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Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now.
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Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with.
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Sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew.
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That'S music to your taste buds.
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Check out dogfish.com for more details and.
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To find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale.
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Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly the Good Old Grateful.
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Dead Cast the Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse.
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Jarno exploring the music and legacy of.
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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.
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I'm your co host Rich Mahan.
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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.
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Album from the Mars Hotel.
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In this episode we dive into the second of the two Phil Lesh written songs, Pride of Cucamonga. It is the 50th anniversary of the Grateful Deads from the Mars Hotel and.
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To celebrate this, Rhino has a grand.
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50Th anniversary release in the works which.
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Includes the original album remastered, some really.
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Cool early demos of songs from the album, and a previously unreleased live show you're absolutely going to want to have in your collection. The Grateful Dead played the University of Nevada, Reno on May 12, 1974. This was the first roadshow for the infamous Wall of Sound which had debuted weeks earlier at home in San Francisco on March 23, 1974 at the Cow Palace.
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This audio from the Reno show was cleaned up and remastered by Grammy Award.
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Winning engineer David Glasser with plangent processes, tape restoration and SPE correction and was produced for release by David Lemieux. All of the aforementioned is 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 you have to see to believe its graphics animate when you spin it on your turntable.
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More info and orders are happening now over@dead.net head on over to dead.net deadcast.
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And check out all of our past.
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Episodes including the complete seasons one through eight and you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you.
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Can listen how and where you like to listen. Please help this podcast by subscribing sharing us with your friends on social media, hitting that like button and if the spirit moves you. Leave us a review. Thank you very much. Very kind of you. And we do have transcripts for many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure. Head on over to dead.netdeadcast index and check them out.
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Hey now, folks, were any of you at the Wallace sound shows in 1974? Well, leave us a recorded message at stories.dead.net and tell us your story about.
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Your experiences with the Wall of Sound. We want to hear from you, and.
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We do use them in the Dead.
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Cast when we get something that fits just right.
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Record your Wall of Sound tour stories@stories.dead.net.
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Well, Phil Lesh has two wonderful compositions.
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On from the Mars Hotel.
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And in this episode, we take a trip to investigate the Pride of Cucamonga. Here's detective Jesse Gian.
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And here we come to the most anomalous song on from the Mars Hotel, Pride of Cucamonga by Phil Lesh and lyricist Bobby Peterson.
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I'm on the edge of an empty highway Howling at the blood on the moon A diesel Mac up rolling down my way I can't hit that boat.
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Or too soon it's anomalous on Mars Hotel, the only song on the album to sound anything like the country rock that the Grateful Dead were often associated with. It's anomalous within Phil Lesh's own songbook, where songs were usually much more complicated. And it's anomalous for the Grateful Dead as a whole. One of a tiny handful of songs on Dead studio albums that were never performed live. The only one like that on from the Mars Hotel.
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Running hard out of muskrat flats it was 60 days with the good light hell at my back Like a shotgun blast High wind chimes in the night.
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It would be Phil Lesh's last lead vocal on a Dead studio album. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
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I really love Pride of Cucamonga, but to hear Phil sing so joyously again. This is kind of what I was.
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Saying about Unbroken Chain that it makes.
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Me wish Phil had written more songs and sung more songs. Musically, it's two very distinct parts. The kind of peppy, you know, beginning.
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Part, but that bluesy middle which comes out of nowhere.
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It's like, what the hell is this? And. And it works. It works perfectly.
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And then the way they come right back into the fun part of the.
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Song, the upbeat, peppy part of the song.
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That'S John McPhee on pedal steel with that part of Cucamonga can also be heard as the quiet end of an era that had begun almost exactly five years earlier in the spring of 1969. That was Direwolf debuted in June 1969 and released on Working Man's Dead in spring 1970. The first original Dead song that falls unquestionably on the country rock spectrum. The sound that would color Working Man's Dead American Beauty, Jerry Garcia's Don Rich influenced lead guitar approach in 1971 and 1972 and how the rock press described the band We've talked about it a bit on the Dead cast over the past few years. Check out our Cumberland Blues episode especially. Not only is Pride of Cucamonga the only country leaning song on from the Mars Hotel, it's the last original song on a Dead album that might be called Bakersfield Dead.
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I see your silver shining town But I know I can't go there Your streets run deep with poison wide your doorways crawl with fear.
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On our Loose Lucy episode, we Talked with Sonic Youth's Lee Ronaldo about his cross country 1974 road trip with the eight track of from the Mars Hotel, where Pride of Cucamonga was in the album's second slot, just after US Blues with China Doll moved nearly to the end, giving the album's flow a much brighter feel.
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So I think I'll drift old where it sat where the weed grows green and fine Wrap myself around a bush of that bright Whoa whoa.
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Good David Lemieux.
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It's not a song that's overly deep until you really kind of dig a little deep and you're like, okay, there's a lot going on in this song. It made me wish Bobby Peterson wrote more songs.
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Us too, but as we'll hear, there's a lot packed into Pride of Cucamonga. After turning Phil Lesh onto poetry and cannabis in the early 1960s, Bobby Peterson collaborated with Loesch on New potato caboose in 1967. We went pretty deep into his biography a few episodes back when we got into Unbroken Chain for a few reasons, mainly that we forgot to include it in the Unbroken Chain episode. Here's what the song of the Northern Saw Whet Owl sounds like. The reference to the Saw whet owl is arguably the only detail of Unbroken Chain that firmly grounds Bobby Peterson in one of the traditions to which he belonged as a nature poet. But Pride of Cucamonga grounds him in the other half. It's a California song.
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Yes, it's me. I'm the pride of Cucamonga I can see golden forests in the sun I had me some loving and I dance.
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Sometime engineer Brian Kehue transferred the session tapes for the new edition of the Angel Share.
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I have to say it was not lost on me that I was not far from Cucamonga when we were going through these tapes.
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Okay, memorize these funny place names. Walla Walla, Keokuk, Cucamonga. Rancho Cucamonga is the actual name of.
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The place and it's a very old Spanish place.
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When the Spaniards came over South America and Mexico, they came up the west coast. They were grabbing land, taking things away from the Native American Indian people. But they took one of those sections and it was called Rancho Cucamonga. If my equinometry is correct, and there's a good chance it's not, I think Cucamonga actually is a three days ride from Bakersfield by horseback. But as we'll learn, the Cucamonga is right there in the song's title. It's a bit of a red herring. It's a California song alright, but most of the action is elsewhere. Please welcome back founder of the Grateful Dead Studies association and Bobby Peterson scholar Nicholas Merriweather.
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He writes that in Ben Lomond, which is Santa Cruz Mountains in 1972.
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We heard a lot from Nick about Peterson's background as a poet and lyricist in our Unbroken Chain episode, and we've linked to various Dead studies projects@dead.net deadcast.
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There are two surviving drafts of Pride of Cucamonga and one is on eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper cut in half. The other is on a full letter sized sheet. And there are only minor differences between the two manuscript drafts. You know, a word here, a word there, nothing really significant. The difference between those versions and what ends up getting recorded and the copyright registration is really quite remarkable. And it speaks to how Phil Lesh edited Peterson's lyrics in order to make them more singable in some cases, or just more kind of elliptical.
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The song was completed by the summer of 1973. Loesch recorded a solo acoustic demo at the Record Plant along with his Unbroken Chain demo in early August, both of which can be heard on the expanded version of Wake of the Flood. As far as we can tell, unlike Unbroken Chain, the Dead never tried Pride of Cucamonga in 73. We're going to use Phil's demo as a guide for the next part of the conversation.
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We'll try the old Pride of Cucamonga again. The original draft, some of the changes that Phil makes, some of them are just to make it more singable. So the first line of Peterson's last draft is Standing on the edge of a big empty highway. Well, Phil changes that to out on the edge of the empty highway. It just sings better. His second line originally was looking at the blood on the moon. Phil changes it to Howling at the blood on the moon, which is good. On the edge of an empty highway.
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Howling at the blood of the moon.
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Diesel Mac. Come rolling down my way can't hit that boulder too soon. Lots of little changes like that. But Phil excises two entire verses. The original version of Pride of Cucamonga is much more specific to Peterson's own life and Peterson's own circle. Running hard out of Muskrat flats. It was 60 days or double life. He let my back like a shotgun blast High wind chimes in the night. That line about Muskrat Flats, Peterson wrote it as Klamath Falls, which in fact.
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Is the town on the Oregon border where Peterson was born.
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And a lot of the excisions have to do with making it less sort of elliptically specific about Peterson and his life. The original way that the poem, the lyric reads is it's about a guy looking back on all of the highways, all of his travels. And its focus is on Highway 101. Well, Phil eliminates that. The chorus is, as Peterson wrote it was, oh, pride of Cucamonga Bitter olives in the sun had me some lovin' and I'd done some time on Highway 101 and you can imagine Bitter olives in The Sun Highway 101 rhymes, but Phil gets rid of the specificity. No more on Highway 101 I'm proud of Kookamonga Whoa, Little olives in the sun.
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Whoa, whoa I had me some.
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Loving and I done some time.
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It reminds me of the move in the Beach Boys Good Vibrations when Brian Wilson edited out the last two rhyming words from the bridge lyrics by Mike. The line originally ends with the rhyme we find.
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In her eyes she goes.
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But more than in Good Vibrations, the edit changes the context with the last line about Highway 101 deleted. The lyric seems to imply that the singer has done some time in jail, which Peterson had in the early 60s for passing bad checks. But that's not what he was writing about in Pride of Cucamonga.
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Pride of Cucamonga was written chiefly and centrally as a tribute to. To Peterson's dear friend Laird Grant, who was an old childhood friend of Jerry Garcia's and who's the band's really, the first roadie. Laird is fascinating also because he lived at 710 Ashbury.
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You can spy Laird Grant Also known as Barney in early pictures of the dead. At 7:10 Ashbury, distinguished by his pointy hat.
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Laird was and is a strong guy, a tough guy. So part of his job was also to keep people off the stage at concerts and also to keep undesirable people people. Out of 7 10. There's a fascinating reference at one point when Charlie Manson was taking an unhealthy interest in the Grateful Dead, and it fell on Laird Grant to be the person to keep Charlie Manson. Out of 710 Ashbury.
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Someone's gotta do it. Laird also became the band's first ex roadie, quitting in late 1967. Something about setting up the new guy's drums. But he remained part of the family.
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Laird Grant is Pride of Cucamonga. Here's why that was his nickname. Laird was fond of drinking. There was a brand of basically fortified wines and just bad wines called Pride of Cucamonga. They had wonderful wine labels.
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If I could find an old radio jingle for Pride of Cucamonga wine, we'd include it here. It's still available from the Joseph Felipe vineyard. We'll just let the chorus stand in for our missing jingle. Whoa, Pride of Cucamonga.
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Whoa, whoa Silver apples in my song. Laird's nickname to Peterson was Pride of Cucamonga because that's what Laird drank. Peterson didn't like the brand. He really liked beer. He didn't like the wine.
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In a 1972 poem titled Rain Dance on Highway 50 for Laird, Peterson wrote about a trip the two took to visit friends at the New Buffalo Commune founded by poets in New Mexico. Radiator Trouble at Emigrant Gap Our first day out of Frisco Drinking beer and apple juice laced with acid the Nevada of night with one headlight Magic jackrabbits and the Paiutes of Austin where we slept. Pride of Cucamonga is a sometimes obscure geography of Bobby Peterson's West.
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Whoa. I'm Pride of Cucamonga.
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Whoa.
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Bit of olives in the sun as.
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Michael Patrick McCullough pointed out on the annotated Grateful Dead lyrics site, Peterson titled an undated poem Bitter Olives, which begins like Plumis Nomlaki wagons burning at Fandango Pass those long fires of autumn Pigpen and I saw along Highway 99 bitter olives in the stare and blister of sun and those fires of autumn also resonate with this line of Pride of Cucamonga, though the narrator is alone in this version.
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Since I came down from Oregon There's a lesson or two I've learned Standing in the road alone, watching the fires burn.
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What were Pigpen and Bobby Peterson doing in the northernmost part of California? And when? That's a side quest we're going to have to imagine, but I can't imagine it was a sober one. Though it's hard to find copies of Alleys of the Heart, Peterson's collected poems assembled and published in 1988 by Alan Trist and Hugh Lagasse Communications, one can see how the images and scenes of Pride of Cucamonga fit into Peterson's autobiography and the history of the Grateful Dead family as a whole, but mostly capturing fleeting moments in the California landscape. This is not a light poet you hold in your hands, robert Hunter wrote in the introduction. In the Palo Alto scene, years before Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions was a hoot in anybody's eye, Bobby Peterson had been the most serious poet among them. Please welcome back Longtime overseer of Ice 9 Publishing and editor of Bobby Peterson, Alan Trist.
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When I came back in 1970, Bobby was very much around the scene then in Marin county. And I remember he was one of the first people I looked up from the old days. You know, he was part of the so called Grateful Dead family, and he was always present in anything that happened in the Bay Area, even more so than Barlow, who was at that time on the ranch in Wyoming. So he didn't get back to California so often. Peterson had a wide circle of friends in the Bay Area. Everybody knew he was, you know.
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In 1980, Allen helped assemble Faraway Radios, the only slim collection of poetry published in Peterson's lifetime, sold through the Grateful Beds newsletter.
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I was living in Fairfax and Bobby was also living in a separate part of that same house that I was living in. And we would be down the pub in Fairfax, and I do remember all of that coming together of faraway radios. Bobby was very excited because, I mean, he had a lot of work by this time that he'd done, and he'd traveled between New New Mexico, Santa Fe and up to Oregon. He's on that trail back and forth, looking at all of the great historical places of the American west and the indigenous peoples, and he brought all that conversation into my life for sure. It was wonderful.
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David Lemieux has a note, but I'd call this more a launch problem than a design problem.
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The whole Oregon thing and the pronunciation of Oregon, which still gets in the craw of all my Oregon friends. Oregon. Since I came down from Oregon, there's a lesson or two I've learned. Eh?
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Cicada. Cicada.
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Nicholas Merriweather up in Eureka the sky's full of greed. You can smell it for miles around. For a long lost good old boy down on Two street, it sure is a hard go round. Well, Phil changes that too. The northern sky stinks with greed.
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You can smell it for miles around.
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The good old bars in the Greystone Hotel are still doing that.
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Get on down as pointed out by the contributors to David Dodd's annotated Grateful Dead lyrics, Greystone Hotel is a generic and ironic name used by inmates to describe jail facilities. It resonates with Lesh's edited lyric about Done some time. The lyrics that Phil Lesh edited out of Pride of Cucamonga are even more detailed.
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There are two missing verses. One is down in Salinas, the Strawberry King, although in one of the drafts he calls it the Lettuce King. Lettuce and strawberries, those are both huge crops down in the Central Valley, Central coast region down in Salinas the Strawberry King serves pie in the sky for the lame and wounded Only brothers on the yard in cold blue clothes. No Soledad means lonely. I copped some spare change in Union Square and headed for the Golden Gate But I got lost drinking Tokay wine in some place called the Hate. By the way, the Tokay wine, of course, is Pride of Cucamonga, the brand. But you lose those two verses and you now have a much more elliptical lyric.
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Whoa, whoa, Pride of Cucamonga.
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Whoa, whoa.
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Silver apples in my song the line Silver apples in the sun has a few different resonances, mainly an 1897 poem by W.B. yeats, the song of Wandering Angus. Almost certainly Peterson knew of the original, but Donovan set it to music in 1971 and we'll let him do the.
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Honors and walk among long dappled grass and pluck till time and times are done. The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.
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It was a phrase that many people played with, including the electronic composer Morton Subotnik, once of the San Francisco tape Music center, on his best selling 1967 album Silver Apples of the Moon, an album Phil Lesh surely heard in 1991. Robert Hunter used the phrase to title a keyboard duet on the Dead's Infrared Roses album. In addition to coming from Peterson's place as a California nature poet, the lyrics to Pride of Cucamonga were in conversation in private ways between Lesh and Peterson Petersen. We've spent a good deal of time on the Peterson part of the songwriting equation. Pride of Cucamonga, for the most part, is one of the most Straightforward songs Phil Lesh ever wrote for the Dead. Passenger being the only real competition, but for that most part also covers this section in 128 and I dance on Time. Pride of Cucamonga was one of the earliest songs tracked at the Mars hotel sessions at CBS with basic tracks recorded on April 1st. Engineer Brian Kehue we have a lot of takes. I think it's take 24 and 25.
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Were combined to make the final on this. The fill tracks have taken some of the most work and I don't know that this one is that complicated. But they must have been just shaping.
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It, trying to get it together to make sure that they had what they wanted with it. Like so much else of from the Mars Hotel, virtually all of the extra Pride of Cucamonga takes were nationalized into other Grateful Dead projects during the leaner years to come. So we really only have the master to play with, which as you'll notice, has a lot more Jerry Garcia lead guitar. You can hear it on the angel share unlike any other song on this record. There's this breakaway where they get into a different time signature. It starts like a crazy organ jam. There's guitar soloing and it's only all of like eight or nine seconds. And then boom, we're back into this freewheeling country trucker song. It's the densest part of the song and there are a lot of overdubs. It's really only a 10 second section in 128 with one extra instrument that's not anywhere else in the mix. Here's the isolated Hammond B3 part. Pride of Cucamonga is a fairly simple song with a core track by the whole Dead. They filled out Pride of Cucamonga over the last week in April. By the time they were done, only the bass and the drums survived from the original take. Jerry Garcia's new guitar part emulated the pedal steel a little bit. Weir's guitar almost sounds like country blues. Keith God shows. Piano just sounds like Keith God show. The bass line dances around and through everybody else's parts. The answer vocals on the chorus are a fun layer. They stacked the background vocals adding another layer. I think it's Filesh Bobby Weir and Donna God show, but it's a great blend.
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Whoa, whoa, whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa, whoa, whoa.
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Jerry Garcia added acoustic guitar under the chorus for some extra folk sing alongy pizzazz. As we mentioned, Garcia's electric part is some fun faux steel guitar, but just regular six string. Except not regular, because Jerry Garcia. I love where the chorus part ends up. Almost like a Bird Song riff. I mean, he's a fine pedal steel guitar player.
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I know he must have put in.
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Thousands of hours to get where he.
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Got because it's so hard to play. It's like three layered chess in a way, compared to playing a six string guitar.
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Since June of 1969, the same month the Dead had debuted Direwolf Garcia had been doing session work on pedal steel guitar. Joining the new riders of the Purple Sage and appearing on numerous records over the next half decade. As banjo took over in late 1972 and 1973, during his period in Olden in the Way and the Great American String Band, he played less and less steel. And so he called in the specialist. Just let's get someone who really can nail it. The specialist in question was someone who'd shared a few bills with Garcia's bands in recent years. That was the Bay Area band Clover with Mitch's tune from their 1971 album 49er. Please welcome to the Dead cast pedal steel player John McPhee.
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Steel player it's almost like a secret society. You gotta love the instrument to really get serious about trying to play it. Cause it's not the easiest instrument to play. And so those of us that do it, I think we kind of form a bond.
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John McPhee had arrived on the San Francisco scene around the time Jerry Garcia played on a certain Crosby, Stills and Nash single. And Garcia became the on call pedal steel player in the Bay Area.
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You who are on the road. I remember seeing Jerry playing in kind of an insider get together of musicians. I forget what the event was. It was at the Automat or one of the recording studios in San Francisco where there was some. I don't know, it was just. There was so much kind of loose stuff going on.
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But both being steel players, it stands to reason that the two didn't cross paths too often in the Bay Area studios.
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As I recall, it was Roy Siegel who was engineering that called me. And Roy was always very supportive of me as a player, as a musician. I've done various recordings that he was involved with. So I was doing a lot of session work back then. And everything looks so complete when you're walking out on the street and the wind catches your feet Sends you flying, crying Wild night is calling.
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It was years before I put it together that John McPhee was a big part of the magic of Van Morrison's Wild Night.
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I liked Jerry's playing. I really liked what he did on Teacher Children. And, you know, it was definitely an honor for me to get invited to be a part of that world. My main recollection is they were so nice to me. They were really supportive. I think Phil had a vision of the general feel that he was looking for from this field, but they really just gave me the freedom to try to find my way through it in my own fashion, which is really cool and says a lot about the spirit of their approach to life.
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John McPhee wasn't the first member of Clover to appear on a Dead album, if you count Bob Weir's Ace as a Dead album, or Ed Bogasse arranged the strings. And John McPhee's not the first member of Clover to appear on the Dead cast either, though Huey Lewis was still truckin Nancy's yogurt in 1974 and didn't join Clover until 76, but you can hear him on our Sunshine Daydream episodes. And John would also go on to play on the classic debut album by Bickershaw Minted Dead cast guest Elvis Costello before joining the Doobie Brothers for the long haul. Like Ned Legend's ARP Odyssey part on Unbroken Chain, they gave John McPhee multiple a mic'd amp, a direct line, and two tracks through a Leslie rotating cabinet recorded in stereo.
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Gary wasn't there when I was doing my part, as I recall. I think it was Phil and Bob, and I forget who all was there.
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Here's a weird, unresolved mystery of the session paperwork. Our buddy Joe Jupiel turned up some billing that suggests that Jerry Garcia tried doing pedal Steel overdubs on May 3rd and 4th, but there's no sign of Garcia on the tapes or the synchronous, where the solo is just way too slick a ghost part. Then Phil Lesh recorded his final vocal overdubs for Pride of Cucamonga on May 5, and there's various bits of paperwork suggesting that the band kept tweaking the album in small ways all the way through the end of May, possibly even flying home between gigs when Steve Brown was on the road and not around to mark down the Exact date John McPhee was through CBS. Possibly your narrator is also extending this story slightly as an excuse to listen to more isolated Pedal steel from the Mars Hotel was in stores within six weeks of the final overdubs, an absolutely, unthinkably quick time by 21st century standards, where record releases are bolstered by months long run ups with carefully organized track premieres and videos. But the promotion game in 1974 was pretty different in the summer of that year, as the Deads tour hit the East Coast. And after the album came out, they began to really get to work. On the album's first single.
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Red and White, Blue Suede Shoes. I'm Uncle Sam. How do you do?
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From Grateful Dead Records, Ron Rakow.
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I hired two guys in New York, Love Roses. Their promotion was miniature Louisville Slugger bats. It had the Louisville Slugger logo at the thick end, and then down the shaft of the bat it said, Love Rosen makes hits happen. So I hired those guys.
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By 1974, the freeform and alternative radio of the 60s was becoming an anachronism. Though we salute independent radio stations then and now, the mid-70s was the height of the radio promotion game, an intricate fiefdom where organizations like Love Rosen acted as intermediaries between record companies and radio stations, a system some said was no more fair than the payola that was supposedly banned in the early 60s. We recommend Frederick Dannon's essential book, Hit Men, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast.
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It took a long time to get a little rapport with them on a personal basis. And then the next time the Grateful Dead were in New York, their office, believe it or not, was right around the corner from the hotel we stayed at. So I would just walk Jerry over there. We stayed at the Navarro hotel, which was 112 Central Park South. And we would just walk over there. And it blew their mind. That never happened to them.
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In August 1974, Love Rosen signed up to work US Blues.
- [41:32]
B
But they got real close with one record, one single, and it got to the most senior people in this chain of radio stations. And they had a meeting in Seattle, and it made it to the final. And then something else got the addition. And that song was my favorite. It's the closest I ever came to being a major success. If that had happened, it would have. I don't know, would have ruined everything, I think.
- [42:20]
A
While the Love Rosen team started working US Blues to radio, Ron Rackow also broke new ground for the Dead, a television ad.
- [42:28]
B
I found an animator in LA through a guy named Chaikin. He was the president of AFCO Films. They used some good place in la and he got the price down reasonably so I could handle it.
- [42:44]
A
Hopefully we'll have this available for screaming on the World Wide Web. But imagine a cloaked figure barreling into castle doors with a sign labeled Mars Hotel and exploding into a murder of crows. Then a single crowd who does battle with a winged serpent and lands in front of the Mars Hotel.
- [43:27]
B
Crackle Dead. Crackle Dead. A bird did all the Talking with the Crow that was on the label.
- [43:34]
A
You can see the from the Mars Hotel television ad and a few different versions on the Grateful Dead movie dvd. The music was from Unbroken Chain and all three mixes of the ad brought some of Ned Legion's Unbroken Chain synthesizer to local Bay Area television sometime in the early autumn of 1974. Craig will do the ads aired alongside the Creature Feature, Star Trek reruns, the Best of Groucho, the Country Music Awards, Jeopardy, ABC's Rock Concert, Kung Fu and a few different movies including Bonnie and Clyde. Unbroken Chain synth player Ned Lagin saw it.
- [44:10]
B
I remember with my girlfriend we saw it on TV and we said, oh my God, I'm on tv. I mean it was like, what's next, Andy Griffith?
- [44:26]
A
We've gotten into Ned Legend's story, especially in our Candyman and Unbroken Chain episodes and of course the bonus Ned cast. His Unbroken Chain session was in late April or early May and joined up with the tour in late June in Miami at the Miami hi Alai Fronton where the Dead played the show now on Dave's Picks 34.
- [44:44]
B
You know hi Alai, the world's fastest game. Hi Alai, America's new super sport. To play it takes dynamite power, lightning speed, nerves of steel.
- [45:02]
A
Jai alai is a Spanish sport then making a bid to insert itself as a cosmopolitan spectacle for 70s American sports.
- [45:08]
B
Fans, Jai alai may soon rank with the nation's leading spectator sports. For years the game has attracted large crowds in fluff and enthusiasm for hi Alai is spreading.
- [45:22]
A
If the vibes emanating from these audio clips are doing it for you, we've linked to the whole 1978 documentary@dead.net deadcast thanks to my friend Matt for helping me to it. Hi Alai was like handball, except more dangerous.
- [45:36]
B
The ball of Palota used for playing hi Alai is somewhat smaller than a baseball and harder than a golf ball. The core is of hand woven virgin rubber covered with linen or nylon thread, which is topped by two layers of goatskin. Hurled through the air at speeds over 150 miles an hour, the Palota can turn into a dangerous, sometimes a lethal weapon.
- [46:06]
A
Did we mention there was legal gambling too? There was legal gambling. The Hialai Fronton also presented another local condition that I think was the reason they didn't debut seastones at the June 22 show.
- [46:17]
B
We didn't do it the first night because they were because the Jai Lai is a strange not strange, but it's not a usually shaped venue. The building in which Hailai is played is the fronton. The name derives from the front wall against which the ball is thrown. This wall is made of huge granite rocks at least 12 inches thick to withstand the repeated impact of the ball.
- [46:44]
A
That is, the wall of sound was surrounded by bigger actual walls made of granite. By June 23, the engineers had conquered the Hiali and Ned Barta's parents recently retired to Florida to the gig.
- [46:56]
B
They came on the afternoon when setup was still going on, and Jerry and Phil were present on the floor near the stage. And I don't remember Phil or Jerry, but they walked up to us and said, is this your parents, Ned? Why don't you introduce us? And I introduced them to my mother and my father, and my father said something like, I hope you're treating my son okay, or something like that. And Phil and Jerry both asked my mom and my father some questions. I don't remember what they wanted to ask or I'm blocking it for some reason today, but they got along really well with both my parents, who were very suspicious of the name Grateful Dead. They didn't have any understanding of whether it was a cult or something else. They didn't know the music. And everything they heard about the Grateful Dead or knew about the Grateful Dead from hearsay, was about Grateful Dead being busted for drugs and being an LSD band and what that meant psychedelics and weird, strange stuff. My parents came away from it feeling much better, as most people do when you meet people who have a reputation and then it's actually fleshed out. So Jerry and Phil did a good job of fleshing themselves out as reasonably coherent, stable citizens.
- [48:12]
A
It helped to have reasonably coherent chaperones.
- [48:14]
B
One of the questions that they asked Jerry and Phil was, what's that smell? But the other side of it, as I thought about it later, was Jerry and Phil were behaving sort of like older brothers to me, in a sense, and. Or just good friends. And it was an acknowledgement of the friendship that we had. And I'm not sure how many other people's parents they ever met.
- [48:36]
A
We'll get deep inside some of the Seastones performances in an upcoming episode, but for now we're going to follow the tour as the Dead moved up the coast from Roanoke to Landover to Hartford before hitting Roosevelt Stadium, the former minor league ballpark in Jersey City across the Hudson from Manhattan, where the Dead had played regularly for the past few years. It would prove to be the Dead's last show in the New York area for two years, their home away from home.
- [49:02]
B
Ron Rakow that was my favorite place to see the Dead. Actually. It was a 41,000 seat stadium. That's a perfect size. That's with the infield and everything. The way it was configured, 41,000 people could get in there.
- [49:16]
A
The Wall of Sound's New York area debut was scheduled for August 2, but it didn't go as planned. John Potenza left us this story.
- [49:24]
B
On July 4, 1974, I turned 14 and I got a ticket to see the Dead at Roosevelt Stadium for my birthday. For my older sisters who were Deadheads, they started me early, taking me to see the Allman Brothers. And I was already well acquainted with all the Dead albums and even a few live shows.
- [49:41]
A
We already had an eight track with.
- [49:43]
B
A 21370 dark star on it.
- [49:45]
A
So we set out for the show.
- [49:47]
B
Early on a sunny Friday morning.
- [49:49]
A
It was August 2nd.
- [49:50]
B
The crowd was typical.
- [49:53]
A
No tie, dye, mostly denim T shirts and halter tops. We walked out onto the field and.
- [49:58]
B
Got up pretty close to the stage.
- [49:59]
A
The wall of sand was right there in front of us, rising into the heavens.
- [50:03]
B
As a young guitar player, I was in awe.
- [50:05]
A
A few of our friends were eyewitnesses. Please welcome back discographer Ihor Slabicki, last heard in our Watkins Glenn episodes. In case you were wondering how easy it was to get backstage in those.
- [50:17]
B
Days, I was in school and I was the program director at the radio station. It wasn't even on the air. It was just sort of a local inside the building. I think it went into the cafeteria and some other places.
- [50:29]
A
I too got my start on a closed circuit radio station.
- [50:32]
B
It was maybe common knowledge that gets among some Deadheads at the time of where they were staying in New York. And so it was very easy to call the hotel and ask for the Grateful Dead rooms or something like that. And whoever answered you spoke with them. I called up the Hotel Navarro, and I think it was like I spoke with Bill Kreutzman. I said who I was and said, can I get a backstage pass from the radio station? I said, yeah, okay, sure. I got there something like early afternoon. Not early enough to hear any sound check, maybe five, six o'. Clock. And just kind of hung around there for a while and watched things and watched people and all that. Early in the afternoon, Phil came out.
- [51:11]
A
And plugged in his bass and started playing.
- [51:13]
B
Then Ned apparently started somewhere backstage and we got about a half hour of Ned and Phil, but nobody had any.
- [51:19]
A
Idea what it was.
- [51:20]
B
Nonetheless, music. After that they left. The crowd kept growing, as did the dark clouds in the sky.
- [51:27]
A
And Please welcome back good old Gary Lambert.
- [51:30]
B
I decided to take a stab at. At music journalism, which was kind of fitfully in progress for a few years there. And my prevailing thought was, damn it, Bob Weir is an underappreciated guitarist because no one appreciates people designated rhythm guitarists, and he's worthy of an article in Guitar Player magazine. So I decided to do one on spec.
- [51:56]
A
When the tour hit Roosevelt Stadium, our cub reporter was mid story.
- [52:00]
B
The ticket said rain or shine. It should always say rain or shine with an asterisk. You know, rain or shine. But let's not be ridiculous about it, because this was intense, torrential rain and water was puddling up on the stage and there were grounding problems and all that stuff. So they waited a long time and the crowd got wetter and more irritable. IHOR Slovicki I was backstage and I remember Bob Weir walking up to the stage, which was on metal, whatever they call those things there, and touching and saying that he was getting shot or at least feeling some kind of electricity. And so that was kind of the lead off to them canceling that show.
- [52:39]
A
John Potenza Eventually, a torrential New Jersey August monsoon started. The field became a mud pit, and.
- [52:46]
B
Finally Bob Weir had to come out and say they were canceling the show. Needless to say, the crowd ready, if you know what I mean.
- [52:53]
A
And they reacted to the news by starting a riot.
- [52:56]
B
Bottles flying, naked guys slithering through the mud, bloody mud, puddles full of broken glass.
- [53:02]
A
Gary Lambert and then the band decided.
- [53:04]
B
To pull the plug and say, look, we're going to come back in a few nights. And people started in fairly large numbers.
- [53:11]
A
Booing and throwing bottles at the stage.
- [53:14]
B
And Bobby told me that, you know, he, like, walked out to see what was going on. A bottle shattered on the stage, and a sizable shard of glass, like, caught him a glancing blow on the forearm. Now, if. If you're a guitar player and you have things like tendons and veins, that could be a sobering moment. And he said, you know, that I could have been much more seriously injured.
- [53:37]
A
The cancellation opened up some more time for Gary to talk to Weir for his story in progress. He'd been working on the piece since the fall and had interviewed Weir a few times.
- [53:47]
B
First one, Boston, December 73, then Springfield, Massachusetts in summer of 74. And then a hotel in New York on the night of the aborted Roosevelt Stadium show that got rained out.
- [54:03]
A
The Tapestones survived, sadly, but they got to go into depth about Weir's gear.
- [54:07]
B
I think Bobby was very pleased with the wall of Sound. In terms of attaining his ideal of playing something approaching jazz guitar in a rock idiom. He could play that 335 with incredible clarity and still have the power to deliver the sound to the cheap seats. He was aspiring to that kind of sound, I think, for. For quite some time. And in some ways that that was the most I've ever loved his guitar sound. He said in one of our interviews, he talked about the amount of wattage and he said if you gave your average British rocker that amount of power, he'd have you bleeding at the ears. But. But the Dead's intention was not, not punishing you with volume, but delivering the greatest clarity possible. He had things like an eventide harmonizer and he had a pretty sophisticated equalization system. He didn't use a lot of distortion in that point at all. He really, he said the sound of a vibrating string is such a cool thing that, you know, why dirty it up? That was kind of his operating philosophy back then.
- [55:08]
A
Gary also got a little bit of a glimpse behind the curtain.
- [55:10]
B
Curtain because I was in hotel rooms and stuff. You were starting to see a little of the fraying around the edges. The band was really getting tired and that amazingly, years before Touch of Gray, there were deep worries that this thing is getting too big.
- [55:28]
A
So they detoured to Philadelphia for a few days and back.
- [55:31]
B
Ned After Philadelphia, we went to New York to play Roosevelt Stadium and we stayed in the Navarro Hotel, which was around the corner on Central park south, across the street from where they had the horse carriages. And I was told at the time that the Navarro Hotel, or Hotel Navarro, however it's said, was actually owned by the who. I don't know that to be true. It's something you might want to look up.
- [55:56]
A
I did, and it's certainly a rumor that circulated for a long time, which doesn't seem to be true in the legal sense of the word, but perhaps in other deeper, more meaningful ways than mere property law. Certainly the who engaged in some absolutely epic ragers there, which, if reported accurately, would have done both cosmetic and structural damage to the building. In his memoir, Rock Scully tells a too incredible to fact check story about him and Garcia encountering Keith moon there in 77 or so. That includes a tale of Moon burrowing through a wall.
- [56:28]
B
I want to believe one of the times when I was coming down in the elevator, I got in the elevator alone, and there was Anthony Quinn. And I had seen Anthony Quinn in war movies like the Guns of Navarone. I had seen him in Zorba and most interestingly for me, as a kid, my parents had taken me to see the movie Requiem for a Heavyweight, which is about the tragedy of an old box. Sir, he was monumental. He's a big guy. He could have been Grateful Dead crew in a different lifetime. So we talked in the elevator, and elevator rides are not that quick. There's only like four or five, six floors there. No one else got in the elevator. And I felt profoundly enriched. And as I said before, the 1974 tours were an adventure. And this is like in Homer going to some island and meeting some God.
- [57:33]
A
In 1973, the Grateful Dead had saturated the New York area with gigs, just as they had since 1967. In March, they'd played a few nights at Nassau Coliseum. Over the summer, they played the Watkins Glen Summer Jam, which we got into last season. In September, they returned to the cop infested NASA Coliseum. But it was nearly 11 months before they came back, which is approximately 100 gazillion years in Grateful Dead New York terms. When the day came for the makeup show, August 6, now in part on Dix Picks 31, the dead arrived in a big way from Grateful Dead records. Steve Brown.
- [58:11]
B
When we played in New York, we had the Hell's Angels all around us, the Bronx Chapter, whatever. And we wound up having those guys escort the cars when we'd go through New York and we could go right through red lights sometimes had bikes on either side. Look like police, only different. It was bad. No, no matter. I mean, it was, you know, something to be honored or else.
- [58:34]
A
Ned Legion.
- [58:35]
B
I didn't go with the band. I rode separately in a limo which went through the crowd. And everybody was wondering, who's that guy? Who's that guy? And then I arrived with the Hells Angels. Bikes on stage and behind the stage. And I arrived with these two girls who I'd met in Philadelphia. And that's where the Hell's angel guy said, I want the girls. And I said, well, it's up to them being a proto feminist. And they said to me, no, we have to fight for the girls. And then Jackson and Joe Winslow and Ramrod said, no, he's a member of the band. So the guy was so upset and angry that he went out and stabbed this hippie guy out in the front of the stage. It was just another eye opening experience for an idealist, a New York Jewish idealist.
- [59:22]
A
You may have seen some photos of Ned onstage at Roosevelt Stadium. They're on Nedbase, which we've linked to@dead.net.
- [59:28]
B
Deadcast yeah, that's in the afternoon setup. That's when I was checking out and setting up my equipment. That was actually done by Interdata, the computer company who I got the computer from. And it was meant to go in Computer World, the journal for computers back then. You can see in the background there's a banner of Deadheads who had been there all night and all day waiting.
- [59:53]
A
They'd played Roosevelt Stadium before, but this was the biggest gig there yet.
- [59:57]
B
Todd Ellenberg after Watkins Glen. Seeing them in Roosevelt Stadium seemed downright homey. And, you know, I didn't see the Dead at Roosevelt in 72, but I saw them again in 74 at Roosevelt in 73. They put the stage kind of around at second base or so it was really pretty close in. While in 74 they pushed it way out in the outfield. A lot more people. A lot more people.
- [60:24]
A
Gary Lambert, one of my all time.
- [60:26]
B
Favorite Bobby lines at Roosevelt, when they made up that show that had had the bottle throwing incident on August 6, we were standing backstage and looking up at the wall from behind and, you know, it looked like the skyline of a small city. And I said to him, man, you know, when you were starting out playing in pizza parlors, you know, could you ever imagine it coming to this? And Bobby said, yeah, especially considering there were times we'd have to cancel a gig back then because no one could find an extension cord. Ihorslabecki, you walked in here into Roosevelt Stadium, you looked and it's things like, I don't know, 30, 40ft high behind the band, and you said, holy shit, this is gonna sound awesome. It sounded like the music was coming out of the sky. You couldn't tell that it was coming out of the speakers or anything like that. It was just coming out of the sky.
- [61:16]
A
Highlights from the August 6, 1974 show are on Dick's picks 31. But the whole gig is worth seeking out. Steve Silberman had a Ted nid Watkins Glen, but he really got it. At Roosevelt Stadium.
- [61:28]
B
I sort of got the improvisational gestalt of the Grateful Dead. And at Roosevelt Stadium, I remember this specific moment during Eyes of the World in the first set and, you know, Phil took a bass lead and I thought, this is the best thing I ever heard in my life.
- [62:04]
A
There were a few big jams in that first set, which closed with the 37 minute version of Playing in the Band into Scarlet Begonia's back into Playing in the Band.
- [62:13]
B
And there is one mystery that your listeners could help me solve, which is, yes, at 17 minutes and 30 seconds or so in playing in the band on the Dick's Picks release, Jerry starts playing a sequence of notes that he played throughout his career. And I've at times, and I have never heard it called anything, but it's unmistakable sequence of notes.
- [63:05]
A
Throughout 1974, Garcia would play with the riff that became Slipknot. And I wonder if that was just another melodic strand he had floating around.
- [63:13]
B
Yeah, and it's a very unusual sequence of notes because it's not exactly consonant, but it's not exactly dissonant either.
- [63:21]
A
And back into playing.
- [63:23]
B
Another thing that struck me about the show on 8674 was the so called sandwich of playing the band in Scarlet. And I believe the Scarlet starts fairly abruptly. Like it's not like they segue into it. I think Jerry just does it, you know, just pivots to Scarlet. But I did appreciate how that created architectures and the flow of the music that. Where you could make points longer than a single song and you could use the accumulated impact of several songs sandwiched together as an element in your spontaneous composition.
- [64:05]
A
During the Seastone set, Phil Lesh deployed his new Osiris bass. As IHOR Slobicki recalls, I have an.
- [64:13]
B
Audience recording and it's out in trading circles, but I think on that you can kind of hear four channels of that bouncer. I think it's mostly during the Seastones set with Ned Legion. That's where you really can tell it was something different, but it was also kind of the. Where I thought the Grateful Dead were heading. Not. Not that they would do that in every single song, but it was sort of like dark starish in a way. You know, musical exploration and visiting new places in Music Land or. Or exploring new places.
- [65:12]
A
John Potenza. The second set in the Dark was.
- [65:15]
B
Like being on a magic old sailing.
- [65:16]
A
Ship creaking through the dark waters with the band exploring sounds. I never imagined someone hit Bobby's guitar neck with a glow stick during Truckin.
- [65:24]
B
But they played on and on.
- [65:26]
A
Ira Kaplan, who had co found the legendary yola tango in 1984, had seen the Dead at Nassau Coliseum the previous fall and returned to see them at Roosevelt Stadium where he had his own brain frying moment. We've included parts of this story in our Sugar Magnolia and Playing Dead episodes.
- [65:42]
B
I remember the Roosevelt Stadium show, which got postponed due to rain, maybe because I had a tape of it.
- [65:50]
A
Ira brought his younger brother.
- [65:52]
B
My younger brother Neil got into it more immersively than I did.
- [65:56]
A
Sup, Neil? Neil Testifies to Ira bringing a makeshift mic stand and capturing the gig.
- [66:02]
B
The Roosevelt Stadium show in particular, I really loved, and I'm sorry to say I can't do it anymore without looking it up. But there was a Long Truckin'. He's gone. The other one was it the other one. And as I said, I would have to look it up now. And going down the road feeling bad that I used to just kind of sing to myself, you know, walking from my house to town, which is like an hour long walk, just kind of retracing my memory of the structure of that. That was a really again, a really eye opening experience. I do remember seeing them do Sugar Magnolia where they did the song. And then like except for Sunshine Daydream, then an hour later, like did Sunshine Daydream and just feeling a part of my brain explode. And you know, that definitely has been referenced within our lineup at times. Sunshine daydream Walk you in the child trees Going where the wind goes Blooming.
- [67:54]
A
Blooming like a red rose. Steve Silberman's older Deadhead friends were impressed.
- [68:01]
B
One of the main things that I remember coming out of the show, the people I was with could not think of any other songs that they wish the band had played because they played them all. And it was an extraordinarily far reaching show. After the show was the first time I saw kind of a real shakedown. And I saw a lot of people, or a few anyway. It didn't take many selling vinyl bootlegs. It was the first time I'd ever seen Grateful Dead bootlegs in any form. I mean, obviously there were no cassettes. They were selling vinyl bootlegs out of their trunks in the parking lot of 8674.
- [68:42]
A
Steve Brown remembers an adventurous exit from Jersey City.
- [68:45]
B
I remember when we were smoking in the backseat of the limo in New Jersey and we had to take a certain turnpike. We had to take a certain route to get back to the hotel. And the contact high with the pot that we were smoking got to the driver and we totally missed where we were supposed to be going. Jerry had already been busted on the turnpike once before. And so this was not a good moment. And we had to go in our 20 miles or something to find an exit to turn around and come back again. Don't smoke and get the driver high. You know you're gonna get lost out here in New Jersey. Thank you, good night.
- [69:28]
A
Two days later, on August 8th, Steve Silberman was back at Roosevelt Stadium.
- [69:32]
B
Two days later, I was back at the same venue to see Crosby, Sills, Nash and Young for the first time. So I saw two epic shows in like 48 hours, which is unbelievable. I was tripping intentionally this time because I was old enough to have started doing that by then. But, you know, the bad news is it was a hellish show. The music was good, but the conditions were not. And part of it was that it was very chaotic night. I remember it was said in Nash's unmistakable British accent. Nixon's resigned, you know, so everybody went wild. You did it.
- [70:29]
A
It's an important moment on certain rock culture timelines. Weirdly, Nash's announcement is missing from the versions I could find. And you can only hear the aftermath. So Steve's dramatic reenactment will have to do.
- [70:41]
B
Roosevelt Stadium was this very sort of brutalist environment. So Crozier, Nash and Young came out to play acoustic and the stage was showered with bottles. And I believe that happened there as I venue a lot, because when Weir canceled the show on 82 74, people were throwing bottles at him.
- [71:03]
A
Too bad. Scene man. Things had been changing at rock shows across the board, especially on the east coast, for quite some time. The Dead obviously weren't the only act affected, but it was still drag city. Gary Lambert.
- [71:17]
B
There were starting to be some bad scenes at shows. I was at a couple at which such things happen, with people setting off firecrackers and. And like, throwing firecrackers toward the stage and throwing other projectiles toward the stage. The crowds were getting a little more rowdy. And I thought maybe it was because once the Dead started getting more popular, the crowds they were. There was a certain tipping point in the focus and the expectations of crowds that were coming to the shows because they were getting on FM radio with things like Truckin and Casey Jones and that stuff. You had people coming to shows with those kinds of expectations, and the Dead could deliver that stuff. But there were times during the show where you could see the cartoon thought bubble with a question mark in it over the heads of the people who were hearing them go down a wormhole in the middle of playing in the band or Dark Star. And there was a certain restlessness and there was a certain. There was rowdiness, there was a little bit of gate crashing. All those things that happened on a massive scale. Years later, it was starting to manifest.
- [72:21]
A
And sometime, probably that same week they got back from New York, the Grateful Dead had a momentous band meeting.
- [72:27]
B
The band at some point got together and said, look, if we are in any way instrumental in causing scenes like that to happen, we might want to take a step back and reconsider what we're doing.
- [72:40]
A
Welcome back, crew member Richie Peckner.
- [72:42]
B
We had a band meeting and Jerry announced that he wanted to take, take some time off. When everybody kind of gasped. What do you mean take time off? Because we got this well oiled machine. But he was starting to feel the effects of constantly touring. But the other thing for him particularly was he was starting to feel responsible for everybody's job. So instead of being a talented, basically genius musician, everybody looked to him for work. So it was kind of a responsibility that I don't think he ever wanted or felt comfortable with it kind of with him. The band was institutionally fatigued with putting up with the, the incredible expense and size and logistical hazards of the wall of sound. Hauling that thing from town to town. The crew was burned out. Everybody was that way.
- [73:38]
A
And it just.
- [73:40]
B
Things felt really burdensome in a way.
- [73:43]
A
Richard Loren had become the band's booking agent when Sam Cutler departed earlier in the year.
- [73:47]
B
It was really, really a difficult, difficult because you can imagine 30 shows, massive soundtrack designed by Owsley. Besides the soundo shows, great quality. It was financially unsustainable and in my view it was a colossal mistake. But they got to have their gigantic thick wall of sound. They had a. For 12 hours or 15 hours to pull up erect and almost as much time to take down. They had to have day off in between. And the crew was double. They were normally even those guys were getting paid tons of money. So I wasn't in management at the time, so I didn't have to deal with the cost that it, that, that it cost them to, to pull it off. That was a difficult time mostly for the cocaine involved. It was. Everybody was high all the time and it was just, it was just, just this hell.
- [74:39]
A
Richie Peckner.
- [74:40]
B
That part was the beginning of a very big shift in the whole culture. So up to that point it had been pretty much psychedelics. And then when coke came in, it really changed people's behavior. And for me it was, it was kind of a end of an era. I didn't have the stomach for it. They were so hard to deal with, every one of them. The coolest, nicest guy was Ramrod. The rest of them, like Barlow called them the cocaine cowboys. You know what I mean? They were big, strong and opinionated and overpaid to the point that they thought they had more power. And they did have more power than any crew member in the history of crews on any performer in the history.
- [75:27]
A
Of music, I believe from Grateful Dead Records, Andy Leonard.
- [75:32]
B
The whole concept of having the number of heads that were on payroll at that point, that was on Jerry. That's not fair. I know he built it. I know it was all done according to his plan and design, or lack thereof. But it certainly all happened under his auspices. And I think he felt a deep responsibility to keep the ball bouncing so that everybody and their kids and their old ladies and everybody was going to be okay. That had grown out into the guys that were making the guitars and the guys that were making the speaker cabinets and the guys that were driving the rigs and the guys with the scaffolding company. And, I mean, the crew had grown exponentially that were watching Garcia to make sure that the paycheck was coming. And I think the pressure really nailed them.
- [76:20]
A
Richie Peckner.
- [76:21]
B
You go to meetings and you find out that the Payroll is now 40 people, 50 people. We're hiring this caterer and that company. And I think he personally felt responsible to work so people could keep their jobs. And I think that was really unfair in a way. Kind of cruel that it couldn't figure out a way to sustain itself without having everything fall to him. If you've got somebody that's got a speaker company or a guitar company and they do stuff for the Grateful Dead, that's great. If the Grateful Dead takes two years off or doesn't order a couple guitars that year, they're still fine. That would be a great organization. But this, like I was saying, this thing was a science experiment. And nobody knew exactly what was going to work. So it was like, hey, I got an idea. Okay, let's do it. But there was no plan of, well, is that sustainable? Like, what will we do next year? That that question wasn't asked. It was, can we do this once.
- [77:20]
A
As a science experiment? The speaker system had worked sonically, if not quite logistically.
- [77:26]
B
After a while, it just seemed like it had gotten too drug centric for me. People justified it, but the fact is, the fact is it could have been done without that with better planning. It required more manpower, more vehicles, more planning to be able to move that giant thing around. The one thing about being on the road is you learn things pretty fast on what works and what doesn't. When you're home and working on stuff, you've got that luxury. But once you're on the road and you're doing gigs, the gigs got to go on. So no matter what you didn't prepare for or what you didn't know, you had to figure it out and get it to work. So that kind of immediacy was probably one of the things that made that whole tour of the Wall of Sound come to an end, was that it was unmanageable. Basically. It was unmanageable in the way that it had developed. Even though everybody agreed it was the best solution anybody had ever heard, it was kind of like we didn't quite get enough. Enough manpower or planning to make it seamless.
- [78:38]
A
Well, what could have made the Wall of Sound more tenable?
- [78:41]
B
With the luxury of hindsight, it's easy to see, well, if we had maybe four more people, then it would have gone up quicker and it would have been better all around, no matter what that expense was. But it was kind of like it was. It was learned as you go. You know, we were basically prototyping something we had not experienced before. It just didn't become apparent enough right away to do anything about it. I mean, it's kind of like it had a life of its own. And there was never really one person who was like the CEO of the development of that project. It was kind of rule by committee. And obviously, some people's voices were louder than others. For instance, Bear had a very large standing in what went on, but that was kind of his personality. But Wickersham, also, undoubtedly a genius, had opinions, but he just wasn't as vocal, he wasn't as demonstrative as some other people. So, yeah, it was just kind of an example of how in that hippie era, you wouldn't always want to be the person telling everybody what to do with authority if you actually didn't have it. You may have had a good idea, which everybody wanted to hear, but there was nobody, like, at the top going, oh, that's a bad idea. Maybe you try it until it fails, and then you move on.
- [80:08]
A
Ron Rackow wasn't at the band meeting, but heard soon.
- [80:11]
B
Jerry just came to my office and said, we decided to take a hiatus. First of all, it was not a year off, off. I don't know where that came from. And when they talked about a time period, they talked about two years. They never talked about one year. They were actually talking about stopping being the Grateful Dead. And this was going to tell them whether or not it was a good idea or not. It was a trial stoppage, the scene in general. It just turned into what I hoped it wouldn't have. For me, it was just like, yeah, okay, I think I'm done. I basically just went back to Mendocino and kind of stepped out at that point. It was kind of like my way. It was perfect timing for me in the 60s, they just give you cash. There was no check. You work, you get money, you get per diem, they give you cash. You know, you needed some money, they just give you cash. It's pretty loose. But by the 70s, it was all starting to be paychecks and W2s and all that. And a lot of us had never had W2 jobs before. So when you get your paycheck, they show all these deductions and then you realize you're getting paid less than you were getting paid before the deductions. There was like this kind of resentment, but it was really ill informed. We just, you just didn't understand, you know, how it worked. But anyway, at that meeting, the treasurer said, so you know that part of your paycheck that you guys always complained about, unemployment insurance. He goes, just go down to the unemployment office and file for unemployment. Because we've been paying into an insurance policy in the event that you don't work. And so none of us had ever done that before. I mean, I thought it was like some form of welfare. I really didn't know. But when I went into the unemployment office and they pulled up my record, they said, oh. He goes, well, you must have a very beneficial company. And I go, why is that? He goes, well, it looks like they've been paying the highest rate into the insurance fund, so you're going to get whatever it was, X number of dollars every two weeks. And I said, really? It kind of facilitated my move back to Mendocino because I actually collected unemployment for two years because that was during the Nixon period and he was so worried about his popularity, he extended unemployment benefits twice during that period.
- [82:33]
A
We'll be talking a lot about the nuances of the Dead's touring hiatus, but I can imagine that a break seemed pretty attractive. It had been 10 years of constant gigging from May 1965 through August 1974, and it was time to take a break from the road.
- [82:49]
B
So I think I'll drift old where it's at where the weed grows green and fine and wrap myself around a bush of that bright Whoa, whoa.
- [83:05]
A
But before anybody could wrap themselves around any more Mexican grass than usual, they had more business to attend to. A European tour scheduled for September and Winterland shows in October, like Unbroken Chain. Pride of Cucamonga didn't appear at any of these shows. Unlike Unbroken Chain, which was a pain in the toughest to learn. I'm not sure why they didn't just go ahead and play Pride of Cucamonga. When the band returned to the road in 1976, L' Esch was no longer singing. Brian Kehue caught them a half dozen years later.
- [83:36]
B
I saw the Dead at the US.
- [83:38]
A
Festival, and I was kind of hoping that song might pop up only because they were, like, 10 minutes away from Cucamonga. But of course, it's not a live song you're likely to hear on the Dead's next album, Blues for Allah. In 1975, Phil Lesh's songwriting took the form of the instrumental King Solomon's Marbles on Terrapin Station. Loesch would write Passenger with lyricist Peter Monk. But even if Lesh didn't contribute any original songs to Shakedown street or Go to Heaven, he still considered himself to be in collaboration with Bobby Peterson. Nicholas Merriweather.
- [84:28]
B
One of the most pithy, fascinating things, tantalizing tidbits in my conversation with Phil was that Phil apparently was working up a third song from around then, from around, you know, the Mars Hotel sessions. Either he couldn't remember the title or he just didn't want to tell me. And he said he asked Peterson to write. He asked Bobby to write him one more song. And Peterson produced this, like, page, you know, multi page opus. And Phil said that he wrestled and worked with that off and on for 50 years.
- [85:07]
A
Bobby Peterson remained a part of the Grateful Dead social circle, with numerous stories of people meeting him at Dead shows in the later 70s or 80s. In the spring of 1986, 12 years after Unbroken Chain and Pride of Cucamonga, 19 years after New Potato Caboose, the Dead debuted a new song with lyrics by Bobby Peterson. The duet for Phil Lesh and Brett Mit.
- [85:31]
B
Shuckers and Godzilla's grandmother, Sweet little Frozen.
- [85:45]
A
The Dead only played revolutionary hamstrung blues once. March 27, 1986, in Portland, Maine. There's a studio outtake floating around, too. In the summer of 86, the great toilet nearly ended when Jerry Garcia almost died. In early 1987, returning from the Dead's New Year shows in Oakland, Bobby Peterson suffered a stroke and died soon thereafter. Revolutionary hamstrung blues was gone by the time the Dead finished in the Dark and became top 10 megastars. More than the cryptical Unbroken Chain, the cathartic Box of Rain, or the psychedelic New Potato Caboose, Pride of Cucamonga is a postcard from someplace else, from somebody on the way to someplace even further.
- [86:28]
B
Guess it's me I'm the pride of Cucamonga I can see golden forests in the sun thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. Friends, fans, we'd like to thank our guests in this episode Ron Rakow, Ned.
- [87:04]
A
Legion, Alan Trist, Richard Loren, Richie Peckner, Andy Leonard, Steve Brown, John McPhee, Ira Kaplan, Gary Lambert, Steve Silberman, Ihor Slabicki, Todd Ellenberg, John Potenza, David Lemieux, Brian.
- [87:22]
B
Kehue and Nicholas Merriweather. 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.
- [87:36]
A
Dead cast Mark Pincus, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Promotions and Jesse Jarno.
- [87:42]
B
Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Doron Tyson. All rights reserved.