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- [00:05]
Rich Mahan
The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the official podcast of the Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to Season nine of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. In this episode of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, we continue our deep dive into the Grateful Dead's 1974 studio album from the Mars Hotel. In this episode we shine a light on the Bobby Weir, John Perry Barlow penned Money Money. It is the 50th anniversary of the Grateful Deads 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 need to hear to believe because it sounds fantastic. It's the Grateful Dead at the University of Nevada, Reno on May 12, 1974. It was the first roadshow for the.
- [01:14]
Jesse Jarno
Wall of Sound which debuted a couple.
- [01:16]
Rich Mahan
Weeks earlier in San Francisco at the Cow Palace. This audio was cleaned up and remastered by Grammy Award winning engineer David Glasser with Plangent Processes, Tape Restoration, Speed Correction and was produced for release by David Lemieux. All of the aforementioned are available as a 3 CD set as well as digitally. There's standard black vinyl, dead.net exclusive custom vinyl and a very cool heliotropic vinyl version that animates when you spin it on your turntable. More info and orders are happening now over@dead.net head on over to dead.net deadcast and check out all of our past episodes including the complete seasons one through eight and you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how, where and when you like to listen. Please help this podcast by subscribing. Share it with your friends on social media. Hit that like button, call your mom and tell her about it. And if the spirit moves you, get your Aunt Edna to leave us a review. Thank you very much. We have transcripts for many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure. Head over to dead.netdeadcast index and check them out. Well folks, we're winding up this season, but we still have another episode coming. Do you have a story about seeing the Wall of Sound in action that you haven't shared with us yet? Well get it in there now and maybe we can use it in the last episode. Leave us a recorded message at stories.dead. and tell us your story about experiencing the Wall of Sound. We want to hear from you. Sometimes we use them in the Dead cast when we get something that fits just right. So record your Wall of Sound tour story@stories.dead.net Money, money money money money. It's a catchy chorus, to be sure, but the band only played it three times before dropping it from their live shows. We're about to get the full scoop from this episode's financial advisor, Jesse Giorno.
- [03:52]
Jesse Jarno
Today we we're jumping into the seventh song on from the Mars Hotel, Bobby Weir and John Perry Barlow's Money Money as has probably come up if you've ever discussed this song, some of the lyrics haven't aged terribly well. Lord, be the lady out of Adam's real Next thing you know, you got her Ribbons, Lil Grateful 8 Archivist and Legacy manager David Lemieux My opinion is.
- [04:21]
Rich Mahan
This song is meant as a tongue in cheek song, and I think it works in that regard. I can see why it rankled some people. I certainly can understand that, but I just, I think that I have a good enough sense of the Grateful dad of Bob Weir, of John Barlow to know where it was coming from, because it's like over the top. I just think it's an incredibly fun and funny song. And when you have a song like China Dollar, it's not a funny song. No. And you've got Unbroken Chain, it's not a funny song. And so you kind of forget that the Dead and you know, these are pranksters. Don't forget, people, these are pranksters. Musically, it's a rocking, bluesy thing, and Jerry's just ripping it. Bob's guitar, Phil, Billy. It's a Keith Ripper, and he's just having the time of his life playing this piano part. Mama don't send me down the rub that bank I kill I got an ocean leading me to sin.
- [05:36]
Jesse Jarno
The Dead played it live only a few times at three consecutive shows in May 1974. Between the album's mixing early in the month and the album's release in June, before the Grateful Dead dropped it forever, I'm pretty sure Bobby Weir hasn't sung Money Money in the nearly 30 years since the Grateful Dead officially dissolved.
- [05:54]
Rich Mahan
I don't look at this as a seven great song album and one that's just kind of mediocre. I looked at it as seven great songs, all very different, just like a Grateful Dead show.
- [06:04]
Jesse Jarno
But here we are. So let's get into the song that was originally called Finance Blues.
- [06:09]
Rich Mahan
Money, money, money, money Money, money, money.
- [06:17]
Jesse Jarno
Money money money money, money was John Perry Barlow's second official lyric on a proper Grateful Dead album. So let's detour into Barlow land for a moment. Weir and Barlow had been collaborating on songs since early.
- [06:37]
Rich Mahan
When the devil wants to take it all away, Cherish well your thoughts, Keep a tight grip on your boobs Cause thinking and drinking are all I have today.
- [06:48]
Jesse Jarno
The fruits of their labor so far could be heard mainly on Weir's 1972 solo debut Ace, which included five Weir Barlow songs backed by the Grateful Dead. Check out our Ace50 episode. Barlow debuted on a Dead album with Let It Grow, the third part of the Weather Report suite on Wake of the flood in 1973.
- [07:11]
Rich Mahan
Listen to the thunder shout I am.
- [07:15]
Jesse Jarno
I am, I am, I am. Barlow was raised Mormon on a ranch in Pinedale, Wyoming. His father, Norman Barlow, was was a rancher and a state senator. Bobby Weir and John Perry Barlow bonded at the Fountain Valley boarding school in the early 1960s, and Weir spent the summer with the Barlows on the bar Cross Ranch. While Weir was hanging out with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Barlow was hanging out with Timothy Leary at the Millbrook estate. The two reconnected on the Dead's first trip to New York in June 1967. This is from David Ganz's November 1982 interview with Barlow, which you can and should read in David's book Conversations with the Dead, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast thanks, David.
- [08:04]
Rich Mahan
I'd been out at Millbrook taking acid with that bunch with Larry and those people, so I was aware of what all that meant. It was just that they had an entirely different spiritual overlay on what they were doing. If they had any spiritual overlay at all, it was in the form of circus rather than Eastern mystic rite or the way in which we were conducting it. So it was kind of fascinating for me to get you guys were mystics and they were pranksters, eh? Pretty much. Pretty much. And then I finally decided that I preferred the combination better, started going back and forth with it, and then there was a period where I didn't see too much of him again. I got sort of serious about college for a while.
- [08:46]
Jesse Jarno
Barlow had a colorful college career at Wesleyan, recounted with occasional facts in his posthumous memoir, Mother American Night. John Perry Barlow is a lyricist, essayist, journalist, and, in the 1990s, after he sold the non proverbial ranch, a co founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. One of the people he met at Wesleyan was the photographer Andy Leonard, who would go on to be vice president at Grateful Dead Records.
- [09:11]
Rich Mahan
I accused Barlow once, in an irate moment of living an anecdotal life. Given a choice between something that he really ought to do that needed doing, and something that would make a really good story, he would go for the good story move every time. And I said, you know, at some point, it's going to blow up on you.
- [09:29]
Jesse Jarno
Barlow is an apocryphal storyteller, but a masterful one where anecdotes often turn into rhetoric.
- [09:35]
Rich Mahan
But Barlow was on his way across country, having been hired by the Grateful Dead to be a songwriter because he didn't want to write his book anymore. And New York City was kind of wearing old on him. He put everything in the van, the motorcycle, all the records, all the leather pants that took off. He was going to move to San Francisco, go on payroll, be a songwriter.
- [09:53]
Jesse Jarno
We discussed this 1971ish story a fair bit as the background to the song Cassidy in our ACE50 episode. It was also how Andy Leonard was pulled more fully into the Grateful Dead's world.
- [10:04]
Rich Mahan
And the next thing I knew, I got a phone call from Wyoming, and he said, I'm at the ranch. My dad is sick. He's had a stroke. The place is a mess. We gotta get the hay equipment going. And there's a long story about why he needed to get the hay equipment going, but it had to happen like that. And he called me and he said, okay, look, in his Barlow fashion, put all your tools in your van, bring your motorcycle, and I want you to go to Detroit. And when you go through Detroit, I want you to pick up the manuals for these following diesel motors, and then get here as fast as you can, because we got to get this stuff going. We have 22 pieces of equipment that are broken, that haven't been run and have been outside, and we need them right now, otherwise I'm going to lose the ranch. So get here. Okay, Love you. Bye. I did. We did get the hay crew actually through that season, and we got enough hay put up to keep the cows alive through the winter. So I did that. But as soon as that was over, which is snowfall, so in October, I went out and said hello to Weir and saw my San Francisco guys and went through. Came back home through Mexico and attempted to redo my photography life. And I think it was in that slow winter period that the boys had time to write. I think that's when it happened. Somebody asked me that the other day, and I could honestly say with a Straight face. I didn't watch those two guys write.
- [11:28]
Jesse Jarno
One song with Barlow on the ranch and Weir in California or wherever the dead were. Barlow and Weir didn't have the luxury of writing face to face all too often, like the former roommates Garcia and Hunter. And Barlow would often have to write to order without knowing what kind of music Weir had in mind. Money Money was one of those for sure. Here's how Barlow remembered it to David Ganz in 1982.
- [11:51]
Rich Mahan
There was one called Money Money that I had the notion of as being some kind of a Mose Allison y kind of, you know, jive blues thing. Well, have you heard the latest? Are you in the know? It's in the morning paper and it' on the radio. It's even going to make the TV news. White boys feel the blue.
- [12:25]
Jesse Jarno
It sounded like Mose Allison done by.
- [12:28]
Rich Mahan
The Grand Funk Railway by the time it was done. Mama don't send me down the R bad thing I kill I got an ocean leading me to sin I was really upset by that and refused to write any lyrics for him for quite a while. I mean, I went on writing his lyrics. It was just that I had to hear the music first. I got stubborn and decided that my judgment regarding regarding what music meant was better than his judgment regarding what words meant. And that was kind of a silly attitude. The way it works best and the way it's been working this summer, I think, is when both of us are trying to develop something together and have the opportunity to spend some time together and get it done that way.
- [13:21]
Jesse Jarno
The song was originally called Finance Blues, which is what Barlow called it when he posted his collected lyrics in the 1990s. He noted that he wrote the words in February 1974. Sure, the lyrics are satire.
- [13:34]
Rich Mahan
For one thing, the lines were real whimsical. There's a fundamental problem in creating art. A, the only person that you have to please ultimately is yourself. B, you really don't have the right to criticize anybody else's opinion of what you've just done.
- [13:49]
Jesse Jarno
To Weir and Barlow's credit, there was a long R and B tradition of writing about relationships where money was part of the equation. Green Ben said, what's wrong with you this day on our romance face to.
- [14:08]
Rich Mahan
Face.
- [14:27]
Jesse Jarno
That was Garcia and Saunders doing Jesse Stone's Money Honey at Keystone in July 1973. Now on Garcia Live Volume 6, in Money Honey, it's the narrator who gets dumped after hitting up his lady for money too many times. Though the Dead had pulled from R and B before that particular Attitude wasn't often part of it. Loose Lucy is about relationship foibles and promiscuity, but doesn't accuse anyone of being only in it for the money, a kind of icky accusation to many in the Dead's audience. Part of the wink is the song singular composition. Please welcome back from the City College of New York, Sean O'Donnell.
- [15:29]
Rich Mahan
It has a lot of meter shifts. It has as much strange meter activity as Unbroken Chain, although you don't hear it that way.
- [15:38]
Jesse Jarno
As Sean points out in the chorus, Weir's She Wants Money is in three, and the answering what she wants is in four, while Weir changes the accents, emphasizing wants the first and third times through and she the second and fourth times. She wants money when she wants she.
- [15:57]
Rich Mahan
Wants money when she wants she wants.
- [16:00]
Jesse Jarno
Money.
- [16:06]
Rich Mahan
There'S something about the tempo that makes you digest it more easily. You could bop your head through the whole thing, even though it's having the meter changes take place.
- [16:16]
Jesse Jarno
Brian Kehue did the transfer of the Angel Share session tapes, also called the Finance Blues.
- [16:21]
Rich Mahan
At this point, my notes showed that it was actually cut the same day as loose Lucy on the 5th of April. And it's interesting because both of them are kind of in the same ballpark. They're both rocking, they're both fun, they're both, you know, with a grin and a smile kind of good song. So I think that that kind of makes sense that they might have been done on the same day. They picked take 11, which was done on the 5th of April, the same day as Loose Lucy was cut, but that was just a basic track. And so days later they come back and of course, they have made a sink reel and they have a copy made of it, so they're all prepared to keep working. And then the sync reel, the one they would do the overdubs on, was 427. And so on the sync reel, we have Bob's harmony vocal and a new lead vocal.
- [17:07]
Jesse Jarno
She wants money she wants money There's.
- [17:12]
Rich Mahan
A shaker piano part, organ part, and tambourine done on the sync reel. So they did quite a few overdubs on that track to make it a little more interesting than just the band rocking out. Although in the end, you know, it does feel like they're just sitting on stage playing for you. It's not a very complicated one.
- [17:28]
Jesse Jarno
Maybe one of the reasons that Money Money's irony gets lost is that the production feels even slicker than the rest of the album. In fact, Money Money is the only song on from the Mars Hotel to use all 32 tracks. Of the two synced up 16 tracks. Even on broken chain only uses 31.
- [17:45]
Rich Mahan
They have recorded his voice with three different microphones at the same time. And it's showing on this sync reel that there is actually a Neumann U47 on track 13. But at the same time they put another mic and recorded that one on track 14, called the U67. And then on the last track of that tape, track 16, at the same time, his vocal was recorded with an older dynamic mic, a very simple mic, and each of those has a different sound. So whatever the concept was, they were going to capture him singing and then maybe pick one or a combination of two microphones to get his vocal to sound good.
- [18:20]
Jesse Jarno
First is the Neumann U47, then the U67, then an electro voice. RE20 my baby give me the finance.
- [18:29]
Rich Mahan
Blues.
- [18:33]
Jesse Jarno
Tax me to the limit of.
- [18:35]
Rich Mahan
My revenues Here she come. Finger popping, clickety click.
- [18:44]
Jesse Jarno
Weir's lead vocal was also given a dollop of subtle digital delay, a first on a Dead album. I'm pretty sure which you can hear here probably more easily on headphones.
- [18:54]
Rich Mahan
She say furs are diamonds. You can take a pic.
- [18:57]
Jesse Jarno
She wants money, she wants money she wants money. It has its usual pile of keyboards. The whole song has Rhodes on the live take, plus overdub piano SA. There's a B3 on the bridge and later on some low frequency ARP Odyssey for extra bass thickness. As Brian mentioned, there's shaker and tambourine. The tambourine part especially is a pretty good way to hear both those meter shifts and understand how this song was written by a rhythm guitarist. The shaker is steadier. This is some of that same section. And there's cowbell across the whole track too. Mixed very quietly. And it's back. But it wasn't the most surprising discovery on the Money Money multi tracks. Take a peek.
- [21:50]
Rich Mahan
What she wants, what she wants, what.
- [21:57]
Jesse Jarno
She wants, what she wants Money, money, money. There are unmistakably two women singing on that background track. One of them is Donna Jean Godsho. The other is confirmed in Steve Brown's production notebook.
- [22:16]
Rich Mahan
When the road.
- [22:20]
Jesse Jarno
Gets too long.
- [22:24]
Rich Mahan
And.
- [22:24]
Jesse Jarno
You'Re all.
- [22:28]
Rich Mahan
Out of song and the.
- [22:32]
Jesse Jarno
Pain it gets too much for you to bear. That was Sarah fulcher from her 1972 album Sarah and Friends, produced and arranged by Steve Cropper of Booker T. And the MGs, perhaps. Obviously, Sarah Fulcher has never been credited with singing on from the Mars Hotel, but that's unquestionably her, and it's not a great outcome, especially on this song in particular. But what's not obvious, in which I didn't get until researching this episode and comparing the different releases of Mars Hotel and Discogs, is that nobody got credit at first.
- [23:13]
Rich Mahan
Take your pick. What she wants what she wants what she wants what she wants Woo. Money money money.
- [23:31]
Jesse Jarno
The original Grateful Dead Records release of from the Mars Hotel has credits for the songwriters, but doesn't mention the musicians by name at all, not even the members of the Dead. What's more, the track list on the back cover is an entirely different order that bears no resemblance to the LP or even the 8 track. The reason is pretty simple. None of those details were settled by the time Andy Leonard had to get it to the manufacturer.
- [23:54]
Rich Mahan
What she wants what she wants what.
- [24:01]
Jesse Jarno
She wants what she wants Money, money money According to Steve Brown's notes, Sarah Fulcher overdubbed her vocals on May 7, less than a week before the Dead began their tour in Reno. Sarah appears too, on Wake of the Flood in the Chorale and Weather Report suite. You can hear her voice at the top of the mix of the background vocals, Darkness Falls and Seasons.
- [24:33]
Rich Mahan
Same Old.
- [24:34]
Jesse Jarno
Friends, the Wind and Rain. Sarah had come into Jerry Garcia's circle of musicians in late 1972, performing with the Garcia Saunders group through mid 1973, but improvising more than singing backup. I interviewed her a few years ago and we've posted a link@dead.net deadcast before her solo career, she'd worked with the legendary Texas musician and thoughts on the Dead favorite Roy Head, and afterwards moved to Memphis, where she briefly played bass in Memphis's first punk band, the Klits. Though she's not on any of the recordings, check her out on Garcia Live Volume 12, where they do a few of her originals, including Go Climb a Mountain.
- [25:26]
Rich Mahan
Just To See the Other side and if I Sleep On My Own.
- [25:38]
Jesse Jarno
Way.
- [25:41]
Rich Mahan
Then I've Got Myself to play.
- [25:46]
Jesse Jarno
But nobody wrote the guests names on the studio tracking sheets during the Mars Hotel sessions. When someone had to reconstruct the list in the 80s, Ned Lagin and John McPhee made the cut, Sarah Fulcher didn't a sadly appropriate fate for the song on which he sang, which we now correct with this episode and on future reissues of the album. Steve's Notebook confirms that Sarah got paid well for her three hour session.
- [26:17]
Rich Mahan
You don't need bucks, you don't need no jack.
- [26:21]
Jesse Jarno
Money's not what she wanted so much, as, you know, acknowledgement. Thanks, Sarah. The Dead debuted Money Money in Vancouver on May 17, ten days after Sarah's vocal overdub, now in the Pacific Northwest box, sounding pretty faithful despite having less tracks to work. Except for the third version on May 21st in Seattle, which was a few clicks slower. They were all even shorter than the album version. David Lemieux.
- [27:14]
Rich Mahan
They only did the three versions in May, three nights in a row. And then they said goodbye to it.
- [27:44]
Jesse Jarno
Here's how Bob Weir remembered it to David Ganz in 1977.
- [27:48]
Rich Mahan
A couple of people in the band didn't like it that well, didn't like the little story, which though tongue in cheek was maybe a little too. I don't know. But a couple folks in the band thought that it was. Didn't think it was as funny as I thought it was. Didn't think it was all that funny at all. So we just put that one away.
- [28:10]
Jesse Jarno
As the wall of sound trucked on to the rest of the spring and summer tours, Money Money disappeared into the mists. They really could have just written a different set of lyrics and made it something new. But the baby left with the bathwater. We'll add one more perspective about Money Money told secondhand. Please welcome back the parent of Deadhead sociology, Rebecca Adams, who went backstage for the first time in 1989 when she was bringing UNC students on summer Dead tour. Like a lot of things, we've got David Gans to blame. Here's what Rebecca wrote in her notes at the time.
- [28:41]
Rich Mahan
Ganz had a tape of some sort to deliver to Jerry. Jerry was sitting at a table with a red haired man who turned out to be Barlow. David introduced me to Barlow, who was polite, and then to Jerry as the professor who taught the sociology class. Among other things, Jerry told me I was. Was famous. I remember that. And just being flabbergasted, I was speechless pretty much. And he asked me about the papers and he said he meant the class papers. So Jerry said, did they tell you their dogs ate them? And I replied, no. Some of them said they have to go on fall tour.
- [29:26]
Jesse Jarno
From this meeting, Rebecca began a friendship with Barlow that would last until the end of Barlow's life. A few months later, in the spring of 1990, she found herself in a conversation with Barlow about a different early 70s lyric that seemed to encapsulate her class. From Black Throated Wind, you ain't gonna.
- [29:44]
Rich Mahan
Learn what you don't wanna know. Which was a perfect slogan for my class, right? Because it was. It actually captured the. The whole perspective I was trying to teach them is that you see what you're looking for. And if you don't force yourself to look for more than one perspective, you only see one perspective. And it's not, you know, you get can never find the truth, but you can get closer to it by using different lenses. And that was the main takeaway. So it was a perfect slogan for the class. And when the conversation I had with Barlow about lyrics was because he didn't like that lyric anymore, he thought it was too pedantic.
- [30:32]
Jesse Jarno
It was that same spring that Weir debuted a new version of Black Throated Win without that line, though it returned soon enough.
- [30:39]
Rich Mahan
I remember saying, well, are there any songs that just where you had, you know, you're uncomfortable with the whole song. And he said, oh, money, Money had to go. He said, once I had daughters, I realized that song had to go.
- [30:56]
Jesse Jarno
It was a few years after the Dead came to the same conclusion. But even storytellers have to grow up. Money Money had debuted in 1974, the era when Rebecca was first going to shows, though she never saw it live.
- [31:09]
Rich Mahan
That would have been when I was first going to shows. I just think that there was such a low level of consciousness. I don't think we were critical in the way that we would now.
- [31:22]
Jesse Jarno
The feminist revolution had arrived. It maybe just wasn't very well distributed yet. Put another way, most rock wasn't yet quite measured to those standards. Or maybe it was, given how quickly the band dropped it. One way to make the song entertaining, though, is to pretend it's about the Dead themselves. It's certainly not. But whatever amount of money the narrator of Finance Blues thought that he or she or they needed, it was absolutely nothing compared to what it cost to operate the grateful dead in 1974. Not that the chaos starting to surround the Grateful Dead in 1974 was about money entirely, but it was one element in a swirling mess that triggered the band's decision in mid August to take some extended time off the road, as we discussed last time. But they had a few more commitments. First, in early September, the Grateful Dead crew packed up the Wall of Sound, stashed what Steve Brown might call subsistence in its hidden compartments, and got ready to ship out for Europe. Please welcome back Brian Anderson, working on a book about the Wall of Sound titled Loud and Clear, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast by August, they were starting to hatch plans to do something outrageous.
- [32:34]
Rich Mahan
Even by their own standards, which was.
- [32:36]
Jesse Jarno
To take the entire thing with them.
- [32:39]
Rich Mahan
To Europe, which is just outrageous.
- [32:42]
Jesse Jarno
Taking a sound system that was that large and had to be broken down into A manifest into like a carnet for the port of entries that they.
- [32:54]
Rich Mahan
Were going to be going through.
- [32:56]
Jesse Jarno
Breaking all of that down, like all.
- [32:58]
Rich Mahan
Of the paperwork to make that happen.
- [33:00]
Jesse Jarno
Was just like mind numbing. But they did it somehow and they brought everything over there for a run of shows. That was the Dead in London on the opening of their Europe 74 tour September 9th. Now on Dix Pick 7. They'd been planning the overseas trip since at least the beginning of the year before Sam Cutler had even departed. But it would be a pretty different experience on all levels than the Europe 72 adventure just two years earlier, a two week, four city seven show jaunt that saw the band and crew frazzled and fraying. In fact, we're gonna give a heads up. The remainder of this Dead cast is going to include recurring depictions of hard drug use, violence, violent drug use, domestic abuse, and extreme avant garde music. Some of this is funny, some of it not so much. It's all a part of the Dead's complicated history. Further details about many of these stories can be found in the band's official biography by Dennis A Long Strange Trip, as well as Bill Kreutzman's memoir Deal and Richard Loren's memoir High Notes. The Dead weren't breaking up. But even as they made some fantastic music, the events on the Europe tour made it abundantly clear why they needed to take a break and make some changes. At the start of the year, Richard Loren replaced Sam Cutler as the band's booking agent and organized their spring and summer tours in the States.
- [34:29]
Rich Mahan
In September, after the Wall of Sound tour, the Grateful Dead wanted to do a tour of Europe.
- [34:36]
Jesse Jarno
I was totally against became a special mission of rock. Scully, who'd served as band manager in the early days but had transitioned to a more freeform job description, which usually involved a good bit of wilding rocks.
- [34:49]
Rich Mahan
Colley was there kind of that, you know, I don't know. He wasn't the manager. He was just one of those guys that hung out with people anyway, so he had this guy in Europe wanting to put together a tour, but he wasn't really a promoter. He was a rock groupie, a rich rock groupie from London. So he and rock got real close. He was a friend of rock's. Oh, I can do the show, I can put on shows, I put on shows. So I knew the thing was going to be a fiasco. I didn't want any part of it.
- [35:15]
Jesse Jarno
Here's how Rock Scully described his state of mind when the band hit London from his book Living With The Dead. I'm as coked up as a Taiwan freighter and the vibes are getting just as quakey. When your brain crackles and your eyeballs burst out of their sockets, it's usually a sign that you're overdoing it just a wee bit. I have to do something.
- [35:34]
Rich Mahan
But what I told John MacArthur, I said, John, I don't want to be involved with that. I'm not part of that. So that's not happening.
- [35:42]
Jesse Jarno
But it was actually happening. The tour was scheduled to begin at London's Alexander palace, the Alley Pally in North London. Rock Scully addressed the situation a little bit in his audiobook to Living with the Dead.
- [35:54]
Rich Mahan
In London, the cocaine frenzy has escalated way beyond even California style excess. It's beginning to spiral, spinning faster and faster, fueled by jet lag and monster lines of cocaine. As the party goes into hyperdrive, the pirates begin to come aboard one by one. There is some question too, as to exactly how seaworthy the good ship Grateful Dead is at this point. I said, John, because they're playing Europe and I want to go to Europe. I'm just going to go as a. Just a public member, you know, I don't have anything to do with the shows because I knew there were going to be a debacle. Too much good coke, even for drug veterans like ourselves, it's just too much. It is sitting around in bowls, for Christ's sake. As soon as we begin to turn to what we are actually in London to do, things begin to go haywire.
- [36:46]
Jesse Jarno
Brian Anderson, ironically, they had so many.
- [36:49]
Rich Mahan
People over there with them, but the.
- [36:53]
Jesse Jarno
Number of hands on deck to actually set up the wall Sound at the Alley Pally or, you know, any of the places they hit in Europe, there was like a dwindling number of crew that were actually able to do that.
- [37:06]
Rich Mahan
So the work was just like backbreaking.
- [37:09]
Jesse Jarno
For those who actually had, like, the.
- [37:12]
Rich Mahan
Presence of mind and weren't, like completely physically burnt out from working on that thing.
- [37:17]
Jesse Jarno
To set up those shows on top.
- [37:20]
Rich Mahan
Of everything else, everyone is dropping acid at all hours. So some of us are peaking, some coming down, some are on the rag, some irritatingly ecstatic. The ones on the rag develop murderous feelings towards the ecstatic ones. And the ones that are ecstatic are grinding down on the ones on the rag. Crew members are threatening to go home. Things are getting outrageously ragged. And we hadn't even gotten to the first show yet in Europe, which presented a whole host of problems.
- [37:51]
Jesse Jarno
But the big one was power, was electricity. Like, that was always a problem. In Europe, whenever the Dead would go.
- [37:59]
Rich Mahan
Over there, the cycles are different over there.
- [38:02]
Jesse Jarno
So they would include in the packet.
- [38:05]
Rich Mahan
Of materials that everyone would take over.
- [38:07]
Jesse Jarno
They would have kind of like these cheat sheets that like broke out power.
- [38:12]
Rich Mahan
In every country that they would be.
- [38:14]
Jesse Jarno
Going to and they were bringing their own power with them. On the first night, one of the band's generators melted down and they started an hour late playing one long set instead of their usual 2. The situation with the promoters was a bloody mess, with tickets being pirated all across London, according to Rock Scully and lots of bad accounting at the door. We spoke with guitarist John Perry for our Tales of the Great Rum Runners bonus episode. He was playing with Robert Hunter in this period before co founding the band the Only Ones. I went to the Alexandra palace one with the huge.
- [38:50]
Rich Mahan
Personally, I wasn't knocked out, but I'm.
- [38:54]
Jesse Jarno
Sure plenty of people were. I knew some of the King's Road.
- [38:58]
Rich Mahan
People who were involved in supposedly selling the tickets for that.
- [39:03]
Jesse Jarno
A lot of money. A lot of money got lost via a lot of fairly dodgy people that I knew.
- [39:09]
Rich Mahan
I would never have got involved with them. So when the management systems find it or think it's a good idea to use the cocaine distribution system, the cocaine distribution people, as a useful means of.
- [39:25]
Jesse Jarno
Selling tickets, then there can be trouble as opposed to working with like the LSD distribution people. I think Owsley was probably a better.
- [39:34]
Rich Mahan
Bet than the King's Road guys they were employing because they knew they were.
- [39:38]
Jesse Jarno
Fun to be around.
- [39:39]
Rich Mahan
But I mean, I wouldn't. I wouldn't have lent them six months.
- [39:42]
Jesse Jarno
Richard Loren I went to the London.
- [39:44]
Rich Mahan
Shows and I just saw completely coked up, bunch of musicians and the crew and everything. It was like, oh my God, I didn't want any part of it. I mean, they were collecting cash going in the back door. I mean, it was so crooked. I mean, nobody got paid together, got totally fucked over. They had promoters and screwing them and I mean, I had nothing to do with that.
- [40:06]
Jesse Jarno
But Heads could still connect with the Dead's music. Elvis Costello was in the house.
- [40:11]
Rich Mahan
I went to Alexander palace to see the Dead around the release of From Miles Hotel. I can't now remember whether it was before or after the record came out. It might have been before because I seem to recall I went home with the same experiences as Europe 72. We had to wait until all that tour was finished for that record to.
- [40:32]
Jesse Jarno
Emerge or maybe just come across your own copy of it. Journalist Andy Childs had written an admiring review of the band for Zigzag when they'd played in 1972, followed by a multi part History of the Dead. And thanks to the excellence of these pieces, he scored a rare interview with Phil Lesh when the band returned.
- [41:21]
Rich Mahan
Jerry's the guy who will always answer questions. He'll always talk. He's always got something to say. Me, I don't always have something to say. I don't always want to talk.
- [41:31]
Jesse Jarno
Thank you enormously for the use of this audio, Andy.
- [41:34]
Rich Mahan
I went to interview Phil at this house in Chelsea they were staying at. They'd taken over the whole house. We were in this room and there were loads of people coming and going then. So I got an impression there was a big family of people with them.
- [41:49]
Jesse Jarno
We've linked to Andy's current projects as well as his archival work@dead.net deadcast along with the original interview, review and features as they appeared in Zigzag. We spent a lot of time this season talking about the songs on from the Mars Hotel and the new music the band was presenting through the Wall of sound. But obviously the songs were only part of it until further notice or unless otherwise stated. We're going to illustrate this next segment with the London 74 Dark Star from the middle of three night.
- [42:41]
Rich Mahan
I think that what we do the best is improvise with some kind of spontaneous structure occurring at the time of the improvisation going on. I mean, structure is necessary. Some kind of structure, internal structure is necessary for music if it's going to be communicative at all. But it just doesn't seem like tunes go past a certain level. Songs with lyrics, you can only go so far with them. You can't take them into a new realm you can hardly ever developed. In other words, all it is is the melody and the lyrics and the chord changes. And if you're going to have a tune that's like, comprehensible, you have to be more or less musically repetitive. And I don't know, I'm just. I personally have just never been into that kind of music.
- [44:30]
Jesse Jarno
Michael Kahler is the author of the superb new book from Duke University Press. Get shown the Light Improvisation and transcendence in the Music of the Grateful Dead, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast My understanding.
- [44:43]
Rich Mahan
Is that they have these amazing experiences at the acid tests and elsewhere. They want to keep having these experiences, and so they think, okay, we tend to have these experiences when we're playing in a certain way. Let's build a mode of approaching songs that enables us to play in this way.
- [45:01]
Jesse Jarno
Throughout 1966 and 1967, the dead began extending their songs and then linking them into extended suites. Especially in 1968 and 1969, following working man's Dead and American Beauty. That was less on their mind, but still part of their syntax.
- [45:17]
Rich Mahan
By 74 they've got other strategies that they can use as well. In some cases they're writing songs with set improvisational sections. Like in playing with the band where you don't know how, how the jam is going to go. They've got a lot more advantages in their pocket at that point, right? Like they're, they're much better musicians by 74s and they, they've also got an audience, right? Like they've, it will not desert them. Like, you know, they can go up and do Film Net and Seastone stuff and their audience still won't walk out, you know, which in 66, 67, that might not have been as much. The Lesh at least has all this background in sort of avant garde European descended art music forms that are leading him in one direction. There's all this jazz rock stuff going on, this free improv going on. There's like noise, you know, sort of noise rock is starting to be a little bit of a thing that one can do. Like you can kind of imagine them being in that position and going, shit, you know, eight years ago we thought extending Beatles Z folk songs was radical. What do we want radical to mean for us in this context? The so called avant garde jazz Weather Report is a really good. But as far as Mahavishmu and let's say even Korea, all those guys seem to be just like. It's like boogaloo. It's like super hyper frenetic boogaloo. And they've forgotten how to swing. I mean, I don't know, I might be old fashioned, who knows? But I really love to hear people swing.
- [47:13]
Jesse Jarno
With Bill Kreutzman, there was very little shortage of that in the Grateful Dead.
- [47:18]
Rich Mahan
I rarely, rarely hear bass players play stuff that's not a pattern. And in fact that's the way people think of it. They say, okay, you lay down the bass pattern for this one or the bass line. Sometimes they call it the bass line, but it's still very repetitive. So I like to play it more in the sense of like the continual bass, the baroque period or the real bass line in classical music, Beethoven all the way up to Mahler in a way that makes the music move to different places. Even though in rock and roll music it just seems to be more convenient to play. The root of the chord. All the. When you got four musicians playing pitched instruments, that excludes the drums. It's real easy to step on somebody else's lines. Sometimes I like to just play in the high register of the bass and let Keith play the bass line, which doesn't fit as well with the drums, but it's just a different technique. There's one quote from the late 60s where Garcia's. I think from the Ralph Gleason book where Garcia is saying, you know, the ideal situation would be to go on stage with nothing in our heads and just completely free, improvise. There's rhetoric along that line that sounds a lot like Derrick Bailey or like John Stevens or like a British free improv person, or like a free jazz or talking. But their actual practice was not that.
- [49:06]
Jesse Jarno
In an interview that same week with Jerry Garcia, Melody Maker writer and future ECM Records producer Steve Lake challenged Garcia on the so called new forms that the band was pursuing. And Garcia didn't have a ready answer. But it was also that same week that the Grateful, they took their biggest step into those newest forms.
- [49:24]
Rich Mahan
Of course, then there's electronic music, which that's a whole new world.
- [49:28]
Jesse Jarno
Perhaps more than any other period in their career, including the acid tests, the grateful dead in 1974 were committed to pushing far past the structures of their songs. Of the core Grateful Dead quintet, nobody was more committed to that than Phil Lesh. We'll return to this interview with Phil soon. The Dead's tour was leaning towards chaos. But amid the chaos, one of my favorite sets of music at a Grateful Dead show occurred on the final night in London. But the chaos had to flare further. First Rock Scully places this story on the first night, but the tale of the tape puts it on the third.
- [50:02]
Rich Mahan
A shouting match erupts during soundcheck. Just the band and the crew is there. And our head roadie, Rex Jackson, challenges us all to just give it up, gives this impassioned speech. We're tearing each other apart. The band hates the roadies, and we've had it up to here with them. It's a fucking horror, man. And it's too dangerous to be carrying around contraband anyway.
- [50:26]
Jesse Jarno
Ned Lagin the first two nights were.
- [50:29]
Rich Mahan
Really fucked up because of power supplies and London and coke and stuff. So on the afternoon of the third day, we had a band meeting and a crew meeting, and everybody decided to flush all their stashes and take LSD that night to get away from cocaine and get back to the brotherhood or sisterhood or, you know, the family or.
- [50:50]
Jesse Jarno
Maybe they dumped it out on the stage.
- [50:52]
Rich Mahan
When it is all piled up, it has to be at least a few ounces. Rex sweeps it all together and then Ramrod puts lighter fluid on it and sets it on fire. We have a bonfire going made out of cocaine, hydrochloride and lighter fluid, and it melts down into this lovely waxy blob.
- [51:09]
Jesse Jarno
Ned.
- [51:10]
Rich Mahan
So that night was an LSD night.
- [51:13]
Jesse Jarno
Phil.
- [51:13]
Rich Mahan
Cocaine makes me evil. It makes me hate music.
- [51:16]
Jesse Jarno
We're talking about acid now, Phil. Stay with us.
- [51:19]
Rich Mahan
At a certain point, there was none of us who would take any of those drives. None of us. Like at the Monterey pop festival in 67, everybody was as stunned as they could possibly be, except us, because we'd been there before and nobody wanted to go on that trip at that time. Later on it came back and we started using it again. I, for instance, I do it all the time. That's what I mean. Old. I'm a. I think it's one of the greatest tools. Are you talking about grass? No, acid. Acid? Oh, yeah.
- [51:53]
Jesse Jarno
Some of the LSD night is on Dick's Pick seven, but a lot isn't. Ask your local CDR trader. The band opened with a tribute to the woman in scarlet begonias that Robert Hunter wrote in London seven months earlier.
- [52:32]
Rich Mahan
I think it's one of the greatest tools for learning about yourself. It's my quality knob. I take a few drops of acid and I turn up my quality knob. Listening back to it later on a tape, which, of course, drugs can't have any influence on the tape, I find that, generally speaking, the quality is just what I thought it was, especially about what I was playing, about the relationship between what I was playing and the whole band is not always that good, because not everybody is always on the same plane on the same trip.
- [53:04]
Jesse Jarno
And after the first set, things got really real. It's never been released, so you'll have to track it down in full yourself. But what followed was nearly 70 minutes of music flowing from Seastones into Eyes of the World, into Warfrat, with Ned joining the band on Rhodes. It's a masterful performance, with Garcia and Kreuzmann coming out early to join Legion and Lesh. We're going to use the excuse of this matured Seastones performance from the third night in London to focus on its composition a little bit. Continuing on from our Ned cast, Seastones was Ned Lagin's project, joined by Phil Lesh, Jerry Garcia and others. Here's how Phil Lesh described it to David Ganz In 1981, actually, I got intimidated by Ned.
- [54:20]
Rich Mahan
He must be the only guy in the history of the universe to get a degree in music and molecular biology at the same time from mit. So I mean, working with a guy like that is slightly intimidating.
- [54:31]
Jesse Jarno
Nearly two dozen times in 1974, after the Grateful Dead finished their first set of the evening, Ned Legion's modular synth setup would come out, including an ARP Odyssey and an EMU polyphonic synth controlled by an intra data computer, along with a Rhodes 88 keyboard. For 15 or 20 minutes or so, Legion and Lesh would improvise within the parameters created by Ned and his work. We've posted a link to Nedbase@dead.net deadcast and back to Phil in 74.
- [55:00]
Rich Mahan
Ned has a very evolved instrument which consists of a synthesizer, modular synthesizer with a keyboard, an electric piano and a computer.
- [55:12]
Jesse Jarno
I love the conception of Ned's setup as one continuous instrument, which it was.
- [55:17]
Rich Mahan
Right now I'm using a ring modulator and that's it. And so the contrast is pretty great because he has under his control, I should say, virtually an infinite range of sounds and of kind of music that he might play. And I've got a very limited range. And so it's like really over balanced this is. He'll tell you different. He'll say, well, Phil, you just haven't worked with without enough, you can do more than you have been doing, and so on and so forth. He's probably right up to a certain point. But I know enough about it to know that there's no possible way that one guy with two pedals and a ring modulator can possibly compete with an entire computer synthesizer system. That's even the wrong word. It's not a question of competition, it's a question of polyphonic music. It's like I essentially have to be the drone relating back to Indian music. I have to be the drone, the ground, the preconscious state out of which the synthesizer which he's playing brings thoughts, let's say. So that's sort of the stage we're at now. Listen, you really ought to talk to Ned about the electronic music part of it. Yeah, I'd like to. Hey, Ned. Sometimes I would be using a pre recorded tape of material or a pre recorded tape of a prior concert or part of a prior concert. So the motivic or rhythmic material would be based off of the tape. And sometimes it was motivic stuff that I created earlier that day at the sound check or had been floating in my head.
- [56:54]
Jesse Jarno
Sometimes if you listen To Seastone's tapes. You're hearing tapes inside tapes inside tapes.
- [57:00]
Rich Mahan
Garcia and Lesh and me and others got cassettes after every gig. The night of the gig, they ran several cassette machines. Another Grateful Dead universe anomaly is that the cassettes that I listen to of the gig are not necessarily the tapes that you're hearing today of the gig. Sometimes the cassettes were two stage mics, and that was it. And so whatever was happening on stage, that's what you got.
- [57:29]
Jesse Jarno
For Ned, it was a way to keep building.
- [57:31]
Rich Mahan
Seastones had its own sources. War and Vietnam and nuclear holocaust, but also biomusic and the new ecology, environmentalism and TV and radio. It was Finnegan's wake. Audio of human and non human biological musical history.
- [57:48]
Jesse Jarno
It was a most modestly scaled project.
- [57:51]
Rich Mahan
What we define as music that had been enlarged by serious avant garde jazz, serious avant garde classical music. And so moment forms, which was a musicological term that eventually was picked up by Stockhausen. The moment form is like a place, and you can describe the natural place in terms of there's water running through it, or there's trees or whatever, or the sky. Those are musicological components. And were there ones that I planned on? Yes, as a composer and as seeds for improvisation. It was free in the sense that once you got in the space, you were free to wander around the space or walk around the space.
- [58:53]
Jesse Jarno
The Seastones performances were meant to be experienced in the venues through the wall of sound. Some of the soundboard tapes don't have all of Ned's outputs, and many of the audience tapes also contain chatty crowds. To my ears, the September 11, 1974 recording is the place to go. It's a fun one to play. For fans of experimental music who don't necessarily think they like the Dead, the summer versions of Sea Seastones had mostly stood alone. But by Europe, they started to do what they'd planned. All segue into the Grateful Dead's performances. To my ears, this is where the lofty themes of Seastones come into fullest conceptual clarity and highlight it as perhaps the most articulated and coherent expression of the Dead's creativity, as they place their music on an arc that lives in the experiential moment forms of Seastones at one end, moving through the controlled drama of Eyes of the World, finding its way to the narrative of Warfrat at the far end, with an incredible variety of powerful expressive freedoms. Between. Billy Kreutzman's entrance on this recording is incredibly subtle. Listen for the way his drums are in conversation with Legion's ambient SYNTHESIZER PULSES.
- [60:28]
Rich Mahan
IT.
- [60:57]
Jesse Jarno
Hearing Billy Kreutzman join Ned and Lesh and Garcia in abstraction is a joy. He never runs out of things to do or say, and there's never a sense that he's just creating conditions for a groove to arrive. He's down among the wild seastones. For more than 15 minutes, Legion pushes the members of the Dead well outside their usual structure, guiding them through moment forms, into the mysteries of life, until very gradually, they achieve tonality and work their way into a Dead tune. I love trying to pay close attention to this recording, to hear the moment that Kreuzmann flips from open, jamming into the groove that will allow them to float into Eyes of the World. It's right around here, about 19 minutes after the tape starts. By this point, I think Keith Godcho is playing too, and Bob Weir as well.
- [62:36]
Rich Mahan
Christman was a great drummer and had the capability of functioning as a great jazz drummer. Great sense of time, great sensitivity, even though he could be brutish at times, personally, great sensitivity to the music. Somebody wrote somewhere a couple of years ago online about how I was very conscious playing closely with Kreutzman. And, yeah, that wasn't by conscious effort, it was by jazz habit. I don't know if he was technically aware of all the great jazz drummers, but he certainly was one.
- [63:11]
Jesse Jarno
The piece melts gradually into Eyes of the World.
- [63:13]
Rich Mahan
It was always assumed that when we float into the Grateful Dead, it would be thematically related. It was like taking abstraction and turning it into representational and then turning it back into abstraction. You could have the idealistic, positive outlook of Eyes of the World, shared at the same time with the up and down positive negative view of Wharf Rat or Morning Dew, which was another one that I ended up playing on in a sequence at A Dark Star. It was logical for Seastones to flow into Eyes of the World in a different way. SA.
- [64:32]
Jesse Jarno
When they finally start playing Eyes of the World for real, Ned takes some sweet leads. The Eyes stretches for over 30 minutes, working its way into far out territory. The song didn't usually find, even in 1974. And from there they landed in Warfrat.
- [65:45]
Rich Mahan
The London audience on the third night were just magical. They were floating spiritually, emotionally, physically floating. 9, 11 people were floating. Their eyes were above their heads. They loved every second of it. Abstract or not. Everybody was swaying back and forth afterwards.
- [66:05]
Jesse Jarno
You can hear Garcia laughing. The Dead had placated themselves in London and staked their place as progressive musicians, but it was an uneasy piece nonetheless. The Dead's backstage craziness didn't change the fact that they were playing for enthusiastic audiences who were savoring the rare chance to see the Dead in Europe. We're going to turn our attention for a little bit to some of the fans who saw the ban on the Europe. 74 tourists Paul Matulik didn't go to Europe intending to see the Dead. Thanks for leaving us your story, Paul.
- [66:42]
Rich Mahan
I launched out of Trieste, Italy in June for a two month wander on the Eurail Pass through Europe. On the very first train ride from Trieste to Venice, I met an American couple that had been traveling around and had to go back to the States for a family emergency. The guy handed me his Interrail pass and that was a kind of Eurail pass that you could buy just for Europe. And it included some countries that Eurail pass didn't have, Central and Eastern European countries and Morocco. As he handed me the Eurail pass, he said, I think I've heard that the Grateful Dead will be playing in Morocco this summer.
- [67:22]
Jesse Jarno
Paul did eventually get to Morocco.
- [67:24]
Rich Mahan
No sign of the Grateful Dead. But in Fez, an American couple said, oh, you're a Deadhead. You got to meet these Welsh cats at our hotel. They're Deadheads. Went up to meet them. Classic scene. You walk into a room, smoke filled, a big boom box and many spent batteries. And three Welsh Dead heads who confirmed that the Grateful Dead are coming to Europe and will be playing in the UK in September.
- [67:50]
Jesse Jarno
Getting warmer.
- [67:52]
Rich Mahan
I just missed the London shows. I hit Amsterdam like a brick wall of hash. And if it weren't for that big hairy freak from Boston who turned to me and said, yes, the Grateful Dead are playing in two days in Munich, I wouldn't have gone there. Much later in life I learned that great Joseph Campbell line that says, myths are public dreams and dreams are private myths. The Grateful Dead became the soundtrack to my private myth and my dreams, and I was soon beginning to realize it. That year. Off to Munich we went.
- [68:31]
Jesse Jarno
I'm a glow to welcome back Uli Toity. If you've traded tapes or photos or posters in the last few decades, you've probably come across Uli, and he's an indispensable part of the extended Dead cast family. Uli saw the Dead on the Beat Club television show in spring 72. But in spring 74, he got to go even further.
- [68:51]
Rich Mahan
I was now old enough to go.
- [68:53]
Jesse Jarno
To shows I had seen already. Led Zeppelin in 73. I had seen Pink Floyd before the Grateful Dead. I've seen the Pink Floyd in 74. I went to See Emerson Lake in Palmers. And I saw the big names. And so of course then when we heard about Grateful Dead, we were all excited. But then it was Munich and that just way, way, way far away from here. Because if you live in Freiburg, there's a Black Forest. And there's no highway going from here to Munich. You have to go to Stuttgart first and then from Stuttgart down to Munich. Even the logistics of getting a ticket were a pain in the tuckus. To get tickets was just impossible. You couldn't go anywhere in town in Freiburg and ask can you get tickets for us for a show in Munich?
- [69:36]
Rich Mahan
No way.
- [69:37]
Jesse Jarno
So we finally knew a guy who lived as a student in one of my friends houses in a room. And the parents still had the address and a phone number. And we called this guy and asked him if he can buy us the.
- [69:50]
Rich Mahan
Tickets and send them.
- [69:51]
Jesse Jarno
And he did that and we sent him the money. When they finally made it to the Olympic complex in Munich. They discovered that some local bands were staging a festival of their own outside the Dead show. It was an occasion. There is a stage on the artificial lake. So people are more or less swimming on the lake when they are on the stage.
- [70:10]
Rich Mahan
And it was organized by the Munich.
- [70:13]
Jesse Jarno
I don't know musician organization. I have no clue who was behind it, but they had Munich bands. I do vividly remember Spaari Funkal because they were singing in Bavarian dialect. And they were singing the blues of the permanent Ra. It was all crazy. Munich had its own Dead loving psych band, Iman Dul. But they weren't there. Amandul was not there. It was Spa Rifanka. And I do remember 69. And there must have been another band, but I didn't know the name. Germany had its own homegrown psychedelic music scene. Which produced bands that many of us American heads love now. But Uli and his friends weren't totally on board yet.
- [70:58]
Rich Mahan
Isn't Saren saying the profit is not worth anything in his own country?
- [71:02]
Jesse Jarno
But then came Cannes. And I never really got into it until they had this hit Vitamin C. That was from a 14 minute live version of Vitamin C recorded at the Olympic in Paris. A year and a fortnight after the Dead recorded much of Europe 72 in the same room and released recently as live in Paris 1973. Cannes wrote a lot of music for movies. So whenever we knew that Cannes music is played, we always watched those movies. Though Cannes were influenced by the Dead, as we heard in our Europe 72 season. There maybe wasn't a lot of crossover in the fan bases. If you were really into Cannes, then Grateful Dead was country. And it wasn't always easy to find out about these bands. Agitation Free, which I think is one of the best bands coming out of Berlin at that time. I never heard way back. I never seen the albums. I discovered that way later. That was Agitation Free's through the Moods from their Live 74 album, recorded in February in Cologne. They had at least one Dead fan among them in bassist Michael Faim Gunther. Not that Agitation Free played the Free festival outside the Dead gig either, but would have been cool. As the festival went on and the European Deadheads milled, another level of chaos came into the equation. There were already people standing in line for the Grateful Dead, and among them a lot of GIs. And then the stadium, Olympic Stadium opened and the soccer fans came out. And that was a lo and behold sight. They had all their flags with their colors of their team. There are these Grateful Dead freaks looking.
- [73:32]
Rich Mahan
In wilderness because nobody knew at the first moment.
- [73:36]
Jesse Jarno
I think the GIs, hey, this is the end of the soccer game. What the fuck is this? So all the circumstances for this concert for me were so special. If you look up pictures of the Olympic hall in Munich, you'll see it's a giant open sided tent. Uli could see the giant speaker system getting ready to mock Shao inside. I didn't know how tall the equipment was. I could see it from the outside, but I didn't know how much deeper I go when I'm in the Olympic Hall. So when I finally see the wall of sound in front of me, I.
- [74:06]
Rich Mahan
Just go, oh no. Oh wow.
- [74:10]
Jesse Jarno
What is this? And mind you, I've seen Pink Floyd with a quadrophonic arrangement in Colmar, France, just three months before Led settlement was awful. I had ear ringing for two days. They were fucking loud.
- [74:22]
Rich Mahan
I was sure my ears are not going to survive.
- [74:25]
Jesse Jarno
But then the most strangest thing happened. The music was never loud.
- [74:29]
Rich Mahan
I could talk to my friends just.
- [74:30]
Jesse Jarno
Like I talked to you, because the music was transparent.
- [74:34]
Rich Mahan
It was not just this.
- [74:36]
Jesse Jarno
It was really amazing. Best sound I ever heard and I never heard the ball again. Paul Matulik had his own astonished reaction to the Wall of sound.
- [74:44]
Rich Mahan
The Olympic hall where the dead played on September 14th in Munich was huge and cavernous. And I doubt there were more than a few thousand fans Deadheads in attendance. I couldn't grasp the dimensions of the Wall of Sound at first when I walked in because the huge room was cavernous and with no one on stage, it was hard to actually Grasp how tall, though, that stack of speakers was. But when the band stepped out, oh, my God, they shrunk the band. It became obvious that, like, this was a monster, monster system. It sure sounded amazing during that first set. I had very little experience at that time with rock concerts in general. So I actually didn't know what your standard lousy sound system sounded like.
- [75:32]
Jesse Jarno
Sounds like a Dead show. One guy had a plastic skull and.
- [75:37]
Rich Mahan
A rose through the teeth.
- [75:39]
Jesse Jarno
And he had it on a stick. I mean, you wouldn't get into a show nowadays with a stick being, like, 2 meters above your head. But he walked in with his skull with the rose in between the teeth. And he went totally up front so.
- [75:51]
Rich Mahan
He could see the whole show. For this, dad had only seen his second show. I couldn't have been critical at all. The music was fantastic because they were playing a lot of their last two albums. I could recognize it. It's the only time I ever heard a complete Weather Report Suite. I would have to wait until further to ever hear the that again. And the show, I thought, was, like, very, very hot.
- [76:16]
Jesse Jarno
Paul had a pretty wonderful experience in Munich.
- [76:19]
Rich Mahan
After the first set, I wandered back into the theater. And, as I said, there weren't that many heads. So you didn't have to walk far before you were away from people. And then you walked a little further and you finally could get to the end of the theater. And I remember there was this sloping wooden floor that. That maybe sloped up to the first row of seats. And it was very dark back there. And you could kind of lay back on the slope. And you wouldn't be flat on your back. You'd be just kind of pointing upward. And you'd be staring at, like, the girders of this structure. And there was, like, nobody around you. And it was black, and the hash brownies were kicking in. And all of a sudden this strange sound came from the stage. I wasn't completely surprised by Seastones. Because before I'd left from the States that summer. The Dead had done their big kind of early summer tour. And a friend had come back from Springfield and talked about the strange sonic weirdness. That emanated from the stage after the first set. And was identified as some kind of Phil shenanigans.
- [77:51]
Jesse Jarno
If people still thought the Grateful Dead were country music, they got a surprise at set break. Though, frankly, it was all surprises to Uli. That concert was the strangest I ever been to up to that point. Because, first of all, I had never heard about a band playing that long making a break and having Ned Laggin and Phil Lash coming up after. I couldn't see Lash, but I saw Laggin. All that noise. It was so strange because we thought, what the fuck is this they had done? And now they're scaring us off. Here's how Phil Lesh remembered it to David ganz in a 1981 interview. We've linked to David's projects@dead.net deadcast there.
- [78:48]
Rich Mahan
Were some moments, and especially in Europe. There were some great moments in Munich. Oh, boy, Germans, when they don't like something, they whistle. So they started whistling because they didn't like it. So Ned just picked up on the whistle and he started with his synthesizer, started to whistle, and he whistled along with him. Pretty soon they were whistling along with him and they didn't know it. He has that kind of sense of humor. A couple of times things were thrown at the stage when I was playing all of these considered by me, but also by Garcia and Lesh. Badges of honor because of the experience of all true art, which is what Garcia thought I was and told me so. Stravinsky, riots for Rite of Spring, Revel and Debussy. People throwing chairs at the stage when they premiered. Works being intensely criticized. These were all badges of honor.
- [80:22]
Jesse Jarno
The show itself didn't have such an impact on me. I thought it was okay, but it wasn't great. I didn't get to the point that they really carried me away. But everything surrounding the show, the little festival, the end of the soccer game, the Seastones portion, the equipment, everything was so gigantic. To see that with my own eyes, I couldn't believe it. What definitely changed for me was the fact that I've seen the best sound ever. Or I heard the best sound ever and seen the biggest equipment I've ever seen. That is what. Something I couldn't explain to my friends back home. To say, hey, it was huge. It was huge, huge, huge. And you have never seen something like this. After the show, it was too late to drive all the way back home. We wanted to sleep on the grass. But that didn't work out because the dew made it all wet. So we slept on the actual road. It was not a paved road. It was a walking path. And we just stretched our sleeping bags there and got in. And in hours, I don't know. Suddenly a crash, somebody yelling. And one guy, hey, he hit me. And then we realized there's a guy and he hit us with his bicycle. But he was so fucking drunk, he fell down and he never got up again. He just went to sleep. He wasn't there when we woke up in the morning, but his bike was still there. If this were a thoughts on the Deadpost, there's only one person who possibly could have been riding that bicycle. And we'll send these next mayhem filled segments out to the memory of our late friend Rick from Rock Scully's Living with the Dead.
- [82:02]
Rich Mahan
In my infinite wisdom and after countless tours, I have calculated that exactly 17 days is the longest we can sail without serious incident. This estimate is based on the flashpoint potential of the most volatile member of the group, Bill Kreutzman. Anything beyond 17 days at sea puts us in grave jeopardy.
- [82:24]
Jesse Jarno
I don't know exactly what day the band departed for their European tour, but it had been less than 17. Off duty booking agent Richard Loren had made it to Germany.
- [82:33]
Rich Mahan
I went to the show in Munich that they did and they came back late. You know, they partied. I came back and went to sleep at 2 o'clock.
- [82:43]
Jesse Jarno
Sleep didn't last long.
- [82:45]
Rich Mahan
Kreutzman came into my room at 5:00 in the morning, knocking on the door, slamming against the wall. You're fired. You steal money from us because the road crew were telling him that I was a thief. I was the guy that paid their money, never mind the thief. So they got into Kreutzmann's cocaine fueled head that I was a crook.
- [83:06]
Jesse Jarno
I'm not sure how the sequence of the evening unfolded, but either immediately before or after this, Kreutzman had also fired manager John McIntyre.
- [83:15]
Rich Mahan
Kreutzman strangled me, strangled me and fired me. The next morning, Phil Lesh heard about it and he said, you're not going to be fired. Don't worry about it. So I said, I'm leaving. I got fired, I'm going. So I left the scene.
- [83:28]
Jesse Jarno
In perfectly cromulent Grateful Dead logic, Richard Loren lost his job as booking agent exactly as the Grateful Dead decided to retire from the road indefinitely and promptly got a promotion of sorts.
- [83:39]
Rich Mahan
In 1974, at the end of September, I was hired by Weir to be their manager. Weir came into my office and we want you to be our manager. Because I was the only sane one left.
- [83:53]
Jesse Jarno
There was more to come. Other squads from the touring party were having a more peaceful, easy time for.
- [83:59]
Rich Mahan
The rest of that Europe tour, which then from there went to Munich and then we drove around the Alps in Switzerland and then Dijon and then back to Paris. Phil and I did LSD almost every.
- [84:11]
Jesse Jarno
Day from Grateful Dead records, Steve Brown.
- [84:15]
Rich Mahan
We were supposed to play in Amsterdam and that got cancelled. So when we left Germany, we had time on our hands. So we rented cars and drove through Switzerland. We started from Zurich. We had a Mercedes. It was Healy and Phil and Ned and me in one car. And we had gotten the little Visine bottles of Osley's favorite liquid, which is always nice to just put a drop right on your. And suck up. Then we also had really good pot, and that was all in, like, baggies and stuff.
- [84:49]
Jesse Jarno
Steve also had a home movie camera with him. A few years back. He digitized his silent films of the Europe 74 adventures, including a lot of what he's about to describe, which we've embedded@dead.net deadcast.
- [85:01]
Rich Mahan
We were very high when we were driving through the Alps. And we'd park and get out and climb up these dams and go up into these areas that we did visit and got out and went through these little towns and walked around and stuff. But, yeah, we were basically tripping pretty good right through all of Switzerland. And we found some places where you could get some really nice wine and bread and cheese and stuff that we'd stopped at occasionally on the way. That was nice.
- [85:26]
Jesse Jarno
Good work, if you can get it.
- [85:27]
Rich Mahan
But we were going to be crossing a border in a certain point in time, and we were pretty high by the time we got there. And so it was like, okay, we're in this movie now where we have to survive. And so what wound up happening is we stopped before we got to the border, and we took all the stash and we put it underneath the mat on the trunk floor and hid it all down in there. And then just had our suitcases all clear and clean. So when we went, if they did check them, the suitcases were cool. Then we had to go one at a time into this little hut, little house thing, a checkpoint. When we finally got to the border and they took us in one time and passports, do all the usual stuff like that. And then they came out and they opened. Open the trunk, and they start looking at all the stuff that's in there, but they didn't lift up the mat. And so here we are just being cool. Being cool. Being cool, you know, in this movie, and we get it back in the car, we drive down, drive down, drive down, many miles down the road, and we find this nice little place to pull over and stuff. And we pull over there, and we start just really laughing that we got away with this thing. Phil and Ned are just crying, and Healy's opening up the trunk, and he's grabbing everything back out again. So we have it again so we can enjoy it, you know. And we wound up keeping it free and clear for ourselves at that point, all the way into France. Yeah, we were able to enjoy it in Dijon and in Paris and no more border checks until we actually had to fly out of France to go home.
- [87:11]
Jesse Jarno
Coming through wine country, Lesh exchanged some of the surplus agriculture they'd smuggled from California in the wall of sound for some French wine.
- [87:19]
Rich Mahan
I can see him coming back in after he did his trade, too. He's coming into the hangar that we played in there in Dijon, and he's carrying all this wine and stuff.
- [87:28]
Jesse Jarno
Ned.
- [87:29]
Rich Mahan
We arrived in Dijon the day before the concert after driving through the Alps and very beautiful landscapes with old castles and villages. We were booked into a motel on the outskirts of the city. It was near a highway and some farmland. When we got there, Jerry and Keith and Donna and Bobby were already there. They already checked in. And some of the guys from the band crew were seemingly very bored and having car races in the parking lot. Phil and I toured around Dijon that day, especially the whole historic original center of the city, which was circular in layout. And then the next day we had a sound check in the hall. Billy joined us immediately. So it was a trio for a while, and then Jerry and then Bob. And it was one of the better afternoon improvised sets that we did.
- [88:24]
Jesse Jarno
The Dijon gig was way undersold and a tour highlight. Now, in the 30 trips around the Sunbox, Lightning Crew, Ben Holler told us this story.
- [88:49]
Rich Mahan
We were somewhere down in Dijon, and all they had was great sandwiches, but they had fabulous sandwiches. And we played the concert. And when it was over, the audience just wouldn't leave. And finally we just turned the house lights on and the crew went out. We waved them, and then we took the equipment down, put it in the truck, and then the crew went out and waved to the audience. And then they got up to leave. And I realized later maybe what had happened was in Dijon, they didn't have buses at night, so the audience couldn't get home till 6 or 7 in the morning when we were done. Then buses started again in the audience, but they watched us take the equipment down.
- [89:47]
Jesse Jarno
Following the Dijon performance on the 30 trips around the Sunbox, Ned and Phil had another excellent adventure in France.
- [89:54]
Rich Mahan
After the concert, Phil and I were so up, we were invigorated by the music and the audience and especially by the chemistry, the chemistry of the moment that we decided to check out of the motel and drive to Paris. That Night. We also wanted to separate ourselves from the Drag Racers from Hell movie, as I characterized it, at the motel. Because Dijon had been such a very nice and interesting and sort of cosmic place, it was decided that it was my turn to be the driver. And so very late at night we got on the road and I drove at very high speed, maybe, I don't know, 170, 180 kilometers per hour toward Paris.
- [90:34]
Jesse Jarno
We'll let the September 18th seastone sound check be our traveling music, which you can hear at Ned base.
- [90:51]
Rich Mahan
In the middle of what was supposed to be a six hour non stop dark of night run, we heard sounds. It turned out that the tires had heated up so much that the rubber was falling off. We had to get off the highway somewhere in rural France at three or four in the morning, pitch black, limping the car along a rural road. We found a country garage and woke up this fellow who did not speak English to get him to replace all the four tires. I had two years of French in high school that could only speak a few words of French like where's the bathroom? And Phil couldn't speak any French at all. Phil was somehow able to negotiate that transaction because I was at that point only able to do one thing. Drive. I couldn't talk, I couldn't get out of the car. I was just driving. The mechanic jacked up the car on one of those lifts that elevates the entire car. With me sitting in the car, my hands on the steering wheel, I was still driving in my head. The mechanic replaced all the tires, lowered the car, and I jetted out of the garage ready to go to Paris. The whole time I had been driving virtually while I was elevated on the lift and was really ready. But we weren't going anywhere until Phil paid the bill. So Phil threw money at the man and almost didn't get in the car. When I zoomed out of there a few hours later, we pulled up to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. It was sunrise, it was beautiful. And Phil and I just stood there looking around in happiness and amazement. It was just great. We went over to the Paris Hilton and tried to check in. We were in our cowboy boots, unshaven, and as you know, you could see electric bolts coming out of our heads.
- [92:58]
Jesse Jarno
Barbarians at the gates. Or depending on your perspective on loose in the City of Light. In his book, Bill Kreutzman recounts a night in which, stranded somewhere in Paris, he decides to hotwire a moped, fails, and concludes that the best way to flag help is to throw it through the nearest shop window. You can read the rest in Deal My three decades of drumming, dreams and drugs with the Grateful Dead. It was pretty clear that people needed a break and within a month that would happen. Many, but not all of the Grateful Dead's ambitions would be put on hold. Those included both bringing the far out spaces of Seastones to arena sized audiences, but also songs like Weir's Money Money. The Europe 74 tour didn't have quite the lasting impact as Europe 72, but the parameters for the world of popular music were changing anyway, especially in Europe. Just two years after Money Money came ABBA's Money Money Money Money Money Money.
- [94:01]
Rich Mahan
Must be funny in the rich man's world Monday, Monday, Monday always Sunday in the rich man's world.
- [94:13]
Jesse Jarno
I dropped it here to make funny in part, but it really could be almost heard as an answer song to the Dead's Money Money. It was written by men, and it's not like it was the Scum Manifesto or anything, but it was sung by and from the perspective of a woman. If John Perry, Barlow and Bobby Weir wanted Money Money to be part of the pop tradition of songs about women and Money Money Money Money was a sequel whether anybody knew it or not. So I must lean I'll have to.
- [94:39]
Rich Mahan
To go to Las Vegas or Monaco and win a fortune in a game My life will never be the same.
- [94:52]
Jesse Jarno
It's a gas, huh?
- [94:53]
Rich Mahan
Money Money money money money money Money Money money. Thanks very much for tuning in to this episode of the good old Grateful Dead cast. Friends, we'd like to thank our guests in this episode. Ned Legion, Elvis Costello, Andy Leonard, Richard Lauren, Steve Brown, John Perry, Ben Holler, Andy Childs, Uli Tutti, Paul Matulik, David Lemieux, Brian Kehue, Rebecca Adams, Sean O'Donnell, Brian Anderson and Michael Koehler. 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 Mayhem Produce Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Doran Tyson. All rights reserved.