Night Beat (58 page)

Consequently, the Acid Tests became the model for what would shortly become known as the “Grateful Dead trip.” In the years that followed, the Dead would never really forsake the philosophy of the Acid Tests. Right until the end, the band would encourage its audience to be involved with both the music and the sense of kinship that came from and fueled the music. Plus, more than any other band of the era, the Grateful Dead succeeded in making music that seemed to emanate from the hallucinogenic experience—music like 1969’s
Aoxomoxoa,
which managed to prove both chilling and heartening in the same moments. In the process, the Dead made music that epitomized psychedelia at its brainiest and brawniest, and also helped make possible the sort of fusion of jazz structure and blues sensibility that would later help shape bands like the Allman Brothers.

“I wouldn’t want to say this music was written on acid,” says Robert Hunter, who penned some of the album’s lyrics. “Over the years, I’ve denied it had any influence that way. But as I get older, I begin to understand that we were reporting on what we saw and experienced—like the layers below layers which became real to me. I would say that
Aoxomoxoa
was a report on what it’s like to be up—or down—there in those layers. I guess it is, I’ll be honest about it. Looking back and judging, those were pretty weird times. We were very, very far out.”

BY 1966, THE SPIRIT of the Acid Tests was spilling over into the streets and clubs of San Francisco—and well beyond. A new community of largely young people, many sharing similar ideals about drugs, music, politics, and sex, had taken root in the city’s Haight-Ashbury district, a run-down but picturesque section of the city adjacent to Golden Gate Park, where Garcia and the Grateful Dead now shared a house. In addition, a thriving club and dance-hall scene—dominated by Chet Helms’ Avalon Ballroom and Bill Graham’s Fillmore—had sprung up around the city, drawing the notice of the media, police, and various political forces. In part, all the public scrutiny and judgment would eventually make life in the Haight difficult and risky. But there was also a certain boon that came from all the new publicity: The music and ethos of the San Francisco scene had begun to draw the interest of East Coast and British musicians and were starting to affect the thinking of artists like the Beatles and Bob Dylan—the same artists who, only a year or two before, had exerted such a major influence on groups like the Grateful Dead. For that matter, San Francisco bands were having an impact on not just pop and fashion styles, but also on social mores and even the political dialogue of the times. Several other bands, of course, participated in the creation of this scene, and some, including Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, would make music as inventive and memorable as the Dead’s. In addition, nobody should underrate concert promoter Bill Graham’s importance to the adventure; he was an often acerbic character, but he would emerge as an invaluable and scrupulous caretaker of the community that he served.

Still, it was the Grateful Dead that became known as the “people’s band”—the band that cared about the following that it played to, and that often staged benefits or free shows for the common good. And long after the Haight’s moment had passed, it would be the Grateful Dead—and the Dead alone among the original San Francisco bands—who would still exemplify the ideals of camaraderie and compassion that most other ’60s-bred groups long relinquished, and that many subsequent rock artists repudiated in favor of more corrosive ideals.

The San Francisco scene was remarkable while it lasted, but it couldn’t endure forever. Because of its reputation as a youth haven, the Haight was soon overrun with runaways, and the sort of health and shelter problems that a community of mainly white middle-class expatriates had never had to face before. In addition, the widespread use of LSD was turning out to be a little less ideal than some folks had imagined: There were nights when so many young people seemed to be on bad trips, the emergency rooms of local hospitals could not accommodate them all. By the middle of 1967, a season still referred to as the Summer of Love, the Haight had started to turn ugly. There were bad drugs on the streets, there were rapes and murders, and there was a surfeit of starry-eyed newcomers who had arrived in the neighborhood without any means of support, and were expecting the scene to feed and nurture them. Garcia and the Dead had seen the trouble coming and tried to prompt the city to prepare for it. “You could feed large numbers of people,” Garcia later said, “but only so large. You could feed one thousand but not twenty thousand. We were unable to convince the San Francisco officials of what was going to happen. We said there would be more people in the city than the city could hold.” Not long after, the Dead left the Haight for individual residences in Marin County, north of San Francisco.

By 1970, the idealism surrounding the Bay Area music scene—and much of the counterculture—had largely evaporated. The drug scene had turned creepy and risky; much of the peace movement had given way to violent rhetoric; and the quixotic dream of a Woodstock generation, bound together by the virtues of love and music, had been irreparably damaged, first by the Manson Family murders, in the summer of 1969, and then, a few months later, by a tragic and brutal event at the Altamont Speedway, just outside San Francisco. The occasion was a free concert featuring the Rolling Stones. Following either the example or the suggestion of the Grateful Dead (there is still disagreement on this), the Stones hired the Hell’s Angels as a security force. It proved to be a day of horrific violence. The Angels battered numerous people, usually for little reason, and in the evening, as the Stones performed, the bikers stabbed a young black man to death in front of the stage. “It was completely unexpected,” Garcia later said. “And that was the hard part—the hard lesson there—that you can have good people and good energy and work on a project and really want it to happen right and still have it all weird. It’s the thing of knowing less than you should have. Youthful folly.”

The record the band followed with,
Workingman’s Dead,
was the Dead’s response to that period. The record was a statement about the changing and badly frayed sense of community in both America and its counterculture, and as such, it was a work by, and about, a group of men being tested and pressured—at a time when they could have easily pulled apart from all the madness and stress and disappointment. The music reflected that struggle—particularly in songs like “Uncle John’s Band”—a parable about America that was also the band’s confession of how it nearly fell apart—and “New Speedway Boogie,” about Altamont. “One way or another, this darkness has got to give,” Garcia sang in the latter song, in a voice full of fear, fragility, and hard-earned courage.
Workingman’s Dead—
and the record that followed it,
American Beauty—
made plain how the Grateful Dead found the heart and courage and talent to stick together, and to make something new and meaningful from their association. “Making the record became like going to a job,” Garcia said. “It was something we had to do, and it was also something we did to keep our minds off some of these problems, even if the music is about those problems.”

As a result,
Workingman’s Dead
and
American Beauty
were records that explored the idea of how one could forge meaningful values in disillusioning times. Says Robert Hunter: “When the Jefferson Airplane came up with that idea, ’Up against the wall,’ I was up against them. It may have been true, but look at the results: blood in the streets. It seems the Airplane was feeling the power of their ability to send the troops into the field, and I wanted to stand back from the grenades and knives and blood in the street. Stand way back. There’s a better way. There has to be education, and the education has to come from the poets and musicians, because it has to touch the heart rather than the intellect, it has to get in there deeply. That was a decision. That was a conscious decision.”

Sometimes, adds Hunter, it was difficult to hold on to that conviction. “When
American Beauty
came out,” he says, “there was a photograph due to go on the back which showed the band with pistols. They were getting into guns at the time, going over to Mickey’s ranch, target shooting. It wasn’t anything revolutionary; they were just enjoying shooting pistols. For example, we got a gold record and went and shot it up.

“I saw that photo and that was one of the few times that I ever really asserted myself with the band and said, ’No—no picture of a band with guns on the back cover.’ These were incendiary and revolutionary times, and I did not want this band to be making that statement. I wanted us to counter the rising violence of that time. I knew that we had a tool to do it, and we just didn’t dare go the other way. Us and the Airplane: We could have been the final match that lit the fuse, and we went real consciously the other way.”

In addition, with their countryish lilt and bluesy impulses,
Workingman’s Dead
and
American Beauty
were attempts to return to the musical sources that had fueled the band’s passions in the first place.
“Workingman’s Dead
was our first true studio album,” Garcia told me in 1987, “insofar as we went in there to say, ’These are the limitations of the studio for us as performers; let’s play inside those limitations.’ That is, we decided to play more or less straight-ahead songs and not get hung up with effects and weirdness. For me, the models were music that I’d liked before that was basically simply constructed but terribly effective—like the old Buck Owens records from Bakersfield. Those records were basic rock & roll: nice, raw, simple, straight-ahead music, with good vocals and substantial instrumentation, but nothing flashy.
Workingman’s Dead
was our attempt to say, ’We can play this kind of music—we can play music that’s heartland music. It’s something we do as well as we do anything.’ ”

In a conversation I had with Robert Hunter in 1989, he revealed something else that he thought had affected Garcia’s singing in that period, and made it so affecting. “It wasn’t only because of the gathering awareness of what we were doing,” he said, “but Jerry’s mother had died in an automobile accident while we were recording
American Beauty,
and there’s a lot of heartbreak on that record, especially on ’Brokedown Palace,’ which is, I think, his release at that time. The pathos in Jerry’s voice on those songs, I think, has a lot to do with that experience. When the pathos is there, I’ve always thought Jerry is the best. The man can get inside some of those lines and turn them inside out, and he makes those songs entirely his. There is no emotion more appealing than the bittersweet when it’s truly, truly spoken.”

WITH
Workingman’s Dead
and
American Beauty,
the Grateful Dead hit a creative peak and turned an important corner. For one thing, the two records sold better than anything the group had issued before, and as a result, the band was able to begin working its way free of many of the crushing debts it had accrued. More important, the Dead now had a body of fine new songs to perform onstage for its rapidly expanding audience. With the next album, a double live set,
Grateful Dead
(originally entitled
Skullfuck,
until Warner Bros., balked), the band issued an invitation to its fans: “Send us your name and address and we’ll keep you informed.” It was the sort of standard fan club pitch that countless pop acts had indulged in before, but what it set in motion for the Dead would prove unprecedented: the biggest sustained fan reaction in pop music history. (According to
The New Yorker,
there were 110,000 Deadheads on the band’s mailing list in 1995.) Clearly, the group had a devoted and far-flung following that, more than anything else, simply wanted to see the Grateful Dead live. One of the aphorisms of the time was: “There’s nothing like a Grateful Dead show,” and though that adage sometimes backfired in unintended ways—such as those occasions when the band turned in a protracted, meandering, and largely out-of-tune performance—often as not, the claim was justified. On those nights when the group was
on,
propelled by the double drumming of Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, and the dizzying melodic communion of Garcia and Weir’s guitar’s and Lesh’s bass, the Grateful Dead’s verve and imagination proved matchless.