So Many Roads (28 page)

The signs that Pigpen was unhappy were growing. During the Festival Express tour in 1970 Cutler had sat down with a lonely-looking Pigpen, who confided how isolated he felt from the rest of the band, starting with his intense dislike of pot and acid. “He just didn't like being high,” Cutler recalls. “Most alcoholics don't. It shows them the true color of their walls. It's an unwelcome window into your own world. Maybe he found it difficult to perform on acid.”

In June 1971 the Dead had been invited to play at a festival in Herouville, France. When the concert was rained out, the Dead threw a party of their own at the château where they were staying and took a day trip into Paris. Given her familiarity with the language, Rosie McGee—who by then had broken up with Lesh—accompanied the band and saw up-close how Pigpen had changed and how distanced he could be from his band mates. On their way to the Eiffel Tower McGee asked whether he wanted to join them. “No, I'm going to stay here at the château,” he told her, and the rest of the entourage went without him. “If you're in that shape, you're on a downhill slope, but I don't think anybody knew that,” McGee says. “You don't think about that stuff, and you don't think it could happen. There was a general feeling that he was going to be fine.” After all, he, like most of the band, was only in his midtwenties; musically and physically, they all felt invincible.

“From a European perspective,” Dead manager Jon McIntire wrote in an artfully worded letter to overseas promoters before the Dead ventured there, “the reality of the Dead may at times seem somewhat suspect.” The Dead had given previous thought to touring the continent, but they'd never managed to actually do it. (They had played a festival in England in May 1970, thanks to Warner Brothers, but that show
was the extent of a European “tour” that year.) This time, though, the fantasy was becoming a reality. Cutler had proven his worth within the Dead organization by landing them more gigs in the States—and doing a far better job than anyone before of handling the logistics of a tour—but a trek through Europe was his cup of particularly British tea, and he began reaching out to promoters and others with whom he'd worked while planning the Rolling Stones' European shows. “Most of the people around the Grateful Dead couldn't organize a piss in a brewery,” says Cutler. “They could organize a nice party and acid trip but not a trip to Europe, so it never happened. They didn't know the logistics. You wouldn't expect them to. They were California hippies.”

According to Mountain Girl, the trip was dubbed “Cutler's Folly,” yet she says everyone knew it wouldn't have happened without the barking British tour promoter. “He knew the territory,” she says. “He knew the music business very well. It made him terribly valuable.” In the end Warner Brothers paid for the trip, providing it would result in another live album.

By the time the nearly fifty-strong Dead entourage arrived in London in April, the band was as prepared as they'd ever be to spend nearly three months away from home. The office had supplied everyone with neatly typed-out lists of hotel addresses and phone numbers, conversion tables, electricity comparisons (“Belgium—200 volts, 50 cycles”), even a list of UK shoe sizes for anyone who wanted to buy new ones on the trip. Cutler rented two trucks, one for the band's equipment and another for the recording gear and lights. Each gig would pay almost the same amount each night, $3,000, which Swanson was instructed to stash in bags in her hotel rooms until someone found the time to go to the bank.

After the bust in New Orleans two years earlier everyone had grown more paranoid about flaunting drugs in public, and they weren't about to make the same mistake in Europe as they had in the States.
According to one office employee, a “special amp” was used to hide the drugs, although Cutler would still demur about the details decades later. “Suffice it to say it wasn't on an individual person, and it got there,” says Cutler. “And there wasn't any brought home. Nobody was going to spend a few months in Europe without a joint. People wanted to get high. And we were quite clever.” According to Cutler, only he and Ram Rod knew exactly where the stashes were, what Cutler calls “a form of protecting people. Ignorance is bliss.”

Whether it was guitars, drums, or unusual amps, the men who'd be lugging it all around had by 1972 developed into a seasoned tribe of road warriors. The original crew, men like Ram Rod, Jackson, and Candelario, had been augmented by a few other rugged Oregon guys, Joe Winslow and Clifford Dale “Sonny” Heard. (The Dead's extended band or PA crew also included Cantor, sound mixer Bob Matthews, sound man Dan Healy, lighting designer Candace Brightman, and roadie Sparky Raizene.) Several years before the trip to Europe Ram Rod, then sharing a house in Oakland with Owsley, brought around a newcomer, a tall, wise-cracking, six-foot-four New Yorker named Steve Parish who had worked his way into the crew. Following a show at the Family Dog at the Great Highway Parish and Ram Rod returned to Oakland. Parish was thrilled to finally meet the now legendary Owsley, who was reading the underground comic
Odd Bodkins
and looking at Parish with initial hostility. (Given he was out on bail, Owsley was often looking over his shoulder during this period, wary of any newcomers.) Finally Owsley gave Parish some of his acid, and together they ingested it and bonded. “That was his way of checking me out,” Parish says. “In those days with the Dead you had to have a cast-iron mind and stomach. You were being tested all the time.”

During their first few years on the road Dead tours were haphazardly organized. “The band would get a call and say, ‘Can you make it to Florida in a day?'” Candelario says. “The shows were eight hundred
miles apart. And even if we drove seventy miles an hour, we'd barely get there. One guy would drive until he couldn't stay awake, and the next guy would step up. We daisy-chained ourselves across America.” For the passengers, the brutal drives were helped greatly by regular quantities of Owsley's acid, and the hard labor came with rewards: once a month each crew member would find a bag with three to four ounces of premium weed tucked inside his cubby at the Dead's office.

Around the country promoters learned to both respect and fear the crew—and to interfere at their own peril. At the first show he worked on with the band Connecticut promoter Jim Koplik was told he shouldn't drink anything backstage; he never knew if and when he would be dosed. Koplik reached for a can of Pepsi and inspected the top. Finding it untampered with, he popped it open and chugged some of it down. Within a minute he felt like he was in an elevator descending a hundred miles an hour. One of the crew had punctured the can with the tiniest of holes and dropped Owsley acid into it. “I thought I was real smart,” he says, “but they figured it out.” At a later show Koplik approached one of the crew onstage and introduced himself. Not believing Koplik was the promoter, the crew member picked him up and hurled him off the stage. Thanks to a recent rainfall, the grass was wet, so Koplik avoided serious injury. When Bill Graham dragged Koplik back onto the stage and verified who he was, the crewman smiled and made a joke, and Koplik knew he had to accept the situation and not protest any further. “I was really pissed at first, but I was smart,” he says. “I wasn't going after that guy.”

Europe presented a different set of challenges for the crew—twenty-two shows, starting at Wembley in London, followed by stops in Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Paris, Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Munich, and other cities before winding their way back to London on May 26 for four nights at the Lyceum. When it came time to load in, the centuries-old theaters and buildings where the band would be playing
offered challenges unto themselves; sometimes the entrance to a theater might be a small alleyway. The first planned show, at the Rainbow in London, had to be hastily rescheduled when the venue closed before they arrived; fortunately the Wembley Empire Pool, the original name for what became the Wembley Arena, was available, and the band pulled in about four thousand ticket holders for each of their two shows.

From the start at Wembley the crew made its presence known to any rambunctious Brits who were looking for trouble. According to Cutler, a few dozen rowdies started getting too boisterous, and two crew members decided to fend them off (and protect the band's gear). In what looked like a bad action movie—but for real—kids would come at them, the roadies knocking them down one way or another before another wave would come. As Cutler, who was watching, recalls, “It went from skirmish to localized battle.” To pacify the fans, Cutler distributed what he calls “liberal amounts of hash” to them. In Copenhagen for a TV broadcast an announcer preparing to introduce the band to the live audience decided he needed to stand atop a garbage can to be seen. To the crew's horror, he emptied the bin filled with half-empty bottles and papers right on the stage. “He turned it over and milk and orange juice and water leaked out all over our cables,” Parish says. “That was disrespectful to the max, man.” Parish yanked him off the garbage can just as the live broadcast began (“I didn't have to hit him—he was scared enough of me”) and the show started. Inside the recording truck Cutler told the stunned director, “You can't do that, man. You do that at your own peril.”

On one of the two buses that plowed through Europe—one for “bolos” and one for “bozos”—Garcia would often hang with Parish and Candelario; Parish in particular was a one-man comic relief and raconteur. Even when they weren't working the crew could raise hell to new levels. One night Cutler awoke in a brothel in Munich (or possibly Hamburg, depending on the source) and heard yelling and screaming.
Running out of his room and leaving behind his companion, he saw a naked Parish standing at the top of the stairs, holding aloft a fire extinguisher and preparing to bash in the head of the bouncer-type running toward him. (In his memoir,
Home Before Dark
, Parish recalls this incident as taking place during the band's second European tour two years later, but Cutler wasn't part of that expedition, so some confusion lingers.) “Come on, Hans, you motherfucker!” Parish yelled, promptly smashing the bouncer in the head with the extinguisher. The Dead crew ran out of the place before he'd woken up. It was, Cutler recalls, “a bit hairy.”

Unintentionally the crew embodied the way the culture around the Dead had changed since the band had grown from being a local San Francisco cluster to a touring beast. Band and crew alike had to be toughened up to endure the endless road trips. Whatever cozy vibes existed in the original community—and some in it would argue there weren't many to begin with—were soon replaced by a more rugged, more aggressive atmosphere, the culture of the rock 'n' roll road, and the changeover rattled more than a few. “The more effete section of the Dead musical community would roll their eyes and sigh deeply,” says Cutler. “But Bill and Jerry were used to hanging out with Hells Angels. Someone punches someone—big fucking deal.” When the band was in Paris Hunter jotted down what he dubbed “The Ten Commandments of Rock ‘n' Roll,” a sarcastic list of the outrages and bullying he was witnessing. The list included “Suck up to the Top Cats,” “Do not work for common interest, only factional interests,” “Make devastating judgments on persons and situations without adequate information,” and, most cutting, “Destroy yourself physically and morally and insist that all true brothers do likewise as an expression of unity.”

In Paris the paper found its way tacked onto a wall backstage, and some were less than thrilled with what they read. “What the fuck
is
this?” one of the crew barked, irked by its insinuations. According to
Mountain Girl, people would add to the list, but the message was the same: far from home, the dynamics within the Dead were adapting to a new era.