So Many Roads (31 page)

Dead employees who ventured to the Cow Palace to see the towers—which looked like a skyscraper looming portentously behind the band—were taken aback by its mass. “It was, ‘We bad—yes!'” says Steve Brown, a former DJ and record distribution employee who'd seen the Warlocks and served in Vietnam before working for the band. “It was like a castle behind them. Hearing different pieces of music from different sections was awesome. You could hear Phil's bass column of speakers, and the vocals were full in the middle. We thought we'd hit on something that would be a new state of the art for everybody.” Another relatively new Dead employee, Andy Leonard, had caught a Dead show at Wesleyan in 1970—he and Barlow had been classmates—and recalled them arriving looking like “a motorcycle gang who'd stolen a bus.” What he saw unfolding at the Cow Palace was altogether different. Watching the road crew soldering and installing scaffolding, Leonard was reminded more of a circus than a standard rock show.

With the Cow Palace test under their belts, it was now time to cart the entire apparatus out on the road; Reno would be the first stop. As Lesh saw for himself, the monolithic structure behind him wasn't simply the embodiment of Owsley's fantasy of pure sound; it was also an
announcement to the world that the Dead were no longer small time; they had their own touring sound system, their own record company, and their own travel office, and they had more employees than ever. Given how many of their employees were friends, the operation was cozy in one way, a juggernaut in another. During a conversation between Garcia and
Rolling
Stone's Jann Wenner, the two leaders of their respective businesses compared notes on how many people were too many to employ and how to grow a business while retaining its closeness. “As long as you can remember everybody's name, you can do that,” Garcia told Wenner, “but once you start not remembering, you gotta stop.” But it was becoming harder to keep track of it all. Whether they wanted it or not, the Dead were now an industry.

Fourteen months earlier the band's new era had been ushered in by a stunning loss. On March 12, 1973, members of the Dead, along with friends, lovers, and overseers, congregated at the Daphne Funeral Home, a nondescript brick building off a main street in Corte Madera. Lying in a casket, his brown cowboy hat atop his head and a wilted yellow daisy his hand, was the startlingly emaciated body of Pigpen.

For at least the previous two years everyone had sensed Pigpen's health was precarious, that his body was beginning to break down from years of drinking. They all knew he'd been indulging since his teen years (although his sister Carol doubts it began at age twelve, as others have speculated). No one thought his lifestyle was harmful or detrimental to his health; it was simply what he did, how he lived his life. In the months after the 1972 European tour ended, Pigpen moved back into his family's house near Palo Alto and later into a home in Corte Madera. By then Veronica Barnard was gone (the common feeling was that he'd sent her away because he knew he was dying), and he was living on sunflower seeds and alcohol. Sometimes he would call the Dead
office or one of the wives just to have someone to talk with. Either to fulfill his artistic impulses or the contract for a Warner Brothers solo album or both, he began recording songs on a tape deck in his kitchen. Living down the road from him was Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane and now Hot Tuna. Casady didn't know his neighbor very well, but he had a few short talks with him that intimated things weren't going well for Pigpen. “I don't think he was tremendously happy,” he says. “He was watching the band move up, and he was no longer part of it. There was a lot of emotion involved.”

On February 11, 1973, Pigpen rallied himself. On stationery festooned with the cover art of
Europe '72,
he penned a letter to a friend in Manhattan. “Just figured I drop you a line & let you know I'm still alive,” he wrote. He said “the rest of the boys”—the Dead—would be playing on the East Coast the following month, but he wouldn't be joining them. “The Doc says I can't make it, to [
sic
] fuckin' cold anyhow. This time I got to recover
right
or else the whole trip could fall thru. So I'm coolin' and playin' it safe, can't afford to get sick again!” Flashing some of his old feistiness, he said he was looking forward to another visit to New York: “NYC does have some foxes & I'm lookin' to get me some! . . . I'll see you as soon as I make it East again.”

Then on March 8 Pigpen's landlady called his sister Carol to tell her the news: her brother had been found dead on the floor of his bedroom on Corte Madera Avenue, a woodsy back road, by band accountant David Parker. Pigpen was only twenty-seven. At his dining room table McIntire took on the grim task of calling each band member and giving them the news, as Sue Swanson sat by his side, holding his hand for support. Mountain Girl had already read it in the paper and was weeping. Pigpen's official cause of death was an internal hemorrhage; an autopsy revealed that his weight had dropped from 250 pounds to 160. Somewhat confusingly, the band issued a statement attributing his death to “a massive intestinal collapse after he got home from playing our 1972
tour through Europe” and added he was under the care of specialists during the summer and fall: “Pig Pen [sic] told us last Tuesday that he felt fit enough and ready to return to his post as bluesman with the band.” Condolence letters from fans arrived from as far away as Berlin and Hamburg.

Other than prerecorded organ music, no songs filled the funeral home in the chapel in Corte Madera. The two hundred mourners assembled for the traditional Roman Catholic service were evenly divided between Pigpen's family, all in suits and looking very straight, and the Dead and their extended family—a mélange of band and crew members, Hells Angels, leather jackets, and girls in belly-revealing midriffs and tie-dye. There would be no testimonials or speeches. Few in his family heard any of the classic Pig stories: the time his pressure cooker exploded and a goopy, inch-thick mix of rice and vegetables covered the walls or the time a stoned guy at one show began harassing Swanson in front of the stage, and Pig walked over and kicked him with his boot.

Following a round of Hail Marys, the priest intoned, “May he rest in peace and pass safely through the gates of death.” At one point Garcia leaned over to Rock Scully and said, “Don't ever let them bury me in an open casket—this is just awful.” Garcia, who avoided funerals and was visibly affected, finally rose up to walk outside, and standing near the wide, two-lane avenue in the suburban neighborhood, he was approached by several reporters. “It was a good rap,” he told them. “But it was out of character. He wouldn't have wanted it this way.” When it was finally over most of the entourage retreated to Weir's house in Mill Valley for a riotous wake.

About ten days later Phil McKernan, Pigpen's dad, wrote a forlorn, deeply heartfelt letter to the band, absolving them of their role in his son's declining health. The typed letter thanked the band “for what which you all gave Ron that is beyond price and of far greater value
than I ever gave him when he was with us in his younger days: you gave him (or, perhaps, he found with you) something which many of us never find: a purpose and meaning for life.” He told the Dead that he and Pigpen had met up (“after some years of ‘second-hand' communication”) and that, to his surprise, Pigpen had forgiven his father years before. From his son, Phil said that he learned about forgiveness, “bearing physical suffering and mental anguish without complaint,” and “love of one's work.” The fact that the father and son had grown closer, according to the letter, only made the missive more heartbreaking.

At his home studio in Novato, Hart, still in self-imposed exile (he didn't attend the funeral either), began listening to the tapes Pigpen left behind to see whether an album could be made of them. But between the sound reverberating off the kitchen tile and what Hart calls “the forty versions of ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,'” the tapes didn't yield much. “It was just him real drunk, having a good time,” Hart says. “We all thought, ‘Jesus, there could be some gems in here.' But no.”

The Dead rarely took the stage at the times printed on their tickets, and thanks to the Wall of Sound, Reno was no exception. An hour and a half after the supposed start time the musicians finally emerged at Mackay Stadium to take their places, looking like stick fingers compared to the colossal columns of speakers behind them. By then a wind that had been threatening to pick up all day finally kicked in, and Scully watched as one of the hanging voice clusters above Kreutzmann began to shake and sway. It took a lot to unnerve the Dead's unflappable drummer, but Kreutzmann looked up with what Scully thought was a rare concerned expression. Sharp-eyed Deadheads may have also noticed subtle changes in the band's appearance. Weir's ponytail was gone, chopped off the year before, and he'd begun dressing sharper;
that night his white flared jeans were the band's most visual component. Garcia had shaved off his beard, but Lesh now had one, which made him look older and heavier than he was.

Given the monstrous system they were taking out of the Bay Area for the first time, it was unintentionally fitting that the set began with Chuck Berry's wry travelogue “Promised Land.” Instantly Lesh reveled in what he heard roaring above him. “It was a brilliant stroke,” says Lesh. “The sound was absolutely clear and coherent for a quarter-mile. And
loud
.” The system delivered a note fifty feet tall, which sailed over the heads of the band like a jet engine soaring overhead yet wasn't brutally deafening to the musicians.

Not everyone on stage was so taken with the Owsley towering musical inferno. The system presented a new set of challenges to Donna Jean Godchaux, who by this point had been singing with the band for two years. Her presence was still a jolt to some Deadheads: “Not everybody in the audience was used to Donna, ever,” says Parish. “There were a lot of people going, ‘Why is she singing?' The guys in the band liked it, though—it helped with the vocals.”

But from her first appearance with them at Winterland, she had found it difficult to find the right pitch onstage with the Dead. “I was a studio singer, never singing off-key,” she told
Rolling Stone
. “I was used to having headphones and being in a controlled environment. Then, all of a sudden, I went to being onstage with the Dead in Winterland. Everything was so loud onstage.” At Mackay Stadium the Wall of Sound presented her with a new stage monitor system and the inability to hear herself. As a result, her singing could often be—or sound—off-key. (Only in the oddball world of the Dead could its strongest singer, the one so talented she had shared studio time with Elvis, sound out of tune.) The Wall of Sound was almost as much of a shock as the night she'd walked onstage and saw that Garcia had done away with his iconic mustache and beard, exposing a chinless, less
distinct face. (Godchaux's own striking features, from her waist-long hair to her Southern-belle smile, offered fans something else to look at.)

As Donna Jean struggled to deal with the newly augmented amplification, the band dug into a set that included previews of a few new songs, “Ship of Fools” (Hunter's veiled reference to the increasingly fractious Dead scene) and “U.S. Blues,” both part of an album that would be their second in a row for their own label. As early as 1969, just after the release of
Aoxomoxoa
, both band and management were starting to grow weary of Warner Brothers. Even though the label gave the Dead an almost unprecedented amount of creative leeway, especially after the disastrous collaborations with Dave Hassinger on their first two albums, the Dead weren't feeling the love for Joe Smith or his company. They went along with all of the label's creative marketing schemes, including a “Pipgen look-alike contest” in ads for their first three albums. “It was about ‘pay attention to the Grateful Dead,'” says Warners' Stan Cornyn, who came up with the idea. “I thought of these weird-looking people, especially Pigpen—he was even hairier than in the picture. About a hundred people wrote in.” Cornyn says the band never complained about the ad.