So Many Roads (34 page)

“Do I see a guy from La Honda out there?” Lesh called out to the thousands in Reno, seemingly recognizing a familiar face amid the throng in front of him.

Even if it were true—a pal from the Kesey or Acid Test days near the front rows—those days never seemed further away than they did now. The Wall of Sound and the swelling fan base were indications, but so was the repertoire. The bulk of the set, that night and during other performances during this period, was largely culled from the previous few, post-Altamont years. In Reno “Sugaree” was taken at a sultry, turtle-race pace; Garcia took a solo on “Tennessee Jed” that dug deeper and hit lower notes before he made his way back to his signature high, sweet pitch. (At New Jersey's Roosevelt Stadium in August an epic, nineteen-minute version of “Eyes of the World” showed how their collective musicianship could expand and swell like the roaring of the tides.) “China Cat Sunflower” and “The Other One” were played in Reno, but little else from the previous decade popped up. Now that Pigpen was buried, the band's early days, when he was such a prominent part of their shows, had left with him.

Whether it was the wind, the just-out-of-the-box sound system, or incoming burnout, the music also had more than its share of frayed edges. There was a raw, jumpy “Beat It on Down the Line” and a careening but inspired “Truckin'” in which Weir forgot some of the lyrics. Garcia accidentally switched up a few of the lyrics to “U.S. Blues.” During “Greatest Story Ever Told,” one of the songs from Weir's
Ace
album, Donna Godchaux's voice wandered out of sync and out of tune as she grappled with the dual-microphone setup and the Wall of Sound itself.

The arrival of a new, more industrialized Dead led to inevitable casualties. In early 1974 Cutler parted ways with the band after a tense meeting. Cutler (who by then had launched his own booking agency, Out of Town Tours, to handle the Dead, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and other acts) claims the Dead wanted to avoid giving him a 10 percent cut by working with another party for half that rate. “That was just an excuse,” he says. “I thought, ‘I'm not gonna do it, simple.' I'd
had enough. I was tired and I'd done my bit. I loved the band and the music, but I hated the politics—a bunch of hippies with nothing better to do than plot against one another rather than get on with the collective thing. There was more politics around the Dead than around the Stones.” Given all the managerial types in their midst, which by now included McIntire, Rakow, and Garcia's then-solo manager, Richard Loren, the world inside the Dead was indeed beginning to grow tangled and territorial, and Cutler rubbed some the wrong way.

Owsley Stanley, too, was becoming increasingly out of place in the larger Dead operation. After the group bust in New Orleans in 1970 Owsley finally wound up in jail, and during that time he'd had only fitful interactions with the band. When he was locked up at Terminal Island, south of Los Angeles and near Long Beach, the Dead had rumbled in one day to play a concert in the prison's library. Band and crew found a seemingly clean and healthy Owsley, who introduced them to his fellow cons and helped them, as always, set up the PA. (To Parish's shock, no one at the prison searched the Dead's trucks and gear; the crew was just waved into the compound despite being, in his words, “psychedelized up.”) As they were setting up, Owsley told Parish, “I've got to come back on the road with you,” but he still had to serve additional time at Lompac, a low-security federal prison northwest of Los Angeles, where friends smuggled in tapestries, décor, and cassette copies of the
Europe '72
shows. Owsley was finally released from prison in 1972 after serving two years in federal jails, and before long he was indeed back in the Dead's employ.

While Owsley was in jail the band hadn't been able to gauge how he was holding up. At Terminal Island Weir was so busy preparing for the show that Bear's state of mind was hard to figure. “We got a little time with him, but I didn't get a great hit on what it was like to be in prison,” he has said. “I was too busy getting the gig together.” But once Owsley was a free man the impact of incarceration became more
apparent. To Mountain Girl Owsley was “completely changed, and not in a good way. He was dark and dour. He'd lost most of his sense of humor. Prison was hard on him.”

Back on the road with the Dead, Owsley was still Owsley. After checking into a hotel room, he'd unscrew every lightbulb, replace them with blue or red ones, and light candles. But adding to the difficulties was the role—or lack of a clearly defined one—Owsley had when he hooked back up with the Dead. To erect the Wall of Sound over the course of a tour more hired hands had been brought onboard, and they were rowdier and more boisterous than the band's original core crew, and each had a specific task. In the early days Owsley had a habit of tweaking the system—say, the EQ settings in the monitors—right before show time. The more tightly synchronized, professional Dead apparatus no longer knew how to handle such idiosyncrasies. “Bear would get these brilliant ideas, but the road was not necessarily the place to make that happen or test that out,” says Candelario. “I learned so much from him, but we were more mechanized and more uniform when he came back out, and it was hard for him.”

Owsley's quirks—enraging roadside chefs with his desire for super-raw meat, lathering himself up with creams in his hotel rooms—were intact. But, again, they were now seen less as quirks and more as distractions. “I'd be like, ‘We're leaving for the airport, come on!'” recalls Parish, who always remained fond of Owsley. “He was at his own pace. There was Bear's world and then there was everybody else's.” As Weir saw it, “We had a number of new faces on the crew, and Stanley was an acquired taste. A lot of new folks, especially the most country-bumpkin ones, could not relate to this guy. He traveled at a different altitude. There was a fair bit of constant tension there.”

To writer David Gans, Owsley later complained there was “a lot of coke and a lot of beer and a lot of booze and a lot of roughness” in the 1974 Dead operation, adding, “I was very uncomfortable.” And yet
there wasn't much anyone could do to resolve the situation, since the Dead themselves were growing increasingly wary of laying down the law to their hired help. It was soon clear to everyone that Owsley's days with the band were numbered. Like Pigpen tangentially, he would be another casualty of the larger, more lumbering—and largely more institutionalized—machine the Dead had become. When the Reno show wrapped up an hour later with “Sugar Magnolia,” that machine tore itself down and began the move to the next town and the next outdoor stadium.

Weir, Lesh, and Garcia (back to camera) working up
Blues for Allah
material at Weir's home studio, 1975.

PHOTO: ROBBIE TAYLOR/THE BARNCARD COLLECTION

CHAPTER 8

MILL VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, FEBRUARY 19 TO MARCH 4, 1975

First came the jokes about what they would do if the cops showed up at their houses while something illicit was taking place. But on the night of February 19 they knew what they had to do: tap into their collective consciousness and create newfangled songs and soundscapes.

For a decade they'd tried making records in just about any way or place they could. And even with the occasional nitrous oxide tank at their disposal—even when they were fully prepared, as with
American Beauty
—the experiences rarely sat well with them. In the confines of an airtight studio, with a clock ticking, they tended to grow bored or distracted, and the absence of an audience left them feeling uncertain about what they'd come up with. They'd waste time or, as often happened with Weir, have trouble finishing songs in time to record them. But now they had Weir to thank for finally making them feel at home while cutting a record.

At the urging of Frankie, then still his girlfriend but not his wife, Weir had built a studio in his home in Mill Valley, which he'd purchased in 1972. Life at the Weir home was a scene of post-hippie domesticity, complete with a loving dog, Otis. He and Frankie had recruited Rondelle Cagwin, a kind-faced twenty-two-year-old friend of the band (she had met Garcia at one of his Keystone Berkeley solo shows) to cook, clean, and help run their house. To Cagwin, Frankie was “someone who embraced life with everything she had—she loved poker and one-liners, and Bobby gained a lot from her music-business sense.” Weir struck Cagwin as shy and sweetly spacey, a “beautiful man inside and out,” yet she also sensed how deeply he'd been affected by being adopted. She'd known others who'd been taken in by other families, and in Weir she felt some of the same guardedness. To Weir's specifications, Cagwin pressed the creases in his jeans.

Attached to the house, above a garage, the studio was equally idiosyncratic. Visitors had to navigate up a narrow, twisty road, then drive up a ramp that had room for only two cars. (To some in the Dead camp the incline felt very Evel Knievel, especially because he'd used a ramp for an unsuccessful jump over Snake River Canyon the year before.) Designed and constructed with the help of Stephen Barncard, the long-haired, bespectacled, and detail-oriented studio engineer who'd worked on
American Beauty
, the studio, called Ace's, had a skylight, a triangular-shaped control room not big enough for the whole band, and an open, if cramped, space for the musicians to play. Adding to the homey, tree-house feel of the place, the recording console, at Weir's request, was made of wood. Seeing the array of old-fashioned knobs used on the recording machines, Lesh, ever the science-fiction buff, exclaimed, “This looks like Buck Rogers!”

The neighbors weren't thrilled by the low-Richter-scale thumping that oozed out of Ace's, especially from Lesh's bass, and a few called the cops to complain. They were also less than pleased to look out their
windows and see members of the Dead's crew parked at the bottom of the street—smoking weed and awaiting word on what gear the band might need to have hauled up to the studio. “If someone wanted us, they'd come down and yank our chain,” recalls one crew member. “But we stayed out of trouble.”

Inside Ace's, the windows blacked over and no hint of street noise to trouble them, the Dead were oblivious to all of it. That February night, once they'd gathered up their gear and settled into chairs, Garcia began wailing high notes on guitar, with Kreutzmann and then Lesh eventually joining in, making for a clattering power trio. Excitedly Garcia told them about listening to his new favorite album, the Beach Boys'
Smiley Smile
. Lesh soon pulled out an acoustic guitar and began strumming melodies that he openly admitted had been ripped off from old folk songs. Even the ever-particular Lesh had to agree the Dead were onto something new and that it couldn't have come at a more welcome time—the end of an exhausting and often frustrating few months that could have easily spelled the end of the band.