From the Mars Hotel 50: Scarlet Begonias

Summary

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GOOD OL' GRATEFUL DEADCAST

From the Mars Hotel 50: Scarlet Begonias

Release Date: May 23, 2024
Hosts: Rich Mahan & Jesse Jarnow
Featured Guests: David Lemieux, Chris Tomson (Vampire Weekend), Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay, Ron Rakow, Lee Jaffe, Alan Trist, Brian Kehew, Sean O’Donnell, Steve Hurlburt, and others

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Episode Overview

This episode commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Grateful Dead’s From the Mars Hotel, with a special deep-dive into "Scarlet Begonias," one of the band's most beloved songs. Prompted by the upcoming anniversary reissue, hosts Rich Mahan and Jesse Jarnow—joined by key guests—trace the origins, musical construction, and cultural imprint of "Scarlet Begonias," highlighting its connections to reggae, the evolution of its performance, the nearly mythical pairing with "Fire on the Mountain," and its resonance as both a classic tune and springboard for ecstatic Dead experiences.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Historical Context & Debut

• "Scarlet Begonias" debuted live on March 23, 1974, at the Cow Palace and was recorded a week later for From the Mars Hotel (04:00–05:00).

• The track quickly became a cornerstone of the Grateful Dead’s repertoire, despite never being released as a single (07:10).

• Guest Insight: Chris Tomson (Vampire Weekend) calls it “the Platonic ideal of a Grateful Dead song—an amazing Garcia/Hunter composition, idiosyncratic instrumentals, and cosmic lyrics.” [05:23]

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2. Scarlet’s Roots: Reggae & International Influence

• The Dead’s exposure to Bob Marley and Jamaican music in late 1973 heavily influenced the rhythmic feel of "Scarlet Begonias" (08:48–11:00, 36:09).
• There was a near-miss business partnership between the Grateful Dead and Bob Marley: Marley almost signed to Grateful Dead Records, but the deal fell through, partly due to philosophical differences ("I'm gratefully alive, not dead"). [23:37]

Notable Quote:

“I can’t be on a label called Grateful Dead because I’m gratefully alive.” —Bob Marley, relayed by Lee Jaffe [24:25]

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3. British Connection & Songwriting Process

• Lyricist Robert Hunter wrote "Scarlet Begonias" while living in London, inspired by an encounter in Grosvenor Square—its original chorus included "Bristol Girls" [32:08–32:52].

• The lyrics condense a long story, aiming for “visual motifs... up to anybody to interpret” [06:39].

• Robert Hunter:

“It was originally pages and pages long… finally got honed down to just the basic moves.” [32:14]

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4. Musical Construction & Studio Recording

• "Scarlet Begonias" is lauded for its rhythmic complexity, blending Jamaican grooves with American rock.

• The song features five unique keyboard parts (piano, harpsichord, B3, acoustic guitar and notably, the Roland synthesizer), underlining the Dead’s sonic innovation (46:01, 51:34, 53:09).

• Brian Kehew (studio tech):

“There’s a little, not very large, not very fancy, but good sounding Roland synthesizer… they’re actually just doing very tasteful parts.” [51:36, 54:00]

• Drummer Chris Tomson:
  Highlights Bill Kreutzmann’s improvisational, “off-kilter” drumming, which contributes to the "waviness of the whole song" [45:40–46:30].

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5. Interpretation & Impact of Hunter’s Lyrics

• Iconic lyric: “Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.”
• The lyric “the sky was yellow and the sun was blue” prompts a visual art project and upcoming book by Steve Hurlburt; artists and Deadheads share their interpretations, ranging from mystical to humorous (62:44–68:16).

Notable Quotes:

“Negative inversion, refraction… the whole entire song is all contradictions, things that can’t be.” —Steve Hurlburt [66:58]
“When they play it, I love the reaction of the crowd on that part… it just means everything’s going great.” —Fan interviews [68:16]

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6. Evolution in Live Performance: The Scarlet–Fire Connection

• In 1977, “Scarlet Begonias” was paired with “Fire on the Mountain,” creating “Scarlet–Fire”—an iconic live jam sequence [07:38]
• The pairing is seen as a musical “lightning-in-a-bottle.”
• Later performances expanded the song’s jam, providing a flexible space for improvisation and audience participation (89:34–93:21).

Notable Commentary:

“I’ve always looked at Scarlet–Fire as three songs—Scarlet, Fire, and the jam in between—because it’s unique every time in the moment.” —David Lemieux [95:38]

• Delves into the most famous version—Cornell 5/8/77—often cited as a defining Scarlet–Fire [94:45–95:52].
• Song structure, lyricism, and improvisation analyzed by musicologists and authors, including Sean O’Donnell and Michael Koehler (Get Shown the Light), who link the transcendent aspect of the song to religious experience:

  “You can set up favorable conditions for getting shown the light. It’s not totally a spontaneous, random thing all the time...” —Michael Koehler [99:31]

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7. Technical Innovations & Live Sound—The Wall of Sound

• Scarlet Begonias evolved alongside the Dead’s “Wall of Sound” PA system, and the podcast explores experiments with sound technology (81:10–86:23).
• The episode discusses challenges such as Bear’s phase-cancelling microphones and the infamous metal-clad piano cluster, reflecting the Dead’s DIY, boundary-pushing ethos.

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8. Transmission & Afterlife: Covers, Legacy, and the Next Generation

• "Scarlet Begonias" has been covered by Sublime (1992), Phish, and others, remaining a gateway Dead song for many (112:23–115:36).
• Chris Tomson narrates how the Sublime cover was his actual intro to the Dead, while DJ Rubes and Nick Paumgarten share personal stories of formative encounters (107:44–109:22).
• Exploration of the song’s presence in modern jam bands (Phish, Vampire Weekend, Taper’s Choice) and ongoing cultural reach.

Notable Quote:

“It was happening music, and that was the beginning of my love affair with the Grateful Dead.” —Nick Rubin, on first hearing Scarlet Begonias [109:22]

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Structured Episode Timeline

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:59 | Introduction: From the Mars Hotel deep dive | | 03:28 | Opener: The lyric & magic of "Scarlet Begonias" | | 05:12 | David Lemieux & Chris Tomson on what makes Scarlet special | | 08:48 | The Bob Marley connection; reggae influence | | 23:37 | Why Marley didn’t sign with the Dead | | 32:08 | Robert Hunter: Writing "Bristol Girls"/early drafts | | 36:42 | Garcia on musical inspiration: Paul Simon, Cat Stevens, reggae | | 45:40 | Drums, rhythm & workshopping the groove | | 51:34 | Deep dive: Synths, keyboards, studio experimentation | | 62:44 | "The sky was yellow..."—Art & meanings | | 89:34 | Live jamming, early Scarlet–Fire, performance expansion | | 94:45 | The legendary "Cornell 77" Scarlet–Fire | | 98:43 | Musicology: Transcendence, improvisation, "getting shown the light" | | 112:23 | Covers: Sublime, Phish, legacy in modern bands | | 119:41 | Vampire Weekend & Dead's influence on the next generation |

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the instant impact of the debut:

  “When they played it at Santa Barbara, it was like a total bomb had dropped. People in the stands were like, what the hell just happened?” —Jeff Gould [04:46]

• On bookending reality & fantasy:

  “I knew right away she was not like other girls. The end, the lesson he’s learned the hard way, the light he’s been shown, is to not make his own desire for a woman into something he knows about her.” —Andrew Shields [34:23]

• On the cosmic lyric:

  “Once in a while, you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.” —Garcia/Hunter [50:37]

• On the Dead’s role as a musical school:

  “The Dead will forever be the best case study of what a band could be or should be… if you like music history and the nuts and bolts, the Dead are just far and away.” —Chris Tomson [122:51]

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Final Thoughts

The episode encapsulates "Scarlet Begonias" as a song at the intersection of craft and cosmic chance—uniquely honed by Hunter and Garcia, yet mutable in the hands of the band and listeners over generations. The tune’s playful and mystical character radiates through its recording, its jams, and its place in Dead folklore, proving why it continues to inspire, surprise, and evoke communal joy fifty years on.

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Recommended Listening:

• From the Mars Hotel (remastered 50th anniversary edition)
• Scarlet–Fire jams: Cow Palace '74, Santa Barbara '74, Cornell '77, Miami '74, Hartford '74, Fox Theatre '81

Further Info:

• Art & interpretations: Sky Yellow, Sun Blue: The Art of Scarlet Begonias (Steve Hurlburt)
• Dead.net/deadcast for transcripts, links, and bonus resources

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Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Foreign.

[A]

The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast.

[B]

The Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead.

[A]

I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful.

[B]

Dead for the committed and the curious.

[A]

Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season nine of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thanks very much for tuning in.

[B]

In this episode of the Good Old.

[A]

Grateful Dead Cast, we continue our deep dive into the Grateful Dead's 1974 studio album from the Mars Hotel. And in this episode we take a close look at one of the band's.

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Most beloved tunes, Scarlet Begonias. 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 cool early demos of song from the.

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Album and a previously unreleased live show.

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You'Ll need to hear to believe.

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The Grateful Dead played the University of Nevada, Reno on May 12, 1974 and this was the first road show for the infamous Wall of Sound which debuted weeks earlier at home in San Francisco on March 23, 1974 at the Cow Palace.

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This audio was cleaned up and remastered by Grammy Award winning engineer David Glasser.

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With Plangent Processes, tape restoration and and speed correction and was produced for release by David Lemieux and sounds fantastic. Love the mix on this one. All of the aforementioned is available as a 3 CD set as well as digitally. There is 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. Very, very cool.

[A]

More info and orders are happening now [e-mail] 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 platforms so you can listen how and where you like to listen. Please help this podcast by subscribing sharing an episode with your friends on your social media hitting that like button and share and leaving a review. Thank you very much. We now 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.

[B]

Any of you heads out there at.

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Any of the Wallace Sound shows in.

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74 well, if you were, hop on.

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Your computer and leave us a recorded [e-mail] or tell us your experiences with.

[B]

The Wall of Sound. We want to hear from you, and.

[A]

We do use them in the Dead cast when we get something that fits just right. Record your Wall of Sound tour [e-mail] she had rings on her fingers and bells on her shoes. Those lyrics open one of the greatest songs the Grateful Dead ever recorded.

[B]

Scarlet Begonias is a treasured gem in.

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The Dead's catalog and certainly a centerpiece on the from the Mars Hotel, Al.

[B]

We all love it, but after listening.

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To this episode, we think you might glean a deeper appreciation for this wonderful piece of music. Here's Jesse Giorno. I mean, come on, that's what I call an irresistible opening. The Grateful Dead debuted Scarlet Begonias in March 1974, recorded it exactly one week later, and released it on from the Mars Hotel in June. It was an instant Dead classic, so much so that we're gonna break format and share this story from Jeff Gould, who saw two early performances of the song that spring before the album had even been released.

[B]

When they played it at Santa Barbara, it was like a total bomb had dropped. People in the stands were like, what the hell just happened?

[A]

Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.

[B]

What a song. What a song.

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There's a lot of perfect Grateful Dead songs, but Scarlet Begonias, it's got everything. It's one of those songs that everybody.

[B]

Who'S playing on it has found the.

[A]

Absolute perfect part for themselves in it. From Vampire Weekend, please welcome drummer Chris Thompson. It kind of is the Platonic ideal of a Grateful Dead song, An amazing Garcia Hunter composition, a lot of idiosyncratic instrumental ticks, Kreutzman high within that, some lyrical nuggets. What starts as something like a love song shifts gears when the narrator is knocked sideways into personal and cosmic revelation with a lyric that embodies crazy psychedelic wisdom, inevitably earned enormous cheers at Dead shows and became one of Hunter's most revered.

[B]

Once in a while you get your.

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Hunter's lyrics are top of his game.

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Scarlet Begonia's is got everything I want. It sings, it's got these visual motifs that are up to anybody to interpret and how they see that song.

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You can just dream up whatever you want based on those lyrics.

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The wind and the willows played G for too the sky was yellow and the sun was blue Strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hand Everybody's playing in the heart of Goldman Heart of.

[A]

Goldman Though it was only four and a half minutes with a whole 47 seconds of outro, it was never released as a single, but it became one of the Dead's greatest hits. Three years after it was written, Scarlet Begonias would connect with Fire on the Mountain, starting on the band's spring 1977 tour, becoming one of their most beloved pairings and resulting in maybe the single most famous performance of any Dead tune, one so famous that even non Deadheads can name it. But we'll loop back to Cornell 77. There's a lot packed into Scarlet Begonias to get into the story of Scarlet Begonias. We're gonna go back before it jammed into Fire on the Mountain. We're gonna go back before it was even Scarlet Begonias. Let's rewind to the week that Wake.

[B]

Of the Flood came out in October 1910.

[A]

That was Bob Marley and the Wailers live in San Francisco in October 1973, performing at the New Matrix, later known as the Stone. That tape is from the later part of their run, but on one of the first two nights, October 17th or 18th, before the dead launched their tour in OKLAHOMA on the 19th, nearly all of the Grateful Dead crowded into the club to catch the Wailers. Please welcome back Ron Rakow.

[B]

Garcia went, Keith and Donna went. Bobby went. I mean, the whole family went. And I talked to Keith about he was excited. We're going, you should go.

[A]

Rakow couldn't make it. He was very likely off promoting Wake of the Flood, coming back to experience the beginning of the gas crisis. As we heard at the end of last season, Jerry Garcia had already been covering Jimmy Cliff and his band with Merle Saunders, but the Dead as a whole were clearly feeling the affinity between their music and the new generation of reggae coming from Jamaica.

[B]

We loved Bob Marley. I mean, we just did, you know, you probably did too.

[A]

It was about two months after this that the story took a twist. I want to thank Henry at the Kingston to Cali podcast for nudging us towards this story. Check out their deep history of California reggae through the Osiris Podcast network. We've linked to [e-mail] deadcast I very.

[B]

Very seldom took a vacation in my Grateful Dead you know, I just worked. But in Christmas of 1973, Emily and I flew to Panama City and took a taxi across the peninsula to the other side of the canal and got on a sailboat with these kids and went around sailing the San Blas Islands. And it got really high. These were wealthy kids. One of them was the scion of the family of Indianapolis that owned that big nutrition company. And the other kids family owned Lands End, which sold clothing and catalogs.

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And already having a sailboat, naturally they had a radiophone on the boat.

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And so I called in to the Grateful Debt Office to see what was going on every third day or so. And I was having the time of my life being in shorts all day long, doing business on a sailboat in the middle of nowhere. Anyway, I call into the Grateful Dead office and there's a message from the lawyer, whose name was Al Cant, that Bob Marley's contract is up and he wants to talk. So I called on a radio phone from the San Blas Islands to the Bahamas, and I had a cursory opening conversation. I did talk to him, but I mostly talked to a white guy. That would have been me.

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We're so happy to welcome to the Deadcast. For the Whaler side perspective, the likely white guy in question, the artist and filmmaker Lee Jaffe.

[B]

I become friends with a musician called Jim Capaldi. He was in a group called Traffic. All of a sudden you're inside my head. You're the light up on Leave Me Alone. And we become really good friends. And he introduced me to Bob. I was visiting him. Traffic was doing a series of shows in New York at the American Academy. And after one of his shows, I went to visit Jim at his hotel. Bob Marley was there, and they had a cassette of the unreleased first Island Records Whalers album, Catch a Fire. And I was completely blown away by it.

[A]

Before we get too much further, we'll note that we've linked to Lee's many [e-mail] deadcast Bob was in New York.

[B]

To buy equipment for his band. And I just hung out with him and helped him. Like at that time, there was one block of music stores in New York on 48th Street. It was just solid music stores and everybody from somebody buying their first guitar. So you would bump into Carlos Santana or David Bowie. I mean, just everybody went there to buy gear. And I spent a few days with Bob going around haggling with the salespeople and helping him get equipment from there.

[A]

Lee Jaffe became part of the Wailers Circle, joining them in Jamaica, staying initially with Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, who is still struggling to create a presence for Bob Marley overseas.

[B]

At that time, Island Records, with all their success, had a very minor presence in the us. They were licensing all their records to Capitol Records for distribution. And all they had was like this one tiny little office within the Capitol Records offices in New York, and no promotion, no support or anything. And Chris asked me if I'd be interested, that they needed help to arrange for a North American tour. And I thought, well, there's nothing more important I could be doing in the world and trying to get this music out.

[A]

The Whalers spent 1973 touring the world and elsewhere, playing Max's Kansas City in New York on bills with Bruce Springsteen.

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I basically did everything on this tour, from arranging the passports and the visas, the plane tickets.

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In October, the tour hit the west coast, where the Dead saw the Whalers at the New Matrix. But when they did, they just stayed semi anonymous, members of the crowd, and didn't introduce themselves.

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I'm emotional right now hearing this, because I didn't know. I didn't know they were there.

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It wouldn't be the last misconnection between the Grateful Dead and Bob Marley.

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We had had the little Radio Airplane commercial. Radio Airplane that we had in the US was basically only from two channels. One BCN in Boston and KSAN and San Francisco, where I managed to arrange for us to do a live performance from the Record Plant. 4K, Sam I know you don't know.

[A]

What life is really worth it's not.

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All that glitter is gold after story.

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Had never been told so now you see the light, you stand up for your right Lord get up, stand up woohoo.

[B]

Stand up for your right Lord Lord.

[A]

The Wailers broadcast live from the Record Plant in sausalito on Halloween 1973, just a few months after the Dead had wrapped the Wake of the Flood sessions there. It's one of the classic Wailers tapes. By then, the original Wailers had splintered and Marley was pondering moving away from Chris Blackwell's Island Records.

[B]

There was a lot of. It was tremendous pressure on Bob on what to do next. He had two albums with a lot of critical acclaim and commercial failures. There was uncertainty what is next band, who would be in it and what a record concert would look like. And he asked me if I would go see if there'd be any interest from any record label. So we had some notoriety in the Bay Area, and I had heard that the Dead were starting their own record label. So I reached out to them. And it was incredible. They were all about it.

[A]

The way Lee made contact with the Grateful Dead was the logical way a tour manager might find the Dead through promoter Bill Graham.

[B]

I just thought it was all Bill Graham, but I kind of remember this name. Ron Rackow.

[A]

Well, Rackow was away leading a fabulous island hopping life. Bill Graham apparently began to make plans. It's hard to know how all of this would have played out for real, but my guess is that Bill Graham envisioned himself as Bob Marley's manager and would enlist help from the nearest major independent record company.

[B]

Bill Graham was like, well, we want to do this. Bob will be the only other act on Grateful Dead records. We'll help him produce the record. The dental play on the record. They basically authored everything. They had total reverence for Bob as an artist, for what he represented, for the message of his music.

[A]

Let's. Let's take a moment to process all this. The detail of being the only other artist on the label grounds this story in early 1974, possibly before Graham would have been aware of the impending launch of Round Records. A detail which will matter to our story again momentarily. In February 1974, Lee Jaffe made it to Winterland, where he saw the Grateful Dead and the Wall of Sound.

[B]

Yeah, I was there with Bill Graham sitting in the balcony in the first row, trying to remember if Bob was with me. We had gone to San Francisco on another trip. I had hooked him up with Taj Mahal to do some recordings. The tables are turning.

[A]

Catch a fire.

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You'Re going to get burned. Now.

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That was Taj Mahal doing Bob Marley's Slave Driver featuring Family Man Barrett playing what's credited as ska piano on the same track as Merle Saunders. But the basic tracks were recorded at CBS in San Francisco, and Barrett was maybe overdubbed in Boston. Lot of strands here, but for lots of reasons, I think Lee Jaffe was probably flying solo at Winterland. Mainly this.

[B]

I don't remember meeting the band.

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Had Bill Graham been wooing Bob Marley, I have no doubt he would have brought him backstage to meet the Dead. Still, nice to imagine Bob Marley in the balcony at Winterland hearing this.

[B]

I had never seen them before, and I was seeing them in their element in the best possible way I could see them. And it was fantastic. They're iconic. They were amazing. They were at the height of their artistic powers in San Francisco. I was seeing them in the best. I mean, seeing them with Bill Graham. I mean, it was fantastic.

[A]

Those are the February 1974 Winterland shows we discussed in the first episode of this season, a trial run for the Almost Ready Wall of Sound. So far, everything Lee Jaffe and Ron Rakkow remembered has been pretty much compatible. If you accept that Rakow was on a boat in the Caribbean for two months, he doesn't think it was nearly that long. So here we get to a few divergences and one kind of lovely cosmic convergence. First, let's return to Ron Rakkow. Somewhere in the Caribbean Sea.

[B]

I mostly spoke to Hal Cant and had. Hal can't go back and talk to those guys.

[A]

If the Dead's attorney, Hal Cant, was involved, it seems likely that they'd already gotten to the point of discussing actual contracts. There were probably at least two levels of deals on the table. Bob Marley signing with Bill Graham for management and then signing with Grateful Dead Records. This is pretty much the only way to reconcile Rakow and Lee Jaffe's versions of what unfolded.

[B]

It was real business. It was all about money. And the Grateful Dead thing was not about money. Money was part of it. Who would want to be in that spot with those guys being disdainful of the people in the record company as part of the hustle? I didn't want to be that guy. Would you like to be that guy? No way. And after two phone calls from the boat, I realized that this was not something I would enjoy doing. This was real business. If I wanted to be in real business, I would have stayed on Wall Street.

[A]

The Grateful Dead had set up their own record company, but the stories burst equally with what ifs and might have beens and WTFs. Round Records, Co owned by Rakow and Garcia, was on the verge of existence. Grateful that Records, co owned by the band and Rakow was the going concern.

[B]

It was a rare moment of wisdom. And that was the decision. It. It never went before the band. It never. I never discussed it with Jerry. I discussed it with Jerry when it was a fantasy. Let's get Bob Marley and have him be in our. In our world that way. And we thought we would make them connect like we connect. And that's not the way it works. That's not what's going on. That's. It would have been different. It would have. It would. Somebody would have had to be that villain. It was a fit economically, but not a fit socially. And it was the same on both sides. There was no rancor at all.

[A]

Interestingly, Lee Jaffe's memoir remembers Marley rejecting the deal in almost exactly the same language. It seemed like a good fit for us politically. The spiritual side seemed Too far away. The memoir goes on to say that the name Grateful Dead was simply incompatible with Rasta philosophy and theology. The timelines kind of blow away from one another here, too. Rakow says he was back in time for the February shows at Winterland, meaning the Dead's part of the deal was perhaps already off the table. And Graham was still pursuing Marley even without them. Here's how Lee remembers it.

[B]

And I remember flying back from San Francisco with Bob and we were talking about it, and I explained to him that he understood what it meant. It meant a lot of money right away. Like they were going to give him a big advance. He wouldn't have to think about, like, food for his family and basic things that had been such a struggle for him for so many years. You have to realize he had had, like, hits in Jamaica in the 60s and he moved to Delaware to his mother's house. And he was working, like, sweeping floors at a auto factory. Bob Marley. So I went for years like that for him. And here with all, he was finally getting some critical success with the island albums outside of the Jamaican Diaspora, but no money still. So I remember flying back from San Francisco. It was either we had seen the Dead or it was from the Taj Mahal thing and discussing it. And Bob said to me, well, I can't be on a label called Grateful Dead because I'm gratefully alive. And that was the end of it. And he re signed with Island Records and made the Naughty Dread album Light.

[A]

Me Up Yourself and Don't say no.

[B]

You'Re gonna light me up yourself. Cause I said so. You see what I mean about how far apart we would have been? Both of those stories are true. When I said I didn't want to do it, I think they said it at the same time to the same people, because there was never a tale. It never came up again. Bob's been struggling from the time he was born, and now he's like 27 years old and he's still struggling and figuring out who he's going to feed his kids. And he's offered, like, the whole popular culture world total financial security for the rest of his life. And he said he couldn't do it because he was gratefully alive. And that, like, said so much. It was a relief for me because I didn't see how it was going to work.

[A]

Whatever went into the decision. The phrase gratefully alive really does say so much. Bob Marley was a Rasta, but he'd been around the Jamaican music scene long enough to understand what was what on the business end of the business and decided that he was better off with Chris Blackwell. And we never got to hear the Barrett Brothers crazy rhythms through the wall of sound.

[B]

Bob was honored to have them offer that. Just as musicians, as artists, it was just like two very disparate cultures compatible in a lot of ways. That's why it was so enticing.

[A]

And that's the story of how the Grateful Dead and Bob Marley almost became business partners. But business or no business, Jamaican music would flood into the Grateful Dead sound even more very soon. Like, for example, the song We're Here to Talk about today. It's probably no surprise to say that Jamaican music fed into scarlet begonias, but we also have to make a stop in the British countryside. That was the British band Over the Hill, who had a tangential but unusual Grateful Dead connection in early 1974. As the year got going, the Dead began to lay the groundwork for the European tour they had planned for September. One prong of this was making sure that products from Grateful Dead and Round Records were available in Europe. The Dead had the perfect representative for just such a task. Like Ron Rakow, he began his year with some adventures in the southern climes. Please welcome back from Ice 9 Publishing, Alan Trist.

[B]

I went on an advancing promotional trip for 74 in advance of the tour, and I remember taking with me a special Halliburton case that I got, which was stuffed with Wake of a Flood albums, which I then gave out to various record companies and press offices in Europe in preparation for the tour. Basically saying, hey, the Grateful Dead coming over here. And you know what? They started their own record company, and here's their first record, right? That was pretty exciting, being able to show the Wake of the Flood album to the people in the business over there.

[A]

Alan took the long route, stopping in Mexico. In early March, he dispatched a letter to Ron Rackow at Dead headquarters. After asking if Ron and Emily had a good time in South America, he wrote, I had a great time in the Yucatan. Mushrooms for breakfast at Palenque, followed by space, time warp, contemplation of ruined stone energy generation. I propose the new science of psychedelic archaeology. Plenty would take up that call in the next decades. When I showed Alan this note, he confirmed that, yes, the magic mushrooms in the meadow below the archaeological site were the size of dinner plates. Back in England, Alan made camp at Vicarage Farm in Bedfordshire, where a new band called over the Hill was getting their act together. Alan offered his assistance. That was Rat Bite Fever by the band over the Hill. Whose sole self titled compact disc was released in 1990. Singing somewhere in that chorus probably is Robert Hunter. Sometime in late 1973 or early 1974, the Grateful Dead lyricist had moved to England with his partner Christy Bourne. The Lost Story of Robert Hunter and Over the Hill is fascinating. We're going to have to bookmark it for a different episode, except for one key detail.

[B]

Hunter went to London during that period in 74. He lived in London for quite a while.

[A]

Here's how Hunter remembered the period to Monte deam in late 1977.

[B]

I lived over on Queen's Gate for a while, about a block from the Victoria and Albert Museum. And that was a real nice time because I just get up every morning and go right off to the DNA for about an hour or two. And it's the best collection of farb in the whole world in that museum. It's not a museum of painting. It's a museum of all the things that the British have collected from their imperialistic ventures over the last couple hundred years. You have Stradivarius under glass and that anything you want to go and dig on is there. I was in London at that time too, and Hunter was there. And I remember visiting him at the house that he rented. When I visited him in London, he was with Christie in this splendid house. I wrote pretty continually while I was there. I wrote Scarlet Begonias there. Funny thing, over in Bristol, the original name of that was Bristol Girls.

[A]

He described the writing process on WLIR in 1978 and how the song started much longer.

[B]

It was originally pages and pages long. There was a very, very involved story there. It was like a quite a plot. And I finally got honed down to just the basic moves. I'd just been learning how to perform it with a solo guitar. And it's a lot of fun. It's really a pleasure. It's originally called Bristol Girls and there's one line in it that I'm using. I look all around this whole wide world Never find nothing stranger than a Bristol girl all around this whole wide world Found nothing stranger than a Bristol girl.

[A]

That was Hunter performing the song with its Bristol Girls tag in 1984. Thanks to Alex Allen and his site White Gum for pointing out that variation.

[B]

I've heard a rumor back that I stayed overnight at somebody's house over there, which I didn't do, which somehow relates to that song. It's mysterious, kind of.

[A]

I don't. I can't explain it. It's a mysterious trip because somehow it.

[B]

Seems almost as Though I did in another. In another body or something like that. Because I can't deny the. The. The rumor that I heard back.

[A]

It seems strangely true and yet.

[B]

And yet I didn't.

[A]

But the story is a bit more literal. We'll let a solo Robert Hunter version guide us from his 1991 live album Box of Rain.

[B]

As I was walking round Grosvenor Square Not a chill to the winner But a nip to the air.

[A]

From the.

[B]

Other direction she was calling My eye could be an illusion But I might as well try Might as well try.

[A]

Not long after Robert Hunter moved to England in the winter 1973 1974, along Grosvenor Square in Mayfair, London, he met the woman who would draw the COVID art for the sole album by the band over the Hill. Then the girlfriend of one of the band's guitarists, Andrew Shields, left us his thoughts on the song.

[B]

His concession that it could be an illusion allows for the possibility that his ideas about her might be all in his mind. His uncertainty at that first moment colors the feelings of certainty that he goes on to express. I knew without asking she was into the blues and I knew right away she was not like other girls in the end, the lesson he's learned the hard way, the light that he's been shown, is to not make his own desire for a woman into something he knows about her scarlet begonias tucked into the curls I knew right away she was not like other girls Other girls.

[A]

They both had partners at the time, and it would take almost another decade, but listener Robert Hunter married her.

[B]

I picked up my matches and was closing the door had one of those flashes I've been here before, hunter told.

[A]

Blair Jackson in 2004. In the song, the character flees, but it didn't end in real life the way the song ended. I'm still with her, I have to say. That's her special song. It was written in England for that girl, really. It's hard to say exactly when Robert Hunter wrote the lyrics to Scarlet Begonias, but it was almost certainly in February or early March 1974, because by March 23 the Grateful Dead were playing it on stage at the Cow palace. Now Dix picks 24. Jerry Garcia told Blair Jackson a little bit about the song's musical inspiration in 1991. It has a little Caribbean thing to it, though. Nothing specific, he said. It's its own thing. I wasn't thinking in terms of style when I wrote that setting, except I wanted it to be rhythmic. I think I got a little of it from that Paul Simon, me and Julio, down by the schoolyard thing.

[B]

It's against the law.

[A]

It was a against the law. Garcia continued, a little from Cat Stevens. Some of that rhythmic stuff he did on Tea for the Tillerman was kind of nice. It's an acoustic feel in a way, but we put it into an electric space, which is part of what made it interesting.

[B]

It could be an illusion But I might as well try Might as well try.

[A]

In our Unbroken Chain episode, we discussed a note that Jerry Garcia sent to the artist Robert Williams, with a demo tape and one line descriptions of each song on the album in Progress. Written on March 21, two days before the live debut of Scarlet Begonias, which makes me wonder if there's a demo, a rehearsal version of Scarlet Begonia still to be discovered somewhere. Garcia described it as up like R and R with Jamaican flavor. Scarlet Begonia's isn't exactly a reggae song, but I don't think it's coincidental that Jerry Garcia wrote it a few months after seeing the Wailers. We've spent a bit of time on the Dead cast talking about the Dead's legacy as a progressive rock act and how that differs from the classical and jazz complexities of so called prog rock. Scarlet Begonia's might be even more progressive than Unbroken Chain, an integration of Jamaican ideas into the California rock vocabulary. It was in the air and it became a wonderful new voice for the Dead from Vampire Weekend. Chris Thompson. Yeah, I was thinking like, again, the Dead being like this ideal conception of a band, like, at the rehearsal studio, like, can you imagine just someone coming in and dropping Scarlet? I wrote this tune over the week, like, I got a new one we should try. And then it's fucking Scarlet Begonias. We can sort of imagine that Donna Jean. God, show McKay all of these new songs that Garcia was just.

[B]

And Hunter were writing and Bobby and Barlow were just coming out of the woodwork. Like every time we would come to rehearsal, Jerry. Well, I had this new song and it would be Scarlet Begonias. And hearing Scarlet Begonias for the first time as I was walking round Grosvenor Square. Not a chill to the winner, but a nip to the air. And then them having that kind of longevity, the way that the songs are.

[A]

Written, the way that Hunter had this.

[B]

Special way of putting words together that fit everybody and you could make it your own to where they're pretty much eternal in that the music never stops.

[A]

And it keeps going on and on.

[B]

Through years and decades and decades and decades. And it's Music that I believe that.

[A]

Is not going to have its end.

[B]

It is other, and I think it's going to outlast a lot of things.

[A]

That was a little bit more from the debut performance on March 23, 1974 at the Cow palace from Vampire Weekend. Chris Thompson, the one I was just listening to, which was the Cow palace one. To me, as someone who thinks a lot about construction of songs and how songs evolve, there is a magic of a demo I just find so amazing to hear, like where these songs start. And so the debut of Scarlet Begonia is one of those moments for me. You know, they kind of had the parts, they've obviously rehearsed it, but it's not. When they're playing it a couple years later, they played it 20 to 40 to 60 times. And there is inevitably, even with the best of songs, like, you have things you figure out, you have tricks that you rely on or whatever it is. Those first couple performances, there's something that's always going to be magical about them because there's lightness. I would imagine there was nerves, even if it's not like, oh, we're going to mess this up. But more like era is this first time you're doing something is very natural.

[B]

Strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hand Everybody playing in the heart of Goldman Heart of gold.

[A]

And here's how the song sounded a week later at CBS Studios. That was the core 74 dead recording. The basic take of Scarlet Begonias. It was a song the Dead were obviously way excited about. The track sheet notes, reel one, take two, March 30, exactly a week after the song's debut at the Cow palace and the first complete songs they tracked at the from the Mars Hotel sessions. Brian Kehue transferred the session tapes for the recent release of Angel Share Recordings. I find on these recordings, most of.

[B]

What we hear is very, very close to the record. These sessions don't involve a lot of experimentation, and they're really not far from the mark when they start recording, at.

[A]

Least for what we've heard. They have spent their time in pre production.

[B]

Instead of messing around in the studio.

[A]

And speeding up and slowing down, they have really kind of dialed in each.

[B]

One for tempo and even arrangement as.

[A]

Far as the basis of each track.

[B]

And Scarlet Begonias is a good example of that. It's them working through the song a few times. It sounds about the same each time.

[A]

I mean, it's very interesting to hear.

[B]

Things without vocals because you can really pick out things like the bass parts and things that were not as obvious before. So I really enjoy hearing instrumentals.

[A]

As usual, it required a little discussion to get the tempo right. Lesh and Kreutzman are skeptical that they might be playing too fast for Garcia to fit in all the words.

[B]

Go ahead and sing it first to himself, playing the chords and everything. I'm glad that's too fast.

[A]

But Garcia loops the groove till they get it. There were a few reasons why it made sense to speak with drummer Chris Thompson on this episode. One is the way that Scarlet Begonia starts the snare intro. He's already kind of like front and center. The little fill that starts it. And then, yeah, he's just kind of like reacting that intro before the vocals come in. He's really trying to like his right.

[B]

Hand on the hi hat.

[A]

Feels like it's keeping time, keeping those eighth notes. And then the kick snare syncopation is just kind of all over the place. Me in a great way. There is no quote unquote part. It's kind of a linear thing that he's possibly improvising. I love that it's really off kilter. Hits the downbeats when it needs to be. But really he's kind of doing his own really interesting thing. That to me, like, adds to the beauty and just waviness of the whole song. At the end of the master take, Garcia is excited to listen back. Ironically, it might be one of the only Dead songs that ended cleanly live. But not on the studio version. They added a fade out later. There's an excitement to it that feels like they captured and got from start to finish ish, like really quickly. And I think maybe that drumbeat kind of speaks to that. If they'd spent two months in the studio, like, refining Scarlet Begonias, all those idiosyncrasies and those weird syncopations probably don't make it through. Once they had that groove and that take, there was some accentuation and ornamentation. The Dead were a decidedly one drummer band on from the Mars Hotel, but Scarlet Begonias was a machine that required percolation and more cowbell. A conga part comes in there too, but there are five count em, five different keyboard parts on Scarlet Begonias, and they all act as rhythmic layers. On the basic track, there's Keith Godchaux's piano, which they recorded through her mic, but also through the Carl Countryman piano pickup. With less leakage from the rest of the band. Here's the pickup track. There's some harpsichord accenting. Those climbs enter in the outro. There's some B3 too, making for a nice scene change that feels part like Johnny Nash's I Can See clearly now and part like Church.

[B]

Sam.

[A]

We'll listen to a composite mix later, but can't resist the urge to combine the organ vocals and acoustic guitar that appear for the chorus.

[B]

It turns out the way it does in the song. Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right well.

[A]

There ain't nothing wrong with the way she moves during the Outro, the organ isn't doubling the main riff so much as providing padding. Brian Kehue the surprise for me was the synthesizers.

[B]

And it's actually.

[A]

It's not that you can't hear them on the record, but I have to.

[B]

Give them a big compliment is that.

[A]

They had a little, not very large.

[B]

Not very fancy, but good sounding Roland synthesizer and they were using it on.

[A]

Several of these tracks. But you don't really hear synthesizer sticking.

[B]

Out in the music here.

[A]

This is Keith Godshaw's Roland synthesizer under the first verse of Scarlet Begonias. It's mostly Keith, but Jerry actually does quite a few little synth tracks in there. And they're mostly playing similar parts, but they're very musical.

[B]

They sound like a pluck sound or an organ or a flute or something. So we have a date of 429.

[A]

Three days after the sink reel was actually made that Jerry and Keith are.

[B]

Adding synth parts to Scarlet Begonias on that sync rail. For example, on this specific song, pieces.

[A]

That did get used that were added.

[B]

On the extra tracks. And then later on when they went to mix, they put up both machines.

[A]

And they used those parts. So the sounds they're choosing are not.

[B]

To show off that we have a.

[A]

Synthesizer or we're cool or we're state.

[B]

Of the art with other new bands.

[A]

They're actually just doing very tasteful parts.

[B]

As if it was an organ or if it was a flute.

[A]

And so I think that's kind of interesting. Throughout this record there are moments when.

[B]

The synthesizer pops up and my ears.

[A]

Went, wow, that's cool.

[B]

Didn't quite realize that was a synths before.

[A]

It's one of the most natural Dead grooves Jerry Garcia ever came up with. Perhaps one of the reasons it was destined to become one of their most legendary songs. But at 4 minutes and 19 seconds long, along with Darkstar, Scarlet Begonia's might be the best example of a Grateful Dead song with several hundred micrograms of untapped energy coiled into its studio take from the City College of New York musicologist Sean o'. Donnell.

[B]

There's something very composite about the way they perform it. It's really the fingers on the hand bit, like it sounds like it's one musical object, but everyone's just contributing a tiny snippet. So it kind of blossoms in a way. It's the fast row, Jimmy. It comes out of that same new language, but it's not brand new anymore for them. So it's got a sort of Jamaican island vibe of sorts. It's another one that sounds like it could have existed on Wake of the Flood, because Bobby's doing a lot of the same kind of pizzicato arpeggiations and things and muted guitar to outline what's happening. Wake of the Flood in general really is the big jump in Weir's playing in terms of really crafted second violin parts, for lack of a better analogy, where single note lines and he'll do pizzcato with this palm muting and bit of clicking. And it's very, very supportive and integrated. This one is the one that takes the next step from the earlier, and it's still already in the Grateful Dead composite language. It seems to be written specifically for that style of play, as opposed to a. This is a chord chart, and we could do other arrangements.

[A]

The song's musical cleverness is in the rhythm and dynamics. There's nothing fancy about the transition climb between the bridge and the final set of verses, except that it rolls over slightly longer than you expect it. But played together with a dramatic destination courtesy of Robert Hunter, it adds up to something wonderful. To me, the guitar break that builds up to this portion of the lyrics is a pretty joyous approximation of a cosmic flash, creating a moment that is both ephemeral and infinite, where the sky lights up and everything is changed forever. As paradoxical as Hunter's lyrics, before the narrator can fully visualize and articulate this cosmic flash, we get a swell 30 seconds of guitar solo. They recorded this right over the original guitar part. You can tell because at first you can hear the rest of the band in the room with Garcia, and then they disappear when the punched in part starts. Sam and then the Wind in the Willows played. T for 2 the Wind in the Willows was a 1908 children's book by the British author Kenneth Graham. T for 2, meanwhile, was a hit 1924 song by Vincent Yeomans and Irving Caesar from the musical no, no Nanette. Here's Marion Harris hit version recorded 100 years ago this spring in June 1924, exactly 50 years before Scarlet Begonia's take.

[B]

Your fee upon your knee Just me for you and you for me Just me for you and you for me alone.

[A]

Tea For Two is about finding a world away from the world. It's a place maybe where the scarlet.

[B]

Begonias grow Far from the cry of the city where flowers pretty caress of grief holy to hide in to live side by side in don't let it abide in my dream.

[A]

The mystical swarming forces of nature getting their act together to perform a 50 year old pop hit is perhaps the least remarked upon paradox of Scarlet Begonia's, but it sets the tone for one of its central lyrics, the sky was.

[B]

Yellow and the sun was blue.

[A]

This is the core of Scarlet Begonias and in a sense nearly any set in which the Dead performed it, and perhaps even from the Mars Hotel as a whole. The moment of aha Revelation where the band almost forces the listener into ecstasy. It's the second time it happens in Scarlet Begonias. Counting the once in a while you get shown the light lyric. As a songwriting move, it doesn't feel accidental, but core to the world shaking shift at the center of the song. Here's the harmony part. The wind and The Willows play T4 too.

[B]

The sky was yellow and the sun.

[A]

Was blue that lyric, the sky was yellow and the sun was blue is the inspiration to a longtime pal of the Dead cast the artist and misfit Steve Hurlbert. For years, Steve has used the Grateful Dead as a launch point and medium for surprising angles on the music and culture. We've linked to his [e-mail] deadcast including the documentary Dreadheads and easily my favorite cover of Victim or the Crime. Patience runs out on the junkie.

[B]

The dark side hires another soul. Did he steal his face or earn it?

[A]

He was force fed. He unlearned it. Whatever happened to his precious self control? Since 1996, Steve has been commissioning fine artists to create pieces using the prompt the sky was Yellow and the sun was blue and this fall we'll publish an art book, Sky Yellow, Sun Blue the Art of Scarlet Begonias and the Ecstatic Vision of the Grateful Dead. Collecting the paintings with accompanying essays. We've posted a [e-mail] deadcast I had.

[B]

Just moved into a new house. I had a bunch of blank walls in the house and for some reason I thought, well, you know, I need some art. And the sky was Yellow and the sun was Blue is kind of a cool lyric and there's colors in it, and it's trippy out of context.

[A]

The lyric is a simple inverted image that anybody with nearly any understanding of English might grasp.

[B]

I came down to Jazz Fest that spring, and I was wandering around the Arts and Crafts section there, and I saw a guy. He had his tent, and he had pottery and paintings, and I liked the paintings. And he had his easel set up outside of his tent, and he was painting this great picture, and it had birds and fishes and snakes and kind of wild colors in it, and I liked it a lot. So on impulse, I just went up to him and said, would you do a commission for me? And he kind of looked at me sideways because I'm sure he's heard that a bunch of times, you know, a commission. He looked at me sideways and said, well, what do you have in mind? So I said, well, there's a song by the Grateful Dead. It's called Scarlet Begonias. There's a lyric in the song. The sky was yellow and the sun was blue. I would like for you to do your style and paint. The sky was yellow and the sun was blue. Sign it, date it. And for some reason I said, give me an artist statement. He thought about it for a second and he said, okay. And this was around noontime. He said, come back at the end of the day. So I came back four hours later, and he had this incredible painting called the Sky Was Yellow and the Sun Was Blue.

[A]

From there, Steve's collection was born. It took a while to manifest into something more than art for his own walls. It's important to note that the people who made the paintings weren't Deadheads and in many cases didn't even hear the rest of the song. His forthcoming book will have 40 interpretations, all titled the Sky Was Yellow and the Sun Was Blue. One that I find quite striking and which I think channels something powerful about Scarlet Begonias is a cityscape with airplanes falling out of the air.

[B]

That's a favorite one of mine. It was done by an LA artist named Tony decarlon. He passed away about four years ago, I think. Could have been more so. I wasn't able to talk to him to tell him about this whole book project. He was from la, Hispanic, gay. He put the words in the painting, and he put the words in both English and in Spanish. And this is in his artist statement. He chose the word fue F U E for Washington. And he mentioned in his statement that the form of that verb and the way he used it meant something was a certain way for a split second. Then it changed back to what it originally was.

[A]

The usage in this painting is religious, capturing the moment of crucifixion. But that interpretation, something was a certain way for a split second is also the definition of one of the great hippie verb forms of the 60s. To flash.

[B]

I had one of those flashes. I'd been there before.

[A]

Been there before, except after the singer's cosmic flash, where he's shown the light, the whole world and everybody in it seems to be changed. Strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hand. Everybody's playing in the heart of Goldman.

[B]

Heart of Goldman.

[A]

Since pretty much the moment I first heard the lyric in high school, I visualized the strangers stopping strangers as an infinite line of R. Crumb characters like Flaky Funtime. There he is again, lined up to infinity in opposite directions against a wild colored sky. Like players on a youth sports team lined up after a game.

[B]

I did a bunch of interviews with Deadheads, like in the parking lots at dead and company this last summer. And I talked to like 300 people and got, as you can imagine, all kinds of answers. Silly, stupid, profound, short, long, you know, everything.

[A]

The range of answers is a pretty good representation of the different ways people experience the Dead's music. Steve shared a few with us and you can check out the others in his Sky, Yellow sun, blue book.

[B]

Negative inversion, refraction. The whole entire song is all contradictions, things that can't be. It starts off with. As I was walking around Governor Square. You can't square a circle. Sky was yellow, the sun was blue is not a possible thing to me.

[A]

It brings back, like, almost a mystical, dreamlike memory.

[B]

Not. Not necessarily one, like in my own mind, but that.

[A]

That whole, like, flipping, the dynamic of.

[B]

You know, familiar things in your life being different colors just gives me, like an off kilter, but in a good.

[A]

Way sort of feeling.

[B]

I guess that's what comes to mind. I can honestly say when I seen that color. I was giving birth to my son. Oh, in the sky. Out of my delivery room in the middle of the night. I used to have a joke with my best friend since I was 12. And they used to say the sky was yellow and your mother was blue. In New York City, best friends would make fun of your mother. And I felt it was a tribute to him. Like, hey, I'm thinking about you during this song. It shows our love when we make fun of each other. The concept of reality really doesn't exist. It's all relative. Honestly, I don't know if I have A set meaning for it. But when they play it, I love the reaction of the crowd on that part.

[A]

Part.

[B]

It's like one of the. The rowdy parts of the song. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. It just means everything's going great.

[A]

Unlike Loose Lucy, which, as we talked about last episode, turned from a silly song about friends with benefits into a metacantric thank you to the band. I'd argue that the meaning of Scarlet Begonias communicated itself perfectly at the end of the song. There's not a big jam nor even a guitar solo. There is, however, a Donna Jean solo.

[B]

Sam.

[A]

It's her only improvised spotlight on a Dead studio album. The band started playing Scarlet Begonias in March 1974, finished recording it in April, mixed it in May, released it in June, and spent the summer supporting their new album. One of the family members assigned to promote from the Mars Hotel was the great tie dye artist Courtney Pollack.

[B]

There was Grateful Jet Records and Round Records, but they were both, you know, out of the same company. And I was the lead promotion man for the southeast of the country. The reason for that, they got busted down in New Orleans. They didn't come back for years, and all those fans felt abandoned and they were pissed off. And the idea was to not send some Northerner down there to try and promote Grateful Dead and get him back in the fold. It was to send this British guy down there because of my English accent. Wasn't like I was a Yankee, you know.

[A]

The week the album came out in June, the wall of sound crossed the Mason Dixon Line, where Ned Lagin and Phil Lesh debuted a set of Seastones music at the Miami High Alai. Now Dave's picks 34, a show we'll touch on soon.

[B]

I started at the High Life Stadium in Miami, and my area went across as far as Texas and up as far as Philadelphia. I had that whole section of the country. Now, I set up a city a couple of days before the band would play that city. So I would precede the band by, you know, two, three days and set up city by city. So I'd go in advance to the next city, find a phone booth, a real old phone booth where you go in and they got phone directory. And I would look up the radio station and all the FM stations. I would plot them on my map around the city and figure out a route. So if I could get appointments one after another, I could go to a number of radio stations in an evening. And during the day I can do the distribution centers. So I plot this from a phone book on the map. Make the calls, kick them off with times and stuff like that. And then go into the city and get a hotel that was central. And then I'd start my tour and do these live talk shows, you know, for a couple of evenings. And the distribution centers. Summertime, with all the free stuff and the posters and imagery. I would create three dimensional effects for promotion. There was an individual Garcia album, and then there was the Miles Hotel album, and there was the Robert Hunter album. Here's the wheel of a hundred years Going down, down, down on the sand, on the sea on the hills of the liquid green they rise, they rise again Their dream's a tattered sail in the wind that was my only tour as a promotion. It worked. We got the venues full with the live radio stuff and everything, and it really set the towns up.

[A]

Andy Leonard of Grateful Dead Records had a pretty similar experience in a different region of the country.

[B]

The thing that almost killed me in that time frame was that I was doing some advanced stuff to go get the town that the band was about to show up in set up so that there would be a buzz at the record store. We don't want to go pump the record stores up the day the Grateful Dead leaves town. You kind of need the stuff in the front row at the record store. So we were doing some of that stuff. And then what I would try and do is I would try and stay and see what was going on with the band, because there was publicity stuff we were doing at the shows. And then I had to make sure everybody got handled that were our new distributors, because nobody in the Grateful Dead organization knew who any of these guys were. Some guy with the black trench coat buttoned up to his neck shows up at the New York gig and says, I'm your distributor, so, you know, it's. Pellers isn't going to let him on stage. So I had to make sure that everybody got seen to that way. And then, of course, I'd like to stay and have a beer with the band. And then, of course, I had to leave to get to the other town that they were headed for before they did and do the same thing all over the place. So I almost killed myself.

[A]

In late July, the band played at the Capitol center in landover outside Washington, D.C. a hep place to be seen as Watergate wound towards its inevitable conclusion.

[B]

I'd meet up with the band after the gig, and we'd go out to dinner, and we played Washington, and we went out to a late night Dinner and we find this really fancy place and of course we're all just dressed like rock and rollers. Got steps, you know, going these grand doors and oh, sorry, you guys can't come in here. You have to have jacket and tie. And I said, well, it's so late, who really cares? He said, I mean, Richard Nixon eats here. Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere. And I said, well, if he'll let him in, they'll let anybody in. Come on then, buy this guy. And what are they going to do, you know? So they put us in a private dining room away from any observers so we could do what we wanted back there, which we did. I was out for six weeks or so and then I came back home and I was pretty wore out by then. Being on the road, you know, not having my routine and doing my creative work, but, you know, that was a certain creativity in that. But being on the road is not easy, as most people know.

[A]

While the representatives of Grateful Dead records did their best to make from the Mars Hotel and its songs into classics, nobody could do that better than the Dead themselves, and in most cases succeeded. Scarlet Begonia started making meanings and blowing minds almost right out of the gate, as we heard at the beginning of the episode. Jeff Gould saw it a few weeks after they finished the album, but before its release at the Santa Barbara show on May 25th.

[B]

I don't literally almost remember the actual performance of Scarlet Begonias in Santa Barbara as much as this thing just kind of happened. And when it was over, everybody was just going, wow, what was that? What was that? It was just crazy. Looking back on it, that's such a shocking sort of thing for the Dead. It was very. So organized and so precise.

[A]

Those early versions are tightly packed, not even cracking five minutes.

[B]

If you think of Scarlett, it's kind of like, I guess a wind up toy, like really, really tight and kind of voice boing.

[A]

Adding to the precision was that they nailed the ending they missed in the studio.

[B]

I did get to see them later on at Hollywood Bowl. It already had a kind of unsprung a little bit, you know, had become much more relaxed. Strawbergonias over time, you can just see how it. They just couldn't keep up that perfection.

[A]

Later in the 70s, Jeff would co found Modulus, an instrument building operation that would intersect with the Dead in ways that we'll detail later. But in 1974, he was just a Bay Area head.

[B]

I was not one of those out on the road, people, but, you know, just kind of, you got some friends and a troop of people and just kind of. You ended up in Santa Barbara and a little farther to go to Los Angeles.

[A]

It was a period when Jeff and other Bay Area Deadheads were starting to venture a little further afield to see the band. The Hollywood bowl is where Pigpen had performed with the band for the last time two summers before. Interestingly, another Bay Area fan in the house in 1974 was Kevin McKernan, Pigpen's younger brother. Please welcome back the keeper of the Pigpen archives. Sully.

[B]

We went to the Hollywood bowl for the Wallace Sound show and we didn't have money, we didn't take it, Serenity, some of those guys, you know. But we had Kevin with us, man, and we pulled up in my 61 VW van and you know, a bunch of skills. And Kevin says, okay, come on, let's go, you know. So we parked, walked over and there's Rock helping, supervising, unloading the. All that box loads of trucks. We got there a day early and Kevin said, hey, Rock, get us in. What's the story? And of course, you know, Rock always had a soft spot. So he just picked out four tickets and said, behave. We go into the band area and there's all this food and we're starving, man. And so you start eating and Paris comes in, goes, what the do you think you're doing? Get the out of here. You know, so it's like, you know, this guy's standing, you know, back then he looked like a 10 foot tall grizzly bear. We just backed the out. It was like, okay, sorry. He was a fucking monster, man. I mean, he's a great guy. What a thankless job.

[A]

As one of the only fully new Jerry Garcia Robert Hunter songs penned for 1974, Scarlet Begonia's might be heard as one of the pieces of Grateful Dead music that the Wall of Sound was there to present. And visually anyway, there's no show that represents the Wall of Sound more than the Hollywood bowl gig on July 21st. Please welcome back journalist Brian Anderson.

[B]

Outdoor shows like the Hollywood bowl, for instance, very iconic gig. Probably the most widely seen visual of the Wall of Sound, I would argue came out of that show. There's a very beautiful technical drawing, kind of a schematic that Marianne Meyer created of the sound system at that show, and that was included in one of the newsletters that went out that year to the fans. And that rig was huge.

[A]

We've linked to both Marianne Mayer's Schematic and Brian's work in progress Loud and [e-mail] deadcast the Hollywood bowl show is the debut of one of the Wall of Sound's lesser remembered components, Though it's right there in the photos in the poster. The Wall of Sound was actually six different sound systems, one for each of the instruments and one for the vocals, though those weren't its only components. In our Unbroken Chain episode, we discussed the debut of the vocal cluster in May. And in our Loose Lucy episode, we got into Phil Lesh's new mission control base, itself considered part of the system. Thanks to David Ganz. We've got more from his 1991 interview with Owsley Stanley, which you can read in his book Conversations with the Dead. Link [e-mail] deadcast but it was all.

[B]

From the same design, which was basically worked out with Wickersham and Curl.

[A]

So we split up all the jobs.

[B]

One guy made this, one guy made that. Then I ran the development of the small system for the piano that was my compartment in those days.

[A]

For the early part of 1974, Owsley spent his time devising a special piano system for Keith God Show. Using an untested new technology, crew member Richie Pechner helped fabricate many of the speakers for the wall.

[B]

I was one of the people. I didn't think it was a great idea. Once again, you know, Bear knew a better way. And his idea was he was going to use this new product xl, this laminated, like aluminum panel, lightweight. So one of the things that became obvious was the Wallace Sound System was very heavy, every part of it. You know, the wooden cabinets were heavy, the center cluster was heavy. It was heavy equipment. Bear figured out that he could make a piano cluster because we always had a piano system, but it was just stacked like it was pre Wallace Sound, like in the Boston pictures. So he wanted to consolidate that into a cabinet, like the center cluster, like the vocal pa, which sounded like a great idea. But he wanted to go down this road of this new composite material because it was new technology, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But there had been no experimenting with the material in terms of putting speakers in it and using it as the cabinet. So he went down this road and had this thing made, and it took months, you know, was going to be ready way before then, never was, and ever. And finally he gets it ready for the Hollywood bowl show and he puts it up and, you know, we're plugging it in and everything. And it wasn't a great idea. It was too tinny. It sounded a little Tinny because the cabinet was made out of metal bare. That was a more high tech. The other one was assigned a raisin to build. He built it out of wood. It worked. It didn't have the efficiency that a rigid cabinet was. But on its size we probably would have had a hell of a time doing it. The center cluster, even though it had this 3/4 inch square tubing iron frame inside, it was all open and it was encased in wood. So the sides and the back were wood. So you still had that warm wood reverb coming out of the back of the cabinet. But the piano cluster that Bear made was all metal. I think it was probably a fatal flaw from the get go, but nobody knew it and he certainly didn't believe it. I can't remember how many thousands of dollars, but that was it.

[A]

Well, you know, research and development and all.

[B]

Truly, if it was R and D, he would have made a small cabinet and tested it.

[A]

Yeah, probably. Bear's piano system was only used at the Hollywood Bowl. Gone by the time they headed east later that week. While we're on the topic of experiments that didn't totally work out, let's call back to what Donna Jean Godsho McKay told us about the phase canceling microphones that allowed the band to sing without monitor wedges in front of them.

[B]

We had these things called phase canceling microphones because the sound was so huge that things would start feeding back in the monitors. And that's had these phase canceling microphones, but they sounded like crap. I hated it. I just hated the sound of those mics. They just squeezed all of the life out of the vocal, you know, all of the tonality out of the vocal. That's my opinion. But it was hard. That was a hard thing. It was a problem with the differentials. We eventually figured out the problem with the differential was that a great deal of the lower frequency information from the human voice is radiated by the chest itself. So you're singing on a microphone that.

[A]

You'Re on the other microphone which is down here, is getting powerful radiation from.

[B]

The vocal box and from the chest. So that not only you're getting the vocal radiation out of your mouth and.

[A]

From the head cavities, but you're getting.

[B]

A similar amount at the same phase into the differentialing microphone and it is canceling the power in the bottom of the voice and it comes out thin. It's very difficult to compensate for. It's unpredictable because the microphones were differential all the time.

[A]

Dope. Sorry, Donna. Bear kind of messed that One up. However, if you're thinking of constructing a genuine phase canceling wall of sound, or even a genuine hedgerow of sound, we offer the following from its designer wasn't.

[B]

Until the whole system had passed into history. I'm sitting there one day with one of the mics. I still think I have a couple of them. And I'm looking at it and all of a sudden I realized what was missing. I know how to make a differential.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

Instead of having a single differential summing amplifier, which is fed the signal mic and the ambient mic all the time, differentially you need two summing networks. You need to split the signal mic and split the ambient mic.

[A]

Personally, I would have just turned them upside down. That's probably why I don't work for Alembic. But Bayer did a little bit of myth busting about the phase canceling microphones that we're going to include here because it corrects an inaccuracy.

[B]

A lot of people thought the differential microphones were to control feedback. They weren't. The system didn't feedback even with an omni mic.

[A]

They were to get rid of leakage, which is a subtly different but very real problem.

[B]

When people weren't singing in a microphone. Microphone would get so much instrument sound.

[A]

That the main PA would be driven.

[B]

Almost to clipping with just that.

[A]

With just leakage, there was no room.

[B]

So if one guy wasn't singing, the other guy was. Unless those mics were dropped out, you couldn't hear them. You couldn't hear anything.

[A]

It was all this bleh noise from leakage. So you had.

[B]

Because everything was behind the band going directly into the mics.

[A]

Hence the phase cancellers. It was a problem that Dan Healy would solve later with gates triggered by floor mats in front of the microphones. But they weren't there yet. We'll return to the Wall of Sounds adventures on the east coast next time. But by the time they hit Hartford on July 31, now Dave's picks too. Scarlet Begonias Regularly was approaching a libertine eight minutes long. And it opened a show for the first time.

[B]

As I picked up, my shell was closing the door. I had one of those flashes. I'd been there before. Been there before.

[A]

Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux musically blows.

[B]

My mind every time. It ends with one of the greatest little that Jerry ever wrote on the album. That hook fades it out. Whereas the Dead. Here's what I love about the Dead is that the song ends when you see it live with that hook. And then it goes into the big, big jab.

[A]

I'm a fan of the vocalizing Donna Jean does on these versions, something she did on the album, like when Pigpen would front the band. I think it allowed them to get to a different space than they did otherwise. This Hartford version we're listening to is just 8 minutes, but potent. Mid 74 when they started really stretching it out. Those, to me, are my favorite versions of Scarlet Begonias.

[B]

By August and then Europe and then October, they're really stretching it out.

[A]

It's like they want somewhere to bring this song. Here's some of the October 19th version from Winterland.

[B]

Sam.

[A]

Listen to those tremendous versions from Winterland 74.

[B]

There's a great one in October in.

[A]

The Grateful Dead movie, where it's scarlet into a nice big long jam.

[B]

And they haven't written fire yet, or.

[A]

Mickey has, but they haven't brought fire to the band yet. I'm not entirely positive, but I think Fire on the Mountain's first draft might actually have come a few months before Scarlet Begonias. It was written at Mickey Hart's ranch in Nevada as fires in the nearby hills encroached. Hopefully we'll get a chance to dig deeper down the line, but thanks to Dead Cast correspondent Dave Perlis working on a new book titled Morning and Marin. Great title. I think those nearby fires occurred in September 1973. Though the song would take a few iterations to get to the Dead, Scarlet Begonias was its own special conversation in 1974. One drummer, no other song attached. You can Watch the Great October 19 version from Winterland on the bonus disc of the Grateful Dead movie. We've posted a [e-mail] Deadcast they didn't play it during their four isolated shows in 1975, but Scarlet Begonias was in the repertoire when they returned in June 1976 and never left. There was one microscopic addition to the song when it came back. See if you can hear it. There's a new word in there. Once in a while you get shown the light changes to once in a while you can get shown the light. There was also the more macroscopic change of having a second drummer, David Lemieux.

[B]

The ones in 1976 as well, because.

[A]

It'S the same thing where they don't have fire yet, so they had nowhere to bring it. If you listen to the one from Detroit October 3, 1976 at Cobo hall.

[B]

They bring that jam to places that are just unreal, and then they lock.

[A]

Into a groove that's unlike anything they ever did. That's on the 30 trips around the Sunbox set. Though it didn't make it to the final album. The Dead recorded Fire on the Mountain for Terrapin station in early 1977. Released on the Beyond Description box set.

[B]

Trading with matches Better loose all the town A whole pail of water Just to put him down Fire, fire on the mountain Fire, fire on the mountain finally, In March of 1977, fire on.

[A]

The Mountain made its appearance, instantly joined.

[B]

With Scarlet Begonias and I mean a.

[A]

Marriage made in heaven.

[B]

It's just perfect.

[A]

When they paired Scarlet Begonias in Fire on the Mountain, Fire on the Mountain wasn't only new to the Dead's repertoire via several evolutions. We'll save for another day. But the drummers had spent time tightening their groove at the behest of producer Keith Olsen. That tightness and newness seem to reflect backwards and reinvent Scarlet Begonias in the spring of 1977 as well. Here's the beginning of what's perhaps the most single famous performance of any dead tune from Cornell. 77. Go, Phil, go. Starting in spring 1977, the Jam became an almost independent vehicle of its own.

[B]

I've always looked at Scarlet Fire as.

[A]

Three songs, Scarlet and Fire and then.

[B]

The jam in between, because it's a.

[A]

Unique every time in the moment. So scarlets can run 9, 10, 11, 12 minutes long.

[B]

And then you get the Fire on the Mountain after that.

[A]

One of my favorite things about the Cornell version is the almost baroque variation Keith Godchau plays on the piano under the final verse, which turns into a a cool anticipatory flourish as they head into the jam. It sounds like a part of the song, but he never played it like this before or after. The addition of Fire on the Mountain didn't change anything about the Scarlet Begonia's jam except its intention. Musicologist Sean o'. Donnell.

[B]

You can go right from the end of Scarlet to it, and I think part of that is why it can be as big as they want it to be. Because there's no real work to travel to the place harmonically. You don't have to get to a new location and you don't even have to reinterpret the chord you're ending on. It's a B and you're in B Mixolydian, and that's where you are. So you're starting at the place where you're getting to. So you're completely freed up. There's no worries. You just have to be inventive with the language in that musical space. And so there's a lot of relaxation. It's automatically fine. There's no stress. There's something about the anticipation of arrival there that the audience brings to it. It could easily become kind of self indulgent end jam that then just gets ripcorded at some point because there's nowhere to go. But because it has a destination, you can direct it there as soon or as long as you want.

[A]

Part of what makes the Scarlet Begonia's jam so powerful, I think, is the way it not just illustrates but has the potential to activate the kinds of crazy inversion suggested by the lyrics. Michael Koehler teaches at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, holds PhDs in religious studies and Ethnomusicology, and is the author of the fantastic new book from Duke University Press titled Get Shown the Light, Improvisation and Transcendence in the Music of the Grateful Dead, which we've linked [e-mail] deadcast.

[B]

The William James definition of religious experience. One of his four aspects of religious experience is the passivity of the recipient. He defines religious experiences as involving ineffability. Can't really accurately describe it. A noetic aspect, the feeling that you've learned something. It's transitory, it doesn't last forever, and the recipient is to some degree passive. They can't actively generate it. They can put themselves in a good condition for it, but ultimately it's not up to them whether it comes down. So that passive in the title, the Get Shown the Light, I think is appropriate for that.

[A]

I never thought about the passive voice at that point in Scarlet Begonia's. Nor had I noticed, for that matter, that it turns active in the second part of the phrase that ith and if you look at it right, is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, as they say.

[B]

You can set up favorable conditions for getting shown the light. It's not totally a spontaneous, random thing all the time, although I guess it can be sometimes. But with the Dead, definitely, I think in their music they developed their whole improvisational approach to rock music as a way of setting up the conditions for the sorts of experiences that they had at the acid tests. But I don't think they ever felt that they could control it. They were like, we can set the table and then. And if the guest shows up, that's awesome. The table's set. But it doesn't compel the guests to show up.

[A]

One aspect of the Grateful Dead experience shared by the musicians and audience, I think, is what Michael is describing creating the conditions for some kind of light to arrive. The Dead had different strategies for this.

[B]

It would fit into what I call in the book, like dance tunes or groove tunes, where the improvisation is set up to enable an audience to keep dancing and sort of keep grooving as opposed to really going out there, like. Like in the other one, or playing in the band or Darkstar or something like that.

[A]

There are different ways of inviting transcendent experiences. One easy trick, and by easy I mean not easy at all, is to make the musicians and audience forget about everything else and just dance. But Scarlet Begonia's jams often manage the pretty amazing feat of staying danceable while bending and warping before resolving into Fire on the Mountain, which I imagine might also translate unconsciously to anybody dancing to it. It as its rhythm threatens to break open. It's a musical tension that I think pairs pretty magically with Hunter's lyrics to make Scarlet Begonias function like very few other dance tunes in the Dead songbook, getting far afield without losing a pulse. Like this 1983 version on Dix Pick Six. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux. When we do the song timings of.

[B]

Scarlet Fire, for instance, on a Dead.

[A]

Cd, the Fire on the Mountain index doesn't begin until we actually hear Phil.

[B]

Usually kicking into Fire on the mountain.

[A]

On the Chicago 77 version, that starts exactly here and once through Fire on the Mountain, and they'd end Fire with the ending of Scarlet Begonias coming all the way around.

[B]

I used to trade a lot of tapes with people who labeled their tapes with Scarlet Fire back into Scarlet, because they go back into that closing hook, that closing riff. I didn't label my tapes that way, but it was very cool that they did that.

[A]

For the next 18 years. Scarlet Begonia's Into Fire on the Mountain was one of the most awaited of the band's second half sound set pieces, A jam that could get far out without ever losing its fundamental danceability and good vibes. The Cornell 77 version got love from a great audience tape, but became infamous when an excellent Betty Cantor soundboard went into circulation in the 80s. We're going to shout out a few classic versions, but this is how and why Scarlet Begonias might be considered a Grateful Dead style greatest hit. Not because it's a single song that people love, but because it's got tons of versions with infinite shades and meanings. We'll hold Fire on the Mountain stories for another day. We know you've got them. New Yorker writer Nick Palmgarden is connected to a Certain version of the song. But I have to assume that, like Scarlet Begonia's itself, there are lots of other variations on this story to be found with other versions.

[B]

I'm known for liking the Fox Theater. 11:30, 81, I guess. But, you know, I still think it's tremendous to me, it's my favorite and it's better than all comers. And I know that some people think otherwise. I'm not gonna debate you, Jerry, okay? I'm not gonna sit here and debate. I think the propulsive energy of it, the Scarlet right out of the gate. And then as the big solo it from Scarlet to Fire is just big and busy and they turn on a dime. Which they rarely did with the two drummer era.

[A]

It's now on Dave's Picks, Volume 8.

[B]

The Fox's Den. It was a cult that existed at the prep school. I went to St. Paul's New Hampshire, and I guess a student there before my time had gone to see the show and had a tape of it. And it became this sort of talismanic worshipped tape that people would listen to. And very quickly, I think some students, in the way that schoolboys will do, they built up a little, you know, a set of rules around it. The so called commandments. Four commandments, you know, one of which thou shall not press. Stop, pause, fast forward, rewind. During the transition, you had to listen to it every year on that date. I think there's something about having to smoke weed during whenever you listen to it. And it was written out like stenciled on a poster board. Stenciled. And it was every year the Fox's Den was the Keeper of the Fox. This earliest generation version of this audience tape recorded by Dr. Bob Wagner. And that person was the keeper of the Fox's Den. And it was all sort of Sam Asdat, under the radar, against the rules of the school and passed down every year from graduating seniors to the up and coming head who's most deserving of being the keeper of the Fox's Den.

[A]

There must be dozens of equivalent cults out there. A multiverse of Fox's Dens for different Scarlets.

[B]

It's one of those Dead songs that sort of sounds different every time the Grateful Dead does it. There's this idea that the Grateful Dead improvises everything and it's never the same twice. No show is alike. But frankly, a lot of the songs always sound more or less alike. I mean, they're obviously playing freely, but they have their parts and it has a certain feeling. Scarlet is this song that sometimes, you know, that so called Jamaica feel that Garcia is writing about in those notes that really comes out and it's really like stop and go, where it has like a really reggae thing. And using the percussion emphasizes that. Other times it has this sort of driving, majestic thing, sometimes fast or something slow. It has a lot of different moods.

[A]

Our buddy Nick Rubin, DJ Rubes from the Bunny Radio and WTJU in Charlottesville left us this story that's a good reminder of why Scarlet Begonias is a pretty good introduction to the dead. In 1984, I was living in Winston Salem, North Carolina. I was a sophomore on the JV.

[B]

Soccer team at my high school. And on the bus to one of our games, I was sitting next to.

[A]

My friend Steve Smith, who was listening to something on his Walkman.

[B]

And when I asked him what he.

[A]

Was listening to, he said the Grateful Dead.

[B]

Now, earlier that summer, I was at a tennis tournament and this kid named Dan Benthal and I were talking about music and having a great time and he. And he asked me about the Dead. And I said, well, they're heavy metal, right? Because I didn't know.

[A]

I thought they were metal because of.

[B]

The skeletons and stuff. He said, no, they're happy music. And I was like, okay.

[A]

So when Steve said the Grateful Dead, I asked him if I could listen to it.

[B]

And he gave me his headphones in the middle of the four. 1384 Scarlet Fire at Hampton Roads. Now, I didn't realize this, but I had heard the Grateful Dead. I had heard Truckin on the radio. I'd heard Casey Jones, but I had never heard Scarlett Begonias.

[A]

And when I put on those headphones.

[B]

I thought, oh my God, it is happening music. And that was the beginning of my.

[A]

Love affair with the Grateful Dead.

[B]

And it all started on the soccer bus on some back road in North Carolina.

[A]

Not long after that performance in 1984, Scarlet Begonias began a brief period where it found destinations other than Fire on the Mountain, notably Touch of Gray. At first, here's how it sounded in Eugene in 1984, exactly seven years after the Cornell 77 version.

[B]

Must be getting early.

[A]

Fire on the Mountain wasn't permanently dislodged, but at least once or twice for the next half dozen years, Scarlet Begonias would find alternate routes. We've posted a link to the Scarlet Begonias page at Jerry Base, where you can see every version and where they went. We know a lot happened in the later 80s, but we're going to jump forward a taste here. People like spring 77. But other heads might also point you to spring 1990. Steve Silberman was one of the producers of the so Many Roads box set, which remains one of the greatest five disc condensations of the band's entire career. He and his co producers didn't choose a classic 70s version, or even a classic 80s version, but went with one from the newly blossoming midi period in 1990.

[B]

Listen to the Scarlet Fire from Cops Coliseum and Dick Loudvalla personally gave that.

[A]

Track to me to put onto so Many Roads.

[B]

The so Many Roads box set and the way that he did it was ideal. We were at the Fillmore and it was like a Dick Lavalla night at the Fillmore. And he like looks at me, he's like, this is the Scarlet Fire you.

[A]

Should put on the box set.

[B]

And it was a heavily mini doubt Scarlet Fire.

[A]

It's unbelievable.

[B]

It swings like mad.

[A]

While Scarlet Begonias probably isn't the most covered Dead song, it's perhaps the most famous Dead cover from Vampire Weekend. Chris Thompson My first thought about Scarlet Begonias is I think it's probably the first Dead song I ever heard. But it was a Sublime version.

[B]

She was caught in my eye it.

[A]

Could be an illusion But I might as well trap. Growing up in central New Jersey in the 90s, the dead were present to some extent. My dad had a very classic record collection. Working Man's dad and American Beauty were in, but he was more of an.

[B]

Almonds guy if I had to say.

[A]

But Sublime was like massive of like my peers at school and I feel like, yeah, I heard Scarlett Begonias and was like, oh, that's a cool song. And then someone was, oh yeah, it's a Dead cover. And then I was like, oh yeah, of course, yeah, yeah, like I knew what I was talking about.

[B]

And just to gain a trust I bought a micro bus Because I sold up on my personal property a tie.

[A]

Tie dye dress she was a psychedelic mess we toured through the north, south.

[B]

East and west we sold some mushroom.

[A]

Tea, we sold some ecstasy we sold.

[B]

Nitrous, opium, acid, heroin and PCP and.

[A]

Now I hear the police coming after charming. Released on 40 ounces to freedom in 1992, the album has gone at least double platinum in the old school record industry since. There are currently two versions of Sublime touring and Scarlet Begonia's remains in at least one repertoire. Of course, it's a staple of Dead leaning bands everywhere. That was Phish performing it at one of their very first shows in 1983. A while back. I Interviewed guitarist Trey Anastasio for the Osiris podcast Alive Again. We talked a bit about the Dead too, and you can hear more of that in our Playing Dead episodes. Fish have a long and complex relationship with the Dead's music. A starting point on a long journey. One of several acts that played important parts in their formation. We've Posted [e-mail] deadcast when we started.

[B]

The Dead played in the gym that year in 1983, which is 10ft from where our first shows the Harris Millis is. I could jump out and touch the door of Patrick Gym, where the Dead played in 1983 months before our shows. And we were 18. And the Dead were the band that.

[A]

Played in the gym.

[B]

They played the most iconic version of Scarlet Fire ever played by that band in that gym. Go listen to it. I like the one from the audience better than the soundboard. It's the best guitar playing I've ever heard. It was the best guitar playing ever. And every 18 year old is going to play the band that played in the gym. That's how you start. The other band that played in 1983 in the gym was Talking Heads. And I was there in the 10th row watching talking Heads with Tina. Real talking heads. And we played a Talking Head song. That's okay, you know, the Beatles played covers, Bob Marley played covers. Everybody played covers when they were 18. And you can play covers throughout your career. But the work of starting to find your own voice as an original artist begins then. Or you're missing an investment in making your economy and your life on a previous generation's youth.

[A]

Fish charted their own path pretty quickly and stopped playing Dead tunes within three years of their formation, but internalized the vocabulary and syntax. By contrast, that's not at all how Vampire Weekend started. Drummer Chris Thompson had listened closely to bands like Fish and the Dead, but hadn't exactly played the music. Funnily, I didn't actually really play drums before I ended up in Vampire Weekend. I had like fooled around. Kath jokingly played the drum beat for chameleon like 20 times in high school, the Herbie Hancock song. And we couldn't find a drummer. When Vampire Weekend was starting, I was supposed to be the guitarist. And from that Chameleon experience, I was just like, oh, I play drums. And then I've sort of been figuring it out ever since now.

[B]

Is it strange I can't connect?

[A]

It isn't strange, but I could check.

[B]

Walked around to where we could.

[A]

That was Kinect from the brand new Vampire Weekend album, Only God was above us jumping over the COVID band phase. Thanks to Ezra Koenig's songwriting, they would eventually work their way backwards into playing Dead covers. Like a lot of people, Ezra Koenig, our songwriter, I don't think he ever hated the Dead or anything, but he wasn't into it. Condensing a bunch of the story. Ezra Koenig saw the California Dead man with the very clever name Richard Pictures. I think feeling that extra level to whatever that magic of the Dead atmosphere is. I think seeing Richard Pictures play at Old Town Pub in Pasadena, the very specific bar, there was a bit of an aha moment for Ezra that was like, this is like so awesome. How can we foster this relationship? How can we foster this, like, attitude when people are coming to a show and not know what to expect and really excited without getting too heavy handed about it? I'd suggest that part of what Ezra caught was the same happy music message that DJ Rubes picked up during his school trip in 1984, coded in a deep way into Scarlet Begonias. We'll let another podcast go through Vampire Weekend's tour show by show, but it's resulted in lots of variations. Showing up in the band's set list and taking themselves seriously as a living, breathing band that might change with the times. I have no problem with playing the Click Track, so I'm not in any way speaking ill of anyone that plays to Click Track, But I do think for Vampire Weekend to be the size we're at, I do feel like we've kind of grandfathered in some weird pre algorithm notions of what being a band.

[B]

Is and what being a band could be.

[A]

To play Madison Square Garden largely just like clicking in. Maybe this is gonna be faster than yesterday's performance of the song.

[B]

I don't know.

[A]

My heart rate's going a little faster, so this one's gonna be faster too. A few Dead covers have popped up in their sets, including A bit of Cumberland Blues as part of their Cocaine Cowboys Cornhole Medley, as well as the sweet performance of Peggy O and SiriusXM recently with Chris on guitar and Amber Kaufman duetting with Ezra Koenig.

[B]

Will you marry me, pretty Peggy? Will you marry me, pretty plagio? If you ever married me I will set your cities free and free all the people in the area.

[A]

But the Dead's biggest influence on Vampire Weekend might be invisible in the COVID Higher Covet era. A lot of ideas were flying around and one of which was someone in Bobby's camp. Bob Weir got in touch with us. Vampire Weekend and was like, hey, we got these, like, we're probably gonna do these ace 50th anniversary shows. I was like, you know, maybe we're thinking like, maybe you guys could be the band and like Bob plays with you. Maybe there's like a joint set and, you know, it's a nebulous idea. But still with a lot of time on our hands, Chris, Ezra and I in this studio, we spent like a good month or two just like just playing Ace, trying to learn all the songs, really get into the parts. Hearing Ezra sing Greatest Story Ever Told, like the Moses came up riding on a quasar. Like hearing Ezra sing, that was very. A treasured memory for me. We're gonna have to imagine that one for now.

[B]

The Qur.

[A]

That was the first real, like very specific, getting into Groen mode. And like whatever plans changed, it just sort of didn't happen. But I feel like playing Ace definitely got me a little closer to sort of like seeing some of his, some of his ticks and some. A little bit more where he was coming from, at least that moment. With some Kreuzmann vocabulary in hand. It also contributed to the formation of a fun new band. Along with guitarist Dave Harrington of Darkside and Alex Bleeker of Real Estate, Chris is now the third member of Taper's Choice we featured on the Deadcast. That was the Walking around outro from the History of Taper's Choice, Volume 1. Taper's Choice. The Tapers thing is like exactly what I dreamt about doing when I was 16. And I think that's also kind of.

[B]

It's like.

[A]

It feels very fun and fresh. Is like accessing that part of myself. The Dead's influence isn't only wide, but deep. We've posted links to both Vampire Weekend and tapir's [e-mail] deadcast it's probably easier to hear the Dead in the latter, but it's been especially fun hearing Chris talk about the Dead, precisely because Vampire Weekend doesn't sound too much like them at first listen. For young musicians navigating the world together and making creative choices, the Dead are both a veritable school of music unto themselves, but also a not exactly practical model of the endless microscopic choices made by a group of friends also navigating the world together, the Dead will forever be the best case study of what a band could be or should be. As a high schooler in 99 and I think as many people, teenagers now, like in 2024, having this distinct 30 year body of work to track to dig into to find the live debuts. How did the song change? The music's good, which makes it all work, but if you like music history and sort of the nuts and bolts, the Dead are just like far and away, any way you want to look, any way you want to turn the cube and investigate. Like the Dead has a great storyline there. Let's spin that cue backwards one more time Back to Scarlet Begonias a week after the Dead first played it, and feel all the jams yet to come as we go back to CBS Studios and move through the song piece by piece. Bill the drummer, if you will. As I was walking around Grosvenor Square.

[B]

Not a chill to the winner but a nip to the air well, I ain't often right but I've never been.

[A]

Wrong it seldom turns out the way.

[B]

It does in the song. Once in a while it gets you.

[A]

On the light and the strangest of places if you look at it right.

[B]

It the wind in the willows Play T for two the sky was yellow and the sun was blue Sa Ham oh, we got a couple. Every time the Dead started up Scarlet Begonia's live in the 80s, we'd all get really excited because we knew we.

[A]

Were getting a 2 for 1. Fire on the Mountain was sure to follow.

[B]

It has to be one of the best song pairings out there, and it.

[A]

Never failed to achieve liftoff.

[B]

Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast friends. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode.

[A]

Jeff Gould, David Lemieux, Chris Thompson, Ron Rakow, Lee Jaffe, Alan Trist, Donna Jean, Gottshaw McKay, Brian Kehue, Sean O', Donnell, Steve Hurlbert, Joe from Trenton, Ross from Asbury Park, Alex from Columbus, Bobby from.

[B]

Oregon, Bill from Southern California, Reader from.

[A]

Boulder, Courtney Pollack, Andy Leonard, Sully, Brian Anderson, Richie Pechner, Michael Collar, Nick Paumgarten, Nick Rubin, Steve Silberman and Trey Anastasio. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast David Ganz for his ongoing.

[B]

Contributions of audio from his interview archive. Executive producer for the good old Grateful Dead cast cast Mark Pincus, produced for.

[A]

Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Dorin Tyson. All Rights Reserve.