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- [00:00]
Rich Mahan
Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly. The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season 12 of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in in this episode of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, we wrap up season 12 with an absolutely mammoth Dead cast episode about the title track from the Grateful Dead's 1975 studio release, Blues for Allah. Speaking of Blues For Alla, the 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition of Blues for Alla is out now. This 3 CD set has the newly remastered album with unreleased sound check and concert recordings. There are also vinyl variants of the original album available, as well as Blues for all of 50th anniversary merch. All of these not to be missed items can be found@dead.net also@dead.net right now for a limited time you can subscribe to the 2026 season of Dave's Picks, the quarterly archival concert releases handpicked by David Lemieux. Early Bird pricing is now in effect through November 30th and the first edition ships out on January 30th. A Dave's Picks subscription makes a great gift for the Deadhead in your life, and there's even a cool gift certificate on the website you can print out and put inside a holiday card. Subscribers are the only ones who get the bonus discs, so don't miss out. Order now and save yourself some bread on a subscription that you'll look forward to all year long. Head on over to dead.netdeadcast and check out all of our past episodes. You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform and you can listen how and where you like to listen. Hey, Please help the Good Old Grateful Dead cast by subscribing. Share us with your friends on social media.
- [02:40]
Jesse Jarno
Hit the like button.
- [02:41]
Rich Mahan
Leave us a review Very kind of you. Thank you. We have transcripts for many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for Your reading pleasure, Head on over to dead.netdeadcast index and check them out. Well, Grateful Dead have always been known to push boundaries musically, and Blues for All of the title track from their 1975 album is perhaps one of the best examples of their adventurous musical spirit ever committed to tape in the studio. You're about to hear all about it and then some. Along with the story of the album art, as well as the September Golden Gate park gig the band played.
- [03:21]
Jesse Jarno
Whoo.
- [03:22]
Rich Mahan
Grab some snacks and buckle up for a doozy. Here's Jesse Giorno. And here we are at the final song on Blues for Allah, its title track and one of the most misunderstood studio recordings in the Grateful Dead's 30 year history.
- [03:46]
Jesse Jarno
A Grammy and will the needle tie is thin.
- [03:58]
Rich Mahan
Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux. I couldn't believe what I was hearing, and I'm reading along with my lyric sheet and my original pressing of the album. So I'm reading along the lyrics.
- [04:09]
Jesse Jarno
I'm like, what is going on here?
- [04:26]
Rich Mahan
And then they take it way out.
- [04:27]
Jesse Jarno
Where you hear the crickets and you.
- [04:29]
Rich Mahan
Take it to these instrumental passages and Jerry doing these.
- [04:32]
Jesse Jarno
The. The tones he was getting w.
- [05:00]
Rich Mahan
Everything David just said opens up into Grateful Dead mysteries that we'll be talking about today, from the strangeness of Jerry Garcia's tones to the layer of crickets mixed in with the track, to the fact that the band even included printed lyrics with their new album. I don't think there's anything more in the studio more ambitious than this. Certainly Blues for Allah was the most ambitious piece of music on the record, perhaps made even more ambitious by the fact that it was both the album's title cut and nearly 13 minutes long, setting it up for extra scrutiny. In fact, it was the first Dead album to even have a proper title cut. We'll also try to answer the question of why the song disappeared before the last of the band's four shows in 1975 that September in Golden Gate Park, A remarkable event we'll be exploring in some detail in the second half of this episode, but we've got an album to finish first. In terms of the melody and the phrasing and all, it was not of this world, Jerry Garcia told Blair Jackson in 1991. It's not in any key or any time. The song has some of Robert Hunter's most always timely lyrics.
- [06:22]
Jesse Jarno
The ships of state sail on we.
- [06:25]
Rich Mahan
Rush and drown in sand. A lot has been made of the song's words, and we'll certainly get into those. But I think perhaps one of the most important things to consider in the song's story is that it's one of the only examples in Dead history where. Where the final title for the piece of music came before the lyricist was involved. The only other case I can readily think of is the 11. And though the lyrics to Blues for Allah are wonderful, I think the song also pushes back at the idea that the meaning of a song is entirely held by its lyrics. We've tried to frame Blues for Allah's massive ambitions throughout this season, where the Dead had a goal of nothing less than creating entirely new ways to play music. And blues for the song might have been the most ambitious of all on multiple levels. So we're going to build slightly to that. Here's Jerry Garcia speaking with mary travers in 1975. We've linked to the full interview@dead.net deadcast.
- [07:43]
Jesse Jarno
One of the things about the Grateful Dead is we've been really eclectic. You know, country music, very, very into that. A lot of poor men make a five dollar bill but keep him happy all the time. Some of the fellas making nothing at all. And you can hear the blues we played for a long time. Jazz, Eastern music, you know, music of the world's just textures, bass music, electronic music. Shall we go, you and I, while we can? Rhythm and blues, rock and roll, you know, all those different styles we've gone into and come back with something. And then out of those, we've developed our own versions of each one of them.
- [09:04]
Rich Mahan
And then the synthesis between them, syntheses between them.
- [09:25]
Jesse Jarno
And we've already dealt with a lot of permutations. So now it's the thing of completely new ones, ones that we invent as.
- [09:33]
Rich Mahan
Opposed to ones we synthesize. This became the defining mode of the album, Blues for Allah. As the Dead sought out different ways to break free of their usual patterns. Some of the tricks would stay with them for the rest of their career. And some of them would stay behind in Aces. This was a pretty radical way to make music for the Dead. Even by the Dead standards, they'd written songs for lots of different purposes, pushing lots of different boundaries. From the start, even their attempts at pop songs stretched at forms.
- [10:36]
Jesse Jarno
If there's a way out, you'll find out and see what in beyond, you'll never wonder what you're doing.
- [10:48]
Rich Mahan
In the 60s, they'd made Axum Oxoa, An Anthem of the sun, which explored the possibilities of the studio as a compositional tool. But even what's Become of the Baby was what Robert Hunter described As a charming minuet before the Dead decided to run through a Moog synthesizer. And they'd written songs in weird time signatures. But even those were still created with the Dead's ballroom audiences in mind. The album Blues for Alo is like a sculpture garden of experimental forms.
- [11:50]
Jesse Jarno
It's a sort of a different scale of stuff. It's fun, but at the same time.
- [11:58]
Rich Mahan
Then there's the level of what music basically is at its most root level.
- [12:01]
Jesse Jarno
And, you know, the soulfulness of a good tune, you know, and a good soulful rendition of it all that is important. On the other hand, we're doing stuff that's simpler too, you know, it just depends on what feels good or what's interesting. The tune. Franklin's Tower is totally the opposite world. It's very simple. It has only two changes back and forth.
- [12:57]
Rich Mahan
But Blues for Allah is perhaps the most complicated song on the album that bears its name. Not because it's difficult to play, but because it's difficult to even conceive. Almost impossible, really. Blues for Allah might be one of the Dead's most imaginative creations. This is Jerry Garcia speaking. Just a week or two after the band had finished the song and a week before its only full live performance.
- [13:19]
Jesse Jarno
The whole Blues for Allah thing is like the idea of taking. Of creating a new form and performing it as though it existed as long as the blues or something else that was more familiar. You know, it's like that just creating a form plus a musical occurrence inside it that's totally unique.
- [13:36]
Rich Mahan
It's a song remarkably outside of both musical space and musical time. In a time of further and further out new musical languages. For the Dead, it might be the furthest and why it became the title of the final album. Though they would evoke several significant pieces of Middle Eastern culture in the final song. I think the original phrase was more of a stand in for the new musical languages they were generating.
- [14:00]
Jesse Jarno
Blues for all it has altered melodic sequences and totally weird asymmetrical scales that are completely fictitious. They don't occur in Western music at all. They're invented for the sake of the song. So it's like there's a lot of different levels of music to think about at the same time.
- [14:20]
Rich Mahan
Blues is sometimes called one of the great American musical styles, but nearly every culture has an equivalent. And though the recordings weren't as widespread in the mid-1970s, there's some incredible desert blues in lots of styles from different regions. This is a little bit from the Tuareg group Tenero in from their 2011 album Tassili, But the Dead were looking for their own sound. As David Dodd's annotated lyric collection points out, the title Blues for Allah was and is also something of a musical pun, almost certainly a reference to the 1951 Charlie Parker Jazz Standard Blues for Al. So how did Blues for Allah come to be? We've got a few different origin points, and they all lead back to the smoky air at Aces over the carport at Bob Weir's house in Mill Valley in spring 1975. Before we drop into this next segment, thanks again to Dan Healy, Robbie Taylor, Kid Candelario, Steve Brown, and anybody else who rolled safety tape at the Aces sessions. And it's such a special time traveling privilege to have access to the Dead's creative process at this level, and to be honest, I'm gonna really miss it. This is one point of origin. Jerry Garcia noodling with the Blues for Allah intro riff on March 4, seeing if it might connect to the song in progress, then called Distort. The pieces don't connect. For the rest of that story, check out our Crazy Fingers episode. There's some evidence that this theme existed by late February, so we're going to talk about it First. Here's a clear version of that riff from the Master Take the center of the fictitious musical mode. From the City College of New York musicologist Chadwick Jenkins. The most radically new thing would be Blues for Hollow, which winds up being.
- [17:17]
Jesse Jarno
A dead end if what we think.
- [17:18]
Rich Mahan
Of as a dead end is what goes on into their live shows because they just didn't do it live very often, as on the Sage and Spirit episode. I'd like to consider the song's 1975 iterations as gorgeous standalone objects. On one hand, they don't seem to be part of the Dead's continuous history in the 80s and 90s, but to my mind, that doesn't give them any less intrinsic value than a song like Truckin that did get performed hundreds of times in concert. And like Sage in spirit, as we'll hear, Blues for Allah wasn't entirely a dead end. I can't say I know exactly what the skeleton key is to how it was developed, but it has a kind of underlying logic. It's not really a mode. It's sort of the shifting chromatic thing around some stable note and everything's grounded around that F. The eternity comes down to A and then we immediately go back to F, so it feels like it's Fs, but then the very next set of lines, the lowest note is F. Sharp. So there's this weird way in which some things stay static and other things move. And also, from the City College of New York, Deputy Dean of the Humanities and Arts, Sean o'.
- [18:19]
Jesse Jarno
Donnell. There's something about the pitch combinations and the tempo. It doesn't feel like it's a piece of music. It feels like it's evoking something like, okay, once you finish this sequence of notes, the gaping chasm is going to open up and something's going to happen. There's not the tongue in cheek of the Spinal Tap. It's like, no, we're invoking that thing that's going to come out of the ground or from sky and smite you. It's not a tonal melody and it's not in what would be sort of a typical exotic scale of some kind. He's. It eventually uses all 12 notes, but that doesn't really stand out in any.
- [19:20]
Rich Mahan
Drama way as it does in Crazy Fingers.
- [19:22]
Jesse Jarno
But. But the snippets are all the same kind of snippets of pitch fragments that the early atonalists used when they wanted to be like, we don't want to reference tonality at all. They came up with little groups of notes that were as different from like a triad as possible. And those snippets are in here, like. So there's like. I would say it's Bartok, Stravinsky, even the second Viennese school before they went serial.
- [19:56]
Rich Mahan
I will once again evoke the great German band Can, who in the summer of 1975, had just briefly missed being the Dead's label mates at United Artists and were traveling similar spaceways. In our King Solomon's Marbles episode, we heard a bit of Cannes similar 1974 track Splash. Also in 1974, Cannes released their Odds and Sods collection titled Limited Edition, which included a number of pieces they labeled EFS the Ethnological Forgery Series, where they channeled the music of Imaginary Other Places. Limited Edition was only released in Europe, and I don't think the Dead were plugged into what can were doing anyway. But I think that might be the best way to understand Blues for Allah on somewhat contemporary terms. Here's a bit of EFS 27. But then on March 5, Jerry had an idea that became the core of the Blues for A La. This whole sequence is some of my favorite material from the Blues for A La Tapes. In part because the music is really cool, but in larger part because of how much laughter is involved.
- [21:39]
Jesse Jarno
Oh, okay. You guys want to try something? I want to Try something. You know that trip we've been into in the Blues for Allah? The thing is playing all Akis. We're all playing akas.
- [21:51]
Rich Mahan
Gotta pause. Jerry right there and point out that Blues for A La already has a working title, something they'd been developing on tapes that we don't currently have access to. Based on those quotes we just heard from Garcia, I think the title Blues for Ala was meant as a literal musical description of what they were doing. And it's about to take a turn back to Garcia's brainstorm.
- [22:11]
Jesse Jarno
I want to try a thing where we start out. We could even all start out in unison or at least playing the same note. And I want. I want to do a thing where, like, hold one note for two bars, you know, say F or something, and then two dice moves, creating some kind of weird triad, you know what I mean? Since we're all playing octaves, it's a.
- [22:39]
Rich Mahan
Pretty heady concept with half the band pedaling on individual notes and half the band shifting then changing roles. If I understand it correctly, you and.
- [22:48]
Jesse Jarno
Me play that F. We can play a rhythm to it or anything for two bars. And on the start of the second bar, you guys who are also playing F, say, both of you move or play any other interval.
- [23:10]
Rich Mahan
And then Phil Lesh counts them in, and it gets real. And away we go. The piece of music that the Dead just created is called on the album Sand Castles and Glass Camels and takes up the middle five and a half minutes of the album's suite. The first take is only two minutes long. That's pretty neat.
- [24:28]
Jesse Jarno
That works great.
- [24:30]
Rich Mahan
It's a really cool concept, actually. Not too far from the cellular minimalism of Terry Reilly's in C, albeit very much not in C, and with instructions of the piece interpreted differently by each performer.
- [24:43]
Jesse Jarno
Yeah, I just decided I wouldn't change until all you guys had changed. Oh, yeah, that worked out of the system. I just did it whenever it seemed like nothing was changing right away. Yeah, that was far out. I did it whenever the wind fucking hit me. Yeah, right on. That's great. That's neat. It's pretty interesting. Plus, it can be any rhythm. I mean, you can change, go into any rhythmic space you want. You know, any rhythmic space.
- [25:12]
Rich Mahan
It's fun to hear Garcia so psyched about a piece of music, and this whole conversation is fascinating to hear the Grateful Dead group dynamic in full flight, both musically and extra musically.
- [25:23]
Jesse Jarno
That's pretty crazy. Yeah, it'd be nice to be able to get really good sustain on everything. Well, now There's a device.
- [25:33]
Rich Mahan
Engineer Dan Healy comes out of the tiny recording booth in the corner, which you can hear creak open.
- [25:39]
Jesse Jarno
Hey, that was pretty crazy. Did you record that?
- [25:42]
Rich Mahan
Oh, yeah.
- [25:42]
Jesse Jarno
The knockers got all of it. Really? Let's hear it back. Well, we can just play that shit forever, man. Let's just play for a while. Play it for a while. And maybe we could expand the idea to include signaling, to go into, like, Largo, you know, real long ways, you know, or something. And with the thought of going back and overdubbing other.
- [26:05]
Rich Mahan
That's a fascinating point here, too, about overdubs. Thinking about this piece of music for a studio album, not necessarily live performance. And here, Garcia ties the room together.
- [26:15]
Jesse Jarno
Okay, here's a little format trip. Why don't we play. Why don't we just start with that blues for, all of. You know.
- [26:21]
Larry Weissman
I mean, why don't we.
- [26:22]
Jesse Jarno
Two times through. Play two times through the. You know, and then just start into that mode and just play it until finally it seems like it might be nice to play blues for all, I guess, some part of it.
- [26:39]
Rich Mahan
And that's how Blues for Allah would essentially function during its very brief life, really. In a matter of minutes, they laid out a good chunk of what would become the album's second side, as well as several of the year's live performances. Not that anything was that simple. They get back to the first part of the piece, trying to find the right feel that will send them into the desert. And after some fiddling around, they find it. They try the Sand Castles and Glass Camels jam a few times, and they're all pretty fun to listen to. It didn't always work this way live, so it's pretty nifty to get to hear them riding that original spark. Later, Garcia would call this the Desert Jam, and he was serious about the idea that the concept could support any number of rhythmic or tonal ideas. Around two weeks after that session, we just heard an expanded group of musicians gathered at Aces to rehearse for the March 23 snack benefit at Kizar Stadium, which we discussed at length in our Slipknot episode. That was the core quintet of the 1975 Grateful Dead, augmented by guests Ned Lagin on Rhodes, David Crosby on 12 string electric guitar, Merle Saunders on B3 organ, and Mickey Hart on drums. It was billed as Jerry Garcia and Friends, but it was the first public progress report from the sessions and featured nine musicians following the loose rules that Jerry Garcia had laid down.
- [29:53]
Jesse Jarno
So here's this weird chord. So then the thing is, then we would like leapfrog over each other, you know what I mean? And so that there would always somebody.
- [30:03]
Rich Mahan
You never play anything for starters less.
- [30:06]
Jesse Jarno
Than a bar long and preferably two or three bars so that it's one tone so that there whatever moves can move over that tone.
- [30:18]
Rich Mahan
The rehearsal sessions for the Snack Benefit also reveal that the song now has an ending section. This would gain Hunters under Eternity Blue lyrics by the end of the sessions. Formally going by the timings on the original Blues for Ala lp, the name of this section is Strange Occurrences in the Desert. There's some off mic singing. In practice, the Sandcastles and Glass Camels jam got a little chaotic live, but the so called first Day session really enforces the idea that structurally it was built for a theoretically unlimited amount of players, like a modern music composition. In some ways it really was the Dead's version of nc except deliberately attempting to even transcend the idea of keys playing the music native to some long lost desert.
- [31:49]
Jesse Jarno
Sam.
- [32:19]
Rich Mahan
The Snack Benefit version now on the bonus CD to the Beyond Description box, offers a beautiful what if even without the 12 string guitar of David Crosby, who had to duck out at the last minute to attend his child's birthday? Things get both fascinating and fuzzy with the titling in this window too. Rolling Stone reported that the suite as a whole at the Snack Benefit was titled Space Age, but as we've heard, they were already using the name Blues for Ala to refer to the intro theme. Has anybody ever thought about using the Blues for a la Tag as an ominous sound cue in a mystery series? Because we've got a mystery to solve, or at least a cloud to unfog. Virtually every book on the Dead mentions some version of the story we're about to tell, and I think there's some blurriness to unpack here. Regarding the title of the piece they were calling Blues for Allah. Let's start with Ron Rakow, who came across an article, I think maybe the COVID story of Newsweek from February 10, 1975, the week the session started, titled Oil Money with an illustration of a coin labeled one petrodollar, like a large quarter with an engraved camel. One of the topics was Faisal bin Abdulaziz al Saud, the King of Saudi Arabia. Please welcome back from Grateful Dead and Round Records Cadillac Ron Rakow.
- [34:09]
Jesse Jarno
The wealth of Faisal every 160 days increased by the net worth of the largest company on the planet at that time, which was IBM. So, and by my calculation, in a short time, three or four years, there was going to be Two piles of wealth in the world, Faisals, and the exact same size pile for every other human being on earth, which is as close to world domination as I've ever imagined. So. So I felt really bad for Faisal. What game, what game can you possibly play if half of the wealth of the entire world is yours and everybody else is scrabbling over their piece of the other half? What game is there left to play? I felt. I felt like, you know, because I was so in love with the game I was playing, I felt like anybody who didn't have something like that, I really felt sorry for them. And that was mostly everybody.
- [35:24]
Rich Mahan
King Faisal of Saudi Arabia had struck the Dead as a strangely sympathetic figure. Phil lesh told Denis McNally that they felt that Feisal was maybe, quote, more of a humanist than any of his predecessors and that he was trapped by history, by religion.
- [35:40]
Jesse Jarno
I spoke to Hunter immediately because I wanted to change the title of the album. And Hunter listened to me very benevolently and patiently. And then, you know, left and, you know. But I wanted to change it to Blues for Faisal.
- [35:59]
Rich Mahan
In 1991, Jerry Garcia remembered this aspect of the band's Faisal dialogue telling Blair Jackson, we were talking about King Faisal in the studio because an article came up about him in Newsweek or something, and I remember being blown away when it said that Faisal owned a third of the world's wealth or something shocking.
- [36:16]
Jesse Jarno
Like that one guy, it didn't get changed. But very shortly thereafter, one of his nephews or relatives just fucking shot him. And Faisal was dead. And the kid was a Grateful Dead fan from that went to UC Berkeley. You know, he wasn't a Grateful Dead freak like we were, but he was an enthusiastic concert goer, one might say an enthusiast.
- [36:42]
Rich Mahan
King Faisal's nephew, Prince Faisal bin Masoud Al Saad, did in fact come at the King and did Not Ms. On March 25, 1975, a topic far too tangled to illuminate here. But the Prince had indeed studied at San Francisco State in 1966, and after that, two stints at UC Berkeley. In between, at the University of Colorado, he and his girlfriend were busted selling LSD and hashish.
- [37:08]
Jesse Jarno
There was a lot of LSD. I was told that by somebody knowledgeable.
- [37:14]
Rich Mahan
On March 28, Herb Kane's column in the San Francisco Chronicle offered an update from the Dead sessions at Aces. It reported that the album in progress was called Glass Camels. And as of Wednesday the 26th, a Phil S. Jerry Garcia original titled Blues for Faisal is now called Blues for Allah. That is, the assassination of King Faisal maybe didn't inspire the phrase Blues for Allah, but rather inspired the band to change the name of the still lyric less piece from Blues for Faisal back to Blues for Allah, if it had ever really been called Blues for Faisal. To make matters more confusing, Herb Kane credits the news source to none other than Hank Harrison, whose biographies of the dead could be, shall we say, misleading. And it's possible this piece of information was subject to generation loss and could have used a fact check. The band played the full piece in progress again at Winterland at the Bob Freed Memorial Boogie in June, which we talked about in our Crazy Fingers episode. By then it seems to have received its final name. Joel Selvin's Chronicle column reported on the lengthy version of Blues for Allah that opened the band's second half the Sandcastles and Glass Camel's Jam made its second live appearance. At its best, the Glass Camel's Jam sounds to me like desert flowers blooming in unexpected secret colors. And once again, both the Blues For Allah and Strange Occurrences in the Desert sections are without lyrics. Another memory shared by multiple participants is that Blues For Allah itself was an unwieldy piece, very much a studio creation. Garcia told Blair Jackson, oh, that song was a bitch to do. When we got toward the end of the album, we had some time restrictions and started working pretty fast, but up until then we'd been pretty leisurely about it. If I'm reading it correctly, the studio tracking sheet for Blues for Allah confirms that it was the first basic track that they recorded to their satisfaction and very close to the last set of overdubs they finished. We'll start with the core quintet Grateful Dead from the basic take. The basic track of Blues for Allah begins with a short prelude of the unusual occurrences melody. The date field of the tracking sheet reads first in parentheses, May 22 and then July 8, which I translate to mean that they recorded the basic instrumental structure of the song on May 22 and then got down to significant overdubs in early July, possibly including the vocals two days before the deadline. The main theme is one of the stranger set of notes in the Dead songbook, made stranger by the fact that they're playing them in unison. Here's Garcia. And we're. Keith God show on rhodes. I think this is the only song on the album that doesn't feature a Leslie rotating cabinet somewhere, but Blues For Allah has plenty of other things making it strange. One of the strangest is that even Phil Lesh plays in unison in stereo. You doing okay, Phil? During the initial Blues for A La section, only Billy Kreutzman is allowed to float somewhat. There's a really rich amount of overdubs and other musical activity across all three sections of Blues for Allah. In addition to the harmonic and rhythmic freedom the rules provided, as Garcia imagined, it also provided a space for studio weirdness. Before we delve into it, let's listen to some of the Sandcastles jam before they started adding to it.
- [44:05]
Jesse Jarno
Sam.
- [44:31]
Rich Mahan
Officially, Sand Castles and Glass camels begins at 3 minutes, 21 seconds into the track and runs for another 5 minutes and 26 seconds. Sometime later in June, Robert Hunter returned to join the band for the final sprint to the album's new July 10 deadline. He told Blair Jackson in 1991, Blues for Allah specifically, I remember them saying to me, damn it, we need the line right now. In the same joint interview, Garcia points out the line lengths are all different. Hunter responds, I remember trying to get a scan for that. The first line I came up with. He sings it to the song's melody was, here comes that awful funky Bride of Frankenstein. I've actually always had a hard time wrapping my head around how that lyric fits to the melody. And maybe you can tell. We used this quote in the first episode of the season. But here's Hunter speaking with WLIR in 1978, and I believe he's referring mainly to the songs Help on the Way and Blues For Allah.
- [46:23]
Jesse Jarno
I was living in England while they.
- [46:26]
Rich Mahan
Were laying down tracks where this, this.
- [46:28]
Jesse Jarno
Is the first time I ever worked this way, where they put down all the tracks. And so I came in with pretty complete basics to work with and wrote the, Wrote the lyrics to an album that was already there. And I'm not certain of it that I do my best work that way.
- [46:47]
Rich Mahan
Ron Rackow recalls Hunter feeling this way in the moment of creation.
- [46:50]
Jesse Jarno
I went to the studio, you know, I would pop in all the time. And one, that one time, Hunter was there, one whole half of Blues For Allah was the dirge to Allah. The other half was songs. And he said, I hope there's something on here good enough for you to make something out of. You worked really hard. And I don't, I don't think my material was up to snuff. I said, man, your material is always up to snuff. Relax. And, you know, we're, we're gonna go, we're gonna be successful our way. That's the way it's gonna happen. And I worked very, very hard on this I wrote most of these songs a little over 20, 30 times, trying to get them just right. And I believe that my lyric work, my lyrics are overworked on this. It was not just that tendency. You start. You start being a professional artist and take a great deal of pride in what you do, and you sort of start slipping away from your inspiration in a way, and you start getting. Bearing down too hard on it, trying to perfect each line, trying to make each one a jewel. Hunter was by himself. Hunter was one of the world's great poets.
- [48:00]
Rich Mahan
The first line that Hunter settled on actually does evoke something of the conversation about King Faisal being the world's richest man.
- [48:07]
Jesse Jarno
Arabian wind the needle's eye is thin.
- [48:18]
Rich Mahan
This is a reference probably to a proverb that appears across cultures in the Bible, as it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. I also hear a reference to the expression the veil is thin, evoking the border between two worlds. Blair Jackson's rare joint interview with Hunter and Garcia took place in early 1991, just as the first Gulf War was unfolding. Hunter told Blair, I find that song holds up well in the current situation, though it also has a basic naivete, sort of why can't we just be friends? But some of the lines in there work still. The ships of state Sail on mirage and drown in space Check what good is spilling blood it will not grow a thing. It wasn't the first time Hunter revoked a LA in a song lyric, though. The first time was a little more buried and connects us to Blues for Allah's biggest competition for most misunderstood studio dead track 1969's what's Become of the Baby. On one eyestalk, it was easy to miss. On the other, you can really hear the seeds for Blues for Allah, Even with King Faisal omitted from the song itself, if he'd ever been there at all. Just invoking Allah in a song lyric in 1975 in this matter was a fairly radical move, let alone in a way that still sounds respectful a half century later.
- [50:19]
Jesse Jarno
Taste eternity, the sword.
- [50:24]
Rich Mahan
Sing blues for Allah, Inshallah. There are three vocal tracks on Blues For Allah, I assume stacked together in the mix, all three of them featuring multiple singers sharing a microphone. Only one of the vocal tracks has this little bit of warm up on the song's introductory tag, Robert Hunter's own annotation in his lyric collection, a Box of Rain reads, this lyric is a requiem for King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, a progressive and democratically inclined ruler, and incidentally, a fan of the Grateful Dead, whose assassination in 1975 shocked us. Personally, I think that might be slightly muddled chronologically, but perhaps the combination of the working title Blues for Allah and the Assassination of King Faisal acted as writing prompts like their reinterpretations of folk music. Perhaps it was a way to stake one foot in the timeless and one foot in the contemporary. Founder of the Grateful Dead Studies Association, Nicholas Merriweather. They're engaged. They're part of culture, they're part of politics. If you're alive in America, there's a lot of tumult on the international stage, especially in the Middle East.
- [51:51]
Jesse Jarno
The Middle east has been at war.
- [51:53]
Rich Mahan
Since, in many ways, you could say, for two millennia. But leaving that aside certainly sent, you know, in the post war era with periodic flashpoints since World War II, and those have been gathering force and ferocity since the 1960s.
- [52:15]
Jesse Jarno
They lie where they fall. There's nothing more to say the desert.
- [52:30]
Rich Mahan
Stars are bright Tonight let's meet as friends. Dennis McNally's official dead bio, A Long, Strange Trip, tells the story of when Hunter showed the lyrics to Barry Melton of the more overtly radical Berkeley combo Country Joe and the Fish. Hunter told Melton, look, I'm political now. Are you happy? And the fish responded, that doesn't sound political to me, Bob. That sounds abstruse.
- [52:57]
Jesse Jarno
The flower of Islam, the fruit of Abraham.
- [53:09]
Rich Mahan
Here's another way to look at this, maybe is that the Dead, and specifically Hunter and Garcia, were also self consciously trying to look beyond the Americana that had defined them since Working Man's Dead in American Beauty, seeking a set of musical and lyrical signposts that pointed to new horizons. I almost tend to think that it's more a classic case of Dead like serendipity. There are large parts of Blues for Allah that don't necessarily have to connect with Faisal's assassination. The idea of the Middle east, it's just that once you drop those ideas into what they are doing, everything kind of makes sense. And the fact that it sort of gets back to the completely spurious Egyptian Book of the Dead quotation that surrounded their name in the mid-60s, that's just kind of icing on the cake. That phrase the Grateful Dead does not appear anywhere in the book of Spells and incantations and Prayers. That's that we call the book of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. But the idea certainly is there. And the myth of the Grateful Dead, the Grateful Dead folk motif certainly has Egyptian and Middle Eastern instantiations and iterations. So the idea that the band might take something as concrete as Faisal's assassination and spin that into what they are already thinking, that makes perfect sense. And that's kind of a cool artistic anchor that I can see appealing enormously. The final lyrics of Blues For Allah have nothing modern about them. A song out of time, both musically and chronologically, and yet always on time.
- [55:01]
Jesse Jarno
The thousand stories have come round to one again. Arabian Night. How gods pursue their.
- [55:26]
Rich Mahan
What fatal flowers of darkness bloom from seeds of light. That line is almost certainly a reference to the Arabian Nights, or, as it's also known, 1001 Nights, a collection of Arabic folktales from the Islamic Golden Age. Along with the reference to Allah and the Arabic expression inshallah, meaning if God wills it, it grounds the song slightly in a more earthly place. But the phrase Arabian Desert now refers to the desert on the Arabian peninsula in far western Asia. In antiquity, Arabian Desert meant what's now called the Eastern Desert in far eastern Africa, starting east of the Nile.
- [56:08]
Jesse Jarno
Bird of paradise, fly in white sky. Blues for Allah, inshallah.
- [56:23]
Rich Mahan
But I think what Hunter, and almost certainly Garcia, were seeking was the place in the desert where geography disappears. The no man's land of the first verse and the blank terrain could connect through the head of a pin into the Mojave or the Sahara, or onto the Martian surface, or even to Terrapin. The actual Arabian Desert has music of its own, and within a few years, the Dead would be engaged with that, too. That was Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart and Hamza El Din at Front street in summer of 1978, a session just before the band's trip to Egypt, which David Lemieux excavated for the Taper section a few years back. But the sand castles and glass camels the Dead evoked were their own, more like a part of the desert that no one had gotten to yet. As Garcia planned, there were a range of overdubs, some over the whole song, some over just the sand castles passage, ranging from simple to some of the most ambitious the Dead had tried in years. There's a synthesizer that runs through the whole tune. I'm going to guess it's Garcia, but I could be wrong, and I think it might be a single take as well. It definitely evolves with the piece. Here it is during the intro. And droning along at the edge of the desert, but also reinforcing Garcia's original concept. Like all the other parts, it gets weirder as it goes, And deep into sand castles and glass camels as it turns into unusual occurrences. The synth goes full wash, But much of the song's texture came from an overdub bender by Jerry Garcia and gradually coming back into the fold. Mickey Hart. This is Mickey speaking on the Arista Years.
- [60:34]
Jesse Jarno
I come down to Winterland and played together again. And it was really a turn on. And then I started hanging out at Weir's house when we were doing Blues for Allah. And that thing started working really well. So there was no reason why not to, you know, just started. We had the chemistry again. And I had done what I had to do. I made my recording studio, built it, learned about engineering and made a solo record.
- [61:00]
Rich Mahan
David Gann spoke with Mickey about it in 1984. Thank you so much, as always to David for the use of his audio. We've linked to his numerous cornerstone book projects@dead.net deadcast, including conversations with the Dead, where this comes from.
- [61:15]
Jesse Jarno
Blues for Hollow was six months, I think, in the studio. Yeah. I wasn't there at the very beginning of Blues For Hollow. I don't remember how that happened.
- [61:22]
Rich Mahan
The Dead's amazing assistant, Steve Brown, took some credit for that.
- [61:26]
Jesse Jarno
Mickey was a cool thing because I was kind of pushing for him to. To come.
- [61:30]
Rich Mahan
Oh, really?
- [61:31]
Jesse Jarno
Part of it. To do some percussion stuff.
- [61:33]
Rich Mahan
I've been working with him up at.
- [61:35]
Jesse Jarno
The barn when we're doing the round record stuff. So there was times where I felt.
- [61:39]
Rich Mahan
Let'S get over all that.
- [61:40]
Jesse Jarno
Try to get him back in the fold, as it were. I said, well, you know, we could get Ricky for. I was kind of, like, saying stuff, you know, to Jerry and people. Mickey would be good on some percussion stuff here.
- [61:53]
Rich Mahan
And that's where he came back into the band.
- [61:54]
Jesse Jarno
Was at Blues for Allah sessions. Yeah.
- [61:56]
Rich Mahan
Mickey adds two layers of loud drums to Blues For Allah. There's this in a lower register, And on another track there are phased log drums running deep into the glass camels. But that was just the start.
- [62:29]
Jesse Jarno
We miked a box of crickets.
- [62:31]
Rich Mahan
David has a pertinent question. I went and bought them.
- [62:35]
Jesse Jarno
I had a cricket connection.
- [62:39]
Rich Mahan
There are several different work tapes of this section in addition to the master tapes. And my guess is that Garcia and Hart devoted a whole master tape to this section, then reduced it down to two tracks for the final version.
- [62:50]
Jesse Jarno
And Garcia and I slowed them up, sped them up backwards at half speed. They sound like whales. And they sounded like chirruping birds.
- [63:30]
Rich Mahan
We made this thing called the Desert, where I. He was engineering and I was in the studio.
- [63:36]
Jesse Jarno
And I would play all my little percussion things all My little bells, all my little metal and all the little glass. It was incredible.
- [64:07]
Rich Mahan
What an incredible time because we had to be real quiet because I was.
- [64:10]
Jesse Jarno
Playing this metal and wood stuff with paintbrush. Had to be so quiet. All that stuff was played very softly. Yeah, it was really wonderful. The Desert Zone, it's called.
- [64:21]
Rich Mahan
And on tracks 15 and 16, it's labeled zone Desert.
- [64:56]
Jesse Jarno
And we make this thing called a desert that went across, you know, in 20 minutes or however long it was.
- [65:01]
Rich Mahan
What Garcia did was he gated it.
- [65:04]
Jesse Jarno
With a vocal gate. It was a VCA voltage controlled amplifier.
- [65:07]
Rich Mahan
He gated the desert and he was saying, Allah. We'll point out that this idea of using a vocal gate so that Garcia's vocal signal affected the sound of Hart's percussion is virtually directly added to the work that Ned Lagin developed for Seastones, perhaps his silent contribution to Blues for Allah.
- [66:10]
Jesse Jarno
And the kicker was we let the crickets go. We. On Weir's Mountain. We liberated them after the recording session because we were feeding them peppers and stuff, you know, keeping them alive.
- [66:18]
Rich Mahan
In this box we had 50 of them. Steve Brown, they were in this cardboard.
- [66:22]
Jesse Jarno
Box and we had a mic it. And. And there they were there, pretty much secure. And then a few got out and.
- [66:32]
Rich Mahan
Then it wound up being where they.
- [66:35]
Jesse Jarno
Did eventually dump them out behind Weir's place on the hill behind there. And they were this whole thing of.
- [66:41]
Rich Mahan
Crickets back there forever, I guess, for poor Bob to have to listen to now.
- [66:46]
Jesse Jarno
And so we let him go in a cricket and Weir had thousands of crickets and he still has them on his place. I mean, for years after that, all he could hear at night, exotic crickets.
- [66:55]
Rich Mahan
Certainly the crickets who recorded for the album had a better fate than their brethren who served a few weeks later at the Great American Music hall, as we heard about last episode, living out their best lives and reproductive cycles on the hillside outside Aces.
- [67:09]
Jesse Jarno
Oh, yeah, about the crickets.
- [67:10]
Rich Mahan
Good question. Well, yeah, I don't believe there are.
- [67:13]
Jesse Jarno
Crickets in the desert, first of all.
- [67:15]
Rich Mahan
At least not on this planet. This is the very last thing you Hear on track 15 and 16 just moments after the fade out.
- [67:23]
Jesse Jarno
It's weird.
- [67:25]
Rich Mahan
It certainly is weird. It's.
- [67:34]
Jesse Jarno
And we went into the night on that and Jerry and I and Rakow.
- [67:38]
Rich Mahan
Was waiting in the next room, you.
- [67:41]
Jesse Jarno
Know, for four or five days, waiting to take the masters down because we were already late, you know, and we were locked up in the.
- [67:47]
Rich Mahan
In Weira's studio, finishing immediately.
- [67:49]
Jesse Jarno
And Garcia for Luke at the end there.
- [67:55]
Rich Mahan
I can't See straight we were going, man.
- [67:56]
Jesse Jarno
It was incredible.
- [67:58]
Rich Mahan
And somewhere along the line, they bolstered the unusual occurrences in the desert ending, which, of course, we have to shine some light on. Tucked Away on one of Mickey's tracks weirded some more guitar. And Tucked Away on the other, Keith added some more roads. Garcia adds a pretty awesome slide guitar part near the end of Glass Camels, just before they land in the vocals, where he both subtly restates the blues for a la theme, but also presages the searing Outro lead. It's there in the final mix. That Outro lead is on the song's basic track, by the way. Once again, there are three tracks of vocals for the Outro. Two of them contain the whole gang singing together gorgeously here, stacked together. But only one of the vocal tracks contains Mrs. Donna jean gotcho. Once again, donna jean. And A Little Surprise at the end of this one.
- [71:08]
Jesse Jarno
Blues.
- [71:25]
Rich Mahan
And we have title one more. Sometime during the final stages of recording the album, art arrived with further Grateful Dead serendipity. Nearby the Dead's offices in San Rafael was the Peanut Gallery, a loose collective of artists overseen by the great Stanley Mouse. One day, a young artist named Phil Garrish showed up with a painting he'd made a year before. Founder of the Grateful Dead Studies Association, Nicholas Merriweather Mao said very clearly that it was while he was in charge of that sort of artist collective, and he was the landlord, which he hated, but he was the business guy. Garrus showed up as a young artist. Maus was blown away and slightly annoyed because he thought Garrus was so young and so good. So he was like, get this away from me. I don't want to see something this good. You know, you're horning in on my territory. And he was kind of laughing as he's telling it to me, but he was like, no, this is how good he was.
- [72:39]
Jesse Jarno
I recognized it.
- [72:41]
Rich Mahan
And I got the sense that Mouse supported Garris, showing it to the band as a possible album cover. It was a short drive across town to the Grateful dead office at 5th and Lincoln.
- [72:55]
Jesse Jarno
I was in my office one day, and my secretary commission said, there's a guy down here that says he has a picture he wants to show you. And he carried up this big fucking painting of a skeleton in a red rose with red sunglasses on, playing a violin in a keyhole hole in a castle wall. And that became Bluesfalla. And I didn't even have my wits about me. I should have. I want. I normally like to buy the painting and Own it. It never even occurred to me. I was blown away.
- [73:29]
Rich Mahan
I never thought about it as a keyhole or a castle wall, but I can see that now. The fuller version of the story is that the fiddler's sunglasses were actually green in the original, but everybody thought it made him look too insectoid, as Steve Brown put it. Steve brought the painting home and hung it above the foot of his bed, where for a couple of days I just stared at the thing until I got the idea that if Phil changed the color of the glasses to match the robe on the figure, it might seem a little warmer. So Garrus actually made a red overlay for the glasses. And after a few weeks of not being able to come up with anything better, I decided to show it to the band again. And this time they loved it. Grateful that archivist David Lemieux.
- [74:09]
Jesse Jarno
I love the colors. I love the purple of the sash down here.
- [74:14]
Rich Mahan
I love the red.
- [74:15]
Jesse Jarno
I just the sunglasses.
- [74:17]
Rich Mahan
I frickin love this.
- [74:18]
Jesse Jarno
I love the back in the band. It's one of those pieces of art that when I look at art, I.
- [74:22]
Rich Mahan
Always wonder, how do they get that.
- [74:24]
Jesse Jarno
Lighting effect out of paint? And I think I always look at this green down here and I'm like.
- [74:30]
Rich Mahan
How do they do? How does a good artist do this? There's very little biographical information that I can find about Philip Garris. He was from San Diego and did some indie comics later in the 70s, and was briefly involved in the Dead's art circle, creating the front covers for Blues for allah and the 1976 Kingfish album, as well as the two show day on the Green at the Oakland Coliseum Stadium with the who that October, he did a number of toto covers of the 80s as well. The fiddler entered the Dead's iconography. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux. The Dead had this huge backdrop.
- [75:04]
Jesse Jarno
It was on canvas and it was probably 15ft by 15ft of the Blues for Allah cover. And they unfurled it at some of the shows in 76, some of the comeback shows. There's that famous picture of Hunter standing. I guess it's a club front. He's holding a bugle, a trumpet, a bugle.
- [75:22]
Rich Mahan
And he's in front of the big.
- [75:24]
Jesse Jarno
Backdrop that the Dead had for this.
- [75:26]
Rich Mahan
A great shot by superhero Deadhead. Ed Perlstein, who we'll hear from later. By the way, I'll use this as an opportunity to introduce everybody to a tongue twister by my friend Matt. Ready? Deadhead. Ed edited it. Now you try. Sorry, David Lemieux. Is talking about the Blues for Allah backdrop. There's that great picture.
- [75:47]
Jesse Jarno
And then many years later when I.
- [75:49]
Rich Mahan
Was working for the Dead, that thing.
- [75:51]
Jesse Jarno
Lived at the Grateful Dead office.
- [75:53]
Rich Mahan
There was another big change with blues for for the very first time a Grateful that album appeared with a lyric sheet. Robert Hunter discussed his take on printed lyrics with Monte Deem and Bob Alson in 1977.
- [76:05]
Jesse Jarno
I used to think that if I printed the lyrics but the band would take the opportunity to mix the vocals down even further. And also I didn't want people to get the whole message right away. I didn't to want like lyrics on records because what I would do well, I like what I do is I read them and that was it. I listen, I'd hear the music, I'd see the message, and so much for that record.
- [76:30]
Rich Mahan
By the mid-70s, though, with more than a half dozen years under his belt as the in house lyricist, Hunter began to rethink his hardline stance.
- [76:38]
Jesse Jarno
Just because so much of it is lost and I'm surprised in a lot of my questions that people ask me are children. There's no reason to play anything like it.
- [76:49]
Rich Mahan
On Blues for Allah, the lyric sheet actually went a step further than that, which I assume was Hunter's idea as well. The title track filled up a whole side of the LP insert in one column. The lyrics appeared in English, but it was accompanied in translations in Hebrew by Drora Prior and in Arabic and Persian by Frank vitter. The blog 52 Words did a brief interview with Drora Prior in 2018, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast, where she didn't actually recall much of the project, but remembered that someone from the Dead had contacted UC Berkeley where she was teaching. The same can probably be said of Frank Vitter, who was also teaching there at the time.
- [77:28]
Jesse Jarno
I wanted you have to have to listen to it a bunch, you know, to get it all forced to listen to it rather than have it right at your grasp. That was probably better than your disagreements.
- [77:46]
Rich Mahan
Yet it would also be the Dead's last album that included printed lyrics. Ironically, more than most of their previous albums, I'd argue that Blues For Allah, and especially its second side, is precisely the kind of album that warrants repeated very close listens. On most of the Dead's albums, the recordings are idealized versions of platonically existing songs. On much of Blues For Allah, and especially the second side, the songs are themselves the recordings barely existing outside the album. They reward listening to one version over and over rather than many different Performances. It's a different kind of value. But it took me years of repeated listening to perceive the flow of Blues for Allah. Like the way this passage from Deep in the Glass Camel section acts as both the prelude to the unusual occurrence's vocal ending, but also calls back to the song's main theme. In his Online Journal in 1996, Robert Hunter wrote about being around for the very final stages of the album's production. I followed the record from the studio right into the pressing plant at Columbia in New Jersey where Patti Smith used to shrink wrap records. She might have been working there when I visited the shrink rap section for all I know. Sorry to interrupt, but gotta fact check you, Bob. Patti Smith grew up right near the Camden pressing plant, but never worked there, never making it off the waiting list, and was already well on her way in New York by that point. Anyway, to continue, the ladies on the line were pleased to see someone from the Dead whose record they were rapping. I saw the stampers being made in the acid baths, the goops of vinyl being pressed, the labels attached, and then spot checked some fresh pressings. They pulled every 20th copy in the listening booths, pronouncing them good. Can't remember who I went there with. Probably Bob Matthews. Yes, I think it was. The album's official Release date was September 1, 1975, the same night as the nationally syndicated broadcast of the Great American Music hall, which we delved into last time.
- [79:57]
Jesse Jarno
You're welcome. Please. The Grateful Ted.
- [80:06]
Rich Mahan
The Great American show and subsequent radio broadcast feature the only fully realized version of Blues for Alla. It had all the words. Unlike the album version. The crickets are right there in the mix from the very beginning, which I love. It had the final Sandcastles and glass Camels section. I think Hard is on some of the percussion he used on the album. Possibly Kreutzmann, too. It's also the longest version of any sandcastles and glass camels on any tape. Nearly 10 minutes long in the middle of a 21 minute version. And it has the only live performance of the unusual occurrences in the desert conclusion with the full vocals. But they never do it again. The album the Grateful Dead have always had in them is out Blues for Allah.
- [82:14]
Jesse Jarno
It's new. It's here now.
- [82:16]
Rich Mahan
It's the Grateful Dead on Grateful Dead.
- [82:19]
Jesse Jarno
Records and tapes distributed by United Artists Records.
- [82:26]
Rich Mahan
Blues for Allah was as ambitious an album as the Dead would ever make. And it lives without companion in the band's catalog. Where Anthem of the sun has Oxymoxoa, Working Man's Dead has American Beauty, Wake of the Flood has Mars Hotel. The Dead never worked in this mode again. One person who was a little unsure about the decision was Al Teller, who became their new record company boss when the band signed over distribution rights for Grateful Dead records in late June 1975. Please welcome back Al Teller.
- [82:54]
Jesse Jarno
If I'm not mistaken, wasn't Blues for All. The first album they did where they were not doing songs they had already worked out on stage and live concerts. That's a whole different dynamic which they had to get used to themselves. And this. This was the first attempt at doing it that way. So they had to go through their own version of a learning process. Whether or not they thought that was what they were going through. I thought that worked against how good that album could have been had they had the opportunity to work out some of these tunes live. Had they worked all these songs in live performances before going into the recording studio, I think the album would have been. Would have been stronger for one of.
- [83:43]
Rich Mahan
Rock'S legendary touring bands. The band didn't tour behind Blues For A LA at all. The Dead followed their muse off the road in late 1974, and a year later that muse remained at rest in the Bay Area.
- [83:55]
Jesse Jarno
One of the things that artists are always concerned about is the sense of their freedom and independence from a creative perspective. And I am a great believer in that. And I gave them all the. All the room in the world. I did not push back in the slightest. I love the album cover. I thought the graphics were fantastic. As I said, I think the. You know, I would have preferred the album to have been the result of being on the road, but I know they weren't on the road, so it was what it was.
- [84:28]
Rich Mahan
This next bit shouldn't be much of a surprise.
- [84:30]
Jesse Jarno
And to be perfectly honest, probably my least favorite track on that album was the title, Cut the Blues for all the side. I remember enjoying side one a lot more than side two overall. Roll away. Roll. One of the things that impressed me about them was, I think Rakow said it was they had index cards for every Deadhead and they would do a mailing to all the Deadheads prior to the release of an album.
- [85:30]
Rich Mahan
Eileen Law had helped organize the Deads mailing list starting in 1971. By 1975, the debt had graduated from index cards to the next level, an innovation of which Ron Rakow was justly proud.
- [85:43]
Jesse Jarno
We took the fan club stuff from Eileen and made her in charge of it. And it went from her to a computerized. A computerization service who did a Computerized alpha zip mailing list. So we can do things by name, number, ethnicity, any which way we want it, we call it out. And anyway we can do only certain zip codes of certain areas and so on.
- [86:11]
Rich Mahan
And in 1973 and 1974 especially, they placed a special emphasis on growing the mailing list. Sending Steve Brown out with the Free Stuff booth, designed by Courtney Pollack, which we've talked about before.
- [86:23]
Jesse Jarno
When Steve took over the free stuff booth the first time he went out, I made note I wanted to see the effectiveness of it. We had a mailing list of 7,300 names with numbers and addresses and so on. After a short while, I think 18 months or so, we had 107,000 Al Teller. So you'd always have a good first and second week sale of the record. That's why they were able to get it on the charts very quickly, because all the Deadheads were out there buying it as soon as it was released. And then it would start to tail off.
- [87:00]
Rich Mahan
Here's how Jerry Garcia described the Deads fan base to Mary Travers in summer 1975.
- [87:05]
Jesse Jarno
We have a small but tight audience, small but together audience. Speaking in all of America terms. Whether we could get them to that next level of sales success was really going to depend on the degree to which we'd be able to get a substantial uptick in radio airplay. And there was nothing on the album that sounded as if we were going to have that kind of a singles breakthrough.
- [87:55]
Rich Mahan
Record World was stoked on the album and the single. Putting the Dead on the front cover and calling them the first family of contemporary music. They wrote of the Music Never Stopped. The Dead have held out for a long time before getting down to an AM type single. And it looks like this is finally it from the more commercial side of their Blues for a LA lp. Given the nature of the group's dedication and lengthy live performances, the Music Never Stops might be more apropos. But this is close enough to satisfy the legion of Deadheads who will follow the guys anywhere. The song didn't crack the record world top 100, though as we've mentioned, it did appear on the Billboard chart 81 with a bullet in late 1975. The album itself fared better, making it to number 12 on the albums chart, their highest placement until 1987. But that was about as far as it got. Global news in Grateful Deadland and a blip in the mainstream. But with the album out in the world, tides were once again shifting in Deadland. We repeat this Jerry Garcia quote from the Great interview with Peter Simon from the spring of that year.
- [89:00]
Jesse Jarno
I prefer playing live to playing in the studio, for sure, just as an experience. It's definitely richer, you know, because it's continuous. I mean, you play a note and you can see where it goes. You can see what the response is, what the reaction is. When you have a group of musicians in a studio, it's not unlike having a room full of plumbers. I mean, what we might be interested in as musicians and what we're doing might not relate to anybody else.
- [89:27]
Rich Mahan
In 1976, Bob Weir spoke with WMMR and described one of the reasons the band had stopped touring in 1974. But to me, it kind of better describes the situation the Dead had created for themselves at Aces in 1975.
- [89:43]
Jesse Jarno
Musically, we were getting sort of dangerously inbred. We were starting to play risks that only made sense to the musicians on the stage. Nobody else caught it. You know, there were subtleties too fine to catch, unless you'd been following it for 10 years every night.
- [90:00]
Rich Mahan
And.
- [90:03]
Jesse Jarno
You can't present that kind of stuff to an audience because it can't help but go over their heads.
- [90:25]
Rich Mahan
Blues for Allah is graduate level Dead, both for the band themselves and certainly the audience. It's not a song that many people would cover over the years. Guitarist Henry Kaiser was probably the first, certainly the first to put one on an album. 1995's Eternity Blue with Marilyn Crispel on piano. That's Gary Lambert on bass, by the way. The New York musician Joe Gallant recorded it with his massive Illuminati ensemble as part of their Blues for All of project in 1996. This performance from the Knitting Factory includes David Ganz, Bob Ralove, Tom Constantin and others. This is what their desert sounded like in 1996, In the years after the Grateful Dead. Unsurprisingly, Phil Lesh was the first to touch it. Keith Eaton left us this story about catching Phil Lesh and friends in Asheville in 2001. While sitting in the upper rafters. People I knew from tour in the 90s were passing by. A guy who I had many exchanges with over the years from the late 80s into the 90s, sat down to.
- [92:24]
Jesse Jarno
Meditate beside us during the second set.
- [92:28]
Rich Mahan
And in the middle of a Dark star, Phil busts out Blues for Allah, A little more swinging than the original. This show became an official release by Phil Lesh. I can't even believe my face, as my grandfather would say. And I think, what on earth is happening?
- [93:21]
Jesse Jarno
And I look to the left of.
- [93:23]
Rich Mahan
Me and my friend Om hasn't even moved a second or an eyelid.
- [93:28]
Jesse Jarno
He's just there meditating.
- [93:29]
Rich Mahan
Our friend and musicologist Sean o', Donnell, who discussed how Blues for Allah is a song outside of tonality, had slightly different reaction when he saw Further perform Blues for Allah.
- [93:39]
Jesse Jarno
I actually heard Further do it at Coney island at the Cyclone Stadium, and I had to go running for the hills. I could not get away. I didn't want to leave from the music, but I had to keep escaping because it was just scary. My third year was elsewhere and I was trying to escape.
- [93:57]
Rich Mahan
Music can be a lot of beautiful, sad, exhilarating, funny, sleepy, and also just really weird and outside of this world. It was a place the Dead themselves were barely comfortable with on stage. To my ears, it's only following the Great American Music hall show on August 13 that the dead began their pivot away from the Plumber like conversations. In that moment, the Dead's world remained fluid, even as Blues for Ala emerged into the real universe. By less than a week later, the members of the Dead were back at Aces, with Mickey Hart now fully reintegrated as a second drummer, and the music had already moved on from the far out languages of Blues for Allah.
- [95:21]
Jesse Jarno
Sailing up and down, looking for a shove in some direction.
- [95:33]
Rich Mahan
That was the Dead at Aces on September 1, the Day Blues For Alla officially hit stores. As the story is usually told, the Dead were having so much fun making Blues for Allah that it spilled over into their next project. This is how Jerry Garcia described it to Blair Jackson. It was a continuation of what we were doing with Blues For Allah. We were having fun in the studio is what it boils down to, and that's pretty rare for us. The energy was there and I thought, I've got a solo album coming up. Let's cut these tracks with the Grateful Dead. I've already taught them the tunes.
- [96:03]
Jesse Jarno
Lord, you can see that it's true Lord, you can see that it's true.
- [96:16]
Rich Mahan
And surely they were having fun. But both Bobby Weir and Jerry Garcia were also under contract and deadline with United Artists for new solo albums due asap. It was reported in a few places that Weir would be making his own album in addition to an LP with Kingfish. Kingfish would regroup later in the fall at Aces to record their debut. But having dissolved Legion of Mary weeks after signing that UA contract, Jerry Garcia needed a band even faster than that. Here he is explaining his new strategy to Mary Travers in early August 1975. This permutation of my solo albums is.
- [96:53]
Jesse Jarno
Me using The Grateful Dead as my band, which is different from the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead makes all its musical decisions on a group level. In that sense, there's no leader or anything like this in this one. I'm going to pretend that I'm the leader and sort of tell everybody what to do. Comes a time when the blind rain takes your breath Says don't you see Gotta make it somehow all the dreams you still believe.
- [97:37]
Rich Mahan
The Dead would record tracks for what became Reflections throughout August of 1975. Though it wouldn't make the final album, one very cool piece of the spring workshop sessions lingered through to the Reflections micro era. Sometimes called the Nines, after its time signature, the version on the All Good Things box confirms its real Orpheus. In fact, I'm going to propose an alternate side B for the final version of Reflections, consisting only of Orpheus. And Comes a Time, check out this transition.
- [98:40]
Jesse Jarno
Sabbath.
- [99:19]
Rich Mahan
But we'll have to fall deeper into reflection some other day. I'm mostly bringing it up because by mid September, Garcia had a new group, the Jerry Garcia Band, featuring John Kahn, drummer Ronnie Tutt and pianist Nicky Hopkins, debuting on September 18th in Palo Alto. In some ways, it was the formation of the Jerry Garcia Band that truly marked the beginning of the Grateful Dead's hiatus, with their final known aces session on September 16th. But before the Dead truly went their separate ways for a little bit, they had one more gig, September 28th in Golden Gate Park. Like all four of the Dead's public appearances in 1975, their free show at Lindley Meadow on September 28, 1975 with the Jefferson Starship is worth hearing. You can find it on the 30 trips around the Sunbox. It's also worth looking at again because of the stories it tells about the Dead, their place in the music world at large, and what their new album meant technically. The September 28th show was called the New Age Biocentennial Unity Fair. And there's a lot about the Unity Fair that's been forgotten from the vantage of a half century. The multi day Unity Fair was the linkage point between the radical movements of the 60s and the radical movements of the later 70s and 80s. With the soundtrack by the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Starship, the road to the Unity Fair is nuanced and fascinating. Here's Jerry Garcia speaking with Mary Travers in August 1975.
- [101:48]
Jesse Jarno
Altamont did a lot toward making it difficult to have large groups of people get together. It killed something, or virtually killed something that we were very much into, which was free music. So it's been Weird for us to see free music, which started out as such a good giving kind of gesture and a good trip for everybody to turn into into murder.
- [102:09]
Rich Mahan
Free shows had been integral to the Dead's existence from numerous appearances throughout Golden Gate park, ranging from the Panhandle just down the street from their far out Hate street pad, to bigger affairs on the Polo Field or elsewhere. When the Dead started touring, they often played a free show in addition to their local paid gigs. We've posted a link to light into Ash's work on this topic@dead.net deadcast but things were difficult after Altamont, which had come into existence in large part due to members of the Dead's family. It took a pretty audacious dream to stage a massive free concert in golden gate Park in 1975. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the chief dreamer came from a resident of the nearby Haight Ashbury. But perhaps more surprising is the fact that he just moved to San Francisco the year before. Please welcome to the Deadcast from the unity Foundation, Bill McCarthy.
- [103:02]
Jesse Jarno
I moved there in 1974, and I moved there because I wanted to make this movie called Darkness to Dawn. And so I moved to the Haight Ashbury. It was a time of renewal, this incredible time to be there. At the end of the 60s, it was really in decline. But then a few years later, people started moving in after they dealt kind of with the drug situation. And there were new shops and it was really vibrant. I wish more had been written about that renewal because I wasn't there in 66 or 67. But I can't imagine it was much more beautiful than the time that we had in the early 70s.
- [103:45]
Rich Mahan
In the spring of 1975, he'd started to plan a fundraising event for his film project when Bill Graham put on the Snack Benefit at Kezar Stadium.
- [103:54]
Jesse Jarno
But something amazing happened right before we did our first benefit, and that was Bill Graham, you know, was the biggest producer in the world, was producing this incredible concert at the old Kezar Stadium at the end of Haight Street. And he had everyone there. I mean, it was Bob Dylan and the Band and Jefferson Starship, Grateful Dead, the Doobie Brothers, you name it, they were all there. And it was to preserve education, having to do with culture and sports in San Francisco schools.
- [104:29]
Rich Mahan
For more on the snack benefit, dig into our Slipknot episode.
- [104:33]
Jesse Jarno
So I went to the concert, truth be told, I went after taking a little bit of LSD and was waiting to hear my favorite band. I had always been, I believe, the biggest fan of the Jefferson Airplane I used to go to concerts when I first moved there. I would listen to them and I had this feeling that I was going to do something with them. I didn't know what it was, but I just had this really intense feeling.
- [105:01]
Rich Mahan
We'll point out that it was something like this same feeling that led Donna and Keith God show to the Grateful Bed. It was still a time of high magic.
- [105:09]
Jesse Jarno
Here we are in 1975, and they had just morphed into Jefferson Starship. And they had a song called Ride the Tiger. And in the middle of the song it says, in the summer of 75, the whole world will come alive. And it was like I was hearing it for the very first time. I heard the words. I turned to my producing partner and remember, we hadn't even produced our first event yet. And I said, did you hear what they said? And he said, no. What did they say? I said, in the summer of 75, the whole world will come alive. So he said, yes. So I said, someone's got to do that. And he looked at me with dread in his eyes and he said, who's going to do that? I said, me and you, Richard, we're going to do that. And the next day, Richard and myself and two of our friends started calling every political, spiritual, environmental and cultural organization in the whole Bay Area and told them that we felt it was time for them to unify. Well, being that we never really done anything, some people hung up on us, others said, what have you ever done before? And somehow, by some miracle, we were able to get 45 organizations, many of whom didn't even want to be in the same room with each other, and got them to come together to create a unity fair.
- [106:46]
Rich Mahan
Now that's what I call riding the tiger.
- [106:49]
Jesse Jarno
I wanted the Jefferson Starship to headline it.
- [106:52]
Rich Mahan
Adding music to the equation was a whole other kind of mathematics. Thankfully for Bill McCarthy's dream, though, in the summer of 1974, free live jams had returned to Golden Gate park for the first time in a half decade. That was Jerry Garcia and Merle Saunders with Billy Kreutzman on drums in Mark's Meadow in Golden gate park on September 2, 1974. Their final show with Billy the K turned out. It was put on under the auspices of a new organization, the People's Ballroom. We're honored to welcome from the People's Ballroom, Larry Weissman.
- [107:43]
Larry Weissman
The People's Ballroom was a program of the White Panther Party, of which I was a member of. I was in the Bay Area chapter, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley.
- [107:54]
Rich Mahan
If you hadn't guessed already. The 1975 Unity Fair, known to Deadheads as 92875 in Golden Gate park, was a major intersection between the Dead and the mid-70s San Francisco Underground and ever changing counterculture at large.
- [108:08]
Larry Weissman
Ewing Newton, the head of the Black Panthers, when asked what white people should do for the revolution, said, you should form a White Panther party. John did that in Detroit and he also opened it up. And so they published a 10 point program for the White Panther Party. Point number one was to support the Black Panthers. And then the rest of the points were pretty much aimed at hippies, you know, free drugs, all various things. And basically any group of people who wanted to come together under those 10 points could form a chapter of the White Panthers.
- [108:47]
Rich Mahan
The John in Detroit was John Sinclair, poet, jazz journalist, manager of the MC5 and subject of this 1971 John Lennon protest song.
- [108:58]
Jesse Jarno
They gave him 10 for two. What else can the judges do? We got. We got to go.
- [109:15]
Larry Weissman
The People's Ballroom idea was John Sinclair's idea. They were looking at it in, in Detroit, more about buying a building and making it a people's ballroom. We took the idea and because of our particular circumstances, decided to do it more as an outdoor production company. And the idea was to form a community coalition that would create a nonprofit production company that covered staging, sound, security and production. To basically create an alternative to the capitalist entertainment structure. Because a lot of people, for instance, kids couldn't go see bands a lot because they were mostly in bars and clubs that were selling liquor. A lot of women were reluctant to go places because of the kind of harassment they were getting. So our idea was to create something that would be an open community production company that could do these events.
- [110:18]
Rich Mahan
For a few years in the mid-70s, the People's Ballroom resurrected a hallowed neighborhood traditional.
- [110:24]
Larry Weissman
Our house was located right on the corner of Coleman Oak. So it was like right next to the panhandle. When we started, we were doing a lot of panhandle shows with local bands such as Ascension, which was an all woman rock band from the hate and Windows, which was kind of David Bowie type band that was a couple of gay guys and their friends. And then we would do shows. I think one of our first shows with a larger group was the Sons of Champlin in Marsh Meadows.
- [110:58]
Rich Mahan
They were serious about the production aspect.
- [111:00]
Larry Weissman
We had a stage that we could build, all made out of plywood that we built the whole stage, it was expandable. The small one was like maybe, you know, 20 by 30ft. But we could go up to as large as about 90ft. Some friends of ours at a recording studio called Receiving Studio had a sound system. And the White Panthers, in working with neighborhood people, provided all the security for the events.
- [111:27]
Rich Mahan
The scene in the hate had continued bubbling on after the Dead decamp for Marin in 68.
- [111:33]
Larry Weissman
Basically, what you had in the hate in the early 70s was a lot of communes. The Good Earth Commune, which I was a part of, was a very large hippie commune with about 18 houses. There were many other communities, smaller and bigger ones. We had one house on our street that was a 1010 apartment giant building that had been completely abandoned that the. The White Panther Party and the Good Earth took over and made into a living space. So there was. There was. It was very much analogous to the 80s Lower east side kind of thing where a lot of squats and collectives. And as it was getting cleaned up, the gentrifiers moved back in. We were on rent strike for years against the bank. So it was a very volatile, still culturally relevant community.
- [112:25]
Rich Mahan
There were far fewer free shows, though.
- [112:27]
Larry Weissman
The city decided to not allow music events in Golden Gate Park. And what we did was we went around and got a petition from all our neighbors. We submitted like thousands of petitions. We ended up taking them the city to court and we broke the ban. And we started with these smaller shows in the Panhandle and so on, and then started to move forward with. With the larger shows.
- [112:55]
Rich Mahan
The Dead still had several close friends in the neighborhood. That was Merle Saunders. Welcome to the Basement, featuring Jerry Garcia from the 1972 album Heavy Turbulence. And the basement in question belonged to his family house where he often held practice sessions. Check out our Garcia 73 episode for more on that connection.
- [113:39]
Larry Weissman
Merle Saunders lived right around the corner from us on Page Street. And at that time Jerry was working with him. And I think their first show with us was 9-2-74 in Mark's Meadows. That was Window and Ascension, which were the two local bands, and Jerry Garcia with Merle Saunders. Merle was the one that arranged that. Although prior to that, on August 31st, we also had a Marsh Meadows show that had Bo Diddley and this. And just out of nowhere, we were there building the stage. And Jerry showed up because he fucking loved Bo Diddley, right? And he comes and we say, hey, what's up? You know, we're talking. And he had this, like, joint that he had prepared specifically. And Bo and his sister showed up, we all got high and it was a great concert.
- [114:54]
Rich Mahan
Can't find a tape of Bo Diddley at Mark's Meadow. Sadly. We spoke earlier this year about Bill Graham's March 75 snack benefit at Keysar Stadium at the edge of the Haight. In several ways, it would lead directly to the Unity Fair.
- [115:06]
Larry Weissman
Bill Graham wanted to do a show at Kezar Stadium, and because it was in the neighborhood, we asked the Dead to reach out to Graham and say, look, you got to talk to the community. You know, we're not going to go along with this unless you can. You know, you need to do. If you're going to, like, use it, you got to do something with us. So there was a big meeting at the Haight Asprey Neighborhood Development Company. And I'm pretty sure I. I know Rock was there. Rock was actually someone who had been to our place, and we had. We knew him pretty well, you know, just as a person around, and he kind of knew what we were doing quite a bit. I think Bob Ware was there and Jerry. I don't think Bill Graham was there, but some of his representatives and then us, the White Panthers, and a bunch of other neighborhood people. And we worked out a deal where Graham agreed to hire about 100 of us to work the show for pay. They were aware of what we were doing and, in fact, were supportive of it.
- [116:15]
Rich Mahan
The Dead's independent spirit wasn't lost on the People's Ballroom crew.
- [116:19]
Larry Weissman
I remember that the Dead tried to start their own record label and record distribution. I always thought that was, like, the best thing they could have done. Things might have been a lot different if they would have been able to create a way of doing their own recording and distribution, but it was just too much for everybody.
- [116:38]
Rich Mahan
Not every band had moved out of the hate.
- [116:40]
Larry Weissman
The Airplane had a mansion over on Fulton street, which was pretty much open to people who knew them. And we lived, like, maybe four blocks away from there. So we had gone over there a lot and got to know Paul Kantner and Jorma. Jorma and Jack had formed Hot Tuna, so they started playing for us.
- [117:02]
Rich Mahan
Also, Jefferson Starship had relaunched themselves in 1974 and were very committed to free shows as well, including a massive free concert in Central park in early May to celebrate the release of their hit album, Red Octopus. We'd like to make an announcement about you fellas in the trees right over there. It's not real good for the trees to be up there. Why don't you get out of the trees, please? I'm looking right at you. Why don't you get out of the trees, please? And a few weeks after that, they played a free show in Golden Gate park, which also included a set by Mickey Hart and Zakir Hussain's Diga Rhythm Band, featuring special guests Jerry Garcia and David Freiberg, which we talked about in our King Solomon's Marbles episode. That too was a people's ballroom joint.
- [118:17]
Larry Weissman
After the Hot Tuna show and the Starship show, we were having a hard time having enough ability to get more permits. And that's where the Unity Fair people came in. They were. Were connected with the place up on. On hate, called the US Cafe, or maybe the Shady Grove Cafe, 1538 Hate. They had this sheet for the Stars Productions, and they were the ones that actually got the permit to do the Dead Starship show, but they didn't really have any connections to get them to do it or. And they had, of course, no way to build a stage or do anything else.
- [118:59]
Rich Mahan
Bill McCarthy.
- [119:01]
Jesse Jarno
We became in partnership with them, which was kind of interesting in a way because we were actually spiritual meditators and they were like really, really strong political activists. So it was kind of interesting coming together, to say the least. But it all worked out.
- [119:20]
Larry Weissman
The idea behind the Unity Fair was it wasn't just going to be music, but, like, all community groups were going to come out and have booths. The idea was to bring everybody together.
- [119:29]
Rich Mahan
The Unity Fair truly did bring together the disparate movements of the Hate.
- [119:33]
Larry Weissman
They were connected also with the Angels of Light, who actually lived on our street. And they were kind of like, I guess you call them gay hippies, you know what I mean? So they were all about the flags and like, they sparkly everything. And I remember we used to. They used to throw great parties. And that's kind of how we met all these people.
- [119:57]
Rich Mahan
Bill McCarthy remembers the introduction slightly differently, but the connection between the Unity Fair and the People's Ballroom would produce some of the city's biggest gay liberation events of the later part of the decade. In 1975, most importantly, the People's Ballroom had an in with the Starship.
- [120:12]
Larry Weissman
We went up to the Starship House, the Airplane House, and we were talking with Bill Thompson and Paul Cantner and saying, look, these guys got the permit so we can do this show. Like, do you guys want to do it? And Bill Thompson started freaking out about Bill Graham and Bill, we're gonna be really mad at us and we, we really shouldn't do this. And I remember Paul just looked at him and said, dude, we're doing this. End of story, that it's gonna happen. And then we just rolled the joint. We all, like got high.
- [120:46]
Rich Mahan
They had to do some fancy talking.
- [120:49]
Jesse Jarno
Park and Recreations was really not wanting bands that big to play in the park. They had this kind of feeling that the, you know, the Summer of Love was gonna come back or something. So when they said, well, who's performing? And of course on the first day we had local bands as well. So I just said, just local bands. And I wasn't lying because the Starship Mansion was right across the street from the park.
- [121:17]
Rich Mahan
There were some bumps in the Biocentennial.
- [121:19]
Jesse Jarno
Road, so somehow we got past that hurdle. Then the unbelievable thing happened. The Starship song Miracles hits number one on the charts. They're right now at this point, right before our event, like the biggest band in the world. And it's like, oh my God. But then they called back and said, you know, they weren't going to do it because they were thrown into chaos. So we're having a meeting to scale back the event at the People Ballrooms, you know, at their headquarters. And right before, I mean, like magic, because it was just right before I was walking out the door. This guy calls me Rainbow Star. Now Rainbow Star was a drug dealer for the Jefferson Starship and drove around in a rainbow colored Mercedes. He was a real character. But he had called me like a month before saying, could he, you know, design the stage? And I said, you know what, you can design the stage. Because first of all, no one else is going to offer to do it. And I don't even know what that means.
- [122:55]
Rich Mahan
The Unity Fair ran several days with local bands playing on a smaller stage, which I think is what Rainbow Star designed.
- [123:02]
Jesse Jarno
So he's asking me, so how's everything with the Starship, the Jefferson Starship? And I said, well, not too good, you know, because they backed out because, you know, because of Miracles. And this guy said the thing to me that changed my life all the way till today. He said, I don't care what they said, what do you see? And I burst out into tears because I could see them as clearly as the phone I was hanging in my hand. So he said, I'm going to give you a telephone number. I want you to call this person. And it turned out the person was their publicist. And I didn't even know what a publicist was. But it turns out she was also the girlfriend of Paul Kantner, which I also didn't know. So I got on the phone, she answered the phone and I just poured my heart out. I said, look, your band is the inspiration for something pretty amazing that's going to happen. 45 organizations many of whom would not be in the same room with each other. The spiritual ones didn't like. The political ones. The environmental ones were kooks. I mean, it was just. I mean, how we got it together I will never know. But anyway, she says, well, I'll talk to the band. I didn't think any more of it because I figured, well, yeah, what does that mean? If only you believe? Like, so we get to the meeting and we're, you know, talking about how do we scale something back? And the phone rings and it's for Ron Lambert, who was the leader of the People's Ballroom. And he goes in the other room. He comes back about two or three minutes later. And this guy is a big guy and he's shaking back and forth. White is a ghost. And he said to me, mccarthy, I don't know what the fuck you told them, but they're coming and they're bringing the Grateful Dead with them.
- [125:12]
Rich Mahan
Larry Weissman had orders to expand the parameters of their invisible ballroom.
- [125:17]
Larry Weissman
Our sound system really wasn't going to be big enough to do it. So I know that the Dead agreed to handle the sound. And I remember somebody telling me, you're going to have to make sure that the stage is. Is, you know, goes out to 120ft from your normal 90. So we had to build more stuff.
- [125:36]
Rich Mahan
The first day of the Unity Fair was devoted to smaller groups playing on smaller stages.
- [125:41]
Jesse Jarno
There were two stages, and one stage was in one part of the meadow, and the other stage was in the other part of the meadow. This Mooney meadow is a pretty big meadow. And so we had two stages running all day. We had all the booths and the displays and all of that.
- [125:59]
Rich Mahan
Workshops, local bands for local people.
- [126:02]
Jesse Jarno
Oh, my God, they were real local. There was Dr. Ejari and his Mountain String Band, and he was a physician from Russia who moved here and had this, like, acoustic string band.
- [126:19]
Rich Mahan
We talked about Dr. Rajari in our Sufi choir episode. That was the sect that Arthur Russell belonged to earlier in the decade.
- [126:26]
Jesse Jarno
Oh, there was Bobby Kent and the Christian Cadillac. There was. I don't know if you ever heard of Freaky Ralph. Freaky Ralph. While he was a mainstay in the late 60s, he used to open up for a lot of the big acts.
- [126:40]
Rich Mahan
The stage featured a gorgeous piece of art that we'll mention briefly because it's yet another connection worth highlighting.
- [126:46]
Jesse Jarno
He had an incredible banner. It was this triangle, this huge triangle. And there was. To promote unity, we had all these artists working on it. Like somebody would work on One side of it, somebody would put another image in the middle and it became this beautiful, beautiful piece of art.
- [127:08]
Rich Mahan
One of the creators was almost certainly Gilbert Baker, who in 1978 would dream up the rainbow flag while tripping at a Patti Smith show at Winterland, a story we told during our Enjoying the Ride season. He debuted at a Gay Freedom Day in 1978, an event with connections to many in the Unity fair crew. Late September 1975 was a whirlwind for Larry Weissman.
- [127:29]
Larry Weissman
We literally had started building the stage 6pm the night before and just worked all through the night. I was super proud of it. I mean the stage was like the biggest thing we'd ever built.
- [127:41]
Rich Mahan
One hard learned lesson from Altamont, which Altamont's organizers should have already known, is that if you're having a big free show, you don't announce it until as late as possible.
- [127:51]
Jesse Jarno
So we had told all the radio stations like a couple of days before and we said, look, you cannot mention this until one minute after 5pm on Friday when Pocketre closes, because if you do before that, all hell is going to break loose. Sure enough, somebody, you know, somebody just let it loose. And the park called us and they were really pissed off and they said, you're gonna, we're gonna have to cancel your event. We said, you can't cancel this event. Thousands of people are coming.
- [128:29]
Rich Mahan
For what it's worth, I think only news of the starship broke on the radio. The dead remained a secret nonetheless.
- [128:35]
Jesse Jarno
So we show up at the office of park and Rec with the People's Ballroom and these guys are all huge and they're angry, you know, I mean, we're angry too, but not angry in the way they are. So we just kind of stormed in there and told them they had to, you know, they had to create, they had to take care of this because this event was going to happen. There's no way we can cancel it. And it was so funny because when we came in, especially with the People's Ballroom yelling and ranting, people were hiding under their desks. I mean, it was just, they were like petrified of what the hell was going on. So finally they acquiesced. Well, it was kind of a fun and traumatic event at the same time.
- [129:22]
Rich Mahan
The cosmic consciousness might have been a little wobbly by 1975, but Dan O' Hanklin was picking up the message. Turns out Paul Kantner was low key, obsessed about manifesting something big and weird for 1975.
- [129:34]
Jesse Jarno
When the airplane released Bark on that album on the B side Is a song called War Movie where Paul Kantner sings.
- [129:46]
Rich Mahan
In 1975, all my people rose from the countryside.
- [129:54]
Jesse Jarno
Not a cultist. I'm not even a fanboy, really, but I was to that degree greatest with the airplane. And we're coming up on 1975 and I'm like, okay, I'm gonna rise from the countryside. So I went ahead and took an airplane to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and then hitchhiked for Minneapolis to California.
- [130:20]
Rich Mahan
You can see why Dana wasn't about to miss the Unity Fair. Obviously Gary Lambert was there.
- [130:25]
Jesse Jarno
I was not a guy who toured a whole lot, but so, yes, I pitched a perfect game in 1975.
- [130:32]
Rich Mahan
It was hard to beat the setting.
- [130:34]
Jesse Jarno
So it was just like a beautifully set up and professional show. A beautiful day in the park. The Dead's history with that park and the San Francisco scenes. History in that park. And it was the starship and it was the Dead.
- [130:46]
Rich Mahan
And it wasn't like anything close to your, oh, let's set up a flatbed truck and find a generator and do a. It was planned. Larry Weissman.
- [130:57]
Larry Weissman
That was the People's Ballroom dude. And that was our goal, like, to be. We felt like just because it's a community thing doesn't mean it can't be professional. So we prided ourselves on providing just as good as anybody could. It was one of the busiest and most intense days of my life because, you know, we had been up all night building the stage. Then we had to help the Dead get the sound system up. And then they got the sound system up. And then at that point, we're beginning to realize this is really going to be big, you know, and then more and more people are coming. And, you know, I mean. I mean, literally we. The biggest thing we'd ever handled was maybe a thousand, twelve hundred people. And we're looking at like 50,000 people.
- [131:41]
Rich Mahan
We've spoken with the great photographer and music head Ed Pearlstein a few times this season, most recently about getting into the Great American Music hall last episode. Around that time, he made what turned out to be a pretty important life move. I started taking pictures with a good camera in 75. In summer of 75, I was pretty poor and I. I couldn't afford to buy my own.
- [132:07]
Jesse Jarno
So different people would loan me cameras.
- [132:09]
Rich Mahan
You'd better believe he was ready for Golden Gate Park. Another perfect picture for the year. I ended up getting there really, really early and they actually ended up building.
- [132:18]
Jesse Jarno
The backstage around me. I went there with.
- [132:21]
Rich Mahan
With Bob Marks and so there weren't any. Like, you had to have a pass or something like that.
- [132:27]
Jesse Jarno
They built the backstage fencing around where I was. And so I was there.
- [132:32]
Rich Mahan
I talked my way onto the stage telling him, I'm shooting for Mickey.
- [132:36]
Jesse Jarno
I said, there he is, ask him.
- [132:38]
Rich Mahan
And they didn't bother. It was a pretty full day. The Jefferson Starship played first. Larry Weissman.
- [132:45]
Larry Weissman
It was overwhelming for everybody involved. I don't think we realized how meaningful it was to the community to have this happen after so many years and so much going on in the hate and redevelopment and the struggle against gentrification. I mean, to have the two bands that probably most represented the culture of that 60s neighborhood playing and playing for people who were also committed to the culture, you know what I mean? Like, it wasn't like Bill Graham was coming in and doing it like it was other people in the neighborhood getting together. So it was very emotional in that sense.
- [133:26]
Rich Mahan
And just as much as it was a reaffirmation for the older heads, it was a reaffirmation for the younger heads like Joan Miller. In the fall of 1975 in San.
- [133:35]
Jesse Jarno
Francisco, I was a 15 year old teenager who was completely enamored with the Grateful Dead, any kind of music. And it was announced that there was going to be a free concert. I think it was announced for Jefferson Starship. And I don't remember it being really publicized that the Grateful Dead were going.
- [133:53]
Rich Mahan
To be involved too.
- [133:56]
Jesse Jarno
So my girlfriends and I, we hopped on our 10 speeds and rode down to the Linley Meadows. And when we got there, the scene was freaks, infringe street characters, kids from the neighborhood, old and new fans of music. And the whole place was just wafting in a cloud of pot smoke.
- [134:23]
Rich Mahan
We thought we had died and gone to heaven. We couldn't believe it was free, just.
- [134:29]
Jesse Jarno
Right in our budget.
- [134:33]
Rich Mahan
And we moved through the crowd, we.
- [134:36]
Jesse Jarno
Listened to some music and it was so much fun.
- [134:39]
Rich Mahan
And free concert in the park with.
- [134:43]
Jesse Jarno
Such great musicians was what, a little girl or a teenage girl in San Francisco, that's all she would care about.
- [134:51]
Rich Mahan
There were some speakers between the bands.
- [134:53]
Jesse Jarno
Bill McCarthy, Keith Lampy, who was a music writer for Crawdaddy magazine, went by the name of Ponderosa Pine because he wanted to save the pine trees. So he would wear a mask as if he was a pine tree. And he had these ropes. But he was a brilliant environmentalist, so he spoke. Peter Berg, who was one of the original diggers, he spoke as well.
- [135:22]
Rich Mahan
One newspaper report mentioned someone speaking on behalf of the San Quentin Six, A story way too deep for today. And while the unity Fair succeeded at Unity. The afternoon of September 28th belonged to the Dead and the Starship. Gary Lambert.
- [135:37]
Jesse Jarno
They both had new releases out. Starship was becoming. That was Red Octopus and Miracles. So that was a huge moment for them. And again, me being the ridiculous, lucky.
- [135:51]
Rich Mahan
Lurking bastard, I actually got walked onto.
- [135:53]
Jesse Jarno
The stage by Bobby for that one.
- [135:55]
Rich Mahan
So I was watching from behind the.
- [135:57]
Jesse Jarno
Apps for most of it.
- [135:58]
Rich Mahan
I haven't found myself yet, but I haven't looked that thoroughly Ed Perlstein. And I walked onto the stage and.
- [136:05]
Jesse Jarno
I ended up sitting on the front.
- [136:08]
Rich Mahan
Of the stage basically to Phil's and.
- [136:13]
Jesse Jarno
Keith's side and just sitting there. And I had the best access in the world to take all the pictures that I want for the whole show.
- [136:22]
Rich Mahan
Nobody bothered me. So that was quite an amazing experience.
- [136:27]
Jesse Jarno
I was slightly stage right, just like sort of peering over maybe Phil's bass amp. Some of my most famous pictures were taken in September 75at the Golden Gate park free show that the Dead did. It was. It was a nice view, what can I say? And also getting.
- [136:44]
Rich Mahan
Getting to look out at the crowd.
- [136:45]
Jesse Jarno
And Lily Meadow unfolding before my eyes and smelling the eucalyptus in the air. You know, that was. That was kind of the. Your fantasy vision of free music in Golden Gate Park.
- [136:58]
Rich Mahan
Jerry Garcia said that free shows had to be free for the band as well. That is free from all hassles and chill as possible. There's a persistent rumor that the Dead took this seriously for the Unity Fair and dosed together for the gig. Larry Weissman.
- [137:13]
Larry Weissman
That sounds right to me. And I think it's a good example of how we were making sure that they would be comfortable with doing it. And I do think that that happened, but I can't say for 100% sure. I can tell you that I certainly was about as high as I've ever been in my life, for sure.
- [137:32]
Rich Mahan
It was the Dead's first show of the year without an introduction by Bill Graham. Like the band's last two appearances in June and August, it began like this. Right away. The Dead are audibly looser than their other recent shows. And it's very possible to hear the band transitioning into the Grateful Dead that would emerge in 1976. It was not a warm and sunny San Francisco day. Jeff Gould, soon to found Modulus Guitars.
- [138:31]
Jesse Jarno
Was there because Garcia is wearing a leather coat. It's cold and foggy. This is where I live. So it's a cold, foggy. Phil's wearing a sweater. You know, I think Bobby's wearing some kind of. I don't know, Northeast leather or whatever it was. Garcia's playing the Travis Bean.
- [138:48]
Rich Mahan
Jerry Garcia was indeed sporting a new guitar. Here he is talking to Bonnie Simmons on KSAN a few months later playing.
- [138:55]
Jesse Jarno
This Travis Beane guitar, which is a new brand of guitar and it's different from most normal ones in that it has sort of a metal neck. I like it a lot. It's very stable and simple.
- [139:08]
Rich Mahan
His Doug Irwin guitar Wolf had gone in for repairs, returning to action in late 1977. Until then, Garcia would play a series of white bodied Travis Beane guitars, giving this sound a slightly different bite. But as they move through slipknot, Garcia breaks a string and after he disappears from the mix, the action trails off the string pop. Happens around here. A very San Francisco free show in the park thing happens during this break. Listen to what Garcia plays in the background.
- [140:07]
Jesse Jarno
If there's a doctor in the house, would you please come backstage because there's a woman having a baby.
- [140:28]
Rich Mahan
Some excellent comedy ensues as Grateful Dead brand echolocation services kick in and they try to figure out where the woman is in the crowd. That's where the doctor is needed, apparently.
- [140:41]
Jesse Jarno
Don't everybody wait. Oh, well.
- [140:43]
Rich Mahan
And we need a doctor backstage.
- [140:45]
Jesse Jarno
A lady having a baby. Maybe there's even two of them.
- [140:51]
Rich Mahan
I like Garcia's off mic reaction to the next comment.
- [140:55]
Jesse Jarno
Is there one out there?
- [140:57]
Larry Weissman
No.
- [140:58]
Rich Mahan
Yes.
- [140:59]
Jesse Jarno
Maybe there's one out there and maybe.
- [141:01]
Rich Mahan
There'S one back here.
- [141:02]
Jesse Jarno
Nobody's really sure.
- [141:04]
Rich Mahan
According to record world coverage of the event, the name of the father was Sunny Place. That's sunny with an O. But take that with a grain of salt. If anybody from Sunny Place's family is out there, get in touch with us. Dan O' Henklin was there, going 3 for 4 in 75.
- [141:22]
Jesse Jarno
The great American Musical concert was perfect. I mean, it was just perfect. And then came later that summer came the free concert in Golden Gate Park. And I went down there with all my buddies from the Weasel band. We were up on kind of a little rise like, like a bench, I think. There was a rhododendron and there were trees. And in amongst all that stuff was a huge statue head carved of wood called the Goddess of the Forest. We're looking out over. Was wonderful. And I was surrounded by all my friends and we were up in the conundrums and we were, you know, partying on and just a wonderful memory.
- [143:03]
Rich Mahan
Having revived it for the reflection sessions the Dead bring back. They love each other. For the first time since early 1974, the debut of the slowed down arrangement.
- [143:13]
Jesse Jarno
God Told the There's nothing you can stop Lord, you know they made a man. They love each other Lord, you can see that it's true.
- [143:39]
Rich Mahan
Matt Kelly from Kingfish plays harmonica on the Music Never Stopped. And Beat it on down the Line, his first official appearance with the Full Dead. Later in the set, they return to Franklin's Tower.
- [144:14]
Jesse Jarno
Jeff Gould in Franklin's Tower, where he says, if you get confused, listen to the music play. And then he rips off this kind of like, I don't know what you call it. I think it's kind of a chord metallic shard. It's just wonderful sound.
- [144:37]
Rich Mahan
You get confused.
- [144:38]
Jesse Jarno
Listen to the music play.
- [145:02]
Rich Mahan
Always enjoy this shot from Phil.
- [145:17]
Jesse Jarno
But anyway, we aren't going to play that now. We're going to play something else.
- [145:21]
Rich Mahan
And Chaser.
- [145:24]
Jesse Jarno
The correct pronunciation of this Tsoon trucking. God willing, we'll remember the words. All you folks that know the words, mouth them real, real vividly.
- [145:40]
Rich Mahan
Sometimes. This excellent jam is labeled the 11, but it's just a jam in. And we say goodbye to One more piece of Blues for Olive, the second and final complete performance of King Solomon's Marbles and Stronger Than Dirt or Milk and the Turkey. I think there's a variety of reasons why some of the Blues for Ala material didn't become cherished parts of the Dead's live replacement. It required close and vigilant rehearsal. But it was more than that. The Dead didn't mind rehearsing sometimes. But Garcia would refer to the 11 with one of his heaviest insults, calling it a musical cop, that it enforced its will on them as musicians and robbed it of its fun. Even the usually fast flying Garcia doesn't sound too confident after not having played the song in six weeks. And pieces like King Solomon's Marbles could definitely be musical cops. Others, like Sage and Spirit and Blues for Allah require not only practice but an especially sensitive level of communication between the musicians and, if playing in public, an attentive audience. But for one more day in the Park, King Solomon's Marbles and Stronger Than Dirt sounded for the Heads. Maybe more importantly, the energy that the Dead in the Starship contributed fueled the next phases of San Francisco counterculture.
- [148:24]
Jesse Jarno
Bill McCarthy backstage we knew a lawyer named Mark Rennie, who then also became heavily involved in the Haight Street Fairs after that. But he said, you know, Bill, what you guys have created here, you can't let this just be a great concert that everybody loves and there's no real impact beyond the day. So he convinced us to create the Unity Foundation a year later. And we put on a whole series of Unity Fairs, four more, including one for Gay Freedom Day. And the Gay Freedom Day was very significant because that was during the Anita Bryant scare.
- [149:08]
Rich Mahan
I came across a pretty amazing story from the Bay Area Reporter previewing the 1977 edition that Bill is speaking about. Next to an article detailing the year's events, there's a photo of unity fair 75 of the grateful Dead on stage, but the only caption reads, unity Fair opens and closes Gay Pride Week. Sure, the Dead weren't at Unity Fair 77, but I'm guessing they still felt part of the Unity.
- [149:35]
Jesse Jarno
I had put together the headliner for the year before in 76, and there were, like, there were about 30,000 people. They came to that event, and it was in Golden Gate park, so it wasn't at the seat of power or anything like that. Well, this year, when everything that was happening and the controversy and then the gardener, the gay gardener, was murdered, like, a week or so before the, you know, before the event. So everything was, like, in a state of flux. Nobody knew what was going on. But I said to my board, I said, we have to get involved in this. We just have to. So we put on a Unity Fair, but also we were in charge of the stage, and we did all of the stage performances for an audience of about 250,000 people. It was headlined by Sylvester. Get on down.
- [150:45]
Rich Mahan
Down, down, down, down, down. The first Unity Fair illustrates how the Dead fit into the long history of radical San Franciscans. The San Francisco music scene continued to flow ever onward, and the Dead remained an enormous local institution. But it would really start to change after 1975. The Unity Fair would be the last major free show in Golden Gate park for many years. In 1976, the People's Ballroom attempted to book a return show by the Jefferson Starship, but fell into a tangle of city officialdom, where the city denied their attempt to get a permit for a show on the Polo field, offering them McLaren Park, a location on the far outskirts of town. That was a pain in the ass to get to the People's Ballroom kept on truckin', helping with the stages at many of the big events we were just speaking about. But The Unity Fair 75 represented something special. Larry Weissman.
- [151:38]
Larry Weissman
I really do think that was, like, kind of a high point that we never were able to reach again. The ballroom went on for a while after that, but it was. We just. We couldn't get, you know, that we never were able to get back to that again because we were too busy trying to survive the onslaught from the. From the government.
- [151:57]
Rich Mahan
It was the Dead's last free show in Golden Gate park or anywhere for more than 15 years, not returning until a 1991 gig on the Polo Field following the tragic death of Bill Graham. In 1977, the dead asked Robert Hunter to draft some new verses for Truckin. They never sang them on stage, but Hunter often used this verse in his solo performances.
- [152:20]
Jesse Jarno
Once in a while, the music gets into the street. VIP your ladies bug every carbon. The beat, the pudding, the lock on Lindley Meadow and keys are beginning to look like a weekend playing the park. Well, Paul didn't his hell.
- [152:37]
Rich Mahan
After the Lindley Meadow show, the Grateful Dead paused their operations in a way they hadn't before. And this is where we start to land this period of Grateful Dead history with a few appendices and other endings. A few days later, on October 4th at Winterland, Kingfish and Keith and Donna, with Billy Kreutzman, shared another bill, gearing up for the two bands to do an east coast tour together later in the fall. In his memoir Searching for the Sound, Phil Lesch describes the aftermath of the Lindley Meadows show as when the hiatus finally began for real. For 10 years, the Grateful Dead had consumed my every waking moment and much of my dream life as well. Now I was truly at loose ends. No musical projects except the occasional Seastones gig. That was Seastones in Southern California near San Diego on November 22, 1975, and what would be the last performance for the project. It marked a bittersweet closing in Ned Legion's five years around the Dead world. He'd helped create a space for some of the band's most furthest out, but also its most intimate music. One of the reasons he's been an honored guest on the Dead cast since before we even launched. And while doing that, he was also busy developing his own voice as a composer, creating the beginning of what was intended to be a much larger body of work. Welcome back to Close out the Seastone Story.
- [154:32]
Jesse Jarno
Ned Lagin I walked away from my direct involvement playing with the Grateful Dead in June of 75. I continued doing music at home and Stones at home and alone and with Jerry and Phil and David. Through 1975. I left completely all of music by the end of 1976. There was no falling out, no confrontation, no fight, no anger, no bad words.
- [154:58]
Rich Mahan
Things had been coming to a slow boil as the Dead faced the reality of having their own record companies and no touring income. They sold distribution Rights for Round Records to United Artists in the early summer of 1975, almost exactly as seastones was.
- [155:12]
Jesse Jarno
Hitting stores, the records were removed from the store and to be relabeled and replaced maybe two months or so later. So all the publicity and immediate royalties coming in, the momentum for Seastones was lost. With the United Artists deal sacrificed with unintended consequences for an album of bio music.
- [155:34]
Rich Mahan
It had done pretty well, making it into the top 20 in Billboard's FM action chart and even cracking record world's top 200. The early summer recall with Seastones is a firm part of Ned's memory, but I've never seen any evidence of a later United Artist's pressing. I think perhaps more likely the album sold out of its first pressing and UA simply never repressed it. Perhaps because it was in quad.
- [155:57]
Jesse Jarno
I had been living off of royalties, advanced royalties from Round Records, thankfully so, and it was expected that that would transfer laid into real royalties from the release of Seastones, which then those royalties actually disappeared.
- [156:12]
Rich Mahan
The accounting of Round Records is a tangled story unto itself, which we'll save for next season.
- [156:17]
Jesse Jarno
United Artists had been helpful in the beginning, but the budgeted money eventually went purely to Grateful Dead movie production and other work. And there was no budget for Seastones 2 or for business supporting us playing live.
- [156:35]
Rich Mahan
At first, UA treated Ned like a star, flying him down to LA for a glamorous photo shoot. A story appeared in Billboard, picked up by the Associated Press and run in newspapers throughout the fall of 1975 with a headline about an album made by a computer. But it's no exaggeration to say that the world wasn't ready for Seastones. Ned was disappointed by its critical reception, or lack thereof, by the new music world.
- [157:00]
Jesse Jarno
There was no discussion of interactive computer technology and computer software, which I was one of, if not the first to do. There was no discussion of voice and words into sound and sound and becoming words and voice, textual continuities. Even though my words were composed by me to be performed by Jerry, by Grace and by David, well known vocalist. And there was no discussion of the music that we were doing and its relationship to overall classic or new music history and meanings.
- [157:38]
Rich Mahan
Since 1975, many of Ned Legion's core ideas about iterative music generation, nonlinear structures and ensemble improvisation have become more widely accepted. But in 1975, Ned Legion needed to make a living.
- [157:53]
Jesse Jarno
Ron Rackow no bad intentions and Jerry said that I was going to be in the movie and I would get royalties from that. That turned out to not be true.
- [158:01]
Rich Mahan
The Grateful Dead Movie had run into numerous problems during its editing phase that kept it from being released until 1977. One of those was that the Master 16 track audio recordings had been handled pretty badly, in part because Betty Cantor Jackson was on maternity leave in October 1974.
- [158:18]
Jesse Jarno
My tracks were lost and garbled and needed to be replaced. Jerry was happy with jams that came out of Seastone, but I would have to wait six months to a year to do those other dubs and I couldn't afford to wait to do that time.
- [158:32]
Rich Mahan
Ned was coming to a very hard decision.
- [158:34]
Jesse Jarno
I believed in the music, I believed in those guys, I believed in all of what we were doing. But it wasn't possible unless I've been born to a rich family that could find the answer. So here's a one clear line. I had to pay rent.
- [158:47]
Rich Mahan
The Seastones live ensemble that featured Ned alongside Phil Lesh, Jerry Garcia, David Crosby and Mickey Hart, was proving tough to keep in balance as a focused representation of Ned's compositional ideas.
- [158:59]
Jesse Jarno
I had certain frustrations that my musical conceptual ideas and my playing and composing was not being discussed or illuminated by the others who knew and made music with me. Jerry and David in particular were emphasizing them wanting me to leave. But I had no existing management or ROTOR booking people or any money to pay for this, given that I wasn't getting royalties from Round Records or from United Artists. And their personal lives, which I was close to, particularly with Phil and Jerry, were changing. And so music as a life, art process was evolving.
- [159:38]
Rich Mahan
In the fall of 1975, Ned Lagin began his exit process.
- [159:42]
Jesse Jarno
Phil said I was too pure, quote, too pure meaning, too idealistic that I was believing in, as he said, idealism, minor loyalty and wanting the ability of freedom to stand on my own as a person, as a composer and as an artist stuff feelings that I think that he shared. David was very angry with me for me quitting music making and told me so. I still remember his facial expression and voice. They are understood. And we stayed friends for years. For years we lived close by one another.
- [160:16]
Rich Mahan
Owsley Stanley remains one of the undersung engineers of the whole Seastones project, and some of his tapes can be heard on the expanded 2018 version.
- [160:24]
Jesse Jarno
And so I asked Phil and Jerry and David, I would prefer not to be talked about, not have a public past life so that I could go and find a job without any notice. And it was the signs of respect that I got from everybody that no one ever said anything. I was just allowed to disappear, to fly away.
- [160:47]
Rich Mahan
By 1976. Ned Lagin would take a job with Processor Technology and begin his new life. He didn't even have to relocate from Marin county to go from being near the center of the rock scene to being near the center of the tech scene. Ned Lagin has continued to create art, photography and writing since then, as well as an album of new music, Cat Dreams, and we've posted a link to his Spirit cats site@dead.net deadcast. The final seastones performances were in November 1975. One at home in San Rafael and one just outside San Diego.
- [161:22]
Jesse Jarno
We drove down there. There were two sets, which is first of all release astounding, and two long sets. And the first. Only the first set got recorded and Bill thought the second set was the best playing I had ever done. He complimented me. There was nothing booked after that. And it seemed later that it was okay that I played my best. The last time I ever played.
- [162:41]
Rich Mahan
The day after the Unity Fair at Lindley Meadow, Jerry Garcia reported back to work on the Grateful Dead movie. A very regular job outside the Grateful Dead and the new Jerry Garcia Band. This is from the August 1975 interview with Mary Travers.
- [162:55]
Jesse Jarno
The film started out as being part of an idea. How could we give our audience us without having to send our bodies around? So the idea was if we could capture one really good performance, maybe we.
- [163:06]
Rich Mahan
Would have something like that.
- [163:07]
Jesse Jarno
Since then, the movie has transformed the.
- [163:09]
Rich Mahan
Idea of what it is to transmute it. It was taking up an increasing amount of time.
- [163:14]
Jesse Jarno
When will it be ready? Oh God, I don't know. I might be working on it for the rest of my life.
- [163:18]
Rich Mahan
I hope supposedly.
- [163:21]
Jesse Jarno
Supposedly somewhere early this next year. I hope spring, maybe early spring, sometime in the spring this next year. I think it should be pretty done.
- [163:29]
Rich Mahan
And here's an Update from early 1976. Speaking with Bonnie Simmons on Ksan. The movie is.
- [163:37]
Jesse Jarno
Sort of bent Brock hut stage getting there. The music is mostly sort of cut and the form of it is coming together. And hopefully we have a March deadline for what we're doing, the editing of it and so forth. Then it goes to the lab sometime in there and gets hung up in that process for I don't know how long. And the sound mixing has to happen and everything. And hopefully the record will be. I mean the record, the movie will be out and maybe July ish, if we get lucky.
- [164:10]
Rich Mahan
They did not get lucky. And the movie would continue to dominate Jerry Garcia's creative world for another year and a half. Finally released in spring 1977. Far too late for it to be a substitute for the actual Grateful Dead. Despite their love of performing live, the Lindley Meadow Unity Fair didn't inspire the Dead to return to the road. It was still a problem that needed solving. Here's Garcia speaking with Ben Fong Torres for a Khe SANS Special in 1975.
- [164:38]
Jesse Jarno
The Grateful Dead problem at this point.
- [164:40]
Rich Mahan
Has to do with we want somebody.
- [164:42]
Jesse Jarno
To turn us on with a new idea. We want somebody to supply us with interesting new input in terms of the.
- [164:48]
Rich Mahan
Kind of format that we'll go out.
- [164:50]
Jesse Jarno
In and the kind of concert we're at, asking the promoters to do something creative, you know, turn us on, give us something that's different than what we've been into.
- [164:59]
Rich Mahan
Interestingly, just in the same landing window of ours in late 1975, Bob Dylan and his friends were doing their best to solve something like the same problem and came up with their own solution.
- [165:27]
Jesse Jarno
I married Isis on the fifth day of Babe, but I could not hold on to her very long.
- [165:35]
Rich Mahan
After returning to the road for the first time in seven years and playing arenas with the band on tour, 74 Bob Dylan was already sick of the hassle. The Rolling Thunder Revue hit the road in New England in late October 1975. Playing only in auditoriums and theaters, the shows were only announced as the collective of musicians rolled into town, a party that lasted through the spring of 76, though they eventually ended up in bigger venues. And if you look closely at the Rolling Thunder stage, like really squinted, you could catch a sight of the Blues for Olive Fiddler stuck to Scarlett Rivera's violin. As it happens, our colleague Ray Padgett interviewed Scarlett Rivera for his absolutely crucial Bob Dylan newsletter, Flaggin down the Double E, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast and asked Scarlett the absolutely pressing question of whether or not she was a Deadhead.
- [166:25]
Jesse Jarno
No, I wasn't. But I liked that sticker, and I related to the skeleton playing the violin, so I put it on my violin and kept it on the whole time. That was my traveling companion.
- [167:00]
Rich Mahan
But seriously, if you're into Bob Dylan with even a fraction of the same passion that's propelled you eight episodes and several hours deep into the Blues for all of podcast, you want to swan dive right into the Flagging down archives. It may not have been created with the title Blues for All in Mine, but it also expresses the music inside and a keyhole to worlds beyond. The Blues for Olive Fiddler got around a trickster in the Dead's Trickster army alongside the wake of the flood Crow, the Jester, the Ice Cream Kid and other chaos making misfits. The fiddler showed up on LSD blotter, of course, and was spotted there as recently as this past summer of 2025 during a bust in New Zealand. We've got one more place to trace the fiddler today and how he ended up in the company of one of the world's preeminent fiddle experts. That was JW Day, one of the many fiddlers collected on the Anthology of American Folk Music by the legendary alchemist Harry Smith. We've spoken a few times with Raymond Foy, one of Harry's caretakers, in his last years. Check out the east coast episode of Enjoying the Ride for the story of Allen Ginsberg securing a Rex foundation grant from Jerry Garcia so Harry Smith could live comfortably.
- [168:43]
Jesse Jarno
Harry got money from the Grateful Dead and it really meant a lot to him that last year that he was living in the Chelsea Hotel. And I used to tease Harry about.
- [168:54]
Rich Mahan
The connection because the Dead would be in town and all the Deadheads would.
- [168:57]
Jesse Jarno
Be hanging out at the Chelsea or outside or looking for floor space.
- [169:01]
Rich Mahan
And I'd say to Harry, your people are in town.
- [169:03]
Jesse Jarno
And Harry would say, they're not my people.
- [169:06]
Rich Mahan
Harry Smith died in late 1991. But after Harry died, when I was.
- [169:10]
Jesse Jarno
Cleaning his room out, I opened the closet door and on the inside of the closet, on the very back wall, was a Grateful Dead poster hanging up. I thought that was very touching. It was a Blues for Allah poster.
- [169:22]
Rich Mahan
I don't think he chose it.
- [169:23]
Jesse Jarno
I think he just happened to come upon it and put it there.
- [169:26]
Rich Mahan
Perhaps the fiddler chose Harry Smith, but the fiddler was finicky. Apparently, even during the years when the Dead regularly flew the Blues for Allah banner behind them on stage, they didn't return to the song itself. On October 6, 1981, in London, on the night Anwar Sadat was assassinated in Cairo, the Night Space segment drifted around the Blues for Allah theme, but never made it all the way there. In 1988, when Jerry Garcia described the Desert Jam to Blair Jackson, he said, it didn't quite work the way I wanted it to, but we did try it in some live jams, and sometimes it worked. We still do this. Some. Mostly Bob and I do it in the space jams now with just the two of us, it's easier to hear the harmonic content. Now, Phil's been joining us lately. If anybody out there can point to specific examples of the band approaching the Desert Jam in space segments, get in touch. Keith Eaton left us this story that I think instinctively speaks to the power of Blues for Ala Impressions fade away over years, but I still won't ever forget how confused I was the first time I ever listened to the B.
- [170:54]
Jesse Jarno
Side of the blues for a la LP.
- [170:57]
Rich Mahan
The LPs I wasn't supposed to touch.
- [171:00]
Jesse Jarno
I didn't know what to make of that. The needles are.
- [171:17]
Rich Mahan
The ships of state Sail on me Rush and drown in sand in their own ways. Blues for Allah Both the album and the song and 1975 as a whole were high watermarks for the Grateful Dead's creativity at its most ambitious. From their music to the way they existed in the world. It doesn't sound like anything else, before or after. It's not for everybody. It never was. But if you want to engage with it, the 1975 Grateful Dead are waiting for you up at Aces, ready with their instruments and a box of crickets.
- [172:11]
Jesse Jarno
A great being wind the needle's eye is thin. It. Taste eternity the source Sing blues for Allah Inshallah. Sa. Islam the fruit of Abraham. The thousand stories have come round to one again. Sam. Let's see with our heart these things our eyes have seen and know the truth must still lie somewhere in between. Sam. Ra. Sa.
- [180:33]
Rich Mahan
Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast, Friends. We've enjoyed having you along for the ride during season 12. We'd like to thank our special guests in this episode David Lemieux, Ron Rakow, Al Teller, Ned Lagin, Steve Brown, Bill McCarthy, Larry Weissman, Gary Lambert, Ed Perlstein, Joan Miller, Jeff Gould, Dan Hanklein, Raymond Foy, Nicholas Merriweather, Sean o', Donnell, Chadwick Jenkins and Keith Eaton. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast David Ganz, as always, for his ongoing contributions of audio from his interview archive. Executive producer for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Doron Tyson. All rights reserved.