Dark Star (26 page)

Richard Loren:
A month later, I became their manager and agent. Now I was not only booking the band, I was dealing with the money. I was called the general manager of the Grateful Dead. At this time, the Grateful Dead were not rich people. “It's not what you make, it's what you don't spend.” I quoted that to them many times. The musicians had needs but the salaries were never quite high enough to take care of them. They were all chipping away at expensive drugs. You had the coke and the beginnings of the heroin thing. They were also paying their employees far more than the going rate.

Peter Barsotti:
The thing about the Grateful Dead was that they were like a primitive tribe. That explains a lot about their closed family, about their clan, about the way they reacted to everybody, about the way they dealt with everything that went wrong within their tribe. Basically, no one was ever rejected unless they got to the point where they ejected themselves. You could make a hundred mistakes, you could be stupid for your whole life, you could blow it a thousand times, and you were still fine. Mainly, it had to do with total subservience of your life to theirs and total acceptance of them as it. “Just buy in behind it, man. A hundred percent.” They also took pride in having no business sense.

John Perry Barlow:
We were a totally primitive tribe. We were like a completely isolated village in Sicily. We had this sort of mafiosi code of honor that was extremely blunt. There was a great deal of loyalty there but it was a hard loyalty. Part of the deal was that as the Deadheads became more and more sweetness, light, love, charity, openness, emotional evolution, the darker we were.

Hal Kant:
They wanted to produce this Grateful Dead movie and I had killed it and killed it and killed it because I had told them the way they were going to go about it was a crazy idea, as in those days there was very little money. I showed up at Winterland for a series of concerts and four different crews were shooting for four days and nobody had ever told me about it. Rakow had gotten them all into doing it and they had a budget of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I said, “Ron, what you're shooting here is not going to be processed for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Forget about anything else. You're not going to be able to process the film.”

As it turned out, the processing costs alone were just under two hundred thousand. Jerry, being the wonderful person he was, had a great, great curiosity, creativeness, and inventiveness and all those things went into, “Yeah, let's do a movie. Yeah, let's do a record company. Cool. Great. Let's do it.” The way creative people deal with their art is not the way you deal with a business. What's the downside if you do a painting you don't like? You throw it in the corner. Or if you do a piece of music you don't like? You just leave it in the can. All his projects were the same. “Let's try it.”

Steve Brown:
The Grateful Dead movie was shot in October of '74. Jerry was very involved with it. From way back, he'd always wanted to make movies. He loved film. We used to go to movies when we were on the road. We'd go before sound checks. He'd get up early and we'd go out to a movie at noon. Jerry really had an artist's eye for detail and he was a superb film editor because he really could see continuity and rhythm and flow. He went through the footage deciding first of all what performances were suitable and what he liked of himself and the band. Later, he helped decide what needed to be in the final cut. He was right there at the table. He was running the thing forward and back himself. He wasn't standing over somebody's shoulder doing it. He was sitting there doing it. In terms of the animated sequence that begins the film, Jerry was the main proponent of that.

Gary Gutierrez:
Their idea at that time was to take a bunch of posters from all the years of posters for the Grateful Dead and use that as a background for a title sequence and we would animate some of that. That was how it began. I went over one night to meet with Jerry where they were editing and we hit it off and I told him I had some ideas. They didn't have much money for the title sequence. I think they had like five or eight thousand dollars. I had learned a lot of things doing animation for
Sesame Street
that made me want to try much wilder things. I saw this as my big opportunity. This thing just grew and grew and it went from eight thousand bucks to I guess eventually about twenty-five thousand. It turned into an eight-minute animated extravaganza of Grateful Dead mythology.

That was partly my fault and partly Jerry's fault because he would see stuff and he would have ideas and he seemed to like my ideas. I remember driving back from L.A. when I heard this “Uncle Sam” song and immediately, a bell went off in my head of a Grateful Dead skeleton as Uncle Sam and then all the other ideas sort of flowed from working with Uncle Sam and using that song as the main basis of it. To use a New Age term, one of the great things about Jerry creatively was that he was really validating. Francis Coppola has a similar quality. Both he and Jerry share that ability to get the best out of you by actually giving you a lot of trust and actually throwing a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. They describe the problem and what they want to accomplish without telling you how to do it and they are open to ideas. Nothing is too corny or weird or out there for them to think about.

Steve Brown:
It was really supposed to be done a lot cheaper and a lot quicker. What wound up happening is the goddamn animation became this black hole where more and more money and more and more time were required. We began refinancing deals. Really, the film broke our balls financially.

Gary Gutierrez:
We were over at Bob Weir's studio where we were doing all of the various sound effects and remixes for the movie. We spent several days in a booth with Jerry. Attached to the basic mixing board were stacks of stuff that they would bring in and plug in and rewire to get weird effects. When Uncle Sam is riding the motorcycle and he says, “All right” or “Wow,” it was Jerry talking through a plastic hose that was hooked into some kind of actuator on an early kind of synthesizer to make his voice sound like dry bone. He was in his glory there. He had a lot of fun watching the animation play back, listening to the music, and doing lots of overdubs.

Steve Brown:
The money to set up the record company had come from First National Bank of Boston. Half a million I think to get us rolling. The independent label, Round Records, had Jerry's
Old and In the Way
album and Robert Hunter's
Great Rum Runners
solo album. At the same time, we'd set up production for the
Wake of the Flood
album, which was the first venture on Grateful Dead Records. That was done at the Record Plant in Sausalito in the late summer and fall of '73. Everything started off really good. We ran it pretty straitlaced, just like the suits would have done. We'd put out an album and run a tour to support it and it went fine. Now we had some merchandise to lay out to people in the way of promotion when we were at the concerts. We'd set up our own booth at concerts and give away postcards and sign people up for our mailing list. This was where the real start of the Deadhead database kicked in. By the time the record company had pretty much run its course and we turned it over to United Artists in '75, we had about eighty thousand names.

Ron Rakow:
Jerry and I got loaded one day on the porch of his music room, which was above his house in Stinson Beach. We looked out at the ocean and Jerry said, “Hey, man. Wanna do something far out? Let's buy our way to the sea.” Meaning, “Let's buy every single piece of property that comes up for sale in Stinson Beach that gets us closer to the ocean so we'll have a path to the sea.” We didn't have any money but we had this relationship with the First National Bank of Boston. They were our factor. They guaranteed the credit of the stores and distributors we sold our records to. So I went to the First National Bank of Boston and told them that we were going to get involved in other projects around which Garcia had expertise. I asked for a two-million-dollar credit line with no collateral. That was a lot of bread. I told them we were going to be in Boston in three months and I asked them to arrange for the senior executives of the bank to have lunch with Garcia at the bank. Then they would know they were in the hands of a genius.

But I knew Jerry wouldn't show up just for lunch. I needed a cookie to get him there. So I had their chief economist agree to show us her predictions of where the worldwide economy was going. Then I went to Jerry and told him that one of the biggest banks in the world was going to give us a private briefing on the worldwide economy that they only gave to top executives. He went nuts.

Jerry and I and Deborah Koons, who was then his girlfriend, went to the First National Bank of Boston. We walked into the twelfth-floor executive dining room and Jerry Garcia was wearing, guess what, Levi's and a black T-shirt. We sat down with the chairman of the board of the First National Bank of Boston, three billion dollars at the time. The chairman turned to Jerry and said, “My daughter wants to play the clarinet. But my music person says it would be much better to start her on the violin. What do you think?” Jerry said, “Let her do what she wants.” The guy said, “Oh, yeah!”

The president of the First National Bank of Boston turned to Jerry and said, “We're getting a sound system. I'm going to get EPI speakers. What do you think of them?” Jerry turned to me and said, “Rack, don't we have a deal with them? Don't we trade them records for speakers? What about those?” I said, “They're good.” Jerry said, “I've listened to them. I think they're really good. I think you'll be very happy with them.” The guy said, “Oh, great!”

After the appetizer, we started walking around the room and looking out over Boston. Jerry walked over to me and whispered in my ear, “We're gonna own this place. This is fuckin' backstage, man.” They gave us the money. Did we buy our way to the ocean? We came damn close.

Richard Loren:
In the end, the record company turned out to be the thing that burned their ass because Ron Rakow walked away with a quarter of a million dollars. A quarter of a million dollars was a lot of money at the time.

Ron Rakow:
For years and years and years, the name of the game was that I was the family barracuda. You don't ever want to fuck with your barracuda because the barracuda will do what barracudas do. He will fucking eat you. What happened was that the Grateful Dead became convinced that it was in their best interests to fuck me. Garcia and I had a meeting on it and Garcia looked me right in the eye and said, “It's clear that this is going to happen.” Because I went across a really entrenched interest in the Grateful Dead and that was Hal Kant.

Steve Brown:
Ron Rakow was down in L.A. on the rug at the United Artists Records office saying, “Really, the album is in the mail. It's coming now.” And there was Mickey Hart up at his barn saying, “Let's put one more drum track on this part here.” To really slam back at the treatment he felt he was getting, Ron Rakow cut himself a check for about a quarter million and freed himself from the whole thing and he disappeared. Now we were really broke. We had to finish this movie and get it out.

Ron Rakow:
Jerry and I were making this movie that was hemorrhaging money. The band had stopped working and the movie was sucking up one huge quantity of money and the band was sucking up another huge quantity of money and there was no output of any kind. My strategy was really simple. I walked into United Artists Records in Los Angeles and said, “I need a million dollars. I'll give you four more Grateful Dead albums, one Garcia album, and one Weir album.” They said, “We already have all these Grateful Dead albums. Why do we need to give you a million dollars to have four more? You're giving us nothing.” I said, “Not true. Because if you don't give me the million dollars, I am going to bankrupt the Grateful Dead and all the individuals in it and we'll make a deal with Warner Brothers the next day. Because the bankruptcy trustee will nullify all existing contracts.”

When I'd told Garcia about this beforehand, he'd said, “Is this true? Can you do this?” I said, “I don't know. Let's find out.” Garcia loved it. He fucking loved it. He was jumping up and down and he said, “This is brilliant. You go and do it. I got your back covered. There is no Grateful Dead without Jerry Garcia. I won't let anything happen to you.”

I was down in L.A. doing this and on Sunday, a meeting of the Grateful Dead at Front Street in San Rafael was called to explain what I was up to. I had been sick so I stayed down in L.A. My attorney was supposed to go to that meeting to explain my strategy along with Garcia. Fifteen minutes before the meeting was supposed to begin, my attorney was called and told that the meeting had been canceled. But it had not been canceled.

Garcia got there and everybody jumped on him. “What the fuck is this guy doing? Do you understand it?” Garcia had nobody to bounce off of. So he sat down in this secretary's chair on wheels and slowly wheeled himself out of the room. He went into the studio, picked up a guitar, and played scales for four hours.

The next day, I went to United Artists' offices and they handed me a check for two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. As the guy handed me the check, with both of our hands still on it, the secretary said, “Emergency call for Ron Rakow.” I picked up the phone and my lawyer said, “Ron, I don't know how to tell you this. The Grateful Dead had a meeting yesterday after all and they fired you.” I said, “The call you got has no status and this call does not compute.” And I hung up the phone. I knew I had just been fucked. I asked myself, “Do I quietly fold my tent and go away feeling fucked? Or do I make sure everyone feels at least as fucked as I do?”