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- [00:00]
Rich Mahan
Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Hello friends, welcome back to the Good Old Grateful Dead cast. We've got the second of our three episodes about St. Louis for you today as we dig into the music and stories from the Grateful Dead's 1972 shows at the Fox Theater in St. Louis. All of this wonderful music is featured in the new Grateful Dead box set Listen to the River St. Louis 717273 and through season four. You can get new episodes of the Good Old Grateful Deadcast right here every other week. Visit us at our website dead.netdeadcast and check out the extra materials we have for you to explore for this episode. Also@dead.net deadcast are all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons 1, 2 and 3 and you can link from there to any and all of the podcasting platforms available so you can listen where you'd like to listen. Please help this podcast by subscribing hitting that like button and if you're up to the task, leave us a review. It helps more than you know. Thanks very much. The new Grateful Dead Live archival release is here. It's entitled Listen to the River St. Louis 717273 and this set includes seven previously unreleased concerts from St. Louis recorded on December 9th and 10th, 1971 at the Fox Theater, October 17th, 18th and 19th, 1972 at the Fox Theater and October 29th and 30th, 1973 at the Keel Auditorium. Production of the 20 CD full set is limited to 13,000 individually numbered copies and will also be available in its entirety as a digital Download exclusively at dead.net In Apple, Lossless and Flack 19224 dead.net will also exclusively release Light Into Ashes Fox Theater, St. Louis, MO 101872 as a double LP on 180 gram custom vinyl. Limited to 7200 copies. The set focuses on an exceptional hour plus jam plucked from the Grateful Dead's October 18, 1972 show at the Fox, which we will feature in detail in this episode. The breakout show from this set is Fox Theater, St. Louis, MO 121071 and will be available as a 3 CD set and a limited edition 5LP set on 180 gram vinyl. This truly is an exceptional collection of music that highlights the oh so important transitional period of the band from the end of the Pig Pen era through the establishment of Keith Gadcho as the band's new pianist, and the integration of Donna Jean Gotcho as a full fledged band member. All of these configurations of Listen to the River St. Louis 717273 are available now. Get more info@dead.net Today we dive into the music and stories set around the Grateful Dead's run of shows at the Fox Theater in St. Louis that took place on October 17th, 18th and 19th, 1972. It's no secret that the Dead loved playing at the Fox. The vibes were right and the band was tight. If you've already listened to these shows, you know how truly magnificent they are. Some of the transitions between songs are absolutely perfect in their subtlety and grace. We get great input and stories from a wide variety of guests in this episode, including Tony Dwyer, Sep Donahuer, Bill Weber, Dre Stein, John Ellis, Bob Simmons, Tom Palazzola, Joe Schwab, Mark Slosberg, Starfinder, Stanley Hawk, Graham Boone and David Lemieux. Time to hand it off to Jesse Jarno.
- [04:52]
Tony Dwyer
Going where the Wind on the.
- [04:55]
Sep Donahuer
Strange.
- [04:58]
David Lemieux
When the Grateful Dead arrived in St. Louis to perform at the Fox Theater in October 1972 for three nights, starting the day after Bob Weider's 25th birthday, the stage was set for three classic shows at one of the band's favorite venues, Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David lemieux.
- [05:14]
Tom Palazzola
Fall of 72 in particular, is some of the most consistently great Grateful Dead.
- [05:19]
David Lemieux
Whatever it is, these shows have it.
- [05:21]
Tom Palazzola
There's something in the air, something magical happening.
- [05:24]
David Lemieux
Or as co promoter Tony Dwyer of Sky High Associates put it, the 72 shows.
- [05:29]
Tony Dwyer
What a fucking scene that was.
- [05:31]
David Lemieux
Our story today begins a few months before the shows in St. Louis's heady Central West End. Euclid Records owner Joe Schwab it was a famous boutique that was at the corner of Euclid and McPherson called the gypsy Cowboy.
- [05:45]
Rich Mahan
Gypsy Cowboy was a very cool place where the hippies would come and hang.
- [05:50]
Tom Palazzola
Out and buy their leather jackets and stuff.
- [05:53]
Rich Mahan
Herb Balaban, who owned it, decided to do kind of a 180. And he switched with this little boutique.
- [06:00]
Tom Palazzola
That was next door on Euclid called the Pseudonym.
- [06:04]
Rich Mahan
And the Pseudonym is a place where.
- [06:06]
David Lemieux
I used to buy records as well.
- [06:08]
Graham Boone
They used to sell them.
- [06:09]
Rich Mahan
He opened a restaurant there called Balaban's.
- [06:12]
Tom Palazzola
Which became a huge institution in St. Louis.
- [06:16]
David Lemieux
One of her Balaban's employees was Tony Dwyer, who'd been instrumental in bringing the Dead to St. Louis's Fox Theater for the first time in February 1970 and had remained close with the band and their crew.
- [06:27]
Tony Dwyer
I had been working at a hip clothing store, a haberdashery hip clothing store in the central west end of St. Louis, which was the Greenwich Village, the Haight Ashbury, the whatever of St. Louis. I think at the time I normally worked in the store, but anyhow, the place is called the Gypsy Cowboy, which the new writer is named an album after the Gypsy Cowboy wonders because he know it's over. Any rock and roll band that came to St. Louis went to the Gypsy Cowboy. I didn't give a fuck who they were. You know, Michael Jackson would show up there. I mean everybody, everybody showed up there to do something, buy something, hang out. It was a hip store. I mean, it was a really hip store. Harvey did a fucking incredible job. I mean, he had turquoise before anybody did. He had abalone, you know, silver belt buckles. He had fucking Santa Fe leather. He had all sorts of shit going on in there. And it was cool. I mean, Herbie knew what he was doing. So anyhow, you know, yeah, the New Riders hung out there. Sam knew the store, everybody knew the store. I'm outside. This was like June and Herbie had been complaining that he needed the trim on the windows painted. But the guy that he had hired to do it hadn't shown up. And I said, well, I'll do it. So I'm outside on a ladder and a car pulls up and Sam and Francis Carr get out. I get off the ladder and I say, sam, how you doing? What's up?
- [08:15]
David Lemieux
By 1972, Sam Cutler was firmly in charge of the Dead's booking. In the spring, he'd brought the band overseas for the legendary two month Europe 72 campaign. That fall he established out of Town Tours, a booking agency to handle the Dead, the New Riders of the Purple Sage and other like minded bands.
- [08:33]
Tony Dwyer
He suggested that we have dinner that night. We had dinner at Girls Apartment, Brooks Ogden, who was the manager at a co manager or something at the Gypsy Cowboy and we had dinner at her place. And Andy Lyons, who was a buddy of mine, a Business partner of mine and I attended and we brought some music with us. And of course it was like heads, hands and feet and spooky tooth and we were playing it and all. Sam would say, garcia, play it better. And I well, Mick Jones would have a different idea. But yeah, I agree with you, Garcia, play it better. So we get down to it and he finds out that I was instrumental in the 1970s show. And he said, really? You have an interest? And I said, of course I do. And with the Grateful Dead, it was more out of love and devotion than the money, although that was involved. So he said, we'll take this up, you know, in a day or two.
- [09:36]
David Lemieux
Sam introduced Tony Dwyer to Step Donahuer and Pacific Presentations, who'd been promoting Dead shows for nearly as long as the Dead were playing outside of the Bay area. In late 1967, Donahauer and a partner signed a deal on the Shrine Auditorium in la.
- [09:51]
Sep Donahuer
We made this deal with the Shrine and then Mark and I hopped in our car and drove to San Francisco and went to the Dead's house on Haight street and sat down with Rock Scully and Danny Rifkin and made a deal to bring the Grateful Dead for two nights, you know, to the Shrine. And then we also booked the Buffalo Springfield. And while we were up there, we saw this incredible loud, wild band called Blue Cheer, who we put on the show, which I think was their first date in la. That was the start of it all. And then in 1970, I got together with a friend, two friends of mine that I kind of grew up with, Gary Perkins and Bob Bogdanovich, and we started another concert company called Pacific Presentations. And that one we started out working secondary markets, you know, it being new young promoters. Even in 1970 there was a couple of established promoters and the agents, you know, wouldn't give us the ax in la, so we had to go to the Hinterlands.
- [10:59]
David Lemieux
When Sam Cutler took over the Dead's booking, Pacific became a partner of choice. They booked the Dead at the Hollywood Palladium in 71 and soon thereafter promoted a trio of Dead shows in Texas and New Mexico. Throughout 1972, Pacific presentations booked the Dead up and down the west coast, including a pivotal show in LA in June. The first after returning from the Europe 72 tour.
- [11:21]
Sep Donahuer
One show that was spectacular, I think for them and kind of a coming of age show was when we put them in the Hollywood bowl, you know, as a headline act. They played there once before on a multi act show, but this was really, they're coming out as A major arena artist, you know, and it wasn't easy getting them in there because at that time, the Holly bowl was managed by the Los Angeles Symphony. I called up and said, hey, we want to bring the Grateful Dead in. The phone was a little silent for a minute, but we got it in there and it was a great show. And I think that was the last show that Pigpen performed with him.
- [12:02]
David Lemieux
It was the beginning of the years in which the Dead tried to balance playing big rooms and smaller, more intimate spaces like the Fox.
- [12:08]
Sep Donahuer
We would collaborate with Sam. He'd have, you know, he'd say, I want to go up to the Pacific Northwest, you know, or here. And then I'd go out and canvas the open dates and available venues, you know, feed the information to Sam, you know, and then he would decide, you know, we discuss it and decide where the best shots were, you know, in terms of intelligent routing, you know, because you got people on the road and trucks and hotels and all that. The Fox was, you know, the venue of choice. He put us together with Tony, you know, at sky High in St. Louis, you know, to do shows. And Tony and I became friends, and we're still friends to this day, we.
- [12:51]
Tony Dwyer
Being Sky High Associates, my brother Jim, Andy Lyons and myself. My brother is eight years my senior.
- [12:58]
Sep Donahuer
Tony was a promoter who spoke the same language as us. He was thorough, you know, we went out and did real thorough jobs. We maximize their business, you know, in the market. So we went and do. And that was our job. Wasn't a couple of stoners putting on a show. You know, we might have been stoned part of the time, but, you know, we were pretty professional about it and took pride in being that way and doing a good job.
- [13:24]
David Lemieux
Pacific Presentations and Sky High Associates would co promote the band's next trips through St. Louis in 1972 and 1973. The vast majority of the music on the Listen to the river box set, for that matter. Sep Donahuer and Pacific Presentations also produced all the shows in the Pacific Northwest 7374 box set as well.
- [13:44]
Sep Donahuer
Sam turned them into a business that paid for itself and made some money for the band, you know, and kept the ship afloat. He brought some discipline in. He researched dates correctly, got good promoters, got good venues, you know, he did a good job. He had great people working with him. His girlfriend Frances, you know, helped him, was right by his side and was delight to work with. And Sharp, you know, and Candelario, and he had a good crew. They were. They were good. They were top, top Notch and I worked with everybody. I worked with the Stones, Bowie, you know, everybody on the planet and just Sam's crew. And the Dead Screw was as good as any of them on a professional level. In some ways better because they had a more challenging product to sell because they didn't have hit records on the radio.
- [14:33]
Tony Dwyer
They put Sep Donahuer in touch with me and we co prod the show. There was a lot of work to do and it was easy for me because of love of the band, love of the music, love of the room. And I had a group that worked for me and I said, this year we're doing three shows at my insistence. And John McIntyre was. He said, Tony, you sure you can do three? And I said, yeah, we can do three. And what it took was doing ticket outlets. St. Louis was really a secondary market at best, maybe even a tertiary market. I mean, you're talking about a city with 650,000 people and it wasn't a big market. So what I did was I got outlets in Champaign, Illinois, in Carbondale, Illinois, Columbia, Missouri. You know, we did all the colleges within 200 miles. We did mail order and we did a bunch of ticket outlets that were normal ticket outlets. You know, this is way before Ticketron or Ticketmaster or whatever they call it. That was the way I was going to fill 4503 seats for three nights. It helped working with Seth Donahuer and people at Pacific. We would talk every afternoon with a ticket post, we'd barrage markets with more advertising. We had radio time everywhere, we had print everywhere. We did everything we could. I think John McIntyre was very pleased with the outcome.
- [16:02]
Sep Donahuer
I ended up doing a lot of shows in the Midwest, not just for the Grateful Dead, but lots of shows in Evansville, Indiana and Kalamazoo, Michigan, you know, and all over the place. The audience is there. You pull from a wide geographic range. When you're doing your marketing, you look at about. You look at having the word out there and tickets maybe in 100, 200 mile radius, you know, the city because you're pulling in from, you know, farm towns and adjoining college towns and so on. So you're not just promoting it in St. Louis, you're going into the general area. And it pays off because you bring in a lot of business.
- [16:41]
David Lemieux
Like a lot of people around the Dead. Tony Dwyer took to his work with a missionary zeal.
- [16:46]
Tony Dwyer
I needed to wake people up to the band and, you know, it wasn't happening yet. You know, they had a core audience, but it needed to be expanded. That's why we went into secondary and tertiary markets to sell tickets, because I thought it was my obligation to expose people to this shit. You know, if they don't know about this, they don't know what they're missing. And if I can get, you know, two people out of 20 to come that had never seen this before, and they go home and, you know, there are going to be 10 more people that are going to come the next time. And, you know, that's how the band was built. And St. Louis was instrumental in it. We did a lot of fucking work for that band. I mean, a lot of work. A lot of work to get the Grateful Dead going there. And, I mean. And of course, they did a ton of work. And every time they played there, they were outstanding.
- [17:34]
David Lemieux
Tickets were general admission, $4.50 each, about $28, calculated for inflation, available at the Fox box office, cashier radio record stores like Pseudonym, Near Gypsy Cowboy and Mardi Gras across the river in Belleville, birthplace of Grateful dead manager John McIntyre. And a few years later, the band Uncle Tupelo. You could also get tickets to the Uncle Julius stand in Northwest Plaza. It probably helped that the Dead were still on their way to becoming one of the biggest bands in the United States when they'd headlined the Fox for the first time in February 1970. It was a bit of a stretch. Now, two and a half years later, it was nearly what promoters these days call an underplay. David Lemieux.
- [18:14]
Tom Palazzola
They were also playing a month earlier, Waterbury, Connecticut, at the Little palace, another beautiful movie palace, Stanley Theater in Jersey City. But they were also playing the Springfield Civic, the same tour that a month earlier. Exactly a month earlier, on September 19, the dead were playing Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City. They were playing the Philly Spectrum a month earlier. These are big places where the connection maybe in those first couple rows, but certainly the 18,000th person up in that corner. There's not really much of a connection. I think, for the band, the finances dictated that they had to play Roosevelt and Philly, and. And who's going to say no to that? If you can sell out 20,000 seats in a night and finance a new sound system, you're going to do it. You know, that certainly weren't getting rich, but they had expenses and a lot of them, and they had a big staff and a big payroll. So, you know, they're going to play it. But I think, given their druthers, playing the Fox would be the place to be. I know that for sure. They would much rather play a Place like that. I know they always lamented after like 81, when they lost the ability to play the Stanley Theater and places like that. You know, at that point on it's just arenas, but in the Fox, I've seen enough pictures taken from the stage looking out. And despite the fact that there's the balcony and it's really high, there is a connection. There's a way to connect. And I think that really more than any band I know that really matters. Having seen, for instance, I never saw the Dead in a place like that, but I've seen Weir in places like that a lot. And there's a difference. There's a very big difference. To see the band in a sit down theater where the band can connect with you.
- [19:45]
Tony Dwyer
The band belonged there. The acoustics were just so fucking ridiculous. And it was the right size room, however many seats that is. Three nights, 4509, 13, 5. That was perfect. And they could feel at home in the place. We didn't scale the house. We had general admission. And It's October in St. Louis. It could be 80 degrees or it can be 20 below zero and it was somewhere in between. But closer to 20 below zero and fucking raining. And we had people hanging out in front of the place, you know, at 8 o' clock in the morning. So this is the first day everything showed up. And I think. I think we were gonna start at 8 o' clock and at 9 we still weren't open.
- [20:29]
Sep Donahuer
There was some stupid stuff with a mirror ball. The mirror ball debacle. Tony was dealing with that one. I think I was like up in the. Worrying about the front of the house.
- [20:39]
Tony Dwyer
And Jackson and Ramrod and a couple of others are up in the catwalk trying to fucking hang a mirrored ball. And we couldn't open up till we got all that shit done.
- [20:48]
David Lemieux
It's like Chekhov wrote, if you hang a mirror ball over the stage on the first night, some cool shit's gonna go down later. At least that's what I think he wrote. Outside heads were getting restless. Maybe this didn't happen the first night, but let's say it did. John Ellis was a local St. Louis dead freak. He recently helped assemble the Grateful Dead Guides massive post about the Dead in St. Louis between 1968 and 1971 that we've linked to@dead.net deadcast.
- [21:15]
Sep Donahuer
What the fox theater used to do is when they really, really started getting popular was, you know, there was of course lines around the building, right? And then at some point they'd let you into the lobby. And then their security would kind of have to hold down, you know, that energy of people trying to get in. And I remember one time me and a couple buddies broke through their line and, you know, we ran through the building because we were familiar with it. And at some point, we're in a hiding closet, and we can hear the stage manager talking to Lesh, saying, you got to help me get these kids out of here. And, you know, get him back in the lobby. And they kind of hear us making noise in the closet. And, you know, the manager, like, you kids get out of here type of stuff. And Les says, is it general admission? And the lobby manager says, yeah. And Les goes, I'd stand my ground if I were you guys, as he walks away.
- [22:12]
David Lemieux
But it wasn't only the mirror ball.
- [22:14]
Tony Dwyer
Holding things up and Osley, you know, working on the oscilloscope, getting shit going. This white noise blowing out the fucking theater.
- [22:21]
David Lemieux
Back on the stage crew for the first time in two years was Owsley Stanley causing trouble in the name of making things sound righteous and making wonderful recordings. It's Bear's tapes that make up the middle nine discs of Listen to the River. He'd been with the Dead on their first trip to the Fox in February 1970, just days after the Dead's bust on Bourbon Street. He'd been arrested for making LSD in late 1967, but the new Orleans arrest violated his parole, confining him to the state of California and removing him from active duty as the Dead's touring sound engineer. That summer, in 1970, he violated his parole again and was off to Terminal island for two years. On his prison record, his permanent address was listed as Grateful Dead, P.O. box 598, Nevada, California. In 1991, our incredible Dead cast friend David Gant interviewed Owsley. One of Owsley's very few interviews published in David's essential book, Conversations with the Dead, available in revised form from David's website. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast they spoke about this period and many, many, many, many other topics. Tons of thanks to David for this audio.
- [23:27]
Tony Dwyer
When I came back in 1972, Matthews had taken over. Matthews didn't look at it that way. Matthews saw things in compartments. Everybody like a union organizer. Everybody had a job and a responsibility, and that was his, and this was his, and this was his and this was mine. All different, right? All isolated. And this went on for two years. I come back and there's a scene that's totally different where nobody is going to helping the other guy, oh, no, that's my job.
- [24:01]
David Lemieux
That's your job.
- [24:02]
Tony Dwyer
That's this job. That's that job, right? And all of a sudden I found that the three things that I did, recording, stage monitors, house mixing. I tried to sit up close to the stage. I could see, hear what was on stage, run the mix on stage from the board. It didn't always work. We got better all the time. It was all one job. It was three guys doing that job, right? Each one fiercely defending his little territory. There was no, I can do this, you can do that, we can switch around kind of thing, right? Oh, no, no. It was, this is mine, this is yours, this is mine. And every one of those guys that had taken one of those positions, although they said, oh, yeah, yeah, come back, but suddenly there wasn't a place.
- [24:46]
David Lemieux
And please welcome back to the Dead cast Bear's son, Starfinder Stanley of the Owsley Stanley Foundation. Starfinder wrote a great essay in the new Listen to the river box set about Owsley's recordings of the 1972 shows.
- [24:58]
Starfinder Stanley
Bear got out of jail after being gone for what, over two years, and he came back into a really different landscape than the one he'd left. I remember him saying it was. The bus had left without him. All of the things that he did were being done by other people who were well established and the crew had gotten. Had gotten more insular and more. They had their. Their whole routine worked out, so they didn't really want him coming back and. And, you know, telling them what to do. They felt like they were doing what they wanted to and what they needed to do, and it worked just fine. He was a constant innovator and innovation takes more time and effort. He was a little bit at ends. Came in and tried to figure out where he could. Where he could fit in, what he could do to contribute. Started making sonic journals again.
- [25:51]
Tom Palazzola
Pretty soon after he got back, got out, he started recording. And that's why the fall of 72, that's all bare and early 73. And then after that, my understanding is he started staying home more to develop the wall of sound. And that's when Kid kind of took over. And there was the transition period where there were shows, RFK73, there are both Kid recordings and Bear recordings of that. So Bear was out there because he was part of the team, he's part of the family, and he's an incredible recordist. So he was out recording and that was pretty much. I think he was doing other things too, with the sound, but he was not doing front of house sound. So during the shows he was able to concentrate solely on the recordings. As opposed to in 1970, for instance, before he went away, he was doing front of house sound and recording. That's a big. That's two responsibilities to do them both right. So that's why some of the recordings in 1970 kind of lack. And when a tape runs out, he's not right on top of it because he's mixing the house sound. So we might be missing three minutes instead of 20 seconds, as you would find later on, there would be a 20 second real change as opposed to not noticing for three or four minutes.
- [26:59]
David Lemieux
Even without Bayer's active participation, it was a psychedelic time in the United States. There was certainly no LSD shortage in St. Louis. In the spring, the Outlaws Dope Scope column reported on the availability of orange barrels, strong and pure, $2 a hit. Window pane back by popular demand. Purple microdots, yellow microdots, yellow, double dome, maybe mixed with speed and just blue. That's not to mention the three kinds of mescaline and various pills. Though the 60s get all the press, history shows that there was actually more LSD in circulation in the early 70s, with some scholars estimating 1972 as the peak of LSD use in the United States. This was in large part thanks to a rogue group called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, responsible for the LSD known as Orange Sunshine. And they were stone dead freaks. But it was during the summer of 1972 that the government began to really bust them up. Some of those arrested over the summer would be spotted out on bail at the Dad's Winterland New Year Show. And at that very same show, 1972, going into 1973, a few more members were hauled in by government agents. But they didn't get everybody. St. Louis head Tom Palazzola.
- [28:10]
Tom Palazzola
There was always a rumor that I never was able to find out that for a while Osley put a lab here. He wasn't manufacturing, but he had one of his tabbing machines here or pill machines here. For a while it was either he or somebody part of that organization.
- [28:29]
David Lemieux
Though it wasn't Owsley, the rumor actually was true. It was Nick Sand. And for a few months in 1972, from summer through the end of the year, St. Louis was perhaps the most psychedelic place on earth. Owsley had trained a few chemists personally. Nick sand was one of them. He was a dead freak. Also. The Dead's archives contain a six page handwritten guest list for their New Year's show the previous year 1971 going into 1972, with Nick sand receiving a 5, nearly the most additional guests of anybody else on the list. And it was because of Nick sand that for roughly six months in 1972, St. Louis was the psychedelic capital of the world. Here's Nick talking from Cosmo Felding Mellon's incredible documentary the Sunshine Makers. I can't recommend it enough.
- [29:15]
Bill Weber
I went off to St. Louis with a new partner.
- [29:20]
Tony Dwyer
I made a beautiful laboratory two story brick building in downtown St. Louis. I formed this company, Signet Research and Development. Everybody was very happy that industry was moving into this impoverished area. And I was getting kudos from the mayor. We made a lot of beautiful psychedelics. We were right out in the open. One more job, one more paycheck. We didn't really accept checks though.
- [29:47]
David Lemieux
The St. Louis lab was located at 2209 Del Mar Blvd. A 25 minute walk or 5 minute drive from the Fox Theater. They even had a smaller lab located in their home in nearby Fenton. I was able to contact Nick's lab partner of the time and future wife Junie Shaughnessy, who says that they had absolutely no clue that Owsley and the Dead were in town. To find out what happened to the St. Louis lab, watch the rest of the Sunshine Makers really do. It's actually hard to tell if Nick and Judy's work had an immediate impact on their surroundings. In the Dopescope column in the St. Louis Outlaw from that October, the same issue they'd reported on the Dead shows, there was a warning of an uptick in pills cut with pcp. Bad vibes, man. But also reports and ratings on a wide variety of LSD and mescaline available in the area, including Berkeley Blue white mescaline, Red blotter, chocolate chip Mesque, dark yellow barrels, burgundy tabs, sugar cube acid and purple flats. With prices between $2 and $2.50 a hit. Between 13 and $16 in 2021 prices. All of which is to say that St. Louis was well prepared for three nights of the Grateful Dead. Tony Dwyer and Sky High Associates had indeed gotten the word out. At the University of Kansas in Lawrence, a group of Deadheads heard about the shows. Bill Weber wrote a really soulful and fantastic essay about his transformative experiences seeing the dead in St. Louis in 1972, titled Sainted at the Fox, included in the new Listen to the river box set. And we're so pleased today to welcome him to the Dead cast.
- [31:19]
Bill Weber
Hey, Bill, growing up in the Midwest, if you want to do things, you get used to driving. So I remember about once a year we would drive to the. You know, we drive to New York or Boston. And occasionally it would be. That would be like a. I don't know, an 18, 20 hour drive. But occasionally we'd also drive to San Francisco or something. And that would be like a 30 hour drive. So you sort of got used to being in your car a lot. So it wasn't that big of a deal to drive from Lawrence to St. Louis. And it was only four and a half hours each way. So that wasn't a long drive when you grew up in the Midwest. I certainly remember getting there and I'd never been to the Fox Theater before. And the experience of walking into that and seeing, you know, a couple of thousand Deadheads there. First off, it felt like I was home when I saw all the Deadheads. And back then it was a bit unusual to see that large of a number of what I considered to be my tribe. And it felt great. It just felt great. But then the Fox Theater just completely blew me away. I had never experienced anything like that before. We had some fairly grand movie houses in Kansas, but nothing like the old Fox.
- [32:37]
David Lemieux
One person seeing their first shows in 72 was Dre Stein, now the host of the other one. Every Tuesday from noon to 2 on St. Louis's KDHX.
- [32:46]
Tom Palazzola
I had heard about the Fox Theater from my parents. They had gone there to see movies and stage productions, vaudeville, over the years. And then in 72, it was basically closed. That was a part of town you did not go into, even in daylight hours.
- [33:03]
David Lemieux
Though the Fox was still showing movies in the early 70s, a search for newspaper articles in that period reveals all kinds of sketchy activity. In 1971, burglars had tried to break through the wall of the Fox to get into the jewelry store next door. In early 1972, a few weeks after the Dead had played there, the theater was the victim of arson, with local youth accused of setting a series of small fires. A few movies had to be evacuated.
- [33:27]
Bill Weber
So I lied to my parents about.
- [33:28]
Tom Palazzola
Where I was going that night.
- [33:30]
Bill Weber
I had always heard that it was a really neat looking building.
- [33:33]
Tom Palazzola
Had no clue of what it looked like.
- [33:35]
Bill Weber
Walked in there.
- [33:36]
Tom Palazzola
It was the most incredible thing on the inside, even in its disrepair, because.
- [33:41]
Bill Weber
At that point it hadn't been restored yet.
- [33:44]
Tom Palazzola
There's this huge stained glass globe that hangs in the middle from the ceiling up there. And it's like I had never seen anything like this. I mean, this thing is just, I.
- [33:54]
Bill Weber
Don'T know, 20ft across.
- [33:56]
Tom Palazzola
It's huge.
- [33:57]
Bill Weber
And you're just like, excuse me. It was just so opulent and so magical. And what was also really special about it was it was a little bit run down. So it felt like you're going into the past in some way. The sacred past that you could, like, go into to hear your band. It was. It was really great.
- [34:20]
Tom Palazzola
My brain was very altered on some substances that evening, and I just couldn't quit. Just freaking out over the ornate, the.
- [34:28]
Bill Weber
Gold paint on everything, and these giant.
- [34:31]
Tom Palazzola
Lions in the lobby. And, I mean, they're, you know.
- [34:34]
Bill Weber
And her eyes lit up.
- [34:35]
Tom Palazzola
They had stones like rubies in their eyes, and they were all lit up.
- [34:40]
Bill Weber
And it was, you know, velvet wallpaper and in the hallways and these grand staircases.
- [34:49]
Tom Palazzola
And I'd never seen anything like that in my life. So, yeah, it was just something else.
- [34:56]
Tony Dwyer
The setup was for security. We had members of the Missouri Rugby Football Union in their jerseys. We had Rent A Cops backstage, and we had St. Louis Police Department off duty guys at the front door. Of course, all the guys from the Missouri Rugby Football Union are flying. And I've got this kid backstage and I hand him the guest list. This guy's, like, in his middle 20s, overweight black dude with an outsized Afro with his fucking police hat hanging on top of it, right? And he's got the list. And he said, Mr. Dwyer, don't worry about a thing. Anybody that's not on this list ain't getting in. And he pulls out a cattle prod. I said, no, no, no, no. I said, give me the cattle prod. And if there's anybody you have an issue with, come and get me. So I go back to visit him about an hour later, and I say, hey, how you doing? He said, everything's cool, man. I got a contact high. I could stay here all night. And I say to him, you have no fucking idea. No idea how high you're getting tonight. So anyhow, this kid's got a fucking grin from ear to ear. And he got blasted that night because he made the mistake of picking up an open Heineken.
- [36:14]
David Lemieux
It wasn't only the security guards who had to watch out for the band's crew, Except Donna Hauer remembers their favorite.
- [36:20]
Sep Donahuer
Thing was to dose the promoter. They got me a lot, many times, but for some reason, I'm able to maintain. So I think they were impressed. If you could sit there and somebody's hit you with a few doses and you can settle the box office and pay the cops, they're impressed. I think I got the Real stamp of approval because I could weather the storm.
- [36:55]
David Lemieux
Finally, it was showtime.
- [36:56]
Tony Dwyer
I'm standing backstage with Garcia and Weir and Lesh, and we're smoking a joint and finally it's now like 9 o' clock and going, you know, guys, what do you think? So they go out to play.
- [37:09]
Sep Donahuer
We're sorry about this delay, but that's how it is.
- [37:13]
Tom Palazzola
Or what? In the technological age.
- [37:17]
Sep Donahuer
Hurry up and wait. We've been here longer than you have, Altair.
- [37:37]
Bill Weber
I don't remember the exact reason for our decision, but we got tickets for. For the Tuesday and Thursday show and we didn't have them for the Wednesday. I think we were. We were mainly saving on finding a place to stay and getting a hotel room and that kind of stuff.
- [37:53]
Tony Dwyer
And.
- [37:56]
Bill Weber
I knew by the first song that I was going to all three nights I wasn't going home. It was just like, no, there's no way.
- [38:33]
David Lemieux
Since playing the Fox Theater for the first time in February 1970, the Dead's configuration had been subtly different each and every time they came through town. The February 1970 show was the very last for keyboardist Tom Constantinople, who was gone when they played the Keele Opera House in October of that year. In the summer of 1970 as well, the acoustic Dead had appeared at the nearby Mississippi River Festival. When they came back in March 1971, Mickey Hart had been furloughed. In December of 1971, they'd returned to the Fox with a new piano player, Keith Godschow. Now, in 1972, they were here with new vocalist Donnajean Godscho, and without Pigpen.
- [39:12]
Sep Donahuer
You may have noticed Pigpen's not with us this evening.
- [39:14]
Tom Palazzola
He's still home convalescing from a long and serious illness, and hopefully he'll be.
- [39:20]
Starfinder Stanley
Back with us next time.
- [39:24]
David Lemieux
Sadly, Pigpen wouldn't make it back to the stage with the Dead. There was all kinds of craziness happening during these three shows in St. Louis. Tom Palazzola told us this story. His memory places it in 1973 at the Kiel Auditorium. But Tony Dwyer is absolutely certain it happened one of the years of the Fox. So we'll just file it right here. A piece of blurry folklore.
- [39:45]
Tom Palazzola
Hippy Bob's a barber, so this guy has really long hair, but he was a barber. But he was also a car and motorcycle enthusiast. And it was one of his choppers was up on stage in memory of Duane Allman.
- [40:02]
Tony Dwyer
Some gang member showed up with it and, you know, Garcia was into Hell's Angels at the time and whatnot. And this guy rode his Motorcycle up on the stage. But I can't remember what show it was. I do remember the incident. There is no question about that. And the guy did. And he had Grateful Dead graphics on his gas tank.
- [40:21]
Tom Palazzola
He may still be a barber. If he is, if you can find a barber shop in Baldwin on Clayton Road, that would be his shop. Each of the nights of the 72 shows have very distinct personalities. The shows certainly do take you on a trip. So the First Night in 72, there is no Dark Star. There's no other one. And that's very rare for 1972 to not have either of those. But what you do get is an incredibly well played, perfectly executed Grateful Dead show, minus one of those two big jam vehicles. There's a major playing in the band.
- [41:03]
Graham Boone
Sam.
- [41:30]
Tom Palazzola
I'd never heard music perform like that before. I remember, you know, playing in the band went on forever. And I was just like, nobody takes.
- [41:41]
Bill Weber
It to this limit.
- [41:43]
David Lemieux
Since the band's last visit to The Fox in 1971, the improvisation playing in the band had broken out from a one minute meltdown and was now stretched over 15 minutes and jumped into hyperspace. Nearly every version, including both of the first two nights at the Fox in 72. Since the last time the Dead had been through St. Louis in December 71, both Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir had released their solo debut LPs, Garcia and Ace, respectively, each with a bunch of new songs that went right into the Dead repertoire. When the Dead showed up in St. Louis in October 1972, the release of Europe 72 was still several weeks away. There were new songs they'd written even since then as well. The latest model Grateful Dead, like Mississippi, Half Step Uptown to the Loo, Half.
- [42:54]
Tony Dwyer
Step, Mississippi Uptown, Toodaloo, hello Baby, I'm.
- [43:03]
Graham Boone
Gone, Goodbye have a cup of rock.
- [43:08]
Tom Palazzola
And ride well to old Southern skies I'm on my way Way.
- [43:19]
David Lemieux
Another piece of jamming that the St. Louis 72 shows featured in a big way was Birdsong, played all three nights and performed on the first night as the show's second song.
- [43:41]
Graham Boone
All I know is something like a bird within her sand.
- [43:51]
David Lemieux
We explored the writing of Birdsong in our episode on Jerry Garcia's solo debut last season. But to get even further inside the song's beautiful improvisation, we proudly welcome musicologist Graham Boone, who teaches at Ohio State University. I met Graham at various Grateful Dead conferences, where he has charted out and analyzed the mechanics of the Dead's improv in Birdsong and Dark Star.
- [44:12]
Graham Boone
You know, here's a song that is like a recollection of Janis Joplin, A memorial to Janis. And there is so much emotion going on in that situation. And this song captures so many things about loving someone and losing someone and about the specialness of Janice. I mean, I'm really reading this, you know, into the song, but, you know, it's a very poignant song. And it's a song that when you hear them playing it, when they come up with the song and start performing it in public, you can feel that. And yet it takes on all these different qualities. It can be celebratory, it can be elegiac. It can be almost angry with intensity. I almost feel like it follows the seasons of the year. You know, there are autumn bird songs, there are spring bird songs, and so there's a lot of joy in it. And it's a song that carries you along into a very special place in the Dead's music. And the early, you know, the 72 bird songs are marvelous because this is this place of emergence where it just is being remade every day. It's just a wonderful, wonderful thing to follow those recordings. It's a beautifully arranged song, and it's kind of a duet between Bob and Jerry, the way it's structured at the beginning. And Phil has this really interesting kind of dancing around the progression. He's really free where, you know, in Darkstar, he's so focus. A lot of the song is about closure, about how the progression is kind of closed, you know, whereas Dark Star is kind of always open. Birdsong has a feeling of closure to it in the riff, in the structure of the verse and chorus, and in the entire song. And they did this wonderful jam to close the song and then conclude this beautiful return to the instrumental theme.
- [45:47]
Sep Donahuer
Right.
- [45:47]
Graham Boone
Of Birdsong. So you really know when you're coming to the end of that song. Whereas with Dark Star, you don't know if you're in the song at certain points. And yet they share a lot of elements. And there are moments in some of these bird songs where they're drifting into Dark Star. And you could feel them kind of playing notes that just a minute. What's going on? And then they pull away from that because, of course, this isn't Dark Star.
- [46:09]
David Lemieux
These are three early autumn bird songs.
- [46:11]
Graham Boone
They really make a set, a nice set of bird songs because they're similar in a lot of ways.
- [46:16]
David Lemieux
We had Graham do what he sometimes does at scholarly conferences and give us guided listens to short segments of the jams to get into the musical mechanics of some of this improvisation. We start with A bit from birdsong from October 18th, the middle night.
- [46:32]
Graham Boone
So right away you have beautiful duet between Jerry and Bob. They're playing almost exactly the same thing and Keith is commenting behind them. It's very pretty. And Billy's coming in now. Listen to what Phil is doing. He's in the background and he's doing really interesting things that are off beat on notes that could be unexpected, but they play beautifully with the flow of the music. Now notice the beat structure. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. One, two, three, Four, five, six, seven, Eight, nine, 10, 11, 12. One, two, three, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, seven, eight. So something wonderful about this song is that it has this eight beat structure, but that in reverse, Jerry stretches it out to 12. And that creates a really interesting sense of diving in, exploring a moment. And again, that's really poignant for anybody who cares about this music. As his voice goes up through the scale, he's also drawing out the cycle through a 12 beat cycle. Whereas almost all of Birds song is often in a kind of eight beat cycle.
- [47:56]
David Lemieux
Even playing the same song on the same equipment three nights in a row, each version had subtly different textures and variables, sometimes both mundane and musically cool at the same time. This is the third night, October 19, 1972.
- [48:14]
Graham Boone
So Jerry's in the middle of a nice solo here with the band. Everybody's contributing. Phil's very active, dancing beautifully around this progression. And Keith is also putting in some trilogy. Jerry gets into this somewhat insistent rift for a minute, rich off, and gets the band going up to the high register. Everybody going along. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, six, seven, eight. Jerry builds back down to the mid range. Jerry goes into another insistent riff. Hanging out on a single note gets everybody going. Then another, another high note, Nice climax, but maybe broke a string because he's about to drop out, which he does here. And then we have a really nice passage where Keith is soloing over Phil and Bob. He's not playing powerfully, not playing loudly or aggressive. You know, he might have. This might have been an unexpected solo for. But he's doing some really nice things with turns, with repeated motives, some really nice little ornaments. And Billy's right there behind him. Fantastic drumming from Billy Clinton.
- [50:27]
David Lemieux
And a little bit from the first night, October 17th.
- [50:32]
Graham Boone
So these guys are jamming away. I don't know if you can hear it, but there's a kind of a 17171 and you can hear Jerry playing a little bit with Some riffs that are a little bit like his Dark Star riff. And there Bob comes back in, rescuing birdsong, if you want. By playing the birdsong riff, Jerry here is going into some high harmonics, which he loves to do in Birdsong. He also does it in Darkstar and other places. Beautiful bent high note harmonics. Almost like a bird, Right, A bird soaring in the sky. So can you hear the. The place at which Dark Star and Birdsong touch on the same feeling?
- [51:48]
David Lemieux
It wasn't the only time the dead approached Dark Star in the first night at the Fox. This is from early in the second set, just after Bertha. Jerry's suggestion doesn't go any further than that. I love being able to hear the atmosphere of the Fox Theatre on these vivid recordings by Owsley Stanley.
- [52:17]
Tom Palazzola
They're not PA tapes. It was a full array of the inputs. And that's why Bear kind of explained it to me once when Bear would explain things to me. He's an incredibly intelligent guy. I'm always of the mind that when somebody explains something to me, I ask them, can you please explain this to me like I'm a 6 year old, because I will get it then. But Bear didn't do that. But if you listen to the fall of 72, for instance, every show sounds exactly the same. Similar to the spring of 77. Betty's recordings from May 77, they all sound the same, which is to say that she was recording for the tape, not for the hall. She wasn't doing that. So Bear's recordings are incredibly uniform through the fall of 72. So, yes, he was getting a full array and doing a mix specifically for tape had nothing to do with what was going out and nor did it necessarily reflect the sound in the hall that a PA tape would. Where there's lots of PA tapes that we have over the years, and particularly the 80s where there's no bass in the mix because there was so much bass coming through, through the subs, through the stage, or there's very little Jerry guitar because it's a small venue like the Warfield, and so there's so much guitar coming right off the stage that it's pretty low in the mix, the lead guitar. So with Bears recordings, that's not the case at all. Everything sounds pretty darn amazing and consistent.
- [53:31]
Starfinder Stanley
It was just bringing the lines in and getting them to two tracks. He wasn't running the pa, so he wasn't mixing the house sounds. At a certain point there were decisions being made at the soundboard that would affect the sound that he was recording. So what he was doing doing was capturing the performance of the sound system. However it was being mixed by the front of house. Bear was very, very, very rigorous about not altering, not Eqing. He would use an oscilloscope and he would take the inputs and he'd make sure that they, everything had proper presence in the mix as it went to the recording deck. But he wouldn't EQ it, he wouldn't change anything other than the levels. He was just bringing it all in.
- [54:14]
Tony Dwyer
Somebody comes down backstage and somebody comes back to me and says, tony, Sepp wants you up in the office. So I go up there and there are the two cops that were at the front door that were frisking everybody for contraband.
- [54:30]
Sep Donahuer
St. Louis narcs actually like, you know, police officers doing the frisking. People coming in and they did, they didn't arrest anybody, they just confiscated and throw it in the trash can get, tell them to go in, you know. So by the end of the night there's this enormous quantity of drugs in these trash containers that were at the front doors. They were taken in the little office off from the front entry to the.
- [54:56]
Tony Dwyer
Theater and they had the equivalent of 33 gallon plastic bags of, you name it, paraphernalia, fucking, you know, greatest drugs in the world. And it's all laid out on this like 20 foot conference table.
- [55:10]
Sep Donahuer
Kind of remember talking to this one St. Louis cop. I says, what are you gonna do with that? And the guy looked at his partner, you know, kind of back and forth and they said, I don't know, you figure it out. And turn around and left.
- [55:24]
Tony Dwyer
So I get back there and says, tony, what do you want? And I start filling my pockets with shit. And sep says to the cops, what are you guys gonna do with this shit? And the cops said, oh, we're not going to do anything. That's up to you guys.
- [55:39]
Sep Donahuer
It was like one of these huge trash bags filled with pot, cocaine, masculine, you name it. Oh my God. And anyway, we took it all back to the hotel and I gave it away to everybody.
- [55:55]
Tony Dwyer
So we wind up with these 33 gallon bags filled with, with paraphernalia and drugs that go back to the hotel that night, back to the Airport Hilton. It was just crazy, crazy, crazy shit. Yeah, there was everything there. So we go back to the hotel and of course Osley's got tapes and of course everybody wants to listen to the tapes for the show, for the night. I mean now it's like 2 o' clock in the fucking morning and we're.
- [56:25]
Starfinder Stanley
Listening to the tapes, the early sonic journals. He absolutely buttonholed the guys at the hotel that night after the show. He'd sit them down, make them listen to the tapes, because he really wanted them to hear, while it was fresh in their minds what had just happened. He wanted them to hear the other side of it and say, hey, this is what they got. Is this what you were trying to give them?
- [56:50]
David Lemieux
By 1972, it's hard to say if he was still buttonholing the band exactly, but it was an era in which the band would sometimes rent an extra hotel room under the last name Nagra, after the tape deck for after show listening soirees. It definitely gave Bear some food for thought. The Owsley Stanley foundation has spent the last few years beginning to archive and release Behr's vast accumulation of sonic journals, most lately the stunning Johnny Cash of the Carousel Ballroom, recorded at the Dead's own ballroom in San Francisco in April 1968. Hawkins, a friend of Bear and Starfinder since forever, has been spending a lot of time with Bear's tapes and has spent some time thinking about this period, too.
- [57:28]
Tom Palazzola
One of our theories is that that gave him the bandwidth to be able to think about the problems more holistically that they were facing with respect to sound reinforcement. And it was one problem after another that they tried to solve. That eventually evolved into the Wall of Sound. And that became, I think, his crowning accomplishment from this particular era, which may or may not have come from an inability to find his place.
- [57:54]
Starfinder Stanley
He joked that he couldn't get his old job at the mixer back, so he set out to make the mixing job obsolete, because the purpose of the Wall of Sound was to make it so you didn't need a front house mixer because you were giving the musicians complete control over the sound. But that was always part of Bear's vision, was realizing that what the musicians could hear on stage while performing was not at all what the audience was getting. And for Behr, that was a real problem, because he felt that it was really important for the musicians in real time to be connected to what they were giving the audience so that they could craft their art more finely.
- [58:37]
Tom Palazzola
Tracking that potential incongruity between what's happening on the stage and what the band is hearing and what the audience is hearing is part of the whole reason for making the sonic journals that OSF is trying to preserve in the first place. That's the evidence. That's what he could take back to the band and say, listen to this. Is that what you intended in the.
- [58:54]
David Lemieux
Fall of 1972, the band was beginning to jump into arenas. Bear may have come back at the wrong time to get back to work at the mixing board, but exactly the right moment to help the Dead face down bigger and more unforgiving acoustic spaces in rooms like the Fox Theater. Though one of the band's all time favorite places to play, there might not have been much room for improvement for Bill Webber. It was perfect.
- [59:16]
Bill Weber
The first show, I remember just being great. I really, really loved it. Scott and I decided that we would try to find a place to stay and we would try to find tickets for the next night. Somehow we went out and found. I remember we got a room in a dormitory. There must have been a university around there or something close by. But we. I don't know how we got a room in a dormitory, but we got a room for two nights. I remember that and got up the next morning and I remember we went to the Ark in St. Louis and we went to the top and looked over all the town and then we went over to the Fox to try to find tickets.
- [59:49]
David Lemieux
The shows were sold out. Bill Weber and his friend Scott weren't the only people turning up at the Fox looking for tickets that week. Remember Spring Rain, the teenagers that jammed with the Dead at Richie Gerber's bar Mitzvah in December 71? We told their story in the last episode of the Dead cast bassist Mark Slosberg.
- [60:06]
Bill Weber
The Grateful Dead came to the Fox.
- [60:08]
David Lemieux
Again the following year. And we said, oh, well, let's go to the Back Door and let's see.
- [60:13]
Bill Weber
If we can rekindle the relationship and see if anybody remembers. And oh my God, we were shut.
- [60:19]
David Lemieux
Down so fast at the Back Door.
- [60:22]
Bill Weber
That concert did not happen. I think obviously things were changing for.
- [60:27]
Tony Dwyer
Them at that point.
- [60:29]
Bill Weber
They had gone from sort of, I.
- [60:32]
David Lemieux
Don'T know, an iconic band of the 60s to this grateful Dead engine that they become became. And it seemed like it happened right.
- [60:41]
Bill Weber
Around that time is things were really happening. So there were, you know, there were tons of security and all that.
- [60:48]
David Lemieux
And who are these 60 at that point? Who are these 16 year olds that are trying to sneak in the back.
- [60:53]
Bill Weber
Door saying that they played with the.
- [60:55]
David Lemieux
Dead at a bar mitzvah?
- [60:57]
Bill Weber
I mean, that.
- [60:57]
Tony Dwyer
That didn't happen.
- [60:59]
Bill Weber
I've always been sort of a shy kid, but for some, somehow I got the nerve to take Scott and I, when we went backstage to see if we could find a way in to the show and I recognized Owsley from Rolling Stone magazine pictures and I saw him and the crew loading equipment on and off the truck. As I mentioned in the article in my notes, I was talking to him and, you know, was saying, is there any way to get in? And if I remember right, he hemmed and hawed. But I had Scott and I had met some young girls up in the front of the theater when we were looking to get tickets. And I said, you know, Owsley, would you like. We could introduce you to some girls we just met? He goes, oh, yeah, that sounds nice. So we brought the girls up and he let us in. And it was a general admission show, so we got our pick of the seats for the Wednesday night show.
- [61:51]
Tom Palazzola
It's deep Grateful Dead, where they go for it and they nail it. And I find that Middle Knight is truly a wonderfully special show. 1018, probably one of the top two or three shows in this box set. Maybe to some people, the top show in the box set. 1018 72. It was always a little heavy on the Weir channel. The Weir's guitar was a little high in the mix, and Jerry's guitar was a little lower in the mix than where it normally might have been. And even 1017 and 1019 are exactly where they should be. Whereas 1018. I don't know what was going on with the recording with Bear, the mix was a little different, but it turned out it was more of less of a mix issue than simply a channel issue. So what Jeffrey did is he brought up the channel with Jerry and actually blended a little over to the. To the Bob side. So it actually. It sounds perfect. I mean, when you listen to 1018 72, it's, you know, it's as it should be heard, which is, again, a credit to Jeffrey. He certainly didn't make it mono or anything like that. But Jerry is where he should be in a 1972 recording. Bob is where he should be. Nice and prominent, but not overpowering. So that was really the only show that had any. I won't even say serious problems that had any problems.
- [63:02]
Sep Donahuer
So.
- [63:02]
Tom Palazzola
And it sounds fantastic now.
- [63:04]
David Lemieux
Bob Simmons had been keeping up with the Dead for over two years, only finding out about the changes in personnel when the band walked onto the stage.
- [63:11]
Tom Palazzola
1972, when the Grateful Dead performed at the Fox Theater. Then I realized Pigpen was no longer there. Keith was taking care of the keyboards, piano.
- [63:41]
David Lemieux
The middle night was the 46th birthday of local titan Chuck Berry, and the Dead played the Promised Land, perhaps in his honor. But that was actually fewer Chuck Berry songs than they played at Most shows in 1972, including the Night before and the night after. And as Chuck Berry would be the first to tell you, people love it when you shout out their city in songs. Bob Weir shouted it out to St. Louis at all seven shows on the Listen to the river box set. Johnny Cash's Big river is on six of them. And on the 72 and 73 shows, there were four performances of Weir's new song, Black Throated Wind, co written with John Perry Barlow. This version is from the following night, October 19th, but we'll drop it here.
- [65:00]
Bill Weber
The first set was really good. I think one of my favorite songs of the Dead, which has always been the case, is China Cat. And if I remember, they closed out the first set with China Cat, a really beautiful version of China Cat.
- [65:12]
David Lemieux
I love Keith's weird quiet jazz lead under the intro, eventually finding a cool descending riff.
- [65:21]
Sep Donahuer
Sam.
- [65:49]
Tom Palazzola
And also Donna Jean was coming on.
- [66:01]
Bill Weber
I think of the four times I had seen the Dead before. I had never heard him play Dark Star.
- [66:07]
Sep Donahuer
They played on the 17th, the 18th.
- [66:09]
Tom Palazzola
And the 19th of October in 72 at the Fox.
- [66:15]
Sep Donahuer
And I know I went to one of those shows. I did hear Dark Star during that time period.
- [66:21]
David Lemieux
That makes it the 18th.
- [66:23]
Bill Weber
And this was the Dark Star night. And Dan was at the Dark Star.
- [66:29]
Tony Dwyer
Night.
- [66:51]
Tom Palazzola
The second night. That's when they do the deep dive. That's when they kind of really take over everybody's mind and do this. Playing in the band. Dark Star, Morning Dew. Playing in the band. The first time they'd really done a sandwich playing in the band jam quite like this.
- [67:04]
Graham Boone
Sam.
- [67:30]
Bill Weber
I was on Some Other Galaxy for a while. There's something about the way that opens your soul and opens your mind and opens your psyche and opens everything. That just blew me away. It was a very special night.
- [67:44]
Tom Palazzola
I do remember the feeling you almost felt like you were traveling with the song and the changes that would make and the space you would be at in the song and the transitions that would come about.
- [68:17]
David Lemieux
A few heads remembered the same moment in Dark Star. Tom Palazzolo was one of them.
- [68:22]
Sep Donahuer
They had a mirrored ball.
- [68:23]
Tom Palazzola
There was a point there where somebody got control of this.
- [68:28]
David Lemieux
John Ellis remembered it too.
- [68:30]
Sep Donahuer
If you talk to anybody that went to those three shows, you know, the October shows from 72. The middle night was the Mirror ball night.
- [68:39]
David Lemieux
Sepp Donahauer credits the Dead's lighting team, Candace Brightman and Ben Haller, for the special effects that followed.
- [68:45]
Sep Donahuer
They were great to work with Ben and Candace. Ben Haller and Candace and Ben went on to become a top dog lighting guy in the industry for Years, Decades. Years. They both were great. Every one of my buddies, we all experienced the same thing, even though we were probably all enjoying the same buzz. So they were playing Dark Star, and I listened to it yesterday, and you can tell where the music starts to slow down and get weird.
- [69:31]
Tom Palazzola
And they had red, white and blue lights hitting it. And so the whole Fox Theater, and the Fox Theater is an incredibly ornate theater, just started swirling with these colors.
- [69:43]
Sep Donahuer
And then there was, you know, that quiet part where every once in a while you hear Kreutzman just kind of go zing across his cymbals. And then the mirror ball started going in the opposite direction as the band was playing. I'll bet you Ben and Candace, who were running the lighting, I believe at that time, they might have had the speed pot on the mirror ball, you know, where they're matching what the band's doing.
- [70:07]
Tom Palazzola
I don't know if it was because of the moment, because of what I might have been on at that time, but it appeared like somebody was controlling the speed of that ball and the band was playing and changing their tempo to the speed of this ball in the midst of one of the jams. And, I mean, it was something that was kind of burned into my memory.
- [70:28]
Sep Donahuer
Our recollection was they started playing backward, which meant when I listened to the tape, you know, it's just that they got weirder and weirder.
- [70:40]
Graham Boone
Yeah. So Jerry's taking a little solo using the volume variation that we'd like to do. Beautiful. A minor lead up to D major. Beautiful arrival. Again, D major is not in the dark style progression. Another harmonic exploration returning. Bobby's trying out a riff. Keith tries out a little trim. Another riff from that. Now Jared comes in with a high arpeggio that's reminiscent of the classic dark style Pecchio. Although it's in a different place that Keith comes in. Beautiful motive that reflects the same motive from Jeremy. Grape Plant flowing down. Billy picks it up and the crowd is roaring. Pause. Bill gets into the dark star progression. And they pick up the pace again. Perfect moment. And it's a beautiful dark star progression. Lazy three, wonderful return to home.
- [72:35]
David Lemieux
And that's all before the first verse. The jam has a ton of different sections and ideas and combinations of musicians.
- [72:43]
Graham Boone
So we're listening to this interesting jam. Jerry getting into really fast notes. Bob has been playing along, but he drops out and there's Keith in the background dropping it. So it's just Jerry, Phil, and Bill, and each one is pushing the other.
- [73:18]
Sep Donahuer
Super intense.
- [73:21]
Graham Boone
Bills all over the town. Jerry's really exploring those chromatic ribs switching into a wild, wild medal. Bill settles into it. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. For a minute.
- [73:45]
David Lemieux
The late Grateful Dead archivist Dick Lotfella played this dark star when filling in for David Ganz on Dead to the World in 1995. We'll let Dick introduce the theme he called the Philo Stomp.
- [73:56]
Sep Donahuer
A great, Great show in St. Louis, Missouri. 1018 72. We are just going to play a part of it, obviously, because we don't have time for this whole show, obviously. But it's a dark star into this jam that occurred in late 72, October and November. I know for sure it occurred in. I'm not sure any other times. And it's a Phil. Phil is the cue. I mean, it is no one else but Phil. He's in a. It comes out of a dark star one time and it's in a meltdown. And you know, Phil is playing those deep, just heavy chords. He just suddenly is the only one playing. Maybe Billy's playing the drums a little bit, tinkering around, but you. You just hear Phil and it is a theme jam. This is no space meltdown brain fry jam. This is a theme qualifying on the level of Spanish themes. And my armpit Left the universe theme, which we'll rename soon. And this filled theme, we might just call it Philo Philo Jam. It's absolutely divine. It's as good as it gets. And I think you'll feel the same way.
- [75:31]
Bill Weber
With Phil doing that bass solo in in the Dark Star, which I. You know, that was the first time I'd ever heard him do a bass solo and things. So it really, really stuck to me. Yeah. And I was so happy that we had decided to stay.
- [75:46]
Graham Boone
So, yeah, here we are in this wonderful Phil jam. Loud, strong, really powerful bass solo. Playing chords and notes and suggesting chord progressions here in the key of D. So they left behind the home original key of Dog Star. And the band is coming in a round filled and it's totally taking the lead. So what's going to happen next? We get break five in a cube to Anything could happen. This could be the beginning of morning too. But it isn't. The filled with takes off into the Feelin Groovy Jam.
- [77:07]
David Lemieux
If the Philo Stomp was a new thematic jam, the Feelin Groovy jam was older. First appearing in Dark star in late 1969, it would appear in Dark Star throughout this fall 72 tour. But then the theme would jump over into the Transition jam between China Cat, Sunflower and I Know youw Rider. We can talk about that another time.
- [77:25]
Sep Donahuer
You felt like you were going on.
- [77:27]
Tom Palazzola
A musical journey, and then maybe they.
- [77:30]
Sep Donahuer
Break into Morning Dew afterwards.
- [78:03]
Tom Palazzola
We also have done a vinyl release of the big jam, the 80 minute jam that is really the centerpiece of the 101872 show. Because we do know that there are those of us who, and many who do want that as their centerpiece show. And that's why we've done the playing. Dark Star, Morning Dew playing in the band 1018, 80 minute jam as a standalone.
- [78:24]
David Lemieux
It was a lot to take in between shows that week, Tom Palazzola set out to meet Jerry.
- [78:29]
Tom Palazzola
It was 72. It was before the 72 show. And my buddy Greek, whose real name is Steve Bilis, and I decided we were gonna go find Jerry Garcia, see.
- [78:40]
Tony Dwyer
If we could meet him.
- [78:42]
Tom Palazzola
So there was two hotels that were up by the airport. There was one that was a high rise hotel, and the other one was this, like, sprawling hotel where it was these quad buildings where there was four rooms in each one. So we go to the big sprawling one, and we go to the front desk and I say, we're here to see Jerry Garcia. And the guy says, there's no Jerry Garcia here. And we're like, yeah, right. So we actually snuck upstairs, walking, wandering around, smelling for marijuana. Because we figured if we found pot, we found the dead and never found anything. So it was like, okay, we're up here, let's go to the other hotel. So we go to the other hotel. We walk in, into the lobby and go up to the guy at the desk and say, we're here to see Jerry Garcia. He says, oh, okay. He's in room, and he tells us where he is. And we're like, well, how do you get there? Well, you go down this path.
- [79:32]
Tony Dwyer
And then.
- [79:32]
Tom Palazzola
So we have actually, we go down there. There's like a sliding glass door and a regular door. So we beat on the door. And Garcia says, who is it? And we said, it's just some friends from St. Louis. And he literally came out. We spent. I mean, and it was the 20 minutes of my life. Spent 20 minutes out on this deck, talking with him, rolling our own and enjoying him also. And it was so funny because my friend Green hated the dead. Loved the Allman Brothers. I was like, yeah, the Allman Brothers are great, but I like the dead. So we always fought. So he was totally unimpressed that we're there on this, like, patio talking to Jerry Garcia. So he says, well, let's get going. And Garcia says, where are you gonna go? And he said, we're gonna go play pinball. And Garcia said, where are you gonna go? You know, he says, I'll come on along. And it was like, the only place to play pinball. They time was at the airport. And we said, we're going just across the road to the airport.
- [80:28]
Tony Dwyer
He says. He says, I go with you guys.
- [80:31]
Tom Palazzola
He said, but I hate airports. He says, I live in them.
- [80:35]
David Lemieux
So that was it.
- [80:35]
Tom Palazzola
So we left. And, I mean, believe me, I barely was able to walk. The third night where you do get the other one is to me, very similar to the first night, incredibly well played. Everything is perfectly executed. Some of the smaller songs are just so incredibly well played. And then we get the other one later in the show.
- [80:58]
David Lemieux
Check out this great reformulation from the other one into He's Gone, a song released officially a few weeks later on Europe 72 Love. Bill Kreutzman's entrance. Here.
- [81:17]
Sep Donahuer
It.
- [81:45]
Bill Weber
The third night. We weren't on the floor.
- [81:47]
Tom Palazzola
We were.
- [81:48]
Bill Weber
They had a lower mezzanine, and we had really good seats on the mezzanine for the. For the third night, the third night, if I remember, there was a really good trucking. And like I said in my notes, too, that he's gone just really touched me. Just really, really touched me. One thing I missed. Well, there's a lot I miss about Jerry being gone. But nobody that I've ever heard in my experience can pull solos out of the galaxy, can pull these licks that just come cascading down and appear and arise and float and go away. And Jerry was doing that a lot. That third night, it wasn't the. The exploration of the Wednesday night of the second night. It was more these tasty little guitar moments that just. Just appeared and would float away and stuff. And there were a lot of those that night. I remember that.
- [83:20]
David Lemieux
That night, the Dead pulled out an unreleased song debuted the previous fall that they hadn't played since. Over the summer comes a time.
- [83:51]
Graham Boone
Only.
- [83:52]
David Lemieux
Love can feel it's just beautiful. For reasons I can't discern after this performance, the song disappeared until it was revived during the studio sessions for Jerry Garcia's solo album reflections, released in 1976 and soon returned to Dead Set Lists after that.
- [84:10]
Bill Weber
There's also an experience with seeing the Dead multiple nights in a row, and you go through these emotional journeys that each night can take you someplace different and unique. And one thing that was so gratifying about the third night was it was sort of a Resolution to the weekend, too. It was like, okay, and we're just going to have fun, and we're just going to take this out and, you know, so they close up with. Not fade away. And it just. It felt complete. It felt like, okay, I can put this to bed now. It's an experience I think you only get when you see him multiple nights in a row.
- [85:01]
Graham Boone
I want to love you night and.
- [85:03]
Tony Dwyer
Day, you know, I love when I feel. No, I love.
- [85:19]
Bill Weber
We drove back that night. I had been struggling for a long time with my sexuality. And I had been very unhappy about it. I'd been very depressed about it. It was a very difficult struggle that I had been going through since I could remember, like, it being 12 or something. And here I was now 19. And that next day, I'm back at Kansas University on that Friday. And that night, I thought, I'm done with this. I'm accepting it, and I'm accepting it full throttle. We had a gay counseling hotline at Kansas University. And back in 1972, that was a fairly radical thing. There weren't that many places in the Midwest that would have such a thing. Probably Boulder and probably Medicine, you know, so there are a handful of places that would probably have that.
- [86:09]
Sep Donahuer
But.
- [86:09]
Bill Weber
So I was at Kansas University. We did have a gay student union back then. And I called them up and I said, you know, I'm done. I'm done fighting this. I'm gay, and I want to. I'm okay with it now. And that is a direct result of having experienced those three shows. The liberation, the freedom, the expansion, the acceptance. So much of what the Dead's music is about, for me, is coming to grips with the way things are. And sometimes that's painful, and sometimes it's joyous and, you know, but it's just, like, you get there, and there's a redemption in it. I've known of no other rock band that offers redemption like the Grateful Dead do. The humanity that Jerry represented, it still touches me, you know, 25 years later, after he's gone. It just still touches me in such a deep way.
- [87:00]
David Lemieux
Bill Weber's liner notes for the Listen to the river box set are an incredibly beautiful complement to the music.
- [87:05]
Bill Weber
After writing the article and about my own sort of liberation that I experienced through these shows, I was thinking that there are millions of other Deadheads that have had their own sense of liberation. Maybe not a sexual one, maybe an emotional one, maybe one in relationship to others, maybe one in relationship to their work, maybe in relationship to their body, to their age. To their. Whatever it is. I think they offered that kind of liberation to tens and hundreds of thousands of us.
- [87:38]
David Lemieux
Not only was Bill Webber out, but he was on the bus.
- [87:41]
Bill Weber
About a month or two later, they played in Kansas City two nights. And then about a week after that, or two weeks after that, they played in Wichita, Kansas. And I was at all those shows.
- [87:52]
David Lemieux
And stayed on the bus. Making his way to the Bay area by the 1980s, where he, of course, intersected with the Grateful Dead world.
- [87:58]
Bill Weber
I used to do commercial and music video work, and there was a company out in San Francisco called Colossal Pictures, and they did the animation for the Grateful Dead movie, and they also did the Touch of Gray video. Gary Gutierrez was the director on both of those, and I did a lot.
- [88:14]
Tony Dwyer
Of work with Gary.
- [88:15]
Bill Weber
So Gary brought me in, and I worked on the Foolish Heart video with him. I worked on the Just A Little Light video with him. And through them, I also. At some point, I met Justin Kman, and I worked on a Backstage Pass video with Justin.
- [88:29]
David Lemieux
Bill was able to cross paths with Owsley Garcia and others.
- [88:33]
Bill Weber
When I was working on Foolish Heart, Hunter came in for the afternoon and just sat in the edit room with me. And it was just Hunter and I for a long time in the edit room together. If you ask me who the most influential people were in the Grateful Dead universe, I think everybody would agree it was. Garcia was number one. Most people would agree that, I think. But from my own personal sense of how I relate Hunter's number two, his storytelling is what still just cuts through me sometimes. The line that I cry almost every time I hear is, if I knew the way, I would take you home. Things like that. Nobody else writes stuff like that, so to be able to spend an afternoon with Hunter was really special. And I told him the story of my coming out after the St. Louis shows. And, you know, he didn't get excited about it or anything, but I think he really enjoyed my vulnerability and my.
- [89:32]
Tony Dwyer
The.
- [89:33]
Bill Weber
The intimacy I was bringing into the conversation. I never really met any other Queer Deadheads in New York, and I'm not real sure why. But then in 1988, I moved to San Francisco, and then I started meeting him and then more and more. And that was another whole sense of liberation for me, was it got to the point where there would be a bigger and bigger group of us. What's really taken off with the Queer Deadheads is social media now. And that has not only connected us or connected me and others with people within our own sphere, our own community, but I know Queer Deadheads all over the country now. And there are these Dead and Company shows in Wrigley. I probably knew 30 or 40 queer Deadheads there. And we all hook up and we all get together and, you know, we go to a bar before or after or have a meal or meet in somebody's hotel room. But the really great thing is we usually sort of commandeer a fairly big section of the floor, and we welcome everybody in, and it's all types of people, all ages, all types of queers.
- [90:47]
Tony Dwyer
And.
- [90:49]
Bill Weber
It'S joyous. It's really fun. And I also think we help influence other people around us because they see men dancing with men or women, you know, whatever. And there's a sense of acceptance that I think permeates beyond our group. And I just want to give a big shout out, too, to all the queers out there in whatever shape, form, size, you know, gender manifestation that exists. And also that queers can also just bring in all the offbeats together in a lot of ways, too.
- [91:25]
Tony Dwyer
So.
- [91:26]
Bill Weber
Which the Dead have been really great at doing. I've been tickled pink to be able to write these liner notes because it's something very personal to me.
- [91:34]
David Lemieux
The previous year, the St. Louis Outlaw had squashed the rumors that the Dead were going to buy the Fox. But nobody ever said anything about just renting it.
- [91:41]
Tony Dwyer
After the 72 shows, my brother and I approached Edward Arthur, and I think we guaranteed him 100 shows a year for an exclusive, and he wouldn't give it to us. Yeah, he said, I would love that, but I can't walk away from my buddy Deon Peluso. You know, this aged movie exhibitor, Deon Peluso wanted to exhibit movies. And, you know, he wasn't interested in having guys on the stage.
- [92:08]
David Lemieux
But so it was for the Dead in the fox Theater in St. Louis. Eight shows in three years. One postscript might have taken place 15 years later, on Aug. 6 and Aug. 7, 1986, when the dead were scheduled to return to the Fox. As Dre stein, host of KDHX's Other.
- [92:23]
Tom Palazzola
One, recalls, There was one show in the 80s that was canceled because Jerry had the diabetic coma.
- [92:29]
Bill Weber
That was a real heartbreaker.
- [92:31]
Tom Palazzola
I was scheduled to go.
- [92:33]
Bill Weber
We purchased tickets together to go to that.
- [92:35]
Tom Palazzola
Unfortunately, he got sick, and it was.
- [92:37]
David Lemieux
Like we were both heartbroken, but it wasn't to be. But the Dead were hardly done with St. Louis, as we'll hear in our next episode. Keep watching that river.
- [93:18]
Rich Mahan
Thanks to all of our St. Louis guests who have supplied us with a riverboat full of great stories. How nice was it to hear the voices of Dick Lotvala and Bear and Graham Boone's play by play exposition of those Jam segments is fascinating. I love hearing the musical elements highlighted in that way and we hope to have more from him in the future. All of this music from Listen to the River St. Louis 717273 is out and available now at your favorite streaming provider and@dead.net take care out there. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast Martin, Mark Pincus and Doran Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.