Skull & Roses 50: Side A

Summary

GOOD OL’ GRATEFUL DEADCAST
Episode: Skull & Roses 50: Side A
Released: April 15, 2021
Hosts: Rich Mahan, Jesse Jarnow

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Overview

This episode kicks off Season 3 of the official Grateful Dead podcast with an in-depth exploration of Side A of Skull and Roses (1971), the band’s iconic first self-titled live double album. Celebrating the record’s 50th anniversary, the hosts delve into the album's context, recording process, key songs, memorable shows (particularly those at the Capitol Theatre, Port Chester, NY), and the surrounding musical and cultural landscape. The episode blends interviews, rare audio, Deadhead memories, and a dose of Dead family mythos, balancing scholarship and storytelling in classic Deadcast style.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Scene: The Importance of Skull & Roses

• Skull & Roses is introduced as a core Grateful Dead artifact, both for longtime fans and newcomers, marking "the best representation of the band to date"—a sentiment echoed by both the band and the hosts.
  • “Jerry Garcia felt that this release was the best representation of the band to date, and we couldn't agree more.” – Rich Mahan (02:25)
• 50th anniversary reissue announced, including unreleased Fillmore West material and collectible vinyl formats. (02:30–02:49)

2. Position in Dead History

• The hosts situate Skull & Roses between the rural/rootsy Workingman’s Dead & American Beauty (1970) and the ambitious Europe ’72 (1972).
• The episode frames the early ’70s as a period when the Dead’s “protoype” sound truly solidified:
  • “It's us, man. It's the prototype Grateful Dead basic unit. Each one of those tracks is the total picture.” – Jerry Garcia, Rolling Stone, 1971 (09:55)

3. Evolution & Identity of the Band

• The Grateful Dead's sound, always changing, is recapped through quick musical flashbacks (’67’s primal Dead, the acid folk era, etc.).
• The interplay of familiarity and change: “To recap a few, but not all…you had to be used to the constant change.” – Rich Mahan (04:45)
• David Lemieux, Dead archivist, and Blair Jackson, Dead historian, discuss how this era’s sound crystallized both live and on record, making songs like “Bertha" and “Playing in the Band” permanent fixtures. (08:03, 11:01)

4. Recording Process & Alembic Innovations

• Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor-Jackson’s role as visionary engineers is highlighted.
• The hosts detail the Dead’s technical leap with Alembic, bringing a 16-track recording truck to venues, allowing for “one electronic source per track”—an innovation for live albums. (42:56)
  • “It made perfect sense. The most important thing was that it made the music sound like it should.” – Bob Matthews (42:56)
• Comparison to contemporary live records and how the Dead’s approach anticipated the double-live album boom. (45:34)

5. The Capitol Theatre Port Chester Shows

• The December 1970 Port Chester run is postponed, leading to the fabled February 1971 six-show recording marathon, intended as the album’s source. (38:23–43:43)
• Candace Brightman's memories as lighting director, and her unexpected Dead conversion:
  • “After everyone had left the theater but me, I found myself standing in the lighting booth staring at the stage about three hours after the [band] had left…it really blew my mind.” – Candace Brightman (36:28)

6. Songs of Side A: Histories & Development

“Bertha”

• Emerges as a new Garcia/Hunter classic. The song is contextualized historically and mythologically:
  • “Bertha was a song that instantly hit me.” – David Lemieux (08:03)
  • David Lemieux shares his concert memory coinciding with the “test me!” lyric and an encounter with security (08:03–09:55)
• The song’s lyric inspiration is debated:
  • Garcia claims it’s named after a roaring electric fan in the Dead’s office (49:28)
  • Hunter calls it “some vague connotation of birth, death and reincarnation” (50:10)
• The album version is pieced together from multiple recordings (“take 13”), including added overdubs by Merle Saunders (52:48–54:34)
  • “It had that feeling of walking into the hall…just as the band is hitting.” – Gary Lambert on the fade-in (54:50)

“Mama Tried”

• Country standard by Merle Haggard, adopted concurrently by the Dead and New Riders.
• The Dead’s live arrangement evolves over two years before being definitively captured for Skull & Roses. (21:03–23:01)
• Deeded from New Riders to the Dead as the bands split and NRPS stepped out independently (23:19–23:37; 23:43; 24:52)

“Big Railroad Blues”

• Snatched from Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers (and by way of Dead’s early jug band roots), this electric blues tune is both “old and new.”
• Only played once during the multi-track run (at Manhattan Center), but nailed in one take. (56:50–57:08)

“Playing in the Band”

• The inside story of its musical genesis—attributed to Bob Weir, but with memories blurring between David Crosby’s jams at Mickey Hart’s barn and earlier Main 10 instrumental explorations (78:25–82:03).
• Lyrics by Robert Hunter—auctioned drafts reveal alternate verses (82:23–83:14).
• The song’s collective ethos is underlined:
  • “Playing in a band is playing together as a band, not as five individuals, but as the collective…that was where the magic was.” – Bob Matthews (83:14)

7. Dead Family, Projects & Overlapping Scenes

• Sidebars chronicle parallel recording projects and overlapping scenes:
  • Hooteroll (Garcia & Howard Wales), New Riders of the Purple Sage’s debut, and the never-finished Crosby-Garcia-Kantner-Freiberg projects (28:31–31:37).
• The spirit of “one overlap after another” rides high—a recurring Dead ethos (16:18)

8. Dream Telepathy Experiment at the Capitol

• In a legendary intersection of science and psychedelia, Dr. Stanley Krippner’s ESP/dream telepathy experiment with the Dead and their audience is detailed at length:
  • “The entire audience attending concerts by the Grateful Dead…was instructed to telepathically transmit an art print…to Malcolm Besant at the Maimonides Dream Laboratory in Brooklyn.” (69:31)
• Krippner reflects on how the project came about through connections with Mickey Hart and the Dead’s openness to parapsychology. (65:21–68:00)
• The procedure, results (“correct 4 out of 6 times…”), and context (“six nights wasn’t ideal”) are all discussed. (88:52–90:26)

9. Hard Realities: Touring, Postponements & Turning Points

• The grueling logistics and flexibility required by life on the road, and the impact of equipment hauls, show postponements, and family drama (including the devastating fallout from Mickey Hart’s father’s embezzlement from the band). (40:03–74:36)
• Mickey Hart’s imminent hiatus: “he went on what Dr. Stanley Krippner calls a furlough and didn’t return to the Dead stage for more than three and a half years.” (73:29)
• The band’s capacity for change and resilience is contrasted with occasionally dark Northeast “energy”—including a bomb threat that led to a notorious 1971 show evacuation in Port Chester. (91:14–92:58)

10. Audience Experience & Deadhead Culture

• First-person reminiscences about buying tickets, skipping school for shows, the boom of the Northeast Dead scene, and the cultivation of a communal “event” feeling:
  • “The Grateful Dead made every show a special thing…it was an event.” – Jesse Jarnow (63:16)
• The birth of the “touring” fan, fans camped out when shows sold out, and sense of shared experience fostered by both band and audience (90:50–91:14)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On What Skull & Roses Meant:
  • “This is the sound of the Grateful Dead…I loved that sound. I loved the new songs. I liked the country direction, which was a continuation of the Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty vibe somewhat.” – Blair Jackson (11:01)
• On “Bertha”:
  • “Bertha was a song that instantly hit me…I just looked at him as Jerry and Brent were chiming in, too…test me, test me, why don’t you arrest me? And I just…I was beaming.” – David Lemieux (08:03)
• On Port Chester:
  • “After everyone had left the theater but me…three hours after the [band] had left, I found myself…staring at the stage…They were just…they really blew my mind.” – Candace Brightman (36:28)
• On Recording Innovations:
  • “The most important thing was that it made the music sound like it should.” – Bob Matthews (42:56)
• On Changing Lineups:
  • “I just assumed that everything was going to be different all the time.” – Blair Jackson (75:51)
• On the ESP Experiment:
  • “Six nights wasn’t ideal for a proper dream telepathy experiment…but that’s why it was called a pilot study.” – Jesse Jarnow (88:43)
• On Band Ethos:
  • “It’s where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts…that was where the magic was.” – Bob Matthews (83:14)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:11 – The album’s reputation and expanded 50th anniversary reissue
• 03:06 – Guests and episode structure announced
• 08:03 – David Lemieux’s first Dead memory: “Test me, test me, why don’t you arrest me?” story
• 11:01 – Blair Jackson reflects on how Dead’s sound changed post-Live Dead
• 19:01 – New Riders of the Purple Sage segment
• 36:28 – Candace Brightman: falling in love with the Dead at the Capitol
• 42:56 – Alembic’s live recording method explained
• 52:48 – Different takes of “Bertha” analyzed (and how the final take was chosen)
• 65:21 – Dr. Stanley Krippner describes meeting Mickey Hart & the ESP experiment’s origins
• 69:31 – The dream telepathy experiment at the shows: process and implementation
• 74:05 – Mickey Hart leaves the band: the impact and Dead’s adaptability
• 78:25 – Bob Weir’s recollections of writing “Playing in the Band”
• 83:14 – Bob Matthews on the collective magic of the Dead
• 90:26 – ESP experiment results and Deadhead audience scene
• 91:19 – Bomb scare, audience surges, and “the last straw” at the Capitol

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Conclusion

In this episode, the Deadcast team sets the tone for the season by showing how Skull & Roses was both a culmination and a new beginning for the Grateful Dead. The focus on the Capitol Theatre run, the enduring songs, technical innovations, mythos, and even dream experiments paints a vivid portrait of a band—and a community—at a crossroads. Fittingly, the show closes by inviting listeners to “get up and flip the record,” promising much more material and deep dives into Side B and beyond.

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Recommended Further Listening/Reading:

• Skull & Roses 50th Anniversary tracklist and extras (dead.net)
• Book: This Is All a Dream We Dreamed (Jackson & Gans)
• Denis McNally’s A Long Strange Trip (for more on the Mickey Hart departure)
• Journal of the American Society of Psychosomatic Dentistry and Medicine (Krippner et al., "Dream Telepathy with the Grateful Dead")

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[End of Summary]

Transcript

[Rich Mahan]

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[Jesse Jarno]

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[Rich Mahan]

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[Jesse Jarno]

To find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale.

[Rich Mahan]

Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly.

[Jesse Jarno]

Foreign 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. Welcome to the good old Grateful Dead cast. Ladies and gentlemen, we are pleased as.

[Rich Mahan]

Punched to be back and kicking off.

[Jesse Jarno]

Season three with this episode, which begins our deep dive into the Grateful Dead's 1971 live release, Skull and Roses.

[Rich Mahan]

If you didn't catch it, we dropped.

[Jesse Jarno]

An April Fool's Day bonus episode centered around the Pranksters and the Fillmore Acid.

[Rich Mahan]

Test entitled Hug the Heat or the.

[Jesse Jarno]

Story of the First Tape. Please do check it out because it.

[Rich Mahan]

Features new interviews with two of the.

[Jesse Jarno]

Original Pranksters, Denise Kaufman and Ken Babs.

[Rich Mahan]

Highly recommended pun intended. As always, don't forget to drop by our website dead.netdeadcast and check out the extras we have waiting for you to.

[Jesse Jarno]

Explore for each episode.

[Rich Mahan]

While you're there, you can revisit past episodes or catch up on the ones you may have missed.

[Jesse Jarno]

There's plenty there to explore.

[Rich Mahan]

You can link from there to any.

[Jesse Jarno]

And all of the podcasting platforms available, so you can listen where you prefer.

[Rich Mahan]

Please help this podcast by subscribing hitting.

[Jesse Jarno]

That like button and if the spirit moves you, please leave a review. Very kind of you. Thanks very much. We appreciate you sharing this with your friends in season three. We do have another golden anniversary we're celebrating. It's the 50th trip around the sun for the Dead's live double album from 1971, Skull and Roses.

[Rich Mahan]

Recorded by the dynamic duo Bob Matthews.

[Jesse Jarno]

And Betty Cantor Jackson, this set faithfully.

[Rich Mahan]

Captures what many consider to be the.

[Jesse Jarno]

Grateful Dead as we all have come to know and love them. Jerry Garcia felt that this release was.

[Rich Mahan]

The best representation of the band to date, and we couldn't agree more.

[Jesse Jarno]

There is a 50th anniversary expanded edition of Skull and Roses that will be.

[Rich Mahan]

Available on June 25 that includes more than an hour of unreleased music from.

[Jesse Jarno]

The Dead's final Fillmore west show. Several configurations are available, including a 2Lp black and white Propeller Vinyl release.

[Rich Mahan]

Pre orders are open [e-mail] in this.

[Jesse Jarno]

Inaugural episode of season three of the.

[Rich Mahan]

Dead Cast, we are diving into side.

[Jesse Jarno]

A of Skull and Roses. This time around.

[Rich Mahan]

Expect a new episode every other week rather than weekly, which should unfold things.

[Jesse Jarno]

At a pleasing pace. In this episode we have a multitude of guests for you sharing their personal memories about this release, the concerts that.

[Rich Mahan]

Led up to the run captured for.

[Jesse Jarno]

These recordings, and the goings on that shaped the scene and made it the unique experience that it was and is.

[Rich Mahan]

Time to hand over the baton to Maestro Jesse Jarno the self titled live double album the Grateful Dead. Recorded in the spring of 1971 and released that fall. Known commonly by its cover art, Skull and Roses might seem a little unassuming to the modern Deadhead or even the casual listener. The year before the Dead broke through creatively and commercially with their two roots oriented studio albums, Working Man's Dead and American Beauty. Both were viewed classics, which we talked about over the last two seasons of this podcast. And the year after, Skull and Roses brought the remarkable triple album Europe 72. Skull and Roses just sort of sounds like the Dead, but for listening audiences, the music on Skull and Roses was another new good old grateful dead for 1971.

[Jesse Jarno]

Playing in the band Daybreak, Daybreak on the land.

[Rich Mahan]

There had been many beautiful Grateful Deads before they came and went quickly, and if you were a Dead freak, you had to be used to the constant change. To recap a few, but not all. There was the feral young dead of their 1967 debut, opening with the Golden Road.

[Jesse Jarno]

See that girl barefooting alone whistling and saying she's a carry on.

[Rich Mahan]

There was the elegant chamber jamming of Dark Star, which took up the entire first side of live dead in 1969, and of course, the warm acoustic guitars and beautiful harmonies that began Working Man's Dead and signaled the previous new era.

[Jesse Jarno]

Well, the first days are the hardest days.

[Rich Mahan]

Don't you worry anymore dolls.

[Jesse Jarno]

When life looks easy street there is danger at your door.

[Rich Mahan]

Skull and Roses began with a new song by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, Bertha, and it too signaled something new. But this Grateful Dead was different than the others. In at least one fundamental way, this Grateful Dead became the Grateful Dead. For starters, Skull and Roses sold even better than American Beauty and Working Man's Dead. It's the only Dead album my parents owned. More though, if you went to a Grateful Dead show at any point after Skull and Roses came out, it might start almost exactly like this.

[Jesse Jarno]

I had a hard Run.

[Rich Mahan]

Running from.

[Jesse Jarno]

Your window I was on that. Running, running no, I wanna. If you can.

[Rich Mahan]

We'll get back to the song's origin shortly, but it instantly became part of the Dead experience. Here's how Bertha sounded in summer 1987 on the recent Giant Stadium box set. I had a hard.

[Jesse Jarno]

Running from your window.

[Rich Mahan]

Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.

[Jesse Jarno]

Bertha was a song that instantly hit me. And I remember hearing it at my third Grateful Dead show. And I was. I'll never forget this. It was in Rochester, New York, July 2, 1987. And I was. I come in halfway through hell in a bucket. We had parking troubles. Big stadium show. AAA Ballpark in Rochester. Go, Red Wings. And I come in, and I get up on the handrailing on the portal that you walk into the stadium, into the floor. The whole building. The whole stadium was general admission, floor and seats. So I walk in and I'm up on a railing, standing on the hand railing, and Jerry's belting out Bertha. And right as he sings, test me, test me why don't you arrest me? Just at that moment, a security guard pulled me by my shorts. I was wearing jean shorts. As we did. He pulls me by my shorts, and he's like, get down from there. And I just looked at him as Jerry. And Brent was chiming in, too. This is when Brent was singing, too. And Bertha, test me, test me why don't you arrest me? And I just. I was beaming. I was 16 years old. And that brought me right back to hearing this record for the very first time. So Bertha is a very meaningful song to me because the album has been very meaningful to me. And seeing it live, especially that first time I ever saw it live. And then I saw it my. It was the third show. I saw my fourth show a week later in Giant Stadium, which was actually part of the Giant Stadium release a couple of years ago. Another tremendous version. Why don't you dance me?

[Rich Mahan]

More than any other album since their debut, Skull N Rose has returned to the band's core mission of making music for dancing. If you envision the Grateful Dead as a giant tie dyed tent with room for everybody, Skull and Roses is where that version of the Grateful Dead became truly explicit. In 1971, Jerry Garcia described Skull and Roses to Rolling Stone, saying, it's us, man. It's the prototype Grateful Dead basic unit. Each one of those tracks is the total picture. A good example of what the Grateful Dead really is musically rather than. This record has sort of a country, light acoustic sound. And so on like for a year we were a light acoustics band in somebody's head. The new album is enough of an overview so people can see we're like a regular shoot em up saloon band. Blair Jackson was the co founder of the Dead oriented Golden Road magazine and most lately the co author with David Ganz of the excellent oral history this is All a Dream We Dreamed. Blair saw his first Dead show at the Capitol Theater in The spring of 1970, just after live Dead came out. But that was no longer the band he was seeing.

[Jesse Jarno]

Live Dead is what really got me into the Grateful Dead as it was for a lot of people in my era. And yet when Skull and Roses came out, I mean I was as excited as I was by any album that they ever they had put out before then. Just because, you know, this is the band that I was seeing. So this was kind of my Grateful Dead. But it wasn't, definitely was not the Live Dead band that I saw in film. It wasn't quite that thing, that feral creature. But by 71, and I saw a lot of quite a few shows and I think I saw seven shows in 71, which seemed like a lot to me. It was like six more than I saw by any other band that year. I loved the band, I loved that sound. I loved the new songs. I liked the country direction, which was a continuation of the Working Man's Dead and American Beauty vibe somewhat. Even if you were listening to Working Man's Dead and American Beauty as your first dose and you went to see them, I mean short of seeing them play acoustically, you weren't necessarily going to get quite that version of the band. But when you saw the grateful dead from 1971 onward, this is the sound of the Grateful Dead that virtually any of these songs, and I'm thinking of most of them, with a few exceptions, Big Boss man and things like that. But otherwise me and my uncle and mama tried and playing in the band. With the exception of the big jams, Bertha Warfrat, these songs, and Warfrat, particularly with the organ part that was added later, this is the sound of the Grateful Dead for the next 24 years.

[Rich Mahan]

But as intuitive and even normal sounding as Skull and Roses sounds today, the road from American Beauty to Skull and Roses was actually surprisingly bumpy and definitely colorful. Though Sam Cutler doesn't have a credit on Skull and Roses, as the band's tour manager, he probably deserves one. On Working Man's Dead, he received a credit as executive nanny, and that title might apply to Skull and Roses too. The Album wouldn't have happened without him, and when it came out in 1971, he wrote the accompanying press release. We convinced him to read it, and we'll be drawing on it throughout this series.

[Jesse Jarno]

The new Grateful Dead album was recorded on the road and is their first album to include material recorded live on both the east and West Coast. It is the best of some 60 hours of tape and recording. Overdubbing, mixing, Album artwork are all the products of the Dead and their immediate family.

[Rich Mahan]

The Dead family members responsible for the recording, overdubbing and mixing were the recording team of Bob Matthews and Betty Kantor. They'd captured the band at home and in outer space on live dead in 1969, as well as the earthy warmth of Working Man's Dead in the spring of 1970. When we last heard from Bob and Betty at the beginning of last season, they'd headed off for an inadvertent side quest on the Medicine Ball Caravan, the traveling festival that left San Francisco in early August 1970 and made it as far as the UK. Here's Skull and Rose's co producer Bob Matthews.

[Jesse Jarno]

And of course, in the interim, they had also gone off and done American Beauty. I knew nothing of it until I got home from Europe working with, but I had my own treat. I got to interact with George Harrison and turn him on to some great music. So that was a shining side to that experience. I turned him on to Live Dead, but then what was more cool was he turned me on to the very first complete playing through from beginning to end of All Things Must Pass. And not only that, after I had the Grateful Dead's live catalog sent over to Apple Records the day before, he came back and talked about how much he liked the live recording and being able to do live recording. And I commented that, you know, he had his own record company. He sure was in a position to do that. About five weeks later, when we were back home and in Mill Valley, somebody called and said, you should go down to Village Music and check out George Harrison's new release. Well, it turned out that George Harrison's new release actually was three discs for the price of two. He had taken our advice and had given away this third jam record that included people who became Derek and the Dominoes.

[Rich Mahan]

Here's a taste of the jamming from All Things Must Pass, disc three from out of the Blue. When Bob and Betty returned from Europe, it was time to make another live album.

[Jesse Jarno]

Instead of going back into the studio, we started making live albums. We always preferred the Live Dead approach because it sounded like the band playing live. It wasn't always an easy thing to arrange, but given our druthers, the musicians and our audience all preferred how it sounded to them Live from our Live.

[Rich Mahan]

Recordings at the start of 1971, Grateful Dead manager John McIntyre mapped out the year to come on a pair of yellow lined sheets now in the Grateful Deads archives at UC Santa Cruz. Thank you to scholar Joe Jupiel of Jerrybase.com for the pointer towards this amazing document. MacIntyre's notes make visible the new world of the Grateful Dead now made possible by record sales and their continued concert draw. But even before the success of Working Man's Dead and American Beauty, they had blossomed into an ecosystem encompassing other musicians, related creative enterprises and a loose collective of friends and collaborators who might float across any number of roles, the vast majority of them totally and absolutely legal. Here's how Jerry Garcia described it in a December 1970 interview with Ted Alvey on KPPC in Pasadena Everything is overlapping. Our whole scene is just incredibly one overlap after another. First on McEntire's very overlapping agenda was a list of records in the pipeline. A new live album was literally job number one item number one A on the list, but it wasn't exactly the new live album that came to be, nor was it the 1971 the Grateful Dead had planned. The other albums would all have impacts on the one that became Skull and Roses, even the ones that didn't come out. Two of the items on the list, items 1b and 1f respectively, were already in the can. And that was good because virtually nothing else came out as planned. One didn't have a name yet, just called Instrumentals, but it would make it to stores in the fall under the name Hooterol, Jerry Garcia's playful space jazz collaboration with Howard Wales, who had added piano and organ to tracks on American Beauty on Truckin. His overdubbed Hammond B3 helped transform the studio recording from acoustic blues folk to an ecstatic all out boogie, a preview of the band the Dead would become in 1971 we interviewed Howard on the last season of the Dead cast and he sadly passed away just as we were finishing the episodes where he was featured. Here's a little bit more of 1am approach from Hooterol, with much love to the musician that Jerry Garcia called the Kaiser out of the gate. First though, was the self titled debut by the New Riders of the Purple Sage, released over the summer, recorded at the dawn of 1971 and take a last flying look at the last Lonely.

[Jesse Jarno]

Eagle he soar in the lake of the night Shed a tear for the.

[Rich Mahan]

Fate of the last lonely eagle. That was Last Lonely Eagle by the New Riders of the Purple sage and John McIntyre's pick for the first single from that band's self titled debut featuring Jerry Garcia on pedal steel. Here's John Dawson, known as Marmaduke of the New Riders of the Purple Sage from that same 1970 KPPC interview with Ted Alvey. Well, it's another one of those overlapping.

[Jesse Jarno]

Scenes you see, because I used to.

[Rich Mahan]

Be hanging out with these guys when.

[Jesse Jarno]

They were the Warlocks playing down in.

[Rich Mahan]

Magoo's Pizza Parlor, you see.

[Jesse Jarno]

And before that even, and before that even, right, we were all hanging out in Palo Alto in the back of Dana Morgan's Music Shop and in the.

[Rich Mahan]

Tangent, the famous old Tangent on Wednesday.

[Jesse Jarno]

Evenings had these strange scenes going in it. And there was lots of country music.

[Rich Mahan]

And bluegrass being played back then. Members of the New Riders had appeared in supporting roles on the previous three Dead studio albums. None would appear anywhere on Skull and Roses, but the Dead's work with them can be felt in subtle ways throughout. The second song on Skull and Roses appeared in the Grateful Dead and New Riders repertoire simultaneously, in that they were still one band when it happened. Bobby Ace and the Cards from the Bottom of the Deck was a hootenanny like configuration that played around the bay area in 1969 and 1970 and occasionally featured tandem vocals by Bobby A. Sweer and John Marmaduke Dawson. At their first show, they performed Mama Tried, which Merle Haggard had only released the previous summer. Here's how Merle's 1968 original starts, with James Burton on dobro and Roy Nichols soaring in on lead guit.

[Jesse Jarno]

The first thing I remember knowing was a lonesome whistle blowing and a youngin's dream of growing up to ride on a freight train Leaving town Not knowing where I'm bound and no one could change my mind but mama tried and.

[Rich Mahan]

Here'S how it sounded when Bobby Ace joined the New Riders at the Fillmore west on June 4, 1970, from the great dawn of the New Riders box set from the Owsley Stanley Foundation. Marmaduke is channeling the Dobro part on acoustic guitar, but both David Nelson on electric and Garcia on pedal steel resist the urge to copy the song's signature intro.

[Jesse Jarno]

Was a lonesomeness of hope in young UN's dream of growing up to rest on a great dream in town not knowing where I found and no one could change my mind what more.

[Rich Mahan]

Much I When the Dead played it, though Jerry Garcia gradually evolved his own distinct intro riff, it wasn't there all at once. Coming gradually into shape in the summer of 1969 and almost audible when they played it at Woodstock. It's mellow.

[Jesse Jarno]

Last thing I remember knowing Was a lonesome whistle blowing and a young un's dreams of growing up to rise On a freight train Leaving town Never knowing where I was found no one could change my mind But Mama tried By.

[Rich Mahan]

The time they got to work on Skull and Roses, though, they had it down. Here's how Garcia's lick sounded a year and change later in 1971.

[Jesse Jarno]

First thing I remember knowing Was a lonesome whistle blow and a young streamer. Growing up to ride on a freight train Leaving town Not knowing where I've bound no one can change my mind.

[Rich Mahan]

But Mama Tried Mama Tried stayed in the New Riders repertoire throughout the fall of 1970, but they surrendered it to the Dead. Just as the Dead were about to record. Was also time for the New Riders to step out on their own and in the process become self sustaining. New Riders of the Purple Sage, guitarist David Nelson.

[Jesse Jarno]

We went to the East Coast Grateful Dead gig, new writers on the bill.

[Rich Mahan]

And in walks Clive Davis of Columbia Records.

[Jesse Jarno]

The year would be 1969 or 70. Anyway, Clive Davis says, can I see you new writers guys here in a minute. I just want to tell you, we're all like, yes, Mr. Dave, hi, you know, glad to meet you. And he says, listen, okay, I'll just tell you. I want to sign you guys. I want to sign you. Would you think about it? Would you think. I think I said to think about it. Just show me where is signed. And Dawson's going, no, don't talk like that, man. He said, yeah, but I just had the feeling that it's going to be a generous offer. Because later, a little later in the flow of conversation, what I realized is what he wants is the Grateful Death. Columbia had been craving for the Grateful Dead all these years, but Warner Brothers got him. Clive Davis and what's his name.

[Rich Mahan]

Warner Brothers were longtime competitors. Friends, but competitors.

[Jesse Jarno]

Joe Smith. Yeah. Oh, this is Clive sneaking one on Joe Smith, man. And he was always talking about it.

[Rich Mahan]

And I asked Jerry months later, did.

[Jesse Jarno]

He talk to you?

[Rich Mahan]

And Jerry says, yeah, he wants us. But I, you know, I can't just dump Joe Smith. Joe Smith's got us started.

[Jesse Jarno]

And so I can't very well do that, you know. But truly, that's what Clive Davis wanted was. So he settled for the New Riders.

[Rich Mahan]

The New Riders wouldn't be the last artist Clive Davis signed in his attempt to court the Dead. And eventually he would score the Dead when he signed them to Arista for 1977's Terrapin Station. But in the meantime, the New Riders self titled debut helped another overlapping part of the Dead scene flourish. The New Riders album was co produced by Phil Lesh and Steven Barnard, who'd received a co producer credit on American Beauty and had just finished working on David Crosby's if I Could Only Remember My Name.

[Jesse Jarno]

There was so much happening. Wally Heider was in such a busy place around that time and John McIntyre didn't become the manager or Leslie said he was and he approached me and he said, we want you to produce the new writers. And I said okay. And so we started the session sometime. This was like after American Beauty and after Crosby's record.

[Rich Mahan]

Like American Beauty and Oxa Maxoa, the New Riders album had a false start. Mickey Hart had drummed with the band on their first sessions, as he had since they began in 1969. But by the time the New Riders returned to Wally Hiders, they had a new drummer, Spencer Dryden, late of the Jefferson Airplane meeting.

[Jesse Jarno]

Spencer was a big change for me. He was not only an experienced jazz drummer and just wonderful guy. We had a bro thing from the very beginning. He was quite intellectual in his approach. He really, really likes a wide range of music and that helps us a lot. He may have been classically trained, if there's such a thing for drummers. He definitely, you know, at least he got instructions from a master. And he was versatile, very versatile. And he was a good percussionist too, which came in real handy. And we, we started working with him and then just, you know, track after track. The time was no longer a problem. I had some latitude. I was, I was definitely producing. Phil was there, Phil was good. You know, we, Phil and I produced the first one, credit wise. But you know, he, he had total confidence in me. And I did have points on that record. Points for the first time on any of this stuff.

[Rich Mahan]

Oh, wow.

[Jesse Jarno]

Yeah. And they were CBS points. They're kind of weenie points. They're like, you know, 2% of wholesale. Okay. You know, so I sort of felt like a producer and occasionally they would put it on the singles. You can see some of the singles have my name, some of them don't at all.

[Rich Mahan]

Steven Barnard was also the engineer on the other sessions that continued throughout early 1971. They'd spent the fall working on David Crosby's if I Could Only Remember My Name, which We dove pretty deep into during the last season in our Addicts of My Life episode. But even after the album was wrapped and ready for spring release, Crosby, Garcia and others kept playing together.

[Jesse Jarno]

I'm in the studio in Heiders. I'm in kind of not such good shape because of Christine dying. And I don't really feel like I can survive really too well anywhere except in the studio. It's the only place I felt safe, the only place I knew what to do that I wouldn't wind up just sitting on the floor crying. So I get in the studio night, and I wind up staying in there, and we made my solo record.

[Rich Mahan]

The Dead's manager, John McIntyre, was optimistic enough about the continuing sessions that they were represented on his list of proposed projects for 1971. Item 1G, right below the untitled Garcia Wales album. It read, crosby, Garcia, Freiberg, Lesh, Kantner.

[Jesse Jarno]

They would come over and we would fool around. And I had lots of money from Deja Vu, so I could stay in there as much as I want. We'd fool around and then we'd see what happened. And we tried lots of songs. Jerry and I would try to write a song, and it would either make it or it would not. We had things like, you know, several of them that were, you know. Let the mountains be my home this.

[Rich Mahan]

Was recorded the first week of January 1971 at Wally Heiters with the same configuration that John McIntyre expected to make an album, probably with Bill Kreutzman on drums.

[Jesse Jarno]

Gonna make the mountains be my home Gonna make the mountains be my home Gonna make the mountains be my home.

[Rich Mahan]

Robert Hunter would write lyrics for the song and Phil Lesh and Further would perform it in the 21st century. Paul Kantner would finish his own version in 1983. The newest addition to the Perot Gang for 71 was multi instrumentalist David Freyberg, co founder of Quicksilver Messenger Service, probably playing piano on the mountain song.

[Jesse Jarno]

We never finished a song, really. I think all there are are these endless jams of us trying to figure out songs. I think there's a bunch of. There's like about three hours of Loser on there, I think, which.

[Rich Mahan]

Where I learned Loser.

[Jesse Jarno]

Anyway. He was still working that one out because I think what you'll hear there isn't quite what.

[Rich Mahan]

What turned out to be Loser.

[Jesse Jarno]

Anyway, that's one of my favorite songs. I love to play that song.

[Rich Mahan]

Here's a little bit of Loser from those sessions with David Freiberg on viol.

[Jesse Jarno]

Now that.

[Rich Mahan]

That part, the second phrase in it is is slow. It's just half the changes. That's okay. It's perfectly cool.

[Jesse Jarno]

There were a number of them that never really got finished. There were a number of outtakes and a number of unfinished pieces and a number of just experiments and a number of us just fooling around that were still there on tape. And Paul had heard them all. And he started saying, you know, this is a band. He wanted it to be a band. He wanted it to be the planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra, Peril. And I didn't, but he did. We used to be roommates, Paul and I, and Freiberg lived together. We knew each other really well.

[Rich Mahan]

Freiburg had known Kantner even longer.

[Jesse Jarno]

We moved to Los Angeles to try to become a folk duo. We rented a house that was like four doors from the beach in Venice, and that was the end of that, because all we did was go to the beach and David Crosby was there and he come by and intimate that that's where he lived, and he lived there when he was there, but he wasn't there that much.

[Rich Mahan]

Though the early 1971 sessions would sputter out, the project was far from over, with most of the players reconvening back at heiders in late 1972 for the album that would be called Baron Von Tollbooth and the Chrome Nun, credited to Paul Kantner, Grace Slick and David Freiberg. We'll come back to some of the other albums in John McIntyre's plans for 71, but it's time for Item 1A and the main event of this podcast. What was labeled Grateful Dead Live at Capitol. The Grateful Dead adored the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York. The previous fall, Garcia had declared that only two venues in the United States created ideal conditions for the Bill Graham's Fillmore east and Howard Stein's Capitol Theater. An hour north from the city by train and right across the street from the station, it was accessible to the growing group of New York City Dead freaks and expanded their reach into the outlying area.

[Jesse Jarno]

They loved it. We loved it. We loved it. And, you know, but, I mean, there's a lot of theaters in America like that. What was happening in America was you poor Americans are a bit slow sometimes. You didn't realize how good those rooms were, so people were turning them into warehouses. I don't know. You know what I mean? There was like the fox Theater in St. Louis. Fantastic, beautiful. It was a fucking cinema, but what a room. Perfect.

[Rich Mahan]

In 1970, the Grateful Dead played 21 shows at the Fillmore east, sometimes two in one night. Almost all of them, including sets by the New Riders of the Purple Sage. That same year, they played 14 shows at the Capitol. To say they were comfortable there is an understatement. It makes sense that they would decide to record a new live album there. The house crew at the Capitol would yield two important members of the great Trovet family. One of them had actually designed the lighting system at the venue and after the Capitol closed, would become the Dead's lighting director in 1972, remaining in that position until 1995. We are honored to welcome to the good old Grateful Dead cast Candace Brightman.

[Jesse Jarno]

I installed the Portchester Theater lighting system after working at the Fillmore for a few months or years or something, I can't remember. And so I just installed it. I mean, I talked to Chris Leinhart. I talked to all the people who knew about installing lighting systems. I had the. I can't remember this guy's name, but I had a technical director that Leinhardt approved of. You know, we needed a front truss at. No, for some reason, that wasn't a standard lighting position. We needed a front truss in Portchester. So I just got a window washing. You know, those things that go up and down buildings and the window washers stand on them. So I got one of those. And then you could just, you know, load it up and run it up. And then also it was easier to focus because you could just run it up and focus it. But, you know, nobody. I don't think anybody. Nobody did that before. I don't even think anybody did it since. But that's what everybody was doing. It's something it had. You know, we were all just inventing things. I was doing that, and it was a lot of work because I didn't understand that I could hire somebody. So I installed everything myself.

[Rich Mahan]

There was no light show at the Capitol. And the ads made a subtle point of this. The sound is crystal. The lighting's subtle. The ads ready. Perhaps a sly dig at the psychedelic visual extravagances at the Fillmore East. Candace is even mentioned in the Capitol's early advertising. Lighting by Candace. Her last name isn't mentioned. Maybe nobody would believe it.

[Jesse Jarno]

Anyway, as far as I can recall, everybody who worked there was just marvelous. There was so much family feeling. Except for that guy. One of my spot operators was complaining that the other spot operator was shooting at him. And I was like, no. I mean, I'm sorry. I just don't believe you. That's ridiculous. And then I went up after the show to the spot booth. And there was bullet holes in the wall on the other side of jeans. That kind of thing used to happen.

[Rich Mahan]

The first member of the Capitol crew to jump to the Dead was Steve Parrish. Candice would cross paths with him again a few years later.

[Jesse Jarno]

That's why I knew Steve from. And he and I were actually. Anyway, he was my boyfriend for a while, and this man likes to laugh, and he can make you laugh to the point where you have to beg for mercy. And so we just got along great.

[Rich Mahan]

But it was at the Capitol Theater where Candace Brightman really fell in love with the Dead's music.

[Jesse Jarno]

I just loved the Grateful Dead. When they. The first time I lit a show of theirs at the Capitol, I had this kind of attitude like, oh, it's such a big deal about themselves. And so I let the show. And there was two sets. I don't remember how long, but I don't know that after everyone had left the theater, I mean, everyone, the crew, there was nobody else in the theater but me. I found myself standing in the lighting booth staring at the stage about three hours after the. Had left the stage with my jaw hanging open. So, you know, I really. They were just. Well, you know, I don't need to. I don't just say they really blew my mind. I just loved them. I loved the music. And it was different, you know, all these chances to write them, you know, because they do shows at Portchester. One time when I was working at. When the Dead were at Portchester Theater, where I saw a lot of them, because bands who spent a lot of time there at the beginning of their tours and the house opened and the audience was in, and it was about an hour and a half or possibly two hours after the show was supposed to start. So I went down, and there was nobody on stage. So I went down and the Grateful, they were all hanging out in kind of comfortable chairs behind their amps, smoking dope. And I said, you know, clients has been waiting for an hour and a half. You know, not in a nasty way, but just kind of informing them. And. And they said, oh, shit. And immediately got up and came onto stage before I could even get back up to the lighting booth. It was a very casual operation, which is one of the things I liked about it.

[Rich Mahan]

After playing 14 shows there in 1970, sometimes with two on the same night, the band had four more scheduled in December, just before the holidays, December 19th through 22nd. Blair Jackson, who lived in Pelham, just north of Manhattan, was exactly the Dead's target audience at the Capitol. A teenager with open ears, he saw his first ever Dead show at the Cap during their first run there in March 1970. By the end of the year, he was ready to take a step that more and more Dead fans were taking.

[Jesse Jarno]

That's when I first got the notion to go to more than one show in a run. I thought, well, you know, if they're playing five shows or whatever it was six shows, you know, I should go to at least two. And I remember very vividly that I was playing intramural basketball. I was a pretty good basketball player, and we had made the playoffs whenever. I guess it was late November or early December or something. And when I heard that tickets were going on sale up at the Capitol, I missed a playoff game to go get in line and freeze my ass off buying Grateful Dead tickets for the two shows.

[Rich Mahan]

The four December shows sold out instantly. You better believe Gary Lambert was on it.

[Jesse Jarno]

The Grateful Dead had played New York City or its immediate suburbs something like 45 times in 1970. Already. They were on such a roll. And that was part of Sam cutler and John McIntyre's grand design to have.

[Rich Mahan]

The Grateful Dead come to the Northeast.

[Jesse Jarno]

A lot, hit a lot of colleges, and that was so crucial to them building audience. So when they scheduled shows in December, I jumped on tickets right away. I had, I think, front row or second row in the first few rows for each of those.

[Rich Mahan]

But the shows didn't happen, at least not in December.

[Jesse Jarno]

Jerry's one central question always was when I said we'd do this, we'd do that, whatever. He used to say, is it going to be fun? So, yeah, it would be fun, Jerry. I promise it'll be fun. And nine times out of 10, it was, you know, there was a 10%, you know, factor that was a bit of a drag. You know, you can't, you know, traveling and constant work. I mean, the first year that I was with the Grateful dead, we did 183 gigs. Believe me, when you do that, you're fucked. You know what I mean? You come back to Marin county, get off the plane, go home, not wash your clothes, change the clothes for whatever clothes you got there, get up the next day and go back to the airport and start again. So, you know, it's not for the faint of heart, that's for sure.

[Rich Mahan]

Sam Cutler is virtually and perhaps literally describing the Grateful Bed schedule in late 1970. And it's hard to imagine that two cross country equipment halls the week before Christmas was anybody's idea of fun. Sometime in December, Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart made their way into a recording studio, perhaps an early effort for Mickey's Barn to record this radio spot announcing the postponement of the shows. Yeah, hi, folks, this is Jerry Garcia and this is Mickey Hart of the.

[Jesse Jarno]

Grateful Dead, here today to say to you that we're sorry. We're sorry. Yes, we really are. But we're not. The only ones that are sorry are lots of sorry people in this world that we're not playing in partnership. Tell them, tell them J On those days.

[Rich Mahan]

Tell them the dates.

[Jesse Jarno]

Tell them the dates. We're sorry for we're real sorry for oh, yeah we're playing in February instead of December. Hi, Mom. It's not how. It's not Howard Stein's fault. It's our fault. How? He's our friend. Hold it, hold it, hold it.

[Rich Mahan]

Everybody got that? If anybody actually heard that on the radio, let us know. In case you couldn't figure out what Jerry and Mickey were saying. The December 19th through 22nd gigs were being rescheduled for February 18th, 21st. In the new year, two more shows were added. The 23rd and 24th. Six nights in one venue was a lot, and the band planned to make good use of it. From California they brought with them the growing sound team known as Alembic, which included a 16 track recording console and the engineers, Bob Matthews and Betty Kanter. They were coming to make a new live album at the Capitol. They returned to the Bob Matthews method.

[Jesse Jarno]

Of live recording, the Bob Matthews method of live recording, which started way back before Skull and roses in Europe. 72 Live Dead was what started it. And the idea was again, each source, a microphone, a guitar, whatever it was, it had one electronic source and then was transmitted to its appropriate track on the multi track in the back of the truck. So there was no interference as far as phase or any other confusion. And it made perfect sense. The most important thing was that it made the music sound like it should.

[Rich Mahan]

Well, it perhaps might not sound that radical to give every instrument its own track on a live recording. The Dead were the first to actually do it. It professionally engineered live albums had existed for nearly a half century before the Grateful Dead took up the mantle with Live Dead. And much jazz, folk and classical sounded fantastic. But before Live Dead, with the exception of the second disc of Cream's Wheels of Fire, live rock albums tended to sound more like this. And while I happen to love the blown out proto punk assault of the Rolling Stones got live if you want it, it's not precisely high fidelity. Somewhere between the Woodstock festival in summer 1969 and its heavily doctored soundtrack. In 1970, the rest of the rock world caught up with the Dead. Live Dead hit stores in late 1969. The who's Live at Leeds and Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishmen arrived. In 1970, the age of the double live album had arrived. Along with the Alembic 16 track. The grateful Dead arrived at the Capitol Theater with a number of surprises in Tower, including seven brand new originals. They began the first show of the recordings for their new live album with a brand new song that would lead off their new live album.

[Jesse Jarno]

I wonder if you can.

[Rich Mahan]

That was the debut of Bertha, recorded by Bob and Betty on Thursday, February 18, 1971, opening night at the Capitol Theater and recently issued for the first time as part of the Fantastic American Beauty 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition. But that wasn't the version they picked for Skull and Roses. They didn't get it on their first try. Gary Lambert.

[Jesse Jarno]

Well, Bertha just charged right out of the box. It was the first song they played at the Capitol Theater in February of 71. And at first he thought, oh boy, a new song. And then it just one of those songs for which the word rollicking was invented.

[Rich Mahan]

You know, it's just exhilarating and fun and funny.

[Jesse Jarno]

You know, it's got almost comic book qualities to the lyric and an immensely singable refrain. You know, just two years earlier, the idea of the Grateful Dead writing catchy songs was unheard of. And here they're just popping them out one after another. And yeah, Bertha was a great opening to that show. And it got better and better, you.

[Rich Mahan]

Know, another element of the songs not.

[Jesse Jarno]

Being quite as ready at the Capitol as they were in later months. But it was already plenty fun to listen to.

[Rich Mahan]

Bertha was finished by sometime in the first two weeks of December 1970, just after completion of the Dead's eastern tour. Probably right in the window when the band decided to reschedule the Capitol shows. By the holidays, three members of the band had performed Bertha live at least once.

[Jesse Jarno]

I'm on my bended knees Bertha, don't you come around here anymore.

[Rich Mahan]

That's what Bertha sounded like live with David Crosby on vocals, played in the very short lived configuration who performed three or four gigs around the Bay Area in 1970 featuring Crosby accompanied by Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh and Bill Kreutzman. It's from a tape that doesn't sound very good out on the loose among tape traders.

[Jesse Jarno]

There's a lot of tapes, rehearsal tapes, jam tapes, you know, screwing around Tapes. There's a lot of tape. If we'd gotten to do David and the Dorks or Jerry and the Jerks, depending on who got to the microphone first. If we'd gotten to do it more, it. It could have. It could have been really good. Jerry and I, every time we played anything together, it got magical. It was extremely loose when we were doing it, you know, down at the Matrix, we were just around on a night off, you know that. But it was okay. And I don't want to sound cosmic and corny and strange, right? But every time that he and I would sit down with two guitars, something happened. There was something in the room going on. I. I think, you know, we. We all agree Jerry was kind of a special cat in the first place, you know, but, yeah, we did. There was a chemistry and it was very unusual and it lit me up and I just. I love the guy. I would have moved in with him.

[Rich Mahan]

When asked about Bertha, Jerry Garcia sometimes told the story about a giant electric fan of that name who lived at the Grateful Dead's office. This version is from the 1972 conversation with Yale Law professor Charles Reich, known as a Stone Sunday Wrap. A field recording from the Garcia Mountain Girl household in stinson beach, early 1972. Transcribed and published as the Second Half of the book. A Signpost to New Space. Available from Hachette Books and Da Capo Press. Wherever books are sold. We've posted a link to the [e-mail] deadcast. We'll have a lot more of this conversation in episodes to come, I believe. This segment of the recording also features a guest appearance by Anabel Garcia. Bertha is a big electric fan that.

[Jesse Jarno]

We used to have in the office.

[Rich Mahan]

Colossal electric fan. And you plug it into the wall.

[Jesse Jarno]

And it would pop along on the ground.

[Rich Mahan]

It was a good. This huge motor is way overpowered. And the fan was a little out kilter and bounce and rattle and bang, up and down and blow. This tremendous gale of wind. It was the only air conditioning we had. And if you left it for a minute, it would crash into the wall.

[Jesse Jarno]

And chew a big piece out.

[Rich Mahan]

It was like having an airplane propeller.

[Jesse Jarno]

You know, live, you know, running around.

[Rich Mahan]

Robert Hunter had a slightly different view of the lyrics. WLIR's Dennis McNamara asked him about the big electric fan in 1978.

[Jesse Jarno]

This was after the fact. I don't know where that story. I think they started calling this fan.

[Rich Mahan]

In the office that would be run.

[Jesse Jarno]

Around and try and catch everyone and cut their fingers off. They started calling it Bertha but no, this is not true. Bertha. Bertha, I think, is probably some vague connotation of birth, death and reincarnation cycle of existences. That's some kind of such nonsense.

[Rich Mahan]

I wouldn't be surprised.

[Jesse Jarno]

But then again, it might not be.

[Rich Mahan]

Never Trust a prankster. What lyricist Robert Hunter was maybe saying was that the song called Bertha was perhaps about birth and rebirth. Well, it's all those things too. Well, obviously, you know, it's whoever it is that you're.

[Jesse Jarno]

You're. You don't want to come around anymore.

[Rich Mahan]

There's one reference in the lyrics that perhaps signals towards Hunter's intentions.

[Jesse Jarno]

I had a feeling I was falling, falling, falling Lord, I turned around to see Heard Our thoughts are coming back.

[Rich Mahan]

To me now the acoustic Garcia, Weir, Dawson and Nelson at The Fillmore East, May 15, 1970 releases Road Trips, Volume 3, Number 3 with a clue about the kind of voice Hunter perhaps imagined was calling.

[Jesse Jarno]

I hear a voice calling.

[Rich Mahan]

It must.

[Jesse Jarno]

Be our, must be it must be our Lord, it's coming from heaven on high I hear a voice calling.

[Rich Mahan]

Every word or land where we never shall die Sometimes appearing on tape labels as I hear a voice calling it's actually a voice from On High, co written by bluegrass originator Bill Monroe with Bessie Lee Malden. Like Garcia suggested about whoever you don't want coming around anymore, the identity of the voice is up for grabs, but it signals at the existential Yo yo behind the Hard Luck lyrics. And while the debut of Bertha at the Capitol in February remains thoroughly enjoyable, it wasn't the one that would be included on the live album that came out that year. Using the traditional math of the recording industry, the Grateful Dead would ultimately go with take number 13, recorded at the Fillmore East a few months later. To get a feel for what the band was looking for, here's a little bit of take number two. The Second Night at the Capitol, February 19, 1971 released on three from the vault in 2007.

[Jesse Jarno]

All that party.

[Rich Mahan]

It'S a bit faster. Rocketing at almost 100 beats per minute. By take three, they'd slowed it down considerably closer to the 90 beats per minute on Skull and Roses. They would play the song every night at the Capitol, takes one through six, so to speak. The Alembic crew began to record multitracks again at Winterland in March, take seven. The Manhattan center in April takes eight through 10, and a few weeks after that at the Fillmore east, where they caught takes 11 through 15. And over the course of tours throughout March and April, the band would learn how to maximize and ornament one of the most traditional Motown like pockets that Phil Lesh and Bill Kreutzman ever played. I love this groove. Listen to it. When stripped of the intro and vocals, to my ear, it sounds adjacent to the R and B grooves that Garcia was beginning to explore with organist Merle Saunders at the Matrix in the fall of 1970. And Saunders overdubbed some organ on the final album version. On a rough mix of the Bertha overdub session, Merle's B3 organ part is much louder.

[Jesse Jarno]

I had a hard run Running from your window.

[Rich Mahan]

It's a fast driving, fun tune that begins in the middle of the action. A day and night where everything goes wrong. It was a great way to start an album, Gary Lambert.

[Jesse Jarno]

And they also had that device of fading it in, you know, at the start of the album. So it's like it kind of had that feeling of walking into the hall, you know, just as the band is hitting, you know, and getting closer to the stage. I like that little fade in at the beginning of the recording.

[Rich Mahan]

Though the fade in has been removed from digital releases, the album has never been remixed. The latest edition begins with some crowd noise followed by the first chords, all mixed from the final tape, which means the album fade in introduction was added when the original album was mastered in 1971 by Betty Kantor and Bob Matthews, probably with Jerry Garcia.

[Jesse Jarno]

I had a hard rug.

[Rich Mahan]

Running from your window. There is one pretty obvious overdub, though. On the original show. Just as the band is about to hit the final chorus, someone stops singing and coughs.

[Jesse Jarno]

Bertha, don't you come around here anymore.

[Rich Mahan]

And here's how it sounds fixed up with Merle Saunders, B3. By contrast, the next two songs on side A of Skull and Roses were much quicker to capture, though that discounts the considerable time each spent developing in the Dead's repertoire. First, Mama Tried took only two a performance in the first set at Poor Chester and another at the Filmoriste, and it was in the can. The dad had played it many times and knew it well. Big Railroad Blues, on the other hand, only took one take during the 15 shows the band multi tracked. They only played it once on the middle night at the Manhattan Center.

[Jesse Jarno]

Wish I had this. Why? What Mama says.

[Rich Mahan]

Nailed it. In the Grateful Dead repertoire, though Big Railroad Blues manage the feat of both being pretty new and also very old. That was a primal version of Big Railroad Blues recorded live on an unknown date during the Grateful Dead's LA sojourn with Owsley Stanley in early 1966. Just after changing their name from the Warlocks to the Grateful Dead and playing the Acid Tests. You can hear that as well as other rare cuts and Oddities from 1966 on the Fantastic collection titled Rare Cuts and Oddities 1966. But it was a one take wonder in 1966 too. At least that's the only recording that seems to have survived into the permanent record. And except for the electric guitar and the drums and the electric bass and the other electric guitar, the arrangement is actually pretty close to the original by Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, with Pigpen staying faithful to the harmonica melody played by songwriter Noah Lewis on the original recording. Cannon's Jug Stompers were a source of other Dead favorites, including Viola Lee Blues and Minglewood Blues, both written by Noah Lewis as well. Big Railroad Blues manifested gradually on its way to Skull N Roses, given the vast amount of missing tapes between 1966 and 1971. There might be whole missing chapters, but the song surfaced in at least one Family Dog jam session in 1969 and a few acoustic sets in 1970, starting just days before the band joined the Festival Express tour and boarded the big railroad across Canada. There's a fun version with David Grisman on mandolin from the Fillmore east in September that has a groove a bit like Mystery Train and almost nothing like what would end up on Skull and Roses. In the fall of 1970, the band re electrified it with a circular new intro lick by Garcia that ran through the whole tune. It's not that everything went wrong in Port Chester. Bob Matthews remembers the music being solid.

[Jesse Jarno]

There was the Capitol Theater in Rye, which was the first one and which went pretty well. These were follow ups to Live Dead. Live Dead was originally created to be titled An Evening with the Grateful Dead. That was originally the title and what the concept was of, you know, sort of the nightclub 30s Paris. For a period of time, the division was An Evening with the Grateful Dead, which everybody thought was really a cool name.

[Rich Mahan]

His assessment of the music is spot on. But by 1971, and probably long before anybody involved with the Grateful Dead recognized that plans change, everything changes. It would be nearly 30 years before the band officially released any of the Capitol tapes. Archivist David Lemieux has spent as much time with the Capitol Recordings as anybody and is a big fan of them. But to his ears, they don't contain the workings of the live album the band hoped to make in 1971.

[Jesse Jarno]

It worked for Live Dead. They recorded seven shows and they certainly got a double live album out of it. Plus a lot of other really good material. And I think if they were trying to replicate that formula, it didn't work in terms of all of that newer material getting it to record. Those shows were recorded exceptionally well, certainly as well as anything on this album, possibly even better. They were recorded extremely well. But what I found as I've scrutinized them, with a few exceptions, I don't think there was any material on those six shows that rivaled what they ended up including on the album. There were definitely some songs that were played at the Capitol Theater that I think were as good or even better than anything played on Skull and Roses. But they were things that they didn't want to be on Skull and Roses. There's an easy win. There's a wonderful easy win. But they just put it out in 1970. They just put out the definitive version on Working Man's Dead. So in the Dead's history of live recordings there, as far as I can tell, and from what I've heard and what I've read, there was always a philosophy of putting things out. Not always, but putting things out that had not yet been released, or at least released in that arrangement. I think the Capitol Theater shows were an attempt to capture the sound of the Grateful Dead that they wanted to get on record, that they ultimately did get on record with Skull and Roses. Having scrutinized those 13 shows, or 14 shows, 15, I certainly think that there's not a lot. There's nothing on these four sides that they played better at the Capitol Theater, I don't think. And I think they would agree. They chose what they chose for a very good reason.

[Rich Mahan]

It's impossible to know for sure what the band's plan was when they arrived in Portchester and how many of their seven new original songs they were hoping to capture for the live album. There were numerous reasons why the recordings didn't work for their originally intended use. It was a busy week at the Cap, and the shows became legendary for other reasons.

[Jesse Jarno]

The Grateful Dead made Every show was a special thing. Wasn't just another gig, you know, it was like a special thing. It was an event, you know, that would be memorable both for the band, crew and audience.

[Rich Mahan]

One reason the February 1971 shows at the Capitol were memorable is because they were a platform for what is formally known as a pilot study in dream telepathy. Telepathy, conducted by Dr. Stanley Krippner, working with a dream laboratory at Maimonides Medical center in Borough Park, Brooklyn. The story of how the Grateful Dead came to Participate in the dream telepathy experiments connects to items 2B and 2C on John McIntyre's list of album projects for 1971. 2B was listed as Alaroca and Son Alaraka Khan was the master percussionist and longtime tabla player to Ravi Shankar. That was a little bit of the first Alaraka and Son album released in 1972 by HMV India and only available as an import under the name Percussion from India. Tabla in solo in Duet it never found American distribution. An item 2C was an album by Alaraka Khan's son Listen under the provisional name Zack and Friends. The Zach in question was the 20 year old Zakir Hussain. At the very beginning of his long and still flowering association with Mickey Hart in the late 60s Mickey was a student of Al Araka Khan and it was at a party for Alaraka that Mickey Hart first encountered Dr. Stanley Krippner by way of Alaraka's then partner Jean Mayo Millay, herself a psychedelic research pioneer.

[Jesse Jarno]

I went to the concert with Ravi Shankar and Alaraka and Shambhatnagar, the three of them and then afterwards we simply walked over to Gene and Al Araka's apartment. We got into the apartment and Jean prepared delicious Indian food. Number of people were there, friends of Alaraka's and Gene said by the way, there's a student of Olarakus who's going to be coming, he wants to talk to you about hypnosis. Well, that student of course is Mickey Hart. And at some time during the party Mickey arrived and said hello to Alaraka who he was studying tableau playing with. Mickey was a multi percussionist. He played all sorts of percussion instruments. He also played other instruments too. Very, very talented guy. And then Mickey wanted to talk to me about hypnosis so we went off to a private room. Mickey had been using hypnosis with some of his music students and he wanted to make sure he was doing it in a way that would not cause any harm. And of course hypnosis is ridiculously easy to learn. It's hard to do responsibly and competently but it's very easy to use suggestion to get somebody to follow directions. So I talked about hypnosis and I said well what you're doing is a form of imagery rehearsal, well known in psychology. And just make sure that if they seem to be slipping into a very profound altered state of consciousness, you bring them up quickly, do not lose contact with them, talk constantly and you will be fine. That satisfied him and Then just as he was about to go, he turned to me and he said, by the way, do you like rock music? And I said, yes, I know rock music. Just last night I went to hear the Grateful Dead. And then he smiled. Then you heard me play. Without those fateful words, I never would have connected with Mickey Hart. It was a last minute comment. He had no idea that I liked rock music. He had no idea that I would have attended one of the gigs that the Grateful Dead are doing. So that's how I met Becky.

[Rich Mahan]

Stanley Krippner soon found himself as the unofficial house parapsychologist to the Grateful Dead.

[Jesse Jarno]

At one point, during my contact with Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzman, I agreed to come to Mickey's ranch. And I hypnotized both Bill and Mickey and did sort of a two person group mind experiment. And Mickey recorded all of that. And at one point I had the two of them sit with each arm around each other, imagining that they were one mind, one organism while they were playing drums. And to this day, Mickey said that this really accelerated the cooperation that he and Bill drew upon for decades and decades. So that was a group. Mine had turned into people. I had many conversations over the years with Bill and Mickey and Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia. Who are the four band members who I knew the best. And we would discuss a wide range of topics. And if I recall, we did talk about ESP from time to time. And so even though I don't recall the details, the group mind hypothesis probably did point up in one of the conversations or another. Jerry Garcia, of course, was extremely talented, very, very bright, had a wide range of interests, and then he came up with the idea for the Portchester Capitol Theater experiment.

[Rich Mahan]

Here's how the experiment was framed. For the six night study, an attempt was made to use a large number of telepathic agents in a situation which would involve some of the emotional intensity which characterizes spontaneous instances of telepathic transmission. The entire audience attending concerts by the Grateful Dead, a rock and roll musical group, was instructed to telepathically transmit an art print which was randomly selected just before it was projected on a screen above the musical group while they were performing at 11:30 each night at the Capitol. The following slide sequence was flashed on the screen behind the band. One, you are about to participate in an ESP experiment. Two, in a few seconds you will see a picture. Three, try using ESP to send this picture to Malcolm Besant. Four, he will try to dream about this picture. Try to send it to him. 5. Malcolm Besant is now at the Maimonides Dream Laboratory in Brooklyn. Sometimes on the recordings, the band can be heard discussing the images. Hey, is that the picture we were.

[Jesse Jarno]

Going to see in a few seconds? Yeah. That ain't a Rembrandt. That's a Dali, isn't it? Yeah, that's a darling. I was led to believe it. What's the name of that one? What's the name of that one? Man with his head exploding. That's an excellent picture. If you see it in really full, stunning color. A good reproduction or a real thing.

[Rich Mahan]

Everyone's a critic.

[Jesse Jarno]

I had arranged everything. So my task, first of all was to be there on the very first night to make sure things went well. And I was there. I was in the booth with Ronnie Mastrian and saw him flip a coin. And the coin heads would be the target picture and tails would be the alternate target picture. And then he would put the slide in the projector and flash it on the screen. It went off without a hitch. And so at that point, I did not attend any of the other concerts. And I wasn't even in the Dream Laboratory for this reason. I knew all of the possible target pictures because I selected them and made sure that both the control picture and the chosen picture were very, very different from one another. So because I had that knowledge, I didn't want that knowledge to interfere with any of the very subtle telepathy effects that were going on. So we had a staff that ran the laboratory and collected the dreams from Malcolm Besant. And then, of course, they were later typed up, sent to the outside judges. So most of my work was actually done before the concert started. And once they started, I just stayed away and let things take their course. You know, songs out, man going, I'm picking up good vibrations. Okay, well, you know, so that's going from one person to another on a kind of subliminal level. So everybody from my generation at that time period kind of believed in the reality of subliminal suggestion and communications weren't sure how it worked, but that, you know, the Dream Lab experiments were part and parcel of that kind of concept.

[Rich Mahan]

But certainly not all the vibrations at the Capitol Theater were good in February 1971.

[Jesse Jarno]

Well, that was a bad week. Yeah, that was not a good week, you know, on so many levels.

[Rich Mahan]

It was a six man version of the Grateful Dead that arrived at the capitol theater in 1971. The original five Warlocks, who'd formed the band in 1965, plus Mickey Hart, who joined two years later for the first show at the Capitol, they played as the septet, joined by keyboardist Ned Lagin, who he spoke with during a bonus Ned cast last season. But after the first night, Mickey went on what Dr. Stanley Krippner calls a furlough and didn't return to the Dead stage for more than three and a half years. It was complicated then and remained so.

[Jesse Jarno]

But he had personal problems. I think he was very, very, you know, man. His father ripped off the band, for fuck's sake. How could that not be, you know, difficult for you? The band was very nice about it. They didn't. I mean, you know, nobody. Yeah, the ban was weird. They didn't. You know, I just found it extraordinary. If somebody at that stage had ripped me off for $350,000, I wouldn't have just, you know, taken it. I'd have been rather upset, to say the least.

[Rich Mahan]

A lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what have yous. If you're fascinated by this unusual juncture in Grateful Dead history, some nuanced further reading is Denis McNally's authorized biography, a Long, Strange Trip, and Bill Kreutzman's memoir, Deal. Mickey's departure shook up the band on stage, the new songs they were performing, and John McIntyre's best and highest plans. With some adjustment, it also began one of the band's boldest periods, with Bill Kreutzman once again putting the. The back in Bill, the drummer. So it went just like Owsley then. Incarcerated at the Terminal Island Correctional Facility in San Pedro, Mickey stayed on the band's payroll, would come out the other side and resume his musical spot in the band. Blair Jackson attended two of the Capitol shows.

[Jesse Jarno]

It was such a conspicuous absence when it happened, because I remember from previous, and I think people have even alluded to this in books, but, you know, I remember Capitol shows where, you know, he would have relatives sitting in lawn chairs on the side of the stage at the Capitol, they would come up and see him play. So it was always funny. Oh, there's Mickey's. Whoever it was, I guess. I guess his grandfather or grandmother or something like that. And then when he suddenly wasn't there one day, that was pretty interesting.

[Rich Mahan]

But to the early Dead, freaks, change was the single thing to expect. At the next Dead show.

[Jesse Jarno]

I never had any idea which show I should buy for. I wasn't even aware at that. Even though I'd seen the Grateful Dead probably, what, four, five or six times by that point, you know, there was no. I had no sense of, you know, see them two nights in A row or. I mean, I. Since every show I had seen up to that point was completely different than the previous one, always had material I'd never heard before, I just assumed that everything was going to be different all the time. The idea that they played six or seven new songs was, you know, just, oh, here's the Grateful Dead playing more new stuff. This is so great. And it was great. I mean, I so remember the first time I heard Bertha. I thought, holy shit, where is this song Is so great. And Warfrap hit me the same way. It's like, what is that? You know?

[Rich Mahan]

Which brings us to the final track of Skull and Rose's side A also debuted on the first night at the Capitol Theater. Some folks trust reason, others trust in mind. Before we dive into the complete origin story of Plane and the band, we're going to pause now for a cautionary and self aware word from Sam Cutler, which has nothing and everything to do with the story that's going to follow.

[Jesse Jarno]

Remembering the Grateful Dead is a strange thing. You know, it's not like remembering doing an exam at school or, I don't know, all of the things you know, or where you were when President Kennedy died or one of those kind of strange memories, you know, Remembering the Grateful Dead is partly very specific, you know, very, very clear, very specific little kind of things. And then it's also, you know, horribly generalized. So you might be remembering 1973, but you could be remembering 1969. Who the fuck knows, you know what I mean?

[Rich Mahan]

Sometimes those memory gaps are pretty revealing and hint at stories untold. Sometimes they just make things more confusing. There are many places where memories aren't false, but nor are they precise and lead down new roads. With all that in mind, let's listen to this story Bob Weir told when he and the expanded Wolf Brothers did playing in the band on a live stream earlier this year.

[Jesse Jarno]

Year.

[Rich Mahan]

Listen also to drummer Jay Lane. Surprise.

[Jesse Jarno]

So David Crosby came up with the seminal leg. You came up with this. And then he left. We were out at Mickey's barn, so Mickey said, make a song out of that. Next day I had it.

[Rich Mahan]

Okay, record scratch noise. Hold on, Weir. Let's unpack this a little bit. That riff that Weir was playing is known as the main 10 because it's a 10 beat pattern. It began to turn up in Grateful Dead jams early in 1969 and became a piece of music by itself. It can perhaps be heard as a companion piece to the 11, or the exceedingly rare instrumental the 7, that turns up on several audience recordings in this era, including one at the Capitol. Here's what the Main 10 sounded like in the fall of 1969 at the Fillmore Auditorium from the November 8 performance released as Dix Pick 16, along with Item 1A on John McIntyre's list of upcoming projects, the album that became Skull and roses. The main 10 also pertained to item 1C. Rolling Thunder, it read, with Mickey Hart scheduled as producer, it was an album that changed shape a few times. Billboard reported in late 1970 that Hart and Kreussman would be recording an album together in Hart's new Barnes studio in Nevado, whose construction was financed by Douglas Records, the same company scheduled to put out Hooteroll by Jerry Garcia and Howard Wales. Rolling Thunder was the name of a shaman friend of Mickey's, also known as John Pope, who would offer a benediction at the beginning of Mickey's first solo album, whose project kept its original name, Rolling Thunder, and featured Ala Raka Khan, Zakir Hussein, Most of the Dead, the Tower of Power horns and many more. It also included another version of the main 10 so where to stay David Crosby Fit in David Crosby moved down the street from Mickey Hart in Nevada sometime in mid-1969, which is probably the earliest point where Weir and Mickey could have been jamming with him at Mickey's barn. One possibility is that Weir was remembering Crosby's contribution to a different part of the song, perhaps the ringing introductory chords, and those led him to finish up the rest of the song quickly, after which he attached the already existing main 10 as a bridge between sections. Here's David Crosby to remember More not.

[Jesse Jarno]

I did hear about that, and I was stoked that he said it. It's like I said, we did do some jams up in his house that turned out really fun, and I'm not surprised that they developed into songs, you know, because that's what we did. They and I both were looking for any place for a song to start, anywhere.

[Rich Mahan]

The lyrics were by Robert Hunter. In 2002, Guernseys auctioned the song's original handwritten draft, publishing small images of four pages in their catalog, including around 10 alternate verses and fragments. Alex Allen did his best to transcribe them, though only a few were fully legible. Need some ground between us Place where we can stand Place where I can see you while playing in the band Open up your window flying out your door People been forgetting just what we came here for Only hope is reason Take her by the hand, you can usually find her playing in the band. You can check out the [e-mail] we've posted a [e-mail] Deadcast Bob Matthews is a big fan of this song. Allow us to repeat something he told us when we were speaking about Working Man's Dead.

[Jesse Jarno]

Playing in the band, to me became a theme song. Playing in a band is playing together as a band, not as five individuals, but as the collective. And that's what everybody loved about the Grateful Dead was that what you heard from them was the Grateful Dead. You heard their entirety of their. Their individuals plus one. One of my other favorite sayings is that it's where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The Grateful Dead was that whole and it was greater than the sum of its individual components and musicians. And that was where the magic was. And that's something that I got to observe and contribute a small part of for so many years with so much glee.

[Rich Mahan]

Joy along with Bertha, playing in the Band was the only other song on Skull and Roses that the Dead performed at all 15 shows they recorded for the album. The final version was take 10 from April 6 at the venue now known as the Hammerstein Ballroom, where Bertha slowed down between the debut and final recording. A few months later, Playing in the Band got a tiny bit quicker and filled out with darting bass and guitar ornaments. And like Bertha, Merle Saunders added some Hammond B3 organ, especially filling out the main 10 sections. Despite the song's jam roots, it would take more than a year for the song to spring a section for improvisation when it turned up on an album not on John McIntyre's list. Bob Weir's solo debut, Ace, with one of the Dead's all time great studio jams. From there, the song became one of the band's jam Staples through 1995, and for the same reason, an anchor of Bob Weir's projects in the quarter century since.

[Jesse Jarno]

I dug it immediately and having seen that rapid development of something like Sugar Magnolia the year before, from that little sketch that turned up in the middle of Darkstar at the Capitol in June of 70, and then being just this full throated monster by that fall, that was another of those weird moments where it's like Bobby's onto something, you know, and it reminded me, it kind of reminded me of some of Jorma's instrumental stuff.

[Rich Mahan]

I kind of.

[Jesse Jarno]

I actually remember thinking, I wonder if Jorma had a hand in this. Because, you know, like those instrumentals Jorma pulled off, like Man's Fate on the first Hatuna album, you know, it just, it was somehow redolent of that to me. But it immediately got me. And, you know, of course, they played it subsequently in the following nights at the Capitol. And I had that thought of, can't wait to hear this one in a few months.

[Rich Mahan]

And interestingly, you know, I think the.

[Jesse Jarno]

Fact that those songs weren't quite ready for prime time at the Capitol in February becomes evident in the case of.

[Rich Mahan]

Playing in the Band, which wasn't even.

[Jesse Jarno]

Completed at that point. And some of the others were just being settled into. So getting the bulk of that stuff later on in April was probably the wise move. They had more time to develop the material. That said, the Capitol shows were clearly amazing enough that three of them have now been released officially. And they're all solid stuff.

[Rich Mahan]

The hours of tape the Dead pulled at the Capitol might not have been appropriate for immediate use, but it wasn't because they were bad shows.

[Jesse Jarno]

When I look at the set list in the Capitol Theater, I say, well, they kind of played the same sort of stuff every night. And what a drag. But it wasn't a drag at the time. You know, it was just great. I got to see the Dead twice in a week for the first time and loved both shows and had the ESP thing going on with it, too. One of the guys who really helped turn me onto the Dead was a high school classmate at Pelham High named David Alcott. He later became David Champagne and was in the band Tree to Write. And very. You know, he had a career as a singer, songwriter and stuff. He was, like, literally the only person I knew who was really into the Grateful Dead. When I first got into the Dead. And he was a guitarist, so he would sometimes bring his acoustic guitar to school. And, like, during lunch period, he'd play St. Stephen or something. I was so impressed that anybody could play St. Stephen on an acoustic guitar. When he found out I was. It's not related to me going to these shows, but he. He was actually part of the experiment with Krippner. He knew Stanley Krippner. And so every night when I was there at the shows, the two shows that I went to, he was down in Brooklyn at the Maimonides Dream Lab. I guess it's called actually being part of the experiment and, you know, trying to vibe onto whether. Whether, you know, they were trans. I remember things showing up on screen where they would say, you know, concentrate on this mantra, this image, nandala type thing. We're trying to transmit this to the Maimonides Dream Lab. Because that was what the ESP experiment was about somewhat. And so, you know, I got to Talk to him two days later and say, what was it like? Well, it was kind of heavy, and I do feel like I felt some vibrations or whatever. But it was kind of cool that he knew, Krypt.

[Rich Mahan]

Six nights wasn't ideal for a proper dream telepathy experiment. The minimum number was usually eight, and they preferred to have even more. But that's why it was called a pilot study.

[Jesse Jarno]

What we did was to take all six of the nights, all 12 of the potential target pictures, both the dummy pictures and the actual pictures. And as I recall, we eliminated the dummy pictures. We focused on the target pictures for the outside judges, and we therefore had six nights, and we had six pictures. You put them on a matrix, you come up with 36 pairings 6 times 6, 36. And that allows us to do a statistic called analysis of variance. Now, in addition to that, Malcolm Besant did his own judging, and he would take a look at the duplicate slides that we had the next morning, and he would see two slides, two pictures, and then he would choose one of the two as being the one that closely corresponded to his dreams. Okay, there were six nights, and he was correct four out of six times, which is, you know, pretty astonishing. But remember that three out of six times would have been due to chance alone. So he had one night above chance. So that was not the statistic that really yielded us the most dynamic results.

[Rich Mahan]

The original dream Telepathy with the Grateful Bed Paper. The first scholarly work on the Dead first appeared in the Journal of the American Society of Psychosomatic Dentistry and Medicine in 1973. We've posted links to more [e-mail] Deadcast Stanley only attended one of the Grateful Dead's Capitol shows, but he did notice that the band's popularity had exploded since he first saw them at the Cafe A Go Go.

[Jesse Jarno]

There are people that trailed them from city to city, lived on a shoestring, sold snacks, stole LSD marijuana. Concerts just to have enough money to get them by. At the Port Chester venue, a lot of Deadheads were outside. They didn't have the money to come inside and be in the audience.

[Rich Mahan]

In the case of the Porchester shows, it's also very possible that they couldn't get tickets. This came to a boil on the last night, February 24, when someone phoned a bomb threat into the venue. If the Dead loved the east coast, it also came with a very specific energy that could sometimes turn dark. The previous fall, they'd outright cancelled the show in Albany under similar circumstances. But this was the Capitol Theater. Jerry Garcia remembered the incident in 1983 when Paul Grushkin and Eric Nelson of Video west interviewed him for MTV and continued to shoot the shit. After the interview was over, we spoke with Eric about his work as a documentarian for Bill Graham in the early 80s during our dead Ahead bonus episode last season. Thanks to Eric for preserving this. The Capitol Theater in Portchester.

[Jesse Jarno]

I remember that one real well. That was a ticket scam. That was funny. It was so obvious too. Was it?

[Rich Mahan]

Yeah, it was real obvious. We all went to this bar right next door with most of the audience, you know, and I mean, it was just obvious what was happening. It was like good, you know, like an hour and a half maybe of a sort of a break in the evening.

[Jesse Jarno]

And then it was, you know, back.

[Rich Mahan]

In with a whole lot of extra.

[Jesse Jarno]

People after this amazingly eventful run already. That was just like, what next? I don't know if anything the next night could have topped it. It seemed like when we got outside, there were already many people gathered outside who, it turned out, had not been in the building at the time. The bomb scare was phoned in. And the later conventional wisdom, never confirmed, but widely suspected, was that the bomb scare was phoned in by a guy who didn't have a ticket and thought it would be a swell way to get back in when they opened the doors again. And that turned out to be the.

[Rich Mahan]

Case because the attendance seemed to exceed.

[Jesse Jarno]

The capacity by a considerable amount for the rest of the show.

[Rich Mahan]

It was the last straw at the Capitol Theater. A few weeks later, Rolling Stone read an article about the incident. Howard Stein blamed local residents trying to run him out of town. Either way, it wasn't a great look. And they were the last dead shows at the Capitol. The venue would reopen in the 90s, then be refurbished in 2011 by Peter Shapiro. It's a different world.

[Jesse Jarno]

So there's a lot of places like that around America. Unfortunately, quite a few got pulled down, but not any longer. Because what. What civic authorities in various towns realizes is if you have a Fox Theater or a Capitol Theater, right, that the. That can lead to the regeneration of a downtown area. Every time there's a Show on there, 3,000 people are coming into a downtown area that was otherwise, you know what I mean, falling on its ass, you know, and not got any revenge. So, you know, so you get a club open next door for the late night people, or you get a restaurant so that people can go and eat before they go to the show. All those little side things, you know, if you're pumping a few thousand people into a downtown area every week. It has a regenerative effect, so local councils and people like that became supportive.

[Rich Mahan]

Let's hope municipalities keep recognizing that. Time to get up and flip the record.

[Jesse Jarno]

Lots of amazing info in that episode, and we've got a ton more to share with you as this season unfolds. Don't Forget to visit dead.netdeadcast to catch the visuals pertaining to this episode.

[Rich Mahan]

We always try to include a little.

[Jesse Jarno]

Something extra for you there.

[Rich Mahan]

Thanks very much for tuning in.

[Jesse Jarno]

We'll see you down the golden road. Executive producers for the good old Grateful.

[Rich Mahan]

Dead cast Mark Pincus and Doran Tyson.

[Jesse Jarno]

Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Luke from you. All rights reserved.