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By Jerilyn Lee Brandelius

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WARNER BOOKS

A Time Warner Company

“Grateful Dead,” skull/lightning logo, and skull/roses logo are registered trade¬ marks and “Grateful Dead” and “Dead¬ head” are registered service marks of Grateful Dead Productions, a California corporation.

This book is produced under the author¬ ity of Grateful Dead Productions and under a license therefrom.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Brandelius, Jerilyn Lee.

Grateful Dead Family Album

p. cm.

ISBN 0-446-39167-0 1. Grateful Dead (Musical group)

I. Title.

ML421.G72B7 1989

782.42166'092’2 - dc20 89-40039 [B] CIP MN

Edited by Alan Trist

Designed & produced by Jon Goodchild/ Triad. Facilitated by Tony Secunda Cover and Frontispiece by Stanley Mouse Editorial Assistant: Dante Anderson Production Assistants: Evana Gerstman and Debbie Trist

Typeset by TBD Typography, San Rafael

Warner Books, Inc.

1271 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020

Printed in the United States of America

First trade printing: December 1990

10 9 8 7 6 5 4

Acknowledgments

It is impossible to thank everyone who has contributed to this book over its many years of preparation, for they are the whole ‘family’, hundreds of people. This book is in large part due to them, especially the Grateful Dead crew and office staff. My deepest gratitude to Alan Trist for his herculean effort in ferreting out the cream of published text and for organizing the photographic material. To Jon Goodchild and Tony Secunda, my warmest thanks for their extraordinary patience in put¬ ting this book together. Without Dante Ander¬ son, many a hurdle might never have been crossed. My special thanks to David Stanford, who first took a publisher’s interest in the project, and to Gary Kephart and Rosanne Esposito who helped in the early stage of pro¬ duction. To Annette Flowers, Christina Hart, Natalie Martel, Bonnie Parker, Ron Poke, Ramrod, Danny Rifkin, Rock Scully and Sue Stephens, my thanks for their advice and sup¬ port throughout the highs and lows. To Bill Graham, Paul Grushkin, Richard Hundgen, Blair Jackson, Les Kippel, Eileen Law, Dennis McNally, Jim Olness, Jerry Pompili, and Dead- Base, my sincere appreciation for their generosity in sharing their deep archival resources. To Gene Anthony, Jay Blakesberg, Alan Blaustein, Rosie McGee Ende, Snooky Flowers, Herb Greene, Ed Perlstein and Steve Schneider, my thanks for their photographic experience beyond the call of duty. To my ‘sweethearts’, Peter H. Aykroyd, Ron Barca, Scott Bonfiglio, Rondell Cagwin, Steve Conn, Patrick Cuffe, Bill Fisher, Hank Gurnsey, David Henderson, Pete Marino, Mad Max, Amy Moore, Dan Murphy, John Paul, James S. Pell Jr., Forbes Reid, Tom Saidy, Gideon Sorokin, John Spediaci and Family, Joan Stevenson and Don Paul, John Stewart, Michael Tobin, Tony and Vikki, Christa Van Sandwick, for always being their with their encouragement and support. To professional and amateur photog¬ raphers, writers and artists - to one and all, my heartfelt thanks. My love, respect and thanks to the Grateful Dead for the opportu¬ nity to assemble this album for our family. J.L.B

Permissions

Permission to reproduce printed text from the following sources is gratefully acknowledged:

Copyright © 1978, 1979, 1987 BAM Publica¬ tions, Inc. Grateful Dead Productions: Copyright © 1965, 1978, 1983 Grateful Dead Productions, Inc. Guitar Player: Copyright © 1978 Guitar Player. Hulogos’i Books: Copyright © 1987, Robert Hunter; Copyright © 1988, Didrik Petersen. Hulogos’i Books, PO. Box 1188, Eugene, OR 97440. Ice Nine Publish¬ ing Company: Donna Godchaux, 1977 ; Robert Hunter, 1985, 1987; Robert M. Petersen, 1980; Choirmaster, 1972; Deadhead Newsletters 1973, 1976, 1980. Copyright © 1972, 1973,

1976, 1977, 1980, 1985, 1987 Ice Nine Publish¬ ing Company Inc. Louisville Times: John

Christensen. Copyright © Louisville Times, Inc. Marin Independent Journal: Kevin Lollar, 1987. Copyright © 1987 Marin Independent Journal, Inc. Medford Mail Tribune: John Lowry, 1978. Copyright © 1978 Mail Tribune, Inc. Melody Maker: Karl Dallas, 10/10/81. Copyright © 1981 Melody Maker. Playboy Guide: Playboy Electronic, Spring 1982. From “A Conversation with Jerry Garcia,” interview conducted by Jon Carroll. Copyright © 1982 Playboy Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with Permission. Point Reyes Light: 7/31/80. Copyright © 1980 Point Reyes Light, Inc. Relix Magazine: John Hall, Charles Young, November 1978; Monte Dym & Bob Alsa, Spring 1978; Sandy Troy, June 1978. Copyright © Relix Magazine, Inc. Relix Magazine, PO. Box 94, Brooklyn, NY 11229. Relix Records: Wavy Gravy, 1988. Copyright © 1988 Relix Records. PO. Box 92, Brooklyn,

Ralph J. Gleason, 6/20/68; 8/10/68; Adele Novelli, 7/12/69; 7/12/69; Charles Perry, 10/29/89; Jerry Hopkins, 6/22/72; Merrill Sanders, 6/8/72; John Grissim, 11/2/ 75, 11/6/75; Mikal Gilmore, 7/16/87, 7/30/87. Copyright © 1968, 1969, 1972, 1973, 1975,

1987 Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission. San Fran¬ cisco Chronicle: ‘New Generation’, 1966; Michael Rossman, 1/66; Clint Roswell, 8/88; Joel Selvin, 9/14/81. Copyright © 1966, 1980, 1981 The Chronicle Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission. Santa Fe Reporter: Howard Passell, 9/14/83. Copyright © 1983 The Santa Fe Reporter. Sonoma County Stump: Nicki Scully, 11/10/78. Copyright © 1978 Sonoma County Stump. Sounds: Hans- Joachim Kruger, 1972. Copyright © 1972 Sounds. Spit in the Ocean: The Pyramid Issue, #5, KenKesey, Paul Krassner. Copyright © 1979 Ken Kesey. Sun (Austin): Enrique Pasa, 3/26/76. Copyright © 1976 Sun. S.F. Sunday Examiner & Chronicle: Ralph J. Gleason, 3/9/75. Copyright © 1975 The Chronicle Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission. The Aquarian: 2/7/79. Copyright © 1979 The Aquarian. The Golden Road: Blair Jackson, Summer 1984, Spring 1985, Summer 1985, Winter 1985, Spring 1986, Summer 1987, Fall 1987. George Hunter, Winter 1985. Spencer Dryden, Winter 1985. John Cipollina, Winter 1985. Steve Brown, Summer 1986. Joseph Campbell, Summer 1986. Copyright © 1984,

1985. 1986. 1987 The Golden Road, Inc. Reprinted by Permission. The Golden Road,

1973.1987 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by Permission. The Progressive: Milton Meyer, 5/83. Copyright © 1983 The Progressive. Reprinted by Permission. The Progressive, 409 East Main Street, Madison,

WI 53703. The Register-Guard: Paul Denison, 7/20/87. Copyright © 1987 The Register Guard, Inc. The Rocket: Linton Robinson, 1/81 Copyright © The Rocket. Time: ‘American Scene', 2/11/85. Copyright © 1985 Time, Inc. Reprinted by permission. Variety: 'Box Office’. Copyright © 1980 Variety. The Village Voice: Robert Christgau, 6/13/77. Copyright © 1977 The Village Voice.

Deadication

This is my version of life with as interesting a congregation of musicians, magicians, and mommies as one can hope to encounter in the millennia of incarnations. How do you cover it all? Many aren’t shown in this book who should be. For the omissions— I didn’t mean ft, honestly!

I thank the ’60s revolution, for without it life as we know it today may never have been. The Summer of Love wouldn’t have bloomed. Conscientious objectors wouldn’t have found shelter from the storm

that was the Indo-Chinese situation (alias Vietnam). I’m eternally grateful for the sur¬ vivors; also for those who pro¬ vided us at home with help in holding down the fort in adversity.

My friendships transcend politics and society. I cherish

some (myself included) who are really wild and some¬ times not totally cool or pop¬ ular. I could care, but I don’t Neither do my friends; that’s why we’re friends. Our loyal¬ ties weather the storms and upheavals. The bonds are strong. The truths we com¬

mitted to are the strengths we draw from in dark and confusing times.

This book is dedicated to our children. A portion of the proceeds will be used to establish a scholarship fund available to them until the age of thirty. You are never too old to learn. I continue to do so, marveling at what life has to offer. With any luck, my companions and friends will remain ‘one of a kind’, unique, loyal and fascinating, so at least life won’t be bor¬ ing. I much prefer it produc¬ tive and rewarding. — Jerilyn Lee Brandelius

trn . .

Dead Shots & Art

Convention: Full page photograph listed first, then clockwise from top left. Key for special cases : t - top ; cr — center right ; bm — bottom middle; etc. Multiple photos by the same photographer listed once per page. In most instances, unattributed photographs are within the public domain, or information about them was unavailable. Any omission of credit is inadvertent and can be corrected in future printings if notification is sent to the publisher.

9 top down, Herb Greene; Ed Perlstein; Steve Schneider; Tom Weir; Gene Anthony; Jerilyn Brandelius; 11 Herb Greene; 12 Rosie McGee Ende, tinted by Alan Blaustein; 13 Gene Anthony; Jim Marshall; 16 - 21 Family Album by parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and Main Street photographers; 22 Gene Anthony; tl- Rosie McGee Ende; 26 Herb Greene; Ron Bevirt; 27 1 - Herb Greene; b - Bob Seide- mann; 28 1 - Ron Bevirt; b - Ron Bevirt; 1— Gene Anthony ; 29 Ron Bevirt ; 30 1 to r, Ron Bevirt; Ron Bevirt; Ron Bevirt; unknown; 31 Herb Greene; 32 Herb Greene; br — Ron Bevirt; 33 Herb Greene; 34 Herb Greene;

35 b - Tom Weir; Herb Greene; 36 Herb Greene; 37 Herb Greene; 38 Herb Greene;

39 Herb Greene; 40 Sue Swanson; Rosie McGee Ende; Herb Greene; 41 Peter Tracy; Herb Greene ; 42 r - Jim Marshall ; b - Herb Greene ; 43 r - Ron Rakow ; 1 - Rosie McGee Ende; br-Herb Greene; 44 Gene Anthony;

45 Ron Rakow; Gene Anthony; Grant Jacobs;

46 Tom Copi; 47 Jim Marshall; Grant Jacobs; Herb Greene; 48 Herb Greene; bl — Rosie McGee Ende; unknown; br - Rosie McGee Ende; 49 Gary Schroeder; Herb Greene; John Schmidt; Rosie McGee Ende; Birgitta Bjerke; 50 Herb Greene; tr - Tom Copi; 51 Herb Greene; Tom Copi; 52 1 - Tom Copi; 53 b - Herb Greene; 54 1- Tom Weir; Herb Greene; 55 Herb Greene; 56 BobVanDoren; 57 t — Michael Moore; br — Herb Greene; 58 Tom Weir; Jim Marshall; GuyCross; Guy Cross; Herb Greene; 59 Birgitta Bjerke; 61 Gene Anthony; Tom Weir; Gene Anthony; 62 1 — Jim Marshall; Tom Weir; Tom Weir; 63 unknown; tr - Tom Weir ; 64 Jerilyn Brandelius ; 1 - Herb Greene; 65 tr — Rosie McGee Ende; 66 Herb Greene; GuyCross; unknown; BasiaRaizene; 67 from centre, unknown; unknown; Rosie McGee Ende; Maj. Gen. Leland Cagwin; Rosie McGee Ende; br- Jerilyn Brandelius; 68 Patty Healy; Rosie McGee Ende; Rosie McGee Ende; unknown; 69 tr — Rosie McGee Ende; bl- Ed Brandelius; 70 PhilLesh; bl-Basia Raizene; br— unknown; 71 Rosie McGee Ende; 72 Jerilyn Brandelius; 73 unknown;

74 Gary Schroeder; 75 unknown; 76 Rosie McGee Ende; Mary Eisenhart; 77 Rosie McGee Ende; Cherie Porter; 78 unknown;

79 1 — Rosie McGee Ende , r — Jim Marshall ; b — Gary Schroeder; 80 Rosie McGee Ende;

81 Rosie McGee Ende; 82 Herb Greene; Mark Raizene; 83 Mary Ann Mayer; 84 Mary Ann Mayer; 85 Mary Ann Mayer; Mark Raizene;

86 Mary Ann Mayer ; r - Mark Raizene ;

87 Mary Ann Mayer; Mary Ann Mayer; br- Mark Raizene; Betty Cantor-Jackson; 88 top row — Rex Jackson ; Betty Cantor-Jackson; Betty Cantor-Jackson; middle row — Mary

Betty Cantor-Jackson; unknown; Rosie McGee Ende; 89 Rosie McGee Ende; Frances Carr; Mary Ann Mayer; Mary Ann Mayer;

90 Mary Ann Mayer; background - Mark Raizene; 91 Mark Raizene; 92 br - Tom Salter; bl — Frances Carr ; tl — r, Mary Anne Mayer ; Mark Raizene; Frances Carr; Mary Anne Mayer; 93 Frances Carr; b — Betty Cantor- Jackson ; 94 Michael Zagaris ; 95 tl - Jim Marshall; unknown; 96 Steve Schneider;

97 tr — unknown; 98 Richard Pechner; 99 Bob Seidemann; 100 b- Richard Pechner; Sue Swanson; Annette Flowers ; Dr. Bob Marks ; t 101 Ken Friedman ; tr - Snooky Flowers ; *

b - Ken Friedman ; 102 Rosie McGee <

Ende; 103 Rosie McGee Ende; 104 Jon Goodchild ; bl - Jon Good- child; Birgitta Bjerke; 105 Birgitta Bjerke; Jerilyn NHj

Brandelius ; Mark Raizene ;

Rosie McGee Ende; Rosie McGee Ende; Birgitta Bjerke; 106 Mary Ann Mayer; Birgitta Bjerke; 107 b — un ^B

known; unknown; Rosie McGee Ende; 108 Cathy Murphy; 109 Courtenay Pollock; un¬ known; Courtenay Pollock; 110 Michael Zagaris; 111 Sunshine Kesey; 112 Herb Greene; 113 Jerilyn Brandelius; Herb Green; Thayer Craw; 114 Annie Leibovitz; unknown;

115 tr — Blue Bailey; bl-Rosie McGee Ende;

116 Bob Siedemann; Jerilyn Brandelius; Bob Bryant; Todd Cazaux; 117 Jerilyn Brandelius; Jerilyn Brandelius; Herb Greene; Sue Swan¬ son; Herb Greene; 118 Herb Greene; 119 bm- Mark Raizene; BasiaRaizene; 120 Jerilyn Brandelius; 122 Bob Seideman; 123 Ed Perl¬ stein; Peter Simon; Ed Perlstein; 124 Jerilyn Brandelius; Roger Ressemeyer; unknown; , 125 ml - Thayer Craw ; Jerilyn Bran-

delius; Patty Healy; Jerilyn Bran¬ delius; 126 Jerilyn Brandelius; . 'S:S

128 Snooky Flowers; 129 unknown; 130 Steve

Schneider; Bob Seide- ■ joS

mann; 131 Jerilyn Brande¬ lius ; Patty Healy; Ed Perlstein;

132 Ed Perlstein; Jerilyn Brande¬ lius; Steve Schneider; 133 Todd Cazaux;

134 Betty Cantor-Jackson; Rosie McGee Ende; Snooky Flowers ; 135 1 to r — Snooky Flowers ;

Ed Perlstein; Ron Rakow; 136 Snooky Flowers;

137 Snooky Flowers; br— Jerilyn Brandelius;

138 TomBrister; Jerilyn Brandelius; 139 Jerilyn Brandelius; Snooky Flowers ; 140 Snooky Flow¬ ers; 141 Jerilyn Brandelius; Patty Healy; un¬ known; 142 Jerilyn Brandelius; GuyCross; Ed Perlstein; Snooky Flowers; Jerilyn Brandelius; Jerilyn Brandelius ; 143 Jerilyn Brandelius ;

tr - Bruce Polonski; 144 Jerilyn Brandelius ;

145 Jerilyn Brandelius ; tr — Betty Cantor- Jackson; 146 Snooky Flowers; b-Ed Perlstein; 147 Gerrit Graham; Gerrit Graham; Ray Slade; Patty Healy;

148 Jerilyn Brandelius; 149 Steve Schneider; Jerilyn Brandelius; br - Patty Healy; 150 Snooky Flowers; t- Ed Perlstein; 151 Snooky Flowers; Steve Schneider; Ed Perlstein; Ed Perlstein; Snooky Flowers; 152 Ed Perlstein; Jerilyn Brandelius; 153 Jerilyn Brandelius;

158 unknown; 159 Richard Loren; Elaine

Ann Mayer; bottom row; Rosie McGee Ende;

Loren; 160 Jerilyn Brandelius ; Harry Popick; 161 Patty Healy; Richard Loren; 162 Bernie Bildman; Jerilyn Brandelius; Jerilyn Brandelius; unknown; 163 background — unknown; Richard Loren; Elaine Loren; Richard Loren; Jerilyn Brandelius; Elaine Loren; 164 Richard Loren; 165 Jerilyn Brandelius; bl- Harry Popick; 166 Jerilyn Brandelius; Harry Popick; Jerilyn Brandelius; Harry Popick; 168 Bernie Bildman; Jerilyn Brandelius; Richard Loren; 169 Richard Loren; tr- Bernie Bildman; 170 Pat Jackson; bl— Jerilyn Brandelius; Richard Loren; 171 Richard Loren; John Cutler; Jerilyn Brandelius; 172 Frances Shurtliff ; Richard Loren; 173 Richard Loren; bl- Bernie Bildman; 174 Richard Loren; bl— Jerilyn Brandelius; 175 Richard Loren; bm — Jerilyn Brandelius; 176 Jerilyn Brandelius; Richard Loren; 177 Adrian Boot; 178 Richard Loren; mr - Elaine Loren; 179 Jerilyn Brandelius; 180 Jerilyn Brandelius;

181 Jerilyn Brandelius; 182 David Colardo; Patty Healy; 183 David Colardo; 184 ©Rob Cohn; 185 Ed Perlstein; 186 Steve Schneider; br - Ed Perlstein; 187 Background — Steve Schneider; Jerilyn Brandelius; 188 unknown; Jerilyn Brandelius; 189 Jay Blakesberg; br- Jerilyn Brandelius; 190 John Werner; br- Steve Schneider; 191 Steve Schneider; Jerilyn Brandelius; John Werner; 192 Benny Collins; Jerilyn Brandelius; 193 Jay Blakesberg; Bernie Bildman; 194 tl - Ron Delany; tr - Jerilyn Brandelius; b — ©Rob Cohn; 195 Bob Seidemann; Snooky Flowers; 196 unknown; 197 ©Rob Cohn; bl- Jay Blakesberg; br- Jerilyn Brandelius; t- Jay Blakesberg; 198 Ed Perlstein; John Werner; John Werner;

199 Snooky Flowers ; br— John Werner;

200 Patty Healy; David Gans; Rachael Pauley;

201 Patty Healy; 202 unknown; Steve Schneider; Snooky Flowers ; 203 Jane Matthews; Dan Healy; unknown; 204 Steve Schneider ; ml - unknown ; mr - David Gans ; Jay Blakesberg; 205 m - Barbara Langer Melton; Natalie Martel ; ml -unknown; bl— David Gans; 206 Steve Schneider; unknown; 207 Steve Schneider; 208 David Gans;

Rachael Pauley; 209 John Walker; Larry Lazio; unknown; 210 Brian Baumwoll; Jay Blakesberg; Jerilyn Brandelius; ©Rob Cohn; 211 Jay Blakesberg; Betty Cantor-Jackson; Alan Trist; 212 Patty Healy; 214 Herb Greene; Rosie McGee Ende; Snooky Flowers; David Foust; 215 1 & b, David Colardo; Mets; Mets; Ed Perlstein; 216 David Gans; 217 clockwise from ml, Kim Wentz ; David Colardo ; Dan Healy; SusanaMillman; Debbie Trist;

Debbie Trist; 218 Yaov Getzler; Patty

Healy; ©Rob Cohn; 219 Yoav Getzler; Jay Blakesberg; 220 William Smythe; ©Rob Cohn; 221 bl- unknown; 222 John Werner; Herb Greene; bl-Herb Greene; 223 John Werner; br-Nicki Scully; John Werner; 224 Susana Millman; 225 Herb Greene; unknown; br — Frankie Accardi; 226 SusanaMillman; ml — unknown; 227 Ron Delany; John Werner; unknown; Cassidy Law; 228 Herb Greene; bl- unknown; tl — Susana Millman; 229 Herb Greene; ml — unknown; 230 Herb Greene; unknown ; unknown ;HerbGreene;bl - Valerie Steinbrecker; 231 1- Jay Blakesberg; m- Jay Blakesberg; b - Ron Delany; 232 John Werner; 234 t -Jay Blakesberg; b- John Werner; 235 Ken Friedman; Ron Delany;

Brian Connors; Debbie Trist; b- Debbie Trist; 236 David Colardo; Snooky Flowers; Mary Eisenhart; David Colardo; 237 Herb Greene; tr — unknown ; 238 Len DelTAmico ; bl — Jay Blakesberg; 239 b — John Werner; Snooky Flowers; 240 Herb Greene; unknown; Susana Millman; Jay Blakesberg; 241 Jay Blakesberg; 242 1- John Werner; Jay Blakesberg; 243 1— Mary Jo Meinoff ; b - Susana Millman; John Werner; tr - Susana Millman; 244 Herb Greene ; tr — Ken Friedman ; 245 1 - Jay Blakesberg ; bl - Rosie McGee Ende ; be - unknown; br- Jay Blakesberg; 246 Ron Delany; 247 Ron Delany; Ron Delany; John Werner; unknown; 248 Jay Blakesberg; Jay Blakesberg; unknown; Herb Greene; 249 Jay Blakesberg; Cassidy Law; Frankie Accardi; John Werner; 250 Michael Loeb; ReneEdy;

251 Len Dell'Amico; b-AlanBlaustein;

252 Jay Blakesberg; 253 1- Jay Blakesberg; Susana Millman; b - David Stanford; unknown; 254 Rain Forest Action Network;

255 John Werner; 256 Jay Blakesberg.

Dead Art

5/6 Stanley Mouse; 7 Owsley Stanley;

8 centre, Stanley Mouse; 24 Stanley Mouse; 25 Norman Hartweg, hand colored by Sun¬ shine Kesey; 28 see 25; 37 Family Dog Posters #12 and #33. Copyright © 1966 The Family Dog Productions dba Chester A. Helms;

58 George Hunter; 60 1 - Alton Kelley, Stanley Mouse & Rick Griffin, 1967 ; r - Rick Griffin, 1969; 68 Alton Kelley, 1969; 75 (Woodstock ‘Bird’ logo), © 1969 Joel Rosenman & John Roberts; 76 tl — Mouse Studios w/Toon N. Tree, 1970; tl- Alton Kelley & Stanley Mouse, 1970 ; 81 Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse,

1971 ; 82 M. Ferguson & Alton Kelley, 1971 ;

84 Alton Kelley & Stanley Mouse, 1972 ;

95 David Stowell; 98 Owsley Stanley & Bob Thomas ; 102/103 Mary Ann Mayer ;

108 Alton Kelley & Stanley Mouse, 1972 ;

109 Courtenay Pollock; 110 tr - Stanley Mouse, 1972 ; br - Alton Kelley & Stanley Mouse, 1970; 112 bl - Alton Kelley & Stanley Mouse & Andy Leonard (photo), 1974; br — Rick Griffin, 1974; 113 Rick Griffin, 1974;

114 Victor Moscoso, 1974; 117 Gunther Keiser, © 1974 Lippmann & Rau; 121 br - Steirnagle ; bl - Greg Irons, 1975 ; 122 1 — Alton Kelley & Stanley Mouse; m - Andy Leonard (photo), Jerry Garcia (thoughts), 1975; 125 Randy Tuten ; tr - Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse ; 129 Philip Garris, 1976 ; 133 bl - Judit Torn Allen; Jordan De La Sierra; 1976; 135 Philip Garris, 1976; 136 Philip Garris, 1976;

138 Owsley Stanley /Bob Thomas; 139 Rick Griffin; br- Owsley Stanley; 140 Gary Guiter- rez; 152 bl- Alton 141 Gary Guiterrez; 152 bl — Alton Kelley; 154-157 Peter Monk (col¬ lage) ; 160 1 - Bob Thomas ; b - Tim Boxall ;

161 Alton Kelley; 164 Alton Kelley & Stanley Mouse, Copyright © Grateful Dead Produc¬ tions, Inc.; 167 Alton Kelley, 1978; 172 Stanley Mouse, 1978; 186 Philip Garris, 1975; 187 Alton Kelley & Stanley Mouse; 192 Gilbert Shelton, 1978; 193 Stanley Mouse, 1978;

198 r - Dennis Larkins & Peter Barsotti, 1980 ; 201 Nutzle; 204 1 - Dennis Larkins & D. Sawyer; b- JimPinoski; 216 Stanley Mouse, 1983; 218 Dennis Larkins; 224 1 — Rick Griffin; 237 Jim Carpenter, 1987; 238 Len Dell'Amico, Rick Griffin (lettering); 240 Herb Greene; 254 b - Stanley Mouse.

Photographs shown on page 9: Jim Marshall; Snooky Flowers; John Werner and Jerilyn; Herb Greene; Gene Anthony and Alan Blaustein.

Contents

Acknowledgments Deadication 7 Dead Shots 9 Foreword 13 Family Album 16

1. Because of the Formlessness 26

2. It Was Pretty Much a Party All the Time, Anyway 32

3. Total Environmental Theatre 38

4. In Those Days, Everyone Rode Horses 64

5. Whistling Through the Fog 70

6. Land of the Corporate Dead 96

7. With Future Events Having an Increasingly Less Predictable Nature 136

8. There Was Serious Sand at the Sphinx 158

9. Everyone’s a Little Crazier 182

10. Who Are the Grateful Dead and Why Do They Keep Following Us? 212

11. The New Dawn 232

Save the Rain Forests 254

St. Dilbert & the Plumber 256

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

How fitting when applied to the Grateful Dead and the legions that have been their 'family' through¬ out the years. The basic entities remain the same — a public arena, the fans, the artists and their instruments And VOILA! — a communion.

The organic formula is so simple — no hydraulic lifts, no spandex pants, no strobe lights — simply good music, the attitude of brotherhood and the desire to experience joy. I've always thought of Dead shows as calling 'time out' to the planet so that, for a few hours, we can all leave our worries behind and just enjoy our¬ selves. The lyrics are meaningful, the rhythm is pelvic, and we all become part of the grand design that is the Grateful Dead extended family.

The heart of that family is, of course, the musi¬ cians; yet there's an inner core of people so closely aligned with the artists through all these years that I don't think of the Grateful Dead as just those musi¬ cians onstage. There are men and women who've matured and children that have been born into the whirl of the Grateful Dead inner circle. Many have worked for none other than this single entity, coming out of the alternative lifestyle of the sixties. From the loose group at 710 Ashbury to the complexity of today's hi-tech music industry, what fives on is a communal spirit — people working together for a common goal.

The family tree of the Grateful Dead would resem¬ ble a cypress, twisted by the winds of time and hanging on by its roots. The young guy loading the truck in '65 is today an integral part of the operation.

The newborn of 1970 now works in the of¬ fice. Friends and relatives make their crea¬ tive statements through the group and earn their keep through the scene. Through¬ out a quarter of a century, we've experi enced the joyful evolution of family life — the unions, the births, the ad¬ ventures of the traveling circus,- and also the tragic loss of family members, who stay on in spirit.

This family embodies the es¬ sence of an all powerful spirit that was born in the Bay Area in the sixties — a sense of camaraderie, of hope for a more idealistic world. After all these years, this family continues to represent a positive alternative — they make it possible for some light to shine through.

This book of photographs celebrates this unique Grateful Dead family.

Cheers!

TimeOut

Bill Graham

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Grateful Dead: The motif of a cycle of folk tales which begin with the hero coming upon a group of people ill-treating or refusing to bury the corpse of a man who had died without paying his debts. He gives his last penny either to pay the man's debts or to give him a decent burial. Within a few hours he meets with a travelling companion who aids him in some impossible task, gets him a fortune or saves his life. The story ends with the companion disclosing himself as the man whose corpse the hero had befriended. ( Funk &) Wagnalls Dictionary )

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The Water of Life: A Tale of The Grateful Dead

Once upon a time there was a dying King who sent his three sons, one after the other, on a quest for the Water of Life, the only means by which he could be healed. After setting off, the three in turn encountered a poor beggar crying for alms. The first two, callous fellows that they were, abused the wretched man and denied him aid. The third, himself a hunchback, had compas¬ sion for the beggar and responded to his pleas, re¬ ceiving in return a bundle of magic arrows that would strike unerringly wherever they were aimed, and a magic lute, the music of which would make anyone who heard it dance.

Armed with these wonder¬ ful objects he continued on his journey, beset by peril and difficulty at every turn. One day while hunting he took aim at a fox with his arrow, but at the last mo¬ ment relented out of pity for the creature. At another point along the way, he spent his last coins paying for the burial of a man who had died a debtor, whose body lay by the wayside.

Along the way, he met a mysterious stranger who offered to help in the Quest in exchange for half of any for¬ tune the prince should gain.

He finally reached the cas¬ tle of an ogre who possessed the Water of Life. The ogre retained him in service and soon he saved the ogre’s life by use of his magic arrows, receiving as a reward the

object of his quest, a vial of the Water of Life.

The ogre had imprisoned in his castle a beautiful young maiden who refused to marry him. The prince won her love by means of his magic lute, the ogre released her and they began their long home¬ ward trek.

But they were soon accosted by the two scoun¬ drel brothers, who in jeal¬

ousy attacked them by stealth, threw their brother down a deep well, and ab¬ sconded with the princess and the Water.

Soon after their departure, along came the fox whose life the prince had spared. The fox let down a rope. When the prince reached the top he found the mysterious stran¬ ger who by magic relieved him of his deformed condi¬

tion. They then embarked on another long and arduous journey back to the prince’s homeland.

Meanwhile, the elder brothers had already returned with the vial and the princess, but because of their misdeeds, were unable to heal the ailing King. The old man was on his deathbed, when amidst wails and lamen¬ tations the youngest son, now a strong and straight- backed young man, arrived. When he anointed the King with the Water of Life, the old man was instantly healed. He then castigated the elder brothers in public and they were banished.

The prince and his beauti¬ ful bride were finally reunited and their wedding was joy¬ ously celebrated. Then the mysterious stranger revealed himself to be the dead man for whom proper funeral rites had been provided thereby releasing his soul from eternal wandering.

The prince offered his entire kingdom to settle their bargain so as to avoid divid¬ ing the princess, but the grateful dead man released the prince from his bond. In gratitude, the old King offered him anything in the kingdom he should desire. The grateful dead chose the lute and arrows, and wine and provision for his final ride to the Nether-world.

Adapted from The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story (Gordon Hall Gerould, London, 1908) by Alan Trist and Robert M. Petersen.

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— PAUL KRASSNER

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THE BLANDNESS OF AMERICAN CULTURE BACK IN 1950 WAS SUMMED UP WHEN SNOOKY LANSON SANG IT’S A MARSHMALLOW WORLD ON THE LUCKY STRIKE HIT PARADE. BUT, BY THE END OF THAT DULL DECADE, A SPIRIT OF CREATIVE ADVENTURE WAS RE-EMERGING ACROSS THE COUNTRY ELVIS PRESLEY HAD COME UPON THE SCENE, ONLY TO HAVE HIS BOTTOM HALF CENSORED OUT OF CAMERA RANGE ON THE ED SULLI¬ VAN SHOW EVEN WHILE YOUNG GIRLS AND BOYS WERE BUSY PRACTICING PELVIC THRUSTS WITH THEIR HULA

In one corner there was a piece of metal, tubular sculpture by Ron Boise, a thumping machine. If you hit it, you got different sounds if you hit it different places. There was a lot of electronic equipment which sent out a low reverbera¬ tion that resonated throughout the hall. And the whole place was filled with streamers and bal¬ loons. There were TV cameras and a TV screen, and you could see yourself in it. Onstage there was a rock group; anybody could play with them. It was a kind of social jam session.

Up at the Fillmore Auditorium, Ken Kesey’s Acid Test event was in action when I got there around the middle of the evening. The people were like the backstage crowd at the California Hall dance (that the Airplane played the same night). The cos¬ tumes were, wow! A strobe light was flickering at a very high frequency in one corner of the hall and a group of people were bouncing a golden balloon up and down in it. It was a most perturbing frequency. It hurt to look at them.

A guy in a white mechanic’s suit with a black cross on the front, and on the back a sign saying ‘Please Don’t Believe in Magic’, ran up and down all night. Oh wow! Periodically the lights went out and everybody cheered. Giant Frisbees, balloons like bas¬ ketballs, acrobats, girls in felt eyelashes four inches long, people with eyes painted on their foreheads, glasses low on the nose with eyes painted on them, men with foxes on their shoulders! Wow! — Michael Rossman (S.F Chronicle, 1/66)

Grateful Dead and Merry Pranksters. Ken Babbs

(below) and the Pranksters’ bus ‘Furthur’; Jerry Garcia. Opposite: Bill ‘The Drummer’ Kreutzmann contemplates the happening and, clockwise from top, Bob Weir, Mountain Girl, Neal Cassady rappin’, Ramrod, Michael Hagen makes ‘The Movie’, Phil Lesh and George Walker.

Everything is relative to the center of it ali, which is music in motion through time and space. — Kreutzmann

The nice thing about the Acid Test was that we could play or not. And a lot of times we’d really be too high to play, and we’d play for maybe a minute and then we’d lose it and have to leave — "This is too weird for me!” On the other hand, sometimes we’d play, and there was no pres¬ sure on us because people didn’t come to see the Grate¬ ful Dead, they came for the Acid Test; it was the whole event that counted. Therefore we weren’t in the spotlight, so when we did play, we played with a certain kind of freedom you rarely get as a musician. Hot only did we not have to fulfill expecta¬ tions about us, we didn’t have to fulfill expectations about musk, either. So in terms of being able to experi¬ ment freely with music, it was amazing. — Garda

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A rock & roll oasis just off Highway 101 in Novato, Rancho Olompali was where the Grateful Dead, the Diggers, the Angels, the Black Panthers and the San Francisco music scene went to dance after a head-banging week in the city. The Grateful Dead were each paid twenty-five dollars a week in those days and gigged wherever they could, often five days a week. An incredible freedom cruised through each day like a tide. The Jefferson Airplane, It's a Beauti¬ ful Day, Country Joe & the Fish, The Sons of Champlin, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Charlatans, Big Brother & the Holding Company. . .

Weekend free-form celebrations of whatever anyone wished to celebrate, beginning in party clothes at the main house, ending naked in the sunshine by the pool. In addition to the Harley-scaled acreage, a huge outdoor oven cranked non-stop. It was the Diggers baking their daily bread to give away later m the park. As each participant got coated wrth flour, ghostly apparitions would leap from the oven to the pool, long hair flying in the wind. It was an easy scene for music and lovers, bands interwove and produced moments that were as high as they get.

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little jams with people who wanted to play. I remember that the Dead would be playing and Neal Cassady would be doing this strange little dance — it wasalmost like breakdancing; very fluid. Out on the lawn there was this very far-out configuration of plumbing that was once part of a sprinkler system or some¬ thing. It stuck out of the ground and stood maybe five feet high. I couldn’t figure out what the hell it was for It was just a mess of pipes with faucets coming out of it that had been modified over the years. Very strange. So the Dead would be playing, and Neal would be dancing on the lawn with this bizarre metal partner He’d dance around it, with it, really. He had some pretty good moves, too. Neal was always in the thick of things.

Those parties — I’m not sure how many of them there were — were always on a nice afternoon. Everybody would play all day in the sunshine — just doing everything— and then when the sun would start to go down and it got cold, people would pack it in. By the

time it was dark most people were gone, but there were always enough people who were either around to begin with or who wanted to stay, so that the party would continue inside. In fact, with the number of people hanging out there all the time, it was pretty much a party all the time anyway. I don’t know if it was 24 hours a day, but every time I was there it was going. —George Hunter (The Golden Road)

The Dead used to have some pretty good parties out at their place in the country, in Olompali. Two or three hundred people would come, and of course, most of them probably took LSD. This was around the time that a lot of new ground was being broken socially and it seemed like a third to a half of the people at these parties would be naked, hanging around the pool. It was a great place. It was a sort of ranch estate that had a nice big house that looked kind of like Tara in Gone With the Wind. Then there was a lot of land around it — hills, a creek in the back, a big lawn and the pool.

It was maybe 1000 feet off the highway, so it was fairly secluded. In between the house and the pool the Dead would set up their equipment and play from time to time during the day. Usually there ’d be members of other bands there, too, like the Airplane and Quicksilver; and there ’d be

What we would do was get up $200 and rent the Fillmore and put on the gig. It was a shoestring operation. The entire show production would be $350. We would make our own posters.

A network began to form, of light shows and all, at the same time. Bill Hamm, who was one of the original liquid light show persons, was around doing lights. A pro-

Not that it was all one com¬ pany (everyone would func¬ tion as an individual), but in those days everyone would come, and it would fit together as a whole when you got there. There was not a whole lot of consideration given to

whether it was

part of one company or not.

That’s where the original ‘family groove’ came from. It wasn’t just the Grateful Dead, but it was a whole entire scene that began happening around San Francisco.

— Healy (Relix Magazine) Opposite: The house at Olompali; inset, Ron Thelin, founder of the Psychedelic Shop, Phil and Stubby,

Danny Rifkin. Left: Alton Kelley, poster artist; Dan Hicks of the Charla¬ tans and Camella Scaggs; below, Ben Van

Metre, film maker.

The Dead had taken off and gone to LA to hang out with Kesey and the Pranksters, and when they moved back it was to 710. There were two houses, not just one. 710 was the one that became famous, but there was another house a few blocks away on Belve¬ dere Street that Phil and Kreutzmann lived in.

It was pretty loose. It was really a good scene. There was very little money: the whole vibe of sharing was

what was happening in those days. It was one of those situations where nobody ever really had anything, but nobody ever really needed anything. It was kind of magic that way. We had what we were doing and that was

basically all we needed. Everyone had a place to sleep and clothes to wear and food to eat.

We’d start partying some Friday and get really stoned and hang out. Come Sunday morning we’d all decide to go play live in Golden Gate Park. We’d play in the Panhandle. This was around 1967. So we would decide on Sunday morning. At about 8 or 9 o’clock somebody would run out and rent a flatbed

truck and a small generator. We used to pull the truck up in front of 710, throw all the equipment on it, and roar over to the park. We’d start up our generator and start playing. We had it down.

— Healy (Relix Magazine)

The party goes on with, insets, Connie Bonner; Jack Casady and Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane. Oppo¬ site, the band on location at the Pacific Gas and Electric power plant.

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OR TWENTY, DEPENDING ON THE DAY. THE RENT WAS CHEAP THE CEILINGS HIGH,

THE KITCHEN TINY, THE FRONT STEPS A GREAT PLACE TO HANG OUT ON SUNNY DAYS. IT WAS A COUPLE OF BLOCKS TO THE STORE, AND IT ALWAYS SEEMED TO TAKE A REAL LONG TIME TO GET THERE AND BACK, WHAT WITH STOPPING TO TALK TO FRIENDS WHO’D DIVERT YOU FROM YOUR MISSION AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY TO GO HAVE COFFEE, SMOKE A “J”, ORJUST SIT ON THEIR FRONT STEPS FOR AN HOUR OR TWO.

Most of us living there didn’t work at any regular job - we paid our rent with a combination of endeavors. The mainstay was the band around whom we’d gathered as spouses or friends, with each of us contributing what we could as man-

►agers, technicians, equipment handlers, pr bookkeepers. The household chores fell to the women and they were no small task. Dinner for twenty was a daily occurrence - so was food shopping.

Doing laundry was a nightmare monop¬ olizing twenty-two machines and it didn't take long for the women to restrict the chore to their own “nuclear unit” . It was very rare to find peace and quiet; also elusive was real privacy. For while you could close your bedroom door to be alone, you always had to encounter people on the way to the bathroom, or in the kitchen, or on the steps, or in the hall - it was dense. You couldn’t really keep any secrets. On the other hand, you never had trouble finding a friend to share them with.

During the day one of the bedrooms became the band office, and the carpet became worn with people coming and going. Add the constant traffic to the notoriety the band had already achieved, and it's easy to see how the house became of particular interest to the authorities.

So it wasn't surprising that when they came to bust the household for alleged use of pot, they brought the TV news crews with them. The narc in charge wanted to get full coverage on raiding a prominent household, and as it turned out, the entire neighborhood as well.

Eleven households were turned in as a result of one very busy informer, and while it was scary going downtown in the police wagon, when we got there we found a hundred and thirty-five of our friends ! Many of the charges were dropped,

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but the presses weren’t stopped waiting to find out. My father read of my arrest while drinking his morning coffee.

Best of all were the glorious free con¬ certs in the Panhandle - a flatbed truck, makeshift electricity, food, wine, friends, sunshine, and some wonderful bands who hadn’t hit the big time yet. At first it seemed amazing that we knew by name so many of the hundreds gathered; but as the months went by, our awareness of a larger community grew until it peaked that fine day in January of 1967, the day of the Tribal Stomp at the Polo Fields to be known as the ‘Human Be-In’.

We heard it through the grapevine, and a half dozen of us started early that morning to walk the couple of miles to the park. As we walked along Lincoln Avenue, we noticed other groups of neighbors walking in the same direction. More joined in off side streets, and by the time we turned north into the park, we were a large, laughing group. A half mile later, we were a horde and as the Be-In took shape through the day, we were awed and thrilled as the Polo Fields filled up with over 20,000 people. It was a day of innocence and hope ; and in many ways the last moments of naivete for a neighborhood that had just gone public.

Stories about the Haight-Ashbury sold lots of magazines and newspapers in 1967, the more sensational the better, and many people planned their summer vacations around coming to see for them¬ selves. In the ensuing crush, the neigh¬ borhood people quietly retreated to the background, or just moved out. As for the crowds of seekers who had been prom¬ ised the ‘Summer of Love', they were a year too late. - Rosie McGee

710 Ashbury, years later; Rock with Sue Gottlieb; Tim Sculley, one of the original recording engineers, at Trouper’s Hall. Opposite: The band on tour at El Camino Park, Palo Alto, 1967; inset, Susila and Billy.

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Many years ago, in the easy, earliest time of the Dead, I was the girl who danced on the stage — before the need for stringent backstage security, before record con¬ tracts, world travels and a general nervousness about the motives of nearby people. I had no motive then except I wanted more than anything to step inside that magic circle of music and dance with it from that central place. I knew this time of privilege wouldn’t last long,

so I wasn’t surprised when it ended. But for some of the most unspeakably happy and truly liberated times I ever had in my life, I’ve always wanted to thank you guys. — Rosie McGee

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Troupers Hall was the meet¬ ing room for a retired actors club in Hollywood. The rent for the gig couldn’t have been much. We did everything ourselves, all in two days. We plastered handbills all over Hollywood. Stage decor was a few lengths of paisley cloth purchased that afternoon at a fabric store. For a box office, we had a card table and a cigar box.

Our not-quite-full house must have had over a hundred people; and when the night was over, our net take was $75. At 2 o’clock in the morning, we went to Cantor’s Deli on Fairfax and spent it all on dinner for everybody — with dessert.

Janis and Pigpen were

kindred souls. They were drinkers and wary of acid, so they ran

together. This photo was taken outside 715 Ashbury, across the road from 710, where HALO (the Haight Ashbury Legal Organization) had its offices, and where the poster artists Mouse, Kelley, Moscoso and Griffin had

their studios.

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The trolleys run along Haight Street pretty often; the tourists snarl up the traffic a bit, but still you can get from the Oracle office to Fillmore Street, change and arrive at the Fillmore or Winterland in less than twenty minutes. At fifteen cents for the entire journey, that’s not bad at all. The Avalon is a little further away, but just as accessible, and nowadays often more worthwhile.

But the ballrooms have lost their importance.

They were vital once ; without Bill Graham, and the hard work and busi¬ ness knowhow he threw into the Fillmore when the scene was starting, there might never have been an SF Sound to talk about. Give him credit, and give Ralph Gleason credit, without whose enthusiastic columns in the SF Chronicle the city would have no doubt shut down those psychedelic super-structures before you could say “building inspector." And Ken Kesey, the man whose Trips Fes¬ tivals irrevocably tied together rock & roll and light shows and the head community. The Family Dog, illuminator Bill Ham, The Charlatans, the Matrix and Jefferson Airplane, all those originators who now cling to their place in history with alarming awareness that after two years the past is buried in the dust of centuries.

The ballrooms have given way to environ¬ ments even more closely knit into the community. The great outdoors, for one; the Panhandle is only two blocks down from Haight Street, and on an average weekend you'll hear everything from Big Brother & the Holding Company down to the local teen group playing top hits off-key. And it's all free, free not just from admission charges but from walls and stuffy air and hassles about coming and going; free so that the music is as much a part of your life as a tree in blossom. You can stop and embrace it, or pass on by.

The Panhandle is the San Francisco Sound today; the music of the street, the music of the people who live there. The ballrooms, obsolete in terms of the community, have been turned into induction centers - the teenyboppers, the college students, the curious adults come down to the Fillmore to see what’s going on, and they do see, and pretty soon they’re part of it. They may not go directly to Haight Street with flowers in their hair (though many of them do), but they change, they shift their points of view, their minds drop out of Roger Williams and into the Grateful Dead. (Crawdaddy, August 1967)

The band and friends con¬ gregate on the steps of 710 Ashbury during the Summer of Love; Big Brother and the Holding Company, 1967; the Pigpen look; David Crosby of the Byrds.

Above all, the San Francisco Sound is the musical expression of what’s going dowri, a new attitude .

History will show; I believe, that the San Francisco dance renaissance played a

toward the world which is commonly attributed to ‘hippies, b.ut which could more accurately be „ ,

key role in the evolution of teen age schlock-rock into music, as well as a key

laid at the feet of a non-subculture called people, earth pepple, all persons who have managed to

role m the social-cultural and political revolution m which we are mvolved.

transcend the superstructures they live in. People who have responded to the .reality of the industrial

After the Trips Festival m January 1966, Graham took over the Fillmore,

revolution by i very small print!

Alter tne trips resuvai m January ivoo, enanam took over me rinmore,

f requiring that they run the system and benefit from.it rather than be^madepart ofit In ,

first alternating weekends with the Family Dog. Luna Castel and Ellen Har-

int between the lines of ‘Naked If I Want To’, ’C-irace.’, .Cr;eam f uff War’ is written the fol- _

mon, tne originals and tlie visionaries who saw what was needed had left the

lowing message: There is a man, me, and there are Men. These, two forces, will and must Interact as

Dog and it then consisted of Chet Helms and John Carpenter. There had been

smoothly as possible. Everything else — concepts, objects, systems, machines — must only be tools , _ ,

a couple of other transitory Dog personnel involving, among others, Rock

for me and mankind to employ. If I or Man respect a system or a pattern mpre than ourselves, we

Scully and Danny Ritkin, now managers of the Grateful Dead.

are in the wrong and must be set free “Nothing to say but it’s okay... .” . , , , _ . .

Their instant success spun oft mto a myriad of benefits at every available

— Paul Williams (Crawdaddy) . . . „ , .... . , . f . , . .

place m the Bay Area. An mcredible number of dances for fund raising pur¬ poses, for profit and for fun took place. It has been an unbelievable three years. The response to the dances was ecstatic. The floors leaped and tumbled and swirled with the dancers and the evolvement of light shows as an adjunct was spectacular.

It ought to be said, it seems to me, no matter what any individual may feel pro or con about either the way the Fillmore Ballroom has been oper¬ ated or the man who operates it, that during the past two years the Fillmore and Bill Graham have brought an incredible hst of great and important music and performers to San Francisco.

Now a struggle is going on between those who want to dance and those who want to listen. It repeats again the situation of the Forties in which the swing era dancers (the jitterbugs) became listeners, first crowding around the bandstand and then sitting on the floor and then demanding chairs. The Benny Goodman band was astonished when it first played the West Coast that the people pushed up to the lip of the stage to hear the trumpet player (Bunny Berigan). Eventually, of course, dances ceased almost altogether and the stage-show con¬ certs took over.

The stiffness of the concert hall is a drag and the booze of the night clubs is a bigger drag and so the informality and the flexibility of the dance halls has been delightful. The problem is two-fold at the moment — the press of the crowd and the floor covered with people sitting and lying down. At some point in the near future, somebody will build a structure to house these shows which is designed for the new purposes. I don't know what it will look hke but it will obviously need to provide space for seeing and dancing, ease of movement and places to sit from time to time.

— Ralph J. Gleason (Rolling Stone, 6/20/68)

Celestial Synapse At the Fillmore

Dead and Bill Graham a services for free. gL

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music and a broad range of tribes— -I mm R a nc ho O lorn p a 1 cwiasws to the Hells Aug Frontiers of Science people , ^

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each other, greeting strangers, ^

and celebrating, **•

Toward two in the morning the a number of stoned ocet srrenees, ** began taking off their clothes. Don Mc¬ Coy of Olompali got up o« the stage stark naked, against a tableau MMSdl Graham restraining the rent palling Mm down.

The organizing body was H Science, headquartered at IQB former hotsprings resort. IGoH of San Francisco, Incorporat^^p’^WfJ.fe, profit ©rgantealkm a year up around Don Hamrick, 4 _F~ _

alumnus of both a Churel„ &J seminary (he has since beer |jMj|l nkute-d for his radical mys and research physics. Aroun ^'•"jMBBj ago Hamrick started speakin- /^B ious calling to establish. ordtA-*^ on earth and to connect the I \ ^B metaphysical aspects of science.

It has to do with the crystal at the center of the living Earth, which is af¬ fected by human vibrations and which may cither change shape (a creative change) or change size (a destructive change, since it would cause earth¬ quakes) . The idea is to send down good vibrations to change the shape of that crystal, and the Celestial Synapse may very well have done just that.

■'Synapse” is the term used by the people around Hamrick for a mass meet¬ ing of minds, parallel to the linking-up of brain, cells that makes thought pos¬ sible. called a -sjdKe in psychology. The Celestial SyoaB s the beginning of a five-day ',”gBL —’Science confer¬ ence. whi' '"^BBi^^grcss of CoA- cerneMfr of Maria

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SAN FRANCISCO— U was a “Fron¬ tiers of Science Celestial Synapse-”

A what? What's Frontiers of Science? What’s a synapse, and what’s the Grate¬ ful Dead's name doing among the lines of medieval Irish script, the kind pre¬ ferred for church bulletins?

The answer to the questions raised by the classy printed invitations was unques¬ tionably the best musical gathering in months. Fifteen hundred invitations were sent out for the February 19 event, and though there was no other announcement probably double that number attennded. Everyone was treated to the best vibra¬ tions and some of the best music the Fillmore West had seen in some time.

After a stirring oboe and bagpipe In- tmductkm by the Golden Toad, Don Hamrick of Frontiers of Science spoke for a few minutes in a gentle rural ac¬ cent, addressing the crowd as “the Good¬ ly Company.” “It is our hope,” he said, “that this evening there will be an open¬ ing and a free interchange, so that some¬ thing new may emerge. Let the barriers fall, let there be a merging,”

Then the Grateful Dead began a set that ran tor four hours or. so with, scarce¬ ly an interruption. “1 haven’t seen any¬ thing like this in years — it’s like one of the old Ken Kescy Add Tests,” said Bob Thomas, piper of the Toad and, like the Dead, veteran of many an Acid Test, — on{y It's less hectic, and confused. It's fucking amazing,” People were handing each other flowers, joints, funny incom¬ prehensible little picket, signs four inches high.

The Dead played continuously, a flow¬ ing .•*%ur<wi<t»torv set of new material.

the concert was to be record- J'j, < :on on the next Dead album, P |§| difficulties in setting up

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Denied a dance permit, the Straight Theater gigs were billed as 'dance classes’ — admission was by registra¬ tion fee of $2.50- Opposite,

Bobby, Phil and Pigpen play¬ ing hi Ann Arbor, Michigan, August 13, 1967. Below from left, Chet Helms, Dill Graham and Janice Joplin, Ralph Gleason.'

If you tried to delineate a Grateful Dead Family Tree, it would not be effective to use the traditional bloodline progression, descending through the ‘begats’ to get to the wider branches. Rather, this family tree, not only of birth and marriage, would have to be felled, its great trunk sliced open and the concentric rings examined to define the widening circles that shape it. At the core you would find the musicians, and with them, their wives and children and other blood rela¬ tives - the families within the Family. But how far do the rings go outward, who is included and in what order? Do you count ALL THOSE PEOPLE?!?

The truck drivers, ex-wives, ranch hands, lighting designers, jugglers, road crew, housekeepers, photographers, past band members, carpenters, shadow people, tie-dyers, medicine men, lyricists, sound mixers, office staff,

lawyers, jewelers, managers, pleasure crew, chiropractors, travel agents, lovers,

friends and neighbors, present AND past?

someone.

Absent family members are missed and talked about. Vigils are maintained in hospital hallways when a member is struck down, and when there is a death, everyone mourns. If a cousin is out of work, an uncle puts in a good word with a friend; if an award is given to one member, everyone feels pride. When tragedy strikes, everyone pitches in to bring things back to normal.

Every family has black sheep, outcasts, vendettas,

prodigal sons returning, geniuses.

There are family jokes, resemblances, pettiness, arguments, drunks, crests, recipes, pets, parties, vacations, heirlooms, pictures, beliefs, and history.

If you’re one of those who doubts there really IS a Grateful Dead Family, consider what “family” means anywhere in the world and draw your own conclusions and analogies.

It all depends on what year it is, who’s out of sight and who’s ‘around’ ; and mostly, on who’s drawing the picture. It also depends on how good your memory is, and on your need for definition in con¬ tinually shifting sands.

Families celebrate seasons, feasts, holi¬ days and weddings ; they shower a preg¬ nant sister with gifts, and sit with her through her labor; babies are shown around with pride at family visits. School graduates, performers, and artists can count on applauding family members in the audience. When a household moves, there are strong backs willing and a truck ready. If child care is needed on a moment's notice, there is always

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More than anything, being part of a family provides untold comfort and con¬ tinuity. You can go away for years and be greeted on your return; you can blow it completely and be forgiven your stupid¬ ity; you can sit alone on a mountain and know you have brothers and sisters down below who care about you; when you achieve something, you have people you can brag to; knowing you can ask for help gives you confidence to not have to ask; seeing the best members do the impossi¬ ble makes everyone else stretch, and when you fail, there are loving hands to help pick you up.

This family, which evolved geometri¬ cally from its beginnings as 'just a rock and roll band' and a few friends, has sus¬ tained an incredible number of people for over twenty years through shared

work and music, humor, adversity, achievement, love,

fierce loyalty,

and very strong emotions.

The feelings have substance; and how¬ ever you define it, whatever its shape and size, however far the rings go out¬ ward, the Family is real. - Rosie McGee

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creep into the midwest and over the bor¬ der. And then we showed up !

Now the Dead and the Airplane were really two different sides of what was happening in San Francisco. The Dead were much freer; they had that family thing. There were always children around, there were always dogs every¬ where, and people tended to not wear

shoes. This is only a slight exaggeration. They really looked the part - if you wanted the definition of the word “hip¬ pie” you'd point to them. Well, some of the Grateful Dead feeling must've rubbed off on our band, because when we found ourselves on the same floor with them and all in connecting rooms, we decided to basically just open up the whole floor. You could start in Jack Casady’s room and open the door connecting to Jerry and Mountain Girl's room, connecting to Kantner's, connecting to Phil’s, connect¬ ing to Jorma’s, connecting to Kreutz- mann’s and on down to the crew's rooms. It was completely wild, and what was even wilder is that, to a room, each was a completely different environment. One kind of incense would be in one room, another in the next. The Dead would put up tapestries on the walls, Persian car¬ pets on the floors, posters were brought out, hookahs. The Dead traveled with literally trunks filled with all this stuff - candles, you name it.

Graham got it all into the country for us. The borders were a little looser then, but the real thing of it was that traveling with this absolute circus completely con¬ founded the customs people. This was a large group of people with tons of boxes of all sizes and shapes. People dressed like you couldn’t believe - day-glo, strange makeup. The Dead took trunks everywhere, and we all got really into decorating the rooms as differently as we could. We simply carried our home with us. - Spencer Dryden (The Golden Road)

One of my favorite memories of the Dead was on this trip to Toronto (in early August 1967) engineered by Bill Graham for the Dead and the Airplane. The Airplane actually went up about a week early and played free concerts in Toronto and Montreal; it was one of Bill's machi¬ nations to do that and then come back and do paying gigs. Anyway, in Toronto, we all stayed for about a week at a very old, staid place called the Royal York.

A really attractive, elegant place that drew an older, very sophisticated clientele. I don't think the poor Canadians knew what they were getting into when they gave us these rooms, all on one floor. They weren't really ready for these freaks from America, especially during that period. It was really just beginning there, with weirdness beginning to

St. Valentine’s Day 1968

Tonight we danced to the grateful dead In a ballroom hung with gold And while we hung our acid heads They made their dream unfold:

They began in red and black ribbons

Of silk shantung

Sequined with gold and pearls

Bold as antique heroes

Humble as home town boys

They led us down a flaming trail

Of flowers and creepers

And low voltage suns

Half hidden in Messianic volcanoes:

Did you see god?

The people all around were asking; Did you slip through the fire Without getting burned?

Till one cool head

Turning out his inner eye; said I made the trip God’s not dead

He’s a beautiful joke.

“We mixed it for the hs^cinatkms and it worked great.”

The mind-bending sound TC achieved on the track involved a number of techniques he’d learned in

avant-garde music circles, includ- ing 'piano,’ in which foreign Bhv objects are placed inside the Wm f piano to alter the instrument’s W / sound, usually to percussive effect. f / John Cage had been writing prepared /piano pieces since the '40s, and both TC and - Phil had dabbled in it in their pre-Dead days, but it was still a radical move for a rock and roll band.

Of his piano preparations for Anthem, TC says, “The most striking was when I took a gyroscope, gave it a strong pull, and put it against the amplified sounding board. It’s kind of a chainsaw sound. One of my other favorite effects was obtained by using coins. At that time I used dimes. Since then I’ve been to Holland and picked up Dutch dimes, which are even better. Then there’s a sound like woodblocks that comes from combs stuck on

the piano’s higher strings. Another I liked was clothespins on the lowest strings, played either with the keys or on a string directly!’ TC’s section of the piece also utilized an electronic tape that he had made at Henri Posseur’s electronic music studio in Brussels during the summer of 1962. The pri¬ mary instrument he used for that was a ring modulator. The tape was assembled from dozens of little fragments of sound cut and spliced together.

“The idea was that this chaos would ensue from ‘The Other One,”’ TC explains. “The final part was an overlay of several live perfor¬ mances, whence it gets that incredible depth; it’s a remarkable effect. So they wanted to take that up and swirl it into an explosion, and out of the ashes of that would stealthily enter the warm, misty waves of ‘New Potato Caboose.’” - Blair Jackson (The Golden Road)

Tom Constanten

*

The Psychedelic Shop

The Psychedelic Shop was America’s first head shop.

And it was the community center for the Haight Ashbury where all neighborhood prob¬ lems were hashed out. We all met there — the Diggers, the Berkeley politicos. The Human Be-In was born there, and so was the idea of ‘Death of the Hippie’ — when the media had co-opted our self¬ name and we wanted to bury it so they’d leave us alone.

The Shop was always packed with neighbors and it served as a gallery for local art and photography.

On the left, Ron Thelin, Psychedelic Shop magnate. Mickey Hart (right) joined the band about this time, teaming up with original drummer Billy Kreutzmann (far left) for their enduring collaboration.

Born Jan. 3rd, 1966. . . Died Oct. 6th, 1967 Led one hel! of a healthy life God ... Let us work together Survived graduate course education in City administration,

Law and Order;

Freedom of the press

Freedom of religion

Democracy in action

Diggers kicked us in the ass, Thank you

Love to the Diggers

Love to Chester

Hari Krishna Hari Krishna

LSD is good medicine

Love it to death

Death? is life . . . some kind of truism

We really were trying to do a good thing

What the fuck, we did a fantastic thing.

Glory, Glory Hallelujah

Dig the Great Spirit

Listen to the Indians

Listen to the trees

We live on the Planet Earth

revolving around the Sun

Hymn to the gentle Sun

The Sun is Free

You are Free

We are Free

God so loved the world

Once upon a time

There was a Psychedelic Shop

That tried to save the World

and succeeded

and then went on to save the Universe God only knows and we are God and God is FREE.

— Ron Thelin

The Fillmore Auditorium ended its two-and-a-half-year career as a fulltime rock hall on July 5. Bill Graham, the Fillmore’s manager, moved his scene to the old Carousel Ballroom, which had become a well-known rock dance hall in its own right under the goodhearted but insuffi¬ ciently professional owner¬ ship of the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and some cronies. The Carousel became the Fillmore West, comple¬ menting Graham’s recently opened New York operation, the Fillmore East.

GRATEFUL DEAD JEFF BECK GROUP ^SEVENTH SONS

NULLA FUDGE MES COTTON |UES BAND

MAMNG ZONE

jfJE FAME IkCOTTON |f| BAND

K ZONE

Healy: It held about 800 people, not very many at all, though we would put as many in there as we could get. It was an old ballroom left over from the Swing era. It was owned by an Irishman.

Garcia: They had Irish music there on Thursday nights.

Healy: That’s all they had in there. Aside from that it was closed all the time, and had been closed down right after the Swing era. It was still in its original state, right out of the ‘20s, right down to the chandeliers in the place. The interior was beautiful. It wasn't at all torn up; it was in mint condition.

Matthews and I met this guy who hap¬ pened to have a four track tape machine we wanted to rent, at a place called Emerald Studios. He was in the Irish League in San Francisco and knew about this place. We were looking around for places to play. He said, “Hey, I know where there is this ballroom," so he took Matthews and me over there. Here was this beautiful old ballroom.

So, we went back and talked to Rock Scully and Danny Rifkin. We decided to cook up a plan to see if we could score it and do some gigs there. We got hold of the people and they were real good about it. They said, “Sure; you want the place, take it." So we built our own stage in there and put on our own rock and roll shows. - (Relix Magazine)

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Northwest TYek(atour the Dead and

j| wesfinJan Played ™ the Pacifio North- west m January and February of 1968)

[^rewasnoheatonusbecLeS-

Pigpen around it was like “Ooooh - look

mentr!"Weaiil00i!edlikeb^2-

men m comparison with Pigpen'

Anyway, I remember when we first got ^Portland Dan Healy who was working

>laZ yhen *tnd Wh0 modmed the SG I’m

Jayrng now), and I went into a pawn

nd^T h^an u°Ught a 56 Les Pau/special ad I bought guns and a bunch of blanks continue the little cowboys and dians ga™ that we'd been playing the Dead for quite a while. (An oft-

1 1 hafth I? fr°m thS 6arly summer of | has the Dead dressing up like Indians

cJ raiding Omoksiiver’s Marin ranch m

I d aldh^9^ W3S Snowing “ Port-

Jn, d, he5e 1 am with all these guns

■ hundreds of blanks. I was taking

i h,3 7Tne ^ °Ur 9™P- And we I e wp WGnt aI°ng with the

laadtoP fTed’whlchwa^you'died'

■ adto stay dead- forac°up]eof t'tes. If someone even shot you with

,£ agery°u had to roll over and play 1 re ah too stiff to do that now,

Quicksilver Messenger Service

One of the guns I bought was this little • 2 cahber blank pistol that was easy to carry ar0und. I remember seemg Pigpen ock Scully and Danny Rifkin (Dead man ’

rom the group, driving down the street So I went running out into the street mak mg some kind of deranged weird noisT- some anguished cry - and I emptied the

Sop ?hedr' Thrr ^ SCTe-hmg p. The doors flew open and Pignen

and everybody just rolled out of the car

into the snow. They r0^, looked dead-

'ar*hearormyeV8lSaKt“-‘d

the corner I stood "0und

kill’. Then the™ SUrveymg ‘the

mmute later of course rh* ni

I got a callo Wh° 6 t0UI Went that way from h in °n “y trigger hnger

from blowmg people away

- John Cipoiiina

The Pleasure Crew got its name during the infamous London Run of 1968. The name itself first took form in a tattoo parlor in Soho where it was graven per¬ manently into the flesh of several mem¬ bers of the cast. Taking George Harrison up on his Christmas invitation, the Dead's management (Rock, Danny arid Jonathan) along with Kesey, Slade, Peter Coyote, Paula McCoy, Frankie Hart, Sue Swanson, Spyder, Sweet William and Frisco Pete, scammed thir¬ teen free tickets from ASCAP, persuaded Uncle Bobo

^GRATEFUL DEAD-

to air freight the Angels' bikes and set off to see if London Bridge had really fallen down. The Hell's Angels had the added incentive of branching out inter¬ nationally. It was first envisioned as a transatlantic party, a Christmas vacation for the pleasure crew, but after two weeks of bouncing off every English wall from Stonehenge to Saville Row, we realized that the language barrier between America and England was enough work for the heaviest members of the pleasure crew.

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The Pleasure Crew From A to Z

Alembic Adventure Couch Crew Cruisin’

Bear and the Boys D’Fonseca’s Dog Breeding as a Sport (Venus/Santu GD Hybrid) ‘Everything’s Easy’

Fuck ‘Em If They Can’t Take A Joke Going For It With Goldfinger and Gas Girl Hell’s Angels and Hey Now

In Novato (Rakow, Lydia, Johnny, Durhams, Crosby, Pig, Weir, Jerry, Hunter and Mickey)

Joyful Jensen Girls Kreutzmann/Kidd and Krew Loose Bruce (Lax Bax/BBB III) and Luvall Marina McGuire and More New York City (‘High Life’)

Overland at Olompali and Olema ‘Pacific High’ Recordings Quotables from Notables Rex and the Rukka Rukka Renegades Slade, Spyder, Sonny Heard and Sweeties Texas Too Much Tango Underlying Themes (Cowboys and Rascals)

Velocity, Vortex and Vindication Windsor Wonderland (WOW) X-Roadies We’ve Known Yes, Yes, Yes

Zonker, Zimmels and the Zone

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London Run Coyote Rolling Rock

I think now which means I should have been asleep now but a cigarette keeps me thinking of the girls first of Frankie as she still remains in London upstairs asleep no longer thinking about last nite as Pete hits out at last on the innocent melody maker man who tells him he cannot eat more no matter how drunk its all become and Frankie afraid afraid, she once the lady of Mitchell/Experience and Casady/ Airplane and one riding to drumming of tables between her legs to Kennedy with Hart/Dead and Rock protesting $ 100 — $ fare to SF and mouth to feed but already she is more beautiful and 4 mos. later she is with Kesey/Prankster on the Oregon farm from city basement/ Scene a gogo to farm country & beaus and life — now afraid asleep at last afraid she blew it when smashing bancardi in Beatles resting room/SF headqtrs london confronting Pete the Angel the motherfucker hit someone Lennon was there now what we got to split tears St Peter Monk for 5 ordained tibetan years celibate ultimate final STP human for us all lasses her and thinking now of Paula who's gone home to her house full of blond California new free children old St wise young with living fibres opened by the men that this trip represents thinking of Sue Swan- son original Palo Alto friend and fan of the Dead but first of

George Harrison always George till the joke is real and George hadn't understood her now with 3 mos. old child to be good wish and had brought her here to Apple London Harri- cle like peoples of the planet know so we full circle in and cliffs hang with free people and teaming Japan cle can we now after five years the brotherhood back to where we come from to see what is have just released on the US is a huge in our heads American music all of fuclc-ups with our heads in religion what of our brother Lennon in the pa- with his beautiful Yolco finally we are flash - we know he's getting back together and using Mahesh &. Pepper to our enrichment and we wish at Gulf Stream, Fla. 100,000 gather to hear the dead 7,000 spent their first day high together in Florida sun- and remanifest themselves in Golden Gate Park where the did it for Central Park's 20,000 who did for you St me St Yoko suns ripples on the rosy tongues of California all come from some-

is real and did she get one final chance to say she was sorry he and in love with the men that had fulfilled her greatest on where it had all started for her now come full cir- Califorma — migrator}' adventure pushes west reaching out and meeting in California full dr- dignified free american men make it together left behind because the music the Beatles two day event everywhere on the air the Joy and pieces of our past and rice and women is nice but pers busted and standing naked ing on the brotherhood of us all and what he learned from the last trip with only to give back and now back in the USSR at Sunday's sunset outside where just last Easter shine to experience each other through the band Quicksilver St Janis that same day played to 15,000 who St Lennon and Taylor returned to England with love for the where down the road and we keep on rolling — Lennon has been

there all along and his Christmas smile made me warm and hunger for home and Ringo's kids made me dance upstairs and maybe if the rockers from the bridge hadn't still been plaguing me I could have danced all nite but they followed us reeling home to our floor in Battersea where for third straight nite the police had come to voice complaints of the citizenry whose delegation I had cooled only hours ahead talking shivering in the hall to the man upstairs who couldn't get his baby to sleep for all the Nortons St Bezzers revving downstairs I said yes there will be silence and when they would not split I did and minutes later the police. They're the only ones that seem to really appreciate your music and/or your pranks but I believe we're getting it together — in LA 80% of the high school students now turning on now with 80% population of India turning on now only London scene two years dry still hung over over drink over cover can we only get it together under DuChamps guilt slip on stage the Albert Hall — Lennon I thank you for being there again. The London hang over is still one year coming down from speed and acid smolder the fire of acid excitement for living fully and I'Ll never forget the tarot on the floor of your office with Amsterdam's Simon and Empress turning up five successive cards reading destruction m the future in all cases with the devil & long & empress all now and behind us but destruction ahead — then Pete hits out and Frankie hits out to stop him facing off with a broken bottle and a kiss no mockery no blame what happened when you used to be so free — Donovan asks me and had I some Angels friends to be free with even without Grass to not have friends around without guns and police don't have guns here even detectives from the yard at Albert Hall and we stood close to them almost constantly between them and the little Bit and Arts Lab and no guns and we felt free as did dancers and hairy Christians who used to geez speed in rainy Oregon gray days on fulbright scholarships hauling blond north african hash to Switzerland and black¬ ened by the soot of New York's Tompkins Square Park same people with now shaven heads calling out on home made cymbals from San Jose and voices raised in Albert's London hall to join in and be together in dance St silence. These same left a temple in San Fran¬ cisco two years after Ron Thelin gave away Psychedelic Shop an^daight boarded up and smiles behind pin ball eyes all turned up tilt except the now hairless Krishnas left California redwoods^gffl|jat all the way for temple statues in London some where! A tem¬ ple in San Francisco where my friends carry guns - my friends ?^^lichael X in London says how can we expect a planet to put a bomb behind us when we carry guns - he don't - good news! because the San Francisco State revolution is as bloody as Mexico City & Chicago and we left and that's where I was arrested first years ago for raising the VC flag over campus in fun. — Rock Scully

iG ROCK ROW WOW k MAY 1969

Monday night, the second night of the Airplane-Dead- Quicksilver engagement is not a big night for rock and roll shows, but the hall seemed to be filled again.

By now everyone knew about Janis, but the crowd was not in a mournful mood. Said Jerry Garcia after the Dead’s set:

“The crowd seemed a little crazier last night than tonight, I don’t know. You have to understand that I have no memory, that’s the price I pay. The difference in vibes? It makes a big dif¬ ference in vibes if you tell somebody, Janis died. That’s like heavy news. But listen, man, these are all people who’ve been on lots of trips, and they’re sensitive,

far-out, weird people, prob¬ ably the weirdest people on earth in this place, and they’ve all looked at death a million times in lots of different ways. Nobody's really uptight about death. Death is something that really happens.

“Janis was like a real per¬ son, man. She went through all the changes we did. She went on all the same trips. She was just like the rest of us — fucked up, strung out, in weird places. Back in the old days, the pre¬ success days, she was using

all kinds of things, just like anybody, man.

“When she went out after something, she went out after it really hard, har¬ der than most people ever think to do, ever conceive of doing.”

Bob Weir: “You know about the irony of her getting Bessie Smith a tombstone, i think we, the bands, should put together a collection and get her a tombstone, kind of a cheap, gaudy tombstone, the way she’d have wanted. I know she doesn’t like want her ashes scattered to the wind, man, she’ll want to go six feet under like all her songs.”

Pigpen had a personal kind of tribute in mind:

“When I get a few days I’m gonna set back and get ripped on Southern Comfort.

“I turned her on to Southern Comfort, man. I knew her when she came up in ‘63 and I was with the jugband. Then she came back to Texas, and when she came back up I told her one day, Tex, try some of this.’ She said (rolling his eyes, reeling), ‘Oh man, that’s good!’

“We used to get drunk and play pool together She beat me 80 percent of

Airplane didn’t appear on Monday night. “He’s feeling really down," said Paul Baratta, “and he thinks this is going to be a funeral thing for Janis. But Bob Weir told him, ‘Hey, man, Janis went the way she wanted to go, come on.’ But he isn’t coming.”

Neither Baratta nor any of the groups spoke of Janis from the stage. But there seemed to be a special edge in the way the Airplane — a trio, as Grace had not yet come on stage and Marty wasn’t there at all — announced, “What do you want to bet by the end of the evening you’re all gonna be dancing?” — Charles Perry (Rolling Stone)

Power brokers: pocket check in the panhandle. The mana¬ gers, from left: Bill Thompson

(Jefferson Airplane), Bill Graham, Julius Karpen (Big Brother), Rock Scully (Grate¬

ful Dead), Ron Polte (Quicksilver) and Danny Rifkin (Grateful Dead).

She Said Call Me Pearl

l to laugh at me — I didn't even know for what, man.

T 2nd I was a painter. I didn't want to just be married. I had aspirations that only guys are supposed to have

she said call me pearl our little blue girl that last time i saw you at the Mo we shared comfort & i teased about your weight i couldn’t know we wouldn’t meet again & i never told you how much

Robert M. Petersen

■>

■« * :

THERE WAS A TIME A WHILE BACK, WHICH SEEMS ALTERNATELY LIKE A SECOND OR A CENTURY,

WHEN THE DEAD USED TO GETTOGETHER SOCIALLY MORE OFTEN THAN THEY DO NOW . . . AND SOME OF THESE EVENTS WERE SO EXALTED THAT IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE THEY EVER STOPPED. THESE PARTIES INCLUDED SUCH STRUCTURES AS THE ULTRA CONSERVATIVE ‘BLACK AND WHITE BALL AND THE REDNECK SHOOTOUTS AT BILLY’S RANCH WHEN THE DRUMMERS HUNG CYMBALS AND GONGS FROM THE TREES AND EVERYONE BLAZED AWAY AT THEM WITH RIFLES AND SHOT¬ GUNS. IN THOSE DAYS EVERYONE RODE HORSES AND OWNED AT LEAST ONE RIFLE AND ONE SIDEARM, SO THAT 3G OR 40 GUNS FIRED CON¬ TINUOUSLY FOR AN HOUR OR SO, SHREDDING THE J ZILDJIANS AND BRINGING THE SHERIFF. ANY EXCUSE FOR A PARTY-HOLIDAYS, BIRTHDAYS, FRIDAYS, SOL¬ STICES, WEDDINGS . . . OR JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT

	m , vj
	W 1111

1

The original horses at the Novato ranch came from the Jensen girls at Olompali. Later, Tomasina, Apache Chipper (The Stud) and Mac Jagger, three great Appaloosas which took up residence at the ranch, were a gift from Roger Lewis. Next, Valerie acquired for Mickey a thoroughbred racehorse named Tychain, l and Stephen Stills supplied another. Mickey k also had a beautiful Morab (half-Morgan

■ and half-Arab). Billy and Susila had

■ Liquorice and Rats Arse. The Jensen girls looked after the horses and other live-

stock, including a large colony of pet white rats, named after the various « denizens of the ranch. These were

later introduced into the community, |9| but that's another story. . .

the set the cooks returned to the barbeque pit. As they came over the shallow rise between the barn and the house they saw two women and a man in metal¬ lic jumpsuits, carving the last piece of meat from the pig’s skeleton.

“Probably thought it was a cow,” said someone charitably. — Peter

One summer day in north¬ ern California, I don’t remember which month or which year but Sweet William was there on a 3 wheeler the club had just made for him (so if you really wanna know you can ask him, he might remem¬ ber) . . . Peter Marino and Jerilyn had sweet-talked Mickey into throwing a promotional party at the ranch for the Tower of Power who’d traded this party for the horn parts on Rolling Thunder.

In addition to the Dead, there were a couple of Hell’s Angels, a couple of Black Panthers, Hog Farm¬ ers, a couple of Weather¬ men and two hundred record executives from Los Angeles and New York wearing metal jumpsuits, like the astronauts.

The cooks prepared tur¬ keys, salmon, salads and fresh bread. Johnny Pine had brought a large wild boar he’d wrestled out of a tree and killed with a buck knife after it was bayed by his dogs. Mickey, and a guy who looked like him, turned the pig on a spit, both wearing beards, mir¬ rored shades, levis and t-shirts— stone bookends except for the joints they kept passing. Hours went by, they turned the spit . . . various chemicals took hold ... fat dripped from the

carcass to the coals, crackl¬ ing as it vaporized into frag¬ rant smoke. Some crazy person dropped 40,000 mics of LSD into the coffee without telling anyone . . . and the ranch began to vibrate.

Some folks rode horses, some Harley’s. The softball game went on its surreal way down by the garden and Mickey continued turn¬ ing the spit. Turkey buz¬ zards warmed their wings, motionless over the hills bees buzzed and hours passed. The pig looked crisp. No one said it was done. We’d all heard of trichonosis, but none of us had ever cooked an animal this size before.

After awhile, Johnny Pine came over and / using the same / knife he’d /

pig with, cut a ^01 deep gash into its ^ flank, then another still deepen

“No man, it’s still raw tv inches down. Lookit (hold¬ ing some flesh on the tip oi his knife), ya can’t eat bloody pig.”

So Mickey, hearing Tower of Power tuning up left the carcass to fend for itself and ambled over to the barn. The band played fast for an hour and then even faster for an encore

-

MMrthad and Slade found the hpuse bythe creek was home

The hippies living there wanted to move for Johnny D' and Sunny; a tinv sheiW

are city, so Mickey rented it. Over the behind the pump house had a-ioft bum;

Jew years,, almost everyone in the in; the second old horse barn way out *

^ jl'Family lived there at one time. And a^mAfeg^wy^used . they kept leaving and Coming back to but that

natempsic, to party, to ride horses, to S^’ffHBfctahumbete of

From top left, Billy and Susila, Spyder, the Magnificent Seven of Rode ‘n’ Roll in late 1969; and Jerilyn with Creek and Christina.

I. WHISTLING THROUGH THE FOG

IN 1970 THE GRATEFUL DEAD STARTED GOING ON THE ROAD SERIOUSLY WITH MAJOR NATIONAL TOURS, PLAYING MORE SHOWS THAT YEAR THAN EVER BEFORE OR SINCE - 144 GIGS. HALF THESE GIGS WERE ON THE EAST COAST THE BAND ALSO ENJOYED GREAT SUCCESS WITH ALBUMS- FIRST LIVE DEAD, THEN WORKINGMAN’S DEAD AND AMERICAN BEAUTY WARNER BROTHERS DIDNT REALLY KNOW HOWTO PROMOTE THE BAND IN EARLIER YEARS. WE CONVINCED THEM TO FINANCE A SERIES OF FREE CONCERTS IN SEVEN CITIES: THEY PAID FOR THE FLATBED TRUCKS AND THE SOUND SYSTEM

AND WE DID THE REST ‘GRATEFUL DEAD COMES TO YOUR HOMETOWN AND PLAYS FOR FREE.’ LOCAL PROMOTERS DIDNT LIKE IT BECAUSE IT AFFECTED THEIR TICKET SALES TO HAVE A FREE SHOW THE NEXT DAY IN THE PARK. IN 1970, WE DID RADIO SIMULCASTS IN FIFTEEN CITIES-THE FIRST ROCK AND ROLL STEREO SIMULCASTS EVER. EVEN OLD PEOPLE THAT HAD BOUGHT STEREOS LISTENED TO IT JUST BECAUSE IT WAS SO UNIQUE. AND WARNER BROTHERS PAID FOR IT ALL. - ROCK SCULLY

Leaving Marin County through the ‘rainbow tunnel’, gateway to the world. Right, the band on the road. Left, Harover, Rhonda, mule Jericho and Hagen; Truck Drivin’ Cheri.

Across the street — David Crosby;

Atherton Avenue — Roger Lewis, Courtenay Pollock, Jerry Buckley, Amos, Thayer;

Blackpoint— Jon Mclntire, John Bologni, Sue Swanson, Joshua; Rose was born

there;

Woodacre — Ramrod and Frances;

Fairfax- Phil and Florence.

RidgeRoad— Hunter; Garcia, Mountain Girl, Alan Trist, Maureen, Christie, Hunter and Sunshine;

Farview— Weir and Pig¬ pen and Veronica;

Indian Valley Road— Rakow and Lydia, the Durham kids;

Rukka Rukka Ranch— Nicasio: Bob, Frankie, Jackson, Sonny Heard, Eileen, Crystal, Steve Parish;

Novato Ranch — Mickey, Jensen girls, Slade, Jonathan, Rock, Sue Gottlieb, Cookie, Debbie and Terry;

Back at the ranch: the women and children had to cover the home scene. By now, there were several ranches— loose households created by renting large houses mostly out in Novato or West Marin. As before with 7 10 Ashbury, this was the economical way to go. A partial list:

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Rolling Thunder

I met Rolling Thunder at Bob Weir's house in 1970. Frankie was really ill and her doc¬ tor's diagnosis wasn't something she could agree with. I don’t know how Roll¬ ing Thunder and his people were con¬ tacted, I just remember one evening he

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arrived with Grandfather Semu (medicine man for the Chumash people) and their warriors. After acting as hostess, I brought Rolling Thunder to Frankie’s room, left him to check her out and returned to the living room. Grandfather Semu was requesting one of the women accompanying the warriors to put out her cigarette. She declined. He asked again. She again refused. He pointed his finger in her direction from across the room (about 10 feet away) and the ciggie flamed up several inches causing the young lady to drop it rather abruptly.

Just then, the bedroom door opened and Rolling Thunder asked for the people who were to be present during the heal¬ ing ceremony to come into the room. He asked me to assist him. I later found out this was because I was not ‘on my moon' and was perceived by him to be sincere in my desire to help Frankie. During the ceremony, he admonished one of the skeptics in our midst and asked that no one sit at Frankie’s feet warning of the danger in a subtle way. One guy, who didn’t listen or hear very well, did just that and as soon as he did, the locked windows at the foot of the bed flew open and he became quite ill himself. - Jerilyn

jyoole would gome around and see what & Bonnie got m a huge row that involved was going on ; they'd look at the band Kris Kristofferson. It was awful, raey

playing through the windows and be were a! strung out oh hangovers, totally amazed.

The Festival Express

The 1970 Canada trip featured the Dead, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Janis Jop¬ lin, The Band and others, and is immor¬ talized in the song ‘Might As Well’.

Dawson: Traveling with the Dead was always pretty wild, of course, and in the first couple of years of the Riders we were with them a lot. The train ride across Canada was just like one long crazy party. I remember that the only time I ever saw Garcia smashed on tequila was on that trip. It was a rare occasion indeed.

Nelson: There were two band cars With equipment set up so you could play, and of course everyone would go down there and jam. Everybody had his own room with a window and a little bed that folded down. Traveling through Canada and then pulling into these little stops that seemed like they were in the middle of nowhere with the band playing - it really seemed like a circus. All the towns -

Scully: That was one of the best trips musically that ever went off. There was singing all night and drinking all night in the parlor cars; card playing and cussing and swearing with the most incongruous bunch of musicians. Chicago blues guys, Little Walter. Kristofferson worked up ‘Bobby McGee' on this trip.

The night before we got to Calgary, the big Roundup started. I think it’s called the Stampede. We were part of that whole Roundup week. We headed into Calgary and all the cowboys were whoop¬ ing it up. We were supposed to be at the : fanciest hotel, except the rooms were tight, the cowboys were tight. We looked like a bunch of drunk hippies. The town was split down the middle between cowboys for the Stampede and Grateful Dead Heads that had 'come from as far away as Vancouver, or had followed the train across Canada. You know, just tie dye and bronco riding. There were fights all over town. Delaney

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Mickey with Ali Akbar Khan and Aila Rahka. At this time, Donna jean Thatcher, was a studio backup singer, singing on a couple of Boz Skaggs records, and cuts for Elvis Presley. Here she is, right, with Mary Holiday, Jeanie Greene, Elvis and Ginger Holiday at the American Sound Studio, Memphis Ten¬ nessee on January 19, 1969. She married Keith Godchaux

in November, 1970, right, who joined the band as a pianist in 1971.

The secret went out at Woodstock that there were so many people com¬ ing in that there was no way we were gonna close the doors. “If you ain’t got a ticket, come on in. If you bought one, drop it over here.” There were people all around that concert trying to give away their tickets.

The Dead did not fare well there. Several things went wrong. First of all, the band’s entrance and exit from the stage depended on risers. And when the Dead were sup¬ posed to go on, the wheels on their risers failed. The gear was so heavy that the risers nosedived. We had to take all of the gear off the risers and stick it out on the stage. A big monster undertaking. Plus it was stormy.

Finally we set it up. Then, since we were the first band after dark, they decided it. was time to unfurl the light show. Only there was a 60-miie-an- hour wind blowing, and the stage was maybe 35 or 40 feet above the ground, all set on big pieces of wood because it had been raining for weeks and weeks, and it was very muddy. They unfurled the light show screen and it billowed out like a sail on a square-rigger and the stage started to scoot down, the whole damn thing started to slide.

The call for action was: pull out your buck knife and rip holes in the $20,000 screen. It was like a cinerama screen. Jonathan Riester just grabbed my buck knife and flew into it. Then my brother; Dicken, did the same thing. Finally, the stage stopped sliding.

That was the beginning. All day long people were saying, “Do not take the brown acid.” Some guy had a brown paper bag full of bum acid. Then this guy comes bouncing across the stage in the middle of the Dead’s set and he’s throw¬ ing out brown acid to the crowd. That was a night¬ mare in itself.

They played a set, but it was not great. “Generally speaking,” said Garcia, “the more people expect, the worse we are. The paramount example was Woodstock.” Weir said- “We had a sound man who insisted that everything was being done wrong so he was gonna set up his whole PA, and proceeded to go about doing so.”

“Hanging up the audi- Woodstock and

ence for four or five hours! roared Garcia, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes.

“When you multiply that by the number of people at Woodstock you get several human years.”

“Yeah,” shouted Weir excitedly, “several human years of chagrin and con¬ sternation, and add to that the fact that when we finally did get it set up the electrical ground was com¬ pletely wrong so every time either of us touched our instruments we got horrible shocks.”

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Later in the year; a press conference in New York announced that the Rolling Stones were going to play free in the park in San Francisco. All the radio stations announced, “Free concert, free concert!” Suddenly it was everybody’s free concert. They planned to make a movie of it, a movie; everybody started looking to make money on it. It became a lie. It wasn’t a free concert— it became an exploited, horrifying event. (The concert was

moved to Sears Point less than 24 hours before the show and was moved again to Altamont Speedway, about 40 miles southeast of San Francisco.)

They had such a crowd coming and they had a riot on their hands. We wanted out, but they had our equip¬ ment But the Grateful Dead never did play at Altamont.

When we got there, they had such a crowd that the scene was changing very fast. It had grown up quickly and had incorpo¬ rated so many people who were just taking. We saw the same thing happen¬ ing in the Haight-Ashbury. —Scully

Altamont Speedway, where unexpected violence, so soon

after the triumph of peace at Woodstock, shocked a gener¬ ation. Garcia and Kreutz- mann talk with Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones at the Heliport before Altamont.

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The Music of Friends

During the early seventies, Crosby, Stills and Nash hung with the boys, trading licks on CS&N albums for singing lessons and help on har- monies with Workingman's Dead and American Beauty.

All my education led me to composition, and I followed that to a dead end. All I could do after I’d composed the things I wanted to say, was to shut up. It was a question of style and tech¬ nique leading you right into a corner

I was composing classical electronic music. Surreal orchestra music. Impro¬ vised chants, reaction music. Then I realized that if com¬ position was improvisation, and you let random chance make your decisions for you, you may as well just blow. Your chances of hit¬ ting any significant combina¬ tions are about the same either way. That’s especially true in a collective situation, when there are more than two musicians playing.

I’ve always thought of the music we play as ‘elec¬ tric chamber music’, which has been called the music of friends. — Lesh, Grateful Dead Program, London 1972

; • . •

Good Lovin’, Good Preachin’

Last week’s Grateful Dead concert up at Gaelic Park was a usual Dead session, meaning that the band- to-fan-to-band electro¬ chemical process for which rock music is famed was on like high mass at Easter Although I think I know most of the time what they are doing musically: I don’t quite understand them elec- tro-chemically. Like the New York Knicks of two seasons ago, they can do excellent things together though they are not a group of deathless superstars. Garcia gets his songs across, but he can’t sing, and Bob Weir’s voice rises to about average . . . maybe better when h^gets to screaming and themusic sweeps him along. I still find it difficult to recognize the Dead songs that aren’t Truckin’ or ‘St. Stephen’ one from the other I am not one of their fans, but seem to be one of their admirers. Their music speaks in a special language to their live

ers, and that language has the vocabulary of every¬ body else, but a convoluted syntax all its own. The note sequences are not com¬ pletely dependent upon musical factors but are also dictated by how involved the band feels and also upon what kind of heat the audi¬ ence is giving off. I’m trying to get to some essences of this thing.

The drama of a Dead concert revolves around the fact that wherever the band plays they know that a certain number (several tons) of their partisans will be there and that their crowd knows the Dead potential to excite them but they also know that the Dead may not get into gear , until the crowd begins to apply some heat, and so forth. Both parties also know that the concert, will be long enough and infor¬ mal enough for anything to

happen on either side of the footlights, and so audi¬ ences improvise (smoke, go to the hot dog stand, kiss and snuggle, cheer; dance, listen like star-struck fools) just like their musi¬ cian friends on stage (who play light and funny for awhile, retire backstage awhile, stand around, or get lost in a piece and turn on the heavy jets). Like good lovers, the Grateful Dead know the secrets of good foreplay, taking your time, surprising the audi¬ ence, intentionally under¬ stated; but Lesh kept bopping and thrumming away, heavily at all times, until his patterns were con¬

sistently getting the other players off. In the middle of ‘St. Stephen’ there was a special coming together: Lesh had found a nice ambiguous but compelling set of licks; Garcia eased into a solo; Weir strummed a cross-time lick over all of it; it built; it quieted; Garcia started to play strange class¬ ical kind of lines; the drums dropped out; the audience got quiet; nothing at all could be predicted for a minute or so; then Lesh began to grope his way out with two chords and rhythms which began to regularize; audience began to jump and then to clap; guitars began to straighten out; the band came home to the cheers of the fans.

Good music making. The listener goes home without a little tune to whistle, but he hears music. As if they were finishing off some personal solos based over the last riffs heard, the fans went out of Gaelic Park without a thousand encores and without a lot of fuss on the streets outside. It’s all very interesting, surprising, and I guess mystifying as before. All I know is that the Dead, or their fans, or the combination of both lure you into planning to return when they’re all assembled and back in town again. — Carman Moore

Jerry and Mountain Girl at the Yale Bowl, July 31, 1971, one of the first stadium concerts.

The San Francisco Panhandle and Golden Gate Park shows were the inspiration for doing nationwide free shows. The Dead was a community band and there was a demand that went beyond just selling tick¬ ets. It demanded that the

Dead play for free — wherever we went there was a com¬ munity that supported us as their ‘community band’ and demanded that, somehow, we play for free outdoors. Above, Mountain Girl and Sunshine.

LA CFETE AU GHATEMJ

Louis XIV donnait dans les jardins du chateau de Versailles des fetes somptueuses ou les grands musiciens classiques a la mode, venaient jouer leur musique tandis que les fastueux jets d'eau s'epanouissaient sous des spectacles de lumiere (in english : light show), et que, derriere les bosquets, les invites s'echangeaient ing6nuement leurs blennoragies chroniques.

II arrivait que Procol Harum vienne faire le bceuf avec Wolfgang Amadeus, et je me souviens parfaitement qu'un soir un grand noir tout maigre et tout frise, est venu semer une panique indescriptible au sein du grand orchestre de Richard Wagner.

Rex Jackson and Mark ‘Sparky’ Raizene setting up in the Chateau grounds, June 21, 1971 ; opposite top, Betty Cantor preparing micro¬

phones; our French hosts, Daniel Schuster and Jean- Jaques Damiani, attend the unloading of equipment.

Herouville or Bust

"Got a passport? Wanna go to Paris? We need you to speak French." With these words Jon Mclntire roused me out of my lethargy in Alembic’s win¬ dowless garage office one Wednesday in 1971. “Day after tomorrow - we’ll be gone five days - you and I will go ahead of the band - I’ll explain on the plane.”

This began an obscure adventure remembered thus:

The sight of the pro¬ posed music festival was a minor dude ranch outside of Paris with a full Hollywood-style western street where we had a beer at the functioning saloon.

When the equipment

arrived at Orly, no truck had been arranged and I was left alone, on a week¬ end, with a wad of money and a couple of local schleppers, to find a truck to rent and get the equip¬ ment to a location 65 kilometers away.

The festival was rained out and the band, having come so far to play music, could only pace the halls

of their lodgings, the 17th century Chateau d’ Herouville, while the storm howled.

There was a glorious springtime visit to the Eiffel Tower with some of the band and crew - even there and even then, a wild-haired guy from Mill Valley came up to Jerry

7

with a “Hey man, far out! ”

At a nighttime gig on the lawn of the Chateau, lit by a news crew's lights, the Dead played to the mystified but game local villagers and a handful of Parisian media, the only option to returning home without playing a lick.

After four fairly sleep¬ less nights, we were back at the airport ; an hour to flight time and the equip¬ ment was on the plane but we weren’t - our tick¬ ets were held hostage waiting for some freight document. Fifteen minutes before departure, still no document and I was surrounded by six supervisors representing two airlines, the airport,

and the French govern¬ ment. All were arguing at once, the airlines over who would nab these pay¬ ing customers, the govern¬ ment agent trying to ensure we would have time to pass through his drug checkpoint, the air¬ port security trying to calm everyone down - while waiting 20 yards away, the guys were about to lose it completely. They just wanted to go home!

Exasperated from an hour of harassment, I picked on the stubborn official who was holding the tickets and shouted over the din in French,

“Monsieur, look at those guys over there (the band). I can’t say WHAT they'll do if they don’t get on SOME airplane immediately. Do YOU want to be PERSONALLY responsible for an interna¬ tional incident, right here and right now?’’ The gen¬ tleman looked over, and the guys, ready to explode anyway, picked up on my cue. One or two gave the well known American one-digit salutation while roaring like lions, and the rest merely projected vis¬

ions of Hell to Pay - the poor man broke down completely and weakly handed me back the boarding passes. A sprint through the airport, a token stop at a security check, and we collapsed in our seats on the plane with our equipment riding below.

The next day was a Wednesday, one week after Jon’s call. I sat at my desk at Alembic, business as usual, wondering if I'd dreamed up the whole thing. - Rosie McGee

At this time, the band called their concerts ‘An Evening with The Grateful Dead featuring The New Riders of the Purple Sage’, jerry’s interest in playing the pedal steel guitar had led him to an active participation with the New Riders. His interest in

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the New Riders stand on Nicasio reservoir during a drought. Below left, Steve Parish; far right, Bobby and jerry torch the band's first gold album.

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Our relationship is mostly out there on the road because our work is a communal experi ence. But we're all living individual lives. It's all interlocked and interwoven, but we have a large community that's too large for everybody to keep in touch with everybody else daily - so everything is out in little camps. We'll all get together and work out stuff on the road or at meetings.

Music obviously exerts a tremendous force on this country.

"Oh yeah, I guess it does; but that doesn't mean that I oughta carry around the responsibility of being the guy that dispenses our music, you know what I mean? It's like being the President. I don't want it. I don't want the fuckin' job. I mean I liked it when you could just be a musician; it's like being an artist and craftsman or something . . . nobody mobs a cat that makes nice leather clothes or a guy that does woodwork." — Garcia

Departure from U.S. was Feast of Fools, I April, 1972. Arrival in London was Easter Sunday, 2 April. April saw England, Denmark and Germany. May saw France, England, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany and England.

7, 8 April Empire Pool, Wembley II April Newcastle City Hall 14 April Tivoli Theatre, Copenhagen

16 April University of Aarhus

17 April TV: from Tivoli Gardens

21 April TV show, ‘Beat Club’: Bremen 24 April Rheinhalle, Dusseldorf 26 April JahrhundertHalle, Frankfurt 29 April Musikhalle, Hamburg 3,4 May Olympia Theatre, Paris 7 May Bickershaw Festival, near Manchester

10 May Concertgebouw, Amsterdam

1 1 May Rotterdam Civic Hall

13 May Lille Opera, open air, Lille 16 May Radio Luxembourg

18 May Deutsches Museum Halle, Munich 23-26 May The Lyceum, London

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We bought some down v .. masks in Newcastle, England, and wore them on the big- windowed European buses to freak out the natives. The band wore them for a few gigs. Below, Ramrod and Keith.

It had always been said, “Someday we’ll go to Europe, and we’ll all go and have some fun.” So when the time came, the band was determined to make it a family affair And it was, and it was fun. And it was work— the logistics of travel and gigging, multi-lingual press conferences, and live recording. Eventually there was some tension between the ‘workers’ and the ‘non-workers’, though not the same as that between the Bozos and the Bolos. Hypnocratically speaking, these divi sions and disharmonies come clear in the mix and the occa¬ sional wrinkle becomes just another fond memory.

true hypnocratic missionary to Bololand. And to look back, it appears evident that Bozo and Bolo knew themselves each the other's raison d’etre. Is hypnocracy not the aspiration to know what it is?

— Choirmaster

The 43 persons constituting the Grateful Dead's European tour apportioned them¬ selves for the most part between two buses which came to be known as the Bolo bus and the Bozo bus. The Bolo bus had a john in it and its seats faced for¬ ward. The Bozo bus had a refrigerator and some of its seats were installed fac¬ ing back, to accommodate four tables. And to look back. The subtle difference in character and import and atmosphere between the two omnibuses was so pro¬ foundly hidden and enigmatic that you could never possibly understand it. The

Bozos wore masks, and the Bolos showed their faces. At one time the Bozos staged a raid on the Bolo provisions ; at one time the Bolos staged a raid on the Bozo provisions.

One St. Dilbert defected from the Bozos and lived for a season with the Bolos. In view of his subsequent martyrdom, his penitence and reconciliation with the Bozos, it came to be said that he was a

The buses took us around Europe for two months and between gigs dropped us off to explore more obscure

byways. Bonnie Parker con¬ templates the cobblestones. Above Robert Hunter, Christie Bourne. Right, the crew.

“It’s a Musical Group,’’ I said

In Paris, Le Grand Hotel is a big deal. Across the street is the historic and opulent Opera House and running off in several directions are the city’s famous tree-lined avenues. In one corner of the massive structures is the Cafe de la Paix, the sidewalk meeting place in all those romantic Holly¬ wood flicks. Nearby are the shops of Saint Laurent and Dior

The hotel itself is so big you can get lost in the hallways. Single rooms start

at $35 a day and all are equipped with balconies and small automated refrigerators that dispense liquor and beer and cham¬ pagne at ridiculous prices. There are jewelry shops, restaurants, hair stylists, masseurs, art galleries, theatre booking agencies, shirtmakers. Everyone on the staff speaks fluent English. It is a popular favor¬ ite of visiting Americans.

“Are you still expecting the Grateful Dead?” I asked the reservations clerk.

“From America

“The Beautiful Dead, monsieur?”

“Uh ... not quite. The Grateful Dead.”

“Oui, monsieur Would you spell the surname, please.”

“D-e-a-d.”

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“It’s a musical group,” I said, filling in the silence. “From America.”

“We are expecting a 37-piece orchestra. ..”

Only the figure was incorrect. The Grateful Dead, half-way through a two-month tour of Europe,

99

numbered not 37 but, depending upon who you talked to, up to 48. There were seven musicians and singers, five managers, five office staff, ten equipment handlers (handling 15,000 pounds of equipment, not counting the 16-track recording system), four drivers and 1 7 assorted wives, old ladies, babies and friends. In its 100 years of catering to the tourist elite, Le Grand Hotel had never seen anything like it. — Jerry Hopkins (Rolling Stone)

Lead guitar & vocals Jerry Garda August I, 1942, Leo

Rhythm guitar & vocals Bob Weir

October 16, 1947, Libra Piano

Keith Godchaux July 19, 1948, Cancer

Drums

Bill Kreutzmann May 7, 1946, Taurus

Organ & vocals

Ron (Pigpen) McKernan

September8, 1945, Virgo

Bass & vocals Phil Lesh

March 15, 1940, Pisces

Songwriter Robert Hunter June 23, 1941, Cancer

Equipment

Rex, Ramrod, Winslow, Heard, Parish

Sound

Alembic Studios — Bob Matthews, Kidd, Raizene 16-track recording by Alembic Studios — Betty, Rosie, Furman

Stage Lights Candace Brightman,

Ben Haller

Light Show Joe’s Lights

Management Jon Mclntire, Alan Trist, Sam Cutler, Rock Scully, David Parker

Office

Annette, Bonnie, Dale

s Konsequenz

yiillionen-Dollar-Gruppen hatten es, rein finanziell gesehen, mit t einer Gruppe wie dser Grateful Dead, die den fur unmoglich 1 auf eigene Fupe zu stellen, eine eigene Plattenfirma aufzuziehen. oderals Gropfamilie, eine Gruppe mit Modellcharakter taten als ?e baltenden Ein — und Ausnahmen ( 1972: Einnahmen: 1 424 534 or Monatlich) kann noch niemand sagen, wohin die Reise geht. Grateful Dead ist wie eine irrsinnig schnelle Reise auf Messers r abkippen werden. Bisland sind wir oben geblieben." — Hans-

a month, two nights I’sWembiy Poo!

; a copy of their own Xeroxed newspaper the Bozos & Bobs News, had been slipped under their hotel room doors.

the desired promotion,

into Room 4600 about noon. This was the Office Suite, where Rosie pre¬ pared the Bozos & Bobs News and others manned

sound checks and trans¬ portation: laundry.

When the Dead :

concert in France in 1971, but never had they done The Grand Tour, long de rigueur for American bands anxious to improve Euro¬ pean record sales.

Outside Room 4600 the

day was warm, the sky a cloudless blue. In small groups, the Dead set out to see the sights.

“Today is a free day,” the Bozos & Bolos News had said. “In the evening, Kinney is hosting a dinner for all of us (and a few discreet press people) at a very fine res¬ taurant located in the Bois de Boulogne (the city park, but what a park!). It is called La Grande Cascade, and holy shit, is it ever neat!

You might even feel like dressing special for it, although you don't have to.

It’s just that kind of place. .

At 7 o’clock, Sam Cutler was telling the bus drivers he was sorry, but could they please do this one thing. . , yeh, he knew he’d given them the day off, but they could have the next two days off, there was just this one dinner . . and yeh, of course they could join the boys for the Royal Kinney Feast.

By eight the labor dis¬ pute’ had been settled and we were off by bus to Le Grande Cascade, a splendid wedding cake of a room

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with oval walls of glass that look out onto a lawn of blossoming chestnut trees. The dinner lasted three anc a half hours. (As long as a Grateful Dead concert set.) During the serving of liqueurs, which followed the Alsatian Riesling Grand' Reserve and the Chateau Meyney “Prieure Des Couleys” 1959 and the Champagne Mumm Cor-

Clockwise from left: our two European truck drivers; Ron Wickersham of Alembic; Sparky with Phil; Willy Legate, ancient and future ideologue; opposite, Bill ‘Kidd’ Candelario on the phones; Pigpen meets Europe.

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Office in San Rafael: Dale Franklin, David Parker, Jon Mdntire, Sam Cutler, Alan Trist, Bonnie Parker, Annette

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“We are not now, an anarchic community.

We’re a survival unit. We’re into survival. . .emotional, financial, physical and psychic survival. Perhaps the basis of the Dead’s popularity is that their stmggle is the stmggle of ordinary people to find pleasure in their everyday life on this planet. ’’

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What is the Dead’s PA system like 1

It varies from month to month, but basically it looks like this: Each of the four singers has a pair of Senn- heiser microphones, mounted one above the other about three inches apart. They’re hooked up out of phase, and this has the effect of cancelling out the background noise. Any sound that goes equally into both mikes disappears when the two signals are added together; so that all you have left is the sound of the voice, since the singer is only singing into one of them. This eliminates most of the feedback prob¬ lem, and it also cleans up the sound a great deal. In addition, there are four or five Electra-Voice RE- I5’s on the drums. Each of the mike signals, and the output from Keith Godchaux’s piano, is then split, with half the signal going to the monitor system and half to the PA.

Why use so much gear?

It’s not just for volume. Most groups could get three times the volume out of this equipment that the Dead does, but that would be a distorted sound. Not that the Dead are quiet; the sound pressure on stage has been measured at 127 db, and that’s loud. But it’s all clean sound, not noise. Most independent sound contractors, whose equipment you’ll see at a typical rock concert, are much more concerned with economics than with high fidelity. They charge so much to fill a given sized room with music, and the cheaper they can do it, the more profit they make.

The philosophy of the Dead’s system, on the other hand, is that since we have the technology to produce a very high quality of sound, we ought to use it. If you care about music, you’ve got to care about what the audience hears. — Healy

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Look over yonder, tell me what do you see?

10,000 people looking after me

I may be famous, or I may be no one

But in the end all the races I've run

Don't make my race run in vain

Seem like there's no tomorrow

Seem like all my yesterdays were filled with pain

There's nothing but darkness tomorrow

If you gonna do like you say you do

If you gonna change your mind and walk away

It don't seem to matter much anymore

Don't even ask me the time of day

'Cause I don't know

Don't make me live in this pain no longer

You know I'm gettin' weaker, not stronger

My poor heart can't stand much more

So why don't you just start talkin'

If you're gonna walk out that door, start walkin'

I'll get by somehow Maybe not tomorrow, but somehow

I know someday I will find someone

Who can ease my pain, like you once done Yes I know, we had a good thing going Seem like a long time Seem like a long time Like a long time Like a long time

Ron McKernan, January 1973

He Was a Friend of Mine

weird how it goes

with beginnings

& endings

again

this year

winter's over

end of the loco months

new green

appearing everywhere sweet lunacy birds & blue skies eternal snows glutting the rivers brown with earth whales starting north with precious young

& pigpen died my eyes

tequila-tortured 4 days mourning lost another fragment of my own self knowing the same brutal night-sweats & hungers he knew

the same cold fist that knocked him down now clutching furiously at my gut

shut my eyes

& see him standing

spread-legged

on the stage of the world

the boys prodding him

egging him on

he telling all he ever knew

or cared to know

mike hand cocked like a boxer’s

head throwed back stale whiskey blues many-peopled desolations neon rainy streets & wilderness of airports thousands maybe millions loved him were fired instantly into forty-five minutes of midnight hour

but when he died he was thin, sick, scared alone

like i said to laird i just hope he didn't hurt too much

weird

all these endings & beginnings pale voices of winter faces, rivers, birds, songs lunacies i wonder

how many seasons

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to the land

fresh winds turn

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we'll hear him sing

again

Robert M. Petersen

Sunshine, Joshua and Annabelle in the melon gar¬ den; Johnny and Joshua ham it up; Phil dwarfed by the Wall of Sound.

Rick Turner, Matthews and Betty and all of us would go out there to try building our own pickups, guitars and amplifiers. Garcia would come in there and tear his guitar apart in the afternoon. That was a great place. That was where the Alembic thing got formed, about 1970/71.

Garcia: That was fun. We got a lot done there. That’s where we smashed Weir’s Acoustic amplifier. We executed it, jumped up and down on it.

Healy: Weir had this horrible Acoustic amplifier that had a horn like the ones under the hood of cop cars. It was a big

Alembic

Healy: At that time we had moved out to Marin County. We had a practice hall up in northern Marin, near Hamilton Air Force Base. In this hall we had our prac¬ tice complex set up, and there was this old shed out back. That became the tech¬ nical electronics shop, where we would work on stuff. Owsley, Wick- ersham,

cabinet, and it had this horn right at the top, right about ear level. It was just mur¬ der, pain every time he'd play it. Your ears would fall right out of your sockets. So finally we couldn’t stand it anymore. One day we decided to sacrifice the amplifier, and we destroyed it right on the spot. That was great. We were seeing appen¬ dages of that nailed to the wall for months.

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On the first fret of Phil Lesh’s new bass two lightning bolts leap out of a block of lapis lazuli. On the third fret a Cosmic Serpent eats its tail; on the fifth, a cres¬ cent moon either waxes or wanes, depending on how you look at it; on the seventh, there is an alchemical salaman¬ der, and so on, up through the planet Saturn and the infinity sign (equals high A, apparently), all inlaid in mother of pearl. On the back of the neck, the god Osiris, the Judge of the Dead, points his divine flail and impassive eyes toward whoever holds the instrument. - John Christensen (Louisville Times)

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These drawings of the Dead’s sound system by Mary Ann Meyer appeared in Dead Head newsletters in 1973 and 1974, They show the metamor¬ phoses from a conventional PA system (below), arranged on towers to stage left and right, to the Wall of Sound, which moved the voice PA to stage center and integrated instrument and voice sound. Right, Donna Jean.

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The Dead’s speakers were usually arranged onstage like this: First of all, the monitor speakers for the musicians to hear them¬ selves. That’s four stacks of speakers — 12-inchers, five- inchers and a bunch of tweet¬ ers— with a total of 4,000 watts power.

Then there were the bass guitar extension speakers on either side of the stage, a vertical stack of a dozen 15-

That’s a lot of power. But you know, if you were to lis¬ ten to it side by side with another system with the same wattage, the kind of system a lot of promoters put up, the other system would probably sound louder. It’s because it would be put¬ ting a lot of power through low-budget equipment and

getting a lot of distortion. Distortion makes sound louder even though the power is the same.

Loud, distorted sound is fatiguing after a while. It’s because subconsciously you’re trying to disentangle the distortion from the music. And you’re straining to make out the words. This is why, for instance, we have two mikes for each singer, one three inches above the other. This system phases out any signal received by both the speakers, which cuts down on background noise and feedback.

— Dan Healy

Kumquat Mae

The Grateful Dead has started a family business in Marin, and it is as much a community center as a cash-and-carry enterprise. The wives of the band members and others have opened a store, Kumquat Mae, at 1218 San Anselmo Avenue, Sari Anselmo.

“We just got tired of sitting around all day while the men rehearsed,” said Kristine Healy (her old man is soundman Dan Healy).

“In the old days, before the Dead got rich, we were much more involved in things. When the band first went on tour in 1965, we all piled into a van and drove to New York. Now if the guys want to go some¬ where, they buy a plane ticket. The whole rock scene has changed. It's big business now. Four years ago we were doing things like the original Carousel Ballroom dances— and the ladies would take turns cooking. I made 40 spice cakes one day. Annie Cor¬ son ran the kitchen. She made real gourmet food

and we would serve this to all the people who came.

“So we were all staying home and watching the kids, sewing, playing base- ball.Then Susila Kreutzmann said, ‘Why don’t we have a store?’ and we ail really dug on the idea. It’s a way to extend our family trip to the outside world again.”

The store opened last September with ten dresses and not much else as stock. The women weren’t sure what it would turn into, so the name Kumquat Mae r V seemed about right They got the name from Mountain Girl.

Right now the store carries clothes of all sorts, furniture, jewelry, antiques, paintings, sculptures, and home-blown glass. Over one hundred artists and craftsmen have brought in their work since the store opened.

and craftsmen have brought in their work since the store opened.

Much of the merchandise reflects the store’s connec¬ tion with the Grateful Dead. A table near the cash register is covered with Dead t-shirts and records, and one window is plas¬ tered with concert posters. A large photograph of the group is promi¬ nently placed on a wall. Joie Gage, who outfits musi¬

cians, offers clothes made to order through the store. Birgitta (“no last name, I’m 100 percent Birgitta”), makes intricate crocheted dresses, coats and vests. “It takes me a month to make a dress, and I get attached to them. Here I can get to know the people who will be wearing my stuff, so it’s alright.” The store also car¬ ries fabric dyed by Cour¬ tenay, who designed the speaker covers for the band.

“We don’t see this place as just a store. We want it to

be more a T . .

center of activity. If some¬ one is looking to buy a 1959 Volvo stick-shift, they should stop in and ask us if we have any leads. We couldn’t have opened the store without that kind of help ourselves.”

Kumquat Mae includes a free store, which has a good selection of clothing, toys, records and furniture. “We have a lot of projects going," said Kristine, “and the more we do, the more we want to do.” — Merrill Sanders (Rolling Stone '

1

Rocking is Not a Chair Thing for Sam & Ethel Tessel

Like whitecaps in a sea of blue, 71- year-old Sam Tessel and his wife, Ethel, stood out as they sat among hundreds of the denim generation who had gathered for the ABC 'In Concert' taping late one March evening at Brooklyn's Bananafish Gardens.

There they were — the oldest hip¬ pies in the land, as they freely called themselves — attract¬ ing no more attention from the audience than the average teenage rock freaks around them. It was soon apparent that the ana¬ chronism was only visual, how¬ ever, for the Tessels are genuine rock enthusiasts.

"You know, rock isn't something you pick up fast," remarked Mr. Tessel. "It took us a full two years before we got a taste for it." Hasten¬ ing the trip, no doubt, was their grandson Mickey Hart, well-known rock drummer who has played with the Dead and the Riders.

Hart wrote a song about

Grandma Tessel and the cookies she brings to the groups she visits. The Tessels were often in the audi¬ ence at the Fillmore East and are known throughout the rock world. Seated a few rows behind Grandma Tessel was a long-haired rock fan wearing a t-shirt which read 'Grandma's Cookies', the name of the popular Hart song.

Mrs. Tessel waited anxiously to see one of her favorites, Mar- madulce (John Dawson), the lead vocalist of the Riders. "There he is!" she said. "They're respectable, nice boys, looking for love and attention, and we understand them." She paused and added,

"Poor Pigpen, did you know him? ” and then remained silent. Ron (Pig¬ pen) McKernan, a founding member of the Grateful Dead, was found dead in his apartment on March 8. He was 27. But her lamen¬ tation was soon forgotten as the music of the Riders filled the room, and the 'In Concert' taping went on. -TV Facts

Later, Kumquat Mae went uptown and moved to Mill Valley, and was renamed Rainbow Arbor. Opposite, Birgitta and Kristine and some of the children of the Kumquat childcare center. Left, Jon Goodchild and Virginia Clive-Smith, two designers at work at Rolling Stone.

Bottom, some of the band wore Nudie suits for only one gig in 1972, designed and made by Manuel of Nudie’s western outfitters in Hol¬ lywood. Nudie had made Elvis Presley’s famous gold lame suit in the ’50s, and by the time Jon Mdntire com¬ missioned him to make suits, first for the New Riders and then for the Dead, Nudie had oufitted a generation of Country & Western stars and Hollywood celebrities.

back in Marin. If that weren’t enough, they’re also - are you ready? - a band. The Dead have been coaching them on instruments, and the New Riders' rehear¬ sal hall sometimes pulses with the rock & roll sound of Sparky and the ABs - Sparky and the Ass Bites from Hell. They’re Dan on lead guitar, Rex on bass, Steve on drums, Danny on piano and Sparky on harmonica - with Sam Cutler sometimes sitting in on rhythm guitar - and as singer, a friend of theirs, Darlene Di Domenico.

“We’re part of the Dead,” Steve Parish had said. “You really put your whole heart into the system, right from the vib¬ ration of a guitar string out to the back of the hall." - Charles Perry (Rolling Stone)

Sparky and the Ass Bites From Hell

“Right now, somehow we’ve ended up successes. But this ain’t exactly what we had in mind, 12,000-seat halls and big bucks. We’re trying to redefine. We’ve played every conceivable venue and it hasn’t been it. What can we do that's more fun, more interesting?”

For the tours of small halls, the sound equipment will be cut back from 23 tons to seven, and modularized so that a crew of two or three men could set it up with fork-lifts, mounting it above and behind the band instead of on both sides.

As for what happens to the crew then, the Dead karass will provide. The Dead are setting the quippies up in a company called Hard Truckers to build speaker cabinets with the rock & roll tour in mind, cabinets that won’t fall apart like com¬ mercial pressboard models.

So the quippies are a company as well as a crew, like so many of the Dead family

Your basic original quippie was Ramrod. He’s from Pendleton, Oregon, and he was with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. He got his name because he was an expert at loading watermelons, so he got in charge of loading the equip¬ ment. He held it together by himself for a long time. Also for a while he was co-manager of the group with Scully.

Ramrod brought in some more guys from Pendleton. One was Rex, Rex Jackson. He does the piano now, and spare parts. You gotta have spare parts for everything on the road.

Actually the original guy from Pendle¬ ton was Johnny Hagen, who was the brother of Kesey's buddy Mike Hagen.

He came on when the Dead asked for somebody from the Kesey bus. He left during the Lenny Hart period and later came back to be quippie for the New Rid¬ ers. All the New Riders’ crew is from Pendleton.

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id ^ Joe Winslow is the other guy from Pendleton. He's in charge of the PA for the left side of the stage - 1 have the right side. And he's a driver with the 18-foot van that carries the lighting equipment.

Then there's Dan Healy, who mixes and oversees the PA. He's been around a long time and he knows a lot about the system. And Danny Rifkin has been around for a long time. He handles mikes and cables onstage.

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Sparky Raizene came to us from Alem¬ bic. He's in charge of the monitors, the vocal speakers on the stage for the musi¬ cians. Then there's Kidd, he goes way back to the Pendleton period, but he actu¬ ally grew up in the Mission district of San Francisco. He works in the mixing booth out on the stage floor, a hundred yards from the stage. And there’s Larry, and the drivers, Moe and Jimmy, who drive the semi truck.

And there’s the lighting crew under Ben Haller; Bill Schwarzbach and Tom Shoesmith. They all come from Fillmore East. And the lights are designed by Candace. She came on with us for the Europe tour. - Steve Parish

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Out of Town Tours & Friends

Booking agents for the Grateful Dead and New Riders of the Purple Sage in early 1970. Standing, from left, is first an unknown person, then Julie Haas, Zero Nylin, Rita Gentry-Tarrini, Ken Beals, Wally Haas, Sam

Cutler, Jim Preston, Jeff Tor¬ rens and Linda Gonzales. Sitting, from left, is the ubiquitous Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Bruce Baxter, Gail Hel- lund, Frances Carr, Jackrabbit Forchette and, last but not least, ‘Mustang’ Sally Dryden.

I’ll have to take steps.’ Well, I he did it another night and f got me ^teird another night

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to boot. So, I started throwing him out at night

■ to see his way rds being a little more tarted letting him jring the day. He lived in the water heater and used to make all kinds of noises ... he would hoot and screech and all that kind of stuff. He had learned to operate the water heater over the years so that he could make it sound any way he wished. I would sit in the living room playing my songs, and as long as I was playing my songs he’d be quiet, but when I stopped, he’d start working the heater again. It was really strange." — (Rock 6/30/73)

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Weir decided the time was by using that exorcism cere- right to go ahead and mony That worked

record his own album, Ace. “3fcn I felt that hemfeht

The first step toward? the making of the album was for Weir who is admittedly something less than a pro¬ lific composer a retirement to the obscure Wyoming cabin of a close friend, John Barlow. “Nobody was around,” insists Weir “ex¬ cept a ghost, and I didn’t care.”

“Did you get any songs from him?” asks wide-eyed Warner/Reprise press rep¬ resentative Garry George.

“Not from the ghost, no, but from Barlow, yeah.

No, the ghost and I worked something out,” says Bob quite seriously. “I don’t know if you need to print this, but anyway, I learned a real simple, temporary exorcism ceremony . . . which I had to perform twice a day in order to keep him out for twenty- four hours. Once around sunrise, and once around sunset.

“He’d been scaring my dog, and dogs don’t like ghosts, so the dog had shit all over the place. The ghost tried to get into my head once around the time I was waking up, and that was a real touchy scene. I don’t know if you’ve ever had an experience with a ghost, but it’s awful, ‘cause ghosts aren’t the best things to deal with. They try to get into people, andit’s not very hard to get them to leave a man alone, but they scare the shit out of animals.

Particularly dogs, and so , V my dog got the shit scared out of him . . .literally. I was up in the middle of the night cleaning that up, with the ■ ‘ '

dog completely out of his mind berserk. The first time the ghost did that, I tried to reason with him saying, ‘Now listen, you don’t go weirding out my dog and I won’t do any¬ thing, but if you do it again,

Opposite: Courtenay opening the mandala; Flying Amini.

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Gathering Together

Robert Hunter, chief lyricist of the Grateful Dead and president of Ice Nine Publishing Company which pub¬ lishes the Grateful Dead's songs, chose the name from Kurt Vonnegut's novel, 'Cat's Cradl e'. The story revolves around the appearance in the world of a new form of water, Ice 9, which once released from its vial would crystallize all forms of water on the planet to permanent ice! Perhaps in a related metaphor, Ice Nine's logo is the I Ching hexagram for 'Gathering Together' changing to 'Holding Together'.

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The Grateful Dead Makes a Real Good Hamburger

In the realms of hip legend, astral pleasures, rock and roll and business as usual, the Grateful Dead stand higher than any other vete¬ ran American rock band.

They began in San Fran¬ cisco forming into an elec¬ tric rock blues/country band at a time when America was waking up to the reality of the transition I from beatnik style to ‘hip¬ pie’ consciousness. The Grateful Dead were the prime movers of that transi tion in the musical field. Alerted to the potential of the ‘new rock’ by bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, they took the evolution of that form several steps further by opening up traditional structures and standard ‘tight’

rock forms with extended improvisation unconnected to jazz, and an acute sense of what it took to move people deeply.

They were, in fact, exploring virgin territory and they were monumen¬ tally successful. Today you can ask any reasonably enlightened follower of rock about his or her first experience of a Dead con¬ cert and receive a reply

couched not in terms of how good it was to boogie, but how staggering it was to come suddenly upon an experience of such great sensual power The Dead had learned how to con¬ ceive and perform a music which often induced some¬ thing closely akin to the psychedelic experience; they were and are experts in the art and science of showing people another world, or a temporary altering (raising) of world consciousness.

It sounds pseudo- mystical pretentious

perhaps, but the fact is that it happens, and it is inten¬ tional. The consciousness- altering power of a very good rock band is one con¬ siderable part of what rock means; what sets the Dead apart from other members of the rock elite (an obvious example being the Rolling Stones) is that they have always used their power;

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carefully, to spread positive energy.

Their sound is unique, completely unmistakable, something soft and lustrous even at its most hard- driving moments. It owes a great deal to years of elec¬ tronic fiddling which have culminated in the most polished, custom-fitted and dynamically ‘clear’ sound system in current use. They are perhaps the most tech¬ nically proficient and musi¬ cally integrated band in the world, and it shows in their frequent concerts and on Europe 72. — Patrick Cann (TheNewYorkTimes, 3/1 1/73)

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St Dilbert The Obscure (2000 - ?)

had asked Rakow to explore the possibilities. A slick financial appliance around the Dead’s funky household (he had come to the band in the mid-’60s by way of Wall Street, where he’d been a whiz-kid arbitrageur), Rakow proceeded to investigate, researching the financial state-

and distribution systems of the major record companies. On the Fourth of July 1972, Rakow ’s vision became a 93-page report known as the ‘So What Papers’ (prob¬ ably derived from that awful cosmic revelation, ‘So What?’). The Dead didn’t go for Rakow’s initial pro¬ posal as submitted. Maybe some of the more conserva¬ tive guys in the organization didn’t like his idea of the Dead’s records

being distributed by Good Humor trucks. (Actually, it sounded pretty good to me — ‘Here comes Uncle John’s van, buy his vinyl sides.’)

The Grateful Dead had firmly decided to have their own record label. In April of ’7 3 we put together a record company crew that would be administered by Rakow as president and general manager; with me responsi¬ ble for recording produc¬ tion coordination and

national promotion, Andy Leonard handling manufac¬ turing and advertising, Greg Nelson covering distribu¬ tion and sales, and Joshua Bardo doing national radio promotion. After taking over the Dead’s old office, which looked like it had been transplanted from Haight-Ashbury to San Rafael, the new Grateful Dead Records office staff was rounded out with Jeanne Jones as accountant and Barbara Whitestone and Carol Miller managing the office.

Despite their reputation as a group of guys who liked to take risks, Rakow and the Dead decided that rather than jeopardize Grateful Dead Records, which was co-owned by all the voting members of the organization, they would create a second label to handle the more financially dubious solo projects mem¬ bers of the Dead were

It was on the road — Highway I between the rural West Marin County towns of Bolinas and Olema — in March 1972 that Rakow had flashed on a whole independent record system that could work for the Dead. After six years with Warner Bros., working with guys in suits who never quite understood them, the Dead had been considering dec¬ laring indepen¬ dence, and

interested in pursuing. Thus was born Round Records.

Rakow financed the

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start-up of Grateful Dead Records and Round Records by selling foreign manufacturing and distribu¬ tion rights to Atlantic Records for $300,000. He also set up a financial umbrella in which the First National Bank of Boston would approve and under¬ write the 18 independent record distributors we had chosen to use throughout the country.

Returning home after a summer of flexing their musical muscles, the Dead had a bunch of juicy new tunes ripe for their first offering on their own new label. And in August of 73 the band, family and crew moved into the Record Plant studios in Sausalito to start work on Woke of the Flood. Around this same time Robert Hunter was at Mickey’s barn recording tracks on our first Round Records release, Tales of the Great Rum Runners.

From the beginning we were determined to make our albums of the highest quality vinyl and apply our own personal quality con¬ trol in all the phases of record production. We commissioned one of my favorite artists, Rick Griffin, to do both initial releases of Grateful Dead and Round Records— Wake and Rum Runners. Rick knew from the biblical story of The Flood (Genesis, chapter 8, verse 7) that Noah had sent forth a

raven. But the raven he rendered on the back cover looked more like a crow to Rakow: He knew that either we’d make a good show of our first independent re¬ leases or we’d be eating that silly bird.— Steve Brown (The Golden Road )

On these pages, the band’s first two releases on Grateful Dead Records, and the first on Round Records, Hunter’s Tales of the Great Rum Run¬ ners. Opposite, Ron Rakow; and left, Pete Morino of Warner Brothers; Steve and Ramrod. Rick Griffin also designed for the Dead, pro¬ ducing this cover for Hunter, and Wake of the Flood.

Dear Fellow Dead Head,

There are two reasons for writing to you now; first to give you the earliest specific information on our new record distribution pro¬ gram; secondly to ask you to join us as part of our eyes, ears and feet on the ground to keep the scene straight locally.

We've decided to produce, manufacture and distribute our records ourselves. The band today finished the recording of an all new studio album (been a long time) called Wake of the Flood. The album will be made from the highest quality vinyl available, which has the best technical properties. In addition, it will be heavier (weigh more, that is) than most albums available in this country. It will be handled locally through independent record distributors and should be avail¬ able everywhere.

This adventure is a jumping off point to get us in a position of greater contact with our people, to put us more in command of our own s!iip, and for unspoken potentials for the 'far out'.

If you're interested in getting involved, drop us a line here. In any case you'll enjoy the record — it's dynamite!

Backstage at the Keystone, Berkeley, during the record¬ ing of Live at Keystone with Merl Saunders and Jerry Gar¬ cia, July 1973. Inset, Joshua Rakow, Annabelle Garcia. Above, Watkins Glen.

There were two litters of puppies at the ranch — a total of 22 puppies. The ran¬ chers had not been keeping up their fences and the pup¬ pies started wandering off the property. The sheriff called one day and told Johnny D to meet him at the front gate. There was the Humane Society truck backed up to the gate —filled with all our dogs, and a few others — dead. The sheriff said he had to shoot them all — but in fact all the ran¬ chers had ambushed the dogs down at the creek. The story made the wire services, and justice was served at the dinner table.

Where Are These Men's Mustaches?

Around this time a couple of gigs occurred at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. One was a Seastones show with Phil Lesh and Ned Lagin's electronic music. Another was a benefit for Sat San Tokh's ashram with Jerry and Mickey. They hadn't seen each other for about a year. Mickey got up and decided to dress in all white and completely shave off his beard. Garcia, unknown to Mickey had gotten up, decided to dress in all black and shave his face. They met at the photo session and were totally blown away. — Jerilyn

Miss Rhonda on her Pala- mino. Acacia, Nicki, Rock and Sage Scully in the pony cart on their ranch at Forestville. Opposite from top, Glups, Crash, John ‘Marmaduke’ Dawson of the New Riders, and Annette with Che.

Dave Torbert, bass player

with the New Riders. The most popular tour poster from Germany.

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On the table for people who came to the booth already feeling a little strange, we had a mirrored infinity box containing a lovely two-headed skull-and-roses sculpture by David Best. It was a unique experience, to say the least, manning this kaleidoscopic wonder throughout the 74 tours.

Giving out posters and postcards of all our records, signing up people on our ‘junk mail' list and getting direct feed¬ back about the Dead and their records seemed an appropriate and friendly way of doing Grateful Dead business. Most rewarding to me was meeting all the wonderful people at Dead concerts all across North America and Europe. I was never in need of any booth handling help, setting up or taking down. Some Dead Heads would follow along and help for a whole regional tour. Local Dead Heads would turn me on to their scene and their town. I've often felt that the best ‘prod¬ uct’ that the Dead have produced has been their fans. - Steve Brown (The Golden Road )

Around this time the band decided to plug in more directly to all the Dead Heads. The Dead Freaks Unite campaign, introduced inside the ‘

Roses’ LP in 71, had been a tre¬ mendous success - we’d built up a mailing list of 30,000 names - and we knew a direct mailing list and newsletter served as an effective communication link with the Dead Heads. To reach even more people, we decided after Wake Of The Flood to send a Grateful Dead Records promotion booth on tour with the band. Our gambit worked: We signed up another 50,000 on the 74 tours.

The booth was designed by Michael Gaspars of Bolinas and consisted of two pairs of 4 x 8-foot folding plywood panels, each with a custom Courtenay Pollock tie-dye representing one of the four sea¬ sons. A 12-foot table in front of the booth was also trimmed in Courtenay dyes. (Many Dead Heads know Courtenay’s work from the '81, ’82 and '83 Greek shows, for which he created the stage backdrops. He also made the Dead's famous early 70s amp covers.) Signs over the booth were made by Kelley & Mouse that read: ‘FREE STUFF' and ‘GRATE¬ FUL DEAD COMMERCIAL MESSAGE.’

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Send news to the hermit sudden departure seized us (being full of hours) to a distant opening of springs

Today our tongue-fingers make resonance of species back into the white bird-pecked sea

Urobouros is Hungry

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We're growing! — some 30 people now on the payroll. We're affiliated with Alembic in San Francisco on design, research and development of equipment and re¬ cording. Our rehearsal hall in San Rafael

equipment maintenance// lo ve ! M o¬ ment. Our office here manages, con¬ trols finance, accounting, insur¬ ance and the like, and Ice Nine Pub¬ lishing Company (copyrights, li¬ censes, songbooks) and Dead Heads.

Out of Town booking agency and Fly By Night travel agency, two outgrowth of our scene, are in the building.

By the nature of the beast, the energie over a hundred directly enter our endeavor. Urobouros turns his circles. St. Dilbert is a bombast. Let's surface the moon with an electrostatic spherical tidal spatial counter-entropic sound system. Energy spoken here.

On earth, our overhead expense is $100,000 a month. In 1972 we grossed $1,424,543.

Seventy percent of this income came from gigs, and 30% from record royal¬ ties. Gigs offer the only means to earn more money when it is needed to maintain our operation in all its particulars. We cannot sell more records at will, but we can go on the road, within the limits of energy: so that we must play larger halls, with more equipment, and a bigger organization, requiring more gigs.

St. Dilbert calls this fellow 'Uro¬ bouros', and he's a good trip, but he

has amindof his own . . .

We like a variety of concert situa¬ tions. Ambiance comes in different sizes.

like a small hall, and so do you, and an outdoor gig in the sun, and a

6,000 capacity aren't sports arenas with novel acoustic and environ¬ mental puzzles).

Urobouros is hungry. How do we control him? We've planned for a year to form our own record

company so as to be more on top of the marketing process, package and promote our product in an honest and human manner, and pos¬ sibly stand aside from the retail list-price inflation spiral while retaining more of the net dollar, (keep a tight ship). If the records cover a larger share of the overhead, then the concert situation becomes

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possible, in the direction we see to go, now. We want this freedom to achieve gig va-

What else might we do? Your mail is an energy input, 400 letters a week that we tack on bulletin boards and read aloud and pass back and forth. This flow enters the common pool of plans and theories, ideas and speculations

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Dead Heads Newsletter-1973.

The Dead After a Decade

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For the estimated 50,000 people who flocked to Golden Gate Park’s Lindley Meadows on September 28th (including a smattering who flew in from as far away as New York), it was a nearly perfect flashback to the ‘60s, a Sunday afternoon with the latest incarnations of the Jeffer¬ son Airplane and — surprise - the good ol’ Grateful Dead in their first public per¬ formance in nearly a year.

The concert also coincided with the beginning of the Dead’s second decade as a musical entity, business enterprise and, significantly, near legendary social institution. The Dead's extended family, perhaps 200 in all, has survived a peculiar saga. Somehow the ‘karass’ has man¬ aged to play out most of the variations on the themes of growth, change, jealousy, loyalty and loves won and lost, and still emerge with its collective sense of humor and vision intact.

“It feels pretty purposeful," said Weir, “much more so than our first ten. Before, if we ever had any guiding philosophy, it was just to go with it. Instead of making decisions, we just let it happen. And what it culminated in, professionally, was hugeness - the Oakland Coliseum¬ sized places and all those monster rooms. So the first real decision we made was not to go on with it ‘cuz it isn’t really what we want. We’ll still gig together in the future as the occasions arise, depending on how things strike us - as long as we don't have to willfully step back into our old roles. Now that we’ve all formed little bands, each of us can individually start that climb again. Because really, there’s no place else to go from here if you’re a musician. But at least we’re going back to the comfortable part of it, little theat¬ ers and clubs that are on a human level.” -JohnGrissim (Rolling Stone, 11/2/75)

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Chesley Milikin and Nicki Scully and, bottom, Ambro¬ sia’s birthday party at Boyd Park in San Rafael. Kristine always gave the best parties for the kids. Right, the Great American String Band, with John Kahn and Maria Muldaur, on stage at The Dead’s Santa Barbara gig in May 1974. The popular Bluegrass album, Old & In The Way, has become the biggest selling bluegrass album to date.

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We falter and fall away, nothing holds. Political action is impossible. All we are left with are our arts. I propose we turn our tools away from the service of all but their muses.

Great deeds are needed.

It is time to retreat. It is time to advance backwards.

No longer are there any choices. What a rehef.

People tire and you can only do one thing so long. The band is tired of touring for ten years and needs to take a year and go fishing, because they really do. They all have projects they wish to pursue and new mate¬ rial to write. Anyone who does not want them to do it is want¬ ing them to drop dead on the spot through a collective wear¬ iness which only a total change can combat.

We mean to keep an office together during the vacation, but revenues will be slight.

The Dead Heads list has been turned over to Grateful Dead Records to maintain and to let you know what they're doing — so please be patient if it takes a while to get a response of some sort.

Each of the departments of the Grateful Dead must now become self supporting in order for the organism as a whole to remain healthy. There is a scheme to keep the overall structure intact so that there is something to take care of the details as the show goes back on the road. It is the fine response of Dead Heads over the years which leads us to conclude that there is some¬ thing worth maintaining and that is what we're up to. - Robert Hunter ( Dead Heads Newsletter)

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If there is any one objective that emerges from the welter of purposeful activity - of documentaries, distribution deals, solo albums and new bands - it’s the Grateful Dead’s eventual liberation from the eco¬ nomic necessity of always having to be the Grateful Dead. “I think we've got a chance,” Weir remarked, “of establishing ourselves to the point where the Grateful Dead will be self-sustaining for as long as we're into it. We’ll be able to keep going and to fulfill ourselves as a group. Maybe by the time we’re old and gray people will still be listening to us."

For his part, 'Cash Flow’ Ron Rakow is not about to wait that long: “With everyone out making a living on his own, the Dead will achieve the status of being

patronized by its members. And that’s when I think they’re gonna do their farth¬ est out stuff yet. We’re already working on some killer ideas - flying ballrooms and holographic reproduction. Really out there. We’re even looking at a concert structure that Buckminster Fuller is doing some design work on right now. I can't give you details but it’s gonna be sensa¬ tional, really transcendental.” - John Grissim ( Rolling Stone, 1 1 /6/75)

Since the Winteriand finale, a full-time staff of four editors has worked in the Mill Valley film house of the Dead’s production com¬ pany, appropriately named Round Reels. Thus far 125 hours of raw footage have been meticulously screened, matched to a soundtrack and cataloged.

“We used as many as nine crews, each with a camera¬ man, an assistant camera¬ man, a sound man, a loader and a runner;” Rakow said. “Together with supervisory personnel we hired 46 people on 1 1 days notice. But by the third night we were all a unit. We loved working together And good cinematographers like Al Maysle and Kevin Keating. And Don Lenzer — he shot a lot of Janis and Woodstock. I knew it was gonna be good when Lenzer went up to Phil as he was tuning his bass. Somehow Don’s camera motor registered on the amp through Phil’s bass pickup, and the two guys started this raving, scream¬ ing dance together Phil’s personality, which is incredi¬ bly bizarre, came tumbling out at this joyous expres¬ sion of new weirdness.”

( Rolling Stone, 1 1 /6/75)

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Opposite, three solo albums on Round Records. Above, Calico of the Hog Farm with Joey; Keith; Donna and Zion.

Bob Weir and members of Kingfish who played at Kit Tobin’s coming out party in San Francisco.

"To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the uni¬ verse. And I think every human being should be a conscious tool of the uni¬ verse. That's why I think it's important to get high. I'm not talking about unconscious or zonked out. I'm talking about being fully conscious."

— Garcia

In January of ’75 the band was ready to hole up daily at Weir’s studio and put together a new album more or less from scratch. They had given themselves the luxury of retiring from the road in ’75, and each band member seemed to be hungry to sink his creative teeth into this new recording which would become Blues For Allah.

The evolution of the songs for Blues For Allah was a fascinating and at times tedious process - working and reworking each segment of each musical piece over and over again. So it was with some dubi¬ ous relief that the band took a busman's holiday to rehearse for a few days with other musician friends for the upcoming SNACK benefit concert at Kezar Stadium in SF. Working with some of their new material, they jammed with David Crosby, John Cipollina, Merl Saunders and Ned Lagin. Since none of the new pieces had lyrics yet, they were all rehearsed and performed at SNACK only instrumentally. As the Allah tracks became keeper takes, lyric sessions were held and the musical tunes emerged as songs. There was no doubting that this was going to be a strong album for the for the Dead. - Steve Brown (The Golden Road)

7. WITH FUTURE EVENTS HAVING

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"Man needs nothing so much as the dance ... All hw^i which history reports to us, all mistakes of politics . . . result from . . derstood" (Moliere). Is it sad to be one's own enemy? ... all that super-star hype. Don't , the shuffle. If I don't hear the Grateful Dead at least once a day I go into withdrawals. Will 7 come play our softball team? Have you sold out? Whoever wants to be bom must first destrV7 world. The egg is the world. Their music is hair. We know each other. Remember, the truth hun if you got any feelings to begin with. Music to remember innumerable lifetimes. The showboat lifted into a brightening atmosphere — orange sun across numerous heads regathering from muddy drizzle fallen for 2-3 days. In case you are planning to rip-off a starship, I do simple veteri¬ nary medicine. What is hypnocracy? Who is St. Dilbert? Run twice as fast as you can run. I'm doing my best not to be a fan. Am I writing tq a computer or real people? Develop wrap-around concert sound. Get a banjo or fiddle player. Form a symphony orchestra from Dead Heads. Make Coke commercials or an underarm thing. Gibran, "Yet unless the exchange be in love and kindly justice it will but lead some to greed and others to hunger." The physical newcomers can go — cool, cool —but they cjpn't dig die head. Is this bad? I don't know, do you think so? It's impossible to ask any more of any musicians than what you've given us. Release more singles. I love you.

(From Dead Heads Letters)

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With Mickey, Arshad, Billy, Ramrod and Larry outside the Barn studio, and, on the left, with Robbie Taylor and Healy in the control room. There was hardly time to leave the property. Every¬ thing came to the ranch —

groceries, people, entertain¬ ment, work. Once, I didn’t go off the property for at least a year! I maintained the mothership. I was Wendy to the Lost Boys. I was the Big Mamu. I kept it together on the home scene. — Jerilyn

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Over a period of four years, Grateful Dead and Round Records had put out no fewer than 14 albums, and Round Reels a feature-length concert film. It had been an incredible flood of experiences goin’ down the road with the Dead. Garcia was spending his time overseeing the film project - when he wasn't working on Blues for Allah or playing with the Garcia Band or producing albums with some of his bluegrass heroes.

The Good Old Boys sessions at Mickey’s studio were a special time for all con¬ cerned, as Garcia had a chance to pro¬ duce artists he had long admired: Don Reno (banjo), Chubby Wise (fiddle), Frank Wakefield (mandolin) and David Nelson (guitar). Two days of pure bluegrass heaven for all of us, but especially for Garcia. Lotsa laughin’ n’ apickin’. It was a good ol’ time. - Steve Brown (The Golden Road)

tremendous light to it. The stories are so great, great ideas. Land of the Incas and all those incredible Beagle Boys plots.

Relix: Yeah, you never forget it.

Garcia: “No man is truly happy unless he can do what he likes to once in a while. I like to dive into my money bin, burrow around in it like a gopher jump up and down in it like a porpoise, and throw it in the air and let it fall on my head." —John Hall (Relix, Nov-Feb 77178)

Weir: “You can’t do that, they'll bust you." “That’s what I want." She wanted to get busted so they’d have her picture in the newspaper

Relix: I thought she was

A good night is effectively invisible. A good night is like no nigh tat all. A good nigh t is when you never think there's anything funny every¬ thing happens smoothly and you hear everything perfectly and effortlessly On a good night everything is easy from our point of view. Because that's when we're most open to everything else. You're not hung up on your own axe and the sound of it. The vocal monitors might be weird or anything. All those things are Uttle stumbling blocks that start to call your attention. Ideally that space is best when you aren 't thinldng at I don 't know whether that's a good show. People might be bored stiff we feel great. It might be that the continuous struggle and ad¬ justment provides a lot of interest. —Garcia

You dive into a rock concert, it surrounds you; and if you value your health and your sanity, you don’t fight it. You swim with the cur¬ rent. That is one reason why rock ‘n roll shattered so many heads whenit first exploded over the airwaves. Those intensely human tunes, love songs and blues howls, boosted to jet decibel through the mysterious power of the elec¬ tron, resonated with more creative energy than any one person could logi¬ cally handle. A sohd dose of it could drive you out of your meticulous mind, free you for a time from the tyranny of your per¬ sonal concerns and convince you with its driving twelve-tone litany that no matter what you thought you thought, here was something. . . more. Fora whole genera¬ tion of skeptical non-believers, it was their first taste of communion. - Enrique Pasa (Sun, Austin , Texas. 3/26/76)

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I started out as a rudimental drummer. I played jazz, big bands, etc. My teacher, Alla Rahka (India's foremost tabla master), turned my head around. He's one of the finest rhythmic minds in the world. I mean, his musical tradition has been around for thousands of years. It is the most sophisticated rhythmic culture on this earth. They made me feel the real pulse; how to divide and play with time on a friendly level, without abusing or disrespecting it. — Hart

In 1968 Mickey Hart was studying at the Ali Akbar College of Music with Tabla Master Shankar Gosh. He would work on compositions with Shankar which included Rhythmic Cycles of 4, 6, 16, 5 St 7 and take these teachings to Bill Kreutzmann. Mickey and Bill were instructing Shankar on traps in exchange for Tabla lessons and would combine their knowledge in com¬ positions of East and West.

In September of 1968 the Grateful Dead played a concert at Berkeley Community Theater. Before the concert the drummers had planned a surprise for the audience. During part of 'Alligator7, the Grateful Dead amps rolled apart and two risers rolled on stage between Mickey and Bill. On them were Shankar Gosh and Vince Delgado, a fine dumbec player and a student of Shankar's. The four men sat and fixed compositions together, taking a rhythmic journey through many 'Tals' or time cycles. Ah Akbar Kahn composed the closing composition for them and when they were finished, the applause was deafening. Shankar left Adi Akbar College in 1969 and returned to India, at this time Mickey also left to pursue electronic music.

In 1970 Mickey was introduced to Zakir Hussain, son of Mickey's mentor, Alla Rahka. Mickey met Alla Rahka in 1967 and had given himself over to the teachings of Indian rhythms during their first meeting. He subsequently became Shankar's student in California. Zakir had come from India to replace Shankar as Ah Akbar's personal drummer as Tabla instruc¬ tor for the school. Quite a job for a man of 21, but Zakir had been studying since 8 years of age — he came weh prepared.

In 1971 Zakir began to select some of his advanced students for a school orchestra of only rhythm instruments. This was called Tal Vadyum Rhythm Band and they performed once a quarter at the Adi Akbar Kahn College of Music. This was the beginning of the Diga Band. In April, 1975, the Jefferson Starship asked them to play a concert with them and the Sons of Champlin. The band decided to play and also to change their name for public performance. The name chosen was Diga Rhythm Band. The concerts at Winterland in San Francisco on May 16 & 17, 1975 were successful. Alla Rahka was there both nights and was very pleased. Bill Graham was elated and the musicians from the other groups were very receptive to the music

"You have to look for archetypal