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- [00:05]
Rich Mahan
The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to Season nine of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. In this episode of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, our final episode of season nine, we wrap up our exploration of the Grateful Dead's wonderful 1974 studio album from the Mars Hotel. There's only one track left at the end of side two to dive into and it's the absolute classic Ship of Fools. It is the 50th anniversary of the Grateful Deads from the Mars Hotel and to celebrate this, Rhino has released the 50th anniversary edition of from the Mars Hotel, including the original album, remastered, some really cool early demos of songs from the album, and a previously unreleased live show you need to hear to believe. The Grateful Dead played the University of Nevada, Reno on May 12, 1974 and this was the first roadshow for the infamous Wall of Sound which debuted weeks earlier at the Cow palace in San Francisco. This was a notoriously windy show so the audio was cleaned up and remastered by Grammy Award winning engineer David Glasser with plangent processes, tape restoration and speed correction and was produced for release by David Lemieux. All of the aforementioned is available as a 3 CD set as well as digitally. There is also a black vinyl version available. More info and orders are happening now@dead.net head on over to dead.net deadcast check out all of our past episodes. We've got a lot for you to listen to, including the complete seasons 1 through 8. You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how you like to listen. Hey, please help us out subscribe to the podcast Share the podcast with your friends on social media. Hit that like button and leave us a review. It all helps so much. Thank you very much. We have transcripts for many of your favorite Dead Cast episodes available for your reading pleasure. They can be found@dead.net deadcast-index so go check them out. A friend once commented to me, man, these Grateful Dead songs grow on you like moss on the north side of a tree. I consider this to be a universal Grateful Dead truth. Ship of Fools is one such song. Personally, when I was a young Deadhead I gravitated towards the rockers and the ballads weren't necessarily my favorite. Now these ballads are absolutely some of my Favorite songs of all time. Ship of Fools is a prime example of this, and Jesse Jarno is going to pull back the curtain and show us the inner workings of this stone cold Grateful Dead classic. Went to see the captain Strangest I could find Laid my proposition down Laid it on the line I won't slave for beggars pain likewise golden Jew But I would slave to learn the way.
- [03:51]
Jesse Jarno
Sink your ship a fool well, here we are at the end of from the Mars Hotel, side 2, track 4, ship of fools. Here's how Phil Lesh introduced it on June 28, 1974 at the Boston Garden. Now, Dix picks 12.
- [04:08]
Rich Mahan
Okay, okay, okay, okay. Now if you'll all just shut up. Second will play a quiet, tender, meaningful, sympathetic, heavy duty ballad in the key of B flat.
- [04:29]
Jesse Jarno
Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
- [04:32]
Rich Mahan
I'm a big fan of Ship of Fools. It's another unique song in the Dead's canon, where it's just a perfect little song Away from me it was later than I thought When I first believe.
- [05:07]
Jesse Jarno
You Now I cannot share your laughter Ship of Fools was debuted in February 1974, almost certainly written with these album sessions in mind.
- [05:22]
Rich Mahan
When Jerry really nailed that solo, when it ripped, it was outstanding. When that song was played, well, boy, was it good. And it, it's. It was always in a weird slot, which is kind of the second, third, or fourth song of the second set because it, it didn't come out of anything. It didn't go into anything. It was just kind of one of these songs that was there, and there's not a lot of those in. In the Grateful Dead second sets. Most song into something, you know, Scarlet goes into fire, Crazy Fingers goes into playing in the band. Uncle John's goes into drums. And I've heard some Ship of Fools that have been the highlight of a second set. I think it also would have worked as a first set song very, very well because it's a nice little six minute standalone song. The bottle stand is empty as they were filled before.
- [06:37]
Jesse Jarno
Time that wasn't. But from that cup no Mo, the tender, meaningful, sympathetic, heavy duty ballad in the key of B flat came to occupy a singular place in the Dead songbook. It might not be one of Garcia and Hunter's most famous songs, but it might be one of their best and unquestionably serves as a perfect springboard to discuss the Grateful dead in late 1974 as they prepared to retire from the road. See.
- [07:16]
Rich Mahan
Ship of Fools sail away from me.
- [07:24]
Jesse Jarno
Let's pause there before we fully embark into Ship of Fools. We're going to welcome back one of the voices we just heard and who we haven't heard nearly enough from this season to get her perspective on from the Mars Hotel. I will never, ever, ever get sick of making the following announcement. Will you welcome, please, on the vocals, Mrs. Donna Jean Godshow McKay.
- [07:47]
Rich Mahan
There's something I want to talk about that I haven't heard people talk about is Ugly Rumors from the Mars Hotel. That's all we ever called it was Ugly Rumors from the Mars Hotel. We always called it the whole title, but I don't see that people do that anymore. And the songs that were on that are just incredibly beautiful songs. Imagine hearing Scarlet Begonias for the first time in rehearsal and it's like, what? And all of these songs, they're just classics and will remain that way, I'm sure, for 100 years or more. Just beautiful songs. China Doll and Unbroken Chain and oh, Beautiful Ship of Fools. Just beautiful songs.
- [08:38]
Jesse Jarno
Sometime in 1973, the band started practicing at their equipment warehouse in San Rafael.
- [08:44]
Rich Mahan
I remember hearing Scarlet Begonia's at Front Street. That's where we would rehearse first of all. And then eventually became a full blown studio once in a while.
- [09:21]
Jesse Jarno
We've been referencing back this season to Jerry Garcia's song by song description of Ugly Rumors from the Mars Hotel. Written just before they entered the studio, it included eight songs just like the final album. Not on the list though was Loose Lucy. In its place was something noted as Donna's song Gospel Flavor.
- [09:41]
Rich Mahan
I don't remember that at all. I have no idea what that song could be.
- [09:47]
Jesse Jarno
There are a few potential candidates on the Keith and Donna album that they made the next year. Oh, well, we talked about some other parts of Mars Hotel though. We'll send this next bit out to listener Jenny Boylan. Donna agrees with you.
- [10:00]
Rich Mahan
One of my favorite things that Keith did on Mars Hotel was Unbroken Chain. And it is just beautiful what he does in that song. It's just fluid and just gorgeous to me. I remember Rob Barocco said when he heard Keith's playing on that he had been until that point basically an organ player. And that's when he kind of turned to the piano. But here's another little aside. Keith hated the song. Money, Money, money, money, money, money, money. He just hated it. He just thought it was so trite and that was one of the things he complained about. What didn't he like, I think of the lyrics, Just the whole concept of the song. He just didn't like It.
- [11:53]
Jesse Jarno
Since it came up, what did you think of having to sing Money Money?
- [11:56]
Rich Mahan
Well, I thought it was a fun song to sing, and I don't know that I thought much more about it than it was just fun to sing. It was a fun song. It was upbeat and it was one of Bobby's tunes that he really liked. So it was fine. It was fine for me. I didn't have any qualms about it.
- [12:17]
Jesse Jarno
Sarah Folter joined Donna at the mic for that tune.
- [12:20]
Rich Mahan
Take a peek. What she wants, what she wants what she wants, what she wants Money, money, money on Money money yeah, she was there for that one song. That was fun singing with her, too, because, you know, of course, I was in a boy band, basically, and so to get to sing with her was fun.
- [12:55]
Jesse Jarno
On the back cover, the band played the pun of the Ugly rumors with the help of Mouse and Kelly, who drew on top of Andy Leonard's photo of the band posed in the lobby of the nearby Cadillac Hotel.
- [13:06]
Rich Mahan
Something I noticed today was on the back where they have the cartoon characters of us. They are all like, all dressed up in these weird things. And I'm like, earth mother or something. I don't have anything weird. Except I had never noticed this before. That right below the hem of my. My dress is some kind of green fish. Like something that I'd never noticed. And was that. Was that a foot? Keith was. Obviously had scales all over him. Did that mean that I had scales underneath my clothes? I don't know. Struck me as funny that I had never noticed that before. What is that? What is that under my dress? What did they mean that to be anyway? The little baby from the back of the album that I'm holding is now 50. It just blows my mind.
- [14:07]
Jesse Jarno
The Grateful Dad's Wall of sound year was tough for Donna Jean, in part because of having a newborn and in part because of the wall of sound itself.
- [14:15]
Rich Mahan
For me, just the onstage sound was so loud and profound and then combined with a wall of sound as well as that. I don't know how I got through it. Hearing was always just a major issue. I mean, I can't even stress strong enough how hard that was. You can't hear that well because of all the sound that's around. But the thin little voice that was coming out anyway was so puny. It was not fun. That wasn't fun. But the band was fun and the music was great.
- [14:57]
Jesse Jarno
Part of the Dead Setup since early 1973 were the phase canceling microphones designed by Owsley Stanley. We discussed those Microphones flaws with some archival audio from both Bear and Donna during our Scarlet Begonias episode, but we'll let Donna get in the last word on the phase canceling mics.
- [15:15]
Rich Mahan
The wall of sound was huge. Of course, there's so much music coming off the stage, so much sound that a lot of times you would get feedback in the vocal mics. And this was supposed to be something that took care of that. But the whole thing about the phase canceling mics is that it canceled out half of the vocal frequencies which complete a tone. And they were toneless, thin and dull and completely uninspiring. And I hated them. It only captured just a small amount of the frequencies in human voice, and it was just uninspiring and just toneless is what I would say. And I hated those things.
- [16:08]
Jesse Jarno
Besides the vocals, did the rest of the wall of sound sound good from where you were?
- [16:13]
Rich Mahan
Well, yeah. Oh my gosh. I mean, how could I complain? I was singing with my favorite band in the whole world in the my favorite music in the whole world.
- [16:25]
Jesse Jarno
We'll have tons more with Donna Jean today, but we'll use that paradox of the wall of sound's puny microphones to pivot us into the song at hand. Ship of Fools it was later than.
- [16:38]
Rich Mahan
I thought When I first believed you.
- [16:44]
Jesse Jarno
Now I cannot share your laughter.
- [16:52]
Rich Mahan
The.
- [16:52]
Jesse Jarno
Grateful Dead's world was becoming untenable, as we heard in our episode about Money money, with the band's brief Europe 74 tour containing both unsettling moments, but also inspired music sometimes connected to one another. As we've mentioned, Sometime in late 1973 or early 1974, Robert Hunter decamped to England. In our bonus episode on Tales of the Great Rum Runners, we spoke with guitarist John Perry, who went on to co found the Only Ones and played with Hunter in that period.
- [17:22]
Rich Mahan
Sometime after the band set up their own label, I think Bob started to find the mechanics of group politics tiresome, and it may have been that the move to England was a move away from too much politics.
- [17:39]
Jesse Jarno
Here's how Hunter himself contextualized Ship of Fools to Monte D'M in 1977.
- [17:45]
Rich Mahan
You know, I might take half a dozen people, incidents, bumpers there. Shit, something like that. Take a whole bunch of things and just put it all in one crashing bumper and song. Sometimes you can pick out something, but most of my things are not like.
- [17:59]
Jesse Jarno
Sketches of any individual person.
- [18:00]
Rich Mahan
It might start off with something in mind, but then the character becomes its own thing in the song and acquires its own attributes, and they may be colorbossing up, but they're not often about anyone in particular, rather than it's pretty.
- [18:19]
Jesse Jarno
Easy to tie that to the State of the Dead, or for that matter, to the United States as a whole in 1974 or any year since, for that matter. Which is how a lot of people have interpreted Ship of Fools over the decades.
- [18:30]
Rich Mahan
Well, I tell you what, that song sure has implications today. Ship of Fools, like, oh, this is our life right now. But beautiful song.
- [18:44]
Jesse Jarno
And look, Robert Hunter was a pretty private guy, and there were surely other crushing bummers we have no idea about. In Jerry Garcia's pithy song Briefing for Robert Williams, he described it in four topical song topical lyrics, but didn't specify the topic.
- [19:01]
Rich Mahan
Saw your first ship sink and dry from rocking up the boat and all that could not sink or swim was just left there to float.
- [19:18]
Jesse Jarno
There have been many songs called Ship of Fools over the years, including by World Party Erasure, John Cale, Van der Graff, Robert Plant and others. But in some ways the Dead had a claim on it. The Ship of Fools is a very old meme, originating probably around 375 BC in Plato's Republic and continuing to iterate through rhetoric and art. It was the topic of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch around 1890 and a few years later, the title of an extremely popular satire in German verse by Sebastian Brandt, in which a fleet of ships set sail, bound comically and disastrously for the paradise of fools, the fleet's port of origin, Basel, Switzerland. Something else relevant to the Grateful that took place in Basel 1943.
- [20:09]
Rich Mahan
War rages across Europe in the neutral confines of Switzerland. Chemist Albert Hoffman is hard at work at the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company's Basel laboratory. While searching for a cure for migraine headaches, Hofmann accidentally ingests a minute amount of an experimental substance that would change both his life and the world.
- [20:30]
Jesse Jarno
It was in Basel that Albert Hoffman first synthesized lsd, testing it on himself, first accidentally, then intentionally.
- [20:38]
Rich Mahan
Shall we go, you and I, while we can?
- [20:47]
Jesse Jarno
That the Grateful Dead were a Ship of Fools with a point of origin in baseline seems like a few levels of referentiality too deep. But perhaps not. Robert Hunter knew his German literature. We're just going to leave it out there. In 2015, the excellent journalist David Brown asked Hunter point blank about whether Ship of Fools was about the dead, and Hunter said, I debate myself about that one. I could certainly make a case for it. And I could also say that it was a bit more universal. I'm open to questions about Interpretation. But I generally skate around my answers because I don't want to put those things in a box. In 1974, just before the Dead took a break from the road, Jerry Garcia spoke of how he and Robert Hunter had been mortified when people took Casey Jones as a pro cocaine song, and they set a blurrier course in their songwriting. If we're going to have misinterpretations, let's have more than one. Let's have lots of them. Garcia told Steve Lake of Melody Maker.
- [21:41]
Rich Mahan
The Grateful Dead fans took all the songs in to themselves. Is that they were able to do that no matter what song it was. They could interpret any way that they wanted, and it was theirs. It became their song, you know, and that's the brilliance of Hunter's writing. That's the way Hunter wanted it. He wanted interpretation to be infinite, and he accomplished that. He was one of the best at doing that lyrically that I ever heard. Oh, I could not cross at all I still might want a few don't lend your hand to raise no flame.
- [22:27]
Jesse Jarno
A top no shepherd fools but in 1996, as the members of the Dead were trying to figure out their next steps, Robert Hunter kind of showed his hand in his online journal when he wrote, I try to speak for what I've always felt, the spirit of the Grateful Dead to a ship of fools on a cruel sea. I found many reasons to relate to Ship of Fools over the years, and I've never had to deal with the Grateful Dead or their roadies in 1974. It's a beautiful allegory, whatever its origins, and was perfectly framed by Jerry Garcia from the City College of New York musicologist Sean O'Donnell.
- [23:22]
Rich Mahan
Yeah, this. This one has a very, very much a gospel vibe on the record. When the organ comes in, it's just right. It was later than I thought When I first believed you Now I cannot share your laughter the chord motions that happen are very in line with the gospel language. I tend to obsess with their harmonic language. And I kind of really like the use of the diminished chords that come in here and they do some kind of word painting. Strangest I could find gets the diminished chord and then it resolves.
- [24:08]
Jesse Jarno
It's a song that I'd love to hear an acoustic demo for, which unfortunately doesn't exist. On the final studio version, Bob Weir played acoustic guitar. Combining it with Jerry Garcia's vocal. We can almost imagine a demo.
- [24:22]
Rich Mahan
Went to see the captain.
- [24:27]
Jesse Jarno
Strangest I.
- [24:28]
Rich Mahan
Could Laid my proposition down Laid it.
- [24:37]
Jesse Jarno
On the line the fancy chord under strangest that you might have to learn how to fret to play Ship of Fools is an F sharp diminished seventh.
- [24:48]
Rich Mahan
These aren't functional diminished chords. These are just decorative ones, so they're purely for the color. It's pretty steady throughout the tune, so there's a welding between the progression and the text. Saw your first ship sink and drown from rocking up the boat and all.
- [25:11]
Jesse Jarno
That could not sink or swim Was.
- [25:15]
Rich Mahan
Just left there to float on the.
- [25:19]
Jesse Jarno
Basic track, Jerry Garcia played electric guitar, Bobby Weir played acoustic, Keith Godshow on Rhodes, Phil Lesh and Bill Kreutzman in their usual roles. Sail away from me Garcia overdubbed his lead vocal, of course. A beautiful performance.
- [25:49]
Rich Mahan
It was later than I thought.
- [25:55]
Jesse Jarno
When.
- [25:56]
Rich Mahan
I first believed you Now I cannot.
- [26:00]
Jesse Jarno
Share your laughter Ship of Fools angel share Engineer Brian Kehue the line that.
- [26:10]
Rich Mahan
Hits me as maybe a clue is something says 30 years upon my head, which is, you know, just a beautifully artful way to say I'm 30 years old. But that's because he's a lyricist and he's a poet. You would say that in such a beautiful way. It's absolutely a spectacular line, even though it's so simple. 30 years upon my head to have you call me child so somebody's talking down to him as if they know better I won't leave you drifting down.
- [26:39]
Jesse Jarno
But whoa, it makes me wild with.
- [26:44]
Rich Mahan
30 years upon my head to have.
- [26:49]
Jesse Jarno
You call me child One of my favorite parts of Ship of Fools emerged during the studio sessions with his very Beatlesque backing vocal by Weir and Donna Jean Gadcho near the very end, which they doubled for extra Beatlesqueness. It's one of my favorite things to listen for in the live versions. Also, of course, the guitar solo.
- [27:35]
Rich Mahan
Sa.
- [28:04]
Jesse Jarno
There'S some extra percussion on the track, including a tambourine, and for extra heaviness, a track that's labeled Drum Pap. As Sean pointed out, there's B3 organ for gospel flavor. There's acoustic piano overdub, too. And like so many other songs on the album, both Jerry Garcia and Keith Godshow added roland synth parts, both kind of woozy and dreamy. On the multi track, it looks like Garcia went first, then Keith, and woozing and dreaming together. Here's how it all sounds combined. In later years, Robert Hunter would sometimes bemoan the failures of Grateful Dead Records and Round Records as foolish side trips that detracted from the musical focus of the Grateful Dead. But as we learned on our Tales of the Great Rum Runners bonus episode, even Hunter would admit that he wouldn't have been able to make his own album how he wanted to without Round Records at his disposal. And Round Records had the same initials as its co owner, the God Show's neighbor in Stinson Beach, Ron Rackow.
- [31:32]
Rich Mahan
To this day I still love Rackow. He was crazy and did the things that he did, but he was fun on a certain level. In Stinson Beach, Garcia and Mountain Girl and Rakow and us lived just walking distance from one another. And so we were always together.
- [31:58]
Jesse Jarno
Even as the Grateful that planned to take a break from the road. The Ship of Fools or Ships of Fools even were still a sail. I'm pretty sure this next story occurred around the time of the band's so called retirement shows. Please welcome back from Grateful Dead and Round Records, Ron Rakow. Garcia and Rakow were the co owners of Round.
- [32:18]
Rich Mahan
We started Round Records and then we owned it. 50 50. And we started a publishing company. We own that 50 50. Then we started a movie company. We owned that 50 50. And then we started the second record company by just reserving the name with the state.
- [32:35]
Jesse Jarno
A second record company.
- [32:36]
Rich Mahan
We started another company called Square Records. I read the Wall Street Journal every day. I always have, even when I was with the Grateful Dead. And I was, I read it Stones a lot of times. So anyway, Columbia Records dropped Vladimir Harwood. He was on their roster. Vladimir Harwood was considered by many to be the world's great classical pianist. I wrote to him and I said we would, we would be honored to represent you in the release of your recorded music. And we would start a label and build it around you and which is what I did with modern music. And it's called Round Records. And I sent him a sample or two of, you know, records that we put out. The Garcia album and Tales of the Great Rum Runners, Robert Hunter's album. Anyway, he said he likewise would be honored. So we started to do that. But his business people couldn't get over this Grateful Dead association. He and I were really in sync, but it never worked with his. I think his wife's family ran his business or some weird shit like that. So anyway, I had all the logos and all the stuff around records. I would just make them square and call it Square Records.
- [34:19]
Jesse Jarno
Oh well, those square records didn't happen. Another Garcia rakow endeavor from 1974 did. To rewind momentarily.
- [34:28]
Rich Mahan
Then we started a movie company. We owned that 5050 round reels would.
- [34:32]
Jesse Jarno
Take a long while to bear fruit. And the next chain of events would shape the next three years of the band's history and even beyond. Like other things in the Dead story, it was the result of their association with the Hells Angels. A young filmmaker had been working on a documentary about the Angels, and their New York chapter president approached Garcia about funding it.
- [34:52]
Rich Mahan
Sandy Alexander came to Jerry, and Jerry said, I can't. I don't do this stuff inside our fan. I use raca. And then. So Sandy called me and said, I want to make an appointment with you and Jerry up at Leon Gast's office.
- [35:09]
Jesse Jarno
In 1973, the young filmmaker Leon Gast met with Garcia Rakow and New York Hell's Angels president Sandy Alexander and committed to making the film that came out 10 years later as Hell's Angels Forever.
- [35:22]
Rich Mahan
It was in what used to be a very famous building. When I was a kid in the apparel trade, it was a building on Broadway in 38th Street. It was famous for housing very successful ladies clothing companies. That whole business changed. And so there was a lot of space, real cheap, and Leon had a big space, real cheap. Jerry and I looked at film every day for a week to decide whether or not we wanted to do the Hells Angels movie. We conceived of Round Reels as our start in the movie business, and the first project was the Hell's Angel Movie.
- [36:00]
Jesse Jarno
The timelines are elongated, unsurprisingly, thanks to Joe Jupiel, we know that Round reels incorporated on August 1, 1974, Jerry Garcia's 32nd birthday, while the Dead were touring out East.
- [36:12]
Rich Mahan
It was an accident, believe me. I never put that together until just now.
- [36:17]
Jesse Jarno
By the fall of 1973, Raquel and Garcia had already started inquiring about the rights to Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, a precursor to his later acquisition of the Sirens of Titan. But the next year, Garcia found a subject a little closer to home, a band with a brand new single. Even the Grateful Dead liked to have meetings and sometimes kept very good notes. When the dead started 1974, they'd planned to record another album in October. And in June, just weeks after finishing the Mars Hotel sessions, they decided, quite sensibly, to push those sessions back, which they did until November. But by August, they decided to pause from the road for a long while, which we've discussed a good deal over the last two episodes. Word of the Grateful Dead's impending retirement got out into the world even before they'd officially decided to take a break. An unsigned item about the Dead's potential retirement appeared under the headline Dead to Go Dormant in the Oakland Tribune on Aug. 4. A rumor denied by Andy Leonard. But the rumor was all but confirmed a few weeks later in Joel Selvin's San Francisco examiner column, headlined, Is the Dead going to Die? From there, it circulated out to the dead freaks back East. Lee Reynaldo had just returned from his summer adventures and was getting ready to begin his freshman year of college.
- [38:03]
Rich Mahan
It was kind of mysterious that they were taking time off and it wasn't very clear at the time. You know, news traveled a lot slower at the time, and it wasn't very clear why they were getting off the road. We'd heard rumors about, like their trip had just gotten too big and incorporated too many people and it just stopped being as much fun. But I don't know, there were darker rumors about maybe, maybe drugs having something to do with it or just a lot of different unclear stuff.
- [38:31]
Jesse Jarno
Here's how Bobby Weir remembered it going down when he was interviewed that October.
- [38:35]
Rich Mahan
I've forgotten who came up with the idea originally. It might have been Danny Rifkin for that matter. But after a particularly grinding tour, which had come on the heels of three relatively grinding tours, it's not that the music was bad, the music was real good, but just the airports and the hotels and everything, everybody was real down. And we were having a general meeting and the idea of, why don't we hang this up for a while and take some of the pressure off. I'm getting old. And everybody just clamored and it seemed just like the thing to do. Ron Rakow when they talked about a time period, they talked about two years, they never talked about one year. So there's that. They were actually talking about stopping being the Grateful Dead, and this was going to tell them whether or not it was a good idea or not. It was a trial stoppage.
- [39:33]
Jesse Jarno
Donna Jean we had been touring for.
- [39:36]
Rich Mahan
So long, and from whose ever perspective it was different, like why we stopped touring at that time. But for me it was like, wow, I get to just be a mom and not be on the road. Which was really hard. If I left Zion behind, it was really hard. If I took him on the road, it was really hard. So my life was very complicated at that time.
- [40:04]
Jesse Jarno
After they decided to take the break, there was still a European tour. We discussed some of the stress points in our Money Money episode, But Donna Jean had her hands full in a very different way.
- [40:15]
Rich Mahan
When we went to Europe that year, which was in September, my sister went to Europe with us and took care of Zion. And that was a. He was about 8 months old then, something like that. And that was really tough because we got to England and Zion had diarrhea and a fever. You know, there were no Pampers in London. And we had to scrounge for baby stuff that we were used to in America. And that was hard. That was really hard.
- [40:47]
Jesse Jarno
The band returned from Europe in late September with only a run at Winterland on their schedule. It was sometime in these weeks that this unfolded.
- [40:55]
Rich Mahan
Gary came to my office. I could tell something was up because he ran from the staircase into my office. And he started talking to me when he was already in the hall. And he gets in. He said, we got to make a movie. This could be the last time the Grateful Dead ever played. So I said, okay. And I got on the phone and I raised the money.
- [41:17]
Jesse Jarno
Without money, forget movies, man, as we like to say. Would that it were so simple.
- [41:23]
Rich Mahan
We needed a lot of money for the movies. In excess of two million dollars. Much closer to two and a half million, I expected. Close to that. Well, first of all, the Hell's angel movie was. There was so much film shot, I couldn't see it costing a lot more.
- [41:41]
Jesse Jarno
Steve Brown of Grateful Dead Records could see the logic in the project.
- [41:45]
Rich Mahan
They thought of it as, I think, a way to say, if we're going to take the breaks coming next year, which was 75, maybe we should give them something to be able to go see and hear. But it can be in a theater.
- [42:01]
Jesse Jarno
But from the start, the Grateful Dead movie was a Jerry Garcia joint.
- [42:05]
Rich Mahan
Jerry, I think, just really felt, yeah, let's do the movie. I kind of really felt he was still the go guy on this thing. And everybody else was kind of like, oh, it's going to interrupt our on the stage playing and things that kind of. Little things like that came up a few times. I think these were kind of in casual talk. They weren't even in the meetings necessarily. They were just kind of when they were talking about it. And then it came to be.
- [42:31]
Jesse Jarno
Everybody just called it the Movie, and we probably will, too. It was good that Rakow had established an open line with the bank of Boston because Jerry Garcia discovered a habit more expensive than buying and smashing eggs.
- [42:44]
Rich Mahan
Nothing burns up money like movies. I mean, cocaine habits don't burn up money like movies.
- [42:50]
Jesse Jarno
The movie was in motion and on relatively short notice. They contacted the filmmaker already in the Round Reels stable.
- [42:57]
Rich Mahan
That's how come Leon Gast got to be the head of production on the Dead movie.
- [43:03]
Jesse Jarno
Leon Gast had a very, very busy autumn in September and October of 1974. He was responsible for filming three different classic documentaries. I'd watch a documentary just about that. While the Dead had been in Europe, Leon Gast was in Africa, if you will.
- [43:19]
Rich Mahan
Let's all welcome the world's Godfather of Soul, Soul brother number one, J.
- [43:26]
Jesse Jarno
Brown.
- [43:33]
Rich Mahan
Dave Brown.
- [43:35]
Jesse Jarno
Dave Brown. Like pretty much every other film we're discussing, the documentary Soul Power took a long time to make it out, but it's an incredible film about the Zaire 74 Music Festival featuring James Brown, Bill Withers, the Fanya All Stars, Miriam Makeba and more. Check it out. Originally, the Zaire 74 festival was supposed to pair with the George Foreman, Muhammad Ali Rumble in the Jungle, which was postponed for a month after Foreman cut himself during training. I'm a little unclear about what unfolded. A lot of the sources say that Leon Gast stuck around Zaire, but he had to have gotten back to San Francisco by early October. Though his incredible Oscar winning film When We Were Kings concludes with the Ali foreman fight on October 30th. I'm not sure that Gast or his partners actually went from Zaire to Winterland back to Zaire. Dissenting opinions welcome. Combined with Hell's Angels Forever, that's four documentaries in progress. His hands were absolutely full.
- [45:00]
Rich Mahan
We had a fellow inside our family of people, Edward Washington, who was a movie freak. He had a lot of connections in San Francisco. Leon just got people that he knew in that, that he worked with in New York and bingo, I mean, there were some important guys. The Maisel brothers, or at least one of them.
- [45:23]
Jesse Jarno
That'd be Albert Maisels with his brother David. He'd been responsible for Gimme Shelter and was in the process of shooting the equally legendary Gray Gardens. Another unlikely cinematic timeline to align with the Dead movie.
- [45:35]
Rich Mahan
The most important guy on the crew in my world was Don Lenzer. If he is not now a famous film shooter, he should be. He was phenomenal.
- [45:47]
Jesse Jarno
Linzer had been on the crew at Woodstock and went on to a distinguished career in documentary filmmaking.
- [45:53]
Rich Mahan
And the next phenomenal one was Kevin Keating. Kevin Keating was a permanent part of Leon's organization.
- [45:59]
Jesse Jarno
Kevin Keating also went from Zaire to Winterland. Steve Brown was assigned to brief them.
- [46:05]
Rich Mahan
So I drew a little thing for them as how the band moves on the stage and told them where the hot areas are to go to. And I get to take them around in Winterland and to the places where the people that are going to be good to film the kind of dancers that you're going to be looking for and that kind of things. And if you go downstairs on their break, they've got this E that are going to be sucking on, which is. And just the crew, not the band.
- [46:57]
Jesse Jarno
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. I don't think it's spoiling anything to say that it would take almost three years to finish and release the Grateful Dead movie. With any luck, we'll spend some time down the road discussing the intricate production. But today we're going to focus almost entirely on the lived experience of what it was like to see the Grateful dead at their five so called retirement shows at Winterland from October 16th through 20th, 1974, lots of which can be heard on the 5 CD box. The grateful Dead Movie With a camera cruise at the ready, the Dead invested the shows with a little more thought than usual.
- [47:53]
Rich Mahan
Ned Lagin the movie Five Nights at Winterland was scripted in the sense that they wanted certain things in the movie, so they set up certain sequences each and every night. It's why I played every night and why they had me set up and where they wanted me set up next to Garcia, etc. To the extent that the sets varied is that they wanted a choice of going from Dark Star into one thing or Dark Star into another thing or another thing into another thing so they could make a choice. There was some discussion about having an acoustic set or doing some acoustic stuff as well, and obviously that didn't happen.
- [48:30]
Jesse Jarno
At Winterland's front door, heads passed under a sign that acknowledged they were being filmed by round reels for a movie provisionally titled There is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert. The phrase came from Hunter and Garcia's old friend Willie Legate. And you can hear this gentleman who is not Willie Legate, repeated in the film.
- [48:48]
Rich Mahan
The bottom line of the whole scene is very simply stated, there is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert.
- [48:57]
Jesse Jarno
Leon Gast and Ron Rakow orchestrated the crew on the ground.
- [49:00]
Rich Mahan
He was directing the crew and we were working very close together. He was at the sound booth and I was behind Jerry. I'm in the movie a million times. I had headphones and the whole crew had headphones.
- [49:13]
Jesse Jarno
The day didn't have much of a choice in the matter. But Winterland was the perfect place to film their retirement. It was home. Gary Lambert, co host of Tales of the Golden Road it was just like.
- [49:25]
Rich Mahan
One of the all time great places to see a Dead show and kind of a dump.
- [49:29]
Jesse Jarno
I mean, it was like it was.
- [49:31]
Rich Mahan
Built as an ice skating arena.
- [49:33]
Jesse Jarno
It had seats.
- [49:35]
Rich Mahan
It had a balcony with seats that were on all four sides. People could sit behind the stage, although not always.
- [49:41]
Jesse Jarno
They sometimes had that section cleared off.
- [49:43]
Rich Mahan
And then just a big dance floor.
- [49:46]
Jesse Jarno
And then there were little auxiliary.
- [49:47]
Rich Mahan
There were bars. You know, like, I think the first.
- [49:49]
Jesse Jarno
Time I ever saw hall dancing was at Winterland.
- [49:53]
Rich Mahan
Perhaps there were some hallways that people would overflow into. You see that guy dancing during Sugar Magnolia in the Grateful Dead movie, The guy in the cowboy hat. She's got everything. Delightful. She's got everything I need.
- [50:17]
Jesse Jarno
Outside tickets were taken by Willie, the Winterland security guard.
- [50:22]
Rich Mahan
Have your ticket out and ready, please. Have your ticket ready. There are two dogs, so you cannot, can't expect me. And I'm sorry, sir. Thank you very kindly. Watch right in and have a good time. Have them out and ready, please. Take it out. And Bo.
- [50:37]
Jesse Jarno
Michael Parrish had been seeing the Dead since the Live Dead run at the Fillmore West.
- [50:41]
Rich Mahan
Willie, was that the guy's name? Bill Graham's forever ticket taker. The big African American guy who's in the Dead movie and the Dead movie. He's, like, friendly, you know, come on, come on in. But usually he was just kind of grumpy.
- [50:56]
Jesse Jarno
Rita Fiedler would go on to work on the animation sequence on the Dead movie and didn't actually attend any of the Winterland shows that fall. But this story really catches the vibe of the place.
- [51:06]
Rich Mahan
There's aspects of the movie that really, really capture beautifully the concourse where the concessions stand rung around the outside. I remember at one point I had ingested a substance, and I was just sort of drifting around. You could easily go between this sort of concession area to back inside, to the show, back and forth. And at one point, I was near an exit, and I really wanted to get some fresh air. And above the. The door to the exit, it said, no, pass out. And there was. There was a cop standing at the door, a security guard, a black guy. And he looked at me and I said, I need to get some fresh air. And he goes, no, pass out. So I said, I'm not going to pass out. You know, it was like I was high as a kite, but I wasn't going to pass out. And I said, no, really, sir, I. I'm fine. I'll be right back. I just need to get some fresh air. So he let me out. So I went out, and then I was able to come back in. Even though I passed outside, I didn't pass out.
- [52:18]
Jesse Jarno
Gary Lambert. It was 5,500 people, but it somehow felt bigger.
- [52:23]
Rich Mahan
And actually, 5,500 was.
- [52:25]
Jesse Jarno
Was what some people considered too big back then.
- [52:28]
Rich Mahan
You know, those of us who have been Spoiled by the Fillmores and those kinds of venues.
- [52:34]
Jesse Jarno
5,500 seemed kind of cavernous. I made a point of getting there.
- [52:38]
Rich Mahan
Early enough to get a good spot on the floor most times, but it was just. It was a great unadorned dump. And it was just perfect for the purpose of a Dead show.
- [52:49]
Jesse Jarno
In some strange way, I certainly never made it to Winterland, but one way to catch the vibe is to check out the umbrella room tone in the space just before the encore.
- [53:19]
Rich Mahan
I saw lots of bands at Winterland. I saw shows of variable sound quality at Winterland. I saw the famous Springsteen shows in December of 78 and shows like that. I mean, I had a long run there because I was there right up to the closing night.
- [53:33]
Jesse Jarno
It could sound terrible.
- [53:34]
Rich Mahan
It could sound like a big, echoey.
- [53:37]
Jesse Jarno
Cavernous place if the sound people didn't.
- [53:39]
Rich Mahan
Have things dialed in right. The Wall of Sound sounded extraordinary in there.
- [53:44]
Jesse Jarno
Jeff Gould would go on to found modulus guitars, but in 1974 was just a serious Bay Area dead freak.
- [53:51]
Rich Mahan
I saw every Wall of Sound show in the Bay Area, starting with the sneak previews in February. I also remember at Winterland being able to sit up high in the rafters and listen and hear perfectly Morning Dew or Ship of Fools. That big vocal harmonies. It was really the best that I thought when I first believed you. When I was at Winterland, I would go all over. I'd be sometimes in front of the stage, or sometimes I'd be in the very last row just to kind of get a different perspective. And, you know, I could be up in the. Up in the rafters and listening to the wall of sound and hearing like Morning Dew or something like that. And it just. It was a very grand experience because you could really hear it. It wasn't just you're far away and everything sounds crappy.
- [54:57]
Jesse Jarno
Multiple nights of the Dead at Winterland was a cause for excitement no matter what. But Joan Brown was a newly minted San Francisco Deadhead in 1974 and left us this story.
- [55:07]
Rich Mahan
In 1974, I was an eighth grader. And going to Myrtle Land was really not what my parents thought was a great idea for a little girl to do. But there were other parents of my friends that were not so strict. And so I would spend the night at their house. And of course we would all go to Winnowland. I think it was in February. It was the first time I really went to the Dead, to Winoland to see the Dead by myself. And it was with a bunch of my little girlfriends and I was hurt. That was it. From that moment on, that's all I wanted to do. And it's all I wanted to listen to. In the fall of 1974, I went to a private high school in San Francisco called Urban. And Urban was probably about six blocks from Winterland. Urban was a hippie, ish alternative high school. For the young and impressionable minds of the Pacific Heights kids in San Francisco. It was kind of a hippie school that we had two classes a day for three hours apiece. Sometimes the kids would smoke in class. Sometimes the teachers would smoke in class. Sometimes the subjects were a little bit off to the left. Sometimes they were right in the center. But one thing that happened in October of 1974. Is everybody was excited because the dad were playing multiple nights at Winterland. And everybody was getting tickets. And if you didn't have tickets, you could always wait in line. So at the afternoon classes, everybody would go and wait in line to grab tickets. But if you're lucky enough to buy your tickets, what we did is during lunchtime, we always had a poker game going. Those Grateful Dead tickets were in the pot multiple times. And multiple times they were won and lots. So I got to go because I won some tickets in the pot during lunch in the poker game.
- [57:34]
Jesse Jarno
Five nights was a lot.
- [57:36]
Rich Mahan
So according to my journal, I. Going to more than one night of a concert was kind of a new thing for me. And I was not really sure how to break it to my parents. But luckily for me, they were hyper focused on the A's being in the World Series. And they were going three nights themselves to the Coliseum. So I didn't have a lot of explaining to do. About where I was going and what I was doing.
- [58:03]
Jesse Jarno
The first couple nights across the bay in Oakland. The A's were cruising to their third straight World Series victory. With Games 4 and 5 taking place in Oakland on the nights of the first two Dead shows.
- [58:15]
Rich Mahan
Those nights I went with my friends. And we arrived super early. Because in those days I was armed with some orange. Sunshine is also referenced in my journal by or code word or. And we got there early so that we could take the acid. And not have to come home to questions by parents when we were kind of out in outer space. And in those days, they let you in super early. And we found seats at Winoland at the time, either if you were a dancer, you went downstairs. If you wanted to be close to the band, you went on the floor. And if you really wanted to see the band, you could go upstairs in the Balcony where people just did not stand up. During the concert. You sat in your seat mostly. And if you wanted to go down, if you wanted to dance, you went downstairs.
- [59:07]
Jesse Jarno
Something that Joan drives home. The Dead were a local band for local people.
- [59:12]
Rich Mahan
Half my high school was there, and half the kids from my neighborhood were there, too. So it never felt like. It felt really intimate. And it felt like this is where the place everybody was. And on Monday, if you didn't have a story to tell about Winoland and the shows, then, you know, you really kind of were out of it. You weren't as cool as you thought you were. But for these shows and the seats that I had, they were like the second row on the right hand side of the balcony. Most of the people around me were there for all the nights of the shows. And we kind of had this unspoken agreement that we would save the seats for each other. And I was lucky to be included in that group. And also in that group were some really cute surfer boys from Marin, who my girlfriend and I were just thrilled to be sitting near. And these people. For every time that the Grateful Dead played at Winterland, we pretty much had the same group and saved this seas for everybody until Winterland closed until about, you know, December of 1978. So this was a really tight group that we had. And I never saw these people outside of going to the Grateful Dead. I never saw them again on Just Around Town. This was the only place that I saw them. And I've considered them friends.
- [60:38]
Jesse Jarno
Strider Brown was our avatar for the Sunshine Daydream gig in Veneta in 72 and provided coverage for us, speaking about Kezar 73 in 74, Strider was traveling around in the way that one can do if you're in your early 20s and it's 1974. Hey, Strider.
- [60:55]
Rich Mahan
I had been traveling up in Western Canada in late September, early October of 74. Me and a friend, Mandy, had gone to visit an old high school friend whose parents were Canadian, lived in Vancouver. So we were in Vancouver. Pretty sure that's where Mandy got word that the Dead are going to be retiring. They're playing their final concerts in about whatever, a week and a half. I'm just taking a guess. And so she took the B line down to the Bay Area. And I made my way down at a slower rate, say. And so that's why I missed the opening night of October 16th. I did hitchhike from Canada down to the Bay Area to make it for the October 74dead shows. And I had to stop in Eugene on the way south.
- [62:02]
Jesse Jarno
Dead fans of All Stripes descended on Winterland however they could. Jerry Pompeili was the house manager at the venue.
- [62:09]
Rich Mahan
I'm in the Grateful Dead movie. There's a scene where me talking to Angelo the Hell's angel on stage, trying to convince him to move his bike off the stage. He'll be here at 5:00. It's not so much you guys, it's.
- [62:23]
Jesse Jarno
The people that you guys have had.
- [62:25]
Rich Mahan
Confrontations with during the years.
- [62:27]
Jesse Jarno
They see someone in here with colors.
- [62:28]
Rich Mahan
On and they remember the time.
- [62:29]
Jesse Jarno
Maybe he got stomped by seven angels and goes berserk.
- [62:32]
Rich Mahan
I mean, I've seen it happen. Well, you know what? Sandy's flying out here from New York.
- [62:37]
Jesse Jarno
And I know he's not taking his.
- [62:40]
Rich Mahan
Patch off, so he's coming along. And then there's another scene which is shot. It's me, but it's shot from behind and it's at the back door and there's two held Hell's Angels trying to worm their way in and me telling them to go off. What you don't see is there's two guys with guns standing on either side of me. But hey, you know, Jeff Gould. The first night, at least I remember getting there early enough to be in line and to be let in. And it was just really fun and joyful to kind of just run into the empty place.
- [63:15]
Jesse Jarno
We've spoken with Jay Curley a few times, most recently on our Watkins Glen episode in the fall of 1974. He'd just made his move to the Bay Area and was ready to see the Dead on their home turf.
- [63:27]
Rich Mahan
I didn't even have a crush walking in the front door. They were so different than east coast shows. I couldn't believe it. Especially the Wednesday, the first show, the 16th. I mean, it went from Seastones, into space, into Warfrat, back into space, into Eyes of the World. And I was like thinking, wow, these west coast shows are really laid back.
- [64:16]
Jesse Jarno
It's a candidate for the jammiest Dead show ever. After closing the first set with a 31 minute playing in the band for the first time in American soil, Ned Legion's Seastones transitioned into a full performance by the Dead, first moving into Warfrat, then Eyes of the world, an 85 minute sequence that was a reverse of the Alexandra palace performance we spoke about last episode.
- [64:38]
Rich Mahan
The genesis of the middle set occurred in March of 74. It was assumed that half the time, not half the time, the Grateful Dead would say we would segue into the Grateful Dead. It turned out to be 25 or 26% of the time, which is still a sizable amount for a separate or quasi separate act. Jay Curley Wonderland got so hot. It was sardine time. But. And Lord knows Bill Graham called it his Schwitz because, you know, he sold the tickets and then they didn't rip them at the door. Brought them to the ticket window and resold them. Jeff Gould, at least, first couple nights. There's also in San Francisco, Heat Wave. You know, I mean, it was like getting close to 100 degrees. So it was like a packed Winterland. You know, it just. It was pretty. Pretty sweaty and crazy up on stage.
- [65:52]
Jesse Jarno
It was fucking chaos. Even more so than the usual Grateful Bed gigs at Winterland. Seriously, go watch the movie. If you track the performances of the movie chronologically, you can see how many people were crowding up there night after night, culminating in the final show on the 20th, where people are almost literally hanging from the rafters. And that's not to mention a certain roadie who is allegedly dropping puddles of acid on people's wrists in order to even get on the stage by the final night. Donna Jean.
- [66:20]
Rich Mahan
It was madness. And it was very lax as far as who got to be on the stage and be backstage as well as on stage, you know, dancing around or, you know, doing their thing. That was then, that's no longer now, that's for sure.
- [66:39]
Jesse Jarno
There's one amazing short sequence of the movie where you see a few kids dancing at the foot of Keith God Show's grand piano, followed a few seconds later by an enormous fireball by the pyrotechnics enthusiast a few feet behind them.
- [66:54]
Rich Mahan
His name was Boots. He was a pyrotechnic guy. And there was a real explosion, many.
- [67:01]
Jesse Jarno
Real explosions constantly through the whole movie. Really. I haven't tracked which night's Boots Jaffe was blowing flames towards the ceiling. Maybe all of them. Hopefully we'll get to talk to Boots sometime.
- [67:13]
Rich Mahan
That was his gig. That was his gig. I don't remember if if that happened elsewhere, but I know it did. Constantly during that time.
- [67:23]
Jesse Jarno
The baby Zion God show had made it to nearly every dead show in 74, but missed Winterland.
- [67:28]
Rich Mahan
When we did the movie Zion, we stayed in San Francisco with the Miyako and Zion's grandparents. Keith's mom and dad took care of him at the Miyako while we did our thing. So he was not at the shows. He was like nine months old, I think. Something like that.
- [67:50]
Jesse Jarno
Exactly like that. Actually, the first night was Bob Weir's 27th birthday, as Phil Lesh reminded. Happy birthday to you Happy birthday to.
- [68:05]
Rich Mahan
You Happy birthday, dear bobby.
- [68:27]
Jesse Jarno
Counting the 50 minutes of seastones and jamming en route into the second set, there were more than four hours of music. One of the longest shows ever. Only four more to go.
- [68:38]
Rich Mahan
And thanks for dropping by. Thanks for being in our movie. Every day of shooting, Jerry and I went in the afternoon, like at noon. We went and found a clump of crew people and sat around and bullshit with them and smoke joints with them and what have you. And they were mostly in a hotel above a man shop on the main street in Sausalito. And we went there and daily and hung out with those guys and talked to him. And Kevin Keating and Don Lenzer shot those meetings. Those meetings are incredible. Incredible. They're on film, a lot of film. There's so much great footage there. It's just. I'm thinking particularly of a day Jerry and I went to meet those guys in the hotel in Sausalito. And somebody said to Jerry, what's the most important thing that the Grateful Dead done for you? And Jerry said everything. I met Dylan. That's what he said I met. He said it like a Breathless fan.
- [69:46]
Jesse Jarno
Garcia had met Dylan a few times, but most fresh on his mind was probably a semi recent jam session in Stinson Beach.
- [69:53]
Rich Mahan
They came up to jam. I don't know what the. What the story was. Dylan was over at. At Jerry's house and Mountain Girl told me about it that evening.
- [70:03]
Jesse Jarno
They was Bob Dylan and David Grisman. Last year I interviewed Grisman for Aquarium Drunkard, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast. And I asked him about this story which took place a few months before the Dead movie was filmed.
- [70:16]
Rich Mahan
I got a call in 1974 out of the blue from Bob Dylan, who I thought it was a joke. Wanted to take a mandolin lesson. So I said, come on over. And an hour or two later he was on my back porch.
- [70:42]
Jesse Jarno
That was the mandolin overdub that Dylan himself played on Blood on the Tracks. If youf See her, say hello. Recorded just a few months after his lessons.
- [70:50]
Rich Mahan
Stayed for three days. I believe we went over Jerry's house during that. She still owes money for that. About $15 a lesson.
- [71:00]
Jesse Jarno
Had to throw that story in there. Jay Curley.
- [71:04]
Rich Mahan
I had a bunch of friends from Connecticut staying with me in my little apartment. We, me and a friend of mine from Columbia, rented a flat in the Fillmore. And it was all of 75 bucks a month. Drunkard's dream if I were to see one. Anyway, no, we went en masse into Winterlands.
- [71:27]
Jesse Jarno
There was just one problem. Well, three problems.
- [71:31]
Rich Mahan
I was semi broke when the tickets went on sale. So I got one for the 20th and then they added the 16th, so I got a 16th. And I didn't have any idea about seeing the other shows. But on that Thursday the 17th, Strider Brown, my old friend, came to my apartment and said, what are you guys doing here? Let's go get some tickets. I said, what are you talking about? It's been sold out for months now. He said, oh, they got tickets at the door. I had showed up on the 17th and like, you know, the mid afternoon or whatever. And they were looking bummed out, Jay and our other friend Mandy. And I said, well, I hear there's tickets for sale at the box office. I may have gotten that hot tip or whatever from somebody. I hitched a ride from down into the Bay area from down I5. We went over there and we bought tickets for the I believe following four nights. To my east coast brain. They just went, what? And so we were living like 10 blocks away from Wonderland. And so we walked over there and there was nobody in line, you know, and in front of the ticket window and this woman was sitting in there looking completely bored. And I went over and said, have you got tickets for tonight? She goes, yeah, how many you want? Almost fell on the ground. I said, do you? How about four? She goes, no problem. Here. Dang, dang, dank, dank. $6 each. I was hip to the trip and so I went on the 18th and 19th and stood in line for increasing amounts of time. And so I was able to see all five shows.
- [73:23]
Jesse Jarno
I love the scenes outside Winterland in the Grateful Dead movie.
- [73:26]
Rich Mahan
You know the Grateful Dead? Sure, I have a ticket. I know, I'm just. Just trying to get my space together so that I can go into the show. I just came from a phone call.
- [73:38]
Jesse Jarno
Been there so many times. In fact, I just came from a phone call and I'm getting my space together right now. The 17th is when our friend Gary Lambert made his entrance from stage left or right even.
- [73:50]
Rich Mahan
I had already determined to move to the Bay Area. The timing just worked out that way. In fact, I think the announcement of.
- [73:58]
Jesse Jarno
The Wonderland show has probably hastened my.
- [73:59]
Rich Mahan
Trip by a few weeks. Weeks.
- [74:00]
Jesse Jarno
But it was really fortuitous timing.
- [74:02]
Rich Mahan
So I saw four out of the five.
- [74:04]
Jesse Jarno
I actually landed in San Francisco the.
- [74:07]
Rich Mahan
Night of the first show on. On the 16th, on Bobby's birthday. And then I saw the last four in a row.
- [74:13]
Jesse Jarno
Gary walked right onto a movie set.
- [74:15]
Rich Mahan
And then there was the phenomena of the movie being made while that was going on. And, you know, there's that famous scene where the guy in the bar is, like, talking about what a load of crap it is. Just up though, this film. Cash off, everybody. This.
- [74:28]
Jesse Jarno
This is the biggest pile of I've.
- [74:30]
Rich Mahan
Ever seen the dad ever do. Oh, you're nuts, man. I remember there was some disgruntlement about.
- [74:36]
Jesse Jarno
Like, camera placements, blocking people's view and stuff like that.
- [74:39]
Rich Mahan
There was like a boom camera, which was not like modern boom camera. It was like actually a guy sitting in a chair, you know, on a boom, which was manually, like, moved around and if you weren't careful, could knock your head off as it. As it panned down toward the stage.
- [74:54]
Jesse Jarno
There was a little point of contention.
- [74:56]
Rich Mahan
There for people who usually had a spot on the floor where they could see everything. And we're kind of being, you know, moved around to make room for that. It seemed minor to me. It didn't really seem terribly disruptive to the enjoyment to me. Jay Curly I stood behind one of the cameras three out of five nights. There was a nice little window where I could see through to the stage right next to the camera. And they never really got in my way. And you see people crawling around the stage with their cameras and. And stuff like that, but they never got in the way.
- [75:29]
Jesse Jarno
Naturally. A few of our friends ended up in the movie. Gary Lambert.
- [75:34]
Rich Mahan
I am actually seen in the Grateful Dead movie in a couple of shots. Look for me during one more Saturday night. It will expose a little editing flaw because I'm singing along and my lips are moving like I think about two beats after the notes are actually sung.
- [76:07]
Jesse Jarno
Jeff Gould.
- [76:08]
Rich Mahan
I'm in the movie during Sugar Magnolia. Some big dude in the crowd in a blue work shirt and a ponytail and a beard dancing.
- [76:18]
Jesse Jarno
After seeing the crowd on the earlier nights, the film crew were able to scout out some talent.
- [76:23]
Rich Mahan
There was one very handsome guy, had a mustache and sort of light reddish hair, brown, light reddish hair. And he knew the words to every song. And sometimes we had him mouthing the words and Jerry singing them.
- [76:39]
Jesse Jarno
It says online somewhere that his name is Greg.
- [76:41]
Rich Mahan
I think his name is Greg. Also Greg.
- [76:44]
Jesse Jarno
If you're out there, get in touch@stories.dead.net they planted him in the front row, and you can see him throughout the movie.
- [77:12]
Rich Mahan
He danced, rinsed his ass off, and his shirt was really sweaty. And at the end of the night, I took off My film crew shirt and gave it. We changed shirts and I went backstage and Jerry, and this is on film. Jerry said, what the fuck happened to you? That was a funny moment.
- [77:30]
Jesse Jarno
There's a wide spectrum of Dead freakdom between the curious and the committed. Cory Arnold, who you may know as the proprietor of the lost Live Dead blog and other endeavors, was in a very particular place in his own arc.
- [77:43]
Rich Mahan
Already seen him twice at Winterland. And this was my third time at Winterland, my fifth Dead show. I was kind of conscious of what I was hearing. I had a couple of Dead bootlegs. I remember that I recognized just about every song. But I didn't come out going, what are those songs? I knew, again, it was a real conscious experience. They play the first set. They do a long playing in the band. I take a break. I was used to the break hanging out. And then the lights come down a little bit and some people come on stage. One person came on stage, it was a keyboard player, it wasn't Keith. And then Phil comes out and he starts tuning up and we're like, what's this? They tune up, tune up, tune up. And of a while, you go, they're not tuning up. And you could feel it on the coming up from your feet. It wasn't like, I didn't say, gee, I want to go home and listen to this, but it was weird. No explanation, no discussion, no fucking idea what was going to go on. And then after 20 minutes, Phil unplugged his bass, walked off stage, and the other guy walked off stage. And no one announced Dead. Nobody said, ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Seastone. They just did. It did add to the weirdness of the whole thing. The next day was Friday. Joel Salvin had gone Wednesday, but because of the time, he couldn't. His Wednesday night report couldn't get into the paper til Friday morning. And in the Friday morning Chronicle, he said between sets, Phil Lesh and keyboard player Ned Lagin played some electronic sounds. And I went, oh, the guy who was on American Beauty. Selvin didn't call it Seastones.
- [79:48]
Jesse Jarno
It was the first public acknowledgement of the electronic performances that Ned and Phil had been staging since late June. The Dead played some of the finest shows of the year. And while we know the Dead returned to the road in 76, every night of the Winterland run marked the final versions of certain parts of the Dead's repertoire. The Thursday show we're talking about, for example, is the last time they did Ramble On Rose with the original vocal arrangement. From Europe 72 with Lesh singing on. The chorus.
- [80:20]
Rich Mahan
Was rambling.
- [80:39]
Jesse Jarno
It was the final one drummer version of the other one at the heart of the second set and the final single drummer version of the impossibly quiet Stella Blue. Crying like the Wind.
- [81:47]
Rich Mahan
It seems like all this life Was just a dream. Jay Curley Either Thursday or Saturday, the crowd just went nuts at the end of the show Before Us Blues, everybody was jumping up and down and yelling with their arms in the air. Phil came around his stack and looked at this oscilloscope, and when he finally got to the microphone, he said, congratulations, people, you make more noise than we do.
- [82:32]
Jesse Jarno
Strider.
- [82:33]
Rich Mahan
And then being October in the Bay Area, the nights are kind of crisp and the air quality is usually really good and the breezes off the ocean and everything. Yeah, it was, you know, call it golden memories. Definitely.
- [82:49]
Jesse Jarno
The shows were everything Joan Brown could have wanted and more.
- [82:53]
Rich Mahan
For those nights. I was the most free and happy and musically inspired that I've ever been in my whole entire life. The Grateful Dead spoke something in me that I could not believe. And I felt like it was such a privilege to be there, and it was such a privilege to look around and realize there really weren't that many girls that like the Grateful Dead at this time and place. And it was really a great time for me as a young teenager to get to know myself. And the Dead were a big, huge part of it.
- [83:30]
Jesse Jarno
Our ultra reliable witness, Michael Parish, was a seasoned head by then.
- [83:34]
Rich Mahan
It was common knowledge that that was. That was kind of the end for now, at least for the Dead. But I have to say, I mean, I got tickets as soon as I knew they'd gone on sale. Santa Cruz drove over to the Sears in Capitola, which was nearest place there was a Ticket Tron outlet, and had no trouble getting tickets. I went to the last three Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
- [84:00]
Jesse Jarno
The Friday show included the last full version of the Weather Report suite with Garcia's beautiful faux steel guitar licks on the Prelude.
- [84:21]
Rich Mahan
We didn't wait. Now tell me why Summer's fade and.
- [84:30]
Jesse Jarno
Roses die Last Ship of Fools for now too. The version on Steal youl Face both Friday and Sunday became three set shows, among the last time the Dead's flexibility flexed in that particular way. Friday the 18th was goodbye to a few more things. It was the last time that Seastones flowed into a Dead set and it was a doozy. Ned Legion and it was already known.
- [85:38]
Rich Mahan
In advance that at least three of all five nights we would do electronic music. And at least three of Those nights, it would segue into the Grateful Dead. The goal was to get Dark Star, Warf Rat, Morning Dew, and some of the others where Jerry liked what I did and how I helped shape the flow.
- [86:12]
Jesse Jarno
The Seastone set on the 18th was a high point for many. Jay Curley was ready.
- [86:17]
Rich Mahan
The Friday show is my personal favorite. I do have a memory of having a wonderful conversation with this pretty lady. And all of a sudden Ned comes out and she goes, oh, I hate this. And she runs into the lobby and it's like, oh, well, so much for that.
- [86:34]
Jesse Jarno
Michael Parrish.
- [86:35]
Rich Mahan
Ned and Phil to Dark Star in the Morning Dew. That was just transcendent. Probably the musical high point of that whole week, for sure. I still think that that's one of the best pieces of music I ever heard. The Grateful Dead.
- [87:15]
Jesse Jarno
Jeff Gould.
- [87:17]
Rich Mahan
It's just beyond the crazy bio sonic sounds or whatever you want to call it. He's a good musician, too. Like, some of them had a really good flow more than others, but there was definitely a cool thing. It just. Once again, it's not Casey Jones. It takes so many forms. The Ned and Phil show is a pretty extreme thing, but it was all part of where everybody was going. Ned Legion, October 18th. Going from the Seastones through a jam into Morning Dew. Garcia and Phil, in particular, understood the significance of that. And doing that with Eyes of the World also had significance. It wasn't that these people were just playing what came into their heads at the time. Oh, I loved it. At that point, I think I'd already gone down the Charles Ives rabbit hole. And, I mean, it was fascinating. It was so loud and just so different than anything you would normally associate with even the Dead's weirdest jams. But again, the way that the Ned and Phil part of that show flowed into the Dead coming out was really just perfect.
- [89:00]
Jesse Jarno
In 1981, David Gann spoke with Phil Lesh about this segment included in his book Conversations with the Dead, which we've linked to@dead.net.
- [89:10]
Rich Mahan
There was one nice time at Winterland, in fact, the posing Winterland, when it sort of drifted in. Yeah, that was great. That was great. Night at Dark Star. That was fabulous. That was fabulous. It's in the movie, and Ned is in the movie, but he hasn't got any credits.
- [89:26]
Jesse Jarno
That's also in the category of getting ahead of ourselves. In 1974, as the dead prepared to retire from the road and make their new album, the horizons of Seastones were a bright color in their musical landscapes.
- [89:39]
Rich Mahan
Yeah, that Seastone stuff is just amazing. Seastones into Dark Star, into Morning Dew. I mean, whoa. I listen to it once a year at least.
- [90:08]
Jesse Jarno
It was the last version of Darkstar until 1978, the last of the single drummer era, and in that way, the last of a developing thread that had grown from a Jam in September 1967 and developed gradually over the next seven years. It was definitely the end of an era.
- [90:27]
Rich Mahan
While we go, you and I While We Care. October 19th. For the first six or seven minutes of the set two performance, I go out and play synthesizer alone. And I used rhythm boxes and computer control, rhythm boxes that I had built from popular electronic circuitry to generate electronic machine rhythms. Today we take it for granted that people can have electronic drums and electronic percussion, but we no longer have the duality, oh, it sounds like a machine or it sounds like a robot. It's robot music. Or, you know, all the derogatory terms that, that I hear. One guy came up, I think it was during the movie and there's movie footage for this. When I was playing solo synthesizer before Phil had come out, a guy came up and right in my face on stage and reached out to touch the synthesizer and I just brushed his hand away. And he sat there for a while and then he just cooled out. He was in some place. If he had been angry, I would assume that he would just knock stuff over or been really hostile. He felt more like he was in a very young child state. And Garcia, Garcia said to me, he said. After that, he said to me, you know, it's really far out. Really amazing stuff happens when you play. Some of it cool and some of it's not cool. He said that one was really cool.
- [93:23]
Jesse Jarno
There were so many departures from the songbook during the Saturday show that we'll only note a few. It was the last time they played the original up tempo Friend of the Devil before it slowed down for Mars Hotel. It was the last version of loose Lucy until 1990, the final version with Donna Jean Godshow. Jump back a few episodes for more about that. For some reason, they played Mama Tried for the first time since August 71, which is a mite sloppy. Garcia and Donna do Dolly Parton's Tomorrow Is Forever for the first time since 72, and the last time with the Dead.
- [95:16]
Rich Mahan
Ever, Joan Brown in 1974. I had mostly just listened to albums with my ear pressed against the speaker. And now as I sat in Wonderland, the music hit me. It hit me so much that even though I was in my seat, all I. I just couldn't even contain myself. My favorite Song before these shows was Let It Grow from the Wake of the Flood album. After these shows it became Scarlet Begonias. I picked up my matches, was closing the door, had one of those flashes. I'd been there before, been there before. While most of the other guys in the group were always talking about the guitar and how Jerry was playing or how Bob was playing or even Phil, me as a girl, I was mostly focused on Donna and how she was swaying back and forth on stage and the joy with which Jerry was playing. I just remember being so captivated by his smile and his expressions and the appreciation that he had with playing for the music. And that's really what I remember from those shows mostly is my admiration for Jerry. And after those shows, Scarlet Begonias was definitely my favorite song. I was always a boogier, but this was it for me.
- [97:01]
Jesse Jarno
And if you check out the bonus disc for the Dead movie dvd, you can watch the long jammed out final single drummer, Scarlet Begonias. The tickets for the show on the 20th were stamped the last one for reasons we discussed before. There are very few ticket subs from Winterland shows, but there are several from this run. And Grateful Dead is misspelled G R E A T E F U L. For Deadheads in attendance, every song might be its last performance.
- [97:53]
Rich Mahan
And now, ladies and gentlemen, here he is, the 43 year old Perfect Master, Mr. Bill Graham.
- [97:59]
Jesse Jarno
Bill Graham nailed the dialogue, understanding the assignment and delivering one of his, his great truths.
- [98:05]
Rich Mahan
Thank you, thank you for coming. As it should be on a Sunday night in San Francisco. The grateful Day.
- [98:13]
Jesse Jarno
Strider.
- [98:14]
Rich Mahan
The final night, Jay, our friend Mandy, myself and a couple other people. I know that we got seats in the front row balcony on the north side of Widerland Auditorium. And we sat next to Shay Ray or Ray Sewell, who was down from Eugene with his partner at the time, Joyce, and their fellow partner Dave, who was also in the restaurant business with Jay Ray. So it was a pretty cool vantage point in perspective. Certainly I can say I was high as a kite. And watching them open up with cold rain and snow was very exciting.
- [99:18]
Jesse Jarno
The first set contained the final American Beauty song played with the original vocal vocal blend.
- [100:00]
Rich Mahan
And then seeing the second drum set being set up, that was like anticipation, whatever it might be. It was a charged atmosphere from Grateful.
- [100:12]
Jesse Jarno
Ed Records and Round Wheels. Ron Rackow.
- [100:16]
Rich Mahan
Two guys came to me that are really heavy in the Grateful Dead and really heavy in my life. 2. Two guys, both from Pendleton, Oregon. Rex Jackson and Ramrod. We were making a movie in October 1974. We were playing at Winoland, and the night before the last gig, Rex Jackson came to me because I was producing the movie. And he said, you know, we talked about it, we being he and Ramrod, really, and I guess some other guys were around, but he meant he and Ramrod. We talked about it, and we'd like to get Mickey up on stage and have him be in the movie. That. That's part of our history. And I said, that's a great idea. So they called Mickey the next morning, and Geraldine answered the phone and she said, rex Jackson and Ramrod are on the phone for you. And he said, no, I don't want to talk to anybody that's not in the band. She said, I think you should do that. You should take this phone call. So for one time, he easily relented, I guess, because he had good feelings about those two guys. And they told him they wanted to come out and get his drum shit and set it up at Winoland. And he said, is it okay with the other guys in the band? And they said, of course. So they didn't even know. The fact is, they didn't even know. Nobody knew this was going to happen. But equipment guys, the equipment guys, as a block, a political block in a lifestyle, in a tribe, had so much power that they could execute it in this kind of way. It's pretty fucking amazing. The guy that really could have stopped it and didn't was Kreutzman.
- [102:11]
Jesse Jarno
Feelings were shifting things and would keep shifting, but in that moment, the return of Mickey Hart was no easy thing. In his memoir, Deal, Billy, Kreutzman made a point of addressing this night and the sudden reappearance of his erstwhile drumming partner, writing, I've never really spoken publicly about this, but I'll be clear here. I objected to having Mickey sit in with us that night, and I think I was probably somewhat vocal about that Backstage. I enjoyed being the only drummer, and I didn't want that to change. I got territorial about it. Mickey didn't know the new material, and we hadn't rehearsed or played with him in years, so I didn't think that it could possibly be any good, and it wasn't that night. Personally, I was insulted that everybody else backstage rallied behind Mickey. The whole situation became really uncomfortable for me.
- [103:00]
Rich Mahan
Grisman was a very, very gracious guy. You know, he really was secure in his position because he didn't stop it. So Mickey played. But at that point, the band stopped going out on tour, so we didn't know whether Mickey would be included. When, as and if a resurrection happened, nobody knew. Nobody knew. And then it just happened. If somebody is responsible for that. Of Mickey getting back into the Grateful Dead, it's Rex Jackson.
- [103:32]
Jesse Jarno
Since Kreutzman had asked him to leave the band in 1971, also detailed in Deal, Mickey had gradually started to welcome his former bandmates to sessions at his Barnes studio, collaborating at different points with everybody but Kreutzman on various studio projects. Donna Jean GodShow McKay had recorded for Robert Hunter's Tales of the Great Rum Runners, but somebody else may have been engineering that session.
- [103:54]
Rich Mahan
But the first time I met Mickey was when we were making the movie at Wonderland, while I was in the band. He played the first time with the Grateful Dead. I don't think I had met him before that.
- [104:08]
Jesse Jarno
To Heads at Winterland, it was pretty obvious what was about to go down when the second drum kit went up. Jay Curley was up with Strider Brown in the balcony.
- [104:16]
Rich Mahan
I had some incredible pot that smoked me into a psychedelic state. But as soon as I saw them bringing out more drum risers, I said, whoa, something's going on here. I hadn't taken acid for any of the shows, so I ran down to the floor and just said, does anybody have any acid? And the guy in front of me turned around and said, here, asking ye shall receive. Yeah. As soon as I saw that drum riser, I knew that I needed some acid and danced my brains out for all five nights. Really. It was incredible. He came for playing in the band and then he was there for the third set as well.
- [105:29]
Jesse Jarno
Mickey Hart had a co writing credit on the song, but had only performed on the song's debut version three years earlier. You can hear Ned Sintson there too. Michael Parish.
- [105:40]
Rich Mahan
You know that that third night was. Was so emotional because, well, I mean, you knew what was happening. And then. And then Nikki showed up. I mean, you could. You can see it in. In the movie too, but I mean, you could see that they were really emotional about it as well.
- [106:22]
Jesse Jarno
Ned Lagin was in the mix, just as he had been on Mickey Hart's last show on February 18, 1971.
- [106:29]
Rich Mahan
And after that, the Grateful Dead were retired. So it wasn't like you were joining a band. It was like I was there for the last iteration playing keyboards in the band, but I was never a member of the band. And my goal personally was to play with them because I enjoyed it, but to also do my own thing.
- [106:50]
Jesse Jarno
Jay.
- [106:51]
Rich Mahan
Yeah, everybody was really excited about the Good Love and having not heard it since Pig died.
- [107:10]
Jesse Jarno
In singing Good Lovin at Winterland, Weir actually became the third Grateful Dead vocalist to sing the song, which had begun as a Garcia vehicle in 66 before Mr. Penn took it over in 69. Deep into the encore in the 20th, they played a powerful Mississippi Half Step. And it's hard not to hear Garcia leaning into the Fare Thee well bent in the lyrics.
- [107:32]
Rich Mahan
If all you've got to live for is what you left behind get yourself a powder charge and steal that silver mine.
- [107:47]
Jesse Jarno
In our Ro Jimmy episode, we unearth the wonderful story from an old David Ganz interview in which Hunter discusses Half Step as being about his own journey to get on his way and start his life for real. Many rivers to cross Moving to the Bay Area, Gary Lambert was still working on his unpublished guitar player profile of Bobby. Weird.
- [108:39]
Rich Mahan
I saw him the last night at Winterland in October 74 and you know, and there was talk this is the end, this is the end of the Grateful Dead. And Bobby just said, you ain't seen the last of us. And he was very confident of that.
- [108:53]
Jesse Jarno
And then Bobby talked more about that. When we spoke after the tour was.
- [108:59]
Rich Mahan
Over and after the Winterland shows, there were so many things contributing to it.
- [109:03]
Jesse Jarno
But he also spoke very optimistically about.
- [109:06]
Rich Mahan
The future because they were already starting to make plans for Blues for Allah and all of that. Bobby had some preliminary tunes in his head.
- [109:17]
Jesse Jarno
This is how Bob Weir described it the day after the final Winterland show in an interview conducted for the movie included in the Look Back documentary on the 2004 DVD.
- [109:27]
Rich Mahan
Well, I view it as one big continuum. I see nothing ending and nothing beginning right now. I've been working at something for the last 10 or 12 years that I'm just continuing to work on. I'm going to start to focus more on a particular aspect that being my recording career, but it's my music that I've been working on.
- [109:48]
Jesse Jarno
Within a month, Weir would debut his new band, Kingfisher, Lazy Lightning.
- [109:59]
Rich Mahan
A sleepy fire in your eyes Is that desire in the sky I keep on trying but I, I can't get through.
- [110:11]
Jesse Jarno
Billy Kwertzman felt that way too. Interviewed a few days after the so called retirement now in the Look Back documentary.
- [110:18]
Rich Mahan
I think it was played up as the last concert a lot, you know, but I just, I just think a cooling period of time where we can just find our own ways. And it's really nice right now to just be able to sit back for a few months and know that you don't have to make an airplane flight and that you feel really good. You got a good place to live. That's just. That's all I need. I don't have to worry about the band. The band I think will take care of itself. When the time feels really good. We'll get together, rehearse new material, probably do another album after Christmas. I hope we do. And this time I hope we find an engineer that we work with real well.
- [110:52]
Jesse Jarno
Sorry, Roy Siegel. Keith and Donna didn't get to weigh in on how they felt at the.
- [110:57]
Rich Mahan
End of the concert. Keith and I got dosed at the last gig and that's when the camera crew were coming out at our house at Stinson beach to do our interview for the movie. And everybody got dosed and nobody. The cameraman couldn't work. Keith and I couldn't talk. You know, that's why we don't have an interview in the movie is we got so dosed that last night.
- [111:25]
Jesse Jarno
The so called retirement was an attempt to reset and recenter themselves creatively and otherwise. Having just arrived in the Bay area and seen five dead shows in a row, Jay Curly had a healthy music head's perspective on it.
- [111:38]
Rich Mahan
Everybody was saying, oh my God, everything's gonna end. I'll never see Jerry again. And that didn't really make a whole lot of sense to me because sitting in my pocket was a ticket for Halloween worth Jerry and Merle. So I said, oh, okay, well I guess I'll just go see Jerry and Merle a million times. Which is what I did. The first show was on a Wednesday. The Sunday before that, Tuna played for free in Golden Gate Park. The weekend after that, Sun Ra played at the Keystone Corner. And it was just like music everywhere all the time. I just couldn't believe it.
- [112:19]
Jesse Jarno
It turned out to be a pretty life changing five nights for Jeff Gould.
- [112:23]
Rich Mahan
Quite tiring. At the end of five nights you went all five nights, you know. And most of us did go. My wife had just returned from a Peace Corps in Africa and we knew each other in high school. And so that was our first time. Easel date was the first night of the five night series.
- [112:40]
Jesse Jarno
Happy almost 50th. The show's also sparked an idea.
- [112:44]
Rich Mahan
Phil's playing his bass and I noticed this huge freaking lambswool strap he's got on. And I'm thinking, boy, that bass must be heavy. And at the time I had started that summer working in this aerospace down down peninsula, Ford Aerospace. We were building satellite antennas and stuff like that. One more famous things is the Voyager, you know, that's still out there. That's been great. But what I was doing the daytime was building structures that were like, lightweight and strong. Because when it takes something in outer space, it costs a lot of money for every kilogram that you have to lift into orbit.
- [113:27]
Jesse Jarno
A few episodes back, we noted that before it got codified into the Wall of Sound, Lesh thought of it as the gantry system. After the scaffolding system used to launch heavy objects into orbit, it just seemed.
- [113:40]
Rich Mahan
To me that this base was really heavy. So I went back and talked to some of my supervisors and then I contacted Alembic. So basically what I did was I came back to Alembic to the, the repair shop and brought them a bunch of trinkets. I can't remember why. Little pieces of stuff made from these materials. It turned out they were very interested and Rick and Ron came down to visit me at the plant.
- [114:07]
Jesse Jarno
Journalist Brian Anderson, working on a book about the Wall of Sound, Loud and Clear, has made it a mission to track down as many pieces of the Wall as possible. We've linked to Brian's project@dead.net deadline. Please welcome back Brian Anderson. The Dead would kind of bequeath some.
- [114:24]
Rich Mahan
Of that gear to groups at their discretion, you know, Bay Area bands, buddy.
- [114:31]
Jesse Jarno
Bands that they could sort of trust. So even in its afterlife, the Wall.
- [114:36]
Rich Mahan
Of Sound was really kind of a valuable resource in that regard. And I've also spoken with some other various tech and crew folk who ended up taking little parts of the system for themselves to incorporate into their home stereo setups, for example.
- [114:55]
Jesse Jarno
So nothing huge, we're talking maybe like.
- [114:59]
Rich Mahan
A pair of 12 inch speaker drivers.
- [115:01]
Jesse Jarno
Or something, or maybe a cabinet or two.
- [115:03]
Rich Mahan
So there was a little bit of.
- [115:04]
Jesse Jarno
That going on as well.
- [115:06]
Rich Mahan
In other cases, bits of the Wall of Sound just sort of eked out.
- [115:10]
Jesse Jarno
Literally around the globe, and a small part of it actually ended up in my living room.
- [115:15]
Rich Mahan
I purchased a unit in the most recent Sotheby's auction.
- [115:19]
Jesse Jarno
And to my knowledge, it is a.
- [115:21]
Rich Mahan
Vocal fill monitor from the Wall of Sound. And it weighs, you know, 65 pounds. I could crawl into it, it's that big and it's sitting in the corner of my living room and it's a literal hunk of junk to some eyes.
- [115:40]
Jesse Jarno
But, you know, knowing some of the.
- [115:43]
Rich Mahan
Places it's been and all of the.
- [115:45]
Jesse Jarno
Sound waves that flowed out of it.
- [115:47]
Rich Mahan
And the people who were able to experience music flowing through it just sort.
- [115:54]
Jesse Jarno
Of, you know, it gives me that.
- [115:55]
Rich Mahan
Woo woo feeling, if you will.
- [115:58]
Jesse Jarno
Richie Pechner had helped build the wall.
- [116:00]
Rich Mahan
The truth is they were just cabinets, you know, they're speaker cabinets. So if you were a guitar player and you could get Pona Jerry's twin 12 inch JBLs, that was it. People had friends and it just kind of all got disseminated around Phil's bass cabinets. There were so many of those, you can give them away for a year. People that knew people. It wasn't like they had a sale, per se.
- [116:28]
Jesse Jarno
One of the bands that inherited parts of the Wall were Osiris, a Palo Alto group fronted by Kevin McKernick, Pigpen's younger brother. We included this story a few seasons back, but we'll put it in its proper chronological place now. Please welcome back Osiris Rode.
- [116:44]
Rich Mahan
Sully and Garcia really had a soft spot for Kevin, way beyond any sort of standard person that's in the music industry. And so Kevin and I drove up to the Dead office because, you know, Kevin was putting together this band with his friends, you know, Scott and the other Kevin and Al and Sam Sheets and Keith Moore played with them too. And Kevin and I drove up and his brother Studebaker Kevin Ole Leadfoot. We got up there and Garcia basically just gave us, or gave him hope. Truck bed full of like Mac amps and those speakers, the hard trucker speakers that were part of the Euro72 tour and most likely were in the Wall of Sound. You know, that's kind of half the battle is getting decent gear. So they started playing gigs like they did free shows at Stanford Frost M Theater, but also up by the Tressiter.
- [117:43]
Jesse Jarno
Union Strider and Jay saw Osiris open for Garcia and Saunders on Halloween that year even. Here's a little bit of Osiris hook, line and sinker, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast. Thanks, Sully.
- [117:56]
Rich Mahan
I know that you've been fishing for quite some time look for a man who will take your life says she loves just about all the time when jump for joy stop.
- [118:15]
Jesse Jarno
All she wants.
- [118:16]
Rich Mahan
Knows she is.
- [118:26]
Jesse Jarno
More than bands getting pieces of the Wall of Sound. Were bands influenced by the Wall of Sound? Ron Long left us this awesome story.
- [118:34]
Rich Mahan
We were a Dead cover band in the 1970s and we lived in Oldsmar, Florida, in a place called the Oldsmar Hotel. We felt cosmically connected to the Dead all the time. And we went to D.C. to hear the Wall of Sound. We were blown away by the sound and we went back and created our own system with custom JBL15s on base, reflex cabinets powered by Crown Cerwin Vega and Phase linear amps run through an Altogether glancing mixing board we stacked the barks and ran all our instruments through the mixer and we killed it in clubs and outdoor concerts. That's how they became the barks.
- [119:33]
Jesse Jarno
The quality and intention of the wall of sound were obvious. The actual signal chain could be harder to discern. That is how to create one sound from several individual PAs and no mixer. One band influenced by seeing the PA behind the band was the German group CAN, who we heard from a little bit last time. We're going to repeat a bit from our Europe 72 season when CAN's engineer Renee Tinner told us about a photo of the dead, possibly from Munich 74 and how that sent the CAN engineering team down a new path.
- [120:31]
Rich Mahan
I got the inspiration from a picture in the paper of their equipment set up on one of those concerts they had in Germany. It inspired my colleague and me to take up that spirit of having a wall of sound behind the band.
- [120:58]
Jesse Jarno
They didn't have schematics and could only do what they saw in the photo.
- [121:02]
Rich Mahan
We just practically groomed any loudspeaker we could find in the studio and mounted it on a construction kind of. There were not boxes with. There was nothing on the back, just all these speakers behind the band. No boxes really, you know, with church loudspeakers mounted one to each other. Most of the speakers were pretty shitty speakers, apart From a few JBL's and the rest was crap. I cannot even say what it was.
- [121:44]
Jesse Jarno
In photos of the era, the band are centered around something that looks like the wall center cluster.
- [121:49]
Rich Mahan
I doubt it was the same quality as of the Dead. I cannot say because I didn't hear. But the inspiration came of having many speakers behind the band.
- [122:04]
Jesse Jarno
I'm pretty sure that system is in effect on the newest Cannes archival release recorded in Aston in 1977, available from mute Records. An audience tape even. Perhaps the wall of sound's biggest impact came with two bands you almost certainly wouldn't expect, including one of the most popular in the world. Big thanks to Queen City Jams for helping us to this info. The first were underground legends and noted Deadhead's black flag in 1986, days after black Flag played their final show, they were spotted in the parking lot at Alpine Valley, catching some Dead gigs on the way home. It was sometime on that last tour as well that their soundman Dave Ratt convinced them to try stacking the gear behind the band without monitors, he wrote on his blog. On the upside, the system was incredibly clear sounding, while on the downside, it sounded a bit distant and the sound Bleeding into the mics was cumbersome enough not to continue with that setup.
- [123:41]
Rich Mahan
I can move. I can.
- [123:59]
Jesse Jarno
20 years later, Dave Ratt got to try again. By then, he was running sound for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The evolution of sound systems, from giant globs of speakers to finesse full narrow line arrays created the opportunity to cover large venues with multiple systems utilizing minimal space. The entire Wall of sound was 26,000 watts. Current systems run at 10 times that power and are a fraction of that size. Plus, we now have the capability of effectively predicting the sonic coverage in a venue based on room dimensions. What this means is that with today's sound system technology, multiple sound systems can be hung conventionally to either side of the band, rather than stacked behind them without blocking sight lines, creating an inconspicuous yet effective implementation of the concept. After testing out systems at home using live multitracks, Rat first wanted to run three systems, but decided that the addition of a third system was subtle compared to expanding to just two. I'm not sure how long that system stayed in use, but in 2006 anyway, the red Hot Chili Peppers were touring with a wall influenced speaker system.
- [125:08]
Rich Mahan
Rest in peace.
- [125:30]
Jesse Jarno
The Wall of Sound became legend. But first it had to earn its name. There are some in print references from 1974 to the PA being called the Wall of Sound, but the name didn't really catch on until sometime in the 1980s. Brian Anderson.
- [125:45]
Rich Mahan
It sort of came after the fact, the tag, you know, wall of Sound.
- [125:51]
Jesse Jarno
The next year, Alembic published a paper about what was still just called the Grateful Dead system that was published in.
- [125:58]
Rich Mahan
1975, I believe, in the Audio Engineering Society of America. That paper was divided into two parts. The first was written by Don Davis of Synergetic Audio Concept in California and.
- [126:13]
Jesse Jarno
Right.
- [126:13]
Rich Mahan
Part two was by Ron Wickersham of.
- [126:16]
Jesse Jarno
Alembic, and that was presented at the 51st Convention of the AES in May of 1975.
- [126:26]
Rich Mahan
By that point, spring of 1975, all parties who were involved in this magnificent.
- [126:34]
Jesse Jarno
Sound project had had a moment to.
- [126:36]
Rich Mahan
Sort of like reflect and just sort.
- [126:39]
Jesse Jarno
Of like digest everything that had happened. And yeah, that paper coming out in.
- [126:46]
Rich Mahan
A respectable journal, that was huge.
- [126:50]
Jesse Jarno
At the time, the system had been an incredible experiment and really quite dangerous. Another thing that I find so remarkable about the Wall of Sound is that.
- [126:59]
Rich Mahan
No one died as a direct result of working on this thing. No one got crushed under a heap of speakers. Nobody fell three stories off the top of the scaffolding when they were tilting.
- [127:11]
Jesse Jarno
A cabinet way up there.
- [127:13]
Rich Mahan
Nobody got electrocuted to death.
- [127:14]
Jesse Jarno
Like, it's amazing that nothing like that happened.
- [127:19]
Rich Mahan
If you talk to some folks who were there working on that thing, when they were setting that thing up, it was like that was kind of sober time. Like, no one was drinking, no one was getting too fucked up because the risk was too high, the margin for error was razor thin, and they just.
- [127:37]
Jesse Jarno
Weren'T going to risk that.
- [127:38]
Rich Mahan
But even still, at a time before, like, OSHA standards were really, really, really strict, nobody got seriously injured or died as a direct result of working on the wall of sound.
- [127:49]
Jesse Jarno
Owsley did fall off the scaffolding at some point, possibly in Oakland, and hurt his arm. But by 1975, the wall of sound had disappeared. The Mars Hotel itself wasn't long for the world either. We got this fun story from listener Gregory Barrett.
- [128:06]
Rich Mahan
Back in the early 1970s, I used.
- [128:08]
Jesse Jarno
To take any visiting friends to the Hotel Mars in San Francisco.
- [128:15]
Rich Mahan
I wouldn't tell them where I was taking them, but it was part of the tourist destination list that I had. And we'd hang out in the lobby. Imagine my surprise when I saw the album come out.
- [128:29]
Jesse Jarno
It reminded me of how I felt.
- [128:31]
Rich Mahan
When I lived in Turlock, California, and they dedicated an entire side of Europe, 72, to the people of Turlock, California. Of course, by now I need to tell you that this next number rose straight to the top of the charts in Turlock, California, numero uno. And stayed there for a week or two. They loved us in Turlock and we love them for that. It just goes to Show there's only 300 of us in the world. We all just run around real fast.
- [129:01]
Jesse Jarno
Sometime in 1975 or 1976, the last residents were kicked out of the Mars Hotel and the hotel was gutted. Ron Rackow is president of Grateful Dead Records.
- [129:12]
Rich Mahan
I have the sign that identified the Mars Hotel as the Mars Hotel. I was in my office in San Rafael. Somebody walked upstairs, right in, didn't even stop. Like he knew everybody, which he didn't. And he said, I just went to the auction of all the stuff at the Mars Hotel and I want you to have this. And he gave it to me and turned around the left. I don't even know who the guy's name is.
- [129:36]
Jesse Jarno
Rakow still has it on the front door of his room.
- [129:38]
Rich Mahan
It says, Hotel Mars rooms. Those are all equal sized, big letters, 3 inch letters by the day, comma, week or month, hot and cold water, steam heat in every room.
- [129:55]
Jesse Jarno
Sometime around then, the crew working on the animated opening Sequence for the Grateful Dead movie caught wind of the impending destruction. Rita Fiedler.
- [130:04]
Rich Mahan
I lived on Brunel Hill, which is right on the edge of the Mission District. And the route I took to go over to Mill Valley and I would occasionally drive by a portion south of Market street where the. The actual Mars Hotel was. It was on its last leg, so to speak. It had been, I think, marked for demolition. And I just took note of it. It was just like a half, you know, just something you notice as you're driving by. Well, I. I began to see there was more activity, more activity on certain times that I drive by, like, oh, my gosh, they're really starting to take down this building. And I mentioned it to Gary and I said, you know, that the actual Mars Hotel, you know, it's down there south of Market, and they're really serious about demolishing that. You know, maybe we should. We should do something about it. So we scrambled and Gary got a camera and several of us, a handful of us, went down to the site because I said, you know, Gary, really, really, we need to do this. It's going to happen really soon. There was actually just the front wall literally standing. So when we got there, that's indeed what had happened. That it was the very last push that Gary was able to film of this bulldozer boom knocking down the front marquee that said Mars Hotel. All of that, yeah, Pretty dramatic.
- [132:06]
Jesse Jarno
The Ship of Fools kept sailing in and out of the mists of Grateful dead history after 1974. No doubt a ghost ship where one might find the spirits of precarious Lee Cadillac, Ron, some friends of rock, Scully's friends, and the embodiment of every earnestly intentioned bad decision in the band's history. Or maybe your own. We're listening to the Boston 76 take. Around the time the Mars Hotel got knocked down. A sweet spot for the song is between the band's 76 comeback through 1978, often with a lovely vocal blend with Donnajean Godsho and lyrics that were always timely. Like Garcia once noted, topical song, topical lyrics. And I'll add topical guitar solo, too. Ship of Fools was a song that never exactly jammed, but Jerry Garcia consistently placed it in the heart of things in the second set. In an interview in 1999 on WCUW in Worcester, late vault keeper Dick Lotvalla discussed why, even though there was no jam in Ship of Fools, hearing it live was still different than listening to it on from the Mars Hotel, even though we recommend doing that too.
- [133:35]
Rich Mahan
It's how they play it. Any of their tunes can do something special to you. Even a Ship of Fools. I remember once crying during one. I was thinking, wow, that is powerful. I overlook it most of the time. Or terse of songs that seem repetitious or the same every time. Sometimes they aren't the same and sometimes they affect you in ways that they didn't before because you hear it differently. It's a matter of education and learning. It's not something fixed.
- [134:07]
Jesse Jarno
Now that's what I call music. In Elvis Costello was seemingly the first outside the Dead world to take up the song.
- [134:14]
Rich Mahan
I went to Barbados in 1990 and I at the time was trying to negotiate with the attractions to try and make a record and it didn't work out. But at the time that I was planning on doing that, I took what had been the band I'd played with to to Barbados to Eddie Grant's studio and we recorded a bunch of rock and roll songs just for fun. It was like a rum drinking holiday. Funny you should mention, you know, that was before I quit drinking. And we had a lot of fun. We caught how and Wolf Songs and and Screaming Joe Hawkins songs and Supreme Songs. And I cut Ship of Fools. I won't slip the biggest pain likewise Gold and Jew. But I would slave to learn a.
- [135:10]
Jesse Jarno
Way to sink your ship of fool.
- [135:14]
Rich Mahan
And I gave Ship of Fool's Day the dedicated album. And you know, I learned to play that one. And It Must have been the Roses, which I felt were related somehow, maybe harmonically. They are related.
- [135:58]
Jesse Jarno
Man, do we love It Must have Been the Roses. Dig into our Tales from the Great Rum Runners bonus episode if you do too. We checked though, and while the songs were both part of the crop debuted by the dead in 74 and there's definitely something similar about how Garcia played them. And there's a conceptual connection to the waves rolling the ships in roses. Harmonically speaking, it's an entirely Vibes based segue. Still, cool movie. See, all I know is I could.
- [136:27]
Rich Mahan
Not leave her there. The bottle stand is empty cause they were filled before.
- [136:44]
Jesse Jarno
Along with New Speedway Boogie, it might be the Dead's most eternally topical song. Unlike New Speedway Boogie, the Dead kept playing Ship of Fools year in and year out. And it could mean something different every single time and probably did.
- [136:58]
Rich Mahan
David Lemieux, Buffalo89 There's a great one there as well. It won't Slater than I thought when I first believed you.
- [137:28]
Jesse Jarno
And since the Ship of Fools is symbolic, we can safely say that it certainly kept sailing in the 17th century German novel. It was a whole fleet of ships of fools set sail from Basel. And we can imagine that too.
- [137:42]
Rich Mahan
Funny, a submarine remarkably like our own. Uncannily, there's someone in it. Look, Aunt, that waving. That's a group of howlers. Wave back. Maybe we're both part of a vast yellow submarine fleet.
- [138:00]
Jesse Jarno
The sea is no less cruel today, and the fleet might be even larger. The paradise of Fools Somewhere just over the next horizon. As you might remember, David Lemieux had a tape with Mars Hotel stuck in the car tape deck all summer.
- [138:30]
Rich Mahan
It got stuck in there and so I listened to Ace and Mars Hotel. It must have been a hundred times in those months. Every that's all we had. We just flipped it back and forth and we didn't complain. And then one day finally I looked in there and it's because the little tape curl had got stuck on the little door of the tape that so all I did is I just kind of pushed it down with a knife or something and it just popped right out. And I was somewhat disappointed because it meant I now had to listen to something different. I love this album so much and I got to know it so well. We've been talking about or songs that I've heard hundreds of times and I want to hear hundreds more. I've listened to this album a lot in the last six months, more than I have in any previous six month chunk for the past few years. But I will get off this recording session with you guys and I will go listen to.
- [139:40]
Jesse Jarno
Takes a Village to make the Dead Cast. And it's a village I'd like to at least hang out in. Besides the production crew that Rich shouts out at the end of every episode, I want to send an extra thanks to the extended research squad. Some have appeared on camera, some haven't. David Ganz, Gary Lambert, Sean O'Donnell, light into ashes of Dead Sources, Cory Arnold of Lost Live Dead, Joe Jupiel and Tyler and MJ and everybody operating the levers at Jerry Base, Uli Toiti and Vulki Rupp for Mustache Forensics. Michael Parish, what the heck Cadillac. Ron Rakow, Nicholas Meriwether of the Grateful Dead Studies association and everybody from the Dead Studies Caucuses, Ben Easton for help keeping the transcript straight. Thanks for listening.
- [140:35]
Rich Mahan
Foreign thank you very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. Friends, we'd like to thank our guests in this episode. Donna Jean, Gotcho McKay, Ron Rakow, Ned Lagin, David Grisman, Elvis Costello, Steve Brown, Richie Peckner, Jerry Pompilli, Jim Sullivan, John Perry, Gary Lambert, Jeff Gould, Joan Brown, Michael Parrish, Corey Arnold Strider Brown, Jay Curley, Rita Fiedler, Renee Tenor Lee Ronaldo, Gregory Barrett, Ron Long, David Lemieux, Brian Anderson, Sean O'Donnell and Brian Kehue. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast David Ganz for his ongoing contributions of audio from his interview archive. See you next season. Executive producer for the good old Grateful Dead cast Mark Pincus, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Doran Tyson. All rights reserved.