Loading summary
Transcript294 lines
- [00:00]
A
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 nine of the Good Old Grateful Dead cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. We are back with season nine and we're diving into track two in this episode. Certainly one of the Grateful Dead's most haunting and melodically complex tracks, China Doll it is the 50th anniversary of the Grateful Dead's from the Mars Hotel and to celebrate this, Rhino has a grand 50th anniversary release in the works which includes the original album remastered, some really cool early demos of songs from the album, and a previously unreleased live show you're going to need to hear to believe. The Grateful Dead played University of Nevada Reno on May 12, 1974 and this was the first roadshow for the infamous Wall of Sound which debuted weeks earlier at home in San Francisco on March 23rd at the Cow Palace. This audio was cleaned up and remastered by Grammy Award winning engineer David Glasser with the Plangent Processes, tape restoration and speed correction and was produced for release. David Lemieux the aforementioned is available as a 3 CD set as well as digitally. There is standard Black vinyl, a dead.net exclusive custom vinyl and a very cool heliotropic vinyl version. You have to see to believe its graphics animate when you spin it on your turntable. Very cool. More info and orders are happening now over at dead.net and head on over to dead.netdeadcast and check out all of our past episodes including the complete seasons 1 through 8. You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform and listen how you like to listen. Please help this podcast by subscribing, sharing us with your friends on social media, hitting that like button and leaving a review. Thank you very much. We have transcripts for many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure. Our Hop on over to dead.netdeadcast index and check them out. Hey now, folks, were any of you at any of the Wall of sound shows in 1974? Leave us a recorded message at stories.dead.net and tell us your experiences with the Wall of Sound. We want to hear from you, and we do use them in the Dead cast when we get something that fits just right. Record your Wall of Sound tour stories@stories.dead.net China Doll Talk about a unique and incredibly heady song. It blends elements of folk, rock and a touch of classical, all encapsulated within the Grateful Dead signature psychedelic sound. The song almost seems to say pay attention with its tone, drawing you into a musical adventure that resolves with a sweet payoff at the end. Here's Professor Jesse Jarno to help us dissect China doll.
- [04:11]
B
In early 1973, Cherry Garcia wrote a new batch of songs in preparation for the studio album the Grateful Dead would record later that year and made demo recordings for his bandmates. Among them was one of the most delicate pieces of music he ever created. And China Doll somehow became even more delicate when the full Grateful Dead took it on in the studio for from the Mars Hotel in 1974.
- [04:55]
C
Tell me what you done it for. No, I won't tell you a thing.
- [05:08]
B
Grateful that archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
- [05:11]
D
I think it's a perfect little song. And it's again, like so many Grateful Dead songs, it's unlike any other Grateful Dead song.
- [05:20]
C
All I leave behind me is only what I found.
- [05:33]
B
Last episode David told us about listening to Mars Hotel over and over when it got stuck in the cassette deck of his father's car the summer when he was 16.
- [05:42]
D
Having heard this song when I was 16 years old, stuck in the car and hearing it hundreds of times and getting to know the nuances of it and not a musician, but wondering, what are they doing?
- [05:55]
C
Stranger 1 Tap come by they flew away.
- [06:09]
D
Why is this song that is this, you know, beautiful little ballad objectively. But why is it hitting me so hard? And I've talked to a lot of people who have China Doll, and it does the exact same thing to them.
- [06:20]
C
I would ask the same of you, but failing will not die.
- [06:34]
B
It's a powerful jewel in the Garcia Hunter songbook, and while there's nothing else quite like it, it didn't come totally from nowhere. Garcia and Hunter first got quiet in late 1968 with the series of songs Destined for Oxumaxoa, Rosemary, what's Become of the Baby and Mountains of the Moon.
- [07:00]
C
Mountains of the Moon Electropel and Bend to Thee.
- [07:06]
B
They were more baroque art songs than folk tunes, and with the exception of Mountains of the Moon, none made any foothold in the Dead's live sets. A year or so later, they created what I hear is the first song in a progression that would in some ways unfold from the harpsichord dappled Mountains of the Moon to the harpsichord dappled China Dol.
- [07:33]
C
All of my friends come to see me Last night I was laying in my bed and dying.
- [07:53]
B
That was Black Peter from 1970s Working man's dead. We explored that in its own Dead cast episode in season one, and we've gone into depth about all the songs I'm about to mention. We've posted links to the relevant episodes@dead.net Deadcast Starting in 1970, Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter mined a thread of increasingly quiet music.
- [08:15]
C
Going to leave this Broke Down palace on my hands and my knees I.
- [08:27]
E
Will roll, roll, roll.
- [08:31]
B
Many of the songs would become known as Garcia's ballads in the folk music sense. They're not. Many verse epics like Terrapin Station and Rubin and Therese are in the folk ballad tradition. The progression from Broke down palace and To Lay Me down towards Comes A Time in Stella Blue is one towards the pop ballad. We've used this quote from Elvis Costello before and we might well use it again. I don't know whether that was ever Jerry or Robert Hunter's ambition to be sort of brought into the great American songbook. But if you only took the songs from 70. Well, maybe from the record before American.
- [09:08]
F
Beauty, there's a few there.
- [09:10]
B
But particularly from Working Man's Dead to Mars Hotel, if you only took those.
- [09:16]
F
Songs, they belong in the great American ensemble.
- [09:18]
B
Elvis Costello had fallen fully in love with the Dead when he saw them perform the songs that became Europe 72 at the Bickershaw Festival. Check out that episode. But he stayed on the bus. The most beautiful melody Jerry ever wrote, Stella Blue.
- [09:32]
G
I'd say the most beautiful.
- [09:34]
B
I always heard Mel Torme singing it. I always wished Mel Torme would have done a version. I think he would have killed that song in a good way. I mean, he would have absolutely taken.
- [09:44]
H
It to a whole other audience.
- [09:46]
C
It all rolls and nothing comes for free. There's nothing you can hold forever.
- [10:17]
B
And then these other incredible song, Scarlet.
- [10:20]
H
Begonia's China Doll, which would be up there with.
- [10:23]
F
With.
- [10:23]
G
With Stella Bloom as.
- [10:25]
F
There's just the.
- [10:25]
B
The exquisite melody, you know, and the tenderness of the singing.
- [10:33]
C
Tell me what you done it for. No, I won't.
- [10:46]
B
From the start Jerry Garcia obviously conceived a quiet setting for Robert Hunter's Lyrics, a mournful piece in D minor. You can hear his early demo for Shynidaal on the new 50th anniversary edition of from the Mars Hotel. His demo from early 1973 doesn't have any drums. Perhaps knowing that no drum machine could approach the soulful sensitivity of Bill the Drummer, it follows its own rhythmic logic. It does have a solemn organ part, as the Greek composer Nigel Tufnell once.
- [11:28]
F
Put it, in D minor, which I.
- [11:31]
G
Always find is really the saddest of all keys.
- [11:34]
C
Really, I don't know why, but it.
- [11:36]
F
Makes people weep instantly to play.
- [11:38]
B
One reason for setting the song in the saddest of all keys is its solemn lyrics. When Blair Jackson spoke with Hunter in 1988 for the Golden Road, this song came up, and Hunter told Blair that one of my original titles for it was the Suicide Song. We'll let Jerry Garcia's isolated vocals highlight some of the individual lyrics here.
- [11:58]
C
A pistol shot at 5 o'. Clock. Look, the bells of heaven ring.
- [12:13]
B
Hunter said of the next line. It's almost like a ghost voice. In his printed lyrics collection A Box of Rain, the next line is set off in italics.
- [12:23]
C
Tell me what you done it for.
- [12:28]
B
Hunter referred to that line in this next one as a little dialogue.
- [12:33]
C
No, I won't tell you a thing.
- [12:40]
B
On the page. That last line of the first verse, the entirety of the second and third verses, and the first half of the fourth are contained inside quotation marks.
- [12:50]
C
I will not condemn you, nor yet would I deny. I would ask the same of you.
- [13:14]
B
And after that the quotation marks end and it returns to italics again, suggesting two characters in dialogue, but failing.
- [13:26]
C
Will not die.
- [13:29]
B
A China doll, it should be noted, is a delicate porcelain figurine popular in Germany from the late 19th through early 20th centuries. Along with the scene setting narration at the start, it's a trialogue of sorts, but it's hard to say who or what is in conversation. There are voices on both sides of the veil, perhaps, or maybe it's all a metaphor, something happening on a Wes Anderson like stage set. Blair suggested that there was an empathy to the italicized voice.
- [13:59]
C
Take up your china, Da.
- [14:04]
B
Hunter called that voice sort of like a guardian angel. Who knows who or what it is. This is a dangerous area for me to be talking about the metaphysics of my lyrics. You don't want me to start passing judgments on this. Something else musical happens in that moment. From the City College of New York.
- [14:23]
F
Sean o' Donnell for me, it really rhymes a bit musically with Half Step.
- [14:29]
E
A song that unfolds in A minor.
- [14:31]
F
For the most part, and then you.
- [14:33]
E
Have a big apotheosis at the end that shifts to A major. And here you have the same kind.
- [14:38]
F
Of thing with this ballad in D minor that then brightens up tremendously at.
- [14:42]
E
The end with the D major and.
- [14:45]
F
The shift of the F natural to F sharp.
- [14:47]
B
David Lemieux the minor to major.
- [14:50]
D
It hits me so hard on an emotional level, and it's like. It's like the darkness and then the light comes on. I think we all hear music in almost a visual sense. And the colors. I mean, I hear scarlet begonias in red, and it's not because of scarlet, just I do. It's how I see. I see the estimated profit in blues and I see China Doll as a song that it's more kind of chiaroscuro. So I see it in the dark and then the light comes on.
- [15:19]
C
Take up your China doll Take up your china daw it's only fracture Just.
- [15:37]
F
A little bit of.
- [15:44]
B
Hunter continued. I know to some degree what I intended there in China Doll, or I know what some of the resonances in there seem to be to me, even if I can't put too good a logical head on it. It seemed right. I trusted it. I had to, hunter told Blair. I think it's a terrifying song, and then it's also got some affirmation of how it can be mended somehow. There's a bit of metaphysical content in there which I kind of leave open. Not that I subscribe or don't subscribe to it at the time. It resonated, right? That song is eerie and very, very beautiful the way Jerry handles it. The song debuted in early 1973, played almost exclusively at first as a gorgeous coda to the original extended Eyes of the World. We focused on that pairing a bit in our season on the Here Comes Sunshine box set. They recorded it in its live electric arrangement at the Record Plant that summer for consideration on Wake of the Flood, which you can hear on the expanded 2004 edition. But it didn't make the cut.
- [17:00]
C
Bells of Heaven Ring.
- [17:05]
B
My guess is that Stella Blue won out in the slot for achingly quiet Garcia song. But I'm also going to guess that the song had an influence in a different way. Imagine you'd written a song as delicate as China Doll, and your band was scheduled to play in some of the biggest, boomiest venues in the United States. You too might want a Wall of Sound.
- [17:30]
F
SAM.
- [17:58]
B
Volume 24 of the original Dix Pick series is from March 23, 1974, a show that was advertised as a sound test.
- [18:07]
E
See you next month at the Cow Palace.
- [18:09]
B
I hope In a sense, every single Dead show could be billed as a sound test of sorts, especially since they switched over to the so called Alembic Pa on February 9, 1973, which we discussed at length last season and which we'll discuss more this season. Its most easily discernible characteristic was lack of front stage vocal monitors along with noise canceling double microphones. The system continued to change and grow. We caught up on its evolution through last time with Brian Anderson, who's working on a new book about the Wall of Sound titled Loud and Clear out next year from St. Martin's Press. We've linked more info@dead.net Deadcast in early December 1973, the system underwent a major change.
- [18:54]
F
The Boston Music Hall. That was the first instance that they stacked up everything behind them on scaffolding.
- [19:02]
B
And in early 1974 the band decided on a pair of further tests, one on their home court at Winterland in the heart of San Francisco and one elsewhere, someplace that would test the newest system's capabilities. They pondered maybe bringing it up to the Portland Coliseum, but settled on a venue closer by.
- [19:23]
E
KFRC presents the only 1966 San Francisco Rolling Stones concert Tuesday, July 26th at the Cow Palace. The Big 610 urges you to buy.
- [19:34]
B
Tickets early for this unforgettable experience.
- [19:38]
E
Tickets on sale now at the Downtown.
- [19:40]
F
Center, Sherman Clay in Oakland, the San Jose ticket office and the Cow Palace.
- [19:44]
B
The Cow palace in Daly City was and is a tried, if not exactly true Bay Area venue, at least in the sense that it's always been kind of a harsh toke. Opened in 1941, along with livestock contests, car shows, circuses, pro sports and other events, it had also held all manners of pop music. As we just heard, it's where local megapop station KFRC presented their really big shoes. Teenage Bobby Weir saw the Beatles there with high school friends in the summer of 65. There's a pretty hilarious account of the Merry Prankster's own separate experience at the gig in the Electro Kool Aid Acid Test. From a sound perspective, it was the kind of worst case scenario the Grateful Dead had to face increasingly at their new level of popularity. Richie Pechner was on the team responsible for fabricating and setting up the system.
- [20:34]
F
And that venue is probably one of the harshest at that time, one of the harshest venues to play in it was cavernous.
- [20:41]
B
Richie had watched Bayer orchestrate the changing shape of the system on the tours in late 1973.
- [20:47]
F
Experimentation was going on live. He would say, okay, I want these cabinets set up in this configuration. But the limitation there was is that we were working in smaller venues on an existing stage. And we'd have scaffolding delivered. And we have to figure out how to place the cabinets at the second level. Because this thing was growing vertically at the time. Eventually it became very vertical in terms of the final setup. So some of those shows were just total experimental setups to either prove or disprove that it improved the quality of the sound.
- [21:29]
B
Richie Pechner and the sound team turned into a virtual assembly line.
- [21:33]
F
We had folks like Richie Peckner and so many others who were cutting lots and lots of wood, a lot of late, late nights, cutting that fine 14 ply finish birch, which is what they settled on. That was the material that they settled on to build all the cabinets in the Wall of Sound. And that stuff is basically bulletproof. But at the time, it was only being shipped into the Bay Area in kind of limited quantities. And they would go over to McBeath Hardwoods in Berkeley and pick up like whole pallets of that stuff. Basically, like the entire load that would come into McBeath, the dead would buy all of it. So they were cutting and fabricating so much wood, building out those cabinets at Front Street. And initially, you know, they didn't have a ventilation system there, so there was a lot of sawdust. And that stuff started creeping into some of the electronics and some of the instruments. And I think they very clearly realized that, oh, shit, we need to kind of like separate this stuff. At some point during that period, Ramrod came back from. I can't remember where he'd gone to do something with the Almond Brothers. And they wanted a guitar system like Jerry's. Same cabinet setup. And we talked about it and said, well, we could do that, but I don't know if we can do that while we're. Or using the Grateful Deaths resources, you know, to build, basically build a guitar system for another band. So we formed a separate company. Ramrod, Rex, myself and a friend of Ramrods. I can't remember the guy's name. Anyway, we formed a little company called Quality Control Sound Products, which basically was a separate entity so we could build these systems for other people. By that point, the dad and their road crew, they had purchased and built their own staging and scaffolding for the Wall of Sound. Because prior to this, they had so Much gear that at certain venues that stuff would go through the floor. It was beginning to not be safe. So they built their own custom staging and custom scaffolding to hold this entire apparatus. And yeah, I think at the Cob palace they had finally enough space, enough elbow room to really set that thing up proper and let it rip. And by let it rip, I guess I mean, you know, turn the volume up to two.
- [24:24]
B
The Wall of Sound was about clarity, not volume, but also some volume. There were still a few major components of the system in development in March, including the piano pa. We'll talk more about the central vocal cluster next episode at the Cow Palace. Hanging above Billy Kreutzman was a vocal system made of smaller component speaker stacks. Michael Parish had been privy to the developments in the dead system since 1969. But from the audience side, a true.
- [24:53]
F
Bay Area head, in a way it's amazing is the Cal palace is still there. They did livestock shows there when I was a kid. We would go every year. They had this boat and sports show where they, you know, it had all these boats and I remember that's the first place I ever tasted yogurt. They had a yogurt stand there.
- [25:15]
B
Michael had seen two of the three shows at Winterland in February and was ready for the next round.
- [25:21]
F
The Cow palace. You know, it was only a month after the Winterland shows and my impression is that much bigger venue, the few thousand people who would usually go to any Dead show already had tickets, but they didn't come close to selling out early on. So I believe it was KYA, the AM Top 40 radio station, started giving away tickets because they needed to fill up the hall and again for to be a sound test. If it was only half full, it wouldn't really have had that effect. So it was the first show that sort of had this sense of what. What one experienced post in the dark, that people who really had no idea what was what the Dead were about or. Or why they were there. There was a lot of people calling for Casey Jones and a lot more drunk people. And it was very apparent in the hall and. And Weir alludes to it.
- [26:25]
B
Steve Beck left us with this memory@stories.dead.net, where you can and should still leave your wall of sound in Mars Hotel Stories for episodes about songs and shows we haven't gotten to yet.
- [26:37]
D
There were people jumping up on the stage doing various things, trying to talk to the band members during songs.
- [26:43]
F
One guy tried to put the Europe.
- [26:45]
E
72 bozo mask on Phil as he.
- [26:47]
F
Was.
- [26:57]
B
And you can hear his response.
- [26:59]
D
To that on the Dick's Picks recording of the show. That's what prompted Weir to say a little later on, you can sure tell the ones who won their tickets over the radio.
- [27:11]
E
You can sure tell the ones that.
- [27:12]
D
Won their tickets over the radio.
- [27:16]
F
Again, maybe sort of fits in with. With what they were going to be dealing with with the larger halls that year. I mean, you know, on the east coast they could fill any sized room they wanted to, but it wasn't necessarily as true. On the west coast they did have sound problems.
- [27:32]
B
Well, it was only a test.
- [27:34]
F
Richie Peckner that shows known for blowing out the system when it was turned on. I think there was something was miswiring and it shorted out the PA so that the show is basically acoustically not perfect.
- [27:51]
B
Sometimes it's hard to know what's causing what on a tape, but on the audience recording you can hear Garcia's guitar go from crisp to muffled in the first few seconds of the opening song.
- [28:15]
F
I could tell during the show that they were tweaking things. The volume of different parts of the band seemed to be. I don't know, I mean maybe it was sort of a self fulfilling process promise that, you know, thinking that it was. That was what they were doing. That's what it sounded like. But it certainly did seem like the. The sound is being adjusted on the fly a little bit. One of the things that came out of this was, well, you can take the best sound system in the world and if you take it to the wrong place, it's not going to sound good. I think the only thing people remember about that was it sounded awful.
- [28:54]
B
That's not all that they remember. There was a pair of significant debuts though. The first has an asterisk.
- [29:07]
C
I've seen where the Wolf Has Slept.
- [29:09]
E
By the Silver Strain. I could tell by the mark he left you were in his dream.
- [29:19]
B
Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow's Cassidy was released on Ace in 1972, which we went into in depth on our Ace 50 episode.
- [29:26]
F
It was a very different arrangement. I remember Weir grabbed a different guitar, a hollow bodied guitar to play that and it didn't quite seem to work. It was really cool that they were playing it, but I think the arrangements they did post retirement were a whole lot better.
- [29:44]
B
After this show it would go back on the shelf until 1976 when it was rebooted in a new key. The other debut had no such issues. Scarlet Begonia's was an instant Dead classic, which we'll get to in due time. Our friend David Ganz experienced the sound test, too.
- [30:11]
G
When I was a young Deadhead in the early 70s, one of the most amazing things.
- [30:16]
B
I went and saw the Dead at.
- [30:17]
F
The Cow palace in March of 1974.
- [30:20]
B
And there was this moment in China Cat Sunflower, when they get to the.
- [30:23]
F
Bridge, that either chord and the bridge.
- [30:24]
B
And Phil hit this note that rattled the whole building. And a week later, my buddy Feldstein.
- [30:30]
F
Had a reel of that show.
- [30:32]
B
And when we listened to it on.
- [30:33]
F
The tape, it distorted the tape, too. And it was like, oh, my God, that's so cool.
- [30:50]
B
Using the latest in modern technology, we've degraded that recording just slightly to make it sound more like David's memory. A few days after the sound test, the San Francisco Chronicle published a photo of the band sound checking at the Cow Palace. It was captioned the Wall of Sound. It's the first and only time in 1974 that I've seen the Wall of Sound called that in print. It was never the project's formal name, but it stuck. They didn't go into common usage until about a half decade later. Still, it was a wall, and people called it that. Steve Brown of Grateful Dead Records.
- [31:24]
I
And then we did the sound check at cow palace in 74. And that was the time when people started referring to it as the wall. As I remember Deadheads and the Crew and people. That's because they had to put it up and it took for hours. Once you could see it drawn, that was like, it's a wall. You know, look at all these speakers. Holy shit. So that got the name pretty early on.
- [31:50]
B
Journalist Brian Anderson.
- [31:52]
F
And then, of course, in 1974, right around the sound test at the Cow palace, you get some local reports that refer to a wall of sound, capital W, capital F. John Wasserman, I think, who was like a local Bay Area reporter and published a story the days after the sound test where he refers to a wall of sound. And I think that's even included in, like, the title or, like, the subtitle of his article.
- [32:25]
B
It's possible that John Wasserman was the first to call the Dead system the Wall of Sound. Or possibly the editor at the Chronicle who provided the headline. Or perhaps Wasserman was just passing along a phrase he heard backstage. It had been used in popular music for years, coined almost a full decade before the Dead's usage and credited to Rolling Stones manager Andrew Lou Goldham, who used it to describe Phil Spector's production for the Righteous brothers in late 1964.
- [32:52]
C
Bring back that mercy that love feeling Bring back that love feeling.
- [33:19]
B
From then on, the phrase was in circulation, often deployed by music journalists in different contexts.
- [33:26]
F
I have found newspaper clippings going back to the early 70s that refer to the sound waves coming off of the stage, coming out of the Dead's rig, as a wall of sound. Now, that's not the same as the moniker that would be given to this gigantic sound system by fans later on, but it is curious that already in the press, folks were using that phrase to describe what was going on. And they were definitely using it in a way that was distinct from referring to the wall of sound that was Phil Spector's production techniques in that same period, late 60s, early 70s. Mickey refers to, you know, how they were playing within a wall of sound. He refers to that in a number of different places.
- [34:29]
B
Andy Leonard was the vice president of Grateful Dead Records and witnessed the wall in 1974.
- [34:35]
E
The wall of sound was awesome. It was a live animal when it became the thing that finally was the wall of sound that everybody sees the pictures of. I just remember being awe of those guys, Kid and Joe and those guys going up in the rigging during the show with the Allen wrench in their teeth and changing a blown speaker cone while everything was going. I mean, I thought, Holy shit.
- [34:58]
B
In 1973. In 1974, the Grateful Dead were undergoing a period of rapid expansion, with new companies being formed left and right to help support the band's growing operation, something Andy realized around the time he got to the Bay Area.
- [35:12]
E
And there were guys working for the Grateful Dead through the ancillary companies that either staged it, built it, maintained it, hauled it, or ran it who I didn't know, because I just got there. And then I realized a lot of these other guys just got there, too. I mean, they may have come from Alembic, or they may have come from one of the trucking crews, or they may have come from a rigging crew that everybody knew because they worked for Bill Graham. You know, there's a million different places where these guys showed up from, but I didn't know them. So I kept thinking, man, there's a lot of guys on this project.
- [35:51]
B
By comparison, there were fewer people working for Grateful Dead Records, the band's new label. That didn't make it any less of an ambitious project. In the wall of sound, they were attempting to hand engineer their own path into record stores. Label president Ron Rackow had hired Andy to work for Grateful Dead Records in mid 1973.
- [36:11]
F
Andy Leonard is brilliant. He's a photographer he's the real deal. He's a lot of things. I hired him, you know, he didn't have any money, so he came to Marin County. You can't be in Marin county without a car. So he got two junk BMWs and.
- [36:27]
E
Took them apart and made one good.
- [36:29]
F
One out of it. Took it. I mean, apart, apart. Daniel couldn't do. He's something else.
- [36:36]
E
I was a fairly serious black and white photographer, sort of half in the art world. And then I paid the bills doing other stuff with the cameras. But I actually had a show that was to be hung with Danny Lyons in Andover. I got sucked up by the mothership and never went to my own opening. So that was the death knell of my professional photography career. That was supposed to be my coming out party, but I was actually across country in my BMW setting up distribution networks for the Grateful Dead record company.
- [37:09]
B
Like the Wall of Sound, Grateful Dead records was an evolving beast with its own masterminds, personalities and politics. And one mostly unified mission. Andy Leonard came into the Dead world by way of Bobby Weird and Andy's Wesleyan classmate, John Perry Barlow.
- [37:25]
E
But I think that Bobby wanted somebody that he knew that wasn't already in the soup to look over the record company on his behalf. Because, you know, as we all know, Raquel and Garcia are the juice behind 80% of the projects that that happened during that time. It was a two edged sword. You know, there was what Garcia wanted to do and Rackow was going to help him do it. Or maybe it was Rakow's idea and then the project was to get everybody else to think that was a good idea because Phil and Bobby and Billy weren't deciding that they want to start their own record company. They were kind of, kind of riding along with, with this stuff that Rack out who is brilliant threw on the table and, and went that way. I think Bobby felt like he might get trampled. I've never had this conversation with him, but we were buddies and I could count. I seen the elephant. I wasn't going to be blown away by anything that I was about to see. And I wasn't going to let anybody steal large amounts of money or hurt my friend. And I'm useful from time to time, you know. I ended up doing, doing a lot of the production and a couple of record covers and some of the PR. It was a small company.
- [38:41]
B
So in 1973 he set up shop at the record company house in San Rafael.
- [38:46]
E
I was the vice president of Grateful Dead Records. My office was on the porch and Rakow's office was looking over the street. We would talk to each other from our desks.
- [38:55]
B
The groundwork that Andy Leonard helped lay in 1973 would set the course for what the Grateful Dead did in 1974 and 1975 especially. The first piece was record distribution.
- [39:06]
E
You couldn't get the A level record distributors because they were kind of tied up with the big record companies and they weren't going to make anybody real happy to tell Warner Brothers that they were selling the Grateful Dead record, which was in direct competition to Warner Brothers last year. So we were down the list a little bit. And in some of the smaller cities, that produced some fairly shaky folks. Josh Blardo and I used to fly around the country and talk to these guys. That's something Ron would have been very good at. But he, you know, he couldn't do 18 or 19 of them from where he was sitting because he was busy.
- [39:37]
B
But his role naturally evolved, helping set.
- [39:40]
E
Up the distribution, which we needed first. And then all of a sudden we needed products, so we needed art and the covers and all that stuff. And then we needed, you know, we needed publicity. And then we needed. And then we needed. So it kind of, you know, my job description moved around a lot.
- [39:58]
B
The same season that Grateful Dead records debuted, so did the world's first major oil crisis, which had a direct impact on sourcing material to press records.
- [40:06]
E
It was a question of, okay, you're going to have music here any second now. Do you have any vinyl to print the test pressings on that doesn't have ground up record labels in it from old records? No. Okay, so we better go down to Tijuana at night and get some virgin vinyl, Right? Okay.
- [40:22]
F
Which they did from Los Angeles.
- [40:25]
E
That's not a big deal. But at that point, in order to get vinyl, they were grinding up old records and PVC pipe and stuff. And you get a little tick every time you ran over a piece of paper in that. And we at least wanted to get the DJ copies out with clean stuff. And this is oil crisis. It was in that time frame.
- [40:44]
B
We're going to need album art too.
- [40:45]
E
Andy, what about cardboard? Is there enough cardboard out there? Who's doing the separations? Who's doing the printing? Where, you know, is. Alan got everybody straight on the copyright. I mean, it was, what do you need today? It was a pain in the tail. Every step of the way there was something that we didn't know about or they weren't going to give us credit for. I was bringing home record covers that had fluorescent Paint on them to see if we wanted to pay for fluorescent Grateful Dead record covers.
- [41:16]
B
In 1973, they released Wake of the Flood, which became their highest charting LP to date at number 18. Decidedly not a failure. In 1974, they shifted to the next level.
- [41:28]
E
It was no longer a science experiment. We were no longer shooting from the hip hop. We had to be a little more careful about what stuff cost. I could go to one of the big outfits in Los Angeles. Now, they don't know the Grateful Dead.
- [41:41]
F
From a hole in the wall in.
- [41:42]
E
Los Angeles if they run a big printing company and do packaging for industry. But if I show up and go, okay, look, I want you to do XYZ for us. And we need 300,000 of them. And you know, we need them yesterday at about 4:30. And oh, by the way, I don't have all the artwork here. And you know, you do that the first time and you really gotta have to talk them into it the second time. When you show up, you've got credit. They got somebody to help you with the artwork. They know what you're looking for. About two thirds of what you need. It was ever so much simpler.
- [42:15]
B
So in starting one record company, why not two?
- [42:18]
F
Ron Rakow Jerry and I had this idea. I forgot what the idea was, but he said, you know what we should do? We should go into business.
- [42:26]
E
Just.
- [42:29]
F
So I said, well, I can't do that. Why not? I said, because the language of business is accounting and you can't speak it. So I. We would have an. I would have a nervous breakdown. So he said, are you telling me I'm stupid? I said, no, I don't think you stupid. I laughed. He said, well, do you know accounting really well? I said, I used to be a 10 accountant. That was my. That's how I got through college. I was an accountant in Chinatown in New York. And he said, well, teach me accounting then. So I left his house and went to San Francisco State University and bought the elementary accounting textbook and the workbook. And I went back there and he started on it in three weeks. Later we were reading financial statements. I went down to Merrill lynch at that time. They gave you financial statements in beautifully prepared books. I got about a half a dozen of them. And I took him up there and we went through them. He had a great time. He loved it. You know, everything else is bullshit. The only thing that's important in business is the numbers. So that's what happened. So that's how we started.
- [43:37]
B
Round records assembled in early 1974 around the time of the sound test at the Cow Palace. Round Records would officially launch later in the spring and serve as an outlet for the band members side trips for the next several years.
- [43:50]
E
Jerry and I were 5050 partners in round Records.
- [43:54]
F
There was nothing that he didn't know.
- [43:55]
E
And there was nothing I didn't know.
- [43:57]
B
To paraphrase the old joke about what happens when you let one Deadhead crash on the floor of your hotel room, what followed is what happens if you go into business with a charged up Ron Rakow. Over the next few years. There'd be mini businesses.
- [44:10]
F
We started it and we owned it. 50 50. And we started a publishing company. We own that 50 50. Then we started a movie company and we owned that 50 50. And then we started the second record company by just reserving the name with the state.
- [44:26]
B
But at the core of the spinoff universe was Round Records.
- [44:29]
F
The plan was to build a real record company and using the Grateful Dead to leave it from.
- [44:35]
B
And at the core of Round Records was Jerry Garcia. In early 1974, before the Grateful Dead themselves got to work on from the Mars Hotel, Garcia got to work on what would become his second solo album.
- [44:59]
C
Trying to Find Somebody, Take Away these Blues, She Don't Love the Hymn, Singing in the Sun, Heydays Are Coming and my Work is.
- [45:11]
B
Now known as Compliments of Garcia. It was a totally new kind of album for Jerry Garcia and a new kind of creative challenge. Ironically, just as the Dead were unveiling their own wall of sound, Garcia made his only album channeling the original Phil Spector style wall of sound, acting as a session player and vocalist on his own record. It was recorded in la, a place Garcia hadn't made a full album since the Dead's debut. Personal manager and new Grateful Ed booking agent Richard Loren accompanied him to Devonshire Studios for the sessions.
- [45:43]
F
I mean I was in the studio for the recording. It was a great experience at a Compliments album in la, you know, seeing Jerry in.
- [45:49]
B
Another whole element producing the album was Garcia's compatriot John Khan. Ron Rackow.
- [45:55]
F
Yeah, the first Round Jerry record, if Jerry was in the studio, Khan was there, he was the producer. He and Jerry were real close and Tom was just great. He's smart as a way. He had some problems and the nature of them are well known, but he was a fabulous guy and smart as hell and Gary loved him and there was nothing he wouldn't do for Jerry and so on.
- [46:20]
B
It was an album of entirely cover songs. Here's how Garcia described it to David Gans and Blair Jackson in 1981. Now in David's wonderful book Conversations with the Dead, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast.
- [46:33]
G
Most of the songs I didn't know neither. So I went in there like as a studio vocalist. And most of them I'd only heard one or two times. That was like one of the few times when I didn't really go on a trip about the material. I let John do the material selecting, except for a few suggestions like Russian.
- [46:48]
A
Mullet.
- [46:53]
C
Here come A Russian Lullaby Just a plain little tune when baby starts to cry.
- [47:09]
B
The end of Garcia's last quote was a little garbled, but he pointed out that Irving Berlin's Russian Lullaby was his own choice. Also one of my favorites.
- [47:18]
G
See yourself Through Somebody else's Eyes is what it's like. And since John and I share such similarities of taste, I mean, he and I have really, really parallel taste musically. Like something that I like is almost sure John is almost sure like it. And you know what I mean, it's just like we're very like each other musically. It's one of the reasons I've been playing with him all this time. I wanted him to have something to do, really. I enjoy working with him. And it's one of those things that he can do and it's one of those situations that he doesn't get that doesn't get happened to him much in his other. The other parts of his musical life.
- [47:58]
B
For the album, Kahn wrote the first of several songs he'd composed with Robert Hunter. The album Closer Midnight Town, a songwriter bonus. Besides John Khan on bass and Merle Saunders on organ on a few cuts, Garcia was working with session players.
- [48:30]
F
All those incredible studio musicians, Michael Omar and playing piano, piano and organ. I mean, God, it was great to hear Jerry actually perform in that way, you know, I mean, a lot of. A lot of Dead fans don't like it because he just couldn't trip out. He was. He was forced to actually play, you know, the solo over the. Over the bass track and everything else.
- [48:51]
E
You know, and then do like a vocal overdub.
- [48:53]
F
And it was like very constructed like.
- [48:55]
E
They do in la.
- [48:56]
B
It was also the beginning of Garcia's relationship with drummer Ronnie Tutt, then taking care of business in Elvis Presley's band. This is just two months after the Compliment sessions. Tut King, they'd be on stage together within a few months. Though it would take a little while longer for Tut to join Garcia and.
- [49:46]
F
Khan on the road with Open Ended Studio, you know, so they just Once, you know, a musician would go on a fade and he'd like, get into a song, oh, yeah, let's play that one, you know, and then they'd all just jump in, you know. It was great. There were so many outtakes on there. I mean, amazing number of outtakes.
- [50:04]
C
There's a place where lovers go.
- [50:13]
F
To.
- [50:13]
C
Cry that trouble is away and they called it Lonesome Town with a Broken Heart.
- [50:39]
B
It was the kind of album that Garcia couldn't have made in San Francisco. Here's Garcia speaking with Ben Fong Torres on Khe San in 1975.
- [50:48]
G
It's never happened up here. The recording scene hasn't, because the recording companies don't have. I've never put any bucks into San Francisco. They haven't opened up kind of. There's no authority up here. So, you know, there aren't people doing.
- [51:00]
E
A lot of work.
- [51:01]
F
It works two ways. It works.
- [51:04]
G
The disadvantage is that there isn't a big recording scene in San Francisco. The advantage is that there isn't a.
- [51:10]
F
Big recording in San Francisco.
- [51:13]
B
If the recording studio is sometimes considered an instrument of its own, then the instrument Garcia and Khan used to make Garcia's album produced a sound that could only have been made in la, because.
- [51:23]
G
Like in la, all those studios have to keep working. So they grind out miserable commercials and jingles and all this other crap and, you know, Saturday morning TV shows for kids soundtracks and cop show themes and.
- [51:35]
F
All the rest of that crap.
- [51:36]
G
It just is, you know, totally mechanical music. And I think most of the players up here really don't want to do those kind of sessions. And it's just everybody's just happy to.
- [51:44]
F
Not have them, really.
- [51:45]
B
Though the bulk of the sessions took place in la, there was some work that could only be done back home in the Bay Area. Neither version of Ricky Nelson's Lonesome Town made the cut. But the acoustic tape in San Francisco is a rare studio session with David Grisman, Vassar Clements, and Garcia's old bluegrass tape collecting buddy, Sandy Rothman.
- [52:09]
C
Where lovers go to cry that trouble and they call him Lonesome Town. Where the broken.
- [52:37]
B
That was recorded at San Francisco's CBS studios. And whether intentional or not, Jerry Garcia once again did side work at the studio where the Grateful Dead would soon be recording. While kind of random, both of Garcia's trips there were instructive of the ways the pop world was changing in parallel to the Dead.
- [52:55]
G
Columbia is kind of a good studio.
- [52:57]
F
But it's so sterile and it's a drag to be there.
- [53:01]
B
Opened by Roy Siegel in 1970 as a Bay Area outpost for Columbia Records. It took until 1973 for any grateful Dead related activity to occur there. A lifetime in Garcia years. He's sometimes credited with banjo on this track by Art Garfunkel, but is listed under guitar on the album itself.
- [53:26]
C
World whose name was Rose county.
- [53:48]
B
That's down in the Willow Garden from Art Garfunkel's solo debut, Angel Claire, recorded at CBS sometime in 1972 or 1973. In 1981, when Blair Jackson and David Ganz interviewed Garcia for BAM, he told them about this session, which turned out to be a bit of a culture clash, but also illustrates different ways of making music. Thanks, David and Blair.
- [54:11]
G
One time I did a session for somebody, Art Garfunkel. It turned out that it was like every little note, every lick and every moment of what I was doing, which was an overdub in a sea of overdose. He wanted me to play my own stuff. I mean, it wasn't that he wanted me to play a part, but he definitely wanted to discuss everything that happened, you know, and it was one of those things where everything that I did, I did four or five times. It wasn't, you know, once wasn't enough.
- [54:38]
B
Cerebral might be a word to describe Art Garfunkel's process.
- [54:42]
G
My spirit, the feeling that I go in with to this deal with is to be basically helpful if I'm working for somebody else. And that's something that I always imagine they are best able to decide, you know, I'm not in a position to advise them. I'm basically there to play as well as I can and then let them make the decisions later, you know, whether they want to keep it or not. And then usually my experience is something along the lines like later on when the record finally comes out, I don't really remember which of my over jobs it is that I'm hearing, you know, and I. It's not nearly as emotionally important to me as it was when it was happening and stuff like that. So it's part of the learning process of record and making records and all that. And it's part of what's interesting about working with other people.
- [55:29]
B
One aspect of CBS Studios that Garcia would take advantage of, both with his solo album and with the Dead, was the location of the studio instrument rentals rehearsal space directly across Folsom Street. One of the first locations outside LA of the still active SIR practice spaces. Artists would use it to tighten up their songs before heading into CBS to track. It was at SIR in the spring of 74 that Jerry Garcia encountered a future bandmate. This is Garcia speaking with Ben Fong Torres on khe San in 1975.
- [56:02]
G
My little band, we were rehearsing over at SIR, and the tubes were in.
- [56:06]
F
The big, big rehearsal thing.
- [56:16]
C
Myself, when I get enough room, can't clean up though I know I should. White pumps are dope.
- [56:25]
B
The Tubes, including Vince Wellnick on keyboards, were literally getting their act together.
- [56:30]
G
Their rehearsal scene is more, more stringent than like a Broadway play, you know, they rehearse like a bar at a time, they're moved.
- [56:39]
F
They have like at 7 o', clock.
- [56:40]
G
It'S the dancer call, you know, 5:30 at the band call the principals and so forth.
- [56:47]
F
And they really.
- [56:48]
G
It's just like a Broadway musical.
- [56:49]
F
It's that tight.
- [56:50]
G
You know, they rehearse it maybe even harder, even tighter. And, you know, so they're very serious on the level of what. What amounts of stagecraft, you know, and I can dig that. You know, it's just like a musical or a play. The fact that they can do it with some wit and enjoy it, you know, that's tremendous.
- [57:08]
B
Though the Dead had CBS signed out, starting a few days after the March 23 show at the Cow Palace. Most of the first week was spent by Garcia finishing up his solo album. On March 30, 1974, the Dead began tracking their first song for from the Mars Hotel. The dance rehearsals for from the Mars Hotel would be less stringent than the Tubes, but become part of how the album was made. Each afternoon, they would convene at sir, run down the music they were going to record that evening, and then head over to cbs. Steve Brown of Grateful Dead Records was a production assistant.
- [57:53]
I
And it was a thing of coming in around dinner time, so I would have to take orders from them about what they wanted for dinner and then go over to Original Joe's on Taylor street over there and pick up the dinners and my van and drive back over and bring them to the studio. And Phil would bring in his French wine and stuff. Wait a sec, we're supposed to be working here. You know, this is like a dinner party. What is going on?
- [58:24]
H
You know.
- [58:24]
I
And so they'd go through this whole thing of eating. And then of course, you eat that kind of food, you know, and you drink that kind of wine and say, oh, yeah, now we're going to work. So it went late into the night oftentimes, but there was plenty of substance to keep people awake.
- [58:42]
B
To help explain the tale of the tape, we once again welcome back transfer engineer Brian Kehue these tracks sound very.
- [58:49]
H
Pristine and almost clear, but almost plain Jane to me. They don't sound full of hippie vibe and amazing coolness. They're cool, but it's still them. But the same way a photographer can take different pictures of the same face. We're hearing the Dead through different filters of the studio that will be in the production. And so on this one. And I'm sure CBS was fairly corporate. It was fairly established in doing high level, high quality work. So it does sound good. But some of the roughness and the weirdness and even the character that I heard on the earlier stuff is not as strong here.
- [59:50]
B
And while it may sound a little slicker than earlier Dead albums. There is still some heady experimentation happening.
- [59:55]
H
It's an interesting window of them pushing the envelope of what was technically possible in studios.
- [60:02]
B
In part because of the rehearsals at sir, in part because of other factors. And in part just because. Everything has to be more paradoxical with the Dead. Compared to the Dead's previous few studio albums. There's more tape, but less music.
- [60:16]
H
So there are different levels of what we call master tapes. A master means it's the original recording. It's not a copy of a previous recording. Now, a master can also mean another thing. In recording. If I do 10 attempted takes of Stairway to Heaven and I like the seventh one. Then that version is called the master. And that's the one that you make the record from. In the case of all the previous work, starting with Working Man's Dead and things like that. Where we go into the master tapes. We often have outtakes that are original tapes. And then the master tape was simply the fourth or seventh version of that. That they added overdubs to and mixed. But in this case, we have additional reels and quite a few of them. It was a really thick and dense project to go through. Just from the numerous rolls of tape that showed up now they were doing something that was quite different.
- [61:11]
B
The first reason for the tape explosion was that they were backing up as they went.
- [61:15]
H
And it's not uncommon, but they were doing safety tapes. So those are a copy. They are not no longer a master. They're simply a duplicate. And an archival thing, if you want to call it that, or a safety tape. What if somebody accidentally erases Phil's bass part. Hoping to punch in a guitar solo, and they hit the wrong track? Sometimes these things happen. You could go back to the safety roll and grab the original bass part and try to line it up again.
- [61:43]
B
And in fact, we'll be Getting to a few interesting bits that Brian pulled out of the safety reels. But they weren't the experiments that made the dead take up twice as much tape as usual.
- [61:52]
H
And then we have these reels which I was astounded by. They were called sync reels, synchronizing or synchronous reels. And it means you have a second machine running and it's literally in sync. It's synchronized to the first machine. When the first machine starts, the second one starts. If the first machine wobbles and slows down a bit, the second machine copies that motion. Hopefully it's done very steadily. But the reason they did that was to give you more tracks. And so as anybody found since the days of the Beatles working with four track, and then they wanted eight track and then eight track became 16. This is a very, very early use of synchronized tape machines. In fact, it's the earliest one I've ever seen in my life.
- [62:37]
B
Steve Brown remembers it well.
- [62:39]
I
That's where we took the 216 tracks and hooked them together. And we're able to get the 32 track. So we had two sync tracks from the machines, but 30 tracks filled. I kept all that stuff that I had to write in all every night, you know, stuff what we were doing on each. Each song.
- [62:57]
B
Thanks to the track sheets from Steve, plus copious amounts of other paperwork, it's possible to pinpoint a good deal of the studio session for Mars Hotel.
- [63:05]
H
It's not brand new ideas. In the Beatles days, their technical wizard Ken Townsend had synchronized two audio tape machines together before by printing a simple code on one track of a four track machine. So they had three tracks of music left and then they controlled the second machine. So they had two four tracks linked together for A Day in the Life. And they did it on fool on the Hill and a couple records. But it was so troublesome, so difficult that they decided not to do that much more.
- [63:37]
B
On the other hand, the dead committed.
- [63:39]
H
They would fill up 16 tracks. They would. Well, probably one of the tracks would be that code. And so the code would also be printed on the second machine so that they could be compared for reference.
- [63:50]
B
Here's what a bit of that sync code sounds like if you listen to it.
- [63:56]
H
And all it did was just make sure the second machine stayed in time with the first. So each machine has 15 audio tracks left for music, giving them a total of 30 working tracks, which is pretty cool. This is more than they needed in almost every case. But what it allowed them to do was just a lot of messing around. You could keep three guitar tracks and put maybe four more down and see which ones work, or even multiple vocals, and then choose between which parts of the vocal you wanted. They weren't even going crazy with it. I mean, on these sync reels, I might have six or eight tracks. They're not using all the available 15, nor did they really need it. I think on some of these, the record's not more complicated than the previous albums, but it gave them some options.
- [64:45]
B
In fact, the advance of 32 tracks turned out to be about eight steps too far for 1974. In early July, two months after the Dead wrapped the sessions and a week after from the Mars Hotel came out, the first band began using a 24 track studio. Queen's sheer Heart Attack was the first album made with a 24 track, and it'd be another few years before 32s became the norm.
- [65:18]
I
That was really a good feeling about, this is going to be a good album. The energy was really good. Everybody was feeling like, hey, we got some good shit here. You know, we're gonna be able to do this.
- [65:30]
B
The work on the album's second song, China Doll, started simply enough.
- [65:35]
H
It has take five complete on the 18th of April, and so that is all we get.
- [65:42]
B
The band had recorded the song for Wake of the flood in 1973 and played it numerous times live. Since they had it down.
- [65:50]
H
It says take five on the box. So what I'm assuming is that they had other takes that were either not complete or. But they threw them out or erased them later. And again, if there is an issue with tape, you can easily record over a tape that you're not going to use again. People feel a little weird about that, like, it's not virgin. But honestly, if you roll the tape back and you sing your vocal twice, it's not virgin either. You've wiped over the first vocal. It's not a problem. There's nothing left on the tape. So to take a tape back and record over it, reuse it, they might have done a reel of China Dolls.
- [66:26]
B
The core take of China Doll features a really lovely Grateful Dead quartet. Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir on acoustic guitars, Phil Lesh on what might be upright bass, or probably just a very warm electric tone. And Keith God show on harpsichord.
- [66:40]
F
One, two, three, four, Sam.
- [67:13]
B
Steve Brown.
- [67:14]
I
I would have to write down each one of the takes, and then when Jerry would listen to them and such, he would then tell me how to be able to get a sense of which one of those takes was the one.
- [67:32]
B
One thing that gives the Studio version of China Doll. Its glow is that there's no backbeat, clicking out a regular sense of time, only accents, much like the magical 1969 versions of Darkstar. Similarly, with the presence of the harpsichord, it's one of the only songs that channels the tonal palette of Mountains of the Moon, almost bringing Garcia and Hunter full circle. Here's what most of Billy Kreutzman's drum parts sound like on Shine It All. And in case you weren't sure where that was in the song, there's an overdubbed electric bass weaving through the song as well. And it's the first sign that something is about to change underneath. The song begins to transform during the third verse. This is where the guitar solo goes in the live versions, but on the studio take, the solo is more like an accompanying part and functions to help move the song towards its conclusion. Dig it, if you will, in isolation. I think it's a phaser that's adding the extra Robert Fripp like awesomeness. It's kind of the screaming opposite of everything else in the arrangement. And yet it works. Now, what if Hear me out but blowing your mind with that. They also did this with that mini choir guiding the song from minor to major. We've arrived at the coda. And here's where Steve Brown's paperwork gets fun. It's China Doll that he's specifically describing here.
- [70:38]
I
When he wanted to change something on one of the takes or have him do another take based on something that he described. And this is where I learned about Jerry's seeing music. He saw music. He would give me verbal descriptions of something physical as an idea of how this should be, you know, so if he says, you know, it has to have a calliope sound to it and it has to have something that is flying in the sky more something that. And so I'm seeing him see his music. It really blew my mind. It's like he doesn't just listen to music, he sees it. And I was. It became, wow, you know, now I can see music too. He opened a door wide on me because I'm sitting there next to him writing down the notes, you know, and stuff as he says it. And you can see what he's saying.
- [71:43]
B
I'm going to guess that the calliope reference grew out of this lyric in the song.
- [71:47]
C
If you can abide it, let the hurdy gurdy play.
- [72:00]
B
A hurdy gurdy is a pretty far out sounding medieval instrument where a mechanical bow plays a violin controlled by a hand crank. It sounds Like a calliope is a steam powered organ, often used in circuses and in carousels. It sounds like this. Neither was probably readily available at CBS when the band was doing overdubs, but what they created evokes the dreaminess of those instruments. Keith Godshow plays harpsichord on the basic track for the song's coda, Keith Godshow laid in a harmonium, a small hand.
- [73:16]
F
Pumped drone organization.
- [73:31]
B
For extra wheeze. Keith also added notes from the bass pedals of an organ, almost ambient. And my favorite overdubbed as well. A celeste, a piano instrument that uses the keys to strike small pitched bells instead of strings. Two more layers of jaw dropping vocals for good measure.
- [74:44]
C
Just a Little Nervous from the Fall.
- [74:51]
B
Combined with everything else going on, it's one of the loveliest sound combinations on the Dead studio albums. To my ears.
- [75:09]
C
It'S only fractured.
- [75:15]
F
Just a Little Nervous from the Fall.
- [75:23]
B
All that and they actually didn't even spill onto the sink reel.
- [75:26]
H
Brian Kehue I have a note here which is interesting. It's the only tape where they use Dolby noise reduction, and most people know about Dolby from their cassette decks or from a Spinal Tap joke here and there. But Dolby was simply a way to keep the tape hiss that's inherent in all analog recordings down low. And I'm surprised, but maybe because China Doll is such a sparse and quiet and gentle song, that's when you really would hear noise. But something much more rocking US blues or something. You're never going to hear a tapestry because it's just a loud song. The tracks themselves are pretty quite loud and the noise is always down in the low, low stuff. Like a quiet song.
- [76:11]
B
A delicate song with delicate parts. Maybe the most delicate song the Dead ever recorded in a studio and intended to be performed on the biggest sound system in the world. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux there's some amazing live versions.
- [76:24]
D
There's May 74 has some great live versions. It's still a brand new song. They had just come out of the studio recording it. Those to me, are the best consistent live versions of it.
- [76:34]
B
When the band hit the road with the wall of sound, the China Doll guitarist solo moved back to its place after the third verse. There are a few versions where Garcia employed the same amazing split signal phaser tone for the solo. Like this one a few weeks later in Missoula on May 14, the first version after the sessions. Now Dave's picks nine it almost sounds like there's a third guitar player up there. When it debuted, Chinadoll was Virtually the second half of a suite with Eyes of the world in 1974. It most often functioned the same way, though also served as a quiet coated in the full Weather Report suite and occasionally Dark Star. They played it for the last time in the original One Drummer formation on October 19, 1974, the night before they took more than a year off the road. The song returned in 1977 and was in and out of the repertoire for years.
- [78:39]
D
China Doll I think the album version is the best version. Reckoning also is the other one that Brent's vocals are just beautiful on on the Reckoning. Maybe it's the harpsichord.
- [78:53]
C
A pistol.
- [79:11]
B
It was a centerpiece of the band's acoustic sets in 1980 and the subsequent Reckoning live album. The only times where Brent Midland played harpsichord on stage.
- [79:32]
C
It's only fractured Just a little nervous from the phone.
- [79:54]
B
The studio original would inform the keyboard sounds of nearly all future versions, like this 1983 take from in and out of the Garden.
- [80:17]
C
Stranger ones have tucked my ear before they flew away.
- [80:31]
D
Shine it all is one of the songs that always came as a surprise, usually after Drums in Space. Occasionally it came out of playing in the band, maybe in the pre drums, but it was always a surprise. It was like a real thrill to see like we got the song. The rarity where I feel it works a little better is when I have headphones and I'm in a kind of a meditative state where I'm, you know, maybe for a walk in the woods or something. That's where I love my China Dolls.
- [80:59]
B
It's not an easy song to sing, but lends itself to the right kind of musician. Suzanne Vega performed it on 1991's dedicated.
- [81:07]
C
Yesterday I begged you.
- [81:14]
F
Before I I.
- [81:15]
E
Hit the ground.
- [81:21]
C
All I leave behind me is only.
- [81:28]
F
What I found.
- [81:31]
B
And I'm quite fond of the live version by Dump. There's one on the Dennis's Picks cassette.
- [81:54]
C
Stranger ones have come my year.
- [82:00]
E
Before.
- [82:03]
C
They flew away.
- [82:10]
B
Oteal Burberge made the song his own in Dead and Company and recorded it for his own solo album. Lovely View of Heaven.
- [82:36]
C
Just a little nervous from the fall.
- [82:44]
B
But I stand with David Lemieux on the beauty of the studio take. So let's end today's episode by hanging out a little bit more at CBS and listening to the music the Grateful Dead made in the studio in 1974.
- [82:55]
F
1, 2, 3, 4.
- [83:10]
C
A pistol shot at 5 o' clock the bells of heaven ring.
- [85:37]
F
SA.
- [86:03]
B
Take.
- [86:04]
C
Up your china down Just a little.
- [86:18]
B
Nervous from afar.
- [86:28]
F
Foreign Foreign.
- [87:08]
A
Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. I don't think I will ever listen to China Doll the same way after this episode. I had the things I always focused on like the minor to major payoff at the end, but there's so much to explore in this song. Hope you all enjoyed this one as much as I did. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode Elvis Costello, Ron Rakow, Richard Loren, Andy Leonard, Richie Pechner, Steve Brown, Michael Parrish, David Ganz, Steve Beck, David Lemieux, Brian Kehue, Sean o' Donnell and Brian Anderson. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast David Ganz for his ongoing contributions of archival audio from his interview Stash 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 reserved.