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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. It's with incredible sadness that we say goodbye to Donna Jean GodShow McKay in her remarkable first career, Donna Thatcher was a backup vocalist on sessions for Elvis Presley, Percy Sledge, Cher and others, officially joining the grateful dead as 1971 turned into 1972. Bobby Weir was the first to call her Donna Jean, and she was no backup singer but a member of the band's frontline, becoming fully salaried in 1973 after starting to write songs on her Wurlitzer for 1975's Keith and Donna album while raising their son Zion. It was Jerry Garcia who encouraged her to bring original material to the Dead. A member of the Jerry garcia band from 1976 through 1978, she remained a fully vested part of the Dead's music and mayhem until 1979 and a family member for the rest of her life. It's been the privilege of privileges to include Donna Jean and her laugh as a regular feature of the Dead cast over the past few years, and both can be heard in today's episode Fare Thee Well, Deej.
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Keep on dancing Keep on dancing through the dance no one's noticed but the bands all have here at all but they kept on dancing.
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The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the.
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Official podcast of the Grateful Dead.
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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.
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Thank you very much for tuning in. In this episode of the Good Old.
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Grateful Dead Cast, we explore not only the delightful Bobby Weir instrumental Sage and Spirit, but we also tell you everything you've always wanted to know about what is probably one of your favorite Dead shows.
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It's certainly one of ours.
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The Great American Music Hall Show One from the Vault from August 13, 1975. The 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition of Blues for Allah is out now. This 3 CD set has the newly remastered album with unreleased soundcheck and concert recordings. There are also vinyl variants of the original album available, as well as Blues for all of 50th anniversary merch. All of these not to be missed items can be found@dead.net also@dead.net right now for a limited time you can subscribe.
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To the 2026 season of Dave's Picks.
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The quarter early archival concert releases handpicked by David Lemieux. Early Bird pricing is now in effect.
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Through November 30th and the first edition.
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Ships out on January 30th. A Dave's Pick subscription makes a great gift for the Deadhead in your life, and there's even a cool gift certificate on the website that you can print out and put inside a holiday card. Subscribers are the only ones who get the bonus discs, so don't miss out. Order now and save yourself some bread on a subscription that you'll look forward.
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To all year long.
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Head on over to dead.netdeadcast and 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.
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How you like to listen.
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Please help this podcast by subscribing, sharing us with your friends on social media.
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Hitting that like button and if the Spirit moves you, leave us a review.
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Very kind of you.
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Thank you very much.
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We have transcripts from many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure. Head on over to dead.netdeadcast-index and check them out. Well, Blues for Allah is loaded with great instrumentals and Sage and Spirit is certainly one of Bobby Ware's great contributions to the album. We're going to take you inside this.
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Beautiful piece of music as well as.
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Inside the Great American Music hall for an exclusive industry only event featuring our.
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Favorite band and Jesse Jarno in is.
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At the Door and your name is on the list. Blues for Allah is the permanent home to some of the most unusual pieces of music the Grateful Dead created. Several of the tracks on the album became staples of the Dead's live repertoire, but Several didn't. King Solomon's Marbles was played four times, all in 1975, and stronger than Dirt only appeared in half of those. Blues for Allah's title track, which will be the subject of our final episode this season, appeared three times in some form also only that year.
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The Needle's Eye is There.
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And Bobby Weir's instrumental Sage and Spirit, which we're talking about today, would only appear twice on the Grateful Dead stage and once kind of by accident. We say this all the time, but it's unlike Anything else the Dead recorded, you'll notice, for example, no drums. Grateful that archivist and legacy manager David.
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Lemieux, because they didn't play it that much live. I never really think of Sage and Spirit. It's just such a beautiful piece and like putting the flute in there. I just love it.
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Sage and Spirit.
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It's a freaking great, great little etude. Like I. It's sort of thing where I don't play guitar. I wish I did so I could play this song. That's the thing I would want to play.
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On the tracking sheet for the studio take, Sage and Spirit is titled simply Etude, and the definition of etude is simultaneously a piece of music designed to either practice or showcase instrumental techniques, or both. Its live debut and only fully rehearsed performance took place on August 13, 1975 at the Great American Music Hall, a show we'll be talking about at some length today. Like a few songs on Blues For Allah, Sage and Spirit had its roots in material that existed before. The sessions at Bobby Weir's Aces studio began in February 1975, and like a few songs on Blues For Allah, it was shaped by the unfolding events of the year as the sessions progressed.
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I think the first time we all heard it was in the Grateful dead movie in October 74, where he is playing, playing it as just a way to warm up his fingers.
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That's Bobby Weir on stage at Winterland, from the sound check sequence in the Grateful Dead movie, while the piano gets tuned in the background, which doesn't mean it was remotely finished. Just a seed, ready to go.
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Part of why Weir is able to do such unique phrasings is he's got unusually large hands, and Jerry said that in an interview. And when you see him doing it, he's really covering a lot of space.
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In there, as we heard in our Music Never Stopped Episode, and especially our episode for the 50th anniversary of Weir's Ace album. He could take a long time to develop his ideas into performable songs. Our correspondent Gary Lambert was working on a story about Weir for Guitar Player magazine. During this window, I got to visit.
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With Bobby not that long after the final Winterland show. As part of some interviews I was doing with him, I went to his home and I'm thinking this must have been November or early December of 74.
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And he got a preview of the album. The band hadn't yet started recording.
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While I was in Bobby's home, he picked up his acoustic guitar from the couch and played a very rudimentary fragment of what turned out to be Sage and Spirit, you know, just jaw droppingly beautiful. And he said, something I'm working on, I can't play it. Of course.
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That was a bit of isolated acoustic guitar from the recorded version. Naturally, as an etude, it was designed to expand the player's technique. It also stretched Weir's brain as a composer. There are only really a few fragments of Sage and spirit on the Circulating Blues for A LA sessions. Here it is in etude form on what's probably March 6th as the coffee brews and the band gets ready to start their workday. But there's a bit from the day before that really grounds the piece in the Blues for Allah process. That might sound like a different Bob Weir song, Lost Sailor, and that's an accurate thing to hear there too. But it's also a section of Sage and Spirit from the Sound of Things on the tape. It wasn't yet connected to the intro figure that we've highlighted so far, which suggests, at least to my ears, that another way Sage and Spirit connected to its peers on Blues for Allah is that it grew from several instrumental modules that they were individually and collectively trying to sew together, sometimes not always successfully. That sketch of Weir's etude would fall into a not always organized jam that in turn ended in the Blues for Allah theme. What might be called the only known jammed out Sage spirit. In 1975, Weider was attempting to shape several pieces for the ongoing album sessions. The music never stopped. Took a lot of work to get it, from a live improv theme to EAC to Hollywood Cantata and into its final form. We don't have nearly as much recorded evidence of Sage and Spirit. In fact, those fragments are literally it. Though I assume there's much more to be heard on the currently MIA Workshop tapes. In between those sketches for March and the final album version in July, there was lots going on in the Grateful Deads world, as we've heard over the past few episodes. In June, United Artists acquired manufacturing rights for both Grateful Dead and Round Records. Their new contract specified a deadline of July 10th for the project. Al Teller was president of United Artists in 1975.
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Having been around artists long enough, I would never tell an artist, look, we have to release this album on March 1st, so you better get the damn thing done. No, the creative process is something that has to unfold in its own timeline and I've always left that to the artists.
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Rolling Stone reported whether the traditionally deadline unconscious Dead are going to be under the gun. At ua Dead Records President Ron Raca said, listen, we're so deadline conscious now, they couldn't possibly be more strict. The session tapes bear this out, mostly ending after a feverish few recordings from early June, because by the end of the month they were almost desperately trying to tie up all the loose ends they'd opened over the previous four. By then, they'd mostly moved on to overdubs. Mostly. That's a session for King Solomon's Marbles from early July, where Mickey Hart is definitely in the room. After the second pass, this happens. I think this might be Rex Jackson talking.
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Were they here earlier? Are we too loud? Are we finally hearing that is the.
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Mill Valley Police Department has just shown up in the driveway at Aces. The next few seconds provide us with a few pieces of color. First, how the different Grateful Deads react when the heat arrives.
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I'll be in the booth back here. Under 200 years old.
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There's a lot going on during those 20 seconds of audio. Alongside the stashes that are presumably being sequestered off camera, we get a hint at what's perhaps the proper date of this tape. I'm pretty sure this is a correct description of the action. Someone announces they're going to hide in the booth. Phil Lesh is pissed. Ever the diplomat. Billy Kreutzman suggests they tell them it's the 5th of July and they're celebrating. Jerry Garcia says to tell the cops that they're honoring the bicentennial in their own way. And Kreuzmann volunteers to go talk to them. Always a reasonable idea. Even further off mic, Mickey Hart suggests sacrificing Billy Kreutzman. Let's listen to that again.
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We're celebrating the bicepennial.
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Phil Lash and Jerry Garcia confer.
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There's still nothing illegal about what we're doing there.
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As long as we do it.
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At least there's nothing illegal about playing music. The rest of it.
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This is a place where I definitely wish the off mic levels were higher. After that, there's a slight pause in the tape, and then you can hear Bobby Weir wondering if the cops like the music. And then it's back to work ironing out the finer details of Stronger Than Dirt. Also, some very serious conversation about insects.
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Thing about mosquitoes, they have a terrible sense of junction. Right, right, right. And they're very, very hesitant vibrations here. You know, they're triggered by carbon dioxide content and moisture and heat. That's the only thing that triggers them.
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Etc. If they don't get the final take during that session, they come very Close. So assuming we can date that session as July 5th, we can also say that the session continued into the wee hours, though there was some attrition by the end of the night, when it might have just been Bobby Weir and engineer Robbie Taylor and they recorded what I believe would be the final basic tracks for the whole album. The tracking sheet for the piece called etude, is dated July 5, 1975. There are four different microphones on Weir's acoustic guitar. We just heard the Studer Cardioid. This is the Studer Omni, the Lynn Cardio and the Lin Omni and assembled, which is how we're going to hear it for the rest of this segment. From the City College of New York, musicologist Sean o'. Donnell. To explain Sage and Spirit, sort of and answer the question, what even is an etude?
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It would be a work that's composed usually to focus on a particular technique. There are ones that work on, say, right hand arpeggiation. So you start a pattern and you repeat that pattern over and over as the harmonies change.
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And Sage and Spirit, it's looser than a composed etude.
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Like if you were writing an etude for someone else, like you're going to work on this particular technique and you would focus on some component. It's sort of a Bob etude. Like, these are Bob isms and I'm going to do them all in a row. So my hands are comfortable with my language.
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Where the music never stopped, pointed toward some of the rhythmic language Weir would develop in his songs. Sage and Spirit pointed at something else.
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It's a bit of a different harmonic language and in a way, to me, pointing forward the same way of a little bit of his electric sound seems to be pointing to his next phase. It's a more ambiguous harmonic language. Again, the. The sort of lost sailor realm where it's like we're going to have these loose sonorities and we'll do things over a pedal and we'll make things float so that then we can land somewhere. It sounds more like a compositional technical exercise than, say, a guitar warm up. Although you have to have facility to play this at all. There's something about it that comes out of the Prelude to Weatherport Suite in.
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Terms of Bob's language on the instrument.
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But it's much more freewheeling than that. That feels like a composition there. The prelude and then this Rhymes of King Solomon's Marbles, where it's an idea and a free, free flow on a couple of ideas.
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I think Sean is picking up on one of Sage and Spirit's secrets. Though it sounds like perhaps the album's most classical composition, its actual presentation is an example of the studio as a compositional tool. It might be the first time a Grateful Dead studio track was overdubbed around a solo performance, and is definitely the first time since the Anthem of the Sun Oxum Oxoa era. There's a lot going on under the hood of Sage and Spirit, and of the many overdubs, I don't think all of them made it to the final mix, so let's adjust our ears to a bit of the full picture before diving under. In Dennis McNally's official dead bio, A Long, Strange Trip, he writes that around midnight one night, Weider was frustrated with Sage and Spirit, and Saxon flute player Steve Shuster was summoned to Aces, and by dawn they had a complete take. I'm not sure if this was the same night as the basic tracks and the appearance of the Cops, but it could be. We spoke with Steve Shuster about his saxophone appearance on the Music Never Stopped, and of course asked about Sage and Spirit too.
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Was that flute? I don't remember anything about it except that I think I remember that it was flute.
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But Steve Shuster also worked as an arranger and transcriptionist, creating lead sheets for the Dead and other clients, which we spoke about previously, and he apparently helped Weir organize the different compositional subunits of the piece. There are two pretty different flute parts entwined with one another. Here's a bit of the first and the second, and combined it's a really cool effect, and the parts diverge a bit later in the track and then come back together. Here it is. From the ending, there's an additional Weir Part two, playing stereo electric guitar through a Leslie rotating cabinet, the album's sonic signature. Instead of left and right on the tracking sheet, the stereo tracks are labeled Comin and Goin'. It's in the mix ambiently. Listening to Phil Lesh's stereo part is both a great example of his never the same way once style of playing, as well as the idea that Sage and Spirit was just as much free flow as it was composition. He's in there for sure. Here's Phil from the beginning. In the middle is a beautiful passage of Volume Swells. During the final segment, as Steve Shuster's flute goes free, the bass nearly gets funky. I definitely hear Keith Godchaux's grand piano in the final picture, but he got two tracks to play with as well, and plays similar ideas on both. Here's one pass at the intro and the other, the piano is pretty far back in the mix, and I assume they chose one of these performances over the other or maybe took parts from each take. But it also sounds pretty cool if you play them together.
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Sam.
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And like everybody but Phil Garcia gets two different guitar parts. The first and the one that's in the final mix, I think is a long, beautiful take of quiet volume swells, sounding very much like a bowed string instrument. Here it is layered with Lesch's volume swell part. Garcia's other part is more upper register combined with his other part during the quiet ending weirdness. It would have given the final song a different flavor had it been used. One thing the song didn't have was a name. So sometime in July, as the final album was being assembled, Weir came up with a title that in a way connected it to one of his earlier songs. Cassidy was named in honor of both Neil Cassidy, but also Cassidy Law, daughter of Eileen Law, born at the Rockarocka Ranch in the summer of 1970 as Weir worked on the changes to what became Cassidy. Sage and Spirit, on the other hand, was named after Sage and Spirit Scully, daughters of Nicky Scully and Rock Scully, one of the dead's first managers, housemates at 710 Ashbury, and who still worked for the Dead in various managerial and freelance capacities as both organizer and disorganizer. Please welcome to the Dead cast from Sage in Spirit. Sage Scully around that time we lived.
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In Mill Valley, which is where Bobby lived, and I think we lived pretty close.
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I'm not sure exactly when he wrote.
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The song, but I would have been.
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Three when it was released. My dad always told the story of my sister and I jumping on a bed, like in a hotel somewhere, like we were, which we often did.
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Whenever we would be in a hotel.
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I would say we were mostly jumping.
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Around on the furniture.
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At that stage in life, Rock is really good at telling stories, and a.
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Lot of times they're true, and a lot of times they just take you on a cool trip and they may or may not have happened. So I'm not totally sure.
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I like to believe that that's what happened because I think it's really sweet and it was likely something like that. In Rock's colorful book Living with the Dead, he writes, bobby wrote Sage in Spirit, while my daughters named Sage and Spirit were jumping on his bed and generally trashing his hotel room. He was trying to play his guitar and came up with a rhythm for this. From their jumping, the flute mimics their laughter. Whether or not that's a literal description it's pretty easy to imagine Bobby Weir sitting still on a couch with an acoustic guitar and putting together the piece called Sage and Spirit while all hell breaks loose around him. On the spectrum of loosened hell that existed in the Grateful Dead world, this fell pretty high on the wholesome end. We were definitely little rascals running around.
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B
Hotels, jumping on the beds.
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We used to play Don't Touch the Ground or something where you, like, have.
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B
To just jump from one thing to the next.
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Or, like, on super cheeky moments, we're putting ice cubes out the window and that kind of thing. In 1975, with the dead off the road, the family vibes ran high around Marin County. Bobby was certainly a nice presence in my life at that time, when I was that age.
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He was really kind.
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He was really good with kids in that scene especially, he was almost one.
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Of the more, like, straight people, for lack of a better word.
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A
So I think he kind of was a bit of an anchor for me when I was really little.
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B
I thought about it the other day.
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A
I think he's more of a hippie now than he was, like, in the 70s rock, too. Like, he rock especially, had kind of.
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B
An erudite feeling to him.
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A
And Bobby also, like, in his tweed suits, little bit of a cowboy, a.
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Little bit of kind of a professional athlete.
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A
He was also just really open to.
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Having us around when we were little.
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A
He was really gracious. Sage Scully can be seen in the Grateful Dead movie, both on and backstage around the time Weir was writing Sage in Spirit.
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B
That little girl in that flower dress.
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A
On the stage is me.
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B
I'm pretty sure my mom used to.
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Make my dresses, so we have a lot of photographs of those dresses with the flowers. In fact, Sage is at the center of one of the movie's most subtly hilarious, extremely cute, and kind of psychedelic moments. My biggest scene and the one that.
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B
I was, like, the most proud of.
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A
And I can even remember, like, when the premiere happened, I was like, I'm.
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B
In this movie, and, I mean, now.
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A
I'm like, what, six or five or something?
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B
And I got all dressed up.
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A
I remember putting, like, lots of beads on and stuff. And it was the scene where I'm, like, walking into the catering room, and I go up and I've got this plate, and I take, like, one thing from, like, either grape or cherry tomato or something, and I just put it on my plate and it. And it makes, like, a boink. And Brock and Jerry, like, they love to boink. Like, any kind of, like, any, like, comic noise or, like, Something to kind of infuse in a.
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B
In a moment.
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A
So that was my big scene.
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B
And I actually can remember them talking about the boink and just having like a good laugh because I think there were a lot of those moments in that movie that Jerry did.
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A
Sage and Spirit are both very cool names together separately. And as a song title.
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B
I was thinking about the song and I know there.
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A
Obviously there's no words, but the names.
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B
Originate from the I Ching.
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A
So when my mom was pregnant, I know she did it with me, and I'm pretty certain she did it with my sister's name.
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B
She threw the coins for the I.
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A
Ching and then she would read the passage. And that's where she found the names Spirit and Sage. And they really suited us. Starting with our fathers, like rock. He is really special. He is a really special man. He was kind of like a little bit softer and he.
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B
He had a rough road, was kind.
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A
Of self induced, but he was graceful. Spirit's dad, Ken Goldfinger Connell. And Ken's like six, three, Big imposing guy, red hair, blotchy skin, like scary looking guy, missing a hand, like right out of the gate, you're like, what is that? Ken Goldfinger Connell was a notorious smuggler and has come up previously on the Dead. Cast as the person responsible for overdosing the apple juice at the Fillmore west in June 1969. Pretty far into the chaotic red on that loosened hell spectrum we mentioned. We refer you back to our Black Peter episode. Suffice it to say, he wasn't around much. They're just these differences. The Sage and Spirit were just both very. There's a duality there that's really interesting and it has played out throughout our entire life.
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B
Even so much as little things.
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A
Like when my mom remarried, I wore.
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B
This cream dress and she wore a black dress.
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A
That signifies our whole life, this yin and yang kind of. Kind of a thing. I never really felt like the song.
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B
Was written for us.
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A
I just kind of felt like it was. The name was bestowed on Sage and Spirit was the last of the album's basic tracks. I think they spent the next week and a half working on the album's overdubs, possibly more. But not everything was dated. It was off into the land of mastering and album art and other details which we'll get into in our next episode. But one of the projects was a party to celebrate it. This would become one of the Dead's all time legendary shows. August 13, 1975 at the Great American Music Hall. Now one from the vault.
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B
You're welcome, please. The Grateful Pitch.
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A
And Wowie Zowie. Are we excited to bring you this next segment. Ron Rakow.
- [39:54]
B
Now, I put that together. I'm hands on on that one. A lot was going on. We were doing a lot of things together. We were making two movies and supporting ourselves as best we could. And we just had a new deal with United Artists, also a new album. I said to Jerry, the entire radio industry is coming to San Francisco for a convention. I'd love to put on a show at that time. So he said, do it. I'll get everybody together. And he called every. He called around and bingo, before you know it, he was off doing it. I went and made the deal for the Great American Music hall and figured out what it would cost and I got a budget.
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A
The Radio Programming Forum, presented by Billboard Magazine, wasn't the dad's usual scene. But as we've heard time and time again, 1975 wasn't the usual year for the Dead. Wake of the Flood had made it to number 18 on the Billboard top 100. And from the Mars Hotel up to a robust number 16. With a new deal with a big record label, there was no reason not to aim higher. And having every major radio programmer in the country come to your doorstep was fairly easy lifting compared to, say, going on the road. The Great American Music hall show in August 1975 became an involved production on multiple levels.
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B
There were two parts to it. There's the backstage and what the audience got. And what the audience got was a party produced by the consummate party producer I've ever met in my entire life. And I would call him my best friend, but he's way more than that. He's my closest brother. His name is Roger Lewis. He was a former partner of Bear Stearns and Company, which is a New York City brokerage firm that was very large.
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A
We're going to detour into a semi forgotten wing of the Grateful Led family in this next segment.
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B
Roger Lewis is the most articulate member of what he calls the Pleasure Crew. The Pleasure Crew are the guys that went along, that were always around, that were ready to even do stuff and be helpful, but they essentially were there because it was a good time.
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A
Please welcome to the good old Grateful Dead cast, Roger Lewis.
- [42:03]
B
I got invited to a Dead performance. It was probably at the one down on 3rd Street.
- [42:09]
A
That'd be the Fillmore East.
- [42:10]
B
I started going down there to those gigs. I met Rakow early on.
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A
His New York apartment became the site of some wild Dead centric parties.
- [42:19]
B
I was Very fond of the guys in the band too. Jerry was an amazing human being. I wasn't tight with Bill Christman, but I was fairly tight with the rhythm guitar player Bob Weir. And I stayed at Mickey Hart's ranch for a while. I always liked those guys. They were amazing bunch of guys, worked very hard and were very good at what they did. But, you know, I doubt if any of them ever remember my name. I was not on the level of their music. I was more on the level of party giver. The great conservative pundit William Buckley lived in the apartment right below Roger Lewis on Park Avenue in New York City.
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A
Hope you all remember to towel the door.
- [43:11]
B
He was a partner in Bastarns and his father was the senior partner of Bear Stearns. And I met Roger before I even left New York. I knew him from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. I didn't know his name or who he was, but I remember his being this. That ended in 1969. It ended because I was beginning a new process in my life which involved the use of psychedelic drugs. I had discovered lsd. I was part of that crew. And that didn't work out for Wall Street. Roger sold his seat on the New York Stock Exchange and came to my house to give the money away as a social experiment. I moved out to California and stayed in his home for quite a while. He was friendly with everybody. He was very friendly with the Airplane, he was friendly with us. He was a great guy. I was just a guy with some assets and always liked to get to know people. And I was friendly. I had no ax to grind. I had no game to play. I ended up being part of a family that was producing and distributing lsd. And I went to prison for it. But that had nothing to do with the Grateful Dead.
- [44:34]
A
In this perspective, nothing is purely illegal fiction. Because the story does in fact connect to the Grateful Dead, if only by virtue of the fact that Roger Lewis was a member of the Grateful Dead family.
- [44:53]
B
My first LSD experience was at Billy Hitchcock's place in Millbrook, which is currently being offered at 65 million. It's a 2,500 acre place. There were several domiciles on that property. One of them they called the Bungalow, which was a stone 40 room house. That's where I first took LSD.
- [45:16]
A
The 40 room bungalow in Millbrook was the headquarters for Timothy Leary and arguably the center of the east coast psychedelic scene. From 1963 to 1968. The Dead played there in the summer of 67. A story for another Day.
- [45:31]
B
I was a big fan of that shit. I took large quantities of it. Lsd, I mean. And it's like that. In those days I was 30. I wasn't 80 as I am now.
- [45:44]
A
Out west, Roger became acquainted with some LSD distributors who decided to market a new upscale LSD to compete with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love's Orange Sunshine.
- [45:54]
B
We called ourselves the Clearlight Family. It became known as Windowpane. There were three partners in the Clearlight Family.
- [46:01]
A
I wrote a bit about the Clearlight Family in my book A Biography of Psychedelic America. And you can read more about the remarkable life of one of the Clearlight partners in Keith Martin Smith's book A Heart Blown the Life and Practice of Zen Master Junpo Dennis Kelly Roshi where the dead come up a few times. I bring this up because it makes Roger Lewis the connection point between the Dead and one of the other major early LSD families.
- [46:26]
B
I was not a partner, but I was the second, right, the next level out from the three. And two of the three were close to me. I didn't know the third. I met him, but I don't remember him. He was in fact the Chemist. But he was kept a distance from everybody and for safety, I guess, and.
- [46:49]
A
Security, probably a good thing. Roger did indeed get busted and he was able to pick up some pro tips from elsewhere in the Dead family.
- [46:58]
B
I was at Weir's house one night for a party and Bear was there and I had not met him before. He walked up and introduced himself and he said, I understand you're going to go to Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institute. Which is why I had been. I knew that I was going. It was a matter of, you know, turning myself over. And I said, yeah, that's right. He said, well, I just got out. Let me tell you about it and tell you who to talk to. So he filled in the blanks for me very kindly. And then I went and spent half a year there. I ended up struggling in 100 pieces of clear light and formed a group. We called ourselves the Lahaina Yacht Club Racing Society. And every Saturday we would take acid.
- [47:57]
A
We're not going to delve really much here, but Roger Lewis ended up in jail as the doubles tennis partner with a member of a certain crime family, non psychedelic division.
- [48:06]
B
It was Monday, labor day of 73, I think. And I had at that time about 15 pieces of window pane left. And I couldn't give it to someone because if they turn me over, I'm doing five more years and I didn't want to do that. And I couldn't throw it out because it was not my part of my religion. I thought of this stuff as the sacrament. So I ended up taking the 15 pieces and not remembering that it's also finals day of the tennis tournament. So I'm lying in the, on the, on the, on this in the yard, and these guys come over, hey, you. And I said, what? Mr. B's waiting for you on the tennis court. I said, oh, you know, you got to be kidding. No, we're not kidding. So I have to go upstairs and put on my tennis shoes. And I real, you know, I don't know if you know, but when you first start getting lsd, you're often not really physically able. And I couldn't tie my own tennis shoes.
- [49:23]
A
Roger and Mr. B did not win the tennis tournament, but Roger did make it out of jail in late 1973, briefly.
- [49:31]
B
I decided that I was going to take Window Pane to London and to introduce it to London because they didn't have anything like that. So I took 8,000 pieces, 2 grams, to London with me. And I was busy marketing it in London when Scotland Yard intervened and arrested.
- [49:53]
A
Back in California the next year. He got to know Bill Graham a little bit better at Winterland.
- [49:58]
B
I did video at Winterland for a while. All I was doing was working, choosing which camera record and where to move the camera. There were some cameras that were movable and some that were not. I was like the director of video.
- [50:14]
A
Sounds fun.
- [50:15]
B
I don't think I was ever paid to do it. I just did it. I was not a guy who needed the money.
- [50:20]
A
As we like to say, good gig if you can get it. And it wasn't very long after Roger Lewis return from Brixton that Ron Rackow called him about helping to organize the Dead's gig at the Great American Music Hall.
- [50:32]
B
I mean, I was very surprised when Ronnie asked me to do that gig because I was pretty much from the polite world Persona non grasso. They didn't give a shit that I was an ex con, but normal, polite people did the job.
- [50:47]
A
Organizing the Great American Music hall party was pretty much just that.
- [50:51]
B
They were introducing an album and they asked me to basically produce a party I was happy to do. It was not the driving force and I was not the creator at any level. I was just something. I was doing something that I was clever at, that I was good at, which is basically dealing with people. And I've always been pretty good at that, and I've always been willing to do it.
- [51:16]
A
Roger's signature is all over the Dead's invoices file from this period with planning starting more than a month before contracting Mad Hatter's Catering.
- [51:24]
B
They asked me to make it basically invitation only, not to include the normal crew. And when they said to do that, I did that. I did what I was asked to do and apparently did it to their satisfaction. But it wasn't to the satisfaction of the people that usually go to Grateful Dead gigs. I'm actually a pretty good party giver, but that was an unusual. My rule if I'm giving a party is if you're. If I see you in the day before you get an invitation and we hope that you're going to come and make it a party. I don't know how to give a party that is exclusive to me. A party is inclusive.
- [52:13]
A
In this case it was pretty necessary. The Dead were attempting to woo the pop radio industrialists in a club that held under 600 people standing. 450 with tables on the floor. Which is how the Great American was set up on August 13, a point we'll repeat a few times.
- [52:28]
B
Ron Rakow it was like an old time small town performance palace.
- [52:34]
A
It's a gorgeous place and very much still in action. Like many Deadheads, I've gone to shows there just for the sake of going great foot led archivist David Lemieux.
- [52:44]
B
I've been to the Great American Music Hall a couple of times and every time I went there I would spend my time looking around just marveling that this is where one from the vault happened.
- [52:55]
A
The venue now known as the Great American Music hall was built in 1907 just after the great earthquake and known as Blancos into the 1930s, then as the Music Box until the end of World War II. We're just delighted today to welcome Lee Brenkman, the longtime front of house engineer at the Great American Music Hall.
- [53:12]
B
The Great American Music hall was opened in the fall of 1972 and what had been prior to that, a very expensive French restaurant and a moose lodge. Not at the same time, obviously. It was made into the Great American Music hall by a couple of friends who had been classmates at the University of Mississippi and had always kind of fantasized about owning their own jazz club. And they found themselves by 1972 both in San Francisco. Sam Duvall was a guy who at that time owned a local chain of pizza restaurants called Front Room Pizza. But they were all first in old Victorian antique furniture. They were all set up to look like somebody's front room, hence the name and As a result of that, Sam also had a side business, basically as he said, going to England, buying lots of old furniture, putting it in a container, and somewhere Mid Atlantic they magically transformed into Victorian antiques. I started there in April of 1973, working for the club 47 years and several months later I was still on their payroll.
- [54:35]
A
Lee started his sound career in Denver Shout out to Queen City Jams, where he worked at the Denver Dog, the Family Dog's Colorado Outpost, before migrating to San Francisco's Avalon Ballroom and the Family Dog at the Great Highway Stories we hope to get to some other time.
- [54:51]
B
They started booking Merle and Jerry's band and that is what eventually led to the August 1975 concert.
- [54:59]
A
Jerry Garcia first played the Great American in 1973 and made it a regular stop in 1974 and 75, playing there more than two dozen times with Merle Saunders and others. This is Legion of Mary on July 5, 1975, just after the session at Aces where the cops showed up and maybe around the same moment that Bobby Weir was recording his basic track for Sage and Spirit. This is now on the Jerry Garcia Collection, Volume 1.
- [55:28]
B
When all friends are gone I talk about you I do mean you who is my friend and all friends are gone Talk about you to me who is my friend when all friends come you always defend me I'm right or wrong Talk about you Doc, about you. Jerry and Merle played places that were not much bigger than a broom closet. They were out there to play. They were not trying to build a career. They just enjoyed playing with each other and Merle's sons. Their job was to bring in the Hammond organ because they were strapping young teenagers.
- [56:14]
A
We spoke with Merle Jr. In our Garcia 73 episode by Jerry Bass Current Understanding the Great American Music hall was the site of the final gig by Legion of Mary on July 30, 1975, pausing Garcia's half decade partnership with Merle Saunders. There's no tape that we know of of that show, but here they are at the Great American over July 4th week. It was a time of great change in Jerry Garcia's world, musical and otherwise. Things were troubled in his partnership with Mountain Girl, a story pretty harrowingly told in biographies by Dennis McNally and Blair Jackson. It was also in early August that he played music with mandolinist David Grisman for for what would prove to be the last time for roughly 15 years. Coincidentally, just a little bit earlier, on the same afternoon that Grisman found the final piece for his first great quintet, the legendary guitarist Tony Rice. This is from their first recordings collection, available from Acoustic Discovery. For a few weeks in August 1975, Jerry Garcia once again belonged only to the Grateful Dead. By all accounts, the band practiced their collective tuchus off for the Great American Show. Emphasis on collective. The Dead cast flag is once again at half mast, but we're honored to have a few memories today about the show that would yield the following introduction for one of our most cherished Dead cast guests. On the vocals, Mrs. Donna Jean Gotchau McKay.
- [58:22]
B
The thing about Grateful Dead rehearsals, this was something you would take to the bank, is that we may rehearse or we may not. Once we all got there, sometimes it would be a full blown rehearsal and everybody on it, and sometimes everybody would just sit around and we would never rehearse. And so it was either one or the other. You never knew what day was going to be which whether we would be sitting around doing nothing or having a full blown, really viable rehearsal.
- [58:57]
A
The Great American show definitely warranted the full blown treatment. The band's call sheet showed the Dead at Aces on August 7th, 9th, 10th and 11th. With the album off to get mastered and a second drummer to break back in, There was surely some celebrating, but equally as surely some focused rehearsal. On August 12, they moved the party to the Great American, taking a full day for tech rehearsal.
- [59:22]
B
Sam Lee Brankman it wasn't the club booking the Grateful Dead. It was the Grateful Dead office renting the hall. And the standard rental deal at the Great American Music hall at that time was there was a fee for the use of the hall, plus a bar.
- [60:11]
A
Guarantee, we'll come back to that bar guarantee. The Dead no longer had the wall of sound at their disposal. Not that it would have fit into the Great American, but they still wanted the sound to be just exactly perfect.
- [60:23]
B
They brought in sound equipment from McCune Sound, because this is when the John Meyer Jam 3s were still a fairly new thing. At that time, the music hall did not have a sound system that was flown hanging from the rafters. They had actually built what looked like a big diving platform out from the balcony above the stage. And the house speakers were up there. But the for the Dead concert, they replaced that with three JM3s in an arc angled down as much as was safe. And then they had some smaller McCune speakers on the side of the stage, and the monitors were all from McCune. And the missing console was a McCune MM4. They you know, this is the time when you couldn't buy a big sound reinforcement console. You had to make one and McCune had made one. It was really an excellent console. And Dan Healy drove that and also mixed the monitors from that. Because this is, you know, that era was not uncommon to mix the monitors from the front of house console. So Dan was doing front of house. I was basically the house tech, David Lemieux. And that rehearsal took the way of being a soundcheck at Great American Music hall the day before, on August 12th. So presumably they booked the place a day, a couple days in advance, and they brought the recording equipment and thankfully they recorded the sound check. Virtually all of it. The music and quite a bit of the banter. Roll away the dew. Roll away. Yeah, man. I mean, for christ's sake.
- [62:29]
A
The 24 track came from Wally Heiter's San Francisco studio, located nearby where the Dead had recorded American Beauty. Lee Brinkman.
- [62:37]
B
The Hydra truck is parked out in the alley behind the club. And we ran all the cabling out. That was the normal setup for multi track recording. Two track recording was usually done by Betty or Bob or whoever was doing it would commandeer one of the dressing rooms and set up it there. You can hear during the banter that they were really setting up and it was. They would rehearse and they'd do a song. It wasn't like they had an uninterrupted four hours, six hours to do this kind of stuff. It was like, okay, nobody's doing anything on the stage for the next 15 minutes. Let's run through. And that's what you get. You don't get a full run through of the show. You get the run through of bits and pieces. I'm sure they were running the reels to see what was going on. And I don't know how many of those would have been complete takes because I do remember them starting and stopping a lot. So we went back and 16 tracks were mixed down by Brian Kehoe. And I think they sound incredible. There's some really, really good music in here. And it kind of shows when they do finally play it for an audience, if you want to call it that, the next day. It's a good thing they rehearsed because this music is complic.
- [64:39]
A
The new blues for Olive 50th release includes about 43 minutes of the soundtrack rehearsal, including two mostly complete passes through the Help on the Way, Slipknot, Franklin's Tower suite, the only in 75, King Solomon's marble, Stronger Than Dirt, Crazy Fingers with a tasty Outro Jam, and the very briefly lived live arrangement of Sage and Spirit Even more than the studio version, which I think was more or less arranged track by track as it was recorded. The live version sounds pretty fully intentional, with some gorgeous soloing by Garcia and thoughtful counterpoint by Phil Lesh. If you like sage and spirit, it's totally worth hearing and imagining lots more Grateful Dead in this mode. There's some other pieces of the Sound Check floating around as well.
- [66:22]
B
We did release a song many years ago, 2003, on a bonus disc from the Sound Check. It was a Keith and Donna song called Showboat sung by Keith. Little rock and roll number, Just a little beautiful little shuffle. If you listen to Keith and Donna band tapes from 75, they play it quite a bit. And Keith has a great voice. It's too bad he didn't sing more lead vocals or even more background vocals.
- [67:18]
A
It's from the Keith and Donna album released earlier that year and the only time the Foolish Dead seem to have attempted it. Another little fork in the universe.
- [67:26]
B
The baby in the cradle Rock two and four Gonna get out of the battle's til the shadow don't move and if that friend you cry don't sing I'm gonna get that baby a bell.
- [67:36]
A
To ring I got a feeling deep.
- [67:38]
B
Down in my soul the baby's away and the bell's gonna cho And I got deep down in my soul so move out the way let the riverboat roll. Oh yeah, that's neat. Got any other ones?
- [67:59]
A
There's also a somewhat topical number which David Lemieux released by way of the tapers section on dead.net a few years back. Did somebody say crickets?
- [68:12]
B
Well, that'll be the day when you say that. That'll be the day when you make me cry.
- [68:22]
A
You say you're gonna leave. You know it's a night comes that'll.
- [68:27]
B
Be the day when I cry.
- [68:31]
A
Or maybe it was the natural slapback of an empty venue.
- [68:47]
B
Can't resist with that echo. So into that bag. I can't believe. It's amazing to hear that live.
- [68:59]
A
The topicality, of course, is that'll Be the Day was by Buddy Holly and the Crickets, and that night the Dead were set to feature some crickets in their show. That was an isolated track from the title piece of Blues for Ala. The section titled Sand Castles and Glass Camels tracks 15 and 16, titled Zone Desert on the tracking sheet, built around the heavily manipulated sound of crickets. A story we'll focus our ears on next episode, which probably took place in mid July with the overdubs fresh in their ears. Mickey Hart Set out to reproduce the sound at the Great American, Ron Rakow.
- [69:46]
B
Mickey was on that show, and he had been rehearsing with the band. And in Blues for Allah, he started to use crickets. So he would gather up crickets and mic them in his shoebox from Grateful Dead Records.
- [70:01]
A
Steve Brown, Nevada.
- [70:04]
B
Mickey knew this pet store up there that had all this shit and stuff because they used him for food. The crickets were food for some other amphibian characters or whatever. They had an encore of the Crickets to come down and perform there for us as well. And we did the same thing right behind the curtain backstage there from the.
- [70:22]
A
Great American, Lee Brenkman.
- [70:24]
B
My main job was running the long mic cable down to the basement to the box with the crickets in it. One of the crew had been dispatched to the scientific supply store in San Francisco, you know, where the schools went to buy the frogs for dissection and the crickets and, you know, all of the live thingies that got used in schools, and they bought 12 dozen crickets, and they put them in a cardboard box, and they brought them in the night before. And not knowing they were crickets, I think whoever took the delivery said, okay, put it over there by the walk in cooler. And when they came back the next day, all the crickets were dead. Somebody was dispatched to go get more crickets, and they brought back the live crickets, and we had a larger cardboard box, and the idea was to cut a hole in the box, put a microphone in the box, run the cable all the way up from the basement, up the back stairs, you know, to the mixing console. And we succeeded in that. Ron rackow Rex got 100 crickets and put them in a box, and then they mic them and moved them around the theater until they got it to where it sounded right. They finally put the crickets on top of a big motor that's next to a wall downstairs in the basement. And Mickey says, that sounds really good, except there's something going on there. There's like a 60 cycle home in the sound. So Rex goes down there, and he sees a motor plugged in next to the box where the crickets are, and he pulls the plug out and. And Mickey said, oh, good, you got it. No, no more problem.
- [72:10]
A
No more hum. No more problem. Right?
- [72:13]
B
But the crickets were not chirping at the same tempo that the crickets on the album were. Somebody remembered from high school biology that the rate at which a cricket chirps is directly related to the temperature. You can actually tell the temperature by counting how many times a cricket chirps in a minute and multiplying it or dividing it by some formula. So a second hole was cut in the box and a 40 watt light bulb was put in the hole. And then the hole was gaff taped shut, as was the box, and the crickets chirped at pretty close to the right spe.
- [73:11]
A
Officially, the Grateful Dead hadn't performed since their October 1974 retirement shows at Winterland. Both of their earlier manifestations in 1975 had been under the banner of Jerry Garcia and friends. The Great American Music hall show was, in a sense, the return of the band when Schrodinger's box was opened and the Grateful Dead were found still alive inside David Lemieux.
- [73:35]
B
They played Kezar in March and then they played the June thing at Winterland, which was okay, and this was a full show, but it was certainly not for their audience. It was a lot of new material.
- [73:47]
A
It was all the blues for all the material.
- [73:49]
B
And Mickey was back. There was a lot. So I won't say there was a lot of pressure on, but they rehearsed.
- [73:55]
A
There was even a formal invitation. The original version was a folded over card with the Grateful Dead written in script on the outside and on the inside. Al Teller, President, United Artist Records, and Ron Rakow, President, Round Records, cordially invite you to a rare and important musical performance at the Great American Music Hall.
- [74:15]
B
It was an industry crowd drawn from the conference that was happening.
- [74:20]
A
Billboard's Radio programming forum, held 8-12-16, 1975 at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill in San Francisco, was a full industry blowout which obviously received detailed coverage in Billboard. With lots of wide open collar, tinted glasses and plaid blazers. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast at the Fairmont, there were performances by Glen Campbell, who just released his biggest single, Rhinestone Cowboy.
- [74:48]
B
But I'm gonna be where the lights are shining on me.
- [74:55]
A
Like a rhinestone.
- [74:57]
B
Cowboy Riding out on a horse and.
- [75:03]
A
A star spangled rodeo Waylon Jennings played for the assembled Schmoozerati. The man called Hoss had just dropped his new number one country banger. Are you sure Hank done it this way?
- [75:15]
B
10 years on the road making one night stand speeding my young life away Tell me one more time just so's I'll understand oh, you sure ain't done it this way did ol Hank really do it this way?
- [75:36]
A
Not that everybody was quite as successful. The night after the Dead, there was a performance by Dr. Hook, who just dropped the medicine show and Released the new album Bankruptcy, including another quartet of songs by Shel Silverstein.
- [75:48]
B
We still got a long way down on the way to the bottom we make a lot of stops, yeah and.
- [76:01]
A
We meet a lot of fools Busting.
- [76:03]
B
Their home on the way to the.
- [76:06]
A
Top George Carlin was over at the Fairmount. So was Boz Skaggs and Andy Williams.
- [76:13]
B
Andy Williams.
- [76:15]
A
There were a few dead friendly faces in the crowd. K San's Bonnie Simmons picked up an award for the best progressive station. And one of the event's keynote speakers was none other than Bill Graham. Wish I could find any coverage of his speech. Billboard's only mention of the event at the Great American was a late secret off site show by the Dead from United Artists.
- [76:36]
B
AL My expectation with the Dead was to continue to build on the nice bass that they had built. Whether we could get them to that next level of sales success was really going to depend on the degree to which we'd be able to get a substantial uptick in radio airplay. And there was nothing on the album that sounded as if we were going to have that kind of a singles breakthrough.
- [77:06]
A
But in the mid-1970s, big rock bands didn't necessarily need hit singles. They could still break through with longer album tracks on what was then called progressive radio, an era that was beginning to near its end. United Artists got behind the event at the Great American.
- [77:21]
B
In general, those kinds of events are not terribly successful. I've been to plenty of them over the years. My preference in terms of dealing with radio people is to go one on one with them. Look the program director or the music director right in the eyeball, play the record and get a reaction right there on the spot, rather than everybody hanging around, drinking, talking to each other and all that stuff. So. But it's the kind of thing you do just to basically show that you're your support for the band this way. The radio community knew that we were seriously behind the band, as we would be. Of course.
- [77:57]
A
While the Dead played for the programmers, the band kept themselves decidedly at arm's length. And as Billboard put it off site.
- [78:05]
B
Donna Jean I remember the Grateful Dead playing at the Great American. We were just testing the waters, you know, with the songs that we had recorded. And it was kind of seeing where it was all going to land.
- [78:19]
A
As Billy Kreutzman put it in his memoir Deal, Something about showcasing our new material for radio programmers and the like. You know, stuff I never actually paid any attention to. From the Pleasure Crew, party organizer Roger Lewis.
- [78:33]
B
I had been to many Dead shows by that time. And my normal was to go in the back door and get on stage. And so I was familiar with a lot of faces, even if I didn't know their names. But when you're at the door, telling faces that you know are normally welcome, that they can't come in, you know, you're not the most favorite guy in the world. You're the shithead that they all talk about.
- [78:59]
A
They also could have just registered for the Radio programming forum, only $200 for early registrants, and ferreted out an invitation. We found a few hardy dead freaks who made it inside the Great American on August 13, 1975, and can act as third eyewitnesses for us. One of our Dead cast irregulars figured out a clever hack to get by. Roger Lewis, Reluctant Firewall. I'll give you one guess. Figure it out yet? Please welcome back Gary Lambert.
- [79:26]
B
I was incredibly lucky in that an old family friend of mine, the late Jerry Graham, had just been hired to replace Tom Donahue, who had passed away at ksan. Jerry had run a radio station that my brother had worked in in Western Massachusetts, a great little thousand watt anarchic station. And he was also a veteran of Metromedia Radio, the parent company of K Sans. So although he'd been on the AM side of Metromedia, where they played Frank Sinatra and stuff like that, but I think they just respected him as a competent radio guy and respected the fact that he had started this, this indie station. So they picked him to replace Tom Donahue. And he came out, I believe maybe in July or June or July of 75. And I went to K SAN a few times to visit and got to know some of the staff there. You know, Bonnie Simmons, who was the music director at the time, became a good friend. And I actually. I knew Blues for Allah was coming out. I was actually working in a record store in San Francisco. And I knew the rep from United Artist Records who was handling the Dead account.
- [80:41]
A
KSAN was the Dead's hometown commercial station, having evolved out of the more freeform KMPX a half dozen years earlier.
- [81:04]
B
Can't stand care. You won't have too much say when you're only away in San Francisco. And Jerry said, well, you know, you above all should be at this thing. And the entire staff of KSAN had been invited to the Great American Music hall on August 13, 1975. And Ksan was making this metamorphosis from, you know, the great 60s San Francisco station into trying to retain that but also move Forward musically. So DJs on case and we're playing some of the earliest proto punk and glam rock and all that stuff. So a dj, wonderful DJ named Richard Gossett, who I think was one of the first people to play Elvis Costello in the States. He would go to London and bring back these records that weren't available in the States yet and turn the KSAN audience onto them. You know, play Bowie and the New York Owls and all that stuff. Had no interest in the Grateful Dead whatsoever. So Jerry said, hey, why don't you just come to the Great American Music hall and be Richard Gossett and anything else you want. We're also in Oakland, Emeryville, Mars, Jupiter, and just about any place else you can pick us up. Some people even up in Chico, can get us on the cable. I want to hear stories about that, though I'll have to drive up there and see what the station sounds like in Chico. Security at clubs being incredibly haphazard in those days. I was able to go up to the table and say, hi, Richard Gossett from ksan. They did not ask me for id. He just checked me off a list and said, welcome. So that's how I came to be a few feet away from the stage.
- [83:22]
A
It wasn't like other Dead shows, or at least none since their early days in the clubs.
- [83:27]
B
There were tables, and they had, like, large round tables that a bunch of people could sit at communally. Along with Kezar remains among my most memorable and unusual Dead experiences ever. It may have been the smallest crowd I ever saw them with. The other contender maybe being Cafe A Go Go. I mean, the great American capacity was, I think, 600. With the seats, it was probably reduced to 300 or less. It was a remarkably sparse crowd getting this unbelievable experience. And I was just the luckiest bastard in the world to be among them.
- [84:03]
A
Roger Lewis hadn't succeeded at keeping everybody out. There were 100 tickets reserved for Grateful Dead records.
- [84:09]
B
I saw friends I knew sort of from the Dead scene as well. You know, some people I'd known going back to Winterland and all that. So, yeah, it was. But it was just. It was really being at the coolest private party ever.
- [84:23]
A
Deb Trist was one of the Winterland regulars who made it in. You might know her as Downtown Deb, host of the Long Running Dead Air on KLCC in Eugene.
- [84:32]
B
Great American music Hall. Beautiful. I mean, exquisite, grand. I guess it had been, like, renovated or refurbished in 72, and then opened for shows. And Johnny Hagan, I knew all the roadies and all this, and he was like, oh, how did. How did you get in here, Deb? And I was like, you know, friends.
- [84:55]
A
In high places or high friends in places. The Private Party was recorded on a 24 track with the Wally Hyder remote truck and broadcast nationally several weeks later, not live on the night of the show. We'll be using the radio tape for this next segment, where I'll note that some Deadheads in the crowd do seem to make themselves known. When the band assembled on stage, they were introduced by one of the conference's keynote speakers, though technically he had nothing to do with the show itself.
- [85:23]
B
Although Great American wasn't Bill Graham's venue, he sort of was the paterfamilias of the show. You know, he introduced the Bad and all that. Good evening. We welcome you on behalf of the group we should introduce.
- [85:49]
A
So why was Bill Graham on stage? Ron Rackow.
- [85:53]
B
Roger was just, you know, a very rich guy, very smart, very affable guy on the scene. Knew everybody for years and years and years, and he asked Bill Grant to come by and introduce the band and told him what was happening. Bill was happy to come. So I. I met Bill at the door, and we made two bets on something, and he won both of them. We bet 12 and a half dollars on something, so he had 25. Then we did double or nothing, so he won 50 bucks. I think we should thank United Artists and Mr. Ron Rackow.
- [86:32]
A
I should.
- [86:36]
B
Make it official. Mr. Rakow is the president of Round Records, and he asked if I could be here this evening. And I said I'd like $12.50, which he paid me at the door. And we flipped double or nothing, and I won, and he wanted to flip again. So I'm being paid $50 for being here. I want to thank him. So he walked on stage, very excited to be announcing a Grateful Dead show for the record industry, but much more excited about the $50 bill he just had in his hand and he just won. So he gets up on the stage and he says, on the way in, I made two bets with Racko and I won, and he paid me 50 bucks. And here it is, and he's waving the 50 bucks on the stage.
- [87:17]
A
And now back to the part you probably know a little bit better. Certainly one of the most beloved of the Bill Graham intros. Unrehearsed and a testament to how absolutely locked together the band was on August 13, 1975, for the first time in a while, they were officially themselves on.
- [87:34]
B
The drums, on stage. Left, Mr. Mickey Hart on bass and vocals, Mr. Philip Lesh. On rhythm guitar and vocals, Mr. Bob Weir. On the drums. On stage right, Mr. Bill Kreutzman. On the vocals, Mrs. Donna Jean Gotcho. Our lead guitar and vocals, Mr. Jerry Garcia. Will you welcome, please, the grateful Ted, the very opening bill. Introing the band while they were playing the opening vamp to help and just. It just was thrilling.
- [88:16]
A
Help on the Way had lyrics now.
- [88:31]
B
Like a child she is here, she.
- [88:33]
A
Is not to blame.
- [88:36]
B
And then they were playing it so beautifully and with such authority because they'd been in the studio making that album, they'd been doing their wood shedding by doing the recording. And so it was so sharp, and the band was in really great spir. Sam.
- [89:26]
A
Downtown Deb it was kind of.
- [89:28]
B
Like a magical situation. The band was, like, sparkling and. And I guess refreshed and, you know, venue was maybe 400 people.
- [89:42]
A
Roger Lewis's memory of the night was focused on his hosting duties.
- [89:46]
B
I don't think it was just standing room. I think there were some tables, but I can't really see it, so I don't remember. I know that I was. I was working my ass off the whole time, making it right, making sure that whatever they needed to be done was done and done well.
- [90:03]
A
David Lemieux it must have been daunting.
- [90:05]
B
As much as they, at this point, played so many hundreds of shows, it really must have been daunting to be on a stage playing this stuff for people who are going to judge you, for music industry people and radio people.
- [90:17]
A
So it's a good thing they rehearsed.
- [90:18]
B
I think the show on the 13th demonstrates that they nailed it.
- [90:22]
A
Gary Lambert.
- [90:23]
B
My sense was the crowd was very enthusiastic and they threw in enough red meat, Grateful Dead stuff as well to keep people engaged. And they played that stuff really well, too. And enough of the stuff from the album was accessible. Music never stopped. It's like, oh, man, this thing is great. This thing really feels great live. So, no, there didn't seem to be a big, jaded industry schmoozer factor that I was hanging around anyway. There's mosquitoes on the river Fisher rising up like birds. He's been hot for seven weeks now. Too hot to even speak now. Did you hear when I just heard? I remember music never stopped being really exhilarating.
- [91:42]
A
Lee Brenkman, the venue tech, doesn't remember the show being packed.
- [91:45]
B
The place was not even 3/4 full. This was invitation only. It was pre Internet, even phone trees were kind of a new thing. And then at some point, word had gotten out and there were some people hanging on the sidewalk hoping for a miracle.
- [92:00]
A
Based in part on a note in relics and some of the stories we're about to hear. I'm gonna guess that this next sequence of events started during the set closing eyes of the King Solomon's Marbles and unfolded into the set break. Outside the venue, Deadheads were starting to mass. One of them was Ed Pearlstein.
- [92:17]
B
We knew enough to go down there, and I don't remember the details of how we heard and what was going on. I know it was myself and three or four friends and then some other groups of people came. But it wasn't a big scene. Not a lot of people knew. There were maybe 20 people standing outside the music hall. We went around to the back to see if the roadies were there, maybe they could talk our way in, but nothing. So we were standing outside. We knew there was a. Maybe a hider's truck or some truck outside recording it. We kind of knew that the Dead were in there. And it was a kind of a record company or suits. The Dead were playing because we were. They had opened up the doors so we could hear it. Some guy comes out, well dressed, and he walks directly up to me. I mean, I was one of 20, you know, and I was just leaning against the car right in front. He walks up to me and he hands me an invitation and he walks away. And I can't remember if he walked back in or if he left, you know, and that was. He'd give it to somebody else to use. And the Dead wanted their fans in there. And so I was the first Deadhead in there. And the first thing I did, everybody was sitting around tables and just sitting at their tables. And there was no other activity. I went straight for the middle of the floor where all the tables were and everything, and I started dancing. It was all round tables with tablecloths and executives sitting around the tables in their suits. Very straight. It was very weird.
- [94:54]
A
Dan O. Henklin was living north of the city.
- [94:56]
B
We found out they were playing at the Great American Music Hall. So I had checked on down there.
- [95:01]
A
He got in somehow. The details are a bit blurry, making him one of the few people outside the band's immediate circle to attend both the Vanita 72 field trip and the Blues for a LA party in San Francisco. We doff our wigs, Dano.
- [95:14]
B
And in the Great American Music hall, the acoustics were perfect. The crowd was small, and they were all great lovers of the band. And the. The playing was pristine. Everything was perfect. Sometimes we visit your country and Live in your home Sometimes we ride on your horses Sometimes we walk alone Sometimes the songs that we hear Are just songs of our own.
- [96:09]
A
Gary Lambert couldn't help but notice the room starting to fill up a bit more as the night progressed.
- [96:14]
B
But there was also room to dance at the sides, and a lot of people availed themselves of that.
- [96:19]
A
Bill Graham may have been part responsible for that, and I think he was.
- [96:22]
B
Also responsible for letting some Deadheads in off the street when word had gotten out that this thing was happening. So they filled up the place.
- [96:30]
A
Or maybe it was Ron Rakow.
- [96:31]
B
The show was very, very interestingly set up. I invited the record industry, and we got the people that were the most Grateful Dead dancerholic people.
- [96:43]
A
Or maybe it was Roger Lewis.
- [96:45]
B
That could have been me. But if it was, I was told to do it. I wouldn't have done it on my own. I was much more obedient than that.
- [96:54]
A
Whoever was responsible, Ed Pearlstein was stoked.
- [96:57]
B
Then I see a few more of my friends. I heard that the Dead started to, like, you know, let the heads in, you know, and so there are a few more people dancing. It was amazing.
- [97:10]
A
Ed Pearlstein had seen the Dead with the wall of sound, but in a small club with something else entirely.
- [97:16]
B
I finally heard really good sound at the Music hall. I think it was the Meyer setup.
- [97:23]
A
The classic Eyes of the World We've Been Jamming includes multiple shockingly tonal bass solos by Phil Lesh Sam. It also still features the ominous alternating chords that marked the start of the song's original outro jam.
- [98:34]
B
Although Mickey had turned up at Other. Other stuff. That was the first time we were really getting the rhythm devils back together in. In some kind of formal sense.
- [98:59]
A
But instead of building to the big 78 ending, they pause for a drum break and re emerge into a different piece in Seven King Solomon's Marbles. It does sound like there's some Deadheads in the house by this point.
- [99:36]
B
And hearing Stronger Than Dirt for the first time, which was really powerful.
- [100:05]
A
One artifact of the CD era is that when the show was released on One from the Vault, the set break was relocated from After Stronger Than Dirt to After around and around in order to make the show fit more evenly onto the two discs.
- [100:18]
B
We're gonna take a short break. We'll be back in just a few minutes, and everybody hang loose.
- [100:24]
A
In practice. What this meant was that the show's first set was side A of the album slightly rearranged with It Must have been the Roses in the Middle. This is my personal keeper Dead take of the song, so I feel obligated to highlight it as well, partly because of Keith God Show's crazy fingers like Rhodes tone.
- [100:41]
B
If I tell another what your own lips told to me Let me lay ne let my eyes no longer see I don't know best to be.
- [101:12]
A
And after a few warm up songs, the second set focused on the album's second side. It includes the only Crazy Fingers that I think approaches the delicacy of the album version. Thanks to Keith God Show's watery roads.
- [101:41]
B
Your brain falls like crazy fingers Peels of fragile thunders keeping time.
- [101:57]
A
And off into a jam. A drum segment and a compact instrumental version of the Other One that nevertheless gets pretty far out for its five and a half minute running time on this evening. The Other One was a prelude to one of the show's centerpieces. And I love how they build the set towards this moment instead of an explosion, a moment of really quiet and drumless grace debt.
- [103:16]
B
It was great. Sublime. That Sage and spirit. I mean, I know those kids Rock and Nikki's kids, Sage and Acacia.
- [103:56]
A
There were some traditional choogle to close the set, but the evening built in a sense to another piece that they only played in its fully realized form. On this night. Blues for Allah. Dig the crickets.
- [104:37]
B
Sam Sigh is there. And then of course, you know, Blues for Olive brought back the weirdness factor. And Mickey with his crickets.
- [105:13]
A
Deb Tryst.
- [105:14]
B
It was a wonderful night. Beautiful music. Strange on some of it with this like Blues for Allah, right? Kind of experimental and improv of kind of trust and intuition. And crickets. You could hear the crickets. I assumed it was on a tape loop or something, but way too easy.
- [106:09]
A
Besides the crickets, at least Mickey is on hand percussion too. It's definitely a new space for the Dead and would shape plenty of drums and space segments to come was one of the only realizations of the Sandcastles and Glass Camels theme, perhaps the strangest and most next level musical place the Dead had found at Aces. So why play this utter weirdness for a room full of radio programmers? We don't have time to delve into the sordid history of radio in the 70s. But by 1975 the formats known as progressive and freeform were reaching their peaks. And there was still an audible class of DJs who would drop the needle on extended or sidelong tracks. I clench my fist in solidarity. It might be the only time after the Anthem of the sun era that the Dead played every song from their newest studio album in a Single performance after the show. Maybe there was a limited amount of meeting and greeting.
- [108:26]
B
Yeah, there was a little bit of mingling. I don't remember who. Who all was out there, but, you know, I. I did see enough of Bobby to catch his eye. And then Bobby said, how the hell did you get in here? I said, nefarious means, my friend.
- [108:41]
A
Nefarious means the band had fond memories of this night, and the crowd had fond memories of this night. We have fond memories of this night even though we weren't there. Only a very few people don't. One of the few is Roger Lewis. It's hard for him to shake the memory of having to turn people away at the door.
- [109:00]
B
I think that pretty much everyone associated with the Dead and the Family despised me after having done it. But you know, I did it. I'm guilty.
- [109:12]
A
But even still, he was one of the contributors to the vibe. One more layer helping the Dead manifest a temporary autonomous zone in a room full of mostly corporate company.
- [109:22]
B
They didn't, as I recall, pay me for the. For the Great American Music Hall. I was happy to do it for nothing, you know, because I was good at it. And I loved putting on a party. I was a functionary, you know, I was like a butler.
- [109:38]
A
And of course, there's the pretty infamous story of what happened to the crickets that Mickey brought in, Steve Brown, and.
- [109:44]
B
They got loose there, too. And we heard from Tom, it was his manager at the time, calling us up at the office and stuff, saying, you gotta come down and get these crickets out of here because they're in the Great American Music hall in the back.
- [110:07]
A
Lee Brankman.
- [110:07]
B
The problem was there was no oxygen getting into the box because everything had been taped up shut. So during the show, when the crickets were no longer in the paper, the crickets were either dying or desperately trying to get out of the box. And somehow they managed to open one of the seams of the box and dozens of crickets escaped. We were picking up cricket corpses in the basement of the Great American Music hall for weeks afterward.
- [110:42]
A
Ron Rackow remembers it slightly differently.
- [110:44]
B
That's folklore. That's not true. The crickets didn't have to escape. They already fucked up the whole show for me. Anyway, the funny thing is, everybody worked for nothing except the crickets. The crickets cost almost seven grand to get in there.
- [110:59]
A
Wait, why did the crickets cost almost seven grand?
- [111:01]
B
The next day, I get a call from the guy that owns the Great American Music Halls, but he says, you had a successful show last night. I Said, yeah, we sure did. He said, yeah, I have one bit of news for you. What's that? He said, you owe me $6,750. And I said, I beg your pardon? He said, one of you guys pulled the plug on the freezer motor and forgot to plug it back in and I had to throw away a room full of meat. So I had to pay the guy $6,750. That's a lot of meat. That is quite possible, except for one thing. The refrigerator in the basement was never used for food storage. It was only for beer. The steaks would have been in the walk in cooler upstairs in the kitchen, which is on the same level as the stage. However, it is very possible that same refrigerator was in the corner where the first box of crickets had died. The real VIPs got drink tabs, but everyone else, it was a paid bar and they did not make the bar guarantee. And I don't remember the figure. Yes, just arbitrarily say it was $2,000. And the bar, you know, the paid bar had only done maybe sixteen hundred dollars worth of business. They said, well, we gave you a two thousand dollar deposit and your bar only did sixteen hundred dollars and we paid you two thousand dollars. So we're going to send a couple of our crew over with a van to pick up $400 worth of beer. To which the answer was not in the affirmative.
- [112:59]
A
There's no receipt for that one in the band archive, nor any record of the band's crew getting $400 worth of warm beer from the fridge they hadn't plugged back in. In his memoir, Deal, Billy Kreutzman writes about a pretty wild road race over the Golden Gate Bridge after the show. In my mind, that show is a crucial turning point, he wrote. I wasn't high on smack that night. I dabbled with opiates throughout the hiatus, but I stayed away from all that junk for the gig. It was a very bright, clear, expressive night for the whole band. It was also just a really big moment for me personally. It was the first time that I thought we could be a band again. And the first time I thought having two drummers again could work. The members of the band got back to work immediately. The next night, August 14th, Bobby Weir and Kingfish were in Southern California at the Fox Theater in Venice. I think this was the first monkey in the engineer since 1970.
- [114:14]
B
Open up the switch and go Monkey's got the love and under control Big motor motive right on time Big looking motor coming down the line Big mouth.
- [114:38]
A
The Keith and Donna band remained busy, which included Billy Kurtzman on drums. They were scheduled to make their Great American debut in August, a story we'll use as an aftermath here because it also points towards several parts of the Grateful Beds collective future. Lee Brenkman.
- [114:54]
B
Sometime in 1975, I think, the San Francisco Police Department went on strike and the music hall had a Keith and Donna show because the police were on strike. All the venues were hiring any private security they could get, and we had the bottom of the barrel.
- [115:13]
A
Good memory, Lee. The 1975 San Francisco cop strike aligns exactly with the Keith and Donna band's debut at the great American August 20th and 21st. Exactly a week after the Dead show.
- [115:25]
B
Possibly because the Dead had played the August gig, rumor got out that it was really a secret surprise Grateful Dead concert.
- [115:35]
A
There was another factor. The Great Americans newspaper ad listed the show as the Jerry Garcia Band, a group that wouldn't actually form for another month.
- [115:43]
B
I think the initial advertising was Keith and Donna, and then it was changed to the Jerry Garcia Band because he had agreed to play with them.
- [115:52]
A
There was no Jerry Garcia Band yet. And in August 1975, Garcia joined the Keith and Donna Band for a handful of gigs, meaning they were fielding four members of the Dead. There's a tape of the first night at the great American August 20th, with a really cool version of Freddie Hubbard's Straight Life, which we'll use for this next se.
- [116:32]
B
And of course, the place is sold out. They can't let any more people in. And you know, people on the street. Oh, yeah, we know. It's really the Dead, man. People were literally. One guy got on the roof and came in through one of the skylights to the back stairway. And that meant he dropped about 22ft, feet onto a narrow, curving stairway and broke the skylight. The process, because they had their own sound people working. I was in the office, and there was a fire escape that came up the back of the club to the office. And there were people banging on the door at the top of the fire escape, begging me to let them in. One guy was shoving $20 bills under the door.
- [117:18]
A
Michael Parish.
- [117:19]
B
We were on our honeymoon up in the Sierras and came back down for that show when it was originally booked as a Garcia Band show. Of course, the Dead had played there a couple of weeks before, and it's like, oh, Jerry Garcia Band, that's interesting. But of course, it really was the Keith and Donovan. I really could have sworn that Mickey was there at that Keith and Donna show. And there was an extended drum duet.
- [118:01]
A
Michael's memory is correct. Mickey joined the Keith and Donna Band on the second night, according to a detailed review of both shows in Relics, putting five members of the Grateful Dead back on the Great American stage just eight days after the Blues for Allah party. Everybody but Weir and Lesh. No tape of that one, though, at least that we know about. It was Garcia's last time at the Great American, and as far as I can tell, the last time it was headlined by a member of the Dead. Maybe it was the crickets or the refrigerator or the fans on the roof. The actual Jerry Garcia band would form and debut in September, which we'll delve into slightly next episode. Blues for Allah hit stores somewhere around August 21, a week after the Great American show and barely a month after the last overdub. On one hand, there were no tours to support it. On the other hand, the music never did actually stop. And on September 1, Labor Day 1975, Metro Media Radio stations around the country broadcast the Great American Music hall show in its entirety, giving an immediate impact beyond whatever wheels it greased among the radio programmers in the house. In fact, it was an instant classic. Please welcome back Joan Miller, a San Francisco high school Deadhead who attended the entirety of the Winterland farewell shows but couldn't make it into the Great American.
- [120:08]
B
In 1975, there was a rebroadcast of the Great America Music hall concert that.
- [120:16]
A
The Grateful Dead play a couple weeks.
- [120:18]
B
After the original concert.
- [120:21]
A
It was going to be rebroadcast on our local independent station in San Francisco, K san.
- [120:29]
B
I was 15 years old and of course that night I had something else.
- [120:33]
A
To do, but I asked my mother.
- [120:35]
B
At a portable radio cassette player and a pink 60 Minute Memorex tape. I put the tape into the recorder.
- [120:48]
A
I asked my mother when at I.
- [120:50]
B
Can'T remember what time it was. Whatever time it was that the show was supposed to start, press play and record. And after 60 minutes, could she turn the tape over? Well, guess what? She did, and I don't. I lived on the third floor. My bedroom was on the third floor. She was probably downstairs in the living room and she really ran up Those stairs after 60 minutes to turn the tape over.
- [121:30]
A
The pink tape to me was a masterpiece. In 1975, I really didn't know a.
- [121:38]
B
Lot of people that had tapes of Grateful Dead concerts.
- [121:42]
A
Even me, though me and my girlfriends.
- [121:45]
B
Had all their records. Up to that point, we really weren't tape traders.
- [121:51]
A
I don't even know if tape trading.
- [121:52]
B
Was really going on then. But the pink Memorex tape was what we listened to over and over again. When I was 16, I got a VW Bug convertible and with portable cassette player.
- [122:23]
A
And everywhere we went on any San.
- [122:26]
B
Francisco street when we were riding to school, it was pretty much the only.
- [122:31]
A
Grateful Dead live concert that I had.
- [122:34]
B
That wasn't from a manufactured tape from the record company. I knew every note of that tape.
- [122:43]
A
I listened to it, I sang to.
- [122:46]
B
It, I drummed to it on the steering wheel of my car. And my favorite Grateful Dead. I'm not a musician, but the change.
- [122:58]
A
From Help on the Way to Franklin's.
- [123:02]
B
Tower was where I cranked it up, where I thought it was masterful.
- [123:27]
A
Cory Arnold remembers the Great American Music Hall Bootleg LP on the streets as early as late September 1975, courtesy of the amazing Cornyphone label under the title Make Believe Ballroom. Ironically, the title was a reference to Martin Block's Old Time radio show that was one of the first to focus on studio recorded music. In fact, the newspaper columnist Walter Winchell coined the term DJ to describe Martin Block's actions on Make Believe Ballroom. Bloch's innovation was to play records and dub in crowd noise.
- [124:00]
B
It's Make Believe ballroom time and free to everyone. It's no time to fret your dialysis for fun Just close your eyes and visualize in your solitude. Your favorite bands are on the stands and Mr. Miller puts you in the mood. It's make Believe Ballroom time.
- [124:30]
A
Like Joan Miller's pink tape, Make Believe Ballroom was another form that the Great American show took en route to becoming part of the Dead's canon. It was a cornerstone for our departed, but always on time buddy Steve Silberman.
- [124:42]
B
One of the first bootleg vinyl discs I got was Make Believe Ballroom, Great American Music Hall 75. And I still remember that. The moment I first heard that, I was at Oberlin. Where? Oberlin College, where I went to school. I was walking across campus one day and I heard Help on the Way coming from Dascombe Dorm, you know, the second floor. And I was like, oh yeah, Help on the Way. I love this, you know. And then I was like, wait a minute, this isn't the same performance. What is this? You know? And in fact, the Help on the Way Slipknot, Franklin's Tower from that show at Great American 75 is still easily, particularly the Slipknot, still easily one of my favorite live performances of all time. So I got that very early on in my life. Bootleg collecting years.
- [125:34]
A
Make Believe Ballroom got around. Keith Eaton left US this story.
- [125:39]
B
When I was a freshman in college in 1985, my second roommate, my first, was evicted, had with him two bootleg cassettes.
- [125:53]
A
One was from my first show in Portland, Maine, in 1982. One was from Red Rocks that year, and the other was a box set.
- [126:01]
B
Of LPs called the Make Believe Ballroom. And having played around with my brother's records and listened to that mysterious music.
- [126:14]
A
It just captured my imagination. And it's really difficult to describe how it touched an old memory, sort of.
- [126:23]
B
The way smell, olfactory senses can do that. And I really glommed on to sage and spirit.
- [126:48]
A
More than the bootleg Alpi or perhaps enhanced by the bootleg Alpine. The tapes of the show. David Lemieux it would have been probably.
- [126:56]
B
In the first 60 tapes I got, which happened fast. So it was early on, and it might have been before I heard the album. I'm pretty sure it was, yeah, I probably got that in 86 or early 87 and got this album sometime in 87.
- [127:09]
A
I've rarely met a Deadhead who doesn't love the Great American Music hall show for lots of reasons, but mainly a combination of the material, the performance and the recording quality. It's a show I'll even recommend to non Deadheads who might be curious about all the fuss. In 1991, the great American show found an even wider audience. Joan Miller I loved the music.
- [127:31]
B
Never stopped. I played it over and over again. It was a tape. Of course, the Pink Tape died at some point in 1991. I was driving in my friend's car.
- [127:45]
A
And lo and behold, I knew every.
- [127:47]
B
Note of that concert, of that tape. I heard it. I heard it was in the middle of the song. I knew exactly what it was. I said, is this the Great American Music Hall? He said, yes. I said, oh, my God, it's the Pink Tape. Where did you get this? Where did you get the pink tape? And he said, jen, they just released it. It's called One from the Fall. Don't you know anything? I was like, oh, my God. I ran out and got it. I've given it to everyone I know and love. It's my favorite, favorite concert of the Grateful Dead.
- [128:43]
A
David Lemieux I had the tape for.
- [128:45]
B
Years, and then the album came out in 90, the CD in 91. And I thought it was like. And they made a big deal of it, saying, you know, we're opening the vaults. And that was unbelievable, you know, as a Deadhead. But the first show that they selected was a show that was a cornerstone to Most people's tape collections. But I remember putting it on and say, I mean, I don't need my tape anymore. It was one of those moments.
- [129:10]
A
One from the Vault was the first complete show release from the Dead's tape vault, and one of the only archival releases of Jerry Garcia's lifetime. In fact, one of the rarest things about One from the Vault is that it's a performance that everybody in the Grateful Dead agreed was worthy of complete release, an almost singular unity among the musicians. Benny Lander left us this story about One from the Vault.
- [129:31]
B
I love the music of Blues for Allah, but specifically the release One from the Vault. That album means just so much to me as a Deadhead.
- [129:43]
A
I was introduced to it probably at.
- [129:45]
B
The age of 12 or 13. It wasn't until my brother gave me one from the vault that I finally was floored and understood the magic of the Dead. And in my years since, I've come to realize that's more of a one of one show. They never really played like that before or since. This batch of songs that were introduced in 75 were a real turning point for the band. The songs from this Night on One from the Vault, kind of, to me, they're the closest link to the modern day, you know, or it's not so modern anymore, but the 90s jam band explosion, that early Fish stuff with the highly composed sections, you know, to me, the Help on the Way composed parts, the Slipknot Jam, King Solomon's Marbles, Crazy Fingers. These are kind of almost borderline prog rock to me, and they share a lot of the DNA of those early Fish songs. And my favorite other band, God Street Wine, a lot of their early composed stuff.
- [131:23]
A
In an era before Dick's Picks, Dave's Picks, or anything besides tape trading and bootlegs, the 1975 Grateful Dead came alive one more time. Sage and Spirit is absolutely one of the pieces that makes Blues for Ala and one from the Vault special. You can hear bazillions of dark stars, and they're all unique. But Sage and Spirit is more like a standalone object, and it disappeared from the Dead stage immediately. Too delicate for any place besides the great American music hall. David Lemieux.
- [132:03]
B
They did one live version at Radio City Music hall. The Halloween thing.
- [132:07]
A
Halloween 1980 was the band's first attempt at a live video simulcast, and predictably, the rails fell off almost immediately, with Phil Lesh's bass failing for the first few songs. So Weir had just the thing. Sean o' Donnell, I was at the.
- [132:22]
B
Calderon and Hempstead for the simulcast of that show. It exactly was what it was. It sort of materialized like it started happening because Bob kind of started it. No one else really knew what to do. Jerry tries to hang so it was a bit chaotic.
- [132:57]
A
It's not quite the same order of musical events as any of the 1975 versions, but that's okay. You'll notice the crowd cheering at one passage where Weir feels particularly confident, and that's because by 1980 Weir had recently repurposed that move.
- [133:34]
B
What mostly always stands out to me is the sort of Lost Sailor seed that's in there, and I feel like that's where the composition goes eventually.
- [134:00]
A
In a 1985 interview, Blair Jackson suggested that some of the ideas you tried in Sage and Spirit, for example, were developed further in Lost Sailor a few years later, and Weir confirms that definitely is a case where that happened.
- [134:13]
B
Compass card is spinning, your helm is swinging to and fro. Where's the dark star? Where's the moon?
- [134:39]
A
We'll have to answer the question about the Dog Star some other time. Sometimes new levels aren't what you expect them to be, but Sage and Spirit remains. Just pull out blues for Ala or one from the vault and float in the unknowingness of 1975. But of all the retired or barely even active Dead songs, I'd bet that Sage in Spirit is probably the one played most by its writer. Weir continued to use it to warm up his fingers for decades, and maybe somewhere he's even playing it right now. The album version is such a singular studio built moment, let's float away into its elements.
- [135:21]
B
Sam SA.
- [138:22]
A
Thanks very much for tuning.
- [138:23]
B
In to the good old Grateful Dead cast, friends.
- [138:26]
A
And thank you, Donna, for sharing your.
- [138:28]
B
Time and stories with us here at the Dead Cast.
- [138:31]
A
May the four winds blow you safely home.
- [138:34]
B
Indeed. We'd like to thank our special guests in this episode.
- [138:39]
A
David Lemieux, Donna Jean, Gaucho McKay, Sage Scully, Ron Rakow, Al Teller, Steve Brown, Roger Lewis, Lee Brankman, Steve Schuster, Gary Lambert, Deb Trist, Ed Perlstein, Dan o', Hanklin, Joan Miller, Steve Silberman, Michael Parish, Keith Eaton, Sean o' Donnell and Benny Lander. 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 Doran Tyson. All rights reserved.