SACKS AND SACKS of mail are piled up in the Grateful Dead office in San Rafael. Thousands and thousands of letters — printed, paisleyed, typed, scrawled, carefully lettered in Celtic uncials — all in response to Garcia’s plea on the inside of Grateful Dead (the Skull Fuck album):
DEAD FREAKS UNITE Who are you? Where are you? How are you? Send us your name and address and we’ll keep you informed.
“25,000 fuckin’ letters, wow!”
“Deadheads, maaan!”
“You know what this is, man? It’s a” — snoooooort — “mailing list. We can now contact Deadheads directly. Tell ‘em where we’re playing and shit like when the next album’s coming out.”
“Cool, maaan!”
Let’s-do-it-all-ourselves fever is running dangerously high. We can do anything! All kinds of plans are laid on glass-topped tables.
“Fuck, man, with a list like this we could even” — snoooooooort — “sell our records, do it through mail order, headshops, at the gigs and stuff.”
“Distribute them in Grateful Dead Good Humor trucks!”
“Hell, yeah! Let’s cut out all the record company bullshit and make our own records. Without producers being foisted on us. No more Ed Thrashers and Joe Smiths. . . .”
“Free at last!”
The only question is “Who’s going to put the bell on the cat?” For this we need a certified adult. Someone who understands the arcana and secret handshakes of the Bureaucratic Order of Suits and Ties. And then . . . heh, heh . . . along came Jones, or Ron Rakow, to be more precise. Actually Rakow has been here all along; it might even have been his idea. Rakow had been involved in running another business venture with a similar megalomaniac — the Carousel Ballroom — which, through no fault of his own, we hastily add, had ended disastrously.
At the Securities and Exchange Commission, Rakow photocopies the financial statements of the major record companies and using these cabalistic tracts he compiles a ninety-three-page report called the “So What Papers” to convince the band that putting together their own record company is the only way to go. On July 4 — (heh, heh) — 1972 he formally presents his proposal to the band.
With the release of Europe ’72 in November ’72 our commitment to Warner’s effectively comes to an end. Europe ’72 is the Dead (mostly) live at their furry finest, but it isn’t a purely live album. The “live” sound is partially re-created in the studio by playing studio tracks back over the same equipment that the live stuff was originally recorded on, thus generating an approximation of the original ambience. Got that?
Garcia and Hunter regret that some of the new songs on the album — which could have been tuned up in the studio — are buried amongst the covers and live versions of earlier songs.
Hunter: “To me, all that material was the kicker follow-up album to American Beauty. Instead, we put out this three-album thing that sounds good, but it spreads out the material so thin we never get to hear what those songs might have sounded like on an album of their own.”
Garcia: “I concur. Instead we dribbled some of that music all the way up through Wake of the Flood.”
There is also a lingering resentment that Warner’s gets most of the bread because the Dead won’t let them charge a whopping twelve bucks for the album. Consequently the Dead end up with a greatly reduced royalty.
All of the above having fueled Jerry’s revolutionary zeal, he is by now wildly enthusiastic about the possibility of Grateful Dead Records: “What are we gonna do now that we’re enjoying amazing success? The nice thing, man, would be not to sell out at this point and instead come up with something far out and different, which would be, y’know, sort of traditional with us.”
I am a little more jaundiced. Where I see the whole business as a huge red herring and waste of time, Garcia, bless his ever-optimistic hippie heart, sees it as subversive action. Bypassing official channels had been central to the Haight’s Declaration of Independence, a strategy Jerry would like to see extended to the whole process of making records. The seductive thing for Jerry about starting a record company is that — on the surface of it, at least — it seems to be in the tradition of underground, guerrilla activity.
In Garcia’s “So What?” utopian vision, Grateful Dead Records is a way of reconstituting the lost community of the Haight by other means. A closed circuit of heads and freaks owning their own company, distributing through their own channels to other freaks. A Deadland of airwaves and albums and concerts that would supersede the first, literal (and doomed) attempt at a hippie community in the summer of 1967. This new plan would no longer necessitate everyone living together or starting our own country or seceding from the union; we would be a community of like-minded souls linked electronically. A virtual Haight-Ashbury! It’s a typical Garcia sci-fi fantasy of stoned, Village of the Damned children with “earphone heads and dirty necks” tuned to the same wavelength.
There is one major flaw, however. The day-to-day requirements of running a record company are the very things we’ve spent our whole lives avoiding. Going to offices, monitoring pressing plants, making out bills of lading, checking inventories.
For hippies, the straight world is the domain of our parents: clipboards, memos, office hours, bosses. The day gig, for all intents and purposes, is our parents. Are we going to become just like them? But nobody wants to hear my objections; they’re all too hopped up on getting rid of the people who tell them what to do. Off with their heads!
Rakow makes the band these giant promises and a year later, on April 19, 1973, they give their go-ahead and Grateful Dead Records enters history — along with Round Records for the more dubious solo projects of band members.
And so the Dead get into the record business. The creation of Grateful Dead Records dissolves the original communal bond between members of the Dead family. This agreement had divided shares in the Dead pie equally among ten members: six band members, two managers (Danny Rifkin and me) and two roadies (Laird and Ramrod). The new arrangement is a straightforward business partnership between Rakow and the band for Grateful Dead Records projects and a partnership between Garcia and Rakow for Round Records, the spinoff projects. So, onward we go into the deep, dark and dreamless wood.
On March 8, 1973, Pigpen dies after a long illness. He is twenty-seven, and our first casualty. His loss is devastating to the band and forever alters the chemistry of the Dead. As Garcia says at Pig’s funeral, “We can go on calling ourselves the Grateful Dead but after Pigpen’s death we all knew this was the end of the original Grateful Dead.”
In August the band, family, and crew move into the Record Plant studios in Sausalito to start work on the first Grateful Dead Records release, Wake of the Flood, named for the first line of Hunter’s lyric to “Here Comes the Sunshine.” According to Hunter it is about living in other people’s homes in the aftermath of the great Vanport, Washington, flood of 1949, but it could just as well apply to all of us.
The opening track of Wake of the Flood, “Mississippi Half-Step Up-town Toodeloo,” was written over a year earlier. The band first played it in concert at Dillon Stadium in Hartford, Connecticut, shortly after the ’72 tour of Europe. It’s one of Hunter’s full-blown Western fantasies: loaded dice, cups of rock and rye, powder charges in the silver mine. All life for Hunter in this period is couched in this wonderful gambling vernacular of the Wild West. “Half Step,” “Dire Wolf,” “Friend of the Devil” (among others) are all card-playing, down-and-out, mission-in-the-moonlight, out-of-luck-gambler-stumbling-around-on-red-mountain-Burgundy songs. Song after song after song about playing your cards right, keeping ‘em close to your vest, laying ’em down, folding ’em — not that Hunter’s actually a gambler, it’s a literary folk thing with him, deriving ultimately from Dylan.
The Wake sessions go pretty smoothly by Grateful Dead standards, but it’s the first of many Dead albums where half the record is great, the other fair-to-middling. Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty work so well because they are consistent in tone and style and full of crafted Garcia/Hunter songs. But band members are beginning to object to Garcia’s getting all the publishing. They feel that these albums are really Jerry-Garcia-backed-by-the-Grateful-Dead records. This is partly true, but only by default. Jerry not only writes most of the songs, he’s the only one in the studio every day.
In response we are actually creating financial spaces on these records for the drummers by incorporating them into the arranger’s royalties based on very little effort on their part. The way record royalties are divvied up is between the writer and the arranger, basically. And so all along Garcia has been cutting the band in as arrangers, but it amounts to a symbolic gesture that is getting more and more ridiculous because no one else is coming up with songs. And Garcia is not only teaching them to the band, he’s doing virtually all the arrangements himself. The band’s contribution is in helping shape the material at live performances, which in turn determines what it’s going to sound like on the record.
Weir and Lesh start to write songs again. Eventually everyone in the band wants to be included, but because their contributions are all in different styles and of uneven quality, a process of fragmentation sets in. On Wake of the Flood, Keith Godchaux gets his own track, “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” (written with Hunter), and Weir gets his own song cycle, “Weather Report Suite,” a sort of mini-opera that takes up close to half of side two. It is grandiose and unlike anything else on the album.
And record company business is constantly intruding, seriously distracting Garcia, interfering with the making of the albums, adding on hours and hours of studio time. As a consequence, Jerry isn’t able to look after Weir and help him pull together his songwriting projects, which are by now becoming extremely ambitious. Jerry comes back from two weeks of looking after record business shit and finds Weir’s song still not ready to go into the studio. Just a few chords, no words, and a very loose concept of what the song is going to be.
Weir’s songs take the longest, come together at the last, and are usually the most critically received by the band. It’s like pulling teeth to get a song out of Lesh or Weir. We’ll have the whole record together except for that one track and it’s come on, Weir, would you get this together, please? You have to get out the cattle prods. Finally he shows up and all he has is a bunch of chord changes. I am usually desperate by this point, saying, “Let’s call John Barlow, let’s call somebody. Chesley, go find somebody. Is Bernie Taupin busy these days? Why don’t you see if Van Morrison has a couple of songs at the bottom of his sock drawer.”
You hear people saying oh, dear God, it’s a Weir epic, oh no! After months of agonizing over his magnum opus he comes up with something about gotta go down by the river and see the water on the rocks (again).
But in spite of everything Jerry and Bobby Weir have always had a special bond, although politically Weir is the diametric opposite of Jerry. There’s no one more conservative than Bob Weir when he’s on a bat. One time Weir comes up to me in the studio and puts his arm around me and starts parroting some right-wing newspeak. I look at him and say, “Weir, hey, it’s me! Who do you think you’re talking to? Get a grip, buddy.” Despite occasional frustrations, Jerry almost always defends Weir, even during that grueling period when Weir is learning slide guitar onstage.
When he gets on his soapbox about something, Bobby’s the world’s greatest expert. Jerry teases him unmercifully. “Where’d you read that, Weir?” he’ll say.
The distractions of running our own business are bad enough, but almost immediately industrial problems raise their ugly head, critical manufacturing-stuff problems we’d never even heard of before. Shortly after our new album is released on November 15, 1973, sleazy counterfeit copies of Wake of the Flood start turning up on the East Coast. As a form of self-protection we begin manufacturing our own jackets with invisible color codes, scratching arcane symbols on the pressing templates and working hand in hand with the FBI (!) to foil the bootleggers. By the time the counterfeiting subsides, we have lost valuable weeks that we could have otherwise spent promoting the album (or even working on a new one!). Still, despite the “evil twin” album, we are able to sell a healthy 400,000-plus copies of the real Wake.
One thing’s for sure, we’re certainly rolling out the product! In March of 1974 the Dead start recording Grateful Dead from the Mars Hotel at CBS Studios in San Francisco. It is the straight old corporate professional recording studio scene, complete with CBS company engineer Uncle Roy (Seigel). Mars Hotel is intensely rehearsed at S.I.R. (Studio Instrument Rentals) across the street before we go into the studio every day. All the tunes are pretty much arranged. The band has been playing them for almost a month before the sessions start.
Mars Hotel has some similarity to Workingman’s Dead in that there are fewer instrumentals, more songs, and the album as a whole is more centered on the lyrics. It is even laid out better for airplay — four tracks on each side. It’s jumpin’ and hoppin’ and poppin’, but compared to the live performances the studio versions are flat. The eternal Dead dilemma. “Scarlet Begonias” and “Loose Lucy” really pump in concert. “Ship of Fools” makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. “I cannot share your laughter, Ship of Fools. . . .”
Phil Lesh gets to do his song cycle this time round on “Unbroken Chain.” With its sound effects, soul breaks, and jazzy interludes, you feel like you’ve walked through half a dozen hotel lobbies. On “China Doll,” Hunter and Garcia’s infatuation with desperate plights, low-lifes, angels, and the raw edge continues in a wonderfully eerie dialogue with Jerry’s compressed vocal sounding like a ghost voice arguing with itself.
There’s a lot of tension building among band members, but much of this comes from the pressure of running their own business, flying to plants in Santa Rita and Santa Whatever, and not seeing each other—not practicing that much. Jerry gets his stuff done in a snap of the fingers, but after the Garcia-Hunter compositions are done the record languishes waiting for the other songs to come together.
Grateful Dead from the Mars Hotel gets its name (and cover picture) from the old Mars Hotel, a sleazebag hotel in the Mission District that is torn down the same year as we made the record. Where “Scarlet Begonias” materialized from is less clear.
“Where the hell did that one come from?” asks Garcia.
“Yes, and who were we before we were taken over by pods?” asks Hunter. “They’ve left us with just enough memory to get by on: social security number, that sort of thing.”
If some aspects of the song are enigmatic, the Caribbean polyrhythms, according to Jerry, have a more terrestrial origin: “I think I got a little of it from that Paul Simon ‘Me and Julio down by the schoolyard’ thing. A little from Cat Stevens — some of that rhythmic stuff he did on Tea for the Tillerman.”
Jerry is still experimenting with voices — Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, Gary Brooker (Procol Harum), Rick Danko’s phrasing, and (with the help of mucho voice compression) evolving a vocal persona. The big advantage of recording in Columbia’s Studio A is the capacity to synch-up two 16-track tape machines and record on up to thirty tracks that all manage to fill up and create an effect Garcia describes as “an acoustic feel put into an electric space.” They make your voice sound good, too!
Somewhere in the middle of recording the album we have to stop and order vinyl, book time at pressing plants, and figure out how to get the airplay necessary to push the album — all this, combined with pressure on the band to finish the album fast enough. Must take advantage of specified Killer Time Periods to sell records. Jesus, we’ve become Mo Ostin.