Jesse Jarno (4:03)

The first side of from the Mars Hotel closed with what kids these days call a bop.

Ron Rakow (4:08)

Round and round and round and round don't take much get me on the.

Jesse Jarno (4:15)

Ground Grateful that archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.

Rich Mahan (4:20)

Loose Lucy is a song that was. It's a party song. I love it. I think it's a great song. It gets everybody up and dancing. And just this arrangement of it, the Pepe the 74 arrangement is so much fun, I just can't get enough of it.

Jesse Jarno (4:49)

Loose Lucy is a song that would change over time, both its arrangement and in a way, what it meant.

Rich Mahan (4:55)

The lyric thank you for a real good time. It's our lyric. It's. It's the Deadheads lyric thanking the band for a real good time. And here's the band singing it back to us, thanking us for a real good time. For a real good time. That's not what they're doing. They're thanking Loose Lucy for a real good time. But the way I interpreted it, more.

Jesse Jarno (5:37)

Than a half century into the collective history of Grateful Dead music, a lot of pieces of their repertoire and lore have ended up with a bit more gravity and different meanings than they were almost certainly intended. That's kind of the story of Loose Lucy that we're going to tell today, and by extension from the Mars Hotel as a whole. But to get there, as we often do, we're going to reset slightly to try to get back to how Dead freaks heard the Dead's music in 1974. In the early 1980s, Lee Ronaldo had co found one of my all time favorite groups, the game changing Sonic Youth.

Rich Mahan (6:10)

I can't see anything at all. All I see is me.

Ron Rakow (6:15)

That's clear enough. That's what's important.

Rich Mahan (6:20)

See me.

Jesse Jarno (6:21)

But in the early 1970s, Lee was a serious long haired, dead freak. We talked with Lee about his experiences at the Watkins Glen Summer Jam last season and were stoked to welcome back Lee Ronaldo. He bought from the Mars Hotel immediately upon its release in June 1974.

Ron Rakow (6:38)

I had no idea it was a real place. We sort of thought of it as like a hotel on the planet Mars. What I really remember focusing on was the album cover, which was so mysterious with that backward riding and all that stuff on it. And I just remember being kind of fascinated by the colorful, spacey look of the. Both the front cover and that group shot on the back cover, where they're all kind of like. Almost like cartoon characters or whatever. It seemed very modern for them somehow at the time. Especially after Wake of the Flood, which had like an image that almost harked back to like old gravures or something like that. I loved Phil Stepped up and I really loved Unbroken Chain. And I thought that his two songs were wonderful. Listening for the secret Searching for the.

Rich Mahan (7:27)

Sound But I could only hear the preacher and the being of his hands.

Ron Rakow (7:38)

Us Blues in that moment in Time Coming up on the Bicentennial and all that stuff. It. It just had this very interesting quality to it, that song. You know, I think people were really psyched to hear that song because it seemed to speak to the moment we were living in somehow in a political way that they didn't usually venture into. I guess I'm Uncle Sam, that's who I am Been hiding out in a.

Rich Mahan (8:10)

Rock and roll band Shaking the.

Jesse Jarno (8:17)

That.

Rich Mahan (8:17)

Shook the hand of P.T.

Ron Rakow (8:21)

Barnum and Charlie Chan.

Jesse Jarno (8:28)

We'll reconnect with Lee's adventures as a young dead freak later this episode. Loose Lucy wasn't a heavy song. It had a pretty clearly conveyed message of fun. The kind of song that made it possible for Mars Hotel. The soundtrack, summer cross country trips. Loose Lucy had a slightly different kind of contemporary political undercurrent. Written a month or two after California ratified the Equal rights amendment in November 1972 and debuted the day after Oregon and Minnesota did the same. If the synthesizers make Unbroken chains sound like 1974 but also the future, the lyrics make Loose lucy sound like 1974 but also 1974. From the new Yorker, Nick Palmgarden.

Ron Rakow (9:08)

The language of Loose Lucy is so sort of caught up in that biker culture, like beatnik culture, it seems like set in a Certain time in a certain point of view.

Jesse Jarno (9:20)

I think this is maybe the lyric Nick is thinking of.

Ron Rakow (9:27)

I mean, it's shocking to hear that come out of Jerry Garcia's mouth too. It's for a guy that was sort of pretty picky about the things that he would say on stage. When Garcia sings about sex, which is pretty rare, there's something kind of sassy about it. There's like an ironic distance or something. That just doesn't bother me as much as we're doing it.

Rich Mahan (9:54)

I got drunk coming home last night. Shadow in the allergy, not all my life.

Ron Rakow (10:06)

Sort of back alley dirtbag druggie biker. Grateful Dead, which I've always liked that. That whole vibe.

Jesse Jarno (10:14)

Dead cast hero Cory Arnold has a theory that I've never seen supported but is plausible enough to float here, that Loose Lucy was written with the intention of giving it to the far raunchier Pigpen to sing. I can kind of hear it from a groove point of view. Loose Lucy is another in a series of cartoon boogies that Garcia would begin to write in 1971 especially.

Ron Rakow (10:35)

So. It has that ramshackle thing, sort of jalopy on square wheels that I love about all of these songs. Ramble On. Rose has it, Tennessee Jet has it. Tons of them have it.

Jesse Jarno (10:46)

The reason for that Lurch is this unassuming little bar of 7, 8 mid verse. That little lurch has surely triggered raised eyebrows and probably a few off mic discussions in any band that's ever tried to perform it. But the playful arrangement supported playful lyrics.

Ron Rakow (11:12)

It's cheeky. I like it when the Dead is cheeky. It's an important part of all rock and roll bands.

Rich Mahan (11:18)

Cross the Heart and Hope to Die.

Ron Rakow (11:26)

Yeah, yeah.

Rich Mahan (11:28)

Singing thank you.

Ron Rakow (11:32)

For a real good time.

Jesse Jarno (11:36)

The scarcity of raunch came up in a conversation with Jerry Garcia, Blair Jackson and David Ganz in 1981. Now in conversations with the Dead, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast. Thanks, David. This is Blair's voice starting.

Rich Mahan (11:50)

There is very little stuff about, you.

Ron Rakow (11:52)

Know, kind of open sexuality. I've never really been that attracted to.

Rich Mahan (11:57)

Songs of that sort.

Jesse Jarno (11:58)

Guess I mean, it's like mostly because most of them have real dumb lyrics.

Ron Rakow (12:04)

Loose Lucy is about the only one that.

Jesse Jarno (12:06)

Yeah, there's a few hints at a raunchy side.

Ron Rakow (12:09)

Sort of some of the Scarlet Begunias, in a way. Yeah.

Jesse Jarno (12:13)

They must have been the Roses.

Ron Rakow (12:14)

It was a weird sort of love song.

Rich Mahan (12:15)

Yeah.

Jesse Jarno (12:16)

There's others too. Oh, I think Candyman is pretty blatant.

Ron Rakow (12:20)

Yeah. Right about What? Candyman? Come on pretty women with your hair, a hanging bell Open up your window.

Rich Mahan (12:42)

Cause the king.

Jesse Jarno (12:48)

One might point at Loose Lucy the song as being the product of the late sexual revolution or, as the Coen brothers once put it, the New Freedoms. But it might also just be a product of contemporary attitudes.

Rich Mahan (13:00)

Do you like sex, Mr. Lebowski?

Jesse Jarno (13:03)

Sex or love or any of that, you know, male, female stuff? I think it's a measure of how Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter thought about the Dead, that sex showed up more in the songs that Jerry Garcia chose to sing with his side projects.

Ron Rakow (13:18)

I'm going red, My tongue's getting tired.

Rich Mahan (13:24)

I'm up ahead, My mouth's getting dry.

Jesse Jarno (13:42)

I've never thought about it one way or another, but I've had women livers, especially back in the 70s. I haven't already saw that for a long time. Say that the stuff was like, you.

Ron Rakow (13:52)

Know, men talking to men, you know?

Jesse Jarno (13:55)

Well, I think you could see that.

Rich Mahan (13:56)

In Hunter's writing a lot.

Jesse Jarno (13:59)

Hunter is very much a masculine on that trip. He's like, acting out.

Ron Rakow (14:04)

He's definitely more masculine of a person.

Jesse Jarno (14:07)

And it's not like there's not karmic payback in Loose Lucy either.

Rich Mahan (14:18)

Shadow in the Allergy, Not All My Lights.

Ron Rakow (14:22)

Loose Lucy brings back the schlemiel thing. You know, he's the same guy almost from Tennessee Jet. Things keep happening to this guy.

Jesse Jarno (14:30)

In Bob Sarlin's 1973 profile of Robert Hunter in his book Turn it up, titled Invisible Song, poet Sarlin paraphrases Hunter speaking about, as Sarlin puts it, a dead character who can be found in many of the songs on Working Man's Dead and American Beauty, their next album. This character is indeed a working man and an underdog and is expressive of the group personality. Sarlin cites Dire Wolf and Cumberland Blues as versions of the character. I wouldn't say the characters in Tennessee Jet and Loose Lucy are continuations of that, but maybe share a universe with that character.

Ron Rakow (15:05)

He's also kind of a rounder and a hapless ladies man. This guy gets beat up all the time.

Jesse Jarno (15:11)

I imagine him as one of the not quite innocents, always asking Mr. Natural for advice in R. Crumb comics, maybe friends with flaky funt.

Ron Rakow (15:19)

Anyone who brags about having sex all night with someone is going to get. Is going to get two black eyes. It's going to get it upside the head is basically the idea.

Rich Mahan (15:28)

We're back home with two black eyes. You know I love you till the day I die.

Ron Rakow (15:40)

Round and Round and round and round Round and round don't take much get the word around.

Jesse Jarno (15:50)

The song was introduced at a chipper bounce in early 1973, with much of the Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter material that constituted Wake of the Flood. That was from RFK Stadium on June 9, 1973. Now on the Here Comes Sunshine box set. A few weeks later, the band slowed it down a bit for their July performances before recording it in the studio in August. I'm not really sure why, but for the duration of the year it became a bit bluesier. Maybe they thought they needed a tune at that tempo to fit in with the album they were making. There was an unfinished studio take of Loose Lucy included on the Beyond Description box set. The song didn't make the album, but they kept playing it through their fall tours and into 1974. Loose Lucy wasn't on Jerry Garcia's original list for Mars Hotel either, that we discussed last episode, but they recorded it anyway and now leaned into an even faster tempo. Maybe they got to the studio and decided they needed another uptempo number. Brian Kehue is the engineer responsible for transferring the recent Angel Share outtakes.

Rich Mahan (17:50)

I'm looking at 45 as the earliest date, but also 48 showed up the copy tape of the master. The original takes was made on 4 20. No joke intended. Many of these copy tapes were made on the same day, so I think that that was a break point where they stopped and said, hey, we've kind of got what we need. Let's back up a lot of these master takes. And before we start doing overdubs, we'll make a safety copy of the tape in case something happens. And the sink reel, as it was with Money. Money was done on 427 to do options there.

Jesse Jarno (18:26)

As you may have noticed, there's not much of Loose Lucy on the Angel Share yet. The surviving tape is labeled take 16.

Rich Mahan (18:33)

It's evidence that they were treating unused.

Jesse Jarno (18:35)

Tape as available tape, not used for the record.

Rich Mahan (18:39)

As you can have this, you can. Don't spend money on that. You can use one of our old tapes.

Jesse Jarno (18:44)

By 1975, when the dead were taking a break from the road and weren't exactly flush with tour cash, the members were working on solo albums, and all those extra takes of Loose Lucy might seem less relevant.

Rich Mahan (18:56)

Don't forget that in this time period, not the Beatles, not Hendrix, not Sinatra, no one had gone backwards into looking at outtakes.

Jesse Jarno (19:04)

All that mattered was the master take.

Rich Mahan (19:07)

And the released mix of it. They didn't even want a different mix of something. They wanted one version of a record that was essentially perfect.

Jesse Jarno (19:15)

As with the session tapes for Unbroken Chain, the original Loose Lucy recordings were probably nationalized into the greater pool of Grateful Dead tapes available for studio projects, which would require and shed a trail of reels for years to come.

Rich Mahan (19:30)

I'm looking now at the Loose Lucy sink reel, which was done on 4. 27 is the date of that one, or at least the date it appears to be dated. And they have that, you know, slide guitar left and right.

Jesse Jarno (19:51)

Played by Jerry Garcia. The slide part is a fun way to ornament the groove without overlapping with Garcia or Weir's other guitar parts. It's more color than flash. The ending is about as excitable as the slide part gets.

Ron Rakow (20:08)

SA.

Jesse Jarno (20:35)

From a guitar point of view, Loose Lucy is a cool way to hear Garcia and Weir build a groove together. Here's Garcia's core part, and here's Bob Weir's part, fitting around that Keith Godsho played Rhodes. Phil Lesh's bass line wasn't your typical Motown groove. They might not have had a second drummer in 1974. Bill Kreutzman added a solid tambourine pulse underneath the whole song. Perhaps the most subtle colors in the final mix are a pair of Roland synthesizer parts, once again played by Keith Godshow and Jerry Garcia. Both overdubbed on April 29th. They both play the same notes, but with very different keyboard sounds. Here's Keith and Jerry sounding more like a secret room in the original Legend of Zelda. And together. This is from the Outro.

Rich Mahan (23:04)

They're not even that different. They're kind of related parts. Like, each guy took his stab at the idea, but they maybe liked both of them. It's fascinating. I do find that a lot of these tracks have Jerry on synthesizer. Not that Keith doesn't play. He definitely does, but we've never thought of Jerry as a synth wizard, but I'm sure he could get around on a normal keyboard. So a synthesizer's not much different in those days.

Jesse Jarno (23:27)

Garcia also did a second vocal tape on the sync reel. Here's the first vocal take they kept. We'll compare the ending to see what Garcia might have been focusing on.

Rich Mahan (23:36)

Your style But I ain't your type don't shake the tree when the fruit.

Jesse Jarno (23:40)

Ain'T ripe yet yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah singing yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rich Mahan (23:55)

Yeah thank you for a real good time.

Jesse Jarno (24:03)

And the second take.

Rich Mahan (24:05)

I like your smile But I ain't your type don't shake the tree when.

Ron Rakow (24:09)

The fruit ain't ripe yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jesse Jarno (24:14)

Yeah Singing yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rich Mahan (24:20)

Singing yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Singing thank you.

Jesse Jarno (24:30)

For a real good time if you guess, they used the second take to fill out Garcia's vocal for the ending. You are correct. The Dead had a production schedule to keep recording in April and mixing in May. They had to get it out by their June tour. While they were making noise in the studio, the head of their record company was starting to make noise on their behalf about upcoming projects. Please welcome back from Grateful Dead and Round Records, mid-70s edition's Ron Rakow.

Ron Rakow (24:59)

Everybody thinks everything in the Grateful Dead was decided and discussed and analyzed. That's not the way it was. It was a bunch of total fucking lunatics. Half of them stoned, half of the other half were drunk, and half of the other half were rigid.

Jesse Jarno (25:14)

Last episode we discussed how their record company, Grateful Dead Records, had spawned a second record company, Round co. Owned by Jerry Garcia and Ron Racau. In May 1974, just as the Dead were putting the finishing touches on from the Mars Hotel, it was time to roll Round into the world. A letter was dispatched to the Grateful Dead mailing list. Dear Gorilla, we're doing it. Appearing in yet another manifestation. But by now you should be expecting that.

Ron Rakow (25:41)

This is my early systemizing the fans to do the work. This is the record company parallel to the Deadheads. The Deadheads were being run by Eileen.

Jesse Jarno (25:53)

Law in the 70s. Deadheads was the name of the band's newsletter.

Ron Rakow (25:57)

We had our own separate mailing list. I was building something from the ground up. There was a lot of internal reluctance to participate.

Jesse Jarno (26:07)

Though they shared infrastructure, Round Records was a separate business from Grateful Dead Records. The mailing contained a 7 inch record with some new music, a sampler for Deadheads at Red. But while it was music from the Grateful Dead, it wasn't music by the Grateful Dead.

Rich Mahan (26:31)

Turn on the bright lights.

Ron Rakow (26:35)

Turn on.

Rich Mahan (26:36)

The bright lights what a fool I.

Ron Rakow (26:42)

Have been.

Jesse Jarno (26:46)

And the other side of the first sampler for Deadheads featured music from a voice not heard on record since the Dark Star single.

Ron Rakow (26:53)

Hammer and ripsaw the waves keep horizon Step up Tell us the name of your poison I took a step forward and it fell out of my hat at the sign in the window Saying take what you lack I went to inquire just about how much pain was.

Rich Mahan (27:11)

Needed to purchase the keys to the ring. I mean, who?

Jesse Jarno (27:15)

RXR101. The first release in the Round catalog would be Robert Hunter's Tales of the Great Rum Runners, A tale we'll save for another day from Grateful Dead. And Round Records, Please welcome back Andy Leonard.

Ron Rakow (27:28)

Round Records was a scale model project, but as far as I was concerned, the music was just as real when we produced Wake of the Flood. And it worked. It's not like the coffers were full because that had been done with a loan. What we did have at that point was confidence and inertia. So everybody that had had one sort of corked up produced it. And we. We thought, we know how to do this. This is not that hard. We're not going to do 300,000 Hunter albums. Let's go. I mean, it wasn't that hard. There were smaller projects pinging right through there. The Grateful Dead would then go and do whatever they did to percolate the next one, which one never knew would be produced when.

Rich Mahan (28:19)

What's this old world going to? Things just ain't the same.

Ron Rakow (28:28)

Anytime the heart of me gets captured by the game if you're going to release a mid Legion album, Seastones or something, that is cool, and that's why we made it. But you know that it's going to have a limited audience compared to a Grateful Dead record. When you call the distributors and you go, okay, here comes another one. It doesn't work as well if you say, I'm going to send you 40 copies and I want you to do some advertising and go down and beat up the record store and see if you can get them in the front. And for 40 copies, no. But if you go, okay, look, Round Records just coughed up three or four records and they're coming through and the volume on this is going to grow.

Jesse Jarno (29:19)

We're celebrating from the Mars Hotel. But it's sibling albums being sent into American reality almost simultaneously with the market force of the Grateful Dead or Jerry Garcia's second solo album and Robert Hunter's Tales of the Great Rum Runners, all released in June 1974. We talked a bit about the recording of Jerry Garcia's solo album during our China Doll episode. Ron Rakow.

Ron Rakow (29:43)

The COVID of the first Garcia solo album put out on Round Records, it had a really good cover by Victor Moscoso. It was Jerry playing a guitar duplicated on like a sand dune or a desert. And there were just birds flying over his head. And it just said Garcia, one word, Garcia, on the top. And then we put it out.

Jesse Jarno (30:09)

There was no proper title other than Garcia.

Ron Rakow (30:13)

And then 20 years later, I'm doing something else someplace else. And I read some major criticism about that album being called Garcia because there was a prior album put out by Warner Brothers called Garcia. I Didn't care. George Foreman had five sons and they named them all George. So what's the big deal?

Jesse Jarno (30:35)

But people do like names.

Ron Rakow (30:37)

Compliments was a tag that went on this plastic that came off when you opened the record. Because we sent them out to the.

Jesse Jarno (30:46)

Radio stations from Grateful Dead Records. Andy Leonard.

Ron Rakow (30:50)

That was hysterical. We were still concerned about bootlegging at that point. It was actually embossed in. The cardboard was put on the. The demo DJ copies, the pre release copies to make sure that nobody would sell them. It was done after the album cover was complete and wasn't done to all of them, obviously. And I think. I'm not sure, but it's. Everybody just sort of decided that was cool. A clever guy that worked for me had a moment of cleverness. His name was Steve Brown. He's the one that came up with compliments.

Jesse Jarno (31:25)

Big up Steve Brown. Back to the letter that was sent out to Deadheads in 1974.

Ron Rakow (31:30)

You gorillas are our gorillas and we love you, but we only want you to do stuff. If you dig it. Dig it. See ya. Anton Round.

Jesse Jarno (31:42)

So who was this Anton Round character? You may have already guessed the answer. Please welcome back Round Records co owner Ron Rack out.

Ron Rakow (31:51)

Well, the origin of Anton Round is my toughest.

Jesse Jarno (31:55)

He also had a brother, Roland.

Ron Rakow (31:58)

Roland. Roland A. I needed a character. Do you know what in the sales game what the words third party influence means? A stranger who has nothing to do with the buy and sell, between the salesman and the potential buyer who gives an opinion that's favorable to the. To the seller or the buyer is a person that one can employ to offer third party influence. He has no win or lose in the. He has no dogs in the fight, but he's giving an opinion. That's third party influence. Well, third party influence is the most effective sales tool there is. After the free sample I needed third party influence. Who was I going to go to? Everybody that I would go to that would be credible had an axe to grind and they wanted me gone so they could grind their axe well. So I had to come up with third party influence. So I invented Anton Round and I already had a company called Round Records. What the fuck? It's simple.

Jesse Jarno (33:05)

Robert Hunter was none too pleased with the arrival of Anton Round onto the scene. In 1988, he told Blair Jackson, when we formed Round Records, Ron Rakow took the mailing list and sent out these horrible little promo postcards signed Anton Round. And I thought it was the sleaziest looking Hollywood bullshit you'd ever want to see. I was outraged at this. How dare you use this for commercial purposes. I was told that the list was now to be used for this sort of thing and basically that the list had been taken over. I said, count me out. Ironically, the Anton Round postcard had not only been in promotion of Hunter's own album, but the beginning of some of the Grateful Dead's first direct mail efforts. Often cited as a breakthrough piece of independent marketing.

Ron Rakow (33:54)

You want to use it for craft business stuff. Yeah, that's true, I did. Right.

Jesse Jarno (34:02)

Anton Round took on a life of his own.

Ron Rakow (34:04)

Round was the name of the company. Anton went with that really nicely. And I made up a story that Anton round was a 93 year old retired multi trillionaire business guy and he would find people that he felt interesting were interesting to him and mentor them. And in the past he mentored Bill Graham, which is how he got to me and Ray Kroc, who went on to found a McDonald's and one other guy of that stature. Three guys like that.

Jesse Jarno (34:41)

Oh, really?

Ron Rakow (34:42)

I got, I got sued or threatened to be sued by the estate of Ray Kroc. Mrs. Crock got one of the mailings. I somebody in her family was a Grateful Deadhead and they got the Anton Round letter in the mailing for the new album release. So she turned it over to her law firm and the law firm called me and said, if you don't one stop, cease and desist. It's called the cease and desist letter. And further advertised that this was fake and recircularized everybody that got it that it was fake. So I called him back and I said, hey, you're dealing with hippies. I don't think you know what that means, but I will stop doing it and I'll write a let. If you want, I'll write a letter of apology to Mrs. Crock and I won't do it anymore. But if you want me to recircular anything or do anything like that, I have to send you a bill for how much it costs because we don't have any money. We're lucky we can keep the door open. So they said, no, we're not summing up with any money. We'll be satisfied you give us assurance that you're not going to do that again. Okay, that was the end of that.

Jesse Jarno (36:03)

I can find no paper trail, published or otherwise, in which Anton Round says he mentored Ray Kroc. But maybe it happened on another stub. I'll keep digging though. There was a whole spectrum of marketing tactics thought up by Grateful Dead Records.

Rich Mahan (36:16)

Steve Brown I came up with ideas that we could use to promote the albums. When we did Mars Hotel, came up with the Mars Hotel soap bars that you'd get in a hotel. You know, the stuff that would be. But when you open it up, it would be like this black soap. You know, that would be weird.

Jesse Jarno (36:36)

Steve Brown would end up becoming the public face of what turned out to be perhaps the most effective idea of.

Ron Rakow (36:41)

All, the best idea of all was the free stuff booth. That was the best idea that worked. The free stuff booth that I designed and Ramrod built, which was a table with the legs folded up inside it. And it was. It said free stuff booth. The free stuff booth. Ramrod made it personally. It was really cool. And Steve Brown took it around. I mean, and when you folded it up, it was 4ft high by 8 by 8ft wide. And we signed people up to join our fan club. And the number of fan clubs members went from 13,000 to 20. Months later, there were 93,000.

Jesse Jarno (37:25)

The free stuff booth was covered in vivid colors by master tie dye artist Courtney Pollock.

Ron Rakow (37:30)

We did the promotion booth. They were 8 foot by 4 foot flabs of plywood. I put a frame around the 8 foot by 8 foot and basically made it so that they would fold into a suitcase. 8 foot by 4 foot rectangle.

Rich Mahan (37:44)

So I could actually pick up one.

Ron Rakow (37:46)

In each hand and. And carry them to wherever we were setting them up.

Jesse Jarno (37:52)

Steve Brown.

Rich Mahan (37:53)

It was a booth that was designed with big signs that said Grateful Dead commercial message, which I actually have still here in this house. And the tables that went in front were all hung with Courtney tie dyes in the front. And the four panels that were behind me and stuff were the seasons also done by Courtney. Tydi Hugh. These were like 4 foot by 6 foot panels. Really nice. Yeah, beautiful.

Ron Rakow (38:21)

In the top squares, the four by four squares, which there were four of them. When the things were opened up and stood side by side, they created a 16 foot by 8 foot high booth. So the top half of the backs of each of these eight by fours. So there were four. It was four Seasons mandalas. And I resined them into the back of the plywood so they had that wet look. So they really bright and brilliant color. And of course it added a lot to the weight of the things. This is massive resin. And we had all our free stuff folded into these cases. I picked these things up. They must have weighed close to £100 a piece of.

Rich Mahan (39:03)

We knew that when we went to these concerts that if we had a booth that would have people sign up to be on our mailing list that we could get to them that way with what we were doing, where we're going to be playing, what the records are they're working on, when they're going to come out and give them little postcards, flyers, or little pictures of the albums that had already been done or were being done.

Jesse Jarno (39:25)

One thing to emphasize is that it really was a free stuff booth. They weren't selling T shirts or any kind of merchandise, really, just hanging out.

Ron Rakow (39:33)

May 74, I think, is when went on the road and did our whole 1974 tours, including Europe and stuff.

Jesse Jarno (39:45)

In May of 1974, the dead had hit Reno, now on the from the Mars Hotel 50th Anniversary Edition, and then performed a trio of shows in the Northwest, now on the Pacific Northwest 7374 box set, all of which we discussed last time. They played outdoors in late May in Santa Barbara, followed by a massive day on the green at home in the Bay Area at Oakland Coliseum Stadium alongside the Beach Boys and the New Riders of the Purple Sage. It was the only outdoor Bay Area show with the wall of sound.

Rich Mahan (40:15)

If you want to drift back by the.

Ron Rakow (40:18)

By the.

Rich Mahan (40:20)

The tie dye's back there, there's an information booth. You can stand in front of the information booth and stand there at home plate.

Ron Rakow (40:26)

Get chills up and down your spine.

Rich Mahan (40:28)

As you think this is the home.

Ron Rakow (40:29)

Plate where the world champion Oakland A's.

Rich Mahan (40:32)

Come to bed every afternoon when they're home.

Ron Rakow (40:35)

I remember this one time there was a stadium, and from where I entered to where we had to set them up was about two city blocks away around the stadium. And I had to walk these things around the passageways to this far remote corner where they'd come up for the concessions and food, drinks and stuff like that, and where I set this stuff up. And that was quite the labor of love, hauling those things around.

Rich Mahan (41:05)

We always had this kind of thing at any kind of a trade show or something where there'd be a table and a booth and there'd be people handing out information and signing you up for their mailing list and stuff. So it's not an. It wasn't a new idea as such. But at a. At a rock and roll show where it was colorful and you had cool stuff to talk to and people to talk to, it was always kind of a. A special kind of a place for people to seek out. I always felt like it was a good idea that worked well. I always have to get some people to help and Stuff. And these guys were dead fans and stuff and living. Staying in a hotel somewhere, a motel somewhere. And they would take in the hotel, in the bathroom, one of the cloths that they give you. And they brought with them a thing that would. What do you call it? It's a.

Ron Rakow (41:55)

An iron on.

Rich Mahan (41:56)

Iron on. Well, not even iron. It's a thing you can make the color go through. Anyway. Anyway, that's it.

Jesse Jarno (42:05)

Part of Steve's collection, which you can see in my book Heads, is the result of Deadhead handiwork burned onto a hotel hand towel of Baron Wolman's 1969 portrait of Garcia with his arms crossed. Captioned Ignore alien orders. Steve's pad is truly a museum. When Rich and I visited, it blew both of our minds.

Rich Mahan (42:25)

That box right there, it's a mirror box, actually, and it's got lights underneath, glass in there. And that double skull you saw over there in the hallway, that is done by David Best that sat in there. And this was mounted on the front of those panels that were behind the. The table there at the booth. And when you lit that up, you look into there, and because there's mirrors shaped a certain way, it's an infinity box. So it's double skulls as far as you can see. David Best is the same guy that does the temples at Burning man and has done a lot of the art cars that you see racing around there over the years and stuff. He was one of the original guys to actually start doing that kind of thing up there, I guess with Larry Harvey and stuff.

Jesse Jarno (43:16)

Along with the piles of mail constantly pouring into the office. It was the most direct line of communication they'd built yet.

Ron Rakow (43:23)

We had free stuff to hand out, which was great.

Rich Mahan (43:26)

Everybody loves free stuff.

Ron Rakow (43:27)

People had asked questions, and to the best of our ability, we'd answer them. I was able to jump from one.

Rich Mahan (43:34)

Subject to another to another to another.

Ron Rakow (43:36)

In my mercurial fashion, do our. What we call promotion, which was essentially a goodwill thing out of that promotion booth. And it was quite effective.

Rich Mahan (43:47)

It was really nice because they'd come up with things that had to do more or less with certain venues that they wanted them to play that they would mention, or places that they knew that the dead should look at to go to and play. They would ask questions about the music and about the albums. They would want to know if there was a chance that they could get tickets for certain shows that are coming up and stuff. And just generally ask questions about the personal things of each of the band people. So you had to have people there to talk to, you know, them in ways that would be friendly and nice. And the more we did that, the more it just started to feel like it was really a cultural thing that was happening, A societal kind of a grouping of folks that were becoming these serious Deadheads.

Jesse Jarno (44:37)

The Wall of Sound hit the road for real in the middle of June with a schedule intended to drop them from the Midwest, down through the south, up the east coast, and then back to the Midwest for the fourth of July. And on homewards as from the Mars Hotel was getting pressed up across the country. The tour leg opened on June 16th back at the fairgrounds in Des Moines, where they'd played the previous May. The 73 show is on. Here comes sunshine. The 74 appearance is on road trips, volume two, number three. At the Des Moines show, the Wall of Sound underwent its next evolution. Please welcome back journalist Brian Anderson, working on a book about the Wall of Sound to be titled Loud and Clear. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast I think.

Ron Rakow (45:31)

The biggest changes as the Wall of Sound got rolling into the spring and summer of 1974 was really just the scale of the whole thing. They had worked out eliminating the intermodular distortion for the most part, the feedback canceling microphones. They had figured out the staging and the scaffolding. And so from there on out, I think it just got bigger. Early 1974, those Winterland shows, the whole rig was on the order of 40 tons. But then by summer and by the end of the year, they were looking at 75 tons worth of gear. I've even heard secondhand that it was pushing like 80 tons worth of gear. So just a staggering amount of gear. And they had the woodworking and carpentry workflow by that point, I think was pretty dialed in. So they could just like crank out the speakers. And yes, they just kept growing that thing. Especially considering the number of outdoor shows that took place that spring and summer.

Jesse Jarno (46:45)

There was one member of the Dead especially who encouraged them to push their technological envelope.

Ron Rakow (46:51)

Flesh was just stoked on everything ever the like avant garde students and audio file searching for the perfect sound.

Jesse Jarno (47:26)

That was the sound of Phil Lesh playing Eyes of the World in Des Moines in June 1974. In Des Moines, Loesch followed Jerry Garcia into the realm of custom instruments, playing his new bass onstage for the first time. A four string quadraphonic alembic named Osiris by its creators, Rick Turner and George Mundy. These days it's known as Mission Control, capable of far more than Your average bass. Today, we're happy to have with us Jason Schuner, a lifelong music professional with an interest in vintage Dead gear. A half decade ago, Jason became the owner of Mission Control and knows as much about the inner workings of the instrument as anybody outside Phil Lesh and the bass's original creators.

Rich Mahan (48:08)

Mission Control was built not for the Wall of Sound, but it was built as part of the Wall of Sound. And it was so far ahead of its time and it was so expensive to build. It was built in 1973 and 1974. It took a little while to build it, but it cost. In 1973, it cost $35,000, which in today's money is almost a quarter of a million dollars. And apparently Phil got a little bit of ribbing from some of the crew guys that his base cost more than their homes.

Ron Rakow (48:46)

His quadraphonic bass was essentially a part of the sound system in that he could throw individual strings to different clusters of his towering 32 foot tall stacks. 32ft being the height of a standing bass wave. And I've had Dead insiders liken that effect to the iconic five note theme from Close Encounters. Right? So bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, in that the notes would sort of like ping pong around the venue. Very, very tricky stuff.

Jesse Jarno (49:25)

The Osiris Mission Control base would be Lesh's main, though not exclusive, axe for the next five years. In 1981, Phil Lesh talked a bit about his experiments in Quad with David Ganz. Thanks, as always to David for the audio. Check out a link to his work@dead.net Deadcast Phil credits the idea of the Quad pickup to one of his fellow bassists.

Rich Mahan (49:47)

This was Jack Cassidy's idea to have a pickup for each string.

Ron Rakow (49:51)

As far as I know, Jack never did it. But I have two instruments that have this.

Rich Mahan (49:56)

I even had a setup that was capable of using it for a while, especially in that big system, the Big Tall system. Rocket gantry systems.

Jesse Jarno (50:04)

Something fascinating there is how Phil refers to the Dead's 1974 sound system. A continuous point of interest to me. We now call it the Wall of Sound. And there's a newspaper clip from that era that calls it that as well. But I think it took a while to catch on in 1981. Phil Lesh doesn't use that phrase. He calls it the Big Tall System that he compares to the support structure for rocket ships in 1974. Quadrophonic was the next big sonic dream. Stereo had really only become prominent in the music industry in the early 1960s. By the end of that decade, experiments in quad were happening in various scenes, which can be read as a technological counterpart to the immersive multimedia happenings that had become part of the arts worlds in the years after world war ii and often involved varieties of surround sound. The Dead would experiment with quad in various ways, including a performance on San Francisco Television in 1970, where viewers were encouraged to create a quad effect in their homes by tuning into separate FM radio stations. In 1973, Pink Floyd had toured with their version of a quad sound system, and Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and Owsley Stanley checked out their gig at Radio City Music hall in March 1973.

Rich Mahan (51:16)

Pink Floyd and a few other bands had played with quad sound, where they were using two left and right mains and then left and right mains in. In the back. And playing with spatial relationships within a room or a stadium or an arena or whatever it may be. I believe it was Phil that. That came up with the concept of actually making an instrument quad capable.

Jesse Jarno (52:02)

That was the sound of Phil Lesh's first quad bass in action. His modified guild Starfire, known as Big Brown, deployed during the outro on the wake of the flood version of Eyes of the World. There are virtually no known photos of the from the Mars Hotel session from the spring of 74, but I'm guessing he plays it there as well. The new base had a new name which connected with both Phil Lesh's nudie suit and his appearance on the back cover of Mars Hotel.

Rich Mahan (52:27)

On the back of the headstock is an inlay of Osiris, which is perfect because Osiris is the king of the dead. The original namesake of of the base is actually Osiris. When they built it, it was called Osiris. It was the Deadheads that came up with the term mission control. Because what they saw was Phil would push a button on the base or he would turn a knob on the base and they would hear it affect the wall. Lots of different filters on it. And the capability of switching from one kind of sound, like the same sound coming from all the speakers, to one string coming from each of half of them, one of these stacks. So in other words, each string from four different sets. So it bounces around. If you've seen the Grateful Dead movie in the scene where they focus on the bass and they talk about the functions of it. And then there's the whole funny part with the cameraman.

Ron Rakow (53:33)

All right, I'm not trying to do that on purpose.

Rich Mahan (53:37)

The camera. Yeah.

Ron Rakow (53:39)

Bring it back, bring it back, bring it Back.

Rich Mahan (53:43)

Come on, come on, come on.

Ron Rakow (53:47)

We can play together.

Jesse Jarno (54:01)

One of the bass's chief architects is in the scene too.

Rich Mahan (54:04)

It's George Mundy that's sitting on the stage talking about the bass with the. With the backs off. And you can see the guts inside. Like most basses or guitars that you hear have one or two good tones on them. This bass has many, many good tones and can simulate the sound of other basses. It was about having as much variety as possible in your palette of tones from one instrument. Mission Control is the product of everything they learned from all the modifications of Big Brown in building it from scratch, with all the information that they had learned. And so for Mission Control, the quad pickup, instead of being between the neck and bridge pickup, is a skinny pickup instead of a full size pickup. And it's between the bridge pickup and the bridge. And Rick Turner explained to me that by placing it there, they were able to get much more distinct separation for each string, and it was much more articulate in the quad mode.

Jesse Jarno (55:36)

The Osiris bass was a singular instrument. And so for the next four or five minutes, we're going to talk about knobs, also buttons and some connectors. This section is for my buddy Bubba.

Rich Mahan (55:48)

If you look at Big Brown and you look at Motion Control, you see that there are a ton of knobs. In fact, people always. They're drawn to the number of knobs on the base. And the truth is that the. The knobs are actually fairly simple. What you have is you have one knob that's a master volume. And then for each pickup, you have what they call a state variable filter. Alembic did a lot of development on the state variable filter, and they came up with basically a filter called the super filter. And the super filter has a master volume for the individual pickup, plus a blend of the filtered sound versus the unfiltered sound. Then there is the choice of a frequency adjustable Q. So the width at which that frequency is affected right there, just at that frequency, or. Or how many of the neighboring frequencies it. It would affect getting a little carried away there. And then there's also high pass, low pass, and band pass filter selection. So you have five knobs that are basically a state variable filter for each pickup. But those filters were so powerful that if he made an adjustment on the fly, you would hear it in the pa. And they put all of that stuff into the base because Phil thought he would want the ability to make those adjustments on the fly while he was playing. And what they. What they figured out was it was a bit of a distraction, so it became a set and forget kind of thing. And so only on a handful of recordings do you hear Phil making adjustments with the knobs. But when you do, it's pretty obvious any adjustment to those filters or any choice of outputs with the buttons on the front would have a drastic effect on the sound coming through the wall of sound.

Jesse Jarno (58:19)

All right, that covers the knobs. What about the buttons?

Rich Mahan (58:22)

When you see all the buttons on Mission Control, those white buttons, those were all preset outputs for mono, stereo, quad, quad plus. Mono quad plus stereo. Apparently there were like 16 different presets. And the reason that they had to build all of that into the base itself and the reason that they had to run the quad system the way they did in 1974, is because consoles were limited to 16 channels. The biggest console that basically you could build at that point, to take four Ampex MX10 mixers, which the Grateful Dead used for years. Bear was a huge fan of those, and you could link four of them together and get a 16 by 2 mixer, which at the time was huge. But you've got 16 channels for the Grateful Dead. It's not like you can devote four or five of them to fill these days. The way that the modern consoles and PA systems work, you would never have built all those presets into the base, which cost an incredible fortune to do at that time. And you wouldn't necessarily spread things out to different individual arrays of speakers. What you would, you would do now is to take the four quad channels and then also either the, the neck and bridge, or a sum of the neck and bridge in mono and just pan them across the soundstage. You would use five or six inputs on the console, which these days consoles have 24, 32, 48, 56, huge numbers of inputs. So there's generally enough extra inputs where you could really do something cool with it. So it was not just ahead of its time, it was light years ahead of its time.

Jesse Jarno (60:17)

Naturally, a quad base needed a whole output system of its own to even plug it in.

Rich Mahan (60:22)

The output is actually an 18 pin limo connector, and there's literally 18 pins worth of output. Now, we only use 10 of the 18 pins, but there's actually 10 functional outputs from the instrument. And the connectors that were used were actually built for the CERN laboratory over 50 years ago. And George, the aforementioned George Mundy, before he came to work at Alembic and then wound up working for the Grateful Dead, had actually worked for the CERN laboratory. So he was aware of these really complex connectors. And he actually sourced some of these connectors to use for the base. And from there you go from this 18 pin cable into a power supply box. And then the power supply box has outputs for the neck and bridge pickups at quarter inch, which can also be summed to mono. And then there are four quarter inch outputs for the quad, one for each string. And they can also be summed to mono. So even the, the quad pickup you can listen to as a mono pickup. And so there's a lot of different output configurations that you can, you can achieve. Hence the 16 presets that were built into it originally.

Jesse Jarno (61:54)

As it turned out, maybe you didn't want to spread four bass strings across the whole speaker system. This is from David Ganz's 1981 interview with Phil Lesch.

Rich Mahan (62:03)

I used it maybe two or three times for about two minutes each, just during the period of the gantry system. When you're doing that, the, the band can't really comprehend. I mean, they can't, they can't work with it because they, they can only.

Ron Rakow (62:14)

Hear part of it because there's a delay of course coming.

Rich Mahan (62:17)

Because it was 1, 2, 3, 4.

Ron Rakow (62:20)

Like that, real tall, 36ft tall.

Rich Mahan (62:22)

I think there's a delay and the band can't work with it musically. So I just, you know, I just abandoned it.

Ron Rakow (62:28)

It was a great idea.

Rich Mahan (62:29)

And I still have the instruments with the right with jack and boxes. It works like a.

Jesse Jarno (62:36)

Though quad basses didn't become any more common than quadrophonic LPs, Phil Lesh's work with Rick Turner and George Mundy at Alembic had a profound influence on the next generations of electric basses.

Rich Mahan (62:47)

And Rick Turner sort of rewrote the book on how to build instruments. And what he did was he. Instead of using a bolt on neck or one piece necks, he would take different combinations of tone woods that were very. They were chosen for very specific reasons. And he would cut them into strips and glue them together and laminate these necks. And instead of the neck attaching at the body, the neck would go all the way through the body, where we get the term neck through. And then they would take also very specifically chosen combinations of cone woods and sandwich them together to make what they called the wings of the bass and, or, or the guitar. And then the, the laminated sandwiched wings would be glued on either side of the laminated neck through portion of the instrument, which is also the way that Wolf was built and the way alembics are still built today. And at that time, that was basically just unheard of. It just wasn't done. And as soon as it was done for Phil and Mission Control hit the stage in all these big venues, high profile situations, it triggered a response from the rest of the music industry. And almost immediately, people like Stanley Clark and MCV from Fleetwood Mac and Skeet Curtis from Parliament Funkadelic, which was a gigantic band at that time, and John Entwistle from the who and John Paul Jones all gravitated toward this type of construction for their instruments and started getting instruments made at Alembic.

Jesse Jarno (64:41)

From there, the influence spread outwards.

Rich Mahan (64:44)

When you look at all of these incredible instruments that were played by all these incredible musicians and bands starting in the mid-70s, that's a direct result of what Rick Turner did and developed and how he. He built things at Alembic and how Alembic went about creating instruments and. And Phil's influence on those instruments became sort of the new standard for boutique guitars and bass guitars. There are countless companies out there that are following the legacy and sort of the pioneering visionary attitude of somebody like Phil Lesh without having any clue where it actually all came from. People that are educated, they know, but there are a lot of people out there that just. That's just become the standard. And what it's referred to within the music industry, that construction technique is, Is referred to as the hippie sandwich. Because it was obviously the hippies, the folks at Alembic, that did this first and the fact that they are literally sandwiching these layers of wood together. It became known as the hippie sandwich.

Jesse Jarno (66:00)

That's an expensive sandwich. But 1974 was the peak of the Grateful Beds imperial period. A more literal phrase than most when applied to them. Along with their music itself, they were pushing at the boundaries of live sound, recorded sound, the instruments used to generate both and the economic and physical means by which it was distributed. For about two years, the Grateful Dead were as independent as it's possible to be for any American artist in any creative field, let alone operating on a national scale. And with one Grateful Dead album released, one coming, and the impending launch of Round Records, at least one person was thinking about how to push it to still the next level.

Ron Rakow (66:39)

Ron Rakow the record company came with the most major capital base extant, the First national bank of Boston. It took me years to figure out why they took us on. I mean, that's a really, really staid bank. It was at the time a $20 billion bank. That's still not a small bank.

Jesse Jarno (67:03)

The story Begins like lots of Cadillac Ron stories with a hyper specific memory.

Ron Rakow (67:08)

I know that I was in room 1234 at the Sheraton Hotel on Boylston street in Boston.

Jesse Jarno (67:16)

It was September 1972, and the dead were at the Boston Music Hall.

Ron Rakow (67:21)

So I call up the First national bank of Boston, and I say, I'm with an orchestra. We happen to be playing in town, and I'd like to come in and discuss with you. You doing factoring for our. We're going to issue our own records. And we. I'd like to talk to you about it. And he said, what is the name of this orchestra? I said, the Grateful Dead. He said, really? I said, yeah. He said, okay, hold on a second. I'm going to give you one of my people. So I. I get this guy. His name was Jim Dollar, of all things. It turns out he's the guy at the First national bank that's in charge of weirdness. Something is too weird for everybody else. It goes to Jim Dollard.

Jesse Jarno (68:11)

That was his real name, James Dollard, with a D at the end. By August 1973, Rackow was in Dollard's office making proposals.

Ron Rakow (68:21)

Every time I went back East, I went into that bank and I made friends with everybody, cross departments, everybody. And so I got the Grateful Dead to become the hottest item inside that bank. That was one of my big priorities.

Jesse Jarno (68:37)

A 1974 Wall Street Journal piece was titled, the Image is Hippie, but the Grateful Dead Also Know Business. It quoted Jim Dollard as saying, frankly, I was very skeptical at first, but I was much impressed with Ron Rackow and his research. Dollard said that working with the Dead was one of the most interesting relationships I've had in this business.

Ron Rakow (68:56)

And then I come up with an idea, and I hit Dollar with it, Jim Dollar. And I say, look, we're going to be in town for three, four days. The next time we come to town, why don't we have Jerry and me come for lunch? He said, you know, the. The. And meet the head of the bank. He said, you know, we have our own lunchroom for that. Our dining room is on the 12th floor. And we went in. I had a good solid nine months of action with those guys before we had this lunch. June 74 was when we had our lunch. They were at Boston Garden. We were staying at a hotel in Cambridge.

Jesse Jarno (70:00)

That was Phil Lash playing Loose Lucy on Mission Control from the same week that from the Mars Hotel hit stores. The Dead at The Boston Garden. June 28, 1974.

Ron Rakow (70:10)

Now on Dick's Picks, 12 I asked Jim to arrange. I'm not going to bring Jerry in just to meet with ordinary people. I want the senior executives of the holding company. Not just your division, but the bank, the whole bank. He said, oh, no, don't worry about it. If we do this, it'll be royalty. He'll be royalty. So we're in the private dining room. There were two or three liveried waiters with, you know, tuxedo pants, a white shirt with a white vest and a white bow tie. And they're serving us, and we have a before lunch cocktail. And we're all mingling. Oh, and we didn't drink, and they didn't allow alcohol, so we all had clamatos. Jerry comes over to me. I separated from him at this thing. That's the way you do it when you, you know, trying to get known by a bank. You don't clot with people. You know, you clot with people you don't know. That's what. That's the purpose for being there. Anyway, so Jerry comes over to me during the course of this pre lunch thing, and he whispers in my ear, back up the truck. This is backstage. And walked away. And I know what that means. Okay, so we sit down, and the seating is amazing. The chairman of the board sat at the head of the table alone. He's the senior guy. On his left was the president of the First national bank of Boston, the bank. And then next to him was the president of the factoring division that we used. And then it went down the line. It was totally hierarchical. On his right was Jerry. And then there were those officers of various divisions all down the line from her and Ahmed. There must have been, oh, 12, 13, 14 people in the room. When we finally sit down to have lunch, Chairman. Everybody is silent. He says, jerry, my daughter. We do the banking for the Berkeley School of Music. This is how we started. We do the banking for the Berkeley School of Music. And my daughter came to me, and she wants to play the clarinet. So I called the president of the Berklee School of Music and I told him what she wanted. And he said, daughter on the violin. So Jerry laughed. You know, he didn't laugh. He cackled. He had a cackle. You see it when, you know, he had this cackle. He said, I'm a father. When my kids asked me or something that they want to do, I don't change the dot on an I or the line on the T. I give them exactly what they say they want. So if they say they're gonna Quit. I remind them they asked for exactly what they got. So the guy, the banker guy said, you know, that's really a good idea. He said, if somebody gave me a clarinet when I wanted to play the guitar, I would probably be in another business. Now that's really wise. I'm gonna take, I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna do exactly what you said. Then the next guy, the president of the bank, the First national bank of Boston president says, jerry, I'm building an entertainment studio in my house and we do the banking for EPI speakers. Do you think that's good enough for a top flight entertainment? So Jerry leans over, he says, hey, Rack, what's the name of that company we trade records for speakers with? I said, epi. So Jerry said, I have them in my house. They're great. We trade records for them for speakers. So the guy, he like swells up. He's got, you know, he swells up, you can see it. And then the guy said, well, they want me to buy Epi 50s. Jerry said, Rack, what's the ones I have in my house? I said, they're epi 50s, Jerry. So he says to the guy, that's exactly what I have in my home. And I swear to God, I thought the guy was going to explode. He was going to have the same speakers as Jerry Garcia that he has in his own house. And the whole lunch went like that for a real good time. So the lunch goes like that and the lunch is breaking up. And Jim Dollar comes up to me and whispers to me. He said, everybody's expecting you to ask for something. You have to make an ask. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, you, you know, we were a bank, we lend money, ask for something. So I said, okay, okay, tell them I want a 2 1/2 million dollar line. No financial disclosures, no nothing. Just on our signature period. We'll sign a note and if I need money, I'll call you and you'll put whatever I asked for up to two and a half million into our bank account. He said, well, that's really an easy ask. I can do that on my own limits. So he wasn't even really a big deal, but he had something to say to them and it was in the right neighborhood, it was in the millions. So. And then it became obvious we were in a spot where we could do a lot of stuff. So they knew that we were not stupid and we were on a fast track. Jim Dollar told me, he said, you guys are limited by your own imagination. We are going to fund you guys no matter what it takes. We get into a limo to get back to our hotel and I say, do you know, we're there, Jerry, we can make the big mistake now. You know, we can flame out, you know, I mean, this could be. And he said to me, don't lose confidence. There's nothing you can do that can affect anything that I consider important in my life. Win or lose. Nothing. What does that mean? He said, can you make me play better? I said, don't be ridiculous. No. Can you make me play worse? No. He said, that's all I care about.

Jesse Jarno (77:59)

Life.

Rich Mahan (78:00)

Don't shake the tree when the fruit is.

Ron Rakow (78:14)

The big part of it is they had a problem and we were the solution. I knew nothing about this problem for several years after this happened. And their problem was this. They had a big bank with $20 billion of other people's money. And they had to invest that money and make the spread between what they paid the people who invested the money in their bank and what they got investing the money. Right? That's banking, right? It costs to have people deficiently trained to be able to authorize lines of credit like Jim Dollar. I didn't know this had a 4 million dollar line of authority to lend $4 million without speaking to anybody. That took years. Their big problem was to get somebody to have a $25,000 line of credit, usually involved between 200 and $300,000 in training expenses. And what would happen once they got somebody up to that level? They would quit because the bank was boring, staid, nobody young wanted to be associated with that bank. And all of a sudden they come up with the hippest band in the United States, the Grateful Dead. And they're flooded with applications from graduates of every major school in the United States. Flooded. That's why they did it.

Jesse Jarno (79:46)

Well, if you can't be part of the problem, be part of the solution. Am I right?

Ron Rakow (80:07)

Good time.

Jesse Jarno (80:12)

In the early summer of 1974, at virtually the same moment that Garcia and Raquel were making friends at the bank of Boston, teenage Lee Ronaldo, seven years from co founding Sonic Youth, was getting ready to go on the road himself.

Ron Rakow (80:25)

Mars Hotel came out. Early summer 74, right when I was graduating high school, I want to say, and that was a pretty momentous summer for me, one of the same buddies that I went to Watkins Glen with. And I took a summer long post high school pre college trip across the country. So we were, we did a huge massive circle around the United States. We hit the west coast up in Seattle and like drove, drove the coast road all the way down to San Diego with heavy stops in San Francisco in particular, and Los Angeles.

Jesse Jarno (81:04)

Lee's story is a great reminder of how from the Mars Hotel functioned when it came out.

Ron Rakow (81:09)

Mars Hotel was kind of the soundtrack of that trip. We had my old Volkswagen bug that we had painted California or Bust on the back with a steely face underneath it on the trunk.

Jesse Jarno (81:22)

We've heard about David Lemieux's experience listening to from the Mars Hotel on a cassette stuck in the car tape deck. And we've heard about Nick Palmgardens experiencing it. On its first CD release in the mid-1980s, Lee Ronaldo had still another.

Ron Rakow (81:35)

And we had an eight track player, one of those aftermarket eight track players that you installed underneath the dashboard with a couple screws and wires. And we had a bunch of music. But Mars Hotel was really the main record of that summer. We played it to death. Red and white, blue suede shoes, I'm Uncle Sam how do you do, man? We've rocked that record all the way across the country and back. And it meant a lot. It just seemed like such a bright record after Wake of the Flood. But it just seemed, seemed like such a bright summery record and full of life to it.

Jesse Jarno (82:27)

There's a reason why Lee and his buddy may have gotten that vibe off the album.

Ron Rakow (82:30)

We had the eight track tape of it. So I think there was a period when I didn't really know the correct order of the songs on that record because of the way that eight track mixed up the order sometimes to make the sides even lengths. I was looking at the track list this morning and I was surprised to see China Doll in second position. It wasn't my memory of it coming that early in the sequence and maybe that's from. From listening to the eight track pretty.

Jesse Jarno (82:59)

Much on the eight track. China Doll has moved to the end of the album just before Ship of Fools. In the second slot is Phil Lesh and Bobby Peterson's Pride of Cucamonga.

Ron Rakow (83:15)

Oh, oh, Better Olives in the.

Jesse Jarno (83:32)

And I have to say though, I understand why they'd want to space out the two slow songs on the album. Moving Pride of Cucamonga up and Shine It all down really does give it a summertime glow. Either way, the car was equipped.

Ron Rakow (83:45)

We had been doing a little weed dealing in high school and we brought like half a pound of weed with us on that trip, like stuffed into the side panels of the vw. And we had this funny pipe that someone gave Us as a parting gift. That was suction cupped onto the dashboard and it had two long plastic tubes coming off it so that, you know, we could, we could kind of both be hitting off it at once, which was kind of, kind of funny. The hate was the first place we went. So we went and hung around in the hate we. And I think we. We what? We strolled by 7:10, which, you know, I, I seem to find myself strolling past it almost every time I'm in San Francisco with a little time to kill. We went to some all night hippie party in Marin county where all the cars. I don't know how we found out about it. I think some girl in San Francisco had told us about it. And we drove up there and you parked your cars up on this bluff and you had to kind of climb down in the dark through this ridge to the beach where the party was. And when we got back to the car in the morning, the car had been broken into and a bunch of kind of minor stuff had been stolen. And they tried to, to rip the tape player out of the car and could not get it free of the. Of its screws or whatever it was. Like we found the tape player like hanging off the bottom of the dashboard. Like it had been tried to be wrenched out of there. But they didn't make it and they stole a bunch of the eight tracks. But the Mars Hotel was not stolen. And so I think for the second half of that trip it was one of the very few eight tracks we had in the car. So we really just like played the hell out of it. And we thought it was kind of a miracle that it being the favorite of those eight tracks that we had along with us, that it was the one that got left behind and that the tape player didn't get stolen.

Jesse Jarno (85:56)

The dual pipe did not survive the trip.

Ron Rakow (85:58)

We were making time going north out of Santa Barbara and had the stereo thing in full effect. And the cops were going by us in the other direction. We were, you know, both going like 60 miles an hour. And like a minute later they're behind us with their lights flashing and we're like, oh shit. We were stopped just outside of Santa Barbara by the chips, the LA Highway Patrol. And they really, they really got a kick out of discovering that. That pipe, they were calling it a stereo model, which was kind of funny. Well, actually at that point we were pretty. We were down to like the last ounce of weed. And they were really playing. They were like two cops. One being the friendly guy and one being the total Asshole. And they. They were like, we're gonna search your car, and if we find anything, you're gonna go to jail and all this stuff. But if you give it to us, you know, we'll. We'll. You'll get off easier. So we actually turned over our weed to them and watched them dump it out into the wind on the Pacific coast highway there. And they took the pipe and split. So they let us off. So I think I'll drift old where it sat where the wheat grows green and fine and wrap myself around a bush of that bright Whoa, Whoa.

Jesse Jarno (87:30)

Ironically, as Lee and his friend hit the west coast, the Dead were traversing the east. And they managed to miss each other. But he'd certainly catch them again. Though it might not have been until 1976, by then, loose Lucy was gone from the repertoire and stayed on the shelf for the next decade and a half. Listener William Cunningham left us this story about when he caught the Dead at the Cap center in Maryland in March 1990.

Rich Mahan (87:53)

We were in college. I was about 19 years old. We used to talk on the way.

Ron Rakow (87:57)

To the show about songs that we really wanted to hear.

Rich Mahan (87:59)

And for some reason, I kept talking about how the song I really wanted to hear was Loose Lucy. Now, we were too early in our Dead experience to realize that they hadn't played Loose lucy since about 1974, so there's pretty much zero chance that we.

Ron Rakow (88:13)

Were gonna get to see it. But then, lo and behold, midway through.

Rich Mahan (88:17)

The first set, they bust out slow version of Loose Lucy and Jerry Garcia. In all the 100 plus shows I saw, I've never seen him grin the way he grinned when he started playing that Loose Lucy. And I'm sure everybody who was there can remember he just looked like he.

Ron Rakow (88:56)

Was having the time of his life.

Jesse Jarno (88:57)

Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.

Rich Mahan (89:00)

There weren't that many songs in the canon that changed so much. They love each other, of course, went from really fast to really slow. Friend of the Devil. Loose Lucy had a pretty dramatic transformation. The 1973 arrangement, the bluesy arrangement, the 1974 arrangement of loose Lucy. I am a little bit more partial to this one to the faster one because it's a little different from anything else for a real good time.

Jesse Jarno (89:41)

To summarize, it was up tempo in early 1973, slowed down in later 1973, then sped up even faster at the album sessions in 1974, which we just heard. Like I said before, I'm not exactly sure the reason for any of these, but it underlined that it was an easy song to adjust to the Dead's needs. If they needed a faster or slower tune to go in the set lists or for an album at that particular moment, they could just readjust Loose Lucy.

Rich Mahan (90:08)

When they brought it back in 1990, it was almost like a hybrid of the two. At least early on, it kind of became more of the slower 1973 arrangement.

Jesse Jarno (90:47)

That was from Nassau Coliseum, March 28, 1990. Also on the spring 1990 box. It wasn't so much that the tempo was that different in the 90s, but that they straightened out the groove with a firmer backbeat. Here it is, from Albany, March 27, 1993, on the 30 trips around the Sunbox We've spoken in the past about how Dead songs could accrue new meanings over time, separate from how Robert Hunter might have intended them. He's Gone was written in early 1972, an epistle from Robert Hunter about being robbed blind.

Ron Rakow (91:38)

Like I told you what I said.

Rich Mahan (91:45)

Steal your face right off.

Jesse Jarno (91:51)

It might be seen as a takeaway lesson from the wall of sound, that just because the audience can perfectly hear every syllable to a song and nuance of how they're delivered, it doesn't mean that Robert Hunter's lyrical intent would become the final word in how a song was received. The great novelist William Gibson once said, the street finds its own uses for things, and he could be talking about how Grateful Dead fans interpret lyrics. There are some pretty clear places about where Robert Hunter's lyrics have communicated and maintained their intent unambiguously over decades, a point he made neatly to Amir Barlev in Long, Strange Trip.

Rich Mahan (92:25)

Shall we go, you and I, while we can, through the transitute nightfall of Diamonds.

Ron Rakow (92:31)

What is unclear about that?

Jesse Jarno (92:34)

And perhaps there's nothing unclear about Loose Lucy either. But whether it is or isn't, maybe isn't the point, which is never quite where you arrive at anyway. Except that Deadhead seem to have very quickly found their own use for the chorus. This is from the audience tape of March 28, 1990, at Nassau Coliseum on Long island, less than two weeks after the songs returned, a demonstration of the chorus's power to put the title character into the background. This might be obvious, and conversely, I don't think it's controversial to point out that the crowd isn't singing to Loose Lucy. They're singing back to the Dead. Grateful Ed scholar Rev Carr wrote about moments like this in his wonderful chapter where all the Pages Are My Days, Metacantric moments in Deadhead lyrical experience, published in the collection the Grateful Dead in concert, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast. In it, he uses the phrase metacantric to describe the moments in Dead songs when the lyrics seem to be describing what Deadheads were experiencing when they heard them live in a room filled with other Deadheads. But Loose Lucy is a metacantric moment where the context of the song's performance disappears the rest of the lyric and changes the meaning. Pulling out the chorus as if it were a hit single separated from the rest of the album. It's no longer about the foibles of sleeping around, but the joy of the communal Dead experience. It's not exactly fair to call Loose Lucy an example of mission creep, because the Grateful Dead were certainly an open ended project. But Loose Lucy is maybe one marker of how the meaning of the Grateful Dead as a whole shifted from the acid tests through the next decades and on into the 21st century for both the band members and the people listening to their music. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux I know.

Rich Mahan (95:19)

That to me it was our song. I remember I saw them play it a lot from 90 onward. Always a thrill to see it live because it had been gone for 16 years. I saw a good one in Buffalo later on, a really good one in Buffalo. I found it was one of those songs where kind of like us Blues. It was the ending where Jared would get Keep bringing the yeah, yeah, yeah thank you for a real good time Bring it higher, higher. And when Jerry's voice did that Jerry voice cracking thing, it was because he was singing so hard with so much joy singing yeah.

Ron Rakow (95:54)

Yeah, yeah, yeah thank you.

Rich Mahan (96:06)

For real good. My mom would be like, oh, is it a good show? I'm like, yeah, it was a great show. Jerry's voice cracked during Loose, Loose. Like that's what showed that the band was 100% into it. It was always one of those songs that was extremely welcome, and partly mainly because it's a great song, but also it's the rarity of it, both in terms of the time I was seeing the Dead, but also in terms of the fact they hadn't played it in 16 years. So it was one of those songs that had a bit of a cachet around it that not all songs had.

Jesse Jarno (96:41)

Robert Hunter was reticent about putting his lyrics onto paper at first, preferring to let Deadheads have their own interpretations. Some editions of Live Dead included a beautifully illustrated lyric book, and Blues For Allah had the words too. But Loose Lucy demonstrated that it didn't actually matter if the lyrics were right or not. They meant what they meant and that's all that they meant.

Rich Mahan (97:17)

For a real good time. Thank you for a real good time indeed. A few years back I went into the studio with some friends and we cut a version of Loose Lucy for the Dead covers project right here in Nashville. We got it in one take. We added some overdub background vocals and I think it turned out pretty cool if I do say so myself. We posted a link over@dead.net deadcast with the other links for this episode. Check it out. Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. Friends, we'd like to thank our guests in this episode Ron Rackow, Lee Ronaldo, Andy Leonard, Steve Brown, Courtney Pollock, David Lemieux, Nick Palmgarden, Brian Kehue, Jason Schooner, Brian Anderson and William Cunningham. 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 reserved.