So Many Roads (43 page)

In Mydland the Dead found themselves with another talented but hypersensitive keyboard player. Born in Munich on October 21, 1952, Mydland shared a military-family background with his first boss, Weir: his father, Didrick Mydland, hailed from Norway, moved to the States to attend Trinity Divinity School in Minneapolis, and later joined the army, where he served as a chaplain. Brent was born during one of Didrick's overseas duties. Once the family moved west when he was a baby, Brent was brought up in Concord, California; during one part-time job arranged by his father, he helped load bombs at a nearby military base.

In 1974 Mydland traveled down to Los Angeles to audition for a slot in the backup band for Batdorf & Rodney, the singer-songwriter duo best known for their cult FM hit “Home Again.” According to John Batdorf, the twenty-three-year-old Mydland who showed up had a “monster singing voice,” an affinity for jazz and blues, and one of
the most intense stares Batdorf had ever seen. “Brent had those eyes,” Batdorf says. “Some guys close their eyes when they sing, but his were open. He was a pretty scary-looking guy hitting all those high notes.” Batdorf says the band would kid Mydland for that trait, but they soon learned they could take any ribbing only so far. During one sound check Batdorf sat down at Mydland's organ and began playing, and Mydland grew visibly upset. “We said, ‘We're just having fun,'” Batdorf says. “We had to talk him down. You had to be careful what you said or he'd go into a shell. It was very odd. We had to walk on eggshells sometimes.” When Batdorf & Rodney broke up, Mydland joined Batdorf's subsequent band, Silver, which cut an album for Arista that included a few of Mydland's songs.

During the Batdorf & Rodney era Mydland met Cherie Barsin, whose sister was married to Batdorf. In no time she and Mydland—then living in a van in Thousand Oaks complete with silverware, pots, and pans—coupled up. Silver's debut album was released on Arista in 1976—the same year the Dead signed with the label—but when it sold poorly, they were dropped, the band fell apart, and Mydland and Barsin moved north to a house in Concord owned by Mydland's father. Barsin recalls seeing Mydland butt heads with his dad and grow uncomfortable when he saw him drinking. At his own home Mydland preferred to write songs, listen to jazz and classical records, and play board games like Solitude and backgammon.

The call to join the Weir band came out of the blue, and Mydland quickly landed the job. At a party for Garcia's birthday in August 1978 Mydland and Barsin were invited along to meet the Dead at the house Garcia was now sharing with Rock and Nicki Scully, and Mydland and Barsin watched as everyone hung out and played guitars. Eventually Garcia emerged from his basement apartment and made Barsin feel immediately at ease by talking to her. A few months later the couple were invited to see the Dead's New Year's Eve show at Winterland, where
they were told Keith Godchaux was going to leave the band. (Apparently the departure was already on the band's mind several months before the meeting with the Godchauxs.) Not long after, Mydland was invited to join the Dead.

In light of his musical preferences and background Mydland didn't seem the obvious choice. Batdorf found it interesting that Mydland, who valued rehearsal and precision, would join the far looser Dead, and Barsin has no memory of ever hearing Dead music played in their home prior to his being hired. (His preferences, she says, were “Chick Corea, Jeff Beck. Nothing with lyrics.”) But the Dead needed a new keyboard player and a rebooted, post-Godchaux sound as soon as possible to continue touring, and Mydland needed a job. “His personality didn't fit in, but they all accepted him,” says Janice Godchalk-Olsen. “The transition didn't seem to be much of a debate.”

In April 1979, two months after the band meeting at the Godchaux's home, Mydland made his stage debut with the Dead at Spartan Stadium in San Jose. As soon as he joined, his predecessor came back to haunt him. “People would yell out ‘Keith!' and that would piss him off,” Barsin says. “He would say, ‘Are they high, or am I just not that good?'” Yet Mydland's devotion to the job was instantly evident to those around him. “He put a lot of pressure on himself to be perfect,” Barsin says. “There were jokes about it, like, ‘How do you screw up with the Grateful Dead? Everybody's high and nobody's going to know.' But he was hard on himself. He didn't want to be a joke. If he could enhance what they did, that was important to him.” Upon landing the job Mydland immediately went shopping for a fresh batch of hole-free T-shirts, and during one camping trip with friends Mydland, who'd grown up water skiing in the Delta area of Northern California, opted out; he didn't want to risk hurting his hands. The anxiety attacks he'd had as far back as the Batdorf & Rodney days—when Mydland would complain of chest pains or sometimes mysteriously disappear for days, what was known as “The Brent Special”—were at bay for now.

Coming after a period in which Keith Godchaux barely seemed to be playing onstage, Mydland injected the band with musical caffeine. His synthesizers and B-3 organ added upgraded textures to their sound, and his singing bolstered the harmonies, especially now that Garcia's and Lesh's voices were beginning to fray. When the time came for the Dead to make their first album with him, Mydland stepped up, writing two songs, “Easy to Love You” and “Far from Me,” the former with lyrics by Barlow. “Easy to Love You” was such a straight-on love song that Arista's Clive Davis wasn't sure how it fit in on a Dead album (and rightly so), and as Barlow recalls, Davis asked them to revise a few lines to “make it sound more like the Grateful Dead.” (Puzzled, Barlow tweaked a few words here and there to make what was once a straightforward love song sound like what he calls “a bit more obscure.”)

The jolt Mydland could bring to the band was heard when his organ revved up in the chorus on “Alabama Getaway,” the Hunter-Garcia romp that became the first track on the new album,
Go to Heaven
. (Performing the song on
Saturday Night Live
after the album's release, the Dead came to life as rarely before on television, and Garcia spit out his Chuck Berry–derived solos with evident glee.) Thanks to producer Gary Lyons, who'd worked with the likes of Aerosmith and Foreigner prior to the Dead, the album was the most studio-tooled record the band would ever make. Not surprisingly, the Dead didn't adapt easily to that approach. Once, Lyons spliced a bunch of different Garcia guitar solos into one, thinking it would be a natural fit. When Garcia heard it, he demurred, “It's nice, but I wouldn't play it that way.” Weir and Barlow's songs, “Lost Sailor” and “Saint of Circumstance,” were moody companion pieces that blended soft rock and fusion as well as the Dead could, and the chugging remake of “Don't Ease Me In,” from their early repertoire, had a jovial bounce. “Althea” made good use of the Dead's trademark shuffle. But the album's generic corporate-rock sound made the Dead, one of rock's most distinctive bands, sound strangely anonymous. Only when Garcia's voice and guitar slipped out
into the forefront did the band sound like their old selves, and fans were put off by the cover photo of the band dressed in
Saturday Night Fever
–themed white suits. (The humor of the photo, or the fact that Garcia and Hart had gone together to see that movie, eluded them.) “As things got bigger and larger, the stakes went up,” says Hart of this era, “and we stopped exploring so much.”

According to Barsin, Mydland had long felt a sense of isolation: growing up in the Delta, he lived in a boathouse on the water while his parents and sisters resided in the main home. He once told Barsin he was haunted by a memory of not receiving an Easter basket as a child, even though his sisters had been given them. Now that he was in the Dead, though, he was no longer alone. Old friends who'd played with him in high school bands began reaching out to him, and a salesman at a local musical instrument store heard he was in the Dead and slashed the price, from $8,000 to $4,000, of a baby grand piano that Mydland was eying. Yet there were early signs that Mydland could be beset by it all. At a party at one Dead show Bill Graham had a Native American tent set up backstage. Everyone congregated inside it, and both Dead family members and outsiders approached the generally shy Mydland. “He seemed almost catatonic at times,” Barsin says, “overwhelmed all of a sudden with the recognition.” He would have to learn, sooner rather than later, how to handle it all.

There would be more wee-wee to come. During the Radio City run, one of the Dead offspring was summoned into either a hotel room or backstage space. The almost-teenager thought something was wrong but was instead asked to urinate into some small plastic tips. From what the kid was told, the band had to take some type of drug test to satisfy the insurance requirements of the closed-circuit broadcast of the Halloween show. “God knows what they thought they were going to find,
but someone thought it would be a good idea if I did the urine test,” says the now-grownup. “I peed into the cups and thought, ‘They're
never
going to believe this is us.'” (Director Dell'Amico, who doesn't recall the specifics of the story, says he can think of one instance in which a drug test might have been requested for those shows: “We could have realized we didn't have enough insurance or an insurer could have asked for it. That's how it could have happened.”)

The story, or tall tale, was pretty amusing, but other, chillier winds were beginning to blow in the Dead's direction. At Radio City, members of the crew heard that a suspected dealer may have slipped backstage—through no one's precise fault—and reportedly pummeled him. The story was indicative of everyone's growing concern about Garcia's increasing fondness for what Loren calls “basically speedballing. You do cocaine and then you smoke that stuff, [called] rat. It's like a speedball.” By 1980, as opposed to 1977, everyone knew Garcia was dabbling in the Persian opiate. It was not hard to notice: his hair was longer and stringier (and sometimes downright weirder, as when he wore it in pigtails during one of the shows in Egypt). More troubling was the impact of his addiction on the band's music. Garcia's voice was starting to sound strained, and during the
Go to Heaven
sessions he was spending more time than before in the studio bathroom. The usual reasons were trotted out: the pressures of celebrity, fallout from the Rakow debacle, his messy personal life. To others it may simply have been boredom. Driving home from a studio one evening with Vicki Jensen, Garcia gazed out the window and talked about how many of his good times were over. “He said, ‘There's nothing fun to do anymore,'” she says. “All the things everyone was doing weren't happening anymore, like Playland [which closed in 1972] or free shows in the park. That stuck with me when he said that.”

Even those who'd escaped the scene were still affected. After their departure from the Dead, Keith and Donna Godchaux moved back to
Alabama, where Donna had been born and raised, and they worked on cleaning themselves up after the previous eight years. They chilled by the Tennessee River, Keith began to relax, and the two formed the Heart of Gold Band, named after a line in “Scarlet Begonias.” On a late July morning in 1980 Keith Godchaux and Pollock were driving back to Courtenay Pollock's house in San Geronimo, where the Godchauxs were staying while working on new music. To Pollock, Godchaux seemed at peace: “I've never been happy with my body,” he told Pollock, “but right at this moment I'm the happiest I've ever felt in my life.” Taking a longer route home so they could continue talking, their car came around a bend, and Pollock, who was driving, saw a rock truck in his lane and a propane tanker easing out of a driveway. On the other side of the road were kids playing ball. “There was nowhere to go, and I had a moment to make a decision,” Pollock says. “There were trees on my right and all this blockage on the road.”

Pollock heard Godchaux say, “Oh, Jesus,” before the car slammed into the back of the rock truck. Pollock was seriously injured and on life support for several days but recovered; Godchaux never regained consciousness from his coma and was pronounced dead on July 23.