ENGLISHTOWN, NEW JERSEY, SEPTEMBER 3, 1977
As their helicopter whirly-birded toward the grounds, Garcia, wearing one of his customary black T-shirts, and Richard Loren, their manager of nearly three years, weren’t sure what to expect. No one was. Along with John Scher, the gregarious, Jersey-based promoter who had started booking their east-of-the-Mississippi shows, both men knew that the corridor between Washington, DC, and Boston had been teeming with Deadheads. In 1970 alone the band played seemingly nonstop in the New York area and built up one of their most rabid followings.
But today’s concert in Englishtown would nonetheless be a test and a gamble. The nearby raceway, its name immediately recognizable to anyone who’d grown up in Jersey and heard its ubiquitous “RRRRaceway . . . Park!” radio ads, could hold up to ninety thousand people. Aside from their participation in festivals, the Dead rarely if ever played to that many paying customers, and no one was 100 percent sure whether that many would pay. The weather was another miserable factor: by the time all the members of the Dead began arriving in Englishtown the Jersey Shore’s notoriously humid summer heat had blanketed Raceway Park.
The tickets had begun selling briskly, a positive sign for the Dead but bad news for local municipalities, who were horrified at the thought of tens of thousands of unruly rock fans descending upon their suburbs. Scher told authorities he’d be lucky to sell fifty thousand tickets, but that didn’t mollify the politicians. “We were still in an era,” he says, “where anything that smelled, hinted, or suggested Woodstock scared people.” The towns sued to shut down the concert; when that failed, mysterious construction jobs on all the major roads leading to Englishtown suddenly materialized a day or two before the concert. Luckily for Scher, a judge ordered the towns to fill in the holes they’d already dug in the highways.
Not every Deadhead heard about the ruling, and starting the night before the show, many simply ditched their cars as close to Raceway Park as they could and began walking. To prevent gate-crashing, Scher devised a complicated but ingenious security plan—renting empty boxcars from local rail yards in Newark and connecting them in a large circle around the park. (The Dead’s crew jokingly referred to the sight as the “Polish Railroad”—“it looked like a train, but didn’t go anywhere,” chuckles a friend who was there.) Fans couldn’t squeeze in between the cars, nor could they climb up its slippery surfaces; if they did, they’d be greeted by security guards patrolling atop the boxcars. One fan managed to slip in, holding massive wire cutters, and was stunned to discover there was no fence to slice open even if he wanted to do it. Working to set up the stage throughout the day, Steve Parish and other members of the crew took in the spectacle. “From the side of the stage we watched the security guards repelling people all day long who were climbing up those things,” Parish says. “It was just bursting at the seams.”
But nothing—not highway snafus nor the oppressive summer weather that would normally drive East Coasters indoors—was keeping the cult away. As their helicopter made its way over Raceway Park, all Garcia and Loren saw was an enormous, swirling mass of bodies extending as far as they could see. “Oh, my God!” Loren said, turning to Garcia. “What a fan base we’ve got!”
At was his custom, Scher walked out onto the stage—with its massive Cyclops-with-a-skull backdrop—as the band was about to go on and introduced them, one by one. The Dead didn’t ask him to do that, but Scher did it anyway, in part because he assumed most of the fans probably didn’t know anyone’s name other than Garcia’s. Then he walked off, they started up “Promised Land,” and the time came to see what would happen when the Dead tried to hold the attention of close to one hundred thousand people on the other side of the country from home.
Given the burnout and stress that preceded their sabbatical from performing, the road back to the road had been measured. They’d only played a few times publicly in 1975—including the SNACK benefit at Kezar, previewing some of the more abstract new material they’d worked up—and released Blues for Allah, the album cut at Weir’s studio, in September. Compared to From the Mars Hotel, Blues for Allah felt underproduced, almost drab at times. But starting with “Help on the Way/Slipknot!” the album had a cohesive, organic flow. With its cozy harmonies and languid chords, that song alone announced a more lissome version of the band, as did the instrumental second half, “Slipknot!,” which incorporated jazz chording on guitars, bass, and electric piano. Written hurriedly by Weir and Barlow, “The Music Never Stopped” amounted to their first foray into rhythms that hinted at low-key disco, but the call-and-response vocals between Weir and Donna Godchaux never sounded more charged.
Blues for Allah presented the Dead at their most sociable, in “Franklin’s Tower,” and most eccentric, in “King Solomon’s Marbles,” a rubbery instrumental that gave Garcia and Keith Godchaux plenty of room to roam with their instruments. The latter felt less like a studio piece than an actual live performance, which was the key to Blues for Allah. For a band that notoriously had trouble translating its concert sound onto studio tape, the album felt especially alive. The experiment at Weir’s studio, making something from virtually nothing, also resulted in the album-ending trilogy of “Blues for Allah,” “Sand Castles and Glass Camels,” and “Unusual Occurrences in the Desert,” three pieces that collectively sounded like Marin County monks on an acid trip.
To launch the album, the Dead played a sparkling performance of Blues for Allah in its entirety at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Because he’d used actual live crickets in “Sand Castles and Glass Camels,” the ever-sonically adventurous Hart bought a box of crickets from a pet store in Novato and carted them to the theater. He wound up leaving them there, and a week later the owners angrily called the Dead office, complaining that the crickets had taken over, especially backstage; the Dead just shrugged and declined to help out.
The Great American Music Hall show (and a free show in Golden Gate Park that September with Santana and Jefferson Starship) became a warm-up for further reunions and reparations. The allure of playing together and earning a sizable living from it couldn’t be denied, and they were reminded that time on the road could be preferable to time at home. Just a few months later, in early 1976, they’d congregated at Weir’s house with Scher, who’d first worked with the band in 1972 at Roosevelt Stadium in New Jersey. The following year he began forming a tight connection with the band—Garcia in particular—when Garcia and Hunter were busted for pot (along with LSD and coke) in New Jersey while driving from Baltimore to Manhattan. “Go bail out Jerry Garcia? Come on!” was Scher’s delighted reaction when the call arrived from management. In the middle of the night Scher drove over to his Capitol Theater in Passaic, opened the safe, and pulled out the few thousand dollars needed for bail; after Garcia and Hunter were freed they all drove back to Manhattan and stayed up talking until dawn.
At Weir’s home the band talked about touring again, but under far more curtailed circumstances than in 1974. In a mailing to Deadheads that would announce the eventual release of Blues for Allah, they hinted at the stress of the road, announcing that they were considering “hit and run” shows “consisting of unannounced concerts . . . This will keep the size down and we will not feel obligated to play a place before announcing it if something else comes up.” Those words were the germ of an idea that would be nailed down at Weir’s home.
It was clear to Scher that the Dead still enjoyed playing together but that aspects of their touring business had to change. The Wall of Sound would have to go, along with some of the extra hired hands; rented gear and a small crew would now be the norm—to “make everything more compact,” says Candelario, who survived that round of cuts. Over the course of hours of conversation Scher heard what the band wanted: multiple days at venues instead of arenas. “Bill Graham made the mistake [of thinking] they were a bunch of drugged-up hippies,” says Scher. “But by the middle of the seventies, not suggesting they were straight arrow, they were sophisticated musicians and business people who agreed they wanted to participate in the business.”
With that they began playing shows again in 1976, starting in Oregon in June. The performances sometimes felt tentative, as if they were still getting reacquainted. Hart had to learn material he hadn’t played before, and he himself was easing his way back in personally. This time there would be no new album to promote other than Steal Your Face, a largely uninspired two-record live set culled from the Winterland shows in 1974 that helped fulfill the United Artists contract.
The Dead were working out their new life on the road, but the situation with their own company wasn’t proving to be sustainable. In early 1976 the First National Bank of Boston wanted its debt repaid, and tension between Rakow and the band was mounting. Everyone other than Garcia was beginning to question the running of the business, and Hart had an outright confrontation with Rakow when Hart was recording Diga, the first album by his percussion ensemble Diga Rhythm Band, at Wally Heider’s studio in San Francisco. Soon after, Rakow was fired. Hearing what had happened, Rakow, according to published reports, cashed a low-six-figure advance check from United Artists and paid off those owed for production of movie projects and other costs. He also kept some for himself that, he argued, would have been owed to him from an earlier contract with the band. As legitimate as it appeared, the news was still staggering to the Dead. As soon as he heard what Rakow had done, band lawyer Hal Kant called Hellman: “What the hell is going on here?” Everyone was as surprised as Kant.
Garcia, ever eager to avoid confrontation, didn’t want to press the matter and draw attention to the band’s financial chaos. (According to McNally’s account, “They negotiated a settlement in which [Rakow] kept the money but retained no interest in the record company.”) Within a few months Grateful Dead Records (and its sister label, Round) were history. Garcia’s salary, which had been about $540 a week, according to Andy Leonard, was cut down to a little over $50 to penalize him and compensate for the depletion in funds. Garcia had been the one pushing for Rakow from the start and now had to pay the price for his decision. The fallout would have enormous implications for Garcia, his personal life, and the Dead.
One day in late 1976 Keith Olsen, an LA-based record producer who’d overseen Fleetwood Mac’s 1975 makeover Fleetwood Mac, found himself in the New York office of Arista Records head Clive Davis. Davis played Olsen a song by one of his acts, the Alan Parsons Project, then announced the real reason for the meeting: he’d signed the Dead and wanted Olsen to produce their first record for the label. “He said, ‘I need an album that could be played on radio,’” says Olsen, who was admittedly ignorant of the band’s music and immediately flashed on the one song he knew well, “Casey Jones.” “I thought, it’s the Grateful Dead—‘high on cocaine’?’” Olsen recalls. “I didn’t know their records. I was as far away from what they did as possible.” After the meeting Olsen listened to a Dead album and focused on the sound of the dual drummers, which he thought was, in his words, “just slush—it wasn’t a tight backbeat. It was just undefined. The guitar parts weren’t together either, and I just thought, “How am I going to fix this?’”
Olsen wasn’t alone in scratching his head over translating the Dead onto tape in a studio; even the band’s management realized how difficult it was. “I don’t think the Dead ever made albums that were anywhere near the excitement and what was going on in a gig,” McIntire told writer David Hajdu. “Slightly off-key vocals are really going to stand out, whereas they don’t when you’re in the hall. And the lack of necessity of one note following another is lost when it’s being recorded.” Thanks to the largely freeform way in which it was made, Blues for Allah had been an artistic success, but the collapse of Grateful Dead Records had squandered that opportunity; the band now had to dig itself out of a considerable hole. They finally turned to Davis and Arista, the company he’d started after an acrimonious split with Columbia Records a few years before. At the time Arista was only three years old and best known for hits by Barry Manilow. But the label was also home to a small group of respected rockers and songwriters including Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Loudon Wainwright III, making it a compatible potential home for the Dead. The band was also aware that Davis had been interested in signing them at least once before. “We went and talked to Arista first,” says Scher, who helped negotiate the deal. “They were the only people we negotiated with in any real way. Clive had signed the New Riders, and Jerry was very happy with the way that happened. So that was their first choice, and at the time Clive had an amazing staff. They felt if there was anybody they could work with in the industry, it would be Clive.” With few alternatives, the Dead had almost no choice but to sign up.
Not wanting to alienate a powerful industry figure like Davis, Olsen agreed to give the Dead a fresh coat of sonic paint. “I had to do it,” says Olsen. “It was an edict.” With that command, he flew to the Bay Area and met with the Dead over dinner at his hotel. When he mentioned that Davis wanted a radio-friendly record, most of the band laughed, to Olsen’s discomfort.
“No,” he shot back, “the president of your record company really wants to have something in your album that’s accessible to the marketplace and accessible on radio.”
The band simply stared back quietly, except for Garcia, who said, “Hmmm—radio’s good!” It was settled; Olsen would lead the charge.
By the fall of 1976 mainstream rock ’n’ roll had never sounded glossier; tellingly, the biggest album of the year was Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive!, a concert album by a journeyman British rocker who represented rock at its cuddliest and most family friendly. Punk was right around the corner; Smith had released her Arista debut the previous year, and the Ramones had launched in the spring with their own first missive, the low-selling but influential Ramones. But radio hadn’t yet taken to punk rock—in some ways it wouldn’t for decades—and only seemed amenable to records that had a studio-sheen glaze over them. In signing with Arista and then agreeing to work with Olsen, the Dead were conceding to the artistic and economic times around them. Weir, the band member most comfortable with mingling with record executives, had at least one meeting with Davis at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “Bobby would do the networking for the band,” says Janice Godshalk-Olsen, who was close to Weir during this period. “Clive was explaining that he wanted the band to go a little more Southern California—or, the word the band hates, ‘commercial.’ And he wanted them to work with his man Keith. Bobby was up for it more so than the rest of the guys.”
Gathering in a circle soon after at Front Street, the band began playing as Olsen paced around, observing them at work. He couldn’t tell whether they could hear each other, especially Kreutzmann and Hart, and he quickly realized their musicianship matched their personalities. “Mickey is pushing, pushing, pushing and on top of the beat,” Olsen recalls, “and Billy was laid back; his backbeat was way behind.” The way Lesh’s bass jutted out to the forefront—rather than playing a reserved, supportive role in the way of most rock bass playing—was an indication of the leading role Lesh saw for himself in the Dead.
Olsen left the rehearsal depressed; he wondered how he was going to make a record with such ingredients, especially because the Dead didn’t seem open to change. A subsequent visit to Front Street wasn’t any better. The band played him “Estimated Prophet,” a new Weir and Barlow song inspired by the sight of unhinged hangers-on at their shows; the narrator hears voices in his head and is awaiting his own personal apocalypse. The song would eventually settle into a groove that hinted at reggae, but at that early stage it still felt unformed. Olsen was praying Garcia had a few good songs to offer. Taking a seat, Garcia played snippets of different in-progress melodies—delightful pieces of music, but not finished works. After each one Garcia would pause and say, “Maybe I should finish one of these songs.” At one point one of the crew leaned over to Olsen and joked, “You know those will never get done!” Olsen’s heart sank until he suggested they fuse all of them into a suite. “Oh, like a symphonette?” Garcia said brightening. As Olsen recalls, “It was kind of brutal until I convinced them they needed more songs.”
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.”
The Dead arrived at Raceway Park in a variety of physical and mental conditions, not all of them encouraging. Lesh was feeling better now that they’d returned to the road. “That fear had been assuaged,” he says, but his life still felt out of sorts. He had started drinking more heavily and, tellingly, had married a woman he’d met in a bar. The post-hiatus Dead also rattled him in ways he couldn’t ascertain. “When we came back after the break, it just was never the same, on some mysterious level,” he says. “We hadn’t evolved together. We’d evolved individually and separately. We had to get to know each other all over again, and, sadly, I don’t think that ever really happened. We were all different people.” Thanks to a daily breakfast consisting largely of beer, he’d put on an additional thirty pounds, and his vocal cords had strained, reducing his singing contributions to the band. “I lost my high notes, so I couldn’t sing the high harmonies anymore,” Lesh says. “Too much alcohol, advancing age. I don’t know. Even after I quit they never came back.”
For his part, Garcia rarely drank; one of the few times anyone saw him inebriated was on the Festival Express tour in 1970. But Garcia was increasingly besieged on numerous fronts, and his need to alleviate stress was growing. That year he endured a messy breakup with Koons. (Inspired by Loren, Garcia had started carrying around a briefcase for his paperwork and, naturally, stash.) Garcia was also feeling guilty about the debacle of Grateful Dead Records and having not only brought Rakow into the fold but also stood up for him during the entire chaotic ride. It was as if he’d been entrusted to run the family but had let it run amuck.
To add to his workload, Garcia was also spending innumerable hours working on a movie built around footage shot at the semifarewell Winterland shows in 1974. Gary Gutierrez, a young animator who’d worked on public-television kids’ shows like Sesame Street and The Electric Company, was hired and had begun working on the segments in the beginning of the movie. One idea, to feature Uncle Sam skeletons in time for the US Bicentennial in 1976, soon became outdated when the project stretched into the following year. The movie went way over budget, and Garcia, Loren, and promoter Scher came up with an idea to rent out movie theaters rather than work with an official distributor and pay for expensive multiple prints. “We didn’t have the money or inclination to do that,” says Scher, “so we went to each of the big cities we knew were giant, found the best theaters, rented them out, and brought in a concert-level PA.” When The Grateful Dead Movie made its long-overdue premiere at the Ziegfeld Theatre in Manhattan in June 1977, everyone dressed up: Donna Jean as Scarlett O’Hara, for instance. Deadheads who’d lined up around the block gave the band a standing ovation as they walked in and took their seats. At a hotel party after, Garcia played tic-tac-toe with Clive Davis, and a friend of the band watched as a female Deadhead barged in on Garcia and said, “Sign my arm!”
One of the few pieces of overt direction Garcia gave to Gutierrez was about the use of various bits of Dead imagery and iconography. “He said, ‘We have a lot of artwork that expresses the idea of chance,’” Gutierrez says, “and he said he would like it to be about how, in life, things change directions this way or that way. He wanted to express the unpredictable randomness of life. I specifically remember him saying that.” Even with a successful career as a rock star, Garcia’s sense of fatalism had never deserted him.
The movie would be an invaluable document of the Dead onstage, but the workload, combined with everything he was juggling in his personal life, was proving to be too much for Garcia. Increasingly his affable, approachable image began working against him: anyone who needed a favor or a financial handout seemed to visit him backstage. “He had guys hounding him to do free shows,” says Candelario. “They didn’t come by to say, ‘Hi, what’s going on?’ They came to tell him he needed to do a benefit concert or whatever. It was a hustle. He had all those kinds of things pounding on him. He wanted to be in that place where he could go in and turn the light off and just be quiet. Finally you can relax and take some time for yourself.”
To reach that place, Garcia began turning to a strong Persian opiate that could be smoked rather than injected. Although some in the organization connected Garcia’s alarming new habit to the fall of Grateful Dead Records, he had begun dabbling in heroin before that collapse. One Dead employee recalls seeing Garcia and one of the band’s colleagues visit a brothel in 1974 so they could do heroin without any band interruptions; Parish first saw Garcia partake of the drug in the winter of 1975. “As far as I know, he started before the Rakow thing,” says Lesh. “That was another reason I didn’t think the band was going to start up again.”
Sources differ as to who brought the drug into the Dead’s camp: one recalls an outsider who would occasionally worked for their business. Garcia told Hart his connection was the son of an ambassador to a Middle Eastern country, who was using his diplomatic immunity to easily bring the drug into the states. For the time being, though, Garcia’s habit wasn’t debilitating, so it rarely set off alarm bells within the Dead camp. Given the consistently brawny level of Garcia’s playing and singing, especially in 1977, there was no reason for anyone to suspect anything was derailing. “In those days his music wasn’t touched by any drugs in a negative way,” says Parish. “He couldn’t play or work enough in 1977. He was still functioning completely in those days.” As Loren comments, “I’m just speculating, but I think it made him feel good, and when he felt good, he played well.”
During a typical year band members would be home less than three months a year—a few days here and there before they were gone again on another leg of roadwork. By now Bill and Susila Kreutzmann’s son, Justin, had grown accustomed to only seeing his father from time to time when he wasn’t on the road. “He’d be home, and we’d have an attachment,” says Justin, “and then he’d go away again, and that would be sad.” Kreutzmann wanted his son to follow in his creative footsteps, to the point at which he bought Justin a Sonor drum kit for his bedroom. Justin wasn’t all that interested—from an early age he was more intrigued with filmmaking than musicianship—and began noticing that, bit by bit, his drum kit would be missing a floor tom or cymbal. As it turned out, his father apparently needed them for his own drums, and Justin didn’t seem to mind the missing pieces; the fact that his father had bought him a drum set to begin with was reaffirming enough of their bond.
Other members of the organization were dealing with loss in different ways. After more than five years Bob and Frankie’s relationship was coming apart just as Garcia and Mountain Girl’s had. Frankie was more than capable of standing up for herself, drinking and playing pool and poker along with any man on the scene. “I think she got bored,” says Cagwin. “She called it the ‘Marin Spin’—the same things that happen always keep happening.” Frankie—and Weir as well—was turned off by the excessive drugging of some of the others in Kingfish. In the early months of 1976 Frankie moved out of her and Weir’s Mill Valley home. “It wasn’t a big dramatic scene,” Kelly recalls. “It was all very calm, which was nice. I sensed they were both ready to go their own ways.”
Sitting with her recording gear by the side of the stage each night, Cantor diligently recorded every gig on the 1977 tour. But she was also grieving over the loss of her husband. In September 1976 her partner, Rex Jackson, died after his car ran off the road near Mill Valley; he and Cantor had married in 1973 and had a son, Cole. (Donna Godchaux’s “Sunrise” was partly inspired by Rex’s memorial service.) The news was devastating to the community, and work became Cantor’s outlet for coping with her grief. “I thought, ‘I want to be here,’” she says of the road. “I was keeping busy. That’s what saved my soul. Being creative kept me from getting depressed.”
The band members in the worst physical shape, though, were Hart and Donna Godchaux. In an early morning in June Hart and his friend Rhonda Jensen, who’d come to live on his ranch with her sister Vicki at the end of the sixties, were returning from a concert to the nearby house of a friend in Half Moon Bay. Pulling up the dirt and gravel driveway, Hart punched the engine on his Porsche too hard, making the car swing out in the back. Because there was no guard rail, the car tumbled over the ravine next to the driveway, an incline so steep it was used for dumping trash. The car was caught in eucalyptus trees whose limbs looked like arms bent at the elbow, but the vehicle still slid down, and Hart was terribly bashed up. Climbing out of the wreck, Jensen told Hart not to move and ran to the house to tell everyone about the accident.
Firemen and police showed up soon, but some began debating how to rescue the car from its dangling tangle. “That’s one of the Grateful Dead in there!” someone shouted in exasperation, snapping the emergency crew to attention. After the car was secured, Hart was pulled out and taken to a nearby hospital with a broken collarbone, smashed ribs, a broken arm, and other injuries; one of his ears was dangling by a piece of skin, causing a female friend visiting him to faint at the sight. The doctors didn’t make any promises to visiting friends, but Brandelius told them proudly that her boyfriend was a “tough fucker.” Making a rare trip to the hospital, Garcia looked at Hart and cracked, “You look like shit!” Hells Angels smuggled pot into Hart’s room to ease the pain. Hart began a long, tedious physical rehab, which took six weeks and forced the cancellation of at least a few Dead shows just as Terrapin Station was about to be released in late July. The Dead’s coffers still took a major hit.
Showing up at a band meeting at Fifth and Lincoln during this time, Donna Godchaux heard the band was planning to do a huge outdoor show in New Jersey. At first she balked for her own health-connected reasons. That summer she’d had an operation of her own and informed everyone it might be physically impossible for her to do the show: her stitches were still mending, and her doctor had warned her against even walking across the street. Garcia hung his head and said, “Well, I guess we just can’t do it, because she sings on all the songs.” With no arm twisting, Godchaux then changed her mind for the good of the band and began making arrangements to transport herself to Jersey by helicopter, limousine, and wheelchair; on site someone would have to physically carry her onto the stage and place her in a chair.
After opening sets by the New Riders of the Purple Sage and the Marshall Tucker Band, the Dead ambled onto the stage. They looked a bit older and chunkier than the last time fans had seen them; Kreutzmann now had wisps of gray sticking out of the side of his head. They also looked like they could have come from several different bands: Garcia’s standard black T-shirt contrasted sharply with Weir’s white slacks and aviator glasses. Half of the band looked as if they were conceding to the fashion trends of the seventies, and the other half seemed to be actively rebelling against them.
The show was adequate but not nearly as momentous as those that came right before and after that year. Self-conscious about his injury, Hart felt as if everyone in the crowd was watching him and his recovering shoulder. With the band’s blessing, he played lighter than usual so he could cruise through the set. In his usual way he overdid it, and his shoulder began to ache. As often happened, Donna Godchaux couldn’t hear very well and was further hampered by her own surgery, relegated to a chair near Lesh during most of the show. “It was like an out-patient clinic on stage,” says Hart. “We weren’t in the groove. We were stale. But we made it through. We did the best we could under the circumstances.”
The circumstances around Terrapin Station were similarly wobbly. Despite its radio-friendly aura, the album wasn’t proving to be the breakout hit everyone had hoped. Deadheads were deeply divided about the record, which only clawed its way to number twenty-eight on the Billboard album chart. Despite all the work put into it and its groundbreaking title suite, Terrapin Station became their lowest-charting album since 1970.
Yet the number of people who’d driven, walked, and shimmied their way between boxcars at Raceway Park told another story. When Scher double-checked the box office, he discovered they’d sold a staggering 102,000 tickets, more than double his estimate. The Dead had played before oceans of people before, at Woodstock and, in 1973, at Watkins Glen, the New York festival at which about 600,000 people showed up to hear them, the Allman Brothers Band, and the Band. Yet those were multi-act festivals, whereas Raceway Park was a Dead show (with two opening acts). The show was the most vivid demonstration yet that the Dead weren’t just a large cult band but rather a phenomenon that couldn’t be denied. “It said, ‘We’re a big band,’” Loren says. “It said, ‘Yeah, the Allman Brothers, they’re big, but they’re not the Grateful Dead.’ A lot of the industry stood up and said, ‘100,000 people at a Dead show—that’s unbelievable!’ And these weren’t repeat [customers]—it was only for one show, not four. It wasn’t the same people going over and over. And they didn’t come to see Marshall Tucker.” By then Deadheads were beginning to snap up tickets to multiple shows in the same cities, a development largely new to rock ’n’ roll. Why would anyone want to see a band two nights in a row? It made little sense to those outside the community, but Deadheads knew how much the sets could change, even how the lengths of certain songs could vary show to show.
After the encore, an eleven-minute run-through of “Terrapin Station Part 1,” they couldn’t wait to return to their air-conditioned Manhattan hotel rooms. But everyone came away with one clear lesson: they could dismantle the band for a while. They could return, as they had the year before, without a new studio album to promote. They could make an album that would leave the fans ambivalent. They could force their fans to walk miles in the heat and then wait hours in the body-fluid-depleting sun to see them play. And when they did perform, as at Raceway Park, they could do it with two of their members physically incapacitated, hampering the music along the way.
Onstage and off, they could screw up as much as they wanted, yet none of it seemed to matter. The fans still adored them and would cut them enormous amounts of slack merely for the opportunity to see them play. The experience, the gathering, was as much the point as the performance. Just after Raceway Park Arista ran an ad in Rolling Stone with photos from the show and the copy, “A New Dead Era Is Upon Us.” Even if they didn’t realize it at the time, the era arrived with many new lessons.