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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. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season 11 of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. In this episode of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, we begin a series of episodes that dive into the massive amount of music in the upcoming Grateful Dead box set Enjoying the Ride, a limited edition 60 CD box set celebrating the Grateful Dead's 60th anniversary with unreleased performances from 20 legendary venues across the country. With the exception of a few tracks from earlier releases, virtually all of the music on Enjoying the Ride is previously unreleased, spanning more than 450 tracks and over 60 hours of music. Of the 20 shows in the collection, 17 are presented in full with some featuring additional material from the same venue. The remaining three, Fillmore West, Fillmore east and Boston Music hall are curated from multiple performances at each venue, capturing key moments on those legendary stages. This 60 CD box set is limited to 6,000 individually numbered copies. ALAC and high res FLAC downloads will also be available on the same day. Enjoying the Ride will be available on May 30th. You can pre order your copy now exclusively@dead.net if you are thinking of picking one up, do it now. It's getting close to selling out with less than 1,000 copies left. Also available on May 30, the music never stopped. It distills Enjoying the Ride into a shorter route through the band's Diamond Anniversary celebration. Featuring at least one song from every venue in the deluxe set, it offers a briefer but no less illuminating journey through the music that shaped the Grateful Dead's live legacy. It will be available on May 30 from rhino.com on three CDs, six LPs, and digitally. Make sure to visit dead.net for more info on both of these not to be missed releases. Head on over to dead.netdeadcast and check out all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons 1 through 10. You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how, where and when you like to listen. Please help the good old Grateful Dead cast by subscribing, sharing us with your friends on social media, hitting that like button and leaving us a review. Thank you very much folks. We need your tour stories. Do you have a great tour story you'd like to share? Well, do it at stories.dead.net Record yourself telling that epic road trip story or the best show you ever saw. You may just hear yourself on a future episode of the Dead cast. Make sure to record them so we can use your voice in the podcast. Thank you. We have transcripts from many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure. Head over to dead.netdeadcast index and check them out. Do you ever wish you had been at the earliest Warlock shows just as the band was getting started? Wouldn't it be great to have a time machine so you can catch the Grateful Dead at Winterland? The Bay Area, being the home of the Grateful Dead, is well represented in the upcoming box set Enjoying the Ride. And this episode we hear stories from heads that saw shows at some of the famous Bay Area venues we've all heard about for decades. Time to hop on the tour bus with Jesse Jarno.
- [04:56]
Jesse Jarno
60 years of the Grateful Dead can be sliced. A lot of 30 years of Grateful Dead music, and 30 years since the departure of Jerry Garcia. Six decades since the very first Warlock show, which may or may not have taken place at a pizza parlor, a topic we'll get to somewhere close to 2,400 live performances through 1995 by Jerry Bass, last count. But a number that's impossible to pinpoint is the amount of highway miles logged by Deadheads on tour, which is very loosely our topic for most of this Deadcast season, and more specifically, the enormous new box set. Enjoying the ride?
- [05:44]
David Lemieux
The tusks keep chucking.
- [05:46]
Jesse Jarno
Oh, please welcome back your friend and mine, Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
- [05:57]
Blair Jackson
We never really like to repeat ourselves. We never want to say, well, that worked, let's do it again. We don't work that way. Just like the Grateful Dead. It's like when they would hit upon a certain riff, they didn't play that same thing the next night that was, you know, in the rear view mirror and they're moving forward. And so it's the same sort of thing where every box set we aim to be very different.
- [06:18]
Jesse Jarno
Unless Otherwise noted. The music we're hearing today is from the new box. This truckin is from The Philadelphia Spectrum. May 13, 1978.
- [06:32]
David Lemieux
Chicago, New York, Detroit.
- [06:33]
Blair Jackson
And it's all on the same street.
- [06:35]
David Lemieux
You're typically.
- [06:42]
Blair Jackson
We've done tours, we've done runs of shows. We've done cities, St. Louis, over three years. We've done Pacific Northwest. So I started thinking about the important places the Grateful Dead played. Important, I think, to them, certainly to Deadheads. And I started thinking of our journey as Deadheads and seeing the band on the road and the places that we talked about as destinations. And some of them are the places you'd expect. The Greek, the Frost, Winterland, places like that. And then they're the places where you might not expect. Why in East Troy, Wisconsin? Why in Noblesville, Indiana? Why in places like why in Hartford, Connecticut? Why did they play so often? And why did they play so darn well? I don't have an answer for those things.
- [07:26]
Jesse Jarno
The story of the Dead and the Heads on tour is another way to look at the story of the Dead. And with shows from 1969 through 1994, so is enjoying the ride.
- [07:37]
Blair Jackson
It's three CDs from each of these 20 venues coming to 60 CDs. And in a couple of cases, where a complete Dead show from one of those venues came to two CDs, we rounded it out with a third disc of music from the same venue from a different year. So it's really a visit to each of these places. And they're all over the country. Several are in the Bay Area. There are a couple from San Francisco, a couple from Oakland. So the. The Bay Area gets four, as it probably should be. Of the venues. New York City gets one, Boston gets two.
- [08:12]
David Lemieux
Sometimes the lights all shining on me Other times I could barely see Made me look good to be.
- [08:36]
Blair Jackson
We wanted to make sure that there were Dead shows in here from all eras. And we do. We've got late 60s, through all of the 70s, through the 80s, into the 90s. We've got a few releases from the 90s in here from 91, 93, 94. It's kind of how we did it. And it really ultimately came down to once we'd chosen those venues, great music, period.
- [08:57]
Jesse Jarno
So we're going on tour with. Enjoying the Ride, more or less hopping across the regions that are celebrated on the box. We have a triple mission in these episodes, which will take us a few directions at the same time. We want to talk about the shows on the new box set, but also the venues themselves and how they related to the Dead and the Heads, a sort of long view travel guide to Dead tour. In doing so, we're also going to be loosely moving through Grateful Dead history at a few different scales. But any history of the Grateful Dead starts on the west coast, and we begin our tor leg today with a visit to the cradle of the Grateful Dead. That was the Dead at the frost amphitheater on August 20, 1983, just a short walk from where Robert Hunter once worked at St. Michael's Alley in downtown Palo Alto 20 years earlier, where an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem hung on the wall and provided the inspiration for Birdsong's first line. Nestled on the Stanford campus, the Frost Amphitheater was one of the favorite venues of both Dead and heads during the 1980s. Like all of the band shows at the Frost, the two 1983 gigs took place in the afternoon.
- [10:25]
Blair Jackson
The second show is pretty good. The first set's okay. The first night, though, we really dug in and it just had that Frost vibe. It's the band having fun playing. Well, it's got a very distinct energy. As Jerry once said about Madison Square Garden, that place is juiced. The Frost is not the that. It's the picnic back home.
- [10:45]
Jesse Jarno
Please welcome Golden Road co founder Blair Jackson.
- [10:48]
David Lemieux
The early 80s were so interesting out here because we suddenly got these fantastic venues where they would play every year. You know, they played the Greek every year, they played Frost every year, they played Ventura every year. Then a little later they added Cal Expo. They were still playing places like the Berkeley Community Theater. They played the Marin Civic Center. So there are all these smallish or really fantastically interesting venues that they were playing, and you could see them 20 or 30 times a year.
- [11:15]
Jesse Jarno
The Frost 83 tapes on the new box come from Dan Healy's Soundboard recordings, which were mixed live with a generous amount of sound from ambient audience microphones. The Frost opened in 1937, but had a checkered relationship with rock music for a while. The Dead were supposed to play there in September 1971, but the venue banned rock music, so naturally Jerry Garcia and Merle Saunders played there not long thereafter on a jazz leaning bill. But it took until the 80s for the dead to get there.
- [11:58]
David Lemieux
It seemed somewhat far away from the East Bay, but those first two shows in 82, it was practically a religious experience. Just being there just seemed like the perfect place for an outdoor Grateful Dead show. The weather was fantastic that weekend. It couldn't have been better. It had a very tiny stage compared to a lot of venues. It was kind of this small cement thing down at the bottom of the bowl, which was tree shaded and just stepped in grass and all that stuff.
- [12:29]
Jesse Jarno
Publications like the Golden Road, launched in 1984, helped spread the legend of the Frost, and rightly so.
- [12:36]
David Lemieux
It was chill, essentially. You could park anywhere. I mean, you could just pull your car over and park in a eucalyptus grove and stuff like that. And through the years they said, no, no, we can't do that anymore.
- [12:48]
Jesse Jarno
Please welcome back our friend Mr. Completely, aka Tyler Roy Hart, who you may remember levitating over the Miami arena in our Infrared Roses episode. He'll be our third eye on the ground for a lot of this season. He made it to the frost in 88.
- [13:03]
David Lemieux
I got to the next to last Frost shows, not the very final ones. I grew up on and around college campuses, right? So that part was. Was familiar to me. But Stanford is so different. It's all that kind of Spanish style architecture on the way in. And so it was both familiar and unfamiliar. Kind of exotic. In any place with trees is better than any place without trees. That's just a kind of a truism for me.
- [13:33]
Jesse Jarno
An important factor about the Frost shows is that they took place in the afternoon.
- [13:37]
David Lemieux
There was a couple of guys who had graduated from high school a couple of years ahead of me, but from my high school, who had been to all the big West Coast Dead show venues and had talked about what they were and knew all the lore. And I had heard that it was like the family venue. Like in the. Like in the small f family sense. Like if you're a Bay Area parent Deadhead, and you're gonna bring your kids to a show. I think the way I heard it described is it was the most like being at a Jerry Band show that a Dead show could be.
- [14:10]
Jesse Jarno
The scene matched the lore.
- [14:12]
David Lemieux
Getting in wasn't that bad. It wasn't insane outside like it was at the Greek, like the entry line. And the whole kind of freak out about it. Am I gonna get her in early enough to get a decent, like, ah.
- [14:26]
Jesse Jarno
Inside, the vibe was impeccable.
- [14:28]
David Lemieux
I walked in and I realized, oh, I don't want to be pushy at all here. You know, the whole east coast going to shows thing, like if you were on the floor or whatever. There was kind of an every man for himself sort of thing going on. And I just wanted to be there. And I was fine with just sort of being around the periphery and in the back.
- [14:53]
Jesse Jarno
The venue has changed a bit since the Dead played there. There's now a Roof above the stage. I've only been to the Frost once more recently, but everything Mr. Completely just said matches up to my extremely limited sample size. It's like a culture that's been imprinted on the ven. The Frost was not only the hometown venue for the dead, but for deadheads at Stanford, including the not insignificant amount of dead freak computer scientists at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Stanford Research institute in the 1970s and 1980s, a topic we got into in our long strange tech episodes, as well as in my book Heads. One of the people I interviewed in 2013 was lab director Les Earnest, who sadly passed away last summer.
- [15:57]
David Lemieux
We had some straight folks in the lab, but more hippies. I was generally pretty straight. I loosened up after coming here as.
- [16:09]
Jesse Jarno
Lab director at Sailor. Les was the inventor of the online status update, the digital tool that eventually morphed into contemporary social media. So thanks, Les. Kinda. There were lots of dead freaks at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab.
- [16:24]
David Lemieux
One of our staff members planted marijuana in the septic tank outflow area and then came to me to complain that the deer were eating it all. I said, I'm sorry, I don't think I can do much about that.
- [16:41]
Jesse Jarno
Going to see the Dead at the Frost was a tradition among the Stanford computer scientists. Before we spoke, Les told me he didn't consider himself a very serious deadhead, but he still saw them far more than the average American citizen.
- [16:53]
David Lemieux
Oh, at least one a year, maybe two or something like that. Frost and the other things, of course, you sort of bring a blanket and stretch out. Enjoy. It was very mellow and enjoyable. People were smoking all around you.
- [17:11]
Jesse Jarno
Steve Jobs and other Silicon Valley heads could sometimes be spotted there. Tapirs love the Frost too. I spoke with the legendary Doug Odie when researching my book Heads, and he brought it up.
- [17:22]
David Lemieux
The environment within which the music occurred is of course an important thing. And that would determine our microphone selection, what microphones we use, what pickup patterns. Outdoors was always my favorite. The Frost Amphitheater, Palo Alto. It's just unbelievable acoustics there. It's the most relaxed, open and natural sounding theater I've ever been in.
- [17:46]
Jesse Jarno
The all afternoon shows had a nice bonus effect. Blair Jackson.
- [17:50]
David Lemieux
One of the other great things about the Frost that somebody should say is on a beautiful day, at the end of a show, at 5:00 or 6:00, there's no place better than the Stanford campus, which is one of the most beautiful college campuses in the world, literally. And so you just see all these heads just kind of wandering around. It was Just fantastic. I mean, there are palm trees and the golden architecture of these buildings and the nice stone and the warmth in the late afternoon. It's just idyllic. And so that was a bonus somewhere to hang out when you're high after the show before you want to go home.
- [18:34]
Jesse Jarno
Not only was the Frost idyllic, but it was unquestionably the hometown venue for the Dead. And since it's the dead 60th anniversary and all, we're going to use this stopover at Stanford for a quick detour into Dead history. What's a Dead tour without detours anyway?
- [18:52]
David Lemieux
Long distance information. Give me Memphis, Tennessee, Detroit Trying to find the puppies Trying to get in touch with me.
- [19:02]
Jesse Jarno
You do not have to tell me.
- [19:05]
David Lemieux
When to call cause my uncle took.
- [19:09]
Jesse Jarno
The message and he wrote it on the wall that was Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions recorded at the Top of the tangent in 1964, about a 20 minute walk from the Frost Amphitheater, more or less across the street from the edge of the campus. We got incredibly detailed about the pre Dead years in our two recent episodes about Robert Hunter's the Silver Snarling Trumpet as well as our episode a few years back. Jerry American folkie Garcia played at the Tangent with virtually all of his early acoustic projects. Here he is with his then wife Sara Rupenthal in May 1963 from before the Dead.
- [19:48]
David Lemieux
Well, once I knew a preacher preach the Bible through and through well it went down to the poor now his preaching days are true oh sweet mama, your daddy's got them deep and I'm blue oh sweet mama, your daddy's got.
- [20:04]
Jesse Jarno
Them deep Ellen Blue the legend of the Dead, of course, is that they morphed from a jug band to the Warlocks and played their first show at Magoo's Pizza in May 1965, less than three miles west of the Frost. But there are some other perspectives on that. Did you think the Dead cast was going to let the 60th anniversary pass without getting into some obscure Warlocks history? Billy Kreutzman's memoir Deal swears that the first show took place on April 1, 1965, at the Menlo School in Atherton, a short walk from Magoo's.
- [20:37]
Connie Bonner Mosley
I don't know if I could put that in that order at all. It came after, in my opinion.
- [20:42]
Jesse Jarno
We are so honored today to welcome to the Dead cast Connie Bonner Mosley, along with her buddy Sue Swanson. Connie was one of the band's first two fans. She was a Warlocks maniac and went Back even further than that. First making friends with Bobby weir when he was just a young folkie.
- [20:59]
Connie Bonner Mosley
He would come to palo alto high school and sit on the lawn at lunchtime with his best friend at the time, Dave swank, who went to paloto high school. And so Weir would show up and they would sit and play their guitars at lunch. And that's what I remember them as, a duo. Often Joan baez would do that. She had been a palo to high school graduate.
- [21:21]
David Lemieux
I know you, ryder Gonna miss me when I'm gone I know you, ryder, you're gonna miss me when I'm gone Gonna miss your pretty mama from rolling in your arms.
- [21:47]
Connie Bonner Mosley
When the Beatles came into our lives, I went straight down to guitars unlimited and got to know the owners, rented a guitar, and I already knew Bob Weir and said I wanted him to teach me Beatles songs, which he couldn't do. He said they were. They were too hard, and we didn't know how to play. He didn't know how to play them yet, but he taught me long black veil and how to blow smoke rings across the room, because he was one of the best smoke ring blowers ever.
- [22:22]
Jesse Jarno
She roams these hills in a long.
- [22:28]
David Lemieux
Black field she visits my grave when.
- [22:35]
Jesse Jarno
The night winds wane.
- [22:40]
Connie Bonner Mosley
When I walked out of the cubicle that we're, you know, filled with smoke and taught me long black veil, Jerry was standing there with pig pants. And that was my first time meeting Jerry. And pig had been in my high school, so I had seen him in the hallway. He looked exactly like he always did when he walked into high school. Palo Alto high school. Vest buttons, you know, cap. The last time I saw him walking down the hallway. Palo Alto, the esteemed Palo Alto high school, Next door to Stanford university, where all the student. The student population were sons and daughters of the professors. He came walking down, he had a girl on each arm. We don't know where he found them. And he might have been drinking, he might not. But that was the last time I saw him in high school.
- [23:30]
David Lemieux
Seeing mama got a rub ball and sister got the tub Going around doing the rub de rub Ain't it crazy? Ain't it crazy? Ain't it crazy one day to keep on rubbing that thing?
- [23:44]
Connie Bonner Mosley
I also saw them as mother mccree's uptown champions. And this was a big transition. Really come. And they were so deep. Jerry was so deep into bluegrass, and he was so good at it and, you know, really articulate at it. Rock and roll just, like, set him free. It was really fun. It was really fun. But I have to give hats off to Chrysler for that, because he knew how to drive a rock and roll song.
- [24:11]
Jesse Jarno
And in 1965, as much or more than the founding members of the Warlocks, Connie knew rock and roll at Stanford.
- [24:19]
Connie Bonner Mosley
Which was right across the street from Paloto High School, where Billy Kreitzman's band played on Friday nights in the freshman dorms. That was fun because high school girls would go and dance with the freshman boys, and it would be like doing the twist, doing the swim, doing the monkey, you know, all those popular dance songs. And Kreisman had them down.
- [24:41]
Jesse Jarno
That could have been J. Price and the Legends, an R and B group, or maybe the Twilights, or possibly the epic instrumental group. All bands young Billy Kreutzman was involved with, or maybe even Troy Weidenheimer's Zodiacs.
- [24:55]
Connie Bonner Mosley
He would play sometimes at lunchtime out in the Paloto High School amphitheater. The band would play, but that's what their thing was, and they were tight. And Billy could drum.
- [25:04]
Jesse Jarno
Connie was at many of the Warlocks earliest practices.
- [25:07]
Connie Bonner Mosley
They didn't want to do what Crutchman's band was doing. He wanted to play Rolling Stones. And it's all over now. And I remember off the hook because Mick Jagger used to do this thing. When he sang, it's off the Hook, he would take his right hand and make this gesture like he was picking up a phone receiver. We showed that to Jerry and he started doing that and it was like it made. Just cracked us up, you know, he. He loved to have fun. That was definitely number one plan, is have fun. And so he would, you know, mimic Jagger's off the hook, you know, movement he did with his arm. I know they did a loving spoonful song. What a day for a daydream what.
- [26:15]
David Lemieux
A day for a daydream what a day for a daydreaming boy and I'm lost in a daydream Dreaming bout my.
- [26:30]
Jesse Jarno
Bundle of joy the Warlocks debuted sometime in the spring of 1965. Connie was at the very first Warlock show at Magoo's Pizza in downtown Menlo park, which will continue to date as Wednesday, May 5, 1965.
- [26:45]
Connie Bonner Mosley
They had him up against the front window. So looking towards the front window, I just remember Jerry sitting on a stool and kind of facing Weir and not looking at the audience or people eating pizza, whatever you want to call it. And afterwards I said, you know, you need to get rid of that stool and stand up and you play rock and roll. You can't play rock and roll sitting down. Looking at the drummer. And so he got rid of the stool.
- [27:13]
Jesse Jarno
Lately, the storefront that housed Magoo's has reopened as a bar called Loretta. Wednesdays are once again Warlocks nights. We have another good reason to confirm that Magoo's was the first Warlock show, because we spoke to someone who preferred a different local pizza spot.
- [27:28]
David Lemieux
I didn't hear from Magoo's, but there is a round table, and that was my go to pizza at that time and place.
- [27:38]
Jesse Jarno
Ron Petrowski was a classmate with a future warlock, having briefly attended the Menlo School with Bobby Weir, as well as future Kingfish member Matt Kelly before Weir's transfer to Menlo Atherton, where he decidedly didn't finish his high school career.
- [27:52]
David Lemieux
Matt Kelly and I were classmates. We all played football, C team below junior varsity, and Bob was a lineman.
- [28:02]
Jesse Jarno
By the spring of 1965, Ron had dropped out and back into Menlo School.
- [28:07]
David Lemieux
I dropped out and went back my senior year.
- [28:11]
Jesse Jarno
This puts us square. In the spring of 65, I was.
- [28:14]
David Lemieux
Studying for final exams in the library, and a friend of mine said that Bob Weir was in a band called the Warlocks and they were going to be playing at the student union that night. I thought, oh, that's cool.
- [28:31]
Jesse Jarno
From here we can date it a little more.
- [28:33]
David Lemieux
It was May because I was studying for finals. Graduation was June 3, so finals would have wrapped up probably by May 23, somewhere in there. And I probably saw them because I was studying for those finals and finals ran a whole week. So that would put it in the middle of May. It was probably a weekday, but it might have been like a Friday that year.
- [29:02]
Jesse Jarno
It seemed like finals would have wrapped on Friday, May 21, so the gig would have been sometime that week besides May 19, when they were at Magoo's. The next week, Phil Lesh would come down and see the band for the first time.
- [29:14]
David Lemieux
So I walked over. They had already started playing. And the student union is very small, of course, I haven't been back there since that night. The front of the building, it was a row of these glass doors with push bars on them. And you went in on the far right door. And the band was set up with their backs to the front of the. The door. I mean, all those doors, that's where they set up. And there was no stage or risers or anything. They were just standing on the floor, wires on the floor and everything. And they're probably 35 to 45 people there, maybe 50. Max wasn't real loud because it was real small. They were good for what they were doing, which was R B covers, radio hits. I'm Gonna Wait till Midnight that's what my love Mama Tumbling down Gonna wait till the midnight about the only one I remember is Midnight Hour.
- [30:48]
Jesse Jarno
That's a version from about a year later recorded at the Fillmore auditorium. Now on 30 trips around the Sun.
- [30:54]
David Lemieux
I don't remember anybody in the band. I don't remember Bobby. I don't remember Jerry. I do remember Pigpen because he sang most of the songs while I was there. I was there maybe 45 minutes. And he had this presence. It's hard to describe. He sounded like blues guys. He had this growl. It wasn't really a gravelly growl, but it was a growl. I don't remember a keyboard at all, but when he was playing harmonica, he was kind of lurching around. He was like the lead man of the band.
- [31:35]
Jesse Jarno
Connie Mosley was there too.
- [31:37]
Connie Bonner Mosley
Yeah, it wasn't good. Wasn't any fun. It was. It's a prep college. Prep for wealthy young. People would come from Chile, Colombia, Egypt, Lebanon, Europe.
- [31:51]
David Lemieux
They came.
- [31:52]
Connie Bonner Mosley
They think they had money to send their boys. And I'm only remembering boys.
- [31:58]
David Lemieux
As I recall, there wasn't much dancing. People were mostly standing around just watching them play.
- [32:04]
Jesse Jarno
Another Menlo School student, though almost certainly gone by then, was Robbie Krieger. Soon to co found the Doors back in la. The Menlo School didn't transition into a co ed school until 1979.
- [32:17]
Connie Bonner Mosley
Just was uptight. Didn't feel very good to not have any girls there. But it could have been a matter of five days later they were at Magoo's. But I know Magoo's was a big hit. Different vibe? Totally.
- [32:29]
Jesse Jarno
Generally, the Warlocks played Wednesday evenings at Magoo's.
- [32:33]
Connie Bonner Mosley
I remember kind of like a Saturday afternoon. They might have played a little earlier because the sidewalk was packed with high school kids, teenagers from wherever they came from. And they neighboring shops shut it down. They called the cops and said, oh, you can't have all these people crowding the sidewalks and blocking our business and shut it down. So that was the end of that. You know, they'd all peering in the window watching the band play where they couldn't fit any more people in the pizza parlor. It was great. It was so much fun.
- [33:07]
Jesse Jarno
During our Phil cast earlier this season, we heard the story of how Phil came down to Magoo's to see the Warlocks a few weeks after seeing the Stones at the Cow palace and came to replace Dana Morgan Jr. On bass. A move that got the band evicted from Their rehearsal space at the music store that at least according to public records, Dana Morgan Jr actually co owned with his father.
- [33:29]
Connie Bonner Mosley
That was what we could do as friends. Let's help them out and also give them a place to rehearse. My parents living room, Sue's backyard, wherever they needed a place they could rehearse. My parents were gone and weren't coming home till the next day. And then my mom walked in the front door and actually my pigpen saw her coming out from the car with luggage and opened the door for her. Because he's the kindest heart you'd ever meet. And helped my mom get. My mom was totally enraptured by his help and who what he was doing in her house. And he was exactly the same. And she loved him because people loved Pig. He just had the biggest heart in the world. They just kindest heart.
- [34:20]
Jesse Jarno
Sue and Connie also became the band's very first roadies.
- [34:23]
Connie Bonner Mosley
They didn't have cars except for Chrysmith who always had his own. He took his own drum kit. Weird. Turned 16. His parents wouldn't let him drive. And then three months later I turned 16 and I could get my mom's car. And then a couple months after that sue turned 16 and she got a car for her birthday so we could haul him around. Somebody had to do it. They didn't have a ride anywhere. Hunter's car had broke down. I mean they just didn't have any way to get around.
- [34:53]
Jesse Jarno
The band got an upgrade.
- [34:54]
Connie Bonner Mosley
Bob Matthews got the first sort of All I want to think of is what an old milk truck. But when he got that, then oh well, we didn't have to borrow mom's car anymore.
- [35:05]
Jesse Jarno
I could listen to warlock stories all day. And hopefully we'll have more tales with Connie Bonner Mosley in the future. A few years later she would co found the band's official fan club. And she remains a hardcore Deadhead to this day. Ron Petrowski never saw the Warlocks again. But he saw lots and lots of Grateful Dead shows.
- [35:24]
David Lemieux
The Kaiser became a favorite. And then outdoor venues. The Greek and Frost. The shows at the Frost they were big fun being on the Stanford campus. I don't know if they sold beer.
- [35:37]
Jesse Jarno
These were all venues we'll be talking about during these episodes. If you saw the Dead at any of them, you might have been shoulder to shoulder with some fans who'd seen the Warlocks.
- [35:46]
David Lemieux
I was just a regular schmo with a ticket though.
- [35:50]
Jesse Jarno
The band themselves left the area in early 1966, moving to LA with the Merry Pranksters, their first shows at the Frost in the 1980s reconnected them with their old stomping grounds in Palo Alto and Menlo Park. But by the end of the decade, with the success of Touch of Grey, the band had outgrown the place back over to Blair Jackson in 87.
- [36:12]
David Lemieux
Just the scene outside was so big, there would be like literally a couple of thousand people in the forests around the eucalyptus groves around the show, hanging out and trying to sell stuff or whatever. I wouldn't say it was a huge surprise when 89 became the last year just because it was overpopulated outside.
- [36:31]
Jesse Jarno
Nearby, Bill Graham was working on the problem and in 1986 unveiled the solution. Located an easy bike ride from downtown Palo Alto or a not always so easy drive from San Francisco. We bring you now to Shoreline Amphitheater in mountain view. In 1991, we'll let a Deadhead TV report from 1988 be our local correspondent. We've linked to the full segment@dead.net deadcast.
- [37:25]
David Lemieux
The Shoreline Amphitheater was built by Bill Graham and the city of Mountain View with the support of private investors. The amphitheater holds over 22,000 people and.
- [37:34]
Jesse Jarno
Features state of the art video screen technology. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
- [37:39]
Blair Jackson
Bill Graham very famously designed Shoreline with Deadheads in mind, which is to say the parking, the access to parking, the access to the venue, the concessions, all of the things that Deadheads liked, which is to say space, ease of getting places, you know, kind security. The blue coats of Bill Graham. Interestingly, the Dead were scheduled to open the place at 86, but Jerry with his diabetic coma, they canceled those shows and the opener ended up being Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. And then finally a year Later, October of 87, the dead were able to debut at Shoreline. What we chose is I, I think a magnificent show From May of 91 with the Vince Welnick and Bruce Hornsby iteration of the Grateful Dead. And what a show. The first set is in my opinion, probably one of the best first sets the Dead played in the 90s where it's relentlessly good. The Picasso Moon, which I know isn't everybody's song, I love it. That Picasso Moon is so head and shoulders above any other.
- [39:17]
Jesse Jarno
And that's just the opening song. The first set also had a bust out when Jerry Garcia left, turned from Cici Rider into a Bob Dylan favorite he hadn't sung for a half dozen years and not with the dead since 73.
- [39:35]
David Lemieux
Now your next go. I drive up a man Chain mama Can't find a film I'm in a mama.
- [39:59]
Blair Jackson
That takes a lot to laugh the deal at the end I've DJed some Grateful Dead party things and I mix it up all the time, but there's a few always go to's, and one of my go to's is that deal on this show.
- [40:44]
Jesse Jarno
Because of its location in the Bay Area, Shoreline became something of a mythical spot for Deadheads. So mythical that it's long been rumored to look like a steal your face logo from above, which it doesn't really.
- [40:57]
David Lemieux
When Till that deal come round don't.
- [41:00]
Jesse Jarno
You let that deal go down Wait.
- [41:04]
David Lemieux
Until that deal come round don't you let that deal go down Wait until that deal come round don't let that deal go down Wait until that deal.
- [41:19]
Jesse Jarno
Come round but despite its location in the heart of Dead country, now adjacent to the headquarters of Google, it wasn't always the Deadhead's favorite venue. Tyler Roy Hart I was at the.
- [41:30]
David Lemieux
Very first shoreline shows in 87, which I really enjoyed, though all the west coast heads all hated it. As Dead Heads arrived, they found some.
- [41:41]
Jesse Jarno
Of the dustiest parking in America.
- [41:44]
David Lemieux
Water trucks tried in vain to keep the dust under control. Short shoreline actually charged $4 to park in this mess. That was during the days of Dead at the dump. That was the famous sticker. And I remember hearing all the rumors about that you could light the garbage methane on fire up on the lawn.
- [42:06]
Jesse Jarno
That wasn't just myth. Shoreline was built on a former dump. It was perhaps for the best that Deadheads weren't the ones to break in the venue. According to newspaper reports, during its opening season, several fires erupted on the amphitheater's lawn due to a combination of cigarette lighters and methane leaks, notably at a Santana gig.
- [42:38]
David Lemieux
I never saw that, so I was skeptical of it, but okay, that's a real thing. That's funny. So I didn't mind Shoreline because I was used to fucking east coast dumps. I was used to hockey arenas and.
- [42:53]
Jesse Jarno
Stadiums for west coast heads. Used to the general admission paradises at the Frost and the Greek and even Winterland and the Kaiser Convention Center. Shoreline was kind of harsh. Blair Jackson through the whole golden road.
- [43:06]
David Lemieux
Years, we developed a large group of folks who would go to shows together. We were a group of like 15 or 14 or something like that. So we were all kind of. Shoreline kind of split us all up.
- [43:17]
Jesse Jarno
Mr. Completely with the counterpoint.
- [43:20]
David Lemieux
So the idea of here's this custom built music only outdoor amphitheater. And yeah, the lawn's A little steep and it's hard to get into the pavilion where the sound is really great. But it didn't seem that bad to me. I thought it was kind of cool. And that was before, not long before, but just before all the big similar venues on the east coast were built. Blair what sheds did to the rock and roll, sort of having everybody just being able to wander out and get their beer and which they did and came back with it. And then they talked to their friends for an hour.
- [43:56]
Jesse Jarno
They did vibe the place up a bit.
- [43:58]
David Lemieux
One year, or maybe it was even two years, somebody brought a bungee jumping concern, you know, it was right, sort of right. Right outside the gates, near backstage and stuff like that. I remember seeing a guy in a dancing bear suit going off the bungee.
- [44:13]
Jesse Jarno
Jumping thing in the early years, after cordoning off special vending lot at the Greek in Berkeley and elsewhere, Bill Graham tried a new experiment at Shoreline, creating what was one of the first official vending scenes.
- [44:26]
David Lemieux
Unlike most venues, the colorful vending area was inside the gates of Shoreline. Vendors paid a hefty $300 for the privilege of setting up their booths on the grassy lawn.
- [44:37]
Jesse Jarno
Deadhead TV knew what was up, though. The real scene, though, was outside on.
- [44:42]
David Lemieux
A small strip of lawn between the parking lot.
- [44:45]
Jesse Jarno
As Blair Jackson pointed out, Deadheads in California didn't necessarily have to leave California in order to see many shows a year. But Deadheads from outside California often traveled there with the express purpose of seeing the Dead and sometimes catching some Jerry Garcia band shows while they were at it. Tyler Royhart.
- [45:04]
David Lemieux
Then I went back in 90 in the middle of that June tour, that weekends only June tour, which was fascinating, where there were Jerry shows at the Warfield on the weekdays in between the weekend Dead shows, which is a cool way to tour. I got my first Warfield show as part of that run. That was amazing.
- [45:27]
Jesse Jarno
Another beloved Dead venue not represented on this box was the Ventura County Fairgrounds, where the dead played between 1982 and 1987. One deadhead I miss very much is the late Eric Schwartz, the incomparable host of Lone Star Dead. I spoke with him for my book Heads and often have to stop myself from emailing him with some silly question. Incidentally, we absolutely don't endorse you trying this next trick at home, let alone on the road. I'm pretty sure he's referring to the summer of 1983 here, leading up to the Frost Amphitheater show that's now on the Box in between tour.
- [46:01]
David Lemieux
It was like Santa Cruz was the place to go because the food stamp laws were so lax that you could walk into the office if you had three weeks off from tour and you were waiting from between Ventura to go to Frost, you could walk in and say, look, I have no money. I've never had money. I don't see any money in my future, and I'm hungry. And they would say, okay, here's a bag of beans and a five pound block of Regan cheese and potatoes and carrots. And in a couple weeks, we'll assign you a P.O. box at Bonny Doon beach and you go and you'll get your food stamps. And then we, you know, a week later we'd get our food stamps and go buy Mrs. Renfro's salsa and a bag of chips and sour cream. And then, you know, we'd try to get whatever we could buy so that our change was. Our price was like. Because they couldn't give you change in food stamps if it was under a dollar. So you just like keep buying $2.01 purchases till you have enough for beer. You go pay for your beer with your change and then go back to the beach. It was pretty hysteric, but it was a pretty big scam, I think. I think a lot of Deadheads wound up just going to Santa Cruz for food stamps for a couple weeks and, and getting beer money out of the. Dealing cigarette money.
- [47:47]
Jesse Jarno
Of course. The Grateful Dead are also rightly known as the San Francisco Band, though they didn't really become a San Francisco band until more than a year into their career, moving into their communal home at 710 Ashbury in the late summer of 1966. By the next year, it was a tourist destination In Haight Ashbury.
- [48:06]
David Lemieux
Doors are for letting people in, not keeping them out in an apartment like this. The doors swing open often. Here live the Grateful Dead, a popular rock group whose bachelor home life ranges from the bizarre to the beatific.
- [48:21]
Jesse Jarno
The dead made 710 Ashbury their headquarters more or less until 1968, gradually filtering north to Marin county after getting busted in late 1967. The band's free concert in March 1968 was their last splash as neighborhood residents, though of course they're associated with it today. David Lemieux first time I went to.
- [48:42]
Blair Jackson
See the Dead in California was New Year's 88 with the TomTom Club opening at the Oakland Coliseum. And I was. I just turned 18. My lady friend had just turned 17. So we flew out to California from Ottawa. I remember we flew on Christmas Day, which didn't go over too well with my family, but it was the only cheap flight we could get. And that was when they did a three night run 28:29 and New Year's Eve at the Coliseum.
- [49:07]
Jesse Jarno
The New Year shows from the following year are repped on. Enjoying the ride.
- [49:41]
Blair Jackson
I definitely did the Dead Heads tour of the Bay Area as much as we were able. These places were important places to the Dead's history. We all knew where they were and we certainly weren't alone. We'd walk up to, you know, 710 and there'd definitely be other Deadheads out there getting their pictures taken.
- [49:58]
Jesse Jarno
Located near Golden Gate Park's panhandle where the band played numerous free shows in 1967 and 1968, 710 Ashbury is a great starting point for all kinds of miniature walking tours, rambles and adventures. The Haight famously got a little sketchy by the early 70s, but has also revived itself a good deal too. Amoeba Records, across from the site of the former Straight Theater, is a crucial stop. Shout out to Booksmith too. One easy walk is about a mile over to 2400 Fulton, the Jefferson Airplanes mansion where they moved in 1968. Our buddy Ned Lagin visited them there in the early 70s.
- [50:37]
David Lemieux
When I first met Grace and Paul, they were living across from Golden Gate Park. They had in their living room a torture rack with a stuffed seal and I was sitting with them in their bedroom where they had a salad bowl that could have fed like 12 Marines filled with pot. So I felt this thing under the bed that I was sitting on or the futon that I was sitting on and I looked under there and there was a white rabbit.
- [51:22]
Jesse Jarno
There's also the option of dissolving to Golden Gate Park. If you follow one path through the park, you might find yourself at the former site of Kezar Stadium where the Dead played in 1973 and 1975. Now on the Here Comes Sunshine and Beyond Description box sets respectively. Or Lindley Meadows where they played in September 1975. Now on the 30 trips box.
- [52:01]
David Lemieux
The correct pronunciation of this tassoon is Truckin.
- [52:17]
Jesse Jarno
Or the Polo Field, site of the 1967 human being, a free gig with the airplane in 69 and their last gig in the park at the Bill Graham Memorial in 1991. There's also the Bison paddock. Don't get lost staring at the bisons or you know, do. Or perhaps you'll make it through to the Windmills and the Pacific at the far side of the park and see the spot where the family dog on the Great highway once stood across from the ocean. Ron Petrowski, who spoke about the Warlocks earlier, loved this spot.
- [53:11]
David Lemieux
I really liked the Family Dog on the Great Highway. That was a great, great venue. It was small and when you walked out, the ocean was across the highway. The fog was always in. You didn't have to worry about parking and this and that.
- [53:29]
Jesse Jarno
It was easy in terms of chill scenes to have fun. The Family Dog's various locations are high on my list of venues I wish I could time travel to. Established as a collective in 1965, one of the original founders, Lauria Castell, actually lived at 7:10 Ashbury before the Dead. The Family Dog originally shared the Fillmore Auditorium with Bill Graham before setting up camp at the Avalon Ballroom there through early 1969, creating a reputation for shows that were far chiller than Bill Graham Productions but didn't pay the bands quite as much. They were gone by the Dead's final gigs there in April 1969, booked by some ex family Doggists represented on Enjoying the Ride with a bonus cassette. That summer of 69, Chet Helms reopened Across from the Ocean on the Great Highway. A story unto itself. This is from Night at the family dog in February 1970.
- [54:24]
David Lemieux
I know you might gonna miss me When I gonna miss your baby from running in your.
- [54:54]
Jesse Jarno
Or you could take the route David Lemieux took, headed east towards downtown.
- [54:59]
Blair Jackson
We always went to Haight Ashbury, always. And then we went to the Psychedelic Shop which I believe was on Market Street.
- [55:06]
Jesse Jarno
The original psychedelic shop opened by the Thalen Brothers briefly operated in the Haight during the period when the Dead lived there. Michael Van Dyke opened its successor on Market street in 1976 where it occupied two different locations over the next 20 years.
- [55:21]
Blair Jackson
I walked into the Psychedelic Shop and I remember buying a couple of huge, like maybe like bed sheets. Like queen size bed sheets. Tie dyed. They were blue. Tie dyed blue. And for years, I mean 20 or 15 years later, when I moved to California or 12 years later, I still had them and they became my curtains at my house in San Anselmo.
- [55:43]
Jesse Jarno
These tie dyed sheets going from 7:10 to the psychedelics Shop would send you past various other Dead locales, most notably at the corner of Marketed Van Ness. Most of the world now knows it as the Fillmore West. Opened in 1927 as El Patio Ballroom for swingin jazz. Bill Fuller changed the name to the carousel ballroom in 1963 when it hosted Irish music and the occasional gig by Johnny Cash, who returned in 1968 after the dead, Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver messenger service took it over.
- [56:25]
David Lemieux
I showed the cloud with a cover up a clear blue sky and tears I cried for that moment Are gonna flood you big river and I. I'm gonna sit right here until I die.
- [56:38]
Jesse Jarno
You can hear the rest on Bear. Sonic Journals, Johnny Cash at the Carousel. For the first part of 1968, the carousel was under the managerial auspices of Ron Rackow. Tell us about that rack.
- [56:50]
David Lemieux
Oh, the carousel. That's very interesting. There was a dance hall, and no one had it except this old Irish guy, Fuller, who lived in Ireland. And he put Irish dances on, you know, regular American music dances on, I think, Saturday, Friday and Saturday night. And 40 or 50 old people used to come and dance around. And, you know, I got a hold of Rohan, Brian Rohan, who was an attorney, and we made a deal with them. But the deal got. The deal got fucked up. From the very first, Rohan didn't understand anything. It was amazing. Ralph Gleason wrote the newspaper column on that kind of music at the Chronicle. He called it the worst lease in show business. And it was. And it wasn't designed to be, but it just was. And then I was so far into it, I called Ramrod, who was there at the carousel knocking down shit so that the. The Grateful, they could play this. This is like Wednesday on Friday. And I said, you know, the lease is up. He said, I don't care. Do it anyway. It'll give us something. Do it anyway. I don't know why I chose to take my business advice from Ramrod, who never had anything even approaching the business in his life. But that's what happened. You know, there are things that happen around the Grateful Dead that are inexplicable, but not to the. Not the Grateful Dead people.
- [58:31]
Jesse Jarno
Later in the year, Bill Graham flew to Ireland, renegotiated the lease with Bill Fuller, moved out of the Fillmore Auditorium, and reopened the carousel as the Fillmore west in summer 1968. We've talked a lot about the Fillmore west over the course of this podcast, so for a deeper dive into its history, we'd point you towards our closing of the Fillmore west episode from season three, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast to set the vibe slightly, though, here's our buddy Michael Parish.
- [59:00]
David Lemieux
It's such an unlikely setting because, you know, I was there at Market in Van Ness, and it was over the Buick dealership. So, I mean, you've seen the pictures of people lined up and they go around the block down Van Ness, and you walk in and it's this really narrow staircase. And then you walk up the stairs.
- [59:21]
Jesse Jarno
And they take your tickets upstairs. It can be pretty chill for a rock ballroom.
- [59:26]
David Lemieux
And then you walk in and it's this really dark, long, kind of relatively low room. Most people are just sitting on the floor. I never even tried the sofas, but they didn't look like something you'd want to sit on. And then up in the back was where the light show set up at the very back of the hall.
- [59:44]
Jesse Jarno
There's a little bit of footage of people chilling at the Fillmore sitting on the floor. In the recent Led Zeppelin documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin. In Late February, early March 1969, about a month after Zeppelin played there, the band played four shows at the Fillmore west that became the core of Live Dead. And in June, they returned for another four. June 5th through 8th.
- [60:33]
David Lemieux
She's on the other side now she's gone.
- [60:46]
Jesse Jarno
David Lemieux.
- [60:47]
Blair Jackson
It is that classic Live Dead sound, just as the Grateful Dead were on the cusp of transitioning into the Working Man's Dead sound. If you kind of look at the primal Dead era defined by Live dead in the 1968 sound, and then the Americana dead, the Working Man's Dead, it's really June of 69 where they start transitioning. It's the very tail end of prime where they could still pull off a Live Dead version of Dark Star.
- [61:16]
David Lemieux
Shall we go, you and I While.
- [61:22]
Jesse Jarno
We begin.
- [61:29]
David Lemieux
Through the transitive night.
- [61:43]
Blair Jackson
It'S recorded by Bear. It's, you know, Bear's recordings are so unique. They're so crystal clear in terms of the mixes. They're not particularly wet and, you know, blended in together. You can really hear what everything is, what every. Everyone's doing.
- [62:27]
Jesse Jarno
The Americana is starting to come in. The June 7 show begins with the very first version of Direwolf, a story we told back on the first season of the Dead cast.
- [62:42]
David Lemieux
The wounds are running around the winter was so hot and cold froze 10ft neath the ground don't murder me, I beg of you don't murder me Please.
- [62:57]
Jesse Jarno
Don'T murder me this particular run of film or shows had a few different issues that required editing. Right at this very moment, you're missing.
- [63:06]
David Lemieux
Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan's singing beautiful duets on the TV.
- [63:14]
Jesse Jarno
In color.
- [63:16]
David Lemieux
All this is going on in the back room.
- [63:20]
Blair Jackson
The recordings have problems in certain places. There's a prominent squeal at certain points that we can't do anything about on the master recordings. But what Geoffrey Norman and Plangent was able to. I don't Wanna even say salvage, but they salvaged almost four hours of incredible music from this four night run. We used three of the nights, but.
- [63:42]
Jesse Jarno
Not all of the problems were strictly technical.
- [63:46]
David Lemieux
One guitar player is pretty much like another, you know how it is.
- [63:49]
Jesse Jarno
That's very convincing, Phil. In 1969, Bill Graham still alternated early and late shows with three bands rotating over the course of the night. This becomes relevant because on the middle night, Jerry Garcia stepped out between the early and late shows, returned late and found that Bill Graham had replaced him. On stage with the Dead was Wayne Cabelos of the band om. Garcia eventually arrived, alright, no problem. But that set isn't exactly box set material. And then the last night of the run there was the apple juice.
- [64:35]
David Lemieux
I mean I just, I wet my lips on that.
- [64:37]
Jesse Jarno
And that's all because I heard a good nose and I got really stubbed. This is Jerry Garcia Speaking with Dennis McNally now in the Jerry on Jerry audiobook from Hachette, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast Phil had to be led on stage by Mickey. Oh, I don't even know if we played that night. Yeah, we played. Yeah, we played. We were out of it. I mean, that was bad. We went into some detail about this night back in the first season of the Dead cast because this was the night that Robert Hunter got megadosed, leading to the writing of Black Peter and some other songs, a topic too broad to get into today. We've linked to that episode@dead.net deadcast so then knocked the band out of commission for the late show on the final night. But what's left is some great music. In 1971, Bill Graham decided he'd outgrown both the Fillmores east and west. Around the corner from the Fillmore Auditorium at the corner of Steiner and Post was winterland. Opened in 1928 as the new Dreamland Auditorium, it became Winterland in 1939, home to San Francisco's Ice Follies. The Dead first played there in 1967, but gigged there especially between 71 and 78. We've hung out at Winterland a bunch on the Dead cast, most especially in our Ship of Fools episode, partly about the so called farewell shows in October 1974.
- [66:57]
David Lemieux
Blair Jackson the Grateful Dead movie captures it so beautifully. I think in every respect that movie captures the Grateful Dead better than any anything anybody will ever write or podcast or whatever. That is the essence of the Grateful Dead and it captures Winterland really, really well.
- [67:17]
Jesse Jarno
The show on the new box is technically the first show of spring 1977, March 20th.
- [67:39]
Blair Jackson
David Lemieux the March Wincheland run is great for the most part, but maybe not throughout, whereas the March 20 show, it's a show that we've always had on our radar as kind of the next thing we want to do from the spring of 77, because they played three runs there in 77, they played the March, June and December runs. And they're all very different.
- [68:01]
Jesse Jarno
The Winterland facility may have seen better days, but it was home. Bill Graham organized pickup basketball games and other wholesome pre show activities on the floor of the Fillmore west. And it institutionalized even more at Winterland.
- [68:14]
David Lemieux
They would have a volleyball game and, you know, they would give tickets to the team from the Deadheads could beat them, they'd win tickets to New Year's Eve. You know, it's what they would do pre New Year's at the shows. They would never dare do that at New Year's. But yeah, it was cool. It was just one of those little Bill Graham touches.
- [68:29]
Jesse Jarno
Blair Jackson was a Winterland regular.
- [68:31]
David Lemieux
I was always slightly oversold, but if you had a spot, which we did, I developed this spot where we tried to go always kind of on the. On the left hand side, like eight or nine rows up in the. In the lower balcony. That was. That was my sweet spot. But sometimes I'd be behind the stage because that's where the only place we could find a spot. And that was always fun and in its own way, you're kind of looking down at the crowd. And the sound was always decent enough because they had speakers back there. It felt very warm and familial always.
- [69:03]
Jesse Jarno
March 20, 1977 was a Sunday and the volleyball was almost certainly in full effect at Winterland before the show. David Lemieux.
- [69:12]
Blair Jackson
It's on the cusp of spring, late winter 77, and it's recorded by Betty. It's a magnificent show and it's incredibly high energy. It almost has an east coast vibe to it. They're trying to blow the roof off the place. Really good Grateful Dead music. Estimated Profit as a standalone, you know, it hadn't started branching off.
- [69:53]
Jesse Jarno
They played Estimated Profit all three nights at Winterland, the third, fourth and fifth versions. One of the brand new songs they were working on that spring for Terrapin Station. The first night of the run, March 18, they properly debuted Fire on the Mountain.
- [70:08]
David Lemieux
Fire, Fire on the Mountain Fire, Fire on the Mountain.
- [70:19]
Jesse Jarno
And at this March 20th show, there's one last standalone version of Scarlet Begonias before they pretty Much permanently attached it to. And every show of the run featured Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter's brand new epic Terrapin Station, appearing for the first time as an encore. Quite a statement for a new song. Station in the Shadow of the Moon.
- [71:36]
David Lemieux
European Station.
- [71:40]
Jesse Jarno
Winterland is sometimes called Winterland arena, and certainly the Ice Foleys used it, continuing to appear there all the way through 1976. Deadheads loved the place the last five days.
- [71:51]
David Lemieux
Sleeping outside for those maniacs. We want to thank you very much for being here every night.
- [71:56]
Jesse Jarno
Before we get into this next story, though, I want to emphasize that people who saw shows at Winterland weren't only Deadheads. Sometimes they just went to Winterland because it was fun. Ron Petrowski, who saw the Warlocks, saw lots of bands.
- [72:08]
David Lemieux
There were other bands that I liked as well, considering the fun factor. Young LUDs were a lot of fun. Joey Cooking were a lot of fun. Dan Hicks and Hot Licks were a lot of fun. Commander Cody, you know, this is a little bit later. They were big time fun.
- [72:31]
Jesse Jarno
Ron was also a Winterland regular.
- [72:33]
David Lemieux
I really miss Winterland. I can't believe they tore that down. Fun is like a key word.
- [72:42]
Jesse Jarno
Last season, when we were focusing on the dead spring 1978 shows, I started researching a fairly historic event that occurred at Winterland during its waning days. At first I thought it might have taken place at a Dead show, though research showed otherwise. And while it's not a Dead story, I also feel confident in saying that the story wouldn't have happened without them both as an influence on the band performing at the time and on the world they helped create. It's also a story that could have only occurred because it took place at a general admission venue. The circumstances were entirely created by the vibe of an open floor and people dancing side by side and sometimes together. It couldn't have happened at Shoreline. It's a Winterland story in every way, and since it's an important and mostly unknown part of people's history, we're going to include it here and because it gives an alternative perspective on Winterland.
- [73:34]
David Lemieux
So I'm Gilbert Baker. I'm a vexillographer. Vexillography is the making of flags. And I love to sew. That's my craft.
- [73:41]
Jesse Jarno
We're going to be hearing from two interviews with the late activist Gilbert Baker, one from 2009 and one from 2012. He arrived in San Francisco in the early 1970s, serving in the army, where he was stationed in the Presidio. By the mid-70s, he was doing occasional work for Bill Graham and other local promoters.
- [74:00]
David Lemieux
And I did many shows for the Airplane and the Starship out in the park and the whole hippie Summer of Love thing. Chet Helms was a very cool close friend of mine. Dancing really, to me is the like music. It's a form of expression that's so freeing and liberating. And for our generation, it's so pivotal.
- [74:22]
Jesse Jarno
Gilbert Baker was also part of the city's flourishing gay community.
- [74:25]
David Lemieux
I lived in San Francisco and in 1978 it was an incredible place to be. Harvey Milk was alive and my friend and great inspiration and teacher to all of us. And it was a time of incredible empowerment and, and political organizing and community building and artistic expression. So Harvey was always like, oh, we have to have a new logo. And we talked a lot about the pink triangle. The pink triangle was the dominant symbol that we used, but it came from the Nazis. It was put on us. And you know, it had a really horrible negative origin about murder and holocaust. And Harvey was Jewish, so he always kind of liked me. It doesn't really work.
- [75:03]
Jesse Jarno
Enter Winterland. This is what Gilbert Baker wrote about Winterland in his memoir, Rainbow People. The Winterland Ballroom at Steiner and Post was our favorite playground. I love the discos and the stud bar, but we went to Winterland to hear live rock and roll music in the broken down plaster Palace. The crowd was as much a part of the show as the band. Everyone was there. North beach beatniks and Barrio Z. The bored bikers in black leather. Teenagers in the back row kissing. There were long haired, lithe girls in belly dance getups. Pink haired punks, safety pinned together. Hippie suburbanites, movie stars so beautiful that they left you dumbstruck. Muscle gay boys with perfect mustaches, butch dykes in blue jeans and fairies of all genders in thrift store dresses. We rode the mirrored ball on glittering LSD and love power dance fused us magical and cleansing. We were all in a swirl of color and light.
- [76:02]
David Lemieux
I remember being at Winterland, which was the great rock palace up on Sutter Street. Seeing Patti Smith, I loved her and you know, everyone joining hands and dancing in circles. And really that informed the idea, wow, we're a rainbow of people. And it came from those kinds of incredible moments of dancing, the colors and all of all of that music.
- [76:48]
Jesse Jarno
Gilbert Baker's vision of the rainbow flag occurred on May 13, 1978, seeing Patti Smith and her band at Winterland. But it was a vision born of San Francisco.
- [76:58]
David Lemieux
All of that San Francisco ness, if you will, really is woven deeply into the Rainbow Flag for me forever. You know, I just. I cherish that. I right away realized, well, obviously it goes to the Native American culture. It's very, very prominent in island culture. And I began to understand how the rainbow in history was used as a symbol of hope, was used as a symbol of liberation in some cases. So it really had a history. Living in San Francisco, the Haight Ashbury and the whole hippie psychedelic movement, which I was heavily influenced by, all of that played into my mind. The hair coming out around the world Ready for the brand new be. Spring is here, Time is right or dancing in the street. They're dancing in Chicago.
- [78:06]
Jesse Jarno
That was the Dead at Winterland, April 1970. On the Thirty Trips box set. Gilbert Baker debuted the Rainbow Flag during Pride festivities in June 1978, about a month after the Patti Smith show. It's not a direct part of Dead history, but adjacent enough, especially given Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye's confirmed status as Dead freaks. In fact, they opened for the Dead almost exactly a year later, May 12, 1979, in Amherst. By then, Winterland was a recent memory. While the Dead were moving back into sports arenas in the rest of the country, Winterland wasn't a sports arena in the modern sense. By the end of 1978, Bill Graham was ready to move on.
- [78:48]
David Lemieux
Sometime later next month, we're going to be leaving this place. And we've been here for a long, long time. And we wanted to take a minute to let you know that we know what you know about these people. They're not the best at what they do. They're the only ones who do what they do. The Grateful Dead.
- [79:04]
Jesse Jarno
The Dead played the venue's final night, December 31, 1978, which you can hear and watch as the closing of Winterland.
- [79:12]
David Lemieux
Lay down, my dear brothers Lay down and take your rest I want you Lay you king upon my savior's pray I love you I bid you good night Good night, good night.
- [79:43]
Jesse Jarno
Listener Dominic Stefano left us this story about that night in 1978.
- [79:49]
David Lemieux
Me and my good buddy Tony, we went to the closing of Winterland, famous arena that the Dead held court at in San Francisco, as we always did every year for the New Year shows. And it's a mind boggling event, the whole thing. You've got the Blues Brothers with Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi playing Flying Karamazov Brothers. It's a wild thing.
- [80:15]
Jesse Jarno
But you never knew who were going to run into Undead Tour.
- [80:18]
David Lemieux
The best part for me was we were staying at the Miyako Hotel up the street. So there's a Japanese hotel and there's a Japanese band. Three girls drum, a bass and a guitar, and we're drinking Harvey Wall Bangers. And Bill Kreutzman walks in, sits down, takes over the drum. And he's playing in the Miyako bar with this little band. And so that's the way. The way that we essentially rock out the end of 78 was listening to Bill play the drums in a little bar in a Japanese restaurant up the street from the closing of Winterland, one of the greatest places in the world.
- [81:02]
Jesse Jarno
Goodbye, Winterland.
- [81:04]
David Lemieux
But if it's okay with you, we'll just leave the stage here. We'll serve you breakfast. Let's put some music on. We'll just see what happens. You can stay as long as you like.
- [81:14]
Jesse Jarno
The Dead would play San Francisco again at places they loved, including their famous run at the Warfield in 1980. And they'd play places they felt less allegiance to, like the San Francisco Civic center for a few New Year's runs. But they'd never again have someplace inside city limits that felt quite like home. For that, they'd have to venture across the bay, which is where we'll be headed next time.
- [81:37]
David Lemieux
Thank you for calling the Grateful Dead hotline number.
- [81:40]
Connie Bonner Mosley
This is a new message.
- [81:41]
Jesse Jarno
As of 24th, the Grateful Dead will.
- [81:45]
David Lemieux
Be playing at the Oakland Coliseum arena.
- [81:47]
Jesse Jarno
In Oakland, California on December 15th, 16th and 17th. There are still plenty of tickets available.
- [81:55]
David Lemieux
Through all bass ticket centers.
- [81:58]
Jesse Jarno
See you there.
- [82:26]
Rich Mahan
Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. Friends, we'd like to thank our guests in this episode. Connie Bonner, Moseley, Ron Rakow, Ned Lagin, Ron Petorowski, Tyler Roy Hart, Les Earnest, Doug Odie, Eric Schwartz, Blair Jackson, Michael Parrish, Dominic Stefano and David Lemieux. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast David Ganz, for your ongoing contributions of audio from your interview archive. Thank you, David. Executive producer for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Doran Tyson. All rights reserved.