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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.
- [00:44]
Ned Lagin
The Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious.
- [00:47]
Rich Mahan
Welcome to the Good Old Grateful Nedcast. Yes, you heard that right. We've got a special bonus episode for you today as we present the Good Old Grateful Ned Cast to you in all its glory. Ned Legion sat in and played keyboards with the Grateful Dead both on stage and in the studio in the first half of the 70s and greatly contributed to their musical development, adding all kinds of electronic, color and avant garde ideas to the Grateful Dead sound. As usual, you should drop by our website dead.netdeadcast and check out the extras we have waiting for you to explore for not only this special bonus episode, but all of our past episodes as well. Lend us a hand and if you could, by subscribing, hitting that like button and subscribe. And if you want bonus points, leave us a review. Thank you very, very much. Well, it is the 50th anniversary of American Beauty and the Grateful Dead have prepared a 3 CD set reissue of this classic album and includes a pristine remastering of the album's 10 tracks as well as an unreleased live show from the Capitol Theater February 18, 1971. It was mixed at Bob Weir's Tri Studios from the original 16 track reel to reel and analog multi track tape. Along with this impeccably remastered three disc set and the live show, there's also a new batch of Angel Share audio. Out now are not only the full band acoustic demos for American Beauty, but also the rest of the studio outtakes from the American Beauty recording sessions. So be sure to check out the Angel Share American Beauty at your favorite streaming service or download provider and discover the DNA of these classic and timeless songs. You ever watch the Grateful Dead movie and wonder who the other keyboard player on stage is? Not Keith, but the other guy playing the Rhodes electric piano? Yep, that's Ned Lagin, the focus of this special Ned Cast. Ned, a digital music pioneer, had an incredible run sitting in with the Dead for years in the first half of the 70s, absolutely injecting the Dead's music with his experimental and groundbreaking methods. Jesse and I visited Ned at his home in Nevada, in Marin county before the Pandemic hit, and we had a fascinating conversation with him that covers not only his time with the Dead but also his other endeavors outside music. Take it away, Jesse.
- [03:22]
Jesse Jarno
It's the good old Grateful Nedcast. I've been waiting for this episode since before this podcast existed. I've never suggested this before, but today's episode would be especially swell under headphones. We're gonna jump right into the deepest end of one of the all time Grateful that improvisations right now, going from the very first version of Warfrat back into Darkstar, the so called Beautiful Jam recorded February 18, 1971 at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York. It's available now as a complete show for the first time ever on the new expanded American Beauty recorded by Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor Jackson and remixed from the original 16 track. There's a chiming instrument under Jerry Garcia's guitar and Phil Esch's lead bass. As Jerry would say, listen loud. For years I wondered what that high chiming part was. It turns out it's Ned Lagin playing a clavichord. Ned was a collaborator with the Grateful Dead for a half decade, playing with them on stage and off, integrated into their creative world in a singular way. You can hear him play a simple piano part in American Beauty's Candyman, and he played synthesizer on Unbroken Chain on 1974's from the Mars Hotel. If you're a Dead fan into live tapes as well as the Dave's and Dixbyck series, you might associate Ned with the Seastones performances with Phil Lesch in between sets at dead shows in 1974. But if that's the only part of Ned Legion's music you've experienced, you might think it sounds like this. That was recorded in Miami on June 23, 1974, released on Dave's Picks 34. Ned Lagin and Phil Lesh playing through the wall of sound. But try or this Ned Lagin was an electronic music pioneer, discovering the richness of generative and procedural sound When Brian Eno is still wearing boas and revolutionizing pop with Roxy Music. Think you've got a handle on Ned? Try this one too.
- [07:19]
Rich Mahan
Two fingers.
- [07:25]
Ned Lagin
Reach and drops skyward.
- [07:35]
Jesse Jarno
Which sounds like something from Brian Wilson in Van Dyke Parks Smile, except sung by Grace Slick and David Crosby in Harmonized on Mars. The words come by way of William Faulkner. All of those are segments from the expanded two disc reissue of Seastones, available from spiritcats.com in reverse order we heard disc 1, track 19, disc 1, track 5 and disc 1, track 47. None of them have titles and they're meant to be listened to in shuffleplay. There's also a new vinyl edition from Important Records. More info and links@dead.net deadcast when we talked to David Crosby, which you can hear in our Candyman and Addicts of My Life episodes, here's how he remembered.
- [08:15]
Rich Mahan
Ned Ned was a wonderfully strange musician.
- [08:18]
Phil Lesh
Very determined to push the envelope, which of course is what caught Phil's attention and Jerry's. He was trying to do stuff with.
- [08:28]
Ned Lagin
Electronic music and they approved of that.
- [08:31]
Rich Mahan
They wanted to push the barriers back.
- [08:33]
Ned Lagin
As much as he did.
- [08:35]
Rich Mahan
So he was hanging out and he was doing something experimental and I thought.
- [08:38]
Phil Lesh
That was really fun.
- [08:40]
Rich Mahan
We did fool around some and I didn't really.
- [08:43]
Ned Lagin
I don't think I contributed that much.
- [08:45]
Phil Lesh
But I think Jerry and Phil did.
- [08:47]
Jesse Jarno
Lots, as we'll learn. Just like the Grateful Dead themselves, Ned Lagin made lots of different kinds of music, and as a collaborator with the Grateful Dead, he served in many different roles. Between 1970 and 1975, Ned joined the Dead on stage to jam almost 20 times, playing organ, clavichord, synthesizers and sometimes Fender 88 electric piano. For a full chronological listing of Ned's jams with the Dead, you can consult, of course, Nedbase nedbase.blogspot.com Listen for the beautiful soft hued keyboard weaving with Jerry Garcia's guitar in this jam from June 23, 1974 in Miami. From Dave's Picks 34. That's Ned on Fender 88 playing through the wall of Sou. Ned Lagin was a jazz trained electronic musician, biologist and composer who played electroacoustic music to perhaps the largest audiences and on the largest sound system of any of his contemporaries in the 70s. Jerry Garcia's Round Records released Ned's album Seastones in 1975, a collection of what Ned calls moment forms, featuring contributions from Garcia, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, David Crosby, Grace Slick, Spencer Dryden and David Fryberg. Considered by the musicians alone, Seastones qualifies for that very special bin in the record store, a creation of the Amorphous Squad, sometimes known as the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra, that began loosely in the summer of 1970. In some ways, it also might be considered the last album by the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra, but it wasn't rock and roll And Planet Earth might also sometimes come into question. Disc two, track 12.
- [11:19]
Ned Lagin
I was going to MIT. I was going to music school, Berklee School of Music. And friends of mine in the dorm that I lived in were telling me, as a jazz improviser, that I ought to listen in particular to the Grateful Dead. And so they loaned me Anthem of the sun and a Oxa Moxiwa and the Grateful Dead, their first album. And I was pretty inspired by all of it. And they talked me into going to a concert, a gig. And I forget whether the club was the Ark or the Boston Tea Party at the time, what the name was. You can get that straightened out for me. But this was a club near Fenway Park. Go Red Sox. That club probably held two or three hundred people, to give you an idea of the size. And the Grateful Dead were an hour late in starting. When they came out, they sat on their amplifiers for a while, trying to get collected, and then played in a marvelous set. So after that, I wrote a letter to Jerry, because my friends again prompted me that what I was doing was. Would. Would fit very nicely with what they're doing. And what they're doing would fit very nicely with it. What they heard me playing in my dorm room. I had a piano in my dorm room. And so I never heard back. I never got a response back. But I'd written Jerry this letter that described music and the Renaissance music that I was studying, the jazz that I was studying, and also the natural sounds in the natural environment. Today, it would be called ambient. And then with friends who were on the lecture committee that got concerts and speakers to mit, I helped arrange the Grateful Dead to come to mit. It turned out it was the week that the students were shot at Kent State. Every university and college in the United States and elsewhere was closed down in an uproar. When the Grateful Dead arrived at the motel, I was there to meet them. At that point, they were still driving their own station wagons, and their amplifiers were in the back of their station wagons. Jerry pulled up, and before he got out of the car, I said, hi, Jerry. I'm Ned. And he just got out of the car and ran down the parking lot. Literally ran down the parking lot going, phil, Phil, I found the guy. I found the guy. I didn't know whether to be embarrassed or frightened at the time. And then we ended up spending days and nights together. They played a free concert. They played a concert in the. In the MIT gym with the New Riders and new writers were just truly spectacular and excellent. Dave Nelson, just astounding Dave Torbert, Astounding. John Dawson Marmaduke. Astounding. Jerry on pedal steel they would go off and do jams that were just as astounding as Grateful Dead jams. That was where I got my first real close up introduction to the pedal steel, which we used eventually on Seastones. And I took Jerry first one night and then Phil a second night into the computer labs where they played the first computer game Space Wars. And we also wandered around the halls at night. MIT has these very long halls. They even had sort of robotic or tractor like things that clean the floors and everything driving around at night. It was a very surreal and almost Pentagon esque. And all the walls were still painted battleship gray from World War II. And then I did a concert of my electronic music in the chapel at mit. The chapel is a circular building with a moat around it and a band of glass at the lower end of the foundation of the structure. So the water ripples outside, water outside ripples. The ripples are seen on the walls inside the chapel. And that was where I set up eight speakers, my first sound space. Eight speakers, four tape recorders barely synced together and played an eight track composition for Jerry, Phil and Mickey. Mickey. When my concert was over, Mickey was in a trance. He was just. He said, I'm out in the zone. And Jerry and Phil looked at each other and then Jerry said, boy, he'd really like to work with a 16 track and a tape recorder. And Phil said yeah. And so they invited me to come to California. This was in May or the first week of May that summer I came to California. I stayed mostly at Phil's house some of the time at Mickey's barn and one or two nights at Jerry's place. And end up in all these jams that are documented in Ned Base. And started the first tentative recordings of seastones on 16 track tape.
- [16:16]
Jesse Jarno
So what did your music consist of previously? Like what were generating the sounds on that composition that was playing at the. At the chapel?
- [16:24]
Ned Lagin
I would characterize it mostly as a collage piece. I had no mix capability besides mixing two tracks into one track. These were all two track tape recorders and I had no synthesizer. So I was grabbing sounds and processing through home built circuitry, modulators and voltage controlled amplifiers. And pseudo guitar effects. I say pseudo because they were really built from popular electronics, not from some musician guide. And I had been playing show music and classical music and jazz. I was going to the Berklee School of Music and had attended. I was playing in the MIT Jazz Quintet which played. We played music for Miles Davis and John Coltrane for the most part, but also a little bit of Frank Zappa. Oh, really? My experience in electronic music was relatively new within the last year or two. Part of it was stimulated in 1968 when I took a course, Intellectual and Social Change with Noam Chomsky. And his books had just come out on MIT Press. And we all read them, devoured them. I used some of his text as metaphors for musical generation, both in terms of generative algorithms, but also in terms of evolutionary algorithms. So that was my biology. I was a biology major at mit, Molecular biology. And so I started theoretically with electronic music in a sense, before I started having access to tools that could create the sounds.
- [17:55]
Jesse Jarno
Like thinking about the structures and the signal chain and stuff. Interesting.
- [17:59]
Ned Lagin
Also an impact from jazz that was also characteristic of the Grateful Dead was sets where you played tunes in various different orders and different performances. So the tunes were sort of mobile and you were going through a series of emotions or poetic statements in different orders at different times.
- [18:19]
Jesse Jarno
You landed in the Bay Area kind of exactly as, I guess, American Beauty was being made.
- [18:25]
Ned Lagin
It was after Working Man's Dead and it was during American Beauty. So I was in the studio at Wally Hyder's. I should back up. When I arrived in California in The summer of 70, I flew obviously in by plane. And then I took a bus into San Francisco. And I can't remember if it was Phil or Jerry. They told me to meet them at Wally Heider Studio on the corner of Hyde and Turk. I have it emblazoned in my mind. I was so worried that I'd get lost that I. To this day, I remember Hyde and Turkish. When I got in there, Jerry was the only one there. And he said, oh, it's good old Grateful Ned. And then he said, you can play on our album.
- [18:59]
Jesse Jarno
Welcome to California.
- [19:00]
Ned Lagin
Yeah, it was very exciting, not only because of the Grateful Dead, but there was three studios there. And during the course of American Beauty, the Jefferson Airplane Starship were in another studio. And Crosby was in the studio once or twice, jamming and playing. And then Santana was there. So it was already the beginning of what I saw as this exposure to the community of musicians who were cross pollinating and playing and sharing ideas while creating their own albums. And then I spent a lot of time with Jerry that summer. He was teaching me tunes, Grateful Dead tunes. And we were jamming together on Dark Star and the Other One. And I showed him reharmonization that I had learned from, from music school. From Berklee School of Music. And in particular the reharmonizations that Dean Earle, my piano teacher at Berklee, who had played with Charlie Parker. So we also ended up. I had transcriptions of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis and John Coltrane and Felonious Monk that Jerry and I also played through.
- [20:06]
Phil Lesh
Wow.
- [20:06]
Jesse Jarno
And did you hear that stuff like then turning up in his own plane after that?
- [20:11]
Ned Lagin
Yes, both in a positive and, I'm sorry to say, a negative way. The positive ways, yeah. Jerry learned a whole bunch about passing chords and substitutions, B minor, for example, for D and G major. When we did Beautiful jam in 81 in 71. I'm sorry, I said there was a negative side to it. And that is that I also showed him my scale and arpeggio books for using passing chords and diminished chords in particular. And Jerry, after a while would. When we went and set up for gigs, particularly in the 1974 tour, while he was waiting for everybody to get ready to play, Jerry would be playing those exercises. And there's nothing worse than having to sit and practice for hours playing exercises except to listen to somebody else playing those same exercises.
- [21:04]
Jesse Jarno
Yeah, the ones you've already internalized or.
- [21:09]
Ned Lagin
Never wanted to internalize. Right. And so for those in the notes in some of the jams in 74, for example, when it gets to a place where Jerry is sort of noodling, you can hear that he's going through. You know, Phil and I would look at one another and go, yeah, there's those. You know, it's your fault. Right, right, right.
- [21:32]
Phil Lesh
So.
- [21:32]
Ned Lagin
But it was great to be able to share music with them as well as having them share music with me.
- [21:38]
Jesse Jarno
Right, yeah, you mentioned that, you know, that you were picking up that he brought in stuff as well. What was coming in from their side?
- [21:45]
Ned Lagin
I had never listened to country western music except for my friends. Turned me on to Tammy Wynette, okay. Who was very big at the time. And Jerry in 1970 indicated to me that I should be really listening to Floyd Kramer, who was the keyboardist on every country western hit album. And so I learned a whole bunch through listening to the things that Jerry suggested I listen to.
- [22:10]
Jesse Jarno
Floyd Kramer helped pioneer a style of country and pop piano playing known as slipnote. Sliding from wrong sounding notes into right sounding ones. Here's perhaps its earliest example, featured on Hank Laughlin's 1960 hit, Please Help Me, I'm Falling, along with guitarist Chet Atkins, one of Kramer's long term musical partners. Please help me I'm falling in love.
- [22:43]
Ned Lagin
With you Close The Door to Temptation.
- [22:50]
Jesse Jarno
Don't Let Me Walk through the music that was released on 1975's Seastones LP began taking shape much earlier.
- [22:58]
Ned Lagin
It emerged from several places. So it's a convergence rather than a single evolutionary line. I had been interested in new music and avant garde music. I eventually studied with John Harbison at mit. He's a famous American composer. But I had been listening to Leghetti and Penderecki and all the modern composers on the one hand. And then, as I said before, I've been playing jazz and I got to hear, growing up in New York, all the jazz players many times, Miles and Coltrane, but also Archie Shepp, Albert Eiler, all the really avant garde guys, Cecil Taylor. And so these were all strains of musical feeling and meaning that were being internalized. Bill Evans was a huge influence on me, and I got to meet him several times and he wrote out some tunes for me. And I mentioned him not only because of the influence, but because I had always been drawn to what I consider lyrical, melodic players. And in rock, they're relatively rare. And Jerry is one of those, okay, in jazz you have Stan Getz and you have Bill Evans and you have Dave Brubeck and in some phases, Miles Davis. I'm thinking of Porgy and Bess and the albums that he did with orchestras. Sketches of Spain, for example. So the kinds of jazz that I played and the kinds of avant garde music that I played to some extent, meshed with Jerry. And it also meshed with Phil, who had studied at Mills with Berio and was familiar when I mentioned Penderecki or Legetti, less so Stockhausen. And one of the years, I guess it was maybe around 72, when we finished the first version of Seastones and Jerry took me and Phil to Clive Davis in New York. They eventually rejected Seastones. But one of the interesting opportunities was that Boulez, Pierre Boulez, was conducting the New York Philharmonic and recording. And I think they were recording Mahler, but I'm not sure. I don't remember. We got the opportunity to go to Lincoln center and sit in the booth and watch them do a professional orchestra recording. But I'd also been listening to Charles Ives, going to mit. I spent a lot of time in Concord. I had a girlfriend who grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, So I knew all of the Transcendentalists, Thoreau and Emerson. So playing Ives, Piano sonata, playing through it, not playing at a tempo, because I'm not at that. It would take years to accomplish that. But so there were Many different, rich American styles. And being introduced to country Western mostly by Jerry, was a very natural thing for an American composer. And to include those themes, motifs, styles, harmonizations as part of a larger painting or tableau of music seemed natural at the time. Four Seastones, one of the metaphors of musical mobility of the sections was not influenced by, but was, I guess, mirrored when I read Vonnegut. And if you read Slaughterhouse Five, the aliens, the Tralfa Midorians live outside time. So they view all the moments existing at the same time. And you play them in any order, as a necklace, as a sequence of beautiful moments. Well, that wasn't where I got the concept. But once I read Slaughterhouse 5, I had another way to explain it to Jerry, who was a Vonnegut fan. And so we sat around in 1970 and 71 talking about Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse 5 and God bless you, Mr. Rosewater and Sirens of Titan, those two. Jerry owned the rights to seastone. Started in 1970 with five basic tracks that I had created at home or in my dorm room, which was home. And one of them in particular, I'm sure Phil remembers, because I've heard from him a couple of times about this. That was white noise to the listener, but it actually, inside the white noise, I had embedded certain tonalities and themes not structured rhythmically necessarily. So you weren't listening to a tune buried in noise, hidden. You were listening to certain metaphoric uses of tonality and sound and texture inside noise. And I recorded Jerry and Phil and David and Mickey and myself on the 16 track, my first 16 track, my second 16 track piece, without them hearing what the others had done. So we would do Phil on the basic, and then we would do Jerry on the basic. But Jerry would only hear the basic noise track, not Phil's track. And at the end, I played everything for everybody and it all just fit together. Would you give him a key or nothing? Wow. They would have to listen to the music. They had listened to the track, which was like 15 minutes long, and just start whenever they want and play into it. And so they were being subliminally. I don't like the word manipulated, but they were being subliminally guided without having a conscious understanding of what that guidance is. If you give somebody a melody to play, they play the melody. If you hide the melody and leave only landmarks for that melody, they find it. Or they find something equivalent in their musical universe for that melody or rhythm and say, in Mickey's case, for example, the first 16 track piece that I did during the summer was multi track piano alone. And that was a borrow from Bill Evans, who'd done an album called Conversations With Myself, which is just spectacular. And everybody should just listen to it. It's so beautiful. And again, a true expression of harmonic impressionistic genius in a jazz solo piano context. Before playing, working with the Grateful Dead, I said I was a jazz musician in New York and New York and in Boston, where I went to school. I played Holiday Inns, I played bar mitzvahs, I played for strippers. I played all the different gigs that musicians did, but I never got into, because I was an academic, I never got into the packaging of that. So people go out and say, I wrote five tunes today. Well, I probably wrote five tunes today. Except they're not finished tunes and probably will never be finished tunes. Right, sure. They're just. Just what happened that day. And that was very much in keeping with the Grateful Dead. Things started out as playing and became tunes. Things didn't start out as tunes and then became playing. Right.
- [29:43]
Rich Mahan
So where is that recording that you were.
- [29:45]
Ned Lagin
I have no idea where it is. There are a lot of recordings that may or may not exist that were left as 16 tracks at Mickey's barn. And he either recorded over them or they're lost, or they exist somewhere. And some of them would exist in the Grateful Dead archives and some of them might exist in the Garcia archives because Garcia and I did some reel to reel recording at his house and when we played at Mickey's. But I don't know if any of that survived.
- [30:14]
Jesse Jarno
Right, Schrodinger's tapes.
- [30:16]
Rich Mahan
Yeah, yeah, Note, exactly.
- [30:17]
Ned Lagin
But it's sort of. It may be that people will find some of these tapes and have never figured out who the piano player was. I've seen some discussion online where they go, that can't be Pig Pen. And there was no other piano player at the time. And it's true.
- [30:32]
Jesse Jarno
Which leads us back to the jam from the February 18, 1971 Dark Star. I got it back in the cassette era, but it was truly immortalized on the so many Rhodes box set in 1999, when a portion was excerpted entitled Simply Beautiful Jam. Let's listen to a little bit more of this breathtaking Jam as it heads back into Darkstar with virtually ambient but shimmering counterpoint by Ned. Tune in to the new expanded edition of American Beauty to find out where it goes from here.
- [31:27]
Ned Lagin
I didn't know about any of this. I had never heard a recording since that was played in February of 71. So David Gans turned me on to this in 2001, 17 years ago now. But if you listen to it, you'll actually hear Mickey and glockenspiel at the same time that I'm on clavichord. So there's two. You can hear that there's two. Definitely two instruments there. And the glockenspiel is just played once, I think. But the characterization, the sustain, or lack of sustain of the note is very characteristic in the color.
- [31:59]
Jesse Jarno
But you were playing celeste. What were you playing?
- [32:02]
Ned Lagin
I was playing clavichord and farfisa organ. Okay. And the clavichord was a Renaissance keyboard instruments. The first keyboard instrument. When you hit the key, it frets the string like a guitar player would with their fingers and sets it in motion. So if you wiggle the key, you get a tremolo. If you tune the key the. The entire keyboard, string by string, like a guitar, you have to tune it with it, like over a piano. If you tune it slightly flat, your hand weight brings it into tune. So if you lay back, you're flat, and if you play a little harder, you're sharp. So you've got the ability to bend notes. How cool. So it's the ultimate. The problem with it is it is very low volume. So when they set me up at Portchester, they put me in a barrier of padding and boxes and stuff, so I could barely be seen. And then Garci would come over, and because of the low volume, my volume was set up so that I was always close to feedback. And Jerry would come over and play something that would feedback through my clavichord strings set. My clavichord strings vibrating, or vice versa. So we played feedback together, and I was actually playing or affecting his sound, the character of his sound. Now, that's sort of interesting just on a musical identity and. And early electronic music ideal. But it's also just interesting from the. From the point of view that I think there were maybe five or six tunes that were new to that concert, but it was the first Wharf Rat, which was just astounding. I loved it.
- [34:11]
Jesse Jarno
That was a little bit of the very first version of Wharf Rat from that same night at the Capitol.
- [34:15]
Phil Lesh
After we got set up and we solved the feedback problems Jerry told me about, they had a bunch of different songs. So the first one he actually went through was Bertha. And I had heard from Jamming earlier, the changes, the chords, and it was pretty easy to pick up. Then he went through Warfrap, which is a longer and more involved vocal. And so he sang it for me and played it quietly on guitar. Then he mentioned Johnny B. Goode, which I just knew what that was, you know, Johnny B. Goode. Chuck Berry was all over the airwave when I was growing up. As a kid you'd watch like the dance shows on TV and you know, there was Chuck Berry and then there was Playing in the Band, which Weir came up to me and asked me to, you know, be careful and sit out during the singing part until I got it. But I knew playing in the Band I remembered as the main 10, which I jammed on out at Mickey's but also had played on in November at in Portchester with the band.
- [35:20]
Jesse Jarno
You can definitely hear Ned in here right from the very first notes of the very first version of Playing in the band.
- [35:37]
Ned Lagin
Some folks just to reason all this.
- [35:40]
Jesse Jarno
Trust in mind I don't trust nothing but I know it come out right.
- [35:48]
Phil Lesh
Once again now and then there was, Let me see if I can remember this. There was the Greatest Story Ever Told. That's what I was thinking of as the Pump Song. And again I knew that from watching Mickey record Rolling Thunder. But also playing that I heard the original Pumpkin at His ranch on the 16 tracks.
- [36:12]
Jesse Jarno
The rhythm of the Pump Song was built around the sound of the water pump at Mickey Hart's ranch in Nevada where Ned had sometimes stayed and made music. You can hear it in 1972's Rolling Thunder. And here's a bit of how the Pump Song sounded when translated by the Dead into the debut version of the Greatest Story Ever Told from The new expanded 50th anniversary edition of American Beauty. It's possibly Ned playing organ, but I think he might be inaudible here. It was a big night and it.
- [37:22]
Ned Lagin
Set the stage for other things to happen after that. I didn't play the next. That was a five gig tour at Portchester. But that was the last night that Mickey played with the band for several years. And so it was deemed after that out of respect for Mickey but also to. To solidify the band that I wouldn't sit in that time. That's 71. In 72 I was out during the summer and 73 I moved out there. But in 72 we finished the acoustic version of Seastones, which I still have. We decided to go to New York and Jerry set up a meeting with Clive Davis and Phil and I went there. It was like 7777 Ave or something like that then. And we met with him and he had given it to his quote, stable of electronic musicians which was like switched on Bach, Walter Carlos and a bunch of people. And they said, this is not music. So Columbia Records rejected Seastones. And we rode down sort of dejected in the elevator, and Jerry said, we just have to find another way to do it. And so that's one of the reasons why I moved to California. We started playing and working on finishing Seastones as an album independent. I don't know. I don't remember historically when the idea for their record company came about, but it had probably been cooking in Jerry's mind for even years earlier than that as a way for entrepreneurial new musicians to control their lives and livelihoods. And because the Grateful Dead was already a relatively large family of crew and wives and girlfriends and business people and other related entities, you were always going to have to find a different way to support that group and to support their music and be happy and productive than the traditional, at least at that point in time, the traditional music business. So I moved to California, and Jerry and I continued to play at his house and at Mickey's. When I met and was playing and sitting in with the Grateful Dead, the only keyboard player was Pigpen. Constantin had left just two or three months or been fired or whatever the circumstance a couple of months before. And when I met Phil and Jerry, and Jerry had run down the parking lot in retrospect, years later, it seemed like he had found they were talking about the guy that could potentially replace Constantin. And that's why I should listen to Floyd Kramer and all those other things. But I was still living on the east coast and first finishing mit, graduating, and then going to graduate school for one year in music. And during that time, Keith appeared. And Keith was just a marvelous rock and roll piano player, one of the best. So there was no comparison for what the Grateful Dead needed as an entertainment rock and roll band. That was Keith.
- [40:17]
Jesse Jarno
What was it like playing with Pigpen? Did he just. Did he just sort of step aside or like what was.
- [40:22]
Ned Lagin
For the most part, he stepped aside. In the very earliest sit ins, of which I think I've remembered most, but not all of them, he would just signal me. I'd be standing next to him at the organ and he would signal me to sit in. So when we did Berklee Community Theater two nights, he did that for the other one both nights. And if you know my playing and recognize, you can see that those two other ones definitely are being shaped by me, whether you can hear me or not. An organ. Pigpen's organ volume was relatively low most of the time for other reasons. Pigpen was just a sweetie. I'm not saying this out of braggadocia, but I was like the rocket science kid genius science nerd. And Pigpen was the tough blues railroad tracks guy. And we hit it off really nice. And he was just a sweetheart. I can't say nicer things about him. And when Constantin came in the band, Pigpen was relegated to playing congas and taken away from keyboards. And so when I joined the mix, I vowed that I would be the sixth member of the mix, not the fifth or the fourth. I wouldn't displace Pigpen. I would be the lowest in volume for my own settings. By the time I had moved to California, Keith had been around for a few months and was playing. And as I said, I didn't move to California to be a part of the Grateful Dead. I moved to California to play with all those guys and for those guys to play with me. And it was still an open architecture plug and play rather than fixed roles. So I wasn't going there to be a member of the Grateful Dead. I was going there to be Ned and to play with other people. And that might be the Grateful Dead part of the time, but it might be me solo piano or solo electronic part of the time, or me and Phil, or me and Jerry, or me and Mickey, or all four of us, or five of us with David, or seven or eight of us with David, Fryberg and Spencer, who. Spencer did a lot of great stuff on Seastones.
- [42:23]
Jesse Jarno
The project had gained its title on a visit to Stinson beach during one of Ned's early trips out west.
- [42:28]
Phil Lesh
The words came to me when I was on the beach in 1970, 71 with some of the kids that were living at Mickey's. I think it was Geralyn's kids, but I'm not sure. And we went to the beach and I came back with a jar of rock seastones. And the metaphor that grew out of that was all these different rocks from different geologies, from different times, from different places all mixed together. And it's a play on words because it's seastones, meaning the rocks, and it sees tones, you know, like, break it up into two words.
- [43:05]
Ned Lagin
The recording was done, for the most part, in Mickey's barn, which had. There were two iterations. The early iteration had a tiny control room the size of a small closet, and you could only get two or three people in there. And the engineer who was mostly responsible for setting that up was Dan Healy. And Dan Healy helped me a lot, learning the 16 track ins and outs and Then they just let me go. And so we were taking LSD and recording all the time. I visited with Grace in San Francisco at the Airplane Mansion and then later at her place overlooking the Golden Gate. I forget what that community's called now. Pacific Heights, maybe. So each of the musicians was brought in to record different sections of music that was composed on paper and started on paper either as written words or as musical paper, but eventually ended up being the Notebook and the score became the 16 track. And so there was a transition for me from moving from paper music to recorded score. And that was only finished when we got to today. With purely digital music, where you can cut and paste music and move it around interchangeably and you can have access instantaneously to anything from 50 years ago or five minutes ago. All the recording sessions were very different. Jerry, we did half guitar, or I should say a third guitar, a third vocal, and a third pedal steel. In time, we did a. Jerry appears on the album more than anybody else, except for me. By 73, he was not playing pedal steel anymore.
- [44:47]
Rich Mahan
And what drove him away from that, or.
- [44:49]
Ned Lagin
I'm about to tell you. Okay, thank you. What drove him away from that was it took forever to set up, and he was the only person that could set it up, you know, with all those rods. Sure. You know, it went into a nice little traveling case, but when you took it out, it was a bunch of parts.
- [45:06]
Jesse Jarno
Really. Specialist knowledge.
- [45:07]
Phil Lesh
Yeah.
- [45:08]
Ned Lagin
Yeah. But as I said before, when he played with the New Riders and when I heard him in the studio with the Airplane and Crosby, it was like, whoa. And he never thought of himself as being a great pedal steel player, not to mention csn.
- [45:21]
Phil Lesh
Right.
- [45:22]
Ned Lagin
Yeah. He never considered himself to be a really great pedal steel guitar player. But that's because he was comparing himself to these guys with infinite technique and chops rather than Lord Green or. Yeah. Rather than what he was actually playing and how it fit with the music. And as you just said with. With Crosby, Stills, Nash, those guys with the Airplane, it was just, you know, teach your children. And it just.
- [45:44]
Rich Mahan
Those are beautiful parts.
- [45:45]
Phil Lesh
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [45:45]
Jesse Jarno
They're just the tasteful things.
- [45:47]
Ned Lagin
And one of the things. One of the things that you learn as a jazz musician and as an accompanist for. For horn players or for vocalists, is to make that little statement or that supporting theme or rhythm or fill that doesn't detract from the foreground, but only reinforces it or provides context for it. Yeah. And Garcia was a great player, guitar wise, and pedal steel that way. And he recognized Other players for that. He recognized that in me. And one of the things that I'm happy to report is if you look at all the pictures of me set up with the band, you'll always see me next to Garcia. And he wanted it that way. And if you look at some of the pictures, he's actually looking at my hands. And watching Grace was a real experience. If you've read anything about Grace or met her, she was a firebrand, I guess the politest way to say it. She was very provocative. And so the first night that I recorded with her, Healy was there, Garcia was there, Phil was there, Barry Melton was there, Mickey, of course, was there. And it was just outrageous. And she kept walking around calling me her Eastern bastard, just trying to intimidate me. And having grown up in New York, I wasn't intimidated, but I was frightened. And then we agreed to work. She and I worked three times after that with a smaller group. And me being the engineer. David Crosby was just absolutely phenomenal. He loved doing what he was doing. He's just a beautiful singer and a beautiful person. He invited me to his house to play his piano anytime. And we hung out there. And some of the greatest moments. And I visited him on his boat, but some of the greatest moments were just hanging out with him. Just a sweet person, right? Jerry, as I said, played the most on Seastones. And. And we just ended up working naturally well together. It was you. This track is one of the vocal tracks for the Words. This is one of three of these tracks. So there's three versions of it. The other two appear in the next release of Seastones. And this is Jerry on the most. Most of the vocals, but backing him up are David Fryberg, David Crosby and Grace. And this is all voltage controlled amplifiers, ring modulators, and the modulation sources being either the instruments that were played or the vocals themselves. One of the things that I should have mentioned before about spatial music and quad, which is characteristic in particular of this mix, is the fact that you could use people's identities to move things in space. So it wasn't just somebody's guitar is being affected by somebody's bass, but the placement and the movement, which has its own rhythmic and presence, the entire presence. So when you listen to the vocals here, you'll hear the vocals move, you'll hear repeats of the vocals, you'll hear anticipating the vocals in space, and you'll hear things appear, which is not true for most mixes except, say, television or movie mixes, where things recede into the. Into the distance or the past or appear in the distance and move to the present in space and in time. So that's accomplished by panning, but also by delays and by tape loops and.
- [49:59]
Jesse Jarno
A little bit more of disc one, track three.
- [50:30]
Ned Lagin
In the early days, meaning 70, 71, 72, I had only home built equipment and maestro ring modulators and various guitar kinds of effects pedals. Wawa pedals are basically filter pedals. And if you get in and hack with them, you can change their filter response or how they behave. And if you hack a little further, you can actually add modulation into them, you know, if you know what you're doing with electronics. And I grew up as a kid playing science and electronics during and after 74 into 75. For the final work on Seastones, I had my EMU modular synthesizer with computer control. And in between, when I was a graduate student at Brandeis for a year, I had the Brandeis Electronic Music Studio, which had a Buchla box in it, an ARP 2600 and a huge ARP 2500, another modular synthesizer. And so I got to use on Seastones all of the state of the art and now cherished analog synthesizers. David Friend, who worked for, was a key early executive at ARP in Newton, Massachusetts. In this little tiny little building, showed me patches for the 2500 and for the 2600. And I actually bought potted modules, the modules they used in the 2500 for me, for electronic modules that I could build into circuitry myself. So I had one of their famous multimode filters and a voltage controlled amplifier and other things. All of those were used with Jerry.
- [52:13]
Jesse Jarno
Disc one, track five.
- [52:44]
Ned Lagin
This track started out as a patch that was one of the standard early ARP 2600 patches. And I recorded recorded this at Brandeis four times because I only had two tracks and four tracks. And then I assembled it on a 16 track and then added other musicians. But I could never get the synchronization completely right until Pro Tools in the recent release. But it started out as a pure electronic music patch that could then be played with and against, or could be used to modulate. So Garcia's guitar and my electric piano are being modulated by the ARP 2600 patch that you hear. And I make that apparent at the very end where you can hear the guitar and the electric piano more isolated from the ARP 2000 600s. In today's world, you can have multiple editions of the 2600 on as many tracks as you like. Back then, it was a big hardware box that you recorded on a tape recorder. And if you wanted a second one in sync with the first, you had to play with the tape machines and.
- [53:59]
Jesse Jarno
The heads and a taste more.
- [54:11]
Ned Lagin
One of the key things in Seastones was that you could extract signals from one musician through envelope followers or triggers and gates, and then use them to modulate or affect other musicians sound.
- [54:26]
Rich Mahan
Interesting.
- [54:26]
Ned Lagin
Okay, so you could have the personality imprinted by one or more parameters. Say Jerry plays guitar. We're not hearing the guitar sound, we're hearing the attack sustained decay of the guitar. But it's affecting my piano sound or Phil's bass sound, and vice versa. With ring modulators or voltage controls, amplifiers, you could have two signals cross modulate one another. What this did was it changed the hearability. If I can create a word of musicians from their personality being directly identified by their musical or vocal sound, into their idiosyncratic personalities independent of their musical instruments. And of course, during the times that we were doing this, we were all heavily intoxicated lsd. We were in alternative places and space times. This made a lot of sense at the time, not because we were so high, but because we were looking at new forms of expression and new forms and ways of being musical. And one of the ways was to. And one of the reasons to use computers was to extract the personalities, the imprinting, the techniques, the habits that various musicians had, and use them to affect the sound of other musicians or the entire ensemble.
- [56:02]
Rich Mahan
So you could almost use the way they phrased a line to modulate another person's part that they play.
- [56:09]
Ned Lagin
Right? So for example, if Jerry were singing, we could use another Jerry signal, pedal steel that went through some long slide change, say over a minute, and that could be used as the modulation for his vocal. This was all done in a composed manner. And it goes back to a very simple metaphor, the metaphor that was the spirit of the times, which was synthesis. Synthesis was not just a musical phenomena or electronic music phenomena. Synthesis was better living through chemistry. Dow Chemical, all the chemicals that were going to help agriculture, all the chemicals that were going to help medicine, were all synthesized plastics. You know, the graduate. What are you going to get into? Plastics. Plastics were modern synthesis, right? Joyce Finnegan's Wake was a synthesis of all the pre existing literature that Joyce was enamored of. So doing musical imprints and cross modulation and intertwining musical identities was an obvious, to me, an obvious extension of technology of the times and where we were going and where we were going with digital music.
- [57:28]
Jesse Jarno
Ned relocated permanently to California in the summer of 1973. In the fall, he participated in a quadraphonic performance at the palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco with Lesh Garcia and Mickey Hart. Ned and Phil continued to develop their live sets, even visiting the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab to discuss possible quadraphonic controls for the Wall of Sound.
- [57:49]
Phil Lesh
Andy Moorer and John Chowning, who worked at the Stanford AI Labs at the time. And where they created a guest user account for me. And where they lend me their Quad joystick. They had been doing experiments and developing software for spatial cue creation so that they could move sounds in space, both in quad environments and in stereo environments with Doppler shifts and things like that. The interesting thing about Quad that. That I discovered in playing with it. Dan Healy had set up a primitive system for speakers and amplifiers for me at Mickey's to experiment a little bit with it was how disturbing Quad could be. Wasn't necessarily immersive, which is what we were looking at as the desirable effect of quad. When you hear sounds behind you, you turn around. So it wasn't really a very desirable thing to have people turning around or hearing and being frightened by sounds behind them.
- [58:46]
Jesse Jarno
During this time, Ned contributed to the Grateful Dead studio sessions that became Wake of the Flood, contributing to Unbroken Chain.
- [58:52]
Phil Lesh
If I remember correctly, that was around or in April of 1974. And it was sort of an interesting period in a number of ways. First of all, we'd already decided we were going out on the road to play live later in the spring or summer. And the other interesting facet of this was that I had heard about this studio. It was originally. It wasn't cbs. It was. I forget who it was, but it was where the first Grateful Dead album was recorded. And so I was interested just from the historical perspective. When I went in there, Jerry seemed pretty happy. And we had already talked. Jerry, Phil and I separately had talked about me potentially adding to various tracks, including Jerry's tracks. Eventually, all that happened was I played on Unbroken Chain. I was playing an ARP Odyssey. And I may have had it through a volume pedal. But otherwise it was just a straight ARP Odyssey. They set me up not in the room, but in the control room, in front of the board. On the front side of the board, they ran Unbroken Chain. And I played a track. And they ran Unbroken Chain the second time. And I played a second track. And they stopped there and said, both of those tracks are perfect. You're done. I had not even gotten started. I hadn't even thought about it. Phil was very. And Jerry were very ecstatic about What I had done.
- [60:44]
Ned Lagin
And then it was deemed time to go out and play live. And the only way to do that was to go on tour with the Grateful Dead. So there was a discussion in late December, early January, after we did the gig at palace of Fine Arts, the first quad gig. And then there was a band meeting in March where it was discussed and tabled. But after that meeting, Jerry, Phil and I and Dave Parker, and a couple other management guys just decided that we were going to go ahead and do it. And as soon as we could all be available to do it. And my equipment would. I had to build an AC power system. I had to do a whole bunch of stuff besides just walk on stage. We would start that in June.
- [61:31]
Jesse Jarno
Do you remember what it was like the first time you felt Seastone stuff through the wall of sound and through that?
- [61:37]
Ned Lagin
Oh, it was astounding. It was just astounding. The first thing is, was just the raw power of it. I could play at 120 decibels, which is louder than being next to a jet airplane. And if I played a huge subsonic chord, I could lift the entire stage. I go boom. And the stage would go boom like we had an earthquake. And the crew guys would say, don't do that.
- [62:04]
Jesse Jarno
How often did he do that?
- [62:06]
Ned Lagin
I wasn't that much of a prankster. The other thing was that you could play notes, low notes that you couldn't hear, but the speakers were going like this. So you had a breeze, you had a wind on stage. I could feel it because I was playing through 9,600 watts, four way crossover and something like 250 speakers. Phil had the tallest columns of 15s, if you look at that drawing of the. And I had. The vocal system that I played through, had the second highest. So again, thanks to the Grateful Dead and to Jerry and Phil, I had the ability to hear this music performed in ways that no other electronic musician on the planet ever heard. And somebody said to me later, you got a lot of courage for going out there and playing the 20,000 people and playing this abstract, wild electronic music. And I just thought it was just an opportunity. A typical patch on stage with me and Phil or Jerry and the others, if they joined, had their inputs going into my system. And then the composition was how those inputs were used and interconnected. And in a lot of cases, there was also a pre recorded tape. As I said, tape became the score. And in some of the performances, that got lost in the outputs. Because on stage, when I played, I played through the vocal system of the Wall of sound, my outputs and Jerry and Phil's outputs were actually pure quad. We had four channels. And sometimes some of those channels, when they compressed the four channels into two, some of them got lost. So you're not hearing the entire performance that we heard. Quad was important, and the wall of sound was important because it gave the band, and me in particular, the ability to play from subsonics to supersonics with huge accuracy and reproducibility. So you can't hear from the tapes what people experienced through their ears and through their bodies in person. When we performed live, the idea of the musical identities being intertwined was carried through into the live performance. It was a reason to carry all that equipment around on stage and try to make it happen. And, of course, there was also the feedback from the audience. So how the audience responded governed how the musicians, to some extent, responded, which governed how the hardware that intertwined the musicians responded. And some of the responses that we got to Seastones were people saying, I was in the front there, and I went to the back, and then I went up in the balcony. And it was like being out in space. And so you got the spatial feel of the sound. You got the spatial experience. We didn't do quad to do quad per se. We did quad or put speakers around you like I did with my eight track concert at mit, so that you could be inside the field of sound, rather than looking at it like it's being presented to you on television, which is what a stage performance is. Deep hearing of music is a bodily, mental, physical, spiritual experience. The entertainment aspects of music to some degree limit that. And only in recent times, again with digital technology and signal processing, have we gotten to a place that people have the opportunity to experience that. And then, of course, this was before there was any kind of art movement that was sound sculpture. So some people characterized what we were doing as sound sculpture, which it was. We didn't limit it to a sculpture or to an art label. But it's interesting to note how much sound sculpture and sound installations evolved that didn't exist in 1970. One of the things that I'm proud of is that we actually went out. And again, thanks to Jerry and Phil and the Grateful Dead in particular, was that we went out and did this live for people, for real people, in real time. We weren't doing it as an isolated academic experiment. And I always rejected the idea that people say, we're doing an experiment or we're trying something new. Well, we are trying something new, but it's not an experiment. It's like playing a new tune is not an experiment. Experiment. It's just playing a new tune.
- [66:19]
Jesse Jarno
Right.
- [66:20]
Ned Lagin
And so I don't ever like the label of experimental music. There are things that you play with at home, chord changes and stuff like that, or patches or sounds. But when you perform or you play, that's not an experiment, that's a performance. And if the audience didn't like it, it wasn't that we were doing it to find out whether they liked it or not. We were doing what we felt heard and wanted to do. There was a level of intention there. Right.
- [66:45]
Jesse Jarno
Was there. Was there negative feedback, too? Absolutely, yeah. Could you feel that on stage in real time?
- [66:51]
Ned Lagin
Yeah. We got stuff thrown at the stage. One guy came up. I think it was during the movie, and there's movie footage for this. When I was playing solo synthesizer before Phil had come out, a guy came up and right in my face on stage and reached out to touch the synthesizer, and I just brushed his hand away. And he sat there for a while, and then he just cooled out. And Garcia. Garcia said to me, after that, he said to me, you know, it's really far out. Really amazing stuff happens when you play. Some of it's cool and some of it's not cool. He said that one was really cool.
- [67:25]
Jesse Jarno
And did that guy come on stage in anger or just sort of wandering on and was like, oh, here's this thing.
- [67:31]
Ned Lagin
He was in some place.
- [67:32]
Jesse Jarno
Right.
- [67:33]
Ned Lagin
Okay. If he had been angry, I would assume that he would just knock some stuffed over or been really hostile.
- [67:38]
Jesse Jarno
Act of curiosity.
- [67:40]
Ned Lagin
Maybe he felt more like he was in a very young child state.
- [67:49]
Jesse Jarno
Right.
- [67:50]
Ned Lagin
And he had gravitated to something that he did not comprehend.
- [67:54]
Jesse Jarno
Right. It sounds like psychedelics were a pretty important part of the process.
- [67:59]
Ned Lagin
We traveled with psychedelics. It's. You know, I'm well beyond the statute of limitations, so I can say whatever I like about this, but we had little yellow murine bottles, eye drop bottles. And in those bottles, Bear had put his lc. And I was proud to have my own little bottle. So we were. We dosed ourselves. Some people were otherwise dosed. You know, when I played Boston in, I guess it was 72, somebody dosed all of the open Coke and soda bottles on the hospitality table backstage. And everybody knew that if the can, you know, the soda can was dented, it had LSD in it. Well, the Boston police didn't know anything about any of that. And they said, oh, look, free soda. And they drank all the sodas. Oh, and then you had these cops In. They didn't take off all their clothes, but they took off some of their jackets and stuff and their shoes and white socks.
- [68:56]
Jesse Jarno
Dancing, that's like, you know, that's one of those hippie stereotypes that hear. Oh, yeah, we dosed the. You know, the cops got dosed and then they got naked and threw their gun away or whatever. But that stuff like that really went down.
- [69:07]
Ned Lagin
Yeah. And I remember Boston, like Philadelphia, because these are. Were rigorous union and blue law towns. So the concert has to end at 11 o' clock or a certain amount of time. There was real restrictions on alcohol and also on union workers. So the crew couldn't take stuff off the truck and put it on the stage. Some union guy had to do that. So there were lots of laws and rules. We never crossed union picket lines. We were all union guys. But there were certain. Some of these things were much more structured. And the response to structure was to undo the structure, loosen the structure, grease the structure, lubricate the structure, which we all did. Yeah.
- [69:58]
Jesse Jarno
And seemed to work.
- [70:01]
Ned Lagin
And, you know, a lot of was going on at the time. LSD was not just a drug that you took to get high. It was a spiritual investment. And there were people like John Lilly and others who were doing interspecies communication and looking at the concepts of mind and consciousness and bodily consciousness. And the first real work on metaphors and linguistics and how they related to the body or not, including Chomsky. These were all things that affected the consumption or the desire to consume psychedelics. It wasn't like to get high. It was to expand.
- [70:44]
Jesse Jarno
Was there discussion of that and discussion of tonight? Tonight we're gonna. I mean, I assume it wasn't happening every single show.
- [70:53]
Ned Lagin
Almost all the shows that Phil and I played and Jerry played, we were dosed.
- [71:02]
Rich Mahan
And how hard would you guys go? Would you like, just take one hit or microdose?
- [71:06]
Ned Lagin
I don't remember. But if you took one drop, it was really light. That's the reason they had it in liquid murine form, so you could regulate your consumption. And, you know, and there's from Tom Wolfe's book. You're either on the bus or off the bus. That was one of the trials by fire. Whether you were. You know, it sounds chauvinistic today, but whether you're part of, like an LSD brotherhood, whether you're part of the Brotherhood. Classic examples of people getting dosed or part of the Brotherhood being dosed was the gig in London. 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.
- [71:50]
Jesse Jarno
Day, this is 9-74.
- [71:52]
Ned Lagin
Yeah. 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. And everybody did that except Keith, who was not, at least at that point in time, a leading psychedelic. But so Ramrod or somebody put it in his stomach medicine. He had a bottle of stomach medicine by the piano. He had some stomach indigestion that night or something like that.
- [72:24]
Jesse Jarno
Wow.
- [72:25]
Ned Lagin
So that night was an LSD night.
- [72:27]
Jesse Jarno
You know, if somebody, you know, if they dosed Keith, you know, against his will necessarily, would he. Would he. Would that kind of thing be called out? Would he say something after? It's just like, okay, it's part of the job.
- [72:38]
Ned Lagin
Yeah. Not part of the job. Part of the flow.
- [72:41]
Jesse Jarno
Yeah. You know, it's like a weather condition.
- [72:44]
Ned Lagin
Yeah. It's like playing in a blizzard. And then for the rest of that Europe tour, which then from there went to Munich, and then we drove around the Alps in Switzerland and then Dijon and then back to Paris. Phil and I did LSD almost every day. Part of the time we traveled with Garcia. You see us on the bus, there's that movie, the Steve Brown movie that we have on Ned Base. By the end of 74, that had dissipated. Other harder drugs had taken over. The realities of being an entertainment business had solidified. There was a huge financial burden because of the record company and the movie all. You know, it's like trying to do too many things at the same time, at the same time that you've sort of backed off and retired from playing live. So you don't have that huge income coming from the tours. But by 74, 75, the tribal identities, the entertainment identities, had solidified by necessity, by financial business. Necessity.
- [73:47]
Jesse Jarno
In late 1974, the band decided to retire from the road, playing five nights at Winterland and filming for what became the Grateful Dead movie.
- [73:55]
Ned Lagin
It was already known in advance that at least three of all five nights we would do electronic music. And at least three of those nights, it would segue into the Grateful Dead. The goal was to get Dark Star, Warf Rat, Morning Dew, and some of the others were. Jerry. Like what I did and how I helped shape the flow. And after that, the Grateful Dead were retired. So it wasn't like you were joining a band. It was like I was there for the last iteration playing keyboards in the band. But I was never a member of the band. And my goal personally was to play with them because I enjoyed it, but to also do my own thing.
- [74:38]
Jesse Jarno
Here's Ned Lagin, Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh from the new Seastones. That was from Seastone's disc 2, track 16.
- [75:13]
Ned Lagin
This is synthesizer modulating rhythmically. Modulating electric piano and guitar. Okay. And bass. Why I find it interesting is intentionally is because since the beginning there has been a real tension, a real pull between living, feeling, organic acoustic music and machine electronic music. And this is an example of how I was bridging with a machine quantization. But this is pre quantization. So it's playing with the ideas of quantizing before anybody invented quantizing. And as I said, it's an electric piano and guitar and bass predominantly. But it does bring into focus and relief the idea that you have that people are getting more normalized to listening to rhythms that were made by machines. And another example of that is on October 19th, in the movie, for the first six or seven minutes of the set two performance, I go out and play synthesizer alone. And I used rhythm boxes and computer control, rhythm boxes that I had built from popular electronic circuitry to generate electronic machine rhythms. And this later, not through me or any influence that I had because I obviously left the musical world, but this later became a standard for electronic dance music, etc. And Bill Kreitzman in his book credits me with having invented all this stuff before it ever existed. Thank you, Bill.
- [77:06]
Phil Lesh
I appreciate that.
- [77:38]
Ned Lagin
Today we take it for granted that people can have electronic drums and electronic percussion. And it has a much more regular beat, obviously, than. Than musicians are. Most musicians are capable of. But we no longer have the duality, oh, it sounds like a machine or it sounds like a robot. It's robot music. Or, you know, all the derogatory terms that I heard.
- [77:58]
Jesse Jarno
Seastones continue to accrete moment forms. In June 1975, when the album came out, there was a live performance featuring Garcia, Lasch, Hart and Crosby at Dominican College in San Rafael. This is from disc two, track five of the new two disc Seastones. This is one of several Seastones recordings engineered by Owsley Stanley.
- [78:45]
Ned Lagin
This is a live segment from Dominican College. It was originally recorded by Bear. It has a pre recorded tape in the background of rhythm, which then Phil and Mickey are playing against. And you have Jerry on guitar and he sounds like one of those lamentable crying, sort of not crying like Hendrix crying, but guitar. And then you have me on lead synthesizer, which is what you're Hearing the most of. And it's one of the rare places that I play lead synthesizer or I play lead, and was given the opportunity inside the Grateful Dead environment to play lead. So it has many layers to it. And as I said, it's an extract from a live performance. All through the spring of 75, I was at Weir's studio every day that was a session. And some days I was there when there weren't sessions because the record company, we were finishing Seastones. Seastones was released in April, but the record company owed me time, studio time. And we knew that was going to be another follow up to Seastones from live material and stuff that I was doing in the studio and had done already at Weir's. My Birthday Jam, which occurred in March of that year, was one of those things that'll appear later in a future release of Seastones. We were jamming every day, and Blues for Allah came out of that. But a lot of. But at that point in time, again, as I described before, tunes evolved out of jams or very rough ideas, or just a chord or a harmony or a feel. And it was marvelous to have three or four months of just doing that. You know, I remember the Beatles did that at one point for one of their albums, sergeant Pepper or something like that. They finally just got to just not be playing live to people, but just dedicated to composing and interacting in a supportive environment. And that's what we had through to June of 75. But what was on the horizon was the fact that the movie needed to be completed and there wasn't enough money for that. And the record company was doing okay. But the only way to get money to continue to support the trip was to either go back out on the road or to sign with somebody. And they signed with United Artists. And United Artists knew of Seastones. They came to one of the gigs, the palace gig. They put me in Billboard magazine. They had me fly to LA and be photographed by the star photographer who photographed Cary Grant, everybody. It was just a great trip. They were going to put me. I used to joke. They said they were going to put me in People magazine as the first person who performed with computers on stage. And I used to joke and say, until they heard that I sounded like an old refrigerator. And so People magazine never didn't bite, never occurred. Then United Artists and the Grateful Dead got into, you know, the schedule of the movie and the schedule of delivering a recordable recording product, Blues for Allah for them, et cetera. And I exited at that point in time, partially because Seastones Partially because I couldn't support myself in a sense. And yeah, there might have been down the line more playing and more investment and more money. It was clear that for several months to years, and you still have to remember that at this point in time, the Grateful Dead were disbanded. They were all going to do their side groups and it was the financial resources or lack thereof that required United Artists and everything to move back into the entertainment business. But the goal had been when they were retiring was to not be in the entertainment business, to be in the music, art, personal business. I basically stopped being a musician and went out and got a job and continued to do music at Home Alone and Seastones at Home Alone and then stopped doing music at all. I had been doing art and writing and I continue doing art writing and photography to this day.
- [83:02]
Jesse Jarno
Ned had a long, fascinating and creative career in the burgeoning computer industry.
- [83:07]
Phil Lesh
After I left the Grateful Dead world, I got jobs first in home computing, Altair based. Then I worked on digital video. I managed research and development for a fellow from New York, Bill Etcher, who was at that point a famous video artist. And that got me back to photography. I had used photography. I had done photography as a kid and used it in recording my natural history projects and excursions and explorations as well as my science projects in my home lab and museum that we're talking about 1978, 1979, and that led to the last 40, 50 years of photography and visual arts being my primary activity after image processing. And I worked on other image processing projects, including projects that had to do with with missile nozzle testing and other high speed video stuff. I worked in biotech and for many years I worked in biotech software and hardware managing small groups of engineers or software programmers. Interestingly enough, some of that has come back in my mind for the recent pandemic. In the late middle to late 1980s, I worked on a monoclonal antibody purification system on an Apple IIe software to control hardware instrumentation. Monoclonal antibodies, obviously you've heard the news, are the premier treatment for Covid today. Going backward. When I was at MIT and I was majoring in biology, I worked my way through school and the job that I had was working in a lab for two postdocs who were doing research on messenger and transfer RNAs and messenger and RNAs are the building block of the current vaccines getting approved. So I worked in biotech, I worked on immunology software, which is also relevant today in pandemics. I was a Macintosh seed developer. I did the first Macintosh with a co employee. We did the first Macintosh software with graphic interface for immunology testing. And that's how I became a Macintosh seed developer. And after that, when I decided I didn't want to commute to San Francisco or the South Bay or the East Bay, I picked up on my natural history and biology again. And did ecological and environmental design, restoration and consulting work and aerial photography to support that. But all during that period of time I was doing photography and graphic arts, sand drawings, natural photographs. I guess one could say that the science and the natural history going back to when I was a young lad, a kid, on that biology led me to things even greater than music in the sense of being outside yourself, seeing if I can be a little bit poetic, seeing an infinitely greater world outside transcendental elemental connections which you could elucidate, that you could understand, see the interrelatedness of things. I realized that creativity, both in music and in art and in life had to do with feeling the meaning and without describing what the meaning is. Being involved creatively is feeling that interrelatedness. And that creation or that elucidation or that understanding of meaning, of different dimensions of existence and of beauty. And composition in photography is like composition and music. I had a few conversations with Jerry about this over time. Jerry was obviously a multidimensional person and an artist. And so we got to talk about. About this to some, to some degree. And I actually ran into him once when I was photographing in the 80s out in West Marin. We talked for a few minutes and then parted ways again.
- [87:17]
Jesse Jarno
NID did stay in touch with a few people from the Dead scene. Or sometimes they would just call him in the middle of the night.
- [87:22]
Phil Lesh
That during the 80s, when I was doing biotech, I was getting calls from Australia. And those calls were from Bear Owsley Stanley, who was trying to get me over time to play music again and to release Seastones, plus maybe some of the other recordings he had done of me with me and of the group performances after I left the Grateful Dead. During the time that I was playing with the Grateful Dead and after I was around with Phil. Phil and I went and picked Bear up when he left the halfway house after. After his term in San Quentin and brought him to his San Rafael apartment. And after that we had interesting discussions because he knew of my intense and deep biochemistry and organic chemistry background. Obviously some synergy with his knowledge and experience. He eventually lived in a house maybe a mile, maybe three quarters of a mile up the road from where I lived in Fairfax. And so we spent time together, me visiting him while he was sculpting and him coming and visiting me. I lived in a very small one bedroom apartment crammed with books and electronic music equipment and my piano. And he hated coming to my apartment because it was just a tight, small space. I don't think it had to do that much with him being in jail. He just had such an expansive personality that seeing anybody boxed in bothered him. He would call me. It would be like two or three o' clock in the morning, my time. The phone would ring, I would think it was somebody dying somewhere. And I had the emergency and it would be there from Australia. And he asked me what I was doing and I told him I was working in biotech with monoclonal antibodies and organic chemistry and high performance liquid chromatography and electrophoresis. And he was, you know, he was interested and enamored of all of that. When I left the Grateful Dead, he would come and record me occasionally in my apartment. But he also went with me down to Santa Clara, San Jose area, where EMU was still, you know, the synthesizer boys, the synthesizer company which eventually got very large, but they were still in their like one or two bedroom apartment. We went down there and recorded me playing their microprocessor synthesizer. Bear was very supportive and a very good friend.
- [89:51]
Jesse Jarno
Eventually it was time for Ned Lagin to make music again.
- [89:54]
Ned Lagin
And it was only around 2005 that I took all the tapes that I had to Fantasy Records over in Berkeley and had them transferred to Digital. In 2005 or 6 or so I started playing at home alone. And then first with Terry Haggerty, guitar player from the Sons of Champlin. Excellent guitar player, excellent mycologist, that's a mushroom person and good fishermen. We used to go fishing together, trout fishing in the lakes up here.
- [90:20]
Jesse Jarno
And from Terry Haggerty, Ned found his first group of musicians to play with since the Grateful Dead, including guitarist Barry Finnerty, who'd played with Miles Davis, pedal steel player Barry Sless and many more. Here's Barry Sless's pedal steel weaving with Ned's virtual pedal steel on the track Catlicks. Plus Dick Bright's violin, Terry Haggerty's electric guitar and others. But it's all one interconnected flow.
- [91:10]
Ned Lagin
I've been working on photography since I was a kid in all different formats. But several of my larger works are non narrative in the sense that Seastones is non negative. So there's no order to the pictures that allows the viewer or listener to trace their own path. And so there can be many paths. If seastones today is 82 tracks, that's considered the space time of Seastones. But there's so many potentially different paths through that. The other side of that was I had always written tunes, either frameworks for improvisation or tunes that were really tunes.
- [91:51]
Jesse Jarno
Like with heads and stuff.
- [91:53]
Ned Lagin
Yeah, Melodies and then you play. But also, and this is true on all this, is true for Cat Dreams. One of the interesting things and this, this fascinated Jerry was how about if you play a tune where you. You don't play the head of the tune until the very end. Oh, so you're working towards that final clear statement rather than you make the clear statement and then you evolve it.
- [92:20]
Jesse Jarno
Even if you thought you knew what kind of music Ned Legion made after listening to this episode, Cat Dreams is a whole other sound world through and through. It's great. This is called the Creek. You can find it@spiritcats.com Ned's been working on a sequel and I'm deeply looking forward to it. And as I said before, you can go deeper into Ned's history with Nedbase. We've posted links to everything@dead.net deadcast before we go, let's leave you with a time honored musical tradition. A Drummer joke.
- [93:17]
Ned Lagin
In 1970, I was in Mickey's barn with Jerry and Mickey and Phil and I said to Mickey is a drummer, a musician, is a barnacle, a ship. Because that's what we said in the jazz world. And Garcia already Jerry knew that and he said, great, Mickey. Then Drew went to my electric piano, which the COVID was off so we could do feedback and stuff. And Drew BD's shot on my electric piano in indelible ink. So the drummer had the last word on that, but it lingers on my piano like a barnacle.
- [93:57]
Jesse Jarno
BD shot was Mickey's sometimes alter ego, named for the arrangement of the drum kit on the studio mixing board at the barn. Bass drum, snare, hi hat overhead. Tom Tom. More on that some other time.
- [94:09]
Ned Lagin
While we're on the subject of Mickey, not only was Phil and Jerry so instrumental, but Mickey with letting me use his barn and helping with everything was just great and I owe him a lot for Seastones. Thank you, Mickey. Well, let me say thank you to Phil and let me say thank you to Billy and let me say thank you to Jerry and thank you to Ned.
- [94:50]
Rich Mahan
Thanks very much to Ned Lagent for being so generous with his time and taking us inside Seastones and the methods he used with the Dead to create such groundbreaking music. Thanks very much for tuning in. Please visit us over@dead.net deadcast be well, be kind. See you next episode. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast Mark Pincus and Doron Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.