MAMA CASS IS dead, you say? God, that’s right! And, fuck, Keith Moon’s gone, too, so it’s at least 1978, right? Oh well, right now exactitude isn’t our main concern. These days we’re trying to become more confused (and succeeding admirably).
At least I know where we are. UC-fuckin’-LA! They’ve finally broken out the home team dressing room for us. The sanctum sancforum. It has taken us five concerts at Pauley Pavilion to get in there. Previous to this we’d been banished to the visiting team’s locker rooms, which are crummy compared to the home team’s. The home team’s dressing rooms are carpeted, with killer showers and big beautiful lockers and a lounge. We’re getting the royal treatment on account of Bill Walton, the UCLA star player. He has shoehorned us in. He’d made the Bruins number one and now he’s put UCLA on top. He has persuaded the coach, John Wooden, to let the team practice to Grateful Dead music, if you can believe it!
And we have, as usual, made ourselves very much to home. Caterers out in back are barbecuing steaks; sauternes and Chablis and champagnes are chilling in buckets. And there are blonde college girls in shorts and tank tops running around, which is always nice. Who needs New Year’s Eve?
Hey, there’s Captain Gas! Without whom no party would be complete. He’s got a long gray ZZ Top beard and a captain’s cap with the anchor and scrambled eggs on it. And he’s got his G-tank of nitrous oxide with him — complete with eight plastic hoses, each equipped with a dead man’s cut-off that shuts off if you pass out and fall over. Let’s not waste natural resources!
With eight people sucking on a tank, it freezes up fast and becomes a giant frozen bomb so frosty you could write your name on it on a Tijuana night in August. To free up the gas there’re only two things you can do. You can turn it over, in which case the gas becomes liquid and dangerous — it”ll freeze your heart and your lungs. Or you can drag it into the shower and heat it up, which is what Peter “Craze” Sheridan has just done.
The whole team showers together so there’re like sixteen shower-heads per wall. Craze turns them all on. It’s a rain forest in there with this frozen tank of nitrous oxide that is slowly thawing out. Meanwhile the roadies have talked a few coeds into entering the shower. This Playboy pictorial wet T-shirt thing going on. One of the girls has taken her shirt off. Their bras are gone and they’re froliclung in the showers, falling down in the shower, lathering themselves up with the soap and the bubbles and sucking on the octopus — each one has her own clear plastic hose. Another five minutes and everybody is stark naked. I’d like to join them but I have other things to do.
I’m charging down the hall when the promoter runs up to me and says, “Rock, man, you better get it together. The Regents of the University of California at Los Angeles are here.”
“Ha! ha! ha! Ha! Hey, that’s not funny, dude.”
“I’m serious. They’re right behind me!” he says, and I look over his shoulder and — fuck! — there they are, these stern overlords of the executive caste in little Benjamin Franklin glasses. Very tucked-in, watch fobs, and discreet lapel pins entitling them to a personal cryonic crypt. Even the women are in three-piece suits.
A phalanx of pinched faces walking in tight formation, their next destination is the team locker room (our dressing room for the night) and just beyond that the showers where bacchanalian revels are in progress. Dr. Gas is stark naked except for that dopey captain’s hat, which he wears even in the shower. People are passing out from the steam and the nitrous.
I know there’s no way I can stop the dour army of Regents. They stride into the lounge. The leader of the delegation is like Rosemary Woods, a librarian from hell. Casting a beady eye around, briskly making a few marks on her clipboard. “The lounge and dressing rooms seem to be in order,” she says. “Now, let’s move on. We’d like to inspect the showers next.”
“Uh, you mean, like —”
“Now!”
“Um, I don’t think that’s advisable just now, ma’am. I’ve got some crew in the shower, ma’am, you know, um, we’re moving out of here tonight, would you mind coming back another time?”
“That’s out of the question.”
One of the gentlemen in the delegation pushes ahead of her. “Belinda, why don’t I just go in there and take a look.” He goes into the locker room, peeks into the showers, and stops dead in his tracks. He’s speechless, riveted to the spot. His mind is split in two. Half of him wants to tear off all his clothes and join them, but the other half (the half that owns four thousand shares of 3M) is appalled.
It’s the way he stops that alerts the rest of them. What could it be that has so paralyzed our Mr. Metalfatigue? The Regents want to know. They all rush in — including this woman.
Half a dozen healthy Southern California Valley girls cavorting with a bunch of degenerate beer-swizzling, gas-breathin’ crazies. And this naked guy wearing a captain’s hat passed out on the ground with a big hard-on. Reader, we blew their minds. I’m told some later moved to Denver. Would you be surprised to hear that we were booted out of there that very afternoon and told we’d never play there again? Or not for another year, anyway.
We are now definitely dependent on Persian, and I think it’s safe to say I can add “drug courier” to my résumé. I make arrangements for packages to be sent to the cities we’re playing. We divvy the stuff up when it arrives. Jerry gets his, I get mine, whoever else is partaking gets theirs. The idea being that this is your daily ration and that’s all you get. Garcia, of course, always runs over his quota.
We develop these foil pipes that hang up the tar on its way up. The more tar that builds up on the inside of the foil pipe, the more you have left when you run out. You melt it and then chase it down a little runway with a ramp — the pipe. We call this residue “rat,” and it is strong stuff. You know if you haven’t opened up the pipe and smoked what’s inside, you still have some left. In lean times we get by on rat.
We use the airlines to ship dope. I have somebody run it out to the port in an envelope, put it on a plane, and it gets there like clockwork until some weird hippie at TWA recognizes Jerry’s name on the package and takes it. The first time it happens, we’re in Philadelphia. I’m jonesing in the Philadelphia Arport waiting for the shit to arrive and it never shows up. I know it got onto the plane, but somewhere along the line somebody stole it. This little glitch leads to a day and a half of the shakes. Garcia is too junk sick to perform the following night. Prescriptions from the hotel doctor help, but we use up all the pills the first night to get rid of the shakes. In Washington, a desperate Garcia decides to do a radio interview in the middle of the night and “put the code out.”
Garcia’s nodding into the mike during the interview. On air he asks fans — in code — to bring their stashes down to the station and he will sign albums for them. He says, “Uh, anybody down with Garcia out there tonight? You wanna come down to the station? I’ll come down from up here and sign autographs, but bring me some down.”
Thirty kids show up at the station reception with grass, ‘ludes, uppers. Uh oh, the wrong drugs! Oh God, now he wants to get more specific on the air, spell out what precisely he needs. We send kids out to get downers and tranks to get us through the night.
Jerry and are I easily doing $700 a day of this stuff. A gram costs $700, and it never sees the end of the day. When we can’t get dope, Jerry goes onstage full of Valium. Bumping his nose into the microphone, tottering around and dozing off midsong. And the songs are all dirge-like and sloowwww
In Boston, Garcia refuses to come out of his dressing room unless he gets some dope. Even when we’re not on tour, I am now roused in the middle of the night to get packages off planes for Garcia.
I’ve also become the band paramedic. Since we can’t risk consulting local doctors about drug-related problems I develop an over-the-phone description of symptoms with Dr. Weisberg: the color of urine, dilation of pupils, etc.
Jerry’s the only band member with a specific attachment to Persian. The others are fairly indiscriminate. Billy Kreutzmann does it whenever it’s around, but he’s never strung out. He’s into everything: drinking, Persian, cocaine, pot . . . whatever. He just wants to get to a certain state of mind and it doesn’t matter to him how he gets there. Hart gets totally strung out, as does John Kahn (the bass player for Garcia’s band), and Keith Godchaux is in the worst shape of all.
Phil Lesh is addicted to wines. Never did Persian; has never been addicted to anything illegal as far as I know. In his youth he used speed, dropped acid in his eyeballs, tried everything he could lay his hands on, and then settled into French wines.
Bobby Weir had a brief encounter with heroin with the Kingfish band and that was it. He’ll use a pill now and then to go to sleep or wake up, but he never becomes dependent on any of it. He has more self-control than anybody else in the band. Which is interesting because looking at this spaced-out kid one might think that he’d be the most likely candidate for addiction. The only drug he’s ever been addicted to is LSD, which gave him a good frame of reference.
Jerry, on the other hand, when he finds a drug he likes he never wants to be without it and will go to any extremes to get it. The other guys in the band know this about him. They’re crashing and they know that he has it, so they beg me to go get it off him.
“Hey, you don’t want Jerry to get sick, do you?”
“Well I’m sick, too,” Mickey Hart is claiming.
Kreutzmann’s on my case, too: “I’m fucked up, I’ve got the shakes.”
“God, you guys, why didn’t you tell me about this before we left?” Keith Godchaux is the worst, a nightmare. He never lets me know and never makes plans and then hits on me constantly. Heavy leaning.
“C’mon, man, I’m the piano player, I can’t play this messed up!” Meanwhile Donna Jean is saying, “Don’t give him any, Rock.”
“Don’t worry, I don’t have any.”
Donna Jean doesn’t do any of this stuff. She smokes grass, of course, but grass in the Grateful Dead camp is just like a salad — that you smoke.
Keith Godchaux is daily getting more and more out of it, nodding out at the keyboard. His forehead, midset, just collapses — crash! — onto the piano. He actually gets lost between Atlanta and Buffalo. When you’re this fucked up, anywhere can become the Bermuda Triangle. Constant, terrible fights in hotels with Donna Jean. In Buffalo, I find her huddled behind the soda machine out in the hall, shaking and crying.
The fighting gets so extreme that Donna Jean and Keith Godchaux each have to have their own limos. Keith is becoming increasingly demanding and grandiose. He insists his own tuner go on tour with him, and Donna Jean is telling me she can’t travel without her rocking chair! We have a case built to transport it.
Things get worse than they already are when Donna Jean and Bobby Weir start having an affair. Keith is now kicking in doors, punching people. We begin auditioning new piano players, and by the end of ’78 we’ve pretty much agreed on Brent Mydland as Keith Godchaux’s replacement. He’s from the band Silver (and had played with Bobby and the Midnites).The Godchauxes are asked to leave the band. It is quite an accomplishment to be so strung out and weird that you’re actually asked to leave the Grateful Dead! Or so I think at the time.
Just over a year later, on July 21, 1980, Keith, after two days in a coma, dies as the result of an automobile accident.
New Year’s Eve, 1978. The Dead have been doing New Year’s Eve bashes for a couple of years now. It’s become an institution and a very big deal. But at this particular one, Graham is not allowing the Hells Angels in wearing their colors. What does he expect them to wear, blazers? Anyway, we’ve already invited the New York Hell’s Angels and a bunch of other chapters to come and they all show up at once — of course! — on a hundred and fifty motorcycles. They want in the back door (with their mamas), which, at Winterland, is one of these huge metal gates that clanks open like a rusty drawbridge. It has a little door cut into one side of it, and outside knocking on this door is Tiny — Tiny, of course, is as big as this room.
“Let us in!” says the giant. The door opens and through the open door the whole hall can hear the roar of the motorcycles. Everyone knows the Angels are here.
It is just bad timing on Graham’s part, but he’s smart enough not to deliver his edict in person. We have a powwow in this little cold storage anteroom right next to the back door, where we store the Heineken. Angelo from Richmond and Badger and Sandy Alexander from Manhattan are standing around waiting for Graham to show up, but Bill has more sense than that. The Angels have fiendish plans for him.
“We may have to hang him out the building or take him up to the air ducts and, you know, and gas him.”
I interrupt their reveries: “Let’s cool it with the serious bodily harm, dudes, the Grateful Dead will refuse to play if Graham doesn’t allow you guys in! For one thing, you’re on the guest list. . . .”
And just at that moment this freak takes off his clothes and starts running around — a naked freak flying all over the concessionary in the back of Winterland. All the security guards are black and not one of them will touch this white boy with a hard-on, so Graham’s lieutenant, Jerry Pompili, asks a Hells Angel to help out. The Angel yanks the guy up and throws him into the Haight-Ashbury free clinic. There’s always a medical unit at Grateful Dead concerts, to deal with the kids who take too many downers or too much wine.
And right at that moment, while Pompili and the rest of Graham’s honchos are distracted, Sam Cutler opens the door and a motorcycle runs into the building and zips right up the ramp and onto the stage and then we park it and bring in another one. We’re going to have them rev up during the Rhythm Devils set.
The show starts with a screening of Animal House followed by Belushi and Ackroyd doing their Blues Brothers routine, then the Flying Karamazov Brothers juggling act, then the New Riders. Kesey & Co. join in on the “Drumz>” sequence — pot-banging being a Prankster specialty. John Cipollina jams on “Not Fade Away” and “Around and Around” at the end of the second set.
Bill Murray and Franken and Davis come out to join the festivities. We have a roadie standing at the top of the stairs to the stage. If you want to get backstage — where the action is — or even onstage, you have to get a drop of acid put in your soda or beer. Black and white 7’2" monsters from the Portland Trailblazers (Bill Walton’s team), Golden State Warriors, and Washington Redskins lumbering around on acid backstage along with the dealers and hipsters, while the Dalai Lama, Francis Ford Coppola, and Herb Caen from the San Francisco Chronicle watch the festivities.
The Dead stage has a maze of alleyways underneath it, an incredible netherworld of cables covered with rubber padding so that you don’t trip over them. The only way out to the audience is usually from under the stage. There’re other parts underneath that are like little clubhouses you can go down into. Nitrous oxide isn’t allowed on the stage, but no one said anything about under it. When the band isn’t playing, you can hear the gas running and the people laughing down there. There’s a scene in The Grateful Dead Movie where everyone is sucking on the nitrous octopus. That’s belowdecks at Winterland.
Janis’s old dressing room has been converted into the Nose Room. Bill Graham has glued plastic noses from Groucho Marx masks all over wall and wired the room with speakers with sniffing sound effects.
Around midnight the Dead start playing. It’s now time for Nicki and me to be lowered from the ceiling dressed in our skeleton costumes. Just part of the job! I have the top hat and Nicki has the crown of roses. We are two scared-shitless guys.
A long, long show. Three sets, two encores. Last “Dark Star,” O ye mystic Deadbase watchers! When they start playing it, the however-many-days-since-the-last “Dark Star” banner goes flying off the balcony. During the encore — around 7 A.M. — the band put their arms around each other to sing “We Bid You, Goodnight.” At dawn Bill Graham puts on a breakfast for seven thousand, and after that Ray Zimmerman has rented a boat to take everybody on a cruise but it never leaves the dock because he’s afraid we’re going to get seasick. We’re fucked up enough already.
New York, September 1979. When we played Madison Square Garden in July we’d broken all attendance records. We’ve come back to do another sold-out show. But there’s a price for success of this magnitude. Twisted minds in lonely bedsits are plotting even as we sleep. About six hours before the set we receive an ominous note:
“Jerry GARCIA dies 2NITE!! ”
A Jerry Garcia death threat! I’m impressed. With this, he’s officially a star. Elvis, Jagger, Dylan, Wayne Newton have all got them. Well, Wayne Newton even I can comprehend.
During the sound check we get a phone call from the creep himself, asking in a garbled voice if we received the note. The cops trace the call, break into the sender’s house. They find a gun permit, but no gun.
We still have a good relationship with the police these days. We hire off-duty cops as our limo drivers and never have a problem. I’m telling everyone we meet on tour that I never found a better cop than in New York City. The precinct that deals with the Garden is Midtown South, which is a pretty heavy beat. They handle a lot of scary shit and are glad to get assigned to a rock concert. And there’s never a problem at Dead concerts. This is still the old days (they don’t waste their time busting kids for acid). The cops like working Dead gigs because the audiences are so easy to deal with. It isn’t a rowdy AC/DC crowd. Grateful Dead fans present them with the fewest problems they have ever encountered.
“Gee, what is it that makes those kids so mellow?” they ask.
Jerry’s reaction to the death threat is almost medieval: “That laughing Jap! I knew it would create problems for us sooner or later. Baaad fuckin’ karma, baby!”
He’s referring to the Grateful Dead skull with the lightning bolt icon. That’s what he thinks has done it. He’s always been afraid that some ritual lulling is going to take place because of it and the Dead will be blamed. He doesn’t, thank God, say this to the police captain. He just tells him: “Hey, you protect the president, just do the same thing for me.”
The police strategy is worthy of Monty Python. The first twenty rows are cops disguised as Deadheads in yellow tie-dyed T-shirts and shorts. Our one proviso is that they not bust anybody for drugs during the show. Healy goes out and buys a bunch of infrared scopes and has the roadies scan the audience continuously. The would-be assassin never shows — so far as we know.
During the set Garcia remains remarkably calm, but after the gig he goes absolutely berserk. He goes back out onstage, I assume to thank everybody for rallying around, and over the PA system begins ranting: “WHO THE FUCK STOLE MY STASH? Where’s my BINDLE? I left my bag here and you guys STOLE all MY DRUGS! I’m not leaving until one of you motherfuckers turns it over!”
In front of the promoter and the union crew — and the place is still crawling with cops! He’s describing his fucking bindle of Persian in shockingly gory detail so they can look for it.
On this 1979 East Coast tour we get tight with John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd from Saturday Night Live. They’ve bought a neighborhood saloon down in the meat market in the bowels of Manhattan, opposite a nude bar called the Sweet Shop or something. It’s their own private bar where they can party all night long with their friends, and no one can stop them! It’s almost invisible from the outside. All boarded up with steel roll-down gates in front and not a single neon beer sign to indicate that anything is going on there.
It’s ancient, built in the 1800s with old wide plank floors. And behind the funky old bar there’s a wooden trapdoor that you can pull up and walk down steep wooden stairs into what might be a dungeon. Stone walls and a low ceiling of old wooden tree beams. Here the serious partying goes on. Jerry spends most of his time down here in a cloud of white dust. There are huge friggin’ lines laid out on top of cases of Heineken. Sometimes there’s a rail of coke on every stair as you go down.
Garcia’s most recent obsession is Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan. He’s bought the movie rights. It’s playing — right now! — in his head. “Hey, maaan, if I may: A man and his dog are about to” — snooooooort! — “materialize out of thin air by way of the chrono-synclastic infundibula on the lawn of a large estate. . . .” The intercortical cameras are rolling.
Vonnegut’s premise is one that would naturally appeal to Garcia’s sense of the absurd. The world’s great monuments are simply very large handwriting meant to be read from outer space.
Garcia explains it all: “See, Salo, this Tralfamadorian, is stranded on Titan waiting for news from his home planet about a spare part for his spaceship and — dig this! — the reply is written on Earth in huge stones — Stonehenge! And the meaning of Stonehenge in Tralfamadorian when viewed from above is: ‘Replacement part being rushed with all possible speed.’ The meaning of the Great Wall of China is: ‘Be patient we haven’t forgotten about you’ and so on.”
Few could resist the lure of the Blues Brothers’ club. One night Francis Ford Coppola shows up and we try to interest him in doing the film of The Sirens of Titan. He’s astonished anyone would even try. “You can’t make a movie of that, it’s philosophy.” But Garcia is convinced it must be brought to the big screen! He begins casting about for screenwriters who’ll take it on.
In order to goose the project, a major meeting is held with Garcia and Ackroyd and some of the SNL writers about raising development money for The Sirens of Titan using some of their connections. Jerry hates meetings, so to keep his attention we invite the delectable Amy Moore down to the bar, and between Amy and piles of cocaine we figure we can get him through it. At this point Tom Davis and Michael O’Donohue begin writing the screenplay. It’s an almost impossible task, the book is a satirico-cosmic tract. The funny bits aren’t really filmable, they’re verbal, and without them the plot is a preposterous interstellar chicken without feathers. As far as I know they’re still trying to get the shapeless thing to fly.
Local precinct cops love to come down to the Blues Brothers’ bar because they can always talk to someone from SNL or a visiting rock star. They like to hang out and drink and observe these people close up. TV stars! Rock legends! In one of the funkiest saloons in lower Manhattan.
Ray Zimmerman, who’s Belushi’s manager (and runs the bar), has an amicable relationship with the First Precinct. In other words, they leave him alone. They know Ray doesn’t have a license, it’s a private bar. When the local precincts come around, he gives them bottles of Johnny Walker Red and glasses of ice and they’re happy to turn a blind eye to whatever else is going on. Some of the guys even come in uniforms. It’s a bit of an alarming sight to see a Hells Angel snorting cocaine off a bar with a uniformed cop right next to him drinking, and the band all doing drugs in the basement.
After Grateful Dead gigs — and especially after they do Saturday Night Live — there are mondo jam sessions there. The usual logjam: seven guitar players, four keyboard players, Kreutzmann on drums and Rick Danko from the Band on bass and, occasionally, a sax player named Mars Williams who is starting a band called the Psychedelic Furs.
All the musicians squeeze into one tiny corner of this little bar. There is a PA system and a drum kit —that way people can just come down and plug in and jam. Belushi always sings with whomever is playing. He loves all the Stax-Volt bands and he has the jukebox loaded with Otis Redding, Booker T and the MGs, Sam and Dave. He gets Garcia to teach him Otis Redding licks. A lot of the Blues Brothers schtick came out of Jerry’s little tutorials. Belushi has a hard time remembering lyrics, but he can always make up spectacular ones on the spot.
Sometimes we go over to Belushi’s apartment and hang out. One night Belushi and Kreutzmann and I go over to a recording studio where the Firesign Theater guys are recording and Belushi decides to see how many microphones he can steal (we have, needless to say, been drinking all night). Eventually Belushi’s pockets are so full he falls down and can’t get up again. He lies there thrashing on the floor with his clown face a mask of desperation, the shiny mikes and black mike cords spilling out of his pockets like giant mechanized spermatozoa.
“Do you know why it takes fifty million sperm to fertilize one egg?”
“No, why?”
“Cause none of them will stop and ask for directions.”
The Blues Brothers’ club is where some of the great SNL routines develop. It’s their lab. They can try out riffs in a very receptive environment. The samurai dry cleaner, Ackroyd doing Mick Jagger or Nixon. Ackroyd’s Nixon sluts lead to us doing a radio spot featuring an intense Richard Nixon trying to scam Grateful Dead tickets.
August, whenever. One of those really hot days in Oregon. They do have them, you know. It reminds me of that day in ’72 we spent at a benefit for Ken Kesey’s brother’s creamery at the University of Oregon, in the woods on the Long Tom River. Hottest day in Oregon’s history. It was so hot the redwoods were sweating. Twenty-five thousand people were coming through the woods, taking their clothes off. Half the crowd with tops off, the others stark naked. Garcia got hit with heat prostration and passed out onstage. Bobby Weir was puking. People were dropping like flies, ambulances screaming through the woods. The only islands of relief from the unrelenting heat were under the parachutes on old telephone poles (or one of Ken’s gin and tonics).
Today is even hotter. 110 in the shade. We’re on our way back to the motel in a VW Bug, Garcia, Page Browning, and myself and a G-tank of nitrous oxide slung in the backseat. We’re breathing gas and driving at the same time, which is really a no-no, and, due to some, uh, distraction the Bug skids off the road and turns over on its side. As it does so the fucking top flies off the G-tank in the backseat and immediately the entire inside of the car freezes up — this is in 110-degree weather.
We get out of there just in time! Or we would have been found frozen inside like an exhibit: “Three hippies in a VW Bug, late twentieth century.” They’d put us next to the Woolly Mammoth from Siberia in the Museum of Natural History.
Once outside everybody’s going, “CLOSE THE DOOR, close the fuckin’ door, SAVE THE GAS!” Volkswagens are supposed to float in water, the idea being when you close the doors, the car is airtight. The Bug fills up with nitrous oxide in seconds. It is frozen solid, a furry ball of frost in the middle of a hot summer night. It’s so frosty you can write your name in the ice! Which Page has the presence of mind to do. He writes: “WILD THING, I LOVE YOU!”
A few minutes later the highway patrol shows up just as I’m pissing on the door lock to get it open. The frozen Bug is all fuzzy with frost like it just came out of the freezer.
“And what happened here exactly?” the highway patrolman asks. I’m not saying a word. I let Page do the talking.
“Waaall,” says Page, “as a matter of fact we have no explanation for it, officer. It’s like spontaneous combustion or somethin’. It’s a goddamn mystery.”
Jerry senses this is not a good tack and picks up the slack, beginning with a supposedly rationalist approach: “Oh, officer, we must have hit an icy spot.” Right.
“An icy spot!” says the incredulous cop. I’m standing behind the good officer trying to signal Garcia to cool it. He’s still trying to explain a completely iced-up VW Bug in a heat wave.
“We don’t have any idea how it happened, officer. Just came round the corner, slid off the road on this, um, vestige of ice.” The patrolman walks up and down the road. Of course you can’t see this icy spot, but were all obviously sober. We’re come down fast.
Eventually he leaves, scratching his head and muttering: “Damndest thing I ever saw. . . .” We’re pissed off that all the gas is sealed in the car and we don’t have a clue how to suck it up. Do you open the window a crack? Can you fill a balloon from a Volkswagen full of nitrous oxide? Let it melt is what were gonna do!
June 1980. A short tour of the Northwest and Alaska. It’s the Summer Solstice in Anchorage, Alaska, which means it’s dark for about five minutes a day. None of our kids can go to sleep. Even with blackout curtains, the rooms are bright as day. An ideal place for people like us who never want to go to bed, anyway. Two in the morning and the sun’s still blaring right overhead like it’s noontime. And the bars are humming. We sit up watching the sun sink two-thirds below horizon.
Grim Hilda, the archetypal pain-in-the-neck groupie, follows us up to Alaska. There’s nothing more fearsome than a Garcia-smitten Deadhead with credit cards. No sooner do we get into the hotel than the desk clerk says, “Mrs. Garcia already picked up the key and went up to the room.”
Grim Hilda is the most notorious in a long line of “Mrs. Garcias,” and she’s tenacious as hell. I thought we’d shaken her back in San Jose where she was sitting by the pool making goo-goo eyes at Jerry. As we checked out, Parish, our roadie, nudged her into the pool and filled her handbag with shaving cream. Once she was in the pool, bang! we were gone. It slowed her down some, but she just jumped on the next plane. The morning after the last gig Garcia opens the door to his room and there she is! He’s on the phone to me screaming. “HELP ME! Grim Hilda’s HERE!!! Get down here IMMEDIATELY!”
“How the hell did she get in?”
“I DON’T CARE IF SHE CAME IN ON A FUCKIN’ BROOMSTICK. GET HER OUT!”
Jerry doesn’t like confrontation. He’ll never tell anyone himself to get out. He wants to be the nice guy. Instead he’ll call a bouncer (like me).
When I get up to Garcia’s floor, I find him out in the hallway. Grim Hilda is in the room refusing to budge. I call management and they send up security, who pry her loose. She’s relieved of the room and taken downtown and booked (for harassment, or maybe impersonating a rock star’s wife).
We get on the plane to Hawaii and damn if the last person to board isn’t Grim Hilda! She has gotten out, paid her fines, and is on her way in the time it takes us to get out to the airport. But — aha! — she doesn’t have a ticket! In other words she’s bogused her way on the plane saying she is with the Grateful Dead (“Oh, the road managers got my tickets”) and gotten on the plane just before takeoff. I inform the captain and they keep her on the plane for the return flight to Anchorage.
June 7–8, 1980. Concerts at the University of Colorado at Boulder celebrate the Grateful Dead’s official fifteenth anniversary. Fifteen years of the good ole Grateful Dead! There’s a time, sayeth the preacher, to rejoice and a time to reflect. And upon reflection it’s clear that it is around this time, late seventies, early eighties, that things begin going seriously awry.
Previously there’d been a clear-cut line between those who made things happen and those who were just kind of there. And there were only one or two band members who were actively involved and initiating stuff. A lot of momentum came from people like Owsley and Dan Healy and Rex Jackson. The others were all nice people but they didn’t really have that much to say. For years they didn’t even write songs. The day it began to dawn on them that you get more royalty money by having your own songs on an album, they began writing. Unfortunately it was around this time that Jerry got strung out and lost his ability to steer the band.
If I were to pinpoint where it began I’d have to say around the time of The Grateful Dead Movie. The Dead movie was made wholly and solely by Garcia and Healy with a little help from Eddie Washington, but everybody else that was anywhere near it was either trying to scam something from it for themselves personally or — if they weren’t involved — were jealous of Jerry’s spending all that time on the project. And, with Jerry down in L.A. much of the time, little wheels began to turn.
One of the myths of the Grateful Dead is that it’s a democracy. That’s an admirable ambition; unfortunately, it’s not true. The Grateful Dead has always been and always will be Jerry Garcia. And when the lung abdicates — as Jerry does constantly — the kingdom falls into the hands of manipulators and thieves. Garcia’s never been really good at being in charge, has he? He passes the buck any time he can. Jerry will squirm out of anything. He can’t deal with unpleasantness of any lund.
What E. M. Forster said of Tristram Shandy might equally have been said of the early Dead: “There’s a god at its center and its name is MUDDLE.” In those first rambunctious years we would have taken this as a compliment. As our fearless leader once said: “Formlessness and chaos can lead to new forms. And new order. Closer to, probably, what the real order is.” This was the high, cosmic energy of the Acid Tests and the early Haight.
For a long time anarchic mischief propelled us. It was a magic force. But now the Dead have become engulfed and paralyzed by those very forces of chaos they once rode like a wave. What we have now is no longer Taoist chaos or fertile anarchy but the default. And we all know what flourishes in the default.
That Garcia was being held hostage by the Grateful Dead had been obvious for years. Jerry wasn’t blind, he could see that the Dead were stagnating, turning into a Haight-Ashbury version of the Buffalo Bill and the Indians show, but any murmur of taking a break — as we did in 1974 — to rethink and revitalize the Dead was met by laying a huge guilt trip on Jerry. The babies, the kids, the hospital bills. “We’ve all got families!” Big wringing of the hands and weeping. There’s a huge jones there for the money. Everybody who works for the Dead has been so well paid for so long they can’t let the cash cow go to pasture. They’ve got mortgages and car payments and God knows what, and all this has swamped the original ideals of the band.
Nothing captures the mindless maliciousness of the default frame of mind like Robert Hunter’s Five Commandments of Rock ‘n’ Roll:
(1)Trash the people that are gone.
(2)Trash anybody around you that’s doing anything you’re not.
(3)If you don’t understand it, it’s fucking with you.
(4)If somebody’s got something better than you, go out of your way to take it away from him.
(5)Don’t volunteer for anything.
The Dead had the chance to be different. In the old days, adventure was our mission. Let’s try it! Healy always wanted to take the band to the Grand Canyon and play, but it seemed as if the more years went by, the harder it got to do anything besides go to the same old places.
It seems like everything that starts out as genuine in America eventually hits the road and starts selling tickets to itself, turning into self-parody in an amazingly short amount of time. And, let’s face it, authenticity is just about the most marketable thing going. Still, I never thought I’d see the day.
August 31, 1981. We’re playing the Aladdin Theater. Vegas, babe! Hippies invade the polyester capital of the world! VW buses full of hair pulling up in front of the Flamingo and Caesars Palace, clouds of marijuana smoke trailing after them. Droopy guys in tie-dyes and cutoffs. And the Bobby Darin lookalikes in sharkskin suits observing this Furry Freak Brothers intrusion can’t believe their eyes. Whaddafug is this ovah heah? Serious infractions of the Italian-American dress code. Lounge lizards are sharp dressers, you better believe it. Sprayed trim jobs, immaculate hair, pussy ticklers, tanned — perfect! All night long, one crazy low-camp high drama after another. Dacron vs. tie-dye.
It’s probably a hundred degrees outside, we’re in this air-conditioned mausoleum with bells going off every few seconds, the slot machines in the background going ping! Pa-chung!
I’m trying to check the band as a mountain of hippies and hippie chicks pour into the lobby. We’ve reserved the whole fifteenth floor — except for maybe twelve rooms — and I hear next to me at the front desk this guy in patched Levi’s and a string vest going, “Yeah, give us something on Floor 15.” I’m going to myself, “Oh, no, we have hippies on the floor!” These are some of the grubbiest-looking guys in the world. Long dreadlocks and beards that have never been washed, reeking of smoke — it permeates the whole lobby — and they’re pulling out gold cards and rolls of cash.
Weir’s going, “Man, where did they get all of that money?” This is before we realize that there is a lucrative side business going on in the parking lots at Dead concerts and in the hallways — grass, LSD, and cocaine. Whatever they think the band is doing, they sell.
The hippie chicks are already over at the gambling machines throwing away fifteen cents and getting complimentary drinks. Meanwhile through the mirrored ceiling men in suits are watching the scene at the front desk with avid interest. Hippy-dippies with gold cards! Deadheads in ragged jeans and sandals and Guatemalan shirts checking in with rolls of hundred-dollar bills! When Las Vegas sees rolls of hundred-dollar bills, they just go apeshit. They are saying to themselves, “Hey, we got ourselves some high rollers!” They don’t, of course, understand that these people are not going to drink. They’re not gonna have one drink the whole night and if they do, they’ll ask for a free one with a roll of nickels, s-l-o-w-l-y throwing the nickels into the nickel machine while ten Deadheads partake of the experience. This isn’t Vegas’s idea of high-rolling.
Wait a minute! What are those freaks doing over at the craps table! There must be fifteen, twenty of ’em, at least! But when the camera zooms in it’ll turn out to be only one Deadhead from New York, the one Deadhead who knows craps (he’s been to Atlantic City). Meanwhile, every time he wins something all his friends are reaching across the table, grabbing the chips and the croupiers are beating them back from the take.
“No, no, no! That’s not your money!”
“But we won! It’s ours!”
The croupiers have pencil mustaches and after-shave and hair so slicked it looks painted on. They are profoundly shocked — not at the tatterdemalion clothing, the hairy armpits, the tits showing in see-through blouses, the reeking beards and torn jeans, but at the breach of etiquette. Ain’t they got no respect? The sacral solemnity of the gambling tables has been violated!
Deadheads are sweeping the money this way and that and the croupiers are whacking their knuckles with their canes. “Aw man that hurt!” Deadheads aren’t used to pain!
It’s an anthropological misunderstanding. The croupiers can’t comprehend the Deadhead thing at all. The group mind. One big unification party at the Grateful Dead concert, where we take you now. Backstage to the Great One’s dressing room.
“Rock, I’m falling asleep here, where’s your stash?”
“Don’t look at me, I don’t have any.”
Between sets, when he doesn’t have what he needs, Garcia sends me out into the audience to score.
“Go out and find somebody. If he’s got any, bring him back, now!”
No sooner do the other band members see me going out into the audience than I start talking orders for various chemical cocktails. Kreutzmann goes, “Know anyone with blow?”
“Yeah, it’s all over the building.”
“Well, GO GET ME SOME!”
“Okay, but you’re gonna have to put up with the guy that’s got it.”
“Aw, I’ll sign a drumstick or something. Here’s some passes!”
It’s easy to spot them. The guy that’s nodding off in his coffee has downers, the guy with big birms around his nostrils like he’s been eating donuts is obviously the coke freak. Usually I don’t even have to look; they come up to me.
“Scully, Scully, can you get me backstage?”
“You got any?”
“Hell, yeah! A solid eight-ball, man!”
“How is it?”
“Best you ever had, I swear, man.”
“Sure, sure. Okay, come with me.”
I loop a plastic pass on and it’s full speed ahead and don’t spare the horses.
“This is Jerry Garcia. . . ,” I say, opening the door to his dressing room, but Jerry doesn’t have time to socialize.
He goes, “BREAK IT OUT!”
Scronnnkkkkkk, aaahhh-hhhhhhaaaa-ha. And that is the end of the audience.
I go, “Say goodbye to Jerry.” The kid’s happy just to have been in his presence. He can go around the hall saying, “Jerry’s doing my blow!”
We get back from the gig and there’re people camped out in the hallways, with shower curtains pulled over them. People turning blue in the lips. There’s loose pot on the coffee table and lines reeled out to the bathroom. Drugs on every surface.
Deadheads are bribing secretaries at our travel agency in San Rafael to find out what hotels we’re staying in, greasing the phone operators with fifty-, hundred-dollar bills to spill the room list and then book hotel rooms on our floor. One Volkswagen full of hippie people spend all their money to find out what floor we’re on and then sell that info and squatter’s rights to other Deadheads and they all pile in. It’s like Calcutta, fifteen, twenty people to a room, sleeping on the floor, in the bathtub.
We end up with Deadheads like Sunshine and Tex having rooms on our floor and inviting all their friends up. “I’m on the same floor as the Grateful Dead!” They leave their doors open and there’s pot smoke everywhere. And here comes Captain Gas wheeling his tank of nitrous oxide into the hotel and onto our floor. Filling balloons with nitrous — bzhhhhhhhht! Balloons are exploding. All the doors are open and everybody’s camped out on the floor of the hallway. It’s their living room!
And we’re in a sense protecting them. I’ve hired ex—New York narcotics officers to look after us (we’re greasing them good). They’ve just gotten acclimatized to the Dead thing (sort of) and now this. They’re asking, “What’s with these guys, are they with the band?” Obviously I’m not going to snitch on them, but I’m in constant fear of getting busted.
There’s Fat Freddie who’s stashed three hundred sheets of blotter acid — with zonked Mickey Mouse icon — under the bed in a glass–ine Zip-loc envelope and forgotten it. And then suddenly realizes there’s thirty thousand hits of blotter acid under the mattress and the room is in his name. It’s a bust! So he sends an underage girl to go up to the hotel room and get it. But the maid’s already found it when she made the bed and the cops are waiting there with the rubber gloves. “Oh, is it yours, sweetie?”
Not long after we move into the big outdoor arenas, Grateful Dead concerts become the focus of serious police harassment. And the little creeps have the nerve to start getting political and high-tech! They’re up there in the booths using binoculars and walkie-talkies. These guys in the stands sitting up there where John Madden used to report on the football games, and they are all the FBI and the CIA and the DEA and the BNDD, Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs for the State of Nevada, are watching our audience and any roach that gets passed is a bust! Down amongst our fans are the hippie-looking cops — they’re about as convincing as hippies on Hawaii Five-O but somehow it still works. A guy in a headband sees somebody smoking pot and says, “Oh, can I have a hit?” And, bang! Sudden little flurry of activity right in front of the band. Where it really starts to make a dent on us is at the Nassau Coliseum. That’s pseudo-Nazi country out there. Another fascist enclave being Milwaukee.
Now not only are we in Las Vegas, it’s Las Vegas, Nevada. The State of Nevada doesn’t tolerate loose change. Whatever loose change is around they want it. Anything that they can’t control is dangerous to them. You can have a career as a hooker at any state-accredited pussy ranch, but no freelance anything. They have ads in the newspaper for bordellos: Sex workers sought today, come on down now. No prudes need apply.
They especially don’t want drugs. Most of the money in Las Vegas comes from drug money in New York and New Jersey and so on. And the Deadheads come here in all innocence smoking weed — these Volkswagens full of hair, bringing their stash with them, roaring out with this pile of smoke and they have no idea that they can be sent away for life in Carson City, Nevada, where the state pen is. The laws are incredibly harsh for anyone caught with even a joint. It’s worse than Texas.
Deadheads have to be warned specifically. We are such a magnet for dopers that our audience becomes a target for police enforcement surveillance. They’re rounding people up in the parking lots and setting up sheriff’s substations to photograph everybody. They lock up these kids briefly and then let them loose until they have to come back for the trial. We are getting letters from parents whose kids have gone to jail for eighteen months for holding one square of window-pane acid. That’s when we start sending out letters to fans warning them.
The Dead realize that they are major bait. We get really careful about how to book our hotel rooms and who knows where we’re staying. I often put Jerry on another floor to keep him away from the fray. The major action is generally happening on the crew floor. Depending on whether or not there’s an old lady along, Kreutzmann likes to stay down on the crew floor to check out the talent. The hallways are just parked full of little hippie chicks.
Deadheads occasionally find Jerry sitting in the hallway. So do I. In the morning on my way downstairs I’ll come across a forlorn Garcia sitting on the floor outside his room. He’s been there all night waiting for me to wake up.
“Garcia, what are you doing out here in the hallway?”
“I can’t find my key.”
“Well, why didn’t you go down to the desk?!”
“I’m scared.”
“Jerry, you’re the reason we’re all here! We’ve got thirty rooms in this hotel and everybody else has booked the rooms because of you, what you do. You’re the Great Barcia!”
Actually, he doesn’t look like the immortal Ludwig van Garcia this morning, I’ll tell ya. Jerry’s trying to make himself very small because he thinks he’s the weirdest-looking guy in the whole hotel. Our fearless leader has apparently taken too many drugs. Too much blow and you get paranoid. You’re afraid what the guy at the desk is going to think of you for losing your key. You’re so far ahead of yourself you’re thinking his thoughts for him and — just maybe! — transfer-ring them to him.
What if I go down to the lobby and the desk clerk doesn’t believe that I’m Jerry Garcia? After all, everybody else has tried to check in as Jerry Garcia (or Jerry Garcia’s wife). So he just sits in the hallway. It’s typical of Jerry’s character to keep it all under the hat. Jerry’s just like one short flight away from the Deadhead dormitories. He could’ve gone down there and found instant bliss. Deadheads prayed for occasions like this. They would have moved out of their rooms for him. “Oh, you want a dry room?” “You want two, three girls to bundle up with?”
The meek guy sitting in the hall not saying a peep is the same guy who has no qualms about running out in front of thirty or forty thousand straight people and asking who stole his dope.
November 17, 1981. The Jerry Garcia Band are in Chicago to play a gig at the Uptown Theater. We’re having dinner with Geraldo Rivera at our swanky hotel in Chicago on the edge of Old Town. We’ve laid on champagne and caviar, the whole bit. He wants us to be on his show, a 20/20 segment called “Not Too Old to Rock ’n Roll.” They’ve got Grace Slick, Mick Jagger, Jerry Garcia, and one of the Beach Boys to do it.
Mick does Geraldo in, in the way only Mick can. Trashes him. (“So, Mick, in the last ten years or so you, me, our whole generation have gone through these immense changes and — ” “Wot changes?”) Now it’s our turn. Mid-dinner Jerry nudges me. “Did ya bring your Visine with you?” We travel with LSD in eyedroppers, Visine or Murine bottles. Good for easy dispensing, too. A drop is fifty mikes, a hundred mikes. Two or three drops is a major hit. Jerry points out to Geraldo a fictitious rock star on the other side of the room, say, Rod Stewart. “Where, where?” Geraldo is frantic. Hmmm, let’s see, about five drops in the bubbly should do it. The incredible thing is after this huge spike Geraldo doesn’t seem to realize he’s been dosed. I don’t know if he knows to this day. But he is certainly acting strange. He’s a basket case by the time of the interview, but the makeup people make him look really good. They have to keep stopping the interview because he is sweating so much! Garcia makes him smoke this big roach just before the show so his eyes are all red. The producer keeps saying, “Geraldo, are you all right?” He is so wonky they have to make cue cards for everything he says and even these he keeps flubbing. The card says something like “How long have the Grateful Dead been together?” Which comes out “How are you grateful?” It’s hilarious. But the show turns out great.
December 31,1982. Oakland Auditorium. The Mother of all Dead New Year’s began with our buddy the deejay Jack Ellis asking Etta James if she’s ever been to a Grateful Dead concert. Etta James is a legendary R&B singer and a big bad woman of the blues and she naturally says, “Now why the hell would I want to do that?”
“Because,” says Ellis, “at a Dead show you can be anything that you want to be.” And what can you say to that? If you’re Etta you say, “Huh!”
Next, Ellis and his wife, Sue, drop by the bad pad that Jerry and I are sharing up on the hill in San Rafael. The four of us are listening to an Etta James tape playing in the background and Jack says, “Jerry, you gotta listen to this chick sing, man, you won’t fuckin’ believe it! She does an imitation of a fucking trombone in there.” Three or four tunes into the tape, Sue and Jerry are talking and all of a sudden, Jerry says, “I know her, I’ve played with her before, like a benefit for a clinic or something.” Jack says he wants to get her a backstage pass after she plays her gig because she’s never seen the Dead.
“Fuck getting her a backstage pass, maaan, let’s have her play New Year’s!”
“Too late. She’s already booked somewhere.” No reaction for a minute, then Jerry goes bonkers.
“Do whatever you have to do. Whatever! Get Tower of power as her backup band, I don’t care.” And that, as they say, was that.
Etta James has a reputation for being a no-show, and she’s already late for the New Year’s lesbian ball at the top of the Sir Francis or the St. Francis or something — the gig she’s playing before ours.
Her husband has just been released from jail and they’ve stopped at a motel, but she calls and says — dig this — a plane has landed on the highway and they can’t get around it! That’s just for starters. The next reason she’s late is that they won’t let her out of the Fairmont. R&B Queen Held Captive by Lesbians!
It’s getting close to midnight and she’s still at the ball so we send over Leon, our Arab limo driver, along with the biggest black roadie we can find to yank her out of there, along with Jack Ellis as baby-sitter. Finally, she is released and dives into the limo. They’re doing seventy across the Bay Bridge and Etta is yelling, “Slow down, baby, I’m not ready to die for you. Hell, I ain’t even heard you play yet.”
By twelve fifteen Bill Graham’s people are panic-struck, but Graham himself is mellow. He climbs up on a ladder and — turns the clock back! Uh oh, he’s obviously been dosed. Talk about fluid, man! He’s like that Oldsmobile transmission — the Power Glide!
She’s two hours late. Weir and Lesh get the keys to the songs down. The Tower of Power are primed. I send them in there and say, “You guys decide on the songs, Etta’ll be here any minute.” She saunters in about twenty after midnight. I holler to Lesh and one-two-three, they go into a tune.
Right before Etta goes on, Jack asks her if she needs anything. “A beer, a line, a joint?”
“Yeah, your fuckin’ Niner jacket!”
Etta does a walk-on, about three-quarters of the way through “Lovelight.” Bobby is totally plugged into her, Tower of Power love her, she is heartfelt and great with the band. They steamroll through Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Turn on Your Lovelight,” Etta’s own “Tell Mama,” Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What You Want Me to Do,” Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle,” and Wilson Pickett’s “Midnight Hour.”
It’s something in the nature of a tribute to Pigpen since these are all songs Pig used to do. The Wicked Pickett’s “Midnight Hour” is the only song they screw up. She can’t get a handle on the lyrics and flubs them.
Etta comes offstage, raving about Hairy Garcia. “That motherfucker Hairy in there, that blew me out, man, the motherfucker can play!”
I say, “Etta, it’s Jerry, Jerry Garcia.”
“Harry? Fuck you! Fuckin’ Harry can play, man. Hes bad, man, I never sang with anyone who could play five notes at once. He’s some magician, I’m tellin’ you!” She’s ecstatic, but she can’t get his name right to save her life. She’s calling him “Berry,” Berry Garcia and Bobby Garcia. And in her overbearing way she makes it his fault!
“Harry Garcia, Berry Garcia, Jerry Garcia, make up your fuckin’ mind! What are you Latin or somethin’? You a Mexican, Jerry, I mean your folks?”
“My dad was Spanish.”
“Aw, that’s what they all say! Garcia sounds like a fuckin’ beaner name to me. What you ashamed of, man? Mexicans, they got big dicks.” She’s almost got him convinced that his father wasn’t Spanish!
Still, it’s one of those moments when the Grateful Dead transcend, when everybody feels it.
“We’re really honored, Etta. This is the first time that the Dead have backed a woman — aside from Janis, that is.”
Veronica, Pigpen’s widow, comes into Jerry’s dressing room where we’re all hanging out. “Honey,” she says, “thank you, for bringing Pigpen’s spirit back into the hall.”
Mickey Hart comes in to pay his respects: “Where’s that black queen o’ yours, Garcia?” It’s like the visit of the Magi, everyone crowding into the dressing room to share in the glow. Then Kreutzmann comes up and does his salutations. “Thank you, thank you for playing with us, Etta.” He’s laughing, he’s tripping and cutting up a little bit with her but I can see he’s been bit.
Bobby and Etta hit it off big time. I’m sitting next to her in Garcia’s dressing room and in the middle of Weir’s pledging-my-troth-upon-bended-knee speech she grabs my hand: “Get this white fool off his knees! Get this boy outta my face! What is he doin’?”
“Etta, he’s part of the band and this is his way of welcoming you. We’re hippies, you know.”
“He’s a goddamn white boy! Get this fool off his fuckin’ knees! No one is on their knees in front of me.”
Soon Bobby’s sitting cuddled up next to her, like mother and son. Her father died last night and Bobby, who lost his parents a few years ago, is getting her through it. Or maybe it’s vice versa. She could have put a blanket on him and he would have taken a nap right there.
In her Pentecostal quavering voice, Etta gets up and testifies. “I understand now, I come to church, I’m back in church for the first time in my life. Now I knows what you mean. I’m gonna go out there and thank Jack, but I want to thank you all for bringing church to me again! This is church music, baby, my kinda church, y’all understand? Tonight I gave myself back to God!”
And we’re all saying “Hallelujah!” (and meaning it).
“This is the church’s music, healing music. This is the Holy Spirit at work. Who would have fuckin’ thought? From a bunch of stoned hippies. Now I know the Pentecostal flame can burst out anywhere!”
On the way home, in a gas station, Cipollina sings “Silent Night.”