C (4:09)

My original pressing that I got, 1985, spring of 85, I paid $30 for it in 85. Yeah. And this is in Canada. I remember exactly where I got it. And I couldn't believe I was finding it because, you know, I'd always wanted this record. There were many songs on this album that I didn't know. This was. I mean, at the very beginning of my tape trading Days, which is to say the first 20 tapes I got in 1985, this was around that same time. I had a couple of albums. I had Working Man's Dead, I had Skeletons from the Closet, I had a few others. I was a little confused because I knew that's it for the Other One, because I did have Anthem of the sun at the time, one of the.

B (4:47)

First kind of four or five albums I had.

C (4:48)

But I didn't know what this Other One business was.

B (4:50)

David wasn't alone. Gary Lambert, who wrote the notes for the new 50th anniversary skull and Roses reissue, bought the album on the day it came out. And it threw him for a loop, too.

C (5:00)

The Other One is intriguing because when the album appeared and I saw that title, the Other One, it may have been the first time I ever saw it detached under that title from the that's it for the Other One suite, on which it had been introduced on Anthem of the Sun. And so I always thought it was.

B (5:17)

The Faster We Go, the Rounder we.

C (5:18)

Get, which was the title that they begrudgingly affixed to it because Joe Smith.

B (5:22)

Said these tracks need titles.

C (5:25)

So that in itself, it being released as a freestanding cut was intriguing to me.

B (5:31)

Before we get too far out, let's do a quick breakdown of the music that appeared on Anthem of the sun, labeled that's it for the Other One. First, beginning the suite, there's the section known as Cryptical Envelopment with music and lyrics by Jerry Garcia.

D (5:45)

The end of the day they waited.

E (5:50)

The sky was dark, dark faded silently.

C (5:55)

They stated he has to die.

B (6:05)

Then on Anthem of the sun, there's the section labeled Quathlebit for Tender Feet, which I'm fairly certain is this. That's the sound of three or four or five or more Grateful Deads layered on top of one another. It's sort of the story of Anthem of the sun compressed into 25 seconds and not one for today after that. There's the section on Anthem of the sun that's called the faster we go, the rounder we get.

E (6:50)

The faster you go, the rounder you get the faster you go, the rounder you get.

D (6:55)

What?

B (6:56)

It's credited to Bob Weir and drummer Bill Kreutzman. After that, there's a reprise of Cryptical Envelopment, followed by a section called We Leave the Castle, a studio creation by Tom Constantin combining tape music and some prepared piano involving the piano, strings and a gyroscope. So when dropping the needle on side two of Skull and Roses, the very first thing you hear, another faded in side beginning, is the tail end of Cryptical Envelopment. And then Bill Kreuzmann's first solo drum break. Though Bill Kreutzman and Mickey Hart have drummed together for the better part of a half century now. Sometimes called the Rhythm Devils, Bill Kreutzman wasn't just a drummer in the Grateful Dead after all. He was credited on the first album as Bill the Drummer, and he occupied that role for the band's entire 30 years. The other one was one of his big moments, too. He contributed the 3 over 4 rhythm that opened the song up rhythmically.

C (8:46)

And it's also one of the first places where you become really fully cognizant of the Phil Bomb coming in at the end of that Kreuzmann solo.

B (9:07)

Phil Lesh's rolling bass intro to the Other one was one of several new developments in the song since its writing four years earlier. The bass intro first appeared not that long after the band recorded the suite for Anthem of the sun, first turning up on Recordings in January 1969.

E (9:23)

The faster you go, the rounder you get the faster you go the round.

C (9:25)

The rounder you get yeah, you know.

B (9:28)

It'S one of those pieces that just.

C (9:29)

Lent itself to stretching out.

B (9:32)

Weir always said that that was a Coltrane inspired feel.

C (9:36)

You know, something like maybe Train's version of Afro Blue, or It was suggested by that kind of cording and that kind of rhythmic propulsion. Bobby was listening to a lot of Coltrane when he was making really his first stabs at writing and that was. That was his first real. That was his coming out party as a songwriter.

B (9:54)

Originally, the stretching involved moving and bending and building and jamming around the song's distinct groove. While it was almost always surprising, the thrills are very much in the dynamics, like this version from March 1, 1969, the Fillmore west, recorded during the shows that yielded live Debt. Every now and then, the band would bend the triplet rhythm of the other one itself. But it wasn't until the very end of 1970 that that became a regular feature of the jams. When they recorded it for Skull N Roses in the spring of 1971, it almost counted as a new song. The version on the album came from April 28th at the Fillmore East. Now they pushed it further and further.

E (11:02)

The faster you go the rounder you.

B (11:03)

Get the faster you go the rounder.

C (11:05)

You get the faster you get.

B (11:36)

Along with the epic jams, which could be the most memorable part of a Grateful Dead show during any year until Jerry Garcia's death in 1995, the song's lyrics provided a link to the band's mythology and history. Here's an alternate verse. Performed October 22, 1967 at Winterland, the song's first known performance, and released on the 50th anniversary edition of Anthem of the sun in 2018. Taught me how to read and write.

C (12:08)

That's all Minute for the song.

B (12:30)

Thanks to dead cast hero David Yans and Marty Martinez. Here's Bob Weir telling the story behind that verse with a little help from Phil lesh. Recorded in 1995. Listener Imagine yourself in the Haight Ashbury in 1967.

F (12:45)

I was in the.

C (12:46)

On the third floor of our place in the Haight Ashbury. And there was this cop who was illegally searching a car belonging to a friend of ours down on the street. The cops used to harass us every chance they got. They didn't care for the news back then. And so I had a water balloon and what was I going to do.

D (13:04)

With this water balloon?

C (13:04)

Come on. He just happened to have a water.

D (13:08)

Balloon in his hand.

C (13:09)

See, I wasn't going to bring that on. And so I got him right square on the head and a prettier shot you never saw. And. And he didn't. He couldn't. He couldn't tell where it was coming from. But then I had to go and go downstairs and walk across the street and just grin at him, sort of rub it in a little bit. Smiling on a cloudy day I understand.

D (13:33)

That becomes clear.

C (13:38)

At that point he decided, to hell with due process of law. This kid's going to jail. He didn't have a thing on me. It never got to court. But on the other hand, I did get thrown in jail and beat up a little bit. I still want to go back. You just happened to have that water balloon handy, kind of just like standing there.

B (13:59)

He was the guy who was breaking the lot.

C (14:00)

Yeah, the cop was coming around, coming around, coming around.

B (14:16)

But it's the song's second verse that casts the song's biggest shadow, though he would sometimes remember the dates the other way around. Weir began singing this verse live in late 1967, and it became a tribute to a friend of the band who died suddenly a few months later.

C (14:30)

I was not done with it. I was wondering what the song was about. And then one night it sort of came to me. Basically, it's a little fantastic episode about my meeting Neil Cassidy. Escaping through the lily fields I came across an empty space.

B (14:51)

It trembled and.

C (14:52)

Exploded Like a bus stopping its place the bus come by and I got home that's when it all began.

B (15:05)

There was God. The bus was the Merry Prankster's psychedelic school bus. Further. And Cowboy Neil was Neil Cassidy. Born in 1926, Cassidy was the legendary Beat Generation trailblazer, close comrades with Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the hero of on the Road under the name Dean Moriarty. In the early 60s, he'd become part of the Merry Pranksters. We've posted a link to Steve Silberman's great history. Who was cowboy Neil? @dead.net deadcast here's how Jerry Garcia remembered Cassidy in a 1995 interview.

E (15:47)

He was the first person I met who he himself was the art, you know what I mean? He was an artist, and he was the art also. And he was doing it consciously as well, you know. So he had. He did things. He worked with the world.

B (16:01)

One of those arts involved driving the Merry Prankster's bus further. But even getting into a car with Cassidy was an adventure.

E (16:08)

Driving in San Francisco, he would go down those hills, you know, like at 50 miles and at 60 miles an hour, and do corners, you know, blind corners, going down those hills, disregarding anything, stop signs, signals all the time, talking to you and maybe fumbling around with a little teeny roach, you know, trying to put it in a matchbook, you know, and also tuning the radio, maybe, and also talking to whoever else is in the car, and it never seeming to ever put his eyes on the road, ever. You know, and this is like you'd be just dying.

B (16:41)

Here's how Garcia described part of Cassidy's power in 1972. Paul Foster was another one of the merry Pranksters.

E (16:48)

If you create space around you enough, you can be awfully crazy. I've known a couple of people who were really far out, but they always had plenty of room. Cassidy always had a lot of room and he was really pushing it. And Paul Foster. Shit, you know?

C (17:02)

Now let me ask you this.

E (17:03)

You know, walking down the street with ice skates on is really pretty far out, you know what I mean? Everywhere with ice skates, right? You know?

B (17:11)

That was from the book length interview published in 1972 by Rolling Stone, Straight Arrow Books. Under the title A Signpost to New Space. Thanks to many magical forces. We found a recording of the book's second half recorded in early March 1972. We've been hearing a little bit from it already. You can acquire A Signpost to New Space from Hachette Books and Da Capo Press, wherever books are sold. We've also posted a link@dead.net deadcast. Thanks to the representatives of Strayed Arrow and the heirs of Charles Reich for permission to use this audio. We have here Jerry Garcia.

E (17:55)

Hello. Hello.

B (17:56)

And Yale Law Professor Charles Reich.

C (17:58)

Hello. Hello.

B (17:59)

Charles Reich was a professor at Yale Law and the author of the 1970 bestseller the Greening of America about the emergent counterculture. His students during those years included both Hilary Rodham and Bill Clinton. He was also an enormous Dead fan and Rolling Stone invited him to interview Garcia. In the summer of 1971, just as the Dead were mixing Skull and Roses with Rolling Stone publisher Jan Wenner. Reich visited Jerry Garcia and Mountain Girl in Stinson Beach a few times. After the interview's publication, Reich returned by himself for a follow up session. And we do mean session.

E (18:33)

Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello.

B (18:36)

Jerry Garcia, Grateful Dead guitarist, and Charles Reich, Yale Law professor, make for charming counterparts around the tape recorder. The laugh afterwards is Mountain Girl. The gurgle is Anabel Garcia.

C (18:48)

These things just make me insecure.

E (18:51)

I know them real well. I mean, I. I love them well, I have hair.

B (18:59)

Charles Wright gets right to it with one of the more astonishing lead in questions I can possibly imagine asking anybody.

C (19:05)

I want to talk about evolution because I've been thinking about it and I've been trying to do. And I just. And I've been. I think I've been seeing it everywhere.

E (19:15)

Yeah.

C (19:16)

And I want to compare notes whether I'm seeing it or making it up.

B (19:20)

If you'd like to check out Garcia and Reich comparing notes on evolution. I really do recommend reading a signpost to news space, but today we're going to jump around a little bit to keep things, you know, relevant to the Grateful Dead.

E (19:31)

There's something I once saw in a hallucination of mine.

B (19:37)

As much as possible. Anyway, we'll get back to that hallucination momentarily. The conversation zigzags around, as you might.

C (19:43)

Expect, but I'm talking about, like, communication frequency. Like we're on a frequency around here.

E (19:49)

We calls this a stoned rap.

B (19:51)

Garcia and Reich touch on a lot of different concepts, and Garcia says something pretty fascinating with a slight correction from Mountain Girl. The subject of this stoned rap is lies and what happens to them.

E (20:01)

The thing that I worry about with things like these interviews, when you're taking a piece of energy at a fast, a huge, incredible. You know, a high speed is like physics. You know, the faster, the faster you go, the rounder you get. You know, the faster you go in the fourth dimension, you know, the bigger you get. As the thing approaches light, the speed of light, it gains mass, right? Okay, that's it. And that's like when you're talking about energy in the history. The fast moving history stream. When you stick something out in there, it's gaining energy, it's gaining momentum at the rate of the time flow, so to speak. And now things are going fast. So, for example, well, consider how much of how much weight the Beatles put out there, or Bob Dylan, you know what I mean? Or Herman Hess, or, you know, anybody who stuck their head up in this last century, bam, you know, so if you put a lie out there, you know, and it accumulates energy, what you've got is, you know, you know, well, we're living in a state of lies gone, you know, accumulating, accumulating vast energy, you know, and the result is the incredible chaos that faces civilization.

B (21:13)

You know, like Charles Wright just said, whoa, here's a little bit more of the other one Jam from Skull and Roses to think about that. And now back to Jerry's hallucination.

E (21:49)

The place where my mind's eye centralizes from, say, the ethos, you know, out of which it appears is like someplace that's like outer space and it's like a planetoid and it's cold, but it's going extremely fast. And it's kind of like the wind of space. And there's a. There's infinite emptiness around it, but the kind of emptiness that you experience in that, you know, space, you know, 360 degrees, stars and galaxies and shit. That's like. Okay, now the place that, that, that, that during that particular hallucination there was kind of like an evolutionary or a, or a cycle running thing. And, and that was one cycle. And that was the cycle, the. Now the cycle that I'm in now.

B (22:38)

Say I have some follow ups, but it's a little late, cutting slightly to the chase.

C (22:43)

So your music is space. I've always known that.

E (22:46)

Yeah. And, and other things are there too. I mean, and you know, I couldn't, I mean, I can't really go into.

C (22:53)

It, but space is tremendously important.

E (22:55)

Right, right. So you're like a space traveler in a way.

C (23:00)

Yeah. Right.

E (23:01)

And I'm essentially singing space songs.

F (23:04)

Right.

C (23:04)

That's what I'm supposed to say.

E (23:05)

Space blues.

B (23:08)

Space blues. It puts a different spin on this comment from Bob Weir addressing viewers watching on KQED television during the band's New Year show at Winterland as 1970 turned into 1971, the year that would produce Skull and Roses.

C (23:23)

Well now for the sake of you TV viewers out there who aren't here and are maybe new to this kind of thing, this is what a spaceship.

F (23:29)

Looks like in construction.

C (23:34)

Complete when it's malfunctions and we're experiencing our first here. That being that Phil's base has just passed the astral zone and we're going to try to bring it back.

B (23:48)

If the Grateful Dead were singing space blues and their live show could be described as a spaceship in construction, then their equivalent of NASA was unquestionably the company known as alembic. Formed in 1969 and named by Owsley Stanley after the alchemical vehicle of transformation, they'd evolved into their own form of spaced out ground control. When audience members were watching the grateful dead in 1971, as the performances on Skull and Roses were recorded, they weren't just looking at and hearing the musicians on the stage, they were also looking at and hearing instruments, amplifiers, and an entire sound system that had been lovingly and painstakingly hand wired by the team of artisans coalescing around the Dead. One of the early players in Alembic was Skull and Rose's co producer, Bob Matthews.

C (24:34)

It started Alembic as a wood shop making cabinets that we designed ourselves that were made out of 15 ply Birch ply so that they were very solid, they had very high mass and didn't resonate and shake, rattle and roll. They were very, very solid.

B (24:55)

One Alembic employee during the Skull and Roses era was Rosie McGee. During her decade as part of the day to day Grateful Dead scene, among other roles, Rosie served as photographer, translator, industrial textile artist, and assistant to Dead management, as well as working in similar roles for other musicians. In her memoir, Dancing with the dead, available from Rosiemcgee.com, she tells her story, illustrating it with many of her fantastic unseen photographs. And probably many that you recognize too. We've posted links@dead.net deadcast as well. We are overjoyed to have Rosie McGee on the Good old Grateful Dead cast. She'll be joining us throughout today's episode and beyond.

D (25:34)

Alembic was founded in the warehouse that the Dead had in Nevada. They had this big warehouse where they kept their gear. They had a little recording area and Bear was around all the time. And Bob Thomas, who designed the Alembic logo and the Steely, lived there as kind of the. The night watchman. And Ron and Susan Wickersham lived in a shed in the parking lot. And Ron was the other brain behind all of the Alembic innovations. And so the Alembic started out as a kind of an R D workshop for the Dead. And they came up, Ron and Bear came up with all kinds of things that they tried out and they'd present them to the band and the band would say, okay, well let's try that. Like, you know, let's take this guitar and change it up or put this in the app or something. I don't know what. Whatever it was, you know, they, they tried all these different things. Well, over time, Ron and Susan were both doing work for the Dead without getting paid. And Susan, being the astute woman that she even was at the time, which was, she was quite young, realized that that couldn't go on. They were working really hard and not making any money at all, you know, living in a shack in a parking lot. So she went down to the office supply store in Nevada and bought a pack of ready forms. And she'd been keeping track of Ron's and her hours all along. And so she just made up a bunch of bills and build the band, you know, and that was the beginning. That was actually the beginning of Alembic as an official business entity. Pretty soon after, though, they came up with the name and they. It became an actual business and it evolved. I mean, it's still existing now, which really points to Susan's incredible business acumen, starting with something that simple.

B (27:56)

It was through Rosie that Alembic recruited the newest member of their crew, a guitar maker named Rick Turner. He'd come out of the Boston folk scene and toured with Ian and Sylvia in 1965 before they went on paternity and maternity leave, respectively. Based out of New York, Rick's band, Auto Salvage, recorded one album for RCA before Rick headed west. We gleefully welcome to the Dead cast master guitar maker Rick Turner.

C (28:21)

My good friends are the band the Youngbloods. I had shared apartments and so on with Banana, a keyboard player. Keyboard guitar player. I'd played guitar in coffeehouse with Jerry Corbett. Jerry Corbett left the Youngbloods. I wound up roadying for the Youngbloods and during their sound and then also doing studio work with Jerry, who got a production contract to basically develop talent. So, for instance, we did Don McLean's first album before American Pie. There's an album called Tapestry, and I played bass on it, Jerry produced it, and we did a number of other things. We did demos with the band that became the Joy of Cooking, and several other artists that we worked with. So the Youngbloods office was out in Point Reyes, where I was living. The manager was a guy named Stuart Cutchens. His secretary was a woman named Florence Nathan, better known now as Rosie McGee. And so I had started on my quest to become an electric luthier, moving into making pickups and building instruments in a little shop in my house. And Rosie saw what I was up to. Jesse actually commissioned the first electric instrument from me. I built a base for him, and Rosie saw it and said, hey, you know, you really ought to see what my old man is up to, and, you know, what Phil and the Dead are doing and the people around them. I said, well, great. So I got the invite to go out to the Pink Warehouse in Nevada and meet everybody. And it was pretty amazing. You know, I was warned, be careful of what you drink while you're there. But I didn't get dosed. And I met everybody and showed them what I was up to. And it was very complimentary to what Bear, and primarily Bear and Ron Wickersham were up to.

B (30:38)

We're not going to go totally down the rabbit hole into every single piece of gear that Rick built or modded for the Grateful Dead over the next half decade and beyond. But just as one example of the ways that he and Alembic hit it off, he had started to make his own electric guitar pickups.

C (30:52)

I had started making pickups. Ron had figured out a way to measure the frequency response of pickups, and mine were way beyond anything he'd measured in terms of. Of wideband frequency response. So we started this process of pretty carefully changing One thing in a design and measuring. Change it again. Measure. Change it, measure again. So we got the general idea on how it works in terms of the coil frequency response of a pickup. Now this is stuff that I'm not going to say everybody knows now, but is. Is well known now. But this was, you know, bear in mind, this is 1969. Nobody was writing about this stuff. The only people that knew jack shit about guitar pickups were people like Les Paul and a few others. Really not very many people. Bill Lawrence is definitely one. Dan Armstrong. The general knowledge that we have now just wasn't there. We had to figure this shit out. Well, there was measuring it, then there was figuring out just how to physically make the damn things. You know, it's like, what do we do here? You know? You know, you gotta understand that in 1969, 1970, you couldn't buy a DiMarzio pickups or Seymour Duncan pickups. And, you know, the only thing that you could possibly get your hand on would have been De Armans. You know, Gibson wasn't selling pickups, Fender wasn't selling pickups. So then there was this whole process thing of figuring out, okay, well, how are we going to make these things? And what kind of machine do you wind the coils with? And da, da, da, da, da. I mean, it literally, it's. For me, it started off literally, hand winding. People talk about hand winding pickups these days mostly as a crock of shit. But I started by literally winding, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, you know, get up to about 594 turns like this. And then comes my wife. Oh, yeah, honey. Oh, how many turns was it? Yeah. Anyway, you know, so then I adapted a sewing machine motor and, you know, and like, I found a counter from a thing that measured fishing line, you know, crazy like that. And somehow or other it counted two for every actual turn. So I had to divide by two and, you know, and then I had to learn how to cast plastic.

B (33:38)

As I said, we're not going to go under the hood of every piece of gear that Rick modded for the Dead. But they were heady innovations. The Dead were no strangers to modified gear, having started with Owsley Stanley's PA experiments in 1966. But by the time the Dead recorded Skull And Roses in 1971, the majority of the equipment in their stage setup was handmade by Alembic, almost down to the last bit of soldering. And that balance would shift even more in the next years.

C (34:04)

And so when I showed up, you know, the team was really. It was Ron and Bob and Betty. And then I was sort of the missing link, you know, And Bear realized that Rick is the missing link. He's the luthier. You know, I think one of the things that he was impressed with was that I was. I was working in brass. I was making brass string nuts, I would make brass bridges, I was making tail pieces. So he got it that I was basically a woodworker, but also a musician. And that's one of the ways in which I connected with Jerry and the other guys in the band. They knew that I was, you know, when I was starting to do all that stuff, I was also a recording musician. And, you know, I produced an album with this guy, Jeffrey Kane, and. And, you know, so I was used to PA systems having mixed for the Young Bloods and toured with them and played through them. I was used to recording studios, having started recording in 65 and, you know, I. I think I'd done. By the time Alembic got going, I'd already recorded on four albums, I guess, as a musician.

B (35:26)

In the summer of 1970, Alembic was hired to be the sound team for the Medicine Ball Caravan, a cross country tour promoted and paid for by Warner Brothers. The Dead bailed at the last moment, but Alembic went along, including engineers Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor. The band stayed home and recorded American Beauty, which you can hear about on the last season of the Dead cast. Both Rosie McGee and Rick Turner were along for their own rides, too, each with their own incredible adventures. We're not going to get to Detour into today, though. Check out Rosie's book, Dancing with the Dead for more on her time with the Medicine Ball Caravan. When the Caravan returned from Europe, both Rick and Rosie went to work at Alembic's new headquarters. They'd relocated from the warehouse near the Nevada Air Force Base to San Francisco, just west of the Haight in the Inner Sunset. Guitar builder Rick Turner, Ron and Susan.

C (36:16)

And Bob broke away from the Dead's warehouse, found a place in San Francisco, and I fairly quickly came in and established a shop in the basement. The first half of 1970, I was working partly in a guitar repair shop in San Francisco, but then also in this basement shop which became known as Olympic. And I'd go out and do PA gigs and, you know, a little bit of everything, you know, help out kind of as a third engineer, not as. Not even a second engineer on the recording sessions, but, you know, because the gear didn't intimidate me. I was used to it All. And so it was fine.

D (37:01)

That's where I worked for them. 320 Judah. I came in as the receptionist, office manager, kind of one woman show for a purchasing agent for all of the electronics and the wood and the different stuff. Alembic started out, like I said, as an R and D lab and then morphed over the years into taking on more and more parts of dealing with instruments and speakers and PA and you know, at one point they were recording live, recording studio recording, building cabinets, designing new electronic items like preamps and pickups and I don't know what, customizing guitars and basses, which is how that started out. And then eventually they started making their own from scratch. All I remember about Judith street is that it was really small. It was really dark. It was in the basement of this art deco building. I think the building's still there. You can drive by it and look at it and down. You know, there was like a little driveway that went down into the garage and the garage door had been nailed shut or whatever. And they had put a people door in the middle of the garage door. They had cut it out and turned it into a walk in. And behind that there was no windows or anything. Then you go down one more floor into the basement that had a little bit of windows. And that was the shop where they did repairs and guitar modifications and eventually started building cabinets.

B (38:52)

One of the Alembic clients on Judah street was David Crosby, who worked with Rick Turner to build the 12 string electric guitar of his dreams. Oh, hey there, Cross. Didn't see you come in.

C (39:02)

He and I created a 12 string. We were, you know, completely not satisfied with the available electric 12 strings particularly, you know, I like how Rickenbacker sound, but they're too narrow in the neck and way too tiny, you know, grouping of strings for me to play. So we took a Gibson 350 or 335 like that model for a while they made. Just for a very short period of time. Gibson made a rosewood laminate 350 instead of a maple. And we got one. He built a big ebony neck onto it. And it's as near as I could tell, the best electric 12 string in the world. It sounds like a glass avalanche. It's just crazy. He. He still uses the guitar. It's the first guitar I believe that ever had LEDs put in the side of the neck. They still work. I don't know how David talked Gibson out of the body. You know, he had Mario Martello sort of the, the grandfather of Lutheri in the Bay Area, Mario made the neck and then I took it over and inlaid the peghead and did the LEDs and made the pickups and Ron Wickersham did the electronics and I made a tailpiece for it. Welded, bronze tailpiece.

B (40:29)

But there was trouble in River City.

C (40:31)

Some other tenant of the building had moved out and ADT alarm company theoretically turned off the alarm system to their place. Well, they didn't. They turned off the alarm system to our place and then these thieves broke in. And of course the alarm didn't go off because ADT had turned it off. And it was weird because our place a was incredibly obscure. It'd go down this, this driveway with, you know, building on one side and a wall on the other. I don't know how they knew we were there or what was in there or maybe they didn't. Maybe they just, you know, here's this little alley. Let's, let's see what's at the end. Oh, you know, hey, we can get in here pretty quick. So they sold Crosby's 12 string. My 12 string was over there being worked on and it got stolen. It got stolen right out of the shop. And they came to me totally shame faced and said, oh, we don't know what to do. It got stolen and we feel terrible. And we're calling every music store in the Bay Area and we want to get it back and we'll make you another one if we have to. It's just terrible. And they were just shame faced, they were crying, they felt so bad. I was the one that had to tell him, you know, not a happy David, face to face. I mean, you know, I mean, just man up and do it, you know. And then Billy Stapleton owned this music store, Bananas at Large, which is still alive and now is in San Rafael. And I got this call from Billy and he said, you know, I have this guitar here that I think might have come from you. It's got the Olympic logo in the peg head, it's a 12 strand. Oh my God. Said, yeah, these two kids came in and put it up on the counter. And I said, you know, I think I have to make a phone call. And the kids went stumbling out the door like needing to buy ice cream or something, you know. So we recovered the guitar and I didn't call Crosby. I knew he was recording at Wally Hyder's. So we went down and we set it up in the studio with lights on it so that, you know, we. It was this perfectly framed picture. If you're looking through the control room window. So we're sitting there glum faced. Crosby comes in and I came into the studio totally depressed. I came into Hiders and I looked and they had it set up on a little stage with lights shining down on. Was so great here because we all felt much better. They really felt bad because they love that 12 string as much as I do. Everybody's proud of it because it's. Near as we could tell, it's the best one.

B (43:33)

Jerry Garcia is playing a Rick Turner creation on every track of Skull and Roses, a guitar that Garcia played nearly exclusively through the first half of 1971. But it wasn't technically an alembic. Jerry Garcia named it Peanut after its body shape. It was the very first electric guitar Rick Turner had ever built. He'd apprenticed to an acoustic luthier during the folk scare before going electric with Auto Salvage. Here's a little bit of their namesake song from 1968, with Rick on lead playing the distinct guitar Jerry Garcia would later play.

C (44:14)

When you drive a car, don't you know how far it'll take you? 67, I guess it was, was a fan of our band, managed an apartment building in New York and somebody had moved out and left behind a smashed Gibson Les Paul. But it was the SG body Les Paul because it was a 61 or a 62, I forget which. And so I drew up a body for it and went to a cabinet shop and had them rough out a mahogany body. And then I put this guitar together on my kitchen table in New York. That's a guitar that four years later, three years later, I wound up when I moved to California, sold that guitar to Jerry Garcia. And that is the guitar affectionately known as Peanut. So that was the guitar that I played in the sessions and at gigs with Auto Salvage.

B (45:28)

The basic shape of Peanut can be seen in nearly every instrument Rick Turner has built since, played regularly by guitarists like Lindsey Buckingham, David Ganz, and many more.

C (45:38)

The shape came from an antique, likely glacel guitar made in Germany or Austria. I'm going to say 1850s or so 1860s. Not dissimilar from some early Stauffer guitars. Stauffer being the guy who taught CF Martin how to build guitars. So it's based on a. Call it a mid century, you know, mid-1800s antique guitar. And I just like the shape.

B (46:17)

It was in the alembic workshop at 320 Judah that Rick reconfigured Peanut slightly for Jerry Garcia. The guitar made its Grateful dead debut in January 1971, a month ahead of the Capitol Theater shows we discussed in the last episode of the Dead cast. And we'll talk more about Peanut in episodes to come. A lot of instruments were on Rick's bench at Alembic in those years. And we'll come back to some of the others in future episodes.

C (46:42)

That's where Peanut that re emerged. That's where Alligator happened. It's where Big Brown happened. It's where The David Crosby 12 string happened. Whole bunch of stuff. It's where Jack Cassidy's Olympic Number one happened. You know, so it's. There's a lot going on in that place.

D (47:03)

We were at 3:20 Judah for I don't know how long, and then moved to 60 Brady street, which had been a recording studio. So there was a recording studio in there. We moved to Brady street, something like.

B (47:21)

It was conveniently adjacent to the Fillmore West.

D (47:23)

It's right around the corner in the alley.

B (47:25)

It wasn't just any recording studio, but Pacific High, where the Dead had recorded Working Man's Dead a year earlier. Over the next few years, while it was the home base for Alembic, the Pacific High name would occasionally be used interchangeably in album credits or on radio broadcasts.

D (47:41)

That was one of the things that was cool about it, is that it was already constructed as a recording studio.

B (47:49)

Behind the studio's board were Bob Matthews and Betty Kanter. Here's what Bob Matthews recalled.

C (47:55)

Acoustically, the room needed a lot of modification, which when we. We being Alembic took over the leash of the building, we did quite amount of acoustic modification.

B (48:11)

Rick Turner moved his guitar shop to his new home in Cotati, but was still very much a presence at Alembic's new headquarters.

C (48:17)

I'd be down there at least one day or two days a week. Come down from Cotati. I helped with some of the studio remodel. That was an interesting thing because we didn't have the money to do it. John Fogarty Credence John Fogarty's brother Tom was interested in investing in the studio and he really loved the space and the idea of what we were doing to it. You know, it had been a studio for quite a while, and it had some great stuff going on and some problems, not the least of which was the acoustics of the big room. And it was a big room. You could fit a symphony orchestra in there. And so we had an acoustical consultant came up with a great design using a lot of compressed fiberglass panels that had a vinyl face and a framework that went around the room hanging these things and they could be moved in and out to change the acoustics of the room. And then also did a sawtooth ceiling in them. Did the floor in this somewhat resilient concrete that was used a lot for tennis courts. The room was really, really beautiful.

B (49:36)

Big Daddy Tom Donahue hosted a series of K San broadcasts there in the next years. Filling the extra space with in studio audiences for performances by Jerry Garcia and Merle Saunders, Van Morrison, the Doobie Brothers, Tower of Power and many more.

D (49:51)

I continued to do the job of kind of whatever needed to be done in the way of administration and purchasing and you know, whatever scheduling. I scheduled the studio and all of that. And at one point they even had a retail store. We had wholesale contracts or wholesale agreements with like JBL and Electro Voice and all these top end electronic and other devices that were used in rock and roll. And we bought so many, I mean like speakers and microphones and so forth. So we decided, hey, why not make them available to other bands and other roadies, you know, whoever at a retail. We could make a little money but also make it easy for people from other bands to come in and buy what they needed that we had tested and used in the. The Dead setups. So we had a little retail store there on Brady street for a while. But it was low key and you had to, I think I remember you had to know it was there.

C (51:13)

We had the the store which became Starz Guitars. Which then moved to south of Market in San Francisco.

B (51:23)

The crew were responsible for what became known as alembicizing the band's gear, the guitars as well as the amplifiers. Bob Matthews remembers they were hopped up Fenders.

C (51:33)

The interstage, the preamp level of the Fender reverbs capacitors were improved. They got a brighter sound. Eventually of course, they moved to the Macintosh equipment. By the time we got to the wall of sound. I remember I used to go buy the twin reverbs from Sherman Clay in Oakland and take them to Dan Healy who would hop up their their guts. And the other change that we would make to those was rather than the gents and speakers that they came from the Fender factory with. We would change out for JBL 12 inch which could take a lot more energy and had a lot more bite and sound.

B (52:16)

These speakers became the core of what was known as the Alembic pa.

C (52:19)

The speakers were regular cabinets, except that they had an additional optional presentation of tie dye fronts that were made by the front office of Olympic on Judith street in San Francisco. We started from when I was my PA. The Olympic PA in, you know, the 70s, early 70s, all of the cabinets had tie dye. A gal named Rosie, who had been with the band from the very beginning, got into tie dyes, and the band really liked it because it established a graphic aesthetic.

B (53:01)

Alembic's gear wasn't known just for its sound, but also its handcrafted California coolness. When Grateful Dead fans were watching the band at the live shows that became Skull and Roses, they were also looking at artwork by Rosie McGee, whose work covered many of the band's amps in.

D (53:17)

Late 67 and early 68. Melissa Cargill, who was at the time Bear's girlfriend, and another friend of ours, Christine Bennett. The three of us were into doing textiles and beadwork and sewing and, you know, various kind of crafts. And we started experimenting with tie dye. We actually went into researching it, and there was. Well, tie dye is a very, very old craft, you know, worldwide. And so we found folding dye, fold dye, and stitch dyeing, which was from Asia and Indonesia and Japan. And we got our dyes originally from a small Japanese arts restorer, Clement Street. And we experimented with that. Then we started using. Melissa, discovered Procyon dyes that came from England, and we started using those. And so this was in 68. This was a setup where I was doing tie dye all the time. I was doing shirts, and it was my hobby. It was a fun thing to do. Well, meanwhile, around 68, maybe late 68, and I think it was Bob Matthews that came up with this. We were at a gig one time, we were all high, and we're looking at the speaker cabinets. And at the time, everything was this. All of the cabinets had this either a metallic grill, you know, gray metallic grill, or black cloth or something. They were just really dull. And we liked color and to enhance our trippy times. And so I think it was Matthews that came up with the idea, hey, let's cover the speaker cabinets and the amps with something colorful.

C (55:24)

You know, we always tried to be different. We always tried to be cutting edge and making a difference and bringing a smile to people's face of seeing something that made you laugh or particularly on a acid test Saturday night.

D (55:39)

So we went to the fabric store at the time was called Psychedelic Fabric Design. You know, paisleys and these really bright colors and all of that. We bought a bunch of fabric and recovered the amps. And in the historical photos of that period, like the Newport pop festival in 68, you can see this psychedelic fabric on the cabinet.

B (56:08)

Though the Dead's PA continue to mutate, at least One of the paisley fenders stayed in service for years to come and can be seen sometimes directly behind Bill Kreutzman in photos from the Wall of Sound era.

D (56:19)

And then somewhere along the line, I don't know, late 68, maybe early 60, I had the idea, hey, I would been doing tie dye for about a year. Why don't I do some tie dyes? You know, we can do our own designs and our own colors and whatever we want. So that's my claim to fame in this story, is that I came up with the idea of putting tie dyes on the fronts of speakers. Speaker cabinet. I think I just covered, you know, I took the frame out, you know, because the grills were just Velcro attached to the front. You know, you just pull them out and so I just attached over the grill as I recall. And so I did that for a while with the amps. Alembic hadn't started building cabinets yet, so it was just the bands amps and stuff. So about late 69, I think is when Alembics started building speaker cabinets for the PA and the monitors.

B (57:28)

It wasn't just the audience looking at Rosie's tie dyes, it was the band too. If you look at pictures of the band Starting in late 1970, their brand new monitor system came covered in Rosie's work around Alembic. The professional term was wedges.

D (57:43)

By then I had already been covering amps with tie dye. So it was a natural thing to have me for the brand new cabinets that they would come with a tie dyed cover. And so they did, and I did that for a while. It was an extra job. I mean, I worked full time at Alembic as their office manager. My passion is photography and writing and, and tie dye was just a hobby. And I found all of a sudden I was having to produce several dozen at a time to keep up with their building of the speaker cabinets. And somewhere along, I don't remember the exact date that Courtney Pollock showed up. He had some of his mandalas already and T shirts, I guess, and his work was gorgeous.

B (58:35)

You know, beautiful cultures had been tie dying for millennia, but Courtney Pollock's work transformed it into a large scale art form. His arrival in the Grateful Dead universe would not only change the band's look, but would bring tie dye to a new generation. We're also honored to welcome to the good old Grateful Dead cast Courtney Pollock.

F (58:52)

I moved from England in 1968 and went to New York City to seek my fortune. I left a good job in Piccadilly in London. As the quantity sold and started in New York City and opened a boutique.

B (59:05)

In Greenwich Village located on Pleecker street near the Fillmore East. Pollock and his partner opened a shop called Carnaby Street West.

F (59:13)

And that's where I saw my first tie dyes walk in the door. And it was this beautiful, beautiful, graceful, tall young lady in this bed sheet that had like a crude sunburst tied onto it. And they cut a hole in the middle and pull it over her head, and there's a robe, of course. It looked fantastic on her. And I was like, how would I make concentric rings on a piece of cloth with dye and ding. I had the whole concept in my head, like, you know, folding half quarters into eights like you're making a paper airplane. And then divide off sections along that expanding strip, and essentially you would have concentric rings. And then I just enlarged on that idea by folding in different angles and geometries. So that's how I got the concept. And when I had the space to order dies and I found this little dye company on Chambers street in New York. This. This old fella, he did industrial commercial dyes, and he did big hundred pound containers for. For the big fabric companies. So I went and visited and said, yes, I'd like to kind of try this as a craft. So I just need, you know, some small amounts. And he. He was delighted with the idea. So he said, I'll make up some pounds of the primary colors, and I suggest and black and a dark blue, and I can make everything else from there. So anyway, that's how I started out. Got some T shirts, got some cloth, had the dyes. They were hot water dyes, and they were supposed to be boiled for an hour to set the dyes. And I started not quite doing that. I folded my geometry into these pieces of cloth, tied it all up. So now it's a bundle and essentially it's a container. And so I'm filling up the container with dye in different angles, different amounts, different color progressions, like you're doing a sand painting on a.

C (61:18)

In.

F (61:18)

In a jar, but in the cloth. And of course, just absorbing enough so that it's not fluid in the cloth so that you can go deeper and deeper and one layer goes over another and doesn't mix together. Seems to defeat the laws of physics somewhat. Anyway, it works for me. And then my first mandala, which was became the flagship design for my.

C (61:40)

For my expression.

F (61:44)

It was my first commission there in this little boutique coffee shop. This lady saw some of my work this Was in the first week of my ever trying anything. I had lots of yardage and cloth and pictures and dozens of T shirts and various items of clothing and head scarves and things. And we took him down to this boutique. She wanted everything. And then she commissioned me to do this mandala for her meditation room that was part of her store. She said, I want all the walls in a continuous design with one end wall being a mandala, all the floor tie dyed. So it was a tie dyed room with a mandala at the end. I said, I can do that, no problem. And you know, I'd been. I was less than five days into dying. So I get home and I look up what mandala means.

C (62:42)

So.

F (62:44)

It says a graphic interpretation of the cosmos according to the philosophy of the artist, something like that. And so I said, oh, I have a philosophy.

B (62:54)

That philosophy manifested and iterated almost instantly.

F (62:58)

I'm just about to start folding this first commission, the big mandala, and there's a knock on the door. And these friends of my girlfriend at the time, they show up and they have these little butterfly envelopes, all beautiful colors. And they open them up like a butterfly. And in the center, this little orange pill. It's orange sunshine lsd, which was really good LSD back then, but I didn't know what LSD was. I was. I just hardly started smoking pot. They came in, this couple of guys, there's my friend there, some of her friends showed up, there's a party, we all take one of these things. I get on with my work. Didn't think anything of it. Folding my sheet up and then dividing off the sections and doing some different stuff with each section and tying in these. What would become imageries in the. Through the geometry. And people are starting to act pretty strange and they're running around and they're, you know, some are kind of hiding in the I chicken and some out in the backyard. And, you know, I'm just alone in there and intensely involved in this process. And it took me a good few hours to tie this thing up. This is the first one I'm doing Now, eventually it's time to diet. Everything's ready. I carry on a diet now. I have already set up this stage elevated platform with lights. I had strobe lights, revolving Christmas tree lights, and a big spiral behind, black light shining on the front. So anyway, I dye this thing up, starting from the center, put all the colors in, work out section by section, start dying. The little individual scarabs, what I call scarabs, they're like Little trilobites. So eventually it's. It goes in the oven. I clean up, get the stage, make sure everything's set, and it's time to open it up. By now, there's some of the babysitters have showed up and they've got their guitars, and I get the piece out and I start opening it from the center out and little by little and rinsing it under cold water. So every little pleat that I open is these imageries and colors and. And these girls are singing the Hallelujah chorus in harmony with the guitars. And it's like this choir of angels. And this thing is opening and it's like. And I was like, whoa, whoa, is this so magical, what's happening? Cause I'm higher on a kite. And I don't realize it because I've been so intensely focused. And so eventually I have it all opened, it's still folded in quarters. And I take one corner and pin it up over the stage and walk the other corner out. Everybody's at the back of the wall waiting for the unveiling, and it drops open and there's this. This audible gasp through the room, and I still won't look at it. The whole thing all opened and pin it up, and then I walk to the back of the room and turn around and oh, my God, it's alive. This thing is just moving. And it was the most extraordinary, just like a living thing. And then I said, is it moving? I said, oh, shit, yeah, guy, it's crawling all over the wall. And I was like, all right, we took that thing. Anyway, that was the first mandala.

B (66:30)

Courtney traveled too, spending some time working with the Incredible String Band. He spent the summer of 1970 in Vermont, where he displayed his tie dyed mandalas in art shows and seemed on the verge of building a fine arts career. But it was 1970, so it was.

F (66:45)

The end of the summer, and it's going to get awfully cold in Vermont. So our little impromptu commune, which was just a handful of girls, handful of boys at that time. We were in our 20s still. I threw the I Ching, which was my oracles, that whenever I had a, you know, a turnstile moment, I would throw the I Ching. And it said fortune in the West. So I just put my stuff together and hopped a Greyhound bus and went out to San Francisco, three days across the country. And there was this hippie girl, she. And I hung out at the back of the bus, getting high and playing around. And she told me about this place called Switchboard in the Haight and Ashbury, by the park there, where a little hole in the wall where you could, you know, find accommodation. So I go into this place, said, yes, I'm looking for a place to live, you know, rolling green hills out in the country somewhere. And they, oh, yeah, right, man, you know, we'll find you a place to crash for the night in the city with 10 other people in a room, you know, to get you off the street. That's, you know, that's kind of what we do. Yeah, you want to live in Marine county, across the Golden Gate Bridge, where, you know, the rock and rollers and the movie people live. And I said, yes, that sounds perfect. And so they're laughing and this guy's on the phone. They said, hey, somebody just called in from Marin county and wants to share a place. Like, gave me the phone. And this guy on the other end, he says, yeah, I've got this two bedroom house that I want to share. I met the guy at the Greyhound station in San Rafael and we drove out to this little out west into West Marin to Nicasio Valley Road, and came down into the valley, and one side's open, rolling green hills like I'd always. And the other side was redwood forests. He drives up this driveway through the redwoods, and then there's this beautiful little stone cottage built around two giant redwood trees. They grow right through the house. So we pull up and I'm like, oh, my gosh. You know, this is really quite exotic. And we go in and it's new. Everything's like, there's stone fireplaces, two bedroom, washer dryer, all of the mod cons and these trees that it's built around. I said, this is really good, but I don't know that I can afford it. He said, oh, the rent's only $80 a month. And I went, $80, I can do that. He said, no, no, your half is 40. I was like, what? He said, well, yes, the owners, these liberal moneyed people that just want to pass some of their largesse onto worthy young people, which they were doing. And we got the little cabin or cottage, and they were building their main house on the top ridge. We had a 360 view out over the ocean over the rest of Marin County. And on the opposite side of the road on the open, rolling side, they had a horse ranch and a main house that they lived in while they were building the big round house on the top of the hill, on top of the ridge. So I moved in there. We spent one evening and then My friend, he was working as an accountant at Shamrock Concrete Company or something. We visited, you know, built a fire and, you know, visited and I had some parts. So we smoked a joint and, and then in the morning I get up, come into the house and of course he was off to work, God knows what hour. So I just put a bag of dyes on my back, a little pack. I walk down Nicasio Valley Road and looking for a, you know, I'm just looking at the properties and figure I'll see I recognize a place that has like hipsters, like minded people. So about a mile down the road I look up this driveway and sure enough there's an old faded American flag and there's, you know, a couple of horses in the pasture and there's this fella feeding the horses and there's a little cottage, the farmhouse. And I go up, start chatting with this guy and name was Jerry Durham. Young man, he was totally open and friendly and I said, yeah. Anybody in the farmhouse said, yeah, go bang on the door. Frank is in there. So I bang on the farmhouse door and this cute little pixie looking girl comes to the door. She's got a ring in her nose and she's just cute as a button. I said, hi, I just moved in down the road and sort of introduced myself to some like minded neighbors and would you like to see some of my artwork, my tie dye work? She said, oh, come on in.

C (71:43)

Yep.

F (71:43)

She said, yeah, hey put, push some of your stuff out. He said, I'll fix some coffee up. Yeah, you know, roll a joint over there, you know. And so I hang up some pieces, few shirts, I put some squares of fabric, just pin them up around the place. She comes out from the kitchen and she stops and looks around. She said, oh my goodness. Oh, these are great. Oh, the guys love this. Oh, and here they are now and these big trucks pull up outside and these big rowdy roadies storm into the house and they stop in the living room and they look around, they go, well, far out man, you can do our speaker front. And that was the Grateful Dead crew. And Frankie is Bobby Weir's partner at the time. He was coming back to town the next day.

B (72:34)

Not a bad first day in California sometime in the fall of 1970. By the spring of 1971, in the shows that were recorded for Skull N Roses, a few of Courtney's tie dyes had been integrated into the alembic pa. We'll have lots more tie dyeing in future dead casts. But for now let's listen to that Other One bass bomb again and imagine it radiating through gorgeous tie dye.

C (73:07)

Over.

B (73:07)

The next four years of Dead shows. Before their road hiatus in 1975, the other one regularly stretched between 20 and 40 minutes, their most regular vehicle for psychedelic jams. The jam on the Skull and Roses version found its way to deep space, and back then it was time for the Cowboy Neil verse, which ends with a guitar tag that was used as a transition into the cryptical envelopment reprise. Another way to think about it is as the ending to the Other One on Skull N Roses. If you listen closely, you can hear the end of the Other One lead into the start of Warfrat, but that's another segue.

C (74:20)

Coming around. Coming around.

A (74:35)

We hope you enjoyed that power packed episode. I know I did, and one part of this one that really struck me was Jerry talking about the damaging power of lies and how it really impacts everybody and the planet. Take care of yourself and each other out there and we'll see you next episode. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast Mark Pincus and Doran Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.