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A
Step into the sunshine with the latest collab from Dogfish Head and the Grateful Dead. Citrus Daydream Lager this refreshing American Lager is brewed with sustainable fonio grain and kissed with citrus and floral notes. It's easy drinking, refreshing and brewed for good vibes only. It joins their fan favorite Juicy Pale Ale for a duo that hits all the right notes. Find these brews near you@dogfish.com Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly. The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season 13 of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in in this episode of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. We continue with the second episode of our three episode arc on the Grateful Dead's 1976 live release Steal youl Face. And there are some new Grateful Dead releases you need to know about. Check out the recently announced Fillmore auditorium show from July 3, 1966. Yeah, 66 making this one of the earliest live recordings of the Grateful Dead released and now it's available as a 3Lp set and a 2 CD set. This show is recorded by none other than Owsley Bear Stanley and has been mastered by Jeffrey Norman with speed correction and tape restoration by Plangent Processes. So you know it's gonna sound great the way it should, the way Bear would want you to hear it. This 3LP set is limited to 6,600 copies and ships this July 3rd, 60 years to the day after it was recorded. Pre order now@dead.net Also on the release front is the 50th anniversary edition of Steal your Face, the Dead's 1976 live album. It's been remastered and is available for pre order now@dead.net as a 2Lp set with beautiful red, blue and black splash ladder vinyl. This anniversary edition was newly mastered by Grammy Award winning engineer David Glasser at Air Show Mastering. Sourced from the plangent processes restored and speed corrected tapes, lacquers were cut by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundmann Mastering and the steel Year of Face 50th Anniversary Edition is available for pre order now at dead.net and hits the streets on June 26th. That's June 26th. Head on over to dead.netdeadcast and check out all of our past episodes including the complete seasons 1 through 12. You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform. So you can listen to the Dead cast anyway, anywhere, just basically how you like to listen. Please help the good old Grateful Dead cast by subscribing, sharing us with your friends on social media, hitting that like button and if the spirit moves you, leave us a review. It helps more than you know. Thank you very much. We now have transcripts for many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading and studying pleasure. Head over to dead.netdeadcast index and check them out.
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B
Well, he's gone.
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A
Get ready for one of the best stories the Dead cast has ever told. This one's a doozy, folks, and includes, among other things, the band's manager being put on trial by the Hell's Angels. Here's Jesse Jarno,
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La.
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B
We plunge today into the darkest heart of The Grateful Deads 1976, the events that occurred in early May of that year that are why their 1976 live album Steal youl Face is called Steal youl Face. The story is dramatic and sometimes pretty ridiculous and always fascinating. We'll find some bright moments in the story of Mickey Hart's Diga Rhythm Band and Phil Lesh's Too Loose to Truck, but there's not going to be a lot of sunshine today. Last episode we detailed the circumstances that led to the existence of Steal youl Face, specifically, a record contract negotiated by Grateful Dead Records president Ron Rakow and signed in June 1975, promising the double LP soundtrack to the band's forthcoming movie by January 31, 1976, with the expectation that both the LP and the soundtrack would be released simultaneously shortly thereafter. When we last left the story in late April 1976, the still in progress album was still simply titled Soundtrack. But that wouldn't do.
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D
It was later than I thought I first believed you.
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C
Now I cannot share your comforter Shape of
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B
Steal youl Face would be the last album released during the original run of Grateful. That and Round Records. Here's how it was remembered by Steve Brown, who worked in a variety of roles for both labels.
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D
The movie soundtrack albums that we put out later Steal youl Face, and then all the individual projects and stuff, especially Mickey's stuff that he was doing too. That was the end for Rakow.
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B
The one word executive summary of how Steal youl Face was named is simply money. The longer version is what we're going to detail today. Once again, then president of Grateful Dead and Round Records, Ron Rakow.
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D
You know, every once in a while I get a clear picture of what the fuck is really going on.
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B
I think Robert Hunter had a lyric about that.
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D
There's some talk that we had a money problem. I don't think we did. They had a money problem after I left for two reasons. One is I took a bunch of money with me, and I didn't think that was right at the time. I still don't think that's right. I don't see where I could have done it differently. I left the Grateful Dead. I believe the actual date is May 6, 1976. I don't know why I have that in my head.
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B
Ron Rakow's memory seems to be basically correct. He left the Grateful Dead during the first week of May 1976, cutting himself a check for $225,000 that he believed was owed to him. The band didn't feel that way. And though everybody was roundly pissed at Rakow for his actions, nobody has ever accused him of bilking the Dead at any other time. Significantly, the Deads didn't call the cops or private investigators on Rakow as they did with Lenny Hart. I've spoken with Rakow a bunch over the past few years as we've detailed the stories behind the Grateful Dead's imperial period. And today's version of the events is drawn from roughly a half dozen conversations.
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D
I would say in July of that year, I had a trial, a real trial with real potential consequences. The Hell's Angels put me on trial to see whether or not I robbed the Grateful Dead or not. And it was at my home.
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B
The subtitle of today's episode could be and perhaps actually is the Trial of Ron Rakow.
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D
I get a call about, I would call it five or six weeks after I left the Grateful Dead from Deacon Proudfoot. Deacon was the. Was the president of the Oakland Angels. Deacon Proudfoot says to us, racko, the story around is that you ripped off the Grateful Dead. We want to talk to you about it. We want to find out the truth of it. We either want to stop it or we want to make it right.
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B
Somehow I've heard the concept of lot justice thrown around sometimes in Dead freak circles. That is the informal legal system of the shakedown street parking lot scene having its own way of doing things. But for the Grateful Dead themselves, and probably anybody, Hell's Angels justice might be a bit scarier. Nonetheless, they set a date.
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D
And I said, you guys come at 6 o' clock at night and I'll make you dinner. They said, good deal.
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B
Rakow proceeded to prepare dinner, and I
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D
buy an Eye of the Round. You know, it's the preem shit if you know how to cook. And this was one of the things I like to cook. So I buy that. I buy some exotic colored potatoes and some incredible salad and I put together a dinner for the. For that Friday night.
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B
I'm a great admirer of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, and I'm certain that you Dead cast listeners have often shared my frustration that the English translations of Murakami's work often omit lavish sections where he describes the intricate preparations for various characters meals. That said, we're going to omit a long portion of Rak preparing for his dinner trial with the Angels, except for this one montage like excerpt.
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D
And there is no fucking steak. It's gone. And across the yard for me is Yoshi, the most brilliant German shepherd you ever saw in your whole life. And Yoshi was just licking its paws.
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B
Dinner was delicious anyway.
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D
And a bottle of wine and, and a couple of beers and bingo, everybody's loose. And then they clean the dishes and we go into the parlor and they asked me the story. And whatever you do, don't lie to us. I said, well, you know, I don't lie to you. Okay, okay, I. I'm just telling you. And I told them the story. The story is the Grateful Dead got broke because they stopped working. And we had borrowed a lot of money to make the movie before we stopped working. And then we're making two movies. We're making one about you guys in the New York chapter and one about our gig here. And they said, okay. They know all that.
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B
To run Grateful Dead in Round Records as well as to finance the Grateful Dead movie and the Hells Angels Forever documentary, Rakkow had taken out loans with the bank of Boston. It's not today's story, but Rakkow is insistent that Grateful Dead and Round Records might have been self sustaining had the band not been trying to use them as their sole means of support. And Sometime in late 1975 or early 1976, the bank of Boston started calling in some of the loans, at least According to Dennis McNally's official biography, a Long, Strange Trip. Rakow disputes this.
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D
I had no requests for return of funds from the First national bank of Boston while I was there.
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B
None in the Dead's archive at UC Santa Cruz. There are a number of folders and binders pertaining to the band's relationship with the First national bank of Boston, and a scholar would do well to go over them, though a preliminary study doesn't reveal any outstanding loans in early 1976,
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D
I was not the least bit uncomfortable with all money flows.
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B
Still, there's no question that the band needed money. Because of this next story's punchline, we can date it to December 1975. Bob Weir was finishing up Kingfish's debut at Aces. The Keith and Donna band had just completed an east coast tour with Billy Kreutzman on drums, and Jerry Garcia was wrapping up the loose ends of his Reflections lp.
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D
Some folks would be happy just to have one dream come true, but everything
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you gather is just.
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D
So. I come up with a scheme to get money out of United Artist Records, and the scheme is incredibly brilliant. And so I tell Jerry my plan, and Jerry just whistles and he says, is this all? Is this true? All this is true. Absolutely, Jerry. It's all true. He said, okay, wow. Go do it.
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B
Ron Rakow's plan involved flying to LA and delivering an ultimatum to United Artists executives.
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D
My plan for how I was going to handle United Artists Records, I was going to convince them that they didn't understand the hippie lifestyle. And I need a million and a half dollars and they're going to give it to me because if they don't give it to me, they're not going to have us. And they said, we already have contracts. We already just gave you a million and a half dollars. You can't go anywhere. We have you contracted. And I said, you don't understand the hippie lifestyle. I have had a meeting with the Grateful Dead and we're filing personal and corporate bankruptcy. And we're going into the bankruptcy court. And the first thing that we have the right to do is disaffirm any contracts we have so I can make new contracts and in one week will be signed to Warner Brothers and we'll get a five million dollar advance. The people at United Artist Records went apeshit. Artie Mogul, pick up the phone and called James R. Harvey, executive vice president of Transamerica Corporation.
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B
Artie Mogul didn't become the president of United Artists until April, following the resignation of Al Teller. Timelines get a little weird here, honestly. And we've got a slight choose your own adventure version of history unfolding, though there's only one ending. It's possible some of this happened later in the year, though, as I said, not the punchline, but either way, at some point in December, Ron Rackow got bumped up the corporate ladder.
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D
So he gives me the phone and I said, hi, Ron Racko here. He said, ron, you live here. So when Are you coming back? I said, I'm coming back tomorrow. And he said, unfortunately, I have a lunch date tomorrow. But if you could come after lunch, let's say 1:45, 2:00', clock, 2:15, like that, we could talk and get this straight. I said, I'll come under one condition. He said, what's the condition? I said, I want to go to the room under the tower in the Transamerica Tower. And he laughed. He expected something onerous, I could tell, because he really laughed. And he said, oh, that's four floors above me. No problem. I'll take you up there. No problem.
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B
Back in San Francisco, Rakow connected with James Harvey.
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D
He said, our business stuff is straight, is real simple. Whatever you want, you got it. You just come to me first. You got it. Whatever it is. My whole scene was a fucking rounding era to the footings on the balance sheet of trend. You know, it's a big deal in United Artists, but United Artists was a rounding era to trans. The Trans America period was over. Okay, we go down to James office and I said, well, when are we going to sit down and talk about our stuff? He said, oh, you mean the money? He said, okay, I authorized already the release of the money. They're going to release it to you in four tranches of $350,000 each.
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B
And so grateful that and Round Records had some signs of money on the horizon. And we'll get to how that worked momentarily. But first, the piece of the story that allows us to anchor it in December 1975.
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D
He said, Incidentally, next Thursday night I'm having a buffet party at my home on Vallejo street, which is right in the, like the preem street in Pacific Heights. And he gave me the number. He said, I'd like you to come and we're going to have a bus pick us up and they're gonna. We're gonna go to the theater on Van Ness Avenue where One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest is opening.
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E
Do you think there's anything wrong with your mind, really?
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C
Not a thing, doc.
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B
Partly written just blocks from where Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter were bumming around in palo alto in 1961. Ken Kesey's one Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest was published to roaring acclaim in early 1962. Kirk Douglas purchased the stage and film rights. The play opened in 1963, but the movie took longer than planned to make. It opened on November 19, 1975, starring Jack Nicholson as Randall Patrick McMurphy. The film version of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest would go on to win five Academy Awards. Ken Kesey swore he never saw it. I mean, you guys do nothing but
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complain about how you can't stand it
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in this place here, and then you haven't got the guts just to walk out.
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D
What do you think you are, for Christ's sake, crazy or something?
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E
We are not.
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A month after the opening, there was a screening to benefit the San Francisco Mental Health association at the Regency Theater on Van Ness, part of the same complex as the long closed Avalon Ballroom.
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D
Jack Nicholson. Oh, the cast came and Milos Forman came.
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B
The Harvey's cocktail party was an all star event.
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Jack Nicholson Talking to Mrs. Jose Cebrian, a doyen of society in San Francisco. I walked right between them and in my beautiful velvet Jaeger jacket and put one arm around Jack Nicholson, one arm around Mrs. Cibrian. And the photographer got there an instant after I did, and bingo, that paper is in the society page of the San Francisco Chronicle.
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B
And there's Rack on the social scene page of The Chronicle on December 19, 1975. The photo isn't exactly as he describes, and I only call out the differences as a reminder that memory sometimes has a way of switching out details. Something to think about in our bigger story arc today and really every day. The socialite Jack Nicholson is speaking to in the photo is Charlotte Malliard. And Rako doesn't exactly have his arms around them. More lurking in the background, though, in the direct center of the camera's view. The scan I've seen is a bit faded, but his jacket definitely looks pretty stylin.
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D
And the only person of all the people I knew in the world that saw it was Jerry. And Jerry called me up and said, did you see the picture of you in the paper? I could tell it's you. Pulled a master stroke of bullshit. That's what he used to call my. My genius things that I did. He called me up and he said, man, that must have been a world class piece of bullshit for you to get on the society pages.
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B
Whatever the details, Grateful Dead and Round records were still alive and would be quite definitively at least for the next few months.
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D
My financial problems were over. I had them all solved, not only for now, but forever in the person of Jim R. Harvey, who saw the value of his connection with what I had over and above the value of the dollars. That's like a hustler's dream. And that's what I had. I got the money I needed and I got it that way. And I thought I was going to be driven down Broadway in New York City and get a fucking confetti parade.
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B
One problem is that it was hardly an instant transaction.
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D
There's no place where a quarter of a million dollars is casual money. Of course, it takes time.
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B
Specifically, it would take five months. Besides gigs by the Jerry Garcia Band and Kingfish, there were a few sources of money flowing through keeping things in the air until then. The first was some new projects with new budgets from United Artists.
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D
Every time I got an advance from them, they. They got more albums due them from various members of the Dead. We're signed on for that. Garcia signed on for it. Kingfish signed on for it. The Grateful Dead signed on for it. I mean, we were broke and needed money, and I was getting the money, but I was using their signatures as props.
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B
Sometime in January 1976, money from United Artists arrived for the next round of projects from Grateful Dead and Round Records. First, it created additional money for Steal youl Face, on top of their previous advance in June 1975, which Phil Lesh and Owsley Stanley started working on in January and February. As we heard about Last Episode. In January 1976 as well, Dan Healy was given the go ahead to mix down the sessions for what would become Round Records catalog number 109. Pistol pack and Mama by the Good Old Boys. Pistol Pack and Mama was an all star bluegrass session produced by Jerry Garcia at Mickey Hart's barn a full year earlier in January 1975, featuring some straight legends alongside David Nelson of the New Riders, the Purple Sage, Steve Brown of Grateful Dad. And Round Records remembered it to us a few years ago.
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D
The one thing that I still think was my favorite, though, of all the ones that were done at the barn, was Jerry's little dream project, which was the Pistol Pack and Mama, the Good Old Boys. Yeah, that was like, you know, Jerry's just dream come true. When you call Daddy Beatbound Just to
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have a little fun.
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Better have fun $15 when that policeman.
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Oh, sweet mama daddy's got 15 bel oh, sweet mama Daddy's got
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D
to have Frank Wakefield, you know, and Chubby Wise and everybody that on Reno. And all these guys that I'd heard of too, and had heard their music before, they're actually working with Jerry Garcia. It's like, how cool is this? Somebody robbed a trim train this morning
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B
and this night somebody robbed the Tranville
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D
train, I swear, right?
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B
And round records number 110, meanwhile, was in some ways even longer in the making.
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Enter the garden of rhythmic delights feel 110 fingers massage your soul Skin on skin The Digger Rhythm Band.
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B
After Mickey Hart's furlough from the grateful dead in 1971, he'd recorded his solo debut, Rolling Thunder, released in September 1972. And after that he'd kept right on recording at the Barn and had a busy few years. When he wasn't a member of the Dead, he'd had a vision as a drummer and continued to improve the studio. Here's Mickey speaking with WMMR in Philadelphia in October 1976.
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C
I built a studio from old electronic parts off the Destroyers and battleships, World War II Navy parts. And we built it and discovered a whole way of processing percussion. And we stayed in the studio for quite a few years learning about it. Like nobody could teach you about this.
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B
With a rotating crew of musicians including Barry Melton, David Freiberg and others, sometimes with Robert Hunter on hand to create lyrics on the spot, they continued to crank out albums.
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C
We did the Rhythm band record there. We did all Bob Hunter's records. I learned with like Bob Hunter saying, okay, come on, Bob, come on in this video and let me record you.
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D
I don't know, it must have been the roses. The roses are the ribbons and her long brown hair. I don't know, it must have been the roses all in those. I could not leave her there.
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C
The Seastone record, that was an interesting project. There was the. There was a bluegrass record that we did, Pistol Pack and Mama.
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B
We just talked about that one, Mickey. It's hard to tell how contracted they were, but Mickey Hart recorded two more albums worth of material for Warner Brothers in 1973 and 1974. Known separately and sometimes together as Area Code 415 and Fire on the Mountain.
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D
The fire on the mountain. Right up on the mountain of the fire.
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B
But perhaps with the Grateful Dead having abandoned Warner to form their own record companies, Warner virtually dismissed the albums. But these were song oriented albums. During this period, Mickey was dreaming of something even bigger. This is Mickey speaking on the Arista Years radio documentary. In 1996, I did a thing called
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D
the Dega Rhythm Band record, okay? And this was the last of the great round records. And you know, it was something I had worked on for years and years. It was a very special thing.
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B
He'd studied with the master percussionist Al araka in the 60s and was close with his son Zakir Hussain. Back to Mickey in 76.
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C
Yeah, I met Alaraka before and he influenced my playing. And his son Zakir Hussain, the master drummer, he's in the band. He's an incredible inspiration. He's absolute perfect, perfect about rhythm. I mean, rhythm is his life. You know, he studied rhythm and his family has studied rhythm for hundreds of years.
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B
The D? Ger Rhythm Band began life as Zakir's practice band. A group of students at the Ali Akbar Khan School of Music in Berkeley who performed an annual concert at the school under the name the Tal Vadyum Rhythm Band and performed at least once at El Camino park in Palo Alto in 1972. From there they decided to create what Mickey described in Drumming at the Edge of Magic as a tuned percussion orchestra modeled after the Gamelan orchestras of Bali. The 11 piece diga rhythm Band debuted and played their only shows in the spring of 1975, opening for Jefferson's Starship at Winterland and then opening again for them for free in Golden Gate Park a few weeks later. Their live sound engineer was Owsley Stanley Garcia sat in at the park gig. But the Diga Rhythm Band was mostly a studio ensemble gathering in Nevada to play in the barn. In Drumming at the Edge of Magic, Mickey describes a four day diga event at the barn where the goal was to keep the pulse going between at least two musicians for somewhere around 96 hours straight.
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C
Diga is a sound actually that is made in the left hand of the baya. It's really. But we play a lot of that thing and we get a thing that sets up sounds like. It also means naked in Sanskrit. It means a lot of things in a lot of languages. It's one of those international words, I think. But mostly it's a. It's a rib band. It's just a stone cold rhythm band. So it's a fusion band. It's a band from all over the world put into sort of like we'd take instruments from every country and we put it into one band and be able to play ensemble music at it with a lot of dignity and a lot of grace and execution.
- [30:30]
B
It was a serious project in every way. In the summer of 1975, Mickey Hart had rejoined the Grateful Dead during the Tail End of the Blues for Allah sessions. And if Warner Bros. Wasn't interested in his projects, Round Records certainly was. By October, Round drew up a contract for the Diga Rhythm Band with the option for further albums.
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D
Ron Rakow he had a budget and so he was on budget. Everything was great. He was on budget because he recorded at home, actually in his home studio.
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C
I prepared more of this than for any Grateful Dead record ever. We weren't able to ever do this for the Grateful Dead. I mean, to spend like years and months to Plan one record in a way.
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B
A document in the dead archive shows an advanced production budget that Mickey used to upgrade the barn. New roofing, insulation, gear fix up and good hustle mech. The budget includes the purchase, not rental of new gear.
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C
We went to great lengths to find microphones and situations to be able to feed. The necessity of the high transient response of the drums. Drums do a certain thing, they call it a spike. It's a fundamental. And then there's the high overtones and there's the subharmonics. And they all should be perfectly in line and in tune. And for you to hear that clarity, that's where the dark hole in space comes. The sound in between the notes, that's the thing that you fight for.
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B
Garcia joined them on a few pieces. One was known by then as Happiness, as drumming. But in its previous and future lives it was called Fire on the Mountain.
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C
Jerry comes and plays with us sometimes. He comes at night and plays the night with us. It's exciting for him to be able to play with so many hot rod percussion players. When he plays with the rhythm band, you know, the rhythm band takes no prisoners, rhythmically speaking.
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B
The other piece Garcia played on was Rasooli.
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E
Sam.
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C
Jerry has got such a sweet personality that he's able to interact with the other drummers and the drummers can play with Jerry Garcia. They're kids, you know, and they know Jerry and they're in the same studio playing with Jerry and they're not intimidated at all. Jerry doesn't intimidate you, you know, he said he's warm and he opens his house to you. You know, that's the kind of thing, that's why he's such a good, fine, fine player. He's a good man.
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B
It was a bold move to put out a percussion ensemble album in any era. And the kind of project that Round Records was designed for. There weren't many of them yet, let alone with actual production budgets for records like diga. But the age of small independent artist owned labels was starting to blossom.
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C
I hope the rhythm band will open up a little space for interaction percussively and knowing it's a working model that 11 drummers can get together. And it doesn't have sound like 11 minds. It could be like one organism and that's what we're trying.
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B
The album would become a percussion landmark, but got perhaps its highest endorsement from the legendary DJ David Mancuso, who instantly put the track Sweet sixteen into rotation at the Loft, his revolutionary psychedelic disco in downtown New York. Sometimes employing it as the night's opening number, as none other than Jamaica Kincaid reported in the New Yorker that year. But as we know, things were getting weird in the world of Round Records. Here's Mickey speaking in 1996.
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D
It was the end of it, you
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C
know, by that time, everything was falling apart.
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D
They didn't want.
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C
Rackow's connections were turning against us, and,
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D
you know, it was the record company
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C
wasn't the record company, they were the enemy.
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D
So it was all over for me.
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B
Ron Rackow remembers it a bit differently.
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D
We made a deal for the album. He made the album in his studio and he mixed it at his studio. Then he wanted more professional facility to remix it, so he remixed it in la. And then he was not satisfied. And he came to me and he apologized and he wanted to remix it again. Nobody else was paying for anything. I'm the record label, so I'm paying for everything.
- [35:39]
B
There are many reasons why you should read Dennis McNally's official biography of the Dead, A Long, Strange Trip. But one of them is his description of the mixing sessions for the Deaga Rhythm Band album. While working at Wally Hyder's in San Francisco, Hart's gear had become unplugged one too many times. We are taking this studio in the name of the people, McNally reports him saying, and called in the hell's angel named Sweet William to guard the studio door. Grace Slick tried to stop by for a visit and was stopped. What's going on, Mickey told her, is that we're trying to make a record. It's okay. You're the safest now you've ever been. Studio management threatened to cut off some of the gear from the outside, and Hart threatened to throw their gear out the window.
- [36:36]
D
So Mickey remixed the album, and I. And I get a copy of it and I play it to Jerry, and Jerry said, that's okay. And then Mickey calls me a week later and says he wants to remix it again. That would be the fourth remix. So I played it again for Jerry, and Jerry said, I don't know if you want to remix it again politically, but in terms of music, it's not going to change. So I said, well, if it's not going to change, I'm not spending money to blow smoke up anybody's ass. I don't do that. So he said, fine. And I turned Mickey down. I said, no more. No more remixing unless you pay for it yourself.
- [37:24]
B
Again, we enter another choose your own adventure part of the story. None of the parties deny the following event occurred, but Rakow Places it at the end of Dega's mixing. And Dennis McNally's official dad biography places it later in the spring, which would give it a slightly different inflection.
- [37:40]
D
I told Mickey that we're not going to remix it again. We went out to dinner and I told him that. And I told him, you know what Jerry said? He took it well. We went through the dinner, we had a couple of drinks. All of a sudden, in the middle of the dessert, he leapt across the table and got me in a headlock and wound up breaking my neck. Ozone Good Humor was kind of like a joke. But Mickey is a trained martial artist. Do you know that?
- [38:06]
B
Wait, Mickey broke your neck?
- [38:08]
D
That's what happened. I didn't even know it. I just thought I had a stiff neck. But about six months later, I went to a really good chiropractor and he did some. Some X rays and he said, you broke your neck. And then I remembered.
- [38:24]
B
But by April and May of 1976, when the diga Rhythm Band was in its final stages, it was probably pretty obvious that the album was going to disapp into a cloud of smoke. The album hit the streets in early July, nearly simultaneously with Steal youl Face, when Grateful Dead and Round Records had only weeks to live. Looking through newspaper databases, there are only a tiny handful of mentions of the Diga Rhythm Band outside the Bay Area. No ads, no reviews. A fraction of the promotional attention received even by the good old boys just a few months earlier. Here's Mickey in 1996.
- [38:58]
C
My disappointment was that my record was
- [39:00]
D
the last of the Round records. It was the last one to go down there where all the other ones are, you know, at the bottom of the ocean where Davy Jones lives. Well, Racal sealed its fate.
- [39:10]
B
The Diga Rhythm Band seemed to continue as a rehearsal group for a while and had vague plans to play live shows. And possibly even performed one more gig in July of 1976. Though it may or may not have been with Mickey. But in that uncertain spring of 1976, the Diga rhythm Band represented one possible future for Mickey Hart. The spring of 76 also brought in another new project in the Grateful Deads world. An extremely local one with no ambitions of going wider. We're going to pause the trial and tribulations of Ron Rakow for a little while for a fun side quest that didn't ripple the waters of the main timeline. In May of 76, with Ned Legion having put Seastones on ice, Phil Lesh debuted a new project. The name of Phil Lesh's new band was a pun on the name of the 19th century French artist Henri des Toulouse Lautrec. And over their half dozen gigs during their seven months of existence, spelled their name a number of ways. When they debuted at River City In Fairfax in May 1976, the recording we just heard from they were billed as to loose to truck and I think mostly just went by Toulouse T O O L O O S. We've posted a link to Corey Arnold's chronology@dead.net deadcast while we're at it, I wanted to thank Cory once again for all kinds of on the ground research support. There are a few tapes out there. This is from December 19, 1976 in BE. Alongside Filesh on base. The band included staple Marin county keyboardist John Allaire and the fabulous guitarist Terry Haggerty from the Dead's old friends, the Sons of Champlin.
- [41:52]
C
Sing me a breeze in sky Singing a rainbow but don't sing of love.
- [42:11]
B
Please welcome to the Dead cast, Terry Haggerty.
- [42:14]
E
We played tons of gigs with them over the years. You know, I thought the Dead was, you know, pretty doggone amazing. Culturally. They were just a little bit older. I think they were kind of more educated, kind of a little bit intellectually smarter, a little bit more, you know, hip with the counterculture.
- [42:38]
B
Though the Sons of Champlin trucked right into the 70s, continuing to change shape, Terry maintained other interests.
- [42:45]
E
I knew the Dead from like, you know, the whole counterculture criminal side more than I did from the musical side.
- [42:53]
B
He was an associate of the infamous Laguna beach surfer smugglers, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Purveyors of Orange, Sunshine lsd, among other things.
- [43:02]
E
I didn't think the Sunshine acid was very good, but they had the amazing hash. And that's where I managed to get the seeds of the 1974 Mazari Sharif. And they brought back one pound of it. Lots of the really great genetics nowadays still have those genetics in them.
- [43:22]
B
Through those interests, he met a pretty hardcore Dead freak.
- [43:25]
E
I was really involved with the pot scene way back then. And a bunch of my friends were pretty big time smugglers, pretty famous. And Dick Watfala. Dick was the guy that basically ran the safe house.
- [43:40]
B
Even so, Terry wasn't necessarily grabbed by the band's music.
- [43:44]
E
You know, I was really into funk, so the Dead weren't funky. And it didn't interest me that much outside of the cultural impact. The music didn't get me that much. But Dick kept on saying, he says, no, man, this stuff's gonna turn into something someday.
- [44:01]
B
But even if Terry Haggerty wasn't necessarily a fan of the Dead. The Dead were fans of the Sons of Champlin.
- [44:06]
E
Mickey was a big fan of the band, and so he was always really talking us up. And Phil was too. So when Columbia wanted to sign them, you know, they went to meet Clive Davis. So Phil is talking to Clive and Phil says, I want to give you a suggestion. I think you should think about hiring this band, at least checking out this band called the Sons of Champlin.
- [44:34]
B
Clive Davis took the Dead's word seriously. He also wanted them on his label and occasionally offered contracts to the band's friends. Notably, he signed the New Riders of the Purple Sage and later picked up the Rowan Brothers on Garcia's recommendation.
- [44:49]
E
So Clive had his guys come and hear us play. They loved the band. Clive said he wanted to sign us. And we went to New York to meet him personally. And when we got there and got up to his office, he says, you know, the reason you're here is because Phil Lesh suggested that I hire you. And we had no idea. Phil was so low key about the whole thing. He didn't say anything to us about it at all.
- [45:19]
B
Columbia released the Sun's album Welcome to the Dance in 1973.
- [45:40]
E
When we signed with Columbia and we were both on the same level, label Sam came in Sam Color, and one thing led to another and they started matching us with the Sons of Champlin
- [45:56]
B
in the out of Town tours stable. Terry Haggerty was also in the Dead's protective circle.
- [46:01]
E
I was really good friends with Parrish and Sonny Heard, and I mean, there's a bunch of knuckleheads back then that were just. Just amazing people. So I. Every time I used to go on the road, people would rob me because they knew I had all this really good herb and it was local kids and stuff, but what, a couple of them were pretty dangerous. So one of the things Steve and Sonny did for me is they. They went with me to this guy's house that I knew was robbing me. And we showed up at his house, like, late in the evening, and he comes to the door and here I am with Sonny Hurt and Steve Parrish. And they just immediately grab him and set him down in the house. And we sat there for a couple hours and they just explained to him that probably not a good idea for you to be robbing Terry anymore. And hopefully this just ends right here. And which it did.
- [47:09]
B
Terry's musical connection with the Dead reemerged in late 1975 or early 1976 when he again, crossed paths with Phil Lesh.
- [47:18]
E
Phil and I had girlfriends that were roommates. And I remember Phil pulling up and he just bought this new sports car, you know, some cool hybrid, you know, Ferrari engine inside some Fiat body. A Fiat Dino, I think it was. He shows up and walks in, and it's great to see him and everything. And we're smoking it up, and all of a sudden we hear this big CR crash. And it's like, oh, Bill got out of the car, didn't put the brake on, left it in neutral and walked into the house in the car, and it was on a hill. Car rolled backwards all the way down the hill and crashed into some cars
- [48:08]
D
down at the bottom of the hill.
- [48:10]
B
How you gonna teach a bassist to engage the emergency brake? The other piece of the puzzle was John Allaire, a journeyman keyboardist, world famous in Marin County.
- [48:19]
E
I'd known John Allaire forever, and he used to be he was just old enough where he could play in bars. And me and Tim and Bill and the Sons, we were still too young. But he had a band called the Cows and we loved him, so we'd go every place we could to hear him.
- [49:08]
B
That was the Cals with Get to step in from 1964, which you can find on the compilation Stone Soul, San Francisco's Lodestone Records, for a taste of the pre psychedelic Bay Area rock scene.
- [49:20]
E
And as we got to know each other better and better, we started playing together. And so there was a number of different gigs and configurations that I played with John in. He met Phil, and I think it was River City there in Fairfax. Might have been Navis at the bar. We played a lot at Na', Vi's, and so we started talking about, well, let's play some gigs.
- [49:47]
B
The catalyst for the actual gigs, though, links the Dead to a pretty major piece of American folklore brewing right there in Marin.
- [49:54]
E
We had a friend, Pat Reddick's, who was a good friend of Phil's. Pat says, I think you guys should have a band together. And his brothers actually were the guys that started the whole 420 movement there in San Rafael High School.
- [50:09]
B
Pat Reddicks was the older brother of Waldo Dave, one of the San Rafael teens that invented and began to circulate the term 420. A legend we assume you're familiar with by now. But we've posted a link to some stories about the Waldos and the late Pat Reddicks.
- [50:25]
E
Patrick came up with all those names and, you know, he was just trying to tie it into trucking and, you know, Classic Dead stuff.
- [50:35]
B
Toulouse to Truck is a pretty great pun.
- [50:38]
E
The initial expelling was Toulouse Lautrec. And then it started getting spelled a whole bunch of different ways. We thought initially that Toulouse was. You could get the implications of it. And it was much more artsy name.
- [50:54]
B
They played scattered shows across 1976 from May through December.
- [51:21]
E
You know, Phil had such a unique style and he was very, very musical. We only played four or five gigs, but, you know, they were hell fun.
- [51:31]
B
Seven by our latest count. The surviving tapes are pretty loose. Was there any practice?
- [51:37]
E
No. Rehearsals? Never. Rehearsals were never allowed. But John Lair was so great and him and Steve Mitchell had to have such a good working thing. We just do a bunch of John's tunes and then we would just go into three Space Jam. John sang a lot of Mose Allison and, you know, just John Lair stuff, you know, and he had a bunch of his students already. And so it was pretty much built in just on your market set go.
- [52:38]
B
Did the Waldos make it to the gigs?
- [52:40]
E
The ones that started the 420 thing, I think were too young to get into any of those places back then. No, all of us were considerably older than, you know, anybody.
- [52:50]
B
But it didn't last past 1976. The last known to lose to Truck date was December at Keystone, Berkeley.
- [53:23]
E
None of us consider it to be a thing. You know, we were all friends and we were just doing it for fun. And when there was no more gigs or nobody was actively pursuing it, I think probably Phil got more busy.
- [53:38]
B
And a few days after New Year's 1976, 1977, the dead headed into his master's wheels in San Francisco to dig into Terrapin Station. And Terry Haggerty and the Sons of Champlin headed for Colorado to record Loving His Yard.
- [54:15]
E
We were putting together together our final push to go to Caribou Ranch and record an album and tour. And I had to go and do that, and everybody had to do whatever they did, and it just kind of stopped.
- [54:36]
B
Terry Haggerty stayed friends with everybody and can still be found jamming and growing around Northern California. Eventually, Terry did click with Garcia's guitar playing. This took place in June 1978.
- [54:49]
E
My really excellent friend for, you know, decades and decades, Shea Ray. And he invited me up to go to one of the first Oregon Country Fairs. So I went up there, and when the fair was over, the Dead were playing at Austin Stadium. So went to that. Took acid. Jerry played amazing. It was the first time that I ever actually had an experience of Jerry Garcia and, you know, and My mind was so freed up from all the stuff that I did and liked. I was just sitting there listening to him, and it was like. It was like a bird that was flying, just swooping up and down. I never realized that about his playing that, like, you know, on a good day, with a tone that he had and with his consciousness. It was, you know, a really amazing experience. And from that particular point on, it's like all of a sudden I really became much more aware of a lot of the counterculture music.
- [56:25]
B
While the individual members of the Dead hustled for gigs, Ron Rackow was working many angles and was still looking for new investment opportunities. I'm not sure if this next story
- [56:34]
D
totally adds up, but I started to work on Apple.
- [56:38]
B
Which Apple?
- [56:39]
D
The Apple I'm talking to you on right now. We were real, real close to a relationship between Jerry and Apple for Garcia being a representative, a spokesperson.
- [56:49]
B
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak entered into the Apple partnership on April 1, 1976. And they definitely needed funds. Wozniak sold his HP65 calculator for $500. Jobs sold his VW Microbus for 1,500. But in this very small window, before they'd even assembled the first Apple one, I'm not sure how rack I would have come across them. I asked original Apple employee and longtime Deadhead Dan Kotke, but he has no memory of this. But weirder stories have proven true. We refer you back to the Scarlet Begonias episode for how the Dead almost snagged Bob Marley for their label.
- [57:25]
D
What I wanted to do was to make a cash investment in Apple. I talked to the First National bank of Boston about lending us $30 million to put in there to buy share at an advantaged price.
- [57:39]
B
And I love this story a lot, believe me, I want it to be true. But I just don't think the First national bank of Boston would have gone for that by this point in their relationship. Nor was Apple ready for that kind of attention. Apple was based in Los Altos, just outside the Dead's native Palo Alto. Ned Lagin encountered Jobs in Wozniak at Homebrew computer club meetings. But he was gone from the Dead's world by early 76 and has a more convincing story about passing on Jobs in Wozniak while working at Processor Technology. Probably lots of people from Big Sur to Berkeley have similar what ifs. The amount Apple needed to start up was far less, closer to 15 or $20,000, according to Walter Isaacson's bio of Steve Jobs. But Rakow's pretty firm in his memory.
- [58:25]
D
It was a stated goal to make Jerry Garcia the most recorded guitar player ever, which he is, in fact, right now, and second, the richest entertainer in the history of the world. That was going to be my legacy. And I stated it to myself and to Jerry and to nobody else. And it was really simple, and I never forgot it. And I was well on the road to pulling that off. I mean, you know, Jerry saved my life. I was an addicted gambler. Lunatic. Bud Shulberg wrote a book, what Makes Sammy Run. I was Sammy.
- [59:03]
B
Being an early investor in Apple certainly would have gone a long way towards accomplishing that. Money's a funny thing, period. But especially funny in the Grateful Dead world. We've told the story about Rakow and Garcia's pitch to the bank of Boston in the summer of 1974, back in our Loose Lucy episode, a move that allowed them to fund many projects over these past few years we've been covering. So let's pause for a second on what happened immediately after that meeting, at least in Rakow's telling.
- [59:31]
D
We get into a limo to get back to our hotel, and I say, we're there, Jerry. We can make the big mistake now. You know, we can flame out. And he said to me, don't lose confidence. There's nothing you can do that can affect anything that I consider important in my life. Win or lose. Nothing. What does that mean? He said, can you make me play better? I said, don't be ridiculous. No. Can you make me play worse? No. He said, that's all I care about.
- [60:04]
B
Sometime in the spring of 1976, Rakow had to take one more loan to keep the debt in the air until the money from Transamerica came through. We've talked about Cousin David before.
- [60:14]
D
Cousin David ran a seven plane, small plane smuggling operation from Mexico. He was a very, very smart smuggler, very organized, military training and all. You know, one of those kind of guys. And he was one of my sources of revenue, of income. When I needed income, I would give him notice and he would furnish me with ammo, boxes of money. We were really close friends.
- [60:46]
B
He provided some of the seed money for Grateful Dead records, which we talked about in our Let Me Sing youg Blues Away episode and helped replenish the Dead's tour stash in an emergency, which came up in the first part of our east coast episodes. Now we're enjoying the ride season.
- [61:01]
D
He had 14 guys. He had family. He had warehouses and trucks. And, I mean, he had a business. He was in the pot smuggling business. And I couldn't. I couldn't take money from him and not give it back. I had to give it back because he needed it. And he, he gave me money for. On the understanding that within two weeks he would have it back because he needed it.
- [61:23]
B
Well, this is true for many of Ron Rakow's stories. We only have his version of what happened next, at least at this level of detail, which is something to keep in mind as he explains what happened. And in Rakow's version, the band's attorney, Hal Cant, waged a war on him because Rakow hadn't consulted him on various UA and Transamerica dealings. In Rakow's account, it was because Cant wasn't getting a cut. In other accounts, it might be that Kant was a trusted outside voice and borrowing money from pot dealers while waiting for a mysterious cash infusion felt a little risky. We'll have more with promoter John Scher next episode, but he provides this character note about Hal.
- [62:02]
D
Their attorney at the time was a guy named Hal Cant. Big, big character, Very, very smart. Didn't have really a mainstream music practice, although he represented the dead and represented the new writers and maybe a few other acts. But he was also a professional poker
- [62:25]
E
player
- [62:27]
D
and I think he won the World Series of Poker a couple of times. So, you know, put in your mind a guy who's smart as can be, knows the law inside out, and he's a gambler, Right?
- [62:42]
B
Hal Cant did rank number one in one category in 1988 and number two several other times, retiring after 2001. Nine years too early to have ever faced off with the late, great Steve Albini. Back to Ron Rakow.
- [62:56]
D
We had another meeting at Weir's house that I didn't even take it seriously. I put up little signs, the jealous versus the zealous. And the score is, that was my sign. I put three or four of them up in Bobby's house and Hal can't came with a trial book, a 4 inch thick black book, all tabbed. And he pulled it out and started to go through it and Garcia went apeshit.
- [63:23]
B
That's not really a sentence you hear too often.
- [63:26]
D
We were all in a circle on various kinds of things to sit on in Weir's living room. Jerry and I were sitting on a sofa. I was in a very light mood, thinking, this can't be serious. I'm doing a brilliant job. Anyway, Jerry jumps up, points at me and says to Hal can't, he is me. Pointing at me, he is Me, am I burning anybody? It escalated, and he asked it three more times, a total of four times. Am I burning anybody? And each time got louder. And finally he was really screaming. And everybody got wasn't that day because
- [64:11]
B
Garcia and Rackow left the meeting. But sometime around then, Ron Rackow and the Grateful Dead decided to part ways.
- [64:18]
D
Gary and I decided that my time is better used in a Jerry Rackow business than in the Grateful Dead business. And I was going to resign from them. They were going to buy me out, and I was going to advise anybody they hired to take my place on how they can do their job. And I was going to work from the same location, but in a different posture. But just with Jerry, just. Just for Round Enterprises, we had a series of things. We had Round Records, and we had another Round Records, which was called Square Records. And then we had the Movie Company, and we had several other movies under consideration, not the least of which was Sirens of Titan and several other things.
- [65:02]
B
Garcia acquired the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut's novel Sirens of Titan in 1978. The late Dennis Rothermel wrote a fantastic article about that project for Grateful Ed studies, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast. Rakow and Garcia had earlier tried to secure the film rights to a different Vonnegut novel, Cat's Cradle.
- [65:21]
D
The Grateful Dead was going to pay me one half of up to $1,500,000 that I raised for them, from where my. Whatever my sources are. Half of that money was for my buyout. So my buyout was for a maximum of $750,000. In my world, that was $750,000, because there's no chance I cannot raise a million and a half since I already had a guy offer it to me.
- [65:54]
B
Here's one place where we re enter our choose your own adventure from an earlier fork. This is also around the time when Transamerica was preparing to deliver their first tranche of $350,000.
- [66:05]
D
It was 335.
- [66:07]
B
$335,000. While Racko is due in LA to retrieve the money, Hal can't call another full band meeting. Racko and Garcia strategized.
- [66:17]
D
He said, okay, wow, go do it. I'll keep the Grateful Dead together. You go do it. I said, jerry, you don't have a good history of keeping anything together when you're alone. He said, true.
- [66:30]
B
Rakow and Garcia hatched a plan to send Garcia to a Dead meeting with David Hellman, the personal attorney he and Rakow shared to act as Rakkow's representative. We're not going to get into every maneuver of the battle. But according to Rakow, Hellman was told the meeting was canceled, which it wasn't. At the meeting, Hal can't raised a series of concerns about Ron Rakow's management and what it was he was then doing in la.
- [66:55]
D
How do you know he's not guaranteeing that you'll do seven albums? How do you know? You don't know.
- [67:01]
B
The already ugly vibe turned uglier.
- [67:04]
D
Jerry got pissed and left because he knew, but they weren't giving him a chance to talk about it. And he went into the. The big rehearsal room and took his little wheeled leg chair and went into a corner and played scales for three hours.
- [67:21]
B
The meeting carried on.
- [67:23]
D
Well, he got everybody so scared, they got panicked and they said, what are we gonna do? What can we do? And then how Said, it's simple. You're the Grateful Dead. Fire him. He made a technical legal mistake, though, which I never. I never. I was. I was too. My feelings were too hurt to do anything about it. But you can't fire the president of a company without a shareholder meeting, and there can't be a shareholder meeting without seven days notice. So none of that. So I wasn't really fired.
- [67:57]
B
But on the other hand, Ron Rakow was fired. He was in Los Angeles getting ready to meet with United Artists the next
- [68:04]
D
morning at 9:00 in the morning, Monday morning, the lawyer for the. The record company, I think his name was Mark Levin, handed me the check. $350,000, I think was the amount, might have been 325. Anyway, they handed me a check. And then I heard the voice of Mark Levin's secretary say, emergency phone call for Ron Racko. And I pick up the phone. He lets go with a check. I have the check in one hand and the phone in the other. And David Hellman says, ron, I don't know how to tell you this, but there was a meeting yesterday afternoon. How can't talk to the band. And they fired you. You have no authority. I said, the telephone call that you got has no necessary validity. And this call to me does not compute. And I hung up the telephone.
- [69:04]
B
If my math is right, it was Monday, May 3, 1976. Outside it was partly cloudy, warming towards the upper 60s.
- [69:13]
D
And I walked out and I went to the bank where I had opened up a grateful debt account and my own personal account right around the corner from United Artist Records. And I sit down in the. The waiting room at the bank. There was like A meeting room that I could hang out in there. And I pulled out, I started to make notes and you know, what is, what the hell's going to happen here?
- [69:38]
B
Given that they'd already been negotiating his exit, his dismissal stung.
- [69:57]
D
What's happening now is I'm fired. There's this money right here in front of me, and I don't have assurance of anything. Because the way this went down, it became obvious to me right in that meeting that my reputation in the music business was going to be trashed in one minute for sure, which I guess it was. I didn't stick around to find out. But I figured it out and I wrote myself a check for $225,000, which I called on account. And I delivered the rest to the Grateful Dead in the. In the bank deposit form. And I gave them the whole cardboard carton that I brought down to pay bills. I put. I had the checks all made out. All I had to do was put the money in the bank and sign the checks and they all would have gone out. I took that, put it in my rent a car and drove it right up to David, David Parker's office and put it on his desk with a note on top of that said, shove up ass. And I went home.
- [71:16]
B
And this is one of several interesting twists in this twisting story of how Ron Rackow walked away from the grateful dead with $225,000. He didn't take all of it. In one version of the Math, that left $110,000.
- [71:30]
D
I left them with most of the rest. We had a corporate commitment to Rolling Thunder, who was the medicine man for the old form Native Americans called the Shoshone Indian Tribe.
- [71:45]
B
I'll let you research Rolling Thunder's claims on that. A topic to bookmark for another season.
- [71:51]
D
And we told him to buy a piece of property to operate from, and he put it in escrow. And he had a twenty five thousand dollar commitment to pay that money this week. And I gave him that money. That was. That was one of the things that I had to get money for.
- [72:07]
B
So that left the dead with, say, $85,000. And in fact, that entire last payroll still exists in the Grateful Dead's archive at UC Santa Cruz, dated May 3, 1976.
- [72:18]
D
Oh, that's the money I embezzled.
- [72:20]
B
A few of the checks are signed by David Parker, the band's longtime accountant, and presumably issued to their recipients. Most aren't. It's hard to tell what unfolded in the ledgers.
- [72:30]
D
It was a Sunday for sure, and I was gone on May 5th.
- [72:35]
B
As you might imagine, the Grateful Dead weren't too psyched. These next bits are from the Arista Years syndicated radio special from 1996, at least for Bob Weir. In his memory, the anger was first about the collapse of the record company, then about the money.
- [72:51]
E
I think the one of us who
- [72:52]
C
was the most disappointed was Billy Kreitzman, insofar as he didn't get to.
- [72:57]
E
Tar and feathered, disembowel and drawing grew on Rakow before. Before Rakow got out of town. And then on top of that, Rakow got out of town with a lot of our money.
- [73:09]
B
Here's Mickey Hart and Phil Lesh.
- [73:11]
D
Oh, yeah, he wrote himself a check.
- [73:13]
C
There was that.
- [73:14]
D
He thought he was his severance base. I think he wrote himself a quarter of a million dollar severance. I'm taking everything with me.
- [73:20]
C
Yeah, I. I earned it. You guys will make.
- [73:22]
D
Make some more someday. It's okay. It won't hurt you too bad.
- [73:25]
E
I'll see you later. Goodbye.
- [73:26]
C
It was one of those kind of nice things.
- [73:29]
B
And so it was probably sometime in the first week so of May 1976 that Phil Lesh landed on the title for the band's forthcoming live album. Drawn from the song written explicitly about the last time a manager had run away with their money, Rakow thinks the title came earlier Steered.
- [74:02]
D
Your Face was named long before I left. I never asked why. I never asked why about anything. They can call it shit on a shingle as far as I'm concerned. If the music is good.
- [74:12]
B
Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter wrote He's Gone in the spring of 1972, when their former manager, Lenny Hart, was finally apprehended and brought to justice for the money he'd departed with in spring 1970, sentenced to six months in jail. We explored the song's history in our Europe 72 episode about the Netherlands, where they recorded the Keeper take they used on the album. The message of the song from Robert Hunter to the band was in part, I told you when you met him, he's gonna rob you blind. Except he put it more poetically,
- [74:48]
E
Like
- [74:49]
D
I told you what I said,
- [74:55]
B
steal
- [74:56]
D
your face right off your head.
- [75:01]
B
It's little wonder Phil Lesh remembered it. The aftermath with Ron Rackow was more complicated. Lenny Hart had cooked the books and scammed the dead over a long period of time. Rakow chose impulsively to take the money for himself and believed the entire time he was in the right. The band didn't send the authorities after him and in fact negotiated a settlement where he kept the money. The next month, he was in Boston on business.
- [75:27]
D
I was making the transition between the Grateful Dead and the First national bank of Boston easier.
- [75:35]
E
I wasn't.
- [75:36]
D
I made that decision that. That. There's a word in Yiddish, shit, it's a marriage. I made that shit. So I went there to make sure it stayed together.
- [75:46]
B
While he was there, the Dead happened to be in town playing the fifth show of their comeback tour, which we'll talk about in more detail next time.
- [75:54]
D
The last time I saw them play was in the Boston Music Hall. They were on tour and I just went there and I walked in the back door. I wasn't even on the stage. I was in the audience. I was seen by Weir, who dedicated the. I think Weird dedicated the encore to me. And it was Johnny B. Goode. This one's for Ron.
- [76:15]
B
And this is kind of what it's all about. That'd be June 11, 1976, in Boston, a month after Rakow's departure. After the tour, the band, Rackow and the lawyers had a final meeting. And it was a few weeks after that when the Hell's angel showed up at Rakow's pad in Stinson beach to eat dinner and put him on trial.
- [76:49]
D
And now we're eight or ten weeks later, and I'm on trial at the behest of the Hell's Angels. And I tell them the story I just told you, period, omitting nothing, including nothing else. That was the story. And so I told my story and I looked at my three judges and Gary Popkin, who was. Was the first one to speak. It's quite a story, you know, And Gary Popkin was the first one to speak. And he turned to the side to Deacon Proudfoot, and he said, chief, I don't know about you, but if I was him, I would have done exactly what he did, exactly that. And. And the Chief looked back at him and said, you know, I would have to. That's what I would have done, too. And the third guy said, me too. And about 10 minutes later, the phone rang. And I answered the phone and it's Sandy Alexander, the president of the New York Angels. And he wanted to talk to any of his members that are there. And I gave him to.
- [78:02]
B
Gary Rackow knew Sandy Alexander well. Not only was Alexander a huge fan of the Dead and Garcia's side trips, but he was one of the subjects of the in progress round Reels film Hell's Angels Forever.
- [78:13]
D
So he talks to Sandy and he says, hey, we did it. And this guy Was in the right. There's no doubt about it. And Sandy said, good. Good to know. And he got off the phone. That was the end of that. That's what he was calling about. And he says, you didn't have anybody call you between 6 and 11. Nobody called you? No. You know, you had no coverage. I said, I don't need coverage with you, man. And anyway, here's Sandy. He said, sandy's coverage for me, not for you. Okay, I got that. I mean, if that had gone the other way, you would be talking to my spirit. I would be dead.
- [78:53]
B
Not that things were ever really friendly again between Ron Rakow and the Grateful Dead as a whole, but he escaped the Hells Angels wrath.
- [79:00]
D
Jerry did play with Bo Diddley on a boat in the harbor of New York City. That was great. And it was a Hell's angel, but I was at it.
- [79:08]
B
You can see some September 1976 footage of the Jerry Garcia Band playing for the Hells Angels on the SS Duchess. If you mash some combination of those search terms into your nearest search bar. Racco is in the crowd, which hadn't fully received word of the ruling from
- [79:23]
D
the west coast and that movie was in financial need. I had to put in 25,000 of my own dollars to make that thing end. And so I went to New York to be at that party. And at that time, the New York Angels listened to the. To the Oakland Angels, except for one of them, the biggest, baddest one. He. He wanted to get my attention one time. And he tapped me on my Adam's apple like you tap a guy on the shoulder. Try it sometime. It's pretty far out. It's pretty far out. Well, when he tapped me on my Adam's apple, he said, you know, I'm not liking the shit I'm hearing about you. And he just opened his hand to make it big enough to accommodate the rest of my neck. And Gary Popkin and Sandy Alexander both dived on his arm and pulled his arm down. Two of them were on his arm and pulled his arm out. No, no, no, Vinnie, no.
- [80:22]
B
It wasn't until his return to California that Rackow's more permanent rupture with the Dead scene happened to.
- [80:28]
D
When I came home from that trip to New York and went to my house, just like I always did, one time I went there, Cousin David was there waiting for me. It was important. He was waiting for me.
- [80:42]
B
Rakow had paid back the money he'd owed, and thanks once again to the late Cousin David for keeping the debt afloat when he did. But this time, cousin David bore bad news.
- [80:52]
D
And he told me that. He said, you can't live here anymore. You're not in a danger free zone here at all. I just left a bunch of equipment guys in there. They're incensed that you ripped the Grateful Dead. And I said, well, what should I do? He said, if I were you, I would move up to Lake Tahoe. You'd love it there.
- [81:16]
B
And from there, Ron Rackow left the chat.
- [81:19]
D
I left the grateful dead in 76. When I left the Grateful Dead, I decided. I later substantiated the decision. If you have a position of power in a scene and you leave it, leave it absolutely completely. Otherwise the whole goal of the whole scene is going to be to get you. So that's what I did. But what I didn't leave was the fruit of that scene, which was the music. Still to this day, when I put on music, my first instinct is right now is to put on Garcia Grishman Records. They're all incredible.
- [81:59]
B
I'll admit to being quite charmed by Ron Rakow. I'll also admit to not being a person who's ever had a financial dealing go south with Ron Rakow. I certainly don't think he set out to scam the Dead. And I also think that he directly enabled some of the band's most important and noble adventures in trying to create a legitimate, self supporting alternative to what was then the main of American music distribution and culture at large. Thanks to Rackow, the Dead explored commercial independence on a scale equal to the Wall of Sound. But those adventures were over.
- [82:31]
D
I love them, they're my brothers. And if everybody that did something stupid, if you cut their head off, we'd be walking around with no people.
- [82:41]
B
There were many axes and they fell in many directions. We'll be touching on some of the damage in episodes to come, and more importantly, some of the solutions. It's not a surprise to say that the Grateful Dead survived Ron Rakow's sudden departure. The solution was one that they themselves had avoided for almost two years and were already making plans for. They went on the road and stayed. The Dead rehearsed throughout April and May of 1976 and were apparently playing for the two or three days immediately following Rakow's departure. Location unknown. Maybe Mickey's barn. Maybe studio instrument rentals in San Francisco. Maybe their warehouse on Front street, which wasn't yet a recording studio. The tapes are pretty scattered. Wherever they did it, the band got to go back to the one thing they knew they could have fun. Chunky peanut butter chew I got peanut
- [84:06]
E
butter
- [84:08]
D
Chunky peanut butter cheese.
- [84:12]
B
At the end of May, the Dead took over the Orpheum Theater in downtown San Francisco, virtually next door to the Warfield, for a few days of tech rehearsals. Grateful that archivist and legacy manager David
- [84:23]
D
Lemieux, at the end of May, they did some group sessions. Yeah, and that's when they were really testing out the new material, the lazy Lightning supplications, but also trying. Let's give Addicts of My life a try. Alive, Full of cloudy Dreams. And I think that would have been a great addition in 76, primarily because
- [85:12]
A
of how well Donna Jean was singing.
- [85:14]
D
I think they really could have blown
- [85:15]
B
the roof off the place with. With Addicts of My life when there
- [85:22]
E
was no free
- [85:27]
C
to hear
- [85:31]
D
you sing
- [85:35]
B
to me. A few members of the press were let into the rehearsals, including the righteous Dead freak photographer Ed Perlstein, and we've linked to his orpheum photos@dead.net deadcast. And if you'd like a fuller peek into the Orpheum rehearsals, there's some footage out there that's labeled as being a sound check from the July shows at the Orpheum, but which I'm almost certain is from the May sessions. One unusual visual aspect of the band's comeback tours were the mirrored Eye of Horus kick drum heads used by Billy Kreutzman and Mickey Hart. They're not yet in use in the video where the kick drums match Ed's photos, and they're definitely in action in July pictures from the Orpheum. Likewise, in both the rehearsal photos and this video, Mickey has an additional percussion setup on the other side of Billy Kreutzman, which didn't hit the road with the band. On the surviving rehearsal tapes, they only practice one song that appears on Steal youl Face. But despite getting ready to release an album, they weren't getting ready to promote an album, perhaps the first sign that nature was healing and things were returning to some semblance of normal in the Grateful Dead's world.
- [87:09]
C
It was later that I thought
- [87:16]
A
But
- [87:16]
D
I first believed you I cannot share your.
- [87:49]
A
Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. Friends, we'd like to thank our special guests in this episode. Ron Rakow, Steve Brown, Terry Haggerty, John Scherer, and David Lemieux. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast, David Gans, for his ongoing contributions of audio from his interview archive. Executive producer for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Doron Tyson. All rights reserved.