually a cheerleader for the Dead) quipped ‘I find the arch aimlessness of their musical approach neurasthenic and their general muddleheadedness worthy of Yes or the Strawbs.’

11

Undeterred, the Grateful Dead dusted themselves off and hit 1976 with everything they had. Calling a halt to their hiatus, the band set out on the road with their ninth touring line-up, once more featuring Mickey Hart and his second drum kit.

The supporting tour proved to be far more successful than the Blues for Allah album, and the Grateful Dead were soon hitting their stride onstage.

Drummer Bill Kreutzmann in particular felt that the album’s tracks were actually far better suited to the live arena than the studio: ‘Once we started performing them live… we turned a corner and it was a whole other ball game. Those songs are among our very best and they lived up to their potential.

‘We had to play them live in front of an audience in order for that to happen. Once we let them outside and started taking them for walks, they each had a growth spurt during which they really discovered themselves. The album also contained a group of really experimental songs (Stronger than Dirt, Unusual Occurrences in the Desert) that bordered on acid jazz composition. Wild stuff. Deep cuts.’

Whilst the live shows were a rousing success, the business side of proceedings was beginning to wear on the band. Running the companies had become burdensome when combined with recording and touring pressures, so the Grateful Dead decided to JERRY dissolve their independent record companies in 1977. Instead they signed with Clive Davis’ Arista Records, and began working on their next studio album.

In an effort to keep things fresh and fluid, Arista brought in Fleetwood Mac’s producer Keith Olsen to oversee recording. This marked the first time in a decade that the Grateful Dead had worked on a major collaboration, and all involved had high hopes for the project.

The resulting album was Terrapin Station, released in July 1977.

It has been said that Robert Hunter wrote the lyrics for Part One of the Terrapin Station suite in a single sitting, during a rare Bay Area lightning storm. This atmospheric setting was certainly reflected in the lyrics, which Jerry Garcia found particularly arresting: ‘I always

like it when Hunter reaches into that – the dim forest of legend, you know? The fire and the storyteller, all that stuff. Whenever he dips into that world, I’m a real sucker for that…

‘Somewhere there’s a long exposition of how the whole Terrapin thing came down, how we wrote it, and Hunter tells his side of it, and I tell my side of it, and it really was one of those things that was a lucky marriage of inspirations. It just happened just at a time when I was composing the Terrapin melody, and I had no lyric for it or anything.

‘Hunter came to me – he called me the very next day, actually, it was that close in space and time, and he says, “I have this thing I’ve been working on.” And I went over to his house, and he had like seven pages of stuff, that included the Lady with a Fan and all – none of them were perfected, but parts of them all were there. Plus a few other things.

‘Then basically what happened was that I just broke down. The reason I never finished it was that I just broke down, I didn’t have any more ideas. I had one other song that I was not that happy with that I had set, that was part of his original set of lyrics.’

The use of an outside producer on the album was a stipulation of the Grateful Dead’s contract with Arista, and although the band had chosen Olsen, it soon became apparent that they had differing visions for the album’s production.

Olsen favoured a heavy production sound, which was popular at the time, but out-of-step with the usually unadorned Grateful Dead GARCIA style. The band even took issue with his recording methods, with Kreutzmann stating, ‘He’d have us play the same thing over and over again, and we’re not really the type of band that can put up with that.

Our very identity is based on the opposite principle.’

For his part Olsen asserted that some of the issues in the studio lay with the band, and lamented their laissez-faire attitude toward recording: ‘During the cutting of the basic tracks it was pretty hard to get every member of the band in the studio at the same time… so [Steve] Parish went out to the hardware store and got these giant nails and a great big hammer and as soon as everybody was in, he hammered the door shut from the inside… we didn’t have drifters from the other studios coming in to listen. We didn’t have people leaving to go screw around elsewhere. We started getting work done.’

‘When we get onstage, what we really want to happen is, we want to be transformed from ordinary players into extraordinary ones, like forces of a larger consciousness. And the audience wants to be transformed from whatever ordinary reality they may be in to something a little wider, something that enlarges them.’

12

Olsen’s addition of strings to the final mix was a particular point of contention with the Grateful Dead, as Phil Lesh put it, ‘The orchestral and choral sweeteners added to the title sequence by Olsen and Buckmaster were a classic example of gilding the lily.’

Upon Terrapin Station’s release, most critics and fans sided with the Dead on the matter, and although it did not become the monster hit that Arista hoped, the album performed respectably.

Still, there were two bonuses, the first of which is the album cover. This featured two dancing terrapins which were drawn by Kelley and Mouse, and based on a drawing by Heinrich Kley. These happy critters have endured to become one of the Grateful Dead’s most recognisable logos – one that still adorns a wide variety of merchandise to this day.

The second, is that the intensity of the Terrapin Station rehearsals whipped the Grateful Dead into incredible form. They were tighter and more cohesive than ever, which became evident during the band’s supporting spring shows. The tapes of these shows are like gold dust amongst fans, in particular those from the last date in Englishtown, New Jersey during which the band performed to an incredible 300,000 fans.

As 1978 dawned, the Grateful Dead now found themselves surrounded by punk rock’s California-centric second wave. The music scene was being reborn around them, and like many bands the Grateful Dead were swept up in this mood of change and the influx of new styles it brought. Though their ethos remained the same, the Dead began to explore new genres, showing an interest in disco, reggae and ballads. As the old rock gods began to be seen as out-oftouch dinosaurs, they scrambled to embrace the zeitgeist and retain their popularity. The Grateful Dead were no different, and their sudden departure from the band’s classic sound lead to accusations of selling out, something Mickey Hart has not denied: ‘We were trying to sell out – “Oh, let’s make a single and get on the radio”. Sure. We failed miserably once again. I mean, we could never sell out even if we tried, and we tried.’

Although to say that it ‘failed miserably’ may be unnecessarily harsh, the album that emerged from this period, Shakedown Street, is certainly not a fan favourite. In fact Kreutzmann even noted, ‘Deadheads refer to this album, and even this era, as “Disco Dead”. I can see why. Given the material and the producer, Shakedown Street just wasn’t as good as it should have been.’

Still, the Grateful Dead ploughed on, with the band’s crucial live performances continuing on their own organic trajectory as the new songs entered set list rotation.

Sadly, Shakedown Street was the last album for Keith and Donna Jean Godchaux, who left the band a few months after its release. This was a blow to their fellow members, as they had become well-loved

friends and contributed sterling work, but the pair felt they needed to pursue their own projects.

The vacant spot was filled by Brent Mydland, a young musician that had recently departed the band Silver. He brought a joie de vivre to his keyboard playing and vocals that galvanised the Grateful Dead.

This boost in energy ensured he soon became a permanent member, and the band now had their longest-running line-up.

The Eighties The Grateful Dead were now focusing their energy predominantly on touring. By 1980 Deadhead mania was reaching its peak, and the Dead’s performances were stronger than ever. Fans gathered in their greatest numbers yet, and the parking lots of Grateful Dead shows became important hubs for counter-cultural networks.

Nonetheless, the Grateful Dead were contractually obliged to create a new studio album, and thus, Go to Heaven, was released in April 1980. The Grateful Dead were still bound to their contract that stipulated the use of an outside producer. Despite the fact that this hadn’t exactly paid off on the previous two albums, Arista sent in British producer Gary Lyons. Gary had previously found success producing Foreigner’s debut album, and he managed to avoid some of the pitfalls of previous producers by not dissecting the Grateful Dead’s sequences unnecessarily.

Still, the album appeared to miss its mark, as work often does when it is borne of out obligation. Fans flocked to buy the album, but it was widely panned by critics. This was perhaps harsh as Go to Heaven, whilst not their finest work, is an enjoyable romp through familiar territory. It was certainly not ground-breaking, but there was a good core of songs, and the musicianship had a vibrancy and joy to it.

Bassist Phil Lesh recalled the backlash against the album in his autobiography remembering, ‘The cover, featuring us in Saturday Night Fever disco suits against a white background, reinforced the impression that we were “going commercial”. Regardless of the reaction from hardcore Deadheads, Go to Heaven sold fairly well after its release in April 1980, making No. 23 on the charts and recouping its studio costs. The critics ravaged it, however; the least offensive description I saw was “cotton candy”. Personally, I thought that the music was a lot better than the album cover – the Garcia-Hunter and Weir-Barlow songs were major additions to our repertoire, and Brent’s two songs, in spite of having been written before joining the band, gave notice that a new voice had arrived.

‘It was our last studio album for seven years, as our disenchantment with studios, producers, and record company 13

executives was complete; and besides, we had fulfilled the current Arista contract requirements with three studio albums in three years.’

The Grateful Dead stayed true to their word, and didn’t re-enter the studio for seven years. During this period they released two live albums, the acoustic Reckoning and the electric album Dead Set, both in 1981.

Although they were attempting to take a break from the pressures of their career, there remained a financial obligation on the Grateful Dead to continue with live shows. As Garcia put it, ‘If our records were successful, we could subsidise our playing. Which is the way most people do it – they make money on the records, and take their losses on the tours… With us it’s been just the other way around… it’s been more fun, but we’re definitely mortal. What would really be helpful would be for there to be half a dozen other Grateful Deads playing.’

Although these shows continued throughout the early 1980s, cracks were beginning to appear in the Grateful Dead’s usually flawless live appearances. Jerry Garcia was struggling with opiate addiction, and this became visible onstage as both his performance and health suffered. Although he began on the road to recovery in 1985, Garcia slipped into a diabetic coma lasting several days in July 1986.

Despite being a terrifying experience, the coma marked a turning point in Garcia’s battle with addiction and his unexpectedly swift recovery threw the Grateful Dead back into the media spotlight.

Jerry’s illness undeniably left him a changed man, both mentally and physically, but he channelled his strength and poured it into his work: ‘Ever since the hospital, I don’t have quite the facility with language that I used to. I used to be much quicker. And now I find myself hunting for words, and things that I know that I know, but I don’t – they’re not readily available… so I have to poke around a little more.

And I feel I’m not quite as quick as I once was…

‘Playing music is what I do. And my playing is fine. So I’m not worried about whether I’m communicating accurately. As long as I can play, I’m okay. Talk has always been cheap… When you’re with musicians or friends or stuff and you’re just playing with language.

And there’s no point, it’s not going anywhere. It’s not a conversation.’

The Grateful Dead got back into the studio and finally completed their twelfth studio album, In the Dark, in 1987. The fans’ long wait was well worth it, as the Grateful Dead rose like a phoenix; they stormed into the charts and scored the only Top 10 hit of their career.

The coverage from the media and MTV boosted the Grateful Dead’s star higher than ever before, and they were now selling out the biggest stadiums across America and the world. In 1987, the Grateful Dead even paired up with the iconic Bob Dylan for Dylan 14

& the Dead, an enormous stadium tour, which also produced a live album.

Although the tour was a success financially, it came at a time when Bob Dylan’s star was one the wane and his output not at its best. Many considered that the shows failed to showcase either Dylan or the Dead’s talent’s to their full potential. Garcia for his part felt that the all-important connection between band and audience was lost in such cavernous spaces and in 1987 he stated: ‘This last year has been pretty good for pace, not really too bad – apart from the Dylan shows, those were work… Also, [shows] that large start to get meaningless. So we are pretty convinced we don’t want to play huge stadiums unless we can play them well. We don’t want to play them often, certainly. So that restricts us to the Oakland Coliseum kind of places, which are still large rooms.

Addressing concerns over the quality of the performances seen on the Dylan & the Dead tour Garcia assured Deadheads that the Grateful Dead were ‘figuring out ways to solve these problems. We want fans to be conscious that we’re working on them, and that things don’t always go in our favour, since now we’re in a world that we don’t control. The world of the big stadiums and that stuff – we don’t control them anymore.’

The tour may not have been the grand spectacle the Grateful Dead envisaged, but Jerry Garcia was still feeling reinvigorated following his 1986 brush with death. He approached life with a new-found passion, exploring new creative avenues and renewing old partnerships. The strongest of these partnerships was, of course, with Robert Hunter. Ever prolific, Hunter had built up an enormous body of lyrics during the 1980s, and Garcia’s first problem was deciding which songs to tackle first. Considering their collaborative writing process, Jerry Garcia mused at length: ‘I take his stuff, he’ll give me maybe ten songs at a time. I’ll take them and read through them, and look at them and look at them and look at them, and sometimes I’ll sit down at the piano and fool around a little. And one of ‘em will start talking back to me, or maybe two of them, or three, sometimes.

All of a sudden a line or two will start resonating, you know? And I’ll start – I’ll have it going around like doggerel, like skip-rope stuff (singsong “yadda-da-dum, da-dum”), and pretty soon I’ll start to hear something that fits it, that works with it in some way.

‘Hunter and I – our best collaborations are when we work together. That is to say, when I feed him a melody, and I say, “Okay Hunter, I’ve got this melody, and these changes that go like this.”

Because he has a tendency to write in very dense rhythmic and metrical stuff that’s hard to break out of the meter. And so they lend themselves to a sort of folk song structure.

‘When I work with him, I make him do things that are more irregular, and I give him phrases that he wouldn’t normally come up

A Grateful Dead publicity photo taken in the autumn of 1976.

Left to right: Mickey Hart, Phil Lesh, Donna Godchaux, Keith Godchaux (seated), Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann.

15

with. We both agree that that’s our best way to work, but I’m such a lazy sucker that I rarely get around to it.

‘So as far as his songs, the ones he gives me and that I eventually turn into music, they find me, and it really has to do with an emotional quality, which I can’t describe. It’s not mechanistic, you know what I mean? It’s an emotional quality of the words, or something about the way a word sounds, or something about the meter, or something about something in it. Sometimes I don’t even know what it is. Sometimes the sense of the words doesn’t occur to me until years later. There’s just something about them that I feel, “Yeah, this song speaks to me.”

‘I don’t know why, it’s the same reason why you like some music and you don’t like others. There’s something about it that you like.

Ultimately I don’t find it’s in my best interests to try and analyse it, since it’s fundamentally emotional. You know what I mean? So as far as which ones find their way – the ones that speak to me on some emotional level that I don’t know what – it’s a non-verbal level. That’s it usually. It’s rarely the sense of it. Sometimes it’s the sound of the words. ‘…we’ve found the difficulty you have when you write a song and you don’t consider what’s open and what’s closed. I mean, you can’t hold a consonant when you’re singing. So closures, and using vowels, and what kind of vowels you want them to be, and stuff like that… it’s the craft of songwriting.

‘That’s one of those things that we needed at least an album to learn that stuff. And now we’ve got it down to “Okay, you need to breathe sometimes.” “You can hold vowels better than you can consonants,” that’s another one. Percussive sounds are better if they’re consonant sounds, and so forth. All that stuff you start to experience, shows you that.’

The Nineties As the eighties moved into the nineties, the Grateful Dead used improvements in technology to outfit their instruments with MIDI, allowing them access to an infinite variety of colours and tones. It is a testament to the band’s steadfast integrity that they were still producing wildly experimental music over two decades after their formation. The Grateful Dead’s last studio album, the ironically titled Built to Last, was an excellent example of this, although it could be said that not all the experiments were successful.

One of the ideas attempted was recording the band as if they were performing live, but without the presence of an audience. Jerry Garcia lamented using the technique whilst in conversation with Relix magazine: ‘It really didn’t work at all. We tried it again – we 16

tried at the Marin County Civic Center, and then we did the stretch up at Skywalker Ranch and what we started to discover was that our material was saying something else about itself and that approach was not going to work on this record, and that we’re really looking for something else entirely different.’

Brent Mydland made a more significant contribution to the album than he had previously, which reflected his increasing vocal presence. Since joining with the Grateful Dead nearly a decade before, Brent had become a key member and earned four song credits on the album (in collaboration with John Perry Barlow).

One of the problems faced whilst recording of Built to Last was that the Grateful Dead still did not work best within the confines of the studio, particularly not when under pressure from greedy record companies. As Phil Lesh told The Grateful Dead Reader: ‘I really believe if we hadn’t had a deadline imposed on us by the record company on Built to Last, we probably would’ve gone back and done the whole thing over again more in line with how we did In the Dark.’

In some cases however a deadline was certainly necessary, as the Grateful Dead’s laid-back attitude to recording could sometimes create a slightly chaotic atmosphere in the studio. In the 2014 documentary The Other One: The Long, Strange Trip of Bob Weir, Bob recalled the often frantic push to meet release schedules: ‘When the real world’s-gonna-end deadline comes, we keep ignoring it until panic sufficiently motivates us to get to work. Then we make most of our records in about a month and a half. The last two weeks are particularly hellish.’

Built to Last was released on 31 October 1989, the critical reception was disappointing, but unsurprising given that the Grateful Dead themselves were not overly enthusiastic about the piece. The heart of the Dead lay onstage and on the road; they had never been infatuated with the singles and hit albums that record companies demanded of them. In that way the album is perhaps a fitting coda to the studio catalogue of a band that never really cared about studio catalogues.

Tragically, less than a year after the album’s release Brent Mydland died of an overdose during the summer of 1990. He was only thirtyseven at the time, and this loss is thought to be a key reason the Grateful Dead never reformed in the studio.

They did continue touring however, with Vince Welnick and Bruce Hornsby joining the line-up, both performing keyboard and vocals.

Welnick remained a member of the Grateful Dead until the end, but Hornsby appeared mostly over a two year span starting in 1990.

Sadly, it had not only been Myland struggling with addiction issues, and Jerry Garcia’s substance abuse was once again reaching a critical point. Despite his ailing health, Garcia continued to tour, and the Grateful Dead consistently appeared live throughout the early 1990s. This could not continue indefinitely; the atmosphere onstage

and also in the crowd was suffering. These issues culminated in the Dead’s troubled 1995 tour of America.

In late May to early June 1995 the Grateful Dead performed eleven shows along the West Coast. The band then flew to the East Coast and began the second leg of the tour in Highgate, Vermont.

The Grateful Dead had previously played a successful show in the town, and felt that its remote position on the American/Canadian border would dissuade unruly concert crashers from attending.

Gatecrashing had become a serious problem for the Grateful Dead. They had always maintained a close and very positive relationship with their fanbase, but the circus that surrounded their live performances was attracting a new sort of fan. These were drawn to the event itself, and the festival atmosphere within the camp-sites that sometimes stretched for miles around the venue.

Whilst the Grateful Dead pleaded with the council not to allow these campsites, they were refused and local farmers capitalised on the opportunity with gusto. A veritable makeshift town sprang up, populated by a party crowd that was fuelled by nitrous, alcohol and whatever else they could get their hands on. The result was that by the time the show opened there were an astonishing 20,000 partygoers in Highgate that didn’t even have tickets. When at least 10,000 of these attempted to enter the concert venue (by any means necessary) the Grateful Dead were JERRY forced to open the gates in order to prevent a riot.

The chaos continued throughout the tour, Garcia’s health was visibly failing and the fans were out of control. In June, the concertgoers at RFK Stadium in Washington were even hit by lightning in a freak accident, leading the band and crew to speculate that the tour was ‘doomed’. The Grateful Dead’s press assistant Jan Simmons even went so far as to call it ‘the tour from hell’.

The poor relations between the Grateful Dead and the unruly crowds reached breaking point at shows in Noblesville, Indiana in early July. The band were scheduled to play two nights, but were forced to cancel after the first evening when mobs of attendees without tickets stormed the venue. The Grateful Dead’s manager Cameron Sears relayed the events of that evening to Blair Jackson and David Gans in the 2015 history of the Grateful Dead This Is All a Dream We Dreamed. ‘Once the fences started coming down, I had to

go out and see what was happening. Deer Creek had a big hill you had to climb and a big fence all the way around it, and once they started rushing the fence, security said, “You know what, we’re out!” What could they do?

‘The most troubling aspect of it was the people inside cheering them on. It was a very twisted sense of entitlement. These were kids that really just didn’t give a shit what anybody said to them. You could say, “I work with Jerry, and no, Jerry doesn’t want you to tear down the fence,” and they’d say, “Fuck you!” They were anarchists, in a sense, and once people are in that place, there’s no reasoning with them. You don’t have a whole lot of alternatives in terms of how do you corral this. It’s crazy. It’s like an altered state. Some of them were these young skate punk hippie kids. A lot of them were Phish kids, too. They would go back and forth. Phish was having all the same problems as we were.’

In the wake of this disastrous night, the Grateful Dead issued a sombre ultimatum to fans reading: ‘Want to end the touring life of the Grateful Dead? Allow bottle-throwing gate crashers to keep on thinking they’re cool anarchists instead of the creeps they are.

Want to continue it? Listen to the rules, and pressure others to do so. A few more scenes like Sunday night, and we’ll quite simply be unable to play. The spirit of the Grateful Dead is at GARCIA stake, and we’ll do what we have to do to protect it. And when you hear somebody say “Fuck you, we’ll do what we want,” remember something.

That applies to us, too.’

The Grateful Dead continued performing, but the tour’s closing night at Soldier Field in Chicago on 9 July 1995 proved to be their last concert together.

Although the Grateful Dead had introduced nearly an album’s worth of new material into their live repertoire during their final tours the tracks were never laid down in the studio.

In August 1995 Jerry Garcia lost his battle with addiction, and passed away at the age of fifty-three in a Marin Country rehab clinic.

The many years of hard living had taken their toll and Garcia died of heart complications. Thankfully, Mickey Hart told Rolling Stone that Jerry was stoic till the end, and ‘died with a smile on his face.’

‘If our records were successful, we could subsidise our playing. Which is the way most people do it – they make money on the records, and take their losses on the tours…

With us it’s been just the other way around… it’s been more fun, but we’re definitely mortal.’

17

An Arista publicity photo taken by Ed Eguedelo in 1979. Left to right: Mickey Hart, Phil Lesh, Jerry Garcia, Brent Mydland, Bill Kreutzmann and Bob Weir.

18

The remaining Grateful Dead members felt that the group’s journey had reached a natural conclusion and chose not to muddle through without Garcia, leaving the Grateful Dead’s legacy intact.

Although the Grateful Dead officially dissolved four months later, material has continued to be released, and the band have appeared in various guises (primarily The Dead) throughout the years.

The gang reformed in 2015 for the incredible Fare Thee Well concerts, which celebrated the Grateful Dead’s fiftieth anniversary.

The string of performances broke records across the US and demonstrated an insatiable demand for tickets from fans.

When three Chicago shows were announced in January 2015, fans requested a staggering 360,000 tickets. Then, when tickets were made available online the next month, half a million people logged on to Ticketmaster, breaking all their previous records. To accommodate the demand two more shows were added in Santa Clara, California, these saw the band playing to enormous crowds of their hometown fans, and resulted in some truly tear-jerking performances.

What made this tour so special was the response from the public. That the Grateful Dead were able to illicit such a reaction after fifty years is a testament to their legacy and longevity. When they performed at Soldier Field in Chicago on 3 July, they broke attendance records there with a crowd of nearly 71,000 fans. In fact demand was so great that promoters even began selling tickets for seats behind the stage. Considering that some tickets were being sold online for $2,000 it is staggering that they were filled, given that they had no visibility of the stage whatsoever.

The viewers at home were equally ready to pay to see the performance and smashed the previous pay-per-view record of 160,000 with a staggering 400,000 viewers.

The raw emotion of these events was visible throughout so many of the performances on the tour. The ‘core four’ were determined to bookend the legacy of the Grateful Dead in spectacular style and they certainly succeeded. Enormous fireworks, stunning visual displays and rousing sing-a-longs proved that the band could put on as great a show as ever.

Looking back over the shows now, you can see legions of fans weep as The Dead performed Brokedown Palace in Santa Clara, and the force of their admiration for the band as they continued to chant ‘You know our love will not fade away’ after they had left the stage following a rendition of Not Fade Away in Chicago.

In all, The Dead performed ninety-four different numbers over the five days, only repeating two songs. This was an extraordinary showcase of their incredible back catalogue. It is so rare that fans get to say a farewell to such a treasured act, and the opportunity to do this, as well as to thank the members for the joy their music brought was a moving farewell to an incredible band.

19

20

IN THE DARK

The Creation of a Classic Album In the Dark is undoubtedly one of the Grateful Dead’s most important albums – one which represented the dawn of a new era in their career. 1986 found the band in uncharted territory, as they had now fulfilled the last of their contractual obligations to Arista with the release of their previous album Go to Heaven. By this point it had been an astonishing six years since the Dead had released a studio album.

The Grateful Dead had been struggling onstage, with Garcia’s opiate use and declining health starting to affect performances.

Garcia and the band seemed to be in a sort of wilderness, and when the guitarist slipped into a diabetic coma in the summer of 1986 many considered that the Grateful Dead would not recover.

Fortunately Garcia unexpectedly emerged from his coma five days later. His illness had been widely covered by the international media, and his seemingly miraculous recovery created a frenzy of publicity.

The Grateful Dead had previously enjoyed huge success, but as a cult band; they now found themselves under the attention of mainstream listeners.

Despite suffering some permanent memory loss (it is said that Garcia had to re-learn many of his established guitar techniques) Jerry was galvanised by his recovery and brought a new vigour to his work with the Grateful Dead. As Bob Weir told Guitar World ‘He bounced off his little brush with death, and the momentum that he picked up carried through to the recording.’

It was not just the recording of In the Dark that benefited from Garcia’s renewed energy. Diving into writing, Garcia reestablished his long-standing creative partnership with the Grateful Dead’s songwriter Robert Hunter. This had always been a fruitful relationship, and the period between the release of Go to Heaven and In the Dark spawned a wealth of new material. Hunter’s lyrics were truly a guiding force for the music of the Grateful Dead, as Garcia told Mary Eisenhart in 1987: ‘When Hunter and I first started, neither of us had written anything but a couple of little ditties. Hunter was a writer, legitimately, but I was certainly no composer. We’ve lucked out and gotten some really nice songs. I mean, I have the experience of singing those songs over the years, so I know how really nice they are.

It’s hard to sing a song that doesn’t mean something to you, and it’s

hard to have a song keep meaning something to you when you repeat it a lot of times. It’s a testament to the power of a lot of those songs that I can still sing them and they still mean something to me.

‘Hunter writes me really well. When he does something that’s my point of view autobiographically…

‘It’s like it scratches that itch – any desire I have to write a song from my own point of view, Hunter does it as well as I could do it. So I go with his version. It’s a lucky combination that works very well.’

The tracks that sprang from this period were partially so successful due to the fact that most of the songs that featured on the album had frequently been played live during the previous five years of touring. The songs had therefore been thoroughly road tested and perfected long before the album sessions. After the dismal Go to Heaven, which was built around songs that were mostly under a year old, the long gestation period of In the Dark helped the Grateful Dead to craft a truly classic album. Honing tracks on the road allowed the band to get a real feel for audience reactions to each song, and unusually, allowed them to take a more commercial route with the album. Safe in the knowledge that the numbers would be well received, the Grateful Dead were able to produce some undeniably catchy songs that had a far broader appeal than before.

The album was the perfect counterpoint to the band’s sudden popularity in the mainstream, and new fans lapped it up. Although the tracks now had hooks and even music videos, In the Dark was undeniably the Grateful Dead in full swing.

With sales from legions of fresh fans and the die-hard Deadhead fanbase, Go to Heaven shot to No. 6 on the Billboard 200 chart, becoming the Grateful Dead’s only Top 10 album. The album gained double platinum status and also produced the Grateful Dead’s only Top 40 single in Touch of Grey.

21

The success of Touch of Grey was bolstered greatly by the popularity of its music video, and the large amount of support this gained from MTV. MTV was really the kingmaker of popular music in 1987, and also blessed the videos for Hell in a Bucket and Throwing Stones with considerable airplay.

When asked to explain the Grateful Dead’s sudden mainstream success after twenty-two years in the business Garcia laughed and replied, ‘I don’t know. I thought it was going to happen on the first record.

‘It’s just one of those things. I hadn’t been thinking about it really.

I guess if you wait around long enough eventually that stuff either comes to you or something. Or else maybe just the slow-rising amount of Deadheads over the years has finally turned into a substantial enough figure now to make it look like we’re successful.’

When In the Dark was released, the Grateful Dead studio line-up consisted of Jerry Garcia (lead vocals, guitars), Bob Weir (guitars, vocals), Bill Kreutzmann (drums), Mickey Hart (drums), Phil Lesh (bass) and lastly, Brent Mydland (keyboards, vocals).

Mydland’s contribution to the album was particularly important, his virtuosity on the keyboard and piano paired seamlessly with his unique vocal skills, and gave a very distinctive edge to the Grateful Dead’s sound. This added nuance really sets the recordings from this period apart from the Dead’s main back catalogue.

Keen to capitalise on this, the band decided to go back to what they did best for the recording of In the Dark. Choosing to use a fusion of live and studio methods, the Grateful Dead attempted to capture the ambience of the live arenas in which the tracks were developed.

Unlike most of their studio albums, this time round the Dead played together as a unit onstage in an empty California theatre – the Marin Veterans Memorial Auditorium in San Rafael. There, the band put down the basic tracks during January 1987, using their classic tour lighting to recreate the live atmosphere. Jerry Garcia told Guitar World, ‘Going in Marin Vets without an audience and playing just to 22

ourselves was in the nature of an experiment. That’s how the energy got into it – it’s a nice little theatre and it has great sound. We rented it, moved our stuff in and set it up just as though we were playing live.

We didn’t have an audience, but it was that same mood. We did the tracks as though we were performing full out, so on some of those tunes I didn’t replace any solos.

‘Marin Vets turns out to be an incredibly nice room to record in.

There’s something about the formal atmosphere in there that makes us work. When we set up at Front Street [the Dead’s customary studio space], a lot of times we just sort of dissolve into hanging out.’

Drummer Bill Kreutzmann also credited the venue with inspiring creative discipline, ‘We ran all the electric instruments through amplifiers in the basement, in isolation rooms, and kept the drums bright and loud onstage.

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.’

This camaraderie was evident in the onstage hijinks of drummer Mickey Hart, which actually inspired the name for the album.

In a radio interview Hart told Ultimate Classic Rock Nights, ‘We set up like we would onstage, but it was a serious recording. We actually were looking at each other, but there was no audience. I came up with the idea to turn the lights off.

‘What I did was, I told my equipment guy, “On my signal, turn the lights off.” I didn’t tell anybody, I said, “Just turn everything off!”

‘They couldn’t see their fretboards and we couldn’t see our cymbals and our drums, and it was chaos! Obviously we were playing a song, and it just turned into some maniac band. Then, of course, it was getting dangerous; we didn’t know what we were doing, everyone was laughing too hard. So I signalled ‘em to turn the electricity back

on, and we just stopped and we looked at each other and we laughed our brains out. I said, “Yeah, it’s great to be playing music in the dark.”’

The album’s cover art also continued the joke. Designed by Randy Tuten, the band’s name and album title form the shape of an eye, with each band member peeping out from the darkness. With just their eyes showing against a black background the group are once again ‘in the dark’. There is one extra eye featured on the right that the Grateful Dead joked belonged to the Ayatollah Khomeini, although it was actually that of their long-time promoter, Bill Graham.

Garcia co-produced In the Dark with soundman John Cutler, and the pair spent February and March 1987 polishing the tracks in the studio. The recordings were, if necessary, ‘cleaned’, overdubbing them and redoing a guitar, vocal, keyboard or drum track in the studio using the same riffs from the stage recording.

Garcia and Cutler chose a light approach to producing, conscious that the heavy production sound of previous studio albums such as Terrapin Station had masked the band’s signature groove. Therefore only a small amount of overdubs were added, and the material on In the Dark was allowed to breathe, with the Grateful Dead’s unique sound in the forefront. Mickey Hart even told Guitar World that he felt the album was the band’s only truly representative recording: ‘I’m really impressed with it. I can listen to it, and normally I can’t listen to Grateful Dead records. We were able to capture the spirit of the band for the first time.’

The public agreed, and following the critical savaging of Go to Heaven in 1980, the Grateful Dead were relieved to see In the Dark lauded by critics upon its release on 6 July. The uncharacteristically warm response from the press proved that the Grateful Dead were back on top form and the crowds joined in with the positive spirit.

Veteran rock journalist Robert Christgau enthused ‘this is definitely the Dead, not Journey or Starship… When Push Comes to Shove, a ruminative catalogue of paranoid images that add up to one middle-aged man’s fear of love, shows up the young ignorami and old fools who’ve lambasted them as symbols of hippie complacency since the 1960s were over.’

Contemporary reviews remain favourable over thirty years since the album’s release, and Dave Connolly of Allmusic wrote that ‘Fans had long mused that the Dead’s studio albums lacked the easygoing energy and natural flow of their live performances, and In the Dark captures that lightning in a bottle. Jerry Garcia, who apparently had to relearn the guitar after a near-fatal illness, approaches his instrument recharged, while his voice shows some of its original smoothness. Of his four songwriting collaborations with longstanding lyricist Robert Hunter, Touch of Grey is far and away the best…

‘What pushes In the Dark past the band’s also-rans are two terrific songs from Bob Weir and John Barlow, the cheerfully cranky Hell in a Bucket and the cautionary tale Throwing Stones. Rarely have Weir’s songs sounded so effortless; punctuated by Garcia’s guitar, they have more in common with the upbeat, flavourful sound of past Garcia/ Hunter compositions than the pair’s own work this time out (a rare case of role reversal)… Although the album is unmistakable as the work of the Dead, much of it recalls the punchy, pungent production of Dire Straits’ recent work. It’s not the second coming of the Dead, but a more entertaining epilogue you couldn’t ask for.’

Interestingly, Garcia anticipated the longevity of In the Dark’s popularity in 1987 when he discussed the album with Mary Eisenhart: ‘I think if you take In the Dark and put it in some other decade, it speaks to that decade just as clearly. And it’s equally non-specific. I mean, if you really listen to it carefully it doesn’t say anything that pins it to the 1980s.

‘It’s stuff that pins it to this world, though. That may be the difference – we’re finding that living this long of a time in this world and surviving it, there’s some things that you start to be prepared to talk about.’

Fans were certainly prepared to talk about In the Dark, and the waves of goodwill that met the Grateful Dead live at this exciting point in their career spawned some superb concert performances. ·

A track-by-track review of

IN THE DARK Released 6 July 1987

Touch of Grey Lyrics: Robert Hunter Music: Jerry Garcia

Touch of Grey was the stand-out single from In the Dark – it became Grateful Dead’s only ever Top 10 hit, and even reached No. 1 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart. The track was released as a single with My Brother Esau and has appeared on a number of albums and collections.

Touch of Grey fused upbeat pop instrumentation with dark lyrics; this unusual combination became an instant hit with the buying public and has remained a popular, if divisive, track ever since.

The lyrics for Touch of Grey were written by Rob Hunter, whilst the music was composed by Jerry Garcia. When Rolling Stone asked 23

Hunter about his inspiration for the track in 2015, he answered candidly: ‘You know, I’ll give you the blistering truth about it. A friend brought over a hunk of very good cocaine. I stayed up all night, and at dawn I wrote that song. That was the last time I ever used cocaine. Nor had I used it for many years before that. Now I listen to it and it’s that attitude you get when you’ve been up all night speeding and you’re absolutely the dregs. I think I got it down in that song.

‘Touch of Grey was not your everyday song – still is startling to hear it in the supermarket. A lot of people put it down, as if it’s not right for us to be popular and all that! I was living with [my wife] Maureen in a Fifteenth Century house on the west coast of England, and one morning I wrote that thing. Jerry and [bassist and Garcia Band member] John Kahn and I were making an album of mine that never got finished, and Jerry said, “Would you mind if I reset the music to Touch of Grey and use it for the band?” And I said, “No, go ahead.” The line “light a candle, curse the glare” is Jerry’s addition to it. My version wasn’t that bad, but [the Dead’s version] has that rhythm and rather excellent chord changes, moving from E to C sharp minor and interesting things.’

The original version to which Hunter referred, was actually very different to the track that featured on In the Dark. As always, tracks by the Grateful Dead were collaborative efforts, and Garcia’s input on the number had a huge impact on the final product, as he explained to Mary Eisenhart: ‘That shows you the difference between Hunter and I as composers. Hunter can write a melody and stuff like that, but his forte is lyrics. He can write a serviceable melody to hang his lyrics on, and sometimes he comes up with something really nice. Like Must Have Been the Roses is largely his melody, and I thought it was really lovely the way it worked. And so I used it pretty much the way it is, with only a few little changes.

‘But other things I changed so they have absolutely no relationship to his original – Touch of Grey is a good example. Luckily we have enough respect for each other so that – I rarely change his lyrics without consulting him, although I’ve gotten more comfortable with changing a word or a phrase here and there than I used to be – I would never touch anything. And any changes that I wanted I would work with him, and we would make the changes.

‘Some things we worked on for years, before they ever came out to be performable songs. One of the ones that I thought really ended up working well on that level was Ruben and Cherise, which is one of my favourite of our songs together. That’s a song that was not a matter of inspiration. That’s one of those songs where we worked on it year after year. We’d bring it out – “Let’s try this again – no, it still doesn’t – ah, forget it.” ‘…Hunter, a lot of times, after the song is done, he rewrites it, and says, “Okay, that’s your version, now here’s my version.” And he 24

‘We spent a lot of time just turning each other on to music. If somebody was listening to something that really caught their ear, they’d make sure that everybody else in the band heard it, and that came home for us in innumerable ways.’

BOB WEIR

25

chooses to take the opposite tack. Sometimes he rethinks what he’s done and decides, “Well, this would’ve been a better ending.” But usually he doesn’t insist that I use it. Like he’s got a verse that he’s been wanting to do for Friend of the Devil for a million years. I refuse to do it… Not for any reason. Just to be an asshole. Not for any good reason. It’s gotten to be that kind of thing. But maybe I’ll blow his mind someday and do it.

‘Hunter has the right to be able to make those decisions downstream. And change them. Like he’s got his version of Lady with a Fan and Terrapin and all that. He’s got one version – he’s got several versions of it, but one version at least has a beautiful conclusion, where everything comes together finally in the end. I prefer the open – you don’t know what happened…

‘It’s like the storyteller makes no choice – and neither do we. And neither do you, and neither does anybody else. I prefer that. I prefer to be hanging. ‘…The mystery, still, in the music world, is how do you – nobody can predict a hit. That’s still fundamentally mysterious. I wouldn’t have expected Touch of Grey to be a hit.’

The Grateful Dead had actually first performed Touch of Grey many years before In the Dark, during an encore on 15 September 1982 at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland.

The track was played sporadically over the following years and JERRY became a much sought after live favourite for Deadheads. When In the Dark was released the track’s undeniable commercial appeal brought in a fresh new wave of fans, much to the chagrin of die-hard supporters. The animosity was such that fans of the song and album began to be referred to as ‘Touchheads’ as opposed to Deadheads, insinuating they were simply there for the mainstream material and couldn’t be considered true fans.

Whilst the song undeniably changed the dynamic of Dead discovery. The catchy and moving hooks made for some truly emotional performances for all fans. Mickey Hart remembered that ‘When [Hunter] wrote Touch of Grey, we were struggling, but it became an anthem to us. It perked us up.’

In particular the lyric ‘I will get by, I will survive,’ became a mantra of resilience, and when Garcia returned to the stage following his coma in December 1986 it was the first song he performed.

Interestingly, not all the lyrics carried the same spirit; in Hunter’s original version the phrase ‘Say your piece and get out’ was actually ‘Say your piece and piss off’. The line was changed as the band were concerned it could affect airplay of the track, but Garcia was known to occasionally perform the old lyric onstage.

The Dead have continued performing the track since Garcia’s death, and it was even featured in the set-list for the final night of their Fare Thee Well tour.

One of the key elements of Touch of Grey’s success as a single was the accompanying music video. This was the first time the Grateful Dead had made a video for MTV and the channel backed them with major airplay.

This proved to be an issue for some die-hard Deadheads, who accused the Grateful Dead of selling out in an attempt to secure a Top 40 single. However Jerry Garcia refuted this claim in 1990 during an interview with the LA Times: ‘We certainly aren’t Top 40. That’s not what we do, it’s not who we are. Our relationship to Top 40 is pretty remote. It’s almost as remote as our relationship to classical music or mainstream jazz. We’re about ninety degrees off of just about everything.”

The video for Touch of Grey was directed by Gary Gutierrez, who had previously created the animation sequences for The Grateful Dead Movie. This proved GARCIA how dedicated to creating this video the Grateful Dead were, as the cost of Gutirrez’s sequences had nearly brought the band to bankruptcy ten years earlier.

In the case of Touch of Grey the gamble paid off, the video was filmed at Laguna Seca Raceway after one of the band’s concerts in May 1987, and proved to be an instant hit with viewers.

The video itself was a fairly normal creation by Grateful Dead standards. The band were featured as life-size marionettes, which performed the number as the Dead. They were then transformed into the band members themselves who played to the end of the track before being revealed as marionettes operated by the skeletons – a suitably cosmic twist.

To accompany the release of Touch of Grey, the Grateful Dead also produced Dead Ringers: The Making of Touch of Grey – a thirty minute documentary about the production of the video. At the helm

‘I think if you take In the Dark and put it in some other decade, it speaks to that decade just as clearly. And it’s equally non-specific.

I mean, if you really listen to it carefully it doesn’t say anything that pins it to the 1980s.’

26

was drummer Bill Kreutzmann’s son, director Justin Kreutzmann, who had spent long years in the orbit of the Dead. Jerry Garcia enthused ‘Justin’s a great kid. If Kreutzmann had half the equilibrium that Justin had, we’d be in great shape. [Laughs] But if he had half the equilibrium he wouldn’t be the crazed drummer… He wouldn’t be the crazed lovable fuck up that we know.’

The filming of Dead Ringers took place after a concert on 9 May 1987 at Laguna Seca Raceway in California. Following the end of the concert some of the audience was readmitted and made up the crowds in the video. As the band, and then their skeleton doppelgängers mimed along to the Touch of Grey single, the crowd were prompted to react appropriately by cue cards.

Interestingly Dead Ringers also shows the preparations for filming the video, and gives the viewer a closer look at the skeleton marionettes used. These were actually life-sized and had been personalised with neat little touches to ensure they were recognisable as the individual members. The puppeteers coordinating the marionettes are interviewed during the documentary, and interestingly one of these is Annabelle Garcia, daughter of Jerry Garcia and Carolyn ‘Mountain Girl’ Adams. With Justin Kreutzmann directing and Annabelle on puppets, the making of the video was very much a family affair, a nice touch that is classically Grateful Dead.

The documentary also features interviews with each band member, and finishes with the music video itself before When Push Comes to Shove closes out the film. All in all Dead Ringers makes for very enjoyable viewing and is a great snapshot of the Grateful Dead during 1987. Although the film was released on VHS at the time, it has never been made available on DVD and is not currently viewable online, which is a shame.

Hell in a Bucket Lyrics: John Barlow Music: Bob Weir & Brent Mydland

The album’s second track is Hell in a Bucket, an upbeat number cocredited to Bob Weir, John Barlow, and Brent Mydland. The track’s popularity was boosted by the success of the accompanying music video, as well as the song’s undeniable commercial appeal; this is about as close to hard rock as the Grateful Dead ever got.

The track itself appears to concern a spurned lover, who tries to set his ex up with a rough-edged biker (in an attempt to spite her).

Outlaw culture was something that cropped up with reasonable regularity in the Grateful Dead’s lyrics, but the songwriting here is far from by-the-numbers, with historical references to Catherine the Great and St. Stephen also thrown in for good measure.

As a collaborative effort, the writing of Hell in a Bucket produced a number of extra lyrics that ultimately didn’t make the cut, but have been uncovered since. This includes the rather cheeky verse by John Barlow: ‘And while you were saying your mantra I was humping your very best friend And comparing myself to Sinatra ‘Cause I did it my way in her end’ As well as the following verse, which appeared in 1983 rehearsal tapes but was dropped from the number over the years: ‘All those noises that come from the bedroom Are so hard to explain to the guests Whatever’s in there should be fed soon When they’re hungry, they’re unpleasant pests’ Super-fan and Grateful Dead producer David Gans claimed to have contributed to the lyrics for the song, stating: ‘I was hanging out at Weir’s a bit in those days, and there were some gnarly ideas batted around for that song. Gerrit Graham (who wrote Victim or the Crime with Bobby) was around for some of these sessions, too.

‘I was actually able to contribute a little to Hell in a Bucket: I suggested to Bob that he change “You imagine me kissing the toe of your boot” to “You imagine me sipping champagne from your boot.”

Barlow seemed slightly miffed about it, but I’m pretty sure he got over it.’

Hell in a Bucket had been a live favourite for Grateful Dead fans for some time when In the Dark was released. The track was first performed on 13 May 1983 at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, and became a regular choice of opening track for Grateful Dead shows. It remained a staple of the band’s set-list until their final Fare Thee Well concerts, where it was performed by the Dead for the last time on 30 June 1995. Since then, Bob Weir has been keeping the track alive, performing the number with his band Ratdog, although they have been on hiatus since 2014.

Like Touch of Grey, Hell in a Bucket’s popularity was fuelled by its music video, but unlike Touch of Grey, Hell in a Bucket’s video was completely bonkers.

Filmed at New George’s in San Rafael, the Hell in a Bucket video is a riotous romp unlike anything produced by the Grateful Dead before or since. Bob Weir makes a goofy yet loveable appearance as the video’s protagonist, resplendent in a purple suit that is pure 1980s Miami Vice. He first navigates his way through a brawl in a biker bar, where he appears to have been drinking with a duck in a slave collar (who may be the true star of the video). Bob then finds himself entangled with a dominatrix and driven to hell by Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, who are painted red and dressed in rather comic devil costumes. There is then an appearance by a variety of 27

farm animals (including the duck) and the next band cameo by Brent Mydland, who performs for Bob and the dominatrix as they enjoy champagne from a shoe… with a tiger.

Next Bob strolls through a crowd of dancing devils, which included Garcia’s daughter Trixie. We are then treated to some more shots of the duck, before an incredibly awkward cameo by bassist Phil Lesh, who is dressed as a circus master and clearly hating every minute of it. The video continues in this vain till the end, and is fiveand-a-half minutes of pure joyful chaos; it wasn’t typical Grateful Dead, but it sure was a good laugh.

Many fans have speculated that the appearance of the duck in the video could be a nod to Bob Weir’s favourite bad joke, one that he often tells live onstage: ‘So once upon a long time ago – this was back in the Middle Ages, fairytale time – a duck goes into a bar, and he hops across the foyer and hops up on the barstool. The bartender, he’s polishing glasses and stuff. The duck says, “Got any flies?”

The bartender says, “We don’t serve flies. We also don’t serve ducks, so you gotta leave.”

So, the duck leaves but comes back twenty minutes later or so and hops up on the barstool. The bartender turns around.

“Got any flies?”

The bartender says, “No! We don’t serve flies. We don’t serve ducks. Get out!”

The duck goes away, comes back, and hops up on the barstool.

The bartender turns around. “You again!”

“Got any flies?”

“No! You come back in here one more time, and I’m going to nail your fucking beak to the bar. You got that? Get out of here.”

The duck goes away, comes back twenty minutes later and hops back up on the barstool.

“You again!”

“Got any nails?”

“No!” “Got any flies?”’

Weir’s ‘dad jokes’ have become legendary over the years, and he has been known to perform an extended bit about an alligator that has been painted yellow (much to the chagrin of his fellow band members) and many short, yet equally terrible jokes. The following is another duck-based skit that Bob performed on Halloween 1979 at the Nassau Coliseum: ‘What’s the difference between a duck?

One leg’s both the same.

What’s the difference between a frog?

One leg’s both the same.

What’s the moral of the story?

It takes a heap o’ haulin’ to make the pigeon toed.’

28

‘It’s a testament to the power of a lot of those songs that I can still sing them and they still mean something to me.’

JERRY GARCIA

When Push Comes to Shove Lyrics: Robert Hunter Music: Jerry Garcia

When Push Comes to Shove is a groove-driven number, that utilises blues-based riffs to perfectly showcase Garcia’s vocal ability. His performance on this number is flawless, although the lyrics lack some of the spark found in other numbers from the album. Mydland’s piano playing is gloriously jazzy, and masterfully complements the rest of the band’s groove. An incredible Jerry Garcia guitar solo steals the show, and rounds off a number that is solid, but can tend to get lost amongst the more in-your-face tracks on the album.

In his book The American Book of the Dead Oliver Trager refers to When Push Comes to Shove as: ‘An eighties observation of alienation which recalls the spirit of the Dead’s earlier composition Ramble on Rose, When Push Comes to Shove is a wry but wary warning, a coaxing gestalt from one friend to another. The person to whom the song is addressed is not only afraid of love but inhabits a world where even roses in a garden pose an unreasonably paranoid threat. But the singer is a sensitive soul who gamely punctures the barricades of his acquaintances fears.’

The reappearance of roses in lyricist Hunter’s writing is certainly not a coincidence, as he once lamented: ‘I’ve got this one spirit that’s laying roses on me. Roses, roses, can’t get enough of those bloody roses. The rose is the most prominent image in the human brain, as to delicacy, beauty, short-livedness, thorniness. It’s a whole. There is no better allegory for, dare I say it, life, than roses.’

When Push Comes to Shove was remixed and released as the B side to the Throwing Stones single in November 1987, and also as a promo single. This shows that the Grateful Dead certainly had faith in the track, and between its first appearance at the Coliseum Arena in Oakland on 15 December 1986 and it’s final showing on 17 July 1989, the track was performed live no less than fifty-eight times.

Although When Push Comes to Shove never made much of an impact with fans, it was a favourite of veteran rock critic Robert Christgau, who mentioned it specifically in his favourable album review of In the Dark: ‘a ruminative catalogue of paranoid images that add up to one middle-aged man’s fear of love’.

The track was a staple in the sets for the 1987 Dylan & the Dead tour, but failed to make it onto the live album. Although, When Push Comes to Shove was actually chosen as show opener on three occasions, it was sadly dropped from rotation by the autumn of 1989 and hasn’t appeared since.

29

West LA Fadeaway Lyrics: Robert Hunter Music: Jerry Garcia

This track is a funky, mid-tempo number, that really gives Garcia the opportunity to showcase his groovy side. His guitar work certainly stands out here, with added fuzz on the solo, and fingerpicked rhythm sections. West LA Fadeaway provides an interesting change of pace on the album, with a slightly haunting tone, that is highlighted by some unusual vocal effects and excellently jazzy drumming.

Although it is a rocky, blues number there is an undeniably urban sound to this track, which is quite a novelty on Grateful Dead numbers. This urban edge was intended to convey the dark side of big city life, as opposed to being an homage to LA, as some fans suspected. In 1988 Robert Hunter discussed his lyrical process writing the song with Blair Jackson musing, ‘I think the initial hit on that was the old song – not the one I wrote – that goes “stop on the red and go on the green but get my candyman home, salty dog, candyman, salty dog, candyman.”

‘I liked that, it was catchy. Little bits of old folk songs have a way of getting into my songs. But then I put that on an LA Freeway. The character in there – his eyes are tombstones. Those are LA attitudes in there. Whew! And Jerry soft-pedalled those lyrics a little. There were verses he didn’t do. I was out to create a real bad character, which is what I consider an LA way of looking at things. I’m not a great fan of LA.’ There has been rife speculation that the song concerns the death of John Belushi, the famous Hollywood actor and comedian, who died of a drug overdose at the Chateau Marmont in 1982.

The lyrics certainly seem to reflect his story, repeatedly referencing a MICKEY ‘chateau’ (of which there are not many in LA).

The use of the word ‘copacetic’ in the lyrics is a nod to the famous dancer Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, whom the Grateful Dead also name-checked in Alabama Getaway. Despite being the highest-paid black performer during the first half of the Twentieth Century, Robinson sadly died penniless in 1949 – another casualty of LA life, like John Belushi. It seems likely that these, all too common, tales were what Hunter was referencing here – the way LA chews up and spits out talent, with no regard for the individual involved.

Whilst Hunter was keen for the song to be as dark as possible, Garcia felt it was a little heavy in places, and removed some of the later verses, although they were heard on rehearsal tapes as early as 1982.

West LA Fadeaway was first performed on 28 August 1982 at the Oregon Country Fair Site in Veneta. The song appeared third in the second set, although in subsequent performances it was usually moved to the first set. Many Deadheads considered it a stand-out track on the album, and it was always well received live. The song was a popular choice for the set list for Dylan & the Dead performances, and has remained in rotation ever since.

Tons of Steel Lyrics & Music: Brent Mydland

Tons of Steel is a country-influenced rock number from Brent Mydland. Mydland actually sings the lead on this track, adding a soulful touch to the sound. His voice invokes the spirit of the workweary blue collar Texan, and provides an interesting interlude from Garcia’s usual vocals.

Brent’s singing really shines here, and it’s a great example of how nuanced his performance could be, switching from smooth country to rough rock ’n’ roll then back again.

Sadly his keyboard sound on the track is a little odd, it has a fuzzy sound that is very much of the 1980s and distracts from the overall feel of the number. It is unclear whose choice it was to add this effect, but it could have been Mydland’s, as Tons of Steel was originally his own track that he recorded for an unreleased album in 1982.

Brent was responsible for both the words and the music for Tons HART of Steel, however the Grateful Dead toughened up the sound of the track for their version, adding a hard rock edge. The lyrics and strong structure remained mostly the same, and Robert Hunter has since expressed his admiration for Brent’s compositions: ‘[with Brent] the old songs came magically into tune and richly harmonised while new songs of Brent’s own composition added diversity to the band’s repertoire.’

Lyrically, Tons of Steel is a hard track to pin down. The song centres around a train, which was a common theme for Grateful

‘We set up like we would onstage, but it was a serious recording.

We actually were looking at each other, but there was no audience.

I came up with the idea to turn the lights off.’

30

Dead lyrics, although this was the first track to reference one in such an explicit allegory.

To this day the true meaning of this allegory remains unclear, and with Mydland’s untimely death in 1990 it seems that it will never be uncovered.

The first of the theories explaining the lyrics, is that they focus on Brent’s personal struggle with addiction. Although it never visibly affected his playing, Mydland battled substance abuse throughout his career, with it becoming more of an issue as the years progressed. This could tie in with the lyrical theme of no longer being able to control something you once trusted ‘She’s more a roller coaster than the train I used to know’.

A large part of Brent’s insecurity and reliance on drugs to boost his esteem stemmed from feeling that he was always ‘the new guy’ in the Grateful Dead. Despite his long years service, and adulation from the fans and fellow band members, Mydland always felt somewhat of a pretender. By the time In the Dark was released, his attempts to numb these feelings with drugs were beginning to take a destructive toll on his personal life, and just a few years later he tragically found dead of an overdose at his home in Lafayette, California.

Another suggestion is that the out of control train in the lyrics actually pertains to the Grateful Dead’s career. That they were riding the roller coaster of show business, not knowing how to slow down.

This is certainly feasible considering the Grateful Dead’s intense touring schedule, and the almost cult-like worship of the band. When In the Dark was released the Grateful Dead were reaching heights of popularity that they previously couldn’t have dreamed of, and it is easy to see that Mydland was finding this overwhelming. Although Tons of Steel was written well before this time (back in 1982) that was when the Dead were suffering a creative burn-out and Garcia has stated that they only continued touring out of financial necessity.

Whilst this all seems to fit with the lyrics, many fans posit that the song is actually a classic tale of romance.

In all romantic relationships there is a certain sense of danger, of getting hurt, of hurting the one you love, fearing that you are no longer in control of your own feelings and fearing that it could all come to a sudden end. This seems to mirror the tone of the lyrics, and the train is certainly referred to as a ‘she’ throughout.

Although this interpretation could be a little too literal, it is really anyone’s guess. Deciphering the meanings and coded references within Grateful Dead lyrics is one of the joys of their work, and this is certainly a track that has kept fans bamboozled for many years – touché Mydland.

Live, Tons of Steel was first performed in San Francisco, at the Civic Auditorium on 28 December 1984. In the three years following that performance, it appeared in set lists nearly thirty times, before

‘When the band would leave the stage, the audience would just take over, and keep the groove going.’

PHIL LESH

31

‘There were many times during our career when [Jerry Garcia] could’ve quit and done something else. But he knew that his power was with the Grateful Dead. He didn’t want to go solo.

Jerry was a groupist. He loved to group.’

MICKEY HART

making its final appearance at the Spectrum in Philadelphia on 23 September 1987. Following the release of In the Dark the track was dropped from live rotation, although it has never been made clear why. Like the lyrics, this remains a mystery.

Throwing Stones Lyrics: John Barlow Music: Bob Weir

Throwing Stones is one of the Grateful Dead’s catchiest numbers; it has an upbeat sound and is undeniably danceable. Despite this, the Dead manage to capture a certain sorrowful tone, which gives the song an eldritch atmosphere. The instantly recognisable beat and strong bass line drive the song along, supported by quirky tempo changes and guitar pieces.

Sang by Bob Weir, it’s a really interesting track, with great depth of sound and meaning. The Grateful Dead felt it was one of the strongest numbers from the album and chose Throwing Stones as a single, which was released in November 1988. Upon its release the single sold well, climbing to No. 15 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, and receiving a generous amount of airplay on FM radio.

The Dead also released an accompanying music video, which was picked up by MTV. In 1987 Mary Eisenhart was fortunate enough to interview Garcia in a back room at One Pass Studios in San Francisco, where he was working on the edit of the Throwing Stones video with Len Dell’Amico. When asked if the music videos had made an impact on record sales Garcia replied, ‘Maybe. Some. You’re asking someone who knows little…

‘I mean, I’ve been in the music business, the industry, as we call it, for all this time, and the closest I’ve come to hits is the Jefferson Airplane and that kind of stuff. I don’t believe it’s something you can know for sure – we didn’t do anything different, other than our approach to making the record was a little different, but that doesn’t account for the success. I think that we [had] a particularly lucky moment in terms of accessibility of material.

‘The next material we put out may be too weird or something. It may be that our next record won’t find a public. But we are excited about making records again, so it’s one of those things where now we’re sort of anxious to make another record, to see whether or not – is this a roll? Are we on a roll now?

‘We’re not uncomfortable with it, and we’ve already been through enough of the music business where I’m not really worried that commercial success is going to in some way – we’re already past saving, you know what I mean? It’s too late for us. ‘…The alternate media are becoming important and viable alternatives to playing live. Records, videos, that kind of thing.

32

They’re going to start to count for something. Because there’s only a more time-exhaustive medium. So with video, you can do the kind limited amount of us-time available to us.’ of stuff you saw us doing today, just things like colourising images, The video for Throwing Stones was directed by Len dell’Amico in changing the density of images, that’s the kind of stuff that you November 1987, and the Grateful Dead (with the exception of Bill normally.

Kreutzmann) descended upon an abandoned school in Oakland to ‘In film you need a lab to do that, which means you need two film the post-apocalyptic piece. weeks to see it. So I mean, there you go – the relationship between The video features Bob Weir miming along to the recorded track, fifteen minutes and two weeks is extraordinary. That’s one of the backed by the Grateful Dead who are decked out in oilskin coats and things that’s fun about video, and in fact the source material of the a variety of interesting hats. For Bill Kreutzmann’s appearance he was video that we’re working on right now is sixteen millimetre film, so replaced by Robbie Turner, a crew member, who wore a mask. we’re actually using film as the visual vehicle, and then we’re using The band’s performance was then interspersed with short clips of the video to modulate it, to change it, and to edit it. It’s not much disturbing footage taken from Ku Klux Klan rallies, Second World different from making movies on some levels, except it’s much faster.

War battles, bombings and other The immediacy is the part that desolate scenes that drive home makes it like audio. the song’s sombre lyrical theme.

‘I don’t see us doing that much The doom and gloom is lifted more concert stuff, except – we somewhat by clips of happier would do concerts the way we times, clear blue skies and children use a video screen at the shows. playing, which intersperse the That is to say, we would pull them video and transform the tone into down routinely, so that every show one of hope. would, say, have a video tape – The video is slightly heavy you’d be able to get a videotape handed, certainly no one could of every show with digital miss the message the band are soundtrack included… conveying, but that was the point ‘We’re planning along those – to express the lyrics through lines, but we wouldn’t do them – film, and this succeeds perfectly. they would be the way we do our When asked by Mary shows. In other words, whatever Eisenhart if the video for happened, that’s what you’d get.

Throwing Stones was a departure The discretion, in terms of the from what the Grateful Dead images, would be with the online had previously created, Garcia director, who would be Len replied, ‘Not really. It’s kind of a [Dell’Amico] or someone like him, BILL KREUTZMANN cousin to what we’ve always done. who would be making the editing It’s a cousin to audio. I mean, decisions in the now, as it’s going that is to say, it’s part of the electronic world, so it’s only different on, and we wouldn’t spend time on post-production. So all this stuff in that it end up on a cathode tube, not on a loudspeaker. But audio would come off exactly the way it occurred, and we wouldn’t fool is a component of video, so there’s always been that anyway, and with it. although we’ve never expressed a visual side apart from The Grateful ‘But we have lots of notions along the lines of doing things that Dead Movie, I don’t find it that remote, you know what I mean? It’s a are formal works. Like the So Far video is a formal work. The albums departure of sorts, but it’s like a first cousin… it’s never felt quite that are formal works. That’s what we’re getting together, we’re working remote to me. If anything, I’ve been optimistic about it. I’ve tended on something on purpose… they’re characterised by “it takes us a long to think it was easier and more available and simpler to deal with time to do them.” For one reason or another. than it actually is.

‘It’s part of what we do, and in an effort to keep ourselves amused, ‘…the most complex video editing problems are nothing, in terms the oftener we change the sort of thing we’re doing, the more amused of the amount of time they take, compared to film. Film is a much we are, you know.’

‘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.’

33

Written by John Barlow, the lyrics for Throwing Stones focus on humanity’s negative impact on the planet and the evils of modern society – covering everything from drug smuggling, guns, war and pollution, to greed, corruption and even a reference to the black death.

The song is a glaring admonishment of mankind’s hypocrisy, one that challenges the listener to look into themselves before criticising those around them.

Bob Weir composed Throwing Stones, and discussed the inspiration for the song with Blair Jackson in 1985: ‘Throwing Stones is kind of weird because it starts out on the dominant. I don’t know how I arrived at that. I think pretty obviously the diatribe part of the song came first because for a song to start out on the dominant is sort of a weird portent to begin with. Then I remember that it occurred to us that we were getting pretty thick pretty quick, and it was time to balance it a bit MICKEY before the whole song became a full-blown diatribe and nothing but. The punks do that well enough. So it occurred to me that what I would do is temper all this by lifting a melody and a couple of words from an old Bahamian folk carol called Bye and Bye. So the second half of the first verse uses those chord changes, and it’s meant to counterbalance things. It had that softness I wanted. It has the punch from starting off on the dominant mode. When it finally resolved in the tonic mode, I wanted to cool it out for the second half of the verse.

‘The world isn’t all bad. But we wanted to paint a picture of the world as we both saw it that night. It took longer than a night, of course, but we had the form of it down in a night. It’s just that sooner or later, whether they [the audience] knows it or not, that’s what they’re saying – sooner or later it’s all going to collapse. I guess the thrust of the song is what we will or won’t do in the face of that: “We will leave this place an empty stone/Or that shiny ball of blue we call our home.” Sooner or later we’ll emerge triumphant as a race, or we’ll make our own graves.’

As with Hell in a Bucket, producer David Gans is said to have influenced the lyrics for Throwing Stones, contributing the lines ‘shipping powders back and forth/singing black goes south and white comes north’ which is supposedly a reference to the guns and drugs that were being smuggled into the States from Central America.

The other lyrics are unmistakably Barlow’s, and the song title itself is thought to be a reference to the Gospel of John, in which Jesus

utters the famous line ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.’ Barlow would, of course, be very familiar with such tales as he was raised a devout Mormon and had been awarded an honours degree in comparative religion from Wesleyan University.

Throwing Stones was first performed on 17 September 1982 at the Cumberland County Civic Center in Portland, following which it became a staple of Grateful Dead shows. The Dead’s master archivist David Lemieux states, ‘…Throwing Stones rather quickly found a home as the penultimate song of many Grateful Dead second sets in the final decade of the Dead’s touring activities. Usually followed by Not Fade Away, Throwing Stones was a powerful Weir-Barlow song with a political message, a rarity for the Grateful Dead. Now, nearly forty years after its debut, its message still resonates, perhaps more strongly than ever.’

Onstage, this message was HART reinforced by subtle alterations to the lyrics, which ensured the song retained its relevance through the thirteen years it was performed live. For example, Weir has sung the line ‘Selling guns instead of food today’ as ‘Sell them guns, rape the earth today’, ‘Blood for oil, dropping bombs today,’ and ‘Drop them bombs, grab that oil today’.

Following the demise of the Soviet Union, the line ‘money green is the only way’ also replaced, ‘money green, proletarian grey’.

When performed live, Throwing Stones was often paired with Not Fade Away, and this combination of tracks became a fan favourite, which last appeared during a concert at Maryland Heights, Missouri on 5 July 1995.

‘I can listen to [In the Dark], and normally I can’t listen to Grateful Dead records. We were able to capture the spirit of the band for the first time.’

34

Black Muddy River Lyrics: Robert Hunter Music: Jerry Garcia

Black Muddy River is a catchy, gospel inspired number that closed out In the Dark perfectly. It is a haunting track, filled with longing and deep contemplation that is brought to life by incredible harmonies and guitar. The sound of Black Muddy River is reminiscent of Tons of Steel, in that it is blighted somewhat by an unusual keyboard sound from Mydland. As always his playing is sublime, but the chosen effect hasn’t aged well, and sounds dated in comparison with other numbers.

Nonetheless, Black Muddy River remains a haunting track, buoyed by its catchy chorus and insightful lyrics. The deep sadness

that tinges the track ensures that it stays with the listener long after the music has faded.

Lyrically Black Muddy River is a dark glimpse into Robert Hunter’s psyche, that takes us along for a ride through his contemplations of life, death and of course, roses.

Thomas Moore’s 1805 poem The Last Rose of Summer is directly referenced in the first line ‘When the last rose of summer pricks my fingers’. This sets the tone for the song, as the poem famously centres around the emptiness and loneliness experienced by the old when they have lost all those around them. It is a evocative piece that resonated with Hunter, although in his case these concerns may have been a little premature, given that he was only in his mid-forties at the time.

Robert Hunter described Black Muddy River to Rolling Stone in an interview in 1987: ‘Black Muddy River is about the perspective of age and making a decision about the necessity of living in spite of a rough time, and the ravages of anything else that’s going to come at you. When I wrote it, I was writing about how I felt about being forty-five years old and what I’ve been through. And then when I was done with it, obviously it was for the Dead.’

Hunter further elaborated to David Gans in 1988, ‘It’s just a good look into the deep dark well, and the heart resonances in that area.

And a statement of individual freedom, that no matter what happens, I have this black muddy rive to walk by.

‘I hesitate to define it for you – I could talk about what I mean by “black muddy river”, and I don’t mean a literal river running around. It’s a deeply meaningful symbol to me, and I think just a little thought into, like, archetypal subconscious resonances gives you all you need to know about what we’re talking about here. And past that you’re setting it in concrete, and just as soon as that’s done, that’s not what it meant at all.’

Black Muddy River first appeared live during the Grateful Dead’s second set at the Oakland-Almeda County Coliseum on 15 December 1986. The moving piece suited the occasion perfectly, as this concert was Jerry Garcia’s first appearance since recovering from his coma, and it is said that by the end of the track there was barely a dry eye in the house.

The number was performed live regularly during the following four years, but made only rare appearances in sets through the early 1990s. Thankfully the song was added back into regular rotation for the Dead’s 1995 summer tour, and Black Muddy River was the last number on the set-list for Garcia’s final show at Soldier Field, Chicago on 9 July. The track would actually have been the last song Garcia ever performed, but in his autobiography Searching for the Sound Phil Lesh wrote that he ‘couldn’t stand the thought of ending the tour with one of Jerry’s most sorrowful songs’ and added Box of Rain to the encore accordingly.

‘I don’t know if I discovered I had any talent. It was dogged persistence.

I had to have the music.’

BOB WEIR

35

They were the cosmic hippie icons that amazed crowds around the world for fifty years with their incredible stage shows.

The Grateful Dead formed in Palo Alto, California during 1965 and from this year on the music scene was never the same. Famous for their wild extended solos and onstage freak-outs, the Grateful Dead fused just about every genre they encountered within their unique sound. Combining elements of psychedelia, bluegrass, rock, country, gospel, blues and a hefty dose of folk, they were the quintessential jam band.

Here we take a deep dive into their fascinating history, with a biography chronicling their meteoric rise to fame, and an in depth look at one of their most important periods – 1987 and the release of In the Dark.

36