So Many Roads (25 page)

The most important healing might have been within the band itself. Coming on the heels of a fractious year, the album, according to Scully, also served to remind the group that everyone had something to offer. “
Live/Dead
got everybody to realize,” he says, “how special the band was and how great they were.” After the turmoil of 1968 the Dead needed such affirmation.

As a new decade loomed, the Dead weren't merely coping with internal friction and record-company collisions; in their own vicinity the business of rock 'n' roll was intensifying. Helms, the promoter of the Family Dog on the Great Highway, felt like a kindred spirit in many ways. Long haired, bearded, and taken to wearing sandals, Helms had relocated from Texas to the Bay Area in the early sixties and, once there, championed local musicians like the Dead (and his Texas friend Janis Joplin). Helms was now running the Family Dog, a loose-knit group whose goals—part commune, part rock-show production company—embodied the growing duality of the scene.

Locally Helms's rival was Bill Graham, who would never be mistaken for a hippie. Graham's life story made even Garcia's or Pigpen's feel cushy. Born in Germany, where his mother was gassed to death during World War II, he'd had to flee to France; at age ten, thanks to help from the Red Cross, he was on a boat bound for the States. Raised by a family in the Bronx, he served in the Korean War and, after taking a stab at an acting career, relocated to the Bay Area, where he began working for the San Francisco Mime Troupe and with the Dead at the Trips Festival. Graham had been appalled when the Warlocks changed
their name to the Grateful Dead, and he and the band had been engaging in a particularly intricate dance. Graham was bullheaded, uncompromising, and driven, words that could also be used to describe the collective Dead. Determined that bands at his shows hit the stage on time, Graham could often be seen walking around backstage with a clipboard. The Dead, meanwhile, kept trying to dose him, even recruiting some of their so-called old ladies to put acid on their lips and kiss him. (Ever vigilant, Graham told them to kiss his hair instead, but he was eventually done in by a loaded soda can.)

Helms and Graham had produced shows together at the Fillmore Auditorium, home to an Acid Test and benefits for the Mime Troupe, but they'd had a falling-out over what Helms would call a “breach of faith” involving a booking for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Helms began presenting bands, including the Dead, at the Avalon Ballroom, while Graham booked the Dead at, ironically, a space they'd tried running themselves. By 1968 the Dead had already grown so wary of promoters that they made their stab at running their own enterprise. For roughly the first half of the year the band—in a business partnership with their peers and friends in the local rock 'n' roll community, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Jefferson Airplane—had taken over and rented out a two-thousand-seat theater in the downtown San Francisco area. Although the Carousel Ballroom was the Dead's personal sandbox, the enterprise wasn't built on particularly solid ground. When it came to booking bands, they couldn't compete with the likes of Helms and Graham, and thanks to a lease agreement that McGee calls “unworkable” ($15,000 a month), the Carousel ran aground soon after it opened. To the Dead's initial irritation, Graham, who was in search of a new space anyway, took it over and eventually rechristened it the Fillmore West. When Helms lost some of his permits for the Avalon in late 1968, he shifted his operation to the former Playland at the Beach, renaming it the Family Dog on the Great Highway.

As much as the Dead liked Helms (and the Avalon, which was funkier and felt far less formal than the Fillmore Auditorium), the promoter wasn't always able to pay them on time. Ultimately the Dead had to admit Graham knew how to put on a show (and reward them financially for it), and eventually they too were working for him at the Fillmore West. For a series of shows there in June 1969 they were paid $5,000. The same month they played Graham's sibling theater in New York, the Fillmore East, and walked away with $7,500. The Dead often exasperated Graham by not always welcoming him as a member of the family, but the band was also pragmatic. “They were smart enough to know that you use what you need from whomever is offering it,” says Kip Cohen, who managed the Fillmore East. “You don't have to hang out with them.”

The Carousel might have been a bust, but it did yield one useful outcome: thanks to the operation's do-it-yourself ambience, many of their friends and coworkers pitched in, and the sight of everyone from Matthews and Cantor to McGee and Frankie helping with the sound system and concessions lent an air of community to the operation. That blueprint would stay with them for the rest of their career. Lenny Hart, Mickey's oddball father, was now running the operation in his strange, somewhat disorganized way. As a result, Jonathan Riester, a road manager they trusted, had left, and taking over that role was Jon McIntire, a refined and diplomatic Illinois native who'd attended college in San Francisco and had first become part of the Dead's circle while working at the Carousel. Starting with his musical tastes (childhood memories of listening to his mother play Chopin on the piano at home), the blond, finely dressed McIntire was as cultivated and diplomatic as Lenny Hart was larger than life and untidy. (Rock Scully was still helping to run the operation as well.)

Although Laird Grant had long ceased being their roadie, plenty of others were willing to lug around instruments and amplifiers for the
Dead for minimal pay, if any at all. By the fall of 1969 the Dead had the core members of the road crew that would largely stick with them for the next three decades. Shurtliff, a Kesey associate who hailed from Montana and Oregon, had been among the first to sign up. Called Ram Rod (after cracking “I am Ramon Rodriguez Rodriguez” when the Pranksters needed someone to “ramrod” people into a car), Shurtliff wasn't physically imposing—he was muscular but of medium height and build—and was a man of extremely few words. Another Oregonian, Donald Rex Jackson, stood over six feet tall, his tree-branch-long arms extending out from broad shoulders, his mustache and shoulder-length hair lending him a Marin-cowboy air.

Joining up with them at the Carousel was Bill Candelario, the Oakland-born son of a welder who'd lived in nearby Alameda until he was a teenager. Acerbic and swarthy, Candelario was the sort of ready-for-anything outsider always attracted to the Dead. By 1967 Candelario was prowling Berkeley. Soon he found himself hanging around—and working at—the Carousel, helping Jackson and Ram Rod haul in equipment; the welding skills learned from his father came in handy as well. “We did whatever you could do,” Candelario (soon nicknamed Kidd) says. “Whatever was going on, you just jumped in and helped. I was doing everything I could, like helping Ram Rod and Jackson load in up three flights of stairs, no elevator.” As they all learned, working for the Dead could be grueling, back-breaking labor, but there were few places they'd rather be, and the perks of drugs and women were unlike anything they'd seen before.

The rituals were manifold. When Sam Cutler later took over as their tour manager they'd converge in the dressing room and share a few joints. Back in their hotel rooms after shows another part of the ceremony began. Piling in, they'd play back the tapes of the night's
show—recordings supplied by none other than Owsley himself, who by now had left and returned to the Dead fold after an uneven ride of his own over the last three years.

The Dead and Owsley had fallen out in the middle of 1966. “My memories are that the band was uncomfortable with having us too involved with them while actively making acid,” says Tim Scully, “while [Stanley] remembers the parting being more over equipment. Both were probably factors.” In December 1967, just two months after the 710 bust, Owsley had been arrested when police found him with LSD as well as STP, and he was charged with conspiracy to manufacture and sell illegal drugs, since LSD was now illicit. Stanley coughed up the money for bail, but as his case dragged on in the California courts, he rejoined the band, recording their shows at the Carousel Ballroom after Dan Healy, their soundman, temporarily departed. In search of audio vérité, Stanley wanted to reproduce the sound, the
experience
, of whomever was playing at the theater. Rather than electronically alter the sound by using equalizers, he'd reposition or change microphones in order to achieve what he considered the purest, least electronically tainted recordings.

When the Carousel went under, Owsley began joining them on the road, mixing their sound and taping their shows. To maintain his anonymity, especially now that he was on bail, he resurrected his childhood nickname, Bear. Whenever the band had technical issues onstage they'd normally yell out “Owsley!” resulting in a room full of people turning around and staring at him. Using “Bear” ensured no one would spot him. He also refrained from having his picture taken because, as Hart says, “He was down by law, against the law at the time.”

To the band's frequent vexation or amusement, Owsley was a far from standard soundman. Sometimes he'd mix the sound right onstage, standing amid the Dead as they played. During one show at Winterland, a vintage San Francisco ice-skating rink Graham also began using
for concerts, everyone had left the venue except Hart and Graham—or so those two had thought. Hearing someone sobbing somewhere in the empty venue, Hart and Graham made their way back onto the stage, where they found Owsley talking to the amps as if they were living creatures. “He was saying things like, ‘I love you and you love me, and how could you fail me?'” Hart recalls. “He was addressing these electronics as if they were a person.” At first Hart and Graham couldn't help but chuckle between themselves at the sight, but they soon realized how serious Owsley was. “He cared so much for it,” Hart says. “He was so into it.” They both stopped laughing.

Whether they were amused or frustrated by him, no one could deny Owsley was one of them, and not simply because of their shared lust for psychedelics. Like the Dead, Owsley wanted to do things his way, on his schedule, and with total control. (And like the Dead, he also rubbed some people, both inside and outside the Dead world, the wrongest of ways.) Owsley was now as much a part of their mythology as their lengthy jams, Garcia's newly bushy beard, or the group-bonding photo on the back of
Aoxomoxoa
, taken by Thomas Weir (no relation to Bob) at Olompali. (Contrary to later rumor, future rocker Courtney Love was not among those photographed.) Yet Owsley's most enduring legacy during this period were a logo and his tapes. Because the Dead had begun playing many festivals—after Monterey Pop and Woodstock, multiday gatherings of bands and freaks were popping up around the country—the road crew needed help distinguishing the Dead's gear from everyone else's backstage. During a drive Owsley saw a street sign—“a circle with a white bar across it,” he would later write—and thought a lightning bolt instead of a white bar would stand out. With the help of artist Bob Thomas, what emerged was a skull with a bolt inside it—“electricity, lightning, sparks,” as the US Trademark Office filing read—that was first used in August 1969 (but not trademarked until seven years later).

Dating back to his earliest association with them, Owsley had also convinced the Dead to tape their shows. The recordings weren't intended merely for historical archiving: they were a form of self-examination, a way for the band to take a careful look at what they'd done correctly or incorrectly over the course of each show. “It was, ‘Hey, dude, you wanna play X, Y, or Z here instead of A, B, and C?” Lesh recalls. “Our music demanded that, and the Bear saw that and made sure we understood how it was necessary. Sure enough, it was very fruitful during the first five or ten years we were doing that.”