So Many Roads (18 page)

After seeing Hendrix light his guitar on fire, Grant looked at Garcia and said, “This ain't fun anymore, man—this is a job.” Garcia just shrugged and told his friend, “Bon voyage,” and Grant was gone the next day. Although he always enjoyed hanging with Garcia and the
other members of the Dead, Grant had reasons for leaving the band and the area. To him the situation at 710, especially the out-front pot smoking, was begging for trouble, and given that he'd already logged time behind bars, he wanted nothing to do with a situation that could send him back there. “The philosophy and the freedom of doing things that we set out to do—they were definitely going to have a thumb put on them,” he says. “And I didn't want to be anywhere near that. I knew what was gonna go down.” Grant jumped onto his bike and rode off to New Mexico before something “strange,” as he calls it, could happen.

On this October morning—and nearly every other one—music crept up on 710 early. As always it would start with Garcia, who would rise at dawn and immediately start practicing scales. By now his hair was long and thick, falling on either side of his head and separated in the middle, deflecting attention from his small chin. To Grant, Garcia's musical discipline had its roots in his friend's brief stint in the army seven years before. “After the army he was a little more disciplined,” Grant says. “Prior to that it was, ‘Oh, well, the sun's up.'” Mountain Girl knew Garcia was talented from the first time she saw him practicing banjo in Palo Alto, but living with him brought his focus into sharp relief. “It took me a while to find out what an obsessive person he was,” she says. “Rehearsing constantly and talking and smoking and practicing.” The two would watch Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kantner drive by in his Mercedes and want to scream “sell out!” But at the same time, they were envious of the Airplane's burgeoning fame.

Creatively, the eighteen months since the heyday of the Acid Tests had been a relentless parade of practicing, getting high, scrounging for money, and watching Scully and Rifkin scrounge for gigs and in general attempt to transform the Grateful Dead into a professional enterprise. To Mountain Girl and others, Scully and Rifkin clearly wanted
the Dead to make it even as both were learning how to be managers, but Garcia himself was becoming increasingly proud of the band's abilities. On January 11, 1967, he wrote to a fan who'd sent a letter to him at 710; in it, he summed up each band member's strengths. Weir was “a hard-working young musician with fantastically good time,” and Garcia described himself as having “spent three years as a bluegrass banjo player. Switched back to electric guitar when the band formed.” Most of their songs were “traditional,” but he added, “We write our own melodies.” He admitted that Lesh had only been playing bass for a year and a half but that he had “absolute pitch.” In an early indication of the direct level of communications that would exist between the Dead and their fans, Garcia criticized the band's earlier show in Sacramento, calling it “far below standard,” then signed off, “Captain Trips.”

In the middle of 1966 they assembled at yet another studio in San Francisco to cut a single for an indie label, Scorpio, and the time they'd spent wood-shedding in Los Angeles announced itself: Pigpen's rough-house voice and stabbing organ were both stronger, dominating their makeover of the twenties blues song “Stealin',” and Garcia's extended lead on the group-written “You Don't Have to Ask” showed signs of pushing the boundaries of the traditional guitar solo. They attempted “I Know You Rider” once more, but with a telling change; in a sign of another future direction, the merest hint of a country lick popped up in Garcia's lead. As with their Autumn Records session the previous fall, though, the recordings still felt embryonic, and only a limited number of copies of a single—“Stealin'” backed with “Don't Ease Me In”—were released in August.

The Dead had little time to be discouraged—their lives and career would, in fact, change for the better that same month. At the urging of DJ Tom Donahue, Joe Smith, who ran Warner Brothers Records, flew up from Los Angeles to check out the band at the Avalon Ballroom. Having come straight from dinner, neither Smith, in a suit, nor his wife,
Donnie, in pearls, were sartorially fit for what they were about to see. “No one my age had ever seen anything like that,” Smith recalls of the music and the fans who sprawled out over the ballroom. “People painting bodies and lying on the floor and smoking, and of course the light shows.” The band was playing, as Smith recalls caustically, “one of their forty-minute drone sets.” The label head was even less enchanted when a guy in the crowd asked his wife to dance: “I said, ‘Oh no, no,
no
,' and I sat her down with a security guy.”

Despite his reservations about the band, its approach, and the people they attracted, Smith knew a mushrooming market when he saw it. Warner Brothers and its sister label Reprise, launched earlier by Frank Sinatra, were far from in vogue and needed desperately to catch up. Smith met with Scully, Rifkin, and their newly enlisted lawyer, Brian Rohan, promising them specialized marketing, as if they were a country act—“and they bought it,” Smith says. In the fall a deal was hammered out, giving the band a $10,000 advance and ownership of their song publishing. Scully also negotiated what were called jazz rates—getting paid by the length of the song, not the number of songs on an album—which he'd learned from getting to know musicians like Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond while working as an usher at the Monterey Jazz Festival.

The signing was the culmination of an astonishing nine months in which the Dead had progressed from being the Acid Test house band with hardly any original material and a sound very much in flux to a tighter rock band with a contract at the record company that was home to Frank Sinatra and Peter, Paul & Mary. As Smith admits, the arrangement benefited the label just as much. “That was one of the two or three most important signings in all those years,” he says. “It changed the nature and opinion of the record company. We were out in front. It was important to indicate we were more than Dean Martin and Sinatra—that we were hip.”

In January 1967 the Dead returned to Los Angeles, but under more welcoming circumstances than the year before. The making of their introductory album was scheduled for RCA Studios, where Garcia had helped out the Airplane on their breakthrough,
Surrealistic Pillow
. They hardly got off to a promising start, though: just before they flew down, Garcia stepped on a nail and had to spend part of the time on the plane and in the studio in a wheelchair. The producer assigned to the task, Dave Hassinger, had an impressive résumé—he'd worked with the Airplane, the Rolling Stones, and others—but the Dead soon realized they wouldn't have quite the creative control Warners had promised them. “It wasn't exactly a fun trip,” says Mountain Girl. “The expectations were so widely different. The band wanted to be in-your-face outrageous, and the producer wanted pop that would sell—and who could blame him? There was more discussion than recording. It was pretty uncomfortable.”

To the band's consternation, guitar solos were edited, and other songs were trimmed; Mountain Girl witnessed more than a few people in the band walking out of the studio in disgust. It didn't help that band members popped Ritalin and possibly diet pills, according to one source. Speaking to
Rolling Stone
writer Michael Lydon about it two years later, Garcia remained philosophical about the sessions: “At the time it was unreasonable to do what we do, which would have been one LP, two songs or one song,” he said. “Nobody would have gone for it. So we made the first record of songs we did.”

Despite their frustrations, they managed in just under a week to record and mix a full album that took listeners on an abbreviated but still enlightening trip through their past and into the present. The songs ranged from their Mother McCree repertoire (Jesse Fuller's “Beat It on Down the Line”) to tracks that recalled their primordial days as a garage band (“Cream Puff War”), the latter driven by Pigpen's amusement-park organ. There were blues (“Good Morning Little
School Girl”) and folk rock (“Cold Rain and Snow,” which found their group harmonies more amply developed). From the drugs they took or the tension between band and producer—or all of the above—the songs had a brittle, jittery energy, as if the Dead were hurtling through their repertoire as quickly as possible. Pigpen's soul-vamping finale for “Good Morning Little School Girl” leapt out, but it was their charged version of “Viola Lee Blues” that hinted at their future. More freeform and less constrained than the other songs on the album—it ran nine minutes long—it had a swirling, psychotic-breakdown midsection that took its cues from their Acid Test days. “The Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion),” recorded later in San Francisco when it was clear they needed something approaching a single, was twisted-kicks garage rock with crackling Kreutzmann drums and a sing-along chorus that made a concession to a hook.

As soon as Warner Brothers released the album,
The Grateful Dead
, in March, the band made it clear that compromise wouldn't be a regular part of their relationship with the label. Smith, label ad-copy writer Stan Cornyn, and other executives at the company flew up for a long-infamous launch party at Fugazi Hall in the North Beach section of San Francisco. Cornyn walked in to encounter what seemed like a giant tub in the middle of the room, filled with dry ice, water, and half-naked women. “I wasn't prepared for it, and Joe wasn't prepared for it,” he recalls. Smith made a toast: “I wanted to say something like, ‘We at Warner Brothers want to welcome the Grateful Dead to the world,' and Rock or Jerry said, ‘We want to introduce
Warner Brothers
to the world.'” Everyone laughed, and in late May Warners ponied up enough money to send the band on its first-ever trip to New York, which included shows at the Central Park Bandshell and the Stony Brook campus.

During that trip they settled into Café au Go Go, the hot-spot club on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, for over a week's worth of
shows. Despite its hokey name, the Au Go Go was one of the jewels of the Village; in the previous months it had hosted Jefferson Airplane, Richie Havens, Tim Buckley, and the Mothers of Invention (at a small theater upstairs from the club). In the audience to see the Dead one of their nights was Barlow, who by then had moved east and was studying at nearby Wesleyan in Connecticut. Although Barlow and Weir had communicated by mail for a while after their boarding-school days in Colorado, Barlow had lost touch with his friend and only heard later that Weir was in a band called the Grateful Dead.

Now, three years after last seeing each other at school and in Wyoming, Barlow was confronted with a very different Weir at the Au Go Go. The short-haired, somewhat stocky football player of school days had been replaced with a nineteen-year-old who had what Barlow calls a “thousand-yard stare” and longer hair than he'd ever seen on a man. Weir also seemed barely verbal. “He was completely different,” says Barlow, who didn't know at the time that Weir had been off acid for nearly a year. “He seemed like a complete space cadet.” But given the new direction Weir seemed to have in life, none of those new attributes necessarily seemed like setbacks.

With Snitch trailing her, Mountain Girl made her way to the kitchen of 710, which was painted in green and orange colors that lent it the feel of a pumpkin and avocado patch. As she watched, he grabbed some of the newly strained pot from a colander on the counter (other times they kept it in an empty aluminum pie pan). The colander was the same appliance everyone used to wash their lettuce, and it did double duty of filtering out the seeds from mangy piles of weed. Mountain Girl watched as Snitch rolled a few joints for himself. She didn't need to reach up to one of the highest shelves in the kitchen cabinet, where, wrapped in waxy cellophane paper, was a squat brick of pot, one of its
corners torn off to make the latest batch. The brick looked as if someone had simply yanked the plant out of the ground and crushed it down into a few pounds, seeds, stems, and dirt included.