SAN FRANCISCO, FEBRUARY 16, 1970
The target-practice gunfire had silenced, the women who fed and tended to them were home, and their Hells Angels buddies were swaggering around elsewhere. On this chilly, drizzly day the members of the Grateful Dead straggled in from different parts of Marin County, crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, and buzzed an intercom at a purple door on Brady Street. Tucked away in a grimy, industrial section of San Francisco, the building didn’t remotely hint at rock-star glamour, and squatters had taken over a crumbling building next door. To attain the proper head-shop mood at Pacific High Recording, the bandmates lit candles and draped multicolored cloths over their amps, brightening up the burlap sacks the studio owner had hung on the walls.
Starting in 1966 outside Los Angeles and continuing in the Bay Area two years later, the West Coast had been rattled by a series of unsolved murders attributed to an anonymous slasher calling himself, with cinematic flair, the Zodiac Killer. The killings had freaked out many in the Bay Area, and Jerry Garcia, the Dead’s lead guitarist and reluctant leader, was among them. During at least one drive home to his rented house in Larkspur he’d stopped at a red light, glanced over, and wondered whether the person who’d pulled up alongside him was the killer. “Please don’t murder me,” he thought, words that would wind up in the song they would be putting on tape that February night at Pacific High Recording. “Dire Wolf,” a wintry tale of mangy animals and a card game in the woods, may have been born of fear and murder. But Garcia’s folkish melody was sprightly and jaunty, as if he were daring the Zodiac maniac to come after him. Onstage at Winterland a few months before, he’d even dedicated one of its earliest performances to “the Zodiac.”
The Dead weren’t easily startled; after all, they’d already witnessed plenty. They’d met in and around Palo Alto over the course of the last decade and, by sheer will if not always musical aptitude, had transformed themselves from folkies, blues fanatics, and classical-music players into a rock ’n’ roll band. Along the way they’d been busted and endured jail time. They’d fought with record company bosses. They’d laughed and gotten high together, but they’d also flashed moments of anger and frustration with each other. At one point a few of them had fired some of the others, although the split lasted barely a few weeks.
Little of that turmoil seemed to derail them; if anything, troubles only made them stronger. About two weeks before, the band had been in their hotel rooms in New Orleans, partying after a show, when a barrage of narcotics cops burst in, resulting in drug-charge arrests of most of the band and some of their crew. Eventually they’d dodged that bullet as well: the head of their label would spring them by contributing to the reelection fund of a local politician—hardly legal, as he would later admit with a laugh. According to drummer Mickey Hart, even the arrests worked to their advantage. “We became famous for getting busted, and every time we did, we raised our price,” he says. “After we were busted we had a meeting with everyone, girls and wives, and said, ‘We should double [our concert fees].’ Back then just getting your name known was a big thing, and we never got any press.” One of their most popular songs, ‘Truckin’,” would even emerge from the whole mess.
The musicians who began assembling at the studio on Brady Street were more complex than their public images. At twenty-six, his face encircled by a mustache, beard, and Brillo-pad-thick head of dark hair, Garcia exuded a beatific papa-bear openness, like a particularly benign guru. (The year before, Rolling Stone, a relatively new counterculture magazine that wedded a love of rock ’n’ roll with deep journalistic reportage, had put Garcia on the cover by himself, the first major signal that the guitarist was becoming the group’s public persona.) At twenty-nine, bassist Phil Lesh had an easy laugh and could flash a prankster’s grin, but his shag haircut and glasses lent him the look of a hip but strict professor, and aptly so: beneath that affable exterior lay a taskmaster and perfectionist. At twenty-two, Bob Weir was the most classically handsome and gracious of the bunch—the women in the audiences couldn’t get enough of his pony tail and girlish frame—but beneath his calm-river exterior was a genuine eccentric, heard in his pick-and-strum approach to rhythm guitar and his unapologetic penchant for practical jokes.
The rhythm section players were comparatively clear-cut. Setting up his collection of percussion instruments, including maracas and congas, was Hart, twenty-six, who combined the mustache and hat of a Cossack with the bucking-bronco energy of the Brooklynite he was. Bill Kreutzmann, the other drummer, was the least hippie-looking of the bunch, although his surly ranch-hand smirk made him almost as charismatic as Garcia; at twenty-three, Kreutzmann was already on his second marriage.
In terms of public image versus private life, however, none of the Dead had anything on Ron McKernan, the singer, harmonica player, and keyboard player known affectionately as Pigpen. The previous year he’d shown up for a photo shoot in a scrunched-up cowboy hat and carting along a firearm and bullets. Riding horses on one of the band’s ranches, Pigpen, all of twenty-four, looked the most natural in that role—less like a musician and more like a posse member about to give chase to a bank robber—but as everyone learned, he was actually the most sensitive of the bunch. When one of the women who crashed at their home woke up in the middle of the night and saw Pigpen in her doorway, she needn’t have worried; he came over and put an extra blanket on her.
The road they were traveling was still full of potholes. They were largely broke and in debt to their record company to the tune of almost $200,000. Their small but loyal road crew was stretched to the limits by slapdash planning that saw the Dead sometimes playing consecutive shows hundreds of miles apart. One of those busted with them in New Orleans was their sound engineer and former financial backer, whose future—both personally and with the Dead—was now uncertain. Some within their scene—a world that appeared loose and mellow but was, in fact, guarded and suspicious of outsiders—were growing wary of their new business manager, who happened to be related to one of the band members. Thanks to any number of in-flight pranks—like the time Weir pulled out a fake gun and “shot” Pigpen and Lesh, after which a pillow fight ensued—every airline except TWA had banned them. That fact hardly surprised one journalist, who accompanied them on a commercial flight and saw them openly sniffing cocaine off a knife being passed around their seats.
And yet for all the drama and craziness, which were as much a part of their world as quality weed, the Dead were preparing for a wilder and bigger ride as the decade began. Their newly hired road manager was promising them more work and better organized tours, and he had the experience and brazenness to make it happen. They were on the verge of moving into a new building, a shingled two-story house in San Rafael, complete with a few palm trees on the property, that would become their base of operations for over three decades.
Most importantly, their music was expanding in scope and power. Less than a week before this February recording session the band had returned to New York’s Fillmore East, a former vaudeville hall that promoter Bill Graham, both the Dead’s champion and sometimes adversary, had transformed into the city’s leading rock ’n’ roll theater, its counterculture church. In 1967 Time magazine had dubbed the Dead’s music “acid rock,” but as those seminal Fillmore shows revealed, that description was now as outmoded as their previous band name, the Warlocks. At the Fillmore they could play one of their own dirgy country ballads, “High Time,” or a lanky, vampy cover of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street.” They could strip it down, strumming an acoustic version of the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up, Little Susie” or Lightnin’ Hopkins’s “Katie Mae,” the latter a showcase for Pigpen’s country blues side. (Decades later “unplugged” segments at concerts would be de rigueur; in 1970 the changeover was almost unheard of.) They could also dive into “Dark Star,” which sounded like nothing else in rock ’n’ roll at that moment: its lilting, dainty melody gradually whipped itself into a group whirlwind, collapsed into itself, stripped down to bits of feedback and drums, and then began rebuilding, instrument by instrument, finally finishing one night just nineteen seconds shy of a half-hour.
During the same shows, the drummers would get ample time for tribal duets during “Alligator,” and Lesh was rarely as unobtrusive as bass players were in more traditionally minded bands; from time to time his bass would pop like a gopher sticking its head up from different parts of a lawn. (It was almost as if he were taking solos while the others were still playing.) During “China Cat Sunflower” Garcia’s guitar danced a sweet jig around the melody; other times, reflecting his own mood swings, his playing could be testy and terse. By the end of each night it was clear the Dead weren’t just West Coast weirdoes; their repertoire made them the most eclectic, fearsome, and versatile American rock band of its time, perhaps ever.
As Fillmore East manager Kip Cohen saw for himself, the scene wasn’t merely about the music; the Dead were beginning to symbolize a new lifestyle paradigm. The Dead had first played the venue in June 1968, and with each run since, they’d attracted larger, more impassioned crowds. To Cohen, many of them seemed like kids from Connecticut suburbs who’d ventured into the nasty big city to see the Dead and get wasted. When the sets ended, often in the early morning hours, the Fillmore staff found itself with “a roomful of people freaking out on acid,” Cohen says, and the staff did what it could to make sure the kids wound up on the right train home or had a place in town to crash. Those fans were an early sign that the Dead were on the verge of transforming from a cult band to a larger, more national one. Indeed, in 1970 they were preparing to play the most shows—about 150—they would ever do in a year by that point. That number meant more travel, more employees, and more temptations once they were out on the road, but during that early period no one yet knew how it would all impact them.
Sam Cutler, who popped into the Pacific High sessions now and then, should have been accustomed to rock ’n’ roll madness. He himself was a road-dog buccaneer; with his thin face and mustache, he looked like Captain Hook after a visit to a leather-jacket emporium. Cutler had worked for the Rolling Stones the year before, helping shepherd them around America on the band’s first tour of the States in four years. Starting in January 1970, he’d begun a new job, tour manager for the Dead, a task that also involved plenty of opportunity to hang with what he first thought were a group of loosey-goosey West Coast hippies.
About two years earlier most of the Dead had fled the Haight (or “Hashbury,” as the New York Times Magazine had dubbed their former neighborhood) for Marin County, just north of San Francisco. They relished the sprawling area’s meandering, tree-shrouded streets, which looked like paths running through Muir Woods, and one by one they settled into various ramshackle houses, ranches, and quasi-communes in towns like Novato and Larkspur. In the privacy of the Marin woods they could do whatever they wanted, or at least close enough to it. Cutler witnessed that for himself during one of his early visits to Hart’s Novato ranch. A television had been dragged out of the house and, with long extension cords, had been set up in a dry creek, and one hundred rounds had been loaded into various guns. With the TV on, there suddenly was Ronald Reagan, the actor turned politician who was now the governor of their state, the man who embodied everything the Dead despised about the straight world. Normally they’d shoot up concrete blocks or records, but now they took aim at Reagan’s image on the small screen and let loose. Cutler estimates they fired off “about three hundred times,” obliterating the set once and for all. Other times the victims were sales plaques their label, Warner Brothers, had presented to the band.
For a time Weir was living in what he would later call a “self-imposed dustbowl of a ranch” in Nicasio in western Marin County. Named Rukka Rukka, it was home as well to Weir’s girlfriend, Frankie (soon to take his last name even though they weren’t married), and various members of the Dead’s crew, along with random wandering chickens and horses. Tales of the origins of the ranch’s name were appropriately bawdy: according to one account, someone they’d known at another hangout would chase after women, squeeze their breasts, and say, “Rukka, rukka!” The Dead thought the story was hilarious, and the name stuck.
Even more than their music, Hart’s ranch became a symbol of the way the Dead could build their own remote community outside the normal confines of society. Whoever had found it first—either manager Rock Scully or road manager Jonathan Riester—Hart was now the overseer of the rambling thirty-two-acre property tucked away beyond a wooden entry gate nearly hidden by trees. Dubbed Hart’s Delight by some, it became the go-to place for the band, friends, roadies, and their increasingly expanding family unit to congregate, get high, and record music. With its large barn (soon filled with recording gear), horses, working water pump, and occasional displays of excitable-boy gunfire, the ranch felt like something straight out of the previous century—though with a few contemporary twists. Mike (nicknamed Josh) Belardo, an afternoon-drive DJ for KMPX in San Francisco, ventured onto the ranch one day to interview the band and had his mind blown even without hallucinogens. “Everybody’s walking around stoned, and the chicks are naked,” he recalls. “Topless women. Horses. It was unbelievable.” Hart had a beloved Arabian white horse named Snorter, a name that took on additional meaning when Snorter would be dosed now and then—“Oh, there were many times with something or another,” Hart admits. The horse didn’t seem all that affected while under the influence, even dodging a herd of trampling cows once during a ride.
Unlawful activity wasn’t always tolerated at Hart’s Delight. They’d already been burned by the law at least once, not to mention driven out of the Haight by a tidal wave of tourism, drugs, and increasing police scrutiny. When Hart learned that certain people living on the ranch were expert pickpockets, he scolded them. “They would come home with things, wallets and stuff,” he recalls, “and I’d say, ‘First, if you’re gonna live here, that’s not the right thing to do, and second, it will bring the heat on the Dead.’” After all their busts, “under the radar” was the operative phrase.
Among those living at the ranch were Rhonda, Sherry, and Vicki Jensen, three sisters who moved onto the ranch after their previous home had burned down. The sisters cleaned, swept floors, prepared breakfast for anyone who crashed there, and fed horses: “It made the music work,” says Vicki, “and that was the inspiration to do it.” The only irksome part of the job involved the women the road crew would bring to the ranch. The Jensen girls had to pick out which horses the girls would ride—and, just as important, find ways to keep the women busy once the roadies left for somewhere or someone else. “They’d just sit there and think that looking pretty was enough,” Vicki says with a laugh. “I used to tell them, ‘You need to join in and help out here!’”
At Hart’s ranch the Dead and their extended family were able to live out their fantasies as cowboys and outliers who played by their own rules without worrying about societal norms. Even the local police were skittish about stopping by. The fantasy did have its learning curve, like the day Garcia went riding on a horse whose cinch hadn’t been tightened. As his girlfriend, Carolyn Adams, otherwise known as Mountain Girl, watched, Garcia fell off and broke a few ribs. “First and last time he was on a horse,” she recalls. “He didn’t like horses after that.” Sometimes even the fantasies had limits.
“Dire Wolf,” the song they were scheduled to start recording that February night at Pacific High, was symbolic in and of itself. If Hart’s ranch was the Dead’s almost-anything-goes headquarters, the Garcia and Mountain Girl house on Madrone Avenue in Larkspur was its creative hub. Set on a flat acre with sizable redwood trees and a creek out back, the house was far from ostentatious. Garcia had moved in first with Mountain Girl, who was now, in the parlance of the times, Garcia’s “old lady.” MG, as everyone called her, already had a child with writer Ken Kesey and in 1969 had given birth to Garcia’s daughter, Annabelle. The two weren’t technically wed, as both had been married before and hadn’t yet obtained divorces, but no one seemed to mind.
One day Garcia brought up the idea of a new roommate: “I want my friend Bob Hunter to move in,” he told Mountain Girl, who hadn’t even met Hunter yet but knew his history with Garcia: the two men, who both could flash wide, welcoming grins, had met in the early days of the Palo Alto folk and literary scene nearly a decade before, living in adjacent cars when they were homeless, and had put their friendship through its share of inspired highs and head-butting lows. With his bookish glasses and brain-of-a-poet intensity, Hunter could be as bristly and intense as Garcia could seem affable and casual. After going their separate ways in the middle of the sixties they’d reconvened when Garcia asked Hunter to sign up as the Dead’s resident lyricist.
Along with their respective girlfriends, Hunter and Garcia were now roommates in Larkspur, and one night they and Mountain Girl were watching one of the original black-and-white Sherlock Holmes movies, The Hound of the Baskervilles. As Hunter would later recall, they all pondered what a “ghostly hound” would look like, and the phrase “dire wolf” emerged. Just the thought of a big wolf called Dire was enough to inspire Hunter, who began writing lyrics, and in no time they had a song.
Financially, life at the house on Madrone could be a daily survival challenge. Although the Dead were technically rock stars, they didn’t have the cash flow that went with that job. Their rent was an affordable several hundred dollars a month, but Garcia and Mountain Girl relied on welfare and food handouts courtesy of the WIC (Women, Infants and Children) program and often settled for meals of peanut butter, honey, and sacks of rice. Other relationships in the generally fraught Dead world were on fairly steady ground. With his second wife, Susila, Kreutzmann had just welcomed a baby boy, William Justin, who came to be known simply as Justin. (Kreutzmann already had a daughter, Stacy, from his first marriage.) Weir had settled into a relationship with Frankie, a sparkplug who’d been a dancer for the TV shows Hullabaloo and Shindig! and briefly an employee of the Beatles’ Apple Records. Pigpen was into the third year of his relationship with Veronica “Vee” Barnard.
As soon as Hunter moved in during the first months of 1969 Mountain Girl saw how intense he could be: she would sometimes look outside and see Hunter using an axe handle to thwack away at a car tire dangling from an apple tree. “Bob had a pretty high need to release his physical energy,” she says. “He had a lot of juice.” Yet the two men complemented each other creatively and temperamentally. Garcia never relished the idea of spending hours working on lyrics; Hunter loved nothing better, even if it meant staying up all night. Mountain Girl recalls “a lot of wine and playing guitars until two in the morning.” Many days, she says, Hunter would bound into the kitchen during breakfast, carrying a stack of papers: “I’ve got a bunch of new ones for ya!” Garcia might flash a vaguely irritated look, as if irked by his meal being interrupted, but would then start sifting through the poems: “Like this one. Like that one,” he’d say. In five minutes Garcia would select up to a dozen lyrics, and soon he’d have the melodies to match.
In June 1970, a few months after the “Dire Wolf” session, Hunter beheld a particularly arresting example of the way he and Garcia collaborated. The Dead, along with Delaney and Bonnie, the Band, Janis Joplin, Ian and Sylvia, and others, embarked on a wild tour of Canada by private train. Everyone was partying and playing music even when they weren’t on stage, so much so that the train had to periodically stop so more liquor could be bought. During one stop Garcia sat on the tracks, grabbed Hunter’s latest lyrics—for “Ripple”—and worked out a melody. For decades to come this would remain one of Hunter’s most cherished memories of a time when their creativity seemed as unstoppable as a locomotive.
The Dead’s world could be a constant lurch between light and dark, and nothing captured the latter mood better than another song that took shape during the same sessions as “Dire Wolf.” If “Dire Wolf” was a merry, if dark-humored, stroll, “New Speedway Boogie” snarled; Garcia’s guitar poked at the melody, and his voice was a little frazzled around the edges at times. The song was testy and aptly so: it documented a moment when the darkness threatened to overshadow them.
The speedway in question was Altamont, where the Dead had been scheduled to play in December 1969 as part of a mammoth free concert with a formidable lineup: the Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The Dead and Stones’ camps had been in discussion about doing some sort of free show, somewhere, and the end result, after two venue cancellations, was at Altamont. (As Scully would later write, “We actually talk[ed] the Stones into doing a free concert in Golden Gate Park,” the original site until the city of San Francisco nixed the idea and the speedway became the organizers’ last resort.) The day-long show was ostensibly a way to celebrate the end of the Stones’ American tour, give them a filmed finale for their in-progress concert movie, Gimme Shelter—and help them ward off accusations of high ticket prices by presenting one concert for free. The Dead weren’t just scheduled to perform the show but also supplied their PA system and crew, who helped set up the recording gear and speakers. One of Hart’s ranch mates was in a truck backstage rolling hundreds of joints for Keith Richards and anyone else who wanted one.
Even when the music finally started up, the vibe felt sour. Chris Hillman, the former Byrds bass player then in the Flying Burrito Brothers, walked through the crowd to the stage to play his set, stumbling over participants who already seemed wasted. Arriving at the stage, he was stopped by a Hells Angel, who asked who he was and almost didn’t let him up. At the airport Sue Swanson, a longtime friend and fan of the Dead’s, saw fear in the faces of other musicians who’d played and were on their way out. “Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were there with their big coats on,” she recalls. “The looks on everyone’s faces were just very serious. Everyone wanted the hell out of there.”
The Dead had forged an alliance of sorts with the Angels several years before, during the early, untroubled days hanging with band friend Kesey in the Palo Alto hills. Some in the band weren’t rattled by the sight of tattooed, hairy, and burly Angels backstage; others were less pleased, though there wasn’t much they could do about it. As much as anything, that relationship between these two seemingly dissimilar camps spelled out the growing duality in the Dead’s world: a seemingly sunny gentility with an undercurrent of hardened swagger that wasn’t remotely for the faint of heart. A reporter covering a 1970 show noticed that Garcia’s case sported a sticker that read, “Blackjack Garcia, the baddest fucking guitarist in the world.” For all the field-of-flowers beauty of their music, the world of the Dead was unsentimental and demanding; to survive, one had to adapt and hold on tight.
At a Fillmore East show that January stagehand (and future movie director) Allan Arkush, an NYU student who worked part time at the theater, heard a knock on the backstage door, and he and a few other employees found themselves confronting a bunch of Hells Angels from the nearby Lower East Side chapter. The Angels name-dropped one of the Dead’s road crew—Lawrence Shurtliff, otherwise known as “Ram Rod,” a muscular, wiry man with old-sage eyes and strong-silent-type demeanor. But even if the Angels hadn’t been on the guest list, Arkush and his fellow Fillmore employees wouldn’t have dared turn them away. That night they had come bearing gifts. As Arkush watched in astonishment, the Angels began lugging nitrous oxide tanks to the dressing rooms, no easy feat given that each one probably weighed about two hundred pounds and had to be dragged up several flights of stairs. A short while later Arkush popped his head into one of the dressing rooms to alert the band that showtime had arrived. What he saw—everyone sucking on nitrous tubes—was so cartoonish it was almost funny. The band happily stumbled their way down to the stage, took their places with their instruments, and waited; Graham had arranged for Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” best known in 1970 as the theme song to the sci-fi sensation 2001: A Space Odyssey, to blast out of the speakers before the show started. When it finished, the Dead just stood there, gazing up at a screen and giggling in a nitrous haze. To make his guitar sound like it too was laughing, Garcia began stroking the strings.
By the time the Dead were helicoptered onto the Altamont site the festivities were no longer festive. After the Airplane’s Grace Slick had mentioned to Mick Jagger the role the Angels had played in security for Airplane shows, the Angels had been recruited for Altamont; whether it would be for security or to hang out in front of the stage and protect generators (as Angels had done at so many free area shows before) would be debated for years. Fights broke out early, and it became clear that some of the instigators weren’t Angels but so-called “prospects,” not full-on Angels. It didn’t help that many in the crowd upfront were wasted. The uniformed local cops on hand were cowering at the idea of dealing with the Angels. As soon as they arrived on site the Dead were informed that an Angel had punched out Airplane singer Marty Balin. (Vicki Jensen, backstage with the crew, saw Balin come flying through the back of the stage after he’d dared to stand up to Angels beating on someone in the audience. “I’m sorry, man,” one Angel was overheard saying, “but you don’t say ‘fuck you’ to an Angel.”) Walking through the dusty air and sun-scorched crowd on their way toward the stage, Lesh and Garcia saw dazed fans sprawled all over, and Lesh accidentally hit Garcia on the head with the back of his bass. It was that kind of day.
Although Woodstock had transpired a few months before, Altamont would not be the good-vibes sequel many had hoped it would be. Freaked out by a scene becoming gnarlier and more menacing by the moment, the Dead retreated to a bus behind the stage, deciding whether or not to play. At one point Dead roadie Rex Jackson, an imposing cowboy who was no pushover, was seen walking around with a black eye, which Cutler presumed was delivered by an Angel. (It’s possible he received it when he intervened on Balin’s behalf during the Angels skirmish, and Jackson was smart enough to know not to fight back.) Ultimately, in what even Lesh would call a mistake—and Cutler would sharply criticize as an act of “cowardice”—the Dead decided not to venture anywhere near the stage. As nighttime arrived and the Stones cranked up, the Dead returned to a helicopter and flew off while most of their crew retreated to their equipment truck and drove back to San Francisco, where the band was due to play at the Fillmore West that same night. Soon after, Meredith Hunter, a young African American, rushed the stage with a gun and was stabbed to death by an Angel. The Dead were too unnerved to even show up at the Fillmore, and Graham wound up screaming at the crew instead of the band. An after-party at the theater, which was never firmed up but was pitched to the Dead by a local promoter as “the most memorable evening in San Francisco ballroom history,” never materialized. Given the Dead’s role in the show, paranoia ensued. Some at Hart’s ranch fled, fearing for their safety from angry Angels.
Another reminder of the dark side of the Dead could be found in an office closer to home. A year earlier, the band was fairly dazzled when Hart’s father, Lenny, a former drummer and now self-ordained minister, reappeared in his son’s life after leaving Hart’s mother during their Brooklyn years. With his short hair and southern-car-salesman vibe, Lenny Hart didn’t look much like his son or anyone on the scene. At first Mickey seemed thrilled to have his father around, at least to those who saw their interaction, and Lenny promised to help the Dead’s shaky business operation. At the ranch the previous spring Lenny would spout lines like “I’ve seen the light!” while holding a Bible, and somehow he convinced the band and its entourage he could be their financial savior. In 1969 Garcia had spoken with Rolling Stone writer Michael Lydon about their business and admitted, “Mickey’s father is now doing it. He’s fronting our whole management thing. He’s taken charge. We’ve given him the power to do what we want to.” Garcia added, somewhat less optimistically, “Right now, things are looking good. But the whole thing about money is still something weird.”
Since then the situation with Lenny had only grown stranger. “He looked like the straightest white man you ever saw,” says a member of the Dead world at the time, “but he had a good goddamn rap. Some people, you can’t read truth or falsity in their face.” Jon McIntire, another member of the Dead organization, was suspicious of Lenny, as was Ram Rod. Garcia would tell McIntire, “I believe what people tell me.” But not everyone was convinced. Mountain Girl once said to Hunter, “Why can’t you just trust Lenny? We need a manager who understands business.” Hunter reacted with what Mountain Girl recalls as “utter scorn at my naiveté and unwarranted confidence.”
For the first time the air was filled with the promise of more income. Feeling guilty after the Altamont debacle, Garcia had asked Cutler to be the Dead’s tour manager; Cutler accepted and soon realized the band needed to play more gigs than ever to shore up their finances. Throughout 1969 they would make only a few thousand dollars a show: $5,000 for two nights at the Fillmore West; $7,500 for two nights at the Pavilion in Flushing, Queens; and $1,059.50 for appearing on Hugh Hefner’s TV series Playboy After Dark. “They knew that if they didn’t start to make serious money, the Dead would cease to exist,” says Cutler. “Every penny counted. We were living on $10-a-day per diems.”
It would take Cutler months to get the Dead out of hock. Until then, when the musicians would ask where the money was, Lenny would tell them their “old ladies” had spent it, which wasn’t the case. When some in the organization asked Lenny to show them the books, he hesitated, then eventually turned over ledgers with entries that had clearly been erased and written over. (Lesh and Mickey Hart also confronted him at a Bob’s Big Boy restaurant and realized he also had two different sets of books.) When questioned, Lenny had a habit of veering into extended Bible talk, almost as a way of zoning them out. The thought of dealing forcefully with Lenny Hart didn’t sit right with any of them—Garcia and Weir especially were not the most confrontational—but something had to give.
At the same time, other parts of their operation were to some degree or another in jeopardy. Owsley Stanley, their acid-king soundman and quality-control inspiration, would soon find himself behind bars after the New Orleans bust. Those close to Garcia were beginning to notice that he could unexpectedly fall into grumpy, blackened moods. When Garcia came home at night he’d frequently grumble to Mountain Girl about one thing or another having to do with the band, then ask when dinner would be ready. Although Mountain Girl didn’t know it then, later she wondered whether this was the beginning of what she calls Garcia’s “secret drug life.” Cocaine was already on the scene; in fact, the band would give it a plug in “Casey Jones,” another new song they’d record for the new album. No one considered the drug even vaguely addictive.
Three months after “Dire Wolf” was cut, a few Deadheads managed to slither in backstage at a show at Temple University in Philadelphia. No one knew how, but in the early days of rock ’n’ roll security, crashers were always possible. One of the fans found Garcia and asked what the band was working on, and Garcia boasted about the new album they’d just finished, Workingman’s Dead. “I like it better than any album we’ve done,” he told them.
“That’s all we do, is sit around and get smashed and listen to that album,” the fan said.
Even though the album wasn’t in stores yet, Garcia let that odd comment slide—he was growing accustomed to remarks like that from their budding fan base—and amiably replied, with a smile, “We get smashed and make ’em.”
Sometimes they did; the nitrous tanks at Pacific High were testament to those habits. But something rare and miraculous was happening with these new songs. Everyone in the Dead had complaints about their first three studio albums: too rushed, too overproduced, way too expensive. It was impossible to satisfy them all at once. As they began filing into Pacific High, though, the mood was uncommonly optimistic. “We had pushed the envelope in experimental,” Hart says. “We had to simplify. That’s why that record was acoustic. There wasn’t a lot of percussion. Bill and I played it very straight. Maracas, congas—light stuff.” Garcia would be singing all but one of the songs, and he was eager to, in his words, “boogie” and not be bogged down in the tape-montage experimentation that ran through their last two albums.
From its inception the new album was mapped out. Bob Matthews, who had introduced Garcia and Weir before the Dead was even a glimmer in anyone’s imagination, would be engineering, along with Betty Cantor. Matthews taped the band working on the songs, put the material in what he thought was a proper sequence, then gave a copy to each band member, who practiced the songs in that order. Omitted at the onset was “Mason’s Children,” another song about death and collapse, this one swathed in campfire harmonies and a folk-rock bounce. (Like “New Speedway Boogie,” it had been written directly after Altamont.) “It was a no-brainer,” says Matthews. “It didn’t fit. That was by agreement.”
Hunter and Garcia had crafted indelible songs before, yet something about these new ones, many written at the Larkspur house, had a special cohesiveness, a sustained vision. They were littered with images of hard-working, hard-living Americana types—the miners in “Cumberland Blues,” the jack-hammering highway worker in “Easy Wind,” the careening conductor in “Casey Jones”—along with a mysterious character, “Black Peter.” “Dire Wolf” was set in “Fennario,” an imaginary burgh overrun with the creatures. Like classic folk songs, the tunes were both down to earth and mythical. Tapping into themes of community, terror, darkness, woozy love, and trains, the songs felt more universal and timeless than anything they’d done before.
By early 1970 less electric, more organic-sounding records were in vogue, as opposed to the post–Sgt. Pepper approach of extravagant sonic creations. Hunter was particularly taken with the music of the Band, but according to Cutler, financial considerations also played a part in their change of direction. Having put themselves in the hole during the making of Aoxomoxoa, the Dead simply couldn’t spend indiscriminately, at least not for a long time. “Garcia and I analyzed what they’d done in the past and why it wasn’t successful and what could be done about that,” says Cutler. “I kept banging on Jerry and saying, ‘Do your album in one bang. Minimal recording cost. Do the two-week album. Just get in there.’ And that’s what they did.”
As they began to record in February, the preproduction work paid off. The sessions began around the time of “Dire Wolf,” paused for more touring, resumed in early March, and wrapped up around March 16. They bore down on two songs in particular. “Uncle John’s Band” had started life as a long band jam on a cassette given to Hunter; he then fashioned lyrics about the band and its scene that were the most hopeful he’d written. (“Goddamn, Uncle John’s mad!” went his first line, perhaps a nod to Garcia’s shifting moods, but Hunter later deleted that line.) “Cumberland Blues,” the mining-story song, had a chugging-locomotive rhythm propelled by Lesh’s bobbing bass. “Dire Wolf” was itself ready to go. They’d been playing it live since the previous June, and Weir had even sung lead on one version. Garcia had taken up the pedal steel guitar with the Dead’s country offshoot band, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and the instrument pranced its way through the song.
The other songs were equally filled with exquisite touches—the “oooh” harmonies in “Dire Wolf,” Pigpen’s warm organ in “Black Peter,” the modest rave-up in “Easy Wind.” But most emblematic of their heightened single-mindedness were their harmonies. The Dead were never known for them; Garcia, Lesh, and Weir each had a distinctive voice with unique creaks and crevices. But the new, folksier approach to their songs begged for vocal blends. Egged on by their friend in esoteric chords and hedonism, David Crosby (also living in a rented house in Novato, the backyard of which was seen on the cover of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà vu), the Dead began working harder than ever on their singing. “They were expected to sing all those parts, and it didn’t go well,” laughs Mountain Girl. “It sounded like cats howling.”
In another sign of their focus, Garcia, Lesh, and Weir decided to have the last laugh and bore down on the singing. “We said, ‘You’re gonna have to sing this right!’” says Cantor (now Cantor-Jackson). “We worked on them until they weren’t flat or sharp and were hitting the notes.” The effort paid off; the mix of voices sounded natural, lending the songs a radiance and a sense of comforting teamwork. A slender brunette with a warm smile, long hair, and sharp ears that had earned her the nickname “Bettar” (as in, “She can make things sound better”), Cantor, then twenty-one, embodied another aspect of the Dead’s rule-breaking approach: she was well on her way to becoming possibly the first woman recording engineer in a largely male business (and in the predominantly male Dead crew). She adored and championed the band and its music—even if she viewed the nitrous tanks in the studio with great skepticism, as she recalls with a laugh years later: “I’m sitting there going, ‘I don’t like this.’ I’m catching the tank as it’s falling over so it doesn’t hit the tape machine. I’m like, ‘Jesus, guys!’”
Everyone in the Dead camp had his or her spiky opinion about every aspect of their organization, but the sessions for Workingman’s Dead marked a rare moment of genuine, yes-we-can Grateful Dead consensus: people seemed happy with the results. Cutler recalls they were “never more focused and on the ball” than during those sessions. “I liked it right off the bat, as soon as I heard the basics,” says Bill “Kidd” Candelario, who had joined the Dead crew two years earlier. Few were more euphoric than Warner Brothers head Joe Smith. The Dead had driven Smith fairly crazy over the previous four years—from overspending to trying to dose him—but when he heard the finished record he was ecstatic. “I had been on their back,” Smith says. “They saw they weren’t getting any royalties. We were sticking with them, but we also said, ‘Please give us something we can sell.’ They wanted to prove they could do it.” According to Matthews, the final bill for the album was less than $15,000. Garcia would never be happy with his singing on “High Time,” thinking he hadn’t nailed it. But when Smith heard the record he gave Matthews a hug and gushed about how thrilled he was to hear the vocals. The feeling behind the album was so optimistic that members of the band stopped by the offices of Rolling Stone to play the record for the staff. “That was a turning point,” Lesh says of the making of the album. “It was kind of exciting to focus, to make such a left turn.”
Outside the studio doors their world could be chaotic, disorganized, and messy. But as this music-making experience showed, they could escape it all. “Being able to do that was extremely positive in the midst of all this adverse stuff that was happening,” Garcia would tell Rolling Stone editor Jann S. Wenner the following year. “It was definitely an upper . . . it was the first record that we made together as a group, all of us. Everybody contributed beautifully, and it came off really nicely.”
As they worked on “Dire Wolf” and prepared for several more weeks of recording, they had the songs, the music, and the hope that they could ward off the bad mojo that threatened to engulf them. It was neither the first nor the last time the Dead would find themselves in that place. As their diffident leader knew, everything could change in the same amount of time it took to strum a chord. It had before; it could happen again.