April 1976: Jerry Garcia Interview

AN INTERVIEW WITH JERRY GARCIA

 

In 1974, I was the music critic for the Philadelphia Bulletin newspaper. Being a regular writer for a major-city daily newspaper at the age of twenty-four was rewarding and gave a certain satisfaction to a young rock fan’s life. Getting paid to see and interview bands like the Grateful Dead, was, at times, so much fun, it almost seemed illegal. But someone had to do it, so…

Anyway, that summer of ‘74 the Grateful Dead were booked for two nights at Philadelphia’s Civic Center. My job was to do a preview story in the Sunday Bulletin on the band. Their publicist approved an interview with Bob Weir (Jerry Garcia, I was informed, “wasn’t talking to the press”), and provided me with ticket to see a show in Providence, Rhode Island, a couple of weeks before Philadelphia, and off I went.

The interview with Bob Weir before the concert was terrific. Weir, as most people know, is a friendly, witty man and gave me more than I needed for the story.

The show that night, at the Providence Civic Center, was a five hour extravaganza, leaving everyone, band and audience alike, drained and exhausted but in a state of euphoria. A few minutes after the last encore, I noticed Jerry Garcia, wearing a dark green t-shirt, Wranglers and Acme boots, leaning against a wall backstage, winding down. I went over to say hello and asked him about a new (at the time) song from Mars Hotel they had closed the show with.

Spotting the tape-recorder I was carrying, he said “I’m not doing interviews this year,” in the same tone of voice he might use to order an after-dinner wine. “I hate all my records,” he added as an afterthought. “The Grateful Dead don’t make good records.”

Was he satisfied with the performance they had just given?

“If I was ever satisfied,” he added totally seriously, “I’d quit playing.”

Two years later, in a New York hotel room, on appropriately April Fool’s Day, 1976 (he has always appreciated a good joke), Jerry Garcia has agreed to an in-depth interview. Following two years of low Grateful Dead activity (which were filled with rumors of retirement), Garcia is in town with a solo band featuring John Kahn, Ron Tutt and Keith and Donna Godchaux. Being into gadgets, he inspects with interest a new tape recorder I had just bought, and we begin…

I spoke with you briefly at the Providence Civic Center two years ago. You told me, “I’m not doing interviews this year,” and then you said, “I hate all my records. The Grateful Dead don’t make good records.

(Laughs) Yeah, that’s true.

You mean, that’s true that you said that or that’s true that they don’t?

Well, both of them are true. But it’s a matter of objectivity. It depends on which side of the coin you’re on. For example, if I buy somebody’s record – a Rolling Stones record or something – what I hear obviously is the finished record, the finished music and the whole thing that’s already happened. In other words, with a Grateful Dead record, part of what I’m dealing with is the dissonance between the original version, the original flash as a composer. When a song comes into my head, it comes with a complete sound to it, a complete arrangement, a complete format and a complete thing more often than not, which represents my relationship to a personal vision. So, for me, comparing the record to the vision, I always feel that it fails.

That doesn’t discourage you to the point of not wanting to make records?

It could. But it doesn’t, because there’s enough to making records or making music that there are enough other ways to get off. So I’m not that hung up on the relationship to the vision except that it produces sort of a feeling of disappointment. You want it to work a certain way and sometimes it doesn’t work as well as you want it to. Like I had a whole long thing I was working on as far as Blues For Allah was concerned that was a technical trip and it required a certain amount of developing hardware to go along with the idea, which is often the case with things I get involved with. Often I want to do something that you can only do by developing or interfacing a certain number of existing possibilities.

With Blues For Allah there was a thing I wanted to do that had to do with an envelope shaper and stuff like that didn’t come together the way I wanted it to. And so, when I listen to it, I think, “Well shit, it isn’t quite where I wanted it to be.” But in the long run, after, like, however many records – nineteen records or something like that – you feel that at least your percentages are getting closer and you’re able to score on other levels. Like on our earlier records, if I listen to them now, they are embarrassing for reasons like they’re out of tune.

And your recent records are never out of tune.

 

(laughs) Now they’re much more together on those levels than they used to be. We’re much more able to pull off the technical aspect without having to sacrifice feeling. In terms of Blues For Allah, the latest Grateful Dead record I can talk about in this frame, I think that’s the first record we’ve made in years where we really had fun. We laughed a lot and got good and crazy. We had an opportunity to get weirder than we normally get to getting. First of all because we didn’t have the pressure of having to go out and tour and travel and thus break the flow.

Why didn’t you have the pressure?

Because we decided not to perform.

You didn’t need the money?

Well, it wasn’t the question of needing the money or not. That was…well, say we didn’t need the money.

Most of your money comes from performing, obviously…

Well, yeah. Sure. That’s been our main thing. ‘Course, most of our overhead and expenses are also the result of that too. It’s a lot easier for us to survive on some levels by not touring just because our expenses aren’t so huge. And with me going out and Kingfish going out (with Bob Weir), we were able to pretty much keep ourselves together.

Anyway, a couple of years ago you weren’t doing interviews. Now you are. Why the switch?

I like to do ‘em when I feel like I have something new to say. Every couple of years my viewpoint changes, you know what I mean? So I have something to say. I have some substance. Also, at the end of a year of rapping – if I have only one rap (laughs), one good thing to say and I spend a year saying it – pretty soon I’m burned out and I can’t stand to listen to it any more. But the fact that I haven’t been out traveling a lot and I’m not road weary also has something to do with it.

In our brief conversation two years ago, you said – in response to whether you were satisfied with the show – “If I was ever satisfied, I’d quit playing.”

Yeah, I think I might, in the sense that part of it is the thing of trying, taking chances.

So why now, at this point in time, do you have something to say? Your solo album?

The solo album is one thing. I think the movie is the thing (The Grateful Dead Movie).

Tell me about the movie.

When we decided we weren’t going to perform anymore, our farewell show, so to speak, was five days at Winterland. It was after we got back from our second trip to Europe – October ‘74. About a month before the Winterland dates I got the idea that it would be neat to be able to film it, just because I didn’t know if we were going to perform again. Or if we were going to perform in that kind of situation again. And that five nights in a place would at least give us the possibility, numerically anyway, that we would have one or two really good nights. In about two or three weeks the whole production thing came together to make the movie.

At first we thought, let’s just make a record of the idea, and I wanted it to look good. I wanted it to be really well filmed but I didn’t really know a lot about film when the idea got under way, but when it was time for the show to start, we had about nine camera crews and a lot of good backup people, good lighting people and the whole thing was already on its way to happening. It was chaotic but well organized in spite of the relatively short preproduction time we had. After the five days were over – and during that time I involved myself mostly with the music, I didn’t really get into the film part – we had a couple of hundred thousand feet of film in the can. So then it was, what’s going to happen to this? Originally, we were thinking in terms of what about a canned concert. Would something like that work? Could we send out a filmed version of ourselves? Then, after getting involved and interested in the movie as a project, I started looking at the footage and the concert stuff and I felt that there was a movie there. A movie in a movie sense rather than a movie in a canned concert sense. Then there was the thing of putting all that together and that’s what I’ve been working on the last year and a half, ever since the filming was over, really.

So it’s coming out not as a concert film.

It’s coming out as a movie.

Is there a plot to the movie?

(laughs) No. I mean, it’s a movie for Grateful Dead freaks. I think you could enjoy it from a perfectly normal moviegoer standpoint. I think it’s a very fine movie, but I don’t want to get into waving a flag about it. I want to see what kind of response there is to it first. Now we’re in our last series of fine cut stages. And I’ve tried to structure it in the same sense that Grateful Dead sets are constructed, so that it goes a lot of places. The concert footage is tremendously beautiful.

To be shown in the proverbial theater near you?

So far, we haven’t ironed that out, but I think we’re gonna try, like we always do, to distribute it ourselves. At least the first flash, so that we’ll have some control over the kind of playback system there is in the theaters.

I’ve noticed your concerts don’t change as much from show to show as your albums do.

That’s true. That’s because albums get to be a certain time and space and the concert thing is a flow.

And you always know what to expect from a Grateful Dead concert.

In a way. But we’re trying to bust that too. That’s one of the reasons we dropped out.

Is this it for the Grateful Dead as a touring entity?

No. We’re gonna start playing again.

You have so many members of the Grateful Dead on your solo album (Reflections), it could almost be a Grateful Dead album.

A lot of the energy from that record is really a continuation of the Blues For Allah groove that we got into. We sort of continued the same energy because we were having a lot of fun doing it.

One of my favorite things that you’ve been involved with in the last few years is the Old And In The Way bluegrass album you did with Vassar Clements, David Grisman, and Peter Rowan.

That was a good band. It was satisfying and fun to be in.

Was the reason you only put out the one Old And In The Way album and didn’t do a whole lot of touring with that band, because of the fact that there’s only a certain amount of acceptance bluegrass can get?

That, and also we ran into a really weird problem in terms of dynamics which was that bluegrass music is like chamber music: it’s very quiet. And if the audience got at all enthusiastic during the tune and started clapping or something, it would drown out the band and we couldn’t hear each other.

What an album though. I didn’t know you were such a hot banjo player.

(laughs) Oh I was real hot when I was a kid. Now my reasons for playing banjo and my reasons for liking bluegrass music are completely different from when I started, ‘cause then I was really hot.

I think that Old And In The Way album may be the best bluegrass album ever recorded.

Wow. Thank you. I’m happy with it too, but the truth is, we had much better performances than were on that record.

That’s hard to imagine.

Oh yeah. We had performances that were heart-stopping. And perfect, you know, but there weren’t as many that were recorded that well.

That banjo solo you did on “Wild Horses” and Vassar’s violin solo on “Midnight Moonlight” …Jesus.

Well, that was really a thrilling band. And I think that was the nicest that Vassar’s played, too. When he was playing with Old And In The Way, he played the maximum of mind-blowing but beautifully tasty stuff, and the music had enough interesting kinds of new changes and new things happening – Pete’s good songs for example – so that Vassar had a chance to blow with a lot of range. More than he does normally. That was neat.

The Grateful Dead have been a strange band for my taste, in that, if I like a band a lot – and some of your stuff I’ve liked an awful lot – I normally like just about everything the band does. But with the Dead, some of the stuff you’ve done has just gone right by me, while other stuff just blows me away. And it’s the same way with your concerts. Say, you’re in the middle of a jam. I’ll be half asleep for a few minutes, and all of a sudden, you’ll do something for five or ten seconds on guitar that will make my hair stand on end.

See, I have that same kind of reaction to the Grateful Dead myself. The Grateful Dead is not anybody’s idea of how a band or music should be. It’s a combination of really divergent viewpoints. Everyone in the band is quite different from everyone else. And what happens musically is different from what any one person would do. For me, the band that I have right now, I’m real happy with. I haven’t been as happy with any little performing group since Old And In The Way in terms of feeling “this is really harmonious, this is what I want to hear.” This band that I have now is very consonant. The Grateful Dead had always had that thing of dissonance. It’s not always consonant. Sometimes it’s dissonant. Sometimes it’s really ugly sounding and just drives you crazy.

Do you spend a lot of time in San Francisco?

Yeah. I spend most of my time just working. I’m very taken with our scene. It’s very interesting.

Your records are getting softer. In fact, there’s only one uptempo song, “Might As Well,” on your new solo album.

That’s true. That’s probably the worst thing about it, the lack of balance of material.

You thought it was too quiet?

Yeah.

When I listened to it, I thought maybe you didn’t like to rock and roll as much anymore.

No, uh…it’s not that. All these things have to do with luck. And timing. For example, the way that solo record was recorded, really a lot of material was performed with the intention of using it on the record, but of the takes that I felt were acceptable, they tended to be more of those softer tunes. So I decided to go with those because I felt the feeling of the tracks was better, not because of wanting it to be that way.

Your guitar playing has remained fairly constant the last few years. The only real deviation was on this new album on the track “Comes A Time.” You used a mild fuzz.

I just used a small amplifier.

There were some real nice sustain on your playing. It sounded terrific.

Yeah. I do those things more on other people’s sessions than I do my own. I tend to be real off-handed about my guitar playing on my own records. In fact, on Grateful Dead records too.

What other records are you referring to?

Well, when I just go and do sessions with somebody more or less anonymous.

You don’t do sessions that often, do you?

Not anymore.

Who are the last few people you’ve done sessions for?

I did a whole spasm of local ones, like all those Merl Saunders (Live At Keystone, Fire Up) records. Tom Fogerty’s records. And the Airplane sessions. Stuff like that. I used to do more than I do now.

Kingfish and your band are both on similar – and sometimes identical – tours at the moments and sometimes even cross paths, but you never share a bill. Are the two bands’ identities so different that it would hinder playing together?

Well, it’s just that neither one of us wants to cash in on the Grateful Dead notoriety. And also the people that are in our respective bands have identities of their own to support. So rather than get everybody under the big Grateful Dead umbrella, it’s better if everybody can have their own little shot. Because, for example, it would be possible for Kingfish to go out and work without Weir. They’re a band without him as well as a band with him. There are those kinds of considerations, because when we start working on Grateful Dead stuff, which we’ll start doing pretty soon, those bands will have their own survival problems. Not so much my band, because Ron (Tutt) works with Elvis. John (Kahn) does studio stuff and he’s always got stuff going on.

Are both you and Kingfish ending up your tours at about the same time?

Yeah. The Grateful Dead has to start rehearsing.

Are you going to do a big summer tour like everybody else?

We’re going to approach it differently. We’re going to try and do small places. We’re going to do theaters. We’re not going to do any barns.

Why, at this point have the Grateful Dead decided to get back together?

We’re horny to play. We all miss Grateful Dead music. We want to be the Grateful Dead some more.

What kind of material will you be doing?

Probably some old stuff but more new stuff, and I think probably the biggest change will be that we have Mickey back in the band.

When you look back on your records – you still probably maintain that you hate all your records…

I don’t listen to ‘em. I can’t (laughs).

Are there any that you hate less than the others?

Well, I always like the one we’re working on, or the one that we’ve just finished. That’s the one I feel closest to. But after that, I have to disqualify myself. I can’t judge them against anything but an emotional situation that I’m in, in relation to the Grateful Dead. Either they recall to me what was going on at the time we recorded or something else. It’s more personal than anything else.

When you work on songs, can you tell which ones maybe become classics with your audience, like “Sugar Magnolia” or “Truckin’?”

Uh…not really. I can’t. ‘Cause often, the ones that get me don’t get anybody but me (laughs).

Which ones have gotten you that haven’t gotten many other people?

Well I don’t know, but there are some songs that I really loved…like I really loved “Row Jimmy Row.” That was one of my favorite songs of ones that I’ve written. I loved it. Nobody else really liked it very much – we always did it – but nobody liked it very much, at least in the same way I did.

“U.S. Blues” got real popular in the summer of ’74 and became a big number for your live shows…

Well that kind of figured to me. Some of ‘em, you can say, “Well, this’ll at least be hot, if nothing else.”

I like “Scarlet Begonias” a lot.

Yeah, that’s another song too. That’s a song I like. “Ship Of Fools” is a song I like an awful lot. But my relationship to them changes. Sometimes I really like a song after I’ve written it and I don’t like it at all a year later. And some of them, I’m sort of indifferent to, but we perform it and find they have a real long life. For me to sing a song, I really have to feel some relationship to it. I can’t just bullshit about it. Otherwise, it’s just empty and it’s no fun. There has to be something about it that I can relate to. Not even in a literal sense or a sense of content, but more a sense of sympathy with the singer of the song. It’s a hard relationship to describe, but some songs have a real long life and you can sing them honestly for a long period of time – years and years – and others last just a while and you don’t feel like you can sing them anymore.

When you write with Robert Hunter, you write the music and he writes the lyrics?

More often than not. But also it’s a little freer than that, too. I edit his work an awful lot and, for example, a tune like “U.S. Blues” really will start off with 300 possible verses. Then it’s a matter of carving them down to ones that are singable. Other songs are like stories. A lot of time I edit out the sense of Hunter’s songs.

So you’re the reason he seems so deranged.

Yeah (laughs). I’m an influence in that. And when I edit his stuff, he really treats it with skepticism, but we have a thing of trust between us now so that he usually laughs when I hack out the sense of the song. Dump it. We have a real easy relationship.

By the way, you have one of the strangest record company bios I’ve ever read. It was credited to Hunter.

I actually think that bio was written by Willy Legate.

Who is he?

Willy Legate is this guy who’s an old, old friend of me and Hunter’s and Phil’s and our whole scene, and he’s a lot of things. And one of those things he is, is sort of a bible scholar. And he’s a madman. We were exposed to him really a lot during a formative period of our intellectual life. And he’s still around in our scene.

He’s the guy who wrote “There’s nothing like a Grateful Dead concert” and he wrote the little blurb inside the Europe ’72 album about the bolos and the bozos. We also call on him to do various things. One time we asked the Deadheads to send us their thoughts, just to get some feedback from them. And they sent us lots and lots of letters and we gave ‘em all to Willy. And he ended up with, like, a two page condensation of all the letters, with every viewpoint, that was just tremendously amazing to read. It was just so packed with information.

Willy is someone who has a lot of different kinds of gifts. He also even wrote some lyrics to some of our early songs before we started recording, but we’ve subsequently stopped doing the tunes. But he’s another creative head in our scene that operated way back from the public.

What kinds of things do you care a lot about these days?

(Pauses) I think the thing I’m most into is the survival of the Grateful Dead. I think that’s my main trip now.

Was there ever a point when you didn’t care a whole lot about that?

Yeah, always.

So this is pretty new?

Yeah, pretty new.

How long has this been going on?

I would say about a year.

Why is that?

Well, I feel like I’ve had both trips, in the sense that I’ve been in the Grateful Dead for ten or twelve years and I’ve also been out of it, in the sense of going out in the world and travelling and doing things just under my own hook. And really, I’m not that taken with my own ideas. I don’t really have that much to say and I’m more interested in being involved in something that’s larger than me. And I really can’t talk to anybody else either (laughs). So sometime in the last year, I decided, yeah, that’s it, that’s definitely the farthest out thing I’ve ever been involved in, and it’s the thing that makes me feel best. And it seems to have the most ability to sort of neutrally put something good into the mainstream. It’s also fascinating in the sense of the progression. The year to year changes are fascinating.

I would say that’s the thing I’m most concerned about now. Everything else has gotten to be so weird. And I’ve never been attracted to the flow politically.

Never?

No. It just isn’t interesting to me.

Do you vote?

No. Vote for what? Even looking for decently believable input from that world is a scene. So I haven’t developed that much interest in the motions of the rest of the world. I’m mainly interested in improving the relationship between the band and the audience, and I’m into being onstage and playing.

How about causes, like the legalization of marijuana, that kind of stuff?

It’s all passing stuff. I don’t know. I don’t have anything to say about moral things. Or legal things. I think there’s a lot of confusion on those levels. Basically my framework politically or anything like that is, I’m into a completely free, wide open, total anarchy space. That’s what I want (laughs). Obviously I’m not going to be able to sell that to anybody (more laughter). Nobody’s going to dig that.

You can’t even give that away…

Exactly. So I don’t even bother. If I have a flag to wave, it’s a non-flag. But as a life problem, the Grateful Dead is an anarchy. That’s what it is, it doesn’t have any…stuff. It doesn’t have any goals. It doesn’t have any plans. It doesn’t have any leaders. Or real organization. And it works. It even works in the straight world. It doesn’t work too good. It doesn’t work like General Motors does, but it works OK. And it’s more fun.

I’m curious to see what effect your new-found attention for the Grateful Dead is going to have on your music.

It’ll be interesting. See, I’ve always been real ambivalent about it. It’s like one of those things that, I’ve always wanted to work out, but I never wanted to try and make it do that. And, in fact, everyone in the Grateful Dead has always had that basic attitude. So we’ll see what happens.

 

(by Steve Weitzman - originally published in The Music Gig magazine, August 1976, as "Jerry Garcia" - republished in Relix, August 1988, as "The Grateful Dead: A Look Back")

September 1974: Jerry Garcia Interview #2

ROCK 'N' ROLL MISFIT

 

Jerry Garcia, specifically, and the Grateful Dead, generally, are rock and roll misfits. The stuff of which anti heroes are made. Being on a stage, says Garcia, is an embarrassment, and it's "unfortunate" that the band is gaining in fame. 

Raised on beatnik literature (Kerouac, Ginsberg and all), Garcia, slumped on the floor of promoter Tom Salter's home, looks anything but a rock and roll star, which is fine by him, because he never, never wanted to be one, anyhow. 

"The most rewarding experience for me these days is to play in bars and not be Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. I enjoy playing to fifty people. The bigger the Dead get the harder it is to be light and spontaneous, and that's my biggest single dissatisfaction."  

"Y'see, my personal code of...uh, ethics, is all based in 'fifties artists' evaluations, which were pretty much characterised by a disdain for success, and I've always carried that." 

And while it's not economically feasible for a band to exist without income or prospects in London, for example, the prototype Grateful Dead didn't just survive, but in fact thrived on other folks' excess in sunny California, tenderloin of the Capitalist world. 

"We never even had to hustle to get by, and certainly never worked hard; hardly ever worked at all, in fact. And being on the street, in the real sense of the term, gives you a unique viewpont." 

And unlike virtually any other band begun with high-minded ideals, the Dead have mostly managed to retain that viewpoint throughout their chequered career. Despite the success that Garcia so abhors, the group still don't make any money as such. 

"We turn it over," says Garcia. "Our expenses are immensely high, because we're into doing it as good as we can, and as the resources and the desire of people to see the group grows, our plan has been to improve aesthetically the quality of the trip itself. Which is the reason for the PA." 

PA seems somehow too humble a description for the Dead's massive wall of sound, comprising 641 speakers and 48 amplifiers, dispensing 26,400 watts of rock and roll, controlled by 24 roadies, no less, the equipment weighing in at a conservative 40 tons. 

The same desire, to improve the quality of the product, led the Dead to set up their own record label, Grateful Dead Records. To be more precise, it was that, plus "the fact that we'd had a long, unexciting, uninteresting relationship with a record company, and hadn't got off on it at all. 

"We never related to the record company way of thinking and they never related to us. Consequently we figured that even fumbling around we could sell records better than they could." 

Has that proved to be the case? 

"Well, sales haven't dropped. And anyway, with the way the thing is structured, it's no longer necessary to sell huge quantities of albums, because there's no parent company taking huge chunks. 

"And since we're not interested in breaking big, we can still be comfortable if we only sell a few of each album." 

Garcia shrugs aside the opinion that, with their own distribution outlets, Grateful Dead Records and sister company Round Records are as independent as it's possible for a non-obscurantist rock label to get. 

"For us to be really independent would mean that we'd have to manufacture the records, and above and beyond that we were actually creating the vinyl. And, I mean, who wants that? That's outrageous... 

"Records are such an ecological disaster, anyhow. It's time somebody considered other ways of storing music that don't involve the use of polyvinyl chloride. 

"Socially speaking, the actual process of record pressing is as close to slave labour as you're ever likely to get. Totally mindless. People stand at these presses, with hot steaming vinyl squeezing out of tubes - it's really uncomfortable. Pressing is depressing! 

"I visited a plant recently, and I thought 'Do I really want to be putting these people through this?' And I really don't. There must be another way. It's hard to believe that we haven't progressed beyond the old Edison cylinder. Needle in a groove. It's pretty crude, really." 

 

This marked lack of progress, Garcia decrees, is rooted merely in the "overwhelming greed" of the music industry, which would sooner make a fast buck than strive for improving the product, any day of the week. 

"I've seen the way greed gets to people. Reality goes out of your life as you start to live in this comfortable dream, increasingly out of touch. Limousines and all, that kind of excess actually kills. What I have to do, what the Grateful Dead has to do, and what anybody who really cares about music right now has to do, is to try and invent alternative structures and forms which will allow music to fit in with life in a manner that doesn't devour the artist. 

"Any moves that the Grateful Dead makes in this direction are of course really minimal - they're minute, and conservative too, but all the same they stem from a certain kind of purity." 

What's "cool" about the Dead, to borrow Garcia's terminology, is that no project ever becomes real unless the entire band agrees. And as there's often disagreement within the band, not too many projects are realised. ("But things that we agree to, man...wow!...there's no stopping them. The dynamism is what makes it interesting.") 

Garcia's value-judgements seem almost strangely old fashioned at times. Where, for example, Keith Richard and Mick Jagger would scoff at the concept of responsibility to the audience (and have done so from the dock, on occasion), Garcia is acutely conscious of that responsibility. "My only ambitions are to play music and to be civil," he says with obvious sincerity. 

With the particular variety of socio-philosophising peculiar to Marin County veterans, Garcia is prepared to extend that line of conversation indefinitely. 

He meets "So you don't want to be Governor Of California?" with a good natured "F--- it!" and continues "I can scarcely govern myself." 

That statement sparks off a breathtaking stream of consciousness flow that works through such chestnuts as "everybody should police themselves," "people don't know about life or death" - that kind of thing.

All the same Garcia is sufficiently politically aware to want to disassociate himself with any of the usual causes-and-issues naivety. 

Any kind of fanaticism, Garcia reckons, however apparently well-meaning, is ultimately corrupt. "I think we've seen more than enough of the I've-got-followers-therefore-I'm-powerful mentality this century." 

This attitude towards over-enthusiastic disciples can extend as far as rock 'n' roll fans, and the Grateful Dead are very wary of being misrepresented, and certainly don't set out to mislead. 

Specific example? 

Well, take "Casey Jones," the "Workingman's Dead" favourite. Part of the chorus runs, you'll recall, "driving that train, high on cocaine." 

"Suddenly everybody was snorting cocaine, as though that was the underlying message of the song, which it wasn't at all. I mean those lyrics are dire. At best, they're pessimistic." 

Consequently, the Dead are now attempting to parallel Bob Dylan's move from unequivocal protest to street poet surrealism. 

"If we're going to have misinterpretations, let's have more than one, let's have lots of them!" 

Obviously, though, the Dead's reputation, however justifiably, is bound up with legendary tales of massive chemical intake. The band that orchestrated Ken Kesey's celebrated Acid Tests. 

Garcia says that stories are "exaggerated." 

"We wouldn't have survived," he says. "In everything you have to attain a balance. See, the Grateful Dead doesn't hold one particular philosophy about anything. Some people in the band don't take any drugs at all. 

"Others take all drugs. We don't share the same perspective on that one. I think drugs are now just a part of life. 

"It's not something that only musicians specifically get into... Obviously our reputation stems from the events with Kesey and Owsley, but LSD wasn't the reason for the Acid Tests, although it was one of the catalysts certainly - and it wasn't necessarily the thing that was good about the Tests. 

"It was a combination of degrees. It always is, I think. Whether you love something or not, whether you enjoy something or not... 

"Drugs aren't necessarily good or bad. They may or may not help you see what you want to see." 

It seems, I observe, that with drug usage apparently on the decline among rock musicians, more and more bands now turn to religion rather than opium as a crutch. Santana, McLoughlin, Herbie Hancock, Weather Report, Chick Corea et cetera. (Oh, and incidentally, those stories about the Dead having signed themselves over to the Divine Light Mission are 100 per cent fictional. "I've never heard anybody in the band say anything about Guru Mahara Ji that wasn't derogatory," Bob Weir said earlier.) 

"The band has investigated specific religions on occasion," says Garcia, without naming sects, although it's common knowledge that organist Tom Constanten left the band to devote more time to Scientology, "but I think we mostly feel that a large part of the reasons for the general obsolescence of so many things on this planet is down to the tendency of the vast majority of religious groups to exclude each other. 

"Now it seems there is a new, more open-ended spiritualism springing out of the old traditions, mostly sparked off by heads and people that have gone in there and studied the things. 

"That's encouraging, but I don't know... I guess music is my religion, in as much as it's my discipline. It's my yoga, it's the thing that I work at, and it's the thing that I measure my achievements against." 

But has music, however good, actually got the power to affect social change? 

"I don't think so. And yet in some ways I think it can do more than that. Music can give people a clean experience, that's free from all connotations. 

"Music isn't propagandist, it isn't political. It's free of the confusion of language, for example - it just cuts through all of that. 

"You can trust music, because it can't hurt you and it won't mislead you. If it's bad, you can just leave it alone. Walk out. 

"If the medium is the message, then I think that music is one of the mediums that has been the most consistent. Music is functional, and it deserves a functional role in society. 

"At its most trivial it helps you through the day, and that's important in itself, and at the heaviest and deepest level it can move you beautifully, awaken you to a recognition of the human spirit. 

"Music assumes that role so readily, it should be given more chances to do so. It's distasteful, the way that music is bought and sold." 

It goes without saying that the musician himself is the lowest rung of the showbiz hierarchical ladder, a situation that naturally distresses any thinking player. 

"Personal fame and fortune is the bait that's always used, and that approach is just redundant, because all you ever get is music that's 'professional' which you can't get off on. 

"And that's where the religious groups actually have an edge, because they're struggling to do something other than make a quick fortune. After a while it gets so you can recognise those aspirations." 

Are you saying that you can determine which music is divinely inspired and which financially oriented just by listening? 

"Aha...err...no, I guess maybe I couldn't, but when you're signed to a contract with say, Columbia Records that requires that you put out four albums a year or whatever, it means that you definitely have to do that. 

"And that in turn means that at some point in your life you're sitting down making music because you're professionally obliged to do so. Okay, so that's one way to do it, but I don't think it's how we reach our higher moments." 

Up until the formation of Grateful Dead Records, Garcia has always suffered that professional pressure, and, essentially, always will suffer it for as long as the group exists. 

Any professional rock musician lives in a controlled environment, and the bigger the group becomes the less chance the individual musician has to step outside that environment. 

If Jerry Garcia didn't feel like playing Alexandra Palace on Wednesday, September 12 [sic], it was still a virtual certainty that he'd do so, because it's another professional commitment, and just as demanding as the "three-albums-a-year" syndrome. 

So where does that leave this unique guitar stylist and reluctant guru to the post Haight/Ashbury generation? Wilt there come a point where the hatred of "stardom" results in the total abandonment of major gigs in favor of boogying in bars? 

"I'm forever at that point, merely because the alternative is so much easier. The Grateful Dead will always exist, regardless of the musicians involved in it, and it will just have to accept whatever changes come up." 

But could it still be the Grateful Dead without the Lesh-Weir-Garcia nucleus to hold the group together? 

"Hell, I don't think it's the Grateful Dead without Pigpen. It's different now. I don't have any special attachment to the Grateful Dead as a band, because it's something that we all invented. It's no big deal. It's just us. It's a useful vehicle and I've learnt a lot from it." 

Isn't there any sentimental reason for wanting to keep the band together? After all, you nurtured it from complete obscurity into financial stability. Surely that must count for something. 

"Yeah, it's been sorta like having a kid. Y'know you bring up a child, pour plenty of love and affection onto it, look after it, and ultimately the kid says 'well, thanks for everything. I'm leaving now. This is it.' 

"I'm always looking for new forms, and if the Grateful Dead at some point would prefer to cling on to old forms, I'll go someplace else." 

The question that has to be raised here, of course, is what exactly is the nature of the new forms we're discussing? The Dead's recent studio albums have revealed a singular lack of "new forms." In fact with the exception of "That's It For The Other One," a reworked theme from "Anthem Of The Sun" which cropped up on the live "Grateful Dead" double, and Weir's "Weather Report Suite" on "Wake Of The Flood," which was indirectly influenced by the Miles Davis/Gil Evans "Sketches Of Spain" collaboration of the late fifties, nothing even approximating a "new form" has passed this way. 

Garcia raises his hands and shrugs in mock desperation. 

"See, we're victims of the medium," he pleads, "a single album is really short, and our records, even our live records, have that song orientation that the stage act doesn't really have. And that's mostly because we'd feel strange about putting out albums that had just one track per side. 

"We're not the band that makes our albums - that's just a guise we adopt to get by in the studio. As soon as they invent a means of putting out five hours of music at a time at some realistic kind of price, we'll release all of our shows. 

"But for that reason I've always felt that the Grateful Dead is a pretty bad recording band. We don't put that much energy into developing as a recording unit. 

"It's difficult, you see, because as a live band our dynamic range goes far beyond what can be accurately got down on vinyl. We can play down to the level of a whisper, and we can play as loud as twenty jet planes. So, the expressiveness of our music is limited by recording. 

"Recording is always a compromise, and I don't enjoy it very much, and I think that the lack of enthusiasm is evident in the albums. 

"Right now I'm trying to develop as a studio musician because I feel it's something that I ought to be able to handle. But, quite honestly, I've never recorded a solo that's worth a shit. Not on a Grateful Dead record, anyhow."

(by Steve Lake, from Melody Maker, 14 September 1974)

Thanks to jgmf.blogspot.com

September 1974: Jerry Garcia Interview

HEY JERRY: HOW THE HELL DO YA PLAY THEM FIVE-HOUR SETS WITHOUT SLINKIN' OFF FOR A LEAK?

Yes, it's an interesting one isn't it? I mean, five hours...that's a long time, and well...camels are different of course, so really it must be a problem. However, Smilin' Jerry Garcia doesn't let The Grateful Dead's music get bogged down with details like that. Read his answers in NME – the one that dares ask the big questions.

It's da Dead, mayun!
Everybody's bloody grinning.
The roadies who're running around Alexandra Palace launching frisbees into the stratosphere, the ones who're plugging things in and carrying things about, the Old Ladies 'n Wives trucking around with their kids...
Everybody is grinning.
Jerry Garcia is grinning as well, wandering around in circles on the stage with his guitar tuned right in on the intergalactic noodle wavelength and a seraphic grin plastered over his mug.
His fingers trucking along busily like the game little troupers they are, he listens with his head on one side to the almost imperceptible sound of his beard growing.
A week ago he only had stubble.
Now he's sporting a Full Fledged Growth. They don't call him the Fastest Beard In The West for nothing.
What's da story, Jerry?
Welllllll, the story is that Jerry Garcia is standing in front of a scale model of the Great Wall of China playing his geetar. There's a bit of Kozmic Ragtime, some patented repeat-echo doodlerama...and what a lovely smile. The Osmonds should be so lucky as to be able to smile with the warm, friendly sincerity of the Grateful Dead and their crew. Why they weren't signed up for a Coke commercial hasta be one of the best-kept secrets of all time.
I mean, here's just one example – just one – of how thoroughly, overwhelmingly wonderful the Dead are. Are you ready for this?
It seems that at the Watkins Glen Festival (which out-statisticked Woodstock by 150,000 folks) the Dead set up speaker towers geometrically proceeding into the audience, complete with a delay system to keep it all in phase, so that even if you were one helluva way back you could still get good sound.
And – here's the killer part – they wired a goddam radio transmitter into the sound system so that all the people stuck out in the traffic jams could hear Thuh Day–ud on their itty-bitty car radios.
Now, ain't that sump'n? Would you get ELP doing that? Would you get The Faces doing that? Wouldja? Wouldja, huh?
So Uncle Jerry stashes his axe and, still grinning through his chin-warmer, saunters back-stage to a room full of impressive-looking electronic devices. On the previous night, some extremely agile thieves had descended through an airvent and ripped off a tape deck.
"It's basically what we get for starting late," beams Garcia. "That's the karma – the starting-late karma."
A philosopher, yet!

Okay, Jerry, let's do the interview. There's one real insiders' Grateful Dead question, the real heavy secret that we've all wanted to know for the last seven years, which is – how the hell do ya manage to play them long sets without needing to slink off and take a leak?
Is it some form of esoteric Yoga bladder control that you learned from Ken Kesey? Do you have tubes strapped under your jeans. What's the deal?
"Hahaaa. There isn't any real secret, I don't think...and I'm also not a beer-drinker, which probably makes a big difference. I haven't really thought about that before" – something goes click, Garcia's brain revolves 180 degrees and he feeds in another punch card – "There are times when somebody will leave the stage for some reason or other...it just doesn't seem like it.
"We don't really do five hours directly. Like we'll play an hour and a half or so, and then come back. Makes the whole thing more reasonable. Hahaaa."
"When you went off last night, I walked out into the crowd," volunteers a member of the road crew, "an' a lotta people thought you were putting them on a hype trip".
Garcia nods a couple of times, inserts an untipped Camel into his smile. "I can't understand why they would think that. They might think that that was where the band was at. I'm on a self-destruction programme," he says, alluding to the untipped cigarette. No filter tip's gonna come between you and that ol' debbil cancer, right, Jerry?
"Maybe. Hahaaa. Death has a better than fair chance anyway. Like tooth decay."
Ye-e-ah...mighty fine lookin' PA system you got there, Jerry.
"The reason that we have it and the reason that we developed it 'n all that is that we weren't really anticipating an amazing growth in our audience, which has happened, and so in terms of – uh – respecting the situation and trying to deal with it righteously, our point of view has been, well, since we're playing to larger audiences in larger places, the thing to do should be to divert the energy into improving the quality of the performance.
"Obviously, the bigger the place, the worse the sound."
Yeah, but Jerry, that problem exists for lotsa bands...
"Yeah, but not that many acts are concerned about it."
Oh.
"It's a problem of individual responsibility. If the musicians feel very strongly about it, then it's up to them to do something about it.
"The economics of rock and roll don't allow for trying to get a better and better sound, since the idea is to cut down on expenses. Our motive is simply a sense of responsibility about what it is. When you're playing in a big room, there's no way to – uh – de-escalate."
So that's why you play all those club gigs in your spare time, huh, Jerry?
"Oh, I do those 'cuz I'm a musician. I'm a player. The thing I want to do most is to play. I wanna learn how to play better, and the only way you can do that is to play."
Hey, Jerry...didja hear about Windsor? Bummer, man. Bad vibes, y'know?
"We've seen it happen in the United States...time and time again. It's almost at the point now where you can describe music as an illegal activity in terms of the free equation. Woodstock and Altamont and all the other large-scale things that were characterised by a certain amount of confusion or violence have all produced a new level of paranoia. We still get busted a lot.
"Basically we're outlaws. We're viewed as outlaws, and we've developed outlaw-style protective colouration. We're not immune, by any means. We haven't gained any degree of respectability."
Well, you could play it like the Allmans and get a dude from the diplomatic corps to waltz you through customs...
"Yeah. Hahaaaa. Screw it, I'd rather take my chances. I don't like to feel that I'm existing on that level. That's not who I am at all. I don't like any of the trappings of success at all. They're all poison. It's hard enough just playin', and that's all I wanna do."
In that case, does it hang ya up to be a guru 'n a "signpost to new space" and all the rest of that Charles Reich aardvaark waste?
"It could, but...I don't deal with my public image. I regret having ever spoken to anyone...haHAAAAh...but I feel that as long as I have...I have a kinda responsibility to follow it up and clarify it as much as I can.
"The difficulty is that my viewpoint is not static. My mind is dynamic and my thoughts are changing and my ideas are changing. I'm embarrassed by that book (Garcia: A Signpost To New Space by Charles Reich and Jann Wenner), I'm embarrassed by seeing my name in print, I'm embarrassed by having to be out on stage, I'm embarrassed...on many levels."
Whoooo-ee. It's amazing that Garcia can even bring himself to walk out of his house in the morning.
"I really just love to play, y'know? I love to play without having to be – uh – fulfilling this human drama aspect of – uh – whatever it is."
Jerry Garcia is really such a nice old hippie that I felt kind of bad about talking to him under false pretences. I mean, I saw the Dead two years ago at Wembley and they were great, but I've never been able to get off at all on their records. So I said just that.
"Ye-e-ahh – our records are awful."
Huh??????
"We've never bothered too much, y'know? HaHAAAA-haah! I don't think that recording is a suitable form for us. The live thing is what we do."
Well, if we're all agreed that the Dead's records just don't cut it, doesn't that make them a bit of a rip-off, something of a burn?
"That's exactly it. HaaHaaa-ha!! It's a burn for us and for the public, too. We've never really made money from records. Our records have always like sold to a small, closed audience. We've never scored big from records. We've always spent more making them than we've made back...or some other permutation of unsuccessful possibility.
"A lot of people come to see us, but don't buy our records. There's a whole big scene of people who do nothing but swap live tapes of us – for free! That's a heavier trip than records, y'know?"
Has having your own label made any difference on that level?
"Yes, it's made it possible for us to get into a – uhhh – a scheming bag, y'know? Haa – HAAAA! We've got our own record company, which means that we can make any kind of crazy plans we want to.
"We can spend time...plotting, y'know. It gives us something to play with. And it also means that we can make records 'n stuff without feeling 'we're gonna turn out another record for The Man'."
The Dead not only tape every single show that they perform, but they even tape their soundchecks as well, even if the soundcheck is just Garcia doodling for three hours. It all goes down on tape. Why d'ya tape everything, Jerry?
"We-e-e-e-lll...you can't always trust your memory...can you?"
But what do you do with all these miles of tape?
"We take 'em all back to California and burn 'em. Hey – take a look at this." He ambles over to a corner of the room and pulls this huge mound of celluloid tagliatelle out from behind a chair. "This here is last night's show." He lets it cascade back on to the floor, wipes his boot on it, and drifts back out on to the stage to play a little more.

*

When you glance over the sleeve credits on West Coast albums of the last few years, you get a distinct "old pals act" vibe off the whole schmear. Maybe these guys are getting a little insular in their old age. Hey, Jerry, have you ever been to see Alice Cooper?
"I never have; never seen him perform. Never been curious enough. It's not my trip. I'm not that much of an entertainment freak. If I go out, I go out to hear some music, and I usually know what I'm going to hear.
"If I'm goin' out, I'm goin' out because I know that so-and-so is playing bass. I hardly ever go to see rock and roll bands, because I'm not into the space of being able to get off on a rock and roll band. Whatever I would be digging would be whatever the band's limitations were, and I'm less interested in my own music than in the music I'm going out to see.
"So if I'm gonna go out, it automatically has to be better than me, which means that it has to be better than anything I'm better than. And I'm better than a lot of rock and roll bands.
"I have a small percentage of get-off space. There's not many things that get me off. It has to be pretty deep."
Hmmmmmm...it does seem as if Jerry Garcia is getting a trifle hidebound these days. I mean, it's one thing to rap about striving for new forms 'n all that garf, but if you don't bother to check out where other people are at, then there's a very real danger of getting a trifle out of touch.

*

Jerry Garcia is a genuinely charming old hippie. If he wasn't in the Dead and wasn't a star and lived down the street from me, I'd probably try and hang out with him a lot and maybe cop the odd guitar lesson from him. But listening to the Dead these days is like visiting your relatives.
It's pleasant and relaxing and really quite enjoyable, but it's also more than a little soporific. They've lost most of their punch and power, and their music now is rich and full, but sluggish and old and fat and slow.
They open up their set with Chuck Berry's 'Around And Around' played about as inappropriately as is possible. It would be foolish to sing: "Well, the joint was flowin', flowin' round and round/just ebbin' and a-flowin', what a laid-back sound," but that's really the way it is.
Even when the Dead play Berry, it just doesn't rock.
Not that I'd want them to come on with strobe lights, power chords and green eye make-up, but...hey, wake up in there, you guys! It is only on 'Peggy-O' and 'I Know You Rider' that their laid-backery coalesces with their material and produces music of genuine, tranquil beauty.
The blue lights highlight the grey in Garcia's hair and beard, turning it almost silvery. He looks very old against the clean-cut All-American Boy collegiate look currently sported by Bob Weir.
Even that phoenix-like guitar sparkle seems a trifle dimmed, and the same licks just seem to be coming around again.
And – horror of horrors – at one point he even leaves the stage between numbers to take a leak.
Another illusion shattered.

(by Charles Shaar Murray, from New Musical Express, 21 September 1974)

October 1974: Death of the Dead

DEATH OF THE DEAD? 

 

San Rafael -- We had been watching a horror movie on the BBC, and by the time we started upstairs, we were terrified. The house, a ready-for-demolition Victorian pile, creaked ominously as we climbed the steeply-angled servants' stairs. Sheet-shrouded furniture, familiar by day, loomed eerily from around corners. After a brief fling at rationality ("We're adults. This is silly."), followed almost immediately by a return of the willies ("I'll watch the door while you go to the john if you stand out in the hall when I go."), my housemate hit on the cure: "Put on a Grateful Dead album." It worked. Halfway through "Ripple," things already seemed brighter. Sure that no monsters lurked in the shadows, we went happily off to our rooms. 

They have always been good for what ails us, but now the Dead are dying. Three winters ago, they played a four-night stand at the Felt Forum. Though they could easily have swooped into New York and shaken their money-makers for only one night at the Garden, they chose to work the smaller hall. But last summer, they played only once - at umpty-thousand seat Roosevelt Stadium. And now they've announced that they will not be coming back to New York - or anywhere else - for a while. Maybe never. The Grateful Dead will no longer perform live, and the Golden Age of Boogie is over. 

"Listen, if there's one thing we learned in ten years on the road," said Ron Rakow of Grateful Dead Records, "it's that celebration is a valid form of revolution." He's wrong. There are any number of reasons why the Dead are going into hibernation, and one of them is that they tried to run their revolution as though it were a celebration. It didn't work. 

Their revolution - not the one that made us boogie on our chairs, but the one that made record company execs quake in theirs - was structural rather than stylistic. True to their mushy Marin principles, the Dead thought music belonged to the people, and they put their money where their minds were. Unlike the adaptive model of rich hippie-cynics - who usually perceived the absurdity of a rock'n'roll "industry" as clearly as they did - the Dead tried to do something about it. They created what was essentially a people's corporation - a family if you will. Rather than working through an established booking agency, they fostered their own (Out of Town Tours, Inc.) in a corner of their San Rafael office, and peopled it with Dead Heads. And their own travel agency (Fly-by-Night) in another. Finally - and most threateningly - they began their own, independently-distributed, record label. 

Out of Town Tours expired in a welter of accusations a few months ago, sending its director (Sam Cutler, of Altamont fame) back to Texas. The people who worked for him - all of them long-time members of the Dead family - were then visited by Hell's Angels and told never to work for the Dead again. "They said something would be coming along in about a month, and that we'd be taken care of," one recalled, "but that if we took any job connected with the Dead, they'd come after us." Far out, man. 

Fly-by-Night folded several weeks ago, and last week a for rent sign went up on the floor of offices that once housed the Dead's operations. The real estate agent says a group of dentists may take it. 

Yet the record company - the most genuinely revolutionary of the Dead's offspring - continues. In a decaying house forever safe from invading dentists, plans go on for a resurrection. The band will continue to record (and a good thing, too - "From Mars Hotel" is their best album since "American Beauty"), and may go back on the road sometime in 1976. If they can find a sane way to do it. 

That condition will be a hard one to meet. Victimized by their own success, the Dead got caught in a spiral of working larger halls so that they could make enough money to support their corporate family, which meant they needed exponentially increasing amounts of equipment (800 lbs. in 1965; 6000 in 1968; 30,000 in 1973; 56,000 now) and more people to transport it and set it up. Which meant more overhead, hence a need to play larger halls. Which meant more equipment... 

All of which was compounded by the legendary disorganization of their entropic road crew. To some extent, their 32-hour set-up time was a function of the complicated equipment and the band's perfectionist zeal. But it also reflected the lingering inability of acid casualties to concentrate on the job - any job - at hand. Besides, who's to give orders in an anarchist family? 

So the band found itself working harder and harder in its attempt to give huge audiences the same experience that they used to share with small ones - with no discernible increase in net income. Though about one-third of their income came from record royalties, almost all their enormous overhead (well over $100,000 a month) went to touring. Six musicians up on stage, not having as much fun as they used to, supporting people who often acted less like family than like superannuated spare-change artists. No wonder the party's over. 

They talk now, bravely, of alternatives. Perhaps buy raw land eight places in the world, then travel from one spot to another, setting up and playing for as long as people want to hear them...or maybe four-walling the group in small halls for a month at a time...or...or... But for now, it's over. Next weekend's Winterland concerts will be the last. 

Say this for the Dead: they tried. And say too that we will miss them.

 

(by Geoffrey Stokes, from the "Rock Notes" column, Village Voice, October 31, 1974) 

March 22-23, 1970: Pirate's World, Dania, Florida

GOOD TIMES BAD TIMES

 

There were two big surprises at Pirate's World this past weekend involving rock concerts. 

The first was the super show Country Joe and the Fish put on Friday and Saturday night before average-sized crowds. Most expected little, got a big high, and left happy. 

The second surprise was the down feeling left by the Grateful Dead after performances on Sunday and Monday night. Most went expecting the best show ever. They left disappointed. 

 

Country Joe and his group fooled around for many years before hitting it in a big way. In fact, the spring of 1969 was the turning point. Only Joe McDonald and Barry Melton were still around from the original group. The decision was made to try the hard rock scene, and the other three making up the group were not hard to find. 

Now McDonald is the lead vocal and Melton the lead guitar, doing some vocal as well. Mark Kapner, who grooves to the organ, piano and uke, has been with the Fish since the spring. Drummer Greg Dewey left Mad River to join the Fish, while Doug Metzler left New York's top underground band, the Group Image, to join this group. 

The original Fish got together in 1965, specializing in light rock, blues, even a little country. It soon was obvious that this combination wasn't going to work, so the hard rock style was adopted. 

Since the group's rebirth in '69, gigs have been easy to come by. The Woodstock Festival was one of the early stops. Soon followed the New Orleans Pop Festivals and the Thunderbird Peach Festival in Canada. A world tour ended back in New York at the Fillmore. 

This year the group has been going better than ever. The release of a fifth LP helped, but the concert this past weekend set off the group for good in South Florida. 

The start of the music was greeted with little attention and less applause. The people were rapping with each other, with the Fish playing in the background. Then a feeling swept through all assembled. Soon the attention was focused on the stage. 

Country Joe swung into "Summer Dress" and "Sun A Rocket" with the kids starting to get into it. It wasn't until the last 20 minutes of the hour and 40 minute concert that the people were set off. 

When McDonald invoked a trick used often by B.B. King the people got hep. He invited the crowd to sing along as the group rocked into the top single "The Love Machine." The 15 minute version of the cut was the final wonder of a pile of wonders. 

Mick Jagger said it best for this group when he was quoted: "It's the singer, not the song." 

Country Joe proved this cliche this past week. 

 

There was a different type of crowd at Pirate's World Sunday and Monday night for the Grateful Dead. More hair and less teeny-boppers showed. It was obvious something heavy was going to happen. 

The Dead, who have shown in the past their dislike of the payed-for concert, put on a lackadaisical show that lasted for little over an hour. Few listened to the group. Less got into the sound. 

"The man in the streets isn't ready for our sound," said group leader Jerry Garcia several months ago in ROLLING STONE. "Rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's is groovy," says second man Phil Lesh. "As long as you render to God's what is God's. But now Caesar demands it all, and we gotta be straight with God first." 

One of the many problems the Grateful Dead have encountered is their inability to cope with the straight world. The original group that became the Dead, the Warlocks, "were already on the crazy-eyed fanatic trip," according to Garcia. 

Seldom does the group go on stage without every member being in some state of drug-induced euphoria. They say they do better while stoned. 

Jerry said: "Okay, so you take LSD and suddenly you are aware of another plane, or several other planes, and the quest is to extend that limit, to go as far as you can go. In the Acid Tests, that meant to do away with the old forms, with old ideas, try something new!" 

He felt this was one of the keys to the sound. 

For some reason or other, the Grateful Dead did not put on a heavy show last weekend. Maybe this area doesn't dig the sound or the members of the group. Maybe the trip the Dead are on is coming to an abrupt end.

 

(by Angelo Rescinti, from the Hollywood Sun-Tattler, March 27, 1970) 

https://archive.org/details/gd70-03-24.sbd.miller.32054.sbeok.flacf 

http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2015/04/march-24-1970-pirates-world-dania-fl.html

April 1971: Boston Music Hall & Fillmore East

April 8, 1971 - Boston Music Hall 

 

[The first part of the review covered Three Dog Night at Boston Garden.]

 

[ . . . ]  If the Garden was a triumph for one of the best of the mass favorites, the Boston Music Hall was a disaster for one of the leading elitist favorites. I don't care who you are or what your taste is - if Three Dog Night had taken that stage last Thursday night for five minutes, they would have come closer to doing what the Grateful Dead failed to do all evening: getting people off. The Dead performed like slobs. The sound was unmixed - you couldn't hear the bass until halfway through the concert when someone finally got the bright idea of turning it up. Never known for their singing ability, the vocalists butchered everything in sight. Someone in that group sings consistently off key, and whoever he is they ought to find him, put a towel in his mouth, and tell him to cool it. Their instrumental work was uninspired, their performing attitude sterile and, in the words of the Last Poets, sanctimonious. 

Who cares if they play for six hours when four of them are less than ordinary, less than interesting, less than moving? Should it really be necessary to wade through hours and hours of rambling uncertainty and false starts for twenty minutes of solid jamming? Thursday night at the Music Hall it was strictly coitus interruptus: the band never really came. 

The audience was a show, too. Where Three Dog Night gets high school students, the Dead gets the dropouts. There was enough manic dizziness, enough mindless reacting, and enough dope to last this city for the next six months. 

The Dead may be a great band in their own way because they know how to build energy. On record, they take the time to make sure it sounds right. But live - whew. How long can they go on without a good lead singer, a good drummer, and so detached an attitude? 

The most frustrating thing about them is that they are constantly repairing with one hand what they have destroyed with another. Jerry Garcia tried to sing Smokey Robinson's "I Second That Emotion." His heart was in the right place but the band was simply not up to this kind of material. His singing was horrid. I threw my hands up in disgust only to hear him line out a beautifully melodic solo on guitar (he is an unquestionably fine guitarist) in the very next instant. 

Such are the confusions of the Grateful Dead. One minute they do something beneath criticism and the next they do something above it. Jerry Garcia can't sing but he sure can play. They are masters of the change-up. And we all know that change-up pitchers are good in short doses but don't make it over the long haul. 

 

* * *  

April 25, 1971 - Fillmore East

I saw the Dead again last Sunday at the Fillmore East. The mail on my previous report was so critical that I had no choice but to see them again, to check my reactions. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I was right. They were every bit as bad at the Fillmore as they were at the Music Hall. And while the audience cheered ritualistically, everyone in the Fillmore seemed to realize it wasn't happening. 

The Dead have gotten themselves into marathon consciousness. They are equating length with some sort of musical virtue. They have forgotten how to edit themselves and they force you to listen to so much bad music in order to hear some fine things that it just doesn't seem worth it. No one really knows why Mickey Hart left the group, but Bill Kreutzmann is not a good enough drummer to carry them alone. Despite their frequent use of (very mediocre) harmony, the critical absence of a lead singer with a competent voice cannot be disguised. As for the rest, well, no one has ever accused the group of being tight and they certainly aren't. Their music has no drive, nothing compelling, nothing that pushes you forward. It sits there and happens. Presumably that is the quality that appeals to their devotees, and I can vaguely see why.

That does not change the fact that the group does certain things that are incontestably atrocious. Anyone who has ever seen the Rascals running wild on a stage - anyone who has ever listened to Felix Cavaliere sing on their first album - has got to laugh at Pigpen doing their "Good Lovin'." He sings off key, he ignores the melody, and he fails to convey any feeling. If you don't believe me, listen to the Rascals do it just once. Likewise Jerry Garcia's lame version of "I Second That Emotion," and the entire ensemble's work on "Not Fade Away." In every case where the Dead do someone else's material, their interpretation is manifestly inferior. The most notable instance in all of Dead history was, of course, their butchery of Bobby Bland's "Turn On Your Love Light." 

The audience applauds about the same for every song. They don't seem to recognize any differences in quality or interest within the performance itself. To me, that kind of lack of discrimination is indicative of an insensitivity to the Dead's music in particular, and music in general. In no way is it a tribute to the group. 

(by Jon Landau, from the Boston Phoenix, April 1971)

 

 

Compare to: 

http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2020/11/april-7-1971-music-hall-boston-ma.html 

http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2019/06/april-25-1971-fillmore-east.html 

March 1981: Mickey Hart Interview

MICKEY HART: RHYTHM DEVIL

CL: Tell us something of your background up until you joined the Dead.

MH: My mother and father were both rudimental drummers and they were involved in the drum corps scene on the East Coast in the 30's and 40's.
My mother taught me how to play the drums - the rudiments. I went through High School on Long Island and played in the school band, and I started to play rock and roll at the weekends in small clubs. The first combo I had, I thought it was a rock and roll combo, I was playing drums and we had an accordion and a valve trombone! That was the trio. Then we got into guitars but we still didn't know what we were doing.
Then I went into the Air Force because they have the best rudimental drummers in the world. I figured that was the only way to get next to drummers of that calibre. Spent a lot of time playing - clubs at night and in marching bands during the day.
Afterwards when I came out I started a drum store on the Peninsula, Jerry was teaching guitar out there - and everybody was hanging out in Palo Alto. I was hanging out with this guy called Sonny Payne who was the drummer with the Count Basie Band. I admired that big band style and once in a while I got a chance to sit in with them in rehearsals and things.
I met Kreutzmann one night and we just started drumming on cars and things. It was with Sonny I think, yeah that's right, I'd taken Sonny to see Janis who'd just started at the Matrix. It was her first gig there or something. It was so loud, James Gurley picked up the guitar and raped it. If you're talking about where punk rock came from - there was nothing like James Gurley. He took that guitar, turned round and embraced the amplifier, turned it right up, shook it, did a little dance with it and rapped it on the floor and it was magnificent. It was the best solo I'd ever heard. Sonny got a headache and walked out of my life that night.
Anyway I met Kreutzmann and he told me about the Dead. So I went to hear them, couldn't believe them, sounded great. He asked me to play for the second set. So I brought my drum set, started playing. Yeah, that was probably at the Straight Theater and we really did play Alligator for two hours.
In those days we'd take a lot of psychedelics and play for long periods of time and we'd get into really monstrous jams. Truly monumental, they had a life of their own, never lived again. That night was really inspired I think, it had to be in order for me to play with the band forever. You knew you were one of the Grateful Dead. You couldn't follow that stuff, there was no way you could academically, technically or mathematically keep up with the Grateful Dead. It would be impossible. Especially then, we didn't know as much as we do now, so it had to come from another place, it was magic.

CL: Tell me about Mickey Hart and the Heartbeats. Were there just the 3 nights at the Matrix?

MH: Was that all there was, I have more tapes than that I think. Someone gave me a whole set of those tapes. He took cassettes right off the masters. Jack Cassady played one night and so did Elvin Bishop. The Heartbeats were really the Dead without Pig Pen and Weir. It wasn't a blues band - it was very experimental music. There we were in the Matrix, this tiny coffee shop. We were set up in there looking at the wall which was only 8 or 10 feet away. There were people coming in off the street, they didn't know who it was. They thought it was a coffee shop, we'd come on and we'd kill them. There was virtually no singing, we played for hours. The only rule was that there were no rules.
I was sick one time at the hospital and somebody slipped the whole set of tapes under the door. That whole period was very far out. It was like trying food for the first time.

CL: Like the Carousel?

MH: The Carousel was amazing. It was our own place, the familiarity of it was an asset musically. It was home. Musically speaking it was like a creative laboratory. Doing one-nighters you're exposed to various elements, there's an uncertainty to your existence. It's like me, I don't live a normal life, it takes me four hours to psyche myself to get up there and do what I do and 3 or 4 at the other end coming down.
Anyway at the Carousel we were in a really important developmental stage musically and technically. We were children in an adult world, and like children we were doing really desperate things and it paid great dividends.
I used to hitch-hike to the Carousel, I didn't have a car, we were making $50 a week, for years! There was a time when we weren't even getting salaries! We were literally hunting for our food. It wasn't hardship, we were all having fun, smoking lots of dope. Me and Bobby and Phil were living not far from 710 Ashbury on Belvedere Street, Kreutzmann lived there for a time too. It got too small at 710. I lived in this closet, had a stairway in it. All I had was an Ali Raka record, a bed, and a candle. Some of the best times I ever had were in the closet.
San Francisco's a creative city, I get the chills just thinking about it. I'm alive there. It's like sticking your musical self into this great plug.

CL: I believe you once played bass with Country Joe & The Fish around that time?

MH: Oh that one! Me and Barry [Melton] were hanging out, working on some project or other, and Joe called him up as something had happened with the bass player and I was learning then. I didn't know any chords, didn't know what changes were or anything. Melton took me down to the gig. I brought my Ring Modulator and Olympic fretless bass and plugged in. I thought it was great. It flipped Joe out. He couldn't believe it. I wasn't concerned with the changes so much as the colour and the intensity. But then Joe used to go up there and sleep for 45 minutes. I don't know about Joe, but it was like comatose music. Same fucking songs, same fucking way. He's not what I call inspiration, musically speaking, let's put it that way - I know he didn't like my bass playing, I sort of like him for it. Over the years I'd say, 'If you need a bass player - call me up', and he goes into a frenzy.
God - that was a long time ago. Barry loved it, but Dorothy Moscowitz came up to me and said, 'Mickey Hart, you know you're random!' and I said 'Yes, I know, thank you. That's the nicest thing you could have said to me,' and she went to pieces and walked away. There is a certain randomness to me and there is that to music.
I never lacked balls especially when it comes to exploring new music. Just before we came over I played this gig with the Rhythm Devils. [Feb 13-14, 1981] Me and Kreutzmann, Airto and Lesh and Flora Purim. We performed at the Marin Veterans Auditorium, recorded direct to disc, sounded great - and that was new music. That was my 1981 version of new music, I let Lesh play bass on that one, but the percussion was all the percussion I'd assembled over the years. Anyway, new music, that's what I'm into, that's what I'm after.

CL: How did the New Riders come about?

MH: Jerry wanted to learn the Pedal Steel. We had Marmaduke, Bob Matthews, and Dave Nelson, and we set up in my barn. I wanted to learn about country and western music, so we set up a workshop.
Being in the Dead was like wearing a spacesuit and being in the New Riders was like wearing a pair of jeans. I couldn't go back and forth in one evening. It was the New Riders, then the Acoustic Dead and the Dead. I loved it, but do you know how many hours a night that was? Dryden had left the Airplane. (I venture that I'd heard he couldn't keep up with their long sets.) Yeah. He didn't really work at being a drummer. I have to keep myself in shape, I did even then. Dryden never did. [line missing] All good drummers but they never thought of their art as physical. They just saw it as practicing the drums. I have to run 8 or 10 miles a day or I go nuts.
Actually, talking of Dave Getz, he is one of the few drummers that really knocked me flat out. He was at Winterland, Janis and Big Brother. Jerry and I were sitting at the top. In those days we could just go out and dig it, unheard of now. All of a sudden, it's the last number of the set and he plays this monstrous drum solo. On the last note he hits the floor tom tom and as he did so he just got up in the same movement and walked off. I was a Dave Getz fan from that day on. Spencer Dryden did it for me at the Fillmore once.
Ginger Baker did it once at the Winterland with Cream, we'd just finished mixing Aoxomoxoa or one of those, and we walked in just as he was getting into his solo. It was amazing, I turned to Jerry and said, 'They have to be the best band in the world' and he said 'Tonight they are the best band in the world.' They were that night.
We invited them to play with us. We played in Sacramento [3/11/68] and Kreutzmann and I get really up for it. We got there and we played and we were the best band in the world that night, no one could play like that. Ginger got crazy and they went out there and I really felt for them because they blew out every speaker on the first note. They were trying to reach our intensity. We were sitting in the front row and we thought about it and so we got our equipment guys, Ramrod and Heard to roll all our equipment out. They played through it and it was so clear it scared the shit out of Clapton, they were used to feeding back through all their Marshalls.
But Ginger was great, there aren't many drummers that can do that to me. Of course Ali [Rakha] does it to me, a lot more. They only did it to me once in their lives. They have to be really inspired. I went to see Billy Cobham last night, mediocre. A great drummer and he's a friend of mine but mediocre. I'd say that if he was here.
He played with us at Radio City (New York, last November) [10/30/80] and afterwards he said to me 'I had no idea. Do you know where this is?' and then he said, 'I guess you do, you're doing this all the time'. He answered his own question, I didn't have a chance to reply. He got turned on to the place that I've taken percussion, what I consider percussion to be. I mean you can't stay in Buddy Rich land forever, that's nowhere.

CL: Why did you leave the Dead?

MH: There was something in my mind that I wanted to do. Also I didn't like touring and the Road was getting a little much for me. I'm into the outdoors. There were minor inner squabbles but mainly it was my own quest to find out what I sounded like personally, instead of just in the Grateful Dead. At that time I built a studio at my house with Dan Healey and learnt about electronics. I didn't just drop out, I went straight into working on Rolling Thunder. I hadn't been able to work on it on the road, it took so much thought. But one good thing about the Dead is that you either are the Grateful Dead or you're not the Grateful Dead, so when I came back I was just back. There was no asking. It was just a matter of 'now it's time, I've finished what I had to do - now I'm ready to play'. I just brought my drums down one night and played and that was it - that's pretty much the way it went.

CL: I've seen it suggested that part of the reason you left was that the Dead's music was getting less complex and your role as ace percussionist was becoming less essential?

MH: That was part of it certainly, but the biggest part was wanting to find out what I sounded like. If I had wanted to be there, I would have been there. I would have made a situation, played percussion, done something to make it musically feasible for me to stay. My leaving was definitely a positive thing, I was just after something else. I knew they wouldn't forget me. I knew that some way, when the time was right it would all come together again. It's a great example of their flexibility that it could happen like that.

CL: Tell us some more about the Barn.

MH: Over the years since it was built up it has become my college. I do things in there that most people wouldn't do, for many reasons. It's my laboratory; it's where I discover stuff that I want to use. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don't. It's also available to some of my friends, like Barry Melton, his is about the most mainstream music that we've recorded there. Most of my work is electronic or high level percussion. I reproduce it my own way and I learn about stuff, you can study all that forever.
The Barn became an Oasis for a large number of people. Now I also go out and record remote - which I call MERT. I don't charge for that because if I make a mistake, ok well it's an experiment, but I do it pretty well and mistakes are rare. All I ask them for is a copy of the tape. I want to be able to get to my locker in the middle of the night and be able to pick out a vintage Ali Akbar Khan from 72 that I've recorded, it's like my wine cellar. I study the world's music, I've been to the Arctic Circle, Cairo, Tokyo, wherever and bring it back. That's my joy. Having the Barn has enabled me to become an engineer.
We recorded just so much stuff there, including my second and third solo albums which have never been released. Fire on the Mountain (the 2nd one) wasn't released because Warners wanted me to go out and tour and I wouldn't. They were looking for a pop oriented thing. There's another example of 'new music' - it may sound great now but back then, can you imagine. When I played it at Warners they all walked out - Joe Smith walked out. I'll never forget it. I realized I had succeeded, I thought 'Wow I must be onto something'. The third record really flipped them out. I'm into new music at almost any cost - as a desperate man should. That's my future.

CL: What about Diga? I believe it's possible to trace their origins back to a Dead gig at the Greek Theater in Berkeley in 68.

MH: That's right. It was Vince Delgado on Dumbeck, Shakhar Ghosht, me and Kreutzmann. It was in the middle of Alligator, we rolled the amps apart, brought the risers forward and played, for a very long time. [9/20/68]
Anyway I went on to study with Shankar Ghosht, I studied tabla and I taught him traps. Also I was working with Ali Raka, we stayed together for days around the time we were recording Aoxomoxoa. I went back and studied at his school and he introduced me to his son, Zakir Hussein - Zakir had a bunch of tabla students, there was also a conga player, a vibe player, and a marimba player, and we all got together and worked out those incredible ornate compositions, for over a year or so. We put it together in the back room.
Anyway one day Grace Slick called me up. Oh right. Grace and I were working on Kung Fu movie scores. I played her a tape of the new percussion band and she loved it. She said 'we're playing at Winterland, would you like to open for us'. [May 16-17, 1975] So I took all these kids down there and it was great, Ali [Rakha] was in the audience. He loved it. Owsley was doing the PA. Then we played in the park. [5/30/75] But there were 14 people and it was too cumbersome to keep it together or take it on the road. So that was Diga.

CL: The Rhythm Devils?

MH: Rhythm Devils are the bastard son of Diga. In the second set we take our solo. When Coppola came and asked me to do the score, I put together Airto, because he's the jungle man and Flora and we did that record. I wanted to take it out live to play new music with old instruments. We had all my things plus Airto's 'sound sculptures', these large metal sculptures that you play. He's a magician. He plays traps really well now and his percussion is superb. Where else do you find out about these jungle things. You have to go to the real thing: Airto. Kreutzmann has become addicted to talking drums. Mike Hinton is a former student of mine when I had the drum store in Palo Alto, he's played with Sinatra and Liza Minnelli, all those Broadway shows. He's a doctor of percussion from Julliard - not too shabby. Phil Lesh on 'unusual' bass. A very unusual ensemble.

(by John Platt, from Comstock Lode magazine #9, 1981)

* 

 

Here are some excerpts from the interview Mickey did with Swing 51 during the same visit to London, March 1981, printed some years later.

 

MICKEY HART: THUNDER ROLLING  [excerpts]
 

From the editor's introduction:
This interview dwells on fairly esoteric subject matter as far as standard Grateful Dead interviews go. This was deliberate as the interview was originally going to appear in the now defunct Dark Star magazine and the focus was on some of Hart's less mainstream activities. Dark Star's Grateful Dead special issue never appeared which was a shame because for its time it would have been out of the ordinary. Nowadays - with the standards set by that excellent Californian magazine Golden Road - people would probably not even bat an eyelid...
The primary focus to the interview was on Hart's many side-projects and the wealth of material that has never seen any commercial release. This subject matter not only included Hart's 1972 solo album Rolling Thunder and its unreleased follow-ups such as Fire On The Mountain and The Silent Flute, but also work with some of the transitory spin-off bands. It also delved into Hart's own original forays into ethnic or world music...

[The questions weren't printed in this interview.]

I was hanging out with Sonny Payne, who was the drummer with Count Basie. I played jazz. I played with Gerry Mulligan a little bit; I played some gigs with him in Europe. I was into big band. I read. I read music - I say that past tense but I probably still do. I haven't read in a long time. I was schooled in concert band, in dance band, in jazz band, in rudimental drumming. That's where I came from, from the rudimental side. Then I learned the dance drums, the trap set, because I had to make money after-hours to put myself through anything I wanted to be put through - school or whatever. And that's how I made my way when I was younger - by playing 'casuals', we call them, affairs, lame little functions with odd bands. Live musicians playing odd music for odd people! But it was a living and I was young and it was the only way you could do it. There was no rock'n'roll then, or rock'n'roll was just starting.

I had this fascination with Indian music because it was so rhythmically articulate and so developed; it was muscular rhythmically speaking. Mostly in the West it's harmony and melody, which is not very familiar in Indian music. Which is melody. But it was rhythmically so developed that I was naturally attracted to it. My teacher was Alla Rakha, Ravi Shankar's drummer, who I sought out years before. I studied at the Ali Akbar Khan College of Music, so I guess that was the beginnings of Diga when I studied classical Indian music. I studied time, tabla, and just your way of going about Indian music, and because it was so sophisticated rhythmically I could wallow in it. Then it worked its way into my style and my thought and I started composing with the added attraction of having all that experience in Indian music.

The beginning of Diga was actually in '68 when Vince Delgado, who was part of the Ali Akbar Khan College of Music, and Shankar Ghosh, the tabla player, sat in with us - me and Kreutzmann - on 'Alligator' at the Berkeley Community Theater and we played for about an hour.
Then I met Zakir Hussain. Alla Rakha introduced me to his son, Zakir, who played with Mahavishnu and Shakti and all those things. A master musician. He's one of the few really talented percussionists in the world. He got all his tabla students together. We got a conga player, a marimba player, a vibe player, and we practiced for a year or so in the back rooms. We learned all these compositions which were very heady and we composed. I put them in The Barn for three months and recorded it. That's where Diga came from. It certainly came from the rhythmic density that I learned from Alla Rakha. [ . . .]

[On leaving the Dead]
We never really split up. I was building my studio and making my records, learning what I sounded like, developing Diga. It didn't seem like taking a backseat. I was quite active, more active than the Grateful Dead. But I didn't go on the road and that's what made a difference.
[Rolling Thunder] was a year of my life. That's what my life sounded like for one year. I really wanted that record to represent somebody's life - mine particularly. It's a true representation because that's where I lived. The rain on the roof - it was the rainy season. I still have 16 tracks of rain! I have boxes of the most beautifully recorded rain in the world.... And there was music and that was the kind of music I was into. I was writing the soundtrack to 'Mickey Hart' that year.
The Shoshone invocation at the beginning of Rolling Thunder is by a medicine man, a Shoshone, a friend and a doctor, the Grateful Dead's doctor. He performs ceremonies and picks his herbs there. He was a certain spiritual inspiration to me and he had a spirit which, I think, embodied the spirit of Rolling Thunder - the studio as well. The invocation is a little prayer thanking the Great Spirit for the music. [ . . . ]

Here's what happened to Fire On The Mountain: it's in a locker somewhere and Warners has it. They signed me up for a few albums and Rolling Thunder was one of them. That was very well received and it was a fine album. Then I went with a second one called Fire On The Mountain which a magnificent version of 'Fire On The Mountain' appears on. I bring it down to Joe Smith and those people at Warner Brothers and they canned it. They wanted 'rock 'em, sock 'em', something to take on the road. I don't think they knew what they had. I don't think they understood it, that fire was in there. They could have been selling fish. They actually walked out on me while I was playing it for them.
A lot of it is me and Jerry at the Palace of Fine Arts. [11/28/73] We got on the stage with our synthesisers and drums and just met and played for four hours. I put some of those tapes on Fire On The Mountain, and there was some stuff that I did with Melton.... All kinds of great, adventurous songs. And also space. Great music, I thought. [ . . . ]
Anyway, I thought those guys [at Warner Brothers] really can't see, so I went into the studio and made the third one - which was not released either - called The Silent Flute.
You haven't heard of that one! That's obscure and that's my best work. A very strong piece of work in a locker someplace in Warner Brothers... I did it all in two weeks and it never saw the light of day. I've never talked about it. [ . . . ]

We live in 415 area code and all my friends like Jim McPherson, John Cippolina, Barry Melton, and David Freiberg were from that area. We got together and played things like 'Ghost Riders In The Sky' and Jim McPherson's songs. Jim McPherson is a great musician and songwriter; he played in Copperhead with Batwang. Cippolina's Batwang....all his guitars've got batwings on them. [ . . . ]
So, we put together this loose, fragmented group of musicians and that's why we called it 415. We never released the material. We just stuck it in the locker. That seems like my life story. Our output is so much greater than our releases. We're pretty prolific.
Most of the big companies aren't really interested in these recordings and I'm not into hawking them. But a lot of them are really worthy. It's just laying there, man. I don't know what's going to happen to it. We play it all the time.... Jerry plays a magnificent solo on 'Fire On The Mountain'. I think the rights might have come back to me [for] Fire On The Mountain. We only leased our records to Warners. After five or seven years those things come back to us. I think I may own it. When did I do it? 1972, and I did Flute right after. It's in limbo.
Maybe Fire On The Mountain will be released some day, if somebody cared to do it, but doing battle with a record company or hassling with a record company is my least favourite occupation, because I'm not very compatible with record companies. We don't see eye to eye on many things. I haven't found one I can even sit down and talk with. Oh, we'll sit down but so far I haven't been able to find a good business relationship with any record company. I wish I could say with Arista it wasn't like that, but it is. When you're a record company all I really need is great distribution... [line missing] the work or its artistic control. Or even any comment on any of the music - it's none of their business. So there are some rules to the way I look at my music, and that's probably why some of it hasn't been released. For example, the advertising has to be sensible. I won't go for pigeons being released or some lame bullshit rap. They wanted to do that with Fire On The Mountain. The Warners guy came up with an idea, saying, 'Let's use doves or something. Release a thousand doves.' I said, 'Pssst. Out! Forget it! Good-bye. You've got the wrong boy." [ . . . ]

A couple of weeks ago [Feb 13-14, 1981] we performed the Rhythm Devils live at Marin Veterans' Auditorium. We went direct-to-disc. It's the first live recording direct-to-disc in concert. It was a milestone album and the tapes sound beautiful. We're talking about deep space, deeeep space. You can see into that record for twenty miles.
It was Airto, Flora Purim, Phil, me and Kreutzmann, and Michael Hinton from Julliard, a doctor of mallets. We rehearsed and we all lived in The Barn for a week, then we went and played. Owsley did the P.A. Crystal Clear are the people on the lathe and I think they'll be releasing that. They have their own distribution. It'll be a limited edition. The Bear also has Nagra tapes, of course. 

We did another Crystal Clear recording with Zakir Hussain and Alla Rakha - the three of us. A live concert. We're building up a library of Crystal Clear recordings. They are exquisite. They sound so good and we're getting better at it.
[ . . . ]

(by Ken Hunt, from Swing 51 magazine #13)
 

 

[Other sections in this interview discuss recording world music, writing songs with Barry Melton on acid, writing 'Ariel' with Hunter, rare recordings with Melton, Hunter & Cippolina, and wearing the white Go To Heaven suit.]

 

Some links: 

http://jgmf.blogspot.com/2015/05/circular-on-mickey-hart-and-rolling.html (Mickey bio) 

http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2009/07/pre-august-1967-mickey-hart.html (Mickey pre-Dead -- see comments)  

http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2016/03/march-11-1968-civic-auditorium.html (Cream) 

http://hooterollin.blogspot.com/2012/08/album-projects-recorded-at-mickey-harts.html (The Barn)  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzUrJDncZ5k (Fire on the Mountain/Area Code 415 sessions)

https://archive.org/details/gd73-11-28.sbd-seastones.finney.968.sbefail.shnf (11/28/73 Jerry/Mickey/Phil/Ned, various tracks -- also more complete here)  

http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2013/01/september-20-1968-berkeley-community.html (Diga origins)

http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2016/05/may-30-1975-speedway-meadows-golden.html (Diga Rhythm Band) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiRgGU7JK0g (Diga 5/30/75)

http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2010/01/rhythm-devils-marin-veterans-memorial.html (Rhythm Devils, Feb '81) 

https://archive.org/details/rhythmdevils1981-02-14.aud.flac16 

Mickey is still playing with Zakir Hussain to this day. Here's some recent work: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr85GrjKeBc (Sound Consciousness: Drones for Sonic Bathing)

 
 

And here's a bonus anecdote from the interview I couldn't leave out:

The Silent Flute has an interesting story. Here is The Silent Flute story.
OK, I'm into martial arts. Grace Slick is into this kung fu stuff too. We're hanging out watching them making kung fu movies. Bruce Lee had just died and they were making these movies in San Francisco at this big house. I was interested in doing the score. I was interested in doing action movies. This was my first look at how it could be.
Then one day Grace says, 'Come on over. I've got something to show you.' She hands me this screenplay. She puts me in this room and closes the door and says, 'Read it.' I started reading this thing and it was called The Silent Flute. What it was was a screenplay by Sterling Silliphant, James Coburn, and Bruce Lee, and it was written for Bruce Lee's next movie. And they canned it! Bruce died. [July 1973] I was just totally taken by the imagery. It's about a guy in his quest for knowledge and he's put to all these tests and these trials. It was magnificent, so well written. I couldn't believe the first draft. So I just said, 'Thank you, Grace.' I'll never forget.
I went home, locked myself in my studio for 2-1/2 weeks. I never left the studio. I had my food put in underneath the door. I didn't change my clothes for a week-and-a-half or two weeks. Serious composing, man! I'd never done that. I probably never will again. I didn't have the script, I just remembered it. And I wrote the score to The Silent Flute. The movie wasn't even in production yet. Grace loved it. Everybody I played it to thought it was just like the movie should have been. I have the ability to do that. Now I can make music and it sounds like what it looks like.
I gave it to Warner Brothers. Jerry was on it too. It was all space. It was gorgeous. Piano. Low frequencies. It was my best work, the best I ever did.
Five years later - this was a couple of years ago, three years ago - I see in a paper that The Silent Flute is going into production with David Carradine with this Richard St. Johns fellow producing it. Warner Brothers were putting it out! Warner Brothers didn't even know that I had written the score years ago. I went to Richard St. Johns and told him and he said, 'What are your qualifications for it? What is your resume?' I've never done a resume in my life! What can I say? 'No, I've not done a movie.' I don't think he took me seriously.
It was made as The Circle of Iron; it was called that eventually. Totally raped by Carradine in Israel. The Circle of Iron was released a year ago and flopped totally. It was awful. They raped it. But originally it was really well done. That's the story of The Silent Flute. Basically I made this music to the imagery of the movie. Of course, what turned out was nothing like what I had seen. That first draft was beautiful. They turned it into a 29-cent special. Bruce Lee would've turned over in his grave.

March 1981: Phil Lesh Interview

PHIL LESH: REDDY KILLOWATT SPEAKS!

CL: There's a quote in the Harrison book that says, 'After the second Acid Test the Dead started playing dragon music, esoteric, asymmetrical music unable to be conceptualized except by a few,' or words to that effect. However all the early Dead recordings from that period, good though they are, sound like slightly psychedelic r n b.

PL: It's hard to differentiate because Hank was not at the Acid Tests. He wasn't welcome as far as I know. He had been our manager, for a short time, he got us one gig and then we moved up the ladder, professionally speaking, and we were working with an agent. After that we had our first major gig, a month long stand, 6 nights a week, 5 sets a night.
So this is all post Harrison having anything to do with the band, anything other than as a friend of mine. So anyway he wasn't at the Acid Tests, the only reason I think he might say that, is because - well he and I took acid together and [he] naturally assumed the rest. The way I remember the Acid Tests is that we played normally except we were stoned. It was kind of easy, strangely enough, it may not seem so.
The way the music developed from 65 to 68, let's say, it was like one long breath, long and slow. But I would say that your description of the slightly psychedelic r n b band was pretty correct up to the Anthem of the Sun period.

CL: In fact that description sounds more like...

PL: Hank Harrison!

CL: Well that too. But musically it sounds like the Anthem/Carousel Ballroom period.

PL: That's right. That music lasted about two years from the end of 67 to early 70, whenever we went in and recorded Workingman's.

CL: Do you remember the demos the Warlocks did for Tom Donahue?

PL: What are the cuts, can you remember?

CL: There's a thing called 'Can't Come Down'.

PL: God. That's a song that I can't remember. I know that we wrote a song called 'Can't Come Down' but I can't remember it [at] all.

CL: There's also 'Early Morning Rain' with you singing.

PL: Yes it is. I never did that much lead singing, cos I never felt comfortable with it, especially live. For some people it's easy, but for me to play the bass and sing - almost impossible.
It's curious that Jerry and Bob now play in the same place that we auditioned for the live gig with Donahue. It was Mother's then but it's now called The Stone. It's still a piece of shit place.

CL: The other thing about the demos is that in some ways they sound more interesting than the 1st Warners album.

PL: Well, for the album we had a producer - Hassinger. He went on to produce Seals and Crofts.

CL: Can we just talk a a bit about your days in Palo Alto before the Dead started.

PL: It was a guy called Mike Lamb who got me into all of that. That's how I met Kesey, Pigpen, Garcia, Alan Trist, all those guys. Mike was in a band later, he had the most amazing voice, sounded like a contra bass trombone that could speak. He was about 6'4" but slender. Good looking dude, man. I had to fight to keep the women away from him. He turned me on to about 3 of my first best girlfriends.
The folk scene in Palo Alto was all there was at that point. The jazz scene was so introverted. There was no local jazz scene at all and when anybody great came to town it was just too overwhelming. Later on we had to follow Miles Davis - the Bitches Brew band - 2 nights in a row. I don't ever want to hear anybody snivel about following anyone else. Because I got the one, man, right there. Made me feel so dumb. I thought, 'what the fuck am I doing here, why aren't I at home digesting what I just heard?'
Anyway to go back. I was going to college at San Mateo, studying music, of course, learning big band jazz charts. Sucking up as much music as I could - trying to find out about Stockhausen, because I'd read about him in the library. Actually one of the best breaks I ever had was a job testing records at the library.
I've always been a book person as well. My grandmother taught me to read at the age of 3, so that I could read the Bible to her. How convenient, says I 37 years later. She was also the one to turn me onto music. She discovered me with my ear against the wall during the Sunday afternoon symphony concert on the radio, my room was next to hers. The next week she said, 'Would you like to come in and hear the nice music?' It was the Brahms 1st symphony conducted by Bruno Walter. I'm four years old and thinking 'this is it. I don't know [how] or why but this is it.' Ah yes, the good old days. Seems like as soon as you turn 35 you start remembering.

CL: (One of the more interesting Dead tapes I have is from the Carousel Ballroom. 14th February 1968. At one point on the tape they move from Born Cross Eyed into a weird Spanish sounding thing that has overtones of Quicksilver. I played it to Phil and asked him what he thought about it.)

PL: I wish we still played like that. That was our Sketches of Spain take, it was part of our act at the time. Sketches of Spain was one of those classic albums, at one time you could walk down any street in a college town and hear it floating out of almost every window. Bringing It All Back Home was the same later on.

CL: Although he wasn't on that, I was going to ask you about Tom Constanten, since he was definitely part of the Dead's exotic period.

PL: It was late 68 that he finally joined. He helped us with Anthem of the Sun with the prepared piano piece. He just brought the tapes over and overdubbed his part. I think that's all he did on Anthem. Later on he joined as an addition, not replacing Pig Pen. He never quite got over a certain stiffness, he couldn't swing or at least at that time he couldn't. That was the big problem. He only stayed just a little over a year. We always had a problem with keyboards. Pig Pen was always a soloist with his harp and voice and his personality, but he wasn't really much of an organ player. So when we started getting into spaces that were more extended he would lay out, which was for the best, I guess. On the other hand, during the Other One he'd play little parts which was always helpful for the texture. But we always had that problem even up till 72 when Keith joined.
Tom Constanten is doing pretty well for himself. Pretty soon I expect to see his name on a movie score. He has a lot of contacts in Europe so it could come from there. He's gone back to performing his own work and lecturing. I met him when he was 17 years old, god he was a weird guy.

CL: That was my favorite period of the band.

PL: Mine too. Although we've become quite proficient at pulling out imitations of that style. But as that time fades into antiquity there are nights when I feel like a parody of myself. But that's got to be natural, because that is a very large part of music, to parody. I find that when we do the feedback stuff I have less and less to play. I have less and less ideas, not a lack of ideas per se, just that they don't seem to relate the same way that they did in the past. To me it's getting to be a mistake to do that every night. Back in 68 we did it every night because that's what we did, by God. In those days we used to say that every place we played was church and that's what it was like. A pretty far out church but that's how we felt.
Back in the early days some nights were amazing and some were terrible, but now we've reached a level of professionalism where we can almost always make it good for the audience, but the chances of the amazing nights [have] been dramatically reduced. But we did learn how to play and we can now stumble through a whole 3 hours and 15 minutes and it will still get the crowd off.

CL: To backtrack again, why didn't you use the complete version of St. Stephen and The Eleven on Aoxomoxoa? (The original has bagpipes, telephones ringing, etc. as well as The Eleven which wasn't used at all.)

PL: I forget, but I'd love to hear it.

CL: OK. There is also another interesting track - the Barbed Wire Whipping Party (possibly the weirdest thing the band ever did).

PL: God! As far as we knew there was never even a mix of that - so some slick sucker did make a mix of it. 'Meat, meat, give me my meat. Hump snippet, lump snippet.'

CL: What was it all about. Why did you do it.

PL: Why not? Well Hunter had this lyric, well it wasn't a lyric, it was just a rave which went something like 'The Barbed Wire Whipping Party in the razor blade forest,' that's the first line I think. 'Last week I went to Mars and talked to God, and he said 'tell 'em to cool out and not to worry, cos the end of everything is death!'' It was so great. Hunter himself read it, which was great because we never got him to perform on our records, so that was cool.

CL: Let's jump to some of your side endeavours like Warp 10.

PL: Well we never really called it that. That was more or less Mickey's term for it. It was kind of an offshoot of the feedback trip and my involvement with electronic music as a student and with Ned Lagin who we met at MIT when we played there in 70.
The thing took several forms, mostly Ned and I, sometimes Ned and I plus Mickey. Once it was the three of us plus David Crosby and Jerry. At one point it was Ned, myself and Crosby, and then finally Ned and myself. We actually went on the road and while we didn't make a lot of money, we drew people and they liked it. It was a lot more coherent with just the two of us, with five of us it was too thick for any real interplay. Then came the Seastones fiasco which was a horrible bummer for Ned both aesthetically and financially - it was a rip off. It was the lowest priority project for Round Records. Ned went his own way after that, although we still communicate. He's into video now with his computer. We essentially did a benefit for him and got him a computer and a synthesizer.

CL: There has been a subtle change of image for the Dead in the last few years. Particularly the slicker production of the albums and the white suits on 'Go To Heaven'.

PL: I think we can lay that in Clive Davis' lap. That's what he demanded. He didn't actually demand that we use producers but he did demand that we acted professional and got commercial.
The guy is a fool, he wanted the Grateful Dead because it is something that had always evaded him. I think the whole thing is dogshit, I hate producers, if I ever have to work with one again I'll probably kill myself. We still owe them another studio album. I'm going to put it off as long as I can. We still have another electric double album coming out from the Warfield and Radio City gigs.
Clive Davis actually went round the producer and made edits! I was thunderstruck. I can't tell you how much I hate the idea of 'Go To Heaven', I can't tell you how much I hate the white suits, although it was my idea. Not the white suits, but putting our faces on the cover for the first time. I could go on and on.
The new album is beautiful I think. It sounds very far out. The way that Dan and Betty put it together is that you can be sitting in the room and the audio image is bigger than the area covered by the speakers. If you are sitting in a certain position it sounds like you're sitting in the sound booth, if you move forward it sounds like you're in the front row, move back and it sounds like you're in the balcony. It's amazing.
The mixes are beautiful too. This is the first album I liked since Blues For Allah.

CL: I liked aspects of that album, especially the experimental quality, but really didn't like the sound of Keith Godchaux's electric piano.

PL: After a certain point Keith never wanted to play. He was so brilliant at the beginning. I heard some tapes from '71, wow that guy had it all, he could play anything. By 75 Donna had joined too; I don't know if you know how difficult it is having husband and wife in the same band? Well that didn't help either, but that's all in the past. Donna's doing well now, got a band called the Heart of Gold Band, singing her heart out. She sings like a goddess and she never sang that way with us and I cussed her out for it. She couldn't say anything.

(from Comstock Lode magazine, issue 9, 1981) 

Thanks to jgmf.blogspot.com