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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.
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A light bodied pale ale brewed with.
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Sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew 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.
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Dead Cast the Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse.
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Jarno exploring the music and legacy of.
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The Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious.
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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 week. We continue our dive into the new Here Comes Sunshine box set in this episode as we head up to Kezar Stadium in the Dead's hometown of San Francisco for a sunny afternoon show that took place on May 26, 1973. Well, speaking of Here comes sunshine, Here comes Here Comes Sunshine 1973. This new release is a 17 CD limited edition set available exclusively from dead.net. it features five previously unreleased concerts recorded during the band's transformative spring tour of 1973.
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The shows included in this set are.
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Iowa State Fairgrounds, Des Moines 51373 Campus Stadium at UCSB 52073 Kezar Stadium today's focus on 52673 and Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in Washington D.C. on 6.
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9 and 6 10.
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1973 and the 61073 show will also be available as a standalone release in two configurations, a 4 CD set and.
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An 8 LP set. The 17 CD set and the 4.
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CD set will be released on June 30th. They're also available digitally and the 8.
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LP set comes on July 28th.
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You can pre order all of the here comes sunshine 1973 releases now over.
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At dead.net head on over to dead.net.
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Deadcast check out all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons one through.
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Six and you can link from there.
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To your favorite podcasting platform so you.
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Can listen how you like to listen.
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Please help this podcast subscribe hit that like button. Leave us a review post about it on social media. Tell your mama.
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Very kind of you. Thank you very much.
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We have transcripts for many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available now for your reading pleasure. We recently uploaded season one so head on over to dead.net deadcast index and check them out. Thanks to everyone who's left their stories@stories.dead.net.
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We'Re asking you to share your stories about any shows that you attended in 73 now.
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Catch any heaters this glorious year? Well, the Dead were on fire and we want to hear your firsthand account. Share those stories over@stories.dead.net and you just.
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May hear yourself on the Dead Cast. This episode of the Dead Cast visits.
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One of the Dead's most legendary hometown shows. We've got the Band, the Crew, Bay Area Dead Freaks, and three glorious sets.
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In the Golden Gate Park Sunshine.
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Besides the show, we've got the skinny on some of the band's recent technological innovations and a look at an important paper by the Haight Street Free Medical Clinic. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Jesse Jarno. It's often said that Grateful Dead shows were special because the band played different set lists each night. Of course that's true, but the songs performed on the five shows of the Here Comes Sunshine box set are largely pretty similar from night to night. There are 13 that the band performed at all five shows, usually amounting to roughly an hour and a half of music, and and many more. They played at four of the gigs. Not that anybody was being nearly that obsessive about it in 1973. The songs were and are just vehicles. But now, 50 years later, and we're possibly being just slightly more obsessive about it, it's a pretty good demonstration of how the same set of songs can carry itself differently in different circumstances. Eskimos don't really have thousands of words for snow, but Deadheads do have infinite words to describe vibes, and the vibes at Kezar Stadium on May 26, 1973 were powerful.
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They love each other.
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Grateful late archivist and legacy manager David.
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Lemieux Going back to my tape trading days in the mid-80s, my 1973 collection wasn't huge. And I'll tell you, I had Maples Pavilion, 2973 in Palo Alto, and I.
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Had this show 526 and that old.
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Saying that, oh, I wore that tape out. If that was true for me, if any show, it was probably Kezar. I listened to it more than almost any other show in my collection. And again, I find that it's a carry on from the Santa Barbara show, where you've also got the Grateful Dead playing to a hometown crowd, which they had done Winterland in December of 72 and they had done the Palo Alto show in February. But this was a big show. This was as Big as the Grateful Dead had played. I'm thinking in the Bay Area.
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I'm with a Canadian. I didn't start collecting tapes until the 90s, but this was a favorite. There was something about the way it bottled the sunshine of the early 70s. Grateful Dead playing outdoors. The both the music itself and the particular quality of Betty Cantor Jackson's recording. Unless otherwise noted, that's what we're gonna be listening to today. A tape that today becomes an almost literal embodiment of a Robert Hunter lyric.
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Oh, this is all a dream. We dream one afternoon I'm a go.
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One of our dream witnesses for the Keys R73 show is the illustrious Mike Dalgushkin, who would go on to co Found Dead base a decade or so later. But in the spring of 1973 was in the first flush of seeing the Dead all the damn time.
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It just seemed legendary before the music even started. It was like. It was just kind of like this epic moment already. And I would say that the Dead certainly rose to the occasion. What I've been saying lately to people is that KZAR is to San Franciscans what Englishtown is to New Yorkers. Ask almost anybody who was at Keyser and they'll tell you it was the best show they ever saw.
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The Dead's Englishtown 77 show, now Dick's Picks 15, was a massive Labor Day blowout in New Jersey that would mint a new generation of Deadheads for the later 70s and beyond. In 1973, even in their hometown, the Dead were still on the ascendancy, up.
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Until a year and a half earlier, two years before, they were still playing the Fillmore west, primarily. And then they kind of got a few shows in at the Berkeley Community Theater and then finally Winterland. But even winterland was only 5 or.
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6,000 in terms of Deadhead lore. Kezar Stadium is location, location, location in the southeast corner of Golden Gate park, just blocks from the end of Haight street and the Panhandle, where the Dead played many of their famous Free shows a half decade earlier. Keys are 73 wasn't free, but it was the first chance for the slightly younger generation of Deadheads to see the Dead in Golden Gate park.
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This was 20, 25,000 people in the hate. You can't get more home than that. Way more home than anything. So it certainly has that vibe I feel, that they played.
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I think when the Dead had friends.
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And family in the crowd, on the stage, backstage, whatever, they took that seriously.
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They didn't want to let their friends and family down.
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When I Listened to the Dead playing Bill Graham shows. They always, I think, I mean, he was their manager for a little bit. He was, I mean, he was the patriarch of that producers in the Bay Area. So I've always found that when they played Bill Graham shows, they stood a little taller. They didn't want to let Bill down. And I hear that in the Keys R show.
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What you might be surprised to learn though, is that as of two weeks before the show on May 26, the Grateful Dead weren't scheduled to play at Kezar Stadium at all. The late promoter Bill Graham is high in the list of storytellers. I wish we could have had on this podcast both to hear about his incredible work, but also for his particular linguistic flair. Bob Arsadi started working with Graham while still in high school.
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I was going to Berkeley High School in the late 60s, early 70s, and when I was a junior in high school, he started doing shows at the Berkeley Community Theater. And it was what, 1970, the school started a thing called School of the Arts, which allowed students to just immerse themselves in the arts as long as they finished their academic stuff. So I'd finished all my academics, so I just spent the entire day, every day in the theater building. And I do costuming and stagecraft and lighting design, radio and broadcasting on different stuff. And whenever there was a show would come in, we would be. If it was a four man union call, there would be four student stage hands provided to the promoter for free. And we were apprentices learning from the union guys. In that first year he was doing shows there, it was like the Mothers of Invention, Eric Clapton, Grateful Dead. Who? Joni Mitchell, csny. So many shows all in, you know, while I was going to high school, in my high school auditorium, we do doing the load in before the show and then we'd do the load out afterwards. But during the show we didn't have a responsibility because the union wouldn't let us operate anything. So Bill hired us to do security on the front of the stage.
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In the long term, Bob and his older brother Peter would go on to become Bill Graham's liaisons with the Dead and the Heads. But in the early 70s, Bob was just starting out.
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I graduated in 72. And then my first show was at Winterland as a paid employee was the Rolling Stones in June of 72. And then my first Grateful Dead show was New Year's Eve that year. And I was hired to be the backstage cleanup guy. I went around policing all the half empty Cokes and beers to keep it spotless. For Bill's friends, as he told me very clearly.
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In mid-1971, Bill Graham closed the Fillmores east and west, which we discussed a bunch in our third season in San Francisco. The former ice skating rink called Winterland, just a few blocks from the original Fillmore Auditorium, became his home venue.
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Right when I started working for him, you started doing, you know, it was Berkeley Community Theater, and then we do the San Jose Civic and we do the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium and we do the Santa Cruz Civic and we go to Stockton Civic and we did all the little Civic auditoriums that are like 3,000 seaters all around Northern and Central California. Because on the east coast, the band can do a show every night all week long and only have to travel 50 or 100 miles to the next show. On the West coast, it's 500 miles between dates and there's only like three, four of us in LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle. That's it, you know, so bands were always looking for fill dates and we were starting to provide them, you know, Tuesday and Wednesday nights in these smaller tertiary markets. And it was, it really clicked. And the kids loved going there and the bands loved to play for. So it made it. Instead of doing one show with them, we'd do three or four.
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In a way, Bill Graham built his own touring circuit in California, which can be seen reflected in the Dead's touring schedule starting in this era. But mostly they were smaller venues with a new touring circuit well on its way. By 1973, Graham needed a Bay Area venue larger than Winterland to stage shows for the new class of arena and stadium acts.
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5,000 at Winterland was huge. That was the biggest place we he usually went to. I mean, there were occasions when he went to the open Coliseum of the Cow palace, but that hardly ever happened.
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Mike Dalgushkin had been seeing the Dead since the Berkeley Community Theater shows in the summer of 72 and listening to them for longer. So when the Dead announced their big local show for the spring, Mike was ready for it.
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It was scheduled for May 22nd and 23rd at the Cow Palace. And so we bought tickets for, I think, the first show.
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As originally announced, the shows would feature the Dead, the New Riders of the Purple Sage and Waylon Jennings, as well as Willie Nelson. The original newspaper ads for the two Cow palace shows bore an interesting description. Open Floor, Start to Boogie on the.
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Green at 5pm yeah, like they were going to spread Astroturf or something inside of the Cow Palace. I don't know how they were. I don't know what it was they were planning to do. Bill is a huge believer in festival seating. You know, no seats on the floor. And so in Winterland was that way. The Fillmores were that way. And when we started doing the big shows at the Coliseums and the stadiums, we had it that way as well.
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It was also a setup that gave Graham a little more flexibility in how many people he might get into a venue, by what means and how to find room for them inside. The on the Green language signified open seating indoors are out.
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But then they rescheduled it for one.
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Day at Keezer, minus Willie Nelson. Bummer. The Dead would have to wait five more years to share Bells with Willie.
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David Lemieux, Bill Graham, you know, famously with the Fillmore west shows and Fillmores.
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Pairing bands that might not have miles.
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In the Dead amongst countless shows, there's always pairings like, oh, interesting pairing, but they always worked because they brought, you know, and so to have Waylon Jennings, I've always saw that as a bit of an inspired Bill Graham touch. And the Dead, of course, I'm sure loved him too. But the New Riders crowd, that cowboy Dead, you know, you look at Deadheads in 1973 and it's a crowd of cowboy hats and flannel. I tied my bandana, took my pack.
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From the floor.
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You were still sleeping as I stood at the door.
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Waylon Jennings was certainly an inspired choice to play with the Dead in 1973, and he was on the bill for both nights at the Cow Palace. But the pairing makes more sense to me when considering Graham's original plans. Two shows at the Cow palace followed by a massive gig on Sunday, May 27 at the Ontario Motor Speedway outside Lake in the heart of the Inland Empire, where Bakersfield country reigns supreme, to feature the Dead, Waylon Jennings and the Allman Brothers Band. Billed as a Day on the green. Tickets were $7.50. Sally Man Romano of Out of Town Tours.
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People are not getting their money's worth these days. You know, you used to pay five bucks and get like 15 hours of the biggest bands in the world, you know, when Bill Graham was putting on a show.
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But even the best laid plans of Bill Graham were subject to constant change. First, in mid May, without giving any particular reason, Graham canceled the Cow palace shows and folded the two nights into one afternoon in Kezar Stadium on May 26, perhaps related to the fact that he'd secured the venue for a Led Zeppelin show on the weekend to follow. But then, with less than a week to go before the Day on the Green in Ontario. Graham pulled the plug, saying, citing noise curfews, though who knows? In Rolling Stone, Sam Cutler was quoted as saying that it was a misunderstanding. And the Dead shows in Santa Barbara on May 20th and their upcoming three night run at the Universal Amphitheater would be their LA gigs for the season. Both explanations could easily be code for lack of ticket sales. It was the second time in six months that the Dead and the Allman Brothers canceled West coast shows together, a pairing California audiences would never see. East coast heads would, though. And we'll meet up with the ALLMAN Soon. Spring 1973 was the beginning of the era of what the Dead members would refer to as mega gigs and as a metropolitan football stadium that housed a professional sports team. Kezar Stadium certainly qualified for that. But it was also in Golden Gate park, which was far more than just a convenient outdoor place for the Dead to play. As a native San Franciscan, Jerry Garcia felt a deep bond with the park. Here he is Speaking with Dennis McNally now in the Jerry on Jerry audiobook, available from Hachette.
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If you go from one end of it to another, you find yourself in these different worlds.
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You know, there's places where all of a sudden it's real prehistoric, looking at those giant ferns and everything is weird.
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You know, weird for ancient things. And then you go, you walk a little further and all of a sudden you're in this pasture and there's sheep grazing and there's little, you know, there's a little pond.
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I have to imagine there were some heads who skipped the opening sets by the New Riders of the Purple Sage and Waylon Jennings and spent the first parts of their Saturday afternoons lost in the controlled wilds of William Hammond Hall's masterpiece.
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It changes, and you're not aware of how it's changing or where it's changing, but it does change, and it has a beautiful, seamless way of doing that. And it's a work, really.
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It's like a poem that's a real.
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Expression that says the kind of thing that I would like to be able to say.
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And it says it beautifully, gracefully, romantically. Perhaps one could start the day with a sunrise meditation on the beach and take a long walk from one end of the park to the other, eventually arriving at the Panhandle in the Haight Ashbury, where the Dead had moved out barely five years earlier. In reality, it seemed like several lifetimes ago. One neighborhood resident who closely observed the changes would play an important role at the Dead's Keyzar Stadium show. We Are honored to welcome to the deadcast founder of the Haight street free Medical Clinic, Dr. David Smith, one of.
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My professors of medicine, said, well, David, where did you go wrong? I was such a promising young medical student. In other words, I was a rising star in the laboratory. And now I move into this murky world of the counterculture, which made sense in the beginning, but then it became much more dangerous. And of course, the story, the psychedelics are a consistent part of this. I took LSD and had a spiritual experience. Totally changed my perception of the universe. So I just took a dramatic change in my career direction. You know, like a lot of people, you know, had a. We're all connected and you can't reject one part.
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The Haight Street Free Medical Clinic opened in June 1967 at 5:50 Clayton, around the corner from the Dead's place at 7:10 Ashbury.
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I was raised in an environment of discrimination during the 30s, in the Great Depression. And I saw that same discrimination had these signs, hippies go home. And so if you think about it, the original Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, Health care is a right, not a privilege, started as a civil rights movement.
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You may have heard that correct formulation before, that health care is a right, not a privilege. And it's quite possible that Dr. David Smith was the first to say it.
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For a marginalized, ostracized population. You don't like their music, you don't like their hair, you don't like their make love, not war. You don't like anything about them. And therefore you're going to deny them health care. Those are themes that in a much broader and different way, still exist today.
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To put it mildly.
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It was basically in the beginning, David E. Smith, M.D. and Associates, doing business at Haight Ash Bray Free Clinics. And then later we became a nonprofit when the bands led by Gilgam did benefits for us. And then that became Haight Ashbury Free Clinic's nonprofit. The publicity was getting out all over the world, and the med students would come from all over the country. They wanted to volunteer at our clinic, take LSD and hear the Grateful Dead. And we had this steady supply of really outstanding med students and young physicians. That's why they came out here.
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For Dr. Smith, it was about science. And he founded the Journal of psychedelic drugs in 1967.
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I had started studying psychedelics at UCSF, and I was at my training in pharmacology and psychopharmacology. And I've studied psychedelics and various animal and human models. And then I found out that the information that was entering into the public media was inaccurate. So I thought we founded the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs. When I started the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, because there was this idea, you know, you take 100 people take a psychedelic, one person has a bad trip. The press focuses on the one person that has a bad trip. Well, that's not what you do in medicine. With medicine, you look at the total population and the individuals that take and don't have bad trips, the people that take it and have spiritual experiences, the people that take it and have fun, and then those that take it and have an adverse reaction, and then you focus on why, you know, what was the difference between the total population and the one that had the bad trip?
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Mike Dalguskin.
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You know, after the so called Summer of Love, the hate really went through the slump, right? It was flooded with speed and then heroin and all that. And it became kind of a dangerous place to go to. We were right in the middle of it and it totally changed the nature of the community. And it changed our service delivery. You know, med student would come down from UCSF to the clinic and there would be flowers and loving and dancing and music. And then when speed hit, it became dangerous. We found out that the med students, you know, were being threatened so then wouldn't come down. So hate went from a very peaceful, psychedelic space to a very violent, toxic environment. There was pressure on me to close the clinic at that time because, well, you started out for psychedelics and now it's speed and heroin and violence.
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In fact, the free clinic would expand.
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The amphetamine abuser was much more toxic, much more violent. So we had this head of special setting for the methamphetamine abuser. And we just. So that's when we got the second facility at 409 Clayton street and then heroin comes along and we had to get a third facility because, you know, there was drug dependence and withdrawal. So the drug scene changed. And as it changes, we had to adapt our services.
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When Bill Graham came calling, they'd be.
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Ready by 73, it had largely pulled out of that. And so, yeah, I used to go down there sometimes. I used to go to Ross Records where you could find Dead bootlegs there and stuff. It was no longer just another neighborhood. It would never be that again. But it had become a more pleasant place to hang out than it had been.
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Steve Brown of Grateful Dead Records was a native San Franciscan, too. He'd made the recording of the band's giant free show on Haight Street, Five Springs earlier in May 1968. Which was also around five blocks from Kezar. He was excited to see the Dead on their shared home turf.
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I don't miss that kind of a show. And Ker, where I used to go with my dad to see the 49ers. Yeah, it was sports and it was the high schools and maybe some colleges.
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The 49ers had moved to Candlestick park in 1971 and Kesar was mostly abandoned.
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No one was doing concerts really there. The most we had were high schools and colleges coming in and doing certain events that had to do with having won something. And now they're out parading and saying, you know, we're going to bring everybody out and thank them and say how wonderful it is that we won this and whatever. But it wasn't a concert place really. I think it was the first time I can even remember where a big stage was set up and they had that kind of thing going on. Yeah, even when I was in high school and we went over there for events, you know, it wasn't anything like a big stage thing going on.
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The move from the Cow palace to Kesar Stadium wasn't without controversy that spring when the band announced a slate of dates at the biggest venues yet. They'd received some bummed out mail and that included the move to Kezar. Some of the anger had to do with the steadily rising ticket prices creeping up to $5 in advance and $6 at the door for Keyzar. Between $30 and $40 in 2023 money. We're so happy to welcome back to the Deadcast our avatar of Vanita 72 Strider Brown.
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During the month of May, I stayed at a friend's place in San Francisco on Ord street, which is walking distance to Keys, our stadium. And of course I got tickets to go. And Bob Weir had been interviewed on KSAN a few days earlier and I was lucky to hear that interview. And basically the only thing that I can really remember Bob Weir saying on that interview was he had never seen Waylon Jennings before and he was very excited about meeting him and hearing his set.
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Thanks to Strider for the tip. While I couldn't find a tape of the interview which featured both Bob Weir and Bill Graham, I did locate a letter in the Dead's archive written a few days after by an anonymous angry caller who felt obligated to write a follow up letter to Weir to explain his position as a musician and a more recent resident of the hate. The short version is that he didn't like being told that his town ain't Got no heart. And also that Dead tickets were so expensive. I moved here a year ago July, he wrote, and the neighborhood is alive and floundering as best it can. I tried very humbly to point out that there were a lot of people in the neighborhood of Golden Gate who could not afford to attend the concert and felt that it was even a rip off. Tell them not to come, came the reply. The letter writer named Joe apparently played in a hate neighborhood band called Window and invited Weir to a free street gig they were playing. Window would put out an album a few years later called the Empyreal Ballet. It's pretty pricey on Discogs these days. Maybe not how they sounded in 1973, but this is from Dance Through a Storm. But the message apparently got through. We talked to Bob Student during our Santa Barbara episode. He remembered how he got into the Keys R show.
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If you said you lived in the neighborhood, they let you in the side door for free without a ticket. Oh, that's how I got in. You just said, yeah, I live on Oak Street. Yeah, come on in.
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Somewhere. I can hear Bill Graham sighing. Bob Barsati.
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B
There was nothing official. I know that Bill often would do stuff to quell negative energy outside gigs. You know, if you'd have a show with that sold out, with so many people outside that they're going to tear the doors off the building, he'd put a speaker out on the sidewalk and tell everyone to stand across the street and you can just listen to the music and everyone go stand across the street and be peaceful and nobody attacked the building, stuff like that. So he had a way of trying to get in the middle of things so that we wouldn't be a burden on our surrounding community and any of the issues that were happening, we tried to internalize them. So if there's some kid that lives across the street and God damn it, I can't get in. This is my neighborhood. Well, come talk to me. We'll figure something out.
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Both Graham and the Dead put in the Work, for example, the band had a great sound system, but they knew each venue and situation was different and wanted to be ready for Keys R. The week before, in Santa Barbara, the System had made its west coast outdoor debut, and Alembic sent Ron Wickersham and Rick Turner to listen, and they observed the wind wreaking havoc on the signal from the stage. A letter from Wickersham to the Dead, billing them for the work reveals that the day after the Santa Barbara show, Wickersham and Turner paid a site visit to Kezar noted that it was even windier and arranged for the Dead to try something new and loudly groundbreaking delay towers. Alemech had been working hard on the PA for several years, and when we spoke with Ron and Susan Wickersham several years back, Ron remembered this show as a turning point.
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B
Maybe the culmination of the stereo PA was a gig at Keysar Stadium. And in that one, one of the big innovations there was having delay towers before digital delays existed. So John Curl got some Philips CCD chips that were charge carrier devices devices. It was digital shifting, but the charges were analog charges, so the signals weren't digitized any rate. By putting several of those chips together, we could sample at a high enough rate to get the audio, the high frequency not decimated by sampling and then recorded on the loop. Little electrostatic charges that went down the shift registers and made a delay for doing that gig. And that one got a lot of credit for being. By that time we were paying attention to directivity, because that's another aspect that comes later into fundamental part of the bigger Volo sound. So if you don't have the same directivity at all free frequencies, then the sound decays at a different rate from.
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There it gets into some pretty thick math. Alembick arranged for the rental of a delay unit manufactured by Eventide Clockworks. Originally, Wickersham had hoped to tilt the array downwards slightly to best angle the sound, but there wasn't enough time to enact it for the show. He suggested that in the future, 16 eventide delay units might be chained together to simulate the tilt that is. Ron Wickersham suggested an early version of virtual audio modeling.
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B
Around, coming around, coming around, coming around, coming around, coming around, coming around, coming around, coming around.
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There's less than a minute of silent footage from the Keezar show, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast. And while the band isn't in the footage, there's a great establishing shot that pans across the stadium where you can see the delay towers. The stage is situated in the west end zone. In the east, though, you can see a green tent with a VW microbus parked next to it. For the first time, Bill Graham arranged to have medical services at a show, but he did it the San Francisco way. Please welcome to the Dead cast from Bill Graham presents Jerry Pompeili.
- [32:57]
B
In the early 70s, when I was running Winland with for Bill, I noticed that depending upon the type of show, Woodland held a little over 5,000 people. Between 5 and 6,000 we would get X number of Incidents, stuff where we either had to roll someone to the hospital up the street or sit on in the staff lounge or, you know, just deal with shit, mostly alcohol, but sometimes drugs and stuff like that. And then every so often, several times a year, we did shows at the Cow Palace. And the Cow palace was three times the size of Winland. And what struck me as curious was even though the Cow palace was three times as big, we didn't have three times as the amount of problems. We had nine times the amount of problems. And I just, you know, that always struck me as, huh, you know, just a kind of thing I tucked away in my head. And then Bill booked the first show at Keys, or stadium, which holds 50,000 people. And I went into Bill's office, I said, bill, and I told him what I just told you. And I said, the way this works, we're going to do a show with 50,000 people. Unless we do something, someone's going to die. And Bill picked up the phone and called David Smith at the Haight Ashbury Clinic. We had a relationship with. And David put Dr. Skip gay and Darryl in ABBA on the deal. I talked to those guys and they set the whole thing up.
- [34:40]
A
Dr. David Smith.
- [34:42]
B
In the beginning, the Fillmore would let clinic volunteers in for free concerts if they were there to help with these adverse reactions. Was kind of this. And then Bill Graham started doing benefits for the clinic because he realized that we were taking care of his population. In other words, the people that went to the concerts that came to the Summer of Love came to Ashbury were the ones that came to the in Ashburg free clinics. It was kind of a community and a movement. But then they started having the bigger and bigger concerts.
- [35:24]
A
Bob Barsatti.
- [35:25]
B
Bill went to David and told him that, you know, now that we're going from 5,000 to 50,000, we need a different set of medical services. And he jumped right in and said he'd put something together. Bill Graham was the leader, of course, but he's the one that talked with us. But it was Jerry Pumpheile's idea to talk with us. And they needed to have a formal program of rock medicine, both to improve the services, but also to get the insurance. It was, I believe, Skip Gay and a bunch of their doctors were putting it all together. And it was something we'd never seen before. And it really worked well with the stadium environment. It really was a fantastic godsend to have those guys there. And it turned out to be so great that we asked him if he'd continue it and do it at our smaller shows. So then they started doing Winterland and the other shows we were doing. And that was the genesis of RockMed.
- [36:21]
A
The proto RockMed tent would also be set up the following week for Led Zeppelin and at many shows to come. It was an extraordinary evolution. What's also extraordinary is that the doctors from the Haight Street Free Medical Clinic also authored a scholarly paper about those first two weekends in 1973 titled a dash of Mash, the Zepp and the Dead head to head to discuss it. Please welcome back from the Grateful Dead Studies Association Nicholas Meriwether.
- [36:48]
B
The three authors are George R. Day, Robbie Elson Baumer and John A. Neumeyer. And they are. George Gay is the director at the time, was the director of clinical activities. They're all at the Haight Ashbury Pre Medical Clinic. Gay was the director of clinical activities. Elson Baumer was the administrator of the medical section, and John Neumeyer was the epidemiologist. So those three guys write this remarkable article and so they start off with a just brief introduction, classic medicalese, nothing more than hey, this is the study. And then very first paragraph after that is labeled historical retrospect and flashbacks and strap yourself in. Now you know that you are in for a most unusual academic article.
- [37:41]
A
Naturally, we had Nick read some of.
- [37:43]
B
It saying scores of psychotropic light years have passed since the idyllic Aquarian age of the Woodstock Nation. The Avalon and Fillmore's east and west have disappeared over the edge, capitalized, driven by the non direction and ennui of their once teeming crowds and eased along with the help of the media and their own chosen capitalized angels. And Altamont took a hobnailed boot in the balls and ego and promotional money wounded, turned inward. You don't get this kind of writing, not only in medical articles, but you certainly don't get that in most academic writing. It's just incredible.
- [38:23]
A
Shout out to the lead author on the article, the late Dr. George Skip Gay, who seemingly gave the piece its voice. When I was researching my book Heads A Biography of Psychedelic America, I mostly focused on all the incredible hard data this paper presents, which we'll discuss too, but it slightly missed some of the more colorful reportage.
- [38:41]
B
The funny thing about the RockMed article is the degree to which they actually allow themselves to not write informal academic prose. It is just littered with wonderful little nuggets of what we would classify as, you know, quintessential deadhead prose. Skip was a little gonzo. I think that's the best way to say it, he was an outstanding physician and very flamboyant. Skip was so well known that we could publish the whole article, including the colorful stuff that wouldn't be allowed in the mainstream medical journals.
- [39:20]
A
Until getting to the more serious stuff. A lot of it just reads like well reported rock journalism. It's important how you say hello. They quote Bill Graham as saying Graham was in the forefront making his presence known. Opening Kezar's gates to the early comers just after dawn, handing out free balloons and Frisbees. One of the new fans seeing the Dead that day was Mike Crater.
- [39:41]
B
I was young, I was like 18, and I was in the Air Force. And I wasn't really a Deadhead like I was. Always thought of myself as a free thinker and collected albums in high school. I had Working Man's Dead and American Beauty. And I didn't have any live albums. And then I left home and got stationed in Monterey, California. And I got live in Europe when it first came out. And from the opening licks of Cumberland Blues, I jumped up and started dancing. I knew that I had to go see the Dead. Then I saw in the pink section of our paper, the San Francisco paper that gonna play Keys are. So I rode the bus from Monterey to Salinas to the Ticketron at the Sears and got three tickets. Mike Dalgushkin, my brother and I, and some friends of ours, we drove up to San Francisco, met up at my friend Gary Ross's place up on Twin Peaks. And then we took the bus down to Golden Gate Park. And it was a sunny morning, or it seemed like the sun was kind of breaking through the clouds. When we got there, we were sitting out there. We found a spot on the field, I think a friend of ours said. I think our friend Steve had gotten out there first and staked out a spot. So we found him.
- [41:05]
A
Mike Crater brought two friends he'd met serving in the Air Force, two guys.
- [41:09]
B
That were stationed in Monterey with me. I had some of the shortest hair of anybody in the whole stadium.
- [41:16]
A
Sometimes the long hair is on the inside.
- [41:18]
B
All three of us were quite, quite experienced by the time we got there. I had read Electric Kool Aid, Acid Cast. So I figured I wanted to get with the whole spirit of things. So we parked out in Golden Gate park and dropped on the way, walking toward the main gate. And it was very strange, strong. It's a miracle I made it inside the gate. Yeah, or just sit down and have to stare at a tree or something, you know.
- [41:46]
A
Strider Brown was A show Veteran by.
- [41:48]
B
Then, Tsar was pretty sure it was my 31st Dead concert since the beginning of 1970 and my third outdoor Grateful Dead concert. You know, the first time seeing him outside was Yale Bowl 71. And then of course at Bonita in Oregon in 72. We went and it wasn't very crowded. I think there were a big stadium. There were like 18,000 people there. We walked right up behind the soundboard and just plopped down on the grass. I mean, we were just a bunch of dudes out for the day. We had no idea. We didn't have blankets or water bottles or any of the stuff, stuff that we consider essential concert supplies. And I laid there, just plastered. The new writers started their set at 10:30 in the morning. And then, you know, with Waylon's set and then a three set Grateful Dead concert. It was absolutely an all day affair. Good morning. Welcome. It's nice to be outdoors in San Francisco. Here we go. To get the muscles moving From Marin county, the new riders of the purple sage.
- [43:25]
A
The doctors from the free clinic reported the faithful dead freaks. And the sun came early. Excitement and a sense of happy anticipation crept over the walls at Kezar. Frisbees were out and Bill Graham joined in a game of touch football at midfield. We were warned to watch out for injuries to the old man Strider.
- [43:42]
B
I like to say that Bonita in Oregon was the last of innocence. But thinking about Keezar, there was some of that feeling. Indeed. Things in the Bay Area in general by 1974 were becoming, you know, somewhat dodgy. Certainly the scene was at least at Keys are. That day was very open, both with the people and being an outdoor concert and being so close to the old Haight Ashbury pretty much on the edge of it.
- [44:19]
A
The place was huge by local bed standards, but it was also homey and open.
- [44:23]
B
The architecture of Pzar Stadium, it had that very old style of football stadiums, elongated and relatively low side. Yale bowl is of that old style of stadium also. But of course, all that changed with super stadiums starting to be built. I think with perhaps Shea Stadium. Mike Dalgushkin they're like apartment houses across the street from the stadium. And people were like up on the roofs and hanging out their windows and up on the roof of Polytechnic High High School, which is across the street, across Frederick street, people were hanging out up there.
- [45:01]
A
One odd historical footnote to the new Rider's performance, Betty Cantor Jackson apparently recorded it on 16 track, presumably Alembics MM1000. In 2018, the tape surfaced via online auction it's been mixed down and now circulates. But there's no real explanation nor any known evidence that she also recorded the Dead to multitrack that day, though that doesn't seem too unlikely.
- [45:30]
B
We ain't likely to see a lot of rainbows out here today unless you're seeing them anyway.
- [45:52]
A
There's some mixed memories of the New Riders set, with a few people reporting that members of Waylon Jennings band joined for the closing Willie and the Hand Jive. But it was just some more local muppets.
- [46:02]
B
Keith played piano with him and Matt Kelly came out and played some harp also. I don't remember seeing anybody extra up there besides those two, you know. I know God damn way out of Willie. Got cool little chips in Moroccan. You can dance, stroll, attitude. You can do the crazy things I do.
- [46:32]
A
Between live sets, the San Francisco Phoenix observed the house music was by the band Van Morrison and Rod Stewart. I actually kind of wonder how that sounded through the Dead system. Up Next, at around 12:30, was Waylon Jennings on the verge of breaking through from the country underground into the crossover territory that became known as outlaw country. In his memoir, co written with certified Dead freak Lenny Kay, Jennings wrote that the gig was the doing of his manager Neil Reschin. He'd just released Lonesome Henri and Mean. Unfortunately, no audio survives of this set. One audience member would recall Jerry Garcia and New Riders pedal steel player Buddy Cage watching Whelan's pedal steel player Ralph Mooney from the side of the stage.
- [47:13]
B
Been traveling these highways it's been making me lonesome.
- [47:28]
A
Henriett Meike Dalgashkin.
- [47:33]
B
I remember him doing me and Bobby McGee. And that caused our friend Steve to remark, oh, no, now the Dead aren't gonna do it. And I do remember somebody, somebody yelling something up to the stage. I couldn't hear what it was, but Waylon replied, I may be country, but I ain't that damn country. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose Nothing left was all she left for me Feeling good what's easy, Lord When Bobby sang the blues Feeling good was good enough for me Good enough for me Bobby McGee.
- [48:15]
A
In his memoir, Whelan didn't remember the Kezar show terribly fondly. He wrote, musically, it didn't work. Deadheads don't care if it's Jesus Christ up there. All they've come to see is the dead. I felt older than them when I walked out. I probably looked like that son of a bitch who told them that if they weren't in by 11 o' clock he was going to ground them. My kids were old enough to be in that crowd. In the end, it didn't matter how the shows went, because the word of mouth whispered like wildfire. The show with the Dead helped Waylon build buzz among rock fans, and it would be cited in his press clips for years to come. A year afterwards, he asked the San Francisco crowd, how many of you were at Kezar Stadium. That changed a lot of things right there. As happens sometimes when bands cross paths, the Dead learn some excellent road lore. This audio of Jerry Garcia and Steve Parish is from David Ganz's bodacious conversations with the Dead, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast. Waylon Jennings and his bus driver had been.
- [49:09]
B
The band had been playing poker with.
- [49:11]
A
The bus driver for years and losing stage steady to him until finally the whole band, wh.
- [49:15]
B
Everybody, they were into it for thousands and thousands of dollars.
- [49:18]
A
And he ran the whole show. He was like the manager. He ran everything, he owned everything, you know, he was like. They were fundamentally working for him. The bus driver, that's like an example.
- [49:27]
B
Of how weird it can get. Yeah. When we renegade park with him, we found out about that. It was funny as hell, I must admit. We tried to do that to the.
- [49:34]
A
Grateful Dead ones too.
- [49:36]
B
We started playing cards, but the only guy that was play with us was.
- [49:39]
A
Croitman, and he'd only break out five bucks.
- [49:43]
B
I was like, hard to do sometimes.
- [49:45]
A
Break everything in the room and too.
- [49:48]
B
So we couldn't get any past that. We tried that one too. Bill. Riverboat Bill.
- [50:17]
A
It was a long day in the sun, and if heads dosed before they went into the show, like Mike Crater, the peaks of their trip occurred during the New Riders and Waylon Jennings sets.
- [50:26]
B
I had to go eat and go to the bathroom and stuff like that. And somehow I. I always made it back to right where. Right where I'd been standing before. It was funny how that kind of had a homing path to that place. But yeah, there were. There were people there without any clothes on. I mean, to me, I was like, oh, yeah, there's a guy without any clothes on. Okay, so what else. What's over here? And now people would like flip out and they would carry the guy out of the stadium. But it was. It was totally relaxed.
- [50:57]
A
Our Dead cast hero, David Ganz, was at Kezar in 73, but not entirely present.
- [51:02]
B
I don't have a lot of strong memories about Kezar because I had a rough time with LSD that day. And I spent a good portion of the show walking around the rim of Kezar Stadium. And I famously posted somewhere in the early days of online that I lost an argument with a hot dog that day. And it of kind of became one of the memes for that date. But I, you know, it was Waylon Jennings, which was interesting. I didn't, you know, it's a lot of stuff just didn't register or stick in my memory because I was having this anxiety experience instead.
- [51:41]
A
In our Santa Barbara episode we spoke with Bob Student, who just returned from the army and filmed part of that show with his Super 8 camera.
- [51:48]
B
I did see the Dead there at.
- [51:51]
A
Keys Are, but like David, Bob had too much too fast.
- [51:54]
B
I took a little too much acid and then I came down with the flu at the same time. So I was really sick and someone brought me over to the sideline and there was four people from the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic there. Oh, it was terrible. I was sick, I was tripping. They took care of me. You know, a couple hours later I'm better and I went home. So that's my claim to be the first patient for Rock Medicine before they became Rock Medicine.
- [52:30]
A
Many years later, Bob would go on to work for Rockmed in non medical capacities, part of another extended family entwined with the Grateful Dead. High Noon had brought the acid boom. Reported the resulting paper, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast. Our tent began to fill with sun and acid overdoses. This was generally a happy and peaceful group, however, and easily managed. The paper itself is behind a scholarly paywall, but many public and university libraries offer free remote access. Or ask a dead scholar near you.
- [53:00]
B
The Dead was very psychedelic. LSD twirling individual came in freaking out and he says, I could see Jerry. The music notes coming out of Jerry Garcia's guitar and into my head and you know that type of stuff and no, no, no, it's a drug. We had a talk down tent.
- [53:21]
A
It's an obvious thing to say that people took LSD at Dead shows, but it's another to start attending to adverse psychedelic experiences and create a protocol to do so. Hugh Romney, soon known as Wavy Gravy, arguably started the very basics of it at the Watts acid test in 1966 and applied them to countless hog farm incursions over the years. Like when they ran security at Woodstock. The Haight Street Free Medical Clinic prepared seriously and thoughtfully, pooling their shared knowledge of working at past festivals and the Fillmore auditorium and offering talk down workshops and other tips the night before, even 50 years later, the territory that Rockmed entered into at Kiza remained seriously contested at best, and virtually outlawed in many places, mostly due to insurance policies and the successors of the Rave act, which. Well, you should look up the Rave act, its sponsor, and its consequences. But back in 1973, the Haight Street Free Medical Clinic just went ahead and did it. The work had its hazards. Nicholas Meriwether.
- [54:19]
B
Thirteen of the 30 workers at the Rock Med tent at the Dead show get dosed. So there's this overwhelming sense in which they take their job seriously. But they also had a view. Good time, but their point is serious. So they conclude that introductory section by saying, then, our purpose then will be to explore the probabilities of what medical and psychosocial problems one may expect within the churning crucible of the rock concerts of 1973, how to deal with their disparities, and in so doing, how best to prepare the smoothest clinical management possible. Nothing but a serious thing.
- [55:00]
A
The paper they published would be cited frequently, helping establish both a protocol and basic understanding of running field medical tents at large public events, a service with ramifications far beyond rock concerts.
- [55:11]
B
What's also clear when you read the article is the degree to which at least one, if not all, three of the authors are huge fans of the Dead. I mean, their admiration for the Dead comes through clearly throughout. So when they talk about. When they shift gears and start talking about the details of the two individual concerts, when they first introduced the Grateful Dead, they say the Grateful Dead has generated over the years a steadfastly loyal following of mellow heads who express themselves in harmonious crowd meeting, dancing at concerts, and a warm, acid acceptance of their own private world. The carnival mood of picnicking, sunbathing, dancing, and a sharing of whatever bottled psychedelic experience might be contained in communal jugs of Kool Aid or artist juice was well verbalized by Graham's introduction of if we're going to christen Kezar, I think we've got the right bottle of champagne. Indeed, it's a great line. Indeed. 20,000 flower children grown older with some admixture of their younger counterparts, brought the renewed warmth of a reunion of family to the somber, gray, moldering presence of old Kezar. Again, you're not going to find academic. You're not going to find prose like that in most academic articles, and certainly not in the medical literature.
- [56:34]
A
But they also provide helpful advice.
- [56:36]
B
Then they've got this wonderful breakdown of, this is how we set up the tent. These are the considerations that we thought about, you know, like, keep the drugs that might be of interest to freaks, you know, keep those bottled up and battened down and then they get into the details.
- [56:53]
A
It's a stellar example of freak straight scholarship.
- [56:56]
B
They also make it a point to say how many people came by the tent to thank them for their work.
- [57:03]
A
Which of course is how 13 of 30 volunteers got dosed before 1pm Mike Crater had dosed himself and was doing just fine, thank you very much.
- [57:12]
B
I think it was the new writers came on, you know, and then another country band came on, Country Waylon Jennings, you know, and I listened to that and then still we're just starting to come down from the. From the peak. And I hear people say, the Dead. The Dead. We got up and just walked right down to about in front of the soundboard and did not move for the entire five hour show or whatever it was. Let's welcome the Grateful Dead, please. Oh, in Norfolk, Virginia, California on my mind straddled that ground and rode it past Raleigh on across Carolina stopping Charlotte.
- [58:04]
A
And bypass Rockland we never was meaning.
- [58:07]
B
Date we was 90 miles out of Atlanta by sundown rollin cross, Georgia state I never had any idea that something could sound like that.
- [58:18]
A
The Dead hit the stage around 2 Strider.
- [58:21]
B
The Grateful Dead's three sets were phenomenal, of course. And I was somewhere down, probably about 50ft, 60ft from the stage. In the center, Mike Dauguskin. The band was in a good mood. Jerry had the grins the whole day. They had. They definitely had equipment problems, which I don't think ever got solved during the whole gig. But musically they managed to transcend that. Thanks a lot. Real nice to be out here.
- [58:56]
A
Later in the year, Donna Jean and Weir appeared on WAER in Rochester and talked about the band's lack of set list planning.
- [59:03]
B
We don't. We go out there and we just do what? Like we never discuss what we're gonna play. We've got a few starter tunes and we've got a few ending tunes, and in between, it's just whatever happens.
- [59:16]
A
The band drew from what was freshest on their mind, their developing repertoire, with occasional curve balls thrown into the mix. There were lots of new unrecorded songs in play, as we've noted and will continue to note. Between some of the new songs and some of the flavors in the extended jams, the Dead were moving into a new era. But they could also just still lean into being the Cowboy Dead.
- [59:37]
B
Mike Dolgashkin it seemed like a lot of what the Dead were doing was kind of like building on that country feel, you know, the New Riders and Waylon, you know, and the Dead were playing a lot of that sort of thing. El Paso, I mean, all that kind of thing. The Race Is on was in there someplace I feel tears welling up and down deep inside like my heart's got a big break and stab alone and it's sharp and thankful I may never see.
- [60:15]
A
Weir had sung the Races on with the New riders back in 1970, but it was new to the electric dead in 1973 and with some new players in the mix. One was Keith Godshow. When the Dead spring tour finished in April, Keith and Donna had actually continued on the road with the New Riders of the Purple Sage singing and playing a bit most nights, with Keith marinating a bit more in country flavors. The other new part of the Race is on is Ms. Donna Jean God Show.
- [60:40]
B
Now the Race Is on in here Comes right at the backstage party's Going to the inside My tears are holding back Trying not to fall My heart.
- [61:04]
A
Donna Jean had parts in lots of songs that were returning to the repertoire for the first time since she joined the band.
- [61:09]
B
One of the things that I loved singing with the Grateful Dead about was the fact that so much of the vocals, it's not like background void vocals, it's ensemble singing. There were background vocals on certain songs in certain parts, but a great deal was ensemble singing. I mean, you take Working Man's Dead and American Beauty, and you got ensemble singing on so many of those songs.
- [61:39]
A
When new songs came into the repertoire now, there was almost always a part built in for Donna in the place Phil Lesch once occupied.
- [61:45]
B
I started doing more vocals because Phil was. Was kind of losing the ability to do his parts the way he wanted to do them, you know, how he wanted to sound. And so I was put more in a position of doing more vocally than I even was on the. On the Europe trip, because I was really a freshie. I was a freshman, you know, a newbie. A newbie, that's what they call them.
- [62:12]
A
For the most part. Loesch would continue to sing his vocal parts through the band's 1974 hiatus, but Anna took on more and more vocal responsibilities.
- [62:20]
B
It translated as well, you know, to the next era that included Wake of the Flood and Mars Hotel and Blues for Allah and, you know, just a lot of ensemble singing, and that was really fun. Jimmy Ronna get there. I don't know. Seems uncommon. Way to go, get out go.
- [63:08]
A
One way the Dead concert stood at a remove from mass culture in this or any era. Was the inclusion of songs that weren't yet recorded for albums and were expected to be experienced real time in the moment. Even in his not great psychedelic space, David Ganz couldn't help but notice the new material.
- [63:24]
B
As often happen in recollecting Grateful Dead things, there's just little flourishes or little bits that stick with you. And I remember hearing the dual guitar thing after the first verse of Ro Jimmy and that just sort of registered, you know, little things like that that help you understand the relationships and how that music is made. And that was one. And I was this is 1973 and I'd been playing guitar for four years and I'd been listening to the Grateful Dead for one. And so I was just really beginning to understand how that music worked.
- [64:04]
A
It was music for a Saturday afternoon. The report from the free clinicians noted that a large part of the audience was sprawled casually on the infield grass, while the dirt tracks surrounding the field was continuously filled with a flowing, milling, living stream, an ever changing parade of freaks. Mostly, it seems like it wasn't much of a dancing crowd. Some dancing took place near the foot of the stage, they observed. A writer from the San Francisco Phoenix observed some of the dancers too, commenting for the dozens of ecstatic dancers. It was indeed ecstatic Gay lib and the gender fuckers and high camp transvestites were scintillating. Many worked out just under the platform and to the right. They were a regular part of the Dead scene in that era. Philip Elwood, the San Francisco Examiner's veteran Dead correspondent, this first ever Kezar rock program brought out a large teenage crowd to mix with the original Dead freaks, now older. Also in evidence was the usual collection of transvestites and histrionics. It was the peak of the glam era, and while it's easy to see the psychedelic roots of Ziggy Stardust, it's not always as easy to see how the glam scene leaked back into the Dead psychedelic world. Though it certainly did, as at Kezar, mainly probably. It was San Francisco, as always, keeping the Dead Freaks Freaky Mike Dogashkin during.
- [65:35]
B
The first set, I was like hoping for a bird song or something to, you know, they could stretch out on. But they did do playing in the band at the end of the set, and it was a great playing in the band. It was one of the best from that time, I think. Sam.
- [66:16]
A
Just listen to that stereo spread. Listen to Bob Weir over in the left channel. One slight bummer about this playing in the band is that Keith gottschau moves over to Rhodes, which would ordinarily be a good thing, except that it doesn't seem to be in Betty's submix until almost the end of the jam. You can hear it pop into the mix about 14 minutes in, but just listen to those sparkles. The second set began with the Dead cast's current theme song, David Gans.
- [67:47]
B
The other thing that I really remembered strongly was Here Comes Sunshine had this beautiful high. The thing Jerry played at the beginning, the intro, like, was this beautiful high up the neck thing, you know, that was really. That wafted out across the. The bowl, what. And whatever was roiling my heart that day, I still managed to remember that music.
- [68:37]
A
Mike Crater.
- [68:38]
B
I can still remember parts of that. Parts of that show. Like it very vividly. Like, I remember Donna saying, you ain't woman enough to take my man. You say, I want to know you don't love me anymore and I'll have to let him go. I say you gonna take it, but I don't think you can. Because you ain't woman enough. Take my place.
- [69:15]
A
Mike Dalgushkin.
- [69:16]
B
There was Donna's song, you Ain't woman Enough to Take My Man. That was kind of a surprise.
- [69:21]
A
Donna Jean's vocal responsibilities had grown since she'd started singing with the band in early 1972. That fall, she and Garcia had done a few duet versions of Dolly Parton's Tomorrow Is Forever, originally sung as a duet with Porter Wagoner. A truly inspired choice. This is from Waterbury 72. Now on the 30 trips around the sun box. Early in 1973, the Dead debuted another country classic by a female songwriter, and this time, Garcia didn't get in the way. You Ain't Woman Enough to Take My man was a number two country smash written and performed by the amazing Loretta Lynn, Originally released in May 1966 on our timeline after the acid tests but before the Dead move to the hate.
- [70:46]
B
Women like you There are dime a dozen you can buy anywhere. For you to get to him, I'd have to move on. And I'm gonna stand right here. It'll be over my dead body, so get out while you can. Cause you ain't woman enough to take my man. They just wanted me to sing something. And at that time, I was just still in a state of fluctuation about who I am and what I do and how do I manage all of this life that I'm living. And that's just a song that came up that I started singing. And I don't remember any More about that or anything deep about it.
- [71:32]
A
But it also must have been kind of fun to really front the band for the first time.
- [71:35]
B
I probably felt good about being able to sing something now, but I didn't within myself, like, oh, my gosh, you're getting to sing a solo. I just did have that kind of mentality. And people would ask me, well, why don't you do more? Why don't you sing more? But the thing was, the Grateful Dead needed a certain thing at a certain time. A certain voice, a certain harmony. And that was my place for a lot of the time that I was in the band. That was my place. And I. For instance, let me give you a little inside thing. We were on stage at one point, I'm sure it was Winterland and the Airplane and the Grateful Dead were playing. And Gracelick was standing right next to.
- [72:24]
A
Me, triangulating a bit, I think. The following conversation took place at the Roadies benefit at Winterland on October 9, 1972.
- [72:32]
B
And she was inebriated and she. She turned to me and the band was playing a song that I wasn't singing on. She said, well, why aren't you up there singing right now? And I said, well, because I don't want to, Grace. And that just shut her up. That shut her up. But anyway, I said that, to say this, that I knew where my place was and I wasn't out to like, take over the Grateful Dead and be the big vocalist and, you know, take over the band. I was never interested in that. I just wanted to sing with the Grateful Dead.
- [73:38]
A
The Keys R Show is really one of my favorite recordings by Betty Cantor Jackson, David Lemieux, Betty really starting here.
- [73:45]
B
But really you do hear it much more in 77 with her recordings. But there's a little bit more sonic manipulation done at the time of the recording. So what she's recorded is what we have. And thankfully, her recordings are phenomenal. Betty was a studio person, you know, Betty had extensive experience on all of the Dead albums at this point, Whether they were the live albums that she mixed, recorded and mixed, or they were the studio records that she co produced. She knew her way around the studio. So to be in the live setting.
- [74:18]
A
I've never talked with her about it.
- [74:19]
B
But I expect that she had some outboard gear. Whether it was a bit of compression or a bit of eq. She certainly had a DBX encoding unit for the spring of 77 and only that tour.
- [74:31]
A
Even once the shows are picked out for Dead box sets, putting them together for release involves far More than just locating the recordings in the tape vault, almost always involving David working in close contact with engineer Jeffrey Norman.
- [74:43]
B
Let's say we used a show that.
- [74:45]
A
Was recorded by Betty and her master tape.
- [74:48]
B
As you know, they cut every 46 minutes or so. So her master tape cuts and it takes 30 seconds or a minute to string up a new tape. And so we're missing, thankfully, we have the kid recording. And Jeffrey is a phenomenal editor, so he does a seamless edit. You can't hear where the edit is perfectly blended, so you're not missing any music.
- [75:08]
A
It's just from a different recording source.
- [75:10]
B
But you can. With headphones in particular, you can hear where the stereo assignments change. And it's very subtle. But all of a sudden, if, let's say, Weir might be hard left and Keith hard right, all of a sudden.
- [75:22]
A
Keith is center, but Jerry's on the right.
- [75:24]
B
And again, it's very subtle and you've got to have your headphones on, but you will notice it.
- [75:29]
A
Chinacat Sunflower is one of those places where you can hear a patch between sources and can ab the recordings made by Betty Cantor, Jackson and Kid Candelario. It helps to listen on headphones. At the beginning of this next segment, Bob Weir is panned to the left, Jerry Garcia is panned to the right, and Keith Godshaw's Rhodes is in the middle. Then for 30 seconds, while Betty is changing reels, suddenly the guitars collapse to the middle before going back to Betty's fuller record. Big ups to Jeffrey Norman for making this sound so smooth. Mike Dogushkin.
- [76:31]
B
There was a nice China Cat Rider in the middle that had that. What's it called, like the Feeling. Groovy jam. They started to stick that in the middle of it. So that was. That was. That was a new thing.
- [77:12]
A
You'll want to hear the rest of that.
- [77:14]
B
About 5 o' clock, they took another break. And then that's when it really took off. It was during the third set or so beginning of the third set, looking behind me and seeing my brother and his seven month pregnant wife headed out because, well, of course, seven months pregnant, that's a lot of energy. So that was the last time my brother saw the Grateful Dead. The jams were being extended in somewhat of a different manner from 72 and earlier. Of course, every year there's changes in the sound and even some of the jam structures.
- [78:23]
A
Keys R was the Dead's first Bay Area show since the death of pigpen less than three months earlier. Out in the crowd was Kevin McKernan. Pig's younger brother. We've posted a touching account of that day by one of kevin's friends@dead.net deadcast.
- [78:37]
B
I'm just glad that I wasn't such a purist that when Pigpen was no longer in the band, that I stopped going.
- [78:46]
A
Did you know people who stopped seeing the Dead after Pig died?
- [78:48]
B
Well, it would have been my brother and his wife. And, you know, part of that was the birth of their first son.
- [78:55]
A
Well, maybe just a part of it, though. Coming in and out of the Dead world for any reason at all is totally normal. Inside every Dead fan, there are two Deads, at least. One that exists in the abstract on recordings and one that exists in real time, touring somewhere, continuing to sound subtly different every time they come through town. I think of the core of the band's third set at Kezar to be the quintessential spring 1973 sequence. It happened three times like this. Once in February, in Des Moines, two weeks earlier. And at Kezar, he's gone into Truckin, into the other one, into Eyes of the World, into China doll. 1 hour and 45 minutes of continuous music according to the timings on the new box set.
- [79:39]
B
Me.
- [79:59]
A
Mike Dogashkin.
- [80:00]
B
They did that bubbly, sparkly jam out of He's Gone that really. I mean, it's, it's. It really doesn't sound like too many others. It's really got a personality of its own.
- [80:40]
A
Mike Crater knew the tunes from the band's newest album.
- [80:43]
B
They played a bunch of stuff off of Europe 72. They did a long Truck in there towards the end, I think maybe in the third set. One time. The light sun shining on me.
- [81:22]
A
It gets good. This is an example of Keith and Garcia thinking the one is in a different place for a moment, resulting in a tiny moment of ambiguity before hitting the peak together. Mike Balgushkin.
- [81:59]
B
The other one was. I mean, they. I mean, they, they went. They went deep on that. Well, God, Phil's bass solo. Phil's bass solo was like, unreal. And I'm hoping now that that show's going to get an official release that that bass solo will take its rightful place in the pantheon of all things Grateful Dead. Right? Because, I mean, never heard anything and before since, never heard anything like that. It was like a whole song of its own.
- [83:08]
A
It was an arrow in end. The other one was more a theme than a song. And we talked about Phil's Philo stomp motif in our Listen to the River 72 episode. Though looked at from a song perspective, the band Goes especially far out on both sides of the verse here. Sometimes they blur together. Keith is playing Rhodes during the singing, giving it a slightly different flavor than usual.
- [83:34]
B
And rainbows bow around and round and tremble then explode.
- [83:41]
A
It left a smoking crater of a mind I like to.
- [83:44]
B
Blow away when the heat come round and busted me for smiling on a cloudy day.
- [83:54]
A
Another big moment came after the verse.
- [83:56]
B
That was a really spectacular tiger that they did. During that. The tiger came out where, I'm sure you've heard of that, where Garcia starts playing like some riff over and over and starts stomping on top of one of his pedals. Our buddy Steve, he said it sounded like it was like millions of rats pouring out of the speakers. That's what it sounded like to him. But you can hear him. You can hear them on the tape. It's like they're all squeaking. To me it sounded like mechanical spiders were running out of the PA system.
- [85:18]
A
Funny, somebody told us before that it sounded like rats.
- [85:21]
B
Oh, it must have been Mikey D, huh?
- [85:23]
A
What, do you all know each other or something?
- [85:25]
B
Then they go into this really spacey thing after that where it's. I mean, it sounds like they've landed on Pluto or something.
- [85:49]
A
The Eyes of the World China Doll pairing was a complete piece of music unto itself. A piece built for improvisation. A structure that was as dynamic as it was dramatic. A balance of open ended conversation on time signatures and big peaks resolving into an extended moment of extreme delicacy played as a cap on the rest of the suite. It's an especially big finish, using 20 minutes of new music as the final set piece.
- [86:35]
B
They did that seven pattern, or whatever you want to call it. They would, they, you know, the usual cycling through it three times and then they jammed some more and then went back to it again. That was a particularly good version of that. And that was something. We all took note of that. Oh, look at. Oh, listen to this. What they're doing here. That's pretty cool. Kept expecting them to go back into the other one, which of course they didn't do.
- [87:24]
A
They chose the slightly more delicate route.
- [87:27]
B
Take up your channel. Take up your channel. It's only fracture.
- [87:45]
A
Just a little nervous from the fall. The show was pretty much over by sunset. From the free clinic report, residual tripping plus the hot sun plus the non threatening environment of the tent caused these clients to remain longer. Indeed, 10 of our COTs were occupied at 6pm at which time the clients, upon told that we were closing down, readily got up and walked away with a happy what me Worry smile on their faces.
- [88:19]
B
The immediate aftermath. I remember we were kind of starting to make our way out of there, and this guy who was just, like, scraggly looking and just, like, completely zoned came up and just, like, stared at the young lady I was with. He just came up and just stared at her. And so we just kind of walked on. And then he had lost. Well, Gary had disappeared. We didn't know where he was. So we just went out to make our way up to his house, right, because that's where we parked the car. So we got on the bus and we're going up Ashbury street. And up ahead of us, we see Gary walking up the street and he flags the bus down. He tried to get a bottle of wine into the show, but they made him that. They told him no, he couldn't see it and hid it in the bushes. After the show, he went back to the bushes, retrieved the bottle of wine, and that's what he was carrying. When we saw him walking up the.
- [89:16]
A
Street, some freaks probably got dinner and caught Johnny Winter at Winterland. Mike Crater, who was then in the Air Force, had a pretty heavy day.
- [89:23]
B
You know, made some life decisions along the way, too. I mean, I relocated to California permanently where I could see as many dead shows as possible and still, you know, maintain a residence and job and all that kind of stuff.
- [89:37]
A
But after the show, it was back to the reality of life on an Air Force base.
- [89:41]
B
We did. We drove right back. Well, no, we only drew. Only two of us went back. The third guy, we never saw again, we think he stayed downtown and the Moonies got him. He was definitely awol. And then he came back out and got out and did whatever we had to do and then went back to the sun. Myung Moon, Universal Life Church.
- [90:05]
A
Yikes. Where's Wavy when you need him?
- [90:08]
B
And, yeah, ended up with somewhere close to 300 shows under my belt.
- [90:12]
A
Strider Brown hung around San Francisco a little longer.
- [90:15]
B
When Led Zeppelin played, I believe, the following week at Keyzar Stadium, I did not go in the stadium to see them, but there was. Before that concert started, there was a Deadhead in an apartment right across the street on the south side of Kezar Stadium who was blasting Live Dead out of his apartment windows. And so I went up there and partied with them. And I think I even went up on the roof and listened to part of Led Zeppelin's set. But I'd already seen Led Zeppelin twice Anyway, in 1969, good scene.
- [90:55]
A
If you've seen the photos of Robert Plant and The Dove. That's from that day at Kezar. Our buddy Steve Brown from Grateful Dead Records was at the Zepp show too. And backstage at that. As a head from the psychedelic days, the amount of alcohol shocked him.
- [91:09]
B
Drunk? Yes. I had never seen people with Zeppelin like that drink more liquor and still go on stage and play like hell, you know. I was impressed. I said, they can't even walk, let alone get on stage and play. After drinking all this liquor backstage, I was just blown out. I was surprised that they could get away with it. And they did.
- [91:33]
A
I was really blown away.
- [91:35]
B
I was like, oh, he's gonna drink that whole bottle. Oh, wow. Yeah, they were getting really, I thought, drunk, you know. But they got on stage and all of a sudden it was them doing it. Good afternoon. As we've been away now a total of about two and a half hours. It doesn't really seem that we should be doing what we're doing right now.
- [92:31]
A
As one of Owsley's favorite alchemical precepts goes as above. So below. The Haight Street Free Clinic set up their tent in the end zone once again. And treated concert goers and kept notes on what they saw. Some 20,000 people at the dead show and 30,000 at Zep. The paper published by the doctors from the Haight Street Free Medical clinic included. Table 3. Comparison of major drug related problems. The results were pretty clear. At the Zeppelin show, they treated 19 people for alcohol related issues versus 14 at the much smaller Dead show. At the Zeppelin show, 14 people came to the medical tent having adverse psychedelic experiences. At the dead 45, Dr. David Smith.
- [93:12]
B
It's just you're under the influence of a psychedelic. There was absolutely no violence. And, you know, but, you know, there were problems, but they were a very different type of problem. And then the Zeppelin came along. Everybody's drinking and doing speed and there's violence and fights. And I think that's what Gip wrote, a dash of mash because he focused on rock medicine. I, from the clinic point of view, wrote a paper that was published in the California Medical Association Journal called Speed Freaks versus Acid Hits.
- [93:47]
A
I find it interesting because it clearly delineates that by 1973 there was no longer a single rock and roll crowd. Something that had almost been taken for granted only a few years earlier. Nicholas Meriwether.
- [93:58]
B
They provide a general summary of impressions. They contrast the difference between the Led Zeppelin audience and the Grateful Dead audience. And they point out that the Grateful Dead audience was uniquely dedicated to the Grateful Dead's music. They were mellower older and more attuned to their life's destinies. They were more into acid, but less likely to succumb to the terror capitalized. And they were more trusting of the medical staff too. And that's something that comes through clearly. And then they also have the section which is called and a Few Final Hints. And point number two is beware of freaks bearing gifts, especially Kool Aid or orange juice. Remember Owlsley's warning quote, maintain with an exclamation point in the end quote. It's just wonderful, absolutely wonderful. By the way, they've never mentioned Owlsley any at any point earlier in the article. So the point is, this article is also designed to be read by people who get it.
- [95:03]
A
The article appeared in volume five, number two of the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs by a quirk of scholarly publication dated winter 1972. Its publication was almost exactly contemporaneous with Stanley Krippner's paper on his ESP experiments at the Capitol Theatre in Portchester, which we discussed in the first episode of our Skull and Roses season.
- [95:22]
B
There's an interesting connection between Krippner's article and this article, the Rockmed article, which is how I abbreviate it in my head, even though it wasn't really called Rockmed yet, which is that both of them are harnessing the energy of Grateful Dead concert for their own academic purposes, but in the process they're telling us something profound and really significant about the Grateful Dead experience themselves. In other words, they are academic articles that don't directly address the Grateful Dead experience per se, but they are fundamentally keyed to and work as articles, as studies, precisely because they take the Grateful Dead experience seriously and end up finding really important things to say.
- [96:23]
A
The paper is worth a read for sure.
- [96:25]
B
It ends up making this just stunning, you know, final, final comment, which I've actually quoted in one of my scholarly articles. But in the end, one must recall the atmosphere of the day in the crowd, which touched each member of the team of an overall joyous melding into a flowing unity of life which unexpectedly warped backward in time to innocent happy days of Hippie Hill and an outdoor rock concert world For Bill Graham and.
- [96:53]
A
His organization, it became built into their operation as they started to scale into even bigger venues.
- [96:59]
B
Bob Barsatti as we started doing the stadium shows, we brought Rockmed with us everywhere, and there was a point when we would be involved in the Arena Managers association convention every year because we were one of the bigger promoters and Oakland Coliseum was always involved heavily. And Bob Quintella the manager of the Coliseum, asked me to go with him and a couple of times to talk with the arena managers about our medical scene and our security. Because we had a little bit different approach to things than many other promoters. And it was great because we were able to show people this amazing operation. And there's an. There's an alternative way to doing it besides ambulances and taking them to hospitals. You know, that's really. We try to treat everybody on site and send them home with their friends. Works out much better.
- [97:46]
A
Like the original free clinic, the paper provided a model for others to follow.
- [97:50]
B
We started the national free clinic movement. And many of the free clinics that started after ours also delivered services to the same population. And so they would come out and they would look at that paper and talk with Skip and go to our trainings, and then they go back and set it up in Eugene, Oregon, the White Bird Clinic. Many of the. They have different names there, but the rock medicine derivatives came from the training, from the Haight Ashbury Clinic. Same way with the free clinics that were set up.
- [98:26]
A
The rock shows that Bill Graham presented didn't have too many problems that required heavy security operations. A perhaps simpler and more civilized age.
- [98:34]
B
Once in a while, you get a drunk guy, he might grab somebody's girlfriend, but that's the only thing that'll ever happen the whole time. Or a naked guy running out, he took a little too much LSD. And if that happens, bring them over to RockMed. You don't have to fill out a report. We'll take care of him. And I can't tell you how many times cops would show up with the naked guy and say, we glad you're here. We don't have to do a report here. Take them.
- [98:58]
A
On their list of hints for everybody else potentially organizing a medical tent at a rock show. They offer number 10, stockpile a few old clothes. Acid heads have a tendency to get natural, which tends to freak out your law and order friends. Don't be caught with your patients, pants down.
- [99:13]
B
It's the dissolving the ego that happens with psychedelics. Back to nature. But they sure, everybody liked to get naked and dance around. And there was no peer pressure to not get naked. But I tried to wash off some of that dust and dirt.
- [99:38]
A
Though the dead might have been the perfect champagne to rechristen Keezar. And heads got to boogie on the adjacent rooftops as well as the green. The neighborhood wasn't too psyched about the shows.
- [99:47]
B
Everything moved to Oakland eventually because you really couldn't Do a lot of shows in that neighborhood. It was too close in neighbors. It was hard for the neighbors to go through that. I think there's apartments right across the street and there's somebody's window right there.
- [100:04]
A
Bill Graham stuck with the branding, though. Mike Dalgushkin.
- [100:08]
B
Both the Dead and the Zeppelin shows were. Were. Were billed as Dancing on the Green. Okay. And then after Zeppelin played too loud in the end, Graham couldn't use Kezar anymore. He moved. The next show was at Oakland Stadium with Leon Russell, and that was originally billed as Dancing on the Green Number Three. And then by, I think, the third week of advertising, they changed it to Day on the Green Number three.
- [100:37]
A
Day on the Green had been the working name for the massive Dead Allman's Waylon Jennings super show in Ontario. Mike Dalgushkin and his crew got a tape of the first Keys R show, of course, which we'll call out because.
- [100:47]
B
Of a fascinating quirk in 74. Late in 74, got a tape of the show, because that's when we started. There was a buddy of ours who actually, during 74, he had, like, a Sony. He got a portable Sony deck that he actually started taping shows on himself. But then a friend of his started getting tapes from other sources. I mean, to this day, I don't know where he was getting them from, but Keys are. Was one of those. Yeah. We had an audience tape of Kezar toward the end of 74. There was unfortunately missing playing in the band and China Cat Rider, because the guy didn't. He didn't like the long stuff. He didn't want to waste tape on the long stuff. But he did have the presence of mind to tape the entire third set. So we had that.
- [101:35]
A
I've heard of Tapers pausing songs to save tape, but pausing to skip the jams. Why, I never. Of course, there was another immediate aspect of the show. Mike Crater.
- [101:45]
B
I know people have mentioned that the way the stage was set up. The stage was set up in the western end of the stadium. So it was a bright sunny day for about a week. Afterwards. You could tell who'd been to the show because we all got sunburned. Everybody's faces were peeling after that because we had to face into the sun. You're dancing around naked. That's what you want to do. That's okay. But if you get, you know, sunburn on your privates and you're in pain when you come down, and we'll take care of that, that type of thing, we're very medically oriented and that did happen naked in the sun. And then you get a sunburn in places that hadn't been exposed to sun. So everybody got a nice red face from staring into the sun all afternoon. So you could tell people who'd been to the show because they were all they had this rosy glow about them.
- [102:43]
A
Why I feel a song coming on.
- [103:18]
B
Thanks very much for tuning in to.
- [103:19]
A
The good old Grateful Dead cast. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode Donna Jean Godshow, McKay, Dave Smith, Bob Barsatti, Ron Wickersham, Jerry Pompili, Steve Brown, Sally Mann Romano, Mike Dulgushkin, David Gans, Strider Brown, Bob Student, Mike Crater, David Lemieux and Nicholas Merriweather.
- [103:42]
B
Extra special thanks, as always, to friend.
- [103:44]
A
Of the Dead cast David Ganz for contributing audio from his interview archive. Thanks very much for tuning in. Don't forget to, like, subscribe and share.
- [103:53]
B
An episode on your social media and.
- [103:56]
A
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.
- [104:13]
B
Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.