Episode 165: “Dark Star” by the Grateful Dead

A history of folk music in 500 songs

by Andrew Hicky.

Episode 165:

Darkstar

by The Grateful Dead.

Before we begin, as we're tuning up, as it were, I should mention that this episode contains discussions of alcoholism, drug addiction, racism, non-consensual drugging of other people, and deaths from drug abuse, suicide and car accidents.

As always, I try to deal with these subjects as carefully as possible, but if you find any of those things upsetting, you may wish to read the transcript rather than listen to this episode, or skip it altogether.

Also, I should note that the members of the Grateful Dead were much freer with their use of swearing in interviews than any other band we've covered so far, and that makes using quotes from them rather more difficult than with other bands, given the limitations of the rules imposed to stop the podcast being marked as adult.

If I quote anything with the word I can't use here, I'll give a brief pause in the audio, and in the transcript I'll have the word in square brackets.

All this happened more or less.

In 1910, T.S.

Eliot started work on the love song of J.

Alfred Prufrock, which at the time was deemed barely poetry, with one reviewer imagining Elliot saying, I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head and call it the love song of J.

Alfred Prufrock.

It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature.

In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse Five or The Children's Crusade, A Duty Dance with Death, a book in which the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unstuck in time and starts living a non-linear life, hopping around between times, reliving his experiences in the Second World War and future experiences up to 1976 after being kidnapped by beings from the planet Tralfamador.

Or perhaps he had flashbacks and hallucinations after having a breakdown from PTSD.

It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature or of science fiction, depending on how you look at it.

In 1953, Theodore Sturgeon wrote More Than Human.

It is now considered one of the great classics of science fiction.

In 1950, Alvon Hubbard wrote Dianetics, the modern science of mental health.

It is now considered either a bad piece of science fiction or one of the great revelatory works of religious history, depending on how you look at it.

In 1994, 1995 and 1996, the composer John Oswald released, first as two individual CDs and then as a double CD, an album called Greyfolded.

which the composer says in the liner notes he thinks of as existing in Tralthamadorian time.

The Tralthamadorians in Vannegut's novels don't see time as a linear thing with the beginning and end, but as a continuum that they can move between at will.

When someone dies, they just think that at this particular point in time they're not doing so good, but at other points in time they're fine.

So why focus on the bad time?

In the book, when told of someone dying, the Tralthamedorians just say, so it goes.

In between the first CD's release and the release of the double CD version, Jerry Jerry Garcia died.

From August 1942 through August 1995, Jerry Garcia was alive.

So it goes.

Shall we go, you and I?

You

have

One principle has become clear.

Since motives are so frequently found in combination, it is essential that the complex types be analyzed and arranged, with an eye kept single nevertheless to the master theme under discussion.

Collectors, both primary and subsidiary, have done such valiant service that the treasures at our command are amply sufficient for such studies, so extensive indeed, that the task of going through them thoroughly has become too great for the unassisted student.

It cannot be too strongly urged that a single theme and its various types and compounds must be made predominant in any useful comparative study.

This is true when the sources and analogues of any literary work are treated.

It is even truer when the bare motive is discussed.

The Grateful Dead furnishes an apt illustration of the necessity of such handling.

It appears in a variety of different combinations, almost never alone.

Indeed, it is so widespread a tale, and its combinations are so various, that there is the utmost difficulty in determining just what may properly be regarded the original kernel of it, the simple theme to which other motives were joined.

Various opinions, as we shall see, have been held with reference to this matter, most of them justified perhaps by the materials in the hands of the scholars holding them, but none quite adequate in view of later evidence.

That's a quote from The Grateful Dead, The History of a Folk Story, by Gordon Hall Gerold, published in 1908.

Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five opens with a chapter about the process of writing the novel itself and how difficult it was.

He says, I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time.

When I got home from the Second World War 23 years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen.

And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece, or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big.

This is an episode several of my listeners have been looking forward to, but it's one I've been dreading writing, because this is an episode, I think the only one in the series, where the format of the podcast simply will not work.

Were the Grateful Dead not such an important band, band, I would skip this episode altogether, but they're a band that simply can't be ignored, and that's a real problem here.

Because my intent, always with this podcast, is to present the recordings of the artists in question, put them in context, and explain why they were important, what their music meant to its listeners.

To put, as far as is possible, the positive case for why the music mattered in the context of its time.

Not why it matters now, or why it matters to me, but why it matters in its historical context.

Whether I like the music or not isn't the point.

Whether it stands up now isn't the point.

I play the music, explain what it was they were doing, why they were doing it, what people saw in it.

If I do my job well, you come away listening to blue suede shoes the way people heard it in 1956,

or good vibrations the way people heard it in 1966, and understanding why people were so impressed by those records.

That is simply not possible for the Grateful Dead.

I can present a case for them as musicians and hope to do so.

I can explain the appeal as best I understand it and talk about things I like in their music and things I've noticed.

But what I can't do is present their recordings the way they were received in the 60s and explain why they were popular.

Because every other act I have covered or will cover in this podcast has been a recording act, and their success was based on records.

They may also have been exceptional live performers, but James Brown or Icantina Turner are remembered for great records, like Papa's Got a Brand New Bag or River Deep Mountain High.

Their great moments were captured on vinyl, to be listened back to, and susceptible of analysis.

That is not the case for the Grateful Dead.

And what is worse, they explicitly said publicly on multiple occasions that it is not possible for me to understand their art, and thus that it is not possible for me to explain it.

The Grateful Dead did make studio records, some of them very good, but they always said consistently over a 30-year period that their records didn't capture what they did, and that the only way, the only way, they were very clear about this, that one could actually understand and appreciate their music, was to see them live, and furthermore, to see them live while on psychedelic drugs.

I never saw the Grateful Dead live.

Their last UK performance was a couple of years before I went to my first ever gig, and I have never taken a psychedelic substance.

So, by the Grateful Dead's own criteria, it is literally impossible for me to understand or explain their music the way that it should be understood or explained.

In a way, I am in a similar position to the one I was in with Lamont Jung in the last episode, whose music it's mostly impossible to experience without being in his presence.

This is one reason of several why I placed these two episodes back to back.

Of course, there is a difference between Jung and the Grateful Dead.

The Grateful Grateful Dead allowed, even encouraged, the recording of their live performances.

There are literally thousands of concert recordings in circulation, many of them of professional quality.

I have listened to many of those, and I can hear what they were doing.

I can tell you what I think is interesting about their music and about their musicianship, and I think I can build up a good case for why they were important, and why they're interesting, and why those recordings are worth listening to.

And I can certainly explain the cultural phenomenon that was the Grateful Dead.

But just know that while I may have found a point,

an explanation for why the Grateful Dead were important, by the band's own rights and those of their fans, no matter how good a job I do in this episode, I cannot get it right.

And that is, in itself, enough of a reason for this episode to exist, and for me to try even harder than I normally do, to get it right anyway.

Because no matter how well I do my job, this episode will stand as an example of why this series is called our history, not the history.

Because parts of the past are ephemeral.

There are things about which it's true to say you had to be there.

I cannot know what it was like to have been an American the day Kennedy was shot.

I cannot know what it was like to be alive when a man walked on the moon.

Those are things nobody my age or younger can ever experience.

And since august ninth, nineteen ninety five, the experience of hearing the Grateful Dead's music the way they wanted it heard has been in that category.

And that is by design.

Jerry Garcia once said, if you work really hard as an artist, you may be able to build something they can't tear down, you know, after you're gone.

What I want to do is I want it here.

I want it now in this lifetime.

I want what I enjoy to last as long as I do and not last any longer.

You know, I don't want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as it is a work of art, you know?

And there's another difficulty.

There are only two points in time where it makes sense to do a podcast episode on the Grateful Dead.

Late 1967 and early 1968, when the San Francisco scene they were part of was at its most culturally relevant, and 1988, when they had their only top ten hit and gained their largest audience.

I can't realistically leave them out of the story until 1988, so it has to be 1968.

But the songs they are most remembered for are those they wrote between 1970 and 1972.

And those songs are influenced by artists and events we haven't yet covered in the podcast, who will be getting their own episodes in the future.

I can't explain those things in this episode, because they need whole episodes of their own.

I can't not explain them without leaving out important context for the Grateful Dead.

So the best I can do is to treat the story I'm telling as if it were in Tralfamadorian time.

All of it's happening all at once, and some of it is happening in different episodes that haven't been recorded yet.

The podcast as a whole travels linearly from 1938 through to 1999, but this episode is happening in 1968 and 1972 and 1988 and 1995 and other times, all at once.

Sometimes I'll talk about things as if you're already familiar with them, but they haven't happened yet in the story.

Feel free to come on stuck in time and revisit this time after episode 167 and and 172 and 176 and 192

and experience it again.

So this has to be an experimental episode.

It may well be an experiment that you think fails.

If so, the next episode is likely to be far more to your taste, and much shorter than this or the last episode.

Two episodes between them have to create a scaffolding on which will hang much of the rest of this podcast's narrative.

I've finished my Grateful Dead script now.

The next one I write is going to be fun.

Don't start precious,

all in its light into ashes.

Realize in deadness,

little

Infrastructure means everything.

How we get from place to place, how we transport goods, information, and ourselves, makes a big difference in how society is structured, and in the music we hear.

For many centuries, the prime means of long-distance transport was by water.

Sailing ships on the ocean, canal boats and steamboats for inland navigation.

And so, folk songs talked about the ship as both means of escape, means of making a living, and in some senses as a trap.

You'd go out to sea for adventure or to escape your problems, but you'd find that the sea itself brought its own problems.

Because of this, we have a long, long tradition of sea shanties which are known throughout the world.

First, I landed in Liverpool.

I went to porn this breeze

while money lasts, I spend it fast, got drunk as drunk could be.

But before me, money was

all gone on Lake

and the horse.

I made up me mind that I was inclined to go to see

no more.

No more,

But in the 19th century, the railway was invented, and at least as far as travel within a landmass goes, it replaced the steamboat in the popular imaginary.

Now the railway was how you got from place to place, and how you moved freight from one place to another.

The railway brought freedom and was an opportunity for outlaws, whether train robbers or a romanticized version of the hobo hopping onto a freight train and making its way to new lands and new opportunity.

It was the train that brought soldiers home from wars, and the train that allowed the great migration of black people from the south to the industrial north.

There would still be songs about the river boats, about how Old Man River keeps rolling along, and about the big river Johnny Cash sang about, but increasingly they would be songs of the past, not the present.

The train quickly replaced the steamboat in the iconography of what we now think of as roots music, blues, country, folk, and early jazz music.

Sometimes this was very literal.

Furry Lewis's Casey Jones, about a legendary train driver who would break the rules to make sure his train made the station on time, but who ended up sacrificing his own life to save his passengers in a train crash, is based on Alabami Bound, which, as we heard in the episode on Stagger Lee, was about steamboats.

I woke up this morning, four o'clock.

Mr.

K has told him I'm gonna get his barla hot.

Put on your water, put on your coat, put your head out, the window, see my drivers roll, see my driver roll.

Put your head out the window, see my driver roll.

Lord, some people said Mr.

Case couldn't run.

Let me tell you what Mr.

Casey had done.

He left Memphis with 49, got newborn news.

It was dinner time, what dinner time?

In the early episodes of this podcast, we heard many, many songs about the railway.

Louis Jordan saying, Take me right back to the track jack, Rosetta Thorpe singing about how this train don't carry no gamblers, the trickster freight train driver driving on the Rock Island line, the mystery train 16 coaches long, the train that kept a rolling all night long, the midnight special which the prisoners wished would shine its ever-loving light on them, and the train coming past Folsom Prison whose whistle makes Johnny Cash hang his head and cry.

But by the 1960s, that kind of song had started to dry up.

It would happen on occasion.

People get ready by the impressions is the most obvious example of the train metaphor in an important sixties record.

nature.

And no one could change my mind, but mama tried.

The one and only rebel child from a family meek and mild.

My mama seemed to know what lay in store.

In spite of all my Sunday learning, towards the bad I kept on turning, till mama couldn't hold me.

And the reason for this was that there had been another shift, a shift that had started in the 40s and accelerated in the late 50s, but had taken a little time to ripple through the culture.

Now the train had been replaced in the popular imaginary by motorized transport.

Instead of hopping on a train without paying, if you had no money in your pocket, you'd have to hitchhike all the way.

Freedom now meant individuality.

The ultimate in freedom was the biker, the hell's angels who could go anywhere, unburdened by anything.

And instead of goods being moved by freight train, increasingly they were being moved by truck drivers.

By the mid-70s, truck drivers took a central place in American life, and the most romantic way to live life was to live it on the road.

On the Road was also the title of a 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac, which was one of the first major signs of this cultural shift in America.

Kerouac was writing about events in the late 40s and early 50s, but his book was also a precursor of the 60s counterculture.

He wrote the book on one continuous sheet of paper as a stream of consciousness.

Kerouac died in 1969 of an internal hemorrhage brought on by too much alcohol consumption.

So it goes.

But the big key to this cultural shift was caused by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, a massive infrastructure spending bill that led to the construction construction of the modern American interstate highway system.

This accelerated a program that had already started, of building much bigger, safer, faster roads.

It also, as anyone who has read Robert Carroll's The Power Broker knows, reinforced segregation and white flight.

It did this both by making commuting into major cities from the suburbs easier, thus allowing white people with more money to move further away from the cities and still work there, and by bulldozing community spaces where black people lived.

More than a million people lost their homes and were forcibly moved, and orders of magnitude more lost their communities, parks, and green spaces.

And both as a result of deliberate actions and unconscious bigotry, the bulk of those affected were black people, who often found themselves, if they weren't forced to move, on one side of a ten-lane highway where the park used to be, with white people on the other side of the highway.

The Federal Aid Highway Act gave even more power to the unaccountable central planners like Robert Moses, the urban planner in New York who managed to become arguably the most powerful man in the city without ever getting elected, partly by slowly compromising away his early progressive ideals in the service of gaining more power.

Of course, not every new highway was built through areas where poor black people lived.

Some were planned to go through richer areas for white people, just because you can't completely do away with geographical realities.

For example, one was planned to be built through part of San Francisco, a rich white part.

But the people who owned properties in that area had enough political power and clout to fight the development, and after nearly a decade of fighting it, the development was called off in late 1966.

But over that time, many of the owners of the impressive buildings in the area had moved out, and they had no incentive to improve or maintain their properties while they were under threat of demolition, so many of them were rented out very cheaply.

And when the beat community that Kerouac wrote about, many of whom had settled in San Francisco, grew too large and notorious for the area of the city they were in, North Beach, many of them moved to these cheap homes in a previously exclusive area, the area known as Haight Ashbury.

Stories all have their starts, even stories told in Tralfamadorian time, although sometimes those starts are shrouded in legend.

For example, the story of Scientology's start has been told many times, with different people claiming to have heard L.

Von Hubbard talk about how writing was a mugs game, and if you wanted to make real money, you needed to get followers.

Start a religion.

Either he said this over and over and over again to many different science fiction writers, or most science fiction writers of his generation were liars.

Of course, the definition of a writer is someone who tells lies for money, so who knows?

One of the more plausible accounts of him saying that is given by Theodore Sturgeon.

Sturgeon's account is more believable than most, because Sturgeon went on to be a supporter of Dianetics, the new science that Hubbard turned into his religion, for decades, even while telling the story.

The story of the Grateful Dead probably starts, as it ends, with Jerry Garcia.

There are three things that everyone writing about the dead says about Garcia's childhood, so we might as well say them here, too.

The first is that he was named by a music-loving father after Jerome Kern, the songwriter responsible for songs like Ole Man River.

Though as Oscar Hammerstein's widow liked to point out, Jerome Kern wrote Dum Dum Dum Dum, My Husband wrote Ole Man River, an important distinction we need to bear in mind when talking about songwriters who write music but not lyrics.

The second is that when he was five years old, that music-loving father drowned.

and Garcia would always say he had seen his father dying, though some sources claim this was a false memory.

So it goes.

And the third fact, which for some reason is always told after the second, even though it comes before it chronologically, is that when he was four he lost two joints from his right middle finger.

Garcia grew up a troubled teen, and in turn caused trouble for other people, but he also developed a few interests that would follow him through his life.

He loved the fantastical, especially the fantastical macabre.

and became an avid fan of horror and science fiction, and through his love of old monster films he became enamored with cinema more generally.

Indeed, in 1983, he brought the film rights to Kurt Vannegut's science fiction novel The Sirens of Titan, the first story in which the Twelve Hamadorians appear, and wrote a script based on it.

He wanted to produce the film himself, with Francis Ford Coppola directing and Bill Murray starring, but most importantly for him, he wanted to prevent anyone who didn't care about it from doing it badly.

And in that, he succeeded.

As of 2023, there is no film of the Sirens of Titan.

He loved to paint and would continue that for the rest of his life, with one of his favourite subjects being Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster.

And when he was 11 or 12, he heard for the first time a record that was hugely influential to a whole generation of Californian musicians, even though it was a New York record, G by the Crows.

Love that bo

G,

my o G

well

Guy love that girl,

love that boys

listen to me

my please

Why love that girl Love that girl Garcia would say later, that was an important song.

That was the first kind of, like where the voices had that kind of not trained singer voices, but tough guy on the street voice.

That record introduced him to RB, and soon he was listening to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, to Ray Charles, and to a record we've not talked about in the podcast, but which was one of the great early doo-wop records, WPLJ by the Four Deuces.

L J,

won't you take a drink with me?

It is a good, good wine.

It really makes me feel so fine.

Well, I went to the store when I opened up the door.

I said, please, please, please give me some more.

White porn and lemon juice.

White porn and lemon juice.

White porn and lemon juice.

White

Garcia said of that record, That was one of my anthem songs when I was in junior high school in high school and around there.

That was one of those songs everybody knew, and that everybody sang.

Everybody sang that street corner favourite.

Garcia moved around a lot as a child, and didn't have much time for school, by his own account.

But one of the few teachers he did respect was an art teacher when he was in North Beach, Walter Hedrick.

Hedrick was also one of the earliest of the conceptual artists, and one of the most important figures in the San Francisco art scene that would become known as the Beat Generation, or the Beatniks, which was originally a disparaging term.

Hedrick was a painter and sculptor, but also organised happenings, and he had also been one of the prime movers in starting a series of poetry readings in San Francisco, the first one of which had involved Alan Ginsburg giving the first ever reading of Howell.

one of a small number of poems along with Eliot's proof rock and the wasteland and possibly Pound's cantos, which can be said to have changed 20th century literature.

Garcia was 15 when he got to know Hedrick in 1957, and by then the beat scene had already become almost a parody of itself, having become known to the public because of the publication of works like On the Road, and the major artists in the scene were already rejecting the label.

By this point, tourists were flocking to North Beach to see these beatniks they'd heard about on TV, and Hedrick was actually employed by one cafe to sit in the window wearing a beret, turtleneck, sandals, and beard, and draw and paint, to attract the tourists who flocked by the busload because they could see that there was a genuine beepnik in the cafe.

Hedrick was, as well as a visual artist, a guitarist and banjo player who played in traditional jazz bands, and he would bring records into class for his students to listen to.

And Garcia particularly remembered him bringing in records by Big Bill Brumsey.

Without you, woman,

I just can't be satisfied.

Cause when things go wrong,

so wrong with you,

it hurts me too.

Garcia was already an avid fan of rock and roll music, but it was being inspired by Hedrick that led him to get his first guitar.

Like his contemporary Paul McCartney around the same time, he was initially given the wrong instrument as a birthday present.

In Garcia's case, his mother gave him an accordion, but he soon persuaded her to swap it for an electric guitar he saw in a pawn shop.

And like his other contemporary, John Lennon, Garcia initially tuned his instrument incorrectly.

He said later, When I started playing the guitar, believe me, I didn't know anybody that played.

I mean, I didn't know anybody that played the guitar.

Nobody.

They weren't around.

There were no guitar teachers.

You couldn't take lessons.

There was nothing like that, you know?

When I was a kid and I had my first electric guitar, I had it tuned wrong and learned how to play on it with it tuned wrong for about a year.

And I was getting somewhere on it, you know?

Finally, I met a guy that knew how to tune it right and showed me three chords.

And it was like a revelation.

You know what I mean?

It was like somebody gave me the key to heaven.

He joined a band, the chords, which mostly played big band music, and his friend Gary Foster taught him some of the rudiments of playing the guitar, things like how to use

don't you roll so slow?

How can I roll when the wheels won't go?

Roll on buddy, pull a load of coal.

How can I pull when the wheels won't roll?

Garcia had never encountered playing like that before, but he instantly recognised that Travis and Chet Atkins, who Stevenson also played for him, had been an influence on Scotty Moore.

He started to realize that the music he'd listened to as a teenager was influenced by music that went further back.

But Stevenson, as well as teaching Garcia some of the rudiments of travice picking, also indirectly led to Garcia getting discharged from the army.

Stevenson was not a well man and became suicidal.

Garcia decided it was more important to keep his friend company and make sure he didn't kill himself.

than it was to turn up for roll call, and as a result he got discharged himself on psychiatric grounds.

According to Garcia, he told the Army psychiatrist, I was involved in stuff that was more important to me in the moment than the Army was, and that was the reason I was late.

And the psychiatrist thought it was neurotic of Garcia to have his own set of values separate from that of the Army.

After discharge, Garcia did various jobs, including working as a transcriptionist for Lenny Bruce.

the comedian who was a huge influence on the counterculture.

In one of the various attacks over the years by authoritarians on language, Bruce was repeatedly arrested for obscenity, and in 1961 he was arrested at a jazz club in North Beach.

Sixty years ago, the parts of speech that were being criminalized weren't pronouns, but prepositions and verbs.

To come,

to come.

I've heard these two words my whole adult life, and as a kid when I thought I was sleeping.

To come,

to come.

It's been like a big drum solo.

Did you come?

Did you come good?

Did you come good?

Did you come good?

Did you come good?

That piece, indeed, was so controversial that when Frank Zappa quoted part of it in a song in 1968, the record label insisted on the relevant passage being played backwards so people couldn't hear such disgusting filth.

Anyone familiar with that song will understand that the censored portion is possibly the least offensive part of the whole thing.

Bruce was facing trial.

and he needed a transcript of what he had said in his recordings to present in court.

Incidentally, there seems to be some confusion over exactly which of Bruce's many obscenity trials Garcia became a transcriptionist for.

Dennis McNally says in his biography of the band, published in two thousand and two, that it was the most famous of them, in autumn nineteen sixty four.

But in a later book, Jerry on Jerry, a book of interviews of Garcia edited by McNally, McNally talks about it being when Garcia was nineteen, which would mean it was Bruce's first trial in nineteen sixty one.

We can put this down to the fact that many of the people involved, not least Garcia, lived in Tralfamadorian time and were rather hazy on dates.

But I am placing the story here rather than in 1964 because it seems to make more sense that Garcia would be involved in a trial based on an incident in San Francisco than one in New York.

Garcia got the job even though he couldn't type, because by this point he'd spent so long listening to recordings of old folk and country music that he was used to transcribing it in decipherable accents.

And often, as Garcia would tell it, Bruce would mumble very fast and condense multiple syllables into one.

Garcia was particularly impressed by Bruce's ability to improvise, but talk in entire paragraphs, and he compared his use of language to Bebop.

Another thing that was starting to impress Garcia, and which he also compared to Bebop, was bluegrass.

Bluegrass is a music that is often considered very traditional because it's based on traditional songs and uses acoustic instruments.

But in fact, it was a terribly modern music and largely a post-war creation of a single band, Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys.

And Garcia was right when he said it was white bebop, though he did say, the only thing it doesn't have is the harmonic richness of bebop.

You know what I mean?

That's what it's missing, but it has everything else.

Both bebop and bluegrass evolved after the Second World War, though they were informed by music from before it, and both prized the ability to improvise and technical excellence.

Both are musics that involved playing fast in an ensemble and being able to respond quickly to the other musicians.

Both musics were also intensely rhythmic, a response to a faster-paced, more stressful world.

They were both part of the general change in the arts towards immediacy that we looked at in the last episode, with the creation first of expressionism and then of pop art.

Bluegrass didn't go into the harmonic explorations that modern jazz did, but it was absolutely as modern as anything Charlie Parker was doing, and came from the same impulses.

It was tradition and innovation, the past and the future simultaneously.

Bill Munroe, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, and Lenny Bruce were all in their own ways responding to the same cultural moment, and it was that which Garcia was responding to.

But he didn't become able to play Bluegrass until after a tragedy which shaped his life even more than his father's death had.

Garcia had been to a party and was in a car with his friends Lee Adams, Paul Spiegel and Alan Trist.

Adams was driving at 90 miles an hour when they hit a tight curve and crashed.

Garcia, Adams and Trist were all severely injured but survived.

Spiegel died.

So it goes.

This tragedy changed Garcia's attitudes totally.

Of all his friends, Spiegel was the one who was most serious about his art and who treated it as something to work on.

Garcia had always been someone who fundamentally didn't want to work or take responsibility for anything, and he remained that way, except for his music.

Spiegel's death changed Garcia's attitude to that, totally.

If his friend wasn't going to be able to practice his own art anymore, Garcia would practice his in tribute to him.

He resolved to become a virtuoso on guitar and banjo.

His girlfriend of the time later said, I don't know if you've spent time with someone rehearsing Foggy Mountain Breakdown on a banjo for eight hours, but Jerry practiced endlessly.

He really wanted to excel and be the best.

He had tremendous personal ambition in the musical arena, and he wanted to master whatever he set out to explore.

Then he would set another site for himself and practice another eight hours a day of New Licks.

But of course, you can't make ensemble music on your own.

are

drowned.

Oh Mary, don't you weep?

One more time.

Oh Mary, don't you weep, don't you moan?

Oh Mary, don't you weep, don't you moan

Girls on you got drowned

Oh Mary, don't you weep

I'm Jerry and that's Bob.

I play guitar.

He doesn't.

I'm Bob Ellen.

Evelyn said,

What is it called when a person needs a

person, when you want to be touched and the two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?

Alicia, who had read books, thought about it.

Love, she said at length.

That's from More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon, a book I'll be quoting a few more times as the story goes on.

Robert Hunter, like Garcia, was just out of the military, in his case the National Guard, and he came into Garcia's life just after Paul Spiegel had left it.

Garcia and Alan Trist met Hunter ten days after the accident, and the three men started hanging out together, Trist and Hunter writing while Garcia played music.

Garcia and Hunter both bonded over their shared love for the beats, and for traditional music, and the two formed a duo, Bob and Jerry, which performed together a handful of times.

They started playing together, in fact, after Hunter picked up a guitar and started playing a song, and halfway through Garcia took it off him and finished the song himself.

The two of them learned songs from the Harry Smith anthology.

Garcia was completely apolitical, and only once voted in his life for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to keep Goldwater out, and regretted even doing that, and so he didn't learn any of the more political material people like Pete Seeger, Phil Oakes, and Bob Dylan were doing at the time.

But their duo only lasted a short time, because Hunter wasn't an especially good guitarist.

Hunter would, though, continue to jam with Garcia and other friends, sometimes playing mandolin, while Garcia played solo gigs with other musicians as well, playing and moving around the bay area and performing with whoever he could.

Bleshing.

That was Janie's word.

She said Baby told it to her.

She said it meant everyone altogether being something, even if they all did different things.

Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together.

Although a head can't walk and arms can't think.

Lone said maybe it was a mixture of blending and meshing, but I don't think he believed that himself.

It was a lot more than that.

That's from More Than Human.

In 1961, Garcia and Hunter met another young musician, but one who was interested in a very different type of music.

Phil Lesh was a serious student of modern classical music, a classically trained violinist and trumpeter.

whose interest was solely in the experimental, and whose attitude can be summed up by a story that's always told about him meeting his close friend Tom Constantin for the first time.

Lesch had been talking with someone about serialism, and Constantin had interrupted, saying, Music stopped being created in 1750, but it started again in 1950.

Lesch just stuck out his hand, recognizing a kindred spirit.

Lesch and Constantin were both students of Luciano Berrio, the experimental composer who created compositions for magnetic tape.

Berrio had been one of the founders of the Studio De Fonologica Musicale di Radio Milano, a studio for producing contemporary electronic music, where John Cage had worked for a time.

And he had also worked with the electronic music pioneer Karl-Heinz Stockhausen.

Lesch would later remember being very impressed when Berriot brought a tape into the classroom, the actual multi-track tape for Stockhausen's revolutionary piece, Gesang de Junglinger.

Lesh at first had been distrustful of Garcia.

Garcia was charismatic and had followers, and Lesch never liked people like that.

But he was impressed by Garcia's playing, and soon realised that the two men, despite their very different musical interests, had a lot in common.

Lesch was interested in the technology of music, as well as in performing and composing it, and so when he wasn't studying, he helped out by engineering at the university's radio station.

Lesch was impressed by Garcia's playing and suggested to the presenter of the station's folk show, The Midnight Special, that Garcia be a guest.

Garcia was so good that he ended up getting an entire solo show to himself, where normally the show would feature multiple acts.

Lesch and Constantin soon moved away from the Bay Area to Las Vegas, but both would be back.

In Constantin's case, he would form an experimental group in San Francisco with their fellow student Steve Reich, and that group, though not with Constantin performing, would later premiere Terry Riley's NC, a piece influenced by Lamont Young and often considered one of the great masterpieces of minimalist music.

By early 1962, Garcia and Hunter had formed a bluegrass band, with Garcia on guitar and banjo and Hunter on mandolin, and a rotating cast of other musicians including Ken Frankel, who played banjo and fiddle.

They performed under different names, including the Tub Thumpers, the Hard Valley Drifters, and the Sleepy Valley Hog Stompers, and played a mixture of bluegrass and old-time music, and were very careful about the distinction.

In 1993, the Republican political activist John Perry Barlow was invited to talk to the CIA about the possibilities open to them with what was then called the Information Superhighway.

He later wrote, in part, They told me they'd brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management, and they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Capor, Tony Rykowski, and Vint Cerf.

They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a website.

We told them that information exchange was a barter system, and that to receive, one must also be willing to share.

This was an alien notion to them.

They weren't even willing to share information among themselves, much less the world.

1962 brought a new experience for Robert Hunter.

Hunter had been recruited into taking part in psychological tests at Stanford University, which in the 60s and 70s was one of the preeminent universities for psychological experiments.

As part of this, Hunter was given $140 to attend the VA hospital, where a janitor named Ken Keesey, who had himself taken part in a similar set of experiments a couple of years earlier, worked a day job while he was working on his first novel, for four weeks on the run, and take different psychedelic drugs each time, starting with LSD, so his reactions could be observed.

It was later revealed that these experiments were part of a CIA project called MKUltra, designed to investigate the possibility of using psychedelic drugs for mind control, blackmail, and torture.

Hunter was quite lucky in that he was told what was going to happen to him and paid for his time.

Other subjects included the unlucky customers of brothels the CIA set up as fronts.

They dosed the customers' drinks and observed them through two-way mirrors.

Some of their experimental subjects died by suicide as a result of their experiences.

So it goes.

Hunter was interested in taking LSD after reading Aldous Huxley's writings about psychedelic substances, and he brought his typewriter along to the experiment.

During the first test, he wrote a six-page text, a short excerpt from which is now widely quoted, reading in part,

Sit back, picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops, soften eye they fall into the sea of morning, creep very softly mist, and then sort of cascade tinkly bell-like.

Must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type, and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant, uncomprehendingly, blood-singingly, joyously resounding bells.

Hunter's experience led to everyone in their social circle wanting to try LSD, and soon they'd all come to the same conclusion.

This was something special.

But Garcia needed money.

He'd got his girlfriend pregnant and they'd married.

This would be the first of several marriages in Garcia's life, and I won't be covering them all.

At Garcia's funeral, his second wife, Carolyn, said Garcia always called her the love of his life, and his first wife, and his early sixties girlfriend who he proposed to again in the 90s, both simultaneously said, he said that to me.

So he started teaching guitar at a music shop in Palo Alto.

Hunter had no time for Garcia's incipient domesticity and thought that his wife was trying to make him live a conventional life, and the two drifted apart somewhat, though they'd still play together occasionally.

Through working at the music store, Garcia got to know the manager, Troy Weidenheimer, who had a rock and roll band called the Zodiacs.

Garcia joined the band on bass despite that not being his instrument.

He later said, Troy was a lot of fun, but I wasn't good enough a musician then to have been able to deal with it.

I was out of my idiom, really, because when I played with Troy I was playing electric bass, you know.

I never was a good bass player.

Sometimes I was playing in the wrong key and didn't even know it.

I couldn't hear that low after playing banjo, you know, and going to electric.

But Troy taught me the principle of, hey, you know, just stump your foot and get on it.

He was great, a great one for the instant arrangement, you know.

And he was also fearless for that thing of get your friends to do it.

Garcia's tenure in the Zodiacs didn't last long, nor did this experiment with rock and roll.

But two other members of the Zodiacs will be notable later in the story: the harmonica player, an old friend of Garcia's named Ron McKernan, who would soon gain the nickname Pigpen after the Peanuts character, and the drummer, Bill Kreutzmann.

Kreutzmann said of the Zodiacs, Jerry was the hired bass player and I was the hired drummer.

I only remember playing that one gig with them, but I was in way over my head.

I always did that.

I always played things that were really hard and it didn't matter.

I just went for it.

Garcia and Kreutzmann didn't really get to know each other then, but Garcia did get to know someone else who would soon be very important in his life.

Bob Weir was from a very different background than Garcia, though both had the shared experience of long bouts of chronic illness as children.

He had grown up in a very wealthy family and had always been well liked, but he was what we would now call neurodivergent.

Reading books about the band, he talks about being dyslexic, but clearly has other undiagnosed neurodivergences which often go along with dyslexia, and as a result, he was deemed to have behavioural problems which led to him getting expelled from preschool and kicked out of the cup scouts.

He was never academically gifted, thanks to his dyslexia, but he was always enthusiastic about music, to a fault.

He learned to play boogie piano, but played so loudly and so often his parents sold the piano.

He had a trumpet, but the neighbours complained about him playing it outside.

Finally, he switched to the guitar.

an instrument with which it is of course impossible to make too loud a noise.

The first song he learned was the Kingston Trio's version of an old sea shanty, The Wreck of the John B.

Sails.

See how the main sail set

call for the captain ashore.

Let me go home.

Let me go home.

Let me go home.

I want to go.

I wanna go home.

Why don't you let me go home?

Well, I feel so great.

I wanna go home.

I want to go home.

First mate, he got drunk.

Broke up the people's trunk.

Constable had to come.

He was sent off to a private school in Colorado for teenagers with behavioural issues, and there he met the boy who would become his lifelong friend, John Perry Barlow.

Unfortunately, the two troublemakers got on with each other so well that after their first year, they were told that it was too disruptive having both of them at the school, and only one could stay there the next year.

Barlow stayed, and Weir moved back to the Bay Area.

By this point, Weir was getting more interested in folk music that went beyond the commercial folk of the Kingston trio.

As he said later, there was something in there that was ringing my bells.

What I had grown up thinking of as hillbilly music, it started to have some depth for me, and I could start to hear the music in it.

Suddenly, it wasn't just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies playing what they could, there was some depth and expertise and stuff like that to aspire to.

He moved from school to school, but one thing that stayed with him was his love of playing guitar, and he started taking lessons from Troy Weidenheimer.

But he got most of his education going to folk clubs and Hootananis.

He regularly went to the Tangent, a club where Garcia played, but Garcia's blue grass banjo playing was far too rigorous for a free spirit like Weir to emulate, and instead he started trying to copy one of the guitarists who was a regular there, Yoma Kaukonen.

On New Year's Eve 1963, Weir was out walking with his friends Bob Matthews and Rich McCauley, and they passed a music shop where Garcia was a teacher and heard him playing as banjo.

They knocked and asked if they could come in.

They all knew Garcia a little, and Bob Matthews was one of his students, having become interested in playing banjo after hearing the theme tunes of the Beverly Hillbillies, played by the bluegrass grates, Flatten and Scrooks.

Hills, that is, swimming pools, movie stars.

The Beverly Hillbilly.

Garcia at first told these kids, several years younger than him, that couldn't come in.

He was waiting for his students to show up.

But Weir said, Jerry, listen, it's 7.30 on New Year's Eve, and I don't think you're going to be seeing your students tonight.

Garcia realised the wisdom of this and invited the teenagers in to jam with him.

At the time, there was a bit of a renaissance in drug bands, as we talked about back in the episode on The Loving Spoonful.

This was a form of music that had grown up in the 1920s, and was similar and related to skiffle and coffee pop bands.

Drug bands would tend to have a mixture of portable string instruments like guitars and banjos, harmonicas, and people using improvised instruments, particularly blowing into a jug.

The most popular of these bands had been Gus Cannon's Drug Stompers, led by banjo player Gus Cannon and with harmonica player Noah Lewis.

the judge repeated,

like he wrote it down.

If you miss Joe Senner,

you must be nice for pounding down.

With the folk revival, Cannon's work had become well known again.

The Rooftop Singers, a Kingston trio-style folk group, had had a hit with his song Work Right In in sixty three, and as a result of that success, Cannon had even signed a record contract with Stax.

Stax's first album ever, a month before Bookerty and the MG's first album, was in fact the eighty year old Cannon playing his banjo and singing his old songs.

The rediscovery of Cannon had started a craze for drug bands, and the most popular of the new drug bands was Jim Queskin's drug band, which did a mixture of old songs like Yora Viper and more recent material redone in the old style.

style.

Weir, Matthews, and Macaulay had been to see the Questkin band the night before and had been very impressed, especially by their singer Maria D'Amato, who would later marry her bandmate Jeff Muldar and take his name, and her performance of Lieber and Stoller's I'm a Woman.

grape pick dip or for long from a dripping scan.

Throw it in a skillet, do my shopping and be bad for it, melts in the pain.

Cause I'm a human.

Let me tell you again.

Matthews suggested that they form their own jug band, and Garcia eagerly agreed, though Matthews found himself rapidly moving from banjo to washboard to kazoo to second kazoo, before realising he was surplus to requirements.

Robert Hunter was similarly an earlier member, but claimed he didn't have the embouchure to play the jug, and was soon also out.

He moved to LA and started studying Scientology, later claiming that he wanted science fictional magic powers.

which L.

Ron Hubbard's New Religion certainly offered.

The group took the name Mother McCree's Uptown Drug Champions.

Apparently, they varied the spelling every time they played, and had a rotating membership that at one time or another included about 20 different people, but tended always to have Garcia on banjo, Weir on drug and later guitar, and Garcia's friend Pigpen on harmonica.

Georgie Bonn.

Natural bonny, even on the road again.

She's on the road again.

Natural bonny, even on the road again.

The group played quite regularly in early 1964, but Garcia's first love was still bluegrass, and he was trying to build an audience with his bluegrass band, the Black Mountain Boys.

But bluegrass was very unpopular in the Bay Area, where it was simultaneously thought of as unsophisticated, as hillbilly music, and as elitist, because it required actual instrumental ability, which wasn't in any great supply in the amateur folk scene.

But instrumental ability was something Garcia definitely had, as at this point he was still practicing eight hours a day every day, and it shows on the recordings of the Black Mountain Boys.

Her eyes were like diamonds,

and her voice sweet to me.

I knew that I would always love her,

and I thought

she loved me.

By the summer, Bob Weir was also working at the music shop, and so Garcia let Weir take over his students while he and the Black Mountain Boys guitarist Sandy Rothman went on a road trip to see as many bluegrass musicians as they could, and to audition for Bill Munro himself.

As it happened, Garcia found himself too shy to audition for Monroe, but Rothman later ended up playing with Monroe's Bluegrass Boys.

On his return to the Bay Area, Garcia resumed playing with the Uptown Drug Champions, but Pigpen started pestering him to do something different.

While both men had overlapping tastes in music and a love for the blues, Garcia's tastes had always been towards the country end of the spectrum, while Pigpens were towards RB.

And while the Uptown Drug Champions were all a bit disdainful of the Beatles at first, apart from Bob Weir, the youngest of the group, who thought they were interesting, Pigpen had become enamoured of another British band who were just starting to make it big.

Garcia liked the first Rolling Stones album too, and he eventually took Pig Pen's point.

The stuff that the Rolling Stones were doing, covers of Slim Harpo and Buddy Holly was not a million miles away from the material they were doing as Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions.

Pig Pen could play a little electric organ.

Bob had been fooling around with the electric guitars in the music shop.

Why not give it a go?

The stuff bands like the Rolling Stones were doing wasn't that different from the electric blues that Pig Pen liked, and they'd all seen A Hard Day's Night.

They could carry on playing with banjos, jugs, and kazoos, and have the respect of a handful of folkies, or they could get electric instruments and potentially have screaming girls and millions of dollars while playing the same songs.

This was a convincing argument, especially when Dana Morgan Jr., the son of the owner of the music shop, told him they could have free electric instruments if they let him join on bass.

Morgan wasn't that great on bass, but what the hell, free instruments.

Pigpen had the best voice and stage presence, so he became the frontman of the new group, singing most of the leads, though Jerry and Bob would both sing a few songs, and playing harmonica and organ.

Weir was on rhythm guitar, and Garcia was the lead guitarist and obvious leader of the group.

They just needed a drummer, and handily Bill Kreutzmann, who had played with Garcia and Pigpen in the Zodiacs, was also now teaching music at the music shop.

Not only that, but about three weeks before they decided to go electric, Kreutzmann had seen the uptown drug champions performing, and been astonished by Garcia's musicianship and charisma, and said to himself, Man, I'm going to follow that guy forever.

The new group named themselves the Warlocks, and started rehearsing in earnest.

Around this time, Garcia also finally managed to get some of the LSD that his friend Robert Hunter had been so enthusiastic about three years earlier, and it was a life-changing experience for him.

In particular, he credited LSD with making him comfortable being a less disciplined player.

As a bluegrass player, he'd had to be frighteningly precise, but now he was playing rock and needed to loosen up.

A few days after taking LSD for the first time, Garcia also heard some of Bob Dylan's material and realized that the folk singer he'd had little time for with his preachy politics was now making electric music that owed a lot more to the beach culture Garcia considered himself part of.

John is in the basement, mixing up the medicine.

I'm on the pavement, thinking about the government.

A man in a trench coat, pouch out laid off, says he's got a bad call, wants to get it paid off.

Took it out and killed him, just something you did.

God knows when, but you're doing it again.

You better duck down the alleyway, looking for a new friend.

A man in a coonskin cap and a pig pen wants $11 bills.

You only got 10.

Another person who was hugely affected by hearing that was Phil Lesh, who later said, I couldn't believe that was Bob Dylan on AM radio with an electric band.

It changed my whole consciousness.

If something like that could happen, the sky was the limit.

Up to that point, Lesh had been focused entirely on his avant-garde music, working with friends like Steve Reich to push music forward, inspired by people like John Cage on the Mont Young.

But now he realised there was music of value in the rock world.

He'd quickly started going to rock gigs, seeing the Rolling Stones and the birds.

And then he took acid and went to see his friend Garcia's new electric band play their third ever gig.

He was blown away, and very quickly it was decided that Lesh would be the group's new bass player, though everyone involved tells a different story as to who made the decision and how it came about, and accounts also vary as to whether Dana Morgan took his second gracefully and let his erstwhile bandmates keep their instruments, or whether they had to scrounge up some new ones.

Lesh had never played bass before, but he was a talented multi-instrumentalist with a deep understanding of music and an ability to compose and improvise, and the repertoire the Warlocks were playing in the early days was mostly three-chord material that doesn't take much rehearsal, though it was apparently beyond the abilities of poor Dana Morgan, who apparently had to be told note by note what to play by Garcia and learn it by rote.

Garcia told Lesh what notes the strings of her bass were tuned to, told him to borrow a guitar and practice, and within two weeks he was on stage with the Warlocks.

In September 1995, just weeks after Jerry Garcia's death, an article was published in Mute magazine identifying a cultural trend that had shaped the 90s and would, as it turned out, shape at least the next 30 years.

It's titled the Californian Ideology, though it may be better titled the Bay Area Ideology, and it identifies a worldview that had grown up in Silicon Valley based around the ideas of the hippie movement, of right-wing libertarianism, of science fiction authors, and of Marshall McLuhan.

It starts, there is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology, and politics.

We have called this orthodoxy the Californian ideology in honor of the state where it originated.

By naturalizing and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless.

The California ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counterculture libertarianism, and is promulgated by magazines such as Wired and Mondo 2000 and preached in the books of Stuart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others.

The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, Slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats, and even the president of the USA himself.

As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America.

While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the info barn, cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the post-human philosophy developed by the West Coast sextropian cult.

With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete.

The Warlocks' first gig with Phil Lesh on base was on June the 18th, 1965, at a club called Frenchies with a teenage clientele.

Lesch thought his playing had been wooden and it wasn't a good gig, and apparently the management of Frenchies agreed.

They were meant to play a second night there, but turned up to be told they'd been replaced by a band with an accordion and clarinet.

But by September, the group had managed to get themselves a residency at a small bar named the Inn Room, and playing there every night made them cohere.

They were at this point playing the kind of sets that bar bands everywhere play to this day, though though at the time, the songs they were playing, like Gloria by Them and In the Midnight Hour, were the most contemporary of hits.

Another song that they introduced into their repertoire was Do You Believe in Magic by the Love and Spoonful, another band which had grown up out of former drug band musicians.

As well as playing their own sets, they were also the house band at the inroom, and as such had to back various touring artists who were the headline acts.

The first act they had to back up was Cornell Gunter's version of the Coasters.

Gunter had brought his own guitarist along as musical director, and for the first show Weir sat in the audience watching the show and learning the parts, staring intently at this musical director's playing.

After seeing that, Weir's playing was changed, because he also picked up how the guitarist was guiding the band while playing, the small cues that a musical director will use to steer the musicians in the right direction.

Weir started doing these things himself when he was singing lead.

Pigpen was the front man, but everyone except Bill sang sometimes, and the group soon found that rather than Garcia being the sole leader, now whoever was the lead singer for the song was the de facto conductor as well.

By this point, the Bay Area was getting almost overrun with people forming electric guitar bands, as every major urban area in America was.

Some of the bands were even having hits already.

We Five had had a number three hit with You Are On My Mind, a song which had originally been performed by the folk duo Ian and Sylvia.

Although the band that was most highly regarded on the scene, the Charlatans, was having problems with the various record companies they tried to get signed to, and didn't end up making a record until 1969.

If tracks like Number One had been released in 1965 when they were recorded, the history of the San Francisco music scene may have taken a very different turn.

Bands like Jefferson Airplane, The Great Society, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were also forming, and Autumn Records was having a run of success with records by the Bo Brummels, whose records were produced by Autumn's in-house AR man, Sly Stone.

The Warlocks were somewhat cut off from this, playing in the dive bar whose clientele was mostly depressed alcoholics.

But the fact that they were playing every night for an audience that didn't care much gave them freedom, and they used that freedom to improvise.

Both Lesch and Garcia were big fans of John Coltrane, and they started to take lessons from his style of playing.

When the group played Gloria, or Midnight Hour, or whatever, they started to extend the songs and give themselves long instrumental passages for soloing.

Garcia's playing wasn't influenced harmonically by Coltrane.

In fact, Garcia was always a rather harmonically simple player.

He'd tend to play lead lines either in mixolydion mode, which is one of the most standard modes in rock, pop, blues, and jazz, or he'd play the notes of the chord that was being played.

So if the band were playing a G chord, his lead would emphasize the notes G, B, and D.

But what he was influenced by was Coltrane's tendency to emphasize in long, complex phrases that made up a single thought.

Coltrane was thinking musically in paragraphs rather than sentences, and Garcia started to try the same kind of thing.

And under him, Lesch was slowly starting to innovate in his bass playing.

Lesch was also thinking in terms of Coltrane, but also of the way classical and baroque composers would use bass lines contrapuntally.

Of all the band, Lesch had the least knowledge of what the norms of popular music forms like rock and roll and blues were, and so his use of the bass inadvertently paralleled the moves being made by a lot of other bass players around this time, now that recording techniques were improving and allowing much better definition of bass sounds on record.

Up to about 1965, the bass on rock and roll records was almost always playing very simple lines.

At its most complicated, it would be something like a boogie walking bass line, but more often it would be the root and maybe fifth of the chord, simple whole notes dead on the beat, often locked in with the bass drum.

Lesch was one of the first bass players to start playing after people like James Jameson, Paul McCartney, and Brian Wilson started coming up with more through-composed parts for rock music, and that became his natural idiom.

What Lesch was doing was not what one might think of as conventional rhythm section work at all, and he would often syncopate his lines, only rarely coming in on the one of a bar as a normal bass player would, but often coming in half a beat later.

The group started to develop a conversational approach to performance, with the instrumentalists, especially Lesch and Garcia, entering into a dialogue with each other, all doing their own thing.

They were particularly influenced by Cleo's Back by Junior Walker and the All-Stars, a Motown instrumental, and it's fascinating to listen to that record in this context.

Cleo's Back is clearly an attempt to replicate stacked records like Green Onions, but the Walker record has each of the musicians doing his own thing, rather than playing in tight lockstep.

They're all paying attention to the groove, but they're riffing on it, coming in and out when they have something to say, playing off each other, as if they all think they're the star soloist, but still somehow working as an ensemble.

By the time the Warlocks had finished their stint at the end room, the San Francisco psychedelic rock scene had exploded, almost without the group realising it, and record companies were on the lookout.

San Francisco was clearly the next big thing to exploit, and Autumn Records was right there.

After Sly Stone had had hits with the Bo Brummels and minor success with the Mojo Men, they were on a bit of a high and were auditioning bands left and right.

The recording of the Charlatans we heard earlier was from a session they did for Autumn that didn't get released, and Sly Stone was just about to start work with the Great Society.

But Stone was apparently not present when the Warlocks did their audition for the label in November 1965.

asking where I'm going and what I eat.

I answer them with a voice so sweet.

I can't come down, it's plain to see.

I can't come down, I've been set free.

Who you are and what you do don't make no difference.

But for that audition, the group actually performed under another name, the Emergency Crew, because Phil Lesh had been looking through records in a shop.

and found one by another group called the Warlocks.

McNally and his biography suggest that this is likely the Warlocks who included two-thirds of ZZ Top.

But as far as I can tell, that band didn't release a record until a few months after this, nor of course is it the Velvet Underground, who never released a record under that name.

There were, it turns out, a lot of bands who decided in the mid-60s to call themselves the Warlocks.

I've found evidence of at least 10, many of whom released singles.

My guess is that the record that Lesh had found was this one, an attempt by a band from Massachusetts to start a dance craze, released on Decca in June 1965.

Lesh remembered the record he'd seen as being on Columbia, but otherwise, this fit.

Temperatundum,

anyway.

Shake away

and hide your face.

Temperatures, anyways.

Oddly, the B-side to that track was a cover of James Brown's I'll Go Crazy, which was a song that was also in the set of the Bay Area Warlocks.

The group got together in Phil Lesher's house and started throwing out names.

When nobody liked any of anyone else's suggestions, they started thumbing through reference books, dictionaries, books of quotations, and so on.

And eventually, Garcia found what he and Lesch thought the perfect name, though Bob Weir wasn't so keen.

The Grateful Dead is a motif for many folk stories throughout the world.

To quote from Gordon Hall Gerald's book on the subject, a man finds a corpse lying unburied, and out of pure philanthropy procures internment for it at great personal inconvenience.

Later, he is met by the ghost of the dead man, who in many cases promises him help on condition of receiving, in return, half of whatever he gets.

The hero obtains a wife or some other reward, and, when called upon, is ready to fulfil his bargain as to sharing his possessions.

Gerald identifies variants of this story all over the world, and sees it crop up as an element in many, many stories.

It exists in endless variations with no single canonical version.

as so many folk stories and songs do.

None of the band knew much of this at the time, but Lesh in particular was so enthusiastic about the name that the matter was settled.

The warlocks were now the Grateful Dead.

In Kurt Bonnegutt's novel Cat's Cradle, there's a religion made up by a calypso singer named Bakanon, which includes a concept called a karas.

To quote from the book, We Baccanonists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's will without ever discovering what they are doing.

Such a team is called a karas by Baccanon.

A karas doesn't necessarily know it's a kerass, it's a collection of people whose lives are intertwined in ways they will never fully understand.

Later in the book, he goes on to define another term.

A wampeter is the pivot of a keras.

No karass is without a wampeter, Baccanon tells us, just as no wheel is without a hub.

Anything can be a wampeter: a tree, a rock, an animal, an idea, a book, a melody, the holy Grail.

Whatever it is, the members of its kerass revolve about it in the majestic chaos of a spiral nebula.

The orbits of the members of a keras about their common wampeter are spiritual orbits, naturally.

It is souls and not bodies that revolve.

In Valingut's twice-fictional religion, there are always two wampeters for every kerass, one waxing and one waning.

And there's no doubt that one of the wampeters around which the kerass that encompassed the Grateful Dead at this time was revolving was Neil Cassidy.

Come, wash the nighttime clean,

come, blow the scorched round green,

blow the one, tap the tambourine,

close the gap of the dark years

Cassidy is difficult to sum up, especially at a remove of nearly 60 years.

He was a vital link between two different versions of the counterculture, the beats of the 50s and the hippies of the 60s, and everyone who knew him talks about him as having been a great artist and a vital inspiration to them.

He was regarded as a peer by Ken Kesey, Alan Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and Jerry Garcia.

But while Keesy Keesy and Kerouac's art was their novels, Ginsberg's was his poetry, and Garcia's was his guitar playing, all things that one can point to and analyse, and that exist as works of art, according to Garcia, Neil was a guy who was like an artist without an art.

He was his art, you know.

He meant that very literally.

He said, If you're doing something and eventually you're doing it well enough to where there's a flow to it, then you know when the flow is there and you know when it ain't, and it's that same thing, but like, like, most people do it the way I've done it.

The way most conventional artists deal with it at that level is to take up a discipline, one specific thing, scope in on it, concentrate your energy on it like an alchemist, and work on it and work on it.

And that becomes the way of telling whether you're on or not.

And then all your energy goes into it.

Neil's way of doing that was to eliminate the tool, you know?

even though he probably wasn't conscious of it initially and used to envy that discipline.

Eventually he became that whole thing.

All of his surfaces, and if if you imagine human beings as having many surfaces, all of his surfaces were on that edge of onness and offness, and being conscious of whether you're on or off.

That whole thing of bouncing on the end of a stepladder, you know, the kind of stuff that Neil could do.

I mean, when he was on, he could really, because he worked at it, man.

He spent a lot of the time doing it.

Everybody else thought it was crazy weirdness, but he was working on it.

Cassidy had been a petty criminal for a great part of his youth, and had been arrested a number of times for car theft, shoplifting, and possession of stolen goods.

But he was also mentored by a renowned educator, Justin Brearley, who saw potential in him.

Through one of Breerley's other students, after getting out of prison when he was nineteen, he met Jack Kerouac, and the two travelled across the country on several occasions, with Cassidy becoming the model for Dean Moriarty, the main character in Kerouac's On the Road.

Cassidy asked Kerouac to teach him how to write, though he never finished a completed work in his lifetime.

But according to many many sources, while Kerouac was teaching Cassidy, Cassidy was also teaching Kerouac, and the prose style which made Kerouac famous was in large part an imitation of Cassidy's style.

In 1962, Cassidy read Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and identified so strongly with the protagonist Randall McMurphy and his fight against a system that considers him insane and eventually breaks him.

that he tracked down Kesey and the two became friends.

By this time, Kesey was a strong advocate for the use of LSD, not in controlled, experimental, safe conditions like those advocated by Timothy Leary at this point, but for general, uninhibited, recreational use.

When in 1964 Kesey needed to travel to New York in connection with the publication of his second novel, he and Cassidy and a group of other people who dubbed themselves the Merry Pranksters decided to make it a ritual event.

They were going to retrace the east-west migration that had characterized white people's journey in America and do it backwards.

They were going to go on the road and bring west coast weirdness to the heartlands and east coast.

They got a bus and painted it in psychedelic colours.

I note that this is in june 1964, before even a hard day's night had come out, to give some perspective on where the general culture was at.

And where the destination should be, they simply wrote further, spelt with a U instead of an E, apparently as a mistake, but taken as serendipity, and went out on the road.

They attempted to make a film of the journey, and they filmed extensive material.

So extensive indeed, that the task of going through it thoroughly became too great for the unassisted Kizi, and the film didn't come out until 2011.

But the Merry Prankster's Journey and Attempted Film did, as the Twelve Hamadorians among you will know, become the inspiration for another film that was released.

After this, Kesey's home became something of a commune, with various of the pranksters often in attendance.

In 1965, a young journalist named Hunter S.

Thompson, working on a book about the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, decided that it might be interesting to bring them along to meet the pranksters, and a party was thrown for the Angels at Kesey's house, with Alan Ginsberg and Ram Dass also attending.

This went well enough that there started to be weekly parties organised by the Pranksters, and just after the Warlocks changed their name to the Grateful Dead, in November 1965, several of them attended one of these parties, where they took acid and had a great time with people like Keesy and Ginsburg.

Shortly after that, the Pranksters decided to do something a little bigger.

They were going to turn their parties into full-blown happenings, in the way we talked about last episode.

and the Grateful Dead were going to be involved providing music.

Part of the reasoning for this was that the film that had been made of the road trip was clearly not yet ready, but they could show bits of it in these happenings as essentially guerrilla marketing, establishing an underground reputation for when it was finally released.

These happenings were to be called acid tests, and the main way they were distinct from the other happenings we've talked about was that everyone involved would be on acid, or at least almost everyone.

A small number never indulged.

notably Pigpen, whose drug of choice was always alcohol, not anything psychedelic.

At a typical one of these acid tests, the Grateful Dead would play their music, which, from the few surviving recordings of them in 1966, was a mixture of fairly standard RB.

When I go to sleep at night, that's the only thing I'm dreaming of.

One little bigger yaida meets up

and rather one formed psychedelic jamming.

Film of the Pranksters Road Trip would be shown.

Some of the Pranksters would make their own music, though they couldn't play instruments.

Casey would write messages on slides which would be projected while the band were playing, and Neil Cassidy would juggle hammers.

After the first of the ACID tests involving the dead, they quickly found themselves with the team.

Co-managers Rock Scully, who they met at the Acid Test, and Danny Rifkin, and soundman Ausley Stanley, who became interested in doing the band sound after an acid trip in which he claimed he could see the patterns the sound was making and knew how to improve them.

Stanley was the first private individual in the world, outside industry and academia, to figure out how to synthesize his own LSD, and he used the money he made from this to help support the group in their career, buying equipment.

He would also record all the group shows, and others he engineered, to check his own work back, and he kept almost all of these recordings.

starting a practice that would lead to the Grateful Dead being the most exhaustively documented live act of the rock era.

Within two months of the first acid test, the group found themselves playing to 6,000 people at the Trips Festival, and they soon built up enough of a following that they actually decamped with the Pranksters to LA, spending two months there holding acid tests while working on original material and trying to get a little privacy as they worked out how to deal with their new followers.

They returned to San Francisco after a couple of months, thoroughly disillusioned with LA, and in July, they released a single on the tiny San Francisco-based indie label Scorpio Records.

People still laugh laugh about as much as they ever did, despite their shrunken brains.

If a bunch of them are laying around on a beach and one of them farts, everybody else laughs and laughs, just as people would have done a million years ago.

That's from Galapagos by Kurt Vannegut.

The narrator in that novel is the son of Kilgore Trout, an unsuccessful and rather bad science fiction writer who appears in several of Vannegut's novels as an inspirational figure who writes mostly for himself and doesn't really realise that he has any fans, let alone that some of his fans regard him as some sort of guru with great wisdom.

There are two main models for Trout.

One is Vonnegut's friend, Theodore Sturgeon, and the other is Vonnegut himself.

While the Dead have been working on original material, they apparently chose not to record any.

While both tracks on their single were credited to Garcia as songwriter on their label, they were actually traditional drug band songs that had been in their repertoire while they were still Mother McCree's uptown drug champions.

The single was only released in very limited quantities, but at least they had now actually made a record, even if the only place to buy a copy was the psychedelic shop on Haight Street.

The Grateful Dead by this point were just one of several bands in the Haight-Ashbury area, and not necessarily the most successful.

That would be Jefferson Airplane, who were actually releasing records, or maybe the Great Society, or Quicksilver Messenger Service, or The Charlatans, or Big Brother and the Holding Company.

All these bands were regularly playing sets around a local circuit, with two venues in particular standing out, the Avalon Ballroom, which was run by Chet Helms and the Family Dog Commune, and the Fillmore, run by Bill Graham.

The Avalon was a friendlier venue, and everyone liked Helms more, and it had a better light show.

But Graham was a better business man, the Fillmore had a better sound system, bought from Owsley during one of his periodic fallings out with the dead, and Graham was also more interested in putting on a wider variety of acts.

Graham would listen to musicians who played his venue and would bring in outside acts that they suggested, and often juxtapose wildly different performers, like the avant-garde jazz pianists Cecil Taylor and the Yardbirds.

The reputation that Graham got was of someone who would rip off the artists who were performing for him, but was so good at business that they'd still end up better off than playing for anyone else.

By late 1966, the group were essentially living in two communes.

Garcia, Weir, Pigpen, their managers, and a sort of girlfriends and Modis in a house on Ashbury, and Lesh and Kreutzmann and their partners a couple of blocks away.

They'd originally lived with the others, but Lesh had soon bolted after having to share a room with Garcia, who snored very loudly.

That wasn't the only bodily function that was causing problems for the group.

Weir had by this point given up on LSD, joining Pigpen, who'd never used it.

But while while Pigpen was drinking a bottle of whiskey a day, Weir had given up in order to become healthier, and had taken up a vegetarian diet which led to a severe flatulence problem.

There were other issues starting to develop between Garcia and Weir as well.

By this point, a group of hippie anarchists called the Diggers had taken up residence in the area, and they were giving away free food, scrounged or stolen from local shops and cooked.

as a combination of political act and performance art piece.

Anyone getting their free food had to step through a frame, because inspired by John Cage, they thought that the act of putting a frame round something made it art.

The diggers also insisted that music should be free, and that it belonged to the people, who shouldn't have to pay to get it.

Garcia had some sympathy for this attitude, and the Dead would often play free shows.

But he was also pragmatic enough to realize that if the Dead didn't get paid for their work, he'd have to get an actual job, which would be horrifying.

The way Garcia squared this was to insist that the group needed to get good enough to be worth paying, and this led to him pressuring Weir, who was the youngest of the band members and the least facile on his instrument.

Weir decided he needed to figure out a way for a rhythm player to function in a band with the soloist who was inspired by John Coltrane.

Mine eventually hit on the idea of rather than looking to rhythm guitarists like Steve Cropper, as most musicians in his position would, listening to McCoy Tyner, the piano player in Coltrane's quartet, and copying his style.

To be a successful creator, you don't need millions.

You don't need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients, or millions of fans.

To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor, you only need thousands of true fans.

A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce.

These die-hard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing.

They will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book.

They will purchase your next figurine sight unseen.

They will pay for the best-of-DVD version of your free YouTube channel.

They will come to your chef's table once a month.

If you have roughly a thousand of true fans like this, also known as superfans, you can make a living.

If you are content to make a living but not a fortune.

Here's how the math works.

You need to meet two criteria.

First, you have to create enough each year that you can earn, on average, $100 profit from each true fan.

That is easier to do in some arts and businesses than others, but it is a good creative challenge in every area, because it is always easier and better to give your existing customers more than it is to find new fans.

Second, you must have a direct relationship with your fans.

That is, they must pay you directly.

You get to keep all of their support, unlike the small percent of their fees you might get from a music label, publisher, studio, retailer, or other intermediate.

If you keep the full $100 of each true fan, then you only need 1,000 of them to earn $100,000 a year.

That's a living for most folks.

That's from an essay called 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly, who, along with Stuart Brand, one of the people who organized the Trips Festival, set up the early online community The Well.

Kelly later founded Wired magazine.

The essay appears in Tools of Titans, The Tactics, Routines and Habits of Billionaires, Icons and World-Class Performers by Tim Ferris.

In late 1966, the Dead put out their first t-shirt, designed by Elton Kelly and Stanley Mouse, who did the group's early posters, which had an image of Pigpen on it.

They also started to move away from their association with Kesey and the acid tests.

The final break came when Kesey negotiated a plea bargain for some legal trouble, which involved him committing to doing a final acid test style show, but with a don't do acid anymore kids type message.

Keesy announced that the Dead would be playing this without asking them and on a night when they were booked to play elsewhere.

They still considered doing it until one of the pranksters told Danny Rifkin that the plan for the event was to play one last big prank and dose the entire audience with LSD.

Unlike many in the Dead Circle, Rifkin detested the idea of dosing people without their consent, and he was also worried that if the performance went ahead, Bill Graham, who was meant to be promoting it, would lose his promoter's license.

The group pulled out, and Keesy ended up doing a much smaller event.

By this point, the Dead were a powerful live band, though very far from the style that they would become known for in later years.

Listening to live recordings from the summer of 1966, they're a conventional garage band, not a million miles away from other bands from the area like the Standells or the Count Five, though with the more imaginative guitarist in those bands.

And it was that powerful live band that Joe Smith of Warner Brothers Records came to see after being informed that the San Francisco scene was ripe with potentially successful bands that they could pick up for bargain prices.

Over the autumn, Warners negotiated a deal with the group for a $10,000 advance and assurances that they would be given a certain amount of special treatment.

Rather than being put through their customary marketing machine, the label would treat them the way they treated country artists, giving them special marketing for their niche genre.

Smith was very eager to get the dead signed.

Other than the Everly brothers, who were making great records but no longer having hits, Warner's had few rock acts and was mostly known for the Artists Sonics Reprise subsidiary, a label that had been started by Frank Sinatra and still mostly had artists of Sinatra's generation.

plus the mildly successful teen pop band Dino Desi and Billy, two of whom were the sons of Sinatra's celebrity friends.

They were trying desperately to build up a rock roster, and San Francisco was the obvious place to turn, since LA had already been picked clean.

As we heard in the episode on heroes and villains, they also bought up autumn records around this time, and got Lenny Waranka, Van Dyke Parks and their circle to work with that label's group of San Francisco artists.

Smith said later of signing the dead, That was one of the two or three most important signings in all those years.

It changed the nature and opinion of the record company.

We were out in front.

It was important to indicate that we were more than Dean Martin and Sinatra, that we were hip.

For this reason they made another important concession, which would have a profound impact on the way the group's sound evolved.

The standard record contract at this time paid performers per song, and that made sense for a time when most songs were about two or three minutes long.

You'd need at least ten songs to make up an album, and so bands were being incentivized to produce as many of those two or three minute pop songs as possible.

But the Grateful Dead liked to stretch out and play long solos, and Rock Scully had heard that there was another way to structure these contracts.

He'd worked at the Monterey Jazz Festival, and there he'd heard that jazz musicians were paid by the minute of recording, not by the song, which was how they could afford to do those long exploratory improvisational tracks that could last an entire side of an album.

Scully insisted on this being the case for the Grateful Dead's contract too, and Smith agreed.

By the time of the group's first sessions for Warners, Garcia at least had some studio experience.

As we heard in the episode on Jefferson Airplane, Garcia had been involved in the recording of their album Surrealistic Pillow, at least according to most participants, though the records producer always said he wasn't involved.

Certainly, some tracks sound very much like they have Garcia playing on them.

Today,

you look into my eyes.

I'm just not the same.

To be any more

than all I am

would be a lie.

I'm so full of love,

I could burst apart and start to cry.

In January 1967, the group made made their first album.

Garcia later said of it, At that time we had no real record consciousness.

We were just going to go down to LA and make a record.

We were completely naive about it.

We had a producer we had chosen because he'd been the engineer on a couple of Rolling Stones records that we liked the sound of.

That was as much as we were into record making.

Dave Hassinger had definitely engineered a lot of Rolling Stones records.

He'd been the group's main US engineer for the run of hit singles and albums they'd had in the previous couple of years.

But Garcia also knew him from working with Jefferson Airplane, as he'd engineered their album.

Hassinger was a super competent engineer who had worked on everything from the Tammy Show to the Chipmunks album of Beatles covers, and he and Garcia had got on well.

But Hassinger had only recently moved into production rather than engineering, and the rules of the studio they were working in meant that he had to use the studio's staff engineer rather than do the job himself as he wanted.

And as Hassinger Hassinger himself said, the band didn't want to hear what a conventional producer had to say.

They just went in and bashed out versions of their live set at the time, though, as always, they found themselves unable to let loose and improvise in the studio without the feedback of the audience.

The first single, The Golden Road to Unlimited Devotion, failed to chart.

See that girl, barefooting alone, whistling and singing, she's a carry on.

Got laughing in her eyes, dancing in her feet.

She's on the alright, finding she would never scream.

That track was actually recorded in San Francisco later, after the record company said they needed a single.

Other than that, the album, which was just titled The Grateful Dead, only took four days to record, including the time spent mixing.

And for the most part, it sounds like any other pop album of the period.

Bob Weir sounds spookily like Peter Talk at points.

Despite Pigpen being the band's frontman and most popular member, he only gets one lead vocal, on the blues standard Good Morning Little School Girl.

with the rest of the leads being shared between Garcia and Weir, but his keyboard is all over the album.

At this point, the group weren't writing much of their own material, and other than the group composition The Golden Road, the only original is Garcia's Cream Puff War, with everything else being standard folklook material like Bonnie Dobson's apocalyptic ballad Morning Dew.

Or drug band material they'd been playing when they were still the Uptown Drug Champions, like Viola Lee Blues, originally written by Noah Lewis and performed by Gus Cannon's Drug Stompers, which is just over 10 minutes long, was the only truly extended track on the album.

The judge decreed it,

Turkey rolled it,

Turkey rolled it,

and down indeed it

judge decreed it,

Garcia said at the time, I think our album is honest.

It sounds just like us.

It even has mistakes on it.

But it also has a certain amount of excitement on it.

It sounds like we felt good when we were making it.

We made it in a short period, four days, and it's the material we've been doing on stage for quite a long time.

It sounds like one of our good sets.

Phil Lesh, not really getting the hang of this promotion business, said in an interview at the time, I think it's a turd.

The album wasn't a success, and only reached number 69 on the album charts, but the group's reputation as a live act was steadily improving.

A couple of weeks before the studio dates, they performed at The Human Bein, a massive outdoor show in San Francisco, with speeches from people like Timothy Leary and the political activist Jerry Rubin, food distributed for free by the diggers, Diggers, paid for by Owsley, who was also distributing the acid, security provided by the Hells Angels, and performances by Jefferson Airplane, Blue Cheer, and Big Brother and the Holding Company.

20,000 people turned up for that event, and they were all astonished to find that there were that many people in what they all thought of up to that point as a rather small scene.

The gathering of that many people in one place to hear the new psychedelic music got the biggest national and international media exposure the San Francisco scene had ever had, and soon everything that wanted to be cool and hip had the suffix in in imitation of the be in.

There were lovin's, Rowan and Martins laughing on TV, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono having bed-ins.

Soon San Francisco and the Haight-Ashbury area was once again being overrun by the kind of tourists who ten years earlier had come looking for beatniks, only this time they were looking for hippies, or trying to become hippies, as the mothers of invention would satirise the next year.

Walk past the wig store,

danced at the fill more.

I'm completely stoned.

I'm hippie, and I'm trippy.

I'm a gypsy on my own.

I'll stay a week and get the craft to take a bus back home.

I'm really just a phony, but forgive me cause I'm stoned.

The human being was also one of the precursors to the Monterey Pop Festival, which of course, as we talked about in episode 151, was only possible because the Grateful Dead persuaded the other San Francisco bands to play, and where of course the Dead played what they considered an incredibly sub-par show, sandwiched between The Who and Jimi Hendrix, both of whom blew them off stage.

The Dead's performance was so bad that none of it was used in the film.

The Dead did though come out ahead from the show.

Apparently, they stole the PA system.

There is, of course, a reason that the Californian ideology became centered in California and developed in the way it did.

And that reason is, of course, infrastructure.

Many people who are influential on the Californian ideology, like the postmodernist science fiction writer Robert Anton Wilson, would argue that if you plotted a timeline of the most innovative people in human history, that timeline would slowly move west and slightly north, accelerating over the centuries as the most radical thinkers followed the Sun.

So, in the last few centuries, the greatest innovations had come from Greece, then Italy, then France, then England, then New York, and then finally the west coast of the USA.

According to Wilson and his friends like Timothy Leary, now that wave had finally reached the Pacific, there was only one place left to go, and so humanity would fulfil its manifest destiny and head up into the stars.

Other, less teleologically minded thinkers have suggested that the growth of that ideology had more to do with the fact that the Bay Area had, well,

a bay, which meant that it was a natural area for naval bases, and thus for much of the 20th century a hub of military activity more generally.

And this meant that when the US government wanted to fund research into military technology, like rockets, or like the computer systems that would be needed to guide missiles, or like a communications network that would allow those computers to communicate, the Bay Area's institutions of higher learning were the best places to turn to.

And so places like Berkeley and Stanford got vast military research grants, and so became the cutting-edge institutions for those topics.

And so Berkeley, for example, counts among its alumnae Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, Gordon Moore, the semiconductor researcher who co-founded Intel and coined Moore's Law, and Eric Schmidt, a software engineer who went on to become the CEO of Google.

While Stanford produced 17 of the 44 winners of the Turing Award for Computer Science to date, and was also the place where, in order to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of U.S.

nuclear forces, and improve military technical and management decision-making, as the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency put it, they developed what was then called ARPANET, but later became known as the Internet.

The first ever ARPANET message, the word login, was sent from Caltech to Stanford, though problems meant that only the first two letters arrived.

So many advances in computer science came out of the military-funded institutions in the Bay Area that soon corporations started building their own facilities there to hire all the bright young graduates.

And Silicon Valley was built, starting with Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.

where basically every personal computing technology of the 90s was invented in the 70s.

And so young men

and it was, sadly, almost all men, sexism and science and technology being what it is, flocked to the Bay Area to work with this cutting-edge technology.

Many of these people were the kind of staggeringly bright, vaguely idealistic people who had been inspired by science fiction stories to build technology for a better, utopian future.

They wanted to go where the best tech was, to have the best toys to play with, but they often didn't like the idea of being funded by the defense industry, because these were young men at a time when the US was prosecuting an unpopular war in which their friends were being called up to fight.

But they didn't dislike the idea enough not to take the money and play with the toys, especially when what they were doing wasn't exactly weapons research.

I mean, yes, they were being funded by the Department of Defense, but they weren't building bombs.

They were making computers talk to each other.

And so, rationalization being what it is, they leapt on any ideas that would let them do Defence Department-funded work while still having a clear conscience.

And one of those ideas was one that was very current among the hippies of the Bay Area, people like Stuart Brand.

The idea was that all large institutions were just jokes, figments of the imagination that didn't really exist, that they're what Vonnegut in Cat's Cradle talks about as a false karas, a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the way God gets things done, what Bocanon calls a grandfaloon.

Examples of grandfaloons are the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Oddfellows, and any nation, any time, anywhere.

As Bocchanon invites us to sing along with him, If you wish to study a grandfaloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon.

So, the Department of Defense and the Government weren't real.

What was real was individuals taking individual actions.

and those individual actions would somehow coalesce into a collective higher purpose without organization.

Individuals all doing their own thing together and leaderless, the same way the Grateful Dead all improvised their own parts and the sound gelled.

That idea appealed a lot to these bright young men.

And this gentle, hippie idea of freedom also fit in with the rugged individualist heroic idea of freedom that they'd read about in all their old science fiction magazines.

a hyper-capitalist pioneering libertarian idea promulgated by editors like John W.

Campbell.

And it didn't hurt, of course, that that those ideas of individual freedom also meant that you didn't have to feel guilty about becoming very, very rich.

There were several other changes to the World of the Dead in 1967 too.

In March, on a trip to play in New York, Bob Weir reconnected with his old friend John Perry Barlow, who would become a major figure in the band's lives over the next few years, and there was a new band member too.

The story of how Mickey Hart came to join the Grateful Dead has never quite made sense.

The way Hart always tells the story, he was at the fillmore watching Count Basie and hanging up with Basie's drummer Sonny Payne, who was one of the great jazz drummers of all time.

And Count Basie definitely did play the film Fillmore in August 1967, as support to Chuck Berry on one of the wonderfully eclectic bills that Bill Graham put together.

But Sonny Payne wasn't in Basie's band in 1967.

He'd stopped working with Basie the previous year, and Basie's main drummer in 1967 was Ed Shaughnessy, before Harold Jones took over for a five-year stint.

Possibly this was a situation like David Bowie and Lou Reed.

Either way, Hart met Bill Creutzmann at the gig, and the two hit it off immediately.

And that wasn't the only thing they hit.

They spent much of the rest of the night going around the streets of San Francisco drumming on bins, cars, lamp posts and so on together.

A little while later Hart came to see Kreutzmann's band, and was impressed.

Soon he was in the band as their second drummer.

This actually opened up a lot of possibilities for the group.

Lesch didn't play like a conventional bass player, which meant that the group didn't have as firmly rhythmic a sound as other bands.

Hart moved in with Kreutzmann and Lesch, and Hart and Kreutzmann soon started spending hours playing together, learning each other's idiosyncrasies.

They even tried hypnotizing each other so that they could be more in tune with each other, which led to some people in the band's circle wondering if Hart had hypnotized Kreutzmann into letting him join the band.

They also tried hypnotizing Pigpen, but it just made him walk into a door.

Soon after Hart joined the band, the group decided they had to get away from Haight-Ashbury.

What had seemed like an idyllic community soon became, in the words of George Harrison, who had visited the area that summer, like the Bowery.

There were drug dealers getting murdered, teenage girls getting raped, and the group themselves got busted for dope possession.

On October the 6th, the diggers held a funeral for the hippie movement.

The summer of love was over.

Most of the band moved to Maring County.

Pigpen stayed behind at first, though he followed later, and it's at this point that the band became the Grateful Dead as they are in the popular imaginary, the Experimental Psychedelic act.

Robert Hunter had been in Mexico for a while, but he'd been in touch with Garcia and had sent Garcia some poems which Garcia had set to music.

Garcia had never liked writing lyrics.

Hunter had now returned to San Francisco and was made a non-performing member of the band, with the job of writing lyrics for the band's music.

The first song he wrote with the band, rather than at a distance, became the non-album single Dark Star.

Hunter heard the band rehearsing what was then an instrumental and came up with the first verse straight away.

in the clouds of delusion.

Shall we go,

you and I, while we can?

Hunter would later acknowledge that he was inspired by the start of the love song of J.

Alfred Prufrock.

Let us go, then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table.

Let us go through certain half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels, and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells, streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent to lead you to an overwhelming question.

When Darkstar came out as a single, it wasn't a success, and it was only a two-and-a-half-minute song.

It wasn't even included on the album which they were recording at the time, Anthem of the Sun, though that did feature Hunter's first contribution to the band, a lyric called Alligator, which was used on one of the two tracks for the Pig Pen side of the album.

Anthrop of the Sun was the first April Dead album to consist entirely of original material, material published by the band's own publishing company, Ice 9, which was named after a substance in Kurt Vannegat's novel Cat's Cradle.

Ice 9, in the novel, is an allotrope of water that's solid at room temperature, and that makes any other water touching it become solid.

One crystal of Ice 9 dropped in an ocean would eventually freeze the entire ocean.

Vannegat always claimed the inspiration for this idea idea came from the Nobel Prize winning chemist Irving Langmuir, but it was also an idea that John Campbell, the science fiction editor who worked with Theodore Sturgeon and L.

Ron Hubbard, had been suggesting to authors since the 1940s, though Campbell may also have got it from Langmuir.

That album had a much more difficult genesis than their first album.

They started sessions with Hassinger in L.A., but soon moved to better studios in New York, and then to other studios in New York.

When they started the sessions, they had two main songs they wanted to work on, Alligator, and one they hadn't titled yet and just called The Other One, which eventually became a suite entitled, That's It for the Other One.

Along with the new members Heart and Hunter, there was another addition to the group at this point.

Lesh brought in his old friend Tom Constantin, who at the time was in the military, working as a computer programmer on an Air Force base in Las Vegas.

and secretly using their IBM machines to create electronic music, but it would take leaves of absence to join the group in the studio and help them create new sonic textures, with John Cage-inspired prepared pianos and electronic noises.

Konstantin was famously a Scientologist, but he had his religion listed with the Air Force as Buddhist.

Whenever he needed time off, he'd make up a Buddhist holiday and get a pass.

Passing a soon got exasperated with the band's endless tinkering.

According to one story, the final straw came when Bob Weir wanted to record some silence from the desert, so they could get the sound of thick air to add to the recordings, though the story is told in different ways to make Weir's request seem more or less reasonable, depending on who is telling the story and when.

And the group and their sound engineer Dan Healy began working on their own, recording an assortment of exotic instruments.

and sounds like a gyroscope spinning on a piano soundboard.

But the group still weren't happy with the sounds they were getting in the studio, and eventually Lesch hit on an idea.

They'd take the recordings of their live performances of these songs and create collages, mixing the live and studio performance together, sometimes layering multiple performances from different shows on top of each other.

It would be like Charles Ives, whose work often involved the orchestra playing two different songs at the same time.

Lesh, Garcia, and Healy spent a huge amount of time in the studio, with Healy, who understood the equipment intimately, helping translate the ideas of Lesh and Garcia, who took charge of this editing process and kept asking things like, Can we make a sound purple?

The resulting album, with two tracks sung by Pigpen, one by Weir, and two duets between Garcia and Weir, is probably the most experimental record the Dead ever made, and the polar opposite of their first album.

It's the one time in their career that the Dead really used the studio to its full potential, and it's all the more surprising that they did that by using so much live material.

And when the beauty is blue,

the rainbow

Those lyrics about cowboy Neil were written by Bob Weir on the 4th of February 1968 while the band were on tour.

When he got back to San Francisco, he learned that that same day Neil Cassidy had died.

The night before, he'd gone walking down a railway track trying to get from one town to another.

He'd only been wearing a t-shirt and jeans.

It was raining and he'd taken barbituates.

He collapsed and was found comatose and died of exposure.

He was only 41.

So it goes.

Anthem of the Sun was not a particular success, either critically or commercially, and is the kind of album that can only be appreciated with a little distance from its release.

The album is very much of a par with other contemporaneous albums whose reputation have grown over the ensuing decades.

Its experiments with tape and music concrete put it somewhere in the same ballpark as the Beach Boy's Smiley Smile, which a few years later Garcia would cite as his favourite album of all time, but which at the time was dismissed as stoned nonsense that was trying too hard.

She drew a comb across her scalp and brushed what she had left.

I tried to salvage what I could and threw it in a sack.

She made it be lying to her room and grabbed all kinds of juice.

She started pouring it on her head and thought it going back.

While it's collaging a mixture of folk and psychedelia, it's very much the same kind of thing that the incredible string band were doing on the hangman's beautiful daughter.

night, good night.

By this time, many of the groups were getting sick of working with Bill Graham, and the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and some of the other groups decided to open their own venue, run as a collective.

As Bob Weir later said, we were young and strong and high on ourselves.

At that point, Bill Graham wasn't the huge mogul that he became, and we thought, there's room in this town for us, too.

We were also acutely aware that Bill was stealing from us, and he made no bones about it.

But he also made no bones about the fact that we'd never catch him.

That said, we probably did better working for him than we would have done working for someone who wasn't stealing from us, because he always managed to sell more tickets.

He managed to get more people into the building and he knew how to get around the fire marshals and all that kind of stuff.

So he was a crook, but he was a great one.

The carousel ballroom, however, only lasted a few months before they realised that musicians and business are not a good mixture.

The ballroom closed and soon reopened under a new name.

Bill Graham had set up a Fillmore East in New York.

and now he closed down his original Fillmore, largely because it was in a black neighbourhood and the hippies were no more immune to racism than anyone else, and rebranded the former carousel as the Fillmore West.

At the group's first gig at the newly renamed Fillmore West, they spanked Bill Graham, giving him acid without his consent.

This was sadly a common practice for the band, and they didn't just do it to their human friends, but to animals, with Hart occasionally giving acid to a horse he owned.

Graham, who didn't use the drug, knew this was a practice of theirs, so refused to eat or drink anything they had been near, and got his wife to put his own food and the thermos into a paper bag, which was then sealed with wax and would be the only food he'd touch while he was there, so he knew it was untouched.

But he thought he'd be safe with a can of 7-up, because, after all, it was a sealed can.

He opened it himself and drank it down with none of them being able to touch it, except that they'd used a hypodermic needle to inject LSD into all the 7-up cans backstage, and then warned each other not to drink them if they didn't want to be dosed.

They were that desperate to make sure that everyone around them used the same drugs as them, and that unconcerned about basic notions of consent.

Remarkably, Graham continued to work with them for the rest of his life.

That story, like many with the dead, is told as happening in different ways at different times.

I've placed it here because the other main version of the story places it at a time when Mickey Hart wasn't in the band, and he remembers it happening, and Graham remembered him being there.

The carousel closed at the end of June 1968.

The album came out in July 1968, and in August 1968, the group fired Bob Weir and Pigpen.

Or at least they tried to.

Lesch, and to a lesser extent the other three, had grown increasingly impatient with the two of them.

Garcia was the leader, and he was a virtuoso guitarist by this point.

The drummers were working together to investigate polyrhythms and were innovating on their instruments.

Lesch was generally regarded as one of the most innovative bass players in the business.

But Weir, the youngest and most naive of the band members, was not yet able to translate his McCoy-Tyner ideas into playing, and Hart described him as playing little waterfalls rather than proper rhythm guitar.

And Pigpen, meanwhile, had never been into this psychedelic thing in the first place.

He wanted to be a bluesman.

and simply had no interest in doing extended spacey jams influenced by John Cage and Charles Ives and Ed Gevarez and John Coltrane.

But somehow, even after sacking the two members who the rest regarded as dead weight, they just

stayed in the band.

Garcia, in particular, was too non-confrontational to actually properly sack someone, or indeed to make any kind of decision at all.

Everyone else thought of him as the leader, the guru, the person in charge.

He thought of himself as just one of the band, and went to great lengths to avoid the responsibility everyone else was putting on him.

So the Grateful Dead carried on as a six-piece, but played fewer gigs.

And instead, Mickey Hart and the Heartbeats, Garcia, Lesh, Hart and Kreutzmann, played their own separate gigs, with the idea that they would become the main band, and the Grateful Dead would wither away.

That didn't happen, though.

Lesch liked to compare the Grateful Dead to the characters in More Than Human by Sturgeon, how when they were working together, blushing in Sturgeon's term, they were like a single organism rather than separate individuals.

As Owsley later put it, you can't fire your left hand just because it doesn't write as nicely as your right.

And without Weir and Pigpen, that feeling simply wasn't there.

So they came up with another solution.

By this point, Tom Constantin had left the Air Force and so he was available to join the group.

The decision to add Constantin to the band was made by Lesch and Garcia, without consulting the other members, and not everyone was happy about it.

They felt that Constantin was far too intellectual a player and was never really comfortable jamming, and some of them didn't like his abstinence from drugs because they're banned by Scientology.

Constantin also found playing in a live band difficult because of the levels of amplification, but it meant that Pigpen could play congas and harmonica and be more of a frontman for much of the show and not have to be the sole keyboard player.

And that in turn gave Weir a chance to develop his style more now that there was another avant-garde player on stage with Lesh and Garcia.

Umwir did eventually find his style, and as the band's instrumental jams grew more complex, he went from being dead weight to being hugely important to the group's sound.

Whereas in most rock bands the bass player would provide a steady harmonic route to keep the rest of the band in place, Lesch didn't play that way, and so both Garcia and Lesch were usually playing improvisational melody lines, twisting round each other and going in different directions.

But any two notes played at the same time imply a chord, and the two were often implying all sorts of complex harmonics.

Weir's job during an improvisation came to be to listen to what Lesh and Garcia were doing, figure out what chord they were employing, and play that chord, and to figure out where both of them were going in their different directions, figure out what chords they were going to be employing, and figure out a smooth route between them that sounded musical and anticipated their decisions.

While Weir and Pigpen were mostly out of the band, the group recorded their third album, provisionally titled Earthquake Country.

And even though Constantin was involved, and on stage they were going steadily more experimental, in the studio the band were being influenced by the same return to roots music the Twelfamadorians among you will remember from other episodes, acts like The Band.

It was essentially a Garcia solo album in all but name, with all the songs having Garcia singing lead, and all but one being Garcia Hunter songs.

The other, Opener St.

Stephen, was by Garcia, Hunter and Lesh.

It was in many ways a return to the kind of music that Garcia had been doing before Psychedelia, a nice simple album that would keep the record company happy after the massive cost overruns and general headaches caused in recording Anthem of the Sun.

And then they discovered that a 16-track machine existed and scrapped the entire album and re-recorded re-recorded it using the new technology, this time with Pig Pen and Weir involved, though not very heavily.

And some sources say Pig Pen's not on the album at all, giving the Rootsy Americana songs a little more of the oddness the band had live.

This made the album once again go massively over budget, and also ended up a little like a falling between two stools.

And in 1971, Garcia and Lesh went back into the studio to remix the album, making it sound slightly more like a conventional country rock album, though nothing could make a track like What's Become of the Baby sound conventional.

The album, named Oxomoxoa, was a failure both commercially and by the band's own standards, and is neither an album that has become beloved by the group's fans, as some of the later ones have, nor a record that stands out as an interesting time capsule like Anthem of the Sun does.

It has some songs that became well loved as part of the group's live sets, but it's the group in transitional mode.

And then, almost straight away, came an album that did not go over budget budget at all, and that almost every Grateful Dead fan holds up as the peak of their vinyl career.

After having used 16-track recording in the studio for the first time, they now decided to take a 16-track recorder into their regular gigs at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore West, and record what is generally cited as the first live recording using 16 tracks.

It's also often claimed to be the first live double album, but as far as I'm aware, the first popular music live double album was actually the 1950 release of Benny Gutmann's 1938 Carnegie Hall shows, the ones we talked about in episode 1.

Live Dead mostly came about because Oxomok Sower was so expensive that the group needed to record two cheap albums if they and one of others ever wanted to make a profit on their deal.

Cutting a live double album essentially gave them three records for the price of one.

and Live Dead was essentially two records for the price of one.

Sides 3 and 4 were a blues album.

Though note that I say sides 3 and 4, not disc 2.

In a very tralfamadorian move, the record's order was shuffled about.

Like many double albums at the time, it was set up for record changes that could stack multiple discs, so sides 1 and 3 were on one disc, and sides 2 and 4 were on the other.

Side 4 was dominated by a 10-minute version of Reverend Gary Davis's blues classic, Death Don't Have No Mercy, along with an 8-minute experimental piece just titled Feedback, and the old Bahamian hymn I Bid You Good Night, which the group probably learned from the incredible string bands recording.

Side 3 was where Pigpen got to shine for the only time on the album.

For much of it, he's relegated to playing congas, in a band with two other percussionists, but side three is a single track, a 15-minute hyperextended version of Bobby Bland's Turn On Your Love Light, presumably inspired by the similarly extended versions that Van Morrison's group Them used to do.

It sounds utterly unlike the Grateful Dead as they're normally thought of, but it makes a lot more sense of their repeated statements that they were always more inspired by the Rolling Stones than the Beatles.

Turn it on me.

I just don't know.

What you tell me,

huh?

So that's all you got to do, like the man said.

Side 2 was a medley of two songs, an extended version of St.

Stephen from Arksamoxoa, and a song with lyrics by Hunter and, unusually, music by Alesh, who only very rarely contributed songs to the band.

That song was called called the Eleven because of its time signature, which is usually given as 11-8.

This sounds more complex than it is, as it's basically just three bars of three and one bar of two, repeated.

One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three.

This is the season

of what we do.

Robert Crisco called that medley the finest rock improvisation ever recorded, though the band were less impressed with the 11 generally.

Garcia said of it, you're trapped in this very fast-moving little chord pattern, which is tough to play gracefully through, except for the most obvious, which is what I did on the 11.

When we went into the E minor, then it started to get weird.

We used to do these revolving patterns against each other where we would play 11 against 33, so one part of the band was playing a big thing that revolved in 33 beats or 66 beats, and the other part of the band would be tying that into the 11 figure.

That's what made those things sound like, whoa, what the hell is going on?

It was thrilling, but we used to rehearse a lot to get that effect.

It sounded like chaos, but it was in reality hard rehearsal.

Lesh, its composer, was similarly in two minds, saying it was really designed to be a rhythm trip.

It wasn't designed to be a song, that more or less came later as a way to give it more justification or something, to work in a rock and roll set.

We could have used it just as a transition, which is what it was really.

It was really too restrictive.

and the vocal part, the song part, was dumb.

But the opening track is the one that arguably defined the band in the minds of many listeners.

The single version of Darkstar, which had sunk without a trace the previous year, was an upbeat two and a half minute pop song.

The version on Live Dead was 23 minutes and took up the whole of side one.

In the months since the single's release, Darkstar had changed utterly.

As Tom Constantin later said, Darkstar is a tremendously adaptable piece.

I can't think offhand of any other piece that is so comfortable to just ease into and work out for a while, and leads to as many interesting places, and then you just ease out of it.

It's simple enough to be malleable, but complex enough to be interesting.

It isn't like some of the jams, let's say one that has just one or two chords that alternate.

You get into this sort of generic jam, which might be nice for shifting gears or moving to another piece, but it doesn't engender as many ideas of its own.

It doesn't suggest as many as the changes of Darkstar do.

Certain motifs were integrated over time, almost like an owl tradition.

I viewed the piece not so much as something written out, but as a galaxy that would be entered at any of several places.

That appealed to me from my Aleatoric 60s days, John Cage and all, and naturally, in the sense that every performance would be unique, with one-of-a-kind moments that were completely spontaneous.

We were just exploring the map, the dimensional capillarious intestine of cosmic Cosmic Goop.

It was now, and would remain until 1974, the centerpiece of the group's live set, though the group didn't play it or any song every night.

But it was a regular, and for much of that time, it and Turn On Your Love Light would be the two poles around which the set was based.

Darkstar would be the track which would allow Garcia, in particular, to wander into new realms on the guitar, while Turn On Your Lovelight would be the closer, a chance for Pigpen to shine, but also to leave the audience on a high with a straightforward, up-tempo, upbeat, danceable song.

Of course, at this point, much of the Dead set was built around improvisation anyway, and increasingly the group didn't have a planned out set list, or endings and beginnings of songs.

Instead, the whole performance would be a continuous piece of music, with the group flowing from one song to another as the mood took them.

ending songs by going into free-flowing jams, which someone would usually then transition into the start of another song, with the rest of the group following him.

Live Dead was not a commercial success, only reaching number 65 on the album charts, but for the first time it gave people who hadn't seen the group live some idea of what they'd been missing.

But soon after it came out, the group would have changed again.

There were a number of disappointments for the group in the months after Live Dead was recorded.

As the Twelve Amadorians among you will remember from episode 192, just as they had at Monterey, the group turned in a well-below par performance at Woodstock, not helped by Bob Weir getting literally blown across the stage by an electric shock caused by a badly grounded mic.

The Dead's performance was so bad that none of it was used in the film.

The group had also taken on Mickey Hart's father, Lenny, to help them with the business side of management.

The Harts had been semi-estranged, and Lenny Hart had become an evangelical preacher, but Mickey knew that his father had a good head for money.

What he didn't know, yet, was that Lenny Hart's good head for money was mostly a good head for getting money for Lenny Hart.

Without the band's knowledge, Lenny had renegotiated their contract with Warner Brothers, and had claimed a $75,000 advance, which he had kept for himself.

They wouldn't find out about this for a while, and meanwhile things were happening like sheriffs coming on stage at the the start of one show, to repossess Pig Pen's organ, because the band owed money they hadn't repaid.

Then the group tried to organise a free concert in London, with Jefferson Airplane and Crosby Stills and Nash, who you will also remember for episode 192, which would have been the Grateful Dead's first show outside North America.

But when Rock Scully flew over to the UK to organise the show, he was busted for possession of LSD.

which he later claimed had been planted by Lenny Hart to get him out of the way while Hart organised the Warners deal.

That show didn't get organised, but the Rolling Stones team were involved in helping bail Scully out, and that created a tie between the two organisations, a tie which meant that when the Rolling Stones wanted to organise a free concert on the West Coast at the end of their US tour in late 1969, the Grateful Dead's management were involved in helping set it up, and Alembic, the company that Ausley had started to produce equipment primarily for the group, was put in charge of sorting out the sound.

The Dead also helped the stones liaise with the Hell's Angels who provided security for the event.

The Tralthamadorians among you will remember from episode 176 what happened at Altamont.

So it goes.

And then in New Orleans, the band, apart from Pig Pen and Constantin, neither of whom used illegal substances, and several of the crew, were busted for drug possession.

They eventually had the charges dropped after Joe Smith at Warner Brothers made a large campaign contribution to the re-election campaign of DA Jim Garrison.

But this caused a lot of inconvenience for the group, not least that it was not Owsley's first arrest, and it made it difficult for him to travel with the group for a while, causing one of his periodic steps away from the group.

Someone else who was stepping away from the group was Tom Constantin.

He'd only been a member of the group for a little under two years, but he'd found playing in a live situation more difficult than he'd thought.

He was fundamentally a studio musician whose best work was planned, not improvised, and he often couldn't hear himself on stage because of the relatively primitive amplification of the time, even despite Ausley's best efforts.

He'd also felt a little like a pawn in the band.

He'd been brought in by Garcia and Lesh without much consultation with the others, and he was viewed in particular as Phil's man, and so criticising him, the new boy, was a good way for other band members to weaken Lesh within the group's power structure.

He was also regarded as a bit holier than now for his promotion of Scientology.

While Garcia, Hunter, and Weir had all dabbled in it at one time or another, and Garcia, Lesch, Weir, and Constantin had even played benefit concerts for Scientology in a country band they had as a side project, Constantin was the only one who stuck with it, and that made him something of an outsider.

The decision for Constantin to leave the group was apparently mutual and amicable, and came in New Orleans at the time of the bust.

Constantin's first major work after leaving the dead was to provide orchestrations on a track on the Incredible String Band's new Scientology-themed concept album, You.

The eyes would sleep,

but the mind would cry.

I must needs walk down God's eyebrows and along the streets of his eyes.

Constantin went on to work with many influential and experimental musicians, hold down some academic posts in music composition, and, in recent years, play with Jefferson Starship and sit in with a large number of Grateful Dead tribute bands.

He is also the only one of the five keyboard players to have officially become full members of the Grateful Dead, not to have died a horribly premature death.

I mention this here because this is another of the many difficulties I have had putting this episode together, and another reason I have to let my own personality intrude in this episode, and actually talk in it about the writing process.

Normally, when something happens over and over again to a band or artist, it becomes part of the structure of an episode, or even a series of episodes.

I can turn it into a neat pattern or a running joke.

Oh look, here's another Inkspots intro that sounds the same.

Oh look, another band has turned Rod Stewart down.

Every instinct in my body as a writer tells me to do the same with the Grateful Deads keyboard players.

Every instinct as a human being tells me that to make light of the tragic deaths of four men who still have loved ones who are alive and might hear this episode would be abhorrent and monstrous.

I have had to put in considerable effort with the structuring of this episode so that that does not become a running joke.

But still it is something that will repeat several times in the remainder of the episode.

But Tom Constantin is alive, and we can be thankful for that.

The time Constantin was in the band is considered by many fans to be the group's most interesting period as a live act, though there are partisans for various other points in their career.

And it is certainly the most experimental period in the studio, and the change from the latter is part of the reason he left.

When he had joined the group, psychedelia had been at its height, and every band wanted to push the limits of what could be done in the studio.

But rather quickly after that, the tide had changed musically.

As the Twelfamadorians among you will know from episodes 167 through 178 inclusive, and from many other episodes after that point, rock music from early 1968 entered a period largely inspired by a band called The Band, who we'll be talking about soon, in which musicians were no longer asking Alice when she's 10 feet tall, or picturing themselves on a boat on a river, but rather singing about steamboats and trains and a pastoral past.

There was a convergence of hippie psychedelia with the blues roots of many of the newer British artists and with the country and folk roots of many American rock stars.

This was paralleling a new movement in country music which had its roots in the Bakersfield sound of people like Buck Owens and which would later become known as Outlaw Country, but at the time was being talked of as Progressive Country.

The result was that you'd have albums like The Everly Brothers Roots, which saw them covering the early San Francisco band the Bob Rummels and new songwriters like Randy Newman, but also country records by Glenn Campbell, George Jones, Jimmy Rogers and Merle Haggard, and giving it all a psychedelic sweetness.

my own memories come alive.

Take

me away

and turn

back the years.

Sing

me back home

before

I die.

The Grateful Dead were as swept up in this movement as anyone, and at one point Garcia was even talking about the group as now being a Bakersfield sound group, though this seems to have been more overenthusiastic hyperbole than anything else.

The Bakersfield sound is hard to pin down, but pretty much everyone has agreed that the sound of Buck Owens and his Bookaroos is the epitome of the sound, and their tight, precise, disciplined playing, spiky telecaster attack with few or no effects, and preference for highly rehearsed, simple, clean lines, often played in unison, couldn't be further from the dead's loose, individualistic playing style, preference for Gibsons, and use of as many effects as they could.

It's hard to find examples of two guitar duos that are further apart than Buck Owens and Don Mitch on the one hand, and Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir on the other.

That said, Garcia was sincere in his love for this music, and he'd even taken up playing the pedal steel guitar, and had formed a country band, The New Riders of the Purple Sage, which at various times would also include Heart, Lesh, and very occasionally Weir, and where Garcia played pedal steel rather than electric guitar.

They included many covers of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard songs in their early sets, though San Francisco's looser playing style didn't really fit the material.

Hart would soon leave the New Riders and be replaced by Spencer Dryden of Jefferson Airplane, and Garcia would also depart after their first album.

But the new riders of the Purple Sage, who continue performing to this day, would continue to be associated with the Grateful Dead over the coming years, often acting as a support act for them.

The Grateful Dead stage show would still continue to involve long, improvised jams, and those would be the things that the audience would most want to hear.

But on record, it was a different proposition.

Garcia in particular had always loved country and folk music, and it couldn't have escaped anyone's attention that the studio experimentation on the last couple of albums had sent the group vastly over budget, while their friends in other bands were selling millions with albums that took a fraction of the time to record.

As Bob Weir said, from a record company standpoint and the way the media is set up these days, it's easier to sell songs than it is to sell improvisational long pieces.

That's one of the restrictions of the art of making a record encompasses the music.

How long the piece is going to be, how appealing and accessible it is to the audience.

By accessible, I mean easily understood.

As opposed to John Coltrane, who played some dynamite music, I mean some really fantastic music, but he was never any superstar, and he had not much of an audience because not many people could understand what he was playing.

It bugs you if you are playing music the best you can play it and not many people are listening.

And just because you're a performer, a performer wants people to listen.

Generally, you might consider changing your material or finding a new sort of material that more people will be interested in listening to, and at the same time you will be interested in playing it.

That's kind of where we settled down, at least with Working Man's Dead.

The new stripped-down lineup of the Grateful Dead went into the studio with a new attitude.

They were going to cut an album like they had with their first record.

Get it done in three weeks, keep it simple, make it about the songs.

They could always be extended into jams on stage.

They went into the studios with their sound engineers, Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor Jackson, who acted as co-producers with the group.

They cut simple demos of all the songs they had, and then the songs were put into a proper sequence, as the group had learned from Sergeant Pepper that the flow of an album from one song to another mattered.

They then went off and listened to the demo album and rehearsed all the songs with the flow and feel of the finished album in mind.

The resulting album, Working Man's Dead, is considered by many fans to be their first truly great studio album, and it's one of the few that has a substantial number of defenders, despite it sounding nothing like the extended jams they were known for on stage.

It's a collection of relatively concise songs, only one of them going over five minutes and none going over six, like Dire Wolf, a song about fate and predestination and how everything is predetermined, inspired partly by a viewing of the Basil Rathbone version of The Hound of the Baskervilles on TV, though little of that inspiration shows up in the finished song.

In the timber's up in Mary Old, the wolves are running round.

A winter was so hot and cold, froze ten feet near the ground.

Don't murder me.

I beg of you, don't murder me.

Please

don't murder me.

The influence of the Bakersfield sound on that track is very noticeable.

But Trawamadorians will also notice that the records we looked at in episodes 172 and 192 were hugely influential on the group's sound at this point.

In particular, the Dead's newfound attention to their harmony vocals, on this album and the next one, was a conscious attempt to copy their friends Crosby, Stills and Nash.

As Weir put it, we've been hanging out with David Crosby and Stephen Stills particularly and listening to them sing together.

and just blown out by the fact that they really can sing together.

And we began to realize that we had been neglecting our own vocal presentation for instrumental presentation, and so we started working on our vocal arrangements and choral arrangements.

As it turned out, the next record we did had a lot of that on it, and it represented a marked change from the way we had sounded in the past, though none of us had really given it any thought.

The other most notable song on the album, Casey Jones, also indirectly has a cinematic inspiration.

The film Easy Rider had been a huge hit in the counterculture, especially among the elements of it that overlapped with the the Hell's Angels and other biker groups.

Robert Hunter, for example, had gone to see the film rather than go to Altamont, as he'd had a bad feeling about the concert, which proved to be accurate.

That film had a number of huge effects.

It basically started the new Hollywood that would define cinema in the 70s.

It made Jack Nicholson a star, but Dennis Hopper summed up the biggest when he said, The cocaine problem in the United States is really because of me.

There was no cocaine before Easy Rider on the street.

After Easy Rider, it was everywhere.

Cocaine had gone from being an unpopular, unfashionable drug to almost overnight being the drug of choice for people who wanted to think themselves hip.

And since cocaine rhymes with train, it was inevitable that when Garcia and Hunter decided to update the legend of Casey Jones, that would get added to the legend.

Driving that train,

I'll cocaine.

Casey Jones, he's been

watch your speed.

Travel ahead,

travel behind.

And no the notion just crossed my mind.

The group later disclaimed the idea that it was in some way promoting cocaine use, with Garcia in particular saying, It's clearly an anti-Coke song.

The words aren't light, good time words, it's just the feeling of it.

We were manipulating a couple of things consciously when we put that song together.

First of all, there's a whole tradition of cocaine songs, there's a tradition of train songs, and there's a tradition of Casey Jones songs.

And we've been doing a thing ever since Oxumoxoa, of building on a tradition that's already there, like Dupree's Diamond Blues.

But the group were using cocaine a lot at this point.

and initially it seemed to be a positive influence on the group, giving them additional energy in the studio.

It was only later that it would start to cause real problems for them.

The new album was extremely popular with the record company.

Joe Smith of Warner's, when he heard it, hugged co-producer Bob Matthews and said, I can hear the vocals, and allegedly ran into the corridors and grabbed people, ecstatically shouting, We've got a single!

We've got a single!

The single in question, Uncle John's Band, was edited into a single mix that Garcia later called an atrocity, with gaps left in the vocals where words like goddamn were used in the unexplagated version.

Apologies for the poor sound quality of this.

As far as I'm able to discover, that single edit has never been released on CD or as a download, and so I've had to use a vinyl rip from a YouTube channel called Scratchy45s.

a build of cannon mouse.

Their mud is dull trend on me.

It's the same story, the crow told me.

It's the only one you know.

Like the morning sun, you come, and like the wind, you go.

But it did give the group their first entry onto the Hot 100, making number 69 on the charts.

And the album itself did even even better, making number 27 on the album charts.

After a string of flops, this new version of the Grateful Dead looked like they might be onto a winner, and they needed one.

The group were also busily rearranging their management team.

Rock Scully would still be involved, but from this point on, he was an advisor paid by the record label, rather than being on the band's payroll himself.

But the big change, and the one that meant they needed money, was that Lenny Hart had been revealed to have been stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the band.

He disappeared with their money, and there was some talk of sending hell's angels after him to get the money back.

But Garcia, who, despite his passivity and unwillingness to take a formal leadership role, was always informally accepted as their leader, decided that his karma would probably get him, so they didn't need to take any action.

In early 1970, the group played the Fillmore supported by Miles Davis, who had just released his Bitch's Brew album, which was the most influential album on the new genre of jazz rock.

The group were all amazed by Davis, and his performance renewed their interest in improvisation, though they were still for the moment even more interested in writing the kind of songs that would earn them enough money that they could make back the money Lenny Hart had stolen.

They went on a big multi-artist tour across Canada, with Jefferson Airplane, Janice Joplin, the band, Buddy Guy and others, all travelling by train.

But the shows were disrupted by protesters, who insisted that they should all be playing for free, not for money, and who were storming one of the venues with thousands of people trying to get him for free.

Garcia eventually managed to calm the protests by organising a free show in a park, with some of the acts, including the dead, playing both shows.

But he, understandably, resented this.

He said of the protests, I think the musician's first responsibility is to play music as well as he can, and that's the most important thing.

And any responsibility to anyone else is just journalistic fiction or political fiction, because that's about the people's music.

Man, where's that at?

What's that supposed to mean?

It wasn't any people who sat with me while I learned to play the guitar.

I mean, who paid the dues?

I mean, if the people think that way, they can make their own music.

And besides, when somebody says people, to me it means everybody.

It means cops, the guys who drive the limousine, the who runs the elevator, everybody.

Much of the tour was spent with Janice Joplin trying to persuade the Grateful Dead, who, other than Pigpen, were not big drinkers, to get drunk with her.

She succeeded, but they got their revenge by spiking her and her band on the last day of the tour with acid.

According to at least one book, the vector for the acid was Janice's birthday cake, which was shared with a number of members of the Calgary Police Department.

Some of the bands on the tour actually decided it would be a plan to hijack the train and drive it down to San Francisco after the tour.

But luckily, rather than driving that train high on cocaine, they realised that the power had been switched off when they got to their destination, so they had no way to get it to move.

While the group was still playing big, multi-act events like this though, they had also started a new style of touring, one that was designed to maximise money and also give them the time to play all the music they wanted.

Where up to this point, The norm for a Grateful Dead show had been for them to go on as part of a bill with two or three other acts.

Now they started touring as An Evening with the Grateful Dead.

The show would start with a performance by the Acoustic Dead, performing largely their new song-oriented material.

That would follow with a performance by the new riders of the Purple Sage, featuring Garcia and Hart, and then to finish off an electric set, or sometimes a show broken into two sets, featuring as wide a variety of songs as they could fit in, from their long jams like the other one.

To covers of James Brown's songs.

These shows would last for five hours and would require no other bands, just the dead and the people in their immediate circle.

This made them both more artistically fulfilling and, crucially, more fiscally rewarding than playing on a package with other bands.

And these shows went along with another innovation, one that came from Rock Scully, and which eventually changed everything for the dead, who at this point were in act with no hit singles and only one moderately successful album, in a world where record sales and radio play were all.

The Tralthamadorians among you have obviously heard other episodes in which I talk about the rise of FM radio.

But in brief, frequency modulation, or FM, was an alternative way of transmitting radio to amplitude modulation, or AM, which had been the norm up until the late 60s and would remain important for a long time to come.

Because of the bands allocated to the different types types of radio in most countries, AM radio could be broadcast for thousands of miles, while FM radio could only be heard dozens of miles away at most.

And so AM dominated among the big commercial broadcasters, while FM was at this point mostly only used by small community radio stations, college stations, and the like.

But those stations were more likely to play obscure music than the big stations were.

and they could also take advantage of one big difference that FM radio had.

There was a consistent standard for broadcasting stereo in FM, while at the time AM radio could only be broadcast in mono.

This made those small community stations perfect for a new format, album-oriented radio, which went on to define what in America is now known as classic rock.

Those stations didn't have to worry about pleasing massive audiences, so they could play stereo album tracks rather than just singles, which were only released in mono.

And they also started broadcasting concerts.

Indeed, one show at the Winterland Arena on October 4th, 1970, became the first ever quadraphonic broadcast, as two different FM stations, KQED and KSAN, both broadcast different simultaneous stereo mixes that you could play together.

Though here you're only going to hear it in mono, of course.

Till the morning come,

it'll do you fine.

Till the morning come

like a fireworks,

showing you the way,

leaving no doubt

of the way or in or the way out.

And this, broadcasting of live shows, became the Grateful Dead's salvation.

Because as Sam Cutler, their road manager, who joined them from the Rolling Stones after Altamont, said, there was a way in which FM radio could be used to reach markets that hadn't been touched.

So for example, in Pennsylvania, you wanted to do a gig at the spectrum in Philadelphia, which holds 18,000 people.

The promoter would say, we'd love to put you on at the spectrum, but you aren't even going to sell 800 tickets.

So how do we get this exposed to enough people that they can sell out the spectrum?

One of the keys to that was FM radio and college radio stations.

We took Pennsylvania as a market area and worked on playing at different colleges where there were 15,000 to 20,000 resident people and used the FM radio station in that market to reach more people.

You play in the state universities of Pennsylvania in order that when you play in a Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, people actually come to you.

They're drawn to you and they know about you.

Then you broadcast live for free.

That just snowballed.

The band in those four years went from not selling very many tickets to being very successful.

These radio broadcasts meant that over a period of a couple of years, the Grateful Dead went from playing to a few hundred people at most, anywhere but San Francisco, New York, and a couple of other major cities, to playing to huge crowds of thousands.

And those broadcasts also started to be taped, and people started making copies of the tapes for their friends.

By 1971, this success was already causing problems of its own, with Garcia saying, The Grateful Dead has become incredibly popular, and we can't play a small hall anymore without having 3,000 people outside wanting to get in.

Our classic situation the last six months has been people breaking down the doors and just coming in.

We have to play 7,000 to 10,000 seats to be able to get people in at a reasonable price, just to do it.

It's weird.

Here's what we're wondering.

Do we really want to do that?

When it comes down to it, we're just heads.

We're not interested in creating a lot of trouble and being superstars and all that.

We're just playing, getting off, out to have a good time and giving it all a chance to happen.

And all of a sudden, there are all these problems making it more difficult to do.

And it's getting to be when it's not fun.

We have to play shows like some military campaigns, just to make sure the equipment guys don't have to be fighting thousands of people to save them.

But back in 1970, it's a plan to save the band financially at all.

Although at that point, the the hope of commercial success in recordings was also still alive.

Indeed, right after the release of Working Man's Dead, the group went into the studio to record another album, one that would generally be considered the closest thing they came to a studio masterpiece.

Let my

son

I don't know

Don't really care

Let there be songs

to fill American Beauty was an album that was haunted by parental loss There was the loss of Mickey Hart's father from the group's management of course an estrangement that hurt him deeply.

But in August 1970 Garcia's mother was in a car crash and died in hospital of her injuries a month later.

And at the same time, Lesch's father was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

So it goes.

But rather than wallow, the band made their most optimistic album and the most collaborative studio album they'd made to that point.

They threw themselves into their work to distract themselves from their problems and gathered as many of their friends around them as they could.

Friends of theirs like Jefferson Airplane, David Crosby, Neil Jung, and Carlos Santana were all recording in the same studio complex around that time, and Lesh described it as jammer heaven.

Those musicians weren't included in the sessions themselves, though various members of the New Riders and other, less famous friends of the band, contributed additional instruments.

But they were around and added to a family feeling for the sessions.

And while the previous two albums had been made up almost entirely of songs by Garcia and Hunter, the other band members contributed songs to American Beauty.

The album album opened with the song whose music Lesh wrote for his dying father, with lyrics by Hunter, and which featured Lesh's first lead vocal and guest appearances by a couple of members of the new Riders of the Purple Sage.

while going home

What do you want me to do

for you

to see you through?

In 1995, that became the last song the Grateful Dead ever played live.

The album also featured another song that would become a live favorite, Sugar Magnolia, written by Weir and Hunter.

Sweet blossom, come on, under the willow.

We can have high times if you live by.

We can discover the wonders of nature.

Growing in the rushes down by the riverside.

She's got everything we like for.

she's got and what turned out to be Pig Pen's only solo songwriting credit on a Grateful Dead album, Operator.

Operator,

can you help me?

Help me if you please

Give me the right

area code and the number

that I need.

My

Almost all the rest of the album was made up of Garcia and Hunter collaborations,

with John Dawson of the New Riders collaborating with them on Friend of the Devil.

But the song that was chosen as a single, and once again released in a single edit, though this time that single has been included on official CD releases, is the song that, for the next 18 years at least, would be their most well-known song, and that had music that evolved out of a jam between Garcia, Weir, and Lesh.

The lyrics to Truckin' were written by Hunter after he went out on tour with the band for the first time and got to experience what life on the road was like.

Looking

up above the

From this point on, Hunter would be a regular backstage presence, as he was considered a non-performing member of the band.

Indeed, the backstage areas of dead shows were growing somewhat crowded, as the band's crew became larger, and as more and more people got admitted to the Grateful Dead family.

Trucking was another minor hit like Casey Jones had been, reaching number 64, and the album also made the top 30.

The group weren't having massive hit records, but they were doing much better than they had been.

Over the next few months, in between gigs, the band members, particularly Garcia and Hart, spent a lot of time in Wally Hyder's studio, where they had recorded American Beauty, with the friends who had created that Jannah Heaven.

Garcia, Hart, and Kreutzmann all added parts to tracks on Blows Against the Empire, the science fiction concept album by members of Jefferson Airplane that became the first Jefferson Starship album, and which also featured David Crosby and Graham Nash.

Garcia, Lesch, Kreutzman and Hart also guested on several tracks on David Crosby's album, If I Could Only Remember My Name, which also featured Neil Young, Nash, several of Jefferson Airplane, and Joni Mitchell.

And Garcia and Lesh guested on Graham Nash's Songs for Beginners, which also featured Crosby, Young, and John Barbeta, the former Turtles drummer who had just been working with Crosby Stills Nash and Young and would soon join Jefferson Airplane.

This music was all, as you can hear, very much in the same area as the two Grateful Dead albums of 1970.

all acoustic guitar and pedal steel and vocal harmonies.

But live, the group was still spending at least as much of their time playing long pieces like Darkstar as they were the more commercial songs.

The posts terrorists from the

That performance of Darkstar, which many fans of the group consider the best ever, is a historic one.

That would be the last time that Pigpen and Mickey Hart would both play on the same stage together.

February 18th, 1971 was the last performance by the lineup of the Grateful Dead that had made their most successful records.

Mickey Hart had taken his father's betrayal of the group very, very badly.

While almost all the group were having drug problems at this time, everyone except Pigpen was using cocaine, and Pigpen's alcohol dependency had by this point become even worse than the other members' more illicit habits.

Hart was spiraling.

According to Kreutzmann's autobiography, Hart had developed a serious heroin habit at this point, and according to everyone, he was depressed and feeling guilty over the way his father had betrayed the people he thought of as his brothers.

Things came to a head on the 18th of February.

Hart was simply too much of a mess mentally to play.

Luckily for the group, they had a hypnotist on hand.

They were playing a short residency, and as part of that run of shows, they were taking part in an ESP experiment, where the audience tried to send images to a sleeping experimental recipient elsewhere.

The hypnotist managed to get Hart into a state to play that show, and then he was driven back to his mother's house, where he was medicated and slept for three days.

The group continued with Kreutzmann as their only drummer, but there was another change that happened that week during the same run of shows.

Bob Weir had been writing more music.

and had of course been collaborating with the band's resident lyricist, Hunter.

But Hunter thought that Weir was showing disrespect for his lyrics, though Weir argued no more so than Garcia did.

Backstage, they got into a fight over the way the band were now playing Sugar Magnolia, which had started out as a gentle country song, but by this point had evolved into a fast rocker, and Weir would sometimes improvise new words.

Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind.

On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.

You are not welcome among us.

You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one.

So I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks.

I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.

You have no moral right to rule us, nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

That's from A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow, from 1996.

Backstage after the show was Weir's old friend John Perry Barlow, who by this time was a part-time writer who'd taken an advance for a novel he had no intention of writing, and had used it to travel the world before becoming a cocaine dealer, the capacity in which he was backstage.

He was just about to travel to his family's ranch in Wyoming, because his father was ill and would die the next year.

So it goes.

Barlow would spend the next 20 years running the family business and living out his cowboy fantasies, fantasies that would also appear in a lot of the writing he would do over that time period.

He would also get very involved in Republican politics, including helping run Dick Cheney's first senatorial campaign.

Much of Barlow's writing would end up being scripts for films that were never made, but for which Barlow Barlow was nonetheless paid.

But the work he would become best known for, at least up until his promotion in the 90s into the position of leading propagandist for internet anarcho-capitalism and the Californian ideology, was started backstage in February 1971.

Hunter and Weir were having an argument about Weir's attitude to Hunter's lyrics, and Hunter turned to Barlow and, after determining that Barlow had written poetry in college, and thus could presumably write lyrics, said, Take him, he's yours.

From that point on, there were two main songwriting teams for the Grateful Dead, Hunter and Garcia and Barlow and Weir.

1971 continued to be a year of changes and loss.

Over the spring, both of Weir's parents died, each on the other's birthday.

So it goes.

And while Bill Graham would continue to be the promoter who booked many of the dead's most prominent gigs, The move in the rock world from bands playing theatres to amphitheatres and stadiums meant that his venues were no longer economical for him to operate.

And so the Fillmores East and West, the two venues that had been most welcoming for the dead, announced their closure.

The bands who played the Fillmore East in its last weeks tended to bring on special guests to make the event special.

The Mothers of Invention brought John Lennon and Yoko Ono on, for example.

And the Grateful Dead were no exception.

bringing another famous Californian band out to play a few of their own hits and to jam on songs that both bands often included in their respective sets, like Riot in Cell Block No.

9, Johnny B.

Good, and Merle Haggard's Okie from Muscogee.

Like the hippies out

As the Tralthamadorians Among Us heard in episode 177, the Beach Boys were at a low ebb in their fortunes at this time, and the endorsement of the Grateful Dead helped them gain the appreciation of a hip college audience, which was a major part in the revival of their fortunes in the 70s.

By contrast, the group's last performance at the Fillmore West, which was being filmed for Bill Graham's documentary, The Last Days of the Fillmore, was so bad that they asked that none of it be used in the film, though Graham eventually persuaded them to let him use performances of Casey Jones and Johnny B.

Goode.

Garcia was asked about that show the next year and said, We struggled to avoid getting into the movie because it was like really a notably bad night for us and the tapes were a drag and everybody was out of tune and everything and we were, it was that thing of not having played for a couple of weeks, you know, three or four weeks we'd been in the studio.

But finally Graham just hassled us and hassled us and we finally went for it.

We doctored them up a bit.

That said, while the band were notably out of tune at points during the show, it wasn't a completely meritless one.

Indeed, a little over an hour of that show, not including the two songs used in the film or film, recently got a release as a bonus disc on the 50th anniversary deluxe edition of the band's next album.

That album was a double disc live album, recorded mostly at the group's Fillmore East shows over the spring, and consisting, other than an extended version of the other one, largely of cover versions of blues, rockabilly, and country songs.

but it's free.

And feeling good was easy load when parties and the blue.

And feeling good was good enough for me.

While that was billed as a live album, it actually had quite a few overdubs.

Pig Pen's playing had been increasingly erratic.

and he had become severely ill, suffering from delirium tremens.

He'd started to cut down on the drinking, but he'd still ended up in the hospital in September, where he was treated for a perforated ulcer and hepatitis.

Given Pig Pen's condition, organ parts were overdubbed on three of the songs by Garcia's friend and occasional performance partner, Merle Saunders.

The album caused a major problem between the group and their record label.

Not because it was a second double live album.

That made sense, especially given there was no overlap in the repertoire on the two albums.

No, the problem was the group's group's chosen title, Skull.

Warner Brothers were adamant that you couldn't release an album with a title like Skull.

You simply couldn't use the word

or any of the other seven words you can't say on television or in a podcast with a clean rating in a title and expected to be stocked on shelves.

The group were equally adamant that it couldn't be called anything else.

Eventually, Warners asked for a meeting about this.

The group agreed, but said that as they were a democracy, the meeting had to involve everyone in their their organisation, all 55 of them.

Eventually, the meeting hammered out a compromise.

The album would go out without a title, just labelled Grateful Dead, which was taken as its title.

All the true Deadheads continued referring to it by its original name, F-Word Intact, while almost everyone else ended up referring to it as Skull and Moses, after the cover image.

to stop it being confused with their eponymous studio album from a few years earlier.

In return for this concession, Warners agreed to give it a huge marketing budget, and it became their first album to go gold.

Wish I had listened more what mama said.

As 1971 came to an end, the group had a further change in line-up.

Donna Jean Godshow had been a member of a vocal group called Southern Comfort, who had become the go-to session backing singers at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, and we actually heard her singing in the episode before last.

She had also recorded backing vocals in several other studios in the South, including, as the Trafamadorians Among You will remember, on Elvis' number one hit, Suspicious Minds.

You know I have never

liked you.

Incidentally, and as a sign of the kind of reason this episode took so very long to do, every source on The Grateful Dead I've Read uses phrasing like, She'd been part of a female vocal group in her teens and worked as a session singer in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where she performed on such records as Elvis Presley's Suspicious Minds.

Suspicious Minds was famously recorded at American Sound Studios in Memphis, not in Muscle Shoals, with some extra work by Felton Jarvis in Las Vegas afterwards.

This meant I had to take time out to find a source for Godshow being on the record that didn't trace back to a source on The Grateful Dead.

But she's credited under her maiden name in Erst Jorgensen's book on Elvis's sessions, so anyone else who has that problem in future can relax.

She had given up on session work and moved to California, where she met her husband, Keith Godshow.

Keith was a resentful lounge pianist who was playing music he didn't like, but who desperately wanted to be playing modal jazz and bebop.

However, after Donna Jean saw The Grateful Dead live, both of them became interested in the group, even though neither had any background in the Dead's kind of music.

One day, a friend of theirs suggested they put on a Grateful Dead album, and Keith said he'd rather be playing the music than listening to it.

That gave Donna Jean an idea.

She took Keith to one of the small duo gigs that Garcia played when the dead weren't playing.

Garcia would pretty much constantly perform live every chance he could get.

This one was a performance with the jazz keyboard player Howard Wales, with whom Garcia had recently recorded the duo album Hooter Roll.

She grabbed Garcia between sets and told him, this is your new keyboard player.

What she didn't know, of course, was that Pigpen was in the hospital, and increasingly in no state to play even when he wasn't.

Indeed, they'd actually tried auditioning Howard Wales, but come to the conclusion that while they liked his playing, they brought the worst out of each other, the group egging Wales on to be too experimental, and him doing likewise for the group.

Garcia got Keith in to audition, first just for him, and then bringing in first Kreutzmann and then the whole band.

Keith Gottshow was now the Grateful Dead's main keyboard player, though Pigpen would still perform whenever he was well enough, and to the extent he could.

Keith's playing was considered revelatory at this time.

He's been compared to the legendary Nashville session player Floyd Kramer for his playing on the country tunes, and called a cross between Chick Career and Little Richard for his more experimental playing.

Within a few months, Donna Jean would also join, on backing and occasional lead, vocals, becoming the only woman ever to be a member of the group.

The new expanded line-up of the group got ready to head out on the road for their first tour of Europe.

But before before they did, there were some solo albums to get released.

Watch each card you play and make slow.

Wait until

The band's contract with Warners allowed them to make solo albums, and Jerry Garcia's first true solo album, simply titled Garcia, had a simple motivation behind it.

He wanted to buy a house, and if he turned in an album relatively cheaply, the advance would be enough for a down payment on one.

As he said later, there was a reason that the first track on the album was called Deal, while the last was The Wheel.

The album was him Wheeling and Dealing for a House.

So in the summer it had been decided that Garcia and Weir would both do solo albums.

Garcia's solo album was actually recorded in July 1971, before Pig Pen's illness worsened.

Garcia was a perfectionist in the studio and wanted to make an album where he had total control, somewhat in the same spirit as Roy Wood's Boulders, although Garcia couldn't play drums or write lyrics, so there were a whole six people in the studio some of the time.

Garcia himself, playing everything except drums, the dead sound engineers Bob and Betty, Ramrod, the guitar tech who everyone regarded as at least as much a part of the Dead Spirit as any band member, sort of the Dead's equivalent of Mal Evans or Neil Aspinall, and who was given the job of co-producing the album, in part to give him an extra payday, Kreutzmann on drums, and Robert Hunter to write the lyrics.

The album was recorded at Wally Hyder's studio, where the Dead and most of their friends regularly recorded, the jam heaven we talked about earlier.

So to discourage the kind of party atmosphere that led to fun times but expensive records, they put up a sign saying Anita Bryant session.

Bryant was a moderately successful middle-of-the-road singer who had been heavily involved in campaigns to prosecute the doors for indecency, and is now best known for being a raging homophobic bigot.

whose campaigns against gay people in the 70s featured exactly the same kind of language and accusations her ideological fellows are currently weaponizing against trans people today.

Nobody wants to spend time around anyone like that, and so the sessions were safe from interruption.

The album was later more or less dismissed by Garcia, and it was disliked by the record label because, even on the new album-oriented stations, it was unlikely that the commercial tracks would get played.

There were plenty of commercial-sounding tracks like The Wheel.

let go and you can't hold on.

You can't go back and you can't stand still.

If the thunder don't get you, then the lightning will.

Won't you try just a little bit harder?

Couldn't you try just a little bit more?

But interspersed with those songs on the album were things like Spider-Gourd.

And the album was mastered without much gap between the tracks, meaning that DJs queuing up a sing-along that wasn't a million miles away from the stuff the Eagles would soon be having hits with, might inadvertently get a blast of Vereza-like musique concret.

Bob Weir's solo album, recorded around February 1972, had a very different story.

While Garcia was so musically feckened that he could just turn out new songs in the studio, Weir had to be encouraged by Garcia to write at all.

But by all accounts Garcia, who hated the responsibility that came with leadership, and refused to take it even though everyone around him him insisted that he was the leader of the group, wanted to encourage the band to have another focus other than just him.

Weir's first solo album, Ace, came together in something of a rush.

He had studio time set aside for the album, but had almost no songs, and drove up to Barlow's Ranch for a frenetic writing session that led to a collection of songs that ended up almost all becoming staples of the Grateful Dead's repertoire.

I've seen weather workers left by the silver stream.

I can tell by the Marquee left you were in his dream.

Our child of countless trees.

Our child of foundless seas.

Weir and Barlow found writing together much more congenial than Weir and Hunter had.

Often the process was far more collaborative than the simple music lyrics split that Weir had had with Hunter.

Weir would bring Barlow just a chord sequence with no melody line.

Barlow would come up with lyrics and sing them over the chord sequence, coming up with a melody line as he did so.

And then Weir would rework Barlow's melody line into something different, while also changing the lyrics around and adding new ones.

The album did include two songs that Weir had already written with Hunter and erstwhile dead drummer Mickey Hart, Greatest story ever told, and playing in the band.

Say it once again now,

but I hope you understand.

When it's done and over, go,

come in, it's just a man.

Daybreak,

That had actually already appeared in live form on the Skull and Roses album, and Hart also did a version of that song on his own first solo album, released towards the end of 1972.

There's also one song credited to Weir on his own, One More Saturday Night, though apparently that started as a collaboration with Hunter, before Weir re-wrote it to get rid of Hunter's contributions.

But the rest of the album is Weir and Barlow, and mostly shows the particular ideas of freedom that Barlow brought to the group.

He was equally influenced by the idea of cowboys in the Old West, and the modern easy rider-style bikers who would head out on the highway looking for adventure in whatever came their way.

People who lived free of government interference and age of consent laws, where men could be men and live as Americans should.

glimpse of black-eyed girls who giggle when I smile.

There's a little boy that wants to shine my feet.

And it's three days ride from Bakersfield.

And I don't know why I came.

I guess I came to keep from paying dues.

So instead, I've got a bottle.

And a girl is just 14.

In a damn good case of the Mexicali blues.

Yeah.

Is there anything?

While Ace was released as a Bob Weir album, it is in fact a Grateful Dead album, and the single One More Saturday Night was released as by The Grateful Dead with Bobby Ace.

Weir initially started recording the album without the rest of the band other than Kreutzmann.

Dave Torbert, the bass player for the New Riders of the Purple Sage, contributed to the opening song.

But soon Rock Scully persuaded him that the easiest way to make the album would just be to persuade his bandmates to record it with him.

Other than Pigpen, who wasn't well enough to join them, all the other members of The Dead at the time, Garcia, Lesch, Kreutzmann and The God Shows, contributed to the album.

And other than Torbert's bass on Greatest Story Ever Told and some string and horn parts, all the parts on the album are played and sung by Grateful Dead members.

It's just as much a Grateful Dead album as any of the group's previous studio albums and contains as many of the songs that they became known for as any of the others.

I went down to the mountain, I was drinking some wine.

Look up in the heavens, what I saw my son ridden fire across the heaven.

Blades black and white, get prepared.

There's going to be a money tonight, huh?

Hey Saturday night.

Hey, uh-huh.

One more Saturday night.

The comic strip Dilbert by Scott Adams became in the 1990s the touchstone for a whole generation of tech workers, especially in the Bay Area, as the titular character, named by one of Adams' colleagues at Pacific Bell, the San Francisco-based telephone company that at that time was moving into computer networking and was a hotbed of the San Francisco hacker culture, came to symbolise the struggles of the software engineers who were being kept down and in their place by the pointy-haired boss.

who didn't understand as much as the engineers he was in charge of.

The message of the comic at that time was that the people in charge should step aside and let the people who knew what they were talking about, the people who really knew computers, do their thing.

In more recent years, the comic started to present the boss as a more and more sympathetic figure, and more of the jokes became about attacking what Adams would refer to as wokeness, such as consideration for people of colour, trans people, and so on.

Eventually, this year, the strip was cancelled, in the actual, not metaphorical sense, as Adams was videoed making explicitly white separatist remarks.

The dead's trip to Europe in 1972 saw Pigpen returning to the group.

He was still very, very ill and could no longer drink alcohol at all, and obviously he had not been taking recreational drugs anyway.

He was very withdrawn, but apparently, his gentle character shone through even more on that trip than normally.

Pigpen was pretty much universally considered the nicest person in the band, even though he was the scariest looking of the band.

While the others mostly looked like cuddly hippies, but could be utterly cold-minded when they needed to be for the good of the band, Pigpen was regarded by everyone who spoke about him in later decades as being practically a saint.

That's not really the case for the people he was hanging around with, though.

On the European tour, Pig Pen chose to spend most of the time with the crew rather than his bandmates, and the Grateful Dead were getting a reputation as having a crew you didn't want to mess with.

The group's sound and lighting system were getting much more complex and much more physically difficult to get in place, and they were attracting the kind of crew who had to be good at quickly and efficiently dealing with physical problems.

The crew also had to deal with all the other problems that the rock stars didn't want to know about, and thus essentially became enforcers.

There are lots of stories in this period of crew members cutting the microphone cords of people in the audience taping the shows, and of Sam Cutler threatening promoters with guns to make them pay up, though Cutler always denied those stories and said he'd never owned a gun.

They were temperamentally very different from the band members, the iron fist around which the velvet glove of the band were wrapped, and so a certain amount of natural separation happened.

On the European tour, there were two buses, and while there was no formal rule as to who sat where, and people could travel on whichever they wished, one bus had almost all the band, other than Pigpen, and a couple of the crew, while the other mostly had the crew, plus Pigpen.

As is the way of things, the two buses developed two ostensible characters, and the people on them got nicknames.

The people on the band bus were Bozos, partly because they sometimes wore clown masks to freak out the people of Europe as they drove past, and partly after I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus, a comedy science fiction album by the Firesign Theatre, parodying futurism, religious creation myths, artificial intelligence, and the idea of government by machines.

Yes, some uncomplicated peoples still believe this myth.

But here in the technical vastness of the future, we can guess that surely the past was very different.

We can surmise, for instance, that these two great balls are.

We know for certain, for instance, that for some reason, for some time in the beginning, there were hot lumps.

Cold and lonely,

they whirled noiselessly through the black holes of space.

These insignificant lumps came together to form the first union, our sun, the heating system.

And about this glowing gas bag rotated the earth,

a cat's eye among eggs, blinking in astonishment across the face of a pine.

The people on the other bus, by contrast, were bolos.

And over the course of the trip, Robert Hunter worked out a complex fake religion in the tradition of other comedy religions like Bocchonism or Discordianism, which were popular in the part of the counterculture that overlapped with science fiction fandom.

This religion, whose patron saint was St.

Dilbert, saw Bozos and Bolos as two necessary opposing forces like Yin and Yang.

Hunter named the religion hypnocracy as a parody of technocracy, a movement that had reached its height of popularity in the 1930s, but still clings on to life to this day, and to which a friend of Garcia belonged.

Technocracy was a huge influence on Golden Age science fiction, particularly on writers who came up through John W.

Campbell's editing of Astounding magazine, like Theodore Sturgeon, L.

Ron Hubbard, and Robert A.

Heinlein, and held a lot of beliefs, but primarily that society should be organized scientifically, with scientists and technicians and engineers in charge, not politicians.

This idea didn't tend to appeal to actual scientists, who could see the flaws in the argument, but did appeal to cranks who thought of themselves as scientists, and for a while had quite a widespread following in North America.

The leader of the technocracy movement in Canada, for example, was one Joshua Haldeman, a former rodeo performer turned chiropractor, who later went on to campaign against Coca-Cola before moving his family to apartheid South Africa because he thought Canada was morally degenerate.

His thinking appears to have had an influence on his grandson, Elon Musk, a follower of the Californian ideology, who tweeted in 2019 that he was accelerating starship development to build the Martian technocracy.

Obviously, ridiculous people like this deserved mockery, and soon hypnocric became the philosophy of the people on the tour, at least those on the Bozo bus.

The European tour was regarded by everyone involved as one of the great experiences of their lives, and the group were playing better than ever before.

Many fans considered their performance of Darkstar in Dusseldorf to be one of the finest ever.

While others point to the performance from London on the same tour.

By this point, Darkstar had become a massive event, something audiences looked forward to.

You didn't get it every show, but when you did, you knew you were going to get something special.

It was considered something rather apart from the group's other material.

Lesch once said, Darkstar is always playing somewhere, all we do is tap into it.

The group were all, other than Pigpen, playing at their best, and band members of all especially pointed out how well Kreutzmann was playing at the time.

Hart's departure had freed Kreutzmann up.

When you have two drummers, each drummer has to stay in sync with the other, and can't make the tiny adjustments to tempo and feel that a single drummer has the freedom to do.

Lesch later said, Billy played like a young god.

I mean, he was everywhere on the drums and just kicking our butts every which way, which is what drummers live to do, you know?

Donna Jean agreed, saying, Billy was so there with what the Grateful Deads music was all about.

He was always postured to play anything.

He never set down a two and four that you couldn't get away from.

Billy's left and right arm were always postured at any millisecond to take that rhythm anywhere that it needed to go.

That's the beauty of Billy Kreutzmann's playing.

He played like a dancer.

Of course, a massive touring operation like the Grateful Deads was expensive to bring across to Europe, and the only sensible way they could do it was to release yet another live album, this time a triple one.

Although Europe 72 is, while often considered the pinnacle of the group's work, not exactly live.

The group were pleased with their instrumental playing, but not with their vocals, and so most of the vocals on the album were re-recorded in the studio back in the US, but not done the conventional way, with the band members using headphones and singing into the mic.

Instead, to make sure that the vocal tracks sounded as they would have live, with instrumental bleed-through to make them fit the ambiance, the group's entire stage setup was replicated in the studio, with the amps positioned as they would normally be, and the mics spaced exactly as they would be in a live performance.

The instruments were played back through the same amps they'd used on stage, and the group redid their parts, including a couple of vocals from Pig Pen.

You said you were hurting,

almost lost your mind.

Cause I made you love,

hurt you

all the time.

But when things go wrong

Those would be his last contributions to a Grateful Dead record.

He played only one show with the group after the European tour, in June, and then he stayed at home trying to get well.

As Bob Weir would later explain, Pigpen had been slowing down and gradually getting sicker, and his musical output was tapering, so by the time he had to stay off off the road, he hadn't been contributing that much, so it didn't have that major an impact.

Coincidentally, I started to hit my stride around the same time, and with Pig Pen sick, there was a need for me to do more.

While he was at home, he was working on some songs for a possible solo album, or maybe to contribute to the next dead album.

But as it turned out, they would never see release.

Pigpen died, alone, at home, of an internal hemorrhage brought on by too much alcohol consumption on the eighth of march nineteen seventy three.

So it goes.

He was twenty seven, and this leads me to another thing I need to say.

There is an utterly pernicious concept called the Twenty Seven Club, based around the fact that several musicians died at that age.

We've already seen one of these, Jesse Belvin, but we're sadly going to see a number more of them between now and episode two hundred, including one next episode.

Various conspiracies and attempts at adding mystical significance significance have become attached to this idea, an idea which has no basis in truth.

Musicians, even famous ones, are no more likely to die aged 27 than at any other age.

But there is some suggestion that some of the later ones, especially those who died by suicide or overdose, were motivated in part by the romanticizing of these deaths.

So I want to say clearly, this is the only time I will ever mention the 27 Club.

Like the Grateful Dead's keyboard players dying, this is not a fun pattern that one can play enjoyable games with.

This is talented, often troubled young people scarcely more than children dying in horrible ways.

I will have no part, however small, in adding to the belief that great art requires self-destruction or that one should die young and leave a beautiful corpse.

calls

go wrong

wrong with you

It hurts me too

Pigpen's death was, in many ways, the end of the Grateful Dead as they had been to that point.

But there were other changes afoot.

The group had decided to set up their own record label, Grateful Dead Records.

Initially, this was planned to be something that would allow the group to be totally independent and be distributed entirely through channels other than the mainstream record industry.

As Garcia said, it's dumb to complain about all that record company.

I mean, if you're enough of an to stick it up where they can shoot at it, you can't complain for getting shot.

It was our blunder, and we've been living with our mistake all these years.

Now, hopefully, we're free to make our own mistakes.

As it turned out, their own mistakes would be just as bad as any that Warners had made, and Grateful Dead Records would shut down in 1976.

It would later be revived in the 90s as an archive label.

But it did mean that the band were in total control of their next few studio albums, with no oversight, which led to unfortunate missteps like Weir and Barlow's Money Money, a song which complains about women being gold diggers, but also about feminism.

In truth, the group's studio albums were increasingly becoming afterthoughts.

As Garcia said in 1973, There are a lot of people on our payroll and we can't really count that much on record royalties to take care of business.

The live shows we do are the main source of income for the band, and we've been playing an awful lot to pay off our overhead.

Part of the reason for starting Grateful Dead Records had been to try to increase their share of the revenue from the records.

But as it turned out, they wanted neither to be in the record business nor to be in the studio.

The group recorded six studio albums between 1973 and 1981.

And of course, as with every band of their size, some of them have their ardent defenders.

But even among that relatively small portion of Grateful Dead fans who defend their studio work, most agree that their great period in the studio ended with American beauty.

But the band was becoming very successful on tour, and developing a devoted fan base.

They were helped in this by the packaging of the Skull and Roses album, which included a message saying, Dead Freaks Unite, who are you?

Where are you?

How are you?

Send us your name and address and we'll keep you informed.

Within a couple of years the group had a mailing list of 40,000 people who got sent Deadhead newsletters, which popularized the term deadhead, which of course contained information about tour dates and new releases, but which also included the kind of stuff that bands would now have on their social media pages, the kind of thing that builds what is now called a parasocial relationship.

Hunter was particularly involved in this, creating cartoons and anecdotes about hypnocracy and the teachings of St.

Dilbert, many of which involve him giving hotfots, a kind of practical joke that involves setting the victim's shoes on fire when they're not looking.

Many of these stories also said a lot about the band's attitude to authority and to the kind of people who look to them for authority, as in one that reads, St.

Dilbert was walking in the market one day, when up staggered a bozo to ask his opinion on whether the king, who had been caught with his hand in exchequer, ought to abdicate, be deposed, have his hand cut off, or be given a medal.

With very little pondering, the Dilbert is said to have replied, You bozos slay me.

You pick a king who best represents the sum of your individual lameness to rule you, and then complain because he has has a big red nose.

While considering this reply, the bozo smelled smoke, and looking down realized that the Dilbert had, once again, placed a lighted match between his toes.

Even though they were only a middling success on record, the group were becoming ridiculously successful, to the extent that in 1973, on a bill with the band and the Ullman Brothers Band in Watkins Glen, they played to an audience which for decades held the Guinness record for the largest attendance at a festival ever, and according to some, was the largest gathering of humans in American history to that point.

The highways around the area had to be closed because of the traffic, with people making it on foot.

150,000 people had bought tickets, but most got in free.

Estimates put the crowd size at somewhere near 600,000.

which, if true, and given the age of the people attending, would mean that roughly one in every three people in their late teens and early twenties from the area stretching from Boston to New York were there.

The crowd for that event was so big that new technologies had to be introduced in the sound systems, delay lines that allowed speakers to be placed further apart to account for the speed of sound.

And this kind of thing was the problem.

The group were touring to try to make money, but to play to huge crowds you needed more equipment.

And if you wanted crowds of this size to hear you properly, you needed equipment that had never been developed before.

Eventually, Owsley and sound engineer Dan Healy came up with the system they called the Wall of Sound, which would give perfect sound in any venue.

That is, in any venue it could fit in.

It consisted of 641 speakers and needed five trucks to get it to a venue.

Many venues couldn't take its weight.

It also took two days to set up.

which meant that they needed two walls of sound and two whole crews, one to go ahead to set up the next show while the dead were playing one the other crew had set up.

This is a period when the shows were generally considered exceptional, but the band was supposed to be doing this to earn a living, but they found that as the audience grew, the costs associated with playing to an audience that size grew, and it just wasn't fun anymore, not least because half the band were dealing with serious cocaine problems by this point.

So in October 1974, the group decided to just stop.

They played a final concert at The Winterland, which was filmed for a film that Garcia later edited, and declared they were going on hiatus.

Much to Creutzmann's chagrin, Mickey Hart turned up and was invited to rejoin them for this last show.

By this time there were creative and personal splits in the band and the crew.

Everything from the drugs they preferred, some of the dead were by this point trying to be clean living, while others were taking everything they could, and several people involved were annoyed by the insistence of the crew at the last show that nobody could go on stage without taking acid first, to what kind of music they should be making.

They sacked a big chunk of the crew, dismantled the wall of sound, and spent 18 months off tour, only playing a small number of one-off shows.

But they found that they didn't know what to do if they weren't touring, and ended up getting back together, with Hart in the band once more, as he would be for the rest of its career, and touring again, starting off by playing smaller venues with a smaller crew.

But something was missing.

Some of the shows were as good as they'd ever been.

A 1977 show at Cornell University is often cited as their best show ever.

Doesn't matter what you wear, just be as long as you want there.

So come on, I ever got

round.

We're

around

And there were other shows, like a performance at the Pyramids in Egypt, which were fondly remembered for reasons other than the musical.

But something about the spirit of the shows was generally lacking, which can probably be summed up best by saying that between between 1976 and 1984, they only played Darkstar five times.

When asked about it, Garcia would say that he felt that the group had said everything they could say with that song, but that they felt obliged to try it every so often just in case.

The sets tended to be far more structured, with rigidly defined areas of improvisation, rather than the loose, smooth movement between ideas of the earlier performances.

Part of the problem was that several of the band had developed heroin addictions.

Garcia would struggle with his until the day he died.

And part of it was that, after the hiatus, Keith Godshow's playing no longer seemed to fit with the band the way it had.

By mutual agreement, Keith and Donner left the band in February 1979 and formed their own band.

But tragically, Keith died in a car accident in July 1980.

So it goes.

Keith's replacement was Brent Myland, who had played in Bob Weir's side band Bobby and the Midnight, and he was considered a better fit, and that change led to the band being somewhat reinvigorated.

In early 1976, Bob Weir had said, If it turns out that to avoid problems we have to play the big indoor places again, we just won't do it.

We won't go out on the road.

We'll just stay home and make records.

By late 1976, the Grateful Dead were playing the big indoor places again, and they continued playing bigger and bigger places.

As the group were reliant on money from live shows, of course the venues they were playing grew, and they hit upon a totally different way of making money from what anyone else in the rock business was doing at the time.

They didn't make a studio album between 1981 and 1987, but in that time they became a bigger and bigger live act,

because they finally figured out some of what was giving them a fan base, and started to exploit it.

People had always traded tapes of dead shows, but up until the early 80s, the group had discouraged this, as all bands did.

fearing bootlegging.

What they realized was that since they weren't making much money from records anyway, traded tapes weren't cutting into their profits much.

What they were doing was acting as advertising for their live shows, where they were making money.

They went from cutting the mics of tapers to setting up special tapers areas at shows, reserved areas where people could record the shows, so long as they only traded the recordings, never sold them.

These tapes being traded led to the creation of a whole fan culture, analyzing the different shows, and commenting on what was the best version of each song, what was the best era of the band, and so on.

People started to go to every show they could, traveling to see each show on a tour, sometimes seeing literally hundreds of shows.

A thriving ecosystem of small businesses started to follow the group, selling home-made merchandise, and the group brought the best of these people in to make their own merchandise, which they sold through their mailing list, or food in the parking lots to concert goers.

The parking lots themselves became party spaces, so much so that a lot of people would follow the band from from town to town, not to go to the gigs, but to party in the parking lots.

The group encouraged this kind of thing by setting up their own ticketing company and allocating chunks of tickets to people on their mailing list, which encouraged more people to sign up for the list, which encouraged them to think of themselves as deadheads.

The dead didn't understand their fan base.

Everything you read about them suggests that they didn't really get why this was happening.

But between good luck and good management, they'd managed to hit on a formula which is now the one used by every single artist who makes a living in the internet era, 30 years before it started to become just the way you do things.

Build a core audience by making work available for free or cheap, and then charge the true fans for extras, like live shows or merchandise or Patreon bonuses.

And there's a reason that everyone working in a creative field is following the example set by the Grateful Dead.

The Grateful Dead's fanbase were intimately connected with the internet from even before the World Wide Web became a thing.

Long before.

The group's geographic connection to the Bay Area and its connection to psychedelic drugs.

Many of the 70s generation of computer scientists were interested in expanding their own intelligence as well as that of their computers, and vague science fictional leanings meant that they were a natural fit for the kind of person who was online when there were only a handful of network computers in the world.

The first web page came online in August 1991.

The first Grateful Dead email list was started in the 70s by researchers in the AI department at Stanford.

When Usenet came along, originally there was just one newsgroup for music, but so many people were posting about the Grateful Dead that the moderators of that newsgroup eventually suggested that a separate dead newsgroup be set up so anyone who wanted to talk about any other bands could get a word in Edgewise, and they became the first band to have their own newsgroup.

A 1994 book called Skeleton Key, A Guide to the Culture of Dead fandom, has a whole appendix called How to Become a Nethead, which lists phone numbers of 19 Grateful Dead bulletin boards along with their mode M bitrates, and which says that there were at the time 40,000 subscribers to the Grateful Dead newsgroups, at a time when almost nobody was yet online.

Rather charmingly, it says of the newsgroup, Before you post your first message, take stock.

Writing to tens of thousands of people at once is not quite like writing a personal letter.

You should take care that the information you are publishing is accurate.

The bulletin board, The Well, set up in 1985 by Stuart Brand, one of the organizers of the Trips Festival, became a huge gathering place for dead fans and for people in the group's organization, especially Barlow, who got into talks on The Well that led to him co-founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

the first civil liberties organization devoted to speech on the internet, and Brand sat on the board.

Brand's slogan, Information Wants to Be Free, became a rallying cry on the internet well into the new millennium, and the culture of the internet and of Silicon Valley grew up heavily influenced by the Grateful Dead's fan culture, and in particular by their encouragement of tape trading.

Everything about the way that music technology and entertainment technology more broadly evolved, the growth of file sharing, the embrace by record companies of streaming as a way to provide music free at the point of listening to meet that demand, and the fact that where 30 years ago mid-level bands made a modest income from recordings and toured to promote them, while now they make a modest income from touring but release records to promote the tour, all of that comes back to the fact that it was Grateful Dead fans who were first online, and who shaped the culture of the internet in ways, good and bad, that we're still seeing today.

It may not be an exaggeration to say that the Grateful Dead have had a more lasting and greater cultural impact than the Beatles, despite not even having a thousandth of their fan base or their specifically musical influence.

The whole Californian ideology, in all its self-contradictory complexity, is, in many ways, an outgrowth of Deadhead ideology, for better and for worse.

And that is why I had to cover the Grateful Dead in such depth here, because without them, the very model I use to fund this podcast would not exist.

If it had been fans of Frank Zepper or the Velvet Underground, who have been working in Stanford's AI lab, rather than the dead, the world would be unrecognizable now.

But while the dead were growing their audience, they were not doing well, and much of that was down to Jerry Garcia.

Garcia's heroin addiction was getting worse, to the point where he was nodding off on stage at times, and the man who had spent most of the 70s desperate to play music was now starting to resent being on stage because the crowds had grown too big.

Once again, they were touring not because they wanted to, but because they had obligations to all their employees to keep the show on the road no matter what their health, playing more to support the crew than for pleasure.

Eventually Garcia collapsed.

His health had deteriorated thanks to his heroin use.

He had undiagnosed diabetes and he dehydrated on a hot day.

He was rushed to hospital and given valium, which the doctors didn't know he was allergic to.

He was in a coma for several days, and when he came out of it his memory was scrambled.

He had to relearn how to play the guitar and banjo, spending months with the help of his friend Merle Saunders, slowly piecing his skills back together.

And, for a while at least, he came off the heroin and controlled his diet.

The group started rehearsing again, and at first it seemed like Garcia wouldn't be good enough.

But then one day in October 1986, Mickey Hart came into the Dead's office smiling and saying, We just did a really good dark star.

it's back.

They started booking a comeback tour the same day.

Garcia's first show back with the group opened with a song which they've been playing for ages but which took on a new life as an anthem of Garcia's recovery and which would become the lead-off single for their first studio album in six years.

everywhere.

Light a candle, curse the glare.

Draw the curtains, I don't care.

Cause

it's alright.

I will

get by.

I will

get by.

I will get by.

I will survive.

And that, 22 years after the band formed, gave them their first and only hit single.

In part, it was because the time was ripe.

1987 saw a lot of media coverage of the 20th anniversary of the Summer of Love.

And also, as the Tralfamadorians among you will know, the late 80s saw many career peaks for a host of the Dead's contemporaries, with the period between late 1986 and late 1989 seeing Paul Simon, Neil Young, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and George Harrison all making commercially successful albums that were hailed as returns to form after a patchy decade, and Dylan and Harrison's supergroup The Travelling Wilburies become a minor phenomenon.

Other than Simon, the Dead were very slightly ahead of the curve in appealing to an audience of boomers starting to enter middle age and get nostalgic for the musicians of their youth.

And while Touch of Grey is not an entirely happy lyric, lines like A Touch of Grey kind of suits you anyway will have given it appeal.

But the success was also helped, even more, by the video, the first one the group ever did, which was filmed after one of the group's shows and featured life-size skeleton puppets, modelled after the skeletons that had appeared on many of the group's album covers, playing the song in front of the audience, with a fun moment on the line, Dog Has Not Been Fed in Years, when a dog runs onto the stage and steals Mickey Hart's leg bone.

and a roadie has to chase the dog down and reattach the bone to the drummer, before turning into the real dead, lip-syncing their hit.

It was huge on MTV and got the record into the top 10, making the Grateful Dead finally a one-hit wonder.

We will get fired,

and we will survive.

But that success brought its own problems.

The group's audience became even more massive, with an influx of new fans who the Deadhead culture found it difficult to absorb and enculturate.

But at least at first, the Grateful Dead were enthusiastic about their new audience, and that enthusiasm was infectious.

They did a co-headlining tour that year with Bob Dylan, acting as his backing band as well as his support act.

The shows weren't great, and the live album that resulted has often been called the worst thing either The Dead or Dylan has ever done.

But Dylan was enthused enough by the experience of performing with the group and by their evident enjoyment of performing on stage that he started what has come to be known as the Never Ending Tour the next year.

And other than a break in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he's kept an intense concert schedule ever since, having played over 3,000 shows in the 35 years since then.

The late 80s also saw a change in the sound of the Grateful Dead, as the group started to experiment more with MIDI-controlled instruments.

Oddly, this meant that Brent Myland, on keyboards, moved steadily more towards playing patches that sounded like real acoustic instruments, while Mickey Hart, for example, would be playing percussion that triggered a whole bank of different sounds.

Garcia was particularly pleased with the ability to use his guitar as a MIDI controller and play sounds like a soprano sax.

He talked in interviews about how he would use it to imitate Eric Dolphy.

For a while, Darkstar came back into the set, now augmented by MIDI, but its place as the part of the set that encouraged the group to improvise had been taken by a piece called Space, and while they played it a lot, it never took off the way it used to.

But the group were having problems.

Now they had a hit, their already fanatical audience was being joined by another group of new fans, who hadn't previously been part of the Deadhead culture, and didn't know its unspoken rules.

And they were playing the biggest venues in America.

By now, they were far and away the most financially successful touring act around.

By late 1987, Garcia was already saying, the audience requires the band, the band requires the audience, you know what I mean?

And anything short of live performances is short of live performances, so some sort of video isn't going to get it, bigger venues isn't going to get it.

When you're at the stadium, that's it, that's the top end, and that's already not that great.

As far as I can tell, we're at the cul-de-sac, the end of popular music success.

It doesn't mean there's no place to go from here, but now we have to be creative on this level as well, and invent where we're going to go.

MTV did a day of the dead, where they devoted a whole day to the group, and that included a lot of coverage of the party scene in the parking lots, and suddenly those became exponentially greater, filled with people who didn't even intend to see the group live, but were just there to hang out outside and get drunk and stoned.

This started to cause problems for the infrastructure of any city and venue where the group played, and required yet more work from their staff.

According to some in the dead's management team at that point, if they played a 60,000-seat stadium, there'd

was saying, this is our big, big problem now.

What to do with the unruly factor now that's causing a large group situation to become aggravated and exhibit mob behaviour.

I don't know.

I don't know that anybody has ever known, short of imposing absolute authoritarian control.

And that is, of course, the opposite of what the Grateful Dead stand for.

Will we be forced to become our own opposites?

Interesting philosophical question.

By 1989, the group started to clamp down on the people selling merchandise outside the shows, in order to cut down on the number of people outside causing a nuisance.

This led to a huge backlash from the fans, which led to the group and their organization deciding the fans were just entitled.

At the end of 1989, Brent Myland had his first overdose.

Like all the group's official keyboard players, Myland was a retiring, quiet, submissive personality.

and nobody in the band up to that point seems to have even known he was using heroin, though they all knew he also had a drinking problem.

When it happened, he was put on on probation by the band and told to clean up.

But he didn't, and in July 1990, he had his second, fatal, overdose.

So it goes.

Garcia was particularly hit by this death.

He'd been the closest in the band to Mayland, but also, to quote Dennis McNally, who at the time was the group's publicist, and was closer to Garcia than to the other members.

My theory was that Jerry to some extent took some responsibility for Brent's death.

He recognised that the internal dynamics of the Grateful Dead, the way they treated each other as human beings, was a fraud, was non-supportive, non-anything that any human being would want to be a part of.

Look how these guys managed to pick the same personality four times.

Pig Pen was the starter.

All three of his successors had the same emotionally vulnerable personality.

But they were so devastated.

And being manly men, they wouldn't talk about it, they wouldn't confront it.

They just tried to put themselves themselves in total denial, get another keyboard player, and keep going.

It was almost archetypal the way they failed to deal with what had just happened to them.

I think Jerry knew this, whether he wanted to admit it out loud or not, and it put him in a bad place, and you can hear it in his guitar playing for the rest of his life.

The group were meant to be on tour four weeks after Mylan's death, and they had such a huge staff that cancelling the tour was not an option.

They had four weeks to find a keyboard player.

They They ended up choosing two.

The Dead had had two keyboard players for much of the 70s.

Even when Tom Constantin had left, but before Keith Godshow joined, various other players, especially Lesher's friend Ned Langin, had played with them on stage though hadn't formally joined the band.

And Langin had played with the group consistently for a period up to the hiatus.

And they went back to this for their first summer tour of the 90s.

For many of the shows, they were joined by Bruce Hornsby, a longtime deadhead, who had become a star a few years earlier with this hit, The Way It Is.

That's just the way it is.

But don't

Hornsby was a big star in his own right, but still played with the group for about a hundred shows in the early 90s.

The official story, as it's always told, is that Hornsby was never an official member of the group, and was just there to help them ease the new guy in.

But reading between the lines of various statements were always a dangerous thing to do.

It seems like Hornsby was trying to push the group out of their comfort zone and towards playing well experimentally, and the group were happy going through the motions, and he eventually tired of this.

That new guy, who did become a full member of the group and would stay with them until the end, was Vince Welnick.

Welnick came from a very different sort of music to anything the group had done before.

He was a founder member of the wonderfully camp art pop proto-punk glam band, The Tubes.

tight.

As a rivets run together,

flashing sparks into the night.

At this moment, don't surrender, darling, if you really care.

Don't touch me there,

don't touch me there.

Don't touch me there,

don't touch me there.

After seventeen years with the tubes, Welnick had left them to tour with Todd Rundgren, who he played with for a few months before joining the dead.

Wellnick wasn't hugely familiar with their music, but had been casually friendly with Garcia since the early 70s, when the tubes had played on the same bill as Garcia when he did some solo shows.

Welnick took a scholarly attitude to the music, and studied it carefully, listening back to shows every night and taking notes.

But Garcia's mental health went downhill after Myland's death, and it took a further knock when in October 1991, Bill Graham died in a helicopter crash.

So it goes.

Soon Garcia was back on the heroine, and according to Wellnick would sometimes fall asleep on stage in the middle of guitar solos, wake up, and then carry on playing.

Hornsby would occasionally rejoin them as the 90s went on, and he wasn't flattering about what he saw.

He said later, I sat in with them a couple of times.

In 1994, I remember playing with them at Giant Stadium, and it was just horrifically bad.

They all knew it.

The band members were all bummed and embarrassed.

I'm looking out at the audience, I'm playing accordion, and I'm standing there in the midst of a sea of mediocrity on the bandstand.

Everyone knew it, it wasn't just me, and you're looking out and seeing these people going completely crazy, and you're going, This is surreal and strange.

It was hard.

It was tough for everybody because no one seemed to be able to reach Garcia.

That was tough.

The last time Jerry Garcia ever performed Darkstar was at the Omni in Atlanta in 1994.

Far from the extended jams of old that could last 40 minutes, it was only 10 minutes long.

He only sang the first verse.

The song would remain forever unfinished.

Garcia was clearly very ill at this point and would only tour for another year or so before checking himself into a stint in rehab which, as it turned out, he would never leave, and which would end the Grateful Dead.

But it wouldn't end their organization, because having already invented the way that all new up-and-coming artists now have to build a career, they now invented, twenty years early, the way that all rock stars of their age monetise their intellectual property.

By the early 90s, the group had discovered that there was money to be made from their old live recordings, recordings that nobody had thought had any value.

They started releasing albums of classic old shows, most of which most Deadheads already had tape copies of, and were astonished to find that they sold in phenomenal amounts.

So much so that in the years after Garcia's death, the group actually made more money from archive C D's and sales of merchandise than they had from touring while he was alive.

Indeed, they were so successful that at one point many of the band members threatened to sue archive.org, the epitome of the information must-be-free idea, which had a vast trove of the recordings the group had previously encouraged fans to share, to get them to take them down.

But Lesh, who had become estranged from the other three, had something of a Damascene conversion to the deadhead cause, and now thought of himself as the fan's representative and a representative of integrity.

He had earlier said, The Grateful Dead have never accepted corporate sponsorship or venture capital money, and I remain unalterably opposed to any deal that would lease, license, or otherwise collateralise the music in the vault.

When he heard about the proposed lawsuit, he went went ballistic and posted a statement on his website saying, I was not part of this decision-making process and I was not notified that the shows were going to be pulled.

I do feel that the music is the Grateful Dead's legacy and I hope that one way or another all of it is available for those who want it.

The group reversed course and came to a compromise which allowed archive.org to keep the soundboard tapes as streaming only, with the lower quality audience recordings still available for free download, a compromise which is still in place.

They also tried to do some interesting things with the archive material even before Garcia's death.

For example, Phil Lesch invited the avant-garde composer John Oswald, who made music using sampling in what he called plundaphonics, to do an extended composition using versions of Dark Star, mixing and matching different performances from over the decades, putting some in reverse, layering them on top of each other.

The result was the only Grateful Dead recording on which every official member of the band, Garcia, Lesch, Weir, Kreutzmann, Constantin, Pigpen, Keith and Donoghene Godshow, Frent Myland, and Vince Welnick all appeared.

In 2006, the Grateful Dead leased all their intellectual property to Rhino Records, a subsidiary of Warner's, for $30 million for a 10-year lease, a lease that has since been renewed.

Mickey Hart said, I think it was a common thought that if we got rid of the business, we might become friends again, we might actually play again.

We really love each other, and deep down we're tired at the heart.

The same week, Ramrod, the roadie who had been considered the heart and soul of the group's crew, died of lung cancer.

So it goes.

Vince Welnick had continued touring with Bob Weir's sideband Rat Dog for a while after the Grateful Dead had split, but had been sacked from Rat Dog after a suicide attempt.

He was replaced by, of all people, Chuck Berry's old piano player Johnny Johnson.

He'd been suffering from depression ever since the group split, and would struggle with it for the rest of his life.

He did play occasionally with some of the other ex-members for a couple of years after the split, but was not invited to take part in partial reunions advertised as featuring the former members of the Grateful Dead.

under names like the Other Ones and The Dead, and he'd been heartbroken not to be included.

As far as he was concerned, he was a member of the Grateful Dead.

He said, I am and always will be a member of the Grateful Dead.

It's a lifetime thing that Jerry bestows upon a person.

Two weeks after the vault was moved to Warners, Wellnick, who hadn't spoken with the other members of the band in years, died by suicide.

So it goes.

Phil Lesch performs with a group called Phil Lesh and Friends.

Weir, Kreutzmann and Hart have spent the last few years performing as Dead and Company with singer and guitarist John Mayer.

They recently announced a farewell tour for this summer, and even more recently announced that Kreutzmann will not be joining the tour, though they didn't say why, other than a shift in creative direction.

In 1994, 1995 and 1996, the composer John Oswald released First as two individual CDs and then as a double CD, an album called Greyfolded, which the composer says says in the liner notes he thinks of as existing in Tralthamadorian time.

The Tralthamedorians in Vannegut's novels don't see time as a linear thing with the beginning and end, but as a continuum that they can move between at will.

When someone dies, they just think that at this particular point in time they're not doing so good, but at other points in time they're fine, so why focus on the bad time?

In the book, when told of someone dying, the Tralthamedorians just say, so it goes.

In In between the first CD's release and the release of the double CD version, Jerry Garcia died.

From August 1942 through August 1995, Jerry Garcia was alive.

So it goes.

Shall we go, you and I?

Lay down,

my dear brothers,

lay down and take your rest.

I want to lay you

here

upon your Savior's breast.

I

love

you

all, but Jesus loves you the best.

And I bid you good night,

good night,

good night.

Bulladoo, rock and roll,

yeah.

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