12-27-70
KPPC-FM 106.7 PASADENA
DJ TED ALVY, 2-4 PM
JERRY GARCIA, BOB WEIR, JOHN DAWSON, DAVID NELSON
[Since I'm not familiar with the New Riders' voices, they are generally identified as ??]
[Candyman, from LP]
DJ: ‘Candyman,’ from the Dead. Let’s turn on the mikes. Members of the Dead and the New Riders, both and together and one and separate, are here.
Garcia: Mm-hmm. It’s a lie.
DJ: Jerry –
Garcia: Yes, yes.
DJ: Bob, Marmaduke, David.
Weir: Marmaduke doesn’t have a mike?
Garcia: Why don’t you guys come up here, slither up to the mikes?
DJ: They can slither.
??: We can sit on the floor.
DJ: I’ll tell you what else we played, just in case: ‘Truck Stop Girl’ from Little Feat, ‘Trucker’s Café’ from Ian & Sylvia Great Speckled Bird, ‘Candyman’ from Fred Neil cause we couldn’t find Roy Orbison, and ‘St Stephen’ from – pronounce the album, just to make sure. I really can’t pronounce it.
All: Aoxomoxoa. [repeated]
DJ: If I had reverb – let me put some echo on it. [We started with] ‘Love Scene’ from Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, a guitar solo from Jerry Garcia.
Garcia: Actually it’s not a solo, it was double-tracked. I must confess, there are parts –
??: It was double-tracked?
DJ: Do you like it at all?
??: Jerry Garcia plays Sandy Bull.
Garcia: No, no. I didn’t like it.
DJ: But it’s a good segue.
Garcia: Yeah well, whatever. Antonioni liked it.
DJ: OK, this is KPPC stereo in Pasadena, and the radio station now belongs to you until 4:00.
Garcia: Where do we sign? [laughter]
DJ: Do you want some of the questions that people have been calling in, like –
Garcia: Sure.
DJ: What do you eat for breakfast; what’s become of the baby? [laughter]
??: Give that guy ten points.
DJ: You may start with, you were busted on the Philadelphia FM station, weren’t you Jerry?
Garcia: No I wasn’t, the guys who played a tape of sort of a very loose interview from my New York hotel room were busted.
DJ: What did you say?
Garcia: Nothing, you know?
Weir: He said ‘Bleep, I must answer the bleeping telephone fifty bleeping times a day!’
Garcia: [laughs] I didn’t say anything, I just rapped, you know? I mean, I never really say anything, you know. And the guy felt that he didn’t want to ruin the syntax or something like that by editing out all the obscenities or whatever, you know, whatever they would object to in Philadelphia at 1:00 in the morning.
DJ: They played Merle Haggard unedited, though. He recorded a concert live there, and they didn’t bleep anything out.
Garcia: Really?
DJ: Anything.
Garcia: Nothing?
Weir: Not even the standard country-western dirty jokes?
DJ: We may, if you’d like to, go into where the Dead were before ‘Workingman’s Dead,’ because a lot of people – I guess you’re aware of it, just by looking at record sales – ‘Workingman’s Dead’ to a lot of people is the first Grateful Dead album, and ‘Live Dead’ when it came out sort of summed up things before, and then your recorded music came out this year, as you have been for how long into things like ‘Workingman’s Dead’?
Garcia: Well, that, it’s kind of like – there’s kind of a dual identity happening, you know what I mean? And we’ve never been able to successfully – What we tried to do with the first bunch of records is to successfully transfer, you know, the live Grateful Dead sound to a record in the studio, but it never worked.
Weir: So we tried making records in the studio and that didn’t work real good either.
Garcia: Right. So then we decide, well why don’t we do something that we can do in the studio and make it work? And that’s what worked.
DJ: Now right before you did this, you lost the organ, right?
Garcia: Huh?
DJ: You lost the organ.
Garcia: Oh, TC?
DJ: Right.
Garcia: Yeah.
DJ: Did that have anything to do with it, or –
Garcia: Umm…
DJ: Cause see like, you’re quoted all over, like in all kinds of weird things, ‘Jerry Garcia says this,’ and there’s things like, ‘He was a classical influence on us,’ and then people say, ‘Well, they were into acid rock, now they’re into country’ –
Garcia: All those things are just weird labels, they don’t really have anything to do with anything, you know?
DJ: Right. What –
Garcia: See, the difference – the thing about TC was that TC just didn’t have, like – his way of thinking rhythmically and his way of melodic phrasing, like, didn’t have – the boogie-roo, you know, if I can use that term. It’s like – the rest of us had been playing like rock & roll continually, and that was like our background playing together, and TC’s background had been entirely classical, and so –
Weir: He was quite an accomplished musician.
Garca: Incredible, you know, an incredible musician, and maybe at some time in the future we’ll be able to get it all working.
DJ: Will he do like an album on his own?
Garcia: He’s doing now, he’s done the music for a play in New York called ‘Tarot,’ which is a mime play, you know and he’s performing with his own music in that play. And you know, he’s keeping busy, he’s like a very creative dude, and super, with a super musical education, just incredible.
DJ: If you could – I don’t know how to go back to the beginning and bring it up, if you know what I mean. You started –
Garcia: Well…
DJ: You started with sort of things beginning in San Francisco. You personally were what, acoustic, folk oriented?
Garcia: Yeah.
Weir: We didn’t really start in San Francisco.
DJ: Was it Palo Alto?
Garcia: Yeah, we were down the peninsula.
DJ: It was you and Bob, Jerry and Bob?
Weir: And Pigpen. In a jugband.
Garcia: See, but that’s like an overlapping layer that overlaps to the preceding era, which was me and Nelson here. We used to play together bluegrass music. And before that, me and Hunter used to –
DJ: Was the whole thing overlapping? The New Riders is an overlapping thing, too.
Garcia: Everything is overlapping. Our whole scene is just incredibly, one overlap after another.
DJ: Cause see, I’d like to approach it cause there are people out there that just got into the music –
Garcia: Oh I know, but we would have to go into a long complex genealogy or something like that –
DJ: I know. Why don’t you and Bob just sum it up in brief statements, and then we’ll play a track that I think started people getting into Dead.
Garcia: OK, you sum it up.
Weir: Well, we jumps and the kids they jumps too. [laughter]
Garcia: I don’t have any, I can’t sum it up cause it hasn’t been summed up yet.
DJ: Can you sum it up in a bleep, at least?
??: Bleeep!
Garcia: Oh man, you know… We’re all musicians, you know, we can put it there, we’re all –
Weir: We’ve known each other for a while and this is how it fell together. You know, and how it fell together is a long and not so very interesting story.
Garcia: Right, you’re right, in fact it’s more than passing dull, man.
DJ: OK, then I’ll –
Weir: It wasn’t dull when it was going down, I’ll say, but to get into all that it’d take years, because you have to explain each event and –
DJ: No, I wasn’t really looking for that, I really don’t know what I was looking for, but I think I got it.
Garcia: Maybe we’ll fall into it.
DJ: OK, I think this will fall into it, and then we’ll go from there.
Garcia: OK.
[Uncle John’s Band, from LP]
DJ: OK, that’s ‘Uncle John’s Band.’ [ongoing conversation behind him]
Garcia: Really, you got a copy of that?
Dawson: Got the tape, yeah.
Garcia: Outtasight, you mean the studio version?
Dawson: Yeah, that one we made so that you can take it down here.
DJ: Oh, great.
Garcia: Let’s listen to it.
DJ: That song flashed people, if they were into the Dead, they said, ‘That sounds like the Dead,’ and then if people weren’t into the Dead, they called and said, ‘Who is that, Crosby Stills Nash & Young?’ You know, something like that.
??: Well the singing ain’t quite that good.
DJ: No, but you know what I mean. Let me do a quick rap. This is KPPC in Pasadena, here’s what’s happening in Laguna. The chamber of commerce and the city council said that if the music is not turned off by 6:00 then no food or medical supplies will be let in.
Weir: Oh, they can’t do that.
DJ: They’re doing it, and probably the music will be turned off at 6, so food and medical supplies could get in. I guess there’s about 5,000 people camped out a second night in Laguna Canyon. The people at KYMS in Santa Anna advise you not to come in today, if you’re not already there, cause it’s like a five-mile hike and they feel hassles are going to begin if the music’s not stopped at 6, and who knows. But the chamber of commerce and the city council of Laguna will let no food or medical supplies in. They want the music turned off at Laguna Canyon Festival. If you want any more information, call Zap Restaurant, 660-9773, Zap Restaurant on Sunset, dial 411 for information. Where are you going to be tonight? Do you know? Do you know what the El Monte Legion Stadium is? Oh yeah, you know, cause –
??: Yeah, you can ride the bus to El Monte. Ride the Greyhound bus to El Monte and there you are. There’s a bus station in the parking lot.
Weir: At the El Monte Legion Stadium?
Garcia: Send your food and medicine.
DJ: You’re aware of the LA trip with that, like the ‘50s rock & roll concerts there, drink wine in the parking lot and reds and that whole thing.
??: Oh yeah?
Garcia: I heard a little about that.
DJ: So like, when we first heard Grateful Dead at El Monte, it was like, you know, a great acid flash. Not true, but it really is happening, you did it last night, and the place wasn’t very full and you don’t like it that way, right?
Weir: Well in this particular case –
Garcia: Well, it doesn’t sound that good when it’s not full.
DJ: Because of the sound. The promoter did price it at five dollars and you had no knowledge –
Garcia: It’s unfortunate.
??: We didn’t know.
Garcia: We didn’t know, honest folks, we really really didn’t.
DJ: I didn’t think so, but I wanted you to say it. Let me bleep that, though. The bleeper’s gone. All right, the information is, El Monte Legion Stadium will sell tickets to you at the door only at 7:00, and they will open the doors at 8 – when the New Riders will go on?
??: 7:30.
DJ: 7:30.
??: What happens at 7:30?
??: That’s when we go on.
??: Oh, we go on at 7:30.
DJ: And they’ll play until the Dead come on, and the Dead’ll play until they stop.
Garcia: Something like that.
DJ: And it’ll happen tonight and tomorrow night.
Weir: It’ll be OK, it’ll be OK, we’re gonna use new microphones tonight and it’ll be better than it was last night.
??: I bet you don’t get new microphones tonight, did you ask for them?
??: Yeah.
Weir: Anyway, that wasn’t all that much of a hassle except for us, but –
??: We’ll get new microphones.
Garcia [loudly]: To digress! Now, where were we? [cross-chatter]
Weir: Oh yeah, when you come and you’re looking for the place and it doesn’t say ‘Grateful Dead’ anywhere, that’s because it says ‘wrestling.’
Garcia: Wrestling? [We’re at the wrestling…]
??: Right, wrestling every Wednesday and Friday night, or Wednesday and -
DJ: Well between the four of you, would you guys do a tag-team wrestling match right now on the air for us?
Garcia & co.: No.
Weir: …take on Marmaduke…
DJ: How about, as an alternative, would you explain what the New Riders of the Purple Sage is, because –
Garcia: Marmaduke can do that.
DJ: OK. How about if we move him to the microphone.
Dawson: Move me into a microphone – am I close to a microphone?
DJ: Explain from the conception to who was playing the last time you were in LA and if there’s any personnel changes and what’s –
Dawson: [babbles in southern drawl] Yas, well, um, uh, yes, um…
??: Watch your level, watch your level.
Dawson: My level? What happened to my level? Goodness… Now well you see, Geminis have a hard time starting this story.
Weir: We’d really believe all that hippie mis–
Garcia: C’mon man, spit it out, spit it into the microphone man.
Dawson: No, we had a – well, it’s another one of those overlapping scenes, you see, because I used to be hanging out with these guys when they were the Warlocks playing down in Magoo’s Pizza Parlor, you see.
Weir: And before that, even.
Dawson: And before that even, right. We were all hanging out in Palo Alto in the back of Dana Morgan’s music shop, and in the Tangent, the famous old Tangent on Wednesday evenings had these strange scenes going in it, and there was lots of country music and bluegrass being played back then. And when I was about five years old I used to sit up on top of the refrigerator and listen to this old country music station out of Chicago, you see. And so I got this country music thing going in my brain. And a while ago, Jerry got a pedal steel guitar that he picked up in Denver, and I was hanging out one day up there with them, when they were just hanging out at their studio place there, and Jerry says ‘hey, come on over and pick a few tunes for me so I can learn how to play this thing!’ And I said ‘sure man, I don’t mind picking a few tunes.’ ‘Heh heh, I can teach him a few of my tunes and maybe I can get a pedal steel player one of these days, heh heh,’ I thought to myself, and he was thinking, ‘heh heh, maybe I can get this guy over here and he’ll pick some tunes and I can learn how to play this thing.’ Right, so we worked that on out, I mean a little more elaborately than all that, but that’s some kind of thing that was going down.
Garcia: Close.
Dawson: Right. And I got this job in a coffeehouse down in Menlo Park, California, called the Underground, and I think it’s now folded.
Weir: Isn’t that Palo Alto?
Dawson: No, it was in Menlo Park. It was right next to Palo Alto, mind you, but it’s in Menlo Park, the Underground is. It’s right next to Kepler’s, famous old Kepler’s bookstore.
Garcia: Ira Sandperl. (Who knows who Ira Sandperl is…)
Dawson: Right. Joan Baez. Peaceniks, all that stuff.
Garcia: Right, old days.
Dawson: Right. Anyhow, that was all there you see, and I had this job singing for the people, when they ate their roast beef sandwiches, it was a little hofbrau kind of thing, and I was supposed to make the music for them to eat by. And so I sang my folksongs, you know, and pretty soon Jerry started coming down in his big rickety old orange bus that he had, and he would drag his pedal steel along, and we were both sort of practicing there, working in the coffeehouse, and he was practicing pedal steel and playing, and I was practicing singing and playing, and we had all the people in the coffeehouse, you know, they were digging it, cause it was something that nobody’d heard before, cause the pedal steel guitar, you know, in 1970 in Palo Alto is like a Volkswagen in Chicago in 1953 kind of thing – it’s very obscure, nobody’s heard of one before. You might have seen such a thing wandering around on the streets but you didn’t know quite what it was, right?
Garcia: Pedal steel, do you mean, or –
Dawson: Right, sure, pedal steels, you’ve seen them wandering around on the streets all the time.
DJ: [Was] Jerry’s bus a bus?
Garcia: Bus a bust? Well it wasn’t really… [sputters out, laughter]
Dawson: This long elaborate story gets down to mainly to this, we started out this thing of, um…
Weir: Come now, don’t belabor the point.
Dawson: I’m trying not to.
Garcia: One thing led to another, and -
Dawson: Right, one thing led to another and we accumulated a couple of more people and said ‘let’s have this country band.’ Right, and we can play some of the famous old country tunes and we can play some of the tunes that I’m making up, and maybe we can have some fun and play some nice country music. And so that’s what we’ve been trying to do.
DJ: OK, Marmaduke, you stand up front at the microphone and sing and play acoustic guitar.
Garcia: He writes all the tunes too, which are all really good tunes…
DJ: Jerry plays pedal steel – David Nelson electric guitar – I can never remember the bass player, who’s still the bass player?
Garcia: Dave Torbert.
DJ: Dave Torbert.
Weir: Toronado.
Dawson: Tornado.
DJ: And Mickey was playing drums, is he still playing drums?
Dawson: Mickey’s not playing drums with us any longer.
DJ: OK, who is?
Dawson: Spencer Dryden.
DJ: Who was formerly with the Airplane.
Dawson: Right.
Weir: It’s the neo-isolationism of the New Riders.
Dawson: Neo-isolationism? I don’t understand.
Garcia: Additional overlaps.
Dawson: Right, additional overlaps! It’s great, Spencer’s got a really nice touch for our music, and it seems to make an improvement, and it’s been good.
DJ: Cause Mickey, he just seems so spaced, I really like him as a professional. Cause when you did, like I mentioned I saw you at Euphoria, which is now Pepperland and it still has a bad sound system you said, you came on and did an acoustic set, and Mickey was there, and then the New Riders came on and Mickey was there, and after a little break and a pantomime show you came back and he was there with Bill and you did electric. He was there the whole time and he seemed to just be spaced into everything. And now he’s on the back of Downbeat advertising Zildjian gongs.
Garcia: Right, that was a hustle to get some gongs. [laughter]
DJ: Do the New Riders have an album that’s completed or not?
Dawson: Well, it’s sort of completed, I mean we’ve made all the basic tracks and we sang a few of the lines flat so we’ll have to go sing them over again, and then we have to mix it.
DJ: Who’s on the album – I mean, how many of you are on the album?
Dawson: Well, all of us are on the album, including Spencer and Mickey, I mean, Spencer did a couple of the tracks and Mickey did a couple of the tracks, so it makes kind of an interesting transition -
DJ: Do you do ‘Honky Tonk Woman’?
Dawson: No, we’re not gonna play ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ on the record, cause it’s all a studio record and ‘Honky Tonk Woman’s more a live thing.
DJ: The next live Dead album, maybe.
Dawson: Well, on the first live New Rider record, you know, there might be such a thing someday that – the first New Rider in the studio –
DJ: But there should also be a live – do a double album with one New Rider, one live Dead –
Garcia: We’ll decide, man.
DJ: OK. [laughter] Are you gonna be on Warners, the New Riders, the same label?
Dawson: We haven’t decided yet.
DJ: Oh, OK.
Dawson: If they give us a good enough deal we’ll talk to ‘em. [laughter]
DJ: Are you gonna stay with the group, Jerry, or are you going to tour separately without Jerry?
Garcia: Oh, eventually I think it would be groovy if they auditioned other steel players, and got somebody so that they could go out and tour, without having to depend on the Dead going along and that sort of thing, you know.
DJ: Right, that’s what Hot Tuna, just went acoustic so they could do that.
Garcia: Right.
DJ: Is ‘Box of Rain’ the closest that I could play of the New Rider-type thing?
Garcia: We’ve got a New Rider tune right here.
DJ: Oh, you do?
Dawson: We’ve got a genuine New Rider tune here, yeah, we made a rough mix of some of the stuff we’ve been doing.
DJ: Well, I could play ‘Box of Rain’ while I’m cueing that up, I can play another track which is just there and it’s going to be played eventually, or you can talk for three minutes while I make noise in the background.
Garcia: Play the music.
DJ: OK.
[Box of Rain, from LP - cut, possibly some talk missing - Friend of the Devil, from LP]
Political Voice: ‘That’s exactly what we’re running against in this country today!’
DJ: That’s Spiro, and before that it was the Grateful Dead, in that order. [laughter] And both are American beauties, both the album and the voice are American beauties. It’s a beautiful cover, it’s a beautiful album – this is KPPC in Pasadena, to be legal. And explain something, before we go into a track from the New Riders of the Purple Sage forthcoming LP, that’s probably not in final mix but it’s at 7 ½ and 2-track, and Jerry, take it.
Garcia: Huh, what?
??: Take it away, Marmaduke!
Dawson: Take what away?
Weir: Son, you got some explaining to do.
Dawson: I forgot my line.
DJ: Harry’s probably got one. Harry’s gonna be here in an hour. Harry!
Harry: Yeah, yeah?
DJ: What year – you know the special you ran for the credibility gap, what decade was that for?
Harry: That was the sixties.
DJ: The sixties –
Harry: You missed that.
DJ: Missed it – I crashed, I missed the whole sixties. Did you want to explain something about ‘Ripple,’ the first track? Cause you got David on electric guitar, and - [the others correct him]
??: That’s not ‘Ripple,’ that’s ‘Box of Rain.’
DJ: Oh, did I say ‘Ripple’?
??: Yes, you did.
DJ: I was thinking of the wine bottle – and it’s there. Take the wine bottle…it’s in the trashcan…
??: Mind’s wandering? Find your mind wandering, do ya?
DJ: Um, who is on ‘Box of Rain’ and why?
Garcia: Why indeed? [laughter] That’s an interesting question.
Weir: That one worked out to pretty much who was there.
??: What was the thesis…
Garcia: It was Phil’s song, and Phil wrote the song cause he had a guitar, and he had this guitar, he doesn’t normally play the guitar, he’s not like a guitar-player turned bass-player like a lot of bass players are –
DJ: Is he a mathematical genius, by any chance?
Garcia: Phil? Well, he’s got absolute pitch.
??: I heard that.
Garcia: Yeah. And he can count. I’ve heard him count. As high as 17 and 18.
Weir: Oh, he counted to 26 last night. (And Bill counted 25.)
Garcia: 26 last night? Erroneously, of course.
??: It was the warmup for…
??: How many, did it countdown, was that…
Weir: It was on ‘Beat It On Down the Line.’
??: ‘I beat it higher than you can!’
Garcia: So anyway, he wrote the song with the guitar, and so he was playing the guitar, singing the song over at my place, and there’s a piano there, so I started banging away on the piano, and when we went into the studio, he thought, you know, in his head, in the arrangement in his head – which is what a record is about, getting the arrangement in your head out into the real world – he’s like, he heard Dave Nelson-style guitar, and it just - so.
DJ: OK – explain Robert Hunter first, and then we’ll go into – [laughter]
Garcia: Explain Robert Hunter just like that, you got a million years?
Weir: He’s nutty as a bedbug.
Garcia: He’s brilliant, Robert Hunter’s really a far-out guy, he’s like a – See, he and I used to, we used to live in a couple of wrecked cars in a vacant lot in east Palo Alto together, and we ate this crushed pineapple, man, that he stole from the army. And plastic spoons, I had a glove compartment full of plastic spoons in my car.
DJ: Pineapples are hand grenades?
Garcia: No no no, this is like the big, you know, serviceable cans, huge big ones with crushed pineapple.
DJ: OK – from the army.
Garcia: Yes. And that was like ten years ago. And –
DJ: Does he write all the lyrics, is he still –
Garcia: Well, see, we work at any number of ways, man, sometimes I’ll have like a melody, you know a whole complete melody including phrasing, and I’ll like sing a wordless song you know, and I’ll put it on a tape for him or something like that and he’ll listen to it and listen to it, and it’ll creep in and out of his head for weeks maybe, and pretty soon he’ll write you know, several alternative possibilities of songs that it could be, and I’ll go through ‘em, you know. It’s kind of like really a good relationship, Hunter’s a great guy to work with because he goes in every direction, he’s completely flexible.
DJ: Who wrote the New Riders song we’re gonna hear, and what’s the name –
Garcia: Marmaduke writes all the New Riders material. Marmaduke is an excellent songwriter.
DJ: OK, and you arrange as well, Marmaduke, or it just falls together?
Dawson: Well, the band arranges it - like, I write stuff that the band can play behind, you know.
Garcia: We just play.
DJ: What’s the song called, and we’ll listen to it.
Dawson: ‘Louisiana Lady.’
Garcia: Is it one song on the tape or two?
Dawson: There’s just one, we got one ‘Louisiana Lady’ and that’s it, and we’re just gonna play it once and then we’re gonna make off with the tape and you won’t hear it until the record comes.
Garcia: Rough mix.
DJ: OK, New Riders.
??: [whispers] Get your tape recorders ready!
[Louisiana Lady – cuts after 20 seconds]
Radio Tape: ‘Mistake, mistake, your disc jockey has just made a mistake.’ [laughter]
DJ: What did I do? …
Garcia: You twisted the tape. You took it… Hey listen man, have you tried plumbing? [laughter]
DJ: I haven’t done it for three years now.
Garcia: Plumbing? No wonder you’re so fussy with that wrench.
DJ: We’ll just see what happens.
[Louisiana Lady]
DJ: OK – ‘Louisiana Lady,’ the New Riders of the Purple Sage.
Others: That’s ‘Looziana.’
DJ: Oh I’m sorry, OK, I’m from southern California. You’re from Palo Alto, right?
Garcia: No, San Francisco.
Dawson: I’m from Chicago. [laughter]
DJ: Marmaduke’s from Chicago. Where are you from, Bob?
Weir: Palo Alto.
DJ: And David, from Palo Alto?
Nelson: Seattle, Washington.
DJ: Seattle? OK. This is KPPC in Pasadena –
Weir: Seattle? I swore I’d kill the next guy I met from Seattle!
Garcia: Don’t do it Bobby, you’ll regret it in the morning! [laughter]
DJ: I’m not gonna explain the mistake I made.
Garcia: Why not, go ahead.
DJ: I put the tape on wrong. Let me get some commercials out of the way, OK?
Others: Yeah, sure.
DJ: The New Riders, whom you just heard, are going to be appearing with a group called the Grateful Dead at a place called El Monte Legion Stadium tonight and tomorrow night. Your tickets are at 7:00 for five dollars and you get to go in and see the New Riders begin about 7:30.
??: And sit by the fire, they have full big fireplaces.
DJ: Really? Really?
Garcia: Yeah, there’s fires there. [laughter] They truly are - fires.
DJ: Can we go back a few years and say is there any other heat there?
Garcia: Ha, very clever.
Dawson: Well all the guys that just got out of Vietnam that now have jobs with the El Monte police department come and hang out, you know, and check out the action.
Garcia: I think you can assume that anybody that isn’t you is the heat.
DJ: OK, let’s do a few commercials. I’ll get some commercials out of the way while you huddle and decide what to do next. If you want to buy the new Dead’s album it’s $2.64 at Warehouse Record stores in West Pomona, Belmont Shores, Long Beach, Torrance…
[commercials]
DJ: OK, we’re back live. [laughter]
??: ‘Mama, can I have a bunch of crazy tapes for Christmas?’
DJ: How about this.
[Casey Jones, from LP – cut, possibly some talk missing – High Time, from LP]
[acoustic guitars & mandolin tuning & chatter]
DJ: That was ‘High Time,’ and how did you hit all those notes?
Garcia: I faked ‘em, man, can’t you hear the…[??]…[not making me] sing it man, let’s face it.
DJ: OK, of the Grateful Dead and the – [loud tuning] Is this mike on? - yeah. OK, the Dead are playing at El Monte Legion Stadium – it’s a dance, right?
Garcia: It’s a dance! [Dance people can afford big fireplaces…]
DJ: I have trouble – I don’t dance – I don’t really get into dancing, but with the Dead, always.
Garcia: Why not?
DJ: Whatever that means. OK, it’s El Monte Legion Stadium tonight and tomorrow night with the New Riders – Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Marmaduke, David Nelson, you’ve got this until a little before four.
[band chatter – “Can we do it in another key?” “What key you like better?” “I’ll try this.” “That too high?” etc.]
SILVER THREADS & GOLDEN NEEDLES
??: That’s a take. [laughter] [more tuning, talking off-mike]
Weir: This [??] folks; I just wanted you to know that.
Dawson: This is KPPC in Pasadena, for all you FCC listeners. [laughter] I used to have my third-class license, you see. I know about that stuff. [DJ asks an inaudible question] On a Sunday sometime?
Garcia: Hey, we have our gospel quartet here.
Weir: Yeah, let’s do it.
??: …gonna do that gospel…
Weir: And it is Sunday, that’s true.
Garcia: All right, OK, let’s try for a couple of gospel songs.
Weir: OK, all you sinners, either hark or split. [laughter]
Garcia: Are these things directional or what? [muffled reply about the mikes]
Weir: Or just a good old Sennheiser – the kind I hate.
Garcia: You got an RCA [??] over there.
[mikes are moved around, more random chatter]
COLD JORDAN
[someone off-mike is talking to the band]
Weir: Well that’s not really a dancing number.
Dawson: Hey we met a guy on the train who could dance and play fiddle at the same time. [question]
Weir: Oh, no, no, the train trip across Canada.
??: Let’s play another gospel tune.
[sounds like the DJ is inviting them to a record store: “go down to [??] Records, and do a trip for a couple hours…any of you, any time you want to come down and do a record…”]
??: It’s an open invite.
Dawson: David Nelson is an avid discophile of bluegrass music, and we could do a number like that sometime.
Nelson: Avid discophile?
Dawson: Right right, you’re somebody that loves records.
[more chatter – “You want a G?” “No, we just want a D, or is it B?”]
Weir: That was ‘I Hear A Voice Callin’, that was in C, I think. [sings]
[some inaudible discussion about singing]
Weir: [deep voice] ‘Sing out, sing from down here!’ Do you think I have a deep voice, down low, husky?
??: Close to the mike will do that too, husky.
??: You get right up on ‘em and they have a lot of [nice false teeth].
Weir: [slowly] You tryin’ to tell me I talk slow? [laughter]
??: Where were we?
??: El Paso.
Weir: El Paso? Sure.
??: Wait a minute, let us figure something out – let’s do the gospel –
Weir: OK.
??: Do a segue.
I HEAR A VOICE CALLIN’
??: Do one more and then [pray for a minute].
??: Sure – gonna do one more gospel number.
SWING LOW SWEET CHARIOT
[inaudible question - mic bumping]
DJ: This one’s on now – OK. Jerry Garcia on my right, extreme right – John Birch on his extreme right – Bob Weir, Marmaduke, David Nelson, thank you.
All: Oh, it was our pleasure.
DJ: Say something to the people so they come down! They don’t know what they’re missing.
??: Oh, yeah, yeah –
??: Make it on down to El Monte tonight –
??: - at the wrestling place, where we’ll be playing with the New Riders of the Purple Sage, as, we’ll be playing with the Grateful Dead.
DJ: El Monte Legion Stadium. [inaudible dialogue] ‘Destination Music’ is next with Harry Shearer. Say something – say you’ll come back and do a trip sometime.
Weir: Hey, we’ll come back and do a trip sometime.
DJ: That one’s not on!
[they play a short farewell instrumental – laughter]
??: Ha, I got you on that one!
DJ: Oh, that was a great wrestling match. OK, this is KPPC, and Harry Shearer’s next for two hours with ‘Destination Music.’ This is Ted Alvy, I’m leaving. I’m gonna see the Dead today, and tonight, aren’t I? And dance. OK, the Grateful Dead, thank you.
Spiro Agnew: ‘That’s exactly what we’re running against in this country today!’
[Truckin’ from LP – cuts]
Nov 4, 2013
Nov 3, 2013
June 17, 1972: Hollywood Bowl
GRATEFUL DEAD: INVENTIVE, EXCITING MUSIC
The Grateful Dead at the Hollywood Bowl Saturday night played improvisational music that was inventive, moving, exciting and inspired. When they were doing their simpler, more country oriented stuff, it seemed almost as if they were slacking off, almost as if they were just filling in time.
Perhaps the lesson is that the simple approach can be just as pleasing and worthwhile as the more complex. Or maybe the lesson is only that the Dead, in their less inspired moments are still better than 95 per cent of the bands around today.
Their style – or styles – can only be described as Grateful Dead. For while country is very noticeable in their recent work, the blues, rock and jazz amalgam is strictly their own. Again, while neither Phil Lesh’s nor Gerry Garcia’s voices is perfect, they lend the music a feel that is distinctly the Dead.
As is customary, they played long enough (over two hours with intermission) for even the most avid Dead freaks to be at least partially sated. The only problem with their selections, including magnificent jams, was that there wasn’t time for more. There could be few complaints when they played “I Know You Rider,” “Sugaree,” “Sugar Magnolia,” “Casey Jones” and “Trucking.”
As beautiful as their songs are, the real treat of any Dead concert is the improvisations they run off their songs. Early in the evening, the jams, although shorter than in previous years, lacked nothing. However, for a period after intermission the normal Dead togetherness seemed to falter.
At the end of “Trucking,” the drummer slipped into a solo which lacked cohesiveness and seemed like something out of a battle of the bands contest. Then Garcia and Lesh began chasing a musical idea and missed, leaving them in something of a hole, trying to sketch something out of notes that didn’t seem to be there. The drummer and bass player seemed not only unable to help but determined to make things worse.
They managed to escape for a short period into a more familiar piece and then, with a great deal of courage, began again toward the musical idea that had eluded them the first time. This time they found a path for the early picked treble notes and then pushed the piece into a writhing vortex of atonality. After their trip into the whirlpool of sound they pulled themselves back out again, this time with success.
It is this kind of commitment to excellent music (in this case, the willingness to risk failure in order to achieve something worthwhile) that makes the Dead one of the major groups today. For while they may not sell the most records, or play to the biggest audiences, they continue to grow and produce the kind of music that is greatly rewarding both on the musical and personal levels.
Appearing with the Grateful Dead was New Riders of the Purple Sage, a group playing in the soft country manner, with occasional hip lyrics. Their smooth style is as something [sic – soothing] as honey down a sore throat.
(by Chris Hosford, from the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, June 20 1972)
http://archive.org/details/gd1972-06-17.shure.melton.miller.116272.flac16
The Grateful Dead at the Hollywood Bowl Saturday night played improvisational music that was inventive, moving, exciting and inspired. When they were doing their simpler, more country oriented stuff, it seemed almost as if they were slacking off, almost as if they were just filling in time.
Perhaps the lesson is that the simple approach can be just as pleasing and worthwhile as the more complex. Or maybe the lesson is only that the Dead, in their less inspired moments are still better than 95 per cent of the bands around today.
Their style – or styles – can only be described as Grateful Dead. For while country is very noticeable in their recent work, the blues, rock and jazz amalgam is strictly their own. Again, while neither Phil Lesh’s nor Gerry Garcia’s voices is perfect, they lend the music a feel that is distinctly the Dead.
As is customary, they played long enough (over two hours with intermission) for even the most avid Dead freaks to be at least partially sated. The only problem with their selections, including magnificent jams, was that there wasn’t time for more. There could be few complaints when they played “I Know You Rider,” “Sugaree,” “Sugar Magnolia,” “Casey Jones” and “Trucking.”
As beautiful as their songs are, the real treat of any Dead concert is the improvisations they run off their songs. Early in the evening, the jams, although shorter than in previous years, lacked nothing. However, for a period after intermission the normal Dead togetherness seemed to falter.
At the end of “Trucking,” the drummer slipped into a solo which lacked cohesiveness and seemed like something out of a battle of the bands contest. Then Garcia and Lesh began chasing a musical idea and missed, leaving them in something of a hole, trying to sketch something out of notes that didn’t seem to be there. The drummer and bass player seemed not only unable to help but determined to make things worse.
They managed to escape for a short period into a more familiar piece and then, with a great deal of courage, began again toward the musical idea that had eluded them the first time. This time they found a path for the early picked treble notes and then pushed the piece into a writhing vortex of atonality. After their trip into the whirlpool of sound they pulled themselves back out again, this time with success.
It is this kind of commitment to excellent music (in this case, the willingness to risk failure in order to achieve something worthwhile) that makes the Dead one of the major groups today. For while they may not sell the most records, or play to the biggest audiences, they continue to grow and produce the kind of music that is greatly rewarding both on the musical and personal levels.
Appearing with the Grateful Dead was New Riders of the Purple Sage, a group playing in the soft country manner, with occasional hip lyrics. Their smooth style is as something [sic – soothing] as honey down a sore throat.
(by Chris Hosford, from the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, June 20 1972)
http://archive.org/details/gd1972-06-17.shure.melton.miller.116272.flac16
September 23, 1972: Palace Theater, Waterbury CT
ROCK FANS JAM THEATER TO CHEER GRATEFUL DEAD
In spite of “Pig Pen” not being here, the Grateful Dead performed with more than perfection at the Palace Theater Saturday night.
Pig Pen, Ron McKernan, vocals, harmonica, some keyboard, was unable to play at this concert because he is sick. The Dead, however, more than made up for his absence.
Jerry Garcia, lead guitar, brought the audience to its feet several times during the song “Playing in the Band.”
Bobby Weir also excited the audience near the beginning of the concert singing “Cumberland Blues.”
The only major problem at the concert was the overcrowding, some fans said.
Larry Wilson, advertising head from Cable Music, termed the concert “a definite success.” He said the Dead just came from Philadelphia and seemed to draw the crowd with them to Waterbury.
Wilson added that the “kids seemed to know where they will be before I do.”
Approximately 2,500 people were waiting outside the theater at 5:45 p.m., two hours before opening. The young people came from Massachusetts, Vermont, New York and New Jersey. One individual said, “We drove 500 miles for this, believe it or not, all the way from Virginia.” He said he had been waiting in line since noon.
Police said the crowd was “very cooperative.”
When the doors to the theater finally opened, the thousands of waiting young people charged down the aisles to the front of the theater.
“It’s a stampede,” an individual exclaimed.
Approximately 40 people already seated in the front felt they narrowly escaped being crushed.
The music, however, was well worth waiting for. The group played for two hours without a break, then after a half-hour rest, played past press time.
During the first half of the concert, the group played many old favorites including “I Know You Rider.” “Sugaree” also kept the audience on their feet.
The Dead plays again tonight at the Palace. It will undoubtedly be as fine a concert as the Saturday night performance.
A staff member from Cable Music expected at least as large a crowd.
(by Michael London, from the Waterbury Sunday Republican, September 24 1972)
http://archive.org/details/gd72-09-23.sbd.jeffm.2201.sbeok.shnf
In spite of “Pig Pen” not being here, the Grateful Dead performed with more than perfection at the Palace Theater Saturday night.
Pig Pen, Ron McKernan, vocals, harmonica, some keyboard, was unable to play at this concert because he is sick. The Dead, however, more than made up for his absence.
Jerry Garcia, lead guitar, brought the audience to its feet several times during the song “Playing in the Band.”
Bobby Weir also excited the audience near the beginning of the concert singing “Cumberland Blues.”
The only major problem at the concert was the overcrowding, some fans said.
Larry Wilson, advertising head from Cable Music, termed the concert “a definite success.” He said the Dead just came from Philadelphia and seemed to draw the crowd with them to Waterbury.
Wilson added that the “kids seemed to know where they will be before I do.”
Approximately 2,500 people were waiting outside the theater at 5:45 p.m., two hours before opening. The young people came from Massachusetts, Vermont, New York and New Jersey. One individual said, “We drove 500 miles for this, believe it or not, all the way from Virginia.” He said he had been waiting in line since noon.
Police said the crowd was “very cooperative.”
When the doors to the theater finally opened, the thousands of waiting young people charged down the aisles to the front of the theater.
“It’s a stampede,” an individual exclaimed.
Approximately 40 people already seated in the front felt they narrowly escaped being crushed.
The music, however, was well worth waiting for. The group played for two hours without a break, then after a half-hour rest, played past press time.
During the first half of the concert, the group played many old favorites including “I Know You Rider.” “Sugaree” also kept the audience on their feet.
The Dead plays again tonight at the Palace. It will undoubtedly be as fine a concert as the Saturday night performance.
A staff member from Cable Music expected at least as large a crowd.
(by Michael London, from the Waterbury Sunday Republican, September 24 1972)
http://archive.org/details/gd72-09-23.sbd.jeffm.2201.sbeok.shnf
Nov 2, 2013
November 17, 1973: Pauley Pavilion, UCLA, Los Angeles
DEAD EYE BASKETBALL TITLE
The legendary Grateful Dead blessed a gymnasium filled with devout followers Saturday night at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, and if they could play basketball half as well as they play music they could be the national champions. No rock group, excepting those phenomenons from Britain, can come close to them.
For three and a half hours, not counting an intermission and interruptions by a perturbed fire marshal determined to clear the aisles of dancing Dead freaks, the greatest American rock group showed the few gathered in the gym who needed to be shown why they are so named.
Each member of the group complements the other members so well that, as a musical unit, they seem to be almost organically integrated. They make the extended musical journey, a very risky thing for any group to attempt, a very worthwhile trip.
Jerry Garcia, their fantastic lead guitarist, is one of the few rock superstars having the good taste to spare us all of those showy trappings. His musicianship defies any amount of glitter and his lofty position in contemporary music remains untouched.
Garcia is undoubtedly the group’s focal point. Without him the Dead would not be the Dead. His solo album last year almost sounded like a new Grateful Dead album where he pulled a Paul McCartney by playing all of the instruments with the exception of drums.
They revamped some established oldies such as “El Paso” and the George Jones classic, “The Race Is On,” reminding us that not enough attention has been paid to Bob Weir’s vocals, convincing enough to make even the most dedicated country and Western purist forget about those originals for awhile. They also gave a very impressive Los Angeles debut of material from their brilliant new album, “Wake of the Flood.” The good-time sounds of “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” stood out among the standouts.
The Dead’s lyricist, who doesn’t appear with the group, is Robert Hunter and his story of “Casey Jones,” their only encore for the evening, is an animated Zap comic book. It’s a cartoon train ride with just enough stops to allow for the laughs needed to rescue a song of somewhat serious subject matter from becoming too heavy-handed.
(by Robert Kemnitz, unknown paper & date)
* * *
PLAYIN' IN THE BAND
The Grateful Dead made a four-hour stop in Pauley Pavilion Saturday night, performing before a capacity crowd of about 9,700. Guitarists Jerry Garcia (beardless for the first time in years) and Bob Weir brought the audience to its collective feet at several points in the concert, most notably on "Playin' in the Band" and "Sugar Magnolia." Despite widespread rumors of crackdowns on dope and booze, the 20 University police on duty reportedly detained only one person the entire evening. One officer patrolling the concert said it was a "good, happy crowd," but added that police were only asking people not to smoke.
(from the UCLA Daily Bruin, November 19 1973)
(Officially released - Dave's Picks vol. 5)
The legendary Grateful Dead blessed a gymnasium filled with devout followers Saturday night at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, and if they could play basketball half as well as they play music they could be the national champions. No rock group, excepting those phenomenons from Britain, can come close to them.
For three and a half hours, not counting an intermission and interruptions by a perturbed fire marshal determined to clear the aisles of dancing Dead freaks, the greatest American rock group showed the few gathered in the gym who needed to be shown why they are so named.
Each member of the group complements the other members so well that, as a musical unit, they seem to be almost organically integrated. They make the extended musical journey, a very risky thing for any group to attempt, a very worthwhile trip.
Jerry Garcia, their fantastic lead guitarist, is one of the few rock superstars having the good taste to spare us all of those showy trappings. His musicianship defies any amount of glitter and his lofty position in contemporary music remains untouched.
Garcia is undoubtedly the group’s focal point. Without him the Dead would not be the Dead. His solo album last year almost sounded like a new Grateful Dead album where he pulled a Paul McCartney by playing all of the instruments with the exception of drums.
They revamped some established oldies such as “El Paso” and the George Jones classic, “The Race Is On,” reminding us that not enough attention has been paid to Bob Weir’s vocals, convincing enough to make even the most dedicated country and Western purist forget about those originals for awhile. They also gave a very impressive Los Angeles debut of material from their brilliant new album, “Wake of the Flood.” The good-time sounds of “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” stood out among the standouts.
The Dead’s lyricist, who doesn’t appear with the group, is Robert Hunter and his story of “Casey Jones,” their only encore for the evening, is an animated Zap comic book. It’s a cartoon train ride with just enough stops to allow for the laughs needed to rescue a song of somewhat serious subject matter from becoming too heavy-handed.
(by Robert Kemnitz, unknown paper & date)
* * *
PLAYIN' IN THE BAND
The Grateful Dead made a four-hour stop in Pauley Pavilion Saturday night, performing before a capacity crowd of about 9,700. Guitarists Jerry Garcia (beardless for the first time in years) and Bob Weir brought the audience to its collective feet at several points in the concert, most notably on "Playin' in the Band" and "Sugar Magnolia." Despite widespread rumors of crackdowns on dope and booze, the 20 University police on duty reportedly detained only one person the entire evening. One officer patrolling the concert said it was a "good, happy crowd," but added that police were only asking people not to smoke.
(from the UCLA Daily Bruin, November 19 1973)
(Officially released - Dave's Picks vol. 5)
Nov 1, 2013
May 14, 1974: University of Montana, Missoula
GRATEFUL DEAD ARE ON NEW MUSICAL PATHS
Members of the Grateful Dead emerged in the early days of Haight Ashbury flower-power-dom, playing together first as a jug band and later as the band that supplied the ultimate acid-rock to a new audience with new tastes.
Since then, they have set out on the musical paths of country, rock, blues and jazz, creating a niche all their own in the music world.
Seven thousand Dead admirers filled the University of Montana Field House Tuesday night, expecting to witness an important part of the music of the 60’s and 70’s. They weren’t betrayed.
Unlike most rock bands that perform as concerts a 90-minute blast of amplified sound, the Dead began slowly and methodically, flowing through “Bertha,” “Mama Tried,” and “Deal.” Each song built on the energy of its predecessor.
The energy did not come out as wildly driving music, but was there in the smooth exactness of Jerry Garcia’s lead guitar and Bob Weir’s innovative rhythm guitar riffs. All the Dead, including Garcia, Weir, bassist Phil Lesh, pianist Keith Godchaux, singer Donna Godchaux and drummer Bill Kreutzman, came through the phenomenal 480-speaker system individually distinctive, but wedded into a sound that is the Grateful Dead.
The wall of speakers, which cost about $35,000 to put together, made the music loud, but not a blare. It is the most innovative and experimental system in the world. Each of the five band members has an individual sound system tied into the whole.
But the musicians were the important ingredient, and Garcia is one of the best musicians there is. He nonchalantly stood onstage, bracing himself on one leg as the other rose and fell with the tempo of the music. Garcia was at his peak in the half-hour “Playing in the Band” jam, when he took a foray into rock, jazz and finally an electronic neverness that left the crowd spellbound.
Weir was outstanding as a country crooner in Marty Robbins’ “El Paso,” in “Mama Tried” and the encore, “One More Saturday Night.” Of course, Garcia’s familiar high-pitched vocals were there to complement Weir’s, and Donna Godchaux’s voice, while unsure at times, harmonized beautifully with Weir and Garcia.
But the night was not all roses. One incoherent jam in the four-hour concert rambled on for 40 minutes.
After the Dead left the stage from their second set, the crowd roared one of the loudest and longest ovations given to a band performing in Missoula. Several minutes later, as the Dead stepped back on stage, Weir was struck on the head by a plastic pitcher that flew from the crowd below him.
“Thanks a lot,” he said gruffly.
It was a distasteful conclusion to a fine performance.
(by Steve Shirley, 'Music Review' from the Missoulian, May 16 1974)
(Thanks to DaveMar)
https://archive.org/details/gd1974-05-14.sbd.miller.114462.flac16
Members of the Grateful Dead emerged in the early days of Haight Ashbury flower-power-dom, playing together first as a jug band and later as the band that supplied the ultimate acid-rock to a new audience with new tastes.
Since then, they have set out on the musical paths of country, rock, blues and jazz, creating a niche all their own in the music world.
Seven thousand Dead admirers filled the University of Montana Field House Tuesday night, expecting to witness an important part of the music of the 60’s and 70’s. They weren’t betrayed.
Unlike most rock bands that perform as concerts a 90-minute blast of amplified sound, the Dead began slowly and methodically, flowing through “Bertha,” “Mama Tried,” and “Deal.” Each song built on the energy of its predecessor.
The energy did not come out as wildly driving music, but was there in the smooth exactness of Jerry Garcia’s lead guitar and Bob Weir’s innovative rhythm guitar riffs. All the Dead, including Garcia, Weir, bassist Phil Lesh, pianist Keith Godchaux, singer Donna Godchaux and drummer Bill Kreutzman, came through the phenomenal 480-speaker system individually distinctive, but wedded into a sound that is the Grateful Dead.
The wall of speakers, which cost about $35,000 to put together, made the music loud, but not a blare. It is the most innovative and experimental system in the world. Each of the five band members has an individual sound system tied into the whole.
But the musicians were the important ingredient, and Garcia is one of the best musicians there is. He nonchalantly stood onstage, bracing himself on one leg as the other rose and fell with the tempo of the music. Garcia was at his peak in the half-hour “Playing in the Band” jam, when he took a foray into rock, jazz and finally an electronic neverness that left the crowd spellbound.
Weir was outstanding as a country crooner in Marty Robbins’ “El Paso,” in “Mama Tried” and the encore, “One More Saturday Night.” Of course, Garcia’s familiar high-pitched vocals were there to complement Weir’s, and Donna Godchaux’s voice, while unsure at times, harmonized beautifully with Weir and Garcia.
But the night was not all roses. One incoherent jam in the four-hour concert rambled on for 40 minutes.
After the Dead left the stage from their second set, the crowd roared one of the loudest and longest ovations given to a band performing in Missoula. Several minutes later, as the Dead stepped back on stage, Weir was struck on the head by a plastic pitcher that flew from the crowd below him.
“Thanks a lot,” he said gruffly.
It was a distasteful conclusion to a fine performance.
(by Steve Shirley, 'Music Review' from the Missoulian, May 16 1974)
(Thanks to DaveMar)
https://archive.org/details/gd1974-05-14.sbd.miller.114462.flac16
Sep 16, 2013
April 1967: Garcia & Lesh on KMPX
TOM DONAHUE SHOW, KMPX-FM
(Beginning of show missing.)
DJ: OK, that’s by the Swan Silvertones, it’s a VeeJay LP. Some of the first music I really got with was gospel music, and as a matter of fact, the first record I ever made was with a gospel group in Charleston, West Virginia – it’s a super bad record, man, I’ll have to play it for you… [Garcia laughs]
Lesh: …[??] first record.
Garcia: Yeah, …[??] first record?
DJ: Yeah, I knew about some of the first records, I was trying to get clearance on playing some of the other stuff on the air, but we’ll get around to that some other night because [you’ll be up here]. I know the immediate reaction of most groups, you say look, man, I like to play [the early stuff] – don’t do that…
Garcia: It’s interesting.
DJ: Yeah, some of it’s interesting because you can see the differences. I was talking about writing album liner notes last night, and I said that I finally figured out the way to do it was to sign a different name to them all, so that years later my name wouldn’t be on it for I know how ridiculous it’s gonna look [Garcia laughs] not much further on. I noticed you didn’t have any liner notes on your album.
Garcia: No, it’s because none of us can read very well.
Lesh: None of us can write either.
Garcia: Yeah. Right.
DJ: And you know, what would you want to say in liner notes?
Lesh: Well, the only person who could have particularly written any liner notes would have been Kesey, and by the time that the album came out, it just didn’t seem right…[??]…so we decided not to do it.
Garcia: After all, it is a record, not a magazine.
DJ: That’s right, it’s not a magazine. [Garcia laughs]
Garcia: Right. However though, if anybody wants to peel back the label, there’s hieroglyphics engraved in the wax.
DJ: …You may be tearing LPs apart all over the city. Have you had any talk about bookings in, let’s say faraway places as a result of the LP?
Garcia: Yeah, we’re going to New York…
Lesh: We are?
Garcia: Yeah.
Lesh: Huh. [excited] We’re going to New York!
Garcia: We’re going to New York the first of June.
DJ: First of June – where are you gonna work there?
Garcia: I’m not sure, I think the Café au Go Go.
DJ: Yeah. I’ve heard that – I like the sound system there to the extent that I dig some of the things that’ve been recorded there, because they recorded things live and they seem to work pretty well.
Garcia: Yeah, they recorded like the Blues Project, but they have a lot quieter scene going than we do. I don’t know, I hope to just go there and turn up real loud and play real loud and just, you know…lethal doses.
Lesh: Did you hear about the sound gun?
DJ: No, tell me – oh yeah, sound guns that they’re doing things with, there’s a whole article –
Lesh: Seven cycles a second.
DJ: There’s an article in Playboy magazine –
Lesh: This is different, that’s high frequencies; this is low frequencies, they use a police whistle eighteen feet across.
Garcia: Right, and a common air compressor, whatever the heck it is, and it puts out this seven cycle per second thing which starts your insides vibrating and you eventually die.
Lesh: Kill a man five miles away with the sound.
Garcia: Imagine it.
DJ: Well, how about if they only had it on you for a little while now, does that make any –
Garcia: Make you sick. In fact, when they were testing it out – when they were trying whatever they were doing with it to see what would happen, everybody got sick for miles around, they all got sick, they had headaches you know – and everybody was very unhappy with the [whole thing of course] – nobody as unhappy as us musicians.
DJ: OK, let’s get back to your top forty.
Lesh: Here’s number two. This is another gospel thing which is a little more crazy than the first one – less discipline, you might say. It’s by Charlie Mingus, and…
Garcia: And it’s called?
Lesh: Oh, that’s right.
Garcia: Out with it.
Lesh: ‘Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting.’
Garcia: That’s it.
[music]
DJ: That’s Charlie Mingus, ‘Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting;’ this is Tom Donahue at KMPX, 107 on your FM dial, we’re playing records until midnight. Our guests tonight are Jerry Garcia & Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, who have the number one bestseller in San Francisco with their current Warner Brothers LP. They’re shaking hands, but they don’t have the money yet – it’s that kind of thing, right? And the album’s done unbelievably well outside of town. I haven’t checked your list completely, are you gonna play anything from it?
Garcia & Lesh: No, no…
DJ: We don’t get a chance to tear it apart or anything like that and say –
Lesh: Well we can talk about it, sure.
DJ: ‘Why’d you blow that note there.’ [laughter] How do you feel about the album yourselves, personally?
Lesh: I feel like it’s a turd.
DJ: Not where you wanted to be.
Lesh: Well no, it was where we were at the time.
Garcia: Yeah, right; it was something we did, it’s all over with, and –
Lesh: The next one certainly won’t be anything like that –
Garcia: No.
Lesh: In any way.
Garcia: The way we sort of – It’s like that one is sort of an attempt to try and sound like the way, the stuff that we do live, with the same instrumentation and everything. There’s not really anything unconventional for us in there.
Lesh: But that’s impossible to do in a recording studio.
Garcia: Right. So we’re not going to try - we’re not going to bother doing that anymore, we’re just gonna like, from now on when we go and record, since the first album is doing so nicely, we hope they’ll let us have a lot of time in the studio, and next time we’ll do a lot more studio stuff, and try and get it [??] which is a whole other thing.
DJ: Because the whole problem of trying to take what live sounds like and put it on tape or disc –
Garcia: You can’t do it in the studio. You might be able to do it if you could record a rock & roll band live, you know with the volumes that we play at like at the Fillmore or something like that, and maybe after two or three months of every night at the Fillmore, we’d start to get, you know, good cuts, good enough for an album I mean, in terms of how clean they were, and how much we like the performance on ‘em, and then we’d have something, but it would be such an expensive undertaking, and long and everything; and the studio facilities are so incredible that we should do something with them. So we’re gonna go in there, you know, and try something different.
DJ: Approaching from a different angle.
Garcia: Right, right.
Lesh: Well, there are people who practice the art of recording, being Phil Spector, who practice the art of recording. When we went in to do the album, we didn’t know anything about the art of recording; we knew a little bit about music.
DJ: Well I think there is a potential of this though, and that is the art of interpretation –
Lesh: Interpretation of what, the recording?
DJ: Of which nobody has been done – no, the art of interpretation of the sound of the group. I think in time it’s conceivable that engineers will come along who actually hear what groups are doing and know how to transplant that sound.
Lesh: Wouldn’t it be more likely to assume that the groups would be able to take over the function of engineer?
DJ: Oh yes, that’s very possible. But I think –
Garcia: [??] would hate it
DJ: I think that’s what every group hopes to do, to get to that point where they can do it, because, you know, he, in the main is another brain between you and what you want to do, and so it’s a jump you have to make into his head and then out onto whatever’s recorded, and I don’t think it’s ever been done successfully, really.
Garcia: I’d say the Beatles –
DJ: Except with the [??] – well, once again, with the Beatles doing their thing though, they’re not doing it through a producer’s head or an engineer – well, the engineer obviously [??] [Garcia: Right, yeah.] But who knows, man, after the Beatles walk out of the studio, they may be saying to themselves, ‘Didn’t get it again.’
Garcia: Right, who knows.
DJ: Because you don’t know what they want, right?
Garcia: Sounds mighty good to us, of course.
DJ: How about Blind Willie Johnson?
Garcia: Blind Willie Johnson, yeah. This is Blind Willie Johnson and his wife Angelina, and Blind Willie Johnson is a particularly interesting slide-style guitarist. He played nothing but sacred music during, I guess the ‘20s and ‘30s and so forth like that, you know, on the streets and all, and his records are valued by old-time record collectors; and this particular song the Blues Project also does; anybody who’s heard the Blues Project record that has ‘Lord I Just Can’t Keep From Crying Sometime’ on it, it’s the same song, and this is I guess where they got it, Blind Willie Johnson.
[music]
DJ: OK, that’s by Blind Willie Johnson, ‘Lord I Just Can’t Keep From Crying;’ our guests tonight are Jerry Garcia & Phil Lesh from the Grateful Dead. Ray Charles is next on your schedule, is this early or late?
Lesh: Late. Very recent, it was the last single.
DJ: Last single –
Lesh: Or the latest.
DJ: You think the stuff he’s cut with ABC has been as good as some of the things he cut with ABKCO? I think he was in a much heavier blues bag, I think, earlier.
Garcia: Yeah, I always liked the seven-piece stuff with the Raelettes and all like that, it was a real nice sound.
Lesh: Well his big band is one of the tightest bands.
DJ: Yeah, there’s some good big bands. I like the sound that Bobby Bland Group gets.
Lesh: Theirs is a lot more funky, I think, than Ray Charles.
DJ: Yeah.
Lesh: James Brown I think actually has the best big band. The tightest. [beats]
Garcia: They’re real snappy.
DJ: Super-disciplined.
Lesh: They use two drums, too.
DJ: Smoke on stage during rehearsal, ten bucks; late for rehearsal, twenty-five bucks. James keeps them in line.
Lesh: Oh I bet he does.
DJ: Have you thought about that, Jerry?
Garcia: Uhh… [laughter] Keeping the boys in line, you mean?
DJ: This is by Ray Charles, ‘I Don’t Need No Doctor.’
[music]
DJ: ‘I Don’t Need Your Doctor,’ we’re going along with selections tonight from Jerry Garcia & Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, and James Brown, who we were talking about a moment ago, is on the list at the moment. You’re picking some fairly recent stuff of James’s too.
Lesh: Yeah, the ‘Man’s Man’s Man’s World’ is the one that seemed to me to use the strings first in the new way. Like, lots of people made records with strings, even jazz musicians, Charlie Parker, [??] Brown, and there’s all mostly like [??], and records [in the background] – but James Brown’s –
Garcia: The harder stuff.
Lesh: And this is a recording that uses the strings in a kind of percussive way.
Garcia: Yeah, very groovy.
Lesh: It sort of seems to me that after that, then the Beatles came out and started using that stuff too, only it wasn’t with the instruments playing, it was with manipulation of the tape, like on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’ its violins: it’s tape manipulation, loops, spirals.
DJ: OK, let’s do ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.’
[music]
DJ: That’s James Brown, ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s World’ – let’s skip right to the next one, OK? James in ‘Ain’t That a Groove.’
Lesh: This one’ll speak for itself.
Garcia: It’s a groove.
DJ: All the way. This is Tom Donahue with KMPX, it’s 107 on your FM dial in San Francisco, playing records 8 until midnight; our guests tonight, Phil Lesh & Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, and here’s James Brown.
[music]
DJ: ‘Ain’t That A Groove,’ that’s James Brown, and that’s from a very recent LP of his, let’s see if we can give the exact title. ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,’ amazing sensational thrilling soul brother number one, whew, doesn’t really have a title, just James Brown. Working out on stage, doing his entire thing. He’s a fantastic showman; lay another one on you. The act hasn’t changed much.
Lesh: Everybody has the same act…
DJ: Right. I saw the basic act [in] ’56 at the Apollo, you know… But I think that’s one of the things people dig about it, because they know they’re going to get that, and that’s what they want to see. And he’s had a lot of imagination, because in his particular area of R&B singing, there are very few who would depart to sing the kind of songs he has on occasion. He’s picked up some strange ballads and done them and, you know.
Garcia: Well, ‘It’s a Man’s World’ is a really far-out thing.
DJ: Well, James is thinking in his own area.
Garcia: But is he really happy?
DJ: Is he really happy? [laughter] Smiles a lot, man… [mumbles]
Garcia: Seems happy.
[cut]
DJ: You done any Dylan tunes?
Garcia: Yeah, we do Baby Blue, ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.’ We also used to do ‘She Belongs To Me’ too. Bob used to croon it.
DJ: This one was –
Garcia: Oh this is Bob’s request incidentally too, he said that we should play it.
DJ: Yeah this particular record had an R&B recording as a matter of fact, ‘Maggie’s Farm’…
Garcia: I heard, I heard –
DJ: Yeah, Solomon Burke, that’s right. Far out.
Garcia: I heard, let’s see, what – James Cotton’s Blues Band do it, Sam Lay sang it, the drummer sang it. It was very interesting.
DJ: OK, let’s get with Maggie’s Blues, as recorded by Bob Dylan.
[music]
DJ: That’s Bob Dylan, ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ on KMPX, this is Tom Donahue, with you until 12 midnight. KMPX is at 107 on the FM dial, we play records 8 until 12, and if you have an opportunity to listen to the station in stereo here in San Francisco, it’s a good way to hear it. Stereo is not necessarily a faithful reproduction, but it’s a small thing of its own.
Garcia: Right, right. [mumbles]
DJ: Do you – have you listened to – I guess you’ve listened to your LP in both mono and stereo and –
Garcia: Yeah.
DJ: Probably heard it a lot of times.
Garcia: Right, well, we [were] the ones that mixed it, the mono mix and the stereo –
Lesh: And we had a rider on it.
DJ: Where? Western, with the exception of –
Lesh: No, RCA; RCA with the exception of the single which was cut at Coast. And the single, I think sounds more like us than the album does. It sounds dirtier.
Garcia: And fuller.
Lesh: And more stuff going on.
DJ: Maybe because you cut in San Francisco, maybe it did something to your mind.
Lesh: I don’t know, they did something.
Garcia: Well we did a lot more stuff on the single too, like we put a lot more, you know, we overlaid a lot of stuff.
Lesh: It’s a recording rather than a transcription.
Garcia: Right, right, and somehow it comes out sounding more like the way we sound live, just because of the enormous amount of confusion involved. And maybe, you know, it’s like we’re used to playing in a big –
DJ: And there were more people jammed in the studio at Coast that night.
Garcia: Oh that’s true –
DJ: ‘Cause I came in and there were a lot of people.
Garcia: Right, a lot of people.
DJ: Because there’s only two ways you can record, one is no people, or the other one is everybody. There’s no in between, it just doesn’t work.
Garcia: That’s true, that’s true, it doesn’t work.
DJ: And I guess you would rather have a lot –
Garcia: Well, when we were in LA, we tried to, you know, we were going to have a big closed session, absolutely no admittance and so forth, big sign and everything, but, you know –
Lesh: Everybody showed up anyway.
Garcia: Yeah, everybody came, so –
DJ: ...brings your old lady and she’s getting in and I’m getting in and before you know it, man, you’ve got a studio full of people.
Garcia: It’s OK, it turns out it doesn’t really seem to make too much difference, you know. The difference that it seems to make is that like, the better you feel, the better you do. And if there’s a lot of people around and it’s kind of a nice, you know, everybody’s kind of in a good thing – [DJ: ??] - or at least moves a little faster.
DJ: This was recorded in –
Garcia: It was recorded in France, as a matter of fact, and it’s the Bulgarian folklore scene, you know, something like the Folklorica de Mejico thing, only Bulgarian. And it’s all these people who are just, like, people of Bulgaria, you know, farmers and what have you, workers and so forth, who also are into music, like I guess everybody is, in some way or another; this is the music of their own country, like –
DJ: The women who sing on this, some of them are quite old you know, sixties and seventies; they’ve been singing this stuff for years.
Garcia: Right, it sounds like it.
DJ: I have a – there’s a weird thing that happens when I listen to this album. There was a a group around many years ago called the Devore Sisters. [I don’t know if you remember] – they had a record called Teach Me The Night [??], successful 45; and their voice quality is such that they sound very much like a lot of the women on this record…
Garcia: …strange vibrato.
DJ: Yeah, right. Albert Grossman picked this album up originally.
Garcia: The thing that I like about this particular cut is the singing is unaccompanied two-part singing, and it’s like semitones –
Lesh: Microtones.
Garcia: Microtones, and it’s just the weirdest intervals that you ever heard.
DJ: This is from an RCA Victor album that I don’t think is available anymore. The album is entitled Music of Bulgaria and the cut is ‘The Moon Shines.’
[music]
DJ: And that particular cut is entitled ‘The Moon Shines.’ We played some of this on the air here, because a lot of people reacted very favorably to it. It’s a great sound to listen to, we’ll get some other cuts on eventually. You worked with Charles Lloyd at any of the gigs you’ve done?
Lesh & Garcia: Yeah, Rock Garden…
Garcia: We had a really good time with him too; in fact, we’ve been, there's been a little bit of, there’s been some communication between us and Charles Lloyd just recently, he's been talking to our managers and we're gonna maybe work something out where we're working together in some other situations, cause we had a good time together.
DJ: He’s great to listen to and he’s building a tremendous audience among a group of people he might never have reached if he hadn’t played those dances, because that has exposed him to people who ordinarily would never have come across Charles Lloyd in their experience. And they listen to what he’s doing.
Lesh: They dance to it too.
DJ: And they dance to it, yeah, and they like him. OK, this is Charles and ‘Dream Weaver.’
[music]
DJ: OK, we’re listening to Charles Lloyd and ‘Dream Weaver.’ Tom Donahue at KMPX in San Francisco.
[Ad: “This weekend, at the Avalon Ballroom, Sutter & Van Ness in San Francisco, the Family Dog presents the Chambers Brothers – also at the Avalon this weekend, the Iron Butterfly. It’s the place, baby!” The ad uses a clip from the Beatles’ ‘Day in the Life;’ the shows were on April 28-29.]
DJ: That’s a thing for the Avalon that Bob McClay produced; our guests tonight are Jerry Garcia & Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, and Charles Lloyd’s someone they’ve worked with, they’ve also worked with Junior Wells. Where was that?
Garcia: Yeah, we worked with Junior Wells at the Fillmore Auditorium
Lesh: When he was there though, he wouldn’t do his blues stuff at the Fillmore.
Garcia: Right, and the band wasn’t, you know – the band that he uses with Buddy Guy, he just – Like on this particular record, he’s just got a little three-piece band backing him up, and it’s just so tasty. This particular cut is – I think it’s one of the finest single blues-band recordings, you know, I mean just musically, the way the stuff happens is so nice.
DJ: OK, this is Junior Wells, ‘Ships on the Ocean.’
[music]
DJ: Junior Wells and ‘Ships on the Ocean.’ And then – I know you played with Charles Lloyd and I know you played with Junior Wells. [laughter] But where’d you play with Leopold Stokowski?
Garcia: Don’t laugh, man.
DJ: Someday…
Lesh: We’re gonna do a thing [??] with a guy named Luciano Berio at the Lincoln Center in September, and be an opera.
DJ: Yeah, somebody else told me about that.
Lesh: …Berio was also my teacher when I was studying classical –
DJ: Tell us a little bit about Berio and some of the things he’s done.
Lesh: Well, Berio is Italian, and he’s composed a lot of music and he’s been played a lot, and I can’t tell you anything about his music except it’s all beautiful.
Garcia: Mostly Italian marches.
Lesh: Italian marches? [laughter]
DJ: OK, well this particular is not Berio, it’s a composition of Charles Ives, Symphony Number Four, and we’re gonna play the second movement from it.
Lesh: If you expect it to sound like a symphony –
Garcia: Forget it.
Lesh: - you’ll be disappointed.
[music]
DJ: And somebody just called to make a comment. Phil, come over here and tell me what he was saying; he was saying it was like the Beatles’ new record?
Lesh: Well, what he thought was that it sounded like the Beatles’ new records, and I was saying that I thought that…you know, we could say whether or not the Beatles had heard this stuff from Ives or any of the people who did it before or not, I kind of think that they thought of it for themselves, ‘cause it’s possible for you to discover stuff that other people have done, for yourself.
Garcia: Right, like a lot of people discovered, you know –
Lesh: Radio…
Garcia: Yeah, something like that…
Lesh: All at the same time, right… [Everyone talks at once.] Those things are in the air, and the Beatles have taken the lead in bringing it to popular music, and I for one am glad.
Garcia: Right, and they do it in their own way, it’s pure Beatles. You know, it’s still the Beatles and –
Lesh: And so, so tasty.
DJ: And [constantly] changing and never hung up in one particular thing.
Garcia: Oh, yeah.
[cut]
DJ: You know, we’re in no hurry, we aren’t going anywhere or anything, but just in case anyone panics, man, you know. We would [??] we both hung up on him and turn off his radio. [laughs] “Sorry about that thing!”
Garcia: Pigpen, we’re sorry.
DJ: Public apology. I would call Ian & Sylvia a little variety from what we’ve had up to now. Anything you care to say about ‘em or why you like ‘em or why you picked ‘em?
Lesh: [There’s a singer,] mostly, and these particular songs, Sylvia sings the one, ‘Jealous Lover,’ by herself, and it’s enough to chill your bones, and the next one is a fine desperado ballad, in a great tradition, with some nice guitar playing on it.
DJ: OK, let’s try Ian & Sylvia and the ‘Jealous Lover.’
[music]
DJ: All right, another one by Ian & Sylvia, ‘Four Rode By,’ Phil said it’s a desperado song.
[music]
DJ: Ian & Sylvia and ‘Four Rode By.’ Skip James is the next thing you got, tell me about Skip James.
Garcia: Oh, he’s a famous Delta blues singer, as it says right here on the cover. [Lesh: ??] But, and everybody thought he was dead for the longest time, and everybody said, ‘Skip James, yeah, he’s dead,’ but his old 78s were around, and people would listen to them and all. You know, it’s really good, is what it’s all about.
DJ: Then they found out he was alive.
Garcia: Right, they found out he was alive –
DJ: Glenn Miller will turn up the same way. [Laughter, everyone talks at once.]
DJ: OK, this is Skip James and ‘Hard Times Killin’ Floor Blues.’
[music]
DJ: That’s Aretha Franklin from her new Atlantic LP, ‘I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You.’ We were talking about Phil Spector a little while ago and the kind of record producing he does, which is a totally creative thing from the beginning as a producer. This is one of the great examples of that thing, this Righteous Brothers thing we’re about to play. Someday I’m gonna get Phil on the show and there’s one thing I’m gonna get him to play, and that is a tape of the track for this record.
Lesh: The instrumental track?
DJ: Yeah. With him singing the parts.
Lesh: Does it exist?
DJ: Oh yeah. I’ve heard the record, he played it for me one night at his house…that strange baronial mansion he lives in in LA. And I’d heard about the record from Bobby Dale and Tommy [Lapuno], the producer down there, about the tape, and it’s, you know, a strange, strange sound. Spector’s voice is a really peculiar voice, in singing. It has not been heard on record since ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’ – last appearance.
Garcia: Was he singing parts in that?
DJ: Yeah.
Lesh: [???] But Mojo Navigator has a thing about him, all his records.
DJ: Yeah, they do a nice discography on him. He was – Phil had a record out that was probably the first S&M record anybody ever came along with called ‘She Hit Me And It Felt Like A Kiss,’ or ‘He Hit Me And It Felt Like A Kiss,’ remember that?
Lesh: Oh, right.
DJ: And they finally had to pull it off the market because [there were so many protests] – and on and on. Here’s the Righteous Brothers, ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.’
[music]
DJ: ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin,’ record [sly disguise because] you’ve been playing it in the middle of the night again. Spector has not done anything for a long time. He keeps saying, “I’m old-fashioned, I’m old-fashioned, I’m totally out of it now, I’m not gonna make any more records.”
Lesh: I hear he’s making some strange movie in Mexico.
DJ: He wants to; he never got down there, the whole project blew up just as everybody was getting ready to get on the boat. But he has been in the studio with Ike & Tina Turner again.
Garcia: Oh, far out, good.
Lesh: If the results of that one are as good as the last one –
Garcia: This one, the one coming up, ha ha ha.
DJ: [We have] the one record that was a complete success in England – ‘River Deep, Mountain High,’ which I think got to number four on the English charts.
Garcia: Too much.
DJ: And Phil took an ad in Billboard at the time, you remember? With the British flag, and the line was something about “King George was right.” [laughter] ‘Cause none of the radio stations in this country would play it at that time. Ike & Tina Turner – Ike Turner’s one of the great minds of all time. You ever talk to Ike in any period of time?
Garcia: No.
DJ: I’d love to get him on the show some night. Let him tell the world how he got started – he’s got a great success story. This is the very record we were just discussing, Ike & Tina Turner in the Phil Spector production, ‘River Deep, Mountain High.’
[music]
DJ: And that’s by Ike & Tina Turner, ‘River Deep, Mountain High,’ I don’t think that record has ever been played in this town before.
Lesh: Really?
DJ: I know it’s never played in any radio stations –
Lesh: That is a crime!
DJ: I think we should start playing it every now and then.
Garcia: I think so.
Lesh: I will give you the record if you’ll play it every night!
DJ: Fine, good, I’ll play it every night.
Garcia: Too much, please do.
DJ: And maybe people will go out and buy it and we’ll put Phil back in business and get him up here and [whistles].
Garcia: That’ll be nice.
DJ: One interview with Phil Spector and it might be all over for the radio station. [Laughter.] You know? Lou Rawls, he’s one of the younger blues singers around, does a thing that’s, I think very peculiarly his own.
Lesh: This is the only record of his that I ever heard, except for ‘Blues for Four-String Guitar’ which seemed a little ostentatious.
Garcia: Lame, you might even say. But he had – he did –
Lesh: This is really tasty with [??] –
Garcia: - that other famous song – what was that -
Lesh: ‘Tobacco Road.’
DJ: I saw him working one night, opened with Bobby Bland and Jimmy Witherspoon.
Lesh & Garcia: Oh, wow.
DJ: Which was a fine, fine trio for an evening. This is Lou Rawls and ‘Trouble Down Here Below. ‘
[music]
DJ: Tom Donahue at KMPX, 107 on your dial in San Francisco, we’re playing records 8 until 12 midnight, our guests tonight are Phil Lesh & Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead.
[music]
DJ: ‘Gotta Get Away,’ that’s by the Rolling Stones. Tom Donahue here with Phil and Jerry. Let’s see you talk a little bit about Otis Redding.
Lesh: Oh, we worked with Otis.
Garcia: Yeah.
Lesh: And it was kind of scary to work with Otis.
Garcia: Yeah, Otis is really heavy.
DJ: I thought he would do better here than he did.
Lesh: He tore it up!
Garcia: He tore the place apart.
DJ: I mean, as far as people were concerned, I don’t think he had the number of people that he could’ve had.
Lesh: Well maybe nobody knew Otis –
Garcia: Yeah, maybe not too many people knew about it, that could’ve been it. But boy, he had one of those standard [shots] where the band would get up and play some numbers and a girl singer would come up and, [mumbling] you know, some group and stuff like that, whole show, you know.
Lesh: The standard show.
Garcia: Yeah, like, when he came on stage, it was like the whole place got about six times as big, and the band just got real snappy, you know; it was so fine and the music was really good. And like, when you go to those shows, most the time, like the James Brown show, the music is like not really where it’s at with the James Brown show, the circus part is what it’s all about, kinda – and with Otis Redding, the music is still what’s happening, you know, and it’s just so good, really, wow.
DJ: This is from the LP entitled “Complete and Unbelievable, the Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul,” and it’s ‘Day Tripper.’
[music]
DJ: That’s Otis and ‘Day Tripper’ and this is Tom Donahue with Jerry Garcia & Phil Lesh and we’re gonna play something from the Grateful Dead album, I figure it’s about time.
Garcia: Til the police get here.
DJ: Right. And the one that Jerry picked out is ‘Cold Rain and Snow.’
[music]
DJ: [Vince,] if you turn that over, I’m gonna play my selection from the LP as we get outta here. I wanna thank you fellows for coming around to talk to us, [it was very interesting.]
Garcia [emphatic]: Oh sure, Tom, that’s all right, anytime!
DJ: Anytime, right? [Laughter.] And we can have Pigpen back and –
Lesh: That’ll be fun.
Garcia: That’ll be good. If you can get him out of the house it’ll be – [long pause, laughter] […] revolutionary, at the least.
DJ: […] that you guys take care of that part of it.
Lesh: Well, if we can [get him up earlier] –
Garcia: Get him [buy shoes are] big enough.
DJ: You get him down here and I’ll find a way to hold him in the studio.
Lesh: I think you can do it!
DJ: OK, we’re going out of here with something by the Grateful Dead called the ‘New, New Minglewood Blues.’
[music]
http://archive.org/details/gd67-04-xx.prefm.vernon.9261.sbeok.shnf
(Beginning of show missing.)
DJ: OK, that’s by the Swan Silvertones, it’s a VeeJay LP. Some of the first music I really got with was gospel music, and as a matter of fact, the first record I ever made was with a gospel group in Charleston, West Virginia – it’s a super bad record, man, I’ll have to play it for you… [Garcia laughs]
Lesh: …[??] first record.
Garcia: Yeah, …[??] first record?
DJ: Yeah, I knew about some of the first records, I was trying to get clearance on playing some of the other stuff on the air, but we’ll get around to that some other night because [you’ll be up here]. I know the immediate reaction of most groups, you say look, man, I like to play [the early stuff] – don’t do that…
Garcia: It’s interesting.
DJ: Yeah, some of it’s interesting because you can see the differences. I was talking about writing album liner notes last night, and I said that I finally figured out the way to do it was to sign a different name to them all, so that years later my name wouldn’t be on it for I know how ridiculous it’s gonna look [Garcia laughs] not much further on. I noticed you didn’t have any liner notes on your album.
Garcia: No, it’s because none of us can read very well.
Lesh: None of us can write either.
Garcia: Yeah. Right.
DJ: And you know, what would you want to say in liner notes?
Lesh: Well, the only person who could have particularly written any liner notes would have been Kesey, and by the time that the album came out, it just didn’t seem right…[??]…so we decided not to do it.
Garcia: After all, it is a record, not a magazine.
DJ: That’s right, it’s not a magazine. [Garcia laughs]
Garcia: Right. However though, if anybody wants to peel back the label, there’s hieroglyphics engraved in the wax.
DJ: …You may be tearing LPs apart all over the city. Have you had any talk about bookings in, let’s say faraway places as a result of the LP?
Garcia: Yeah, we’re going to New York…
Lesh: We are?
Garcia: Yeah.
Lesh: Huh. [excited] We’re going to New York!
Garcia: We’re going to New York the first of June.
DJ: First of June – where are you gonna work there?
Garcia: I’m not sure, I think the Café au Go Go.
DJ: Yeah. I’ve heard that – I like the sound system there to the extent that I dig some of the things that’ve been recorded there, because they recorded things live and they seem to work pretty well.
Garcia: Yeah, they recorded like the Blues Project, but they have a lot quieter scene going than we do. I don’t know, I hope to just go there and turn up real loud and play real loud and just, you know…lethal doses.
Lesh: Did you hear about the sound gun?
DJ: No, tell me – oh yeah, sound guns that they’re doing things with, there’s a whole article –
Lesh: Seven cycles a second.
DJ: There’s an article in Playboy magazine –
Lesh: This is different, that’s high frequencies; this is low frequencies, they use a police whistle eighteen feet across.
Garcia: Right, and a common air compressor, whatever the heck it is, and it puts out this seven cycle per second thing which starts your insides vibrating and you eventually die.
Lesh: Kill a man five miles away with the sound.
Garcia: Imagine it.
DJ: Well, how about if they only had it on you for a little while now, does that make any –
Garcia: Make you sick. In fact, when they were testing it out – when they were trying whatever they were doing with it to see what would happen, everybody got sick for miles around, they all got sick, they had headaches you know – and everybody was very unhappy with the [whole thing of course] – nobody as unhappy as us musicians.
DJ: OK, let’s get back to your top forty.
Lesh: Here’s number two. This is another gospel thing which is a little more crazy than the first one – less discipline, you might say. It’s by Charlie Mingus, and…
Garcia: And it’s called?
Lesh: Oh, that’s right.
Garcia: Out with it.
Lesh: ‘Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting.’
Garcia: That’s it.
[music]
DJ: That’s Charlie Mingus, ‘Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting;’ this is Tom Donahue at KMPX, 107 on your FM dial, we’re playing records until midnight. Our guests tonight are Jerry Garcia & Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, who have the number one bestseller in San Francisco with their current Warner Brothers LP. They’re shaking hands, but they don’t have the money yet – it’s that kind of thing, right? And the album’s done unbelievably well outside of town. I haven’t checked your list completely, are you gonna play anything from it?
Garcia & Lesh: No, no…
DJ: We don’t get a chance to tear it apart or anything like that and say –
Lesh: Well we can talk about it, sure.
DJ: ‘Why’d you blow that note there.’ [laughter] How do you feel about the album yourselves, personally?
Lesh: I feel like it’s a turd.
DJ: Not where you wanted to be.
Lesh: Well no, it was where we were at the time.
Garcia: Yeah, right; it was something we did, it’s all over with, and –
Lesh: The next one certainly won’t be anything like that –
Garcia: No.
Lesh: In any way.
Garcia: The way we sort of – It’s like that one is sort of an attempt to try and sound like the way, the stuff that we do live, with the same instrumentation and everything. There’s not really anything unconventional for us in there.
Lesh: But that’s impossible to do in a recording studio.
Garcia: Right. So we’re not going to try - we’re not going to bother doing that anymore, we’re just gonna like, from now on when we go and record, since the first album is doing so nicely, we hope they’ll let us have a lot of time in the studio, and next time we’ll do a lot more studio stuff, and try and get it [??] which is a whole other thing.
DJ: Because the whole problem of trying to take what live sounds like and put it on tape or disc –
Garcia: You can’t do it in the studio. You might be able to do it if you could record a rock & roll band live, you know with the volumes that we play at like at the Fillmore or something like that, and maybe after two or three months of every night at the Fillmore, we’d start to get, you know, good cuts, good enough for an album I mean, in terms of how clean they were, and how much we like the performance on ‘em, and then we’d have something, but it would be such an expensive undertaking, and long and everything; and the studio facilities are so incredible that we should do something with them. So we’re gonna go in there, you know, and try something different.
DJ: Approaching from a different angle.
Garcia: Right, right.
Lesh: Well, there are people who practice the art of recording, being Phil Spector, who practice the art of recording. When we went in to do the album, we didn’t know anything about the art of recording; we knew a little bit about music.
DJ: Well I think there is a potential of this though, and that is the art of interpretation –
Lesh: Interpretation of what, the recording?
DJ: Of which nobody has been done – no, the art of interpretation of the sound of the group. I think in time it’s conceivable that engineers will come along who actually hear what groups are doing and know how to transplant that sound.
Lesh: Wouldn’t it be more likely to assume that the groups would be able to take over the function of engineer?
DJ: Oh yes, that’s very possible. But I think –
Garcia: [??] would hate it
DJ: I think that’s what every group hopes to do, to get to that point where they can do it, because, you know, he, in the main is another brain between you and what you want to do, and so it’s a jump you have to make into his head and then out onto whatever’s recorded, and I don’t think it’s ever been done successfully, really.
Garcia: I’d say the Beatles –
DJ: Except with the [??] – well, once again, with the Beatles doing their thing though, they’re not doing it through a producer’s head or an engineer – well, the engineer obviously [??] [Garcia: Right, yeah.] But who knows, man, after the Beatles walk out of the studio, they may be saying to themselves, ‘Didn’t get it again.’
Garcia: Right, who knows.
DJ: Because you don’t know what they want, right?
Garcia: Sounds mighty good to us, of course.
DJ: How about Blind Willie Johnson?
Garcia: Blind Willie Johnson, yeah. This is Blind Willie Johnson and his wife Angelina, and Blind Willie Johnson is a particularly interesting slide-style guitarist. He played nothing but sacred music during, I guess the ‘20s and ‘30s and so forth like that, you know, on the streets and all, and his records are valued by old-time record collectors; and this particular song the Blues Project also does; anybody who’s heard the Blues Project record that has ‘Lord I Just Can’t Keep From Crying Sometime’ on it, it’s the same song, and this is I guess where they got it, Blind Willie Johnson.
[music]
DJ: OK, that’s by Blind Willie Johnson, ‘Lord I Just Can’t Keep From Crying;’ our guests tonight are Jerry Garcia & Phil Lesh from the Grateful Dead. Ray Charles is next on your schedule, is this early or late?
Lesh: Late. Very recent, it was the last single.
DJ: Last single –
Lesh: Or the latest.
DJ: You think the stuff he’s cut with ABC has been as good as some of the things he cut with ABKCO? I think he was in a much heavier blues bag, I think, earlier.
Garcia: Yeah, I always liked the seven-piece stuff with the Raelettes and all like that, it was a real nice sound.
Lesh: Well his big band is one of the tightest bands.
DJ: Yeah, there’s some good big bands. I like the sound that Bobby Bland Group gets.
Lesh: Theirs is a lot more funky, I think, than Ray Charles.
DJ: Yeah.
Lesh: James Brown I think actually has the best big band. The tightest. [beats]
Garcia: They’re real snappy.
DJ: Super-disciplined.
Lesh: They use two drums, too.
DJ: Smoke on stage during rehearsal, ten bucks; late for rehearsal, twenty-five bucks. James keeps them in line.
Lesh: Oh I bet he does.
DJ: Have you thought about that, Jerry?
Garcia: Uhh… [laughter] Keeping the boys in line, you mean?
DJ: This is by Ray Charles, ‘I Don’t Need No Doctor.’
[music]
DJ: ‘I Don’t Need Your Doctor,’ we’re going along with selections tonight from Jerry Garcia & Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, and James Brown, who we were talking about a moment ago, is on the list at the moment. You’re picking some fairly recent stuff of James’s too.
Lesh: Yeah, the ‘Man’s Man’s Man’s World’ is the one that seemed to me to use the strings first in the new way. Like, lots of people made records with strings, even jazz musicians, Charlie Parker, [??] Brown, and there’s all mostly like [??], and records [in the background] – but James Brown’s –
Garcia: The harder stuff.
Lesh: And this is a recording that uses the strings in a kind of percussive way.
Garcia: Yeah, very groovy.
Lesh: It sort of seems to me that after that, then the Beatles came out and started using that stuff too, only it wasn’t with the instruments playing, it was with manipulation of the tape, like on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’ its violins: it’s tape manipulation, loops, spirals.
DJ: OK, let’s do ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.’
[music]
DJ: That’s James Brown, ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s World’ – let’s skip right to the next one, OK? James in ‘Ain’t That a Groove.’
Lesh: This one’ll speak for itself.
Garcia: It’s a groove.
DJ: All the way. This is Tom Donahue with KMPX, it’s 107 on your FM dial in San Francisco, playing records 8 until midnight; our guests tonight, Phil Lesh & Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, and here’s James Brown.
[music]
DJ: ‘Ain’t That A Groove,’ that’s James Brown, and that’s from a very recent LP of his, let’s see if we can give the exact title. ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,’ amazing sensational thrilling soul brother number one, whew, doesn’t really have a title, just James Brown. Working out on stage, doing his entire thing. He’s a fantastic showman; lay another one on you. The act hasn’t changed much.
Lesh: Everybody has the same act…
DJ: Right. I saw the basic act [in] ’56 at the Apollo, you know… But I think that’s one of the things people dig about it, because they know they’re going to get that, and that’s what they want to see. And he’s had a lot of imagination, because in his particular area of R&B singing, there are very few who would depart to sing the kind of songs he has on occasion. He’s picked up some strange ballads and done them and, you know.
Garcia: Well, ‘It’s a Man’s World’ is a really far-out thing.
DJ: Well, James is thinking in his own area.
Garcia: But is he really happy?
DJ: Is he really happy? [laughter] Smiles a lot, man… [mumbles]
Garcia: Seems happy.
[cut]
DJ: You done any Dylan tunes?
Garcia: Yeah, we do Baby Blue, ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.’ We also used to do ‘She Belongs To Me’ too. Bob used to croon it.
DJ: This one was –
Garcia: Oh this is Bob’s request incidentally too, he said that we should play it.
DJ: Yeah this particular record had an R&B recording as a matter of fact, ‘Maggie’s Farm’…
Garcia: I heard, I heard –
DJ: Yeah, Solomon Burke, that’s right. Far out.
Garcia: I heard, let’s see, what – James Cotton’s Blues Band do it, Sam Lay sang it, the drummer sang it. It was very interesting.
DJ: OK, let’s get with Maggie’s Blues, as recorded by Bob Dylan.
[music]
DJ: That’s Bob Dylan, ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ on KMPX, this is Tom Donahue, with you until 12 midnight. KMPX is at 107 on the FM dial, we play records 8 until 12, and if you have an opportunity to listen to the station in stereo here in San Francisco, it’s a good way to hear it. Stereo is not necessarily a faithful reproduction, but it’s a small thing of its own.
Garcia: Right, right. [mumbles]
DJ: Do you – have you listened to – I guess you’ve listened to your LP in both mono and stereo and –
Garcia: Yeah.
DJ: Probably heard it a lot of times.
Garcia: Right, well, we [were] the ones that mixed it, the mono mix and the stereo –
Lesh: And we had a rider on it.
DJ: Where? Western, with the exception of –
Lesh: No, RCA; RCA with the exception of the single which was cut at Coast. And the single, I think sounds more like us than the album does. It sounds dirtier.
Garcia: And fuller.
Lesh: And more stuff going on.
DJ: Maybe because you cut in San Francisco, maybe it did something to your mind.
Lesh: I don’t know, they did something.
Garcia: Well we did a lot more stuff on the single too, like we put a lot more, you know, we overlaid a lot of stuff.
Lesh: It’s a recording rather than a transcription.
Garcia: Right, right, and somehow it comes out sounding more like the way we sound live, just because of the enormous amount of confusion involved. And maybe, you know, it’s like we’re used to playing in a big –
DJ: And there were more people jammed in the studio at Coast that night.
Garcia: Oh that’s true –
DJ: ‘Cause I came in and there were a lot of people.
Garcia: Right, a lot of people.
DJ: Because there’s only two ways you can record, one is no people, or the other one is everybody. There’s no in between, it just doesn’t work.
Garcia: That’s true, that’s true, it doesn’t work.
DJ: And I guess you would rather have a lot –
Garcia: Well, when we were in LA, we tried to, you know, we were going to have a big closed session, absolutely no admittance and so forth, big sign and everything, but, you know –
Lesh: Everybody showed up anyway.
Garcia: Yeah, everybody came, so –
DJ: ...brings your old lady and she’s getting in and I’m getting in and before you know it, man, you’ve got a studio full of people.
Garcia: It’s OK, it turns out it doesn’t really seem to make too much difference, you know. The difference that it seems to make is that like, the better you feel, the better you do. And if there’s a lot of people around and it’s kind of a nice, you know, everybody’s kind of in a good thing – [DJ: ??] - or at least moves a little faster.
DJ: This was recorded in –
Garcia: It was recorded in France, as a matter of fact, and it’s the Bulgarian folklore scene, you know, something like the Folklorica de Mejico thing, only Bulgarian. And it’s all these people who are just, like, people of Bulgaria, you know, farmers and what have you, workers and so forth, who also are into music, like I guess everybody is, in some way or another; this is the music of their own country, like –
DJ: The women who sing on this, some of them are quite old you know, sixties and seventies; they’ve been singing this stuff for years.
Garcia: Right, it sounds like it.
DJ: I have a – there’s a weird thing that happens when I listen to this album. There was a a group around many years ago called the Devore Sisters. [I don’t know if you remember] – they had a record called Teach Me The Night [??], successful 45; and their voice quality is such that they sound very much like a lot of the women on this record…
Garcia: …strange vibrato.
DJ: Yeah, right. Albert Grossman picked this album up originally.
Garcia: The thing that I like about this particular cut is the singing is unaccompanied two-part singing, and it’s like semitones –
Lesh: Microtones.
Garcia: Microtones, and it’s just the weirdest intervals that you ever heard.
DJ: This is from an RCA Victor album that I don’t think is available anymore. The album is entitled Music of Bulgaria and the cut is ‘The Moon Shines.’
[music]
DJ: And that particular cut is entitled ‘The Moon Shines.’ We played some of this on the air here, because a lot of people reacted very favorably to it. It’s a great sound to listen to, we’ll get some other cuts on eventually. You worked with Charles Lloyd at any of the gigs you’ve done?
Lesh & Garcia: Yeah, Rock Garden…
Garcia: We had a really good time with him too; in fact, we’ve been, there's been a little bit of, there’s been some communication between us and Charles Lloyd just recently, he's been talking to our managers and we're gonna maybe work something out where we're working together in some other situations, cause we had a good time together.
DJ: He’s great to listen to and he’s building a tremendous audience among a group of people he might never have reached if he hadn’t played those dances, because that has exposed him to people who ordinarily would never have come across Charles Lloyd in their experience. And they listen to what he’s doing.
Lesh: They dance to it too.
DJ: And they dance to it, yeah, and they like him. OK, this is Charles and ‘Dream Weaver.’
[music]
DJ: OK, we’re listening to Charles Lloyd and ‘Dream Weaver.’ Tom Donahue at KMPX in San Francisco.
[Ad: “This weekend, at the Avalon Ballroom, Sutter & Van Ness in San Francisco, the Family Dog presents the Chambers Brothers – also at the Avalon this weekend, the Iron Butterfly. It’s the place, baby!” The ad uses a clip from the Beatles’ ‘Day in the Life;’ the shows were on April 28-29.]
DJ: That’s a thing for the Avalon that Bob McClay produced; our guests tonight are Jerry Garcia & Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, and Charles Lloyd’s someone they’ve worked with, they’ve also worked with Junior Wells. Where was that?
Garcia: Yeah, we worked with Junior Wells at the Fillmore Auditorium
Lesh: When he was there though, he wouldn’t do his blues stuff at the Fillmore.
Garcia: Right, and the band wasn’t, you know – the band that he uses with Buddy Guy, he just – Like on this particular record, he’s just got a little three-piece band backing him up, and it’s just so tasty. This particular cut is – I think it’s one of the finest single blues-band recordings, you know, I mean just musically, the way the stuff happens is so nice.
DJ: OK, this is Junior Wells, ‘Ships on the Ocean.’
[music]
DJ: Junior Wells and ‘Ships on the Ocean.’ And then – I know you played with Charles Lloyd and I know you played with Junior Wells. [laughter] But where’d you play with Leopold Stokowski?
Garcia: Don’t laugh, man.
DJ: Someday…
Lesh: We’re gonna do a thing [??] with a guy named Luciano Berio at the Lincoln Center in September, and be an opera.
DJ: Yeah, somebody else told me about that.
Lesh: …Berio was also my teacher when I was studying classical –
DJ: Tell us a little bit about Berio and some of the things he’s done.
Lesh: Well, Berio is Italian, and he’s composed a lot of music and he’s been played a lot, and I can’t tell you anything about his music except it’s all beautiful.
Garcia: Mostly Italian marches.
Lesh: Italian marches? [laughter]
DJ: OK, well this particular is not Berio, it’s a composition of Charles Ives, Symphony Number Four, and we’re gonna play the second movement from it.
Lesh: If you expect it to sound like a symphony –
Garcia: Forget it.
Lesh: - you’ll be disappointed.
[music]
DJ: And somebody just called to make a comment. Phil, come over here and tell me what he was saying; he was saying it was like the Beatles’ new record?
Lesh: Well, what he thought was that it sounded like the Beatles’ new records, and I was saying that I thought that…you know, we could say whether or not the Beatles had heard this stuff from Ives or any of the people who did it before or not, I kind of think that they thought of it for themselves, ‘cause it’s possible for you to discover stuff that other people have done, for yourself.
Garcia: Right, like a lot of people discovered, you know –
Lesh: Radio…
Garcia: Yeah, something like that…
Lesh: All at the same time, right… [Everyone talks at once.] Those things are in the air, and the Beatles have taken the lead in bringing it to popular music, and I for one am glad.
Garcia: Right, and they do it in their own way, it’s pure Beatles. You know, it’s still the Beatles and –
Lesh: And so, so tasty.
DJ: And [constantly] changing and never hung up in one particular thing.
Garcia: Oh, yeah.
[cut]
DJ: You know, we’re in no hurry, we aren’t going anywhere or anything, but just in case anyone panics, man, you know. We would [??] we both hung up on him and turn off his radio. [laughs] “Sorry about that thing!”
Garcia: Pigpen, we’re sorry.
DJ: Public apology. I would call Ian & Sylvia a little variety from what we’ve had up to now. Anything you care to say about ‘em or why you like ‘em or why you picked ‘em?
Lesh: [There’s a singer,] mostly, and these particular songs, Sylvia sings the one, ‘Jealous Lover,’ by herself, and it’s enough to chill your bones, and the next one is a fine desperado ballad, in a great tradition, with some nice guitar playing on it.
DJ: OK, let’s try Ian & Sylvia and the ‘Jealous Lover.’
[music]
DJ: All right, another one by Ian & Sylvia, ‘Four Rode By,’ Phil said it’s a desperado song.
[music]
DJ: Ian & Sylvia and ‘Four Rode By.’ Skip James is the next thing you got, tell me about Skip James.
Garcia: Oh, he’s a famous Delta blues singer, as it says right here on the cover. [Lesh: ??] But, and everybody thought he was dead for the longest time, and everybody said, ‘Skip James, yeah, he’s dead,’ but his old 78s were around, and people would listen to them and all. You know, it’s really good, is what it’s all about.
DJ: Then they found out he was alive.
Garcia: Right, they found out he was alive –
DJ: Glenn Miller will turn up the same way. [Laughter, everyone talks at once.]
DJ: OK, this is Skip James and ‘Hard Times Killin’ Floor Blues.’
[music]
DJ: That’s Aretha Franklin from her new Atlantic LP, ‘I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You.’ We were talking about Phil Spector a little while ago and the kind of record producing he does, which is a totally creative thing from the beginning as a producer. This is one of the great examples of that thing, this Righteous Brothers thing we’re about to play. Someday I’m gonna get Phil on the show and there’s one thing I’m gonna get him to play, and that is a tape of the track for this record.
Lesh: The instrumental track?
DJ: Yeah. With him singing the parts.
Lesh: Does it exist?
DJ: Oh yeah. I’ve heard the record, he played it for me one night at his house…that strange baronial mansion he lives in in LA. And I’d heard about the record from Bobby Dale and Tommy [Lapuno], the producer down there, about the tape, and it’s, you know, a strange, strange sound. Spector’s voice is a really peculiar voice, in singing. It has not been heard on record since ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’ – last appearance.
Garcia: Was he singing parts in that?
DJ: Yeah.
Lesh: [???] But Mojo Navigator has a thing about him, all his records.
DJ: Yeah, they do a nice discography on him. He was – Phil had a record out that was probably the first S&M record anybody ever came along with called ‘She Hit Me And It Felt Like A Kiss,’ or ‘He Hit Me And It Felt Like A Kiss,’ remember that?
Lesh: Oh, right.
DJ: And they finally had to pull it off the market because [there were so many protests] – and on and on. Here’s the Righteous Brothers, ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.’
[music]
DJ: ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin,’ record [sly disguise because] you’ve been playing it in the middle of the night again. Spector has not done anything for a long time. He keeps saying, “I’m old-fashioned, I’m old-fashioned, I’m totally out of it now, I’m not gonna make any more records.”
Lesh: I hear he’s making some strange movie in Mexico.
DJ: He wants to; he never got down there, the whole project blew up just as everybody was getting ready to get on the boat. But he has been in the studio with Ike & Tina Turner again.
Garcia: Oh, far out, good.
Lesh: If the results of that one are as good as the last one –
Garcia: This one, the one coming up, ha ha ha.
DJ: [We have] the one record that was a complete success in England – ‘River Deep, Mountain High,’ which I think got to number four on the English charts.
Garcia: Too much.
DJ: And Phil took an ad in Billboard at the time, you remember? With the British flag, and the line was something about “King George was right.” [laughter] ‘Cause none of the radio stations in this country would play it at that time. Ike & Tina Turner – Ike Turner’s one of the great minds of all time. You ever talk to Ike in any period of time?
Garcia: No.
DJ: I’d love to get him on the show some night. Let him tell the world how he got started – he’s got a great success story. This is the very record we were just discussing, Ike & Tina Turner in the Phil Spector production, ‘River Deep, Mountain High.’
[music]
DJ: And that’s by Ike & Tina Turner, ‘River Deep, Mountain High,’ I don’t think that record has ever been played in this town before.
Lesh: Really?
DJ: I know it’s never played in any radio stations –
Lesh: That is a crime!
DJ: I think we should start playing it every now and then.
Garcia: I think so.
Lesh: I will give you the record if you’ll play it every night!
DJ: Fine, good, I’ll play it every night.
Garcia: Too much, please do.
DJ: And maybe people will go out and buy it and we’ll put Phil back in business and get him up here and [whistles].
Garcia: That’ll be nice.
DJ: One interview with Phil Spector and it might be all over for the radio station. [Laughter.] You know? Lou Rawls, he’s one of the younger blues singers around, does a thing that’s, I think very peculiarly his own.
Lesh: This is the only record of his that I ever heard, except for ‘Blues for Four-String Guitar’ which seemed a little ostentatious.
Garcia: Lame, you might even say. But he had – he did –
Lesh: This is really tasty with [??] –
Garcia: - that other famous song – what was that -
Lesh: ‘Tobacco Road.’
DJ: I saw him working one night, opened with Bobby Bland and Jimmy Witherspoon.
Lesh & Garcia: Oh, wow.
DJ: Which was a fine, fine trio for an evening. This is Lou Rawls and ‘Trouble Down Here Below. ‘
[music]
DJ: Tom Donahue at KMPX, 107 on your dial in San Francisco, we’re playing records 8 until 12 midnight, our guests tonight are Phil Lesh & Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead.
[music]
DJ: ‘Gotta Get Away,’ that’s by the Rolling Stones. Tom Donahue here with Phil and Jerry. Let’s see you talk a little bit about Otis Redding.
Lesh: Oh, we worked with Otis.
Garcia: Yeah.
Lesh: And it was kind of scary to work with Otis.
Garcia: Yeah, Otis is really heavy.
DJ: I thought he would do better here than he did.
Lesh: He tore it up!
Garcia: He tore the place apart.
DJ: I mean, as far as people were concerned, I don’t think he had the number of people that he could’ve had.
Lesh: Well maybe nobody knew Otis –
Garcia: Yeah, maybe not too many people knew about it, that could’ve been it. But boy, he had one of those standard [shots] where the band would get up and play some numbers and a girl singer would come up and, [mumbling] you know, some group and stuff like that, whole show, you know.
Lesh: The standard show.
Garcia: Yeah, like, when he came on stage, it was like the whole place got about six times as big, and the band just got real snappy, you know; it was so fine and the music was really good. And like, when you go to those shows, most the time, like the James Brown show, the music is like not really where it’s at with the James Brown show, the circus part is what it’s all about, kinda – and with Otis Redding, the music is still what’s happening, you know, and it’s just so good, really, wow.
DJ: This is from the LP entitled “Complete and Unbelievable, the Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul,” and it’s ‘Day Tripper.’
[music]
DJ: That’s Otis and ‘Day Tripper’ and this is Tom Donahue with Jerry Garcia & Phil Lesh and we’re gonna play something from the Grateful Dead album, I figure it’s about time.
Garcia: Til the police get here.
DJ: Right. And the one that Jerry picked out is ‘Cold Rain and Snow.’
[music]
DJ: [Vince,] if you turn that over, I’m gonna play my selection from the LP as we get outta here. I wanna thank you fellows for coming around to talk to us, [it was very interesting.]
Garcia [emphatic]: Oh sure, Tom, that’s all right, anytime!
DJ: Anytime, right? [Laughter.] And we can have Pigpen back and –
Lesh: That’ll be fun.
Garcia: That’ll be good. If you can get him out of the house it’ll be – [long pause, laughter] […] revolutionary, at the least.
DJ: […] that you guys take care of that part of it.
Lesh: Well, if we can [get him up earlier] –
Garcia: Get him [buy shoes are] big enough.
DJ: You get him down here and I’ll find a way to hold him in the studio.
Lesh: I think you can do it!
DJ: OK, we’re going out of here with something by the Grateful Dead called the ‘New, New Minglewood Blues.’
[music]
http://archive.org/details/gd67-04-xx.prefm.vernon.9261.sbeok.shnf
Sep 10, 2013
January 17, 1968: Carousel Ballroom, SF
OUTSIDE AGITATOR [excerpt]
Saturday night's show at the Berkeley Community Theater [1/20/68] is a fine start in the direction of the bands taking over their own productions. Country Joe & the Fish did the whole thing and they came through well. The Congress of Wonders did a marvelous set, appearing on the rising stage and doing their "O Feel This Unchained" satire on the Haight-Ashbury and the generation gap to the audience's delight.
The band was good but not the best I have heard it, and the light show was not by Jerry Abrams' Headlights as advertised. I don't know who did it, but it was restricted considerably by only one screen to work on, and the use of the dancer in silhouette behind the screen was good but overdone.
The dance earlier in the week at the Carousel with the Grateful Dead, The Quicksilver, and the Abrams Headlights was a great success and one of the grooviest evenings in some time. The Dead are in excellent form and the Quick are at their best now, having just finished their Capitol album. Jerry Abrams' light show was first rate. For the opening set of the Dead, he ran a long sequence of film loops concentrating on eyeballs that was in perfect synchronization to the music and one of the most effective devices I've seen. Robert Nelson's award-winning film on the Dead was shown in the intermission and is intriguing, a montage, impressionistic visual extension of the sound track.
The Carousel is a great ballroom (it's the old El Patio at Market & Van Ness) and the bands will return there in mid-February again. Meanwhile, they are now touring the Pacific Northwest (they played to 2,000 people at Eureka Saturday night).
(by Ralph Gleason, from the Daily Californian, January 24, 1968)
(The rest of the article was about a poorly attended Aretha Franklin show at the Oakland Auditorium on Sunday 1/21.)
*
Saturday night's show at the Berkeley Community Theater [1/20/68] is a fine start in the direction of the bands taking over their own productions. Country Joe & the Fish did the whole thing and they came through well. The Congress of Wonders did a marvelous set, appearing on the rising stage and doing their "O Feel This Unchained" satire on the Haight-Ashbury and the generation gap to the audience's delight.
The band was good but not the best I have heard it, and the light show was not by Jerry Abrams' Headlights as advertised. I don't know who did it, but it was restricted considerably by only one screen to work on, and the use of the dancer in silhouette behind the screen was good but overdone.
The dance earlier in the week at the Carousel with the Grateful Dead, The Quicksilver, and the Abrams Headlights was a great success and one of the grooviest evenings in some time. The Dead are in excellent form and the Quick are at their best now, having just finished their Capitol album. Jerry Abrams' light show was first rate. For the opening set of the Dead, he ran a long sequence of film loops concentrating on eyeballs that was in perfect synchronization to the music and one of the most effective devices I've seen. Robert Nelson's award-winning film on the Dead was shown in the intermission and is intriguing, a montage, impressionistic visual extension of the sound track.
The Carousel is a great ballroom (it's the old El Patio at Market & Van Ness) and the bands will return there in mid-February again. Meanwhile, they are now touring the Pacific Northwest (they played to 2,000 people at Eureka Saturday night).
(by Ralph Gleason, from the Daily Californian, January 24, 1968)
(The rest of the article was about a poorly attended Aretha Franklin show at the Oakland Auditorium on Sunday 1/21.)
*
OUTSIDE AGITATOR (excerpt)
[ . . . ] Last week at the Carousel Ballroom, an ancient stronghold of old folks and Irish dances, the hippies took over with the Grateful Dead and the Quicksilver Messenger Service playing a dance there. It was a beautiful evening with a gorgeous light show by Jerry Abrams' Headlights and marvelous, soul satisfying music by the bands.
Midway in the evening, the Irish manager of the hall, Gene Hagen, asked his "floor manager" (euphemism for bouncer) how it was going. The huge floor manager (who is built like two Green Bay Packer guards glued together) shrugged his immense shoulders and slowly smiled. "There's been no trouble all night," he said in wonder.
Downstairs on the door a sign (traditional to this kind of ballroom operation) still hung. "Male Patrons are expected to wear a coat and tie at all times," it read. I was wearing the only tie in the joint.
(by Ralph Gleason, from the Daily Californian, January 22, 1968)
(The rest of article was about the aftermath of the Monterey Pop Festival.)
1967: Garcia & Django
THE SOUND OF A NEW GENERATION
Early this month a long-haired young man named Jerry Garcia went to all the record stores in San Francisco and bought all the albums he could find by the French gypsy jazz guitarist, Django Reinhardt. This would not be at all remarkable except for the fact that Jerry Garcia is the lead guitar player and featured soloist with The Grateful Dead, and rock groups are supposed to be something other than jazz.
But like so many other things in our world, what seems to be turns out not to really be at all.
Jerry Garcia, like a number of the very best of the young rock musicians, is a fan of all music that's good and that, of course, includes jazz.
"I've been listening to a lot of jazz lately," he says. "I've been listening to a lot of Django Reinhardt. Mostly for the guitar, but I've learned as much from the violin player in terms of those really lovely, graceful ideas. And that's the kind of stuff I like. Anything that is beautiful. Indian music. Soul music, rhythm & blues, old time blues, jug band music. Anything."
That catholicism of taste is one of the reasons why the young rock musicians are so important and are already making a deep imprint on contemporary music. It is a curious thing that jazz began by accusing the symphony and conservatory players of refusing to listen to them. Now the jazz musicians, or at least a regrettable majority of them, are not opening their ears to the worthwhile music coming from the new generation.
John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet is an exception. He has been digging the groups in England as they have appeared and spent some time in a New York studio working on a record of "Misty Roses," the Tim Hardin tune, for Atlantic because "I wanted to find out how it is done."
Lewis has a healthy respect for the rock musicians. Of the British youth, he says, "they are living the history of jazz all over again," pointing to their interest in blues and traditional jazz and now rock.
But Lewis is an exception in the ranks of jazz, whereas Garcia is not an exception in the ranks of rock. Almost all the good rock musicians with whom I've talked, British or American, have dug jazz and many of them came from it to rock.
The point, of course, is that good music is good music regardless of labels. The music that Garcia's group, The Grateful Dead, plays is really jazz even though the sound of the electric guitars at first inhibits you from saying that. The Dead have a deep, driving swing that is irresistible, and the solos played by Garcia are pure jazz solos. The vocals are folk-rock-blues, of course, but the solo lines by the bassist, Phil Lesh, a former jazz trumpet player, and the over-all feeling of the group is precisely the same kind of feeling that emanates from the best jazz groups and always has.
We're in for some interesting new sounds in the future. The more the rock players listen to jazz, the more complex and inventive they will become. And the jazz players, for all of their complexity and invention, have things to learn from rock. I won't be surprised to see the day that John Lewis records with Jerry Garcia. I would like to hear them.
(by Ralph Gleason, from the "Lively Arts" column, Datebook, April 9 1967)
Thanks to jgmf.blogspot.com
Early this month a long-haired young man named Jerry Garcia went to all the record stores in San Francisco and bought all the albums he could find by the French gypsy jazz guitarist, Django Reinhardt. This would not be at all remarkable except for the fact that Jerry Garcia is the lead guitar player and featured soloist with The Grateful Dead, and rock groups are supposed to be something other than jazz.
But like so many other things in our world, what seems to be turns out not to really be at all.
Jerry Garcia, like a number of the very best of the young rock musicians, is a fan of all music that's good and that, of course, includes jazz.
"I've been listening to a lot of jazz lately," he says. "I've been listening to a lot of Django Reinhardt. Mostly for the guitar, but I've learned as much from the violin player in terms of those really lovely, graceful ideas. And that's the kind of stuff I like. Anything that is beautiful. Indian music. Soul music, rhythm & blues, old time blues, jug band music. Anything."
That catholicism of taste is one of the reasons why the young rock musicians are so important and are already making a deep imprint on contemporary music. It is a curious thing that jazz began by accusing the symphony and conservatory players of refusing to listen to them. Now the jazz musicians, or at least a regrettable majority of them, are not opening their ears to the worthwhile music coming from the new generation.
John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet is an exception. He has been digging the groups in England as they have appeared and spent some time in a New York studio working on a record of "Misty Roses," the Tim Hardin tune, for Atlantic because "I wanted to find out how it is done."
Lewis has a healthy respect for the rock musicians. Of the British youth, he says, "they are living the history of jazz all over again," pointing to their interest in blues and traditional jazz and now rock.
But Lewis is an exception in the ranks of jazz, whereas Garcia is not an exception in the ranks of rock. Almost all the good rock musicians with whom I've talked, British or American, have dug jazz and many of them came from it to rock.
The point, of course, is that good music is good music regardless of labels. The music that Garcia's group, The Grateful Dead, plays is really jazz even though the sound of the electric guitars at first inhibits you from saying that. The Dead have a deep, driving swing that is irresistible, and the solos played by Garcia are pure jazz solos. The vocals are folk-rock-blues, of course, but the solo lines by the bassist, Phil Lesh, a former jazz trumpet player, and the over-all feeling of the group is precisely the same kind of feeling that emanates from the best jazz groups and always has.
We're in for some interesting new sounds in the future. The more the rock players listen to jazz, the more complex and inventive they will become. And the jazz players, for all of their complexity and invention, have things to learn from rock. I won't be surprised to see the day that John Lewis records with Jerry Garcia. I would like to hear them.
(by Ralph Gleason, from the "Lively Arts" column, Datebook, April 9 1967)
Thanks to jgmf.blogspot.com
Sep 9, 2013
1967: The San Francisco Music Scene
THE NEW MUSIC AND THE NEW SCENE (excerpt)
...In the day of the North Beach beatnik, music was jazz and folk singing with soft guitar accompaniment, to be enjoyed with poetry reading, wine, and beer in coffee houses or with a pipeful of marijuana while supine in somebody's pad. Dancing was not the "in" thing to do, especially in public. Like the most sophisticated members of the bygone Edwardian set, who looked upon it as an attempt at something best accomplished in a boudoir, the North Beach beatniks eschewed dancing because they considered it "dry fucking."
With the advent of the Beatles - a second, third, and fourth coming of Christ to the young generation - the "in" music even for most beatniks became electrified, amplified, bouncy rock-and-roll that was definitely meant for motion. This was the kind of music that acid heads like Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were digging the most, and it was dance music. That meant a significant change for the beatnik scene that was becoming reincarnated in the Hashberry.
In communal houses and pads around the Hashberry, combinations of folk, pop, jazz, and blues musicians gathered to talk, smoke pot, and experiment with the basic patterns produced by the Beatles and Rolling Stones rock-and-roll bands. Somewhere along their rock-on-drug trips, they created a form of electric music that became known as "folk rock," or more esoterically, "San Francisco rock" and "Western rock." It was amplified as loudly as the human ear could tolerate - louder than some human ears could tolerate. It blasted, it socked you in the head, and it mimicked, poked fun, antagonized. The names of the folk rock bands were adapted from the mood: the Great Society, Big Brother & the Holding Company, the Grateful Dead.
Few music or social critics would deny that the hippie bands created a new sound. It is an amalgam of other musical forms, but the totality of it is different from the rock-and-roll that Elvis Presley, Fabian, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones used to play. In fact, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had to alter their old styles and imitate it in order to keep up with the change.
The primordial quality of the hippies' folk rock music, like their intellectuals' vision of the new society, is primitive. Melodies are simple, harmony consists of a few basic chords, drum beats are narrow throbs, and everything together is repetitious and hypnotic. Around the primitive quality, however, the amplifers, loudspeakers, tape recorders, electronic machines, and electrified musical instruments from guitars to oboes - yes, oboes, electric oboes - have woven a variety of effects.
The music is an outgrowth of Negro blues, rock-and-roll, country-western, and finally, ragas from India. Ragas are thematic note groupings with seventy-two parent scales, known as melas. Each raga is supposed to have its own character, color, and mood, according to the time of day, the season, or the occasion. It is then up to the musicians to improvise within these given forms. The main instruments used are: for melody, the sitar - a guitar-like instrument with twenty strings; the tamboura - a four- or five-stringed instrument that is used to maintain a continuous hypnotic drone; and the tabla - a pair of drums serving as tenor and bass. Sometime in 1966, the folk rock bands began using ragas and these three Indian instruments in their amalgated music forms or else imitated them with guitars, oboes, and other Western instruments. This development has led to the suggestion that hippie music be identified as raga rock.
Despite the primitive quality in most of the rock music, it is wrong to use the term "simple" as a generalization for all of the compositions and all of the hippie musicians. Several of the numbers that the Jefferson Airplane recorded on the RCA Victor album, Surrealistic Pillow, require close listening for an appreciation of all their effect. For example, take "Coming Back to Me," a sweet, lolling song somewhat in the style of seventeenth-century English folk music. After getting that much out of it, a repetition may produce the sensation of drifting into a dreamy meadowland. A third repetition, paying attention to the Baroque touch added by Grace Slick on recorder, can produce the image of a shepherd grazing his flocks.
You can also pick up the delineation of the hippie life style in the words of the songs, if you can hear them. For example, take "The Golden Road," on Warner Brothers' Grateful Dead album, celebrating the girls on Haight Street in the following paeon:
See that girl, barefoot (doeeyoumoo) / Whistlin' and a singin' /
She's a-carryin' on / Laughin' in her eyes, dancin' in her feet, /
She's a (neonwhirrwhirrmoo) / And she can live on the street.
The strange words in parentheses are the nearest approximation I can make to what I hear coming from the Dead, even with my ear smack against the phonograph speaker. For the other way they delineate the hippie style is to blast everything at top volume with amplifiers so that all other sounds of the world are wiped out.
The next generalization about the hippie music that's safe to make is that it depicts the philosophy of the New Community. Most of the philosophizing is taken up with odes to love, a reflection of alienated youth's desperate desire to gain affection from parents and tenderness from a dog-eat-dog, violent society. When Grace Slick of the Airplane sings "don't you need somebody to love," she also means: I need somebody to love; we need somebody to love.
Of course, the love gives way in the rock groups' songs, even as it does in their lives, to blatant sex - e.g., the Fugs' "Wet Dream Over You." But this again is part of the philosophy, to challenge the old order's moral structure in a loud, aggressive, blunt manner. No subjects, no words must be banned. Drugs, death, violence, war, race prejudice, sex, religion, and the President of the United States must all be discussed, challenged, pranked, and satirized with complete openness. Hence, Country Joe and the Fish use the word "fuck" on television and describe President Johnson as "a man insane" in the song "Superbird." The Fugs sing "kill, kill for peace" as part of what their leader, Ed Sanders, calls their "total assault on the culture."
Any critic who calls this a put-on does not know the hippie musicians, only their imitators. The members of the hippie folk-rock groups not only sing and play their philosophy, but they also live it.
In the first place, they all take drugs, as announced in some of their names - the Mind Benders, the Loading Zone, the Induction Center, the Weeds. In the second place, the musicians, like all other hippies, are dropouts. Almost every one of them has given up school or profession to become a folk-rock musician and live the life of a hippie.
The Grateful Dead, the original associates of Ken Kesey in producing the Acid Tests, are all high school and college dropouts living in a tribal setup like the Merry Pranksters. At the time that I met them, their house on Ashbury Street was shared with them by their girl friends, managers Danny Rifkin and Rock Scully, and several teen-age school dropouts using the place as a crash pad. The earth mother was Mountain Girl, now Jerry Garcia's mistress, but still bearing testimony to her former relationship with Ken Kesey with a blond-haired baby that he sired.
The Dead's music, when all other analyses are thrown in as qualifications, is primarily an imitation of Negro blues. The style of singing is guttural, down, and dirty; and the diction is that of Negro slang: "Ah luhv you, babuh." That, plus the fact that the music drowns out the words, is why middle-class white people have such a difficult time understanding what the Dead are singing. You have to be a Negro, hippie, or drug addict. And even that is no guarantee that you can pick up the words. The Dead's music is the very heart of acid rock - guitar, organ, and bass intertwined in a whirling, blurring, mind-shattering mass of Negro, hillbilly, and Indian music. Its basic purposes are to blow the mind and provide action sound for dancing, although sometimes Jerry Garcia's rapid runs on the guitar can be interesting as music.
"Captain Trips" he is called, a play on both his guitar runs and mind journeys on LSD. Dressed in a white-and-red striped hat, he reminds you of Ken Kesey, "Mr. Stars and Stripes." Both are pranksters. Both like to live in a tribal setup. Both have given funny nicknames to their people - bassist Phil Lesh is "Reddy Kilowatt," organist Ron McKernan "Pig Pen," and drummer Bill Sommers "Bill the Drummer." Both are basically scholarly men who have deliberately adopted the loose Negro style of life and slang. Both have taken their minds apart with drugs.
"I didn't need Timothy Leary or LSD to do it, either," Garcia told me. "Back in high school I was high on bennies, things like that. I never heard of Leary. Nobody in the Haight-Ashbury follows Leary. The people here would have done this thing without acid, without Leary. I would have been a member of some weird society wherever I went. Don't ask why. Don't try to analyze it, man. It just is, that's all. This is where we're at. This is our trip. We just don't dig that other way."
Garcia is one of the impossible people in the New Community for a writer to talk to, even one who is living with it. Because of his massive mop of curly black hair, he has been described in print as a "troll" and "a cross between Wanda Landowska and the Three Stooges." He and the Dead have been ridden by critics as musical illiterates and drug addicts leading flower children down the path of sin. So, he has taken to pure pranking when a journalist questions him. No writer is closer to the folk-rock bands than Ralph Gleason of the Chronicle. Yet, this is how Garcia described his music to Ralph:
"We're working with dynamics now. We've spent two years with loud, and we've spent six months with deafening." And so on.
It gets no better in the hippie press. Here is the way the Grateful Dead summed up their philosophy for the Underground Press:
Garcia: "I wake up automatically at 9 EVERY morning (except for sometimes when I wake up later or earlier), and gaze out the window at the flocks of geese flying north/south for the winter/summer and ask myself what does it all mean? I drink as much orange juice as I can get my dirty hands on because I know that it's gonna taste good. My boots don't fit me perfectly, so my little toe hurts. Sometimes I see someone that I think I recognize, and I say hello or smile or something like that. It's fun to shoot at strangers, while they're innocently passing the house, with the sonic blaster. Especially if they're pretty, heh. Philosophically, I have nothing to say... I like to play loud... If I had a rocket ship or some extraterrestrial friends, you'd never see me. I hope that humanity survives the incredibly stupid hassles that we've gotten ourselves into."
Last I saw of the Dead, officially, they were on television explaining their philosophy to dazed newsmen. Unofficially, they were going about their usual business of planning free benefits in which the toilets would be stopped up with money. For further analysis, await the new philosophical tome in the music sections of the national magazines.
The most well-remembered communal pad where the new sound was created was at 1090 Page Street in the Hashberry. Oftentimes, the New Community's budding musicians would find food and shelter there when they were broke, and they would join a gathering clan playing and taking drugs in the garage below the house. Friends and neighbors began dropping in to listen to the sound - might as well, couldn't concentrate on anything else if you lived anywhere within a block of it - and the Hashberry had its first free rock concerts.
One of the familiar figures on the Page Street garage scene was Chet Helms, a twenty-two-year-old dropout from Baptist theological school. Like many of the musicians' and beatniks' connections in the Haight-Ashbury, Helms lived the beat life style. Long before most of them let their hair grow out, he had long blond Jesus tresses flowing down his shoulders and a scraggly beard and moustache.
But Helms was not so doggedly noncommercial as the new breed of beat, making music and fun. He suggested that the folk-rock bands charge admission to the garage. (His version of the story is that he [wanted] it to discourage more people from coming because the place was getting too crowded.) When even larger crowds came to the garage, Helms organized a folk-rock concert and dance at the Longshoremen's Hall in October of 1965. Several hundred youngsters came to the hall, some with long hair and dressed in beatnik garb, others straight. Obviously, money was to be made from the new folk-rock scene. All that Helms needed was an organization with some capital and a dance hall.
With an engineer from New York, Bob Cohen, Helms put together the Family Dog, named after a tiny spaniel pooch that lived with him and his friends in one of the communal pads. Then, he approached another New Yorker, Bill Graham, owner of the Fillmore Auditorium and producer-director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, about working together to make folk-rock dance concerts a big happening on the neobeatnik scene. Graham had already put on his own folk-rock concerts in November and December of 1965, using the Fugs, the Great Society, and the Jefferson Airplane to do several benefit performances for the Mime Troupe. Its actors and actresses had been busted for "obscene performances in public places" under a recently enacted California antipornography law. Around four thousand people showed up for the second benefit performance in the Fillmore Auditorium, waiting in a long line around the block outside or finally being turned away because the capacity of the place is only fifteen hundred at a time. Then, in the first month of 1966, Graham collaborated with Kesey for the Trips Festival in creating a "total environment" performance. This meant that movie projectors, strobes, tape recorders, and amplifiers were used to bombard every creaky floorboard and every cobwebbed corner of the old Fillmore Auditorium with music, electronic blips and bleeps, flashing lights, and moving pictures of amoebas, holy men, Indians, and other symbols of the acid head's world.
When Helms told Graham about the success of the Family Dog and suggested a sort of merger of these New World business ventures, Graham was indifferent. He was on the verge of resigning from the Mime Troupe over "political differences," and he was not sold on the future of folk rock (it killed him at first to admit it after he made a million dollars from it, but then he started taking a Socratic irony in recalling his original mood). So, Helms asked if the Family Dog could rent the hall, and Graham agreed.
Later, Helms and Graham parted company, and Helms opened up his own business in the Avalon Ballroom at Sutter and Van Ness streets, staffed entirely by people with long hair and beards.
"The Family Dog is the largest brain trust in the world," Helms likes to say in interviews. "We are roughly arranged around a sort of organic tribal structure in the sense that people who are natural organizers are generally the leaders," and since he and Bob Cohen did the organizing, there is no doubt left about who he means.
"Helms is definitely an organizer," I was told by Grace Slick, who knew him in the formative rock days when he was peddling dope. "Instead of running a bank, he runs the Avalon and the Family Dog, that's all."
Helms drifted into the Hashberry from Texas when he was twenty-one, leaving behind him a broken future that was supposed to have led to the Baptist ministry. He wound up on drugs instead of religion, but he kept on wearing a deacon's frock coat. Neither that nor his long blond Jesus tresses had anything to do with hippies; there was no such thing as hippies then. Helms, like so many hippie men, was obsessed with a Jesus self-image. When he picked the motto for the Family Dog, it was the following graffito that he took from the wall of a men's room:
May the Baby Jesus Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Mind
Later, he became enraged over Ramparts' cover story on the hippies, in which the motto was deliberately reversed to: open your mouth and shut your mind.
Evening at the Avalon provides plenty of the ear-splitting sound characteristic of the hippie band. Continuously changing light projections of liquid colors and protoplastic forms bathe the dancers. Their luminiscent, striped, and dotted clothes glow eerily amid the flashing lights. Symbols, concentric circles, and pictures of Indians and Oriental priests are beamed onto the walls.
Suddenly, the fast, screaming music dies down to a soft love song and then gives way to a mournful Indian dirge. The light show changes. On one wall there is a picture of Buddha and on another a picture of Christ on the cross. Several hundred of the youngsters on the dance floor join hands. They sway back and forth in a trancelike state. They keep it up until the musicians come on again with another fast, loud set and the lights begin blipping all over the cavernous dance hall. Once more, the Avalon is a sea of maddening motion and deafening sound.
Bill Graham at the Fillmore kept on with the Jefferson Airplane and other folk rock groups and made his million with them. The Fillmore remained the same place and Graham remained the same man: blunt, unpretentious, obsessed with man's need for hard work and honesty. The Fillmore is as dingy as it has always been. The floor is still dirty and creaky, and the plaster on the walls is still cracking. One of the cracks is covered with a blown-up photo of Ronald Reagan dressed in a cowboy suit, looking tough as he points a gun in his left hand; under the photo is the caption: "Thanks for the votes, suckers." There are also anti-Vietnam posters, an anti-LBJ cartoon, and a picture of Graham, wearing a suit and tie, in a cage held by a female labeled "S.F. Society," with the serpent of Eden for her headband and dollar-signs for her earrings; the caption is: "So, I sold out, so what?"
At the Fillmore's nighttime rock-dance concerts, where Graham still insists on supervising everything personally, the confrontations between him and the hippies who come into the place have become legend. Knowing that he is wealthy, some of the school dropouts ask him: "Hey, man, got a dime? Got a quarter? I wanna get into the dance."
Graham turns on them: "Do you have a penny?"
"Well, I asked you first."
"I know you asked me first, but do you have a penny?"
"Well, hell, man..."
But Graham is gone to raise hell with four young hippies breaking up the line formation at the window. "Get in line!" he yells at them. "All these other people are in line. You think you're any better? Get in the line. You like to touch people. Here's your chance. Stay in line, like good flower children."
"Hey, Mr. Graham," they say. "Come on now, where's your love?"
"Fuck love," Graham says. "Get in line!"
I interviewed Graham in his cubbyhole office amid the usual chaos - secretary beside him clacking away on her typewriter, messages strewn all over his desk, telephone ringing continuously with calls from Time, Newsweek, and promoters from New York to Brazil. Posters announcing various folk-rock dance concerts covered almost every inch of the wall. His skinny legs bounced nervously, and his lips worked up and down as he tried to answer phones, direct his staff, make new appointments, read messages, and talk to me all at once.
"The first folk-rock dances were held right here, before Kesey or Helms came in this place," he said. "I mean, you want to talk about Acid Tests, Trips Festivals, hippies, dates, purposes - it's all a crock of shit. The dance concerts were put on as benefits, and then they were put on for people to have fun. What is Trips Festivals? People dancing and having fun, that's all. These things were never exclusively for people with long hair or beards freaking out on the floor. They were for anybody. A guy with a tuxedo could come in here with a half-naked blonde bitch, and they could wiggle their butts all over the floor and do their thing, and nobody would give a damn. Let 'em groove.
"Now, of course, there are certain laws we have to abide by or we're out of business. I mean, I had this thing going with the cops: you let us be loose, don't be uptight about the way people dress or act, let 'em do their thing, and I'll make sure nothing happens here to make trouble for you."
Out of the Fillmore and the Avalon came vibrations shooting across the country, drawing school and job dropouts to San Francisco. Hitchhiking or driving in imitations of Ken Kesey's psychedelic bus, they headed for where the action was - the Avalon and Fillmore like two giant magnets, with LSD and folk rock their energy fields....
(by Burton Wolfe, from The Hippies, 1968, as excerpted in The Age of Rock, ed. Jonathan Eisen, 1969)
...In the day of the North Beach beatnik, music was jazz and folk singing with soft guitar accompaniment, to be enjoyed with poetry reading, wine, and beer in coffee houses or with a pipeful of marijuana while supine in somebody's pad. Dancing was not the "in" thing to do, especially in public. Like the most sophisticated members of the bygone Edwardian set, who looked upon it as an attempt at something best accomplished in a boudoir, the North Beach beatniks eschewed dancing because they considered it "dry fucking."
With the advent of the Beatles - a second, third, and fourth coming of Christ to the young generation - the "in" music even for most beatniks became electrified, amplified, bouncy rock-and-roll that was definitely meant for motion. This was the kind of music that acid heads like Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were digging the most, and it was dance music. That meant a significant change for the beatnik scene that was becoming reincarnated in the Hashberry.
In communal houses and pads around the Hashberry, combinations of folk, pop, jazz, and blues musicians gathered to talk, smoke pot, and experiment with the basic patterns produced by the Beatles and Rolling Stones rock-and-roll bands. Somewhere along their rock-on-drug trips, they created a form of electric music that became known as "folk rock," or more esoterically, "San Francisco rock" and "Western rock." It was amplified as loudly as the human ear could tolerate - louder than some human ears could tolerate. It blasted, it socked you in the head, and it mimicked, poked fun, antagonized. The names of the folk rock bands were adapted from the mood: the Great Society, Big Brother & the Holding Company, the Grateful Dead.
Few music or social critics would deny that the hippie bands created a new sound. It is an amalgam of other musical forms, but the totality of it is different from the rock-and-roll that Elvis Presley, Fabian, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones used to play. In fact, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had to alter their old styles and imitate it in order to keep up with the change.
The primordial quality of the hippies' folk rock music, like their intellectuals' vision of the new society, is primitive. Melodies are simple, harmony consists of a few basic chords, drum beats are narrow throbs, and everything together is repetitious and hypnotic. Around the primitive quality, however, the amplifers, loudspeakers, tape recorders, electronic machines, and electrified musical instruments from guitars to oboes - yes, oboes, electric oboes - have woven a variety of effects.
The music is an outgrowth of Negro blues, rock-and-roll, country-western, and finally, ragas from India. Ragas are thematic note groupings with seventy-two parent scales, known as melas. Each raga is supposed to have its own character, color, and mood, according to the time of day, the season, or the occasion. It is then up to the musicians to improvise within these given forms. The main instruments used are: for melody, the sitar - a guitar-like instrument with twenty strings; the tamboura - a four- or five-stringed instrument that is used to maintain a continuous hypnotic drone; and the tabla - a pair of drums serving as tenor and bass. Sometime in 1966, the folk rock bands began using ragas and these three Indian instruments in their amalgated music forms or else imitated them with guitars, oboes, and other Western instruments. This development has led to the suggestion that hippie music be identified as raga rock.
Despite the primitive quality in most of the rock music, it is wrong to use the term "simple" as a generalization for all of the compositions and all of the hippie musicians. Several of the numbers that the Jefferson Airplane recorded on the RCA Victor album, Surrealistic Pillow, require close listening for an appreciation of all their effect. For example, take "Coming Back to Me," a sweet, lolling song somewhat in the style of seventeenth-century English folk music. After getting that much out of it, a repetition may produce the sensation of drifting into a dreamy meadowland. A third repetition, paying attention to the Baroque touch added by Grace Slick on recorder, can produce the image of a shepherd grazing his flocks.
You can also pick up the delineation of the hippie life style in the words of the songs, if you can hear them. For example, take "The Golden Road," on Warner Brothers' Grateful Dead album, celebrating the girls on Haight Street in the following paeon:
See that girl, barefoot (doeeyoumoo) / Whistlin' and a singin' /
She's a-carryin' on / Laughin' in her eyes, dancin' in her feet, /
She's a (neonwhirrwhirrmoo) / And she can live on the street.
The strange words in parentheses are the nearest approximation I can make to what I hear coming from the Dead, even with my ear smack against the phonograph speaker. For the other way they delineate the hippie style is to blast everything at top volume with amplifiers so that all other sounds of the world are wiped out.
The next generalization about the hippie music that's safe to make is that it depicts the philosophy of the New Community. Most of the philosophizing is taken up with odes to love, a reflection of alienated youth's desperate desire to gain affection from parents and tenderness from a dog-eat-dog, violent society. When Grace Slick of the Airplane sings "don't you need somebody to love," she also means: I need somebody to love; we need somebody to love.
Of course, the love gives way in the rock groups' songs, even as it does in their lives, to blatant sex - e.g., the Fugs' "Wet Dream Over You." But this again is part of the philosophy, to challenge the old order's moral structure in a loud, aggressive, blunt manner. No subjects, no words must be banned. Drugs, death, violence, war, race prejudice, sex, religion, and the President of the United States must all be discussed, challenged, pranked, and satirized with complete openness. Hence, Country Joe and the Fish use the word "fuck" on television and describe President Johnson as "a man insane" in the song "Superbird." The Fugs sing "kill, kill for peace" as part of what their leader, Ed Sanders, calls their "total assault on the culture."
Any critic who calls this a put-on does not know the hippie musicians, only their imitators. The members of the hippie folk-rock groups not only sing and play their philosophy, but they also live it.
In the first place, they all take drugs, as announced in some of their names - the Mind Benders, the Loading Zone, the Induction Center, the Weeds. In the second place, the musicians, like all other hippies, are dropouts. Almost every one of them has given up school or profession to become a folk-rock musician and live the life of a hippie.
The Grateful Dead, the original associates of Ken Kesey in producing the Acid Tests, are all high school and college dropouts living in a tribal setup like the Merry Pranksters. At the time that I met them, their house on Ashbury Street was shared with them by their girl friends, managers Danny Rifkin and Rock Scully, and several teen-age school dropouts using the place as a crash pad. The earth mother was Mountain Girl, now Jerry Garcia's mistress, but still bearing testimony to her former relationship with Ken Kesey with a blond-haired baby that he sired.
The Dead's music, when all other analyses are thrown in as qualifications, is primarily an imitation of Negro blues. The style of singing is guttural, down, and dirty; and the diction is that of Negro slang: "Ah luhv you, babuh." That, plus the fact that the music drowns out the words, is why middle-class white people have such a difficult time understanding what the Dead are singing. You have to be a Negro, hippie, or drug addict. And even that is no guarantee that you can pick up the words. The Dead's music is the very heart of acid rock - guitar, organ, and bass intertwined in a whirling, blurring, mind-shattering mass of Negro, hillbilly, and Indian music. Its basic purposes are to blow the mind and provide action sound for dancing, although sometimes Jerry Garcia's rapid runs on the guitar can be interesting as music.
"Captain Trips" he is called, a play on both his guitar runs and mind journeys on LSD. Dressed in a white-and-red striped hat, he reminds you of Ken Kesey, "Mr. Stars and Stripes." Both are pranksters. Both like to live in a tribal setup. Both have given funny nicknames to their people - bassist Phil Lesh is "Reddy Kilowatt," organist Ron McKernan "Pig Pen," and drummer Bill Sommers "Bill the Drummer." Both are basically scholarly men who have deliberately adopted the loose Negro style of life and slang. Both have taken their minds apart with drugs.
"I didn't need Timothy Leary or LSD to do it, either," Garcia told me. "Back in high school I was high on bennies, things like that. I never heard of Leary. Nobody in the Haight-Ashbury follows Leary. The people here would have done this thing without acid, without Leary. I would have been a member of some weird society wherever I went. Don't ask why. Don't try to analyze it, man. It just is, that's all. This is where we're at. This is our trip. We just don't dig that other way."
Garcia is one of the impossible people in the New Community for a writer to talk to, even one who is living with it. Because of his massive mop of curly black hair, he has been described in print as a "troll" and "a cross between Wanda Landowska and the Three Stooges." He and the Dead have been ridden by critics as musical illiterates and drug addicts leading flower children down the path of sin. So, he has taken to pure pranking when a journalist questions him. No writer is closer to the folk-rock bands than Ralph Gleason of the Chronicle. Yet, this is how Garcia described his music to Ralph:
"We're working with dynamics now. We've spent two years with loud, and we've spent six months with deafening." And so on.
It gets no better in the hippie press. Here is the way the Grateful Dead summed up their philosophy for the Underground Press:
Garcia: "I wake up automatically at 9 EVERY morning (except for sometimes when I wake up later or earlier), and gaze out the window at the flocks of geese flying north/south for the winter/summer and ask myself what does it all mean? I drink as much orange juice as I can get my dirty hands on because I know that it's gonna taste good. My boots don't fit me perfectly, so my little toe hurts. Sometimes I see someone that I think I recognize, and I say hello or smile or something like that. It's fun to shoot at strangers, while they're innocently passing the house, with the sonic blaster. Especially if they're pretty, heh. Philosophically, I have nothing to say... I like to play loud... If I had a rocket ship or some extraterrestrial friends, you'd never see me. I hope that humanity survives the incredibly stupid hassles that we've gotten ourselves into."
Last I saw of the Dead, officially, they were on television explaining their philosophy to dazed newsmen. Unofficially, they were going about their usual business of planning free benefits in which the toilets would be stopped up with money. For further analysis, await the new philosophical tome in the music sections of the national magazines.
The most well-remembered communal pad where the new sound was created was at 1090 Page Street in the Hashberry. Oftentimes, the New Community's budding musicians would find food and shelter there when they were broke, and they would join a gathering clan playing and taking drugs in the garage below the house. Friends and neighbors began dropping in to listen to the sound - might as well, couldn't concentrate on anything else if you lived anywhere within a block of it - and the Hashberry had its first free rock concerts.
One of the familiar figures on the Page Street garage scene was Chet Helms, a twenty-two-year-old dropout from Baptist theological school. Like many of the musicians' and beatniks' connections in the Haight-Ashbury, Helms lived the beat life style. Long before most of them let their hair grow out, he had long blond Jesus tresses flowing down his shoulders and a scraggly beard and moustache.
But Helms was not so doggedly noncommercial as the new breed of beat, making music and fun. He suggested that the folk-rock bands charge admission to the garage. (His version of the story is that he [wanted] it to discourage more people from coming because the place was getting too crowded.) When even larger crowds came to the garage, Helms organized a folk-rock concert and dance at the Longshoremen's Hall in October of 1965. Several hundred youngsters came to the hall, some with long hair and dressed in beatnik garb, others straight. Obviously, money was to be made from the new folk-rock scene. All that Helms needed was an organization with some capital and a dance hall.
With an engineer from New York, Bob Cohen, Helms put together the Family Dog, named after a tiny spaniel pooch that lived with him and his friends in one of the communal pads. Then, he approached another New Yorker, Bill Graham, owner of the Fillmore Auditorium and producer-director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, about working together to make folk-rock dance concerts a big happening on the neobeatnik scene. Graham had already put on his own folk-rock concerts in November and December of 1965, using the Fugs, the Great Society, and the Jefferson Airplane to do several benefit performances for the Mime Troupe. Its actors and actresses had been busted for "obscene performances in public places" under a recently enacted California antipornography law. Around four thousand people showed up for the second benefit performance in the Fillmore Auditorium, waiting in a long line around the block outside or finally being turned away because the capacity of the place is only fifteen hundred at a time. Then, in the first month of 1966, Graham collaborated with Kesey for the Trips Festival in creating a "total environment" performance. This meant that movie projectors, strobes, tape recorders, and amplifiers were used to bombard every creaky floorboard and every cobwebbed corner of the old Fillmore Auditorium with music, electronic blips and bleeps, flashing lights, and moving pictures of amoebas, holy men, Indians, and other symbols of the acid head's world.
When Helms told Graham about the success of the Family Dog and suggested a sort of merger of these New World business ventures, Graham was indifferent. He was on the verge of resigning from the Mime Troupe over "political differences," and he was not sold on the future of folk rock (it killed him at first to admit it after he made a million dollars from it, but then he started taking a Socratic irony in recalling his original mood). So, Helms asked if the Family Dog could rent the hall, and Graham agreed.
Later, Helms and Graham parted company, and Helms opened up his own business in the Avalon Ballroom at Sutter and Van Ness streets, staffed entirely by people with long hair and beards.
"The Family Dog is the largest brain trust in the world," Helms likes to say in interviews. "We are roughly arranged around a sort of organic tribal structure in the sense that people who are natural organizers are generally the leaders," and since he and Bob Cohen did the organizing, there is no doubt left about who he means.
"Helms is definitely an organizer," I was told by Grace Slick, who knew him in the formative rock days when he was peddling dope. "Instead of running a bank, he runs the Avalon and the Family Dog, that's all."
Helms drifted into the Hashberry from Texas when he was twenty-one, leaving behind him a broken future that was supposed to have led to the Baptist ministry. He wound up on drugs instead of religion, but he kept on wearing a deacon's frock coat. Neither that nor his long blond Jesus tresses had anything to do with hippies; there was no such thing as hippies then. Helms, like so many hippie men, was obsessed with a Jesus self-image. When he picked the motto for the Family Dog, it was the following graffito that he took from the wall of a men's room:
May the Baby Jesus Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Mind
Later, he became enraged over Ramparts' cover story on the hippies, in which the motto was deliberately reversed to: open your mouth and shut your mind.
Evening at the Avalon provides plenty of the ear-splitting sound characteristic of the hippie band. Continuously changing light projections of liquid colors and protoplastic forms bathe the dancers. Their luminiscent, striped, and dotted clothes glow eerily amid the flashing lights. Symbols, concentric circles, and pictures of Indians and Oriental priests are beamed onto the walls.
Suddenly, the fast, screaming music dies down to a soft love song and then gives way to a mournful Indian dirge. The light show changes. On one wall there is a picture of Buddha and on another a picture of Christ on the cross. Several hundred of the youngsters on the dance floor join hands. They sway back and forth in a trancelike state. They keep it up until the musicians come on again with another fast, loud set and the lights begin blipping all over the cavernous dance hall. Once more, the Avalon is a sea of maddening motion and deafening sound.
Bill Graham at the Fillmore kept on with the Jefferson Airplane and other folk rock groups and made his million with them. The Fillmore remained the same place and Graham remained the same man: blunt, unpretentious, obsessed with man's need for hard work and honesty. The Fillmore is as dingy as it has always been. The floor is still dirty and creaky, and the plaster on the walls is still cracking. One of the cracks is covered with a blown-up photo of Ronald Reagan dressed in a cowboy suit, looking tough as he points a gun in his left hand; under the photo is the caption: "Thanks for the votes, suckers." There are also anti-Vietnam posters, an anti-LBJ cartoon, and a picture of Graham, wearing a suit and tie, in a cage held by a female labeled "S.F. Society," with the serpent of Eden for her headband and dollar-signs for her earrings; the caption is: "So, I sold out, so what?"
At the Fillmore's nighttime rock-dance concerts, where Graham still insists on supervising everything personally, the confrontations between him and the hippies who come into the place have become legend. Knowing that he is wealthy, some of the school dropouts ask him: "Hey, man, got a dime? Got a quarter? I wanna get into the dance."
Graham turns on them: "Do you have a penny?"
"Well, I asked you first."
"I know you asked me first, but do you have a penny?"
"Well, hell, man..."
But Graham is gone to raise hell with four young hippies breaking up the line formation at the window. "Get in line!" he yells at them. "All these other people are in line. You think you're any better? Get in the line. You like to touch people. Here's your chance. Stay in line, like good flower children."
"Hey, Mr. Graham," they say. "Come on now, where's your love?"
"Fuck love," Graham says. "Get in line!"
I interviewed Graham in his cubbyhole office amid the usual chaos - secretary beside him clacking away on her typewriter, messages strewn all over his desk, telephone ringing continuously with calls from Time, Newsweek, and promoters from New York to Brazil. Posters announcing various folk-rock dance concerts covered almost every inch of the wall. His skinny legs bounced nervously, and his lips worked up and down as he tried to answer phones, direct his staff, make new appointments, read messages, and talk to me all at once.
"The first folk-rock dances were held right here, before Kesey or Helms came in this place," he said. "I mean, you want to talk about Acid Tests, Trips Festivals, hippies, dates, purposes - it's all a crock of shit. The dance concerts were put on as benefits, and then they were put on for people to have fun. What is Trips Festivals? People dancing and having fun, that's all. These things were never exclusively for people with long hair or beards freaking out on the floor. They were for anybody. A guy with a tuxedo could come in here with a half-naked blonde bitch, and they could wiggle their butts all over the floor and do their thing, and nobody would give a damn. Let 'em groove.
"Now, of course, there are certain laws we have to abide by or we're out of business. I mean, I had this thing going with the cops: you let us be loose, don't be uptight about the way people dress or act, let 'em do their thing, and I'll make sure nothing happens here to make trouble for you."
Out of the Fillmore and the Avalon came vibrations shooting across the country, drawing school and job dropouts to San Francisco. Hitchhiking or driving in imitations of Ken Kesey's psychedelic bus, they headed for where the action was - the Avalon and Fillmore like two giant magnets, with LSD and folk rock their energy fields....
(by Burton Wolfe, from The Hippies, 1968, as excerpted in The Age of Rock, ed. Jonathan Eisen, 1969)
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