A Long Strange Trip (45 page)

On the band’s return home in July, they found that the central topic of conversation in San Francisco music circles was the planned Wild West Festival. Festivals were the keynote and overriding trend of the rock music business that summer, although most of them were less than successful. Newport ’69 in Los Angeles in June, Denver Pop the next week, the Newport Jazz Festival (which included rock acts) in early July, and the Atlantic City Pop Festival in early August were all marred by violence and gate-crashing. The generation gap between youth and any sort of authority was deeper than ever. The Wild West Festival had been Ron Polte’s idea, in conversation with Kingston Trio producer Frank Werber. In March the two of them brought together Tom Donahue, Bill Graham, Ralph Gleason, Bert Kanegson, Barry Olivier of the Berkeley Folk Festival, Rock Scully, Bill Thompson, Jann Wenner, and David Rubinson, a producer then working with Bill Graham, and formed the San Francisco Music Council. The idea was to celebrate the city and the scene, “a party and a spiritual statement” in the words of the minutes of their first meeting, with shows over several days, some for money, some free, some big rock shows at Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate Park, with smaller shows involving theater groups or ethnic musicians like Ali Akbar Khan. The Airplane and Jann Wenner kicked in some money for start-up costs, and the council, trying to prevent it from turning into a Bill Graham event, chose Barry Olivier as director and began to lay plans. “No one’s talking hope—except those who are singing and dancing,” said Rock. “This
is
the revolution,” added Werber.

On July 20, most of the Dead gathered at Garcia’s house, because he had a TV, and watched the most amazing television program of their lives, the first human steps on the moon. It was an extraordinary moment, but it came at a time of gross dissension back on planet earth. Four days before,
Easy Rider,
the film that would for many define the essence of the sixties, had premiered, and Jack Nicholson’s character, a well-meaning liberal attorney driven to drink, slurred, “This used to be a helluva good country. I don’t know what happened to it . . . people talk about freedom, but when they see a really free individual it scares them.” A few minutes later his character is beaten to death. The rebellious heroes, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, are murdered as well.

At the planning sessions for the Wild West Festival, the fault lines among interest groups began to appear, as well as a vivid fantasy life. At a meeting at Tom Donahue’s house in Marin, someone suggested having horses and covered wagons transport people within the park, and even the always-visionary Mickey Hart had to explain gently that teams of horses required expert handlers, not volunteers. Then the light-show artists began to brainstorm. On June 23 they imagined a special building for a 360-degree light show that would be 150 feet in diameter with a 30-foot ceiling. At the next week’s meeting they decided that a screen 240 feet long and 20 feet high would do. Glenn McKay, whose Head Lights traveled with the Jefferson Airplane and received 10 percent of the Airplane’s gross, then around $30,000 a show, appeared at this meeting and casually told the light artists that they deserved more. He showed off his fancy boots, and said, “I see a new projector, I buy it. Get together and organize.” And he left. The light artists, who generally earned $100 a show from Graham and around $300 from Chet Helms, ran with the idea. On July 14 they proclaimed, “There must be good publicity for light shows,” and if they were not allowed to do daytime shows in the park, which required a building, “doing shows at Kezar at night for money would run contrary to the spirit.”

Festival plans began to solidify, and the July 18
Festival News
newsletter revealed that there would be three paid nights at Kezar, and otherwise everything would be free. By July 28, the incipient discontent of street radicals focused on the imaginary wealth that was about to be made by the festival, and at a community meeting at Glide Memorial Church, a black community activist and S.F. State student striker named Arnold Townsend verbally squared off with Bill Graham. A murky, never-defined group called the Haight Commune, joined by the Mime Troupe and various interlocking combinations of vaguely politicized street people, had all decided the festival was going to be a rip-off. By now, the city fathers had begun to wonder if the festival idea was such a good one.

In the last days of July, promoters Bill Graham and Chet Helms received a letter from the Light Artists Guild (LAG) signed with the pseudonym “Ma.” It announced the existence of the guild, demanded equal billing for light shows with the bands and a fee of $900 for a two-show weekend. “Nobody talked to me, I just got this letter,” roared Bill. “Who is this ‘Ma’ who signed the letter? Nobody knows! . . . But what they will not accept is that they are not a draw . . . Their only negotiating point is ‘art’ . . . You know what demanding is? Demanding means WEIGHT! Where’s their weight?” Graham was right—the LAG had none. They did have chutzpah. They would not confront Graham, and instead chose Chet Helms, who had reopened the Family Dog that June at a building left over from Playland, an old amusement park at Ocean Beach, on the Great Highway. The Dead were booked to play three shows there beginning August 1, Garcia’s twenty-seventh birthday. It would not be a happy one.

When the band arrived, they found the guild picketing the building and, with power supplied by Helms, staging a light show on the outside walls of the Dog. Years later, Jerry Abrams, the LAG leader, would defend their actions: “As long as light shows were being hired and we were a certified art form . . . we felt we should be compensated and publicized . . . we struck the Family Dog first because it just turned out that that was the first weekend we were going to do it. The Dead were playing and we figured we could reach the most people . . . I had assurances from Jerry Garcia . . . that he would honor our line. Chet knew [about it in advance]. Everybody knew.” Both Chet and Jerry said they did not know in advance, and Garcia certainly felt that, as he later put it, “The whole thing was stupid.”

There were around four hundred people inside and perhaps a thousand outside at the Family Dog when Garcia and Hart arrived. Whether Jerry Abrams knew it or not, he had a perfect victim in Garcia. His grandmother Tillie was alive, and although she was quite senile, she would have come across the park like a tornado if her grandson had crossed a picket line, and Garcia couldn’t. Whatever he thought about the merits of the strike, he felt a sense of responsibility to his greater musical community, an obligation to try to mediate if nothing else. Chet, Jerry, Mickey, Rock, and a representative of the LAG, Bob Ellison, crowded into Ram Rod’s equipment truck and began to talk. As Hart recalled it, Garcia said, “It’s not about the fuckin’ lights, it’s about the fuckin’ music . . . Yeah, there should be more equity and lights should be treated with respect, but this is not the way to go about doing it.” Mickey, being Mickey, was ready to fight his way out, but calmed down. And instead of a negotiating session—there was nothing, really, to negotiate—it became a catharsis, each of them singing the same tune. No one was making money, and they were all emotionally stretched to the limit. By the time they exited the truck, it was too late to play; in their absence, the band had thrown together a jam, but the full Dead did not perform.

On August 5, there was a Wild West/LAG/music community meeting at the Family Dog, and Ralph Gleason turned to Bill Belmont and said, “You guys have lost it. You gave it away to Bill Graham—why?” Belmont shrugged. “He screams louder than the rest of us, I guess.” Though Graham had actually been assisting Chet financially, the meeting began to focus on Graham as a monopolist. “I’m fucking sick and tired of four years of POINTING,” he said. “I’m sorry, world, for being a success? I’m sorry for making a good living? For bringing good music to this town? Apologize for what? Feel guilty about what?” Dramatic as always, he announced that he was closing the Fillmore West at the end of the year and concluded, “I leave here very sad. I may be copping out, but your attitudes have driven me to my choice.” Stephen Gaskin, a power in the freak community, replied, “Bill, we’ve heard that rap many times before. You took the choice between love and money. You got the money—don’t come looking for the love.” Graham went off. “I apologize, motherfucker, that I am a human being. I fully apologize. Emotional—you’re fucking right . . . you’re full of shit, and I have more fucking balls than you’ll ever see. You want to challenge me about emotions, you slimy little man, fuck you.
Fuck
you.
Don’t get peaceful with me. Don’t you
touch
me.” Unfortunately for Bill, Gaskin immediately recognized the line “Don’t get peaceful with me” as being from the play
The Connection
and responded, “I saw the play, it was better.” Exit Bill Graham.

Minutes later, a brick came sailing through a window, hurled by some wandering stranger. Suddenly, there was barely a Family Dog, Friday’s canceled show having all but bankrupted Chet, and hardly a music community, either. That night, still planning a Wild West Festival, Ron Polte and Tom Donahue attended a meeting of the Haight Commune, where a member named John the Motherfucker told them that the “pimp merchants of bread and circuses” were going to pay $150,000 rent (the actual figure was $12,000) for Kezar Stadium, and that the festival was part of the establishment, and not of the freak community. At a press conference the next day, Donahue speculated that psychedelics, in addition to opening people’s minds, might encourage paranoia. “I find it difficult to understand the motivation of people who want to bring a halt to the getting together of their brothers in a celebration. I want to know who sent them up or set them up.” He announced that the governing council of the festival would triple the number of seats on the board in an attempt to include and conciliate the various factions.

Eleven days before the festival was to begin, the city’s Recreation and Parks Department limited the number of places in the park that could be used, and the handwriting was clearly visible on the wall. There were ongoing threats of violence, and Barry Olivier finally canceled the event. As Ralph Gleason wrote, “Apparently there is no place for dreams anymore.” The San Francisco music community lay in ruins.

27

Interlude: “Eastbound and Down” (END OF SET ONE)

June, Miami Arena

God, Florida is a weird place. The band has taken a cross-country commercial flight to begin the tour, although from here on, they’ll use charters, and the flight is filled with guys who are apparently extras on
Miami Vice,
every damn one of them dressed in gold-chain, open-to-the-navel, coke dealer/pimp shirts. Airplanes and airports are a Dead field of expertise. Most of our party can tell you more than you want to know about anything taxiing by, and some of them can pilot small planes. It is a life spent in airports, “tunneling from one vacuum to another,” as the rock journalist David Dalton once wrote. Submitting to other people’s schedules is not the Dead’s favorite thing. As road manager, Rock Scully developed a technique for when Weir was, as usual, late. He would dump his briefcase out on the jetway and then oh-so-slowly gather his things up, to gain a delay. Pity the poor Grateful Dead travel agent. In the seventies it was a man named Randy Sarti, who recalled standing at the S.F. Airport curb with then road manager Danny Rifkin, waiting—what else?—for Weir. Bob finally arrived, they grabbed his stuff and ran to the gate, and Sarti ended up with a Halliburton briefcase full of pot. Security wouldn’t put the metal case through X rays without opening it, so Randy was stuck with the case—until he happened to see a luggage handler he knew, and the man threw it in the belly of the plane. At the other end, the band and crew spotted it on the luggage carousel and gave Sarti a standing ovation in absentia.

The Dead also know hotels. On first arriving, the experienced tour participant checks his rooming list to see who might be on either side. There’s at least one crew member who is a semiprofessional eavesdropper, and Scrib, for instance, has a very penetrating voice. The rooming list contains various pseudonyms, an interesting reflection of personality. Garcia won’t use one, arguing that it would be giving in to fame. This might be noble, but it also means that he frequently shuts off the phone, so that those who work for him must go and knock on the door whenever they need to speak with him. Weir is Hugo Fuguzev (“You go fuck yourself”), Hart is Dr. Kronos (time), and Phil has been known to be Buck Mulligan (from James Joyce) or Chester the Molester. Brent is Clifton Hanger.

It’s an amazingly good night for the opening of a tour, and Jerry is smiling as he kicks off “Bird Song,” from his first solo album. Hunter dedicated it to Janis Joplin in his book of lyrics, and that feels right: “All I know is something / like a bird within her sang.” It’s a wide-open vehicle for jamming, and done right, it is exquisite. Tonight it’s right. “Tell me all that you know / I’ll show you / snow and rain.” The jam ignites, and they play music like an endlessly variable Lego set, Garcia betraying the romantic’s ultimate love of form, in that he unceasingly tests any shape with yet another possibility. It is a statement of unswerving faith in the creative moment. The song is a jigsaw puzzle, in which the first chorus is a picture with missing parts, and with each repetition they fill in the musical open spaces until the final chorus coalesces into the full, richly detailed picture. Playing like this is really all about bonding and breaking, blasting and dissolving. They regroup, regenerate, and push on. It is remarkably formal playing, but composed on the fly; not least of Garcia’s gifts as a player is a clear sense of underlying architecture, of a precise shapeliness to even the most extended solo.

A kid in the front row gets a little out of it, hops up and down in front of the rail pointing at his face and talking at Garcia. “It’s all right,” says one crew member. “It’s a message from Jerry’s dentist. He owes for the kid’s braces.”

Backstage, Robbie Taylor’s production assistant, Eric Colby, has gathered up a shopping list. Over the tour, his runners, two in each city, will gather this and much, much more.

MICKEY HART:
all available CDs and cassettes of Argentinian tango accordionist Astor Piazzola

1 pair AIWA mini speakers—sample pictured in Sharper Image catalog

1 AIWA remote controller RC-8R ditto

1 pr Kolodny headphones

2 pr New Balance running shoes, #996 size 8

KIDD CANDELARIO:
repair oxygen tank

CDs: John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Charlie Musselwhite, Norton Buffalo

10 small toggle switches: 7201 CNK with 6 poles. 10 nuts

12 lamp bulbs: halogen OSRAM 5.2V .85A w865

small bag assorted rubber bands

2 red road cases with 1’’ thick foam rubber insulation

MORPHEUS
[the lighting company] request—1 cheap wooden stool, drum throne height

DAN HEALY:
one baby bottle warmer for travel—looks like shower cap

ROBBIE TAYLOR:
12 lanyards [for laminates]

4 boxes (total 96 pieces) DURACELL pro cell or copper top only batteries

RAM ROD:
book
—Jane’s—
pictures of military aircraft 5 rolls 400 ASA Kodak black and white film 36 prints

HARRY POPICK:
1 travel water pik

CREW:
4 ICOM radios $273, 6 ICOM bp-20 battery packs . . .

June, Silver Stadium, Las Vegas (Second Night of Three)

Dead Heads in Vegas; what a hoot. “Thousands of tie-dyed, braided, wiggy, happy kids,” wrote Rip Rense in the L.A. Herald Examiner, “swirling and twirling among the roulette wheels and crap tables, staring with electric eyes into the spinning faces of slot machines and hoping to influence the outcome . . . You can look at it as poetic: the Dead’s gentle philosophy and open heart energy descending on the city of cheapness and cutthroat chance like (as one observer put it), ‘a rose dropping on Formica’ . . . And you can look at it as wholly appropriate: The Dead— whose lyrics are rife with tales of luck and fate, cards and dice.”

In fact, the Dead’s annual visits to Las Vegas in the 1990s were a show business phenomenon. Three 40,000-capacity stadium shows, all sold out, and of those 120,000 tickets, at least 105,000 were sold to people from somewhere else—Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, San Francisco. Danny Zelesko, the promoter, has a piece of the show from Bill Graham Presents because they owed him for a money-losing show. In the long run, he is a lucky boy. Vegas is a pleasure city, and as long as the promoters schedule the weekend carefully, the Dead are welcome. Up the street from the band’s hotel is the Mirage—what a perfect name for the American consumer culture. Across the desert, 30,000 New Bedouins cruise, freak flags high, in buses with greenhouses in the back, a Sphinx above the driver’s seat, a bus that is a wooden chapel, with stained-glass windows, pews, and altar. And inside the buses, all hair and stoned eyeballs, are Dead Heads laughing at Vegas.

The band is rocking, and Weir toasts the Vegas vibe with his tribute to the decadent eighties, “Hell in a Bucket.” “You imagine me sipping champagne from your boot / For a taste of your elegant pride / I may be going to Hell In A Bucket, babe / But at least I’m enjoying the ride.” It is a hot, up-tempo rocker, and the dancers are in a languid frenzy. Up front, the audience presses ever forward against the rail, creating the frog people, they of the flat faces and bulging eyes. Eventually, the band will have to play the “Take a Step Back” chorus to parcel out some breathing room. In the parking lot, license plates read 10ACJED, ANY WNDO, BTWIND, DRKSTAR, DRUMZZ, GR8FUL, JK STRAW, OTH ONE, RUKIND. In the back of the stadium, a man in his sixties, balding, with glasses, begins to dance and snap his fingers, and his wife edges away, embarrassed. The song ends, and Weir steps to the mike: “Billy broke a snare, and you can’t beat that.” Actually, the drummer is sneaking off to take a leak. In the brief pause, Scrib thinks of Garcia, who was grievously disappointed with yesterday’s show. “A shoe store. I should open a fuckin’ shoe store. I could fuckin’ sell shoes.”

June, Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey

Hot and steamy tonight. Jerry begins the riff that signals “China Cat Sunflower,” one of the most enduring of Dead songs, and parallel beams like yellow tendrils stab out into the audience as though from the spaceship in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Look for awhile at the China Cat Sunflower
proudwalking jingle in the midnight sun
Copperdome Bodhi drip a silver kimono
like a crazyquilt stargown
through a dream night wind
Krazy Kat peeking through a lace bandana
like a one eyed Cheshire
like a diamond eye Jack

The queer, neo-Carrollian doggerel rolls to the beat of a slightly unbalanced drive wheel, a whirring hypnotic rhythm that is entrancing—and entraining: it sucks you into it. The lyrics were written long before Hunter thought of himself as a lyricist, and they show it in their opaque abstraction and the odd way they break rhythmically. “I had a cat sitting on my belly at one point,” he said once, “and followed the cat out to—I believe it was Neptune, but I’m not sure—and there were rainbows across Neptune, and cats marching across this rainbow.” Thematically, it has an almost Zen-like feel to it. Properly approached, its imagery induces a dream state, and it is psychedelic in exactly the same way as is
Alice in Wonderland.
The final line, a reference to the “Queen Chinee,” is a tribute to the Edith Sitwell poem “Trio for Two Cats and a Trombone.” As the lyrics end, Garcia’s quicksilver notes haul the band into a new tempo, the energy pulses, and they
rip—

Early July, RFK Stadium, Washington, D.C.

—into “I Know You Rider,” a traditional folk tune that they’ve played since 1965. They glued it onto “China Cat” soon after they had the song, and jacked up the tempo to make it a most worthy set-closer. Dead Heads dance, the sweat flying. God, it’s miserably oppressive here, hot and disgustingly humid. This is where Jerry became terribly ill in 1986. It’s not as bad tonight as the 120 degrees he once faced in Las Vegas, or the 113 in Kansas City when he refused to come out of his trailer for a while, but it’s damn nasty. In the nineties, the band got air-conditioning onstage, giant tubes that snake under the deck and blow cold air on them through grates. D.C. is the home of Gallaudet College, so there are many deaf Dead Heads here, holding balloons to pick up the vibrations in the air as signers give them the words. “I can almost see the music” from the way the audience moves, said one Deaf Head. “Here they don’t stare when I sign,” says one Head, as a man wearing a ten-inch Pinocchio nose strolls by.

Hail today the size of golf balls landed eight miles away, so big it smashed car windows, and there was heavy rain all night. Watching a new storm approach, Scrib turns to Ram Rod and says, “Keep the faith.” “Faith helps,” he says, “but always have a Plan B.” Putting on entertainment in the outdoors gets complicated. Once at Giants Stadium a tornado touched down three miles away from the show. Lightning danced all around the facility. The audience members refused to leave their seats to take cover, and as the rain poured down, Scrib could not stop looking at the guy who was up on the roof of the stage with a broom, pushing off water as it collected, right in the middle of the biggest lightning rod in Bergen County, New Jersey.

The music shrieks and roars, and Harry goes over to talk to Brent. After a long colloquy, he returns to his board, and Scrib asks what Brent said. “I don’t know. I think he said he’s okay, but not singing very well.” Harry kicks his monitor speaker in and out in a nervous gesture and tells a joke. “What’s the difference between a monitor mixer and a toilet? A toilet only has to deal with one asshole at a time.” The only time Scrib ever saw Garcia actually yelling in anger was at Popick. Playing when you can’t hear yourself is not a fun thing. Working for a band one cares about isn’t always easy either. Candace bleeds internally when she fails to meet her own standards. Healy, too. Scrib fucks up by giving an adult rather than a facile made-for-TV answer to a TV newsman, and spends the night lacerating himself. Being a front man for magicians has its complications, but being part of a group of people committed to the Muse is very fine.

I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train
I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train
I’d shine my light through the cool Colorado rain

And at the word “headlight,” one Panaspot onstage stabs wildly into the audience and the audience melts into a gently frenzied puddle. The band sweeps to the end of the song, stacking up the harmony until it hits the tonic and the set comes to an end. Weir mumbles, “We’ll be right back,” and everyone sits down.