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Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly.
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Foreign.
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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 I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. We're so happy to be back. We are extremely excited to bring you season nine of the Good Old Grateful Dead cast as we dive into the Grateful Dead's 1974 studio album from the Mars Hotel. We have big things planned for this season and by big we mean wall of sound big. It is the 50th anniversary of the Grateful Deads from the Mars Hotel and to celebrate this, Rhino has a grand 50th anniversary release in the works which includes the original album remastered, some really cool early demos of songs from the album and a previously unreleased live show you will need to hear to believe. The Grateful Dead played the University of Nevada, Reno on May 12, 1974 and this was the first road show for the infamous Wall of Sound which debuted weeks earlier at home in San Francisco on March 23, 1970 at the Cow Palace. This 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 Deluxe set as well as digitally. There is standard black vinyl of the original album remastered, a dead.net exclusive custom vinyl and a very cool heliotropic vinyl version that you have to see to believe its graphics animate when you spin it on your turntable. Very cool. More info and orders are happening now over@dead.net well head on over to dead.net deadcast and check out all of our past episodes including the complete seasons one through eight and you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how you like to listen. Please help the Good Old Grateful Dead cast by subscribing sharing us with your friends on social media hitting that like button. And if the spirit moves you, leave us a review. Thank you, very kind of you. We have transcripts for many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure. Head on over to dead.netdeadcast index and check them out. Hey now folks, were any of you at the Wall of sound shows in 1974? Well, leave us a recorded message at stories.dead.net and tell us your story about your experiences with the Wall of Sound. We want to hear from you and we do use them in the Dead cast when we get something that fits just right. Record your Wall of Sound tour stories@stories.dead.net well the grateful Dead were firing on all cylinders in 1974 as they headed back into the studio to record the second release for their own Grateful Dead Records from the Mars Hotel. Track one, side one kicks off with the fan favorite US Blues. And there's more to this song than meets the ears as you are about to learn. Here's Jesse Jarno to lay it all out for us.
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Waving wide.
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If you heard that chorus at a Grateful Dead show, it probably meant one the show was almost over. US Blues was nearly always reserved for the end of the evening played to send the crowd out into the Shakedown street parking lot bazaar and the world beyond. But on this season of the good ol Grateful Dead, Cast US Blues is our opener because before it became the band's all time most played encore, it let off the band's 1974 album from the Mars Hotel.
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Red and white blue suede shoes, I'm Uncle Sam, how do you do?
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And that's where we're headed on this season of the Deadcast to explore the wonders of from the Mars Hotel, the second album from the band's very own Grateful Dead records. And we'll be using the album and its songs to tell the story of the grateful dead in 1974, their record company, and the innovative PA system that became known as the Wall of Sound. Please welcome back Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
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D
I think of all of the Dead's records, which I've heard them all as much as we all have, but I think the one album that I know the nuances of more than any, it's Mars Hotel. And I absolutely adore the album. I love all eight songs on it, every one of them. But you know, it's the sort of thing that if I hear a different take of it, a different version, an angel share sort of thing, I will know immediately that it's not the right one, because I know the nuances of this album again, more than any I've ever seen.
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B
Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places, if you look at it right.
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Recorded in the spring of 1974 at CBS's Studio A in San Francisco, from the Mars Hotel was the second release from Grateful Dead Records, the band's own label, featuring five songs by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, one by Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow, and two by Phil Lesh and Bobby Peterson. After making no official Dead studio albums between 1970 and 1973, from the Mars Hotel would be their second in less than a year.
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For a real good time.
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There's a reason that archivist David Lemieux knows Mars Hotel so well.
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D
A funny story about Mars Hotel is I took the vinyl and I made a cassette of it so the album both sides can fit on one side. So one side was Mars Hotel and one side was Ace. So I put it in my dad's car. This is late 86 into early 87. And I put it in my dad's car, Mars Hotel, Ace. It had auto flip, so when it got to the end flipped over so you didn't have to take it out. So I listened to it a few times and I hit eject and it wouldn't come out and so it got stuck in the cassette deck. I used my dad's car a lot, like every day. It was a Chevy Cavalier. I remember because I put a bumper sticker on in 88 and it said the fat man rocks the valley when I went to Alpine 88. And then when he sold the car, he peeled it off, but the letters had bled through with the sunburn, so it was on there forever. And so I listened to Ace and Mars Hotel. It must have been a hundred times in those months. That's all we had. We just flipped it back and forth and we didn't complain.
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Uphill the school both ways too. With that in mind, one way to think about this ninth season of the good ol Grateful Dead cast is that it's all just a dream in the mind of teenage David Lemieux, as from the Mars Hotel, loops endlessly on his father's tape deck. Alright, heads, let's dream. 1974 was kind of a strange time to be an already legendary rock band from the 1960s. It was the age of David Bowie's Diamond Dogs.
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Rebel Rebel Put on your dress Rebel Rebel Rebel Rebel Hot Tramp I love.
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You so Queen's sheer heart attack She's.
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A killer queen got my agility Dynamite with a laser beam.
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ABBA's Waterloo, Steely Dan's Pretzel Logic.
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Ricky, don't lose that number. It's the only one you want. You might use it if you feel better when you get home.
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In fact, 1974 would be the year the Grateful Dead had their first album in the year's 10 bestsellers. But there's a big catch to that statement. He wouldn't achieve that for nearly 20 years.
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See that girl whistling and saying she's.
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In late 1973, the Deadhead released their first LP on their own label, the best selling Wake of the Flood. Their old label, Warner Brothers, hit the market with a new compilation. For veteran Deadheads, Skeletons from the Closet might seem like a curiosity, like who put Rosemary on there?
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D
It was nothing more than Warner Brothers capitalizing off the Dead and knowing that they'd now lost this band. That never sold great, but it sold consistently.
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With Skeletons from the Closet, Warner Bros. Finally got what they wanted out of the Grateful Dead or any band. They threw their resources at a massive hit. But in 1974, Skeletons from the Closet only cracked Billboard's top 90. In 1987, around the Time of Touch of Gray, it re entered Billboard's catalog chart and bounced in and out through the early 90s.
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D
It's gone quadruple platinum. And that's, you know, 4 million plus. Whereas even American Beauty and In the Dark, I think there are 2 million maybe. We think everybody's got that. Well, everybody plus everybody else has skeletons.
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Skeletons from the Closet was the first place that many, many latent Deadheads first heard the Grateful Dead.
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D
My brother came home with it. He put it on. This was like 83, 84, and I was 13, 14 years old getting into older music because none of the newer stuff really spoke to me. Michael Jackson, Duran Duran, Culture Club. It wasn't my scene because I always listen to Pink Floyd and Zeppelin and Bowie and a lot of that kind of, you know, better older music. But I hadn't heard the Dead. And my brother brought home skeletons with that artwork.
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B
Wow.
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D
Couldn't believe it. The Golden Road comes on and my buddy and I are like, dude, we just looked at each other. I remember that very well. It was a dude. This song is wicked good.
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Skeletons from the Closet was a pretty fitting title. In early 1974, as the dead made plans for the next release on Grateful Dead Records, they were now competing against their own accumulated past. Here's how Jerry Garcia described it to DJs Jim Ladd and Tom Yates in early 1974 doing those things.
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In the beginning, the Trips Festival and the early Fillmore shows are the things that gave us the basic lsd, acid rock, whatever that label was. And then later on, they started calling us acoustic country. You know, something like that. Mellow, laid back and all that. Because we put out Working Man's Dead, which had a few acoustic tunes on it. In neither of these instances were those labels having really anything much to do with who we were or what we were doing.
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By 1974, people were looking for new ways to describe the Grateful Dead, who are then entering their 10th year of constant change.
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B
Lately, we're sort of like the psychedelic revival. I mean, now we represent psychedelic nostalgia in a weird way. It's all just an effort to keep qualifying the limits of stuff, what they are and what they aren't. And that's all part of that illusion that we've all been sold and that we're trying to not get into.
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C
Like I said, 1974 was kind of a strange time to be an already legendary rock band from the 60s, but it was also kind of just a strange time in general.
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People have got to know whether or not their president's a crook. Well, I'm not a crook.
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Yeah, whatever, man. 1974 would prove to be the Grateful Dead's biggest year yet, at least by some metrics. It would also prove to be their most combustible. By the end of the year, it wasn't exactly clear that there was still even a Grateful Dead. We've got mini jams ahead, so let's start slowly and pretend for a minute that the Grateful Dead are just a normal rock band where you can go through their albums song by song. And that explains everything. Lets wind back to Stinson Beach, California, early 1973.
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Rock the boat.
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That's the sound of Jerry Garcia in his home studio in Stinson beach in early 1973, where he recorded demo versions of seven mostly finished songs for his bandmates to learn and consider for the studio album they were getting ready to record last season. Then Grateful Dead Records president Ron Rakow.
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B
Described it, his studio was, oh, 25ft from the back door to his house, not even on a piece of land that was a little higher than the house. So the studio was a really nice one room building that was very, very nice, very effective. It was effective for him. He had room for him and one other person. I guess you could have an engineer and another person. It was very small. He could do it all by himself. And he did often, and he put things together and he played everything but the drums.
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But not all of the demos made the cut for Wake of the Flood, and there's a reason for that. Some weren't exactly done.
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Pay the fine, See Me down.
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That verse, for example, didn't make it to the final version of the song that this episode is about Us blues. The chorus survived, but the original title didn't. Wave that Flag.
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Coming on My Own.
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Mind Wave that Flag is singular among Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter compositions in that it underwent a near total lyric overhaul after its public debut. I think this verse might begin with the phrase ride that train.
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Ride the train Count your change Sit up straight Wail your faint don't delay what I say Check the style, Run am I.
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When the Dead took the song, it became a natural hippie rock boogie in the mode they'd refined on Skull n Roses in 1971, capturing the beginning of their single drummer period. But it's pretty delicious to hear Garcia play the song himself with a click track, holding down the rhythm on an acoustic guitar, adding some countryish string bends, playing Shaker, adding a synth bass line, and singing it more quietly than the sole belter it had become.
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Summer Time My Woman.
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There are very few demos to compare this one to, except for the others recorded alongside it, but Wave that Flag even underwent lyric changes between the demo and the first live version in February 1973 at Stanford, with new verses appearing.
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Walk on waves, Pull the tube, Stretch the Truth be the foe.
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And in fact, Wave that Flag changed with nearly all of its 15 performances in the first half of 1973. Though Robert Hunter was on tour with the Dead for some of this period and may have contributed a few new lines here and there, I suspect that many of the changes were less about carefully tweaking the lyrics than Jerry Garcia finding an order that made sense for him to remember. Many so called traditional folk songs are comprised of what musicologists call floating couplets that might appear alongside any number of melodies. I know you, Rider is one of these. Though none of the rhymes in Wave that Flag derive from old folk songs exactly. The effect is like an accelerated version of the process, seeing what might survive.
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Lay your legs, pick up sticks.
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That was the final version of the song in its Wave that Flag guys bidding adieu in the nation's capital at the height of Watergate at RFK Stadium on June 10, 1973. Now on the Here Comes Sunshine box. The words to Wave that Flag certainly aren't nonsense, but there's a playful interchangeability to Them. Each little fragment is an impressionistic punchline without a setup. In 1977, David Ganz asked Robert Hunter about how the song made it from Wave that Flag to its final form as U.S. blues.
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There were a lot, a lot of lyrics I wrote to that, for sure. You know, like on that scene of Wave that flag, pop that bag, there's a lot of things, you know, you could fill in that way. And I think that's one of the cases of a song finally getting solidified in the studio. You know, like throwing out verses that were sang all right on stage. Since you can't hear anything but weren't so good in the recording studio. It may have been one of those kind of trips. Sometimes you do change it at the last minute. It just ain't working for the record. Or you write something a little more hip. Or you throw out something that's too seditious.
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In the case of US Blues, it was just as the Dead were starting to prepare to record from the Mars Hotel. It obviously didn't take a lot of prompting for Robert Hunter to write lyrics that deconstructed Americana. But with the right kind of ears, both Wave that Flag and US Blues might be heard as a topical song. Besides the oil crisis in Watergate and the slow end of the Vietnam War and, you know, Roe versus Wade, there was another news story running under 1973 and 1974. Well, sort of news. That was the young American singing this land is your land. Freaky times. And more specifically, bicentennial times.
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D
This is two years before the bicentennial. I just felt that it was a song, that it was the Dead's kind of patriot dude to write the American song. But they did it very tongue in cheek, as they always do.
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The American bicentennial celebration was in the news on a nearly daily basis in 1973 and 1974. And as Robert Hunter, like any reasonably well informed popular songwriter, was surely aware, there's only one cure for bicentennial fever. More flags. That was the Dead sound checking the song at Winterland in February 1974, a year and a few weeks after its Wave that Flag debut, getting ready to unveil its new identity and fixed set of lyrics. Some of the lines carried over from the original, but not all. And now the song had a narrator. The song is sung by Uncle Sam, or perhaps by America itself. US can stand for different things at the same time. US Blues wasn't a new phrase to Robert Hunter. He'd used it once before, almost. Hunter told the story to WLIR in.
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1978, the song that we did, One More Saturday Night, it was originally US Blues. I went down to the mountain I was drinking some wine look up in the heaven Lord, I saw mighty sign Written by across the heaven plain is black and white get prepared there's gonna be a party tonight hey, Saturday Night.
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That was One More Saturday Night, One of the very few songs in the Grateful Dead songbook credited solely to Bob Weir, but it began life in 1971 as a collaboration with Robert Hunter. The two somewhat infamously had a blow up over a line in Sugar Magnolia. But another disagreement might have been even more significant. Sometime in 1970 or 1971, Hunter gave a set of lyrics to Weir titled Us Blues. Here's how Weir told it to our buddy David Ganz in 2004.
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I think he had like a verse or something, a sketch that he gave me and I got started working on it and then I. It all happened and one night I just got up ahead of steam and cranked the song out. One More Saturday Night was his line. I wrote the rest. I used that one line. And as I was writing, the rest of that verse wasn't ringing my lofty bells. I kept intending to work it back in to the tune and then take the lyric and take everything that I'd written and submit it to Hunter and let him correct it. But he. As far as he was concerned, the song was done. So he took his name off it.
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As always, we've pointed to David's books@dead.net deadcast back to Hunter's version of the story from 1978.
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He got it into his mind to rewrite the lyrics and he still wanted to call it Us Bruce. I said, no way. I'll write another Us Bruce, you know, Which I did.
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It turns this next rhyme into an extra hilarious self referential meta lyric.
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B
We're all confused. What's to lose? You can call this song the United States Blues. I probably wrote in England. I was doing a lot of my writing in London at that point.
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Hunter moved to England sometime in late 1973 or early 1974 and spent the next few years there, first in London, commuting back and forth to California every few months. I'd posit that having written Wave that Flag, Hunter remembered his earlier draft and recovered the title. In addition to the encroaching bicentennial, there was one other Sam that Robert Hunter might have been pondering in the first months of 1974. The storyline we're about to introduce isn't necessarily the inspiration for how Wave that Flag became US Blues, but the timing is too close to discount. For the first time since 1965, the Dead didn't play on New Year's 1973 going into 1974. Instead, Jerry Garcia and Billy Kreutzman jammed with the Allman Brothers at the Cow Palace. A few days later, the band held its first meeting of the year. According to the meeting minutes in the band's archives, they mostly discussed the continued expansion of the new sound system, setting up gigs in February at Winterland, the shows where they debut US Blues. Phil Lesh would be vacationing in Hawaii, the minutes note. Bob Weir was headed to an unspecified location to work on new material, but the first major business of 1974 took place on January 14th. Sam Cutler departed We've spoken a good deal about and with Sam Cutler over the past few years of this podcast, including lots of participation from Sam himself. Sam had road managed the Rolling Stones on their fall 1969 tour of the Americas through the Altamont Disaster, and was soon the booking agent for the Grateful Dead.
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B
I was trying to take the Grateful Dead, who were known in San Francisco and on the west coast vaguely and were earning about $2,000 a night, to being a successful band in America, which I achieved, I think, without trying to be big headed about it. That was the same thing Warner Brothers were trying to do. To do that you need the right record as well as you know the right shows and as well as visiting New York 20 times a year.
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C
For lots more of Sam, check out our seasons about working man's dead, American Beauty, Skull and Roses and Europe. 72 in late 1972, Sam founded out of Town Tours, a booking agency we discussed much last year during our grateful Dead and Company episode. Early in 1973, many of the Dead's operations moved to 1530 Lincoln Avenue in San Rafael, where Out of Town Tours and Sam Cutler set up shop across the hall from John McIntyre and Grateful Dead management. Sam passed away in 2023 and I'm sad we didn't get to finish debriefing with him, including the topic of his departure. We can put some of the pieces together. It would veers into office politics. Sally Man Romano was Sam's executive assistant at out of Town Tours.
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B
When everything blew up with Cutler, it was happening kind of in meetings that involved the Dead and Sam and so it wasn't out of the open, but it was horrible. You knew that something not good was going on.
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C
There are a number of perspectives on what went down and why, and we offer nothing definitive Ron Raca was the president of Grateful Dead Records just down the street.
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B
He was a good talker and I liked Sam, and he could get things done. He was an admirable leader of a crew. He was a great crew leader. He was a great road manager. Terrific. And so there were a bunch of people around Sam that were really, really good people. And he actually, I think, did a good job as a booking agent. But he created somehow, for some reason, a lot of animosity within the Dead family. All of a sudden, he got tired of putting up with being argued with, I think, by guys in the band. He just sort of threw his pencil on the table and walked out as far as I could see. I don't know how it all went down. It was weird.
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According to Sam's memoir, you can't always get what you want. The band called the meeting and told Sam they'd found an agent who would take 5% commission instead of the industry standard 10% that Sam was getting.
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B
Sam got fired, essentially, and he had his independent agency, but that was kind of silly. 90% of the operation was the day.
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C
Sam says he more or less nodded and walked out and never spoke with Garcia again. By some accounts, Sam Cutler's departure was the result of a long running battle between Sam and dead manager John McIntyre. When Lenny Hart had run off with the band's money in 1970, at the same time that Sam began to take over the road managing and booking, John McIntyre was assigned to manage the band's relationship with Warner Bros. And the mainstream culture industries at large. I wouldn't take the following song interpretation as a literal truth, but in some versions of Grateful Dead history, particularly John McIntyre's, there's a pretty famous Grateful Dead song that was about him.
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B
Come Hear Uncle John's Bed by the Build aside got some things to talk.
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C
About here beside the rising tide John MacIntyre with. And there was an unfortunate undercurrent of homophobia that existed inside the Dead's extended family. It was by no means universal, nor even a majority attitude, but it almost certainly contributed to tensions. By early 1974, the vibe in the office had gotten pretty bad, I think.
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B
Only he and McIntyre, and he's not here with us anymore. And, you know, a few other people know exactly how that transpired, but it wasn't fun for him, I'm sure.
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C
And so we present something our buddy David Ganz floated when we visited him in Oakland last year, like John McIntyre's belief about Uncle John's band being about him. What David's about To say falls into the category of interpretation. We deploy it here as a matter of thought to, you know, tie the room together and not a matter of fact.
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B
There is a whole class of Grateful Dead songs that are epistles from Hunter. I have a theory developed in the last couple years that US Blues became US Blues by focusing on the person of Sam Cutler. If the second verse is first person Sam Cutler, that puts the song in a different frame. I'm Uncle Sam, that's who I am I'm Uncle Sam, that's who I am Hiding out in a Rock bowl van.
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C
Which would make the song a meta commentary on the power struggle between Uncle John versus Uncle Sam. Run your life, steal your wife.
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B
I don't know how literal any of it is, but it's just one of.
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A
Those things that suddenly you go, if that's what it is, then think about the whole song in that respect.
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B
And if it ain't too bad, I thought about it anyway. I'll drink your health Share your will Run your life Steal your wife.
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C
It does make a weird amount of sense to me that in early 1974, just when Robert Hunter moved to England, that he might write a song about the Dead's departing British road manager and frame him as Uncle Sam. We'll get into the studio recording of US Blues shortly, but engineer Brian Kehue, who recently transferred the Mars Hotel tapes, shares this observation about the studio version of the song. That gives it another unexpected British connection on the tapes.
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B
It also says US Grayson.
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C
That's even seen more often. And so what's interesting about that is.
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B
Gray's is spelled G R E Y S, which is the English spelling. Like, if you think of the T, Earl Grey, it's spelled G R E, Y. So it's interesting that there's a hidden note on the tapes that says us Grays. Obviously, Blues makes more sense.
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C
Interestingly, later on, Touch of Grey would also employ the British spelling. Sally Man Romano had been Sam Cutler's executive assistant for the previous two years.
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B
It led to me working for McIntyre, who I love, you know, more than life itself. We were all on the same floor of the same office building, and I just walked across the hall and sat down and went to work for McIntyre as his assistant. So I don't remember him asking me or anything, but I'm sure he did. A lot of us got absorbed into the Dead when they were really at their peak, kind of in terms of personnel and the number of assorted jobs and hangers on and everything.
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C
In early 1974, despite Sam Cutler's departure and the closure of out of Town tours. There were a number of projects driving job creation around the Grateful Dead, including the band's record company and Frankie Weir's Fly by Night Travel. But it's time to address the 75 ton Wally.
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B
Do not call me that.
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C
The giant and innovative speaker system we call the Wall of Sound, which the Grateful Dead traveled with throughout 1974. In early 1974, at their first meeting of the year, the Dead booked three nights at Winterland in February and three additional days before that earmarked for sound experimentations. Nobody was calling it the Wall of Sound just yet, by the way. We'll get there. We'll have a number of different perspectives on the Wall over the course of this season. So let's first zoom back and hear about its origins directly from the source. The Wall of Sound derived in many ways from the ideas of Owsley Stanley, the one time LSD chemist who turned his dazzling and obsessive mind to audio. David Ganz interviewed him in 1991 for his book Conversations with the Dead, and we've linked to David's books@dead.net deadcast. We've used bits of this interview in our Bear Drops episode and we might repeat a few bits for the sake of linear storytelling. Thanks again, David and Bear.
- [35:30]
B
My idea about the sound man is that he has to become transparent. A recordist is different, and I was always a recordist, right? But a sound man running the house sound system, he's only an assistant to the musician. If he's a total contributing musician and is a member of the band, that's fine. If he's not, he should make himself so transparent as not be there.
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C
This is the process that led Bear to becoming a taper, which we've explored before, especially in our Bear's Choice 50 episode. But naturally he took the idea much further.
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B
So then an extension of that is why not have it in such a way that the musicians have control of everything? Why not? They should be able to if everything's coming from behind them. And it's designed in an area so it couples to go out to the far audience. But that on stage they're able to intercept just enough of it so it's not too loud and out of control. And they can adjust themselves, their own vocals. They're listening to the mix of their vocals, they can adjust the levels so it's just right.
- [36:28]
C
Then you don't need a sound man.
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B
He's the guy that's out in front, maybe with a walkie talkie Saying, tell Phil to turn his whatever up.
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C
And while Owsley was at the center of many conspiracy theories over the years, the Wall of Sound is one where he gladly described himself as a mastermind.
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B
I was only controlling it like a puppeteer controlling a lot of puppets at once. I couldn't make my influence felt directly. It was very slippery. The only reason that it happened the way it was was that I figured out ways of feeding my ideas and things in through people without directly confronting them.
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C
The division of labor sounds pretty chaotic in a very Grateful Dead way. A team of Owsley, Stanley, Dan Healy, John Curl, Alembics, Ron Wickersham and others.
- [37:13]
B
At one point, Healy was doing piano. Another point I was doing piano. Healy was doing something else, somebody doing something else. It was like there was three of us that were basically sound man, Waker, Sham, Dan and I. It was very difficult to say who was doing what because it was no sound mixer, because there was no mixing board. And so we were all working with it. It was no mixer. So we were all involved in it. And because of the way it worked out, it happened because of the ideas which I had, because I had an image. I was working from an image. This image was fed into a lot of different people. Through Wickersham, through Ely, through Curl. And I sampled the thing, but it was like remote control. It was very difficult to get it all together. The result was that I couldn't concentrate on anything.
- [37:58]
C
We'll have lots more bear to come, but you can check out the full interview in David's book Conversations with the Dead, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast another voice we're going to hear from about the Wall of Sound comes from the small village who helped build, transport and rebuild it at every show. We're so pleased to welcome to the Dead cast Richie Peckner. Richie had been part of the extended Dead family since their earliest days in San Francisco.
- [38:23]
B
I saw him at the Fillmore Auditorium in 66. That was the first time I seen him. But I was living in the Haight Ashbury, so they were kind of around. It was kind of part of the culture those first couple of years. I was 18 years old, just graduated high school up in Nevada, which is in Marin County. And had moved to the Haight Ashbury extensively to go to San Francisco State College. But the apartment I rented was right off Stanion Street. So I kind of found myself in the middle of this whole thing that was going on there.
- [38:59]
C
Richie was not only in the thick of the stew, he was sometimes helping to Ladle it out with the Diggers, the radical mutual aid anarchists of the Haight Ashbury.
- [39:08]
B
I'd been working or hanging out working with this group called the Diggers, which is this notorious group of folks that were into free stuff. And they had like a free kitchen and a free food store and all sorts of social, revolutionary kind of stuff. And anyway, somebody asked through a connection if the Diggers could provide a flatbed truck for a free show in a panhandle. And the answer was yes. And I was asked to go down, pick up the truck and pick up the band and drive it into the panhandle. So that was my first interaction directly. There were several free shows during that period. And this was just incredible, the amount of people that showed up. And it was more or less spontaneous in that it wasn't, you know, a publicized show per se. But, you know, word got around and it was pretty memorable.
- [40:03]
C
In late 1967, the Digger Connection led to some paid work.
- [40:08]
B
This fellow named Danny Rifkin, who was also enrolled in San Francisco State, but was also working for the band at that time as a road manager. And after that Golden Gate park thing, I saw him several times. And then early November, he called me and asked me if I would be interested in driving. They needed an extra driver. They were heading out to New York for some gigs and they needed a. An extra driver. And he knew, of course, that I could drive from the Golden Gate park thing. And this was like right before finals. I said, oh, Danny, what about finals? And he said, oh, he had already dropped out of college. And I thought about for a second, I said, sure. So that was my first hire, so to speak, with the band was driving in a like a five car caravan from 710 Ashbury to New York City. And I'd never been east of Squaw Valley at that point.
- [41:06]
C
It was a cold trip. And the Dead made their second visit to New York and their first to the Village Theater, which Bill Graham would take over in a few months and rename the Fillmore East.
- [41:15]
B
It was kind of mind blowing to see how the band resonated with the people on the other side of the country, at least for me. I mean, I think they'd been there one time before. They did some shows before that, but that one was pretty remarkable. One of the things I remember was it was pretty cold and we all had to go out and buy underwear because of course we were from the Haight Ashbury. We weren't wearing underwear at that point.
- [41:44]
C
Ritchie moved in and out of the Dead Crew in the next few years.
- [41:47]
B
It was a pretty different scene back in the 60s, late 60s, early 70s, it was much more laid back, certainly less intense. So it's kind of like you had friends and, you know, there'd be some shows and you'd go to shows or, you know, you'd do some work or not do some work. But then when they started experimenting with the sound system, I kind of got involved in that early on. So that was kind of my full employment period where I was on the payroll and traveling with a band and all that.
- [42:16]
C
Over the course of 1973, Richie Peckner connected with the band in a deeper way.
- [42:21]
B
I got at that low mostly through Ramrod, who I met on that first trip. And we became really good friends. And he knew of my construction background because I had moved up to Mendocino and was building houses and stuff in the early 70s. So he kind of asked me one day something about building cabinets or something. I came down, we hung out, and he kind of showed me what they were trying to do. And, you know, one thing led to another and before you knew it, we put together like a cabinet shop in one of the rehearsal spaces to start cranking out cabinets.
- [42:55]
C
The Dead were soon crowded out of the Deluca street space in San Rafael.
- [42:59]
B
They had rented it for that, but we kind of took it over and the two weren't very compatible, you know, making a lot of dust and having a lot of musical instruments around. So they got a bigger space and we kind of took over that space to produce all the equipment.
- [43:16]
C
The band relocated their rehearsal headquarters to a warehouse in San Rafael's canal district at 20 Front street, where they'd remain for the next 20 years. Ritchie hit the road with the band for the series of fall outings booked by out of town tours to help the Dead support Wake of the Flood. It was during these shows that the sound system underwent another major transformation. To discuss it, please welcome to the Dead cast journalist Brian Anderson, who is currently researching and writing a book titled Loud and the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection. We've linked to more information@dead.net deadcast I.
- [43:51]
B
Would consider those shows in end of November, December of 1973. Those are the beginning of the wall sound for me. So the Boston Music hall, that was the first instance that they stacked up everything behind them on scaffolding. Otherwise it wasn't going to be able to fit the stage at the Music Hall. That was a real sort of landmark moment when they realized that, oh, shit, like we could. We can do that. Then over the next couple days, you get Cincinnati and Cleveland. And if you look back at the photographic record of those shows, you can see that the center vocal cluster, sort of like the iconic part of the wall of sound, was already taking shape in the form of individual speaker stacks, as above.
- [44:46]
C
So below was Owsley's alchemical saying that applied throughout the wall of sound, tuning the system to be a seamless part of the band. And so, just like the music, the speaker system never stopped changing.
- [44:58]
B
Of course, a big thing about this story is that the configuration of gear was never the same twice. Like, it was different. Every show, every tour, every city, every venue, it was always different. So you get those couple shows late November, early December 1973, where everything is in back of them for the first time, and the center cluster is starting to take shape. You've got the dual microphone thing going on, but then later in the month, they kind of go back to, you know, just your sort of standard stereo setup, stage left, stage right, PA arrays with kind of no coherent Enter cluster. So you get a little flash of it right at the end of the year. There's.
- [45:45]
C
We've got some related stories about the rapid growth of the Dead sound system. Ron Rakow from Grateful Dead Records.
- [45:51]
B
There was no budget control on the sound system. The sound system was an invention. I had to raise the money to pay for the shit.
- [45:59]
C
Even still, Rakow committed himself to the bit.
- [46:02]
B
In New York, Ramrod came to me and said, hey, look, we're using these Mac 250. They just came out, and they're fabulous. And we just bought about 50 government cubes out of a government storage sale with two handles on them. You could put a whole Mac 250 in one with Foam river on the top and foam river on the bottom. Close this up and you could pick them up. Therefore, with the chain of 20 guys, you can have God knows how many of these and load them in fast and in these cubes, okay? So Ramrod said, so anytime as we go from city to city, call around from the high five stores, find out who sells Mac, and buy all the 250s you can. So in New York, I bought four. In Boston, I bought three. In Philadelphia, I bought three. In Chicago, I bought four. In a week or eight days, I bought 20 of them.
- [46:59]
C
I'm going to guess that it was sometime not long after this that the phone rang at the Grateful Dead records office in San Rafael. The last time our friend Steve Brown told us about an unexpected phone call, it was the FBI calling about counterfeit wake of the flood LPs. This time it was a different government agency.
- [47:15]
A
One of the funnier things that did.
- [47:17]
B
Happen to us, too, at one point, I remember at the office at the 5th in Lincoln, was when we had made a big, huge purchase from McIntosh for all those amps to go to the Wall of Sound and everything that we needed for the amps that the band wanted to have and the crew wanted to have these big Macintosh got a call from the Navy. And the Navy said, listen, we've been talking to people at McIntosh for these specific amps that we need for our submarines that are over there in Vietnam. And the war is going on still. This is, you know, 1974, and there weren't any available because the Grateful Dead had bought up all that brand of that particular amp.
- [47:57]
D
So we helped stop the war.
- [48:00]
C
Many years later, Ron Rakow discovered another result of the band's buying spree in the late 80s.
- [48:07]
B
I'm moving into this house, and there's a butler's pantry right next to the dining room. And I put my hi fi system in it. It was a Macintosh preamp with a Macintosh amp. It was the exact duplication of the home version of the Grateful Dead stage sound system. And I run wires everywhere where I wanted to hear it. And then I closed the door to the pantry after I have the equipment on shelves, and the door was thicker than I expected and the knob cracked. The last plate on the preamp. Oh, fuck. I just ruined the faceplate on this preamp. I wonder how much that cost. So I call McIntosh in Binghamton, New York, and I asked for the president, and I get him on the phone, and I said, you know, I just broke the glass face of the M74 preamp, and I wonder if you have it and would you send it to me and not charge me for it because you owe me? He said. So he started to laugh. Think of what do I owe you? I said, man, are you kidding? I was with the Grateful Dead. We put Macintosh on the map. He said, oh, are you the guy that went around in 1974 and bought all the Mac? 250s? I said, yeah, yeah, that was me. And so this guy at Macintosh is telling me this story. He said, you know, our inventory is based on having a multiple. The multiple was seven times a week sales that we put out this amplifier. It didn't sell. And all of a sudden it starts to sell out all across the country one day after another, all across the country. So we figured we had the hottest new product ever. And we made a bunch of them. It almost put us out of business. We never sold another one. We never sold enough. So he said, rather than bou, you owe me, you should pay me 100 times the value of that face plate, which is 22 bucks. He said, but I'll send it to you anyway. So he did. And that was the story.
- [50:20]
C
When you look at pictures of the dead in 1973 and 1974, those cool gray boxes on stage behind every band member with glowing vu meters are the Dead's Macintosh amps. Imagine them glowing behind the band during all the live musical segments this season. Let's get back to that Winterland sound check. Is there a limiter on the monitors?
- [50:57]
B
Did somebody put a limiter on the monitors?
- [51:01]
C
That was the Dead and an unidentified dog. Sound checking addicts of my Life at Winterland before the first of three shows, February 22, 1974. A song that wouldn't appear in concert between 1972 and 1989. As you can hear from what Jerry Garcia just said, the Wall of Sound did actually have vocal monitors. They were just located behind the band with the rest of the speakers. Brian Anderson.
- [51:25]
B
They hauled in what was, by that point, around 40 tons of gear into Winterland for a three night run of shows at the end of February, right in their home court. So they were very cozy there. They knew that terrain. You can make a case for these Winterland shows being the birth of the Wall of Sound as we know it, right? Because it was 1974, you know, and they had sort of specifically called out in these meetings, these sound experimentation gigs, and they had green lit the fabricating of this center cluster. And while the center cluster wasn't done like here, it all was on their home court, right?
- [52:10]
C
Richie Peckner.
- [52:12]
B
That was right before the center cluster was finished. So if my memory serves me well, the cabinets for the vocal PA were stacked, and they were still the wooden cabinets, not the finished metal enclosure that is dominant in all the pictures of that 74 tour. So that was like the last configuration before it got replaced.
- [52:36]
C
In addition to helping build and assemble the wall, Ritchie was also an ace photographer and responsible for some of the best documentation of the system. If you're studying photos, the emergence of the smooth, curved center cluster marks the main visual difference between the December and February versions of the system and what was to come. Our friend Michael Parrish, a winterland regular since 1969, came up from Santa Cruz to attend two of the February shows and caught some of the new tunes.
- [53:28]
B
It was in A way, sort of a parallel to the show at Naples almost a year before, in that it was where a bunch of new material popped out. And, you know, they led off with US Blues, which was a really very cleaned up version of Wave that Flag. And then, you know, they also had debuts of It Must have Been the Roses Ship a fool. It was later than I thought When I first believed you Now I cannot share your light.
- [54:10]
C
But just as important as the songs was the sound. As someone who'd seen the Dead at Winterland a number of times, including four months previously, Michael Parish was well familiar with how the band normally sounded in the former skating rink.
- [54:23]
B
It was a lot bigger, there were a lot more speakers than there were in November. And it sounded really, really good. There was a very palpable difference between the way the Bandit sounded in November to February. It was sort of amazing to have that entire assemblage in that small room. Part of it was the vocals really sounded pristine. The voice canceling microphones aside, it really made a huge difference. You could hear everybody separately and clearly, which was an amazing improvement, I would say. And then similarly with the instruments, you were able to have much more of sort of a 3D image of the instruments, which was a little confusing sometimes, I think, because where it was coming out wasn't necessarily where the musician was standing.
- [55:17]
C
Most of the three February shows at Winterland were released on Dave's picks 13 and 42, respectively, as well as a 2022 bonus disc. The first version of US blues since its transformation is on that bonus disc. Whatever spurred Hunter to focus the lyrics, having Uncle Sam as narrator is a wonderful frame to hang the fun, surreal images, especially if you envision Uncle Sam as a skeleton, an image inevitably realized a few years later in the Grateful Dead movie. We'll unpack a few of the new references, which all would have been familiar to general audiences in 1974. Hardly hidden folk sources, Uncle Sam himself had been a stand in for the United States since the early 19th century. But it took Robert Hunter to connect him to Elvis or perhaps Carl Perkins.
- [56:02]
B
Well, it's one for the money, two for the show three to get ready now go cat, go but don't you step on my blue suede shoes. You can do anything. Stay hard for my blue suede shoes.
- [56:19]
C
That was the immortal Carl Perkins original 1955 version of Blue Suede Shoes turned into a massive hit by Elvis the next year. And bodacious footwear for Uncle Sam, his bad self. Hunter referenced it in lyrics the year before to Keith. God, show's Let Me Sing youg Blues Away. And though neither the Dead nor Jerry Garcia's side projects are known to have performed Blue Suede Shoes at a show, the Dead Sound checked it a few times in late 1973, just before Wave that Fly became US Blues. This is a bit from December 12th at the Omni in Atlanta. Amongst among the new US Blues lyrics I'm pretty fond of the con man like construction of this line PT Barnum was the great American showman and con artist Phineas Taylor Barnum, born around the same time as Uncle Sam, known for circus freak shows and mermaid bones. Probably he didn't actually originate the phrase there's a sucker born every minute, but I'm reasonably certain he'd be fine if we attributed it to him and Charlie Chan chillin part time and the problematic these days. Charlie Chan was a fictional Chinese detective in novels and movies who countered some mid century Asian stereotypes while also perpetuating a number of others. Given his proximity to our narrator, we'll let him slip off, add him to the tally of Uncle Sam's weird associates, and perhaps just advise you to maybe not go as Charlie Chan for Halloween. Every now and then, Garcia would swap in another character, like this show from January 13, 1980, the Shah of Iran. Also probably on the list of ill advised Halloween costumes these days. But what isn't really all three Winterland 74 shows are worth hearing with deep jams and a few more debuts. That was Jerry Garcia and Keith Godshow playing the lick that would become known as Slipknot in the playing in the band jam from the first of three nights. On the second night, the band was showered with marshmallows and roses.
- [59:15]
B
Maybe it'd be a good idea to save all these marshmallows for the hungry.
- [59:18]
D
People that are in the audience next to you.
- [59:23]
B
One other thing. It's really a drag stepping on roses. It's really a drag looking down and seeing that you just crushed a lovely rose. So you ought to save the roses that you're gonna throw up here for.
- [59:32]
D
Later in the show where they stand a better chance of survival.
- [59:38]
C
Fuck the roses.
- [59:39]
B
Save yourselves if you can.
- [59:44]
C
If the February shows were a successful tryout, the real sound test was still to come. As Phil Lesh reminded people at the end of the final encore, see you.
- [59:52]
B
Next month at the Cow Palace.
- [59:54]
C
I hope we'll visit the March 23rd show at the Cow palace next time. So far, 1974 had started out as planned. In fact, the schedule they laid out at the beginning of the year Mostly came to pass. January 9th, 31st, rest sure? Yeah, no problem. Except for Garcia. We'll get back to that guy. 2.1.17. Rehearse and develop new material. Seems like that happened maybe at least a little. And in late March, stretching through early May, just as planned, the Grateful Dead set up shop in downtown San Francisco at Columbia's Studio A. Steve Brown of Grateful Dead Records was a production assistant.
- [60:35]
B
That was every day, every night, and, yeah, those were long days. That was down there at the CBS.
- [60:40]
A
Studios on Folsom street, right across from.
- [60:43]
B
Where we're doing our rehearsals during the day at Studio Instrument Rentals. We rehearse across the street and come over.
- [60:49]
A
And these again were some songs that.
- [60:51]
B
They'Ve been working on already. So we're kind of halfway there on most of those.
- [60:54]
C
On April 15, they started work on US blues labeled US Grays on the tape box. Here's how take one sounded.
- [61:07]
B
One, two, one.
- [61:30]
C
Brian Kehue once again did the transfer of the tapes. And we'll have lots to unpack about the wonders of the Mars Hotel sessions. And we're going to save the technical details for another time.
- [61:39]
B
These tracks sound very pristine and almost.
- [61:42]
C
Clear, but almost plain Jane to me.
- [61:45]
B
They don't sound full of hippie vibe and amazing coolness.
- [61:49]
C
They're cool, but it's still them. One aspect of the sessions that differed from the previous three Dead studio albums is that the takes didn't preserve a lot of in studio chatter.
- [62:03]
B
The end. How many repetitions?
- [62:04]
C
Two. And that chatter between Garcia Weir and Keith Godshow is some of the only talking during the US Blues tapes.
- [62:11]
B
Not that they were poor, you know, but tape was expensive and it remains a cost factor. Those that even want to try it nowadays, you've got to really focus your attention.
- [62:21]
C
Also, it is a bit distracting.
- [62:23]
B
Can you imagine everything you do, if you want to try something crazy or weird, that someone's recording it, you know it's going to be captured for posterity.
- [62:30]
C
And for reasons we'll explain, the Dead were using even more tape than usual. Another big difference between from the Mars Hotel and the previous albums we've explored is that the Dead didn't record scratch vocals as they did live tapes. So the raw tapes for the sessions are entirely instrumental.
- [63:15]
B
There were two complete takes. It's labeled Take eight as a Master. This is where they did overdubs and.
- [63:33]
C
Added layered vocals that waved that flag part.
- [63:36]
B
That is the hook. You can just always picture thousands of people singing it, but it's actually nobody singing it. It's funny to hear the song go.
- [63:43]
C
Into that section with no one sing. That's how Take Eight sounded through a room mic in CBS's Studio A. The sound of your core 74 Grateful Dead playing live in a room. David Lemieux has always been fond of Phil Lesh's contribution.
- [64:19]
D
I remember I was really turned on by the bass part in it. And when he does it live, I think it's even better. But he's got this kind of cascading, this ascending descending bass riff on it that I think holds the whole thing down.
- [64:48]
C
Here's how Garcia's rhythm part sounded. Weir's rhythm in that same spot. Likewise, Keith God chose playing roads on the basic track. There are a few overdubs to call out. Here Are the fills Garcia played during that verse more noticeable and giving the song some of its distinct sound is the overdub on a tack piano, a regular piano, but with some slightly harder objects like tacks, creating a plunkier sound reminiscent of how we probably imagine saloon pianos. Neil Young uses one frequently. But perhaps most interesting is what contrasts with the old time sound of the tack piano. Both Keith Godshow and Jerry Garcia overdub Roland synth parts.
- [66:53]
B
The surprise for me was the synthesizers.
- [66:56]
C
And it's not that you can't hear.
- [66:57]
B
Them on the record, but I have to give them a big compliment is.
- [67:00]
C
That they had a little, not very.
- [67:02]
B
Large, not very fancy, but good sounding Roland synthesizer. And they were using it on several of these tracks.
- [67:09]
C
But you don't really hear synthesizer sticking.
- [67:12]
B
Out in the music here.
- [67:14]
C
Can you pick them out of the part of Us Blues we've been zooming in on?
- [67:21]
B
That's who I've been hiding out in a Rock bowl bed Shaking the hand and shook the hand of P.T. barnum and Charlie Chan.
- [67:45]
C
Here's what Keith is doing.
- [68:15]
B
It's mostly Keith, but Jerry actually does.
- [68:18]
C
Quite a few little synth tracks in there. They're mostly playing similar parts, but they're very musical.
- [68:51]
B
They sound like a plucked sound or an organ or a flute or something. So the sounds they're choosing are not to show off that we have a synthesizer or we're cool, or we're state of the art with other new bands.
- [69:04]
C
They're actually just doing very tasteful parts. And so I think that's kind of interesting.
- [69:08]
B
Throughout this record, there are moments when the synthesizer pops up and my ears.
- [69:12]
C
Went, wow, that's cool.
- [69:14]
B
Didn't quite realize that was a synth before.
- [69:45]
C
Garcia's isolated vocal is fun. You can hear some echo on it back to back.
- [69:52]
B
Chicken Shack.
- [69:55]
C
Son of a gun Better change your act.
- [70:01]
B
We'Re all confused what's to lose? You can call this song the United.
- [70:11]
C
States Blues with the isolated vocals. You can also hear some quiet vocalizing between the proper singing, too. But the fun stuff is really the big chorus that emphasizes the singing along. Here's the sound of Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh gathered around a single microphone. I don't think Donna's singing Wave that.
- [70:34]
B
Flag Wave it wide and high Summer time done come and gone my old man.
- [70:54]
C
And as with American Beauty, they employ the old fab trick of stacking their voices, adding still another layer of gang vocals.
- [71:01]
B
Wave that flag Wave it wide and high Summer time done come and gone My oh my Summertime done come and.
- [71:32]
C
Go My oh my it's not really.
- [71:35]
B
Angry, like a Crosby, Stills and Nash song.
- [71:38]
C
Their way of taking down established things.
- [71:42]
B
Was to make fun of them. It's sort of a cynical poke at something, but they also have that it's.
- [71:48]
C
Just couched in a sense of humor.
- [71:50]
B
It's not really mean.
- [71:51]
C
And while it might have been written with the bicentennial in the background, with a heaping pile of Americana on top, the chorus's takeaway message is ambiguous and sweet.
- [72:00]
B
Summer time done come and go My.
- [72:05]
C
Oh my it was the kind of good feeling song that seemed made for the radio, a game the Dead would Explore later in 1974 when the song was released as a single. The Grateful Dead were already approaching critical mass in 1974, and throughout the year they sold the song their own way, not afraid to use it as an opener, but also dropping it right into the middle of second set jam sequences. The month the album came out, June 1974. It shows up in a few places that might seem surprising to Deadheads now. Here we are, deep in the jammy wilderness.
- [72:54]
B
Sam.
- [73:32]
C
That was from Boston Garden, June 28, 1974, the day after the album was released. Now on Dixbyx12, where the full Weather Report suite unfurls into the mine Left Body jam before building slowly towards us Blues. They'd take a few more minutes to recombobulate. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux I think.
- [73:51]
D
It'S a great opener. It's a rocking song. When I saw the Grateful Dead movie for the first time and saw how they used it there, I just thought that that was a perfect use of the song and the way the visuals. They made a rock video for it. Gary Gutierrez did with that opener. I just think it's a perfect opener for an album and a song that has legs to this day, perhaps just.
- [74:11]
C
As much or more than the song's appearance as a single in 1974. Gary Gutierrez's animation in 1977's Grateful Dead movie cemented the song's hit status and transformed Uncle Sam permanently into a skeleton. By the end of 1974, it had moved into the band's encore slot, where it stayed almost exclusively for the next 21 years.
- [74:33]
D
I remember reading the review. Might have been in the Golden Road Magazine. It might have been in Relics, I don't know. But I remember reading a review of a show and it talked about US Blues. And it used the phrase it was a throwaway song. It was a. You know, they played the throwaway U.S. blues as they encore, as they often do. This is before I'd seen the Dead, and I was almost appalled that anybody would take for granted seeing the Dead do anything. I mean, they could come out and tell jokes all night and I'd be happy I hadn't seen them yet.
- [75:04]
C
Last season, we devoted a whole episode to Let Me Sing youg Blues Away, the first single from Wake of the Flood, which the Dead played a grand total of a half dozen times in concert and posited that because it doesn't appear on tons of Dead tapes, it's off the radar of many Deadheads. The opposite is true of US Blues.
- [75:21]
D
People ask me, when you're listening, what makes a great show different from a good show? And I say, well, it's the nuances. It's the things that, like, are a little out of the ordinary in the most mundane places. US Blues. I don't wanna say it's a mundane song, but it's never really all that different. It's just really good all the time.
- [75:37]
C
But that doesn't mean there aren't totally fun ones that stand out.
- [75:40]
D
There's the fun one with Belushi. He doesn't really contribute too much, but it changes the dynamic of what the band was doing that night.
- [75:48]
C
That was the night John Belushi cartwheeled onto the stage at the Capitol Theater in Passaic. Jay Blakesburg's pictures are cool. Squint your ears and you can kind of hear Belushi wave that flame.
- [76:03]
B
Wave it wide. And.
- [76:22]
D
1988, I got my first batch of Betty tapes. And one of them was the Red Rocks, July 78. And during the US blues, Jerry vocally goes off during the My, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my. And he screams like he does that Jerry thing.
- [76:57]
B
Oh, my, oh, my.
- [77:03]
C
It's now an Excellent sounding official release.
- [77:05]
D
It's way above and beyond, and so Jerry just goes berserk in it.
- [77:10]
C
US Blues wasn't a political song, but that doesn't mean it wasn't political. Like another great songwriter or maybe two from last century wrote, we live in a political world, and I am a political girl. Sorry for the janky audio in these next clips.
- [77:25]
B
Yeah, we have the basic distrust of all political happenings.
- [77:29]
C
This is Jerry Garcia from the January 1974 interview with Jim Ladd and Tom Yates. It's not that Garcia didn't have takes on things being 1974. The topic of Richard Nixon came up every morning.
- [77:41]
B
He wakes up with what must be a sense of total responsibility about everything in America. All this stuff is sitting there. Plus he's blowing it, you know, horribly. You know, it must be horrible. It must be just amazing, really. I feel for the poor guy, man.
- [77:59]
C
As the Grateful Dead, they had their own strategy.
- [78:01]
B
We don't have any confidence in statements. You know, everybody's had that, you know, dried up sort of, how can you believe words, no matter how neat they sound?
- [78:11]
C
And we appreciate that.
- [78:12]
B
We're not trying to be right and we're not trying to tell anybody anything, but we are into stirring up whatever activity we can, you know, sort of using a shotgun approach, the one that just contains randomness, just because it's so hard to do something nowadays on a level of language or anything else that doesn't contain some kind of weird trap in it. And our trip has been to put out things that are trapless as much.
- [78:36]
C
As possible with some of that context in mind. We'll leave off today's episode with one final US Blues adjacent story from a few weeks after the interview. Clips we just heard. When researching this season, we came across a letter in the Dead's archives on the band's official letterhead addressed to Richard Nixon in the White House. Former Grateful Dead records president Ron we.
- [78:59]
B
Got really, really, really high backstage at Keystone Corner in Berkeley, and that was what happened.
- [79:06]
C
Go on.
- [79:07]
B
Keystone, Berkeley. Garcia and John Kahn and those guys would play there whenever they wanted to, and they always wanted to. So certainly when Garcia wasn't on the road once or twice a week, they'd play there. So I would always go, so we're sitting backstage. They would play for four or five hours. They play until they can't stand anymore, and then they sit down and get high and go do it again. Well, John Khan was one of the world's wittiest guys, so I used to love to go there and sit down with between him and Jerry and start some shit. And so I started some shit about this. When we wound up talking about Nixon in the White House, it was right relevant and bingo the next day I get this idea.
- [79:56]
C
So it was that a letter from Grateful that Records was dispatched to The.
- [80:00]
B
White House 23 January 1974. Mr. Richard M. Nixon, President, United States of America, White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. dear Mr. President, while we are vastly different socio political persuasions, several of my associates and I had our first political meeting in our 10 year history and we concluded that your involuntary removal from office would produce a decidedly negative result on the American lifestyle if in fact anything so diverse could be so collectively described. Therefore, our focus was to arrive at a solution of what is now your problem and can be everyone's problem. We pass our solution along to you with only the remotest expectation that you will carry it out. Since while it is brilliant, it is not extremely logical, we have concluded that the problems referred to above would disappear as if by magic were you to chrome the entire White House. Sincerely, Ron Rako Summertime Summer Summer Time.
- [81:40]
A
I don't know about you, but my longtime favorite version of US Blues is from the Grateful Dead movie. Loved it when I first saw it years ago as a teenage Deadhead and it still gives me me the same gleeful feeling when I watch it now. Thanks very much for tuning in to this episode of the good old Grateful Dead cast. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode Brian Anderson, Steve Brown, Sam Cutler, David Gans, Brian Kehue, David Lemieux, Richard Loren, Michael Parish, Richie Pechner, Ron Rakow and Sally Ann Romano. Extra special thanks a friend of the Dead cast, David Ganz, for his ongoing contributions of audio from his interview archive. We'll see you back in two weeks with episode two. Executive producer for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Doron Tyson. All rights reserved.