NEW YORK CITY, OCTOBER 31, 1980
Even the union workers agreed: part of the wall had to go. After all, the Dead had a slew of shows about to begin, and their damn recording consoles had to be installed. If it meant a portion of a stairwell had to be removed—in a building that had just been given landmark status by the city of New York—so be it. On the occasion of the Dead’s fifteenth anniversary, nothing and no one could stand in their way, not even Radio City Music Hall.
Just over a week before, the load-in had begun for the Dead’s eight-night stand at the six-thousand-seat venue. On many levels the sight would have been unimaginable several years before. The venerable midtown building had opened its doors nearly fifty years before, in 1932, and by 1980 any tourist who came through the city seemed to be legally required to attend Radio City Music Hall’s Christmas and Easter shows with the Rockettes or see one of the family-themed movies it hosted. But by the late seventies, with New York City in fiscal freefall, Radio City’s future was suddenly shaky; movie attendance dropped, and plans to convert it into an office building or parking lot loomed. Thankfully the interior of the building was granted landmark status in 1978, and its famed art-deco lobby and other interior design elements were refreshed for $5 million. During talks to save the building the idea of booking pop acts came up, and by the fall of 1980 Radio City Music Hall had presented one major pop star, Linda Ronstadt. Now it would host an entirely different kind of beast, the Grateful Dead, who were about to settle in for eight nights, October 22 to 31 (with the nights of October 24 and 28 off).
The band’s clout became evident right away, when Deadheads converged upon Rockefeller Center, some camping out, and snapped up almost thirty-six thousand tickets priced between $12.50 and $15.00. In an ambitious move that recalled the special screenings of The Grateful Dead Movie, the last night, Halloween, would be broadcast live by a closed-circuit feed to fourteen movie theaters around the country; in addition, all the anniversary shows, both at Radio City and preceding ones at the Warfield in San Francisco, would be recorded for a live album or two. The entire undertaking felt like an event, especially when word trickled out that the band would be playing its first acoustic set in a decade, complete with their fairly new keyboard player.
To accommodate the recording the Dead needed two hefty Neve recording consoles, one rented and the other shipped out from their Front Street home base. Both had to be hauled up a flight of stairs to reach Plaza Sound, the studio that sat atop Radio City (and where punk bands like Blondie and the Ramones had recorded). The Dead’s office had sent paperwork ahead of time to make sure the consoles would be able to make it into the building, but when the time came to install them, a problem arose: the consoles couldn’t quite clear the stairwell. After some head-scratching, one of the union workers at the venue, with Hart’s urging, said, “Oh, fuck it—we’ve gotta get this thing up here.” With that they grabbed a sledgehammer and took down a few inches of the stairwell wall.
Promoter John Scher had no idea the “renovation” was happening until he heard from Betty Cantor, who would be recording the shows, and the thought of physical damage to the interior of a New York landmark rattled even Scher, who thought he’d seen it all with the Dead. “I remember Betty telling me after they’d already done it, after the fact,” Scher says. “I was basically shitting in my pants until the shows were over.” It wouldn’t be the first time the Dead would encounter some pushback in their career, but this victory was significant. “I had no second thoughts about that,” says Hart. “It was the thing to do. Nothing stops the Grateful Dead. Onward into the fog.” They’d already made it to fifteen years despite adversity, busts, deaths, and fallow periods, and no one was about to let a bit of concrete stand in their way.
By then the bright memories of 1977 were starting to dim. Beginning the following year, the self-control and efficiency that had marked the previous year was beginning to slip out of the Dead’s grasp, and the grind of touring was starting to wear them down. “When I first came along people were doing a little bit of everything,” says Courtenay Pollock, the tie-dye artist now fully immersed in the Dead world on and off the road. “But with the demands of these tours, people started jacking themselves to keep up the pace.”
Culturally the Dead were also now out of sorts. Thanks to the rise of punk rock and disco, the Dead, although only in their thirties, were now ensnared in what amounted to a sixties backlash; anything that even vaguely reeked of patchouli oil and weed was newly reviled or mocked. Even the country’s hip, Dylan-quoting president, Jimmy Carter—who’d been elected in 1976, the same year the Dead returned to the road—was beginning to stumble. In the next election, a month after the Radio City Music Hall shows would wrap up, the country would embrace Ronald Reagan, a symbolic gesture of political and cultural change.
Eager to simplify themselves—and rejecting a return to the buffed sonics of Terrapin Station—the Dead hired Lowell George of Little Feat to produce their next album. The hookup sounded ideal: George had his feet planted firmly in American roots music, and the band could relate to him (and his funky, cutting-razor slide guitar) more than they could Keith Olsen. For extra comfort, the sessions wouldn’t be held in Los Angeles but at Front Street, the Dead’s warehouse in San Rafael. Although the band had been renting it for a few years, Garcia had used Front Street the previous year to record his Jerry Garcia Band (or JGB) album Cats Under the Stars. Maria Muldaur, the sexy-voiced former jug-band singer who’d had a hit with “Midnight at the Oasis” in 1974, sang on several tracks on the album, thanks to her relationship with John Kahn, Garcia’s buddy and favorite non-Dead bass player. “Jerry and John were like spiritual brothers,” says Muldaur. “It was musical, and it was something beyond that. Jerry respected John and the knowledge he had of other kinds of music. He liked his sensibility. They had this intuitive connection.”
Kahn and Muldaur had been a couple since 1974, and now, years later, Muldaur was witnessing the craziness at Front Street for herself: recording sessions that started after midnight and were fueled by coke and wine. (Because she had a young daughter and woke up early each day, Muldaur took to carting along an espresso machine to help keep her awake late at night: “I called it Italian cocaine.”) Yet Garcia’s side band, which had started in 1975 during the Dead’s hiatus and was now more or less known as the Jerry Garcia Band, was by now a legitimate and flourishing concern. With players that included Kahn, Elvis drummer Ron Tutt, and Keith and Donna Godchaux, with others to follow, the JGB allowed Garcia to revel in different rhythms and repertoire than the Dead. (Don’t Let Go, a live album recorded in 1976 but released much later, was a prime example of the group’s loose, funky Marin swing.) The sessions at Front Street for what would be Garcia’s fourth studio solo album were especially productive. From Garcia’s biting guitar on the pumped “Rhapsody in Red” to the enchanting story-song “Rubin and Cherise,” about a love triangle set in New Orleans, the album featured some of Garcia’s best outside-Dead work, and he would be justly proud of it for years after. Its lack of commercial success would also be devastating to him.
Months later at the same place, work on the Dead’s new album, Shakedown Street, would prove far less satisfying. It was George’s idea to tape the band at their rehearsal space, and with him they finally recorded “Good Lovin’,” one of Pigpen’s showcases, now with Weir singing lead. George did return the band to its dance-band roots with a modern twist; the title song leapt into a disco pool even more so than their cover of “Dancin’ in the Streets” on Terrapin Station, and Weir and Barlow’s “I Need a Miracle” roared in ways the Dead hadn’t done in the studio before. With his white overalls, genial manner, and love of American music, George was seemingly a natural match for them. But the material was patchy, and the party atmosphere at Club Front wasn’t helping; George was no stranger to cocaine, and he and some of the band members (and crew) indulged themselves regularly. “A lovely guy, but he was screaming on coke the whole time,” says Hart. “He was killing himself. And, again, it was a desperation move. Nobody in their right mind would want to be the producer of the Grateful Dead. It’s a death sentence. No one can handle that. They always crack up.”
After school Justin Kreutzmann would show up to watch his dad work and, he says, “Everyone would still be up from the night before. Everyone was so unhealthy and the combination of Lowell and the Dead wasn’t doing anyone any good.” Weir invited his old friend and former Kingfish partner Matthew Kelly to play harmonica on “I Need a Miracle”; when Kelly showed up, George immediately lectured him. “Lowell came up to me and said, ‘I don’t allow any drugs at my recording sessions,’” says Kelly. “Which was ironic and somewhat hypocritical. Everyone was using them.”
In the midst of that work one of their grandest adventures was taking shape. Thanks largely to their manager and booker, Richard Loren, they would be heading for Egypt for three nights of concerts in September 1978. The trip involved all manner of paperwork and diplomatic massaging, including trips by Loren, Lesh, and Alan Trist (now a longtime band employee) to Egypt and Washington, DC. Eventually they arranged it so the trip would be a fundraiser for two Egyptian charities (as opposed to a State Department–sanctioned trip that might raise eyebrows), and their dream of playing their most celestial music at the foot of the Pyramids became a reality.
In typically untidy Dead style they almost didn’t make the trip. To raise additional funds (in part to help pay for all the friends and family who’d be joining them), they played a show at Giants Stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands area outside of Manhattan. Because Shakedown Street wasn’t completely finished (George had to leave the drawn-out sessions to return to his band and upcoming solo album), a few of them flew back to Front Street after the show for last-minute tweaks. Before anyone knew it, the whole band was back. “It was, ‘Well, if he’s coming back to fix this part, then I’m coming back too,’” says a Dead employee of the time. “They all snuck back.” As a result, office worker Sue Stephens had to hustle and buy last-minute tickets from San Francisco to Egypt and make sure the band made it to the airport on time. By then a first plane, filled with Mountain Girl and various Merry Pranksters like Kesey and Ken Babbs, had already arrived.
Though it was bound to be an historic expedition, the Dead arrived in Egypt in various states of disrepair. Kreutzmann had broken his wrist beforehand. Garcia was suffering from withdrawal from heroin. Their regular piano tuner refused to join them after he felt one of the crew dissed him. “That put a kibosh on the show right there,” says Candelario. “The piano was out of tune. We had some other synthesizers and things, but not the nine-foot Yamaha Keith was used to, and he was bummed about it. That set the whole domino thing up.” To kill all the mosquitoes and bugs in the air, trucks were spraying DDT all around their hotel, the Mena House in Cairo.
During the days leading up to their three shows at the Pyramids, everyone in the Dead caravan immersed themselves in the country and its culture: riding camels and horses, sampling the hashish openly sold on the streets, and visiting the King’s Chamber high up in the Great Pyramid. (With its dusty, freewheeling ambience, the country was almost like an oversized version of Hart’s Novato ranch during its heyday.) Healy and Owsley tried to create an echo chamber in the Pyramids. On the third night of performances, the Dead played during a full eclipse, with the moon and the nearby Sphinx scorching the sky. “That third night we brought the Egyptians down off the dunes in front of the stage,” Hart says. “They parked camels and slowly started coming down.” For most but not all of them the trip ended with a boat ride down the Nile, both to see the sights and to keep the band away from the Nubian porters who were trying to give them pure opiates.
Sadly the music was the least of it. Revealing their oncoming fatigue as well as their various ailments, the Dead played largely perfunctory sets. The shows were so unexceptional that Garcia would nix the release of a live album meant to pay off expenses. (It would eventually be released, but years after Garcia’s death.) Egypt wouldn’t be their first time messing up a high-profile event. They hadn’t played all that well at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967; at Woodstock two years later, rain, technical delays, and hundreds of thousands of eyeballs watching them spooked them enough to result in a choppy performance. In the recording truck outside the Great Pyramid, which had been pulled in through the sand by truck, Betty Cantor was taping the shows as always, but, something felt off. “I thought, ‘This seems typical,’” she says. “It was one of those things, one of those very big shows, like Woodstock, when they didn’t play well. All the big ones, they would screw up. It would always baffle me.” The erratic shows in Egypt, though, were indicative of something more ominous: the mighty Dead were once again starting to swerve a bit off course. In late 1979 the band pulled into New York’s Madison Square Garden for three shows. On the first night a friend of the band laid out some positive-energy crystals onstage. At a previous show the crew had spoken to the friend about it, saying they appreciated the gesture but worried that the more light was added, the more darkness would be attracted. Sure enough, on the second night at the Garden a death threat was called in. The crew seemingly knew of what it spoke.
Tom Davis had an answer when someone at Radio City asked about the sketch with the LSD-dosed urine. “What are you guys afraid of, a little wee-wee?”
Before part of the wall in the Radio City stairwell came down, another issue had to be resolved about the live broadcast of the Halloween show: the matter of two forty-minute breaks. To fill up that time, and to the event producers (Loren and Scher) and director (Len Dell’Amico, who worked at Scher’s Capitol Theater in Jersey), the answer was obvious: skits featuring Davis and his Saturday Night Live partner, Al Franken.
The bond between the Dead and SNL continued to be unbreakable. The Dead were frequent visitors to the Blues Bar, the scuzzy downtown hang-out run by Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, and Belushi and Kreutzmann particularly hit it off. “It was a brotherhood of madmen,” says Parish of the Dead and SNL bond. “We looked in each other’s eyes, and we knew.” During the Terrapin Station sessions Olsen watched as Belushi visited some later New York overdubbing sessions; the comic performed a few cartwheels in the studio, hung out, then passed out. “He drank everything he could and took everything and then passed out in front of the console,” Olsen says. “Everyone said, ‘Don’t bother him—let him be.’”
As writers and performers, the tall, gawky Davis and the short, frizzy-haired Franken couldn’t have been more ideal for the assignment at Radio City. They shared a dark, cynical sense of humor with the Dead (among the rightly revered SNL skits they’d written were Aykroyd’s Julia Child–bloodbath bit and Bill Murray’s “Nick the Lounge Singer”), and both were Deadheads: Davis in particular had been to many shows starting in the early seventies. Thanks to him, the Dead had appeared twice on SNL, first in 1978 and then 1980. (According to Davis’s memoir, producer Lorne Michaels was unsure about presenting the Dead the first time, and then-bandleader G. E. Smith told Davis the Dead were “not happening” at the time.) When Parish ejected Franken and Davis from one backstage area at a Dead gig, they turned the encounter and humiliation into an SNL skit, with Belushi playing “Parish.” To kill time between sets, what better than skits along those lines? “If it hadn’t been for Franken and Davis,” says Rock Scully of the plans for Radio City, “I doubt the Dead would have done it.”
The anniversary shows would officially kick off with a long run of gigs at the Warfield, and Franken and Davis flew in from New York to tape segments in advance, letting the Warfield stand in for Radio City. The duo’s knowledge of the Dead and its music as well as the musicians’ willingness to goof on themselves couldn’t have made a better match. “Jerry’s Kids” lampooned Jerry Lewis’s muscular dystrophy telethons but with acid casualties; a pretend dressing-room visit by Franken and Davis allowed Weir to mock his fondness for his hair and blow dryers. Holding a microphone, Davis walked into the men’s room at the Warfield to see whether people were “doing drugs,” barged into a stall, and found one stoner, played by soundman Healy, who threw up (barley soup substituted for actual vomit). Other skits were rampant with drug and penis jokes, and Garcia mocked his own physical deformity by holding a box that contained his finger. “They made fun of themselves whenever that opportunity came up,” says Dell’Amico of the process of sketch writing for the show. “They’d say, ‘Go for that.’”
The skits pretaped at the Warfield were uniformly riotous, but someone at the Rockefeller Corporation, which owned Radio City Music Hall, wasn’t so taken. Sue Stephens found herself frantically retyping scripts at the last minute with minor but telling changes. On the grand Radio City stage one day Dell’Amico and Franken were deep into rehearsal for a skit in which Franken, in thousands of dollars worth of makeup, would be impersonating former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. With Kreutzmann joining in, Davis would “bust” the faux “Kissinger” for secretly taping the shows.
While they were practicing, “a phalanx of four men in black suits and carrying briefcases” watched by the side, according to Dell’Amico. The director was told to stop filming because the men—Radio City lawyers who supposedly represented the Rockefeller family—wanted to shut down the skit. As it turned out, Kissinger and Nelson Rockefeller were old friends. “I said, ‘They can fuck off,’” Dell’Amico says. “And that was that. I think they looked at the paperwork and said, ‘They’re right, they’re renting this room.’ If you’re working for the Dead, you’ve got muscle because of the money coming in the door.” As Dell’Amico predicted, the skit aired in its entirety.
Early in the months of 1979, when the thought of playing Radio City was merely a pipedream, Kreutzmann and his son Justin, then nine, walked into the lobby of Club Front. Because the space had become a communal hangout, it wasn’t unusual to bump into other band members there, and today it would be Keith Godchaux—bidding farewell. “It’s been nice playing with you,” Godchaux said with a friendly, zero-hostility smile, and he and Kreutzmann shook hands. A few days later the Kreutzmanns returned to Club Front and, in nearly the same spot, met Godchaux’s replacement, whose youth (he was twenty-six), shoulder-length hair, and beard made him look as much like a Deadhead as a fellow musician.
One night Godchaux asked a friend of the band to take him for a ride to a suspicious part of town. “Are you talking white or brown?” she asked him, meaning cocaine or heroin, and he was caught off guard: “Whoa, how did you know?” he replied. By the time of the Egypt escapade Godchaux’s drug abuse and his and his wife’s on-the-road difficulties were among the band’s worst-kept secrets. Never the band’s most thunderous player or most forceful personality in the band, Godchaux seemed to recede even further into the background as his addiction took over. (He would sometimes have a bottle of Pepto-Bismol on his piano to ease his nerves.) His zoned-out demeanor during the making of Terrapin Station barely changed as they recorded Shakedown Street; during the final stages of recording John Kahn wound up playing some of the keyboard parts himself.
Always more outspoken and opinionated than her generally subdued husband, Donna began confronting Keith about his hard-drug use; combined with the stress of trying to raise a young son, Zion, on the road, the couple was coming undone. Tales of their screaming matches backstage and a notorious car smashup outside Club Front were commonplace. During the Egypt trip Nicki Scully, Rock’s wife, had to talk Donna down during a meltdown over one issue or another. During a Jerry Garcia Band tour in 1978 to promote Cats Under the Stars, Maria Muldaur would try to stand in between the couple onstage so Donna wouldn’t be able to see when Keith would briefly stop playing and give his wife two middle fingers at once, which would often make Donna burst into tears. “Keith and I, we were wasted,” Donna told Rolling Stone in 2014. “We were exhausted. And the band was exhausted with us. Keith and I would be getting along, but then I’d be mad at him. All that kind of stuff in the mix. It was just a constant struggle because we needed to be a family and we were on the road all the time.”
At a group meeting at the Godchaux’s house in 1979 everyone came to a mutual decision: it was time for the couple to leave. “It was a relief, in a way,” Donna said in 2014. “It was sad in another way. But it was what needed to happen. It was turning into being not profitable for anybody, and we needed to go, and they needed for us to go.” According to a source in the Dead camp, the band had already begun auditioning replacements for Keith by then, but one in particular sprang to the head of the line. For his own Bob Weir Band, Weir had hired Brent Mydland, a young but experienced singer and keyboard player. Given the LA-pop feel of Weir’s Heaven Help the Fool, Mydland was a natural for a band designed to promote the album. He’d already worked with two groups, Batdorf & Rodney and Silver, that were both far more soft-pop than the Dead would ever be.
In Mydland the Dead found themselves with another talented but hypersensitive keyboard player. Born in Munich on October 21, 1952, Mydland shared a military-family background with his first boss, Weir: his father, Didrick Mydland, hailed from Norway, moved to the States to attend Trinity Divinity School in Minneapolis, and later joined the army, where he served as a chaplain. Brent was born during one of Didrick’s overseas duties. Once the family moved west when he was a baby, Brent was brought up in Concord, California; during one part-time job arranged by his father, he helped load bombs at a nearby military base.
In 1974 Mydland traveled down to Los Angeles to audition for a slot in the backup band for Batdorf & Rodney, the singer-songwriter duo best known for their cult FM hit “Home Again.” According to John Batdorf, the twenty-three-year-old Mydland who showed up had a “monster singing voice,” an affinity for jazz and blues, and one of the most intense stares Batdorf had ever seen. “Brent had those eyes,” Batdorf says. “Some guys close their eyes when they sing, but his were open. He was a pretty scary-looking guy hitting all those high notes.” Batdorf says the band would kid Mydland for that trait, but they soon learned they could take any ribbing only so far. During one sound check Batdorf sat down at Mydland’s organ and began playing, and Mydland grew visibly upset. “We said, ‘We’re just having fun,’” Batdorf says. “We had to talk him down. You had to be careful what you said or he’d go into a shell. It was very odd. We had to walk on eggshells sometimes.” When Batdorf & Rodney broke up, Mydland joined Batdorf’s subsequent band, Silver, which cut an album for Arista that included a few of Mydland’s songs.
During the Batdorf & Rodney era Mydland met Cherie Barsin, whose sister was married to Batdorf. In no time she and Mydland—then living in a van in Thousand Oaks complete with silverware, pots, and pans—coupled up. Silver’s debut album was released on Arista in 1976—the same year the Dead signed with the label—but when it sold poorly, they were dropped, the band fell apart, and Mydland and Barsin moved north to a house in Concord owned by Mydland’s father. Barsin recalls seeing Mydland butt heads with his dad and grow uncomfortable when he saw him drinking. At his own home Mydland preferred to write songs, listen to jazz and classical records, and play board games like Solitude and backgammon.
The call to join the Weir band came out of the blue, and Mydland quickly landed the job. At a party for Garcia’s birthday in August 1978 Mydland and Barsin were invited along to meet the Dead at the house Garcia was now sharing with Rock and Nicki Scully, and Mydland and Barsin watched as everyone hung out and played guitars. Eventually Garcia emerged from his basement apartment and made Barsin feel immediately at ease by talking to her. A few months later the couple were invited to see the Dead’s New Year’s Eve show at Winterland, where they were told Keith Godchaux was going to leave the band. (Apparently the departure was already on the band’s mind several months before the meeting with the Godchauxs.) Not long after, Mydland was invited to join the Dead.
In light of his musical preferences and background Mydland didn’t seem the obvious choice. Batdorf found it interesting that Mydland, who valued rehearsal and precision, would join the far looser Dead, and Barsin has no memory of ever hearing Dead music played in their home prior to his being hired. (His preferences, she says, were “Chick Corea, Jeff Beck. Nothing with lyrics.”) But the Dead needed a new keyboard player and a rebooted, post-Godchaux sound as soon as possible to continue touring, and Mydland needed a job. “His personality didn’t fit in, but they all accepted him,” says Janice Godchalk-Olsen. “The transition didn’t seem to be much of a debate.”
In April 1979, two months after the band meeting at the Godchaux’s home, Mydland made his stage debut with the Dead at Spartan Stadium in San Jose. As soon as he joined, his predecessor came back to haunt him. “People would yell out ‘Keith!’ and that would piss him off,” Barsin says. “He would say, ‘Are they high, or am I just not that good?’” Yet Mydland’s devotion to the job was instantly evident to those around him. “He put a lot of pressure on himself to be perfect,” Barsin says. “There were jokes about it, like, ‘How do you screw up with the Grateful Dead? Everybody’s high and nobody’s going to know.’ But he was hard on himself. He didn’t want to be a joke. If he could enhance what they did, that was important to him.” Upon landing the job Mydland immediately went shopping for a fresh batch of hole-free T-shirts, and during one camping trip with friends Mydland, who’d grown up water skiing in the Delta area of Northern California, opted out; he didn’t want to risk hurting his hands. The anxiety attacks he’d had as far back as the Batdorf & Rodney days—when Mydland would complain of chest pains or sometimes mysteriously disappear for days, what was known as “The Brent Special”—were at bay for now.
Coming after a period in which Keith Godchaux barely seemed to be playing onstage, Mydland injected the band with musical caffeine. His synthesizers and B-3 organ added upgraded textures to their sound, and his singing bolstered the harmonies, especially now that Garcia’s and Lesh’s voices were beginning to fray. When the time came for the Dead to make their first album with him, Mydland stepped up, writing two songs, “Easy to Love You” and “Far from Me,” the former with lyrics by Barlow. “Easy to Love You” was such a straight-on love song that Arista’s Clive Davis wasn’t sure how it fit in on a Dead album (and rightly so), and as Barlow recalls, Davis asked them to revise a few lines to “make it sound more like the Grateful Dead.” (Puzzled, Barlow tweaked a few words here and there to make what was once a straightforward love song sound like what he calls “a bit more obscure.”)
The jolt Mydland could bring to the band was heard when his organ revved up in the chorus on “Alabama Getaway,” the Hunter-Garcia romp that became the first track on the new album, Go to Heaven. (Performing the song on Saturday Night Live after the album’s release, the Dead came to life as rarely before on television, and Garcia spit out his Chuck Berry–derived solos with evident glee.) Thanks to producer Gary Lyons, who’d worked with the likes of Aerosmith and Foreigner prior to the Dead, the album was the most studio-tooled record the band would ever make. Not surprisingly, the Dead didn’t adapt easily to that approach. Once, Lyons spliced a bunch of different Garcia guitar solos into one, thinking it would be a natural fit. When Garcia heard it, he demurred, “It’s nice, but I wouldn’t play it that way.” Weir and Barlow’s songs, “Lost Sailor” and “Saint of Circumstance,” were moody companion pieces that blended soft rock and fusion as well as the Dead could, and the chugging remake of “Don’t Ease Me In,” from their early repertoire, had a jovial bounce. “Althea” made good use of the Dead’s trademark shuffle. But the album’s generic corporate-rock sound made the Dead, one of rock’s most distinctive bands, sound strangely anonymous. Only when Garcia’s voice and guitar slipped out into the forefront did the band sound like their old selves, and fans were put off by the cover photo of the band dressed in Saturday Night Fever–themed white suits. (The humor of the photo, or the fact that Garcia and Hart had gone together to see that movie, eluded them.) “As things got bigger and larger, the stakes went up,” says Hart of this era, “and we stopped exploring so much.”
According to Barsin, Mydland had long felt a sense of isolation: growing up in the Delta, he lived in a boathouse on the water while his parents and sisters resided in the main home. He once told Barsin he was haunted by a memory of not receiving an Easter basket as a child, even though his sisters had been given them. Now that he was in the Dead, though, he was no longer alone. Old friends who’d played with him in high school bands began reaching out to him, and a salesman at a local musical instrument store heard he was in the Dead and slashed the price, from $8,000 to $4,000, of a baby grand piano that Mydland was eying. Yet there were early signs that Mydland could be beset by it all. At a party at one Dead show Bill Graham had a Native American tent set up backstage. Everyone congregated inside it, and both Dead family members and outsiders approached the generally shy Mydland. “He seemed almost catatonic at times,” Barsin says, “overwhelmed all of a sudden with the recognition.” He would have to learn, sooner rather than later, how to handle it all.
There would be more wee-wee to come. During the Radio City run, one of the Dead offspring was summoned into either a hotel room or backstage space. The almost-teenager thought something was wrong but was instead asked to urinate into some small plastic tips. From what the kid was told, the band had to take some type of drug test to satisfy the insurance requirements of the closed-circuit broadcast of the Halloween show. “God knows what they thought they were going to find, but someone thought it would be a good idea if I did the urine test,” says the now-grownup. “I peed into the cups and thought, ‘They’re never going to believe this is us.’” (Director Dell’Amico, who doesn’t recall the specifics of the story, says he can think of one instance in which a drug test might have been requested for those shows: “We could have realized we didn’t have enough insurance or an insurer could have asked for it. That’s how it could have happened.”)
The story, or tall tale, was pretty amusing, but other, chillier winds were beginning to blow in the Dead’s direction. At Radio City, members of the crew heard that a suspected dealer may have slipped backstage—through no one’s precise fault—and reportedly pummeled him. The story was indicative of everyone’s growing concern about Garcia’s increasing fondness for what Loren calls “basically speedballing. You do cocaine and then you smoke that stuff, [called] rat. It’s like a speedball.” By 1980, as opposed to 1977, everyone knew Garcia was dabbling in the Persian opiate. It was not hard to notice: his hair was longer and stringier (and sometimes downright weirder, as when he wore it in pigtails during one of the shows in Egypt). More troubling was the impact of his addiction on the band’s music. Garcia’s voice was starting to sound strained, and during the Go to Heaven sessions he was spending more time than before in the studio bathroom. The usual reasons were trotted out: the pressures of celebrity, fallout from the Rakow debacle, his messy personal life. To others it may simply have been boredom. Driving home from a studio one evening with Vicki Jensen, Garcia gazed out the window and talked about how many of his good times were over. “He said, ‘There’s nothing fun to do anymore,’” she says. “All the things everyone was doing weren’t happening anymore, like Playland [which closed in 1972] or free shows in the park. That stuck with me when he said that.”
Even those who’d escaped the scene were still affected. After their departure from the Dead, Keith and Donna Godchaux moved back to Alabama, where Donna had been born and raised, and they worked on cleaning themselves up after the previous eight years. They chilled by the Tennessee River, Keith began to relax, and the two formed the Heart of Gold Band, named after a line in “Scarlet Begonias.” On a late July morning in 1980 Keith Godchaux and Pollock were driving back to Courtenay Pollock’s house in San Geronimo, where the Godchauxs were staying while working on new music. To Pollock, Godchaux seemed at peace: “I’ve never been happy with my body,” he told Pollock, “but right at this moment I’m the happiest I’ve ever felt in my life.” Taking a longer route home so they could continue talking, their car came around a bend, and Pollock, who was driving, saw a rock truck in his lane and a propane tanker easing out of a driveway. On the other side of the road were kids playing ball. “There was nowhere to go, and I had a moment to make a decision,” Pollock says. “There were trees on my right and all this blockage on the road.”
Pollock heard Godchaux say, “Oh, Jesus,” before the car slammed into the back of the rock truck. Pollock was seriously injured and on life support for several days but recovered; Godchaux never regained consciousness from his coma and was pronounced dead on July 23.
By the first night at Radio City, October 22, the nerves of the theater’s owners were frayed. Deadheads had lined up around the block to buy tickets, preventing some Rockefeller Center employees from getting into the buildings. A minor stampede occurred when the ticket window opened. “The fans surrounded the place and took over,” says Dell’Amico, who was observing from the sidelines. “They’re doing drugs on the street. Management was freaking out.”
The Rockefeller Corporation decided to retaliate. By way of Loren and Scher, they ordered the band to stop selling a commemorative poster for the event. The move took everyone aback: no one had thought the artwork would be a problem. Dennis Larkins, Bill Graham’s stage designer and art director, had been assigned the task of illustrating a poster for the run of shows at the Warfield. He and Peter Barsotti, one of Graham’s right-hand men, settled on featuring “Sam and Samantha,” the iconic Dead male-and-female skeletons. The poster, which showed the skeletons leaning up against an illustration of the Warfield, was so well received that Larkins was told to design a similar one for the Radio City run. From “Sam” wearing an Uncle Sam top hat to the use of the skull-and-lightning “Steal Your Face” logo on the building, the poster was clever and witty, and the Dead signed off on it with no hesitation. “The figures weren’t intended to be threatening, more like benevolent guardians,” says Larkins. “They weren’t intended to imply the death of anything. It was Dead iconography.”
According to Rockefeller executives, though, no one cleared the illustration with them, and the corporation, possibly also irked by the Dead’s wrangling over production costs, struck back. Interpreting the skeletons as a death wish for the hall and claiming the facade was a copyrighted logo, the corporation insisted the poster “suggests the Music Hall’s impending death and is unpatriotic.” The Dead, rarely accustomed to pushback at this point in their career, were stunned. “Here we are, saving Radio City Music Hall from its demise,” says Loren, “and they’re suing us for doing it.” (Strangely, the slight damage inflicted on the interior stairwell wasn’t brought up, probably since the Dead had warned the Hall owners about the specifications of the recording console.)
After initially demanding the entire run of shows be canceled outright, Radio City allowed the Dead to simply stop the sale of the posters at the venue and have the entire print run destroyed. The music, though, would proceed—but without yet another big-showcase glitch. Gathering onstage with their acoustic and percussive instruments for the final night at Radio City, with an audience at movie theaters from Florida to Chicago watching them, they couldn’t start: something was wrong with Lesh’s bass. He would pluck, adjust, and start playing again, and still it didn’t sound right. Finally Garcia said, “We’re gonna start out with a little instrumental that doesn’t involve Phil,” and they launched into a vocal-less version of the title song of Weir’s Heaven Help the Fool album. Lesh wouldn’t fully join the rest until several songs into the set.
Backstage at the Warfield, before the first acoustic-set run-through at that venue, Dell’Amico witnessed band members wandering into Garcia’s dressing room and expressing wariness about playing without electricity for the first time in so long. “It seemed like everybody was skeptical about the acoustic thing—they all thought it was crazy,” says the director. “‘Why are we doing this?’ But it’s something Jerry wanted to do, and he was laughing.” (An Angel sitting somberly in the room also approached Garcia and passed along a greeting from Sandy Alexander.)
Judging from the technical snafu at Radio City, maybe they had a right to be worried, but in the end the acoustic segment, only eight songs long, was charming and lovely; the arrangements lent “It Must Have Been the Roses” (a bittersweet ballad that had first appeared on Garcia’s 1976 solo album, Reflections, and had become a staple of the Dead’s repertoire) and “Ripple” an autumnal feel not heard in previous performances of those songs. “Cassidy” recaptured the strumming gallop of the version on Weir’s Ace. The plugged-in portion of the night started with “Jack Straw” and wound up with a mesmerizing electric version of “Uncle John’s Band”; Mydland’s vocal contributions, the way he returned the band to its three-male-voice harmonies of the Workingman’s Dead era, were particularly evident on those two songs.
During the third set out came the concert segment that came to be called Drums. Percussion interludes had become a part of the concert ritual since 1968: sometimes during “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks),” during the start of “The Other One,” or after “Truckin’.” By the spring of 1978 Kreutzmann and Hart were given a percussion-bonanza segment all their own; by year’s end it would often segue into Space. (The latter wouldn’t have a name until Dead Set, the two-LP live album from the electric part of the Radio City and Warfield shows, was released in 1981; Reckoning, the unplugged companion album, came out first.) The back-and-forth interplay between Kreutzmann and Hart during Drums, which also included a battery of percussion instruments, could be captivating, and Space would present the Dead at its wildest, most free-form and spaciest, Garcia’s guitar venturing into uncharted free-form territory in ways that recalled their early Acid Test shows. With those segments, Dead shows acquired even more breadth and adventurousness.
Another Kesey-like moment permeated the Halloween show at Radio City as well. In one live skit Davis pretended to drink the notorious acid-dosed urine backstage, and afterward he was seen wandering around onstage, even trying to climb the scaffolding, as Franken warned him, with an increasingly concerned tone, to be careful. Later Davis told Dell’Amico he actually had taken acid and was stumbling around onstage with good reason, but it’s doubtful anyone informed Radio City executives of that either.
In fact, it’s almost certain no one did. Once the shows were over the legal wrangling began. Radio City and the Dead haggled over who would pay the leftover production costs, which ultimately amounted to $146,000. Eventually Radio City filed a $1.2 million lawsuit against the Dead, largely on the grounds that its reputation had been damaged by Franken and Davis’s sketches during the Halloween video broadcast. “Despite the Music Hall’s strenuous and repeated objections, the band’s representatives refused to remove small portions of the tape that were potentially damaging to the Music Hall’s image and reputation and in violation of the standards mandated by the contract,” read Radio City’s filing. “Those objectionable portions either suggested that illicit drugs were being used in the Music Hall or were obscene, in bad taste or against good morals. For example, one segment, actually filmed in a San Francisco theater, reported to show men vomiting in a Music Hall restroom while another, also filmed in advance and without any reference to what was actually happening in the Music Hall, suggested that bad cocaine was being passed around the theater. . . . There is no doubt that the Music Hall was damaged by the simulcast.” And yes, the skit in which “urine laced with LSD being consumed on stage” was also brought up. In its reply the Dead’s legal team countered that “the Music Hall’s lawsuit to enjoin use of the offensive videotaped segments and damaging poster were unnecessary because the dispute could have been resolved.”
In the end the lawsuit was settled out of court, and everyone could claim one victory or another. Radio City Music Hall allowed the Dead to proceed with plans for a cable special of the show for Showtime, but thanks to the suit, the Dead wouldn’t be allowed to use the now-outlawed poster or any Radio City logos on either Reckoning or Dead Set. For the Dead the shows would hardly be moneymakers. According to their own paperwork, they only earned $32,000 after spending $13,500 on road expenses, $3,134 on limos and cabs, and other bits and pieces. But much like the Wall of Sound, it proved the lengths to which the band was willing to go to push the technological envelope, often at their own expense.
One final disaster was averted Halloween night. In a truck outside Dell’Amico smelled a horrid, burning stench. He normally kept his cool under such circumstances, but on one of the previous nights at Radio City all the gear onstage had blown out the venue’s huge brass electrical panel, never a good omen. Leaving the truck, Dell’Amico saw smoke on the street outside Radio City and briefly panicked. Luckily, the source turned out to be a tire fire in New Jersey that was so pungent it wafted over into Manhattan. Although they came close on several levels, the Dead hadn’t succeeded in destroying Radio City; if anything, they would make it acceptable for other major rock acts to play there over the next few decades. Once again, they laughed in the face of disaster and walked away untouched.