So Many Roads (27 page)

“We'll be with you just as soon as Pig finishes polishing his organ,” Weir addressed the crowd the following night, their last of four at the Lyceum. By 1972 little about a Dead show was predictable, but one aspect remained constant: the band members rarely, if ever, addressed the audience. The fans wouldn't hear any witty banter or rehearsed repartee. At the Lyceum those who sat at tables by the bar or were able to walk right up to the front of the theater—very possible because the show wasn't quite sold out—could focus on the unique sight of the Dead at that time: Garcia's dark, full-bodied beard; Weir's waist-length ponytail; and the white sheet with the skull-and-roses logo draped over the front of Pigpen's organ. The lack of chatter only added to their mystique, making them seem more enigmatic. The most anyone
could expect were a few dryly delivered, slightly halting remarks from Weir—although tonight's, about Pigpen's organ, was more meaningful than the several hundred in the Lyceum knew.

By the time the Dead had arrived in Europe almost two months before, no one could ignore the fact that Pigpen wasn't the same man he'd once been. The husky, head-banded kid from East Palo Alto was now an emaciated twenty-six-year-old with a narrow, triangular face that made his ears stick out more. Even his ever-present cowboy hat looked haggard. His arms were so thin that Kreutzmann's wife, Susila, part of the contingent of friends and family that accompanied the Dead across the ocean, could put her entire hand around one wrist.

As far back as the 710 Ashbury days Pigpen had been feeling out of sync as the band's music morphed and expanded, pushing beyond the boundaries of the blues and R&B. After shows Rock Scully would watch as Garcia would put his arm around a disconsolate Pigpen and say, “Pig, I know we lost ya, but here's what you can do,” after which the two men would hunker down in the kitchen and talk. “There wasn't room for the stuff he did when they were doing ‘Dark Star,'” Mountain Girl says. “He had to learn organ parts he didn't really want to play. He wanted to get back to doing ‘Smokestack Lightning' and ‘King Bee.' He was kind of grumpy about it.”

Thanks to its folksier, more approachable songs,
Workingman's Dead
had become their best-selling album: hopping onto an elevator with the band while they were on the road that spring, Scully told everyone, to their shock, that the record was number twenty-seven on the
Billboard
album chart, marking the first time they'd cracked the Top Forty. Now, mere months after they'd finished it in 1970, they were preparing to record yet another set of new songs. Garcia and Hunter were still on a music-and-lyrics binge: alone in a London hotel room before the sessions began, only a batch of parchment paper at his disposal, Hunter dashed off lyrics to several new songs, including “Ripple”
and “Brokedown Palace.” He and Garcia already had “Friend of the Devil”—more wild dogs, more running away, this time set to a folkish melody (co-written with John Dawson) that sounded timeless—and “Candyman,” the tale of a seductive bogeyman that had a slinky and subtly gripping melody. With Hunter, Weir, never the most prolific of writers, had penned what could be interpreted as his jubilant ode to Frankie, “Sugar Magnolia.” Lesh gave Hunter a tape with a melody and a precise vocal line, and Hunter wrote an elegiac, moving lyric (“Box of Rain”) about Lesh's father, who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and would soon pass away. The collaborative spirit extended to the moment Hunter, Garcia, Lesh, and Weir sat around a pool in Florida during one road trip. Hunter pulled out “Truckin,'” a lyric he'd been working on for months, inspired by their bust in New Orleans. Their guitars in grabbing distance, Garcia, Lesh, and Weir set it to music in about a half-hour.

To put these songs on tape, the Dead assembled in yet another new-to-them studio, Wally Heider's in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. Having worked with the Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, all friends or peers of the Dead, the assigned engineer, Stephen Barncard, had heard stories about the Dead at work, the legends of “heavy air” and similar head-scratching requests. Barncard steeled himself, but the Dead who showed up were rehearsed and professional, ready to work. “No nitrous, nothing whatever except a little weed,” Barncard says. “Not even much of that. They must have taken the pledge or something.”

Working more efficiently than ever, the Dead cut two or three tracks a day. The songs on the landmark album that came to be called
American Beauty
—which would be released in November 1970, only five months after its predecessor—retained the melodic Americana of
Workingman's Dead
but were slightly more produced and arranged. To ensure “Box of Rain” stood apart, Lesh told Garcia he didn't want it
to sound like the Dead. Lesh, who would be singing lead on an album for the first time, asked Garcia not to play guitar, perhaps pedal steel; Garcia declined and opted for piano, with Lesh on acoustic guitar, not bass. (David Nelson and Dave Torbert of the New Riders filled out the arrangement.) The switch paid off: “Box of Rain,” robust and earthy, with sunny harmonies from Lesh, Weir, and Garcia, was one of the most heart-warming songs the band would ever commit to tape.

Noticeably absent from the sessions, though, were several key players in the Dead. By mutual decision, Constanten had parted ways with the band early in the year. Often unable to hear himself on stage, still a practicing Scientologist who avoided hallucinogenics, Constanten had never completely fit in with the Dead. Early in 1970 Constanten was out, prompted also by an offer to write music for an off-Broadway show in New York.

Far more dramatic, at least in terms of the circumstances, was Hart's estrangement from the band. Soon after the completion of
Workingman's Dead
everyone learned that the rumors about Lenny Hart were true. As it turned out, he hadn't been forthright about their finances. Although the band had assumed he was socking away the cash to pay taxes, Hart was actually investing it in shady companies; then he'd run off with advance money given to him by Warner Brothers. When confronted by the band, Hart promised to pay back $70,000; he gave them one-seventh of that and left, taking whatever they had in their bank accounts to boot. (“They were like, ‘Oh, man, Lenny's karma will get him,'” says Cutler. “Yeah, right. Smoke
another
joint.”)

Mountain Girl remembers Hart personally delivering the news of Lenny's deception to her and Garcia at their house in Larkspur. “He came around in a terrible state of apology and depression and said that leaving the band was the only thing for him to do,” she says. “He was so ashamed and humiliated.” Hart never officially signed paperwork to resign from the Dead, but no one in the band reached out to him
either. “No one said anything,” Hart says. “I never said anything to them. It was one of those understood things.” With his new girlfriend, New York socialite Cookie Eisenberg, Hart began spending even more time on his funky Novato ranch, and he played only a small role in the making of
American Beauty
.

Between his father's betrayal and the rigors of being in the Dead, Hart began to collapse. “The road was hard for me,” he says. “It was getting really difficult with all the drugs and stuff. I did everything everyone was doing. I didn't go off the deep end, but I tried everything.” To those who visited the ranch during this period, the days of horse riding, gun shooting, and wild times suddenly evaporated. “Mickey went into a tailspin,” says Swanson. “The energy around the ranch was sad and confusing.” Garcia, Lesh, and Hunter were often spotted at the studio in his ranch, but the shadowy times around him would only grow darker in the years ahead. After a particularly harrowing show at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester in 1971—with a hypnotist from Long Island helping out—Hart was suddenly gone, and the Dead were now back to a one-percussionist band for the first time since the fall of 1967.

At that same series of shows Hunter announced he'd tired of trying to write songs with Weir, especially after Weir rewrote some of the lines to the party anthem “One More Saturday Night.” Never happy when anyone tampered with his words, Hunter removed his name from the song and handed the collaborative reins over to John Perry Barlow, now back in Dead circles after spending time in New York working on an unfinished novel. “When Hunter turned to me and said, ‘Why don't
you
write songs with him?' that was a big deal in my life,” Barlow says. “My official function up to that point was Weir's best friend and someone who would carry a box here or there and drive a truck. But definitely not a hanger-on either. So that was a huge day for me.”

With so much change in the air, it was perhaps too easy to overlook Pigpen's state. According to Barncard, Pigpen showed up only for one
session for
American Beauty
, when he sang lead on his one prominent vocal on the album, for the funky shuffle “Operator.” One of the first truly alarming signs of his health arrived a year later, in the fall of 1971, when he was rushed to Novato General Hospital with hepatitis and a perforated ulcer. Some of the Dead gave blood to help him; Pigpen's sister Carol and their mother came to visit and found him, according to Carol, “in good spirits.” His father, Phil McKernan, wrote an open letter to the fans: “A couple phone calls would sure help his morale—which is just a bit low.” Pigpen's friends knew little about his family back in Palo Alto and how his relationship with his father had scarred him. As Carol recalls, “We were not a family that talked about personal stuff.”

Pigpen's morale wasn't at all helped when the Dead recruited a new keyboard player while he was recovering from his hospitalization. Only twenty-three, Keith Godchaux had a scraggly beard and a sweetly doleful look on his face—like Garcia, he had the feel of an old soul—yet he was so shy that his new wife, Donna Jean, had to take it upon herself to introduce the two men at one of Garcia's side gigs at the Keystone. (Garcia, addicted to his guitar, was beginning to play local club shows with his new musical friends, bass player John Kahn and keyboardist Merl Saunders.) A former studio singer in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Donna Jean had sung backup on hits like Elvis Presley's “Suspicious Minds,” R. B. Greaves's “Take a Letter, Maria,” Neil Diamond's “Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show,” and Percy Sledge's “When a Man Loves a Woman.” Her Presley session was among her most memorable. “My back was turned to the door when Elvis walked in, and I knew he had walked in,” she told
Rolling Stone
in 2014. “He had that kind of charisma and a power about him.” During the sessions Presley listened to each singer separately and critiqued each one (“it was very intense,” she recalls), yet Godchaux says the singers kept their cool as much as possible. “When we were singing we were so
professional—we didn't bat an eye,” she said. She and the other singers only went nuts later, when they converged at a nearby International House of Pancakes, held up a Polaroid they'd taken with him, and screamed with glee for an hour.

By the early seventies, though, Donna Jean had decided to head out west; she knew she had to be part of the California music community. There she saw the Dead play at Winterland and, through mutual friends, met Keith, who'd grown up in Concord, a suburb east of San Francisco. At the Keystone Donna Jean more or less announced to Garcia that her husband would be the Dead's new pianist. “I told Jerry that Keith needed to be in the band, and I needed his home phone number,” she told
Rolling Stone
, “and I got his number!” (“Donna had a lot of moxie,” Mountain Girl says.) Garcia rehearsed with Keith Godchaux first, then with the entire band, and before they knew it, the Dead had a versatile pianist who could improvise, play boogie-woogie, or revel in delicate runs that would act as counterpoint to Garcia's leads. At the same time, Godchaux had a low-key personality that wouldn't upset the band's delicate balance.

When Pigpen heard the news that the Dead had a new member—not a replacement, just an addition—he didn't protest, but friends felt his disenchantment. “It was a pretty clear message to Pig,” says Swanson. “It was nothing he said, but it was clear he was broken-hearted. It was just a look he had. He was being eased out, in a way.” (Scully still used Pigpen's bad-boy image to the band's promotional advantage: at a convention of independent record distributors, Pigpen joined him, holding a funeral wreath that said, “Sell our records . . . or you're dead.”) Whether or not it was timing—the addition of Godchaux compensating for Pigpen's increasing absence or diminished onstage aura—their music began revving up as soon as Godchaux signed up. With him they became, as Lesh later wrote, “the turbocharged turn-on-a-dime Grateful Dead that only had been hinted at before.” During a series of
shows at New York's Academy of Music in early 1972 they unleashed, for instance, a wild, runaway-train version of “Casey Jones.”