Blues For Allah 50: Crazy Fingers

Summary

GOOD OL' GRATEFUL DEADCAST

Episode: Blues For Allah 50: Crazy Fingers

Release Date: October 23, 2025
Hosts: Rich Mahan & Jesse Jarnow

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Overview

This episode of the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast is a deep dive into the creation, musicality, recording, and legacy of “Crazy Fingers,” the ethereal track that opens Side Two of Blues for Allah. The hosts, with help from guests and rare archival material, dissect the song’s development during a time of transition for the Grateful Dead—artistically, organizationally, and personally. The episode covers the music’s jazzy/reggae structure, Robert Hunter’s enigmatic lyrics, studio evolution, its early live debuts, the Dead’s industry shake-ups, and the enduring legacy of “Crazy Fingers” in their repertoire.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Setting the Stage: Blues for Allah’s Evolution

• The deluxe 50th anniversary edition of Blues for Allah is announced, along with associated unreleased recordings and special vinyl editions. [03:35]
• The Deadcast encourages listener participation and reflects on the fanbase’s ongoing engagement with Dead history.
• “Crazy Fingers” is described as a Hunter-Garcia masterpiece with a unique reggae-inflected groove and rich lyrics.

2. The Mystery and Charm of “Crazy Fingers”

• David Lemieux: “It’s a magnificent piece of art.” [04:41]
• The hosts and guests stress the song’s assembly of careful instrumental and vocal layers. Unlike “China Doll’s” frailty, “Crazy Fingers” is “delicate” through complexity and nuance, not just quietness. [05:02]

“A lot of the Dead's lyrics… they’re all open to interpretation… and Crazy Fingers is a song that is surreal. It reminds me a little bit of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds… you can get so much visual out of it.”
—David Lemieux [05:30]

3. Origins and Studio Workshop Sessions

• The song originated during a period (spring ‘75) when Dead members jammed at Ace’s Studio, nurturing new ideas communally.
• Early versions, referred to as “Distorto,” had a much harder edge before evolving into the final form. [10:42–12:48]
• Sean O’Donnell: The chord progression was chromatic, hinting at the song’s jazz leanings even before the lyrics arrived. [12:08]
• Collective composition and the band-as-workshop ethos are examined:

“We’d go into the studio, we’d jam for a while, and then if something nice turned up, we’d say, well, let’s preserve this little hunk and work with it… That’s how we did most of that album.”
—Jerry Garcia [09:34]

4. Musical Structure and Theoretical Insights

• Musicologists Sean O’Donnell and Chadwick Jenkins break down the harmony, calling it “smoky ambiguity” and highlighting its lack of tonal gravity, calling it “drifting” and chromatic but not dissonant. [22:53/23:08/25:01]
• Reggae, jazz, and “traditional” elements mix. O’Donnell notes it requires true band rehearsal and integration, not just individual preparation. [25:59]

“It’s the synthesis of so much of Jerry’s past and future… post-Row Jimmy lilt, that reggae lilt… somehow the melody comes across like a jazz standard… a highly chromatic tune that doesn’t just blow so nicely.”
—Sean O’Donnell [21:53]

5. Lyrics: Haiku, Revision, and Evocation

• Robert Hunter (WLIR 1978) claims “Crazy Fingers” is built from “seven or eight haiku,” instilling concise mystery. [32:44]
• Scholars and the hosts debate this, noting early drafts weren’t strict haiku but had similar spirit—short, fragmented, imagistic verses.
• The lyrics went through multiple drafts, sometimes scattered and cryptic, referencing everything from EE Cummings to Mexican folk music to Yates and Gramsci. These allusions highlight the period’s sense of change and turmoil. [Discussions and lyric comparisons 35:15–47:43]
• Chadwick Jenkins compares the song’s fragility to Japanese kintsugi pottery—celebrating the beauty of impermanence and assembly. [35:57]

“…You’re taking the fragility of it and making that part of its stability and beauty… Crazy Fingers works like that.”
—Chadwick Jenkins [35:57]

6. Band Dynamics, Industry Upheaval, and Recording Process

• The Dead, between labels, sold their indie Grateful Dead and Round Records to United Artists for financial relief amid economic downturns and shortages. New UA president Al Teller recalls early meetings:

“Just being around those guys for a very short period of time just reinforced that sense… The use of virtually every musical genre in one form or another; I thought that was very, very impressive.”
—Al Teller [07:59]

• Teller facilitated the UA deal on “a burger-stained napkin,” symbolizing the Dead’s unorthodox approach. [73:12]
• Garcia reflects on the “gratuitous” nature of recording in an era where they saw themselves as primarily a live band. [91:58/92:24]

7. Early Live Debuts & Scene Reporting

• The Bob Freed Memorial Boogie in June ‘75 featured the debut of “Crazy Fingers” just weeks after its final studio recording, in a quasi-Grateful Dead lineup. [83:45]
• Fans recall the mixture of new and familiar material and the palpable excitement at the “return” of the Dead.

“You can also hear them as something more than that… Here they are opening with the debut of the very song we’re talking about today, less than two weeks after recording it…”
—Narrator [83:02–83:45]

• The episode explores the communal context of Dead scene, including anecdotes about ticket-getting, crowd dynamics, and “Jerry and Friends” shows.

8. Studio Finishing Touches

• Overdubs on “Crazy Fingers” were minimal but precise—built around July 1975, with stacked harmonies, bell parts from Mickey Hart, and acoustic piano overlays from Keith Godchaux (whose entry adds a shimmer in the outro).
• Garcia and Godchaux are heard editing and arranging the final outro (piano underscoring “Crimson and Clover” vibes). [95:12]

9. Performance Legacy

• “Crazy Fingers” became a recurring but not ever-present part of the Dead’s setlists: it disappeared after ‘76, only to return in ‘82, where it continued to evolve over the next decades.
• The track’s enduring mystique is tied to its harmonic ambiguity and evocative lyrics—it “let the band soak in." [98:57]

“Crazy Fingers is a song where you can just let it soak over you. That’s how I felt about it… There’s no song like it in the repertoire.”
—David Lemieux [98:57]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Jerry Garcia on lyric selection:
  “My capacity as a person who chooses a lyric to sing is really about as much as I would want to have toward the responsibility of the content… I’m fascinated by fragments because of my involvement in traditional music.” [35:15/37:00]
• Robert Hunter (on his approach):
  “Crazy Fingers is a son of about seven or eight haiku YouTuber versus a haiku. And I'm rather proud of that.” [32:44]
• David Lemieux (on the song’s uniqueness):
  “There’s no song like it in the repertoire. I don’t think this is; it’s a unique song for the Grateful Dead. A beautiful, beautiful piece of art.” [98:57]
• Al Teller (signing the band):
  “It was not a one napkin deal. It might have been a three napkin deal.” [73:12]
• Gary Lambert (on live surprises):
  “Another delightful surprise… we were starting to get some of the song forms that were going into Blue Terrala… this wonderful sense of something creative evolving in real time.” [87:49]

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Important Timestamps

• 04:41: David Lemieux introduces the song’s studio beauty.
• 07:30: Garcia on evocative vs. thought-provoking songs.
• 12:08: Sean O’Donnell on the early “Distorto” chord progressions.
• 20:27: Final studio takes begin to resemble the finished product.
• 23:08: Chadwick Jenkins on the song’s ambiguous tonality.
• 32:44: Robert Hunter claims the lyrics are built as haiku.
• 35:15: Garcia and Hunter debate lyric editorial process.
• 73:12: Al Teller and Ron Rakow hash out UA deal on napkins.
• 83:45: “Crazy Fingers” live debut at the Bob Freed Boogie.
• 91:58: Garcia on the Dead as a live band first and foremost.
• 98:57: Lemieux reflects on the song’s unique, meditative quality.

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Episode Flow & Tone

The overall tone is affectionate, scholarly, and at times whimsical, blending recollections and close readings with the oral history style that appeals both to lifelong Deadheads and the "curious." Through interviews, session outtakes, fan memoires, and layered music analysis, the episode offers a comprehensive, accessible, and loving portrait of a song that epitomizes the Dead’s experimental spirit and collaborative artistry.

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For Newcomers:

This narrative is as much about “Crazy Fingers” as it is about the Grateful Dead’s broader journey—musical invention, group dynamics, and self-management, all thriving in the face of industry, economic, and personal challenges. The episode delivers an essential window into how the band, their music, and their culture persist and evolve, continually inviting listeners deeper down the rabbit hole.

Transcript

[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.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Foreign.

[Rich Mahan]

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 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 flip our Blues for Allah record over to side two and drop the needle on track one. Crazy Fingers. Well folks, the Grateful Dead Blues for all of 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition is out. Now you may have already checked it out, but if you haven't, listen to this. It's a 3 CD set. It features the newly remastered album with unreleased sound check and concert recordings. The set features almost two hours of unreleased recordings. Among these are highlights from rehearsals from the August 12, 1975 soundcheck at the San Francisco Great American Music hall, including the album tracks Sage and Spirit, Help on the Way, Slipknot and Franklin's Tower. The collection continues with performances from June 21, 1976 at the Tower Theater in Pennsylvania, spotlighting five blues for all songs alongside favorites like Eyes of the World. Rounding out the set are selections from the Bill Graham Snack Benefit, which stood for Students Need, Athletics, Culture and Kicks that was held at Kezar Stadium in Golden gate park on March 23, 1975. There are also vinyl variants of the original album available including a picture disc, a Midnight Fire red vinyl edition and 180 gram black vinyl. Very cool looking blues for all of 50th anniversary merch is now also available and all of these can be found at dead.net and [e-mail] you can check out the Dolby Atmos mixes on Blu Ray disc. They were mixed by Stephen Wilson and if you know who he is, you know he's making some of the best surround sound mixes there are out there right now. These sound nothing short of fantastic and they are ready to blow your mind. Over at rhino.com truck on over to dead.net deadcast and check out all of our past good old Grateful Dead cast episodes, including the complete seasons 1 through 11. You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform and listen how and where you like to listen. You know, you'd be surprised how many of our fellow heads don't know about the Dead cast yet. You could really help us out by subscribing, sharing us with your friends on social media, hitting a like button, leaving a review. If you Any way you can help spread the word about this to your friends? We appreciate it. Thank you. Do you have a great story about anything Blues for Allah related? Were you lucky enough to catch the band at one of their 1975 shows? Then we need to hear from you. Head over to stories.dead.net and record yourself telling us all about it. You may just hear yourself on a future episode of the Deadcast. We have transcripts from many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure. Head over to dead.netdeadcast index and check them out Crazy Fingers, the track that kicks off side two of Blues For Ollie, is nothing short of an absolute Hunter Garcia classic. The band employs a cool reggae groove that pairs oh so well with Hunter's poetry, and that's laid over one of the best chord progressions on the album. Get ready to find out all about Crazy Fingers. Here's Jesse Giorno.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Flipping the side on Blues for Allah. We come to one of the most gorgeous pieces of music the Dead ever created in the studio. Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter's Crazy Fingers, Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.

[David Lemieux]

It's one of those songs. I do love the studio version of it as much as I think most live versions, or possibly even more. It's a magnificent piece of art.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Crazy Fingers is a delicate song, and not delicate like the fragile quiet of China Doll. Delicate as in a really careful assembly of instrumental and vocal parts.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Your brain falls like Crazy Fingers, peals of fragile thunder keeping time.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Though the final piece would be credited to Garcia and Hunter, Crazy Fingers was the kind of song and performance that could have only emerged from the situation the Dead built for themselves at aces in spring 1975.

[David Lemieux]

A lot of the Dead's lyrics are they're all open to interpretation. They're all whatever we get out of them, and some more so than others. And Crazy Fingers is a song that is surreal. It reminds me a little bit of Lucy in the sky with Diamonds in terms of it is so out there and you can get so much visual out of it too. And that's the thing, I mean, I visualize, I think, all of the Dead's lyrics in one way or another.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Cloud ends reaching from rainbow Tapping at the window Touch your head so swift and bright Strange feelings of light flow.

[David Lemieux]

But this one, it's a song that I still don't understand and I don't want to. Some of them are a little bit more on the nose, like Keep youp Day Job. This is not Keep youp Day Job. This is a song that has so many ways to interpret it.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Gone are the days we stopped to.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Decide.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Where we should go we just run Gone by the broken eyes we saw through in dreams Gone, gone, dream and love.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

We'Ll have more to say about this topic deeper in the episode, but here's a thought Jerry Garcia floated to Peter Simon in March 1975 as Crazy Fingers began to take shape.

[Jerry Garcia]

I like songs that are more evocative than, say, thought provoking.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Crazy Fingers was created during a tumultuous window in Grateful Dead history when they came to the hard decision to sell Grateful Dead and Round records to United Artists, which we discussed some last time this episode. We're delighted to be visiting with Al Teller, then president of United Artists, who reminds us of this important point to keep in mind as the real world encroached on, the Dead sequestered at Aces Studio in Mill Valley.

[Al Teller]

When I was an undergraduate and saw them for the first time, or listened to them or read about them for the first time, I just liked their attitude. They were independent. They had their own way of doing things musically. They had their own way of going about their career. And I thought that was very cool. I really felt that if you feel strongly about something, and particularly when you're dealing with creative businesses where there are no formulas, no matter how often people will pop out of the woodwork claiming they do have formulas regarding creativity, the ability to have a belief in yourself and a belief in your vision and the wherewithal to execute it. Critically important. Just being around those guys for a very short period of time just reinforced that sense. I was a great admirer of how they went about their musical journey. The use of virtually every musical genre in one form or another I thought was very, very impressive.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

We'll add more with Al Teller later this episode, but now we reset ourselves a slightly earlier in the creative process. Blues for Allah had a few different, broader missions as a creative work by the Dead. Jerry Garcia articulated them to Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary that August. We've posted a [e-mail] deadcast the thing.

[Jerry Garcia]

For us musically is where do we go from here without going back, without covering ground we've already covered? The thing to do for us to do is to start structuring whole new kinds of music to play.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

We've used part of this quote before, but Jerry Garcia spoke to Blair Jackson about Blues for Allah and told him the whole idea was to get back to that band thing where the band makes the main contribution to the evolution of the material. So we'd go into the studio, we jam for a while, and then if something nice turned up, we'd say, well, let's preserve this little hunk and work with it, see if we can't do something with it. And that's how we did most of that album. What became Crazy Fingers originally had a hard rock and roll feel. It was completely different. A lot of it went through metamorphoses that normally would take quite a long time. We sort of forced them.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Sam.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

That was the piece of music that was originally called Distorto. The earliest piece of the sessions we currently have access to, from February 19, 1975, at ACES, excavated by David Ganz for the Grateful Dead hour. It might be the first time they tried it. You can hear Jerry Garcia calling out chords. They kept working with the song in February and March, and the Distorto only got fuzzier. Here's a bit from February 28th. Can you hear the connection to Crazy Finger? Please welcome back from the City College of New York, the Deputy Dean of the Humanities and Arts and esteemed Dead Cast Musicology correspondent Sean o'.

[Rich Mahan]

Donnell.

[Sean O'Donnell]

The chord sequence is the same. The top descending chromatic line is his vocal line in the tune in Crazy Fingers and the chords of the same chord progression.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

And very quietly, as they're trying to resolve headphone issues during the March 4 session, Phil Lesh achieves title very quietly mentioning the working name of this piece.

[Rich Mahan]

What.

[Sean O'Donnell]

I know. I think he's called it a rocker when Jerry referred to it. But it's. It's more like that gruff fusion mid-70s fusion distortion.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

That'S Al DiMiola playing guitar on Return to Forever's piece the Shadow of Low from 1972. But the chord sequence was very much in line with the band's idea of creating new languages to play inside.

[Sean O'Donnell]

I really feel like he's thinking about collections of notes on this record or at this time or. Or maybe at the studio. While he's thinking of ideas, he's thinking about groupings of notes to. To do things that wouldn't be your normal. I'm just going to play a pentatonic scale or I'm going to just play a major or minor scale. And it's chromatic in a jazz standards way. Like, okay, you know, their progression is pushing us this way. But then when it. It starts to use so many of the tones, you're like, this is going for something.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

We talked in the Slipknot episode about how part of Blues for Allah involved connecting together different ideas the band was working through at the Aces sessions. Sometimes those connection points were only passing ideas. This is from the March 4 session, and there are a few passing ideas happening at once. Not all of them having to do with Distorto.

[Al Teller]

I think so. Oh, yeah, I think that'd be a.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

That's Weir suggesting that he might do Robert Hunter's new solo tune, Last Flash of Rock and Roll with Kingfish. He didn't. But listen to Garcia noodling in the background. I think this is the earliest appearance of the Blues for Allah theme on the surviving tape. The ideas didn't really connect. And we'll get back to the Blues For Allah themes soon enough. The band had plenty on their hands with Distorto. Here's Garcia talking through the chords. He's still not done with it and has an idea for a B section.

[Jerry Garcia]

To a whole other feeling. Like a slow three, four. Oh, I got an idea. Oh, there was a thing of his.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

I'm pretty sure Lesh and Garcia just implied they were working on a piece by Keith Godshow. And maybe we can pencil him in as the writer for one of the other unfinished grooves we were discussing last time, possibly the thing called E to A flat, which would have connected at least harmonically to this. Garcia's response is fascinating to me because it implies that they were still thinking of these as workshop sessions, which, with individual songwriters in charge, as opposed to attempts at collective composition. Garcia would come up with his own B section first. They try a take at a minutely faster tempo, and that's all we have of Distorto. And the piece of music doesn't show up again on the currently accessible session tapes for almost three months, by which point it sounds a bit more familiar. Sam Sometimes this session is labeled April 2nd and sometimes June 3rd, but I think it's actually from June 4th, because the sequence includes two full takes of Crazy Fingers, the second version being the final album take, which is marked on the tracking sheet as reel 121, June 4, take 2. Obviously, by now the song is pretty much locked in, which we'll break down in a moment. But at the session start, they're still working on the feel. Things were loose but productive at Aces. Listen for Garcia singing off mic.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

A 1, 2, 3.

[Al Teller]

I want.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

That's it.

[Al Teller]

That's a good.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

That might be a little fast.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Just a little fast. So the lyrics to Crazy Fingers were in place by the time they recorded the basic tracks. Not always the case with this album, as we heard last episode. Garcia breaks off that take, but they're feeling it. Oh, also, the B section is done. Take it from the top again. That's it, though.

[Al Teller]

That's a good.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

That might be a little fast.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Just a little fast. And with that, they're pretty much ready.

[Al Teller]

Yeah, that sounds.

[Jerry Garcia]

Starting to sound neat. Let's get one more of them.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

We have one of the raw session tapes for the final version, which we'll refer back to occasionally.

[Al Teller]

A 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Sean O' Donnell is a big fan of what the piece transformed into.

[Sean O'Donnell]

I love that tune. I just. I love it. It's the synthesis of so much of Jerry's past and future. It has, like, a really traditional structure, this AAB form, very structured. It has that post ro Jimmy lilt, that reggae lilt that is there. Somehow the melody comes across like a jazz standard in some ways. Feels like it would be Garcia Band repertoire in a lot of ways. And then it's this highly chromatic tune that doesn't just blow so nicely. You don't notice that it's really sophisticated in a compositional way. It sort of be coming out of the let me sing your blues away trajectory of, like, let's cram as much chromaticism in here into the structure of the song as possible. But it's done so much more fluidly in Jerry's hands.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

In his memoir, Searching for the Sound, Phil Lesch calls Crazy Fingers Jerry's beautiful essay in smoky ambiguity. Also from the City College of New York, Chadwick Jenkins.

[Chadwick Jenkins]

Crazy Fingers would not be possible without tonal ambiguity. Crazy Fingers is the great example, I think, of ambiguity on this album. There is a fully diminished chord, and that does contribute to it, but the whole thing's ambiguous. You start off with this figure on the G. A sus chord that resolves, if you wouldn't even call that resolving. It just alternates between the sus chord and a triad. When we first hear it on the album, it sounds to me like it's almost like a. Like a dominant chord. Like, I keep expecting it to go to C minor, and I feel like the whole piece flirts with this.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Where are we?

[Chadwick Jenkins]

Kind of energy, the G kind of wins by fiat because you have that nice little walk down and these things that sort of yell out G to you. And then the very first thing you get is a fairly typical progression for the dead 5, 4, 1 in G, but then immediately goes to B flat and creates a sequence out of it and drifts all over the place.

[Al Teller]

Sam.

[Chadwick Jenkins]

It'S such an odd tune to me. Some of that is that fragility of the nature of the tonal sense of it. Like you never feel fully grounded, but it's not so dissonant that you're like, oh, we're in some weird place. It's just kind of drifting.

[Al Teller]

Sam.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Hearing the isolated guitar parts, I'd really love to hear this song performed by Jamaican jazz master Ernest Ranglund. As much as the tonal fragility, there's also the construction of its dynamics.

[Sean O'Donnell]

Sean o' Donnell it's one where you have to do band rehearsals as opposed to the fill version, where you have to go learn your part and then you have to put it together. It's in that sort of Road Jimmy camp where you all have to be on the same page in terms of the feel of it and where you're putting your one finger on the hand.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Every musician in the mix is contributing in significant ways to the picture of the tune, but to my ears, the thing that gives Crazy Fingers its dreamy glow is Keith God Show's Rhodes run through the Leslie rotating cabinet. That's one of the signature sounds of Blues For Allah, and Bobby Ace has his guitar dialed to a subtly irie reverb, adding to the song's reggae feel, which of course Billy Kreutzman is supporting. But Crazy Fingers is only partly a reg egg groove. I'm not sure how to describe what Phil Lesh is doing, but I wouldn't call it an island feel. If I heard this bass part without knowing where it came from, I could maybe guess that it was Phil, but. But probably wouldn't be able to peg it as Crazy Fingers. This is what's happening under the intro into the first verse. His playing on the B section is more recognizable, of course, adding density to the outro. Surfing under and around Garcia's guitar sa.

[Sean O'Donnell]

Sean o' Donnell this is a fairly dense chord progression, which is part of what makes me say it has a jazz standard kind of vibe, where the progression is very tight and directed. And it's not in the overly complex camp, where it's different every time it comes around. Which is the trouble a lot of fill tunes or other tunes where it was this way a second ago and now it's this way. Whereas this is again that very strict AAB structure. So it's always going to cycle through, it's always going to be the same. And as long as you know the progression, you're going to be fine with the notes on the page part of it. So then it's just the blocking into a groove that keeps all those styles present that it kind of synthesizes.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

The total picture is a synthesis that's both singularly Grateful Dead and singular within the Grateful Dead. While there were other reggae tinged moments in the Dead songbook, none with quite this rhythmic delicacy, with one notable exception, it never quite flowed like this again on the basic take, the song continued for another minute. Here's how the fade out sounds on the album and here's a little more of it. You can imagine where it goes from there. The lyrics were finished by then, as.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

We heard before your rain falls like crazy fingers Peals of fragile thunder keeping time.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Here's Robert Hunter speaking with WLIR in 1978.

[Al Teller]

Crazy Fingers is a son of about seven or eight haiku YouTuber versus a haiku. And I'm rather proud of that.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Hunter is speaking in a symbolic sense. Please welcome back Christopher Kaufman, author of the forthcoming book from Duke University Press, Clowns in the Burying the Grateful Literature and the Limits of Philosophy, which we've linked [e-mail] deadcast to call them haiku.

[Christopher Kaufman]

I think, is kind of like generous. The traditional haiku at least has the strict syllabic requirement and, you know, after Kerouac that kind of goes out the window. But they are three line poems or stanzas or something. But I always hesitate a bit when I encounter that word haiku in that quote, because I'm like, ah, yes and no, right? Like loosely maybe.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

The other two characteristics of haiku are the kiraji, known as the cutting word, and the kigo, a seasonal image, neither of which Crazy Fingers has in literal senses. Perhaps it's most accurate to describe Crazy Fingers as a series of haiku like gestures. It's also possible Hunter was remembering an earlier draft that was haiku before getting edited into the song. Speaking with Blair Jackson in 1991, he said crazy Fingers was in fact all written beforehand. It was a page or two of haikus I'd been working on in a notebook. Jerry looked at them and said, hey, this might fit together as a group.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Recall the days that still are to.

[Al Teller]

Come.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Some sing blue.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

But amazingly we also have two and a half Very different lyric drafts for Crazy Fingers, courtesy of Steve Brown, which indicate that it wasn't quite as smooth a process as that. If Garcia did spot something in Hunter's notebook, that draft is missing. But Steve has a remarkable typewritten document that we've [e-mail] deadcast, where you can read not only a very early draft for Crazy Fingers, but also some of the lyrics Hunter typed over as he worked. There are seven verses on the sheet, none of them proper haiku, and only the first of them has any firm relationship to the song that became Crazy Fingers. Your rain falls like crazy fingers Peals of fragile thunder clapping Satisfaction in the wine A little time and who can tell? Here's Jerry Garcia speaking with Peter Simon in late March 1975. As Distorto is changing into Crazy Fingers.

[Jerry Garcia]

Off camera, my capacity as a person who chooses a lyric to sing is really about as much as I would want to have toward the responsibility of the content. I mean, the fact that those are the things of Hunter's output, which is really pretty enormous. Only a small part of it ever gets to be he and I songs, and those get to be. Those are usually edited quite a lot from what they originally were.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

I've been taking things as easy as I can Inventing further dreams to go fulfill Company is one, a crowd is two or more I don't think I've ever been alone before Earlier, Chadwick Jenkins spoke of the song's tonal fragility, and that's of a piece with its lyrics.

[Chadwick Jenkins]

The haiku is another example of a kind of fragility. The point of a haiku is you have so few words and you're trying to make some kind of statement that's both imagistic and kind of emotionally moving in this very same small space. Fragility just seems like the right word for that song to me in a lot of ways. And this is gonna be. This is gonna be a weird stretch, but it's almost like kintsuge, right? Like the art of kintsuge. To take another Japanese art where you. You have a broken pot and you put it back together with the. The glue that has the gold in it. So you're. You're taking the fragility of it and making that part of its stability and beauty and so on. And to some extent, Crazy Fingers works like that. You've got all these harmonic fragments that would work in different ways, that would be cohesive in different ways, that you're taking them and pulling them together, and it makes it all work. And yet, at the same time, it's like you feel the fragmented nature of it. And haikus are kind of like that for me too.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

One by one the marks get wise. Everyone gets civilized. I saw the wolf light in your eyes Flicker like a match inside the wind it was getting thin.

[Jerry Garcia]

See, that's part of my editorial finger in there. That's the editorial hand of Garcia in there. And my feelings about it are that. Well, I'm personally, I have this hang up about songs. I'm fascinated by fragments. I'm fascinated by fragments because of my involvement in traditional music. There's a lot of things around that are fragments of songs, old traditional songs.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Pedal fingers tapping, Tarantella. Six slow winters into seven. Sliding seven is an easy slider. Three ways you can make it. Three ways you can slide in easy.

[Jerry Garcia]

And they'll be like this tantalizing glimpse of two or three verses of what was originally a 30 verse extravaganza. And there'd be like two or three remaining stanzas left in the tradition. And you read them or hear them and they're just utterly mysterious and evocative.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

And Steve also hung onto a draft that was much closer to the final verses and certainly closer to the final rhyme scheme, but still not quite there, which we've also [e-mail] deadcast there are some fascinating differences. Hunter was in England for lots of this period and this is all very speculative. So I wonder if Garcia requested that he develop that first draft we just heard and he came up with the second we're about to quote from. And then Garcia edited from there. I'll read from the draft version and then we'll hear what it turned into. It's typed in all caps, which is kind of funny for a song that we've been discussing in the same terms as haiku. Several lines in Crazy Fingers evoke other pieces of literature. Surely many writers compared the sound of rain to tapping fingers. But in the first line I hear an echo of EE Cummings poem Somewhere I have never traveled gladly beyond. Which concludes, nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands. With that your rain falls like crazy fingers Peals of fragile thunder Keeping time, Recalling pain that still is to come. Some sing blue.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Your rain falls like crazy fingers Peels of fragile thunder Keeping time Recall the days that still are to come. Some.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Sing blue Hang your heart on laughing willow Stray down to the water.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Deep sea of love Hang your heart on laughing willow Stray down to the.

[Al Teller]

Water.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Deep sea of love Lovers of.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Love Return to this sea when they go there's still a third typewritten document that Steve held onto, titled Corrections for Crazy Fingers, not an exercise manual. And even some of these corrections got changed before the final version, which we'll include some of as well. These lines appear calm as the dawn Red face of the sea sailors still.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Know Beneath the sweet calm face of the sea Swift undertow.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Love may be sweeter than life I don't know Feels like they could be the same May lady lullaby sing each strain for you Soft, strong, sweet and true Life may.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Be sweeter for this I don't know See how it feels in the end May lady lullaby sing plainly for you Soft, strong, sweet and true.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Cloud hands reaching from a rainbow Tapping at your window Touch your hair so swift and bright Cool fingers of light float in.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Air Cloud hands reaching from a rainbow Tapping at the window Touch your hair so swift and bright Strange fingers of light float, float in air.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Something I'll flag the next verse is something I only recently picked up on in this period of Robert Hunter's work, a series of lyrics, either partly in Spanish or with references to Mexican culture, which also includes Hunter's solo song Keys to the Rain, as well as the first draft of Franklin's Tower, which we missed a few episodes back and will include here. Like Crazy Fingers, there's a similar typewritten draft in Steve Brown's collection that contains a verse that doesn't quite fit the rest of the rhyme scheme. This performance from 1978 is a reminder that Robert Hunter sometimes had other ideas about how their songs might go.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Some watch by night, some watch by day.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

If you get confused, hear the music.

[Rich Mahan]

FL.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

A lighthouse for the s.

[Gary Lambert]

Light.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

In this next scrapped verse, Hunter references Malagana Celerosa, a famous Mexican song here sung by the Four Amigos on the Ed Sullivan show in 1960. Malaguena celerosa, blue light, City Tango, Columbine or in parentheses Valentine Dark as the night, you're still by my side Shine.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

And shine who can stop what must arrive now? Something new is waiting to be born. Dark as the night, you're still by my side Shine inside.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

The line about something new is waiting to be born resonates a lot with me, thinking about the grateful dead in 1975. A deeper echo is William Butler Yeats poem the Second coming, written in 1919. What rough beast, its hour come round at last Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. But then there's the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, writing from prison in 1931 after being imprisoned by his local fascists. The old world is dying and the new world struggles to Be born. Now is the time of monsters. No matter how it's phrased, it's a powerful image of change, destiny and, you know, hope. In the 1970 book about alternative spirituality titled the New Religions, philosopher Jacob Needleman wrote, sooner or later, we are going to have to understand California, and not simply from the motive of predicting the future for the rest of the country. Something is struggling to be born here. It's possible to read the Grateful Dead as symbolizing that on both micro and macro levels, especially during 1975 as they tried to build both new musical forms and run their own record and film companies. Anyway, as Robert Hunter was Gone are the lights that flicker and die Changing each dream in midstream While Lady Lullaby still lies here by me Bells chime out from the sea Gone are the.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Days we stopped to decide where we should go we just ride Gone are the broken eyes we saw through in dreams gone Both dream and lie.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Life may be longer than love I don't know See how it feels in the end While Lady Lullaby Sings plainly through you this much is true Life may.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Be sweeter for this I don't know Feels like it might be alright While Lady Lullaby Sings plainly through you Love still rings true.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Midnight on the carousel ride Mirror of changing faces Gold ring glide When I reach for it My hand touches yours by my side and this appears in the amended draft. Never could fathom or figure why it slips away when you try Midnight on.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

A carousel ride Reaching for the gold ring down inside Never could reach it just slips away when I try.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Christopher Kaufman has a thought about this line which I think is appropriate for this period of Dead history, when Robert Hunter was feeling alienated enough from the Grateful Dead collective to relocate to England for a few years.

[Christopher Kaufman]

Still on the gestation page of the of the project, I read the Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human that they were always talking about early on. There's a passage in that that reminded me, when I read it, of Crazy Fingers. There's this character in this book who can go into other people's minds and is trying to describe what that's like. So here's the quote. It said, like walking in a tunnel. And in this tunnel, all over the roof and walls, wooden arms stuck out at you like the merry go round, the thing you snatch the brass rings from. There's a brass ring on the end of each of these arms, and you can take any one of them you want to. So when I first heard Crazy Fingers, however many years ago, I didn't know carousels that worked that way with the gold ring like that was foreign to me as a 13 year old or whatever I was when I first heard the lyric. But the. The notion that you're going like inside and there are these rings, these brass rings that you can grab and sort of jumped out at me when I was reading that novel a couple of years ago. And this sounds like the clothes of Crazy Fingers, where you're like reaching for the gold ring down inside. And the lyric continues, you never can reach. It just slips away. In both cases, you have this internalization and then the presence of this reward and you're on this merry go round thing.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Theodore Sturgeon called these group minds bleches, a combination of blend and mesh. And keep the Dead's blesh in mind as we continue through this next segment. For a moment, it was possible that they wouldn't be the Dead again. The reality was working against them on that front. How was their own blesh functioning? Robert Hunter was contributing lyrics, but mostly from a distance. Founder of the Grateful Dead Studies Association, Nicholas Merriweather, who wrote liner notes for Blues for all of 50. Hunter's absence, that's significant too. He's always been there. He's always been part of the stew. His absence is also a part of that larger kind of sense of turmoil and chaos. And that has to weigh pretty heavily on at least Garcia. This is the guy that he collaborates with that in many ways serves as a kind of anchor for his own creativity. And to have him 3,000 miles away at a time when there is no Internet and no easy telephone, this is significant too. We'll pop open the overdubs to Crazy Fingers a little later in this episode, but between the recording of the Master take on June 4th and the overdubs later in the month, there was a lot going on beneath the sweet, calm face of the Sea. Two days after the basic tracks for Crazy Fingers, on June 6 came the fully realized live debut of Seastones at Dominican College in San Rafael with an expanded ensemble led by Ned Lagin, featuring Jerry Garcia, David Crosby, Phil Lesh and Mickey Hart. Ned Legion had been a pretty integrated part of the Dead's collective musical mind through the first part of 1975, playing during many of the workshop sessions, which sometime included Legion's own compositions, like this April 17th tape from ACEs minus Jerry Garcia, but with David Crosby and John Cipollina of Quicksilver Messenger Service. Welcome back composer Ned Legion. We've linked to Spirit Cats, a collection of Ned's visual art, writing and [e-mail] deadcast.

[Al Teller]

That's part of a. A multi part work called A Lost Soul and Cipollina's on that. And Cipollina knew that because we had jammed on that at Mickey's years before. He was interested in piano.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Seastones existed in multiple forms. In June 1975, Ned Lagin was celebrating the Seastones album, created in multiple drafts and sub realizations between 1970 and 1975, finally making it to stores in all its quadraphonic glory in spring 1975. The album came together from numerous recording sessions at Mickey Hart's barn and elsewhere starting in 1970. We got deeply into the underpinnings of it during our Nedcast and I'd also recommend you check out Ned's writings on his Spirit Cat site.

[Al Teller]

All the technology and all the art and the writing of mine and the composition and the playing all converged to some degree in the 74 Tour with Phil and with Jerry, but really converged in 75 starting in June.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

It wasn't just that the musicians were creating music together, it's that Ned Lagin devised a signal chain where their signals affected one another.

[Al Teller]

If Crosby or Garcia were playing through a ring modulator, either voice or guitar or anything else, a delay voltage controls a layer of vca. I could feed the other side of it, the modulator side of it, with a pre recorded tape and I could turn that on and off or play the on and off or gates and triggers through my digital keyboard, the emu. There were some rehearsals at Weir's and then at my apartment in Fairfax. Phil lived right up the street, okay. Bear lived right up the street. So they were over at my place with my synthesizer set up there. And Crosby came by a couple of times, which caused some heads to like fall off their necks, people seeing him. Garcia came to my apartment where I had this stuff set up, but I would work with them individually.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Though there was certainly improvisation involved in the live version of Seastones, it was also an intentional performance of pieces from the album.

[Al Teller]

There were some goals because I wrote words, so there was some goal. I give them words and they would play with the word and with me and the electronic effects or modulation until we got what we liked. Garcia and Crosby both have ring modulators, but they also have echoplexes and. And they're using through preamps, they're using effects pedals, Wawa pedals, which are really filter pedals and volume pedals. Crosby had his electric 12 string and he had his mic and he had his music stand and he had the modulator There and a couple of other effects that I had designed into the system. And Garcia is the same, except it was electric. And I couldn't convince Garcia because of the setup time to bring pedal steel.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

There were only four musicians on stage at Dominican College.

[Al Teller]

Mickey brought his entire barn of instruments, and then he was forced to use the orchestra pit because he had so many instruments.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

There was no front of house engineer at the Seastone shows. And in Patty Healy's photographs, you can see the dead speaker cabinet stacked up behind the ensemble. A miniature wall of sound of multiple smaller systems combined into one, with the mixing happening on stage.

[Al Teller]

So if they were going through my synthesizer or their owns, if you look at the setup, their speakers were right behind them. So they heard themselves better than the audience heard them. So one of the things that needed to be corrected there was to have a PA mix. The words from the album were part of the words. It's sort of indistinguishable in the recording because once again, we didn't have anybody mixing.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Ed Perlstein was one of the Bay Area dead freaks, keeping their ear to the wind for live events that spring and made it to the Dominican College show.

[Christopher Kaufman]

I saw Phil Lesh and Ned Legion.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Do Sea Stones at Dominican College in June 75. It was very, very dark, and somebody.

[Christopher Kaufman]

In the middle of the show used.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

A flash, and everybody went, whoa. You know, because, like, it was crazy. The sounds were very low and soft, and he was trying to keep the audience quiet and let them. Let them listen. And, of course, Deadheads don't like to be quiet. Jeff Gould, who founded modulus instruments in 1978, was also at the Dominican show and shares a memory with Ed Pearlstein.

[Al Teller]

They had a show at the Dominican College in Marin. David Crosby was there, and it was pretty wild stuff. There's somebody shooting flash pictures. It really pissed Bill off in the middle of the Dominican show when they're trying to get to this kind of space and somebody's in the audience shooting flash pictures. It was not very cool.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

So how was the show, Ned?

[Al Teller]

It was a good starting point. It was good. It could have been better in a sense, but it always could be better. So I shouldn't even say that it was remarkable in that Garcia and me and Crosby were really into it. And we played this quiet section that Garcia thought was some of the most beautiful music he'd ever made outside of the Grateful Dead, of course. It was sort of orchestral, and it was a version of the seventh section on the album. The Crosby and Garcia voices and me on Synthesizer organ the longest section of Seastones on the recording.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

We've talked at a few points this season about how the Dead's activities were parallel with some of their progressive contemporaries in 1975, and we've got another example here. That was Robert Fripp and Brian Eno recorded at the Olympia in Paris on May 28, 1975, around a week before the Dominican College performance of Seastones from the only short tour that Fripp and Eno did together. In some ways, the British duo were the closest corollary to Seastones making their live debut under dimmed stage lights after an extended studio collaboration which included the 1973 classic no Pussyfooting. Much of their music was made by feeding Fripp's guitar into Eno's tape machines to create long and gorgeous tape delays. A few years earlier, when he was in Roxy Music, Eno had processed his bandmates instruments through his synth, but is said he only ever treated them one at a time. And even Fripp and Eno's combination of guitar and synth and tape loops didn't match the systemic and organic integration of instruments that Ned Legion built for the live Seastones performances. It was still beautiful though. Though we're often tempted to imagine the Grateful Dead as a band out of time, they had to operate in the world just like everybody else. A position they had to think about even more during the years they were operating. Grateful Dead and Round Records, a period that was starting to come to an end In June of 1975, as they recorded Crazy Fingers and the expanded Seastones debuted at Dominican College. Here's Jerry Garcia speaking with Mary Travers in August 1975.

[Jerry Garcia]

I think it might have worked had we started at a different year. I think this last year was particularly a drag economically, especially on the record industry. The whole trip, what with the paper shortage, you know, the covers and all that, and vinyl, the tremendous escalation of vinyl and all that stuff.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

The mid-1970s was the beginning of the extended oil crisis that would shift global politics profoundly and in a sense a signal that the on the road years were about to get less freewheeling effects we're still feeling today, both economic and environmental. It was always a tough time to run an independent record company, but in 1975 it wasn't getting any easier.

[Jerry Garcia]

Plus the whole sort of collapsing American economy so that distributors couldn't pay their regular what normally they would pay. And the whole record trip has taken a tremendous beating. And since our scene has always been scuffling, even at its very best, Always is scuffling. We were just. But we marginally succeeded for a while.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Last episode, we discussed what the band had to do to stay solvent, which was send Ron Rakow to Los Angeles to seek a way to salvage Grateful Dead and Round Records. The day after the Seastones gig we've been discussing and three days after the June 4th crazy finger session, on June 7th, Record World announced that the Dead were looking to sell.

[Jerry Garcia]

We decided that the idea of dealing with all the independent distributors was not really working too well. We fell in with the United Artists, which has its own distribution. And so it's able to absorb a lot of the expanse that the distributors individually have to take over.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

For the first time in a few years, the Grateful Dead had a new record company boss. Please welcome to the good old Grateful Dead cast Al Teller, then new president of United Artists, on his way to becoming a music industry legend.

[Al Teller]

I have a couple of engineering degrees from Columbia University. Then I went to Harvard for my mba. But you know, I've been a music junkie my whole life. And while I was getting my MBA, the summer job I had me through my two years was working at McKinsey and Company, the big management consulting firm. And they assigned me to a study they were doing for CBS Records and which was a very good piece of luck for me because when I went into the building and met some of the guys and all that stuff, it became clear to me that this is something, this is what I wanted to do. I got to meet the senior executives and Clive Davis offered me a job as his assistant when I graduated. That's how it started.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

In direct and intentional contrast to the many characters involved in shaping the gray filled ed story in the early 1970s. Al Teller was the first in several years that one might describe as establishment.

[Al Teller]

I ended up going to United Artists back in this would have been 1974. I was 29 years old at that time. I never intended to leave CBS again, but the opportunity to be responsible not just for the marketing side of the game, but also the A and R side was just too attractive for me.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

United Artists was founded as an artist first movie studio by Charlie Chaplin and others, but were purchased as a diversification aspect by the enormous life insurance company, the Transamerica Corporation in 1967. In a funny way, they were a local company based out of the not at all creepy sounding Transamerica pyramid in downtown San Francisco, completed in 1972.

[Al Teller]

They really didn't have a compelling artist roster at that time and I'd have to be hard Pressed to say who their big. I think, you know, maybe the Nitty Gritty Jerk Band.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Real Circle Beyond.

[Al Teller]

Just curiously enough, before I actually moved to California, I spent a week or so at the UA's offices in New York where I was living. And I remember when I went to the office for the first time in New York, there was already a pile of memos and letters for me. And at the very top was a test pressing of an album. And so I prefer to listen to an album rather than read a lot of memos. So I put the album on and it was a test pressing of ELO's El Dorado album.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

All day. Cause I can't get it out of my head.

[Al Teller]

They've become a great hit for us. So they rapidly became the biggest selling artists at ua. Working on that album, breaking that album was one of the experiences I really look back at fondly.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Al Teller was on his way to a career as a hitmaker and would later have massive success with Bruce Springsteen and others.

[Al Teller]

Even though I wasn't a Deadhead, I was a fan, particularly of their, of their live performances. And I spent the virtually the entire decade of the 60s, from 61 to 69, either in college or graduate school. I saw the Dead in New York in the 70s a couple of times. Academy of Music, Fillmore east.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Probably as a 20 something member of the record industry, Al Teller certainly kept track of the Dead's efforts.

[Al Teller]

I'm reading the trades and the various, you know, all sorts of music publications. So I, I knew what they were up to. And if I recall correctly, my reaction to that was, yeah, well, of course they would do that, or they would try that because they're the Grateful Dead. They had been pushing all sorts of boundaries. They never struck me as a band that felt particularly confined by the conventional wisdom of the time. And why would that apply to the conventional wisdom of how you go about conducting business as an artist in the music business? So it didn't come as a great surprise. I wondered how well it would turn out for them because the realities of distribution and the music marketplace certainly at that time were not the easiest. And having marketplace weight and gravitas and relationships and a adequate staff, all those things came into play. And I just wondered how they were going to go about doing it.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

As we've talked about, Grateful that and Round Records operated profitably for the small record companies they were. But the Dead themselves needed money to live on, an income not provided by even a small independent record company able to put albums into the top 20. We're going to repeat a few Ron Rakow quotes that we used last episode.

[Al Teller]

I started with United Artists was not desirable, but they had plenty of money behind them and they needed us the most. I just don't recall exactly how Ron Rakow and I connected. I don't know if he reached out to me or some intermediary reached out to me on behalf of them. But one way or another, Ron and I met and I liked him and we got along and he invited me up to visit with the band, which was. That was an interesting session. It was at Bob Weir's house, his home studio, I think all the guys in the band were there and they were sort of seated in almost like in a horseshoe kind of fashion. And I was on a little piano stool in the middle of them and I had to keep spinning my. On the stool to answer various questions that they threw at me.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Unlike Joe Smith, their last establishment rep, Al Tiller, was their contemporary.

[Al Teller]

I was the same age as these guys. In fact, a couple of guys in the band, I'm sure, were actually older than I was. I was born in 44. I think a couple of the guys were born a little bit earlier, A couple, perhaps a little bit later. It would have been nice for Warner or Columbia or Capital or anybody to get us. We had a little reputation. It wasn't little, it was a big reputation. We didn't sell very much, though. But United Artists could build a company on us and. And so I went at them looking for seven figures in advance and all kinds of stuff and got everything I wanted. And I thought, in terms of what I was trying to accomplish with the label itself, that having the Dead associated with the Island Artists was a very cool thing to do at that time. It would give us a kind of projection into the consumer marketplace that I thought would be very helpful for us as far as our corporate parent, Transamerica, the insurance company out of San Francisco, was concerned. I couldn't care less what they thought.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Of the many tapes we have from Aces. The Dead's first meeting with Al Teller is not among them.

[Al Teller]

I made it clear that as far as I was concerned, you know, whatever music they turn out was fine with me. I was not going to push back musically on them whatsoever in terms of marketing and promotion, stuff like that. I was always just. My mindset in general is be collaborative with an artist. I'm not going to dictate how we're going to do things. So I try to put them at ease about that. I thought we had a pretty good session. I wanted us to have our own identity in the record company and everybody else wanted that also. And Rakow and I went off to have lunch and we started to outline the, you know, the structure of what a deal might look like. And I scribbled a few notes on a. On a napkin that I was using that the burger I was eating was dripping on the napkin. So it was a burger stained napkin. With my notes. We did it on their napkins. It was not a one napkin deal. It might have been a three napkin deal. It's very possible that I pulled several napkins out of the napkin holder. Yes, I think Ron is correct because when I thought about it, I said, how could I have possibly gotten all the points on one side of one greasy napkin? I took it with me back to LA and I went, I'll never forget this. I went into the law office of our business affairs head and I dropped the napkin on his desk. I said, make a contract out of that.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

On June 11, Grateful Dead Productions and Grateful Dead Records prepared a contract that I think was preliminary paperwork for their proper UA contract, with an actual deadline right there on paper. The first album shall be completed on or before July 10, 1975. In the midst of all of this, the Grateful Dead were getting ready to manifest again, as when they popped up at the snack benefit in March. Jerry Garcia and friends were set to appear at Winterland at what was billed as the Bob Freed Memorial Boogie to help pay expenses for the family of the late San Francisco poster artist Bob Freed. Not as well known as some of the other local poster artists, Freed did a handful of Dead posters, including the great tripinski from Lake Tahoe. 68. He died suddenly of a stroke in January 1975, and several benefit events were organized by fellow artist Wes Wilson. The group of friends that appeared on stage at Winterland was the seven piece Grateful Dead that would become familiar to fans when the band returned to the road a year later. But that wasn't what was planned. Ned Lagin.

[Al Teller]

The Winterland gig was Jerry Garcia and friends, and there was only one friend, me. Mickey wasn't supposed to be there at all.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

As with Mickey's unexpected arrival at the October Winterland farewell, it caused rumbling among the rest of the rhythm section. And for reasons separate from the unexpected arrival of Mickey, Ned Lagin chose to extricate himself from the gig. Over the next few months, he would begin a slow separation from the Dead world, which we'll return to later this season. Heads in the crowd didn't know exactly what to expect back with more tales from the Golden Road, yours, ours and his, please welcome Gary Lambert.

[Gary Lambert]

Basically, every time Jerry played someplace or, you know, there's, oh, yeah, the rest of the band's gonna show up.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

And, you know, it didn't happen.

[Gary Lambert]

But that was very common Deadhead word on the street kind of stuff. But I never really came to expect it.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Dan O', Henklin, who he spoke with about Vanita, 72, and Watkins Glenn, 73, made it to this show, too.

[Al Teller]

When I moved west permanently in 1975, I arrived in Monterillo on the Russian river around my birthday, which is June 16th. So it was right around this time of year. And my friend, not a Deadhead on the order that I am, or the others that we know are, but still was one of those guys that made it to Watkins Glen, he looked at me and he said, here. Happy birthday and welcome back and welcome to your spiritual homeland. And it was a ticket to the Bob Freed Memorial Show.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Michael Parish.

[Al Teller]

I produced the Kingfish show at ucsc. When we did the show at. At Crown College, we had them to dinner. So my. My first wife cooked dinner, and we were all sitting around and the thing that they were all talking about was, have you ever seen Trilogy of Terror? It's a really pretty bad set of three horror segments that was broadcast that year. Karen Black was in one of them, and they were just all talking about that. Do I make you nervous?

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Dr. Karen Black, a major star, creates a television first. There's.

[Al Teller]

There's a golden chain wrapped around it.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

To keep the spirit from making the doll come to life.

[Al Teller]

Face to face to face with the Unbearable unknown. Trilogy of Terror.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

But Michael stayed in touch with Kingfish management and soon picked up a good tip.

[Al Teller]

My connection with Kingfish was. Was helpful. I didn't get tickets from them, but it definitely said, you really want to go see this show? So I made an effort, and I think it was basically sold out, but there was the local Santa Cruz record store, Odyssey Record sold tickets, and we went down and they actually had some. So I was very glad to be able to go to that.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Daniel Hanklin.

[Al Teller]

And we all piled in to the vehicle and headed down to San Francisco. And yes, my reaction was, yes, yes, yes. Because then I knew that all the ugly rumors really were false.

[Gary Lambert]

Gary Lambert, the Bob Freed Memorial Boogie, also billed as Jerry Garcia and Friends and King Fish and Keith and Donna, I believe. And the mirrors. I don't remember the mirrors, but there was a. The mirrors were on the bill.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

That'd be Mirrors, the San Francisco Band Featuring future KSAN DJ Trish Robbins and not Mirrors. The Cleveland Band, featuring Velvet Underground Taper Jamie Klimek, Michael Parrish.

[Al Teller]

Robbins was the lead singer, but she also later became a DJ in the Bay Area. I suspect there was a Bob Freed connection. I don't know if she was already a DJ at that point. He pulled some strings. I mean, it was unusual because that was the only time I ever heard them or heard of them. But, you know, they only played like half an hour or something.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Let me be your love maker Let me be a soul shaker.

[Sean O'Donnell]

Around this.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Town Last summer when you and I first met oh I thought I was cool uh huh Living by the rule what a fool Trying to play hard to get.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

That was from an archival self titled Mirrors album released more recently. Their keyboard player had some connections to the next act, who occasionally covered one of his songs, Keith and Donna. Possibly the debut of their new drummer, Billy Kreutzman. Like Seastones, they also had a new album to promote and a set of Kingfish.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Raised in a lion's day.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

It was a pretty different vibe than the Snack benefit in March. Gary Lambert.

[Gary Lambert]

First of all, you were at Winterland. It was the Mothership, so there was a real comfort there. And you weren't going through Graham Central Station in Santana and the Doobie Brothers and all that. It was a much more focused Dead family kind of event. And with the unannounced Dead once again.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Capping it off, Jay Curley and his friends didn't need inside intel.

[Al Teller]

Well, it was another Jerry Garcia and Friends trip. But we all knew that the Dead were gonna play there for sure.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

And sure enough, they got a full Bill Graham intro. We'll stick with the excellent robertrondo audience tape of this show. This time Bill Graham seems to have gotten the memo about not calling them the Grateful Dead.

[Al Teller]

Jerry, Bob, Mickey, Bill, Phil and Keith.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Founder of the Grateful Dead Studies Association, Nicholas Merriweather. When we listen to the Snack benefit, when we listen to the the Bob Freed Memorial boogie, those are, in retrospect, very clearly Grateful Dead concerts semicolon. You can also hear them as something more than that. Here they are opening with the debut of the very song we're talking about today, less than two weeks after recording it for Blues for Allah.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Your.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

We'Re going to zoom in a tiny bit on this Jerry Garcia and Friends set. Of the four performances from 1975 that might be called the Grateful Dead, this is the only one so far without an official release. But like each performance, it signified changes both things going on out of the public eye at Aces and in how the Dead thought of themselves as a live band that performed in public.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Life may be sweeter, but this I know. See how it feels every year.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

It still wasn't officially the Grateful Dead, but with the United Artists deal on the table, it was getting closer to the moment when they'd have to acknowledge that they were, in fact, the Grateful Dead. The Snack show was a performance of several in progress, new pieces sewn into a suite they were then calling Space Age. The Bob Freed Memorial Boogie featured the return of some old favorites. Here's Jerry Garcia speaking with Peter Simon in March, just after the Snack benefit.

[Jerry Garcia]

I mean, there's some songs that you can keep doing over and over again, and they still live. They still have something that you can. You can really feel as though you. The song means something to you, and you can do it and feel honest about it. Some. Some material just really lasts that way, some doesn't.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Beat It on down the Line was one of the oldest songs in the Dead's book, stretching back to their days as Mother McCree's Uptown Jug champions, and one they could still play without thinking too hard. Probably most of the material had to pass both the honesty test that Garcia mentioned, as well as being able to play it without having practiced it. Probably very few people noticed at the time, but it was the first sign that Phil Lesh was no longer an active vocalist.

[Gary Lambert]

That fed the more traditional Deadhead's desires. And those of us with the lust for novelty were also wonderfully appeased.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

It was great to have the familiar Dead back, but the new music was the focus for many. The first set was bookended by new material and some of it wasn't quite finished.

[Gary Lambert]

Another delightful surprise. And you. We were starting to get some of the song forms that were going into Blue Terrala. You know, we got Crazy Fingers, we got, I think Help, Help and Slip were. Were instrumental at that point. So. So again, we're getting this wonderful sense of something creative evolving in real time, you know, and it's not the way we used to absorb it from like one Dead show to another. And seeing these jams coalesce into songs. This was like these one off events in which you've got like a little. A little progress report.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Jay Curley.

[Al Teller]

Yeah, first Crazy Fingers, First Franklin, the first Help on the Way without lyrics. But yeah, there was a bunch of new songs there.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Future Modulus founder Jeff Gould was there.

[Al Teller]

That was a really good show. That one stands out to me is the some reason Crazy Fingers and Franklin's tower. It's like one of those things you hear, you know, roll away the do or, you know, roll away adieu.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

How to write the first time Roll.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Roll away the dew Roll away the.

[Jerry Garcia]

Dew.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

In the second set, the audience got something, almost the extended space age piece they'd performed at the Snack.

[Al Teller]

And of course, they did the whole Blues for Allah again, which was just incredible. Michael Parish There were some really significant differences in the pacing and everything, but it was more or less the same thing they performed at the Bob Freed show, you know, the last part of the. The jam part of that show in the second set.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Here's Jerry Garcia speaking with Peter Simon in March.

[Jerry Garcia]

The definition of what we do is we're a live band for sure. We're not anything but that. And. And recording has been sort of gratuitous just because. Because we play music.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

To be a band in the mid 20th century, making studio albums was almost an accident of technological and historical fate. Though Garcia calls it gratuitous, that doesn't mean they didn't make art.

[Jerry Garcia]

One of the forms that music can go out in is the record, but it's a distinct form. It's not a reflection of what we do. So we just treat it as though it is what it is. It's as though if you're an artist, you might work in. You might prefer to work in lithographs, you know, but sometimes you do gouaches, you know, and lithographs might be what get you off the most.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

The Bob Freed Memorial boogie on June 17 was surely a nice respite for the band, because when they returned to Aces, they were under a new deadline to actually finish the project. Based on an archival letter from Ron Rakow and the deal's announcement in the Trade Press on June 28, I'm pretty sure the new contract was only finalized on June 27th in LA. The overdubs for Crazy Fingers all occurred in early July, with the new United Artists deal hanging over their heads. And there aren't too many overdubs, really. Of course, there's the stacked harmony part, not arranged in time to perform at Winterland.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Life may be sweeter for this I don't know See how it feels in the end May Lady Lullaby sing Play for you.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

The backup vocals for Crazy fingers are dated July 14 and are the last dated piece of the sessions, though there's plenty of overdubs without dates. Notably, it's also the only written evidence that the Dead immediately blew through their July 10 deadline. While we contemplate that. Let's listen to another one of those.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Gone are the days we start to decide where we should go we just.

[Sean O'Donnell]

Ride.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Gone are the broken eyes we saw through in dreams who lies.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

The end of the song is the first place on the album where we hear Keith Gadcho on a full acoustic piano, entering about two thirds of the way through. You can hear Garcia and Godcho talking through the part on the July 5th overdub session. That circulates.

[Jerry Garcia]

Or something like that. It's like a.

[Gary Lambert]

It's like a suspension.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Sounds a little like Crimson and Clover to me. Here's the piano entrance on the album. And a few days later, on July 7, Mickey Hart added bells. They go under the verses of the song. Here's what one verse sounds like. We'll add the vocals for a little context.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Your rain falls like Crazy fingers Peals of fragile thunder Keeping time Recall the.

[Rich Mahan]

Days.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

And the Outro. And a rarity also on July 7th, Bill the drummer added another kick drum, almost ambiently under the whole thing. But that was it for overdubs. Crazy Fingers was performed at the Great American Music hall on August 13, a show we'll delve into next episode. And that version retains some of the glow of the blues for a LA recording, in large part because Keith Gadcho is playing Rhodes.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Keeping time.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

The Outro solo sparkled a tiny bit, too, hinting at what might come before sailing into a drum duet. When they returned to the road full time the next summer, Crazy Fingers was in the repertoire. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.

[David Lemieux]

Crazy Fingers is a song where you can just let it soak over you. That's how I felt about it, and I felt it was almost meditative. There's no song like it in the repertoire. I don't think this is a unique song for the Grateful Dead. A beautiful, beautiful piece of art.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

There's a live version from the 1976 comeback tour on the New Blues for a la 50, with a piano replacing the Rhodes.

[David Lemieux]

And then from June 22, just a simply gorgeous Crazy Fingers. The way it would open with that just incredible intro by Jerry, and then Phil doing that cool pattern and then dropping into your reign falls like Crazy Fingers. And then the nice big outro jams, often led by Phil.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

This June 76 version is nearly 13 minutes and begins to realize some of the jam's potential. A space somewhere between the other one and the Spanish jam.

[David Lemieux]

What a combination. Crazy Fingers into Comes a time. I mean, these are two back to back Jerry beauties.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Crazy Fingers didn't survive 1976 in the band's repertoire, a new level of blues for Aula that they didn't quite sustain. It returned a half dozen years later in 1982, with a slightly modified feel for the newest model, Dead. Specifically, Garcia's picking on the intro pattern wasn't nearly as intricate, playing it more like the simplified outro. This is from 1985 at the Frost on the Stanford campus. Now On Dave's picks 49, the 80s and 90s, Crazy Fingers continued to carve their own identity and found their own ways to defy gravity. Here's a bit From Giant Stadium, 1991, an example of the outro jam with lots of bass, Crazy Fingers was a moody piece, and if not literally, ambient music could generate an ambience all its own. I love this story from Blair Jackson from the Dead's first revelatory visit to the Frost Amphitheater in 1982.

[Al Teller]

I had gone up to the top of the hill to kind of, kind of check it out and all that kind of stuff. And even though we were close to the front and, oh God, they're out on stage, and I remember kind of walking, drifting down as the music was starting and thinking, this is, you know, this is Nirvana. This is the greatest thing I've ever been to the Grateful Dead at the Frost, playing like playing Crazy Fingers.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

SAM.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Jesse Jarno)]

Because of how it sat harmonically, it was often linked to playing in the band. And while it might not have been as delicate as it was at Aces, it still provided the band with pathways into the mysteries, like this late period version from Landover 1993, now on the Enjoying the Ride box. But if it wasn't quite clear, we adore the studio version, so we're gonna float away today. And into the even stranger parts of Blues For Alla's second side.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Falls like crazy fingers Peels of fragile thunder Keeping time.

[Al Teller]

SAM.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Life may be sweeter for this I don't know See how it feels till the end May lady lullaby sing Play me for you Soft, strong sweet and true so swift and bright Strange fingers of light Float in air.

[Al Teller]

SAM.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Gone are the days we start to decide where we should go we just ride Gone are the broken Broken eyes We saw through in dreams gone Both dream and light.

[Al Teller]

Sa.

[Robert Hunter (lyrics)]

Sam.

[Al Teller]

Foreign.

[Rich Mahan]

Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. Friends. There's a video of Jerry out there, I think, on YouTube, where he's warming up backstage before a show and he's finger picking crazy fingers. See if you can find it. It's nothing short of 100% pure Jerry joy. We'd like to thank our special guests in this episode. David Lemieux, Al Teller, Ron Racau, Ned Legion, Gary Lambert, Michael Parrish, Dano Heinklein, Ed Perlstein, Jeff Gould, Jake Hurley, Blair Jackson, Sean o', Donnell, Chadwick Jenkins, Christopher Kaufman and Nicholas Merriweather. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast, David Gans for his ongoing contributions of audio from his interview archive. Thanks, David. 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.