IT’S ALL BEEN too much. We’ve been slipping deeper and deeper into drugs. Since 1970 we’ve been doing close to a hundred gigs a year, and made four studio albums (not counting the two live albums). The band is at the end of its tether, a whirlpool of inner events is swirling, our nerve endings are close to the surface. The band is stagnating, we don’t have any new songs, we’re worn out, it’s been ten years without one break. We all agree it’s a good idea to take a year off.
The last official engagement of the Grateful Dead juggernaut is to be the five-night “retirement shows” at Winterland, October 16–20, 1974. Followed by a one-year vacation.
Just before the last concert, Mickey Hart had appeared on the scene. It’s not that anybody at this point — including Mickey — thinks he’s coming back into the band for good, he just wants to jam with the Dead one more time. The problem is Kreutzmann, who isn’t all that crazy about having him back in the band.
Rex Jackson has a plan. We move Mickey’s drum kit into Winterland and hide it at the bottom of the stairs. On the last night at Winterland, Rex asks Kreutzmann if Mickey can jam with the Dead. Kreutzmann has no objection to playing with Mickey — “problem is, we don’t have enough drums.” To which Rex answers, “Oh but we do, we’ve got another trap set just down the stairs here.” Mickey’s, that is!
Kreutzmann can’t argue with that. We’re all standing there and Rex can be very persuasive. And that’ how Mickey came back into the band. After that night, Kreutzmann just accepted him. It is such a shiny evening with two drums again. Even Kreutzmann is slightly humbled by the power of their combined energies. The Grateful Dead need the rolling thunder of sound that the two of them generate — and it’s stayed together ever since.
The break in touring enables us to extricate ourselves from a $100,000-a-month overhead for trucking around the Wall of Sound, paying a crew of forty people to maintain it, and meeting a monster payroll.
But nobody is on retainer, and we are all fairly heavy into dope. Did I forget to mention that? China White is eating up more and more of our money. Up till now we’ve been relying on our per diems to pay for our habits. We break up at the height of the drug frenzy, so naturally we all decide it’s time to quit dope as well. And of course there’s also the vague thought that it might even be a good idea for everyone to get off drugs and take a deep breath.
But what to do with all this time? And how to make some bread? For Lesh and Weir and Hart and Kreutzmann it’s a complete burn, because Garcia immediately — the next day! – has a new band. He has this physical need to play, so bang! he makes a few phone calls and has a band together, is out booking nightclubs and going to work.
Everybody’s hustling to keep up with Garcia, and soon junior versions of the Grateful Dead are sprouting up everywhere you look. There’s Kingfish with Bob Weir, Old and In The Way, the Diga Rhythm Band, Keith & Donna, as well as Garcia’s Legion of Mary, and God knows how many more are on the way.
With the band broken up, there’s no regular income anywhere: People are dropping from $500 a week to zip. The Grateful Dead has been a gold mine, and none of us is prepared for the abrupt downturn in our finances. A month ago we had fat salaries and all of a sudden . . . laid off! Any plans involving money are shelved, and here am I struggling to keep my head above water. Gotta do something to make money, man. I mean, I have bought things — large, money-devouring things. I own cars, even have commitments for chrissakes! I owe my soul to the company store, and I don’t have a pot to piss in — it’s an outhouse, actually.
Oh yes, I am also strung out. So I need money to do what any self-respecting hippie in my position would do: get involved in a (far-fetched) marijuana-smuggling scheme. My slithery cohorts, Tyler and Bruce, are bringing in three hundred pounds of pot from Mexico, which I plan to hide in a cunningly contrived stash in my barn. I wlll sit on it and the dealers will come over to my house and get what they need. I am to be the marijuana troll sitting under the bridge. What could be simpler?
Well . . . the plane runs out of fuel (they forgot to take out the seats!), is forced to land on a highway and . . . they get popped. Unfortunate, but thank God I am not in any way connected with it.
Shortly afterward Tyler calls me up. He’s desperate, crying to me over the phone: “They’ve got me dead to rights, man, you gotta help me get out of the country. You think you can get me some phony I.D.?”
When we meet downtown I see this gold Dodge across the street from the phone booth with a guy in a shiny jacket staring at me. So I have the good sense from my Hell’s Angels training to take twitchy Tyler through a car wash in case he’s wired. Nothing in the paperwork I give him has been touched by anything other than rubber hands. I take a hankie and pull the envelope out of my pocket. It’s got the Michigan driver’s license, the social security card. He can get a passport with this shit. I’m saving the motherfucker’s life, but he’s sandbagged me, called me from a federal building.
The next day who should come across my bridge but three DEA agents. I happen to be growing pot in my front garden, trying to disguise it with corn stalks, but the grass is getting higher than the corn. They see it, but that’s not what they’re here for. I’m in my car leaving with my kids for school when they come up the driveway. They look like barrio L.A. thugs: leather jackets, greasy hair — you can smell the grime on these guys, and they’re clearly packing guns. At first I think they might be Hells Angels (!) but when I take a closer look I know they’re cops. It’s the white socks. Immediately I put the car in reverse and back up to the house, run in, take everything I find and throw it into an ammo box, which I stash under the house. The only thing I miss is a string of peyote buttons that is up on the top of my bookshelf, but the rest of it, they will never find. I get back in the car as if nothing has happened going five miles an hour and as I come up to them they pull out these big silver .44s I know I’m sunk, but manage my best “Is anything wrong, officer?”
He says, “Get out da car wid your hands on your head, mudderfugger!” and I know the little creep has nailed me. This, my friends, is what happens when you get laid off from the Grateful Dead!
The hiatus may have been necessary, but stopping a juggernaut like the Dead creates many problems. There’s far too much time to brood and get fucked up. Another casualty of this period is Jerry and Mountain Girl’s relationship. They officially separate in 1975. She had spoken about her frustration over life with Jerry as far back as 1971, but they stayed together and had a second daughter, Trixie, in 1974. After Mountain Girl leaves, Garcia begins to lose his bearings. Kreutzmann and Suzila break up around this time, too, and shortly afterward he gets married for the third time, to Shelley, with whom he will live for the next fifteen years.
I’m out on bail. My court case won’t come up for another year and I put it in the back of my mind.
The band goes back in the studio at Weir’s house in Mill Valley. So far, for Grateful Dead Records they’ve cut one fair-to-middling LP (Wake of the Flood) and one solid album (Mars Hotel) with actual tunes on it that could’ve got radio play had we so wished. Really. Now it’s time for something completely off the wall. The band is in a speculative mood, a Zen frame of mind, and they have lots of time on their hands. Hence, Blues for Allah, their last studio album for the Dead label.
Garcia has always been a big fan of Beat spontaneity — “first thought, best thought.” Now Chairman Garcia announces the ground rules for the new album: “We”re gonna go into the studio with no preconceptions, and with no material. We bring nothing in. It’s a chance to let us hang out together and let ideas evolve from absolute coldness, from absolutely nothing.”
This sort of talk always makes me nervous, but I’m aware that part of Jerry’s motive is to heal the rifts and get back to where the band makes the main contribution to the evolution of the material. This approach can lead to advanced noodling, which it soon does on the drum sequence at the beginning of "King Solomon’s Marbles” and the aptly titled “Milkin’ the Turkey.” There are way too many instrumentals. This kind of stuff’ll work at a concert, but on a record it is wasted time and space. It goes on so long you are almost relieved when this bright and bouncy country twangin’ tune of Bobby’s comes along (even though it doesn’t exactly fit with the Near Eastern theme of the album). But then, Donna Godchaux’s solo on “The Music Never Stopped” doesn’t quite blend in either.
Donna’s voice works better in the studio than it does in performance. Her voice has never harmonized well with the Grateful Dead live. She has a beautiful voice; the only problem is that it doesn’t blend that well with Garcia’s and Weir’s. Jerry has a sort of Americana take on a song. Like Dylan, you can’t argue with it. And why bother, it sounds great. But put a glorious singer like Donna next to him, and it’s like putting a Meissenware figurine next to an old whiskey jug.
Bobby wrote “Sage & Spirit” while my daughters, named Sage and Spirit, were jumping on his bed and generally trashing his hotel room. He was trying to play his guitar and came up with the rhythm for this from their jumping. The flute mimics their laughter.
“Help on the Way,” “Slip Knot!” and “Franklin’s Tower” are actually all part of one long song. “Franklin’s Tower” is great in performance, but on the album it sounds too neat and tidy. Garcia’s guitar is far punchier live. It sounds a wee bit flat. The truth is these guys have never developed a persona for themselves in the studio. Their attitude is “Nice suit, let’s have it cleaned and burned.”
Since the band isn’t touring, the guys now have all the time in the world to spend on the album, a prescription for serious mucking about. Such as collecting five hundred crickets in a cardboard box, sticking microphones inside it, slowing the tapes down, speeding them up, and playing them backward at half speed so they end up sounding like whales and chirping birds.
These crickets chirp on the bass track throughout the second side of Blues for Allah. But this shouldn’t be mistaken for a simpleminded exercise in decorating the track with sound effects. It’s in aid of a far more mystical quest:giving voice to the desert. The Dead asked themselves the ancient question: If the desert could talk what would it sound like? To answer this truly mind-boggling question, Hart and Garcia construct the talking sands. Garcia engineering, Hart in the studio playing all his little percussion things — bells, metal, glass. So that when Jerry says “In’sh’ALLAH” it’s not a human voice that you hear pronouncing the name of God but the brittle desiccated voice of sand being blown across a hot moonscape.
“I think that’s the first record we’ve made in ten years where we really had fun,” says Garcia. “Also had the chance to get weirder than we normally do.” Now that’s saying something.
The off-the-cuff approach may work well for musical instruments, but it doesn’t transfer all that well to language. It’s a nightmare for Hunter, who prefers to sit back and toy with things a little bit more. “Blues for Allah” with its long melodic phrases and twelve notes (or more) to the bar is hardly made for impromptu versification.
“Okay, Hunter, we’re ready for the words for this one about now.”
“Well . . . it’s not in any key and it’s not in any time. And the line lengths are all different. How in the hell am I supposed to get a scan for that?”
“Dammit, Bob, stop stalling, just give it to us hot off the brainpan, whatever it is.”
“How about ’Here comes that awful funky bride of Frankenstein’?”
“Right length, wrong country.”
“How about: ‘Arabian wind, the Needle’s Eye is thin’?”
“That’ll do, got any more?”
On the other hand, “Crazy Fingers,” with its loping camels and bells, comes together in a blinding flash of satori, just leaps off a page or two of haikus Hunter has been scribbling in a notebook. Jerry spots these random jottings and recognizes them for what they are: lyrics!
But by the time Blues for Allah is ready for release, Grateful Dead Records is floundering financially. From now on United Artists wdl manufacture and distribute Grateful Dead Records. Sic transit gloria mundi (that’s how the cookie crumbles).
Over a period of four years, Grateful Dead and Round Records have put out no fewer than fourteen albums. But the Grateful Dead have only made three albums: Wake of the Flood, Mars Hotel, and Blues for Allah, stretching themselves to the max in the process with loans from the Bank of Boston.
In 1976, the Dead close down Grateful Dead Records for good — after Steal Your Face, the double live album culled from recordings made at Winterland in 1974 — the so-called retirement shows. This record is called Steal Your Face for good reason. Ron Rakow had assured everybody that there was plenty of good material on these tapes, but as Lesh, who mixed the album with Owsley, eloquently puts it: “Rakow wouldn’t know good material if it came up and pissed on his shoe.” Let’s face it, this album would never have been released if we hadn’t needed money for the film.
Did I mention the film? While the Dead are on hiatus, Garcia is also embarked on a new career, moviemaker. He’s working on The Grateful Dead Movie, a documentary of the retirement concerts at Winterland, filmed every night with six cameras and nine crew members (and a whole lot more money taken out of the Grateful Dead coffers to pay for it). Besides doing his band projects, Garcia, with Dan Healy and Eddie (“big black leopard”) Washington, commutes down to L.A. every week. Garcia is the director, Healy the engineer, and Eddie the director’s assistant. Eddie is crucial to this project because he’s the only one who was involved in shooting it. He monitored the filming on six screens in the mixing truck and he also knows the songs backwards. The directing of the film is essentially an editing process, so it’s from Eddie’s notes on the sequencing that the film is spliced together. He also acts as a kind of crew boss for these two loose hanging wires named Garcia and Healy.
While the three of them are hunkered down in Burbank, the rest of the Dead have forgotten they ever made a movie.
Garcia spends two and a half years working with Healy on The Gratefull Dead Movie, editing some 150 hours of film, painstakingly synching the footage to the music, during which time no one in the band ever asks what it sounds like, what it looks like, or what Jerry is trying to do with it. He works like a dog on that film. It isn’t until it’s almost done that anyone else in the band takes the slightest interest. And then — all at once — the chihuahuas of paranoia begin howling.
Phil freaks. He insists that I take him and a committee of Grateful Dead band members to Los Angeles. I call Garcia down at the lot: “Um, get ready, there’s a small palace revolution going on here, and they all want to come down tonight and see what you’re doing with their movie.”
Sharp intake of breath from Garcia: “Oh, no, please. Not the Grateful Dead. I’ve been working on this thing for a year, and they want to come tonight?”
“Well, Jerry, I thlnk that, uh, on the other hand, man, it might be a mistake to put them off. They’re starting to think something’s amiss and it’s only going to get worse if we avoid them.”
“Oh, maaan, that’s gonna interrupt my whole work schedule! Tell ’em there’re no rooms down here.”
Which happens to be true. I call the Grateful Dead travel agent;and the best he can do is to book the band into this newly finished old folks’ home. It has aluminum bars next to the toilet and red handles to summon the nurses in case you fall down. The beds have railings around them like big cribs for giant babies. Phil takes one look and says, “I don’t care for this room, Rock.”
“Tough, there aren’t any other rooms. You wanted to come down here on one day’s notice. Hey, you can’t do much better than this, man, there’s a Kiwanis convention in town!”
Goddamn if Jerry doesn’t charm the shit out of them! He could always do that. But it was a shabby thing for them to do. And Phil as the instigator ends up spending all of about twenty minutes looking around and watching a little bit of the movie and then wants to go to a fancy French restaurant and drink some wine and have a nice dinner.
A year after my bust, my case comes to court. I get eight months and probation, and thank God it’s in a minimum-security federal corrections institute where I have the good (?) fortune to get to know H. R. Haldeman, fresh from his Watergate exploits, cooking his heels in the room next to mine and cursing Richard Milhous epithet-deleted Nixon. Screaming with rage.
“That cocksucking S.O.B.! Sick little shit!” He’s telling me all these nightmare stories while I’m trying to eat that cold toast and awful mush that they make in the joint. His epithets about his former boss are scorching. Otherwise, he’s a mild-mannered, well-spoken company man, a Southern California promotion man who became the Assistant to the President. He tears Nixon a new asshole — daily.
“Jesus, Scully, it’s lucky that they booted the fucker out when they did or the world might’ve ended with his presidency. Damned lucky! The goddamn raving lunatic was hell-bent on bombing somebody.” Then H.R., shaking imaginary jowls, does his Deputy Dawg imitation of Nixon: “‘Or shooooould we make peace: with them? I dunnooooo.’ What a fucking dimwitted nerd!”
When I come back to work with the band I wind up doing carpentry, putting in a new floor at 20 Front Street, the Dead rehearsal space in San Rafael. How art the mighty fallen!
Jerry is still working on the Grateftrl Dead Movie down in Burbank. It now has fantastic animation sequences by Gary Gutierrez, film clips of the 196os, concert footage of the band and audience, and interviews with band members, crew, and Deadheads, including one in which a stoned fan objects to the whole idea of filming on ontological grounds — i.e., it interferes with the concert in progress, to which one can only agree, adding: “Om Sri Maitreya, dude!”
It’s meant to translate the Grateful Dead experience onto film, “coming from what it’s like for me — in my head, as abstract ideas, nonspecific images — and what it’s like for anybody.” But the roiling, mind-fusing cauldron of a Grateful Dead concert is not something you can really bottle, and the effort of this quasi-mystical venture is taking its toll on Jerry. Wearily he is beginning to call his endless sojourn in the studio “two and a half years of doubt.” All those days and nights running into one another in that huge sublunar studio in Burbank. Lobsters scuttling at the bottom of the sea. A high floating, detached mood pervading everything as Garcia settles into a permanently stoned state of mind, getting heavier and heavier into dope.
And we aren’t only smoking just pot anymore. By 1976 we’ve moved on to a new drug. Persian base heroin.
In the beginning nobody quite knows what it is. And they haven’t taken it long enough to get strung out. Like Alice, we are satisfied that since the bottle wasn’t labeled “poison” it must be okay. And, hey, it is organic!
The Persian has come to us from a guy I’ll call Ashram Harry. Ashram Harry was an old friend of Garcia’s, a swami with a long white beard, turban, and flowing robes who had his own ashram. And one day a devotee who had been in Iran studying Sufism brought him some Persian as a gift. He tried it and loved it and turned Garcia onto it.
At the time — the fall of’77 — Jerry is very involved in the studio, mixing down his third solo album, Cats Under the Stars. He’s in the studio twenty hours a day and the Persian creates this single-purpose intensity that allows him to focus for hours on end during the incredibly tedious business of mixing.
The Grateful Dead had quite a bit of experience as drug guinea pigs. It was on us that the alphabet psychedelics, MDA and MMDA, had first been “tested.” A lot of our experience with drugs had, in fact, been as white mice. “Let’s try it out!” is our approach. We are the original experimental animals.
Persian is an innocent by-product of our guinea pig mentality where any new drug is okay with us as long as it feels good, and the Persian is unbelievably dreamy stuff.
My first brush with smack had been so grisly I had nothing to do with the insidious opiate family until the ’74 Tour of Europe when the French promoters offered the China White heroin.
We had also used certain drugs like cocaine and speed as road tools. Sleeping four hours a night, a different town every night. The band, the crew, everybody was using coke to get going. Working until four in the morning, crash, wake up with a line, hit the road. Even after we’d been through the coke mill in London, we put it down to, uh, just doing a bit too much. You know, nothing to do with using it for ten years!
For some reason we figured that Persian is recreational — like coke! We believe that coke is something you don’t really get strung out on, anybody knows that. How can it be harmful — I do it every day!
Anyway, worrying about getting strung out farther down the line is not one of our major concerns when a new drug comes along. First of all, there is the myth of the Invulnerability of the Dead — a myth the band devoutly believes in. And the Persian is so hard to find that it doesn’t seem like any of us will ever get a chance to get hung up on it. Weird logic, I know. After we try it for the first time, it is a long, long time before we can find any more. Eventually we run into a couple of Iranian playboys whose father had been the chief of police in Teheran. They own a car dealership in the East Bay, and they do a little side business in Persian.
And, hey! Persian is so cosmic, it even comes with its own mythology. It had been used in the fourteenth century by Persian warriors who heated it on the blades of their swords before going into battle. Now who could resist a drug like that?
What Persian turns out to be is a very refined form of Iranian opium. Not so refined that you can’t get addicted to it, though. It is also very volatile; has to be mixed with cocaine so that it won’t evaporate completely when you heat it in tinfoil. Mellow rush, especially mixed with cocaine — known as a “spredball,” long a favorite of jazz musicians.
And Persian has the advantage of no telltale smell. A smell so faint that cigarette smoke would cover it. Plus you can’t identify it. On the other hand, it isn’t something you can nip in some place and do real quick. It takes some preparation, and the crinkling of the tinfoil makes it extremely hard to do on the sly. But once you start smoking it, well, that’s all you ever want to do. All thought of life beyond the foil soon vanishes. Oh great. . . .