Blues For Allah 50: King Solomon’s Marbles/Stronger Than Dirt or Milkin’ The Turkey

Summary

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Good Ol' Grateful Deadcast: Blues For Allah 50

King Solomon’s Marbles/Stronger Than Dirt or Milkin’ The Turkey

Date: September 25, 2025
Hosts: Rich Mahan & Jesse Jarnow
Highlighted Guests: David Lemieux, Ron Rakow, Eugene Dolgoff, Ned Lagin, Nicholas G. Meriwether, Sean O’Donnell, Chadwick Jenkins, others.

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Episode Overview

This episode delves deep into the story behind the Blues For Allah instrumentals, “King Solomon’s Marbles” and “Stronger Than Dirt or Milkin’ The Turkey,” commemorating their 50th anniversary. The Deadcast explores not just the music itself, but also the wild innovations, avant-garde experiments, and cultural context that swirled around the making of Blues For Allah in 1975. From tales of pyramid-shaped records and holographic playback to mind-bending time signatures and the intertwining of psychedelic tech with Deadhead ethos, this episode is a celebration of the Grateful Dead at their most progressive and unorthodox.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Context & Complexity of the Instrumentals

• Album Placement: “King Solomon’s Marbles” and “Stronger Than Dirt” sit at the core of Blues for Allah, as a sequence of interconnected, wild instrumentals.
• Musicianship: David Lemieux: “This is 11-level Grateful Dead in terms of how complex it is and how hard it must be to play—until you know how to play it.” (05:10)
• Origins: Developed in the spring of 1975 during intensive workshop sessions at Bob Weir's Ace's studio; known for their wild time signatures and inventive forms.

2. Progressive Technology and Psychedelic Innovation

• LSD & Tech Culture: The band’s history with LSD and its transformation into a tool for exploration of consciousness set the foundation for their electronic and musical experiments. (07:46)
• Holographic Pyramids: Enter Eugene Dolgoff, a scientist and inventor who pitched a futuristic holographic record player in the shape of a pyramid to the Dead, kickstarting a narrative that blurred fact and hype but reflected the band’s obsession with upending traditional formats. (11:08–25:18)
  • Rakow’s Pyramid Prop: “We painted them black and told everybody that this was the future... the entire library of Grateful Dead albums on the pyramid.” (25:31)
  • Nicholas Meriwether: “This business of the holographic pyramids, I think it's most likely just a riff on the standard bullshit of the whole pyramid power nonsense that was going around.” (26:46)

3. Musical Evolution & Time Signatures

• Grateful Dead’s Odd Time Count: Jesse Jarnow breaks down the Dead’s use of unconventional time signatures. Notable examples:
  • “The 11” in 11/8,
  • “Main Ten” (the seed of “Playing in the Band”) in 10/4,
  • “King Solomon’s Marbles” as a ‘pedal to the floor romp in seven’ (41:56),
  • Proto-Solomon Jams traced back to 1973 improvisations by Lesh (42:54–46:00).
• Sean O’Donnell: Highlights how the band “are just doing this… pedal to the floor in seven,” with Lesh as the most fearless improviser. (41:53)

4. Genesis of “Stronger Than Dirt”

• Naming: Tied directly to the old Ajax commercial’s jingle—“Stronger than dirt!” (51:02)
• Musical Quotation: This classical technique of quoting pop culture, used by Lesh, is compared to jazz and Charles Ives practices.

Ned Lagin: “[The resemblance is there] because of subliminal absorption of things that were going on. Once Jerry or Phil heard stuff, heard the idea of stuff being used, he would do it himself, subliminally or overtly and consciously.” (51:41)

5. Musical Construction & Development

• Chadwick Jenkins (CCNY): Breaks down “King Solomon’s Marbles” harmonically, focusing on its signature major 6th over minor chords and jazzy textures. (55:54–56:15)
• Historical Song Development: Lesh’s inspiration cited as Shelley’s “Ozymandias”—tying King Solomon and Egyptian motifs into the Dead’s lyrical and visual iconography. (59:15)

Phil Lesh (from memoir): “I had sketched out a little Latin-flavored seven-beat instrumental number inspired by Shelley's poem Ozymandias called King Solomon's Marbles.” (59:13)

6. Live Performance and Evolution

• Short-Lived Live Sets: The sequence was played live only a handful of times in 1975:
  • Highlight: August 13, 1975, at the Great American Music Hall—the only version approaching the album’s tightness. (62:00)
  • Poignant observation: “Poof, that was it for King Solomon and his Marbles—never heard on a Dead stage again.” (62:50)
• Phil Lesh & Friends: Revival of the piece in the 2000s. Notably, July 3, 2001, Cuthbert Amphitheater, Eugene, Oregon, described by guest Keith Eaton as “just absolutely bounce—it's like it's suited for Jimmy's Jazz Is Dead style.” (63:07–65:00)

7. Other Lesh Compositions and the “Eternal Now”

• Lesh brought other complex pieces to the Blues for Allah sessions, some of which only survive in rehearsal tapes or would be repurposed in later albums (e.g., beyond “Description” and Terrapin outtakes). (67:34–77:58)
• Band Collaboration: The internal, real-time debate and improvisation in the studio reflect their mission to “cut ourselves loose from the past, basically, and develop new levels to go off of.” (34:41, 42:54)

8. Interconnected Side Projects and the San Francisco Scene (Spring 1975)

• The Dead’s hiatus was creatively fertile: Legion of Mary, Kingfish, Keith & Donna Band, Seastones, and Diga Rhythm Band operated simultaneously, with frequent cross-pollination. (83:07–88:50)
• In Golden Gate Park, the Diga Rhythm Band debuted alongside Jefferson Starship, showing the vibrant, grassroots continuity of the Bay Area community. (88:09–91:50)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• David Lemieux on Complexity:
  “This is 11-level Grateful Dead in terms of how complex it is and how hard it must be to play—until you know how to play it.” (05:10)

• Nicholas Meriwether’s Pyramid Power Reality Check:
  “This business of the holographic pyramids… it's most likely just a riff on the standard bullshit of the whole pyramid power nonsense that was going around.” (26:46)

• Phil Lesh, on Musical Mission:
  “We always have felt free to do that. In fact, compelled.” (34:12)

• Jerry Garcia on New Musical Spaces:
  "It's also more—considerably more—experimental… we're certainly sort of into defining new spaces for ourselves musically." (34:54)

• On Naming 'Stronger Than Dirt': Jesse Jarnow: “There’s a ridiculously easy way to remember which part is called King Solomon’s Marbles and which part is called Stronger than Dirt. Specifically, can you sing the phrase ‘Stronger than dirt’ over it?” (50:59)

• Phil Lesh on his Inspiration: "I had sketched out a little Latin-flavored seven-beat instrumental number inspired by Shelley's poem Ozymandias called King Solomon's Marbles." (59:15)

• Jesse Jarnow on the fleeting live life: “Poof, that was it for King Solomon and his Marbles—never heard on a Dead stage again.” (62:50)

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |-----------|---------------| | 04:20 | Introduction to King Solomon’s Marbles/Stronger Than Dirt | | 11:12 | Eugene Dolgoff’s story: holography, Lennon, credit card tech; Dead connection | | 25:18 | Dead announce “holographic intentions” and pyramid player hype | | 34:12 | Garcia on freeing themselves from past musical habits | | 41:53 | Sean O’Donnell: “Pedal to the floor romp in seven” | | 51:02 | The Ajax “Stronger Than Dirt” jingle connection | | 55:54 | Chadwick Jenkins breaks down the harmony and jazz influence | | 59:13 | Phil Lesh’s inspiration: “Ozymandias” and the name | | 62:00 | August 13, 1975: definitive live performance | | 63:07 | Phil Lesh & Friends rendition in 2001, Eugene, OR | | 67:34 | Other Lesh-penned pieces from the Blues for Allah sessions | | 88:09 | Michael Parrish recalls the Diga Rhythm Band debut in Golden Gate Park | | 91:16 | Ed Perlstein assists the Diga band, Zakir Hussain as frontman |

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Flow, Tone, and Final Thoughts

The episode is an exuberant and detailed trip through the Dead’s most boundary-pushing period. The hosts and guests keep the language playful and in-the-know (“11-level complexity,” “subliminal absorption,” “cut ourselves loose”), blending musical nerdery, stories of tech utopia, and the Dead’s particular brand of cultural weirdness with affection and insight. The five-decade hindsight allows for both myth-busting and celebration, capturing the ever-present “nowness” that kept the band from ever resting on their laurels.

Endnote:
King Solomon’s Marbles and Stronger Than Dirt occupy a unique place in the Dead’s discography: bold experiments in rhythm and form, the echo of a brief yet luminous creative flash. The episode closes by celebrating this moment of “perpetual experimentation” as a reflection of the Dead’s ethos—never afraid to “venture into uncharted territory.”

Transcript

[A]

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 dive into an instrumental from Blues for Allah, the Twisting Turning King Solomon's Marbles, Stronger Than Dirt or Milking the Turkey. Well folks, the Grateful Dead Blues for all of 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition is out now. This three CD set features the newly remastered album with unreleased sound check and concert recordings. Check this out. The set features almost two hours of unreleased recordings. Among the highlights are rehearsals from the band's August 12, 1975 sound check at the Great American Music hall, including the album tracks Sage and Spirit, Help on the Way, Slipknot and Franklin's Tower. This collection continues with performances from the June 21, 1976 show at the Tower Theater in Pennsylvania, spotlighting Five Blues for All the songs alongside favorites like Eyes of the World. Rounding out the set are selections from Bill Graham's Snack that Students Need Athletics, Culture and Kicks benefit at Kezar Stadium on March 23, 1975. There are also a few vinyl variants of this 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 Steven Wilson and yes, they are ready to blow your mind. All of these fine releases are out now via dead.net and rhino.com did you know? If you head on over to dead.net deadcast you can check out all of our past episodes including the complete seasons 1 through 11 and you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how, where, when and whenever you like to listen. Please help the good old Grateful Dead cast by subscribing sharing us with your friends on social media. Hit that like button and leave us a review. It helps more than you realize. Thanks so much. Do you have a great story about any of these songs? Well, the ones we haven't covered yet on Blues For Allah. Were you lucky enough to catch the band at one of their shows in San Francisco in 1975? Then we need to hear from you. Head on over to stories.dead.net and record yourself telling us all about it. You may just hear yourself on a future episode of the Dead Cast. We have transcripts for many of your favorite Dead Cast episodes available now for your reading pleasure. Head over to dead.netdeadcast index and check them out. Well, Blues For Allah is a Grateful Dead album like no other, and one of the things that sets it apart is the number of instrumentals on the album King Solomon's Marbles, Stronger Than Dirt or Milking the Turkey. Gotta say, that title always caught my attention and still does highlight the band's creativity and breadth and show they weren't afraid to venture into uncharted territory. Here's cartographer Jesse Jarno to guide us through it.

[B]

The third track of Blues for Allah, counting as its fourth and fifth songs, brings us straight into the album's weird core. King Solomon's Marbles and Stronger Than Dirt are a pair of bass driven instrumental motifs developed during the intense spring 1975 workshop sessions at Bob Weir's ACEs studio. They didn't survive past that year's few performances, its thrilling high wire music and one of the tracks that makes Blues for Alla, Blues for Allah, grateful that archivist and legacy manager David lemieux.

[A]

This is 11 level Grateful Dead in terms of how complex it is and.

[B]

How hard it must be to play.

[A]

Until you know how to play it.

[B]

That observation works on a few levels. David means the 11, the Dead's explosive song written in 118 time, released on 1969's Live Dead as the third segment of the album's suite and a high watermark for complexity in the Dead's canon. But also, as only occasional bassist Nigel Tufnell famously put it, these go to 11. We're talking about two interconnected pieces of music, often confused with one another, but taken as a whole, they definitely go to 11. The first part is called King Solomon's Marbles. I remember the poster in the early 80s, the 100 Grateful Dead songs. I had that on my wall and.

[C]

It was really fun to kind of. I'd mark them off.

[B]

It's oh, this one, this one. And I never. I don't think I got all hundred.

[A]

But I got, you know, in the 90s maybe.

[B]

But I do remember there's King Solomon playing marbles on the ground. The second part is titled Stronger Than Dirt or Milk and the Turkey. We'll introduce a handy musical mnemonic to remember the difference later, but to disambiguate right now, this is what's called Stronger Than Dirt or Milk and the Turkey. With the hindsight of now 50 years, I think it's maybe a bit too easy to dismiss some of the soon abandoned songs on Blues for Allah and the events of the Grateful Dead's 1975 at large as failed experiments or even worse, footnotes and trivia. In the world of the Grateful Dead, what always really mattered was the now, and they made some of their most radical nows in the mid-1970s. And most importantly for us, they did it with tape running. In 1975, the Grateful Dead were pursuing some pretty far out ideas about music and technology and everything else, and that collective pursuit wasn't anything new. The band had their roots in one of the most popular and complex technologies of the 1960s.

[C]

LSD has passed through three distinct phases. The first was a period of scientific investigation when a variety of mental aberrations were examined.

[B]

Later, some of the scientists observed that.

[D]

Many of the reactions were not madness at all.

[C]

And they proceeded to explore the possibility that the drug might be effective in the treatment of certain mental disorders, that it might help us understand the creative process, the nature of perception and other human mental activities.

[B]

When the Warlocks changed their name to the Grateful dead in late 1965, LSD was in the late phases of transforming from a so called miracle drug into into something newer and scarier, at least to some people. To others it was new and adventure making technology and it created the matrix for a counterculture that aimed to change the human mind and society at large. Here's merry prankster Stuart Brand Speaking in a 2003 documentary about the birth of the Whole Earth Catalog, the publication that would draw together the worlds of heads and Technology starting in 1968.

[C]

The whole Earth Catalog project specifically came out of an LSD afternoon where I was on a rooftop with probably 200 micrograms of LSD in me, nothing better to do and thinking about or in context of lectures I had recently heard by Buckminster Fuller. And Fuller, like McLuhan, was one of the people we were paying attention to.

[B]

Then, not coincidentally, those 200 micrograms were left over from the Trips Festival held just before that. In our two part long strange tech episode, which we've linked [e-mail] deadcast, we outlined the Dead's entwined connections with the experimental tech culture of California. And of course, we've discussed the innovations of the Wall of Sound, which included Phil Lesh's quad base coming to bloom in 1974, but still an active project in 1970. All of this is what I mean when I say the Dead were a progressive band. It wasn't just the weird time signatures, though. We'll get back to those momentarily. So when the Grateful Dead announced new plans in their January 1975 newsletter, it was from a band that had just spent a few years inventing a new way to present live concert sound, building their own instruments, founding their own record companies, and had gone to work trying to reinvent their own music from the ground up. Please welcome back then president of Grateful that and Round Records, Cadillac Ron Rackow.

[C]

There was a fan in New York, his name was Eugene Dolgoff. D O L G O F F He came backstage and you know, he said to somebody, it might have been Jackson somebody, you know, I'm a scientist and I do this. I have an idea, I got to talk. So they brought him to me. He was a young guy and I think he was just in undergraduate school, but he was taking a science based curriculum so that he can go on and get his advanced degrees. He was an expert in holography and.

[B]

Please welcome to the good old Grateful Dead cast, Eugene Dalgoff.

[D]

I've been involved in holography and laser work since 1964. I worked on developing holograms for advertising and for display and trying to find a way to mass produce holograms, which I eventually did. And the technique is used, you know, all the credit cards and debit cards in the world. That was my invention.

[B]

Eugene Dalgoff began studying holography when he was still a teenager. Around the same time as his interests in holography began, so did his interest in rock and roll.

[D]

I'd been playing since I was about 14. I was in non success, just neighborhood bands. There was one group that I was in actually that wound up being famous, but I left them. We were called the Trenchcoats. We'd play at the churches and the neighborhood and so on. We got a gig at the Night Owl Cafe in the Village. There was another band that played with us. Eventually this guy came in from Mercury Records. I think he was. And he signed up both of our bands and he changed the names of our bands. So my band, the Trench Coats, was changed to the Blues Magoos.

[C]

We ain't got nothing yet. No, we ain't got nothing. Yeah.

[B]

And the other band, they changed the.

[D]

Name to the Lovin Spoonful.

[B]

Do you believe in magic In a young girl's heart how the music can free her whenever it starts and it's magic if the music is proving it.

[D]

Makes you feel happy like an old.

[B]

Time movie by the early 1970s, Gene's work with holography was starting to take shape.

[D]

I had the idea of making a hologram mass produced to put on a Beatles album cover. And I went and contacted John Lennon and wound up meeting him in his apartment in Manhattan and showing him and Yoko all the holograms that I had made. He just was blown away by it. And he said, yes, let's do it.

[B]

The Beatles had recently disbanded, but John and Yoko were living in New York in the midst of their radical early 70s projects.

[D]

He had recorded this song called Mind Games. And he. He got the idea that he'd make a picture of the Earth with him on it and then Yoko on the moon in 3D, you know, and as you moved, you could look around the moon and see Yoko.

[B]

Playing those mind.

[C]

Games together.

[D]

Doing the ritual.

[C]

Dancing the sun.

[D]

He took me to his lawyer manager to pitch this project. His name is Alan Klein.

[B]

Like a lot of dreams, the holographic cover for Mind Games died in Alan Klein's office as Beadle George sang Beware of abco. Some of the dates in this story are a bit murky, but I'm pretty sure Gene Dahlgoff entered the Grateful Dead narrative In August of 1974, when the Wall of sound stopped at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City and the Grateful Dead were in New York for a week.

[D]

I had a friend who was working at a company in Manhattan involved in this new sound system called Aphex. And it was really an advanced thing. And they called it a holographic sound system, which was just a marketing gimmick. It was not holographic, but it was. It was an advanced sound system.

[B]

The Aphex Aural Exciter would be launched to the Music World in 1975 as a way to pull out the brightness in sonic frequencies. An alternative to traditional eq. They still exist. And the Aphex Exciter has been used as a production tool on Dead archival releases. Naturally, the Dead came in for a demo.

[D]

This girl knew the work that I was doing and that I tried doing the album cover with John Lennon. She thought of me in the context of music and records. She thought, hey, maybe they want to see your holograms and do an album cover. So she called me up, she said, come down to my office today. They're going to be here. So I went down to the office in Manhattan.

[B]

And so Gene Dolgough met with Jerry Garcia and Bobby Weir for the first time.

[D]

The day I met them at Aphex, they were talking about the Wall of Sound, and they wanted to include the Aphex technology with that wall of Sound.

[B]

But coincidentally, probably that very same week, the Dead also decided to retire from the road, a decision that put them on the path towards Blues for Allah and the story we're telling this season on the Dead Cast. But that only meant they were looking for the next big trip.

[D]

I met Jerry Garcia. I met Bob Weir, showed them holograms, and they loved it. And they said, wow, this is really great stuff, but what else are you doing? So I told them we work on a lot of different things. So I invited them to my lab. I was also teaching a course at City College of the City University of New York, and I had created that course and written the textbook for it on light, lasers, and holography. And the college put some money together and funded me. So they funded a laboratory for me at the college.

[B]

We'll pause here to shout out the deadcast musicologist buddies at the City College of New York, located in Harlem.

[D]

I invited them to come see the lab. One day I met with them, and this time it was Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Phil Lesh. And they met me, and I. I drove them to the college and parked it in the south campus parking lot. And then we had to walk all the way through the campus to the north of the campus to get to my laboratory in the engineering building. So the four of us walked through the entire campus of City College, and no one recognized them. I was astounded. You imagine us all walking in in a single pile. I mean, it was amazing. And right next to my holography lab was a nuclear reactor. So when we went in there, we all had to put on the dosimeter badges to, you know, make sure we didn't get radiation dosages. So all the guys put them on as well, and it added to the mystique of the whole experience. You know, it was kind of fun. So, anyway, I showed them the lab, and I showed them some of the other things that I was working on.

[B]

One of Eugene Dalgoff's claims to fame was in production and about to unfold in the fall of 1974, and sure to impress the science fiction fans in the dead.

[D]

In 73, I wrote my first and published my first paper on the holographic model of the brain. Because once I learned how holography worked, it blew my mind. And I realized that the whole universe was holographic and that the brain was holographic, which is a complicated technical thing to go into, but it's definitely true.

[B]

The paper put Gene in touch with none other than Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, who is then producing a new documentary.

[D]

They set up a meeting for me and Gene Roddenberry in early 73, and I explained to him this one invention of mine, which I call a matter hologram. And I said, so you could have a room where you can reconstruct anything you like. You can have jungles, you could have a new location, you could have physical objects, whatever you like, and you could use it as a recreation room or a training room or simulation of war or whatever you want.

[B]

Star Trek the Animated Series went on the air in September 1973, and in September 1974 aired the episode the Practical Joker, featuring the first appearance of the holodeck, then known as the rec room.

[C]

Well, what'll it be, A swim at the beach?

[B]

We're cutting a lot out of this particular story, but we've posted links to more about Gene Dolgough's connection to star [e-mail] deadcast creating a functional holodeck was perhaps a bit out of the Grateful Dead's price range and ambitions, even in 1975. But Gene Dalgoff had another line of research that was more relevant to the Dead's interests.

[D]

One of the things I was working on, I had the idea that since you can take a laser beam and modulate it, we could put sound on a laser beam. And I had a little modulator with connected to a radio. And then I sent the music on the laser beam to a receiver. And then I had a amplifier and you could hear the music. And whenever you put your hand in the laser beam, the music stopped because you were blocking the laser. So that showed that I was transmitting sound on a laser beam. And I did it live on the TV show.

[B]

This radio is now sending its sound.

[C]

Over the laser beam.

[B]

Now, this is a receiver. As soon as we put the receiver.

[C]

In the laser beam, the sound will.

[D]

Come out of here.

[C]

Ready? Let me go over here.

[B]

The beam is now being projected onto.

[C]

This Little radio thing.

[B]

And the beam is going to turn it on now.

[D]

And I can hear sound coming out.

[C]

There is sound coming out of that here.

[B]

And every time you put your hand here, stops.

[C]

Good.

[D]

My idea was, well, why don't we. Instead of playing a record with a needle and wearing down the needle and the record, why don't we read the grooves with a laser beam? Because we can put the sound over the laser beam. And so then I got the idea of making a record that way and have it on. On a film. And that would be the new record. So I told that to the Dead. And they introduced me to their manager, a guy named Ron Rakow.

[C]

He lives in the Bronx. And he. He came and gave us all an eye test at the Navarro Hotel. That was really brilliant. Using holography just on a wall. And if you put the holograph on the wall and you move around a certain way, if the thing moves with you, your eyes are normal. If it moves against you, you're either. You got something wrong with your eyes. It was an eye test that really pinpointed that people that had something wrong and needed to go further.

[D]

I really enjoyed Ron. He was a brilliant guy, a creative guy. When I eventually met Ron, and Ron took me down to meet his father, who worked in the garment district, and we became friendly.

[C]

His idea was to get something and put the record on that and make a holographic reader. He was going to design this stuff anyway.

[D]

The Dead was so loving this idea, and they said, okay, maybe we can put our records on your new type of record. So Ron, being the creative guy he was, said, why don't we just forget about discs? Let's make the record in the shape of a pyramid. Can you do that? And I said, yeah, we could scan the laser beam around the pyramid and still get the data from it. He said, okay, so imagine two cigarette cases, and you open it up. Let's open up the two cases. And you put the pyramid in. And you close it. And that's the record player. And then the laser reads it. And the album would be on the pyramid. And I said, sounds great.

[C]

His goal was to get us to do a little pyramid in a pyramid reader. And you put this little pyramid in it. And it had all the Grateful Dead albums in it. The newest one was right at the top, but everyone was on. On the sides of the thing. So every time you bought a Grateful Dead album, you got the entire. Their entire release set of albums. That was. That was. That was an early plan. This is actually pretty funny. Now that I think about it, in.

[B]

January 1975, the band announced their holographic intentions. As Rakow's alter ego Anton Round put it in the band's newsletter, this would have the advantage of no surface noise, no pops, scratches, skips, or any of the baloney about present day records and tapes. The pyramid's musical quality wouldn't change until it is broken clean through, which wouldn't be easy, even on purpose. Technically, it is possible to make a small player, same size as two packs of cigarettes, to retail in stores for about $13. Of course, we have lots of music to listen to over such a device. And the Pyramids would cost no more than a record, and perhaps less so. Really, how serious were you about this?

[C]

Call it a third serious. We had props and we could show it to people and all that stuff.

[B]

And here's where the story gets murkier, because while Eugene Dalgoff was beginning research in New York, Ron Rackow is beginning hype out in California.

[C]

I bought one of these. It's a little plastic board, I would call it 4 by 6 inches. And on it it has pyramids that supposedly have the same structure as the Great Pyramid. And I went, I went to Ramrod and I had one of those boards cut up on a band saw. So I had the little pyramids all separate. And then I. I asked Ramrod to make me two palm wall packs linked together by a hinge. And in the bottom one, put the base, a slide that would accept the base of this little pyramid. And then when you closed it, the top would go into the. To the cutout at the top. This had to be done with the chisel. And we painted them black and told everybody that this was the future. And we were going to have just a cable that went from this into your sound system. And we were going to put the entire library of Grateful Dead albums on the pyramid.

[B]

Progressive indeed. Maybe a little too progressive. But the holographic project would receive lots of mentions in articles about the Dead over the next few years. Racau's concept of encoding the music on a pyramid shaped object marked the first appearance of a pyramid into the Dead's personal iconography, a somewhat subliminal introduction of a shape that began to recur and iterate over the next few years of the band's creative life. Please welcome back historian Nicholas Merriweather, founder of the Grateful Dead Studies association and author of the liner notes for the new Blues for all of 50 release. This business of the holographic pyramids, I think it's Most likely just a riff on the standard bullshit of the whole pyramid power nonsense that was going around. So the pyramid power scam, it's right on up there with pet rocks. And it was the idea that there was an inherent power to the pyramid shape. Such that you could make a little glass pyramid and put your razor blades inside it. And they would not only stay sharp, they'd get sharper. Pyramid power made it to English speaking minds through the popular 1970 book Psychic Discoveries behind the Iron Curtain. But even at the time, other members of the Dead family were beginning their exploration of Egyptology. That would result in the band's 1978 visit to the pyramids. We'll get back to the desert soon.

[C]

I didn't show it to anybody but Jerry at the thing. And one time in a meeting he said, give me that black saying that you walk around with. He said, this is the most amazing thing I ever saw. You see this shit? This is two cigarette packs. Two. And we both smoked palm oils at that time. And he pulled them out. He said, these are two palm oil packs hinged together. Ramrod made this shit. Racko made us Minions. This is what he used. Everybody got everybody. You know, we were out of our mind laughing.

[B]

Rakow's hype prop and the vague idea of pyramid power make it seem all pretty imaginary. Thought of next to magic Alex, the Beatles would be in house. Visionary. But that would be wrong. Rolling Stone reported in March that there was a crew of scientists plugging away at the Dead's Round Record headquarters in Marin county at the time. Rakow estimated it would be available for sale between nine and 15 months. Both those were inaccurate, but Gene Dolgov's holographic playback system was very much under research in 1975. Though he says he never went to California for the project.

[D]

We really had prototypes. I mean, it was real work going on. So I do remember checks from Round Records, but whenever I'd see them, they'd give me cash.

[B]

He was a regular when the Dead or one of Jerry Garcia's projects came through New York.

[D]

One day when I was at the Navarro with Jerry, I told him that his new song, Us Blues, was number one hit material. And he said no. And I said, really? It could be top 40. And I said, but could you teach me how to play it? So he gave me a guitar and he had a guitar and together we played Us Blues. And that was really a fun experience. Playing guitar with Jerry Garcia.

[B]

I don't think it'll be spoiling anything to say that the Holographic Pyramid reader didn't come to fruition. But there's a little more to Eugene Dolgoff's story with the Dead, which we'll return to down the road, and a lot more to Dolgoff's career, which includes the patent on the very first LCD projector in the early 1980s. As usual, we've posted [e-mail] Deadcast in 1975, holography was a very real project in development. For the rest of this season. Consider it to be in the present tense, part of the Dead's ongoing experiments in form, trying to reinvent the universe. In this window, there was another, just as wild idea somewhere in the works. Jerry Garcia hinted at it in his late March 1975 interview with Peter Simon. If we keep playing in the same room, we really understand it. So the music gets really articulate, which.

[C]

Is one of the directions it needs.

[B]

To go in to be more clearly stated and more greater subtlety and greater nuance. You know, all that, and that has.

[C]

To do with understanding a room really well.

[B]

And you can do that if you're playing it really often. So that's one possibility. A few years earlier, the band had even purchased a small parcel of land on Lucas Valley Road in Nevada with the project name Deadpatch. But nothing came of it. So far, the situation at Aces was the closest they'd been able to find.

[C]

And just the thing of being trying to fit in responsible consciousnesses with what's.

[B]

Happening in the world and feeling that.

[C]

It'S really as much our responsibility as anything to create the right situation for.

[B]

What we're doing, to be in just on any level. But in 1975, a new line of research began.

[C]

Ron Rakow it was a plan to make a round ballroom that you could move around. We had a drawing made of a rolled up blueprint of how to make it and what elevations and so on. It was rolled up in a big, you know, leather sheath and it was, oh, 24 inches, 20 inches high. And when you rolled it up, it was two inches around. Somebody told me it was by Buckminster Fuller, but I don't believe that.

[B]

In fact, Rackow himself told rolling stone in November 1975 that Fuller was working on the project. It sometimes got called a floating venue, but they meant in the portable sense, not the aquatic sense. Unfortunately, we're unable to get the late Bucky Fuller on the line to confirm or disconfirm this information.

[C]

It was drawings made of exactly what the sphere is now. The drawing that we had in other Words. The walls are separated by three or four feet, just like the sphere is separated by five or six. The sphere is put in one place and left there. But we intended to pull ours from place to place and have our setup all already there and just land and play. The sphere is exactly that, but is anchored. And it wasn't the size of the sphere. It wasn't that big. It was an idea of projection in inward and outward, just like the sphere does. It was set up for 6,200 seats, which is about one third the size of the sphere.

[B]

So a progressive band. And inside the progressive Dead, there are progressions within progressions in all manners of the word. As the band's classical head in residence, bassist Phil Lesh had long been one of the group's primary instigators of new music, in the sense that that phrase is used in classical circles, compositions written in the 20th century. Basically. It was one of the dead's ongoing missions. As Jerry Garcia told Peter Simon, the.

[C]

Thing of being able to progress or come up with new ideas, we always have felt free to do that. In fact, compelled.

[B]

It was a mission so compelling that they retired from the road to chase it. We used this quote last episode, but it's once again relevant what we hope to be able to accomplish by not performing a lot, which is get away from our habits, get away from our old repertoire, and just, you know, cut. Cut ourselves loose from the past, basically.

[C]

Shocking as that might sound, and develop, you know, a new. New levels to. To go off of, really, to depart from.

[B]

Garcia was pretty blunt about the band's new directions.

[C]

It's a little bit more difficult and it's also more. Considerably more experimental.

[B]

I mean, it's really questionable as to whether the things will work well, whether.

[C]

They'Ll be successful musically, but we're certainly.

[B]

Sort of into defining new spaces for ourselves musically. To go to King Solomon's Marbles was almost certainly one of the pieces he was thinking of. Like Slipknot, but even more ambiguous. It's sort of possible to trace the ideas of King Solomon's Marbles back to earlier Dead eras and compositions. The 11 remains the Dead's most famous excursion into a rhythmic space outside the standard 44 beat of rock. But it was hardly the only one. So let's count up going through some of the Dead's odd time signatures. Up to and including the blues for ALA sessions, the Dead had surprisingly few pieces in the fairly normal time signature of 3:4, known as Walt's Time. There's the bridge to Warfrat I know.

[C]

That the living tonight.

[B]

Most of the Dead songs and most rock songs in general are in four. Four. Our musicologist correspondent Sean o' Donnell insists that while it only matters if you're trying to write the song out on paper, El Paso can be counted in six. Out in the West Texas town of.

[D]

El Paso I fell in love with a Mexican girl.

[B]

Nighttime I'd find me.

[D]

In roses Cantina music would play and fill in a wood world.

[B]

And next episode we'll expand on the roughly 15 second flash of six. Eight time on Blues for Allah by 1975, the Dead had a few pieces in seven. For starters, there was the rarely played instrumental, just known as the Seven, played a few times between 1968 and 1970. Here it is at the Capitol Theater on March 21, 1970, thanks to Ken Lee's audience tape during the Blues for A La Sessions. They were also working on a new piece by Bobby Weir, which might sound familiar. Early versions of Lazy Lightning and Supplication turn up throughout all phases of the Blues for A La Sessions, and Weir finished it in time to record it at Aces that fall, leading off Kingfish's debut album the next year.

[C]

I Keep On Trying, but I.

[B]

Also in development at Aces in the spring was a piece that was labeled as Nines on some of the session tapes and eventually took on the name Orpheus, recorded by the Fool Dead during the sessions for Jerry Garcia's Reflections album later in the summer and eventually released on the All Good things box in 2004. It sounds like a jam, but it's another composition that feels genetically related to King Solomon's Marbles.

[C]

Sam.

[B]

Counting Our Count, the original instrumental seed for playing in the band was called the main 10 because it was in 10. 4. Here it is from one of its early performances in November 1969. Now on Dick's Picks Volume 16, we've mentioned the 11 already. Truckin can be counted as a groove in 12.

[C]

8.

[B]

The Blissed out jam at the end of New Potato Caboose has a long moment in 13. Eight. Like this take from August 24, 1968. Now on two from the vault.

[D]

Sam.

[B]

Perhaps the reason why it got as far as it did was that by Phil Lesh's standards, King Solomon's Marbles was actually a pretty loose piece of music compared to many of the examples we just heard from the City College of New York. Welcome back. Sean o' Donnell what I like most.

[C]

About it is that they are like, this is what we're doing.

[B]

We're just doing this. This is a pedal to the floor romp in seven. As Sean points out, Garcia isn't really soloing in seven, just following his inner shred.

[C]

That's sort of where the bravery comes in again.

[B]

Phil seems the one most willing to take the chance. I know that sounds opposite of, like he has these very complex things that.

[C]

He'S building, but he also is totally willing to free will it, maybe more than the rest of them. He'll just do it and I'll put.

[D]

It on the record and this is.

[C]

How it's going to go, and it's.

[B]

Equal to all the other things to him. But in that way, I think that might be deliberate. While the Blues for Allah sessions were an attempt to generate songs, the Dead were also an improvising band. And I think we're thinking about creating explicit new launching points. In his conversation with Peter Simon, Jerry Garcia used the phrase new level several times. Here's one. Cut ourselves loose from the past, basically, shocking as that might sound, and develop.

[C]

New levels to go off of, really to depart from.

[B]

And another, in a sense, we've just bankrupted our own material by using it so much. And so the idea is to create.

[C]

New levels of places to get off.

[B]

I think King Solomon's Marbles was exactly that, a jumping off point that felt both distinct but also wide open and comfortable enough to just, you know, shred. We've talked before about how Blues for Allah represented perhaps a final moment where the Dead made an album filled with musical ideas that seemed fully contemporary with the music of their peers, except in their own deady way. King Solomon's Marbles is a place where that's definitely true. I'm virtually certain that Phil Lesh never heard Can's album Soon Over Babaluma and this track, Splash, released in November 1974, that sounds uncommonly close to the piece that became King Solomon's Marbles. It's also in seven, but like Franklin's tower's resemblance to Walk on the Wild side, I suspect it's just a coincidence a similar musical path arrived at from similar approaches. It's so extraordinarily adjacent to King Solomon's Marbles that we'll listen to slightly more. We've talked about Cannes before on the Dead Cast, back in our Europe 72 season especially. I'm pretty sure, for example, that can did hear the Dead song one more Saturday night on the German television show beat Club in 1972, not long before recording this. And can definitely saw pictures of the Wall of Sound and built their own version of it, which we talked about with their engineer Rene Tinner back in our West Germany episode. But King Solomon's Marbles had its own particular evolution. Starting in the later part of 1974, during the same window that Jerry Garcia began to fool around with the prototype of Slipknot, Loesch began to lead a jam that Dead scholar Light Into Ashes has called the Proto Solomon Jam. It's not exactly what became King Solomon's Marbles, either in terms of the notes played or their rhythm, but it's easy to hear the connection. That's from the February 26, 1973 Dark Star in Lincoln, Nebraska. Now Dix picks 28. During the early iteration, Loesch would sometimes play the riff in 5:4 as we just heard, and sometimes in 6:8 as they switch to right afterwards. On this version, we've of course linked to the post about the Proto Solomon Jam, sometimes known as Phil's Jazz Jam, at dead.net deadcast rather than a song or even a groove in the conventional sense, it's more like a feeling the relationship between Lesh's bass and the rest of the band. And as Light Into Ashes points out, not dissimilar to Wayne Shorter's footprints, the theme appears throughout 1973 in parallel with another bit of Lesh's in an odd time signature. The ending sequence to the original Eyes of the World arrangement hear from that same February 26, 1973 show. Tuning into the circulating sessions from Aces, it's easier to hear how those ideas perhaps remanifested into the piece we now know of as King Solomon's Marbles. This is from an early session on February 28, 1975, and by a few weeks later at Ned Lagin's birthday jam on March 17, 1975, which we discussed on the Slipknot episode. There's a definite form to it, but that's only the first part of what became the final song. The piece was rehearsed extensively and incorporated into the sequence known as Space Age, performed at the Snack Benefit. But what was performed at the Snack benefit was only the piece that we call King Solomon's Marbles, and in a slightly different form than the final album. After the Snack benefit, the Dead got back to work, and King Solomon's marbles continued to evolve. It's not until the May 12 session after Garcia's return from the Legion of Mary tour that we first hear the second section of the song, known as Stronger Than Dirt. And there's a ridiculously easy way to remember which part is called King Solomon's Marbles and which part is called Stronger than Dirt? Specifically, can you sing the phrase Stronger than dirt over it?

[C]

Stronger than dirt. New Ajax laundry detergent is stronger than Dirt.

[B]

That was the Ajax commercial jingle circa 1965. And like the product it's advertising, it makes clear what's behind Stronger than Dirt. Did you ever see socks?

[C]

This white New Ajax laundry detergent is stronger than dirt.

[B]

Hank Harrison's Dead book includes the reproduced text of a notebook page from 1962 that indicates that Phil Lesh had the phrase stronger than dirt in mind, since at least then Ned Lagin was around for this part of the workshop sessions. When Stronger than Dirt came into existence. Ned Lagin thinks the music came first and then somebody realized what it sounded like.

[C]

Somebody labeled it from the resemblance. I don't know who, but the resemblance is there because of subliminal absorption of things that were going on. That once Jerry or Phil heard stuff, heard the idea of stuff being used, he would do it himself, subliminally or overtly and consciously.

[B]

Quotation of popular sources was a device often used in contemporary classical music, including Phil Lesch's beloved Charles Ives, not to mention being the basis for a lot of bebop, where familiar themes got reharmonized and turned into new songs using quotes.

[C]

Both in Seastones and in studio sessions. That's pretty important to me. It was part of my education in improvising and being taught improvisation. And some of the pre recorded tracks for Seastones performances were musical quotes, but some of them appear only as rhythmic or what I learned from Renaissance music. Cantus firmus, bass sound, the bass sound, so they were the basis upon which other harmonies and other themes and rhythmic structures were created.

[B]

Phil Lesch would have been familiar with the technique from both his jazz and classical backgrounds. The piece on Blues for Allah has been labeled and mislabeled in numerous ways over the years. The most common mistake is to call the entire piece King Solomon's Marbles and then label part one as Stronger than Dirt and Part two as Milk and the Turkey. But this is incorrect. Part one is King Solomon's Marbles. Part two is Stronger than Dirt or Milk in the Turkey. Again, here's Part two, Stronger Than Dirt. The version of the full piece on Blues for A LA only existed for a limited amount of time, as we heard it was still in development on the Kezar Stadium show from March. Besides some of the rehearsal tapes, the two parts can only be heard together on the studio version from Blues for Allah and the live recordings from the Great American Music hall in August and Lindley Meadow in September. Here it is at the Aug. 12 soundcheck rehearsal for the Great American Music Hall Show. But without that section, all you've got is a sparkling King Solomon's Marbles. Now let's go back to the top and talk about the two part piece of music heard on Blues for Allah. The tracking sheet for King Solomon's Marbles. Stronger Than Dirt seems to be MIA from the final tape reel. So I'm not sure when the final version was recorded. I'm gonna guess sometime after the Bob Freed Memorial boogie on June 17, because I think otherwise they would have played the full piece. Here's Billy Kreutzman's drum int. But then you have this additional part which I think is Mickey Hart overdubbing the smaller Latin percussion setup that you can see on stage in the photos of the September 28 show in Lindley Meadow. While he was on tour with the Legion of Mary that spring, Jerry Garcia told an interviewer in Philadelphia that the new album sessions were an attempt to quote de Grateful Dead ourselves. So, like Slipknot, the pieces combine rhythmic and harmonic ideas that were part of the Dead's evolving vocabulary, which we talked about extensively during our Slipknot episode. Associate professor from the City College of New York, Chadwick Jenkins. That major sixth over the minor chord is a big part of it. That first real lick by Jerry, once.

[D]

You get past that, that opening, it's a B minor and he hits the seventh above it.

[A]

And then the major six.

[C]

A minor.

[B]

Chord with A major six over it shows up constantly in this album. Like it's not that they've never used it before, but it's A major just sound of this album. If you listen to King Solomon's Marbles, Bob Weir's doing that chord over and over again on all the B minor jams and, and quite a few of the A minor jams. Like it shows up that, that minor six chord again and again. And then there's this part, it's just an A, A nine chord, right? But what he's doing is he's coming up to the third and then he's. He's got this neighbor figure which makes it sound really cool, right? Because you have the, the notes that don't quite fit resolving the notes that do fit and you get that, that very jazzy sound. So that's King Solomon's Marbles. And then there's the Stronger Than Dirt section. Don't the Doors refer to it in the end of one of their tunes, The Stronger Than Dirt thing I'm obviously not a golfer, but Chadwick's right. It's at the end of touch me from 1969. As I said, I'm not sure when in the sessions the band tracked King Solomon's Marbles, but at one point the song was considered as a possible title for the album. As late as July 1975, United Artists in house cover designer Bob Cato made a mock up for the Dead album to be titled King Solomon's Marbles, depicting a statue, presumably King Solomon, dropping a marble into a larger ocean of marbles, or perhaps a ball pit of marbles, including the floating torsos of Richard Nixon, Dwight Eisenhower and others. Before his position at United Artists, Bob Cato had worked at Columbia designing covers for Bob Dylan, the Band and others across the great divide. Just grab your and take that ride get yourself a bride and bring your children down to the riverside and I'm also not sure when in the session the instrumental took on the name King Solomon's Marbles. Phil Lesh addressed the title briefly in his memoir, Searching for the Sound. We've linked to the audiobook from Simon and [e-mail] deadcast this time we wanted.

[D]

To start off just playing together to.

[C]

See what would surface that could then be elaborated into more extended structures. In that spirit, Jerry brought in a strange, almost atonal melodic entity that would evolve into the title song and sequence for the album.

[B]

And I had sketched out a little.

[C]

Latin flavored seven beat instrumental number inspired by Shelley's poem Ozymandias called King Solomon's Marbles. I met a traveler from an antique land who said, two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert.

[B]

Here we have a subtle Egyptian connection that Lesh must have known about. We've linked to an essay about the [e-mail] deadcast and I'm pretty sure I'm getting this right. Shelley's poem was built on a series of historical conflations that connected with the Egyptian statue known as Young Mammon of the Pharaoh Ramses ii, set to soon arrive in London. And the poem blurs the identities of Ozymandias with the king of Kings, King Solomon, and yielded a pretty famous and on the pedestal these words my name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair Nothing beside remains Round the decay.

[C]

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.

[B]

Though it wasn't composed as a piece of a bigger suite, that's how King Solomon's Marbles often ended up functioning when performed live on the album, though, it flowed in a different way between Franklin's tower and the music never stopped. Grateful Ed archivist David Lemieux and the way they end it is just so classic. It's like with that note that and then, I mean, it's one of those.

[A]

Albums that I've again listened to so.

[B]

Many times as, as all of the great albums have been listened to that.

[A]

Many times by us.

[B]

Just the transition of the way the.

[A]

Note on which Jerry ends the song.

[B]

And the way that they, they then.

[A]

Pick up the music never stopped.

[B]

It's just so freaking perfect. Hold that thought. King Solomon's Marbles and Stronger Than Dirt were extremely short lived, but their brief live existence is worth noting. The King Solomon segment was played at all four shows of 1975, but the tightest and the only version to approach the blues for a la take was, unsurprisingly, the August 13, 1975 show at the Great American Music Hall. At that gig, it came out of the first eyes of the world since the band's road retirement, almost like a replacement for the song's old 78 ending. And of course, it never quite worked like that again. They played it again in the post drums weirdness slot during the Sept. 28 show at Lindley Meadow, but by then the groove had slipped back to the looser feel heard earlier in the year. And poof, that was it for King Solomon and His Marbles never heard on a dead stage again. Unsurprisingly, Phil Lesh and friends took up both pieces of the Suite. When Phil returned to the road at the turn of the 21st century, Keith Eaton left us this story about Phil Lesh's fuller realization of the music.

[D]

I'm thinking back to July 3, 2001 at the Cuthbert Amphitheater and after having been brought out of hiatus, my own hiatus of seeing shows by my friend Corey, we end up at the Cuthbert Amphitheater and seeing Phil Esch and Friends, the quintet the Q. And out of this long.

[B]

Sort of.

[D]

Dreamy, alternately rocky wharf Rat, well suited to Warren Haynes and his pathos, the band out of nowhere just bursts into King Solomon's Marbles. SAM and it isn't just that they play this and it's I'm sort of shocked, but not surprised because Phil Lush and Friends has been amazing every time I'd seen them thus far. Listening back to it recently, it struck me just how polished and fully formed it was at that moment. John Molo, Phil and Jimmy Herring, as this core trio just absolutely bounce it's like it's suited for Jimmy's Jazz Is.

[B]

Dead style, and Rob Barocco hangs right tight with them.

[D]

And Warren More acts like a rhythmic foil. But I hadn't even thought about the fact that I don't even know if anyone had rehearsed or played that song since 1975 or 76 rehearsals. And bam, there it is out of nowhere.

[B]

But remember what we said earlier about the prevailing nowness of the Blues For Alla sessions. We're going to go back to Aces for the remainder of this episode and listen to some more bits of the sessions for the album that was then known maybe as King Solomon's Marbles. Looking at Phil Lesh's songwriting on Dead albums and in the Dead set lists, it's sometimes easy to miss how much music Phil Lesh worked on during the 1970s and especially during the Blues For Allah period. Not that he was nearly as prolific as Jerry Garcia, nor even Bobby Weir, but Phil Lesh had a number of pieces in development alongside King Solomon's Marbles. He had no less than three other songs that made it to various stages during the Blues for Allah sessions. I think Phil is playing acoustic guitar here. That was Phil Lesh teaching a song to Bobby weir early in March 1975. Of the three pieces, it's the one we know the least about. No title or anything else, but there's an extraordinary 45 minute stretch of tape that starts with Phil talking through the chords to Weird and ending with the full band playing the piece. Ned Lagin made an observation about Phil Lesh's collaborative skills in this period.

[C]

An Unbroken Chain. That was a learning growth experience for Phil in terms of what he could expect from the rest of the band in terms of how to play his tunes. Phil had evolved. I can just say that because we were very close at the time. Obviously, Phil had evolved.

[B]

While the music we're talking about in this segment mostly got put to the side, the tensions from the Unbroken Chain session only surfaced between the cracks.

[D]

I have a tendency to lay back.

[C]

On that cake and you have a tendency to rush it.

[D]

I really think the important thing is not to be late with the two.

[C]

That comes after the new one.

[B]

That's the only important.

[C]

Yeah, that's the two. Yeah. Okay, then rush it and be right on.

[B]

You'll be unsurprised to find that it has some kind of odd time signature and Jerry Garcia does some clarifying.

[C]

Well, I think that if anything, you're tending to try to put it into.

[D]

Regular 404 time, which is the Natural.

[C]

Thing to do in terms of playing it normally. So.

[B]

Insofar as that figure is concerned.

[C]

You'Re playing.

[B]

And rushing.

[C]

Four, four.

[B]

After that, the band doesn't quite get through a full take, but they're able to play it through a bit almost. And at least for the Asus tapes we currently have, that's it for that piece of music. Disappearing backwards into the chasm of nowness of 1975, Loesch's other two pieces unfolded in more notable ways. Later on that same March 4th tape, he runs through another set of changes with the band. These ones are pretty gnarly.

[C]

Every time it says E 11th, it's Discord.

[B]

Remember how we told you about seventh chords in the Slipknot episode?

[C]

Polytonal chord. It could be between an E on the bottom and something else on the top. It's A major. It's ena with a D. Right, okay. Right, right. And E7 on the one and a major on the tom. Actually, you can play it as if it was a dominant of E. Right.

[B]

It's not always a smooth process.

[C]

Play it all through one time or a few times. To try playing it all through and getting it on tape, it's a heck.

[B]

Of a lot easier learning.

[C]

Oh, true. But if you had the chord names to look at while I was playing, it would probably be a little simpler.

[B]

Yeah, they don't get nearly as deep into this one, but there are some places where Phil makes it through the song while singing a vocal melody.

[D]

The whole last two halves of the thing, or two thirds.

[C]

The whole thing could be.

[B]

I asked Ned Lagin if he thought the pieces Phil introduced during the Blues for A LA Sessions were intended to be filled out with words by Bobby Peterson or another collaborator.

[C]

Yes. Was that clear enough?

[B]

This piece is one of those. If I'm hearing it right, it's a song that would resurface at the Terrapin station sessions in 1976 and 1977 with the name Equinox, featuring lyrics by Peter Monk, who also wrote the words to Passenger. By then, Phil had heard his vocal cords and was no longer singing. So just as Passenger was handed over to Bobby Weir and Donna Jean Godschow, Equinox was assigned to Jerry Garcia. That's the version released on the Beyond Description box set. Hopefully we'll have a chance to work backwards from the Terrapin session somewhere down the line. The other piece Phil started working on during the Blues for Allah sessions had an even more convoluted evolution.

[C]

It.

[B]

That's the song labeled Proto 18 proper. Also released on the Beyond Description box. As you might surmise from the title, or maybe not, it's in the time signature of 1808 and is referred to on the tapes as Phil's thing in 18. Thanks to Chadwick Jenkins for the consultation there, and thanks to my pal Dave Mandel, host of WFMU's Marvelous Show. It's complicated for pointing out that many songs in odd time signatures often call them out in their titles. Like Dave Brubeck's Take 5, Proto 18 proper is one of the first pieces the band worked on at the early sessions in February and started out as a more sprawling and slightly jammier proposition. But just as Distorto would turn into Crazy Fingers, Proto 18 proper was destined to molt as well. There were many notes and notes about the notes. Garcia can't find his there's really some.

[C]

Conspiracy that all pieces of paper that.

[D]

Have chords written on them.

[C]

They're not all, but chords written on.

[D]

Or lyrics must disappear in the studio.

[B]

Proto 18 proper leads to this band conversation where Phil tells his bandmates that he wants to play with the expectations of the dancers with the song's weird time signatures, and his bandmates are a little skeptical.

[C]

You know what I'm talking about. We'll have to dig deeper than that. Can't fuck them up with simple turnarounds and time weirdness. Yeah, tricks. I just can throw them a bit.

[B]

When they're in trips.

[C]

What's true? Unsure. Haven't had a chance to see their beats yet. It'd throw me if I was dancing. God, I'd sure like to hear you play the whole thing now.

[B]

Throw them in a ballroom dancing class.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Even by then, though, the tapes document Lesh and the band trying to figure out how everything fits together.

[C]

Also, let's figure out how the other part fits into that.

[B]

And also how does the 18 fit into it?

[C]

The other part comes out of the 18. We've only been playing this part.

[B]

We haven't been playing the 18. Yes, I know. Presumably the 18 is part of it.

[C]

And then this middle section is another part of it.

[B]

By the end of March it was shaped into something more like a song. Like this take from March 26, which David Lemieux excavated for a taper section drop a few years back, feeling simultaneously complete but also missing the manic energy of its starting point.

[C]

Sam.

[B]

They really worked on it. The instrument that sounds like an acoustic guitar is Bob Weir's new cowboy fancy model Ibanez. Probably run directly into the studio board. It shows up with a diamond sharp, clean tone at various points in the sessions. But Proto 18 proper didn't have a future as a song, at least like that. Listen closely to this section. Sound familiar? It would turn up on the next Grateful Edge studio album known as Add a Sight in in the full Terrapin Station SU. The time signature has been stripped from 188 to 6 and the Calypso factor turned up, though Lesh wouldn't receive a writing credit. Pour one out for Proto 18 proper. Alive in the eternal now of the 1975 blues for a la tapes during these months of 1975, the Grateful Dead were, in Jerry Garcia's phrase, a more or less permanent musical association. The research and development flowed both ways. So while the Dead met up at Aces for regular workshop sessions, every member of the band engaged in other musical activities such that the lines continued to blur and blur some more. One of the most interesting sessions took place on April 17th. That was King Solomon's Marbles, as played by the one time lineup of Phil Lesh, Bobby Weir, Billy Kreutzman, Ned Lagin and David Crosby. In some regards, it was a typical day at aces. Alongside King Solomon's marbles, they worked on Weir's new song, then known as EAC, which we'll delve into next episode. But like Ned Legend's birthday jam on March 17, they also worked on pieces by David Crosby, including Lowdown Payment. John Cipollina of Quicksilver Messenger Service stopped by. Steve Brown's session logs refer to this ensemble as Snack, a reference to the band that had rehearsed for the gig at Kezar Stadium in March. But Ned's not so sure about this.

[C]

That's just an error on Steve's part. Or he meant to write Seastones, because they both begin with S. You got to remember that people were smoking very strong weed.

[B]

The absent band members on the April 17 session could be accounted for, and planting a flag in that date is a good place to reflect on the swirling worlds of the dead. In spring 1975, Jerry Garcia was on tour with the legion of Mary. There's no tape of his Atlanta show on April 17th, but here he is the next night, April 18th in Chicago.

[C]

Oh Kyrie.

[B]

I'll be coming soon through.

[C]

The Loose in.

[B]

Keith and Donna Jean Godshow were in nearby san Anselmo on April 17, debuting their brand new live band at the Lion's Share. In mid-1975, the Dead were fielding more spin off bands than they ever had before or after, a whirlwind of musical activity that peaked around April, May and June of 1975 it was probably sometime in June that Billy Kreutzman signed on for duty as the drummer with the Keith and Donna Band. We've posted a link to Corey Arnold's Keith and Donna [e-mail] deadcast they gigged intensely, playing more than four dozen gigs around California between April and September and then setting off on an east coast tour with Kingfish. Jerry Garcia occasionally joined them too. Here they are doing Art Pepper's Straight Life at the Great American Music hall in August.

[C]

It.

[B]

Bobby Weir and Kingfish were mega busy in this window, too. Kingfish didn't have a gig on Thursday, April 17, but they played on Monday at the Lucky Lion Edgewater in Oakland. On Monday the 14th. On Friday the 18th they were in San Bernardino opening for Joe Walsh. And on Saturday the 19th they were at the infamous North Hollywood honky tonk the Palomino, where, as fate had it, they were down two key members of the band, bassist, vocalist Dave Torbert and lead guitarist Robbie Hottenot. In their place was none other than Sir Douglas Somme of the Sir Douglas Quintet. Preparing for their debut gig in early June was Ned Lagin and a Seastones ensemble set to feature Garcia, Crosby, Lesh and Hart, which we'll talk about more later this season. So by the count of active members of the Dead, we've got Legion of Mary, Kingfish, the Keith and Donna Band, and Seastones. Also debuting that spring of 1975 was the Diga Rhythm Band, Mickey Hart's second formal appearances since leaving the Dead in 1971. That was the Diga Rhythm Band in Golden Gate Park, a show we're going to zoom in on slightly because it also helps locate us in the history of San Francisco live music. Another timeline important to the Grateful Dead, our friend Michael Parrish was in Golden Gate Park's Lindley Meadow on May 30, 1975.

[C]

That was really a wonderful afternoon. It was one of those things where they announced it in the morning, I think, that Starship was going to play in the park. And I don't remember if they actually announced that Diga was playing. I think so. I think it was announced as the Starship, the Suns and the dgorhythm Band, which of course at that point there hadn't there wasn't any product out, so nobody really knew what the deaga unless they'd gone to the Starship shows at Winterland, which I did not.

[B]

The year before had seen the surprising and delightful return of live music to Golden Gate Park. You might be familiar with this recording of Jerry Garcia and Merle Saunders playing in Mark's Meadow in early September 1974, just before the Dead went to Europe. That show, as well as the D gig were presented in Golden Gate park by an organization known as the People's Ballroom, an offshoot of the Michigan group known as the White Panthers. Right now, right now, right now, it's.

[D]

Time to.

[B]

Take out the jails, motherfucker. That, of course, was brother Rob tyner of the MC5 at the Grandy Ballroom in Detroit. One front of the radical organization known as Trans Love Energies, founded by poet John Sinclair, which also spawned the White Panthers. Inspired of course by Oakland's Black Panthers. The White Panthers San Francisco offshoot organized the People's Ballroom in the Bay area starting in 1974, a program to create hundreds of one day jobs using government funding and minimal donations. For music heads too young to have experienced the initial wave of free shows in the park from 1966 through 1969, it was a chance to catch San Francisco music in its natural state.

[C]

It was a nice afternoon. That was really one of the few times pre hardly strictly bluegrass that I heard free music at Golden Gate Park.

[B]

It was a pretty brief window for the revival of shows in Golden Gate park, but the People's Ballroom itself would last into the 1980s. Though we'll certainly make some arguments this season about how popular music underwent a few radical shifts in 1975 that seemed to sever it from the counterculture. There were still groups like the People's Ballroom who provided a continuity.

[C]

It was a very large crowd. It was a nice sunny day. And DIGA was the first group that came out.

[B]

Photographer Ed Perlstein, a few months from picking up a camera, was also there. I actually ended up helping members of.

[D]

The Diga band carry their instruments onto the stage.

[C]

Michael Parish I made a tape. I actually had a little mono Sony recorder and I recorded it. It's long gone. It was not good quality. But Zakir seemed to be the, you know, like the front person more than Mickey was. Mickey wasn't announcing anything. It was really Zakir.

[B]

It's great to see you all here today. We are the Diga Rhythm Band from the Marine County. The Diga Rhythm Band were a new configuration that had started recently recording at Mickey Hart's barn. Ed Perlstein the only other thing I.

[D]

Remember about that is being really stupid and coming in shorts and no shoes and, you know, free form hippie style and it being freezing with the fog in.

[C]

And then they brought out Garcia and Freiberg. To huge applause, which certainly the crowd.

[B]

Was going crazy, Zakir Hussain announced the name of the band's final piece, which would turn out to be another piece of Terrapin Station that had its origins during the era of Blues for Allah.

[C]

We are gonna do a piece for you which is known as the Fire.

[B]

On the Mountain, but it seems like we got fire here in ourselves today. Fire on the Mountain already had two lives being originally recorded for Hart's scrapped 1974 album of the same name, after being written during a jam session while neighboring hills in Nevada burned. And sometime in this period, the Diga Rhythm Band recorded a version known as Happiness Is Drumming for what would become Dega's debut album. But on May 30, 1975, it was Fire on the Mountain.

[C]

There was a lot of speculation about whether other members of the Dead were going to show up later and play, and of course, they didn't.

[B]

In the summer of 1975, for one last time in Golden Gate park, free sounds rang out. They wouldn't last past the year, but they'd last through the summer anyway, the eternal now of live music manifesting powerfully. We'll return to the park soon, but let King Solomon's marbles carry you back to that moment.

[C]

It sa.

[B]

It.

[C]

Sam.

[A]

Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. Friends, we'd like to thank our special guests in this episode. David Lemieux, Ned Lagin, Ron Rakow, Eugene Dulgoff, Michael Parrish, Ed Perlstein, Keith Eaton, Nicholas G. Merriweather, Sean o' Donnell and Chadwick Jenkins. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast, David Ganz 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 Dorin Tyson. All rights reserve.