The first sign of change was the caravan of trucks that pulled into Reno the day before. For Lesh the moment arrived when he walked onstage for a soundcheck at the University of Nevada’s Mackay Stadium, a college football field that could pack in seventy-five hundred people. After strapping on his specially made quadraphonic bass, he plucked a few strings to test the levels, and out came a colossal rumble that made each note feel like the intoning voice of the Lord. The amplification was so potent that Deadheads who arrived at Mackay early and were standing near the stadium’s entrance saw the water in a fountain rippling with each of Lesh’s thumps. “You played one note through it, and it was like, ‘Oh my God,’” Lesh says. “It was stunning how powerful and clean it was. It was a real ego-booster, I’ll tell you.”
The concept of massively upgrading the Dead’s sound system originated with Owsley Stanley’s relentless desire for sonic clarity. The Dead had already attempted stacking speakers vertically during earlier shows with Owsley; the sound would supposedly be much more coherent than if the speakers were arranged in a horizontal row on the stage. But it wasn’t enough. About six months before the Reno show, during a backstage meeting with Bob Matthews, a more precise and far more elaborate plan began to unfold. Owsley’s dream called for a system that would make each instrument sound as crystal clear as a mountain stream, and the Dead now had the resources to try it. Given how many Deadheads were now showing up at gigs, enough to play larger outdoor venues like Mackay, the time to do it had arrived. With Matthews, Dan Healy, and other technicians and crew all working together, the project began in all its over-the-top madness. “We were talking about the bass,” Lesh says, “and Bear said the bass stack should be 20 feet high, and I said, ‘Okay,’ so that’s how we started.” As crew member Candelario recalls, “We got so big that we had to make the leap. And what does it take to move sound 350 feet? It takes a stack of speakers about 50 feet tall.”
The plan ultimately called for over six hundred speakers—ranging in size from a few inches to fifteen feet tall—piled atop each other in heaven-ascending columns; each instrument had its own column. Collectively the setup would use over twenty-six thousand watts of power. Everyone would sing into two microphones at once: one in phase, the other canceling out leakage. The road crew would have to increase to sixteen. “There was nothing like this,” says Lesh, still the one in the band closest to Owsley. “We had to invent all the technology that made the whole thing possible.” No one stopped them or told them it was too ridiculous. When Sam Cutler heard about it all he could think to himself was, “Whoopie—more madness!” As Cutler recalls, “You don’t think, ‘I don’t know about that.’ You think, ‘Good for them, let’s go for it.’”
Even for the increasingly hard-bitten crew, some of whom had been with the Dead for seven years, the new system could bust their collective balls at once. They would have to build not just cabinets but platforms to hold them. Cutler would have to find a forty-foot truck with air-ride suspension to handle the delicate gear. The cabinets would have to be wrapped in straps and yanked skyward with pulleys. Sally Mann Romano, who’d befriended and worked for Jefferson Airplane (she also married Airplane drummer Spencer Dryden) before signing up for the Dead office, recalls contracts that specified four different brands of acceptable forklifts. “Nothing else would do,” she says. “The wrong stage construction would have meant the stage would have fallen in and someone would have died. People had an image of the Dead as a bunch of acid-dropping navel gazers, and there was some of that. But we worked our asses off.”
The crew would have to start at eight each morning in order to have multitiered scaffolding in place by noon. After a lunch break they’d spend all afternoon wiring the amps and installing the hundreds of homemade speaker cabinets. Scaffolding was needed to set the cabinets in place. “The idea was to give the audience the same sound the band heard onstage, with the monitor system and everything behind the band,” says Parish. “Some of Bear’s ideas, to bring them to reality, would just about kill you. We had to learn how to weld. It was some dangerous stuff you had to do.”
The truth behind Parish’s words became grindingly clear when an embryonic version of what became known as the Wall of Sound was rolled out and tested at the Boston Music Hall on November 30, 1973. One of the trucks of gear arrived late, and Candelario found himself in a unique position: dangling by wires above the audience, attempting to bolt a cluster together with a two-by-four and braces as Deadheads watched him work. “It was a real nerve-wracking performance,” he says. “It was nuts—really crazy. You’re right there with them. That close.” Parish recalls Owsley being “out of his gourd that day. He had us tipping that thing in crazy ways. We were fighting him all day. It seemed to take years off our lives.” As always the crew completed its back-breaking job, but the show didn’t start until midnight.
After ongoing work by the Wall of Sound team, the system made its full public premiere at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in March 1974; it was simply too large to set up at Alembic, the company set up by former Ampex Ron Wickersham and guitar luthier Rick Turner where the band rehearsed. Garcia and Weir each had thirty cabinets; Lesh had sixteen. In this version six bass speakers were bolted through to serve as a pedestal. A cluster of speakers would dangle above Kreutzmann’s kit, and the crew would have to keep tilting them until the correct angle was reached. “We attacked it like a group of killer bees,” Candelario says. By then the cost had mushroomed to over $350,000, a staggering sum for the time.
Dead employees who ventured to the Cow Palace to see the towers—which looked like a skyscraper looming portentously behind the band—were taken aback by its mass. “It was, ‘We bad—yes!’” says Steve Brown, a former DJ and record distribution employee who’d seen the Warlocks and served in Vietnam before working for the band. “It was like a castle behind them. Hearing different pieces of music from different sections was awesome. You could hear Phil’s bass column of speakers, and the vocals were full in the middle. We thought we’d hit on something that would be a new state of the art for everybody.” Another relatively new Dead employee, Andy Leonard, had caught a Dead show at Wesleyan in 1970—he and Barlow had been classmates—and recalled them arriving looking like “a motorcycle gang who’d stolen a bus.” What he saw unfolding at the Cow Palace was altogether different. Watching the road crew soldering and installing scaffolding, Leonard was reminded more of a circus than a standard rock show.
With the Cow Palace test under their belts, it was now time to cart the entire apparatus out on the road; Reno would be the first stop. As Lesh saw for himself, the monolithic structure behind him wasn’t simply the embodiment of Owsley’s fantasy of pure sound; it was also an announcement to the world that the Dead were no longer small time; they had their own touring sound system, their own record company, and their own travel office, and they had more employees than ever. Given how many of their employees were friends, the operation was cozy in one way, a juggernaut in another. During a conversation between Garcia and Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, the two leaders of their respective businesses compared notes on how many people were too many to employ and how to grow a business while retaining its closeness. “As long as you can remember everybody’s name, you can do that,” Garcia told Wenner, “but once you start not remembering, you gotta stop.” But it was becoming harder to keep track of it all. Whether they wanted it or not, the Dead were now an industry.
Fourteen months earlier the band’s new era had been ushered in by a stunning loss. On March 12, 1973, members of the Dead, along with friends, lovers, and overseers, congregated at the Daphne Funeral Home, a nondescript brick building off a main street in Corte Madera. Lying in a casket, his brown cowboy hat atop his head and a wilted yellow daisy his hand, was the startlingly emaciated body of Pigpen.
For at least the previous two years everyone had sensed Pigpen’s health was precarious, that his body was beginning to break down from years of drinking. They all knew he’d been indulging since his teen years (although his sister Carol doubts it began at age twelve, as others have speculated). No one thought his lifestyle was harmful or detrimental to his health; it was simply what he did, how he lived his life. In the months after the 1972 European tour ended, Pigpen moved back into his family’s house near Palo Alto and later into a home in Corte Madera. By then Veronica Barnard was gone (the common feeling was that he’d sent her away because he knew he was dying), and he was living on sunflower seeds and alcohol. Sometimes he would call the Dead office or one of the wives just to have someone to talk with. Either to fulfill his artistic impulses or the contract for a Warner Brothers solo album or both, he began recording songs on a tape deck in his kitchen. Living down the road from him was Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane and now Hot Tuna. Casady didn’t know his neighbor very well, but he had a few short talks with him that intimated things weren’t going well for Pigpen. “I don’t think he was tremendously happy,” he says. “He was watching the band move up, and he was no longer part of it. There was a lot of emotion involved.”
On February 11, 1973, Pigpen rallied himself. On stationery festooned with the cover art of Europe ’72, he penned a letter to a friend in Manhattan. “Just figured I drop you a line & let you know I’m still alive,” he wrote. He said “the rest of the boys”—the Dead—would be playing on the East Coast the following month, but he wouldn’t be joining them. “The Doc says I can’t make it, to [sic] fuckin’ cold anyhow. This time I got to recover right or else the whole trip could fall thru. So I’m coolin’ and playin’ it safe, can’t afford to get sick again!” Flashing some of his old feistiness, he said he was looking forward to another visit to New York: “NYC does have some foxes & I’m lookin’ to get me some! . . . I’ll see you as soon as I make it East again.”
Then on March 8 Pigpen’s landlady called his sister Carol to tell her the news: her brother had been found dead on the floor of his bedroom on Corte Madera Avenue, a woodsy back road, by band accountant David Parker. Pigpen was only twenty-seven. At his dining room table McIntire took on the grim task of calling each band member and giving them the news, as Sue Swanson sat by his side, holding his hand for support. Mountain Girl had already read it in the paper and was weeping. Pigpen’s official cause of death was an internal hemorrhage; an autopsy revealed that his weight had dropped from 250 pounds to 160. Somewhat confusingly, the band issued a statement attributing his death to “a massive intestinal collapse after he got home from playing our 1972 tour through Europe” and added he was under the care of specialists during the summer and fall: “Pig Pen [sic] told us last Tuesday that he felt fit enough and ready to return to his post as bluesman with the band.” Condolence letters from fans arrived from as far away as Berlin and Hamburg.
Other than prerecorded organ music, no songs filled the funeral home in the chapel in Corte Madera. The two hundred mourners assembled for the traditional Roman Catholic service were evenly divided between Pigpen’s family, all in suits and looking very straight, and the Dead and their extended family—a mélange of band and crew members, Hells Angels, leather jackets, and girls in belly-revealing midriffs and tie-dye. There would be no testimonials or speeches. Few in his family heard any of the classic Pig stories: the time his pressure cooker exploded and a goopy, inch-thick mix of rice and vegetables covered the walls or the time a stoned guy at one show began harassing Swanson in front of the stage, and Pig walked over and kicked him with his boot.
Following a round of Hail Marys, the priest intoned, “May he rest in peace and pass safely through the gates of death.” At one point Garcia leaned over to Rock Scully and said, “Don’t ever let them bury me in an open casket—this is just awful.” Garcia, who avoided funerals and was visibly affected, finally rose up to walk outside, and standing near the wide, two-lane avenue in the suburban neighborhood, he was approached by several reporters. “It was a good rap,” he told them. “But it was out of character. He wouldn’t have wanted it this way.” When it was finally over most of the entourage retreated to Weir’s house in Mill Valley for a riotous wake.
About ten days later Phil McKernan, Pigpen’s dad, wrote a forlorn, deeply heartfelt letter to the band, absolving them of their role in his son’s declining health. The typed letter thanked the band “for what which you all gave Ron that is beyond price and of far greater value than I ever gave him when he was with us in his younger days: you gave him (or, perhaps, he found with you) something which many of us never find: a purpose and meaning for life.” He told the Dead that he and Pigpen had met up (“after some years of ‘second-hand’ communication”) and that, to his surprise, Pigpen had forgiven his father years before. From his son, Phil said that he learned about forgiveness, “bearing physical suffering and mental anguish without complaint,” and “love of one’s work.” The fact that the father and son had grown closer, according to the letter, only made the missive more heartbreaking.
At his home studio in Novato, Hart, still in self-imposed exile (he didn’t attend the funeral either), began listening to the tapes Pigpen left behind to see whether an album could be made of them. But between the sound reverberating off the kitchen tile and what Hart calls “the forty versions of ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,’” the tapes didn’t yield much. “It was just him real drunk, having a good time,” Hart says. “We all thought, ‘Jesus, there could be some gems in here.’ But no.”
The Dead rarely took the stage at the times printed on their tickets, and thanks to the Wall of Sound, Reno was no exception. An hour and a half after the supposed start time the musicians finally emerged at Mackay Stadium to take their places, looking like stick fingers compared to the colossal columns of speakers behind them. By then a wind that had been threatening to pick up all day finally kicked in, and Scully watched as one of the hanging voice clusters above Kreutzmann began to shake and sway. It took a lot to unnerve the Dead’s unflappable drummer, but Kreutzmann looked up with what Scully thought was a rare concerned expression. Sharp-eyed Deadheads may have also noticed subtle changes in the band’s appearance. Weir’s ponytail was gone, chopped off the year before, and he’d begun dressing sharper; that night his white flared jeans were the band’s most visual component. Garcia had shaved off his beard, but Lesh now had one, which made him look older and heavier than he was.
Given the monstrous system they were taking out of the Bay Area for the first time, it was unintentionally fitting that the set began with Chuck Berry’s wry travelogue “Promised Land.” Instantly Lesh reveled in what he heard roaring above him. “It was a brilliant stroke,” says Lesh. “The sound was absolutely clear and coherent for a quarter-mile. And loud.” The system delivered a note fifty feet tall, which sailed over the heads of the band like a jet engine soaring overhead yet wasn’t brutally deafening to the musicians.
Not everyone on stage was so taken with the Owsley towering musical inferno. The system presented a new set of challenges to Donna Jean Godchaux, who by this point had been singing with the band for two years. Her presence was still a jolt to some Deadheads: “Not everybody in the audience was used to Donna, ever,” says Parish. “There were a lot of people going, ‘Why is she singing?’ The guys in the band liked it, though—it helped with the vocals.”
But from her first appearance with them at Winterland, she had found it difficult to find the right pitch onstage with the Dead. “I was a studio singer, never singing off-key,” she told Rolling Stone. “I was used to having headphones and being in a controlled environment. Then, all of a sudden, I went to being onstage with the Dead in Winterland. Everything was so loud onstage.” At Mackay Stadium the Wall of Sound presented her with a new stage monitor system and the inability to hear herself. As a result, her singing could often be—or sound—off-key. (Only in the oddball world of the Dead could its strongest singer, the one so talented she had shared studio time with Elvis, sound out of tune.) The Wall of Sound was almost as much of a shock as the night she’d walked onstage and saw that Garcia had done away with his iconic mustache and beard, exposing a chinless, less distinct face. (Godchaux’s own striking features, from her waist-long hair to her Southern-belle smile, offered fans something else to look at.)
As Donna Jean struggled to deal with the newly augmented amplification, the band dug into a set that included previews of a few new songs, “Ship of Fools” (Hunter’s veiled reference to the increasingly fractious Dead scene) and “U.S. Blues,” both part of an album that would be their second in a row for their own label. As early as 1969, just after the release of Aoxomoxoa, both band and management were starting to grow weary of Warner Brothers. Even though the label gave the Dead an almost unprecedented amount of creative leeway, especially after the disastrous collaborations with Dave Hassinger on their first two albums, the Dead weren’t feeling the love for Joe Smith or his company. They went along with all of the label’s creative marketing schemes, including a “Pipgen look-alike contest” in ads for their first three albums. “It was about ‘pay attention to the Grateful Dead,’” says Warners’ Stan Cornyn, who came up with the idea. “I thought of these weird-looking people, especially Pigpen—he was even hairier than in the picture. About a hundred people wrote in.” Cornyn says the band never complained about the ad.
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.
The mere fact that they were playing an outdoor stadium like Mackay was one sign of the Dead’s flourishing fan base. The record company was too young to be profitable, but the road was another, more financially rewarding story. Thanks to Cutler’s relentless schedule and brutal bargaining, the band had begun raking in more cash each year on the road. Throughout 1969 they earned a few thousand dollars a gig. By 1971 the fees had edged up to between $10,000 and $15,000 a show, the latter at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Connecticut. Some contracts called for three-hour performances; others, like the one at Yale, openly flaunted show times: “The Grateful Dead have the right to perform for any length of time that they feel is necessary,” it stated bluntly. In 1972 they grossed $78,000 at Dillon Stadium in Hartford, Connecticut, which meant they took home about $25,000, a huge cash influx for the time. The following year they were handed a $25,000 guarantee (plus 60 percent of the gross, average for the time) in Tempe, Arizona, and $30,000 for Denver.
Their file cabinets began to bulge with statements like the one tucked away in early 1973. For four shows they would be paid, after expenses, $22,262.42. Their tour riders, including one for that year, specified requests for “sufficient light refreshments for fifteen (15) persons . . . Budweiser beer, coca cola, doctor pepper [sic lower case], and fresh fruit juice,” along with “a grand or baby grand piano (preferably Steinway) tuned to A440 international pitch.” As Sally Romano remembers, “What the Dead wanted, the Dead got. We had a huge advantage—we could dictate the terms of the contracts 80 or 90 percent of the time.” Keith Godchaux might have been quiet and self-effacing, but he was also very particular about his pianos, as Cutler learned when he took Godchaux keyboard shopping in New York after the band hired him. “Keith wouldn’t say boo to a goose, but once you got to know him, he wasn’t so shy,” says Cutler. “He had his feisty side. He played twelve different pianos and picked the one he liked.”
By the time of the Reno show as well as subsequent gigs with the Wall of Sound, the coffers were still growing. In one month alone, March 1974, the Dead made a profit of $326,935, including $54,254 in gigs, $396,709 in royalties, and $17,379 in band earnings. Other barometers of the Dead’s growing commerce sprouted up around them. Thanks to a well-placed note on the inside of the 1971 live album, Grateful Dead, asking Deadheads to write in, they now had forty thousand names and addresses of fans who would receive newsletters with band news. It was a logical step up from the few hundred names that Sue Swanson and Connie Bonner Mosley had collected for the band’s first fan club mailing during the 710 Ashbury days. (“We thought, ‘150, wow!” says Bonner Mosley.) Grateful Dead Records employees like Brown began setting up booths at shows, giving away free posters and postcards and collecting more names and addresses. They would bypass the corporations and go directly to their fan base.
Because more product was needed to feed the record-company beast, the Dead started assembling at CBS Studios in San Francisco to make another album in early spring, 1974. (In the same Creem interview pegged to the release of Wake of the Flood from the year before, Garcia said the band already had two albums of material ready to go.) The loose-knit atmosphere of the Sausalito sessions for Wake of the Flood was out, replaced with a more professional undertaking that began with an in-house engineer, Roy Segal, who’d worked with fastidious record makers like Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Every day from 1 p.m. to 1 a.m. the Dead showed up for work and bore down, each session preceded by a full meal with wine, followed by cocaine later in the evening. “It felt more serious—it wasn’t just hanging,” says Brown. “They buckled down to get a hit album, hopefully.” Between takes they’d hang upstairs at the offices of American Zoetrope, where they heard talk of a new movie that the company’s owner, Francis Ford Coppola, was making about Vietnam, the film that would eventually become Apocalypse Now.
The signs that the Dead were serious about their business—or, at the very least, of knowing they had to sell records—were evident in the schedule: by April 30, just about a month after work had started, the album—From the Mars Hotel, in honor of a transient digs around the corner—was done. The album had the feel of a band that knew how vital it was to appeal to radio. Thanks no doubt to Segal, the tracks had the lightly buffed sheen of typical FM radio rock of the time. “U.S. Blues,” a wry comment on the state of the nation during the Richard Nixon years, was an appropriately bouncy opener, ready to serve in arenas and stadiums. “Scarlet Begonias,” Hunter’s ode to his new love, Maureen, whom he’d met in England, had a Latin-on-acid groove, and Lesh’s “Pride of Cucamonga” fit squarely into the truck-stop country-rock in vogue at the time. (Weir and Barlow’s “Money Money” also had an FM-boogie feel, but its seemingly antifeminist lyrics were so reviled that it was quickly ejected from their stage repertoire.) The band also took advantage of the enhanced studio wares to stretch out. Hunter and Garcia’s “China Doll,” which could be interpreted as a conversation between God and someone who commits suicide by gunshot, had a chilling harpsichord arrangement, and Lesh’s other contribution, the masterwork “Unbroken Chain,” with lyrics by his old friend Bobby Peterson, was an intricate, tempo-shifting tour de force that blended in Tibetan bells, synthesizer, and one of Donna Godchaux’s most sensuous harmonies.
As with any label, Grateful Dead Records hired people to talk up their records to disc jockeys and record stores, the industry networking that the band generally abhorred. Belardo was given the task of editing down “U.S. Blues” for the radio. Because he didn’t know how to do that, he asked a CBS engineer, who put a razor blade to the song, nipping and tucking to make it a bit shorter. The fact that no one in the Dead raised any objections to editing their art was, for Belardo, a telling indication that the band was trying to play ball with the suits. “Previously nobody would have let anybody do anything like that to their music,” says Belardo. “But then it was, ‘Well, this is what you gotta do if we’re gonna play in this league.’ I don’t think there was any excitement about it. It was, ‘Okay, we gotta go to the dentist.’”
To promote the finished album, Brown conceived a clever idea—sending out promotional bars of soap tied in to the hotel theme of the title. But there would be a twist: the soap would be the gag kind that turned one’s face black after a good scrub. When he heard the idea Garcia giggled; it appealed to his Mad magazine sensibility. Then they had second thoughts. It was all too easy to imagine an important radio executive using the soap and not being especially happy about it. In the end they dropped the idea; Garcia said he didn’t want to feel guilty if the joke backfired. They could still be the freewheeling Grateful Dead, but now only up to a point.
As Peter Rowan saw for himself, there were less conventional ways to gauge the way the Dead had become an institution. In early June 1973 he and Garcia deplaned at Boston International Airport. Rowan, Garcia, and other members of Old and in the Way, Garcia’s current Dead offshoot band, had just grabbed their luggage from the carousel and were on their way to find a taxi into town. Just then Garcia paused. “Wait a minute,” he said, with a devilish grin. “I’ve gotta get Big Red.”
A Massachusetts native who’d logged time as a member of Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys, Rowan had met Garcia by way of mandolinist David Grisman. Grisman and Rowan had played together in a psychedelic folk band, Earth Opera, and Rowan had subsequently joined the more rock-oriented Seatrain. After he left Seatrain, Rowan—who’d met Garcia earlier thanks to his brothers Chris and Lorin’s group, the Rowan Brothers, whom Garcia had championed—moved to Stinson Beach, where he lived on the beach near his old friend Grisman. Having overdubbed mandolin on “Friend of the Devil” and “Ripple” on American Beauty, Grisman was peripherally connected to Garcia and the Dead world, so it wasn’t surprising when one day he invited Rowan up to Garcia and Mountain Girl’s hillside bungalow. “Jerry was standing in the garden in a T-shirt and jeans with a five-string banjo and a big grin on his face,” Rowan recalls. “God, what a welcome.” The jam sessions both outside and inside the house, accompanied by plenty of weed, eventually led to Garcia, Grisman, and Rowan forming a bluegrass band.
Garcia’s new side project was an outgrowth of his new living arrangements, and both were early signs that Garcia was seeking his own space apart from the Dead. With a population that numbered only in the hundreds and a far-from-anywhere ambience that made it amenable to alternative lifestyles, Stinson Beach, tucked away on the curvy Highway 1, was the escape Garcia yearned for at the time. Eventually other members of the scene, including Rakow and Candelario, lived there, but for Garcia, Stinson Beach was a retreat. “It was hard to find safe places to live when you’re a freak,” says Mountain Girl. “And Jerry liked that drive to Stinson. He said it was the only time he had to himself in his life. We needed a place where he could completely relax.”
Also aboard the formative acoustic band was John Kahn, a tall, funny, and multitalented bass player who’d met Garcia at jam sessions at the Matrix club in San Francisco. Born in Memphis but adopted by Los Angeles–based parents—his new father was a talent scout—Kahn had grown up around show-biz royalty; according to Linda Kahn, later his wife, young John Kahn was once babysat by Marilyn Monroe. Kahn, who developed a love of jazz in high school, was a very different bass player from Lesh, more rooted in blues and R&B, and he and Garcia clicked as friends, players, and movie fans. First with keyboardist Howard Wales, then with another keyboardist, Merl Saunders, they began a series of outside-Dead jam sessions at area clubs.
When Grisman and Rowan showed up, Kahn had no idea Garcia played banjo and was himself rusty on upright bass, but Kahn too was swept up in the casual energy of the new ensemble. Even though the musicians were all in their twenties, Garcia named it Old and in the Way, after a Grisman song. “We said, ‘Of course, that’s who we are!’” Rowan recalls. “That’s the irony and joke of it. We were useless characters and the only way we could survive was to play music.” First with Richard Greene and later Vassar Clements on fiddle, Old and in the Way went from a casual get-together to a performing and touring band, complete with Owsley tagging along to record shows. With Rowan handling lead vocals and frontman duties, Garcia was happy to play banjo and mostly sing harmonies on a repertoire that included Rowan’s originals, traditional folk and bluegrass songs, and even a startlingly fresh cover of the Stones’ “Wild Horses.” During future Old and in the Way gigs Garcia would scowl when fans yelled out the names of Dead songs.
At their debut, at the Lion’s Share club in San Anselmo in March 1973, Rowan received his initial taste of the cult of the Dead. After their first set the band walked back to the dressing room, still carrying their instruments; within the new band the rule was to keep playing and never put any of their instruments down. On the way backstage the musicians walked through a gauntlet of Deadheads—what Rowan recalls as “the most long-haired and bearded people you’ve ever seen in your life”—who were holding lit pipes and large joints. As Garcia passed them, they bowed in worship, and Garcia acknowledged them by stopping for a few quick hits of whatever was extended to him. “He seemed indomitable,” says Rowan. “He had a constitution of iron.”
Before a Dead show at RFK Stadium in Washington, DC, on June 10, Old and in the Way had flown into Boston for a set of their own at the Orpheum Theatre. When Garcia mentioned “Big Red,” Rowan looked back at the luggage carousel—where, seemingly out of nowhere, a large red bag had materialized as if by magic. No one recognized it; it wasn’t even tagged. “It had not been on the plane,” Rowan recalls. “It was put directly on the carousel by somebody.” Garcia grabbed it and, with the other band mates, made his way to their hotel, where other members of the Dead were waiting. Everyone gathered around the suitcase as it was cracked open, revealing a massive amount of quality pot. Along with the Dead, Old and in the Way grabbed plastic baggies and split up the booty. (The Dead weren’t always so welcoming to Garcia’s side players, as Rowan felt backstage at the RFK show: “It was kinda weird. It was like, ‘You’re not gonna take Jerry from us—he’s ours.’ They didn’t say that, but that’s the vibe I got.”)
Rowan, who’d never heard the word “sensimilla” until that day, lit up a joint from the luggage stash. He’d smoked his share, but this joint was something else entirely: strong and mind-numbingly overpowering. “It was like, ‘Oh, this is what the Grateful Dead smoke,’” he recalls. Where the luggage and its contents originated was never confirmed: rumors flew that a fan from either a local research lab (or even the government) sneaked it into the airport and onto that luggage carousel as a way to thank the Dead. That day Rowan learned another lesson about Garcia’s world. “That’s when I started to go, ‘This Grateful Dead thing is really big,’” he says. “There was always stuff like that. They were living large.”
“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.