So Many Roads (39 page)

Whether they liked it or not, the band settled into preparing for the recording of their Arista debut. More so than probably any previous studio collaborator, Olsen put the band through its paces, making them rehearse and replay parts until they had them down as tightly as possible. Normally the Dead would have bristled, but not this time. “Keith was cracking the whip, but we liked it—it made us sharper,” says Hart. “We became much more disciplined. We were trying to make a real record for Clive.” Slowly the songs began taking shape: “Estimated Prophet,” Donna Godchaux's ballad “Sunrise” (Garcia had strongly encouraged her to write a song for the album), and Lesh's “Passenger,” the most rock-rooted song he'd ever written for the band. The pieces of music Garcia had previewed for Olsen had transformed into an epic Hunter-Garcia suite called “Terrapin Station Part 1,” blending folk melodies, percussive interludes, and orchestration that, when finished, proved the Dead could pile on production without losing their essence. Once Olsen was confident the band had enough material for a record, the Dead moved into a motel in Van Nuys, close to Sound City, the mangy but first-rate studio where Olsen was working. And thus began the process of attempting to turn the Dead into a professional-sounding rock band, a chart competitor with the likes of Boston, ELO, and other lushly produced FM rock bands.

Not surprisingly given the match of producer and artist, the recording didn't start promisingly. Over the course of the first month the band insisted on playing simultaneously, but to Olsen, the result was a mess. Lesh's bass would often go out of tune. Keith Godchaux was mostly asleep on a couch in the studio; he'd wake up, play his part, and pass out again. Olsen felt the band had nothing usable after the first few weeks, and the band grew tired of hearing the producer's refrain—“not good enough.”

Olsen, perplexed or frustrated himself, estimates that 25 percent of his time was devoted to rounding up the band: just when a few of them
were ready to get to work, others would wander off. And even when he managed to gather them together, they didn't always stay in the same room for long. “Then it was, ‘We've all gotta go to the bathroom' or this and that,” says Olsen. “They would just
drift
. It was just taking forever.” With the Dead's first round of 1977 concerts coming up fast, Parish and Ram Rod seized the moment and took control. One night in February the band bogged down in percussion overdubs. The roadies came up with a novel idea: nail the studio door shut. “We were under the gun, and it was taking
so
long for those overdubs,” says Parish. “It was a joke, but it kept the guys in there, and they couldn't get out. It was a symbolic nailing that really worked.” (Hart thinks they also hammered it closed because drummer and singer Buddy Miles, working in an adjacent studio, was stealing cymbals when the Dead weren't around.)

Gradually the project began to mesh. To Hart, Olsen was “too small to hit,” so the drummer, among the most particular of the Dead in terms of sonic tweaking, let the producer have his way just enough. Olsen was impressed with Garcia's seemingly endless concepts for arrangements and guitar parts: “Jerry would have twenty ideas for everyone. He'd say, ‘I got a bunch of ideas,' and we'd do them all.” Godchaux's “Sunrise,” a languorous ballad, required yet another musical pivot on the Dead's part; the soft-rock rhythm and feel of the song didn't come naturally to the band. Visiting Sound City one day, Allan Arkush—who recalls seeing a very young Annabelle running around and Garcia so wrapped up in album production that he didn't have time to play with her—heard “Terrapin Station Part 1” played back over the sound system and was impressed with how vast and far reaching it was.

In a strange way the finished album,
Terrapin Station
, was even odder than
Anthem of the Sun
: the sound of the Dead with some of its rough edges sanded down. They finally got around to cutting a studio version of “Dancin' in the Streets,” the Martha and the Vandellas hit (usually called “Dancing in the Street”) they'd been performing
since the Pigpen days, but the song had been lent a disco beat fitting for the times. Within the band the reaction to the finished work was mixed. With tempered enthusiasm, Lesh later called the album “a fairly successful effort” that “varied wildly in terms of material.” Hart lost it when Olsen overdubbed strings over one of his parts in “Terrapin Station Part 1” without telling him. “I wanted to strangle Keith,” Hart says. “He took out all the timbales and put on those stupid strings. He thought the strings would supersede a beautiful unison part by me and Garcia. I couldn't believe it. After that we never really trusted Keith again. He tried to put a dress on the Dead, and it didn't fit.”

At the Novato house of his Jefferson Starship friend David Freiberg, Garcia played a test pressing of the album for Betty Cantor. The two had a close, jocular rapport that allowed her to amiably bust Garcia's chops (she also regularly cut his hair during this time), and the production on “Terrapin Station Part 1,” particularly the orchestration, gave her a perfect opportunity to rib her friend: “Oh, that's something Keith [Olsen] put on,” Garcia said, less than excitedly. “I don't know.”

Garcia began “making excuses,” she recalls, and Cantor replied, “That ain't gonna fly with me, dear!” she said. To her, Garcia didn't seem all that happy with the finished album, but, she says, “He was trying to rationalize it somehow.”

How the album would fare in the marketplace was another matter. When Olsen sent an early copy to Davis, the Arista boss labeled it, says Olsen, “a good compromise.” (Davis, Olsen says, also instructed Olsen to make Weir's first Arista solo album,
Heaven Help the Fool
, more commercial than
Terrapin Station
, and starting with a Richard Avedon glam-boy cover photo, they did just that.) The Dead didn't have much time to sit and ponder what they'd just done. Once the album was in the can they would see how all the task-master studio work would pay off on the road, where the Dead always felt more at home and their songs always sprung to life.

May 8, 1977, started as a warm spring afternoon but turned into a chilly night, and several inches of snow blanketed the campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The late-spring flurries didn't keep away five thousand Deadheads who crammed into Barton Hall, the school's field house. “All right now,” a newly bearded Weir told them about halfway through the show. “We're gonna play everybody's favorite fun game—‘Move Back.' Now, when I tell you to take a step back, everybody take one step back.” Weir had to say it a few times, and bit by bit the fans shuffled toward the rear to alleviate the crush at the front of the stage. At least one other potentially hazardous crowd issue loomed. Arriving at the show from his Jersey office, Scher had to recruit security to make sure stoned Deadheads didn't accidentally plunge into one of several waterfall-like gorges that are part of the school's exquisite campus. “If you were too fucked up and walked off the edge of the gorge,” recalls Scher, “you were dead.” As a result of that last-minute chore, Scher missed the first twenty minutes of the show.

But once the playing began, little was amiss. All the hours the Dead had logged in the studio with a chart-minded producer had transformed the band into a monstrously strong unit. At Barton Hall “Morning Dew” was even more cathartic than before, “Deal” had an extra bit of strut in its step, and “New Minglewood Blues” growled. The relentless pace that Kreutzmann and Hart had been put through by Olsen resulted in tight, synchronized beats that gave the songs the firmest of backbones.

Later, beloved Dead archivist Dick Latvala would scribble excited notes on tape boxes of each show, especially Barton Hall. But that performance was just one of many highlights of an inordinately smooth-running group of shows. “That was just a magic year,” says Parish. “All the gears meshed together for us at that time.” Over the course of two tours, an Eastern-rooted swing in the spring and a Western and
Midwestern trek in the fall, the Dead played some of the sharpest, most consistently enjoyable shows of their career. Whether in college gyms, theaters, or arenas, they'd rarely sounded so well oiled, playing what Donna Godchaux called “regular shows like regular people did.” At the on-campus coliseum at the University of Alabama they dug into a slow, mournful “High Time” and added dramatic flourishes to “Looks Like Rain.” A beautifully burnished “Wharf Rat” in Hartford showed how they'd matured as a band without losing their loose and easy charm. During a particularly strong “Sugaree” in St. Paul, Garcia discharged a wild flurry of notes.

Fans also heard a new combination introduced onstage early in the year: “Scarlet Begonias” segueing into “Fire on the Mountain,” written during a jam at Hart's studio as Hunter watched a blaze up in the hills that threatened to creep down. (The band cut a version of the song with Olsen for
Terrapin Station
, but no one was satisfied, so it was held for their next record.) They busted out a new cover, the festive New Orleans stomp “Iko Iko,” which would become an almost permanent part of their repertoire. “We had all this new material that everyone was excited about playing,” Donna Godchaux told
Rolling Stone
, “and everyone wanted to say, ‘All right, this is the time to really make a statement and not just be a psychedelic weirdo hippie band.' And some of the other songs were more song oriented than jam oriented.”

At New York's Palladium, a smaller venue that allowed them to work out some of the kinks in their set in the spring, “The Music Never Stopped” had especially crisper, more synchronized rhythms from Hart and Kreutzmann. Garcia sang the traditional ballad “Peggy-O” with heart-tugging sweetness and ripped off a solo in “Comes a Time” that burst with soulful, laser-beam intensity. The band embarked on “Terrapin Station Part 1,” navigating its prog-like twists and turns with grace and nimbleness. Cantor, who sat by the side of the stage each night and recorded all the shows, heard a difference between 1977 and
the previous year. “In 1976 it was seat of the pants,” she says, “but in 1977, it got tight.”

Moments of Dead craziness still abounded, of course. In Chicago Kreutzmann and Hart dressed up as doctors before they took the stage, with Donna Godchaux acting as a nurse, before the band played “Good Lovin'.” (“I don't like this—what's going on?” Garcia said nervously before they started.) At the Palladium Hells Angels rode their hogs right into the band's dressing rooms, and one club member proudly brandished a knife and demanded they play “Truckin'.” The bond between some of the Dead and the Angels remained amicable. Garcia was friendly with Sandy Alexander, who ran the club's New York City chapter, and their relationship nearly saved Garcia's life one night in the seventies. During a New York run an unhinged pimp sneaked into Garcia's hotel room and held a pistol on him; someone calling himself Garcia had been messing up some of the pimp's women. A rescue call went out to Alexander, who showed up with club members; before anyone could even remotely entertain the idea of calling the police, the Angels had located the imposter and brought him to the hotel, where he was dangled outside by his ankles. “I saw him once, when he was out the window,” says one Dead employee. “They had to do what they had to do. Some things had to be dealt with.”

Less burly guests also made it backstage at the Palladium. The Dead had befriended members of the
Saturday Night Live
cast, another group of nonconformist pop-culture rebels, and one night John Belushi appeared backstage, popping into Garcia's room to share some weed. Belushi also asked Cantor whether she wanted an impromptu tour of NBC right before she began taping the show. (“I said, ‘I'm actually kind of busy right now, but thanks for the invite!'” she recalls.)
SNL
writers—and noted Deadheads—Al Franken and Tom Davis were also spotted wandering about; these would be far from their first or last Dead shows.

The Dead weren't quite mainstream, but something about them in 1977 felt almost acceptable to the nonconverts. When they arrived at the University of Alabama, marking their first-ever visit to a state not known for being friendly to long-hairs, the school's football team helped the Dead crew set up. “Female hospitality was wonderful,” says Parish. “The girls on those tours in the South were incredible, man. Unbelievable. They were like sexual goddesses. They loved us, and we loved them.” Most importantly Parish says of the band and crew, “We were still tight and had each other.”