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- [00:00]
Rich Mahan
Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the official Podcast of the Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Hello friends. Welcome back to the good old Grateful Dead cast. Surprise. We've got a bonus episode for you today and we're taking you on a trip across the pond to explore the half dozen times the band played jolly old England. We have some new guests helping to tell the story of these shows, including Alex Allen, Richard King, Rich Lee and John Mulvey. And yes, you can get brand new episodes of the good old Grateful Dead cast right here every other week. Visit us at our website, dead.netdeadcast we've got some great extra materials for you to explore about this episode at that same place. Dead.netDeadcast there's all of our past episodes. Also, you can get the complete seasons one and two and you can link from there to anywhere you like to listen. Please give us a hand. Help us by subscribing. Hit that like button. Share it with a friend. Leave us a review thank you. You have heard by now that it is the 50th anniversary of the Dead's live double album from 1971, Skull and Roses. The expanded edition is coming on June 25th. It includes more than an hour of unreleased music from the final Fillmore west show by the Dead on July 2, 1971. Several configurations are available, including a 2Lp set and a 2 CD set. It's all available for pre order now@dead.net and of course when it comes out, you can listen anywhere you like on your favorite streaming platform. Well, we all know there's nothing like a Grateful Dead show. And how much fun is it to travel to another town to catch one? How about another country? One that feels European, but they speak the same language? Even better, Jesse Jarno is about to stamp your passport on a trip through the Grateful Dead's shows in England.
- [02:42]
Alex Allen
We've been trying to get here for a long, long time and we eventually finally made it. Please welcome the Grateful Dead the Grateful.
- [02:50]
Richard King
Dead.
- [03:16]
Narrator/Host
By the end of their career, the Grateful Dead were the most popular touring act in the United States, and their impact is still being measured. They only traveled overseas a few times during their three decades on the road, though, so it's not hard to see why their European fan base wasn't quite as enormous as back home. The working title of their epic triple live album, Europe 72, was simply over there. John Mulvey is the editor of the British music magazine Mojo.
- [03:42]
John Mulvey
Americans that I've spoken to about growing up in the world of the Dead. There's always been a presence. There's always been a visible Deadhead in a community and in any school or college or world that Deadheads are there in Britain, certainly growing up in the 70s and 80s and, you know, becoming a music journalist in the 1990s, they weren't easy to find. They were a properly invisible cult for most of that time.
- [04:12]
Narrator/Host
Invisible as it may appear at first glance, the Dead's relationship with England runs surprisingly deep. On this season of the Dead cast, we've been recounting the Grateful Dead's adventures during the first part of 1971 as they assembled the live album that became known as Skull and roses. But had 1971 unfolded as planned, the Grateful Dead's relationship to British music fans might be rather different. I had a vision on the south coast of Glastonbury Tor such a strong.
- [04:40]
Richard Lee
One that I drove without navigating.
- [04:42]
Richard King
It was so unnecessary.
- [04:44]
Narrator/Host
And sure enough, an hour and a half later, a sign 7 mile to Glastonbury. Americans had no monopoly on wild psychedelic ideas. That was Bill Harkin, one of the co founders of the Glastonbury Festival, known in its 1971 incarnation and 1972 documentary as the Glastonbury Fair. Fifty years ago this month, over the summer solstice, a few miles from the land formation known as Glastonbury tour, on a cosmic ley line with Stonehenge, some 10,000 fans watched artists play atop a giant pyramid shaped stage with music including Traffic, Fairport Convention, Hawkwind, David Bowie and the heavy sounds of the Edgar Broughton Band. From the very start, though, that artist's list was supposed to include the Grateful Dead. Found hidden in the Grateful Dead archives by our pal Joju Peeled, is a planning document for 1971 in which manager John McIntyre laid out the year to come. In late June, the Grateful Dead were to arrive in England Solstice, Stonehenge and or Glastonbury Free Festival. It reads with a provisional note about a Granada television crew following them around. Only Glastonbury happened that summer, but it helped set off a revolution. The Dead weren't there. Writer Richard King is the author of two really fantastic books about independent music in England, notably the History How Soon Is now? The Mad Men and Mavericks who made independent music 1975-2005. He's also very much a Dead freak.
- [06:39]
Richard King
Michael Evis said, up until 95, he said, we'd love to get the Grateful Dead here. So, like, Glassary is always huge then in the night. But it didn't really get turned into what it is now until the BBC started televising it. But prior to that, I think they got hold of it in about 90, maybe 99, 2000, I'm not sure. But prior to that it was maybe a different type of festival, Certainly didn't have a TV audience of that scale. And he would always say, they wanted the Grateful Dead there. And he was the only person I can remember in the music business in Britain who even mentioned their name. I mean, there was so little interest. And if they had played Stonehenge and Glastonbury, I think their relationship to Britain would have been completely different.
- [07:27]
Narrator/Host
It was the dawn of a new moment in the British underground.
- [07:29]
Richard Lee
It would be very nice to see.
- [07:31]
Alex Allen
Not just Glastonbury fair happen, but lots.
- [07:35]
Richard Lee
Of small festivals happening with the same.
- [07:38]
Alex Allen
Motive at the same time, perhaps four times a year at both solstices, at both equinoxes. You see, we can't tell how what.
- [07:50]
Richard Lee
Good will come out of it until we try it.
- [07:54]
Narrator/Host
Glastonbury didn't happen again until 1979. But the British festival scene spread across the landscape almost exactly as predicted, becoming a backdrop to British summers. It was a pivotal festival season in which the Dead almost participated. Had all gone according to plan, the Dead's brand new live album would have been out and Warner Bros. Would have footed the bill for an international tour to promote it. As we explored in episode one of this season's Dead Cast, that plan got a little sidetracked and Skull and Roses made it to stores in fall 1971. The swinging London had no shortage of psychedelic acts. The Dead still had a place in the local canon. According to andy Roberts authoritative 2008 book, Albion Dreaming, a popular history of LSD in Britain, the Dead and the Incredible String Band were the two big favorites for the early waves of serious London acid heads. This is yous get brighter from 1968's We Tam.
- [08:49]
Singer/Performer (possibly a vocalist or musician featured in the episode)
I know you belong to.
- [08:56]
Richard Lee
I know.
- [08:57]
Singer/Performer (possibly a vocalist or musician featured in the episode)
You belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you.
- [09:07]
Narrator/Host
And in fact the Grateful that had lots of plans to come to England. Over their 30 year career, the band performed 21 shows in London and cancelled almost the same amount. Rolling Stone announced a trip as early as December 1967. Billboard detailed European tour dates for fall of 68. There was going to be a free show with the Jefferson Airplane in Hyde park in September 69 and seven nights at the Roundhouse in March of 1970. And that was all before the Dead actually made their British debut in May of 1970 at the Hollywood Festival. Writer Richard King was too young to make it, but puts it in context.
- [09:41]
Richard King
They first came over for a festival in 1970 called the Hollywood Festival, I think, which was in Newcastle under Lyme, which is a small, smallish town in the kind of North Midland. I mean, it's not Glasgow, it's not Edinburgh, it's certainly not Glastonbury or not that Glastonbury was completely underway by then, but it's a pretty obscure place to have a festival. There's a rumor that they played in London the night after. That's never been substantiated.
- [10:11]
Narrator/Host
At the Lyceum, another cancelled show. It was an eventful few days. The BBC followed the band around, shooting In Black and White, a project that fell apart for some fairly Technicolor reasons. The Dead's adventures at the Hollywood Festival can be seen in Amir Bar Lev's amazing Long Strange Trip documentary. And it's another what if, what if? There'd been a nationally aired Grateful Dead BBC film in 1970. As we explored during the last season of the Dead Cast, it was also an epic visit for the band's lyricist, Robert Hunter. As he told WBRU in 1979, first.
- [10:45]
Robert Hunter
Time I went over there, I had this feeling of being an American that I'd never had here, an American writer. And it just put me in a real good perspective about the I sat down one afternoon for a bottle of Retsina. A case of Retsina. I thought it was a case. I didn't drink the whole case, but I had all that I wanted. Just bathing and being in England for the first time. And I heard a lot of people dreaming about going to London. And I was one of them.
- [11:13]
Narrator/Host
And it was somehow Spooner Hunter was staying at the apartment of Alan Trist, an old friend of both Garcia and Hunter's, who would go on to run the band's Ice 9 publishing company.
- [11:21]
Alex Allen
Those three songs, Ripple broke Down palace and To Lay Me down. The lyrics at least were written in one Creative bust that Hunter had in my flat in London near Kensington Gardens.
- [11:36]
Singer/Performer (possibly a vocalist or musician featured in the episode)
There you will There you will I love you more than words can tell Listen to the river Sing sweet songs to rock my soul do, do, do.
- [11:54]
Narrator/Host
Do do do we talked to Alan at length during our Ripple and broke down palace episodes last season. The Dead didn't make it in 71, as we heard, but they returned the next year on their own terms, bringing their whole family to England and the continent beyond for the grand tour. The expedition began and ended in London. At Wembley Pool on April 8, they unfurled a legendary dark star which they subsequently contributed to the Glastonbury cause. It became side A of the Glastonbury Fair triple LP released that year. There was no music that summer at Glastonbury or Stonehenge. The Dead headlined in front of an estimated 60,000 at the massive Bickershaw Festival. In the crowd soaking it up were future rock luminaries, including Elvis Costello and Joe Strummer. We're gonna mostly hold off on going too deeply into the 49th anniversary of all these momentous gigs, but the band's eight British shows in 1972 minted the first real generation of British Deadheads. Alex Allen saw five of the shows that year.
- [13:19]
Alex Allen
I was at Cambridge University at the time, and a few friends of us drove up to Bickershaw in Lancashire and pouring rain, and we only actually went for the Sunday, the last day. And I remember sort of sitting on plastic ground sheets getting soaked. And my memory is. May not be entirely reliable, but my memory is that the new riders came on and the rain stopped and then they played and then the Dead came on and the sun shone. You know, the evening sun shone. It may not be entirely reliable, but that's what I remember. It was a fantastic afternoon evening.
- [14:08]
Singer/Performer (possibly a vocalist or musician featured in the episode)
Half a mile to the sun by the morning light One plank on and another to go My old body moving but two.
- [14:23]
Alex Allen
On the basis of that, I went to all four nights at the Lyceum. And of course I remember Pigpen, who was, you know, very prominent in those days, which was. And it was great to have caught, you know, quite a few concerts with him, which was, you know, fairly near the end for him.
- [14:40]
Singer/Performer (possibly a vocalist or musician featured in the episode)
Get it right, do it nice and if you make a mistake. Paper advice but if you need it, you got to have it.
- [14:49]
Robert Hunter
Expect yourself a shotgun or bring it.
- [14:51]
Singer/Performer (possibly a vocalist or musician featured in the episode)
Back Whoa look up the wall Know you gotta crawl before you start crawling Be ready to fall if you fall in my direction don't expect no F at all.
- [15:07]
Narrator/Host
The four tour closing nights In London were the last shows that included performances by the band's original frontman, Ron Pigpen McKernan. He would pass away slightly less than a year later. The Strand Lyceum gigs became the core of the triple album Europe 72, released at the end of that year.
- [15:34]
Singer/Performer (possibly a vocalist or musician featured in the episode)
Just like Crazy Otto Just like Wolfman Jack Sit flush with a royal blood Aces back to back.
- [15:51]
Richard Lee
There are lots.
- [15:51]
Alex Allen
Of new songs that, you know, never heard. So by the end of the four nights at Lyceum, we'd heard most of them a couple times and, you know, we're getting a bit more familiar. They were, I thought, intriguing and had fascinating lyrics. So as I said, it was the sort of Tennessee Jed, Brown Eyed Women ramble on Rose that I started thinking, you know, and they're sort of fascinating and references because that then brings out. Get sort of Wolfman Jack. Who on earth is Wolfman Jack?
- [16:23]
Narrator/Host
This is 50,000 watt clear channel XERB Radio, North America Central Studios, Los Angeles. 1090 on your dial.
- [16:38]
Singer/Performer (possibly a vocalist or musician featured in the episode)
Hey, baby. Welcome on in here to the Wolfman Jack show for Tuesday night.
- [16:43]
Narrator/Host
Americans of a certain age might know Wolfman Jack, AKA Robert Weston Smith, as a ubiquitous radio DJ whose voice could be heard across the country on powerful Clear Channel radio stations, as well as in the film American Graffiti. But for British Dead freaks, the Grateful Dead's mythical America would become a place to explore. But the Dead themselves weren't done exploring Europe yet, returning to London in 1974 for three shows at the Alexandra Palace.
- [17:10]
Alex Allen
They were great shows. It was a rather bigger arena and not quite the sort of intimate feel of the Lyceum. But again, it was wonderful to get an opportunity to see the Dead live again. And in that case, it was only an interval of a couple of years.
- [17:26]
Narrator/Host
Though the Dead only made it to London six times in all, they arrived each time as a subtly or wildly different version of themselves, especially during the first half of the band's career. Even fans in the United States had to be used to a new version of the Dead every few months. The 1974 shows included the massive speaker array that became known as the Wall of Sound. They opened the Run that year with a new song whose references didn't need explaining. This is From Dix Picks Volume 7, recorded at the London 74 shows.
- [18:27]
Alex Allen
As I was walking around Grosvenor Square, which is where the American Embassy used to be, I remember going, gosh, you know, picking it up.
- [18:34]
Narrator/Host
Some of the music. That run was also a little more inscrutable. In between Dead sets. The shows also included performances by Ned Legend's SeaStones project.
- [18:43]
Alex Allen
One of the bits I remember particularly was of course, Phil and Ned in the. Which was. I was, you know, quite into that sort of music. I mean, some of the sort of classical music I liked was sort of Stockhausen and things like that. So it was quite sort of up my street.
- [19:01]
Narrator/Host
We had Ned on last season for a bonus episode to talk about his work with the Dead. And he talked about the lows and highs of the London 74 gigs.
- [19:10]
Ned Lagin
The first two nights were really fucked up because of power supplies and London and coke and stuff. So on the afternoon of the third day, we had a band meeting and a crew meeting and everybody decided to flush all their stashes and take LSD that night to get back to get away from cocaine and get back to the Brotherhood or Sisterhood or, you know, the family.
- [19:34]
Narrator/Host
It was an intense time to be around the Grateful Dead. When they got back to the States. Following five shows at Winterland in October 1974, the band took the next year and a half off the road. It would be another seven before they made it back to England. But by then the seeds had been planted and it was possible to discern a scene of British Deadheads in the early 80s. Richard Lee was a teenage music fan.
- [19:57]
Richard Lee
I'd been reading music papers, you know, I was an avid music listener. I listened to a lot of the British prog rock, Genesis, elp, King Crims and all that stuff. Before that I'd been into the glam rock, David Bowie stuff and my musical taste, you know, my late teens were just changing and I'd read all this stuff about the Dead and I'd heard about them. But what really changed it was there was a British magazine called Dark Star and they ran some really big multi page features. One on the Dead in Egypt and one of the closing of Winterland. And I read those and I thought, aha, this isn't the usual stuff.
- [20:30]
Narrator/Host
Founded in 1975 by Steve Burgess, Darkstar didn't strictly cover the Dead. But they were unquestionably a searchlight casting for British heads.
- [20:39]
Richard Lee
And they realized, you know, the British music scene, New Musical Express, Melody Maker, they weren't really covering any of that west coast stuff. And Dark Star was. The magazine was primarily West Coast. Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, anything from west coast they were obsessed with. And they just graduated, I think, because they were the only people here at that point really doing that. You know, they got quite a lot of attention. You could go to record shops and buy the magazine quite easily. It was well Produced and it was different to whatever else was around. But they ceased to exist round about 1980. Just. They literally ceased. Just as the Dead finally arrived in 81, the magazine ceased production.
- [21:19]
Narrator/Host
One could forgive them for giving up.
- [21:21]
Richard Lee
There were lots of cancellations, if you remember, due here in 76 at Wembley with Santana, that got cancelled. They were then due here on the way back from Egypt. They were playing three nights in London that got cancelled because Shakedown street wasn't finished. So there'd been lots of attempts to get here. They were cancelled for one reason or another. The tickets had gone on sale for all those, and then they were cancelled once they were on sale.
- [21:44]
Narrator/Host
There are some posters around for the August 7, 1976 show at Wembley with Santana and the New Riders of the Purple Sage, to be promoted by Bill Graham. If the Dead manage to fill the 10,000 capacity Alexander palace in 1974, they could still only pull 11,000 at Wembley. And Graham pulled the plug about two weeks before the show. It also explains that photo shoot of Garcia and Carlos Santana at Bill Graham's house, which was to promote the gig. In the accompanying interview with the Guardian, Garcia declared, I'm an anarchist. I realize it's just an ideal, but I feel we should govern ourselves and everything should be allowed. It was almost four months to the date before the Sex Pistols dropped their British debut single with a slightly less classical and less constructive definition of the same term.
- [22:30]
Singer/Performer (possibly a vocalist or musician featured in the episode)
I am an anti Christ I am a nano coaster don't know what I want but I know how to get it I wanna destroy Passiply Cause I wanna bay the continental drift seemed to be speeding up.
- [22:55]
Narrator/Host
The Grateful Dead movie was supposed to debut at the Rainbow Theater in 1977, and even that got cancelled. It was 1981 before the dead successfully pulled off another European trip.
- [23:05]
Richard Lee
It's like, oh, wow. It was a big deal because he hadn't been here since 74. So it's like, oh, my God, I was just getting into them and had to go and see them now. I knew enough that I had to go and see all four nights. Of course you do. You know, Britain in 1981 was a pretty right wing political country. Margaret Thatcher was in power. You know, musically, it was that post punk phase. Things like the Police were really huge. Genesis, all the post punk stuff. So for the Dead to appear in the middle of that was quite bizarre, really. And I turned up at the Rainbow and it was wall to wall full of hippies, all these really young hippies. And I was thinking, where have all these people Come from. It was quite an amazing scene. It was like something out of the late 60s. But they were all really young. They weren't in their late 30s. They were all mid-20s, I seem to remember. And then I had four nights of the Dead at the Rainbow, doing some stuff that I knew, some stuff that I didn't know.
- [24:05]
Narrator/Host
Alex Allen was at the Rainbow shows in 81 as well, both in March and when the band returned in October, they were good.
- [24:12]
Alex Allen
They didn't quite have the magic of 72 or 74. And of course, it was Brent Midland there who was great, I remember. And again, there's some new songs there. I didn't think the Rainbow was such a good venue, really. But no, I mean, I certainly wouldn't have missed it for anything. One of the things that always struck me very much about seeing the Dead is that, you know, when I first saw them in 72, I was at university. When I saw them in 81, there were a lot of people who were clearly still at university, plus the people like me who'd been at university 10 years earlier. And then when I saw them in 1990, it was exactly the same. You know, there were the people who'd been at University, university in the 90s, people in the 80s, people in the 70s. It was, you know, I mean, the sort of generations who were looking at it just kept expanding. I went to the fairly well shows in Chicago in 2015. And I mean, you know, that again, you could see they were all generations.
- [25:14]
Narrator/Host
But the Dead came back to a different England than they'd left Richard King in Britain.
- [25:18]
Richard King
If you think culturally, what happened between 1974 and 1981, it's astonishing how music changed in the time they'd been away. So not only did punk happen a couple of years after 1974, post punk happened, and the really kind of as much as punk or post punk, the thing that really took off in that era was the authority of the music papers in Britain, especially the nme, which was absolutely at its high point of sales and of influence. And it created this sort of weekly hothouse atmosphere in the music culture in Britain that someone like the Grateful Dead just had no way into.
- [26:09]
Narrator/Host
What a long, predictable trip it's become was the title of an interview with Jerry the New Musical Express, published from the band's trip over in 1981, conducted by Confrontational punk journalist Paul Morley. He did his best to provoke Garcia into some kind of lather. Did it work? Not really, but there's some fascinating conversation. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast. By contrast, on the same trip, Ken Hunt of the slightly more obscure journal Swing51 conducted one of the more informed and sympathetic interviews with Garcia ever done. We've posted a link to that as well. The Dead might have been a secret in England, but they were a secret influence, too. An anthology of work by groundbreaking Joy Division producer Martin Hannett says he was first inspired to play bass by Phil Lesh, who provided a model for the musician who became known as the Mad Genius of Manchester. But as out of step as the Dead may have seemed with British pop culture, 1981 was a grand year to be a British Deadhead. Robert Hunter had just recorded his great solo album Jacka Roses in London, and.
- [27:13]
Richard Lee
Then that was followed up. Interesting enough, Robert Hunter was living in the UK at the time. He was living down in Bristol and he played five gigs in the uk. Couple in London, one in Bristol, one at the Glastonbury Festival. And I saw. So I went along to Glastonbury and saw Robert Hunter played to about 30 people on a sunny afternoon.
- [27:32]
Narrator/Host
Actually.
- [27:33]
Singer/Performer (possibly a vocalist or musician featured in the episode)
There's a road no simple highway.
- [27:40]
Richard Lee
Between.
- [27:41]
Singer/Performer (possibly a vocalist or musician featured in the episode)
The dawn and the dark of night if you go, no one may follow that path is for your steps long.
- [27:58]
Richard Lee
They came in the march because Reckoning had just come out. And along the four Rainbow shows, they played the Gruhallere in Essen in Germany, which was the big rock palace shown on TV all over Europe. So they did that for Reckoning, and then Dead Set came out in the fall. And so they came back to promote Dead Set with a full European tour, you know, four nights here, Germany, France, Spain, even. And so, of course, I went to all those. I went to four English ones anyway. I didn't go to the European ones, which I had now. But, yeah, that just captured a lot of people, I think, at the right time, who may be my sort of age, just a bit older, and were looking for something that wasn't the whole new wavy kind of thing then. It was after the October shows. I'd met people, got addresses, and we started trading tapes at that point, quite slowly. And that's how the whole thing started to take off from those tape trading exchanges. I'd gone all the tapes at this point. I'd seen them in London. But those Dark Star Magazine reviews of the Rainbow, of the closing of Winterland and the Egypt shows. And I thought, it wasn't like that in London, you know, the closing of Winterland, great as London was, it wasn't like the closing of Winterland. And I just thought, I need to get a bit closer to the source. It was my first time out of the uk. I came to San Francisco and saw the Dead in Ventura, hung around, just spent a lot of time around the Bay Area, which I absolutely loved. And then finished the trip with two shows at Frost Amphitheatre in August of that August. And in between, I saw Bobby and the Midnights at the Keystone as well. And that was it for me. That was it. I was, you know, a lifelong Deadhead from that point onwards, really. It was like the rainbow hippie thing, but on a completely different sort of scale in a different way. And it was just like, wow, this is amazing. When I was there, you know, I picked up things like Relics magazine and I picked up numerous copies of the official book of the Deadheads, the Paul Grushkin thing. Because people who Deadheads here in Newman said, oh, if you're going, can you get me this? Can you get me that? So I picked up all this stuff to take home with me. And this is kind of what led to Spiralite in the sense that I'd got all this stuff for people went to meet them and we all said, let's do something.
- [30:11]
Narrator/Host
And so began Spiralite, the beautifully produced Dead magazine that ran for the next dozen years.
- [30:16]
Richard Lee
We decided to do this little newsletter which we called Spiral Light. And I just thought that was a great name because it's a spiral light. It shines the light to all these different people. And I think the first one we did maybe just 50 or 60 of them and it was really difficult to do just to get something like that printed. At that time in the uk, no one had home computers or anything like that.
- [30:38]
Narrator/Host
There was a homegrown British psychedelic scene too. The free festivals of the 70s continued into the 80s. Richard King is also the author of the Lyrical History, the Lark, the Music of the British Landscape. And he sees a pretty big difference between American and British festivals.
- [30:53]
Richard King
To a British imagination, Watkins Glen sounds like this amazing. It sounds like it should be in Arizona somewhere in this secret. And then you look at the photos and it's this kind of pretty gnarly, kind of full on wasteland at the end of the show. And it looks like the place has been trashed. And in Britain in the 70s and 80s, festivals were kind of a bit more like that than a kind of flowery, peaceful scene. So the free festival scene really got going in the early 70s. It started in a place in Windsor, in the Royal Parks in Windsor, near Windsor Castle, outside London. And the original ones were organized by people who were quite heavily involved in the squatting scene. But by the 80s, when you look at footage of the Stonehenge Solstice Festival, the people there don't look like hippies. They're wearing army surplus clothing and leather jackets and they've got punk haircuts, a lot of them. And there are signs saying heroin for sale. And not for a minute suggesting everyone there was into really hard drugs. But it was a tough, outlaw, edgy scene. By the mid-70s. I don't think you could say. I don't think you could even say this at any point, but they were not a hippie band. They were a British freak band. But the music they represented and made was a lot darker and a lot. It was a version of psychedelia that was very, very intense.
- [32:51]
Narrator/Host
That was Uncle Sam on Mars from Hawkwind's Adam Henge 76 live album. There were at least a few Dead heads following Hawkwin around on the festival scene. When I was researching in the Dead archive a few years ago, I read a few issues of the Music Never Stops a Hand stapled fanzine out of England. The COVID of one of the issues I read featured a collage of sumo wrestlers with the Dead's faces pasted over them. It featured current Dead set lists as well as total coverage of psychedelic Prague festival veterans Hawkwind and the punk band the Damned.
- [33:22]
Richard Lee
That was a guy called Alistair, who. He lived out in Norfolk and he was of a similar mind to us. He'd. He'd been to see the Rainbow shows, particularly the October ones, and he thought, there's a whole gap, you know, the music press weren't covering all this stuff, you know, they weren't talking about the Dead, but they also weren't talking about the free festival scene, the alternative stuff that went with that, all the Hawkins stuff that no one covered. And that crossover between the sort of the late hippie thing and what was almost this sort of underground related, sort of alternative punk thing that linked into it a bit. And he was trying to cross those two things over with. The music never stopped. And that had lots of Hawkwind, lots of Dead and stuff that were related in between that maybe other people wouldn't cover so much.
- [34:11]
Narrator/Host
Spiralite continued to gain momentum, though.
- [34:13]
Richard Lee
And I think it was just a word of mouth thing. And it just expanded like that, really. And then, you know, there was core group of us who started it. You know, people like Kenningham, Jake Frost, Dave, Lorraine Smith, Nick Mosey. They stayed with us for a few years and then that kind of changed. So people like Robin, Maggie Kedwood came along, Tony Willis, Paddy Ladd, and it just picked up steam. And I think part of, if you've ever seen the magazine, the quality is quite poor to start with. But then we had access to a university printer at some point and things started improving. The print quality started improving. We could do color and it just picked up, really. You know, we'd be writing. We'd always try to have reviews of current Dead shows, whatever was happening.
- [35:02]
Narrator/Host
Paddy Ladd is another British Deadhead. We'll shout out here. Part of the Spiralite family who helped organize the Deaf Head section at Dead shows in the States with sign language interpreters and big balloons to feel the vibrations. Since then, Dr. Ladd has become one of the world's leading proponents for the rights of the hearing impaired.
- [35:20]
Richard Lee
At first we'd write the addresses on the envelopes. We did it all ourselves, and some record shops would take it. So we'd send them back to the post to record shops like Virgin Megastores. They would put it in with the records. I worked with Virgin Megastore for a while, and a lot of people would buy it and they'd come to the counter with it and go, wow, what's this? We've never seen this before. And so that helped as well.
- [35:43]
Narrator/Host
The Bobby and the Midnights played London in 1983. British dead freaks had to make their own jams. And a properly cozy, homegrown British Dead scene found its footing.
- [35:52]
Richard Lee
Knowing all these Dead Heads, we'd have a sort of Deadheads party every day. A little town called Cheshire, just outside London. Spiralite party in this little remote place. So we could have quite a lot of noise without disturbing anybody, you know, and you could stay up all night. And we had two cover bands over that period. One, the Cosmic Charlies, who had been around for a lot of the 80s, into the early 90s. And then another sort of spin off band from that called the Shotgun Ragtime Band. I worked for Virgin Records at the time, and we had a friend who ran an independent record store without a net, had just been released before they got here, and he'd got three boxes full of it, you know, dozens and dozens of me said, well, we'll send it all back. There's no way we'll sell all these. And he did. He sold them all really quick, which is an indicator of how much things have changed, really.
- [36:41]
Narrator/Host
They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder. It also makes Deadheads even Deadheadier. As it did, perhaps, with Alex Allen, who began studying the band's Lyrics.
- [36:50]
Alex Allen
It sort of grew gradually. I mean, I started sort of, you know, collecting the lyrics and then I started collecting more and getting very, very interested in them. You know, I found it. I think he's absolutely brilliant lyricist.
- [37:06]
Narrator/Host
Alex's work now lives@whitegum.com the single most authoritative source for Grateful Dead lyrics, both original songs and their many covers. But his work on the site began decades ago.
- [37:17]
Alex Allen
I started working on what was intended to be a concordance to, well, Grateful Dead lyrics. I was including John Perry Barlow at that stage, and I got quite a long way in sort of rather, you know, sort of my Apple II computer or something like that, churning out in a programs to do the database. And then I went to work for the British Prime Minister and that was all far too much, so I had to drop it all. I mean, it was originally going to be a sort of self published book. By the time I came out of working for the Prime Minister, it became clear that it had to be a website. It gradually morphed from being just books and things like that through, you know, early sort of bulletin board kind of stuff, through to eventually the World Wide Web. And right from the early days, Grateful Dead actually were a huge part of the early days of the Internet and the World Wide Web.
- [38:15]
Narrator/Host
One of the first collaborative projects in the history of the Internet, in fact, was a Grateful Dead lyrics file compiled at the Stanford Artificial intelligence lab in 1973, traces of which can still be found on the web to this day. I wrote a bunch more about it in my book, A Biography of Psychedelic America. Even if our British listeners might not know who Wolfman Jack is, they've likely sussed out our guest's day job by now. But I do feel obligated to mention to our American audience that the esteemed Grateful Dead scholar Alex Allen is properly the Honorable Sir Alex Allen. His distinguished career as a civil servant over several decades has included time as Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, some fascinating posts, and a few passes through the public eye. This is neither the time nor the podcast to explore any of that, except to mention the time Alex made the papers for windsurfing down the Thames in a suit and bowler hat during a rail strike, flying a steal your face on his sail. He wound up a bit wet. A few years back he wrote an essay titled the Deadhead in Downing street, which he's kindly let us share@dead.net deadcast.
- [39:19]
Alex Allen
One of the things that I did was the sort of main international job in the treasury. And I remember going over to Washington with John Major when he was Prime Minister and his wife Norma. Originally, when I went, he was the Chancellor and there was no. He didn't have too much protection. We'd walk around the corner to the Tower Records where he was interested in, I don't know, sort of Frank Sinatra kind of stuff. And then when he was Prime Minister and had all the Secret Service stuff, I mean, it would be incredible because we'd drive up with all Secret Service protection, go into Tower Records. You know, I would go to the sort of areas where there were Grateful Deads things. And he would go off to that and his wife Norma, who was an opera lover, would go up to the opera. We'd do all these Secret Service people binning around. It was quite funny.
- [40:07]
Narrator/Host
And a few years after that, Tony Blair took office. The former guitarist in a cover band called Ugly Rumors, named after the alternate cryptic text printed on the COVID of from the Mars Hotel. Alex Allen was there to greet him.
- [40:20]
Alex Allen
I reminded him about that. He'd forgotten all about it. I was in the Prime Minister's office when John Major lost and he won and took over. I remember saying, you know, talking about the Grateful Dead and saying. And he'd forgotten that he played. Well, he remembered he played. He'd forgotten where the title came from, the name of the band.
- [40:39]
Narrator/Host
We're already well ahead of ourselves. Not to say that Tony Blair falls into this category, but it's a good moment to recognize and emphasize that some of the most hardcore Dead fans come from abroad and whose dedication and appreciation has taken different forms than following the band around from show to show.
- [40:55]
Alex Allen
One of the people I work quite closely with is Matt Schofield, who runs the deaddist.com website, who lives in Leicester in the UK and he and I, we pass tapes to each other back in the and also we email each other quite a lot on pointing out new songs or new covers and things like that. I've never met him, but I have quite a sense of email correspondence along.
- [41:24]
Narrator/Host
With Alex's white gum. Matt's deaddisc.com is another site that gets referenced countless times when assembling Deadcasts. We've posted links to some of our favorite finds on their sites@dead.net Deadcast the Dead's music continued to twist and turn in 1987, when Touch of Grey made it to the top 10 in the United States and was inescapable on MTV. It barely cracked the top 40 in England. Around that time, a new British psychedelic scene began to emerge as well. Mojo editor John Mulvey Took some time to come around.
- [41:56]
John Mulvey
The Dead encompass so many different kinds of music and so many different attitudes and different interpretations of psychedelia. But it's kind of interesting how few of those chime with sort of prevailing concepts of what psychedelia is in Britain in the 80s and 90s. I think one of our misperceptions about psychedelia growing up as kind of indie rock fans in Britain in the 80s and 90s was that it was quite often perceived as something heavier and dronier and more repetitive than maybe what some ideas of psychedelia can be. That kind of indie iteration of psychedelia is kind of filtered through bands like Spaceman 3 and then on Spiritualized that were really kind of much more into sort of minimalism and the Velvets and that kind of thing, really. And it was about density and heaviness and repetition and. And the achievement of trance states through just hammering, brutal single chords.
- [43:05]
Narrator/Host
But what the Grateful Dead presupposed was what if you could achieve trance states by lightly playing multiple chords? A different European psychedelic scene reminded Richard King of something familiar.
- [43:15]
Richard King
Probably the nearest comparison to the Dead in this country, I'd say, was Acid Hassan, because that was a very euphoric, far more melodic music. And it's music for people to dance to. And I think. I don't think many people in this country understand the extent to which the Dead was dancing music all the way through. And if you look at footage of. There's that great film downhill from when they play Alpine Valley, is it in 89. And you look out and you just see the whole audience is moving as one. And if you kind of just sped up their dancing as one, up a bit, it would look exactly the same as the footage of people dancing at the Hacienda in Manchester, off their heads on ecstasy, dancing to Acid House at the same time in 89.
- [44:05]
Narrator/Host
Moving at their own speed, the Dead finally made it back to Europe in 1990. They'd transformed plenty since 1981, most recently, earlier in the year, Brent Midland had died and the Dead showed up in Europe with two keyboardists to replace him. Former member of the Tubes, Vince Welnick and Bruce Hornsby, who may have been more popular in the UK than the Dead. Alex Allen, who'd seen his first shows in 1972, was there, of course, Wembley.
- [44:30]
Alex Allen
Arena, not the Stadium. That was great. It had Bruce Hornsby and Vince Wellmade. That was the full cast. I thought they were really good shows, actually. And I remember I'd been with some friends who weren't Sort of huge Deadheads. I remember we were on the Halloween show and I said to them, you know what we're going to have as an encore, don't you? And they sort of said, no. And I said, it's going to be Werewolves of London. Of course, it was. It was very appropriate.
- [45:26]
Narrator/Host
And Richard Lee, who'd seen his first shows in 1981, was there, too, caught the Dead a few times since then, most recently at the Greek in Berkeley the previous summer. And he knew exactly how Special the Dead's 1990 trip was.
- [45:38]
Richard Lee
It was actually pretty cold weather for those three November ships. It was end of October. November, it's really cold weather. But there still was a big scene outside. Yeah, and it was just more because a lot of the American Deadheads were doing all of Europe or being round most of Europe, and were finishing up in London. And so it was just the same scene you used to in the lot in wherever you were, you know, Pittsburgh, Oakland, wherever. Just in outside Wembley Arena. And it was very apparent. I mean, the first two shows were sold out, absolutely rammed.
- [46:12]
Singer/Performer (possibly a vocalist or musician featured in the episode)
And.
- [46:15]
Richard Lee
I think. I think the people, the people who worked at Wembley, the, you know, the stewards, the attendants, whatever, had never seen anything quite like it. It was very clear and, you know, they weren't told what to expect, but the sort of scene appeared outside. And then when the band were playing, there'd be loads of people outside in the foyer, dancing rather than watching the band. So for a British gig at that point, it was clearly something that was very different. You could see people watching it thinking, oh, right, what's this about?
- [46:42]
Narrator/Host
For Richard King, the Dead's last night in London, their last night outside the United States, was his first show.
- [46:48]
Richard King
It felt like a very miserable late autumn day in terms of the weather and the vibes and the concrete. Even through that sort of atmosphere, once it got to outside the venue, it had been transformed. You know, there were Deadheads had set up many shakedown streets. And even before going in, I kind of felt, okay, something's happening here. And I'd never seen people who looked like the Deadheads. I'd seen plenty. I'd lived in Bristol in the west country, the apex of the traveler, crusty, gnarly scene. I saw those people every day. But these were people. I mean, I think it's worth saying these were Deadheads who could afford the airfare to Europe. But these people just looked. They all had suntans, they had beautiful hair, they had really good skin. I just thought, well, you know, if I was in America, I'D hang out with these people because they're having a really good time and they. They look like they know how to have a good time and they're really well dressed and they're really. I'm sure, you know, many of them had kind of. Were drawn from the wealthier end of the Deadhead spectrum. You know, as I say, they could afford the airfare, but there was just a kind of sense that these people were living in their own moment and in their own reality. They came on stage really promptly as just full of Americans. And we sat near the back of the hall. I mean, 10,000 arenas, really not much for the dead in 1990. Seeing them in. I wouldn't go as far as saying it's a club show for them, but seeing them in a small hall with only 5,000 people was. I don't know if I imagined it, but it felt like they played a slightly more intimate, stranger show than they might have done.
- [48:32]
Narrator/Host
I don't think it was imagined.
- [48:53]
Richard King
The second half of the concert was very, very special. I had a. It may have been special because I had a hit of Strawberry lsd, which, at the time, Strawberry was the kind of ravey Manchester lsd. And this LSD had come from Manchester and I'd kept it in my fridge. And I thought this was. I thought I was kind of communing between the rave scene and the Dead by taking this LSD from Manchester. I think I'd. I'd like to think I was. I mean, I laugh, but I. I believe that I was. And it certainly felt like it once the show got going. And they did a weird thing.
- [49:31]
Richard Lee
They.
- [49:31]
Richard King
Bruce Hornsby was there and obviously anything. I knew, anything went. But I still thought it was a little strange that the guy who sung that's the Way It Is was on stage with the Ted. Yeah, he was amazing. And they. The second set, they did a kind of. They played around with playing in the band and then they went into a kind of Dark Star. And part of the Dark Star was being picked up by Bruce Hornsby on the piano. It sounded incredible. Dark Star, you know, had been my way in one of my ways in. When I'd heard it on the Zabriskie Point, watching Zabriski Point, when I was teenager, very stoned one night, I thought, that guitar sounds incredible. And then Live Dead was the first album I bought. And I couldn't believe I was seeing them play Dark Star because I hadn't anticipated it. I thought it would be a bit more of a. Well, I did. They just didn't play it that often around then. I mean, obviously if Branford Marsalis is in town, they might. But, you know, I just thought this was an incredible honor and, you know, a communion. I thought, okay, I've taken acid, I'm watching the Dead. And same thing happened to me that happened to tens of thousands of other people. I went into that place. We started with Dark Star. It went into space drums, the space. I've listened back to it. It was really heavy, really heavy space. And then they kind of went back into Dark Star, I think. But, you know, it lasted for hours and. And I was a changed person afterwards, you know, same thing that happened to so many other people. I just thought, right, well, I've. I've gone to that place and, you know, I've. I've never left it.
- [51:11]
Narrator/Host
The Spiral Light Crew was well represented as well.
- [51:13]
Richard Lee
The last night at Wembley was the last Dead show in the uk. And I think you get victim of the crime, Touch of Grey playing the band Dark Star in the first, in the second set. And that was great at the time. It still sounds good. And that's also the set where Bruce Hornsby does that piano solo. Silver Apple is the moon that turned upon Infrared Roses, which is a lovely piece.
- [52:07]
Narrator/Host
Infrared Roses is the Jeopardy style answer to one of my favorite Grateful Dead trivia questions. What's the final album of original material the Grateful Dead released? Infrared Roses came out in 1991, a few years after Built to Last, sewn together from the band's MIDI power Drums in Space segments. And one of the last pieces recorded for Infrared Roses was titled Silver Apples of the Moon, Tracked at Wembley arena. The Dream of the Dead plane. Glastonbury was apparently still alive.
- [53:01]
Richard Lee
Every year they tried it, and they even tried one year. I think this must have been. It was. They talked to the Dead when they hear 1990 at Wembley, and I think it was 91. They were trying to get them back. And the problem the festival had was the Dead played such a long set at that point. That point, no one else was doing like three or three and a half hours. And they were trying to. This festival organizers were trying to figure out, how do you fit this in with all these other bands? And they're actually talking about doing just a one day festival and just having the Dead headline it with a few other bands. There was quite a lot in this interview with the guy I talked about.
- [53:35]
Narrator/Host
The 1994 Glastonbury Festival included appearances by acts like Peter Gabriel, Elvis Costello, Bjork, Johnny Cash, Rage against the Machine. Blur and a newish band called Radiohead, who'd recently released their debut album, Over a thousand acts played at Glastonbury 94 on over 15 stages. Richard King was there.
- [53:56]
Richard King
Glastonbury. A quarter million people there at that festival. And if you see on the TV now, there's all the flags and the big pyramid stage. And the pyramid stage was there for sure, but it wasn't that kind of flag scene then at all. It was very different. And there were many, many different stages to Glastonbury. And there still are small cabaret stages, theatre stages. You don't really see them on the TV coverage. And there was a stage there, ironically called the Avalon stage. And I made a point of going to see the Dead tribute band play there. There's a band called the Cosmic Charlies and they did a really good. They did a really good kind of Europe 72, heavy set, with maybe an Eyes of the World or Franklin's Tower thrown in. And it was fine, you know, it was definitely several levels above workman. Like it was a good show. And yeah, 20 of us there watching them. Out of quarter of a million people, there's 20 people watching the Dead covers band at Glastonbury. And then the year later I went to this wake after Garcia died in Glastonbury at the Town Hall. I don't know how we heard about it. My friend James heard about it. We drove out there. We were living Bristol, it was maybe half hour, 40 minute drive, quite late at night. Yeah, we got there and there was another. There was a covers band there and that was a heavy scene. Someone read out some tributes that they seen. I don't know who from. Or they kind of said what Bob Weir had said in the park. And yeah, you walked in and you could smell patchouli and you could smell weed and you could smell a few other things. And it was a kind of intent. It was awake. And they played. Another band played and they had. They did a. More like a 77 set. And they had a female vocalist who was really, really good, who did the kind of Donna Weir role. But there was maybe like 30 of us dancing and dogs, stray dogs. And most people there looked like they kind of slept in their clothes.
- [56:10]
Narrator/Host
The Dead's visit didn't make much of an impression on the new British underground.
- [56:14]
Richard King
I worked in a record shop and we ran our label at the back of a record shop. I don't know if you've heard the band Flying Sorcerer Attack, but the people in that band worked in. In that shop and we put music out by them on our label. And, you know, it was. It was a shop that was part of the original Rough Trade cartel. So it had. The pop group had been there, one of Massive Attack, Daddy G had worked there. It was a proper head shop. And I worked there for four years. And not once did I sell a Grateful Dead record. And not once did I engage in a conversation about the Grateful Dead other than the boss saying, just. The boss ragging on me. Just, you know, basically calling me a clown. You know, say, put. Put some of that music on you. Actually play me some. I want to hear how bad it is. That kind of thing. And it was just, you know, and this was a shop that had every Popul Vu album, every Fellow Couti album, every can album. It had Stockhausen lp. It had really, really heavy music. And that's just. That's just the stuff that was for sale out the back there was, you know, you could go as far. We had original Silver Apples albums. You know, they've probably only ever been 100 in the UK and we had them there. We had Sun Ra LPs that he'd hand designed that. The owner had bought a job lot at Heathrow Airport. You know, it was a heavy, heavy music shop. Encyclopedic knowledge. The owners and the staff all had an. Absolutely no one gave a damn about the Grateful Dead.
- [57:45]
Narrator/Host
The Dead's fan base in England might have been more selective, as a famous semi fictional British rock manager once put it. But what British fans there were really like their licorice. Their lives were transformed by the Dead just as much as any American heads. Richard Lee, who we've been speaking to today about spiralite, became an archaeologist who's done work in Egypt and elsewhere and is currently working on his PhD studying prehistoric landscapes in Ethiopia.
- [58:10]
Richard Lee
That article in Darkstar had such a huge impact on me. Not just for the Dead, but for the location. Egyptology, archaeology. This taps into something else I'm interested in as well. So, yeah, that worked on two levels for me. And eventually I went to university in my late 20s. I didn't go when I was, you know, in my teens. I went was about 29, 30. But yeah, it was very much prompted by that interest that I'd read about in Dark Star and the Dead Plane there, and the fact that he tried to record, you know, they put some microphones in the king's chamber and all of that stuff in the Great Pyramid. I found all that just fascinating. Yeah. So that, that as well helped shape.
- [58:46]
Narrator/Host
What I do and For British rock fans, the walls are crumbling further each day. Mojo editor John Mulvey got on the bus 20 years ago. @ this point, I did go to.
- [58:56]
John Mulvey
One of the farewell shows in San Francisco, and again, it's like just those moments where it kicks off in the second set. It's kind of genuinely startling still to me that that music could. And really inspiring, that music so far out could translate such a mass audience. There are moments of, you know, revelation whenever I'm listening to the Dead from kind of any period, really, where they hit these moments, you know, the kind of space jams or whatever, where you're thinking, they're playing this to, you know, tens of thousands of people. What an extraordinary fluke of genuinely extreme experimental music being played on a mass stage. It's still kind of mind blowing.
- [60:11]
Narrator/Host
That was the Fare Thee well band, with Fish's Trey Anastasio on lead guitar. Recorded July 5, 2015, at Soldier Field in Chicago. After more than a half century, Grateful Dead music continues to generate surprises. Maybe someday they'll make it to Wembley.
- [60:54]
Rich Mahan
I find it so interesting to hear the opinions of people from other countries about the Grateful Dead, since I consider them to be such an American band. And what we heard in this episode proves that this band could and still does connect with people, no matter where they're from. We are everywhere. Have a good one, friends. We'll see you next episode. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Doran Tyler Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.