So Many Roads (46 page)

Kreutzmann's comment was apt: they
were
ready to play, at least some of them. Once the full band was set up in Studio D, Kaffel was impressed with their mountains of gear; it looked as if they were setting up to play a live show. With Garcia set up in his own booth, they'd started that day's session with “My Brother Esau,” for which Weir offered up a fairly growled vocal. The take was fine, until Garcia hit a bad note toward the end. They took another crack at the song, and this time it sounded stronger, especially Mydland's organ and synthesizer parts.

Even so, the mood wasn't encouraging. “Well, it's not getting
worse
,” Garcia muttered. The band took a five-minute break in the lounge
before reconvening in the recording room, where they went at “My Brother Esau” one more time. It wasn't the easiest song to play: the rhythms had a tumbling, falling-down-the-stairs quality, and the song didn't have a genuine chorus to speak of. Yet bit by bit it seemed to be congealing. Lesh was bouncing on his toes, and Kreutzmann's rhythm was firm and steady. (Between takes Lesh complimented the drummer: “I've been trying to figure out how you swing for years, man.”)

But again Garcia's musicianship was off, and “My Brother Esau” ground to a halt. During one of several subsequent takes Weir stood up, as if they were doing a show, and everyone had the feeling they were approaching a final, finished version of the song. “We're getting so close,” Weir deigned to say, perhaps jinxing matters.

But it wasn't to be; the band took another break, and the lounge again beckoned.

Other distractions were nipping at them as the Fantasy sessions were underway; by 1984, more members of their organization were falling away. Given Scully's role as a codependent in Garcia's life, the band was increasingly distrustful of the longtime former manager, who was now doing publicity for the band. Matters finally came to a head when Scully was called into a band meeting and accused of pilfering money during a New York trip with the Jerry Garcia Band. According to Scully, the hotel had mistakenly thought they'd overcharged the band, and Scully had walked out with roughly $2,600 in what he thought was honest cash. Few in the Dead office believed him, though, and office workers complained about unpaid hotel bills and other expenses. At the meeting Hunter spoke on Scully's behalf but to little avail; Scully was soon given what he called his “walking papers” and went into rehab himself.

Scully would be the latest stalwart of their organization to be gone by the summer of 1984. By then Mydland and Betty Cantor had been in
a relationship for several years. With her encouragement and seasoned help, Mydland had started working on an album of his own songs, on which Garcia and John Kahn had guested. “He was trying to make a statement on his own, separate from the Dead and trying to prove himself,” she says. “And it was really good work.” But when the couple broke up, Cantor parted ways with the Dead camp soon after. “I had become an ‘ex old lady,'” she says. “I thought, ‘How could I be considered an ex-old lady? I've been working all through this.' They were afraid it would cause problems. They thought Brent would be uncomfortable. I thought, ‘Okay, I'm going to get the hell out of Dodge.' I had to go on to a new life for a while.” With that, another key member of their organization—in this case, on the technical and recording side—was no longer around.

In 1981 Richard Loren was beginning to feel fried after roughly a decade of managing Garcia and then the Dead. During a brief European tour that spring, when the band was playing Germany with the Who, Kreutzmann burst into his room and accused Loren of stealing money from the band and lying about it—and then fired him. (When Kreutzmann told Lesh what he'd done, Lesh, in his memoir, retorted that firing Loren was “a stupid move.”) Later, back in California, Kreutzmann apologized and Loren kept his job, but the incident was a sign to Loren that managing the Dead in the new decade had become a tiresome, thankless job. Still, Loren had one more grand idea up his sleeve and decided to run it by the band. In what would amount to an Egypt-like experience but on American soil, he envisioned renting a riverboat and sailing down the Mississippi to New Orleans; the Dead would play and hold seminars, and well-heeled Deadheads would fork over hundreds of dollars for tickets. The whole endeavor would be filmed for a movie. It was, in Loren's words, “a no-brainer,” and unlike Egypt, they would be paid upfront and have control over the event.

Attending a band meeting in May 1981, Loren made his case for the project, abetted by photos and cost estimates. He was under the
impression Hart and Weir were willing to take part, but no sooner had he finished his presentation than Garcia intoned, “We don't want to do that.” The gesture was striking: at board meetings Garcia rarely spoke first, preferring to let everyone else weigh in and then, peering over his glasses, weigh in yea or nay. Everyone would look to him for comment and gauge their moods by what he said.

Garcia's immediate dismissal of the idea stunned Loren; the concept was dead on arrival. Back home Loren tried to grapple with what had happened. Maybe, he thought, Garcia didn't like the idea of being holed up on a boat with Deadheads who would see his physical deterioration up close. Maybe Garcia was worried about how he would get drugs in such a setting. Whatever the reason, Loren came to a depressing realization. “The Jerry who rejected that presentation from me was a different man,” he says. “It wasn't, ‘Gee, that would be fun!'” With that, Loren parted ways with the Dead.

For all the psychodrama, the business of the Dead was increasingly robust, especially on the road. In 1983, thanks to Danny Rifkin, the Dead decided to take concert ticketing into their own hands because counterfeiting was becoming a major issue. The band opened their own ticket office to handle mail-order sales, and it worked: in 1983 they sold 24,500 tickets, and in 1984 the number spiked to 115,000. “We added $2 to each ticket as a service charge, and that's how we operated the ticket office,” says Steve Marcus, who eventually ran it. “The ticket business never cost the Dead a penny, the only business of theirs that didn't.” At first, employees worked out of an apartment in a building next to Front Street, where police would routinely arrive to deal with drugs, hookers, or domestic violence calls in other apartments. No one suspected that several hundred thousand dollars' worth of tickets and cash were in the small apartment downstairs. The first show sold through mail order was at the Warfield in March 1983, and it proved revealing of the fascinating, back-and-forth rapport between the Dead and Bill Graham,
who continued to promote their West Coast shows. The Dead made sure their guests at that Warfield show had quality orchestra seats—and Graham's guests were relegated to further back in the balcony. The Graham people complained, deigning it unacceptable, but the Dead's people laughed it off. In the end, though, both camps respected each other, and the Dead's Graham-produced New Year's Eve shows, with Graham himself dressed as Father Time, were eagerly awaited annual events.

At a band meeting in 1984 sound man Dan Healy complained he was having trouble seeing the stage thanks to all the microphones being held aloft by audience tapers camped out in front of his board. Tapers had often been nuisances: in the old days Rex Jackson would walk out into the halls, see the microphone cables, and walk up and down the aisles, cutting the cables and stashing them in his bag. During the same period Sam Cutler made sure the contract riders for shows asserted that “employer will not permit recordings of the performance,” although this dictum was largely aimed at unscrupulous promoters who wanted their own bootlegs.

The band had since become more lenient about fans recording the shows for themselves, but the increasing numbers of tapers was becoming an issue. Kidd Candelario, who'd been making quality tapes of shows for years, spoke up. He admitted to being irked by the tapers himself; at some shows friends who had guest tickets would approach him and complain that the tapers had taken over their seats. “The tapers were everywhere,” Candelario says. “They were always picking on people who were there to see a show and have fun and scream and clap. And the tapers were like, ‘You can't do that—no clapping, no whistling, no yelling.' They thought they had free rein to do anything they wanted.”

At the meeting someone—no one remembers who—brought up stopping fans from bringing in recording gear altogether. But the band wanted the tradition to continue, so the idea of banning them was
quickly shot down. Candelario and Steve Marcus of the ticket office suggested putting the gearheads in their own area, far from the soundboard, which evolved into talk of a regular, separate section for them. Perhaps that would be the best use for the 200 to 250 seats regularly not sold for each show because they were behind Healy and had obstructed views. Everyone, including the Dead, agreed it was the best solution—and also one that provided extra income no one had counted on. With the number of Dead employees continuing to swell, any additional dollars were welcome.

The tapers at the first show with an official section, at the Berkeley Community Theater, weren't particularly happy: at the last moment Healy moved the soundboard to beneath a balcony, where tapers didn't think the sound quality was as strong. But the night began the tradition of a small sea of what looked like miniature telephone poles sticking up at Dead shows. At least something in the Dead world was working.

By the early eighties little in pop music resembled a Dead concert. From the music to the audience, there was nothing punk, new wave, or disco about any of it, and the most diehard of fans, whether young or long term, were starting to follow the band around the country. Nothing like it had been seen in pop, even to an established veteran like, of all people, Joan Baez, the folk music institution with the vibrato-rich soprano.

By the time she shared a stage and studio with the Dead—and then entered into a relationship with Hart—Baez had her own scattered history with the band. During the Palo Alto days Garcia's first wife, Sara Ruppenthal, had met and befriended Baez, then a folk superstar, and Baez had asked Ruppenthal to join her on tour as an assistant. (She declined, opting to stay in the area with Garcia; today Baez has no memory of those encounters.) Almost twenty years later Hart and Baez met and became a couple, sharing, she says with a fond laugh, “different
forms of insanity.” The two would go motorcycle riding together, and one time she mounted one of his big Harleys by herself and took off up a hill. “I was a little iffy,” she says of the ride. Her son Gabe became a Deadhead himself, traveling with fans around the country and bonding with Hart over drumming. It was, Baez says, “a family for Gabe,” which she welcomed, given her own relentless touring schedule and time away from home.

While traveling with the Dead after she and Hart had hooked up, Baez took in her first show. Venturing out into the crowd, she accidentally stepped over a kid lying in the aisle, and what she calls her “Florence Nightingale side” jumped out. “I said, ‘I'm going to save this guy,'” she recalls. Picking him up and setting him into a seat, she saw someone walking by with what looked like lemonade, grabbed it and offered it to the half-passed-out fan. “Is there anything in it?” he asked. When she said no, he was shocked: “Oh, shit!” (She didn't think he wanted to be
more
stoned.) The crowd, meanwhile, moved in what she calls “Ouija board dancing,” calling it “a roomful of slow-motion robotic weirdness accompanied by the smell of heavy patchouli and drugs.” It was, she says, a learning experience.

Baez was in the midst of her own self-proclaimed “period of confusion.” For the first time in her career she didn't have a record deal—like many of her peers, she was now the victim of an industry that saw some sixties acts as dinosaurs, especially once MTV arrived in 1981. Since Hart had a studio, the couple decided to make an album using the Dead as her backup band. The idea didn't seem completely off the wall because both she and the Dead inherently loved folk music, and she had joined the Dead onstage for several disarmament benefits in 1981 along with their traditional New Year's Eve show. She and Weir dueted on “Me and Bobby McGee,” which the Dead had been performing for some time, although Garcia walked offstage one night in the midst of one of her songs, which Baez didn't understand.