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- [00:05]
Rich Mahan
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 10 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 wrap up our look at the new Grateful Dead box set Friend of the Devils and head to the April 16, 1978 show in Huntington, West Virginia. This new limited edition Friend of the Devils is almost sold out and with good reason. The band was playing great in spring 78 and as the name suggests, this 19 CD box set features eight unreleased concerts showing the rise of drums space as second set traditions. Friend of the Devil's April 1978 includes complete shows from Curtis Hickson Convention hall in Tampa, Florida on 46 the Sportatorium in Pembroke Pines, Florida on 47 Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Jacksonville on 48 the Fox Theater in Atlanta, Georgia for two shows on 410 and 411 Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke University. That's the one with the great video from 412 Castle Coliseum in Virginia and Blacksburg on 414 and the Huntington Civic Center. The feature of Today's episode on 416, the concert at Duke is the breakout show from this box and will also be released separately. Duke 78 is available in three CD, four LP and digital configurations. Both Duke 78 and the limited edition Friend of the Devils are out now. More info and orders are happening@dead.net head on over to dead.net deadcast check out all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons one through nine and everything we've released in season 10 so far. You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform and you can listen how you like to listen. Please help us by subscribing Share this podcast with your friends on social media. Hit the like button. Leave us a review. Thank you. It helps more than you realize. Do you have a great tour story you'd like to share? Well, do it over at stories.dead.net Record yourself telling about that epic road trip or the best show you ever saw, and you just may hear yourself on a future episode of the Dead Cast. We have transcripts for many of your favorite Dead Cast episodes available now for your reading pleasure. Head on over to dead.netdeadcast index and check them out. The April 16, 1978 show at the Huntington Civic center in Huntington, West Virginia was a heater, and we've got some great stories from heads that were there to illustrate just how great it was. A bonus, you also get some insight into Jerry's playing approaches from the man himself, and we delve into some very fashionable aspects of the band scene. Here comes Jesse Jarno down the Runway now.
- [03:30]
Jesse Jarno
Upon the Blue Ridge Mountain There I'll take my stand upon the Blue Ridge Mountain There I take my stand Rifle on my shoulder Six shooter in my hand Load, load. I've been older.
- [03:55]
David Lemieux
I've been all around this world hadn't been in Grateful Dead set list since 1970, but maybe a few hardcore Deadheads made copies to listen to for their trip across the Blue Ridge Mountains, going from Williamsburg to our final stop on Friend of the Devils in Huntington, West Virginia.
- [04:18]
Jesse Jarno
In the timbers of Mario, the Wolves are running.
- [04:45]
David Lemieux
Once again, Grateful to had archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
- [04:50]
Bob Wagner
Huntington again. I had to look on a map like Blacksburg. These are places that. I mean, this isn't New York City, this isn't Boston. This is Huntington, West Virginia. Cool venue. I get a little bit more out of the show by kind of envisioning what the venue looks like inside and out.
- [05:08]
David Lemieux
We've posted links to James R. Anderson's photos of the venue on the day of the Dead gig, where you can see the modern brick building, the cemented entrance area, the still bare April trees and the venue's fountain.
- [05:19]
Bob Wagner
I feel that at the final three shows of the box, or two shows, plus Williamsburg, the 14th, 15th, 16th, they got to a plateau. So they'd been building and they started strong and they kept going with the momentum until they got to that weekend, till the Friday, Saturday, Sunday of the 14th, 15th, 16th, and then they plateaued there.
- [06:08]
David Lemieux
As we've heard over the past few episodes, as the tour curled northwards, it picked up more and more followers the closer they got to the Northeast. People had been regularly following the Dead around in the Northeast since at least 1970, but after the band's return to the road in 1976 especially, it became something more like a national pastime for a certain cohort of people. Here's how Jerry Garcia described the fan base to WHMR in November 1978.
- [06:34]
Jesse Jarno
The interesting thing about it is that, and it may or may not be visible from, say, your point of view or even from longtime Deadhead's point of view, is that it's not like the same audience all the time. There's a turnover. And our audience, in fact, has been growing in a way we're the slowest rising rock and roll band in the world. And our audience has been growing. We have a lot of people in the audience who are really quite young, some of them like half our age, you know. And it's interesting, it leads us to believe something along the lines of that there is a kind of a minority group, regardless of say, generation or age or whatever, that can dig what we're doing.
- [07:12]
David Lemieux
And here's Garcia articulating a similar thought to none other than Studs Terkel a year later.
- [07:18]
Jesse Jarno
I think that our audience now there's really a lot of different kinds of people that like what we do. But I, but I real but I believe basically that our audience is still that percentage of the people who don't buy the mainline rap, who aren't going for the normal number of possibilities of ways you can live your life. They've decided to try alternate possibilities. I think there's still a percentage of people in each succeeding generation who are those people?
- [07:45]
David Lemieux
Which is to say, from a sociological perspective, Deadheads might be described as a non generational, decentralized community, a large group with a shared experience binding them together, if maybe nothing else. But of course, there are lots of something else's that bind many Deadheads together in addition to loving the music. And the late 1970s is when some of those began to visibly emerge. Over the past few episodes, we've heard about a few different artifacts produced by Deadheads in the mid-70s, concert tapes and photographs and fanzines. Today we're going to investigate a few more as we try to channel the Dead shows. On Friend of the Devils, that was Pigpen and Garcia dueting on I'm a Hog for your baby at New York's Manhattan center in April 1971. From the expanded version of Skull and Roses, Pig was depicted on the first official Grateful Dead shirt, and you can spot band and family members proudly wearing it in lots of photos from 1967 and beyond. Some fans in the hate sold pins in 1966 with the phrase that gave name to this podcast, good ol Grateful Dead. And by the spring of 1971 at the Manhattan center, at least one Deadhead was selling homemade Dead shirts with an illustration of Jerry Garcia. And there were many more to come. Like a lot of things, the shirts really began to bloom in the late 1970s. Unless otherwise noted, we'll be listening to sounds from the Huntington, West Virginia show from April 16, 1970. Annabel Walsh teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York, and her research focuses on Deadhead fashion and material culture. One of her ongoing projects is the Deadhead Style Archive, which hopes to preserve the history of Deadhead clothing and sartorial vibes in all their forms. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast in looking.
- [10:38]
Annabel Walsh
At photographs from the Spring 78 tour, people are dressed in fairly inconspicuous fashions, right? They're more or less wearing what's considered fashionable at the time within the larger culture, with some exceptions, of course. You see a lot of the denim jackets and sometimes you have, right, a T shirt cut out and stitched onto the back of a jacket. You see a lot of denim. It's like denim overload.
- [11:06]
David Lemieux
To call back to what Rob Blitzstein told us last episode, Monster Corporation had those patches, skull and Roses patches that.
- [11:14]
Jesse Jarno
We got at Poster Mat in Greenwich Village, and we had them all sewn.
- [11:17]
David Lemieux
Onto our denim jackets and we were like the Grateful Dead gang in high school. It's what Deadheads do. You spread the faith. Handmade and repurposed clothing had been a central part of counterculture style that continued through the 1970s. Mouse and Kelly's Monster Corporation and Bill Graham's Winterland production sold an array of Dead shirts. But it was during the period of this box set that Deadhead style as we know it, lots of tie dye, lots of homemade shirts, began to emerge, perceivable thanks to generations of Deadhead photographers.
- [11:48]
Annabel Walsh
When you compare some of those images to Jay Blakesburg's photos from just two years later at Radio City, for example, there's a noticeable shift in just a two year period. So you see a marked increase in people actually wearing tie dyed clothing and T shirts that visibly signal their Deadhead identity, which I think ultimately underscores the role and the importance of the lot scene or the vending scene as sort of a facilitator of a distinct in group aesthetic.
- [12:19]
David Lemieux
There have been pockets of parking lot camping and vending for years, but the 1979 into 1980 new year shows in Oakland were the first place they began to coagulate into what might be recognizable as a full on shakedown street parking lot bazaar. As we'll discuss, parking lot T shirts were an important part of Deadhead's style, but are by no means the only aspect of it, something Annabel took into consideration when trying to find the right name for the Deadhead style archive.
- [12:45]
Annabel Walsh
I've been trying to kind of grapple with that question over the years of what does it mean to look like a Deadhead? Well, people typically think the tie dye and the Birkenstocks, the open toed sandals. So much of our understanding of what it means to look like a Deadhead is sort of framed by and reinforced by these long standing cultural discourses about what Deadheads were. But there's so much more to it, and it's changed so much over time. But also just it's such an individualized thing, the way that people express their identity through fashion.
- [13:20]
David Lemieux
The late 70s was an accelerator for Deadhead style. We spoke with photographer Jay Blakesburg about these years during our in and out of the Garden episodes. The most famous of the T shirt artists at that time was Ed Donahue. I met ed in 79 and in 80 we traveled together. We drove from Boulder to Portland to Seattle to Spokane together in a van, him and his wife Linda.
- [13:44]
Jesse Jarno
Ed was the first guy in the.
- [13:45]
David Lemieux
Parking lot selling Grateful Dead related shirts that had no Grateful Dead symbols on them. Nowadays, his work if you can find those vintage shirts in mint condition, they're thousands and thousands of dollars. Also expensive these days is Rin Tanaka's My Freedam, Volume 4, one in a series of oversized art books that document vintage American fashion, featuring a long section of Dead shirts alongside an attempt to date them. Published in 2006. It's an imperfect chronology, but a great starting point and wonderful to flip through. We've posted some links@dead.net deadcast I lucked into a copy literally ducking out of a summer rainstorm a few years ago. It has some beautiful tie dyed Ed donahue shirts from 1977 and 1978 and beyond.
- [14:30]
Annabel Walsh
Annabelle Walsh, the name that comes up when we're thinking about late 70s dead fashion. Thinking about Ed Donahue, you know, not to overemphasize his importance, but I really do think he should be considered and is considered by a lot of vendors, present and past, one of the most influential artists in the Dead scene.
- [14:58]
David Lemieux
There had been lots of important Dead artists before that who generated the Dead's rich iconography, but they'd almost exclusively been friends and colleagues of the Dead. Connected to the original San Francisco poster scene, Ed Donahue represented something new.
- [15:12]
Annabel Walsh
He designed his first shirt that realized T shirt, which in terms of what that shirt looks like, it features a skull figure in the center. That's a very obvious nod to the steelier face. But instead of a 13 point bolt in the center of the skull, there's an eight point compass star. So he's already kind of manipulating the existing iconography in interesting ways and putting his own spin on it. So he designs that or conceives of that design. Initially in 1974 later copyrights the design in 1977. And that's when a lot of his work starts to kind of take hold within the scene. Right. He becomes a really important presence within the touring circuit and becomes a mentor in a lot of ways to other T shirt artists like Mickey O'Kennedy and Philip Brown, who worked very closely together and had this sort of collaborative artistic partnership that continues to the present day. So he's sort of coming into his own and establishing a name for himself within the Dead scene in the late 70s. He starts selling in 1976 after the dead return from their hiatus. But 77, I think, is when his work starts to kind of pick up and get recognized within the scene. And then what's interesting too is that you have In January of 78, the dead Stig at Celand arena in Fresno. Phil is wearing that realize T shirt on stage. So very quickly his work is getting recognized and embraced by members of the band. I don't know the story there. I don't know how or why Phil acquired the shirt. I would love to know that story. I've always been curious.
- [16:58]
David Lemieux
Us too. Contact the Deadhead style archive or hit us up@stories.dead.net Tie Dye had been a part of the homemade clothing scene around the Dead since the late 60s, and especially after Courtney Pollock collided with the Dead in 1970, which we talked about at length in the side B episode of our Skull and Roses season. But it seems to be Ed Donahue who really initiated the tradition of combining homemade art with beautiful tie dye.
- [17:23]
Annabel Walsh
One of the things that stands out about Donahue's work is also he had a practice of naming each design. Right. So I mentioned the Real Eyes t shirt. In 78, he had the Sun Rose T shirt. And so, you know, when I think about it, I can't help but make connections to fashion history because that's, you know, that's my background, that's my area of focus. Right. So I think about how in doing so, in assigning names to the T shirt, Donahue was most likely unknowingly. Right. I don't think this is a conscious thought, but he was sort of following a design tradition in fashion that dates back to the late 19th century with a French couturier named Jeanne Pequin and later a London based designer named Lucille or Lady Duff Gordon, who. The two of them sort of popularized this practice of assigning kind of evocative names to garments. For instance, Lucille's gowns, they carried really interesting names, like the sign Sounds of Lips, Unsatisfied and red mouth of a venomous flower. So, I mean, Donahue's T shirt names may not have been as overtly poetic or dramatic or evocative, but I think this act of naming each design, it's important and it's significant because it also reflects a sort of tacit connection or link that's being made to the fine art tradition of titling works. So in this way, his T shirts are almost transcending that commercial function, and they occupy a space that's more akin to fine art.
- [19:06]
David Lemieux
Through the late 70s and early 80s, Deadheads played with Dead iconography in sometimes humorous ways, or moved in finer art traditions, like Ed Donahue or Keith Haring, who sold shirts on Spring Tour 77, at least according to Rin Tanaka's My Freedam Volume 4. The next major leap in Deadhead style can be dated to 1984, when the first shirts appear that mash up Dead images with pop culture references, including Jerry Garcia on a box of corn flakes and Club Dead parodying the Club Med resorts. But there was another emergent art form for sale in Grateful Dead parking lots during these years. Like the T shirts, this art often came covered in trippy and playful iconography. And like the T shirts, it's become pretty collectible. Unlike old lot T shirts, though, it's a bit harder to find on ebay, especially in its original form, because LSD blotter was both quite illegal and intended to be eaten. Though the stamp like blotter hits have become the standard depiction of LSD in popular culture, they didn't really become the dominant form until the era of this box set. Bob Minkin, who we spoke with last episode about a unique way of ingesting liquid. LSD came into the Extended dead scene in 1973.
- [20:31]
Bob Wagner
Liquid was a thing barrels, barrels orange did. They were once called window pane, which was kind of translucent kind of these gel things.
- [20:43]
David Lemieux
Bob just gave a pocket history of the earliest forms of LSD distribution. In our LA66 Bonus Bearcast, we talked to Owsley's assistant Tim Scully, about their earliest forms of underground LSD manufacture when they pressed it into pills in the attic of the house where the dead lived briefly in la. Orange Sunshine was initially created by Owsley's proteges Tim Scully and Nick Sand. Windowpane, made with gelatin, was created by another Bay Area consortium started in 1968.
- [21:12]
Bob Wagner
I also remember actual pills, like really small microdots. They were called, like purple microdot. It was like the smallest pill you ever saw.
- [21:21]
Rich Mahan
It was like a 16th of an.
- [21:23]
Bob Wagner
Inch or smaller, and you're looking at.
- [21:24]
David Lemieux
It and you're like, how could something this small. The microdot, meanwhile, likely came from whales, produced by the idealistic chemist Richard Kemp, who is said to have distributed microdots for free during the Dead's appearance at the Bickershaw Festival in 1972. As we noted last episode, Bob Minkin kept receipts.
- [22:03]
Bob Wagner
All the acid I did mid late 73, 74, was either like little tiny pills like that or like window pane. I actually kept notes of why I have them. Well, the first time I did acid was 6-6-73, and it was purple microdot. So here, 2-9-74. Hit a window pane 8-20-74. Okay, now, this was at a concert. New Rise of the Purple Sage Command.
- [22:31]
Jesse Jarno
Dipody in Central Park.
- [22:32]
Bob Wagner
Black blotter. The acid I did on the blotter, I don't really. They really wasn't artwork on the ones that I did. These were just paper that was perforated. Perforated little squares. Then the first time I saw Garcia play. 74-11-9. Clear dot blotter. Whatever the hell that is.
- [23:08]
David Lemieux
Bob was witnessing the transition into the new standard for LSD distribution. Eric Davis is the author of the new book from MIT Press, the Untold Story of an Acid Medium, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast in full disclosure, I helped edit the book's second half, which features annotated example from Mark McLeod's Institute of Illegal Images in San Francisco. But it's the book's majestic first half that we'll be getting into today, which is Eric's meticulous and thoughtful history of LSD production and distribution. Welcome back, Eric.
- [23:42]
Eric Davis
I would say the 74 is a time when, like, there's this sort of struggle around the medium. And there's some outfits that have been as well established that are continuing. You still had various forms of orange sunshine and other kinds of capsules and tablets. The window pain world was still rolling along, and there were other forms of gels and microdots. It was kind of a mixed zone where blotter was starting to become more of a figure.
- [24:18]
David Lemieux
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love were officially busted in 1972, and Operation Julie knocked out Richard Kemp and the microdot producers in Wales in 1977. As Eric's blotter book recounts, it was also the end of the line for another chemist, Eric Ghost. So in the later 70s, around the time of the shows on the Friend of the Devil's Box, Blotter started to take over. Often without any art on it at all.
- [24:42]
Steve Silberman
At first, Ghost gets busted, so his supply dries up. So some of the blotter that had been dominating the market goes away, so it makes room for new makers. And the fluorescence of the images and the kind of playfulness and the real kind of 80s quality of a lot of, like, not hippie quality of a lot of the imagery might come about just because there was more of a gap in the market. People realized it was. It was a convenient way to deal. It sort of worked with people and it was fun, you know, whatever. Just had a kind of vibe to it that people liked, that there was more like, okay, let's make a mark. Let's make a new thing. Let's do something that's got four colors in it.
- [25:28]
Scott White
Let's.
- [25:28]
Steve Silberman
Let's make a. Let's make our own image. You know, like, there was a little bit more sense of basically of recognizing that it was a print medium. You know, it was like, oh, it's like, hey, we have our little alternative newspaper that has drugs on it, or we have our little underground comic that has drugs on it. And those connections you could see before, again, like the fact that Mr. Natural was the first or one of the first printed blotter images is really significant because it shows there's this connection between one kind of underground print medium and another one.
- [26:03]
David Lemieux
Pop culture and LSD had collided a decade earlier when Eric Ghost distributed some of his earliest LSD in elaborate parodies of Kodachrome boxes for brilliant color. They read check out Eric's book for that and many other examples. This playful and somewhat ironic pop culture attitude feels more grounded in Andy Warhol's pop art than it does in San Francisco's psychedelia. And as we were saying, wouldn't really make the leap until Deadhead fan art until the mid-1980s. I'd suggest that the proliferation of blotter contributed to that.
- [26:36]
Eric Davis
There was kind of a shift at the same time. Some heads really distrusted the form, Owsley being the most famous, who hated it and thought it would degrade. And it's in the light and it's not reliable and it's not dosed evenly. And, you know, all of which has some truth to it. But there was a perception of it as being a kind of a kind of cleaner. And I suspect that another reason that it's kind of starting to come into that period of time in this, in the mid-70s, is that, like, acid is being used by more and more people in that period of time. Psychedelic use in the late 60s was powerful in some localities. But by the mid-70s, it's in every high school across the land. And in that world the kind of informality, ease and sort of, I don't almost collectability of blotter becomes salient. I think it starts to work and even the kind of cartoony dimension of it makes it more fun in a way that I think worked for more naive populations that were like, oh, let's try this out.
- [27:52]
David Lemieux
Another big shift that happened in the later 1970s is that informally and accidentally at first, the Dead's post hiatus touring circuit began to become a distribution network for lsd. Both a social place where bigger deals went down, but a traveling market for wholesale and retail goods.
- [28:08]
Steve Silberman
It starts to become the dominant distribution mechanism and the dosage per hit decreases. One of the things I realized doing this project is I probably should be clearer about what we know and then what the lore is. And the lore is more than just a rumor because it's like a consistent story you get, but you never quite get your finger on anything. It's not written in anything. It's just stuff people say a bunch and it seems like it makes sense. So it's hard to categorize some of this countercultural history stuff that way. But it's pretty widely acknowledged that that was a collective decision. So it was that multiple manufacturers somehow communicated to one another in some fashion or another to like, let's just bring it down.
- [29:10]
Eric Davis
And it's also a time when it has less of the huge sacred revolutionary charge that it did. And so it becomes more and more like a fun drug which is then tied to a big shift that happens in the late 70s. Just a moment coming up where there's a general agreement among the families and there's multiple families that are producing and different groups who are putting the material on blotter and other formats. But there's an agreement to lower the dose of a single hit. And so you have the whole rise.
- [29:47]
David Lemieux
Of, you know, so called disco hits, the smaller hits. And iconographic art was transformative.
- [29:53]
Eric Davis
There's a general perception that acid culture declines not because it's not being taken, but it's just become more banal, more ordinary. Just part of like getting stoned and whatever. It's like the magic is gone, but at the same time the medium becomes more enchanted and more strange and people start playing with it. Some of it's funny, some of it's ironic, some of it's beautiful, some of it's sketchy. There's like a whole iconography of, like, what does acid mean now when it's no longer attached to this sort of revolutionary impulse, Whether it's a spiritual revolution or part of the. The transformation of politics and culture. So in a way, like Blotter as a printed medium carries the load of what LSD is going to mean as its meanings change. And the people who are taking the change and do it do so for different reasons.
- [30:55]
David Lemieux
Blotter was a secret, special handshake and a form of currency among Deadheads and other undergrounds. And sometimes between them.
- [31:02]
Eric Davis
It's also kind of like a handoff from an earlier generation of alternative or underground print. Whether you're thinking poster art or you're thinking alternative newspapers, or you're thinking underground comics, like, these are all media that are of central importance to the counterculture, and they're print media. The context of the original poster artists like Mouse and Kelly and Rick Griffin, everybody working in the late 60s. Okay, so they're. They're basically making advertisements. And the advertisements are keyed to a future moment in time. They're kind of like promises, like, wow, look at this cool image. There's this dance next week, and the image and the excitement of the image is like, tied to this very specific moment in time that's extremely local. Like, nobody else gives a shit. No one else is paying attention. Initially, it's just inside of this ecology here are these little glimpses, foretastes of this very specific moment. They're almost like tickets. Like the way of having a beautiful ticket, a Willy Wonka ticket, or a beautifully printed Grateful Dead ticket. It's like the ticket is already tied to a future event. Well, that's what Blotter is. I'm sitting there, I'm holding a cool, wow, look at this cool sheet. What a funny image or a beautiful image. What is it? It's a ticket. It's the first step in a stage that's going to lead towards some bigger, more glorious experience. So much so that it kind of consumes itself.
- [33:10]
David Lemieux
I promise you won't be disappointed by Eric's book. We'll return to some of these themes shortly. But you can imagine some of the outer and inner textures described by Annabelle and Eric as we imagine Deadheads converging on Huntington, West Virginia for the last show on Friend of the Devils.
- [33:33]
Jesse Jarno
We can share the women, we can share the wine. We can share what we gotta use. Cause we done shared all of.
- [33:50]
David Lemieux
Scott White was in college in Lexington, Kentucky, and had just gotten on the bus. He left us some great stories about catching the dead in the south in spring 1978.
- [34:00]
Scott White
I was a freshman in college that year. Had gotten turned on to the Grateful Dead my freshman year in high school. Thanks to the cousin of my best friend who was in college. He got us tickets to see the Dead in Cincinnati in 76 and then in fall 77 Bloomington. Can't remember how that the Dead were playing Lexington. We got our seats as soon as they went on sale. Then about a week and a half before the show in Lexington, we found out about the show in Huntington. Were stunned. They played that little dump of a town on the Ohio river, two and a half hours away.
- [35:23]
David Lemieux
There's some pretty obvious signs of Dead freakdom. We think Scott and his friends might have been exhibiting some of them.
- [35:29]
Scott White
My buddy saw them at William and Mary and at Virginia Tech. And then we called him about the Huntington show. He drove 12 hours to make it in time since he was coming back to Kentucky anyway to see the Lexington show that Friday and the Huntington show was on Sunday. We drove over on Sunday, early, maybe 11:00, got there. Tons of tickets got in. The biggest it was, was maybe half full, which would have been four or five thousand people. My buddy Mark had driven over from Williamsburg, Virginia, where he'd seen the dad on Saturday night. And he must have left like in the middle of the night because we met him in Huntington, like I don't know, two, three o'clock in the afternoon.
- [36:39]
David Lemieux
Dr. Bob Wagner made the drive up from North Carolina.
- [36:42]
Bob Wagner
It was a Sunday night. Okay.
- [36:44]
Annabel Walsh
I remember there were more Northerners at that show.
- [36:47]
David Lemieux
Even though it's West Virginia, maybe because.
- [36:50]
Jesse Jarno
It was the weekend they were able.
- [36:51]
Bob Wagner
To make the trip. And so I remember meeting a bunch of new people through the tapers that I already knew. There was a whole contingent of people.
- [37:00]
Annabel Walsh
From Rochester, New York that some of whom were involved in taping and. And friends of theirs that were tour fixtures back then. And so a bunch of those people were at Huntington. And luckily somebody had good seats because.
- [37:14]
David Lemieux
I recall I didn't have have a good ticket.
- [37:17]
Jesse Jarno
We wound up with a good spot.
- [37:19]
Bob Wagner
To make a tape.
- [37:36]
David Lemieux
Kathy Sublette Huntington, West Virginia that was a good show too.
- [37:41]
Jesse Jarno
It was a little hollow sounding, but it was a great show. They were on fire.
- [37:47]
David Lemieux
That tour. The bands sound pretty supercharged to me to blame because no one David Lemieux.
- [38:24]
Bob Wagner
I felt that this show, they kind of leave it all out there. I think the big thing that showed that to me was ending the first set with Scarlet Fire. By 1978, it was primarily a second set. Jam and Here they are having so much fun. They end the first set with Scarlet Fire.
- [38:49]
Jesse Jarno
Not a chill to the winner, but a n to the end. From the other direction she was calling.
- [38:59]
David Lemieux
My eye it could be an illusion.
- [39:04]
Jesse Jarno
But I might as well try Might.
- [39:06]
David Lemieux
As Well try in 19 minutes, it's a pretty compact version of Scarlet Begonias into Fire on the Mountain over the rest of their career, it would only occur in the first set three more times, the last being at Rosemont Horizon nine years and 364 days after this version. This Scarlet has a charming lyric scramble about shoes on her toes for me. The Huntington version of Fire on the Mountain is marked by super present Singing with a smile Garcia vocals.
- [39:45]
Jesse Jarno
Long distance run up with one foot out the door Caught in slow motion in a fall to the floor Playing cool music on a bathroom below they gave all you you had why you want to give up.
- [40:08]
David Lemieux
And along with the singing with a smile vocals is guitar playing to match. Have we mentioned that Bobby Weir was using a slide on his guitar a fair bit in 1978? I actually don't think we have, but this is one of the places where it kind of works. In the second set, Ship of Fools feels equally locked in.
- [41:39]
Jesse Jarno
Don't lend your hand to raise your face.
- [41:59]
David Lemieux
But the heart of the second set began with estimated profit. And we're going to use the jam sequence to once again illustrate John Sievert's incredible 1978 interviews with Jerry Garcia for Guitar Player magazine. Since our last episode, Guitar Player Magazine, founded in 1967, announced it was ceasing publication. Thanks one more time to the Retro photoarchive for access to this interview with one of Guitar Player's most loyal readers. For Garcia, practicing was playing, and playing was life.
- [42:49]
Jesse Jarno
I love it. It's what I do, you know? And now I think I'm playing probably playing now more nights per year than I ever have.
- [42:56]
David Lemieux
In 1977 and 1978, he gigged relentlessly with the Jerry Garcia Band and the Grateful Dead.
- [43:02]
Jesse Jarno
Those are really the only things I'm involved in because right now they're both sophisticated and demanding enough and interesting enough and fun enough. They're both very satisfying. And so that's really all I want. I want to deal with right now. I really couldn't take on another project. I think it would kill me in terms of always finding something interesting and new and different. It's generated by the rhythm section, say whatever in it, which whoever is comprised of. That's always true. I think I love it. Yes, that I think also probably comes from my banjo playing to some extent. And I've always been really interested in the single patients like as a legitimate Internet of a technical problem on the banjo. Syncopations are what you want to be able to freely choose in the context of the roles in banjo since it's a limited. So with the guitar you're dealing. It's like opening that up into sort of non euclidean possibilities. If you're in the right kind of rhythmic context, then you have the option of being able to continually re evaluate your position in time. So for me then it becomes the thing of syncopations based on sycop. In other words, I like to start an idea when the music is in flow, in what I perceive on a beat that I perceive to be something like a 16th note triplet off of four. So it's like intensely syncopated from the get go. And then if I play an even pulse, it's like adding a new. It's like constructing a sentence off of another sentence before the sentence is completed. And so for me that level of the linguistic, the. The punning in other, you know, you might describe it as, you know, it's a lot of fun and it's just something I'm attracted to in music. Rhythmic ingenuity knocks me out.
- [46:03]
David Lemieux
The jam in 7, 8. Time out of estimated Profit is perhaps an example of giving Garcia and the band new ways to stretch. Often landing in Eyes of the World in even newer ways. Sometimes graceful, sometimes lurching, sometimes in between. Tonight it went like this. Here they land in Eyes of the world at around 130 beats per minute. Around 20 beats faster than the 1973 and 1974 versions. We're going to use Eyes of the World for the next part of Garcia's guitar breakdown. Here's his intro solo to Eyes.
- [47:41]
Jesse Jarno
The kind of picks I use are Fender heavy mostly because you can get them anywhere. Also, the way I hold my guitar pick is strange too. I don't hold it the. The standard way, which is like something like that, the fist, but more like the way you hold a pencil. I think that maybe Howard Roberts describes this as scalpel. I sometimes palm my finger pick and play with just my fingers. But I never play with my pick and my fingers. That's something I don't do. I don't know why, I just never picked it up. Yeah, but I do palm. I pick and play with my thumb and finger. I do that quite a lot actually.
- [48:41]
David Lemieux
Yeah.
- [49:03]
Jesse Jarno
The kind of strings I use, which are probably interesting, some of the vincy Strings and any. I have a sort of weird gauge, slightly different from stock gauge but just slightly the in there. They are ten thousands for the top string, thirteen for the B. Seventeen for the, for the G. Then 28, 28. Pardon me. Yeah, 28, 38, 48. So the slightly heavier bottom lines are kind of high action too. Pretty high. Most guitar players don't like it very much. Well, it has to do with how you finger too. And I think for me the whole approach to fingering I think might have to do with my five string banjo. Most guitar players fingers sort of flat fingered like that some way. I that using this part, this part of the finger, you know, kind of like the whole first joint. That's like one look of a typical guitar hand. But I, I somehow I got myself into the trip training myself to try to come down on a string pretty vertically perpendicular to the fingerboard as much as the. So mostly I play on the tips of my fingers. And so the high action doesn't get in my way in that sense. I'm not pulling other strings along with it and so forth. It's just. I have more sort of a pinpoint style of fingering. It's basically generated from thumb. From this combination thumb and first finger rather than from the wrist or whatever. But I use all the different, all different kinds of motion depending on whether I'm doing single string stuff, chord stuff, whatever. I also play with my fingers too. Usually I have a general, like I say, a category of tone that I'm involved in for that particular tune and then I just work off of that. But I think most of the changes that I get in terms of dynamics and tone are a result of touch rather than fooling with the knobs. Although I do fool with the knobs. See I use the bass end, the extreme bass end of my tone controls to get a kind of. There's a. You know, based on the capacitance for resistance so forth. There's a kind of a great horn like sound you can get down there. You know, it has a whole seems that appears to have a whole other set of overtones from the normal guitar. From the stringiness of. Yeah you know, of single coil pickups. But again it's one of those things that I. I don't have a formula for it. A certain amount of it is related to my banjo playing where you have problem solving continually going on in terms of you have three fingers that are moving more or less constantly and you have to change the weight, say the melodic weight from any one finger. To any other finger. Now, what that really converts to is rhythmic changes. So for me, the thing of it's always been interesting to me to have little rhythmic surprises. And that means, say, for example, accenting on all the off beats for a bar, then the next two bars every other on beat, things like that, these various ways of accenting them.
- [53:59]
David Lemieux
And within that flow of melodic and rhythmic ideas, Garcia also had a vocabulary of expressive techniques.
- [54:05]
Jesse Jarno
I have about maybe four or five different kinds of vibrato. Some of them are unsuspended, that is to say, nothing but my finger on the string is touching this guitar. My thumb is off, the back of my hand is off. And I'm just going like this, you might say. And then it's a matter of slow and fast. Some of them are supported. That is to say, it's just my finger that's doing them and my hand is not doing them. Some of them, it's my whole arm. Some of it's my wrist. It depends on, first of all, the position I'm working out of which finger I'm leaning with. And, you know, what's available to me. I also do some lateral vibratoes, some that aren't across the fingerboard, but up and down the string in guitar. My guitar playing, I almost never hammer on. It's one of those things that I just recently noticed. Maybe it's because that idea got to be has a certain inexactitude, for example, in banjo playing, that I rejected somewhere along the line in favor of other kinds of ornamentation.
- [55:20]
David Lemieux
In the hammer on Happy 80s, where it was one of the central parts of heavy metal and other harder sounds, it was one of the many techniques that would separate Garcia from the new wave of guitar shredders.
- [55:31]
Jesse Jarno
But I frequently pull off. But I almost never pull off one tone. I almost always pull like a real fast triplet, you know, like three or four tones real fast. And that's something I do a lot without even thinking about as a little ornament. My whole hand position is I play it very much off the tips of my fingers and never off the flat, the first joint, you know, off the tips always. So it's a little unconventional. Keep a high knuckles, you might say, so that I'm coming down. And that makes it so that my pull offs, my little groups of pull offs, are really well articulated. It's something I've worked on a lot. Early on, I was lucky enough to have somebody mention to me about the usefulness of your little finger. So I always spend a lot of Time. In fact, my little finger is one of my better fingers. That's interesting. It's one of the things that I prefer more than I prefer my ring finger, which is the standard guitarist's finger. You know, I use my little finger where most guitar players would use their ring finger.
- [56:59]
David Lemieux
And from his own play, Garcia could get critical and figure out where to try going next, both immediately and globally.
- [57:06]
Jesse Jarno
Tending to think along certain positions because they were more available to my hand than musical, for example. So I got into a hole into that, which was a serious problem for me on stage, you know, correcting. And I think that that's one of the kinds of things that you tend to fall into, is that you tend to do the things that are easiest for you to do. That's what you. That's what you. That's what is within your grasp. And the excitement of playing on stage and so forth. So busting out of that. I would describe them as rhythmic and idea habits in addition to technical habits. The thing of just having a certain more or less limited kind of vocabulary and depending on my ability to exploit it, rather than developing a greater vocabulary. So I've been through a lot of these things that are kind of like, oh, deciding to never play anything longer than a half note during a solo, for example, for a year, in order to cut down on the busyness of. For example, I get really tired of busy. Decide that what I want to do is exploit as much of the single note and the tone of the guitar, for example. So there was a period when I played really slow, please, regardless of the rhythmic pad, like us.
- [58:20]
David Lemieux
John Stevert also wondered if Garcia meant he'd tried never playing anything longer than a half note or shorter than a half note.
- [58:27]
Jesse Jarno
Oh. Oh, shorter, actually. Yeah, shorter is right. Yeah, I meant shorter.
- [58:30]
David Lemieux
What this means is that he tried not to play as many quick clusters of fast notes. My first guess is that the period he's discussing was maybe around 1976. Here's the Jerry Garcia band at Sophie's in Palo Alto in November 1976. Now, Garcia Live, Volume 6. Though I wasn't able to find any samples that match Garcia's descriptions exactly.
- [59:20]
Jesse Jarno
But.
- [59:20]
David Lemieux
Having listened to some, probably this was more an idealized version of his playing than something he successfully executed for the entire year. If anybody has any other takes on when Garcia was attempting to never play anything shorter than a half note, chime in@dead.net deadcast thanks again to the Retro Photo Archive for all these cool Garcia interviews. The first of them was conducted backstage at Keystone Berkeley when the Jerry Garcia Band shared a bill with Robert Hunter's band Comfort in December 1977. I like the way it ended, so we'll use it as our transition back to Huntington, West Virginia a few months later.
- [60:16]
Jesse Jarno
I think I gotta go out and watch my friend Hunter.
- [60:18]
David Lemieux
And now back to the Huntington, West Virginia show already in progress.
- [60:40]
Scott White
Scott White I remember the thing that stunned all of us the most was how lightly the Huntington and Lexington shows were attended and how utterly otherworldly the drums were. And why on earth were the other members involved besides Mickey and Billy? The whole drum sequence was a complete freak out. Our buddy had told us walking in we had to stay in the arena and not leave during the set break as we didn't want to miss any of the drums. And man was he right. Back then, drum solos were pretty typical of rock shows, but usually lasted no more than about 10 minutes. I do remember Bonham's being insane and long when Zeppelin was in Louisville the summer before, but nothing like what the Dead did. I heard nothing like it. And it was even freakier in Lexington.
- [62:18]
David Lemieux
Some of the reports say that the full band was up there during the Rhythm Devil segment in Huntington.
- [62:23]
Scott White
Was unbelievable back then. There weren't any tapes being traded that we were aware of. We had some bootleg albums that we had bought at a used record store. Of course we had all the official releases, but you know, there are songs we didn't even know existed. I remember them playing Iko Iko and one of our roommates was from New Orleans and he had turned us on to Cajun music and stuff like that. So we knew that. But it was just fabulous.
- [63:04]
David Lemieux
Dr. Bob Wagner's recording of the tape got pretty well circulated.
- [63:07]
Bob Wagner
It's funny, somebody on Facebook just about.
- [63:12]
Annabel Walsh
A year ago wrote on my timeline.
- [63:15]
David Lemieux
What'S the best way to get to Huntington, West Virginia?
- [63:18]
Bob Wagner
Because I'd been there in 78. He's asking me what's the best way to go?
- [63:23]
David Lemieux
If you don't know the best way to Huntington by now you haven't been paying enough attention to all the Sweet Garcia interview clips. Practice reading through various scene reports online. It sure sounds like the local heat were out in force before, during and after the Huntington show, including some undercovers acting with fairly suspicious sounding techniques.
- [63:45]
Scott White
Scott White we were all kind of coming down from the high and Mark was approached by a policewoman who to a bunch of freshman college kids was rather comely and rather exotic. At any rate, Mark got busted. Turned out he probably was carrying a couple of two ounce bags which was the size a couple of guys would go in on, as opposed to, say, a half pound bag.
- [64:15]
David Lemieux
Oof.
- [64:16]
Scott White
It was worrisome because back then that amount of weed was a felony level. So they took him into custody. We were in our car and had no way to communicate with him. Since we had planned to spend the night and then drive back the next day. We ended up sleeping in our car because we had indulged in some hallucinogenics. We got up the next morning, Monday, went to the police station. They just let him leave. Of course they let him leave without his weed. So we just assumed that that was for their personal use. Well, we got in our car and, being pretty stunned, flew back over the Tug river into Kentucky just as soon as we could. I still can't believe he walked away. So drive back Monday morning. Obviously skipped classes all day and just partied all week for Lexington. Wish you would have included the Lexington show.
- [65:56]
David Lemieux
Grateful Light archivist David Lemieux.
- [65:58]
Bob Wagner
It feels almost like a tour closer, that they're leaving it all out there. And yet, because in a way, in terms of the tapes, we kind of started this discussion a couple hours ago talking about the archival side of the tapes from this run. This was the end of a run in terms of how the archive has viewed these tapes. But then they had a day off. And then on the 18th, they started up again with a show at the Pittsburgh Civic arena, also a really good show. And they went on for about another week, until the 24th, playing a bunch of great shows.
- [66:39]
Jesse Jarno
The only game in Town. No Man's Land. The only game in town Parable. The only game in town.
- [66:52]
Bob Wagner
And plateaus are good things. It means you've hit a peak and that's a good thing. And then they didn't fall off. They stayed there. And that's kind of what I always feel, is that the Pittsburgh was the first show. Once they were on this plateau, they were at this peak. And they were like, okay, let's stay here. And they did. They stayed there. All five of those shows are terrific. And then, you know, then they take 10 days off and come back in May with one of the wildest tours I've ever heard the Dead do. That's if you really want to hear some crazy stuff from that era. May 10th and 11th, the Dick's Picks Volume 25. It is insanity. Start to finish, in a great way. Like, they are having fun. So different from this stuff.
- [67:50]
Jesse Jarno
Don't you let that deal go down. Wait until that deal around. Don't you let that deal go down. Wait until that dealer. Wait until that deal. Don't you let that feel.
- [68:20]
David Lemieux
There are many more stories about the grateful dead in 1978, which we'll save for other days, but we're going to touch on a few of them as we wrap up our episodes on Friend of the Devils. The full on steel drum rhythm Devil's madness lasted through the spring. Oftentimes, the only way to know who was up there drumming unless you were there is to check the newspaper reviews or memories people have posted online. If you know of shows outside the purview of this box set where members of the Dead, besides the drummers, perform during the Rhythm Devils segment, you should drop a line to Jerry Bass. Over the course of 1978, the percussion section of the shows continue to change, with the steel drums appearing, but giving way to other textures too. Here's some from the first night at red Rocks on July 7th. That summer certainly sounds like more than two drumsers to me. In the summer of 78, a few months after this box set, the band began work on what became Shakedown street with producer Lowell George of Littlefeet, a tumultuous project of its own that will hopefully get to you down the line. On the final album, the Rhythm Devil's work was condensed into a two minute track titled Serengeti. The other big event for the dead in 78 alongside Shakedown street was their October trip to Egypt, which included a musical pairing with Hamza El Din and his band, which you can now hear on Rockin the Cradle, which wasn't improvised but constituted another rhythmic expansion for the Dead. Mickey Hart spent the next weeks exploring and recording the rhythms of the Nile and the grooves traveled home with the Dead for their October shows at Winterland, known as From Egypt with Love, which included appearances by Hamza El Din. The October shows at Winterland in turn led to the next development in the world of the Rhythm Devils.
- [71:47]
Bob Wagner
David Lemieux I think Francis Ford Coppola went to the October 78 shows at Winterland, the Egypt with Love, and saw what they were doing because they were still doing the pretty extensive Rhythm Devils portion at those shows. He was friends with the Dead already and, and I think that's where he said, oh, this could be a good thing to score my new movie.
- [72:48]
David Lemieux
Francis Ford Coppola would only draw sparingly on the music Mickey Hart and Billy Kreutzman contributed to Apocalypse now, but the sessions and subsequent album the Rhythm Devils Play River Music was an important landmark in the Dead's development. Expanding into Beautiful new places. It led to the addition of a number of instruments that became part of Mickey Hart's arsenal, including the open tune monochord known as the Beam, which took a few years to make it to their full time live setup, as well as the suspended percussion array that became known as the Beast, which started showing up full time at Dead shows in May 1979. Every now and then the drum segment would find itself in a different place in the set, whether by design or fate. One of those times was Cleveland on November 20, 1978. The soundboard tape has some nasty cuts in it, but it's worth seeking out and it ties together several of our themes. Once again, Steve Silberman.
- [74:31]
Scott White
They started the second set with a jam into Jackaro. That was completely unusual, like, you know, even for hardcore Deadheads to start the second set with, you know, in Jamie, it was very unusual.
- [75:10]
David Lemieux
There was a whole ass drum section in there too. For reasons you might understand, things were a little wavy. Steve was attending nearby Oberlin College.
- [75:20]
Scott White
That was a huge event for the Oberlin Deadhead community. There were, I believe, more than a hundred people from Oberlin at that show, and it was a small venue. Somehow those hundred people got a hold of some hits of a particular vintage of LSD called Red Dragon, which was some of the best LSD I ever had.
- [75:43]
David Lemieux
I don't know how they got it, gee, us either. The Red Dragon with some of that newfangled LSD blotter with cool designs that Erik Davis was describing.
- [75:52]
Steve Silberman
And Red Dragon, for example, was a very good asset that was popular, but it was not 250 mics, you know, it was closer to 100 at least according to my sources. So it's. That's a good symbol of like a new. And it's almost kind of like the Dead going back on tour at 77. It's like, it's a little more disco, it's a little brighter, it's a little more accessible, a little more danceable. Yeah, there were a lot of Red Dragons and one of the nice things about that was that it's a pretty simple design and one of the ideas there is that you wanted to have as little ink on it as possible so that. Because you just don't want to like gob up the whole thing with possibly toxic inks or just like weird stuff that isn't really food. So that was like even part of the concept of that. They were quite popular and I think they were both copied by others and later came out in like a different format because it was a classic enough image that later on there was like another kind of outline version of the same figure. I think it was beloved by many.
- [77:32]
Scott White
And because we were all tripping balls, as they say, when the Dead came out for the second set, to do that beginning, it was such an intimate venue that it was like your friends walking into the living room with the guitars, you know. And so people weren't even really, like they didn't get a big ovation when they came out for the second set. They just sort of came out, you.
- [77:57]
Bob Wagner
Know, started tuning up and just like.
- [78:00]
Scott White
Pretty quickly just like started jamming. So it was like we were all there together. It was the most communal feeling I probably ever had at a Dead show. Really high on acid, really experimental music. And so that was definitely a moment when I sort of leveled up.
- [78:36]
David Lemieux
And that's where we'll leave off our conversation with Steve silberman about the 1978 Grateful Dead. From the end of the 70s onward, the drums and space segments of the shows is where the Dead's most far out music lived. A forum to constantly try new moods and ideas that could be described as musical periods unto themselves. Space segments could veer into Garcia Logs, but with the art of sound, engineer Dan Healy could turn into weird and sometimes stereo mixed wonderlands. Sometimes ambient, sometimes bending towards chaos. Like this October 12, 1984 version from Augusta, Maine, now in the 30 trips around the sun box set. By the introduction of MIDI at the end of the 1980s, the Rhythm Devil segments of yore had morphed into organic electronic music, a wholly original new voice for everybody in the Dead, where it was often hard to tell which instrument sounds were coming from. You can hear a whole lot more about that period on our Infrared Roses episode, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast. Call it rhythm Devils, drum space, percussion madness, or just improvised music. It became an institutionalized way for the Dead to keep pushing further and higher. Their own space program, so to speak. If you draw a line from the acid tests to the Future, April 1978 might be seen as the prismatic point. Everything from the past coming in and shooting back out in a powerful and clarified rainbow full of sound. We'll end our dive into this era with one more dip into the Rhythm Devils segment from the Duke 78 show, featuring tour chef Sy Kosas clonking on pots and pans. We here at the Deadcast invite you to crank it up and clunk along. And the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewel.
- [81:45]
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 Kathy Sublette, Rob Blitzstein, Bob Wagner, Bob Minkin, Jay Blakesburg, David Lemieux, Steve Silberman, Eric Davis and Annabel Walsh. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast David Ganz for his ongoing contributions of audio from his interview archive. Executive producer for the good old Grateful Dead cast Mark Pincus, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Doron Tyson. All rights reserve.