So Many Roads (32 page)

During this time, the Dead were already considering a switch to Columbia and its boss, Clive Davis, yet they remained with Warners, especially after Lenny Hart absconded with their funds. Their irritation with the label became the topic of ongoing conversations. “Joe [Smith] must stop holding us back,” read notes from one discussion in 1971, which added that Warners should “broaden the base on [the] underground.” Over the course of fifteen hand-written yellow-pad pages, the band, with Scully leading the charge, rattled off their expectations for their corporate parent. Most significantly, they wanted advances on side projects to be raised from $35,000 to $50,000, which would include a solo album by Pigpen. The band felt sales of their albums were thirty to fifty thousand copies below what they should be and groused there
was “nothing new in WB approach”; the label's “response is too slow,” the notes concluded.

For their part, Warner Brothers was growing tired of the Dead and its chaotic operation. “We'd run our course with them,” says Smith. “They didn't want anything to do with us. They didn't want anything to do with
anybody.
They annoyed me so much. I'm seeing them sell out at concerts—why can't I get something on tape that would carry through with that?” The Dead had enhanced the label's reputation from the start, but by the time they'd packed up for the European tour in 1972, Warner/Reprise was now home to Neil Young, Van Morrison, Alice Cooper, and Black Sabbath, and it no longer needed the credibility boost provided by the Dead. Smith was also furious when Garcia released a side project—
Hooteroll?
with keyboardist Howard Wales—on another label.

When word began circulating that the Dead may want to find another home, Smith wasn't concerned. “I made no effort to hold onto them,” he says. “If James Taylor had said that, I would've fought like crazy. But the Dead weren't that important to us in any way, other than they'd helped our image.” The Dead's modest album sales and the fact that they hadn't yet managed a major hit single also made them feel commercially expendable. Smith had also never fully warmed to the band on a personal level. The thought of spending generous amounts of time with the Dead was about as appealing to Smith as having a scalding-hot fork jabbed into his cheek. “The Dead once asked me, ‘Why don't you invite me to your house?'” he says. “I said, ‘I don't want you on my
street!
'”

“Who can (on exec level) keep us informed and take our case,” Scully had asked at one meeting. Although they would come to have mixed feelings about the results, neither he nor the band had to look far. They'd known Ron Rakow, a Wall Street stock trader who'd relocated to San Francisco, since the time he'd lent them money for a
sound system. Rakow, who'd befriended Scully and Rifkin, had been in and around their community ever since, helping work out the deal for the short-lived Carousel Ballroom experiment (their first foray into a band-run business). A New Yorker, Rakow was the opposite of a Marin County hippie, and proudly so. “He talked a mile a minute, but he was really sharp, and he was accepted,” says Vicki Jensen. “He was part of the show. Rakow was supportive of them when they had hard times, and he was magical in his own way. He spun quite a thing.”

Sensing a new business opportunity, Rakow felt it was time for the Dead to take control of their music and destiny, and the answer lay in starting a record company of their own. Jefferson Airplane and the Beatles, among others, had launched their own labels, but each was distributed by another, larger company, which wouldn't be the case with the Dead. Rakow typed out his “So What” papers, outlining a strategy for the band to make and promote their own records and also making the case against Warner Brothers. As part of his research he'd dropped into a bunch of record stores in towns where the band was playing in 1972 and wrote down the quantity of Dead LPs in each. He reported back to the band that more than eighteen stores didn't have any at all. When
Time
magazine ran a story on the state and business of pop music in February 1973, Garcia, who hadn't yet officially parted ways with Warners, was quoted as saying, “I resent being just another face in a corporate personality. There isn't even a Warner ‘brother' to talk to.”

In the Dead's offices at Fifth and Lincoln in San Rafael, a house the band had rented several years before, Rakow's do-it-yourself idea was greeted with some wariness. Cutler was opposed. “I viewed all of it with great skepticism,” he says. “Whomever had the loudest mouth and could persuade Jerry would get their hands on the wheel of the good ship Grateful Dead.” McIntire was also unsure. The other members of the band were dubious or indifferent to the record company plan.
According to Lesh, no one in the band could stand the thought of dealing with all the minutiae that would be involved with any aspect of the record business.

Garcia would have little of that dissent; he was uncharacteristically irked at McIntire when he heard the manager was putting up roadblocks to the deal. Given the death of his father and its impact on his family, the idea of an in-house record company that would bond everyone together, with Rakow as requisite enforcer, appealed to Garcia. “We were so bad at business,” says Hart, “and Rakow seemed to know and care and wanted to do something. Brilliant, or semibrilliant, ideas.”

Rakow took Garcia to a preliminary meeting for a loan with First National Bank of Boston, which had previously invested in movie production. Both men charmed the employees. (When one of the executives said his daughter wanted to play clarinet in school, even though the head of the music department recommended violin, Garcia replied, “I have kids—any time they express any interest in anything, I let them do whatever they want to do.”) Briefly, the idea surfaced of distributing the records by way of ice cream trucks. “If somebody sent in a card and said, ‘Here's $4, I want a new Dead album,' we'd send them a receipt, and they'd flag down a Good Humor truck and give them a coupon and get a record,” explains Andy Leonard, the Barlow college friend and photographer (and new Weir acquaintance) who'd been hired at the label to help with distribution. “We'd pay the Good Humor trucks to carry twenty Dead albums a day. It wasn't crazy talk. It was a delivery issue.” They never actually contacted Good Humor or any other such company, but according to Leonard the idea, which kicked around for a few weeks, wasn't dismissed as quickly as legend has it. Rakow went as far to fly to New Jersey to discuss it with John Scher, an East Coast promoter who was increasingly becoming part of the Dead's inner circle.

Once the First National Bank of Boston loan came through along with a cash infusion from Atlantic Records, which would handle the foreign distribution, Grateful Dead Records became a reality, and some of the first employees showed up for work in April 1973. (The deal wasn't announced in the music trades until late August.) Pigpen had died only the month before, and his passing, says Steve Brown, “cast a pall over the company—we started under a cloud.”

The label was, naturally, unconventional; employees would recall going into meetings in Rakow's upstairs office at Fifth and Lincoln and finding a Hells Angel or two sitting in. At the outset many were in awe of Rakow's ability to set up the business. “In those days nobody lent money to rock bands,” says Mike (nicknamed Josh) Belardo, the KMPX DJ who had interviewed the band at Hart's ranch in 1970 and later took a job at the label. Brown, one of Rakow's first hires, witnessed for himself the way in which Rakow's approach to business phone calls lit a fire under Garcia. “Rakow would have someone on the hook, doing the [aggressive] Bill Graham thing, and Jerry would be sitting back enjoying it,” says Brown. “He loved this alter-ego bad-boy thing. Jerry couldn't bring himself to be that guy publicly or even privately, so watching someone else do it was fun for him.”

If the Dead had seen themselves as paragons of a new, looser society in the previous decade, the launch of Grateful Dead Records (and its sister label, Round, devoted to side and solo projects) was proof that they were adapting to altered times. A few years later, in 1976, Tom Wolfe would dub the seventies the “Me Decade,” and the Dead's new venture unintentionally tapped into the emerging solipsism of the decade—the sense that after the dreams of the sixties had died, it was time to hunker down instead of tearing down the walls. Rather than rely on anyone else to help them through the malaise, they would do it all themselves. Even the title of Grateful Dead Records' first release,
Wake of the Flood
, implied rebuilding after disaster. (According to a
Garcia interview in
Creem
magazine at the time, the working title was
We Are the Eyes of the World
.)

Wake of the Flood
came three long years after the Dead's previous studio album,
American Beauty
, an eternity in that day and age. Recorded over the summer at the Record Plant in Sausalito and released in the fall, the album felt at times like a free-for-all: Weir's three-part “Weather Report Suite,” a gorgeous composition blending an instrumental opener with alternately melancholic and rousing subsequent sections, was the most ambitious piece he'd ever attempted, and Keith Godchaux sang his first lead vocal on a Dead album (“Let Me Sing Your Blues Away”). The mood of the album was relaxed, not as airtight as that of
American Beauty
and
Workingman's Dead
; if the band felt restricted in any way while working for Warner Brothers,
Wake of the Flood
signaled the pressure was off. Some of the songs—especially “Eyes of the World,” which swayed like a gentle island breeze, as well as parts of “Weather Report Suite”—felt ready to be opened up for jamming onstage. “Stella Blue,” the lyrics of which Hunter had written at the Chelsea Hotel three years before, contemplated “broken dreams and vanished years,” and Garcia set them to a languid melody that added an extra degree of ache to Hunter's words.

The album was too haphazard at times, especially in the sequencing: only the Dead would start such an important album in their career with a modest, slinky excursion like “Mississippi Halfstep Uptown Toodleloo,” and placing the ballads “Stella Blue” and “Row Jimmy” next to each other almost canceled out the power of each. The album would have been better served had it started with “Eyes of the World” or “Here Comes Sunshine,” a slow dazzle of a song with a chorus that sprouted open like flower petals.

As the initial release on an independent label run by people who'd never attempted such a thing,
Wake of the Flood
had its share of launch problems. Garcia told several different artists to devise cover art, then
had Leonard deliver the bad news to the ones whose illustrations had been rejected. To acquire bags of virgin vinyl for pressings, Leonard had to risk life, limb, and potential jail time by driving a pickup truck into a particularly seedy part of Mexico. But the worst news was about to crash through their office doors. One day Leonard took a call from one distributor: the copies he'd received of
Wake of the Flood
sounded so bad, he said, that kids were bringing them back to the stores. Leonard thought it was a hustle—retailers wanting records sent to them for free—until he asked yet another grousing store owner to send him a copy of the supposedly flawed record. What arrived in the mail at the Dead office was a truly fake
Wake
: a cover that amounted to a mimeographed photo of the artwork and an LP with music that sounded as if it had been copied from a cassette, complete with hissing noises. They'd been bootlegged.

Theories about what happened ran amok in the office: Was it one of the major labels trying to make the Dead look bad? Or was it something slightly more sinister? One source says the label was told in advance by shadowy figures in Brooklyn that any release on Grateful Dead Records would be bootlegged and that they would have no choice but to go along with it—but, at least, it wasn't personal and the bootlegging would be limited. As if to prove the theory, the problem suddenly stopped and the fakes went away.

But in the ensuing chaos, which also included an unlikely-for-the-Dead visit from the FBI, the Dead lost a sizable chunk of money; they sold four hundred thousand copies of
Wake of the Flood
but could have sold even more without the bootlegs. “Here we are, a new fledgling company—we don't have the budget for someone to steal 25 percent of our income,” says Belardo. “We almost didn't survive.” Months later Leonard and McIntire, who were sharing a house in Bolinas, wound up with a box of
Wake of the Flood
fakes. They were so infuriated with the whole mess that they pulled out one of the ubiquitous guns that were
part of the Dead world, set up the albums in a row outside, and blasted them to pieces. One of the shot-up
Wake of the Flood
bootlegs remained in Leonard's possession for decades to come.