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A
Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly.
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Foreign.
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A
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. Thanks very much for tuning in. Well, today on this episode we're continuing our dive into the new Here Comes Sunshine box set and we'll time travel Back to the May 20, 1973 show in Santa Barbara, California at UCSB for one whole lot of fun in the sun. 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 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 Fairground, Des Moines, IA 51373 Campus Stadium, UCSB Santa Barbara, CA 52073 Kezar Stadium, San Francisco 52673 and Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in Washington, D.C. on 6, 9 and 6101973 the 61073 show will be available as a standalone release in two configurations, a 4 CD set and an 8 LP set. The 17 CD set and the 4 CD set will be released on June 30th and will also be available digitally that same day. And 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 platforms so you can listen how and where you like to listen. Please help us by subscribing to this podcast. Hit the like button. Share an Episode on Social Media Leave us a review thank you. It was very kind of you and it helps more than you know. And we have transcripts for many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure. And we recently uploaded season one, so bop on over to dead.net deadcast index and check them out. Get your read on. Thanks to everyone who's left their stories@stories.dead.net we're now asking you to share your stories about going to shows in 73. Did you go on tour that year? Well, the Dead were on fire. We want to hear your firsthand account. Share those stories over@stories.dead.net and you just may hear yourself on the Deadcast.
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C
The.
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A
University of California, Santa Barbara is literally right on the Pacific Ocean, with a town of nothing but students just to the north called Isla Vista. The sun, sand and surf occupy the time of most of the students when they aren't in class, but on May 20, 1973, you could find most of the population of Isla Vista at the stadium on campus attending the Grateful Dead concert happening that day. Here's Jesse Jarno to tell you all about it.
- [04:20]
D
There are many things to love about the new Here Comes Sunshine box set, and we're doing our best to articulate all of them during these six episodes of the Deadcast. But one thing I've been appreciating while putting these together is the title. For starters, it's given us some obvious theme music. Of course, Here Comes Sunshine was one of the Dead's newest songs during these five shows debuted a few months earlier, and people in attendance would mostly have been hearing it for the first time. As we discussed in the first episode of this mini series, it can be heard as a musical stand in for the band's world building ambitions in 1973, but it also catches the feeling of these specific five shows in a really precise way. Today's variety of Sunshine, recorded May 20, 1973 at Harder Stadium on the campus of UC Santa Barbara, is the kind refracted through Pacific skies with a breeze off the ocean, grateful that archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux, I find the.
- [05:40]
E
Santa Barbara show to be something very special. It's kind of got that Southern California vibe.
- [05:47]
F
They love each other. Oh, you can see that it's true. Oh, and you can see that it's true.
- [06:02]
E
And if you look at the set lists to the first three shows, and they were consecutive weekends, we get a Sunday, a Sunday and a Saturday, and we get Midwest, Southern California, Northern California. And the set lists are very similar and they're very similarly structured shows. You get your big playing in the bands, you get your Here Comes Sunshine, and each night you get no dark stars. In these three shows, you get them focused on A truck, another one Jam. And then Eyes of the World, of course, is in there. And you get China Dolls and Stella Blues, and they're very similarly structured and yet they're all remarkably different.
- [06:40]
D
All the music on the first four of the five shows on the new box set was played outdoors in the full daylight. And the musical differences between the performances might be akin to the differences between types of sunshine, each with its own subtly different configuration of clouds. Blue on blue gradients, illumination and warmth. The Santa Barbara show captures its own particular quality. Our friend Michael Parrish, also a world famous paleontologist, has appeared a few times on the Dead cast. He started seeing the Dead as a teen at the Fillmore west in early 1969, and you might still run into him at a show.
- [07:14]
B
It's one of the shows I think I have the fondest memories of. It was just one of those days when everything was perfect. It was a sunny day outdoors at the UCSB stadium, A little bit of a breeze off the ocean, so it wasn't too hot. And, you know, they just played all afternoon. It was really. I kind of compare it to what it was like seeing the dead in the 90s, which isn't really fair, but, you know, it wasn't jammed. There was plenty of room for people to move around. I had my camera, I was taking pictures the whole time, and it was just a really wonderful show.
- [07:51]
D
Sounds pretty chill and I haven't come across any dissenting experiences. But like sunshine, there are countless varieties of wonderful, and we're happy to have gathered a sampling of those today. And though it seems fairly obvious that a Dead show in a big stadium with a breeze off the Pacific would be just that, it took some work. Roll the opening credit, Sunshine. As we feel obligated to mention nearly every episode, the rock and roll touring industry was still figuring itself out, especially at the scale and the quality the Dead were pursuing. In 1973, when we dug into the Des Moines show for May 13, we learned that the local music circuit presentations virtually got their start with the gig. And there's some similarities with the show the Dead played a week later in Santa Barbara, a show put on by Pacific Presentations and Associated Students, UCSB's student union. Please welcome, from Associated Students, Jim Cronot.
- [09:10]
G
I was living in Arroyo Grande, Pismo beach area, and so I'd go, you know, go south, go north, go to concerts. I was a real music fan. Well, I was a concert fan in high school. I had gone up to see a couple of shows in San Francisco. Bill Graham, Cream and would go to Ventura. So when I got to ucsb, I think it was probably my third year I applied to get, I became the concerts chairman for the university and that it was the spring of 72 and so I started self educating myself and how to work with talent agents and well respected promoter Sep Donahuer and Gary Perkins down in Los Angeles. I continued to pursue working with Pacific Presentations, drove down to Los Angeles numerous times and explained to Sep that I wanted to do a series of indoor concerts as well as Kickstart a stadium show again because they had been canceled in 69. Three years earlier there was a quote riot at Crozysville's Naz and Young concert and the university put a hold on any future concerts in the stadium as it happens.
- [10:31]
D
And because of course Michael Parish was.
- [10:33]
B
At that show too In November of 1969 I was unfortunately unable to go see the Rolling Stones either at the Oakland Stadium or fortunately I guess at Altamont. So as my consolation prize I got to go down with my brother to see Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young at that stadium, one of the first outdoor shows they did. And there was, we couldn't really see it where we were, we were up in the stands. But I guess that there was a mass rush through the gates. A bunch of people got in without paying and broke down the gates and so they didn't do any shows there for three years.
- [11:08]
G
They used it for intramurals, they used it for soccer, but there was just no football team and there was no, I mean 24,000 seat stadium was sitting, you know, the capacity wasn't being used.
- [11:22]
D
Jim took on the job of concert chairman with a long game in mind. Sepp Donahauer of Pacific Presentations had been working with the dead since 1967. We spoke with Sepp for our Listen to the river episodes and caught up again recently. Please welcome back to the Deadcast, Sepp Donahauer.
- [11:38]
C
When we started Pacific presentations in 1970, I targeted Santa Barbara as a market for us to go into. And I went up and met with Jim, you know, and then we just started working the market on campus.
- [11:54]
D
Booking the Dead at the campus stadium turned into a real issue with the university ombudsman even joining Kernot in the negotiation process, circulating petitions and and writing to the student paper to declare the dead to be UCSB's favorite band. The ins and outs of traffic and parking and security are there to read in the Daily nexus Archives.
- [12:13]
G
So 12 months in the planning and negotiations we were with the administration and the police department. We had to overcome A number of obstacles. Security was the main issue. No off campus ticket sales was another one. And they were saying at that point the capacity could only be 15,000 if we were to do a show.
- [12:36]
C
That was never easy with the stadium because you have to deal with the campus security. You know who's very nervous? The athletic department because it's their venue. It was like easy rolling shows in to Campbell hall and Rob Jim because you know, they're just kind of turnkey venues. The stadium was always a little more work.
- [13:00]
D
Things got a little heated. The show was announced in early March, but the contracts still weren't signed. A month later in the Daily Nexus a letter appeared under the heading Demand the concert. It read in part in Tuesday's Daily Nexus. There is a suggestion that the Grateful Dead may not perform in May as a result of counter revolutionary elements in the administration. People, it's time to seize the time and advance the cultural as well as the political revolution. Demonstrate in the administration building on Friday at 10am to let Goodspeed know we demand the Grateful Dead serve the people. UCSB Vencellamos NAME WITHHELD if there were any protests. The Daily Nexus didn't cover them, though they did review Olden in the way when they played the Granada Theater in April with Fiddle and Richard Greene.
- [13:54]
G
We were going meeting after meeting after meeting. And they wanted a secondary security fencing set up outside the stadium, which we did. New entrance gates and then a definitive plan for security which included a number. I mean a lot of UCSB police officers amounted, posse. We had 85 student volunteers. We ended up establishing a relationship with a security company called Peace Power, which is a predecessor to National Event Services and Bob Bartlett and developed a really good student crew handling the production, the setup, the security backstage Security Dead negotiations.
- [14:42]
D
Break down UCSB concert date unlikely read a headline on April 27.
- [14:47]
G
The planned date was May 20. And at that point it had gone on dragged on so long, the Grateful Dead started getting cold feet. They were looking at other cities for that particular date. And we had announced the date March 8. And by April 30 we were on the cliff. Either we're going to get it or not. And it was getting shaky in mid April and we finally convinced the university to allow the date. They approved it April 30, which was 20 days out from the concert.
- [15:28]
D
If we've learned anything over the past few years of the Dead cast, it's that the live music business still only worked a few weeks out in the early 70s with lots of last minute venue and even city Changes built into the process. As we mentioned last time, all five shows on the Here Comes Sunshine box set are surrounded by gigs that didn't happen. Two days after Santa Barbara, the Dead were supposed to open two nights at the Cow palace back home in San Francisco. Gigs we'll unpack next time. But Santa Barbara came close to not happening until it did.
- [15:58]
G
So then there was a rush for ticket distribution, advertising, production, planning and coordination. I mean it was, it was non nonstop. I mean I. We had had good experience with some major acts indoors. So the crew, our crew was good. Pacific Presentations was great and we pulled it off. So at that point, tickets, looking back on it, tickets were 450 for students and $5 for the general public. And we had ticket outlets from San Luis Obispo to the north and Ventura to the south. La Sala Ticketron.
- [16:33]
D
With the show locked down, Sepp Donahauer and Gary Perkins of Pacific Presentations went into action. By 1973, they had a good amount of experience with the Dead.
- [16:43]
C
I worked hand in hand with Sam putting the Dead on all over the US. I was doing a lot of shows with the Grateful Dead at that time, in the mid-70s time window because we were good promoters. We were pretty organized and businesslike and we were fun guys and always had a good scene, you know, around backstage and, you know, whatever. But my partner Perkins and I, you know, we both had MBAs from USC. We weren't fools. And we spent a lot of time, you know, making sure things ran smooth, you know, and got great graphic designers to do good looking, marketing, stage passes, you know, trying to do it, make it a, you know, an uptown operation. And the dad appreciated that.
- [17:24]
D
When Sam founded Out of Town Tours, he brought the game to the next level.
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C
They were always the same people that were around the Grateful Dead. It just got formalized. I was working with the same people. He just organized it. He had himself and Candelario and then he had Frances Carr, his sweetie pie, working with him. She's was sharp as a tack and very good. You know, they did a great job. They got everything got organized. And not only that, but because things ran smooth, the band started playing better. I think their best recordings are from that mid-70s window, you know, when they were young and full of energy. I know. I think as a promoter, I've got more box sets of Grateful Dead dates than anybody on the planet besides the late Bill Graham.
- [18:13]
D
That's really entirely possible. Jerry Bass doesn't have a sort by promoter and official release option just yet. But we'll get back to you, the Dead were hugely popular in 1973 for a reason. Ombudsman Jeffrey Wallace's statement about the Dead being UCSB's favorite band might have been provably true.
- [18:31]
G
At that point in time on the campus, people liked the Grateful Dead. And when it was finally put on sale, you could see with, I mean, 6,000 students out of. I think we had 22,000 on campus. That's a good percentage of students going to the concert. And it was sold a lot of albums. It was like the local record store where I had tickets. They were ecstatic because people were coming in to buy tickets and buying albums at the same time.
- [19:03]
D
As we mentioned before, our friend Michael Parish was one of the heads who attended the show.
- [19:07]
B
I was at UC Santa Cruz as a student. I was my junior year. And there was a whole bunch of people that drove down together, which was really fun. And we ended up staying with some friends in Isla Vista, which is the little sort of bedroom community for ucsb. We wandered over the night before the show to kind of check out the stadium. And the stadium was lit up and they were doing a sound check. Wasn't any songs, but it was basically Phil playing with his new toys.
- [19:54]
D
That's from Vancouver a month later on the Pacific Northwest box, not the Santa Barbara soundcheck. There's no tape of that that we know about. But, hey, verisimilitude.
- [20:03]
B
We weren't able to get into the stadium. You couldn't actually. We were probably, I don't know, a hundred feet from. From the actual stadium. And it sounded like it was like a long bass solo and. And it was bouncing around. It was hard to tell how much it was just the echoing of the stadium or whether he was actually going from speaker to speaker. And one thing that's interesting about this show is that the previous time the Dead had played at Santa Barbara was in May of 1969. And I don't know if you've read Michael Lyden's article on the Dead.
- [20:52]
D
Yep, the Dead's first Rolling Stone cover, published the week after Woodstock, with a Baron Wolman photo of Garcia and the headline, good old Grateful Dead Note to copy editors Like Truckin. There's an apostrophe.
- [21:03]
B
Basically, it was a. It was a disaster. They played after Lee Michaels and the Youngbloods, I think, and the PA was terrible. So Bear took it apart. And after they played just a few songs, then they argued about whether he was going to set up their PA or not. And ultimately they just didn't play anymore.
- [21:20]
D
The next time the Dead brought their PA to UC Santa Barbara, you best believe it worked.
- [21:43]
F
Trucking. I got my chips Casin. I keep trucking like the two dog man together more or less in life.
- [21:55]
D
Before the gates open. Let's talk a little bit about today's tapes. Grateful Dead archivist David Linier.
- [22:00]
E
The new box set has five shows in it. Five consecutive shows over the course of four weeks. And we have three recording engineers. We have Kid doing some of it, we have Betty doing some of it. And we have Owsley doing. We have Bear doing two of the shows as well.
- [22:19]
D
The tapes on Here Comes Sunshine sound great. As so often with 60s and 70s dead, they're not soundboard recordings, but special submixes created on the fly by the Dead's talented self taught team of audio engineers.
- [22:32]
E
The first three shows in here, the Des Moines, Santa Barbara and Kezar, there was a lot of overlap. There were two masters. So we generally were using the Betty recording, but there were portions of those that were missing, in which case, like entire sets, which we've used the kid for, which sound phenomenal. They sound kids recordings sound amazing. As a guy whose background wasn't in the recording world, his recordings, again, we talk about clarity of the instruments and I feel that kids recordings are really crystal clear as you can differentiate every sound, every instrument, every note.
- [23:08]
D
Kid Candelario's tapes for what we'll be listening to today.
- [23:26]
C
Till I laugh.
- [23:29]
E
Betty's are a little different. They're Betty's.
- [23:31]
D
And for the sake of a quick comparison, this is Betty's tape of Big river from Keys Are the following week with a slightly different sonic picture.
- [23:43]
F
Storming up every time I heard her drown that silly drown Then I heard my dream the Dagmond Stream Cavort in Devon foe and I follow you like a river circle.
- [24:05]
D
There were many shades of wonderful at play at The Santa Barbara 73 show. Different for every attendee there. It wasn't a full house, but it was a good crowd.
- [24:13]
G
The total paid attendance was right at 15,000 14,922 and 8,800 were non student and 6,200 were students. So we had a good student turnout, but a good public turnout.
- [24:30]
D
One of those members of the public seeing the dead for neither the first nor last time was Bob Student. Bob grew up in San Bernardino and started seeing the dead in 1969 before a two year stint in the army where he thankfully only got sent as far as Hawaii where he served as a base photographer.
- [24:46]
H
When I got out of the army, what I wanted to do was get a van, drive around the country and pick up hitchhikers. So I got out in 1973, went back to San Bernardino, got myself a van and visited a friend of mine in Ventura because she said she had tickets for the Dead. And that was the Santa Barbara show.
- [25:10]
D
It was the beginning of a long adventure with the Dead.
- [25:13]
H
When I went to Santa Barbara, it was less than 30 people out front selling bootleg shirts, weed doses. 30 people entailed takedown Street. And they were in groups of four or five, hiding from the promoters that would chase them away, you know, when I was on tour in 81 to 83, there were about 300 people. When we went to Boise, Idaho, I actually went out down Shakedown street and counted 300 people, cars selling T shirts and everything else. Then again, when I was a rock med volunteer in the 90s at the Oakland Coliseum, about 93 there was a show and there were over 3,000 vendors selling their Patty burritos and everything else.
- [26:25]
D
With the Dead getting bigger each year, they were attracting new fans at every show at Santa Barbara. One of those was 17 year old Gary Wolfen.
- [26:34]
I
I had American Beauty and one of the first albums I got was Skull and Roses. I mailed the postcard off and all that.
- [26:42]
H
Who are you?
- [26:42]
D
Where are you?
- [26:43]
I
And got on the mailing list and everything. I've never been to a rock concert before. I ended up graduating at midterm in January and my two buddies from high school invited me. And so I thought, you know, that sounds like it'd be fun. And I went down there and just had the time of my life. There was cops inside the place, but they were just standing like security guards. They weren't bothering anybody. You know, kind of like a free for all.
- [27:16]
D
Jim Kernutt.
- [27:17]
G
There was no security problem. People were well behaved. I mean, they were having a good time. You know, it was just beautiful sunny day, and it couldn't be better.
- [27:28]
D
They even had shirts made up with the phrase seen on the poster.
- [27:31]
G
I was reading a comment online from a student who we had of the student volunteers for the security. It was like the line monitors. We had given them T shirts saying no drugs, no glass containers. And this guy was. So he goes, that was my favorite shirt. I loved wearing that shirt. And I. I went on a trip and my roommate stole it.
- [27:57]
I
There was definitely a lot of characters, you know, a lot of. A lot of people walking around naked and all the bands playing on just, you know, just like. The only way I could describe it is that everybody was Just doing their own thing. And nobody was bothering anybody, even the cops there. They were just standing there against, you know, the taking it all in. Like, I guess we're getting paid for this.
- [28:53]
B
As happened so often, the new writers were opening, and it was pretty close to the end of Dave Torbert's tenure with the band. But they put on a great show. And one of the pictures I have that's kind of funny is there's a picture of Phil backstage wearing headphones listening to the new writers while they were playing. And then you could see Marmaduke and Buddy Cage and some of the other. And I think Spencer behind the Dead while they were playing. So again, it was sort of an extended family thing, I think, you know, because it was. It was the only. Only the second time that the Dead had played in California that year. So it probably was kind of a big vacation for most of the Dead family as well.
- [29:34]
D
Rosie McGee of Fly By Night Travel took a casual weekend jaunt down to Santa Barbara with her new travel agent privileges and snapped some great photos that you can see in her Dancing with the Dead memo, as well as her sumptuous recent collection of photos, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast. Naturally, we had to ask what she remembered about that gig. Nothing. I let the camera do the remembering.
- [29:58]
G
Yeah.
- [30:01]
D
Oh, I don't. I don't specifically remember that. Okay. Fair. Rosie had been seeing Dead shows continuously since the very beginning. I'd been like, what I call the heart of the beast. I'd been in the Heart of the Beast since 1965. And by then I was like, okay, what else can I do?
- [30:22]
I
And.
- [30:23]
D
And they were on a trajectory that went on without me for a while. In fact, the Santa Barbara photos would be her last photos of the Dead for a half decade. A not quite endpoint in the body of photography, Rosie began in early 1966. Later in the year, as planned, from the get go, Rosie would leave Fly By Night Travel to tour the world and elsewhere. Her photos of Santa Barber are great, but as Rosie was making her exit from the Dead's world, others were making their entrance. Welcome back to the Dead cast.
- [30:53]
J
Al Franken, my partner, Tom Davis. We were a comedy team, Franken and Davis, and he was a Deadhead before me.
- [31:01]
D
The two began their comedic partnership in high school, but Tom wasn't quite university material.
- [31:06]
J
I was going to Harvard and Tom was not a very good student, but the spring term of my senior year, he just stayed in my dorm room.
- [31:17]
D
Tom had been out to California earlier in the year and had his mind blown at the Maples Pavilion. His own first Dead show. A story you can read in his killer memoir, 39 years of short Term Memory Loss.
- [31:28]
J
Tom basically played Frisbee, smoked a lot of dope, and therefore fit in very well. And no one. It was funny because he. We had a whole system that feed them, and there was a main dining room, but there was another off dining room. And my friends suck them food. We got them food in the little off dining room until they figured it out. And then it was very, very circuitous and tricky how we fed him, but we got through the whole term. And then after the. I graduated, Tom and I and my wife, now my wife, we drove out to LA in a Volkswagen van. And Tom was a Deadhead at the time. And I'd heard the Dead and I'd heard, you know, on some albums, but I, you know, I wasn't a Deadhead. And so we get to la, and when is this concert, by the way? So I can tell you exactly about how long after we arrived arrived that this happened.
- [32:31]
D
That'd be May 20th.
- [32:33]
J
Okay, that sounds like a day after we got there. So. Well, I don't know. We were gonna start out in comedy and maybe we just said, okay, let's go to the Dead, maybe take some acid. We'll get some ideas.
- [32:49]
D
Stranger things have happened at people's first Dead shows. Of course, to spoil a few twists, Franken and Davis would land jobs as writers on Saturday Night Live's inaugural season, two years later, sharing an office and a salary. But they had some Dead shows to catch first, like Al Franken and Tom Davis. Gary Wolfing got himself set.
- [33:07]
I
And we met these girls and they were sharing a big plastic milk jug, a gallon milk jug of wine with us. And then when we got down to the bottom of it, we saw about 20 pieces of water acid circling around on the bottom of the jug and. And wow, it was on from there.
- [33:29]
D
Had you dosed before?
- [33:31]
I
Oh, yeah, yeah, I have. Otherwise, I might not have known what all those papers swirling around on the wine were.
- [33:38]
D
Okay, cool. Just checking.
- [33:40]
I
I just. I didn't know what to expect. I just knew I was going to a concert and that I liked certain songs. And oddly enough, they opened that show with Bertha, one of my favorite songs. Still is.
- [34:08]
D
So you may notice here that Garcia's voice is a little hoarse throughout this show.
- [34:18]
F
From your window.
- [34:30]
D
David Lemieux.
- [34:31]
E
Now, Jerry's voice is quite shocked at Santa Barbara. And so you've got that. And I've always found When Jerry's voice is a little lacking, he's. He's clearly got a cold or something. When that happens, there's a little pep in his step when it comes to his guitar playing. And of course, when any of the five guys on that stage playing are playing a little. I don't want to say better, but a little more energetically, the rest of the guys pick up on that.
- [35:12]
F
Wondering what to choose.
- [35:15]
D
Sounds a little uncomfortable. But about Garcia's voice in Santa Barbara, funny story, September.
- [35:21]
C
You see that picture at UCSB Stadium where Cutler and I are standing kind of on the field at the entry to the stadium.
- [35:28]
D
We have. And we've posted a link@dead.net deadcast at.
- [35:32]
C
That show, Garcia had a cold and he couldn't sing. He could barely talk before the show.
- [35:39]
G
Jim Kernot, Sherry had a sore throat. We had ambulances on site, so we had a doctor on site.
- [35:46]
C
So I had to get the University of California doctor in the health department there on the university to write a prescription for cocaine.
- [35:56]
G
It wasn't our doctor. It was A backstage doctor, Dr. Brown, if I remember correctly, he was a doctor in Los Angeles that sep had brought up his backstage.
- [36:09]
J
Now that sounds apocryphal. A prescription for coke.
- [36:13]
G
And so they sent. The prescription was for a narcotic and an atomizer, and they were going to spray it down the back of Jerry's throat to caute. To anesthetize his throat so he could sing. And I sent my roommate down to pharmacy to fill it. And they looked at him and said, we don't carry it in water solution. We only have alcohol. So he brought the prescription back and the doctor threw it on the ground. He says. I said, water, not alcohol. So I had to send them back down to another hospital. And they looked at it and said, well, this is going to take maybe we can't fill this until tomorrow. And so my. My roommate Jimmy Clark said, well, I've got 23,000 kids at the stadium right now waiting to see Jerry Garcia. Are you going to fill it? And so they filled the prescription.
- [37:09]
C
He came back because somebody told me the magic mixture to make so he could sing. So we got this prescription, ran down to the pharmacy and got a bottle of liquid Merck mixed up a concoction for him to gargle, you know, with, I don't know, lemon and honey and cocaine or whatever, you know, and cleared him up and he went out and sang.
- [37:40]
D
We do feel obligated to point out here for both obvious reasons and perhaps less obvious ones that this was pharmaceutical cocaine, quasi legal and guaranteed not to be sketchy.
- [37:50]
C
I'm telling you, it was real bad. I mean, it was like, oh, God, he can't sing. So it was actually a realistic, valid use of a drug and something actually that it's designed to do from a medicinal standpoint. And it worked.
- [38:10]
D
There's some squeakiness, but it hardly gets in the way of the music.
- [38:14]
C
I remember we took the rest of the bottle, poured it on a plate and let it dry in the sun and snorted it all.
- [38:19]
D
Yep, guess that'll happen.
- [38:21]
G
So about six months later, I get a call, a notification from the health department. UCSB Health department. We hadn't paid for it. And so the bill had come in, I think, for $4.50 for this prescription. And the health department said, we don't know anything about.
- [38:41]
D
Was dealt with.
- [38:43]
J
Okay, all right, all right. But I have my suspicions. I need a little bit more verification on that story.
- [38:50]
C
Years later, I googled or something. I saw a picture of the bottle online. I went, oh, my God, there it is. Because everybody was getting a real chuckle out of that one backstage. Somebody had it for sale on ebay, and it had Jerry's name up.
- [39:13]
G
You.
- [39:13]
C
Know, the cocaine vial from UCSB pharmacy or well, or something, you know, whatever, you know. And it was somebody bad. They got it listed on ebay. I used to have a picture of it, and it was a nice looking, you know, dark brown bottle.
- [39:30]
D
I can't seem to find any images, but the bottle does seem to be floating out there somewhere. Maybe some world wide web conjurer can summon it from the depths. Anyway, that's why Garcia's voice sounds like that.
- [40:07]
G
My niece was showed up. She was young. She got up on stage with about 20 roses and was throwing them into the audience. And I still kid her about that.
- [40:20]
D
Michael Parrish.
- [40:22]
B
It was such a good feeling event. I saw them play better, for sure. But that was one of the shows I probably enjoyed the most.
- [40:30]
D
Al Franken.
- [40:31]
J
It was one of these outdoor concerts, beautiful day, amazing concert. And that was it for me. That was it, you know, so that was it. And from then on, I was enormous. Deadhead.
- [40:52]
F
Won't you carry me back to Tennessee?
- [41:04]
J
Well, the vibe, of course, is just that is that vibe. But I hadn't been to a lot of concerts before, so there's that. So I can't compare it. I've gone to a lot of concerts that weren't dead concerts since, and I can compare it that way. You know, it's a dead show. There's Nothing like a Grateful Dead show. It's an adventure. You're there. This is not like I'm going to a concert and I'm going to enjoy the concert. Then we're going to drive home and we bought our tickets. Now you're in for a day and an evening.
- [41:44]
B
Michael Parish it was three sets of Grateful Dead music, and they only did that, I think, four times in 1973. They had done it the previous week in Des Moines and then RFK and also the show at Kezar were all three set shows, but that was pretty much it for the year.
- [42:03]
D
Yep, that's the new Here Comes Sunshine box set.
- [42:05]
H
Dude.
- [42:05]
E
Now the race is on and here.
- [42:08]
F
Comes pride of the basket. Heartaches are going to the inside My tears are holding back they're trying not to fall My heart's out of the rocket do love.
- [42:30]
D
Bobby Ace Weir had sung the Races on by George Jones during the 1970 acoustic sets with the New Riders of the Purple Sage. But it had only jumped into the dad's electric repertoire that spring. Not that anybody was really keeping score at that point.
- [42:43]
J
I remember loving the crowd. I remember. I don't. Yeah, I've been to so many concerts since that my memory of them isn't all that different from the memory of the last one. It actually is because the last one was at Citi Field at this last tour, and that one had a much bigger age range.
- [43:05]
H
Bob Student I had the brand new Super 8 video camera that I had just purchased to celebrate my getting out of the army, and I shot six minutes at the show. Of course there's no sound and I had it on Super 8 tape.
- [43:25]
D
Bob's footage is now online and we've posted a link@dead.net deadcast it's really fun. Linearly, it's only a few minutes, but Bob ran the camera in time lapse for large chunks, capturing some cool phenomena, including the moment the crowd goes from sitting to standing when the dead come on.
- [43:42]
H
The camera had an intervalometer that you can attach to it and do frames. And that's what I did. I was playing with my new camera.
- [43:53]
D
One genius shot is when Bob locates a semi comatose dude sitting with his arms slung over the railing while in time lapse, hundreds of concert goers mill by him at fast speed. Really, you could set it a Philip Glasses score to Coin Escotsi I set.
- [44:08]
H
The camera on the rail for the guy who was on the rail. I was a little ways away. I set it on the rail. I had been watching him for a Little while. And I said let me get a picture of this and then turned on the barometer and back the guy a while. Yeah, it was, you know, how many different shots can I do? I was obviously more interested in the crowd than the individual band members on the stage because everyone down front was taking pictures of the band. I shot some pictures of the stage, but back then my only interest on stage was Donna. She was the cutest of the batch.
- [44:56]
D
Bob's short reel from Santa Barbara shows a pretty impressive range of shots for a silent camera, catching lots of cool textures of the scenes including the breezes off the ocean, big ups to the heads and lawn chairs parked up close to the side of the stage. In the spring, the Dead had moved the so called Feelin Groovy jam into a regular home between China Cat, Sunflower and I Know youw Ryder. As we just heard at Santa Barbara, I like the little melancholic turn they make just before the drop into Rider.
- [45:52]
F
Sam, I know you rather gonna miss me where I'm Gone.
- [46:26]
D
Gary Wolfing definitely picked up on the band's sound system.
- [46:30]
I
The sound was really good.
- [46:32]
D
The Dead had debuted the newest version of their sound system in February at Stanford. They also debuted a short lived stage lineup that would barely outlast the shows on this box set and which we forgot to mention last time. From left to right, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Jerry Garcia, Keith Godshow. A similar arrangement to what they'd switched to in the 80s. Though many people associate the noise canceling, double microphones and lack of vocal monitors with the 1974 Wall of Sound, both were in effect by the start of 1973, as Donna Jean told us a few episodes back. But like the Dead's music, their sound system was also a process and they were in active collaboration with the texts from Alembic all through the spring. The Dead's archives contain a report from Alembic's Ron Wickersham reporting that he and Rick Turner had joined the band in Santa Barbara to observe the new system in action following the show in Iowa the week before. It was only the second time that the system had been used outdoors. They observed that same ocean breeze that Michael Parish remembered and Bob Studen caught on his silent film. But they contemplated it perhaps more than the average heads. The Alembic report reads in part one. Other factor in outdoor gigs is the wind. In Santa Barbara, light winds caused the sound to blow away from the intended destination. And I found that the beam from the five foot speakers was going over the top of the stadium walls. And was being blown to a Hill about 800ft at 45 degrees towards stage left. Alembic would recommend the construction of delay towers at the even bigger Megagigs to come. A new frontier in live amplification.
- [48:03]
F
Sun will shine in my back Glows of pain the sun will shine in my back Go so faith.
- [48:25]
C
Our twins.
- [48:26]
F
Will know all that shit.
- [48:34]
D
Michael Parrish.
- [48:35]
B
The first and second sets were pretty much short songs, but, you know, they had all of these new tunes to break out. And I had seen the premiere of most of those tunes at the show and Naples Pavilion back in February. But by now they've been road tested and really sounded just wonderful.
- [49:16]
F
Julie Catch a rabbit by his hair Come back step like to walk on.
- [49:30]
D
Ro Jimmy is one of those dead songs. It took me a little bit to come around to. But hearing the clarity of the 1973 mixes allowed me to finally hear the interaction between the instrumental parts and feel the slow motion groove as something powerful and subtle.
- [50:12]
B
I had started slowly trading tapes. You know, I had Master FM recordings of like the Harper show, the Winterland 10470 show. Calibration. There were a lot of things that I had masters of, so I was able to trade with people. But there really hadn't been a huge network that had been set up. I would say that the sort of tape distribution network on the west coast was really primitive compared to what was happening on the east coast at that time.
- [50:46]
D
We'll put a bookmark here to discuss the activities of the tape trading clubs that were starting to emerge out East.
- [50:51]
B
One of the things that I'd gotten just a few months before that was part of a tape from the Maples show. It actually been broadcast on kzsc, the Stanford radio station. Just. Just some songs from it. I believe it was an audience tape. It was actually like a couple of tapers who were in the studio with the dj, and one of my friends who lived in Palo Alto had taped it, so I got it from him.
- [51:19]
D
Like a few other things Michael has told us about that specific recording doesn't seem to be in digital circulation.
- [51:25]
B
So I had taped versions of a few of the new songs, which was really exciting because we'd heard them once. And I just remember really being taken by the new batch of songs. It just seemed like an entirely new thing for the dead. Here Comes Sunshine, Eyes of the World, China Doll, all being really very different stylistically than anything they'd done before that. So it was fun to be able to get that. And again, at the Santa Barbara show to hear Them sort of polished and sparkly and new was really fun.
- [52:05]
F
Wake up to find out that you are the of the world.
- [52:30]
D
The Grateful Dead's jam suites had begun to evolve in late 1967 and early 1968 with the multi part that's it for the other one, the alligator caution pairing that would often result in spectacular feedback squalls. And the sequence that became Live Dead centered around Darkstar, St. Stephen and the Eleven. But by the early 1970s, the suites began to expand. Notably, the Other One dropped its cryptical envelopment intro and Outros for good in 1972, besides a brief return in the 80s. And the dead developed a number of songs that might build around the middle section sung by Bob Weird, now known just as the Other One. Dig the side B episode of Our Skull and Roses Season in Santa Barbara. The Suite began in a familiar Happy place, debuted in 1970, Truckin had attached to the Other One by the end of the year, and in 1972 grew a jam in Santa Barbara. They hit the song's big peak, signaled by Garcia's dramatic High up the neck restatement of the intro theme, which had taken nearly three years to develop before solidifying in the spring of 73. And they detour through the theme of Nobody's Fault But Mine by Blind Willie Johnson, a Garcia motif for years here played with a slide. It's after the Nobody's Fault jam that the road really opens up and the horizon melts into the sky and then the sky becomes the territory. After that the clouds gather into the triplic rhythmic figures of the other one. But the other one is more like an island in the sky. And after the verse, they're a sail.
- [56:03]
J
Again.
- [56:31]
D
In 1972, both playing and the Band and Truckin had become full fledged jam songs for the Dead. He's Gone had begun to link up with the Suite at the front end, and Wharf Rat and Stella Blue both began to link up to the end. In early 1973, Garcia introduced a major new second set jam piece. I love this transition from Santa Barbara, as if they're collectively blowing the sky back to blue.
- [57:02]
F
It.
- [57:41]
D
It'S easy to hear why Michael was taken by Eyes of the World even before it developed its wild collaboratively written ending. You're perhaps familiar with what's known as the distracted Guy meme in the early 1970s. Jerry Garcia was a little bit like that with the quiet ballads he played in the spot after the other one. At first it was Warfrat, which went a little by the wayside when he and Robert Hunter wrote Comes a Time, which went a little bit by the wayside when they wrote Stella Blue, which went a little by the wayside when they wrote China Doll. He'd rotate them more in the later 70s, but in early 1973, Stella Blue had largely been relegated to random and kind of awkward mid set slots. Not tonight. You can hear the band's musical chord question mark as Garcia moves into Stella Blue, the sound of a band without a set list. But once there, they slip into the amazing quiet mode they developed as a quint.
- [59:41]
F
All the years come by. They melted to a dream. A broken angel sings.
- [60:06]
D
Naturally. Weir gets the big rock and closer slots. All in all, it'd been a lovely afternoon.
- [60:45]
E
Thanks a lot, folks.
- [60:47]
F
We had a pretty nice time here today.
- [60:52]
D
Like to thank you all for coming. Hope your voice feels better soon. Jer after more than a year of planning, the show paid off. After paying the new riders of the purple sage some $6,840 and subtracting $8,180 in miscellaneous travel and gig expenses, the Dead walked away with $22,980, around 156,000 in modern terms. It also paid off for USB senior Jim Kernot.
- [61:21]
G
It was very successful. The administration and the police department were more than satisfied with our planning and execution. And thanks to Seb Donahauer, who stuck to it to keep the Grateful Dead interested, we were able to do it. At that point, I convinced the university that a paid professional was needed to help students organize and promote the concerts. And I created a job for myself or I got the job. And so for six years I was working as a student affairs officer. And thanks to the Grateful Dead and Donna Howard and all that, we over the Next. During the six years I was there, we produced over 100 concerts. I mean, it was an active university schedule, which included three stadium concerts with the Grateful Dead. We had an indoor gymnasium concert with a Grateful Dead Jerry Garcia Band and Kingfish played an intimate theater we had on campus.
- [62:24]
C
And we brought in the Grateful Dead, Rod Stewart, the Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen. I mean, you know, I could send you a show list, but that town's never seen so many great shows. I mean, we had Bruce Springsteen and Rob Jim, and he played a three and a half hour set. People still talk about it.
- [62:42]
D
As with music circuit presentations in Des Moines, the week before the Grateful Dead Santa Barbara show helped launch a promotion career that stretched beyond Kernutt's time at ucsb. Al Franken and Tom Davis, meanwhile, began their Deadhead lives at Virtually the same moment they began their entwined professional careers.
- [62:58]
J
I can't remember how many we went to. I do remember in 73 going up to San Francisco to Winterland for a set of four shows. And that was a big deal. I think that might have been the first time I went through four shows in a row.
- [63:15]
D
Those shows can now be heard on the Most excellent Winterland 1973. The complete recordings. Lots of Deadheads have commented over the years that the Dead's extended passages and long shows have created good spaces for brainstorming and problem solving and general unchecked creativity. While Al Franken and Tom Davis might not have come up with any new comedy bits in Santa Barbara, Dead shows did become part of their process.
- [64:06]
J
I did a lot of thinking at these things. I used to do a lot of writing actually for SNL when I was at the concert. I was very free associative. But you feel connected to these people, certainly, but also kind of. You just go, oh, I wish humanity could be like this. And then I would do a lot of thinking during it and a lot of dancing. But I love being at the concert and I got it. They were actually productive for me. Sometimes there was a drug involved too. I wouldn't want to bring a notebook. I guess I could have put a little notebook in my back pocket, I suppose, but I didn't. That wasn't what was going on. I was preciating and going and just. Or be working on an idea I had.
- [65:01]
D
In early 1975, Al Franken and Tom Davis would graduate from being Deadheads to being in house Deadheads in the lunatic occupied Saturday Night Live writers offices on the 17th floor at Rockefeller center, they would be responsible for luring network television to the Dead. When the Dead made their SNL debut in 1978 and provided comedy bits for the Dead's closed circuit Halloween 1980 telecast from radio City that became the concert film Dead Ahead. One of the bits was a pretty incredible tracking shot gag that involved all six members of the Dead.
- [65:33]
J
It is all the stuff backstage was one take and then we're not. We don't cut until we get onto the stage at. Right on the stage at Radio City. The first part of it, the going backstage and offending them all and being assholes. All that was shot in San Francisco.
- [65:52]
D
Which meant Al Franken and Tom Davis got to catch a bunch more shows, including the telecast itself. Tough gig.
- [65:58]
J
They did three sets that night and the acoustic set is beautiful.
- [66:17]
D
There was a race rare version of Little Sadie from Halloween 1980. Now on the expanded edition of Reckoning. We explored that more in our Dead Behind Dead Ahead episode back in 2020, which also included some great storytelling from the late Tom Davis. Courtesy of David Ganz. Once again, I'll plug Tom's delicious memoir, 39 Years of Short Term Memory Loss, which includes some sad, sweet stories about working with Garcia on their never produced screenplay adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan. Tom would go on to co write Owsley and My LSD Family with our buddy Roney Stanley. Also worth A read by 1973, Melko Parrish had been a pretty hardcore Deadhead already for a few years and was ready to move to the next levels.
- [66:58]
B
Probably that summer of 73. I was thinking I should just write to the Dead and volunteer to help them with their tape libraries, but I thought they wouldn't want me to do that.
- [67:07]
D
It actually would have been a pretty ideal time to write to the Dead to do that. It was sometime in this period in the spring of 1973 that the dead began to migrate their gear and equipment and other stuff into the Front Street Warehouse in San Rafael, where their first proper tape vault was born a few years later. We discussed it a bit in our Inside the Vault episode last year, but Michael was industrious and found tapes anyway.
- [67:30]
B
Santa Cruz is set up in this college system where there are separate residential colleges, so he went down and knocked on his door and it was like one of the first really major trades I did with somebody. He had a bunch of stuff from the east coast and I had all this stuff from the West Coast.
- [67:43]
D
There was a lot to absorb, but the Santa Barbara tape wasn't yet around.
- [67:47]
B
I didn't have a tape of it for years. It was kind of a holy grail for me. I believe there was an audience tape of it, but I probably didn't get one until sometime in the 80s.
- [67:59]
D
By the time of the first edition of the taping compendium in 1997, only a not that great audience tape was out there. For many attendees for many years, the Santa Barbara show was nothing more than a gloriously remembered Sunday afternoon in the sun. For Bob's student who'd seen the Dead a few Times in the 60s, it was the beginning of something new, and.
- [68:18]
H
That was the start of my going on summer tour with the Grateful Dead, which started in June and ended up at Watkins Glen for the big show there.
- [68:30]
D
We'll pick up the Adventures with Bob in his van soon enough, but we'll see you next week at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco.
- [69:01]
A
Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode Al Franken, Jim Kernit, SEPP Donahauer, Rosie McGee, Michael Parish, Bob Student, Gary Wolfing 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, subscribe and share an episode on your social media 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 Doran Tyson, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mayhem Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.