So Many Roads (23 page)

By late 1969 Frankie and Weir had hooked up once she heard he was available. Her first-ever nude bathing took place with him when the band played a discombobulated, wiring-challenged set at Woodstock that August (one that, as with Monterey Pop, wouldn't end up in the film of the event). Some of the women in the Dead scene didn't know what to make of Frankie at first. “She was a mysterious gal,” says Mountain Girl. “Nobody could quite figure her out. She was able to move through social situations with a lot of grace without revealing much about herself.” Still, the consensus was that she became a stabilizing influence on Weir. “She was good for Bobby in a lot of ways,” says Swanson. “He was going through that period when he was doing his macrobiotic, when he was pretty spacey because of the diet. She brought him out of that and brought him back.” In due time a British tie-dye artist, Courtenay Pollock, made his way to the West Coast and moved into the ranch dubbed Rukka Rukka at Frankie and Weir's invitation. With her ever-present nose ring, Frankie was, to Pollock, “hip, cool, and connected”; she not only helped install him as the Dead's official tie-dye artist (his creations would soon grace the front of their amplifiers) but introduced him to other nearby bands.

In late 1967, shortly before the treks north began, the Dead started the process of making a second album, once again in Los Angeles. This time, though, the music wasn't coming together as fast as it had on
The Grateful Dead
. The songs were freakier, weirder, and at times more mannered than those on the first album, and not surprisingly, the initial sessions, again with producer Dave Hassinger, yielded “only fragments,” says Lesh, who openly pressed for more and more console-blowing experimentation. Helping his cause was his former roommate and music-college pal Tom Constanten. Although he'd joined the Air
Force in 1965, Constanten never lost interest in music, and after being sent tapes of the Dead's new songs, he used a furlough break to drive to LA from Las Vegas, where he was stationed. “They wanted my bizarre avant-garde stuff,” Constanten says, and he was more than happy to oblige. In the studio, as Hassigner watched, Constanten—or TC, as he came to be known—would insert small 10-cent coins from the Netherlands into the strings of a piano to attain a cowbell-like sound or put a gyroscope on the piano to make a clattering noise.

Work eventually shifted to a studio in New York, which famously proved to be Hassinger's last stand. The producer grew particularly agitated when it came to the band's vocals, which rarely achieved pitch perfection. “Nobody could sing the thing,” Hassinger told Garcia biographer Blair Jackson. “And at that point they were experimenting too much in my opinion. They didn't know what the hell they were looking for.” When Weir suggested they try to imitate the sound of “heavy air,” Hassinger had finally had enough. As Lesh recalls with a laugh, “Hassinger literally threw up his hands and walked out, mumbling.” Adds Constanten, “Hassinger was proud of the recordings he'd made [with other bands], which were very doctrinaire. These were not like that. He had the same mentality as Joe Smith, that we were uncivilized, unwashed ruffians.”

The incident wasn't so amusing to Warner Brothers, especially when Hassinger called label head Smith to tell him he didn't want anything more to do with the Dead after spending plentiful (and plenty unproductive) amounts of studio time on the new record. “It was terrible—they were so undisciplined,” says Smith, who was already experiencing buyer's remorse a year after signing the band. “You're in the studio and the clock's running. If you want to do this at home, go home and fuck around. But don't do this at a recording session with all the equipment and engineers.” Smith was so exasperated that he did something he'd never done up to that point in his career: he wrote
a letter to the band expressing his outrage about what he called their “lack of professionalism.” “Your group has many problems,” he wrote. In the letter, addressed to Rifkin and sent to 710 Ashbury, Smith was particularly displeased with Lesh: “It's apparent that nobody in your organization has enough influence over Phil Lesh to evoke anything resembling normal behavior. You are now branded as an undesirable group in almost every recording studio in Los Angeles. . . . You guys ran through engineers like a steamroller.” The group responded by scrawling “Fuck You” over the first page of the letter, which irked Smith even more.

The Dead were now without a producer and had only portions of an album, but from the near debacle came inspiration. They resumed work with a fresh and knottier twist: “The idea dawned on us: ‘Well, are we a live band or not?'” Lesh recalls. “‘Let's take live footage and mix it and fuse with those studio sessions and create a tapestry or collage.' Which was so ideal, so avant-garde.” The resulting album would blend live and studio recordings within the same song—especially “Alligator,” where the sound of Pigpen onstage, urging the audience to dance, would be combined with studio takes.

Anthem of the Sun
, as the album was called, shaped up to be one of the strangest and most singular rock albums of the time, a swirling, in-and-out-of-focus tapestry that would be the closest the band ever came to capturing its early, feed-your-head live shows in a studio. Guitars evoked Renaissance fairs or wrapped themselves around songs like snakes. Tempos shifted. Moments of languid beauty would collide with snippets of squalor, including noises that evoked the sound of car engines turning over. (“New Potato Caboose,” home to the latter sounds, was also the only time Constanten would remember sharing an organ with Pigpen in the studio: TC played the high notes, Pigpen the lower ones.) Few albums of the time would dare open with a seven-minute-long track like “That's It for the Other One,” a group collaboration that incorporated lead vocals from both Garcia and Weir and lyrics that
referenced Neal Cassady and an exotic woman Weir had bedded. The song was an example of the collaborative spirit that ran through the album, with Garcia even writing some lyrics. “None of the songs were written completely solo,” says Lesh. “That was a true collaboration in every sense. I never had as much fun in the studio as I did on that one. Everything just happened at the right time.” It would remain Lesh's favorite Dead album.

Even though they eventually finished the album, releasing it in July 1968, drama was never terribly far away. Warner Brothers' Cornyn recalls a meeting with the band during the Los Angeles sessions at which some of them complained about one of their two drummers. When Cornyn said, “Well, we've got a lot of drummers here in this town,” the band simply stared at him with no response. He wasn't sure whether they were just airing their differences or thought he was asking something preposterous.

One of the first signs that the Dead's world was becoming a tribal survival course came during the New York sessions for
Anthem of the Sun
. Bob Matthews, whose expertise with recording gear had given him a vital role in the organization, openly expressed his unhappiness about working with Hart, refusing to set up his drums one day. “I didn't think he belonged in the band,” Matthews says. “Billy is a phenomenal drummer. He's more than one drummer. So I was making a statement I had no right to make. Phil said to me, ‘Bob, what's going on? We're asking you to set this guy up.' And I said, ‘No, I can't do it, man—I feel very strongly about this.'” The band had no choice but to fire Matthews and send him on a plane back to the Bay Area. In their pursuit of the best possible music, the fuzzy community atmosphere would only go so far.

It didn't take long for Garcia to finish singing the first verse of “Dark Star,” but words weren't the point. As they arrived at the eleventh
minute, the instrumental interplay again took over, with Lesh's bass now wrestling for control of the song. In the way Garcia would take command but then retreat back into the song's haze, “Dark Star” spoke volumes of the band's peculiar dynamic, the way Garcia didn't always want to lead. But Lesh wouldn't be steering “Dark Star” for long. In fact, no one would. Moments later the song essentially crumbled to nothing and the instruments largely dropped out, leaving little but an increasingly diminishing hum of feedback and then, finally, silence. At twelve minutes all that could be heard were dribs and drabs of organ and a dollop of bass. The music was no longer jazz or rock but a variation of new-music minimalism, to the point where, at twelve minutes and forty-five seconds, no one was playing at all.

Eventually the organ—manned by Constanten, now a full-on member of the band—began stirring, like a vampire from a coffin, soon joined by Garcia's counterpoint guitar. The tone shifted from the languorous beauty of the introduction and the deadening tones of the midsection to music that hinted at horror-film soundtracks, building to a crescendo coupled, at fourteen minutes, with splashes of cymbals and elbow-nudging percussion. Garcia's and Weir's guitars locked in together, Garcia zipping up and down the fret board as if playing scales (something he would do almost every night before shows, even arriving at the venues early to work on his fingering). Kreutzmann and Hart began thumping and pounding more, with cymbals or sticks. Everyone was finally together, but the music itself was in freefall. The original melody had long been annihilated, sacrificed at the altar of wherever they were going with their instruments that night.

Many times during the last two years the transition from R&B and blues covers and zippy originals like “The Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion)” to their on-the-fly jams was easier for some in the band than for others. By the middle of 1968 Pigpen, the most traditionally minded musician of the bunch, was already grappling with the band's
increasingly improvisational focus, and Weir's guitar chops were uneven and still a work in progress. For Garcia and Lesh the situation was growing increasingly frustrating, exacerbated by the drawn-out recording of
Anthem of the Sun
that put everyone's skills under a powerful microscope. “Jerry said he was mad at Bob and Pig,” Scully recalls of the early months of 1968, after
Anthem of the Sun
had been wrapped up. “Danny and I decided to ignore it. They didn't know what they were talking about.”

But the interpersonal relationships within the band were becoming tangled. Lesh could be particularly assertive and edgy in his drive for perfection, to the point where the band sat him down one day and told him to pull back on his grousing. (Lesh and Weir had a complex rapport, starting with their differences in age—Lesh was a seasoned twenty-eight, Weir still an impressionable twenty—and widely varying musical abilities at the time.) Lesh's approach to bass also required the other players to compensate for the lack of solid bottom. “Phil wasn't fulfilling the role of a standard bass player,” says Hart. “He was putting the one on the sixteenth note
off
the beat, instead of putting it on the beat where we could get into a groove, so Bill and I had a rhythmic problem with Phil. He was taking his liberties, and we had to concentrate on keeping it together. There were all these interrelated musical things that were rising because we were into new musical space. It was the growing pains of us becoming the Dead.”

Garcia and Weir still had the same dynamic—older brother and younger sibling—and the way Garcia kept an eye on Weir struck many in the Dead world as a rare instance of Garcia willing to be in charge of anything or anyone. In the pre–710 Ashbury days Garcia always tried to make sure Weir got home on time, especially when he was still living with his rock-wary parents in Atherton. Still, Garcia could be exasperated by Weir's inability to play a steady rhythm, an outgrowth of Weir's budding interest in staking his own ground. (Contrary to rumor, he'd
never officially taken lessons with Garcia, and for a reason: “If we were going to be working together, I needed to carve out another path,” he later said.) At home Mountain Girl would listen to Garcia vent. “There was a lot of frustration with each other at the way some people would pick up material and execute it well, what the perceived level of commitment was,” she recalls. “Jerry would get impatient with [Weir and Pigpen], that they were behind where he wanted to go. People wanted to be successful faster than success came to meet them, and everyone wanted to blame somebody else.” Hart blames Weir's musical formlessness at the time on the youngest member's macrobiotic diet, and to Hart, Pigpen only seemed to want to play shuffles and “wasn't really participating or showing up.” At a rehearsal as early as 1966 Kreutzmann openly complained about Weir's “asshole guitar.”

By the summer of 1968 Weir and Pigpen were squarely in the bull's eye. “It was me who encouraged Jerry to think about those issues,” Lesh admits. “I was more frustrated than him at first. Maybe he wasn't listening in the same way I was.” Finally Scully heard from Lesh and Garcia that a meeting needed to be called, either to fire Weir and Pigpen outright or at least give them a warning. “I was asked to deliver the news,” Scully says. “I said, ‘Are you kidding?' It was the upshot of everybody's frustration over the recording process and what we were going to put on these next albums.” With Owsley along to record the proceedings, the band congregated at the new Potrero Theatre, a shuttered movie theater now being used as the band's rehearsal space.