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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 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 seven of the Good Old Grateful Dead cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. This episode digs into all of the behind the scenes business happenings with the grateful dead in 1973, and like everything else they did, they did it in their own inimitable way. Hey, speaking of 1973, we've just announced a brand new Grateful Dead box set that we know everybody's going to absolutely love. Here Comes Here Comes Sunshine 1973. This new release is a 17 CD 30 limited edition set available exclusively from Dead.net that features five previously unreleased concerts recorded during the band's transformative spring of 1973 tour. The shows included in this set are Iowa State Fairgrounds, Des Moines, Iowa 51373 Campus Stadium, UCSB Santa Barbara, 52073 Kezar Stadium, San Francisco 52673 and Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, Washington, D.C. 6973 and 610 73. The 61073 show will also be available as a standalone release in two configurations, a 4 CD set and an 8LP set. The 17 CD set and the 4 CD set will be released on June 30th and will also be available digitally. The 8LP set comes on July 28th and you can pre order all of the here comes sunshine 1973 releases now over at dead.net head on over to dead.net deadcast and check out all of our past episodes including the complete seasons one through six and you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how you like to listen. And please help this podcast by subscribing. Hit that like button and if the spirit moves you, leave us a review. And most of all, just tell your friends. Thank you, very kind of you. Well some of you know we have transcripts for a lot of your Favorite Deadcast Episodes those of you waiting on Season one transcripts don't have to wait any longer. They're up now for your viewing pleasure@dead.net deadcast index. Check them out. Thanks to everyone who has left their stories over@stories.dead.net we're now asking for your stories about going to shows in 1973. Did you catch any heaters in this glorious year? The Dead were on fire and we want to hear your firsthand account, especially if you caught any shows on that spring tour. Share those stories@stories.dead.net and you just may hear yourself on the Dead Cast. Well, this Dead cast sets course for 1973, diving into the newly announced Here Comes Sunshine box set with first hand tours of the ambitious family businesses in orbit around the dead in 1973, including an independent record label, a booking company, travel agency, clothing boutique, and more. Jesse has the scoop, so let's dig in.
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In 1973, as spring began to bloom, the Grateful Dead were pretty much the biggest band in the land. They jumped from clubs to theaters, from theaters to arenas, and on the five shows on the new Here Comes Sunshine box set, from arenas to stadiums. Over these next six episodes of the Grateful Dead Cast, we'll be taking you deep into these epic shows. But our trip is longer. In 1973, the Grateful Dead manifested as their own virtual solar system. Not just a band, but a cluster of supporting businesses in various orbits that helped get the music from Marin county to the universe at large. Sunshine. Please welcome back to the Deadcast, the fantastic Mrs. Donna Jean Godscho McKay.
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For me and Keith especially, you know, we had just really come on board. By the time we went to Europe, I was barely on board. I had just really sang with him as far as being on tour, that kind of thing in New York before the trip to Europe, so I didn't have very much of a personal knowledge about how everything was before I joined the band.
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B
The Grateful Dead had left for Europe as countercultural heroes and come back as something bigger.
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C
Being in a band that big was an incredible thing, and especially the Grateful Dead being more of an underground band taking off. It was almost like a starburst or something, you know, it got big so quickly there was hardly any time to adjust what was happening.
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D
Daybreak on the Land.
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B
Here Comes Sunshine is the name of the new Grateful Dead box set, capturing five stadium shows in four cities. Here Comes Sunshine was part of a batch of songs written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, debuted by the Dead in February 1973, and its lyrics provided not only the title of the album the band would record over the summer and appear on its first single, but also might be heard as a theme for their most ambitious period ever. In turn, the theme of the next half dozen Dead casts and beyond. The Dead would start their own record company, spin off their own booking and travel agencies, and nurture businesses ranging from boutiques and artisanal clothing to innovative instrument builders and live sound pioneers. And throughout made some pretty excellent music. Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world Heart has its features, its homeland and thoughts of its own we now discover that you are the sun and the morning.
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Break.
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The heart has its season and songs of its soul Grateful that archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
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A lot was going on. They were getting out of the Warner Brothers contract and they were starting their own record company that took up a massive amount of their time, energy and money. So going out on tour several Times. But after April 2nd at the Boston Garden, you look at that summer right up until Nassau in September, there is no tour with the exception of that little six show, three in the Pacific Northwest and followed right up by three in LA at Universal Amphitheater. So what you get is the Grateful Dead instead doing massive shows. The five in this box, all massive shows. And then Watkins Glen and then a couple of Roosevelt with the band.
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B
By sheer size alone, it was a new era for the Grateful Dead.
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E
You get five similarly sized shows. Des Moines, I think they got about 20,000 people at that at the fairgrounds, which was a big open, essentially a stadium without a big cavernous seating. Then you get a big stadium, UC Santa Barbara Stadium. And then you get Kezar Stadium, which is very different from the current Kezar Stadium. If you go to Kesar now, I mean it's a public running track basically. But back then I think the Niners played there before Candlestick for a little while. So keys are was a bona fide stadium. And then RFK with the Allman Brothers.
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B
Besides the size, there was another factor shaping these performances.
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E
These are all daytime shows these. So I've always found that there's a different sound. And so where an indoor show at Winterland where you've got the lights, it's a dark room with the lights having a big impact on the experience. A big 35 minute dark star works incredibly well in a situation like that. Whereas outdoors in the beautiful sunshine of Kezar Stadium on a Saturday in The Haight At 3:30 in the afternoon, Truck. Another one works a little bit better.
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That was truckin for May 20, 1973 in Santa Barbara. The second of the shows on Here Comes Sunshine played in front of a giant crowd on a Sunday afternoon by one of the most popular bands in the United States. But it didn't happen overnight. And it wasn't because of a record company or a hit single, though having a few decent selling records was part of it. But those had never been the point. One of the remarkable things about the Grateful Dead is that they had an employee whose job it was to consider what exactly the point was. Here's Keith Godshow and Bob Weir on Waer in Syracuse in 1973.
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D
One guy, one brilliant guy working.
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Alan Trist is truly brilliant.
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Actually probably the oldest of our in.
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B
Tech business organizations is our publishing company, which we were obliged to create for our first record. It's really a good idea to have in many ways to have your own publishing company. And so we've gone through a couple of managerial change arounds and turnovers of.
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One sort or another.
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But is 9 has more or less.
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Stuck with us ever since way back then. As ever, we are so pleased to welcome back Alan Trist, longtime director of Ice 9, the Grateful Dead's in house publishing company.
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D
In 1917 I came on board and sorted out Ice 9, which at that point was a bit of a confusing setup. All of the songs were copyrighted to McGanahan's Kajellifeti, who was an invented for the group as a whole. Joint creator, joint writing.
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Alan's appeared on the Dead cast a few times, starting during the broke down palace episode of our American Beauty season as well as throughout our Europe 72 shows to discuss his ongoing role in the Dead's organization. A close friend of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter from their earliest days in Palo Alto, it was officially Alan's job to tend to the band's original songs and register them with the proper rights organizations as needed. But thinking about the Dead and Robert Hunter's lyrics specifically as one core of the Grateful Dead, it follows that Allen became the center of the Dead's ongoing think tank.
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D
It was after 1970 when the band came back to California with a new reputation that was much wider and with new sales potential. And that brought the idea of going more independent in all the different ways, much closer to us. I mean, things have been going on before in the 60s with regards to independence questing.
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B
Though the Dead signed to Warner Bros. Many of their operations had remained independent beyond Ice 9. In 1968, along with the Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver messenger service, they tried running Their own venue to compete with Bill Graham, the Carousel Ballroom. Graham took over a few months later, but a few years after that, the Dead had grown into a successful band.
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D
I wrote what you might call position papers for the band as needed.
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One term that shows up in Alan's papers as a factor to be considered in decision making that probably wasn't showing up on a lot of companies business plans was questing.
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D
The term questing, I mean, the idea of group vision questing is kind of what we were going on is normally associated with an individual vision quest. But there's no reason why a group can't have a vision quest too. And we did. The questing might be in the context of the general feeling in the 1960s and the 70s that we could create a new world. Kesey used to say, in regard to what one was doing in life, always stay in your own movie. And so staying in our own movie or the Grateful Dead movie meant working with records, with touring, with music. We weren't going to be out there being activists in any other way because it wasn't our movie. And so hopefully everybody was doing that in their movies and we were doing ours. So but by questing, I mean how do we vision quest in our own movie? How to do something that's creating a new world that the 60s were kind of trying to do. Smaller independence enables you to recreate the universe from on a step by step basis within your own movie.
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B
That was a little bit of Dark Star from June 10, 1973. The sound of several universes busy being born, or perhaps a few busy dying by now. I needn't remind anybody about the success of the Grateful Dead's merchandise sales and how it's one of the things that ultimately allowed the Dead to shape their own universe. The Dead had sold a few locally made shirts in the 60s, like the famed pig pen design, but merch didn't come until they really hit the road. And it started as a literally in house operation and turned into an independent business of its own in an unexpected way. Please welcome back to the Deadcast, the author of the great memoir Dancing with the Dead and original Dead family member Rosie McGee.
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G
I want to give credit to Susil Kreutzman, or formerly Kreutzman, because back in 69 or 70, Susila had had a baby, Justin Kreutzman. Justin was maybe six months old or a year old at the most. And Billy was just starting to go off on the road all the time. So Susila wanted to be on the road with Billy. More often. And so she created a business from scratch. There was nothing going on around us until she came up with that as a way to be on the road with Billy. She'd throw the boxes of shirts in the back of the equipment truck and fly off to the gig and. And yeah, she did that. She worked really hard at it. And she had a little baby with her. They'd stick her in the back table in the lobby or something.
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B
Somewhat famously, the sound company Alembic came together as a spin off of the Grateful Dead and their extended family of bands to do custom recording, build and modify custom instruments and amplifiers, and construct custom live sound solutions. We'll talk plenty about Alembic in these episodes. But just as serious sound wizards circulated around the Dead, so did serious artists of other kinds, like tie dye master Courtney Pollock. Check out our interview with him on the side B episode of our Skull and Roses season. If you look at photos of the Dead on stage at any of the Here Comes Sunshine shows, you can see a few tie dyed amp covers by Courtney and even a few lingering paisley amp covers that Rosie herself made.
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G
He did speaker covers for Alembic and for the band. And every single home in that time period had at least one Courtney sheet mandala on the wall or on the ceiling, or if not three. There was a lady named Sue Gottlieb who made fringe leather purses and vests. And, you know, once one was seen and appreciated, a whole bunch more were made. Novato Frank had Native American jewelry that everybody was wearing. Christine Bennett cowboy shirts, other stage wear and so forth.
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B
Shake it, Shake and Sugary Just don't tell them that you. No Shake it, shake it, Sugary Just don't tell them that you. That was Sugary. From the Des Moines show on May 13. In the early 70s, it became apparent that the Dead's t shirt business might be something a little bigger than Susa Lakrezmann wanted to deal with, but not before opening the local outlet.
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G
And she started a store called Kumquat May in San Anselmo. And it was three things. It was a retail outlet for the shirts, and she started it with Christine Bennett. But it was also a consignment shop for Courtney and these other artists that I've mentioned and many others. And not just art and craft, but, you know, secondhand store for stuff from people's kitchens or whatever. You know, it was kind of a potpourri of items. And it was also turned into a place for mostly the women, but not just the women, but people who didn't go on the road. It became a, a homing place. You know, people would come and, and, and spend the time, spend some time and hang out and nurse their babies and you know, this, whatever. It was a very cool place. Susle has not been given enough credit, has never been mentioned that I know of in that context as having made a real contribution. So I'm speaking for her.
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B
Kumquat May was opened by the spring of 1972 when the dead mentioned it in their newsletter and it became a scene of its own.
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G
The store in San Anselmo was very much loosey goosey. Suslo was and is an astute businesswoman and she kept it together behind the scenes. It was very tight, but as far as appearance and, and the kind of store that it was, it was very homey and comfortable and lots of couches and different chairs and just kind of a. It was a big store. It was a big building. Then somewhere along the line she tightened it down and made it much smaller and moved it to Mill Valley.
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B
The later iteration was called Rainbow Arbor and according to a Rolling Stone article, featured a more than life sized papier mache statue of the Keep On Truckin kit out front, plus more paper mache inside in the form of tree trunks extending from floor to ceiling where the foliage is continued in paint. The store sold dead T shirts made by Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelly's Monster Company, as well as shirts Susale designed for the New Riders of the Purple Sage and the Allman Brothers. The T shirts themselves turned into a real business.
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G
She eventually sold the business to Winterland.
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Productions and even that's an undersell. Winterland Productions became one of rock's first enormous T shirt companies. And to hear the late founder Del Farano tell it, he never would have gotten into the business if Susale hadn't gotten tired of dealing with it.
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G
And Susale is also a talented artist. At the time, she's very great seamstress and she used to make cowboy shirts for Billy and, and so she sold some of those and you know, she's gone on to make all kinds of things. I think right now for the last 10 years or more, she's become a very, very skilled quilter. Makes quilts.
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B
Sometimes we live no particular way but our own Sometimes we visit your country and live in your home Sometimes we ride on your horses Sometimes we walk alone Sometimes the song that we hear are just songs of our. That was Eyes of the world from the June 10th show in Washington D.C. on here comes Sunshine While Kumquat May and Rainbow Arbor became places for the Dead's family to congregate, the Dead charged Alan Trist with exploring a project provisionally titled Deadpatch.
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D
It was the idea of, well, couldn't we have a campus and, you know, have our office, rehearsal hall, recording studio, all the facilities we needed to conduct business in one place, in one beautiful place in Marin County. Why not? You know, so that idea was floated. There was a. A piece of land which David Parker, I think, had bought at that point on Lucas Valley Road. It was an investment. I think probably one of the only investments the great ever made was this tiny part that, you know, this was one possibility. We could build that facility there. But we said, well, let's go a little further. And we looked at several other locations around Marin county, mostly in the central area, which would be convenient for everybody to get to. I remember, you know, 20, 30 people going out, oh, let's meet at this place that's for sale. We go out into the woods somewhere and there'd be some useful looking gland. We could do something here, you know, so it was a fantasy that didn't go anywhere because, like with many things like that, the, the, the. The Dead, in the end would feel, let's not tie ourselves down too much with, you know, they would like this, rent a truck, not buy one. You know, it took a long time before they actually bought their own truck. So be light with your possessions.
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B
But in another way, the Dead had already established their own campus, setting up a few different bases of operation in walking distance or quick drives away from one another in San Rafael.
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D
It's all connected in that little industrial downtown area of San Rafael, which is another reason why, you know, Dead Patch didn't happen. We. We had it sort of in a different way.
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B
You know, it became a virtual company town. In 1970, the band had started renting a house at the corner of 5th and Lincoln, and a few years later took over two floors at 1330 Lincoln. The artists Mouse and Kelly had their monster company not far away. And the New Riders of the Purple Sage established their own office on Front street nearby in the industrial district down by the canals. The New Riders took over a corner of a warehouse, and the Dead's crew started storing their gear in another part. A half decade later, the Dead themselves would start practicing and recording there full time, naming the place Club Front, a home base alongside the house at 5th and Lincoln until 1995. There's a pretty famous photo from the summer of 1973 that documents the Population of the Dead's company town.
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G
Every so often, there's this photo of the Grateful Dead family on a loading dock. It's an Annie Leibowitz photo with about 60 people in it. Three rows of people, and there's kids and dogs and all kinds of people. It was taken in the industrial part of San Rafael, somewhere near Front street in the Canal area in San Rafael. I think they just made a deal with some neighbor. I don't remember exactly, but it was somewhere around there. It wasn't at Front street because Front street didn't have a loading dock like that.
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We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast and it shows up regularly.
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G
A couple of times a year, it'll show up on social media. And inevitably people will comment something like, well, it's no wonder Jerry felt forced to continue when he really didn't want to. There's all those mouths to feed. There's the implication it implies this group of people, this visual aid of 60 people are all freeloaders. And they're wrong. They're wrong as I've described. Actually, that photo was taken for Rolling Stone. They did a cover story called the Corporate Dead. All these companies were created around a band that was just about to break out like big time.
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B
In the 1971 interview that became the book A Signpost to New Space, Jerry Garcia summarizes the basic financial principle that drove the Haight Ashbury scene at large, and the Grateful Dead scene in specific. He called it hip economics. He explained, the whole theory in Hip Economics is essentially that you can have a small amount of money and move it around very fast and it would work out. But when you have thousands and thousands of people, it's just too unwieldy. By 1973, the dead scene encompassed its own hip economy.
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G
The first four places that we lived, we were all living together. And it wasn't communal in the sense of that we were a commune. It was communal in the sense that we had no money, and it was the only way that we could. That they could survive. So we were all gathered, this group of friends around a. A band that. We were gathered around the band. And it grew out from that. And then things just happened organically. Alembic showed up in 1968 as initially an R D for the electronics and the instruments for the band, with Ron Wickersham, Susan Wickersham, and Bear coming up with solutions to electronic issues and sound issues and guitar issues. And it grew from there. So everything. It was more organic. But I don't think there was this overview of changing society. I think it was more taking care of business in the best way we can. And we might as well do it with our friends. Because at the heart of it, we the friends, were the only ones who really knew what they needed.
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B
Find out that you are the eyes of the world Heart has its beaches, its homeland and thoughts of its own we shall discover that you are the song that the old man.
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G
But at the heart of was our knowledge of who they were and what they needed to be comfortable to insulate the band from all those petty realities so that they could just go on the road and everything would be taken care of properly. And so the thought occurred to some people that if the band was going to need all these services anyway, as they got bigger and went into more traveling, why not have friends in those businesses instead of corporate strangers, you know, straight people in quotes.
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B
Maybe if I am a never made up on the scene But I can give you what you want but you got to come home. That was hard to handle from Bear's Choice, the band's final release with Warner Bros. It was a kiss off to their former label as the band set their own independent course on the high seas of hypnocracy. The dad's original contract with Warner Bros. Expired at the end of 1969, but was renewed by the less than scrupulous manager Lenny Hart to extend through the end of 1972, resulting in a peculiar bit of economics that we explored in our Bears Choice episode. By the time Bear's Choice hit the streets in the summer of 1973, the dead had initiated a plan that would reshape their world. Driven by the vision of Ron Rakow, a longtime band associate who dropped out of the finance world to manage the Carousel Ballroom and photograph the Dead. He'd been along for the Europe 72 tour and plenty of other trips.
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D
Braco was around for all those early 70s years. He was thinking about that. The band was thinking about how do we become more independent, you know, of the music business? How do we use the resources we have? Ron started thinking about setting up a record company and he was given that license by the band. Well, start working on it, Ron. I spent several. I mean, we'll run around with him, you know, we talk about it, to go over to his place. He come to mind. I was sort of set as his kind of number two to try to figure this out. That went on for some months, as I remember. And eventually Ron wrote the so what? Papers about how to set up a franchise operation for the Dissemination of the records.
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B
In the weeks after the band returned from their Europe 72 tour, Rackow began to organize a plan to begin the long process of conversation and deliberation within the dead's family. Rosie McGee.
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G
Ron Rackow had the idea and he made a presentation to the band about doing their own record company. And my involvement was he hired me as a temp to put together the handouts and the package and the slides for the presentation to the band of the record company. And I spent a week with Ron, you know, turning this mountain of ideas into a coherent proposal. It was exactly the so what papers.
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D
And that was brought to the band at a meeting. A very interesting meeting was in Forest Knowles in Marin county, outdoors in the summer. Ron set up a big blackboard, you know, with. With huge sheets of paper. And he started going through the different parts of what he was proposing. And we were all sitting around having a good time. Yeah. As Ron laid out what he was proposing, I remember one point there was talk about, well, we could get some money from this bank or raise something for that. And the bank said, no, no, no, we're not putting ourselves in that position. So Ron went up to the blackboard, just ripped that sheet off, you know, and we went on to other things.
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B
Some accounts place Rakow's flash on Independence Day 1972, a perfectly cromulent day for an independent record company to celebrate its birthday. Lots of artists had their own imprints on major labels. But true independence for a major artist to take full control of their operations was and is a bold radical move in any era of music. And even within the idea of radical independence, Rakow's proposal was fairly radical. The idea was more or less to set up Grateful Dead franchises in different cities.
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D
It would have been built around models of local Deadhead action in different cities. I think that was Ron's idea, you know, that you found a head shop, for instance, that was selling merchandise and you encouraged them to expand their operation to taking our albums, that sort of idea. The one I remember that sticks in my mind was the idea of the ice cream van which would go to all of the concerts, and your local Dead Records franchise would sell them right there in the parking lot, which is.
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B
Certainly a forward thinking way to distribute one's records. Essentially imagining Grateful Dead authorized Deadhead run pop up shops. I'm going to read a little bit from Ron Rackow's so what papers, because I find this an interesting proposal. We'll punctuate it with bits of the playing in the band from Kezar May 26, there's this overworked, overtaxed house in San Rafael where 50 or 60 people come and get charged up, function, share their flashes, share their getting high. There's no reason why that particular set can't be the lever to simplify in the creation of other sets just like that or similar to it all over the world. The currency is records. That's a currency. They're well packaged, tradeable, entertaining, and people like them. They certainly buy a lot of them. Imagine then that there's. There's a house in San Francisco, a funky little place. Walk into it and see a girl behind a desk with a typewriter. Four cats work in offices in what used to be bedrooms and dining rooms and kitchens and so on. At about 11 or 12 o', clock, a whole bunch of kids come in. Each one goes to the office of the area that he's concerned about. They spend some time and these kids leave with some grateful that records. And they go out to high schools or UC in Berkeley or the college in San Jose, or a shopping center in the Marina or Mill Valley, and they sell these records, exchange them for cash. Maybe they zip back to the city and get some more. Maybe they don't. Maybe they'll do that tomorrow. Perhaps a kid who's been doing that for two weeks and he only had $200 and wanted to go to Europe, and he'd just sold enough of the last batch of records to get his ticket and get on the plane and split. Imagine further, that same set duplicated in Rochester, New York, in Brooklyn, in Memphis, just outside Chicago, in Madison, Wisconsin. Any place where there's a lot of young folks, we can create little places which, when put together, form a distribution pipeline into which products that come out of or through the house in San Rafael go out and get disseminated all over using every possible business method which will be adapted for this use. Ron Rackow did market research suggesting using 35 franchise spots around the country, we would create a distribution force which covers 90.3% of the national market, as opposed to, for example, the Warner Brothers distribution force which covers 85.5% of the national market.
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D
Thank you.
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B
Thank you. We're going to take a short break.
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F
Everybody hang loose and we'll be back.
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E
In just a few minutes.
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B
Play a lot more.
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D
And everybody said, well, let's go, you know, take it to the next step. And that's what Ron proceeded to do. I remember after that going, going around with him to various pressing plants in California and I think in New York, too. Once to see how that operation worked, you know, what were the qualities of vinyl that were available and how would that part of the operation work?
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B
There's some record of a delegation from the Dead paying a visit to Stanion Records in la. And the marvelous clouds sail by Marvelous clouds, clouds aloft in the soft summer sky Marvelous clouds. That was Rod McKeown, once the best selling poet in the United States and labelmate of the Dead at Warner, who launched his own independent label in 1970. Stanion Records. Indie labels had been part of the record making landscape since the 1940s. The major label consolidation in the 60s, 70s, 80s and ever since would make them a more urgent concern. The Dead were researching all the options they could dream up. Allen prepared a position paper titled the State of the Changes, synthesizing Ron Rackow's proposal for Grateful Dead franchises with a few other suggestions that had come up.
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D
There were basically four ideas that were on the table and that we had been discussing in the office for some months, even years before. The first was a regular record company. I'm going to quote now. Well, we know it works after its own fashion and we're used to the hassle. It doesn't scare us, but it's a ripoff. It's a bummer from a questing point of view. And in the case of our making a public choice come December 31st to line up again, that would be the end of the contract term would probably have definite negative feedback with all the consequences that follow from that.
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B
There were plenty of record companies that would be happy to have the Grateful Dead on virtually whatever terms the band dictated. Clive Davis of Columbia had been virtually courting the Dead for years, by some accounts giving a fat contract to the new riders of the Purple Sage in order to lure the Dead themselves. It didn't work, but Clive Davis wouldn't stop trying. This could take several forms, Allen's paper noted, including record by record deals, the grunt model, the Apple model, et cetera.
- [42:23]
D
So that was our thoughts about the record company. Well, we know how they do it, but we're not sure that we want to go on that trip. I mentioned another term in there, the scare factor, which is going to come up in some of these other readings. And I should mention that all I may mean there is that when you take on work beyond your own movie, as you've defined it for the moment, which was touring, and then you take up record production and ticket sales and all of these other things, it's taking on a lot of responsibility in areas you're not used to. And you have to think about who in the team can cover these things. We need to get more employees. So the scare factor is really, whoa, that's a lot of work. And that's. Do we want to go there? So we were constantly having to balance that energy that had to be created with the questing direction that was desired.
- [43:29]
B
One suggestion was a distribution deal through a discount record distributor.
- [43:33]
D
Another possibility for independent records was a discount house. And here the man. That's to say whoever's in charge of things would be working for us and would buffer us from the major part of the marketing hassle and the scare by itself. It is unlikely that this approach would cover the ground that we need to cover. It is neutral in regards to any questing component. So that was another way of going. But it didn't have much pizzazz to it. You know, it was just an option on the table.
- [44:13]
B
Then there was Rakow's idea to franchise the band.
- [44:16]
D
A third one was. Is really the franchise mail order kind of idea. Which we are. Which is the so what papers. And the big question in regard to that is, can we find the right franchises and will they do the job on a continuing basis? If yes, then we'll do all right. Financially, it's heavy on the scare factor because this is setting up new stuff from the ground up. It's untested. And the degree of hassle involved probably depends on finding the right home office executive group. That's to say, people in our own world who could handle this kind of business and knowing how the rest of us are going to support their effort. Which means there would be extension of everybody's work.
- [45:11]
B
The last suggestion is also pretty radical. I'll read the executive summary. Annual subscription to the gd. The Bayer proposal also involving total independence.
- [45:21]
D
The other fourth possibility that was on the table was the subscription model. But the big question here is whether the Grateful Dead record buying core is a stable enough population for us to count on them to take out subscriptions. Even if it was the only way to get the records. By making it hard for them, we might just be cutting our own throats. This technique does not seem strong enough in itself. So, you know, there was too much unpredictability in that world for the subscription model to really stand up. Maybe later on it could have worked a lot better. Certainly as the Deadhead network became a very stable population and the newsletters and the. And the list was very established, it might have worked a lot better. But at this time it was a little crazy.
- [46:25]
B
Wow. So Owsley suggested a plan that artists wouldn't really experiment with seriously until the 21st century. I can see why it might not have worked in 1973, but the dead were definitely dreaming as big as ever.
- [46:37]
D
We started having a real mailing list which Eileen Lohr took care of in the office, and it built up very fast. And the subscription model might have been associated with that because, you know, here's an initial list you can work with.
- [47:25]
B
That was Mississippi half step from May 13th in Iowa. The questing factor was a real element, both on stage and in business that Alan and the Dead took seriously. The state of the change's response to the so what papers also makes clear that the Dead considered their questing to be an integral part of what a more modern consultant might call their brand, which might just be another way of saying integrity. From Alan's paper, we know that success.
- [47:51]
D
That'S sales, reputation, image, et cetera, due to the quality of the music, is strongly reinforced by the how of everything associated with the music's dissemination. If the how is right, the medium is the message. Therefore our options should be tested against their onlineness with the direction of independence. That was the basic idea. I used the term online before there was an online. Of course, I don't know what I even call it. What I mean by that is that the what, what the fans wanted was to see in the Grateful Dead a whole integrated system that not only produced great music that was their lifeblood, but also produced it righteously, you might say, to use an old word. And that's why moving away from the established music business, record companies, agencies, management, touring and so forth, was, was constantly pushing us because they were seen as unrighteous. And indeed they had been very much so in the 50s and the 60s. They were. They were ripping off all kinds of artists and had a very bad reputation. So to be online with the record companies was. That's not good. But to be online by creating our own way forward, that was the questing we were up for doing.
- [49:45]
B
In preparing the so what papers, Ron Rackow also commissioned a slightly non scientific survey to be undertaken by a New York City Dead freak who interviewed other potential dead freaks on the street. In June 1972, he came back with 1100 interviews and I wish I could see the raw data. The so what papers summarize a bit saying the main response was about money, with very much cynicism about music industry and groups themselves. Large contrast with three years ago when groups were looked up to for leadership. Dead sometimes accepted from cynicism Sometimes not.
- [50:17]
D
Looking at those survey results from, say, a sociological point of view, I don't know quite whether they stand up to any scrutiny. But, you know, some of the things the wrong pulled out of that survey, which are in the. So what papers are kind of interesting in that they express that questing aspect that we were picking up from the Deadheads, wanting to connect with that. And because some of people were questioning whether the values of the counterculture then were really being expressed by the Grateful Dead, which was. It was curious to see that because there was also going on a change of attitude about the cost of music to the fan. I think it certainly is happening in the early 70s. I remember once sitting backstage at a small club where the band. I forget the name of it, the Matrix in San Francisco. And before the show, and Jerry was walking around and he. He came over to me and offered me a hit on a joint. And. And there was a. A fan sitting next door who engaged Jerry in conversation and said, jerry, why, you know, these gigs should be free. You know, we should. We should be free. Why, you know, you know, they were. They were free in the park. They should be free. And Jerry, you know, said the obvious thing, of course. Well, it costs us a lot of money to put on a show what's free. But nevertheless, the question, the attitude that this person had carried, it was carrying Forward from the 60s the idea that everything should be free. It was kind of the crazy, outlandish extremes of 60s thinking. So I think that Ron Survey picked up some of that. Some of that residual thing. And. Which made it even more important for the band in setting up its record company and its independent ideas to be very solid in the organization of the activity itself, legally and from a productive and administrative point of view. And also show to the Deadheads that we were also moving in the direction that those 60s values suggested.
- [52:56]
B
So how to walk that line, to use more modern management terms. Sorry. How could they keep their free colors aloft but scale it up to stadium size or bigger?
- [53:06]
D
Over the course of the next year, our key decisions will concern the performance of. Of the franchise operation and the gaining of knowledge about the innovative marketing strategy that involves secondly, organizational analogs of head consciousness. That's to say, the counterculture values we've been talking about are decentralization within a unity idea, autonomy, open system, flexible structure, adaptation and change. If the franchise start to operate with these characteristics, and we with them, it will be at the edge of our control.
- [54:01]
B
They were prophetic words, gently and sagely helping the Dead set their course. Into the new weird waters. The franchise operation wouldn't manifest exactly as Rakow proposed, at least not on an official level. But it was a place to start. Straddled that grid road it passed Raleigh on across Carolina Stopping Charlotte in my face rockin we never was a minute late we was 90 miles out of Atlanta by sundown Rolling cross Georgia State that was the promised land from Santa Barbara, May 20th. You can see great shots of that show by Rosie McGee in her books Dancing with the Dead and her incredible recent anthology of Dead photos.
- [54:52]
G
Right after the Europe 72 tour, or, you know, a few months after, there was a lot of talk and activity. I think Sam Cutler started Out of Town Tours first, but there was this discussions that, okay, the band's heading into the big time, you know, as far as being on the road a lot and needing all of these services, you know, from booking, booking to travel to everything else.
- [55:24]
B
Sam Cutler became the Dead's tour manager in 1970 and took over booking duties by 1971. Here's band manager John McIntyre describing Sam's evolution on WAER in 1973. Sam Cutler, out of Town Tours. He was the road manager, and then he was road manager and booking agent, and his booking agency, he handles more than just the Grateful Dead, you know, so that was consuming more and more, more of his time. So right now, Rock Scully's being the road manager, Sam's being the booking agent, you know, so we switch around a lot. We'll have Sam back here on the Dead cast soon enough to talk about out of Town Tours.
- [56:02]
G
Sam founded Out Of Town Tours after the Europe 72 tour, which was quite complex. He did all the. He arranged it, he tour managed it. I mean, it was an awesome tour de force, you know, of management, tour management and all of that. So he came out of that, and my guess is he thought, okay, well, I can do all this stuff. Why don't I make it a business so that I can control every aspect of it and I don't have to, as much as possible, don't have to depend on other people who may or may not understand and what our needs really are. He was perfect for that. I mean, he was, he was, is smart, he's financially astute, which the band wasn't. And, you know, they needed, they needed a boost on that. And to be a tour manager for a major rock band, you have to be like, brutally streetwise. And Sam's got that in spades. He is brutally streetwise. And you don't want to get on the bad end of an argument with him, especially when he's tour managing a band. You know, he's quick on his feet. So anyway, he started Out Of Town Tours.
- [57:28]
B
Out Of Town Tours announced its formation in the fall of 1972 as the dead were pondering their new record company, the first obvious act for Sam Cutler to sign up, inasmuch as he was pretty much booking them anyway. It was the New Riders of the Purple Sage, who'd recently released their third album, Gypsy Cowboy. It's a dark and rainy night but my engine's running right and I hope to get to Memphis before dark yeah and if I make it through Gonna say what I have to Then I'll be running Whiskey Keep Mary alive they signed up the New Riders, Columbia labelmates, the funky new incarnation of Bay Area stalwart Sons of Champlin, who put out welcome to the Dance that year. Another musician they signed up was none other than Ramblin Jack Elliot, the one time Woody Guthrie partege and authentic Brooklyn Cowboy. Don't let your deal go down till your last gold dollar's gone.
- [58:50]
D
Don'T let.
- [58:50]
B
Your deal go down Then the last gold dollar is gone and a little later on they'd signed the great Texas musician Doug Somme, once of the Sir Douglas Quintet. The Dead had recently jammed with him over Thanksgiving 72 at the Armadillo World headquarters in Austin. Sometime soon thereafter, Jerry Garcia and David Grisman accompanied Psalm on a session that remained unreleased until Rhino Handmaid's genuine Texas Groover set in 2003.
- [59:21]
D
From a Jack to a king.
- [59:25]
B
From loneliness to Wendy Play the if you look at the Dead's bookings, liner notes and ephemera from the era, the artists on the Out Of Town tour roster intersected often. Sam had an able office staff ready to help keep the new out of Town world a reality. One member was Sally Mann Romano, then married to Spencer Dryden, former badass drummer for the Jefferson airplane, and in 1972 employed as badass drummer for the New Riders of the Purple Sage. Please welcome back Sally Mann Romano.
- [60:05]
C
You know, I worked with Cutler, as we like to say, he gets in trouble if he calls me his secretary. I was his executive assistant. You know, I was Cutler's girl. You know, I was his assistant.
- [60:17]
B
Sally wrote a firecracker of a memoir with one of the greatest titles ever. The bands with me. It's funny because it's true. We've posted a link@dead.net Deadcast an infamous rock character of deliciously ill repute herself, Sally had appeared on the COVID of Rolling Stone's Groupies issue and book. I have to say, the story of how she got the job at out of Town Tours makes me cringe a little. And when somebody adapts Sally's book into a prestige, screaming dramedy with a bitchin soundtrack and blurs the details slightly, Sam Cutler's job offer will surely be a comically awkward centerpiece like Mad Men set in early 70s Marin County.
- [60:52]
C
He just showed up at my house one morning at about some ungodly hour for rock and roll, like at 9 o' clock in the morning or something when Spencer was on the road and, you know, it was obvious he was coming over to, like, come on to me. And, you know, I think, what are you doing here? And I mean, we weren't really friends or anything. I mean, I knew him, but he just showed up and I made him breakfast. And somehow out of that, you know, him drop the visit. I got the job working for him. And I mean, he asked me, I think, if I took shorthand. So I lied and I said I did. And the whole. He just, like last year found out that I never did take shorthand. I just, you know, I could speed write and, I mean, I could remember what he said. And he dictated all of these letters, all that time thinking that I was just, you know, like, firing off the short head. Oh, it was hilarious. He was kind of fun to work for, but, you know, he's a serious dude. You know, when he wants you to do something, you want to get it done.
- [61:52]
B
Rock and roll or something. But I'm glad Sally did lie, because the Grateful Dead archives contain one of her notebooks from this period, written in hurried but quite legible English most of the time, making it much easier to look over these days. We'll get to some of that later. Sally had been around the San Francisco ballroom scene since before there was a ballroom scene and had witnessed Bill Graham and the full spectrum of backstage characters. Sam Cutler was certainly one of those.
- [62:17]
C
I know he gets mixed reviews, but. And I mean, he got mixed reviews from me. I mean. But now, 50 years later, I love him like a brother and really, really happy to have worked for him. Cutler was like. I mean, he's like sort of a. At the time, you know, I think this is true his whole life. He's a larger than life character, much like Bill and not quite as physically imposing as Bill, but he just, you know, these are people. When they walk in the room, people turn around to look. You know, he's funny and profane, and those are my two favorite qualities. He Was a lot of fun.
- [62:53]
B
It was a good gig and thorough.
- [62:55]
C
The funniest thing about it is I know more now about forklift capacity than probably any woman on earth. Just because the Deads, you know, this is back when they had the, you know, the billion pound sound system. So, you know, the contracts, you know, specified the forklifts. And I mean, all that capacity, you couldn't just show up with some off brand Japanese forklift. It was intense.
- [63:22]
B
The crew of people Sam employed had all been around the Bay Area music scene since the early days.
- [63:27]
C
And like Rita Gentry, who went to Santana, she did the contracts and she sort of. I don't mean she negotiated them. She kind of oversaw them. And Gail, Helen, who is Rick Turner's wife, did the books and kept the money straight, thank God. And Chesley was there hanging out all the time.
- [63:45]
B
Chesley Milliken had seen the dead in 1966 and dropped out, eventually working in the record industry, including a spot as the house hippie at CBS Records. He was technically vice president at out of Town, handling Doug Somm and others.
- [63:58]
C
Chesley was like something out of a freaking Irish novel. I mean, he was drunk all the time. You managed to have a really good time doing really hard, good work, and I like that. And, you know, the fan club was there and Eileen Law. You just got to hang with such interesting, talented people all the time. And that was a good thing. I just lucked out and was with the Dead during the golden age of not only the band, but the crew before, you know, later on. I mean, I learned this just recently that they got, you know, such a bad reputation for being a little manhandly, you know, and. And sort of reading their own press or something.
- [64:42]
B
Sally had been around the Dead scene for years, but as a member of the Jefferson Airplane family, which brought her a slight outsider's perspective.
- [64:50]
C
One of the main differences is, of course, is like, the Airplane had records that were getting hits on FM radio and the Dead were not there yet. You know, they had White Rabbit and Somebody To Love. And so that makes a big, huge difference in, you know, your outreach nationally. When they would play at Golden Gate park and stuff. You know, they were huge. So. But I think it was at that time a little bit more localized.
- [65:16]
B
We used this bit back in Season three, but it bears repeating.
- [65:20]
C
One of the coolest differences between the Dead and the Airplane. There was much more of that communal sort of family vibe happening with the Dead. But people misunderstand about bands. They think everybody sort of hangs out together when they're not on the road. And, you know, nothing could be farther from the truth. You've been on the road with these jackasses for six, eight weeks. You. They're the last person you want to see when you come back. And people tend to hang out with their wives or their other friends that aren't in the band. But the Dead, it's such an extreme, extended bunch of people that. And Bill, what I wanted to say, putting together these, the softball games, everything, that was just wonderful. You know, it was just. It really was such a wholesome kind of family thing. And like, Frankie Weir, she's just the most freaking ace softball player. And she had softball games going out of the Mill Valley Cavern. And that was a lot of fun. Very different from the airplane.
- [66:19]
B
We'll throw in one more detail from Gayle Helland, who also worked at out of Town tours in the 70s and was part of the Dead Airplane softball games. We'll have a lot more from Gayle down the line.
- [66:29]
C
I was at some of those softball games. All I remember. All I remember is that Grateful Dead girls were really good at softball, too. Everybody would go, wow, you know, like, don't let the girls play.
- [66:40]
G
Yeah. And then the girls would get up.
- [66:42]
C
There and just, you know, we're talking mountain girls and Sherry Nelson and people like that. They could hit that ball.
- [66:47]
G
They were good, you know, Company life.
- [66:50]
B
In a company town.
- [66:51]
C
We were all in the same little office building in San Rafael. The number of assorted jobs and hangers on and everything. So the office was a lot of people, you know, accountants. And the fan club was there. And the Frankie's Travel Agency was on the first floor. Fly by Night.
- [67:16]
B
Frankie was Frankie Weir. That was Sugar Magnolia from the Santa Barbara show. On the new box set, a song written with Frankie weir's muse, Rosie McGee.
- [67:41]
G
Frankie, who was Bobby Weir's girlfriend at the time, decided, why don't we start our own travel agency? And the, the. The main impetus at the beginning was that the wives and girlfriends wanted to be on the road with their guys more often, but they couldn't afford it because of tickets. Right. And so if you have a travel agency, you can sell tickets. Well, you can pocket the commissions is what I'm saying. You know, if you. If you're buying retail from a travel agency, you're going to pay full price. But if you are the travel agency, you can pay without the commission. And the commission goes into the coffers to run the business. And I was really smart.
- [68:37]
B
Frankie Weir was quite a character, someone. I wish we could have spoken with. She was a former hullabaloo dancer, worked for the Beatles, Apple Records, and her energy seemed to be a source of inspiration for not only her partner, but a number of women in the Dead scene. In lots of photos from the era, you can see her boogieing just to the side of the stage and not infrequently on the stage right behind the band. Rosie was ready for Fly By Night.
- [69:00]
G
I'd been working at Alembic for a couple of years already. I was a purchasing agent and an office manager. I did the studio time booking for the recording studio that they had and I was pretty happy there.
- [69:16]
B
Rosie had worked in the music scene since before she began dating Phil Lesh in 1966, and like a number of people in the Dead's inner circle, worked ably and flexibly at a really wide variety of tasks, including, but not limited to tie dyeing amp cabinets, photography, working in the band's office, and handling French interpretation.
- [69:35]
G
On international trips in 70, 71 and 72, I did some international traveling, which I had always wanted to do, and it really wetted my appetite. I have total wanderlust, you know, and, and I love to travel, or I used to in the, in those days. So in those days, travel agents, unlike today, have had incredible benefits from the airlines. If you had worked as a travel agent for a solid year, you could buy a ticket for the cost of the tax on the ticket, any ticket, anytime. And for me, you know, I had this, this wild wish, like a lot of people in the, in the early 70s, to do around the world trip, you know, to go to Nepal, maybe go to India, go to wherever. I signed up for Fly By Night with the understanding that after one year, my one year anniversary, I'd be out of there. And so I did, you know, I worked there for a year.
- [70:50]
B
They might have been a bunch of dope smoking hippies who liked to boogie, but it also required some serious interfacing with the adult boundaries of consensus reality for a company called Fly By Night Travel to get off the ground. Great name by the way, though they had to keep it a little DL.
- [71:05]
G
I'm sure it's still true now, but even back then, unlike out of Town Tours, which was a booking agency, a travel agency is strictly regulated by the feds, the Department of Transportation. And so it took extra time and we had to jump through a whole bunch of regulatory hoops. And here's some of the requirements that we had to have. We couldn't be closed access, we couldn't be operating in A back room where nobody could see us, right? We had to be publicly visible, publicly advertised, and accept random walk in and call in businesses or business, just like any travel agency. We had to have posters on the windows, we had to be in the yellow pages. We had to do all that. We had to prove financial viability with financial statements before we could even get our license. And we had to have our name approved. So we had to call it FBN Travel because Fly By Night wouldn't fly privately. We were Fly By Night Travel and our tagline was here today, gone tomorrow.
- [72:25]
B
I know the day of travel agencies is pretty much gone, but it did make me want to book some travel through a bunch of dead freaks in San Rafael.
- [72:32]
G
We had to have a lead travel agent with at least three years of documented experience. And so we put in an ad in the local paper. This was in San Rafael, Nevada. And we found a local suburban housewife who had recently retired, or so she thought. Retired from the travel agency business. And she was, her name was Wilma. She was a cheerful, wonderful woman in her 40s. She'd barely even heard of the Grateful Dead and. But somehow we talked her into, and she was willing, bless her heart, to take up the challenge of being the straight laced legal front for our escapade. And so she turned out to be the, the perfect hire. She trained me and so I could be the lead agent on the rock band tours. And then she handled any call in or walk in random strangers. And yeah, she was fantastic. She had a great sense of humor and she thought nothing of having three Hell's Angels sitting in front of her desk, you know, with their feet up. So anyway, bless Wilma. I never could have done it without her.
- [74:00]
B
There are many picturesque sights to see if you feel like checking out Grateful Dead historical spots. From the gorgeous Victorian at 7:10 Ashbury to the ruins of Olampali. There's even some charm in seeing the Front street warehouse to get some of the context for Gilbert Shelton's sleazy depiction of the warehouse district on the COVID of Shakedown Street. But other than the fact that it hasn't been torn down, 1330 Lincoln Avenue in San Rafael is and was almost completely unremarkable, at least on the outside.
- [74:28]
G
13:30 Lincoln is a kind of a early 60s faceless little office building. It could be dentist offices or something like that. And so Sam and his cohorts got the upstairs suite for their offices and, and we moved into a little corner, smaller corner office downstairs. And as I said earlier, we had to have posters in the window. We had to have our name on the door, we had to have public viability from the street. And so occasionally somebody would walk in, but inside there were no rules of what it had to look like. So you can imagine Courtney Tie Dyes just. It wasn't too outrageous. I mean we had work to do and all of that. So we handled. Over time we handled tours for the Dead, the new writers, Jesse Cullen, Young Ramblin, Jack Elliot, David Bromberg, and for a time we had Steve Miller and Boss Gaggs and others.
- [75:41]
B
In 1973, as the dad's adjacent businesses launched or kicked into higher gear, there was no shortage of clients.
- [75:48]
G
We had suspected that this would be a viable business because there was this overflow, you know, all of the spouses, the girlfriends, the friends, anybody not just that wanted to go on tour, but that wanted to take a vacation to Hawaii or whatever. Everybody like glommed into Fly By Night travel and it became a viable business. And meanwhile Frankie, who was the boss, right, she was in her back office hanging out with the Hell's Angels that we're visiting and she was our well civilized corporate owner, public face when necessary. But honestly, I don't think she ever did a lick of work. You know, she didn't have to, you know, she put it all together and, and we did the work and, and it worked.
- [76:44]
B
Sunshine Daydream Water as the Dead prepared to move into stadiums for the first time, with a few tours and arenas under their collective belt, they knew that the move to arenas and stadiums wasn't the friendliest one. Here's Bob weir speaking on WAER in 1973.
- [77:20]
G
Most of those large places sound pretty fair.
- [77:23]
B
And what we do is we send.
- [77:24]
G
Out an advancement who looks over the.
- [77:28]
B
Place and ascertains whether or not it's.
- [77:32]
G
Going to be suitable or not.
- [77:33]
B
That was another job for Fly By Night.
- [77:36]
G
There was always somebody advancing the tours. Often it was either Bob Matthews did that role for a long time where he would go out by himself or with one other person to look at the, the halls and, you know, check things out from a band point of view. I mean that's just a standard thing, advancing the gigs.
- [78:01]
B
Here's Keith GodShow on WAER. For him it was a vibe thing.
- [78:05]
D
As far as I'm concerned. Aside from the, the obvious problems of.
- [78:09]
B
Making a big hall Savages, the major.
- [78:13]
D
Thing that bothers me about playing big calls is people have a much harder time enjoying themselves. And that cattle, you know, it's really. You get the cattle flash from it.
- [78:24]
B
Everybody Stand up.
- [78:25]
D
The crush up front, right.
- [78:27]
B
And I, you know, I think that's much. Despite the fact that we're in. In the business of making music that sounds good to me, it's more important.
- [78:38]
D
That the people who come to see it, enjoy it.
- [78:41]
B
And Jerry Garcia speaking with Father Miles Riley in 1976. The question of what we'd like to do is improve the quality of the experience, both on the level of what we're doing amongst ourselves and how we interact with the audience and what the audience experiences while we're there. In that sense, we're the Don Quixote's of rock and roll. We're doing something nobody else cares to do, which is trying to figure out how to make the experience which we value and which our audience values something that's more in line with what it feels like, which is a positive sort of outpouring of good energy.
- [79:16]
D
Alan Trist Our engineers knew that there was going to be a technological change, but it wasn't right there now when we needed it.
- [79:27]
E
David Lemieux Dennis Leonard, who to this day is the most talented, genius sound engineer designer that I've ever known. And he said, even at that time it was the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd who were doing the most amazing stuff with sound. I remember Wiz telling me. Dennis Leonard in 1973. 74 early 70s the only two bands that really cared about the sound were the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd. And those were the ones where they really wanted everybody to have a good experience as opposed to just being happy to be in the same room as their heroes.
- [80:06]
B
The Dead did their homework. There are tales of Jerry Garcia and Owsley Stanley stopping in to see Roberta Flack on an off night in October 1972 to check out the system put together by their old friend Dinky Dawson, formerly engineered with Fleetwood Mac. The late Dead taper Harvey Lubar told me that he and fellow taper Jerry Moore checked out Pink Floyd's quadraphonic midnight Dark side of the Moon show at Radio City Music Music hall in March 1973, and saw Garcia, Bayer and Lesh in an adjacent row. The Dead delegation left at intermission.
- [80:36]
E
Harvey said, here they are eight years into this thing they call the Grateful Dead. Maybe there's a career to be had out of this. They're playing stadiums, they're playing bigger places, and the sound system is getting to be really, really good. And as the sound system developed better, as we led towards 74 with the wall of sound, I feel that there's the band listening to each other even More than they ever did. Where it's again, it's not just about power and let's just blow this roof off this place. It's about listening to each other and really we get more of the things and they really start developing in 72, where Phil and Billy, for instance, would stay out and do a little duet often during Darkstar, during the other one. And you can the listening like these two guys. And then as Jerry and Bob might join them and Keith comes in.
- [81:56]
B
That was from the June 10th Darkstar at RFK Stadium.
- [81:59]
E
I find that there's a nimbleness where every note really, really matters, whether it's on a little first set rocker like Deal or Loser, a little ballad thing like that, or it's the big other ones and the dark stars and stuff.
- [82:40]
B
The band debuted the newest iteration of their sound system at Stanford University's maples pavilion on February 9, 1973, the first show of the year, which also saw the debut of many of the songs that would become Wake of the Flood and From the Mars Hotel after that, a gig so legendary that we can't totally get lost in it. One controversial aspect of the system was putting the entirety of it behind the band, eliminating the need for vocal monitors, but requiring the invention of new microphones to deal with it. They look cool, but not everybody was down.
- [83:11]
C
Donna Jean we had these things called phase canceling microphones because the sound was so huge that things would start feeding back in the monitors. And that's why these phase canceling microphones, but they sounded like crap. I hated it. I just hated the sound of those mics. They just squeezed all of the life out of the vocal, you know, all of the tonality out of the vocal. That's my opinion. But it was hard. That was a hard thing.
- [83:42]
B
And it's true. If you compare the vocals from the fall of 1972, the last tour with the original tie dyed monitors, to the first shows of 1973, the first with the new design. There's some pretty stark differences. Some got worked out, some didn't.
- [83:57]
C
You had to eat that microphone and then that was part of the problem because you would get kind of a muffled sound because you had to be. Hear what I'm saying? It was a muffled sound because your mouth was right there on the microphone. And it. It was just not natural. Didn't sound natural to me, but it.
- [84:16]
B
Was part of the Dead's process, which Donna sums up as well as anybody I've heard everything.
- [84:21]
C
Grateful Dead kept evolving and you just had to roll with everything The Grateful Dead was trying to keep up with the Grateful Dead.
- [84:30]
B
The company in charge of the new sound system was alembic. Rosie McGee had worked for Alembic for a few years, most recently at their 60 Brady street location, formerly known as Pacific High, where the Dead had made Working Men's Dead.
- [84:42]
G
Alembic is a really good example of the organic ebb and flow of these businesses is that as things change with the band and things change with the businesses, they morphed as they needed to. And I mean, Alembic still thriving, believe it or not, a thriving business all these years later. But their concentration is on custom guitars and basses and a few electronic preamps and other products that they developed like Ice 9.
- [85:17]
B
Alembic predated the current wave of expansion so much that they had already started to spin off companies themselves.
- [85:23]
G
There was a time when Alembic did many things, too many things. And it was at a time when I worked for them. They were doing live recording, they were doing studio recording, they were doing guitars, they were building cabinets and running pa. They were doing it all in this tiny place on Judah Street. And I don't know exactly when Hard Truckers started, but one of the first elements of Alembic to fall away, I think it was when they moved to Brady Street. Then the Hard Truckers took over the building of cabinets. It was like the first aspect of the business that really was easy to let go was like, okay, you go over there and make cabinets and. And because it was a messy. I mean, the original Alembic at On Judah street, you can consider they're making cabinets, which means a lot of sawdust and all that kind of stuff in the same building where they're making, doing guitar repairs and, you know, other delicate stuff that really can't take sawdust.
- [86:56]
B
I'd love to see a visualization of the dad's business network.
- [86:59]
G
Part of the counterculture thing is entrepreneurship of like minded people who patronize each other's businesses. And it could be a vegetarian restaurant, or it can be a plant nursery that doesn't use pesticides or, you know, whatever. We were in the Grateful Dead bubble and it got bigger and bigger, but we were still so focused on the Grateful Dead and their needs and their trajectory as a band and all of that, that we barely paid attention to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, there's a whole bunch of other bands and they probably all had their own concentric rings of. Of auxiliary businesses.
- [87:51]
B
While plenty of bands spawned businesses and a few had their own imprints at larger Record labels. No band in 1973 was pursuing independence at the scale of the Grateful Dead. Here's Bobby Weir coming at you from Des Moines, Angeles, Virginia. Tide water for 1109 telefolks back home is to the promised land. Calling at the bubble inside the music industry, Word had leaked that the Dead had planned to start their own company, but hadn't made any moves just yet. Please welcome back to the Deadcast, your friend and ours, Steve Brown, a friend.
- [88:42]
F
That worked for Warner Brothers Records that told me as a head buyer for a big chain of record stores that I was involved with, I was finding out that they were look interested in maybe having their own record company and coming at the end of their Warner Brothers one, they decided to consider that. And of course, Rakow had put out the, you know, thing that he put to them and made it interesting to them to read and then decide, you know, maybe. And when I heard about that, I said, well, maybe I should put together as a Grateful Deadhead way back when and known as some kind of proto Deadhead.
- [89:28]
B
Steve Brown was certainly a proto Deadhead. We spoke with him a bit during our St. Louis 73 episode and we're so excited to have him back. Steve was so proto that he saw Jerry and Sarah at the top of the tangent in Palo Alto, the Warlocks at the in room in Belmont, and made probably the earliest Dead audience tape on March 3, 1968, at the Free show on Haight street, not to mention snapping the killer photo of Garcia walking to work that day. Steve had some Dead cred, had played bass in a local band, but also had serious real world music business experience around radio and records.
- [90:02]
F
I started in 15 in radio at KSFO in San Francisco, working for Don Sherwood, the biggest de stocky in San Francisco for years, you know, and the fact that they had me programming music, you know, at 16 years old and. And for six different shows on that, the biggest station in San Francisco, who had the giants and the 49ers and all this music, you know, and the highest rating of any one in San Francisco. And so here I am, a kid learning this stuff, you know, way back when.
- [90:37]
B
Steve's life from the early 60s through the late 70s illustrates what it was like to be ahead in the record business. And by 1972, he was ready to go to work for his favorite band.
- [90:47]
F
Since I've been in music business for this long now, why don't I see if they might be interested in using me to be able to be somebody that could help them with their new record Company of their own, which seemed pretty daring at the time, just knowing what they were up to in their real life and knowing that maybe you could pull off business like that. Let's see. So when I did find that out, I got a hold of them at their office and said, I'd like to come in and talk to, you know, somebody there about their record company idea. And they gave me a date to come in. I think it's December, the end of, see, 1972. And that's when I thought, yeah, a nice Christmas gift here. And they said, well, come on in. It'll actually be the very first days of January that I had my own thing written out and presented it to them and took it in real proud, you know, like that, oh yeah, this will work. They'll go for this.
- [91:54]
B
Steve had caught wind of the so what? Papers and prepared his own response, so why me?
- [91:59]
F
Papers. It was pretty much a business kind of thing that didn't necessarily have all my personal life all in there, but more of the business point. I thought that's what Rakow would go by, Jerry.
- [92:14]
B
I didn't know where Ron Rakow dreamed big and Alan Trist could thoughtfully synthesize the different far out ideas and find ways forward. Steve Brown had on the ground experience that he was able to bring to the table. And by the table I mean the actual big table that Sam Cutler had brought back from Europe.
- [92:30]
F
And it was a room that they had for their meetings and stuff, a big long table, you know, and stuff. And it was just Rakow and and Jerry in there and me. And so we got into a little bit of what they were thinking they wanted to do and what I had done as far as being in the industry and knowing about how this stuff gets done. And it was something that when we got to a certain point, Rakow had to go do something else. And it left me with Jerry in the room, this big table and just me and Jerry, you know, like that. And then it just shifted into growing up and being in San Francisco as, you know, youth and what kind of stories we had about each other, you know, having been in San Francisco back in the day. And what happened from that point on was nothing to do with business. It was just me and him like that. And so for half an hour later or whatever, it was the time. I didn't time it, but it was at least that amount of time or more. And then Rakow came back in, they opened the door and we both got up and walked out. And Jerry turned to Rakow and said, he's hired.
- [93:49]
B
Kind of sounds like a dream job interview.
- [93:51]
F
It wasn't about what I knew in the business. He didn't care as much about the business as he just did. I think how I would be as a person to be with. And because we laughed a lot during our talks, I think that he'd. Right away, you know, I kind of hit the button that time. Yeah, we. We had a nice feeling together. Yeah. And. And we had a lot of the same things about music together also, which was another part of it. And that was important, I'm sure, to him, too, that how much I knew. He knew that I'd been in rock and roll, that we actually went out and played at concerts a bunch, you know, for about three years or so, until I had to go active duty in the Navy, but. And then I had to run a recording studio for the Navy, which was a whole nother deal.
- [94:38]
B
That's a story we get into a bit in our Listen to the River October 1973 episode. Finally, on April 19, 1973, the Grateful Dead officially voted to form their own record company, Grateful Dead Records. It was the 30th anniversary of Bicycle Day, Albert Hoffman's first intentional LSD trip, though that wasn't yet a recognized holiday. Sometime around then, Steve Brown began commuting from his place in Pacifica to the expanding company town of San Rafael.
- [95:07]
F
We wound up taking over the little house that they used to have as their thing down at 5th and Lincoln. They just shifted it over to the record company. I. I don't know if that was Rakow's doing or what. You pull into the back of the building of the house and park. And if Jerry's already there, you got to park around his car. You know, he had that sports car that was from a European one. He had two of them at different times in different colors. One was gold, and another one, I think was blue. For a while, of course. So I'd come in the back door, which comes into the kitchen area.
- [95:43]
B
The last of the Dead's tenant seemed to have moved out by early 1973, with the electricity getting transferred back to the band's name.
- [95:50]
F
Just us night and day, but it's kind of like living there. And we had the nice kitchen in there where the French roast coffee was being made. And Jerry would have his guitar sitting out in the kitchen playing. And if he had some friends come in with another guitar to play with them, and I where's my recorder?
- [96:08]
B
The company wouldn't get formalized into a business called Grateful Dead. Records. Until later, in 1973, the band's checkbook showed that it was still internally referred to as so what? Through the spring of the year, at least, ultimately, the members of the Dead would share ownership of Grateful Dead Records with Rakow and Garcia, co owning the Round Records spinoff. But Garcia was unquestionably the band member most involved in both projects and the most present at the office.
- [96:33]
F
So I go into the front office, which is the nice big living room office there, and stuff, which was nice to have that one. And there he is sitting at my desk, and he's drawing on my pad, my. My desk pad. And I go, okay. And I sit over on a little back from over there and we talk for a bit and stuff. I let him keep doing stuff, which was nice. And you can see it here in my home hanging on the wall.
- [96:59]
B
Every inch of the cardboard desk blotter is filled with interlocking doodles and illustrations, many by Garcia and many by Robert Hunter, making it a rare visual collaboration between the two songwriters. We've posted an image of it@dead.net deadcast. Steve Brown is also an incredible archivist whose collections have been reproduced in many places, with significant chunks living in the Dead's own archive at UC Santa Cruz. Not for the last time, we'd like to thank Steve for his foresight.
- [97:26]
F
So I was feeling very comfortable in the morning there at the place to work, with Jerry being there and anybody else who was there at the time, mainly the gals at work there, and then going upstairs and stuff and seeing Rakow. And then Jerry would go upstairs and he would sit in the chair across from Rakow's desk, and the two of them would get into the kind of, oh, I like this bad guy. Raquel was kind of what Jerry's feeling was here. I'm with the bad guy.
- [98:01]
B
Ron Rackow came to the Dead with a checkered reputation of his own, but he was putting his energies fully into the Grateful Dead.
- [98:08]
F
Rakow, the whole rest of the crew, and the whole rest of the people that work for the Grateful Dead. It was always kind of like, you know, rock. I was not to be necessarily trusted, maybe. And we've had some problems in the past with Mickey's dad and people like that.
- [98:25]
B
If Steve filled the role as practical problem solver at Grateful Dead Records, Ron Rack House served the equally real role as commander of the dark arts that the record business often requires.
- [98:35]
F
And when I walk in the room, I think they got a little quiet sometimes. But then again, I'd sit there long enough and they had to let loose, you know, what they're up to. So it was very comfortable to be there, in a way of having been in the Navy and having been around people that had stuff going on in their world and having kind of a real openness to allowing me to be part of that. And it grew over time where I started knowing more than I probably wanted to know. But on the other hand, it also made me walk the path the way that I wouldn't step in any either, you know. So it was really good to kind of be on touch of what's going.
- [99:17]
B
On, no matter how you ingest it. It was a pretty extraordinary gig. Early in his life with the Dead, Steve received a rather unusual employee briefing.
- [99:26]
F
One of the first things that I was handed when I went to work for the Grateful Dead for their new record company was the Ten Commandments of Rock and roll. According to the Grateful Grateful Dead, this.
- [99:40]
B
List, which will resist the urge to recite in a countdown fashion, was written by Robert Hunter himself synthesized like a cynical winking B side to the optimism that he voiced in songs like Here Comes Sunshine. For a while, I'd assumed it wasn't written until much later, but Steve's 1973 start date seems to lock it down. Earlier. It's a little dark, so we've added some music from Here Comes Sunshine's title track, the June 10 version, to, you know, balance it out. And so we present the ten Commandments of Rock and Roll.
- [100:11]
F
Number one. Suck up to the top, cats. Number two. Do not express independent opt. Number three, do not work for common interest, only factitional interests.
- [100:53]
D
Number four.
- [100:55]
F
If there's nothing to complain about, dig up some old gripe. Five, do not respect property or persons other than ban property or personnel. Number six. Make devastating judgments on persons and situations without adequate information. Number seven, Discourage and confound personnel, technical and or creative projects. Number eight. Single out absent persons for intense criticism. Number nine. Number nine. Number nine. Number nine. Remember that anything you don't understand is trying to fuck you. Number 10. Destroy yourself physically and morally and insist that all true brothers do likewise as an expression of unity.
- [103:55]
B
The Grateful Dead were all about remaking the world. But Robert Hunter couldn't help but report from the front lines of rock and roll as he saw them inside the Dead's universe. Like Hunter's lyrics, the meanings were nested. Steve had plenty to do as the record company looked for its wings and tried to figure out how and if they could actualize the concept of franchising the Grateful Dead.
- [104:14]
F
Oh, My goodness. I was way over my head when I realized how much more I was responsible for. You know, I thought I came in here for some kind of easy fun, but all my life, it had been fun. Like I said at 15, when I had to go to radio and be there at 5:30 in the morning because the show comes on at 6. So I was used to having changes of things that, you know, I wasn't necessarily going in and ready for. And so when I got to the Grateful Dead. Okay, all right, all right, Okay. I can do this. Okay.
- [104:48]
B
In this season and beyond, Steve will be our guide to Grateful Dead records and plenty more. And I witnessed to an excited participant inside the unfolding Dead universe.
- [104:57]
F
Well, talk about the responsibility factor. Oh, my God. And it wasn't anybody really else, you know, except all the things I had on my list to get done. And so it was really kind of a challenge that I felt, I'm gonna make this work because I really like this band, and I really like, you know, what I feel about their future of making their own records and their own record company, and I'd like to be part of making that happen.
- [105:59]
A
Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. When I lived in Marin county in the 90s, singer songwriter Steve Wolf took me to the Dead's office in San Rafael. I got to meet Eileen Law and hang out while Steve took care of some business he had there. It wasn't lost on me how cool it was that I was included on that visit. Thank you, Steve, for that memory. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode. Donna Jean, Godsho McKay, Alan Trist, Rosie McGee, Steve Brown, Sally Man Romano, Gail Heland, and David Lemieux. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast, David Ganz, for contributing audio from his extensive interview archive. Thanks very much for tuning in. Don't forget to like and subscribe and give us your 1973 tour stories by recording yours over at stories.Dead.net executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Doron Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.