Sunshine Daydream: Veneta, 8/27/72, part 2

Summary

GOOD OL' GRATEFUL DEADCAST

Episode: Sunshine Daydream: Veneta, 8/27/72, Part 2

Release Date: August 25, 2022
Hosts: Rich Mahan & Jesse Jarnow
Notable Guests/Voices: David Lemieux, Johnny Dwork, Adrian Marin, Sam Field, Michelle Lefkowith, Chuck Kesey, many others

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Overview

This episode commemorates the 50th anniversary of one of the most legendary Grateful Dead performances: the benefit show for Springfield Creamery at Veneta, Oregon on August 27, 1972. Immortalized in the film "Sunshine Daydream," the concert is revered for its freewheeling communal atmosphere, historic context, and intensely inspired music—despite surviving oppressive 100+ degree heat and widespread psychedelic revelry. The hosts and guests unpack the day from a variety of angles: music, culture, technical innovation, the unique spirit of community, and the concert’s legacy as both myth and lived experience.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Scene: Arrival and Atmosphere (05:03–12:45)

• Unprecedented Gathering: The show felt like a "gathering of the tribes," reminiscent of Woodstock in its scale and spirit.
  • “I think there’s something happening in our culture that’s never existed—that is a sense of fun and freedom we’ve never had before.” – David Koranda (06:31)
• Community & Cause: The benefit was intended to save Springfield Creamery, making the concert both a cultural and practical rallying point for the Eugene/Springfield community.
  • “It was a big friggin deal for the community… everybody was rallying… to salvage their business.” – Michelle Lefkowith (07:22)
• Vivid Vignettes: Attendees describe a festival-like field—people trading weed for beer, lounging, playing frisbee, topless dancing, and enduring the intense sun.

2. Cultural and Psychedelic Context (10:42–14:14)

• Peak LSD Era: August ’72 coincided with the height of LSD use in America; the show embodied the acid-test ethos of early Dead gigs.
  • “This was pretty much the last Acid Test. …there was slightly less pressure to put on the best show ever… but more pressure to put on the party of the year.” – [Guest] (22:57)
• Celebratory Freedom: The crowd found “joy” and “extremely positive party feeling” unusual even for Dead shows.
• Physical Realities: The day was scorching—reported between 98–108°F, making survival as much about shade and water as about music.

3. Technical Innovations & Challenges (14:00–21:15)

• Filming "Sunshine Daydream": Sam Field and crew faced major obstacles—limited film stock, dosed camera operators, and the challenge of syncing audio and visuals.
  • “They never had enough money to buy enough film stock to shoot a three hour show… By the time they got up there, they could… trust their own radar.” – Adrian Marin (15:25)
• Alembic Audio: The 16-track Ampex MM1000, fresh from "Europe '72", was used for multitrack audio, with Ron Wickersham inventing a primitive sync box to match film and sound (19:43).
• Tapes Circulate: Different mixes (including some with strange echoes) would sustain the show’s myth until a proper mix decades later (20:39).

4. The Music – Breakdown & Highlights

The First Set & Psychedelic Lift-off (32:57–47:29)

• Onset of the Psychedelic Journey: The band and audience "get high together" during the “China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider” jam.
  • “You listen to Jerry’s playing during this sequence as he starts to get high… the music starts to brim with this electrical exuberance…” – Johnny Dwork (34:07)
• Musical Analysis: Isolated multitrack segments highlight Bob Weir, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and Bill Kreutzmann’s interplay (41:44–47:12).
• Physical Effects: Even as the band pushes musical boundaries, the heat strains tuning and energy, leading to a much-needed break (47:29).

Set Two – Jams & Cultural Icons (48:40–72:00)

• Playing in the Band: This rendition is “as psychedelic as Dark Star,” noted for its unusually slow tempo and instant evaporation of time (48:49–52:00).
• Birdsong: Considered by many a “peak” version, with an ethereal, sun-soaked, slightly out-of-tune magic.
• Naked Pole Guy: The appearance of Gary Jensen (aka Naked Pole Guy) during "Jack Straw" becomes iconic—a visual metaphor for the show’s uninhibited, communal spirit (55:43–61:34).
  • “He was the representative of the holy fool… the sacred mirror reflection of the experience that many of us have… metaphorically naked.” – Johnny Dwork (57:13)

Set Three – Sundown and Dark Star (73:16–89:14)

• Dark Star: The climax—over 30 minutes—comparable to spiritual journeys and jazz improvisation on the order of Coltrane’s "A Love Supreme."
  • “It’s really the Zen essence of Buddhism and jazz music accordingly. …channeling wisdom that is beyond what we can think.” – Johnny Dwork (75:04)
• Animation Solution: With the film crew too dosed to record, a trippy National Geographic–collage animation fills the visual gap during "Dark Star" in the film (80:22).
• Transitions: A “death and rebirth” thematic arc—Dark Star → El Paso (a song about dying), then “Sing Me Back Home” and finally rebirth in “Sugar Magnolia.”
  • “She replied, ‘Wow, you know, it’s as though Jerry Garcia was having a conversation with God.’” – Johnny Dwork (88:43)

5. The Aftermath and Lasting Legacy (90:23–97:21)

• Show End: Ends with “One More Saturday Night,” the crowd chanting, “We want the Dead,” and the audience flowing away peacefully (90:23–92:16).
• Concert Impact: Though it didn’t raise much money, the band’s $10,000 gift saved Springfield Creamery (98:03).
  • “That got us into the yogurt world. That was all we needed.” – Chuck Kesey (98:03)
• Personal Transformation: Many attendees describe the show as personally transformative, a catalyst for greater self-awareness, growth, and community (97:13).

6. The Afterlife of "Sunshine Daydream" (101:08–124:13)

• Film’s Tumultuous Journey: Delayed by legal and critical issues; not officially released until 41 years later.
• Bootlegs Spread the Legend: VHS copies (intended for convenience) spread underground, ultimately feeding demand for an official restored release (114:39–117:54).
  • “We just thought it was an extremely clever form of guerrilla marketing…” – Sam Field (114:43)
• Archiving and Cosmic Legacy: A musical highlight from the concert is literally shot into space on NASA’s Osiris Rex spacecraft as an artifact of human achievement (124:50).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the acid and the vibe:
  “Almost everyone at that show—the band, the crew, the pranksters in the audience—was tripping that day, including the filmmakers who were dosed.” – Johnny Dwork (31:13)
• On physical freedom:
  “It was so much fun. I laughed my ass off. There was such camaraderie at this thing.” – Michelle Lefkowith (27:04)
• On technical innovation:
  “God bless Ron Wickersham and his genius… an early sync sound system…” – Adrian Marin (19:50)
• On communal ethos:
  “I had somehow found the family that I had been missing. I think many people would agree with that. And the Grateful Dead, they were our band.” – Camille Cole (28:26)
• On musical transcendence:
  “It’s as though Jerry Garcia was having a conversation with God on God’s level of conversation.” – Johnny Dwork quoting a listener (88:43)
• On the show’s afterlife:
  “We weren’t doing very well on collecting revenue… but it seemed like a great way to let the happiness spread.” – Sam Field (117:54)
• On community power:
  “The thing about the concert was that nothing bad happened. There were no fights… Everybody had a good time. And that was our target.” – Chuck Kesey (92:16)
• On saving the Creamery:
  “We didn’t make any money after all this effort… The Grateful Dead felt sorry for us and gave us $10,000. That got us into the yogurt world.” – Chuck Kesey (98:03)

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Key Timestamps

• [05:03]–[12:45]: Setting the scene, community, Woodstock echoes, physical/sensory vignettes
• [14:00]–[21:15]: Filming challenges, Alembic multitrack, innovative 1972 sync technology
• [32:57]–[47:29]: “China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider” and the onset of communal acid trip
• [48:40]–[72:00]: Set two, “Playing in the Band” and “Birdsong,” appearance of Naked Pole Guy
• [73:16]–[89:14]: Set three at sunset: “Dark Star,” themes of death/rebirth, musical transcendence
• [90:23]–[92:16]: Show winding down, peaceful dispersal, the Dead’s peaceful legacy
• [97:13]–[98:21]: Aftermath, transformative power, Creamery saved
• [101:08]–[124:13]: Life of the film, bootlegs, restoration, space archiving

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Conclusion

The 8/27/72 Veneta show endures as an emblem of the Grateful Dead’s unique interaction with their community, their technical and artistic innovation, and their ability to transform hardship (heat, chaos, drugs) into transcendent experience. "Sunshine Daydream" is more than just a film or a great show—it’s a slice of living cultural history, as relevant to the committed Deadhead as to the curious listener in search of American myth in motion.

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Visit dead.net/deadcast for multimedia extras and explore interactive tools like “Playing in the Band” multitrack app. For a deeper dive into the Springfield Creamery benefit’s legacy, check out linked documentaries and transcripts.

Transcript

[Rich Mahan]

Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season six of the Good Old Grateful Dead cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thanks for taking this trip along with us into the world of the Grateful Dead in this episode. As in the season six opener last week, we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of what many Deadheads consider to be one of the best shows the band ever played. August 27, 1972 found the band on stage at a benefit for the Springfield Creamery in Veneta, Oregon. Well documented in the film Sunshine Daydream, this Show Sports Vintage 1972 Grateful Dead playing their hearts out for an enthusiastic crowd in scorching temperatures. Our website dead.netdeadcast has extra materials for you to explore from this episode. [e-mail] deadcast are all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons one through five, and you can link from there to any of your favorite podcasting platforms so you can listen where you like to listen and new for you. To explore our transcripts for many of the episodes in seasons one through five, head over to dead.net/deadcast index and click the transcript link on the episode you want to explore. Thanks to everyone who has contributed their [e-mail] a fair amount of you made it into the podcast, so thanks very much for your input. Were you at any of the Madison Square garden shows in 1981, 1982 or 1983? Well, if you were, head over to stories.dead.net and record your story about those MSG shows today. Well, speaking of msg, boy, is there a cool new Grateful Dead box set heading our way in and out of the garden? Madison Square Garden 818283 it boasts 17 CDs from six previously unreleased concerts recorded live in New York City at Madison Square Garden between 1981 and 1983. Also available is Madison Square Garden New York, NY 3 981, a 3 CD set featuring one full show from the box. Both titles are available September 23rd and are available for pre order now at dead.net Also new to explore is the Grateful Dead server on Discord. Download the Discord app on your mobile device or computer and then search for the public Grateful Dead server and click the Join button. Find the deadcast channel and chat with fellow heads about the latest episode you just listened to. Jesse and I pop on from time to time and answer questions.

[Sam Field]

So.

[Rich Mahan]

So we'll see you there. But wait, there's more. All of you musicians out there are gonna love this one. Announcing Playing in the Band an interactive web based mixing board that allows you to jam with the Grateful Dead. You can mute the channel of your choice and fill in for any member of the Dead or press the Solo button on any channel to listen and learn or duet. We have five songs from the 82772 Veneta, Oregon show ready for you to explore and jam along [e-mail] playinginthe well, the show in Veneta is underway. New Riders of the Purple Sage have played a cracking opening set and it's time for the Grateful Dead to step into the sunlight, literally in over 100 degree heat to deliver a scorching three sets of highly electrified music. Take your salt tablets, don't forget your canteen and get ready for a heater. Time to hand the microphone over to Jesse Jarno.

[Johnny Dwork]

On my mind.

[Sam Field]

And rolling fast while.

[Johnny Dwork]

He had gone across Caroline dropping Charlotte by pike rocking with never was a minute late.

[Sam Field]

We was 90 miles out of the.

[Johnny Dwork]

Land of our sundown bulldozer state at full stolen.

[David Lemieux]

August 27, 1972 dawned in Lane County, Oregon at a pleasant 60 degrees, but heated up quickly.

[Sam Field]

Bring in summer please.

[David Lemieux]

It would be a legendary day in Grateful Dead history and we contend, the broader history of music. By the time the gates opened at noon for the Springfield Creamery's potluck picnic with the Grateful Dead, it was over 80 degrees Fahrenheit and still climbing. The concert film Sunshine Daydream would be drawn from this day, but some of the audio would be added later as we'll learn.

[Sam Field]

Listen.

[Johnny Dwork]

Did you know?

[David Lemieux]

And if it keeps going like they.

[Adrian Marin]

Say it's going to keep going, then.

[David Lemieux]

It'S liable to match the all time Oregon record of 105. When the new Riders of the Purple Sage began their opening set, the temperature was still a bit tolerable.

[Johnny Dwork]

There was a little place called Hamburger Dan. Heard that old jukebox A thing song about a truck driving man.

[David Lemieux]

That's from the archival new writers album titled Field trip released in 2004 by Omnivore. We went a bunch into the background of the Creamery benefit in our last episode. In case you're just joining us, the concert field was filling up. David Koranda this field is full of.

[Johnny Dwork]

Deadheads and fun people who just went out there to listen to the music and hang out and support the Creamery. It had that same kind of feeling when I went to Woodstock. There was. We got there a day or so early and there were maybe 100 people there at the time. And then as people started coming it felt like holy shit, what's happening? And that I felt that same sense of here we go again as we were on our way out there. Of like I think we've created something new here. I think there's something happening in our culture that's never existed and that is a sense of fun and freedom that we've never had before.

[David Lemieux]

The dad had come to save the Springfield Creamery. Michelle Lefquith was living on the non commune nearby called Adytum.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

It was a big friggin deal for the whole community of Eugene, Springfield because I think Springfield Creamery some folks got a little bit of hot water and so everybody was rallying around them to try to salvage their business.

[David Lemieux]

At the front gate you might have had your ticket taken by Nancy Van Brasch Harmon, the namesake of Nancy's yogurt, still available in dairy cases nationwide.

[Sam Field]

I was up front helping with admissions and stuff like that in the beginning and then going backstage to see if there are things that could be helped with. And then everybody was out on blankets out front dancing. So you just moved about.

[David Lemieux]

Camille Cole would shortly join the mobile commune known as the Bus Farm.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

I am willing to bet that there were all kinds of vans and trucks and all kinds of reconstruction and painted wildly parked all around that big city.

[David Lemieux]

One of those Volkswagens belonged to Dave Tharp. He'd been an east coast head before heading west.

[Johnny Dwark]

I moved out west to Moscow, Idaho. There I met a friend named Bruce who told me about a show that was in Oregon.

[Johnny Dwork]

He rode his motorcycle.

[Johnny Dwark]

I took my Volkswagen van and we.

[Johnny Dwork]

Went over to near Eugene, Oregon to a place in.

[Johnny Dwark]

And lo and behold, that was the Creamery show. It was extremely hot. I had a Volkswagen van that was full of water. It was a camper van and we.

[Johnny Dwork]

Packed extra water so we didn't have to worry that much about water and where we were going to stay.

[Johnny Dwark]

I Thought it was amazing.

[Johnny Dwork]

West coast show was a completely new experience to me. I was used to seeing them in great rock halls.

[David Lemieux]

The Oregon Daily Emerald reported people everywhere roaming around the huge rectangular grass field west of Elmira. Wine, beer, dope, Coca cola, ice cream sandwiches and free food. A ten foot high stage. A water truck full of drinking water which ran out. Good times. Mango man didn't make it to the show but left us this [e-mail] it.

[Johnny Dwark]

Was the summer 72 was the summer.

[Sam Field]

I would have been going into freshman year. And my buddy Joey wanted me to go.

[David Lemieux]

And there were about four or five.

[Sam Field]

Of us that were always hanging out.

[Adrian Marin]

And you know, doing crazy things and.

[Johnny Dwark]

They'Re all trying to convince, convinced me.

[Adrian Marin]

To just go and deal with the.

[Johnny Dwark]

Consequences later, which I didn't.

[Sam Field]

My, my dad, those guys just couldn't understand my dad.

[Adrian Marin]

But anyway, so they did go.

[Sam Field]

And Joey, he's one of those kids with the first kids grow the long hair and super cool looking, you know, he, he ended up on the 11 o' clock news and he had a beer in one hand and a joint in the other. And they were talking about the decadence of the, of the hippies and everything down in Eugene.

[David Lemieux]

Which means that at least one local television station covered the event. Maybe that tape is still out there somewhere. David Karanda it was like a, in.

[Johnny Dwork]

A way, like gathering of the tribes, so to speak. The one thing that was in common was listening to the Dead and then as the sidelight. Okay, this is important. We're going to support the Creamery. And everybody felt that too.

[David Lemieux]

In the years after Woodstock, there had been many attempts to find festival magic. As the rock festival became an increasingly regimented and regulated cultural form, the Springfield Creamery benefit followed its own path. Another factor in the day perhaps is that by some accounts August 1972 was the exact peak of LSD use in the United States and perhaps the world. Only a few weeks earlier there'd been a massive multi state bust of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the world's preeminent hash and LSD smuggling non organization. Some half a million hits of acid were confiscated. But there was no drought in Oregon. The members of the Dead would long acknowledge the importance of the venues they played in shaping the music they created. And they would find a freedom at the Veneta Fairgrounds that was disappearing quickly from their itinerary of theaters, arenas and stadiums.

[Johnny Dwork]

Yeah, it had a higher level of joy. I mean that everybody, everybody who went to any concert felt like this is awesome and I'M happy to be here. But that one had a far more celebratory feeling. You felt it in this caravan going out there. It was as if we were all little kids going to a circus together. And I don't remember feeling that from any other concert. Not that they weren't great, but it was an extremely positive party kind of feeling.

[Adrian Marin]

I think Don Whitten There were a lot of Frisbee playing going on. In fact, there was a girl that I went to high school with. She was a year younger than I.

[Johnny Dwork]

Was, but I just remember her out.

[Adrian Marin]

There topless, playing Frisbee. And when she saw me, came over.

[Sam Field]

And gave me a big hug and.

[Adrian Marin]

Everything went back out playing Frisbee. So, yeah, people just hanging out, trying.

[Johnny Dwork]

To eat a little bit, drinking water.

[Adrian Marin]

And it was just kind of one of those places just to hang out.

[Johnny Dwork]

We had never been to anything like.

[Adrian Marin]

That before, so it was an eye opening experience.

[David Lemieux]

True to the event's inadvertent mission of being nothing like an actual rock concert, the band was preceded by merry prankster Ken Babs.

[Johnny Dwork]

Before you get to the I know who this guy is, but he ain't Bill Graham.

[David Lemieux]

Who took the liberty of spending a few minutes mumbling band introductions while one by one bestowing each individual musician with their own gift. Phil Lesh received walnuts. Even Ramrod, the chief of the Dead's road crew, got a present.

[Johnny Dwork]

Okay, I got one more and then we'll begin. Which is for the man who has come straight out of our area from Pendleton, Oregon, to go down and coordinate activities in the Bay Area with lifting the equipment to the point where I gave him my bad back. Now he takes it over. So I'm going to give him a present for that occasion. I'm speaking none other than Ramrod.

[David Lemieux]

And now.

[Johnny Dwork]

So here you go. Grateful Death.

[Sam Field]

Left my home in the.

[Johnny Dwork]

Fortini, California on my mind Settled that way out and rolled on the cross Caroline Dropping Charlotte.

[Sam Field]

Bye bye. Rocking.

[Johnny Dwork]

We never was a minute late we was 90 miles out of the land.

[David Lemieux]

Of our sundown road the cameras were rolling for what was supposed to be the first authorized Grateful Dead concert film documentary producer Sam Field.

[Sam Field]

My job as producer was to make sure that the whole thing happened. And so, no, I was not a cameraman. My actual concert job was to make the two track recording of the show from the board feed so that we had something to edit to. I actually stood over by Parrish's corner over on the Jerry side or whatever and that and I had a, you know, 10 inch reel two track recorder with a sync track. You know, it was like a Nagra, but it was a Stellavox brand, as it turned out. But so we had our sync pulse on the tone track of that recording so that we had something to sync up film to and to listen to and, you know, edit to. So I would start at the start of a set. The reels were whatever they were an hour, an hour and a half long. So I didn't really have to stay there and watch the meters. So I would make sure that the film loading crew was cooperating with the cameraman and that the cameramen were getting enough water or whatever, whatever they were drinking.

[David Lemieux]

Adrienne Marin helped the filmmakers restore the film in the 21st century.

[Adrian Marin]

They never had enough money to buy enough film stock to shoot a three hour show, right? That was out of the question. That would have been tens and tens of thousands of dollars. Sam had just enough money to buy, oh, I don't know, something like 27,000ft of film or something. By the time they got up there, they had immersed themselves in the music to the extent that they could trust their own radar. John was the guy who was in charge of that. So when it came time to shooting songs in Venita, nobody rolled unless John's hand gave the signal as each song was about to be played. It was John's word as the director to say, we're shooting this one or we're not shooting this one. Out of something like what? How many songs performed that day? They only got eight of them, but they got the right eight, I think.

[David Lemieux]

The two stage cameras were operated by director John Norris and editor Phil DeGuerre.

[Adrian Marin]

John's camera is the camera A. He's the one shooting Jerry straight on and then Jerry and Bobby and then Phil's camera. Phil Daguerre's camera is what would be called the B camera. He's the one shooting Phil Lesh, Joe Valentine, he's still up in Eugene. He was probably one of the most essential folks who jumped on board to help John and Sam. He built the standing tower, the Crow's Nest, on which he shot much of the crowd and band.

[David Lemieux]

Also helping with the construction and occupation of the Crow's Nest was the architect Al Strobel, a resident of the nearby Church of the Creative Commune, who went on to play Philip Gerard, the one armed man on David Lynch's Twin Peaks, as well as playing a righteous role in the more recent Twin the Return. This audio was recorded backwards and then reversed. Please welcome back Al Strobel.

[Sam Field]

I helped build one of the camera towers stage right. And then I sat up there for a good portion of the concert with my little Bolex and filmed a bunch of it, and some of which I think was actually used when they made the film and then went backstage and filmed a bit of that too. The Super 8 was a lovely little kind of pistol grip handheld camera that took beautiful pictures. I actually took a picture of a live birth with that once.

[David Lemieux]

Miraculously, our friend Adrian Marin has located some footage of Al Strobel helping Joe Valentine to build the Crow's nest. Check out dead.netDeadcast the Dead also presented the documentary filmmakers with a gift of sorts. After its triumphant tour of the continent, Alembic's Ampex MM1016 track console returned home to the sound company's Brady street headquarters, around the corner from the former Fillmore West. The Alemba crew had set it up to finish the overdubs for Europe 72 on the same gear on which the band recorded the music in late August. They packed it up and sent it back into battle in the Oregon heat, along with Bob Matthews, Betty Kanter, Europe 72 Recordist Wiz Leonard and Alembics own Ron Wickersham, Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.

[Johnny Dwork]

Sixteen track, same tape reels as the Europe 72 tape reels. The big blue tape reels with the Alembic logo with track one through 16 of which vocals and instruments were assigned to which track the Alembic went up and it was the same crew. I know Bob and Betty were involved in that recording.

[David Lemieux]

When Alembic had acquired the MM1000 in 1969, they'd scrapped the album they were working on and started again making Oxymoxoa. The MM1000 is what allowed them to record live Dead, Skull n roses and Europe 72. Veneta was perhaps its last hurrah recording a live Dead show.

[Johnny Dwork]

They did record multi track of New Year 72 Winterland and presumably I don't know if they were Alembic tapes, But there is 16 track of some of that show and then absolutely nothing in 73 and 74. And what they built for the Grateful dead movie in 74 was drastically different than the Europe 72 setup in Venita.

[David Lemieux]

Lots of decks were rolling, there was.

[Johnny Dwork]

A two track made live, there were cassettes made live, there was. I don't know what it was something that was made live specifically as kind of a very Rough Guide track for the film project.

[David Lemieux]

Not only that, but Alembics, Ron Wickersham designed a primitive device for the filmmakers to be able to sync their picture with sound.

[Adrian Marin]

God bless Ron Wickersham and his genius. He created almost like a little black box with a digital numerical readout. And that was placed with a bit of a shading cover over it because if the sun was so blistering bright and hot that day, it would be very hard to see any kind of digital readout on any device. And so that was placed sort of where mainly John could see it. And then with every song there would be the need to shoot that with the film camera. And then in the editing room, the film with the burn in film stock number on the. On the side near the perforations of the film could be matched up with the number that was presented on the analog device digitally. And so this was an early sync sound system designed by Ron Wickerson.

[David Lemieux]

The two track tapes are the source of the Veneta recordings that have circulated since the late 70s. Some with a characteristic and strange echo effect.

[Johnny Dwork]

There were some weird sounding tapes from there and there were several masters made. Behr had just come back at the end of July, so he now had some influence on the two track stuff being recorded. Recorded Nothing to do with the multi tracks. So I really don't know what we were hearing because so many different iterations of the master were made. And I don't think the multi was mixed down until Jeffrey did it in 2012 or so.

[David Lemieux]

Those 16 track masters were recently accessed again to create Playing in the Band, a web app where you can isolate tracks and jam along with the Dead. You can find more [e-mail] we're able to showcase some of the isolated instrumental tracks from the Venita show, which we'll highlight throughout today's episode. We'll start with just a tiny taste, listening first to Bob Weir's guitar introduction to Playing in the band. And now how Jerry Garcia ornaments it with a harmony.

[Adrian Marin]

Part.

[David Lemieux]

1 Musical Footnote we'll add here. At the end of the Europe 72 Tour, Jerry Garcia's 55 Stratocaster given to him by Graham Nash gained a sticker that gave it a new name, Alligator. But Alligator spent a lot of time on the Alembic workbench. And the summer of 72 was one of those periods. In August and September, Garcia played a 57 Sunburst Stratocaster that because of this show has been dubbed by Gearheads as the Venita Strat. We've linked to Mike Clem's Jerry Garcia instrument [e-mail] deadcast somebody said, and I.

[Johnny Dwork]

Agree, that this was pretty much the last Acid Test. And it had the same vibe. You could freak freely and the band, just like an Acid test, could play or not. And so they played three sets, and they were incredible sets. And, you know, there's slightly less pressure to put on the best show ever when you're doing it as a benefit, but more pressure to put on the party of the year, because people have come and they're expecting this big party.

[David Lemieux]

And back on the party planning committee, so to speak, was one Augustus Owsley Stanley iii, known to friends as Bear. There's some great fragmentary shots of him in Sunshine, Daydream and Grateful Days footage. He'd been in prison for two years, from early August 1970 to late July 1972. He'd worked dead shows right up until the time he went away and returned to the crew within days of his release. We'll have a lot more to say about Baer's return in the future, but it's a good bet that he's also the reason that Jack Cassidy flew to Oregon to hang out in between Jefferson Airplane tour stops in the Midwest. Some of the tracks from their Chicago shows turned up on 30 seconds over Winterland. If someone had a third eye for a good time, it was Jack Cassidy. Things in Veneta were aglow. Johnny Dwark was a founding editor of Dupree's Diamond News.

[Johnny Dwark]

The Grateful Dead is, especially at that time, a psychedelic band. They were ambassadors for the psychedelic experience. And so I think we need to talk about the psychedelic experience. Environmentally speaking, August 27th was, to say the least, a very challenging day for both the audience and performers alike. Amazingly, it was 108 degrees on stage at the peak of the sun's arc that day. Until recently, that was actually the hottest day in Oregon's recorded history. The sun was so intense that for a lot of the show, many audience members actually had to retreat into the shade of the woods that surrounded that beautiful field.

[Johnny Dwork]

That old sun's making our instruments get mighty strange, so they're gonna be out of tune for a little while.

[David Lemieux]

Two days later, the Oregon Daily Emerald would report the heat as only 98 degrees, which still sounds like a mighty intense way to experience a show.

[Johnny Dwork]

Chuck Kesey Ticket takers were all volunteers, and as soon as the band striked up, all the volunteers went to the band. We lost our whole staff.

[David Lemieux]

Lawrence Roberts is the author of May Day 1971 a White House at War, A Revolt in the Streets, and the Untold History of America's biggest mass arrest.

[Sam Field]

It wasn't really a traditional rock concert, but it started to look like it pretty quickly after the band started playing, right? Everybody moved up the stage.

[David Lemieux]

Michelle and David and the Adytum Gang were pretty close.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

I don't remember even being able to get out because we were close to the front and I mean it was friggin jammed. There were thousands of people there.

[Johnny Dwork]

It was very hot out and it was pretty packed and just a very, very friendly atmosphere and then just kind of funky the way it was all being set up. People hanging around trying to get the equipment set up, still getting the sound system set up. I was standing up somewhere about the first third and there was a guy in front of us who had a trash can filled with ice and bottles of beer. And he said, I'll trade you guys some weed for beers. And we traded and he shortly passed out and we finished the trash can and that's, that's pretty much what it was like. I mean, just people dancing around, drinking beer, smoking weed, listening to the music, greeting each other, laughing a lot and getting sunburnt.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

So we just drank beer and did our hippie spins and arms up in the. I. I know that sounds cheesy too, but it was kind of a physically freeing experience for me as well as feeling a part of something. Like at the time I wasn't quite sure. I mean, it was certainly during the women's movement, the feminist movement. It was the first time I heard concepts like co op or a collective and just a lot of the people that were there of that mindset. I was thinking this. Maybe it's too much to say for the first time. But it definitely left an impression on me. I felt happy for a time, like I was just free there. It was so much fun. I laughed my ass off. There was such camaraderie at this thing.

[Sam Field]

Larry Roberts Amazing, amazing me was not only the sound system I remember being excellent, but not only I was just wondering how they could play with such intensity and precision. And you know, I kept thinking, aren't Jerry's fingers gonna slip on the strings? You know, it's so hot, so sweaty. But somehow they were just really rose to the occasion as they often do.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

Camille Cole this sense of family. Oh, we all just found each other because this is really early on, I would say stay in this sort of alternative lifestyle. So many people came to Oregon, to California, to the west coast and sort of found each other like family in those days. And that particular day and many days from then, I felt that I had somehow found the family that I had been missing. I think many people would agree with that. And the Grateful Dead, they were our band.

[David Lemieux]

Michelle Lefkowith.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

I'd never seen anything like it because I grew up in a double wide trailer and I had a military father. And the long and short of that is I had a really volatile childhood. But here I am where everybody's just digging on each other and peace, love and sisterhood. I actually was really in my element. It changed my life.

[David Lemieux]

Dan o' Hykinen was a serious dead freak, but he was having a hard time with it.

[Sam Field]

I knew that the playing was just off the map. The playing is so superb in that show and I really cherish my CDs and my DVD of that boxed set, But I did not have a good time at that show. It was so hot that I was forced. Even though my friends, Steve is crazy, he was always right down in front. Other friends of mine were down, jumping up and down. I couldn't handle it. I had to move to the back of the crowd, into the shade under the trees. And, you know, I don't know what I had. Maybe I had a gallon banjo canteen. And I was just nursing that all day long until it was hot, until. Until it was coming out hot. But I sure knew it was historic.

[Johnny Dwork]

We're changing our name to the Sunstroke Serenaders.

[Sam Field]

I knew that the material that was being presented was some of the best playing that I've ever heard. And I was astounded. I couldn't believe that those guys could even maintain up there on the stage in the heat.

[David Lemieux]

Dano certainly wasn't alone in seeking shade in the woods.

[Sam Field]

And I think a lot of them didn't even know how serious it can get. And I know now a lot more than I knew then because of many, many years of outdoor life in the desert. But at least I had like a gallon Danzo canteen around me. And I knew I had to keep drinking it whether it had gone hot or not. I think there was one point where I was looking for to refill my canteen with cold water, and I couldn't. I just had to drink the hot water.

[Johnny Dwark]

You know, almost everyone at that show, the band, the crew, the pranksters in the audience, was tripping that day, including the filmmakers who were dosed. But out of that struggle is born the classic hero's journey. And that's why the audio and the film of 827 are so especially exhilarating for us Deadheads to witness. You can hear the band give all of their attention to playing and singing in tune in those challenging moments.

[Johnny Dwork]

I told you my friend Durango would be back before we knew it. And here he is now with the report of the water situation, which has become very dry in the area with probably still another three hours to go with the intensity. So there's going to be, according to his report, if they get it going, a fire truck will move slowly along there and spray out from its nozzle.

[David Lemieux]

Durango was otherwise known as Wavy Gravy, AKA Al Dente, AKA Dimensional Cremo, AKA Hugh Romney.

[Johnny Dwork]

So hang in and we're gonna move with the truck just so you know what you're getting hit with, so nobody.

[Adrian Marin]

Thinks it's something weird coming down on them.

[Johnny Dwork]

It's just water from the creek now, you dig? The water coming by is not drinking water. So save your drinking water and get. Use this for the rubbery water, the body soothing water. So you save a little. Conserve. Oh, this is. See the report from the action centralists. Conserve your water.

[David Lemieux]

Gotta watch out for that rubbery water. David Karanda There really wasn't any way.

[Johnny Dwork]

To get out of it. You had to leave or go pretty far away to get away from the sun. And so I'm sure that there were plenty of people who had some pretty bad sunburns when it was all over beginning that day.

[Johnny Dwark]

On the first set, it's obviously represents the gestational stage of that day's great journey in which, you know, the band is trying to get used to the unusual heat of that day. For the first few songs, the show, it's not really that much different than a normal show, but for anybody who's had a strong psychedelic experience, it's undeniably obvious that on 8 27, the band starts to get high during the China Cat sunflower. There's a point right after the jam between China Cat and I know you Rider where the initial China Cat jam levels off on a new, very trippy level.

[Sam Field]

Sam.

[Johnny Dwark]

You listen to Jerry's playing during this sequence as he starts to get high and the music starts to brim with this electrical exuberance, this expanded chi energy that starts flowing through anybody who is starting to trip. You know, his noodling just becomes like electric, this accelerated noodling. It continues through the next few songs, which to me it represents the unbridled wildness of the childhood phase of the archetypal journey.

[David Lemieux]

Adrienne Marin helped restore Sunshine Daydream and is the director of Grateful Days, a wonderful documentary about the event. The creators of the Sunshine Daydream concert film have since passed, but Adrian is here to speak for them.

[Adrian Marin]

They weren't pros in the sense that they were going to be able to shoot under the challenges presented by acid. And so that was the big thing, because the acid was just flowing that day so incredibly through everything. Were you going to be able to keep it together? And so John, you know, obviously kept it together, I think better than anybody. He told me that during China Cat Rider, he was probably peaking the most. And the camera work during that is just so sensitive and astounding.

[David Lemieux]

Meanwhile, the Far West Action Picture Services team was out in the field.

[Adrian Marin]

There were probably about five or six cameras total at any given time. There were really much more than you would think, based on the footage represented in the film. But again, that's because everybody was just tripping so hard, right? And a lot of the footage, unfortunately, isn't useful.

[David Lemieux]

AI has been pretty good at restoring bumpy silent film footage from a century ago. Maybe someday it'll be sophisticated enough to correct the wild zags of a bunch of dosed pranksters and pals. Things were getting intense out there. Sunshine Daydream producer Sam field died in 2019, but I interviewed him a few years before that for my book Heads.

[Sam Field]

Even if you weren't prepared with the sunblock, if that was even invented, then I don't think we knew what SPF meant. Even if you weren't prepared in that way, it was hot. It was hot. And so there was plenty of reason to dress appropriately. Well, or undress appropriately, as we said.

[David Lemieux]

Some of the radio dialogue in the Sunshine Daydream concert film was added later in the process. Like Keezy wrote in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, it's the truth. Even if it didn't happen, women and.

[Sam Field]

Children are going to have to be.

[Johnny Dwork]

Taken care of first. I mean, I was just back there. Do you know what I mean?

[Sam Field]

At the truck, the water truck. What happened? It was the women and the children there. One woman coming up out of the inside of that water truck and the.

[Johnny Dwork]

Babies all around and her thirsty.

[Sam Field]

And the people underneath are licking on.

[Johnny Dwork]

The bottom of the water truck.

[Sam Field]

And there's one skinny dude coming up from inside the water truck with a T shirt full of water and squeezing it into a jug and saying, that's all there is, sister.

[David Lemieux]

But the water situation was pretty dire and suitably weird.

[Johnny Dwork]

Okay, Chuck Keasy, Chuck Kesey, you all know him. He's the host here today. Go to the water tank truck. The pump is no longer working as the host, you have to fix it. Okay? You got that, Chuck?

[David Lemieux]

Chuck Kesey to the dead cast, please.

[Johnny Dwork]

There was a moment in there that in health and safety and do we have enough water? And that's a good question. And I brought in a milk tank truck full of water and figured out how many people there might be and. And if you were dispensing water, how much water there would be and whether or not it would be enough. And as I went around worried about things, I came to the water truck and I looked over and they were taking showers underneath the water and instead of drinking it, and I thought, holy smokes, we're going to run out of water. And about that time when the truck hatch of the tank truck flopped open like this, and out of the water truck came a naked hippie. And I thought, whoops, we lost the water. The dad said this was the nakedest concert they've ever been to. And it was really hot and everybody was naked.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

Camille Cole People were sweating and taking off their clothes, which is sort of tradition out of the country fair site anyway, so no one noticed.

[David Lemieux]

Nancy Hammer of Nancy's Yogurt has this observation about the film.

[Sam Field]

You look out over this sea of people and, you know, what's astonishing is that nobody has tattoos. A sea change in 50 years. It was so hot that everybody took their shirts off, you know, and there were no tattoos. Larry Roberts A lot of people stripping off their clothes because of the heat. And it's another thing about, you know, the. Added to the veggie burgers and organic food and the music and everything, there was much more casual nudity in the Oregon commune world at the time. And it wasn't shocking at all.

[David Lemieux]

Well, maybe to a few people.

[Adrian Marin]

DON Whitten, My wife always tells this story. This girlfriend of hers that was there with us, there was this guy came walking up and he's just naked as a jaybird and he's carrying a like.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

A salad with him. And he just plops down right next.

[Adrian Marin]

To Donna, this girl we were with, and she just had this look on her face like, oh, my God.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

What?

[Adrian Marin]

You know, we're just innocent little Southern Oregon kids. Never been at this kind of thing before.

[David Lemieux]

It's funny because it's salad. During the China cat sunflower, I know you rider sequence in the original cut of Sunshine Daydream, there was a fair bit of nudity edited down a bit for its official release several decades later. Producer Sam Field.

[Sam Field]

We were in our early 20s and single when we did it. As we grew older and Realized that maybe this will have some cultural legs. It just seemed appropriate to take a little bit of the leering aspect out. And it just wasn't necessary. And so we did find some other shots that could replace some of it. The way we've got it now, it's a little more tasteful, I hate to say, a little more adult, but a little bit better for the years to come. And it just didn't need to be that.

[David Lemieux]

Good call, guys. Though, to be fair to the filmmakers on two points. First, it was an accurate representation of the day. The next day, the Eugene Register guard went with the headline the Bayer look was in evidence at Sunday rock concert. And secondly, while I've not done a proper survey, though there's certainly much gratuitous nudie in many documentaries about rock concerts of the 60s and 70s. Sunshine Daydream has a far higher balance of naked nudes than most. The purple sock rule did not apply. While we've got these multi tracks, let's listen to a tiny bit of the peak between China Cat, Sunflower and I know you Rider.

[Sam Field]

Let's start with Bob Weird.

[David Lemieux]

And this is what Garcia is doing over that. But of course, the propulsion of the jam comes plenty from the rhythm section. Let's check in with Phil Lesh. Over to you, Phil Camp. Forget Keith. God show. The piano pickup was a bit crunchy. One of the Dead crew's current tech battles in 1972. David Lemieux got a copy pretty early in his tape trading career.

[Johnny Dwork]

So it would have been fall 85, maybe early 86. I got Vanita. And you know that moment in Bertha when they just go flying off.

[David Lemieux]

That's why hear me please.

[Sam Field]

I am on my bearing knees.

[Johnny Dwork]

Earth, don't you come around here anymore. I'd never heard anything like that.

[Sam Field]

This.

[Johnny Dwork]

By this point, I probably had three or four 1972 shows. And so I knew the 72 sound very well. I knew Europe 72. This was so dramatically different and you know, naive. 16 years old, 15, I guess I didn't know why. I didn't know that they were maybe super on that night. But that Bertha just started soaring.

[Adrian Marin]

That's why, if you please, I'm on my baby knees.

[David Lemieux]

No doubt a super intense Bertha and extraordinary ripping from Garcia. Bertha is one place where I feel like the Dead's rhythm section dug in hard. It entered the band's repertoire just as the Dead became a one drummer band again in early 1971. And Bertha is one of the deepest grooves that Phil Lesh and Bill Kreutzman built together. Let's start with Phil Lesh keeping the pulse, but also throwing in lots of his own ideas in a way that makes it more than a guitar solo.

[Sam Field]

It.

[David Lemieux]

And a bit of Billy the K on drums, the gang of one sounding pretty ferocious and also adding to the conversation.

[Johnny Dwark]

However, the combination of the band obviously trying to settle into the peak of their own psychedelic trip that day, along with the challenge of keeping their instruments in tune obviously proves to be challenging. And so they wisely take a break. Everybody with the sun at its apex at that point needed a break.

[Johnny Dwork]

Hey, we're going to go take a short break and drink something because it's real hot up here and regain our energy. Yeah, cop a couple salt tablets and try again.

[David Lemieux]

According to historical data from the website weatherunderground.com who are uncomfortably literal about telling you which way the wind blows, the temperature reached its peak around 5pm when it hit something like 98 degrees or even hotter around the time the Dead started their second of their three sets. Chuck Kesey I was on the scrapper.

[Johnny Dwork]

Truck with Babs and Ken. Luckily I thought, oh what kind of water have you got? And they were ready. They were ambitious.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

Yikes.

[David Lemieux]

Ween Freaks might recognize this as pretty close to a concept that Dean and Gene Wein joked about in the liner notes for their live album Paintin the Town Brown, in which a giant shit mister would slowly spray the audience during their live epic Poop Ship Destroyer. We can thank Chuck Keezy for keeping the poop ship away. The heat was still an issue, but it was time for the jams to really get going.

[Johnny Dwark]

Johnny Dwark when the band returns and they launch into a playing in the band that starts apart from all others.

[Sam Field]

Wow.

[Johnny Dwark]

This playing in the band. So unusual. It's every bit as psychedelic as the Dark Star, but it's also really distinct from any other playing in the band that I know of. When the band launches into it, the tempo is incredibly slow. Like it might be like the slowest start to a playing in the band that they ever played.

[David Lemieux]

And he's right, that's pretty slow. Weirdly though, playing in the band had just undergone a tempo shift, but in the exact opposite direction. The Veneta version is around 116 beats per minute. When the song debuted in 1971, it was around 124, though settled back down to something like 120bpm by the time the band recorded it for Ace and toured Europe in the spring. When they started playing over the summer, though, the tempo crept back up, including the performances at the Berkeley Community Theater just a few days before venita like this august 25 tape now Dave's picks.

[Johnny Dwork]

24 look for answers, look for fights Some folks up in treetops Just looking for their tights But I can tell you future look what's in your hand But I can't stop or nothing I'm.

[David Lemieux]

Just playing it but in the Venita it was nearly 10 clicks slower than that. When they played the song again the next week in Colorado, the tempo was back up again and it would continue to get faster and stay in that range for the rest of the Dead's career. And before you ask, yes, Dead and company play it just a little bit slower than the Veneto version, around 113bpm.

[Johnny Dwark]

As soon as Bobby finishes singing the lyrics and the musicians enter jam space, any sort of normal time based reality vanishes instantly.

[David Lemieux]

It's truly an otherworldly playing in the band, the dawning of a two year period where the song entered wild realms nearly whenever they played it, which was most shows in that era. But go check out the 08:27:72 version, as dreamy as they come. And if you'd like to break it down into components for yourself, check out the Playing in the Band web [e-mail].

[Sam Field]

Sam.

[Johnny Dwark]

To me, this, this playing in the band and then the birds song and the greatest story that follow. This represents to me the archetypal life cycle that's about coming of age. It's the thing that happens to us that where you reach the pinnacle of your life force, right? You could argue that playing in the band, that birds song and that greatest story are as great as any version that they've ever played.

[David Lemieux]

One song at a time, dude. Dave Tharp I remember this floating dragon.

[Johnny Dwork]

Well, quite a few years later Sunshine.

[Johnny Dwark]

Daydream came out and I realized my paper dragons in the air were actually a naked man.

[David Lemieux]

Good news, Dave. Check out Adrian Marin's amazing short documentary Grateful Days and you'll totally see a big floating dragon over the crowd. But there's definitely a naked man in the concert film, and one specifically that most people remember. If you watch Sunshine Daydream carefully, it's during Jackstraw that one of the day's most infamous figures earns his name. I wrote a bunch about the Creamery benefit and what happened next in my book A Biography of Psychedelic America. So we're going to use a few short excerpts from the new audiobook read by me. It's available from Hachette Audio wherever You get your audiobooks. Naked Pole Guy ascend. In a hairy, sunstroked flash, he bounds from the roof of a backstage equipment truck and scampers to a sweet perch behind the Grateful Dead while the band plays Jack Straw in the melting Oregon heat. At this moment in late August of 1972, more vividly than any other, the Grateful Dead's territory is completely manifest in front of them as they play for 20,000 people at a hippie organized benefit in the northwestern countryside. Sunshine Daydream producer Sam Field, if you.

[Sam Field]

Look closely, he goes through the arc of his day. Because I think there's a place where you see him sort of before he climbs up the pole, just sort of sitting on a platform back in that corner of the stage. And then, of course, you see him go up there, and then you see him put his pants on and then fade away. I guess we called him Pole Guy, but I don't think. I don't ever remember anybody ever calling him Naked Pole Guy or anything. It was just sort of part. He just came with the territory, or part of the ambiance and back to Heads.

[David Lemieux]

The Dead are already midway through the second set of the afternoon when Naked Pole Guy arrives in the frame. But it's been a magical day already. Jerry Garcia spoke of the presence of invisible time travelers at Woodstock, and the Dead's gig at the Oregon Renaissance Fairgrounds has its share, too. For starters, there's the crew of tripping long hairs, capturing just as much as they can on their limited film stock. Naked Pole Guy will become legend, a human freak flag boogieing in the breeze while just below the Grateful Dead jam incandescently for the Oregon Heads go. Naked Pole Guy go during the edit.

[Sam Field]

I mean, he was there, and so did we choose to keep him in more shots or take them out like, hey, do we have enough of him? You know, this is going to be a distraction. It could have been a cloud or a redwood tree. In a way. It was just sort of. It was just part of the environment. Once we realized that it was kind of cool, we certainly kept it. But it was nothing we really went for or meant to minimize or anything. It was just sort of there. During our focus groups, we were aware that it got an audience reaction as people saw it for the first time or wondered where it was going to go and stuff like that. But I think even people seeing it for the first time are barely noticing him as he gets to the end of his supporting role.

[Johnny Dwark]

I've heard tale he was actually embarrassed about his being shown naked on the pole that day. While I can appreciate that, oh, my golly, that's just so perfect for, like, he was the representative of the holy fool, which was a key part of both the Merry Prankster and the Grateful Dead ethos. He's like the holy fool that gets injected or the trickster into the most serious moment, you know, So I think it's really perfect. Jerry's playing the most serious music of his life, and there's some naked guy writhing behind him. It's a perfect juxtaposition. In some ways, he's the sacred mirror reflection of the experience that many of us have when we're listening to that music, when we're all melted down and metaphorically naked. He's the actual reflection of what we feel like inside, right up there on the screen.

[David Lemieux]

One thing about Naked Pole Guy is that from the angle the cameras were shooting, that is, upwards from the front of the stage, some objects might be further away than they appear on the screen. As the concert film circulated in the 80s, 90s and 2000s, naked pole guy became something of a reluctant underground film star. Ultimately, he was pretty embarrassed about the pole that made him a star. Lots of people have questions about him, and we've got a few answers.

[Sam Field]

I didn't even know his name until a couple years ago, or even much of his story.

[David Lemieux]

We'll let Strider Brown do the honors of giving Naked Pole Guy a name.

[Sam Field]

Gary Jensen, the gentleman who was up on the Douglas fir post. He, you know, I mean, I don't think people were paying too much attention to that, but it was the film that, you know, of course, made him notorious or famous or infamous or how however that works.

[David Lemieux]

Sadly, Gary Jensen went to the great Pole in the sky about 15 years back when Adrian Marin was working on his crucial short documentary, Grateful Days. He was able to find him still in the Springfield area. And it's Adrian that's now going to humanize Naked Pole Guy for us.

[Adrian Marin]

Somehow. One day, I was able to get Gary Jensen on the phone and thought maybe I'd get to go meet him or something. It would be a very brief conversation, but we ended up talking for hours. He did not want to meet because he'd fallen off the wagon. His health was precipitously getting worse, and I think he knew he was on the way out, and he didn't want to be presenting himself that way. It was really sad. It was really intense. But, man, it's almost like he encapsulated the themes that are involved with this so much, about sticking together. And showing support for your community and looking back on things with somewhat of the bittersweet nostalgia of idealism and youth. And realizing, though, that you wouldn't maybe do things any different even if you had a second chance at it. And so he really waxed poetic to me something fierce. Gary Jensen did and was so inspiring and yet really sad.

[David Lemieux]

It was Gary Jensen, naked pole guy, who helped Adrian connect with many of the figures that ultimately appeared in Grateful.

[Adrian Marin]

Days, God bless him. Without Gary, we wouldn't have our little rinky dink documentary that helps tell so much of the story behind the film. I really owe him so much, and I miss him. And of course, every time I watch the concert film or the documentary, I miss his voice and wish it could have been included, but it's still there in my head.

[David Lemieux]

Make no mistake about it, Gary Jensen was a serious head.

[Adrian Marin]

Gary Jensen was obviously quite a dashing figure in the hippie sense. He was somebody, I think, who clung to and defined and explored the tenets of psychedelia as much as anybody at that time.

[David Lemieux]

And in that place, that's not all he clung to.

[Adrian Marin]

I believe he was known as the Mushroom King, because he probably was a big aficionado of mushrooms, of course. I mean, it's where it kind of all begins, right? And so Gary was known for exploring not just some of the more deeper recesses of the mine, but doing so in some of the more harder to find recesses of the natural world. He was quite familiar with the natural territory there around Oregon, and he would explore it while on these psychedelic adventures. And so he was really kind of a hippies hippie. He had his own little scene for a minute there. He had a wife named Maria. Mushroom. That was her name.

[David Lemieux]

If you rewatch the moment in Jack's draw during which he gets up on the pole, pause to ponder that this almost certainly wasn't Dude's first nude psychedelic ascension.

[Adrian Marin]

You don't make a move like getting on the top of that pole unless you're a figure of some renown who can get away with it. And he did, you know, and kind of makes the show all the more exciting when you think he's along the ride with you.

[David Lemieux]

Okay, maybe it's a little understandable that he'd be embarrassed or transmogrified into the holy fool or whatever. And we're definitely not done talking about that. But you know something? You might have been naked on a pole, but dude was there to see and hear this.

[Johnny Dwork]

All I know is something like a.

[David Lemieux]

Bird in a sand. Also up front to see Birdsong was Don Whitten.

[Adrian Marin]

I went back to the shade for a while, and then I moseyed on up through the crowd again. I was like the only one of our entourage that day who left the shade. Got off that way, you know, I. I wanted to see what was happening up, up close. As I walked up closer to the stage, looking at that ramshackle kind of tower thing that they had built out in the crowd, and I just thought, how the hell is that thing standing up? There were a couple of dozen people hanging on to it. And I thought, I'm not going to stand underneath that deal there. But, you know, it made it through the show. Yeah, the crazy tower thing, I think that was a Chuck Keezy production somehow. I think Chuck kind of oversaw that.

[David Lemieux]

And survived for many years thereafter, as we'll learn.

[Adrian Marin]

I got up there just before they.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

Started Birdsong, and I just fell in.

[Adrian Marin]

Love with that tune and that version. It was just so melodic.

[Sam Field]

Tell me all that. You know, I'll show you.

[Adrian Marin]

I didn't know the backstory about the lyrics dedicated to Janice, but it was.

[Johnny Dwark]

Just so I. I just loved it.

[David Lemieux]

We talked about the writing of Birdsong on our episode last year about Jerry Garcia's solo debut. It went through a few iterations in the spring and summer of 1971 before disappearing for a little bit, coming back into the Dead's repertoire just after their return from Europe, when it finally found a beautiful new form.

[Adrian Marin]

That's probably the closest I got to see the Dead and Jerry playing. It was just magical.

[Johnny Dwark]

Anyone who's tried to sing in tune while tripping hard will instantly recognize this distinct tripper's warble in Bobby and Jerry's voice when they're striving to sing in tune, especially during the hot second set.

[Sam Field]

Don't you cry, don't you cry anymore.

[David Lemieux]

Lawrence Roberts.

[Sam Field]

I took a couple guys who I knew from back east, but I also brought my new girlfriend, who was not a Deadhead. Didn't know much about the Dead at the time, and she was completely Transported by birdsong. Dr. Star, some of those songs was pulled into the community from that.

[Johnny Dwark]

It's crisp, it's electric, it's brimming with youthful vibrancy, sort of like a flower in peak summer fluorescence. You listen to the arc of how they work the Birdsong jam over that period of their career, and that's the version where all of the different parts, the part before the drum segue and then the jam at the end, everything falls into perfect Alignment.

[David Lemieux]

Many people call this the arrangement of Bird Song with the false ending jam. And it's pretty pronounced here.

[Johnny Dwark]

In classic trickster irony. When the Pranksters built the stage, they didn't position it so that the band would be properly shaded from the sun. The result of which is that it was challenging for the guitarists to keep their instruments in tune. Which is why the Dead, I think, resisted releasing this show for many years. On the other hand, the tone of the guitars, especially Jerry's guitar during the pinnacle of the sun's arc, specifically during the birdsong in the Greatest Story, it has this ethereal timbre to it, with some notes almost seeming to mysteriously float in and out of existence in a very ephemeral, ghost like or angelic manner that, that I've never heard in any other show that they've played. And as much as they may have been challenged, that unusual tonal quality, I think, is really part of what makes this performance singular. It's also incredible to watch the birdsong sequence and to see the brilliant sky and the infamous Naked Pole Guy and Jerry beaming. It's be tific.

[David Lemieux]

There were a lot of ways that the Springfield Crimin benefit wasn't like other rock concerts. At most normal rock concerts, a security guard would have told Naked Pole Guy to like, not be naked and not be on the pole, and probably would have enforced both those things. But Naked Pole Guy's not trying to bug the band. He's just up on a pole naked, and that's cool. So he's in. If you've listened to the old circulating recordings, you'll surely observe that Ken Babs interrupts the band constantly with stage announcements. It can be annoying to listen to, but it might be thought of as well as a failed innovation. Send Wavy Gravy into the crowd with a pen and paper as a way to create an open line to the stage. Listen to that way. It's a fascinating form of oral bulletin board.

[Johnny Dwork]

Dan Hill to the Tower. If anyone finds the keys on a leather string, please bring them up front. They're for Kay. Jim Greenhill, meet Cliff. On the dance floor by the Akiba Tower. There's a guy with a cut leg behind the white Volkswagen van and a doctor's needed for him. Where is the white Volkswagen van on those? Okay, it's over here on the north side of the field. If y' all refrained from trying to hop this fence, you wouldn't. You wouldn't fuck yourselves up.

[David Lemieux]

For obvious reasons, the system didn't become the norm. The Dead were very Often an energy source for various groups. But it's fascinating that for one afternoon those groups were able to use the Dead's microphone to organize.

[Johnny Dwork]

And Dominic of Rainbow Farm wants to meet brothers and sisters at entrance of back of band. Any brothers, sisters or owners of land. Brother freaks come to back of band. Om Shanti. Spare love always for a hippie.

[David Lemieux]

As we discussed last episode, yes, it's that Rainbow family, the OG branch. If you are getting sick of Babs's announcements, allow Bob Weir to be your avatar.

[Johnny Dwork]

Oh, right, right. The kids tent. For you guys that don't know about it. It's located down there at that end. If you don't know about it, you don't wanna.

[Johnny Dwark]

You know, you can listen to how great a story evolves over the Europe 72 tour. And it's not until the end of the Europe 72 tour that they start to put in that St. Stephen Jam. And in that greatest story on 827. That St. Stephen Jam is perfect. It's as rocked out a moment as the Grateful Dead ever played. It's exultant, epic, thoroughly awe inspiring.

[David Lemieux]

For the record, I'm of the school that doesn't think of the Middle Jam and Greatest Story ever told as actually literally St. Stephen, but I hear the resemblance and the name is stuck with tapers.

[Johnny Dwark]

So wisely, after the Greatest Story, they take another break. And this is really, really great performer strategy because it gives people another break. But it also sets up the third set to begin at sunset.

[Johnny Dwork]

We're gonna take another break, let the sun go down a little more and come back play some more.

[David Lemieux]

Some heads had had enough. Don Whitten.

[Adrian Marin]

I hate to admit it, but we.

[Johnny Dwark]

Left before the show was even over.

[Adrian Marin]

It was.

[Johnny Dwark]

It was just so damn hot.

[Adrian Marin]

We said, this has been great, but man, we're burning up here. We split after the second set, which, you know that's blasphemy.

[Sam Field]

I know.

[Adrian Marin]

We went swimming after the show in a. It's called Fern Ridge Reservoir and it's not very far. It's only a couple miles from Veneta.

[David Lemieux]

By then, Strider had become friendly with members of the Dead's family.

[Sam Field]

I run into Frances Car and I said something to her about, hey, would it be okay to come backstage? And she goes, well, just stay out of the way. And so I run into my brother and he goes, hey, Bones, my old original nickname. I got a spot up here in front of the stage that. Check it out. My brother had spent, I believe the second set on the platform that was below the Front of the stage, it was about three to four feet above the ground. And then you could stand up chest high and look right at the stage.

[David Lemieux]

And there's naked pole guy bearing bare assed witness to one of the most spectacular sights on the best of all possible galactic planes.

[Sam Field]

I was able to stand right next to cameraman John Norris was right on my left and Garcia was approximately 6ft in front of me. And that's how I experienced one of the most phenomenal dark stars of all of all time and space.

[Johnny Dwark]

And as the day begins to fade, the music turns heavy and unfathomably mysterious, like death approaching. So you know, Dark Star, especially at that time in their career, it sounds when they start that dark star like it's a ship setting out from port to sea.

[David Lemieux]

If you listen closely, you can hear a dog barking just off stage as they start though it's more obvious on the fan circulated versions. The sun melts over the planetary rim while the Grateful Dead unfurl their jam epic dark star. 31 minutes of shining free flight flowing through gentle modal waves and intricate piano runs. Shifting and swelling scenes and high speed pursuits down wormholes all brushed in Garcia's soft hued wah wah guitar. It's a wondrous improvised achievement out there in the heat.

[Johnny Dwark]

It's really the Zen essence of Buddhism and jazz music accordingly. I don't know of any other improvisational music where we listeners can witness the miracle of musicians being fully present in the moment. Channeling wisdom that is beyond that which we can think of before we can speak it than that which was played during the playing in the band in the Dark Star that day. Whether or not the wordless wisdom that is obviously flowing through the band during those jams actually means anything, it is at least truly awe inspiring. And seeking communion with the great mystery is an ancient perennial quest of humanity. A quest that was obviously achieved on that day back in 72. And amazingly we can now re experience it through listening to the audio or watching the film. It's just such a blessing that we.

[Adrian Marin]

Have this.

[David Lemieux]

Larry Roberts.

[Sam Field]

We were generally toward the back, trying to stay in the shade. We would work our way up during some of the show. I remember was it the third set when they started with Darkstar? That was such an amazing miraculous version of that. I remember kind of wandering closer up to the stage during that Mike Sherwood.

[Adrian Marin]

I stuck out the whole thing. I'm pretty much if I can get up front and close, I want to be where the people are at. Not only my first show, but it was my 19th birthday. It was a great birthday party. I liked the first album. I just fell in love with Skull and Roses. I mean, that was just burned into my brain. But Life Dead just never really taught me. It started off with 23 minutes of Dark Star and I go like. It's not very poppy. I wanted something a little faster at set three. You're pretty burnt out on the day. It's been pretty intense at that point. It's starting to fade and I go into set three and it goes into 30, 31 minute Dark Star. And I wasn't ready to hear it with Live Dead, but at this point, Fully Present. Just stood for the whole thing. This absorbed it all. And it was a very jazzy long piece, but it's like, wow.

[David Lemieux]

It's easy to get lost comparing different versions of Darkstar, but it's also worth thinking about Darkstar in terms of other musicians on similar quests and the vehicles they manifested. It's true, not a lot of it's on film, but one example might be John Coltrane's Love supreme and most especially the recently discovered live version from Seattle in 1965, recorded the Night Before Coltrane reportedly took LSD for the recording session that became the posthumous album Om. More than any other song, to my ears, performances of Darkstar in this era move the band out of rock and roll and into the kind of music played by the Coltranes, both John and Alice, Lamont Young's Theater of Eternal Music and other quite intentional pathways to excellence.

[Johnny Dwark]

Watching Jerry in this film of this show, looking so vibrantly healthy and playing so impeccably, so beautifully while obviously being so high. The film sequence of Jerry staring out into some other dimension while he's playing that otherworldly Dark star as the sun is setting and everything is glowing is so beautiful and so magical and so. So utterly enthralling. And there's this one point where they're all playing as.

[Sam Field]

Golly.

[Johnny Dwark]

I'm not even sure you can put this in words properly, but there's this sense that they're being pulled towards the mystery. Almost like you can imagine what our astronaut would feel as they are pulled into the event horizon of a black hole.

[David Lemieux]

The version of Dark Star in Sunshine Daydream has a suitably trippy animation sequence, perhaps influenced by Monty Python's Terry Gilliam, featuring surrealist birds and a giant hand reaching down from the sky. Adrian Morin.

[Adrian Marin]

The animation is a whole story unto itself. It was created by Charlie Barecca and a couple of associates of his, and they had Done it kind of for another project that they were working on. And as you can tell, it's all this amazingly collaged imagery from National Geographic. And so the other project that they had created it for kind of stalled or something. And all of a sudden they realized they had this giant chunk of nobody recording during Dark Star because everybody was so completely dosed to the gills, right? And so they were all just completely zonked and gone. And nobody had reloaded film or anything like that. And so that's why, you know, thank God Charlie thought of this animation and really saved the day.

[Johnny Dwark]

And there's this extraordinary moment where they then.

[Sam Field]

Golly.

[Johnny Dwark]

There's this moment where after the incredible drum and bass duet, where they launch into what is not as fully articulated a Feeling Groovy jam as you might hear on two 13:70 Dark Star or 4 hours, 14 minutes and 72 seconds. But it is a Feeling groovy jam.

[David Lemieux]

Sometimes it's the Feeling Groovy jams you don't play. Though the changes are almost implied at various points as they launch.

[Johnny Dwark]

It's as though it's a Feeling Groovy jam from outer space. It's less melodically focused, but it's definitely that same feeling of exultance. And it's as though that's. The astronaut is waving back at the rest of us, right? Having seen what's on the other side of the event horizon. And it's like that final. Like, it's incredible. And then they turn back towards the mystery, and they then are drawn into the mystery. It's like meeting death. And this is really an incredible thing when one experiences this music either in a holotropic breathwork session or a shamanic session or a psychedelic session, where one is faced with the unknown or the inevitable. And we have the opportunity, when we're faced with that event horizon to either run away or to take a breath and go through that portal and join the mystery. There's this one point where Jerry teases Morning Dew. We almost get a morning dew.

[David Lemieux]

Weir says no.

[Johnny Dwark]

And yet Bobby then brings us into El Paso. And the interesting thing to note about that El Paso is that it's a song that's about death.

[Sam Field]

From out of nowhere Karina has found.

[Johnny Dwork]

Me Kissing my cheek as she kneels.

[Sam Field]

By my side Great little spot.

[Johnny Dwork]

To the.

[David Lemieux]

Not to deny a single thing about what Johnny's saying about the symbolic flow of the set, nor even to criticize the choice of El Paso. But I'll point out that there are a number of songs that could have been combined here to land with similar existential oomph, like, say, a gnarly other one Meltdown Jam into Black Peter or the brand new Stella Blue. The day already had a pretty high body count between me and my Uncle Mexicali Blues and Jackstraw. And that's not even counting the more symbolic birdsong. And he's gone. A lot of death out there. And there's no denying the heaviness of what comes next.

[Johnny Dwark]

When that El Paso is done, Jerry adds to that conversation about death, and he launches into one of the great, great moments in all of what I call Grateful Dead church.

[Johnny Dwork]

Morgan.

[Adrian Marin]

Led the prisoner.

[Johnny Dwork]

Down the hallway.

[David Lemieux]

To his tomb. I stood up to say goodbye like.

[Johnny Dwark]

It'S the same thing that happened when the Grateful Dead played a really Good Morning Dew when they played that gospel Sing Me Back Home, which is literally about facing your death. It's a real life story about Merle Haggard being on death row and watching a two bit criminal being led in chains by the warden to the electric chair.

[David Lemieux]

The band had debuted the song the previous spring, but put it back in the closet pretty quickly, at least until reviving it with Donna Jean God show in Europe.

[Sam Field]

How I used.

[David Lemieux]

To.

[Sam Field]

Make my own memories come alive.

[Johnny Dwark]

And what happens next after death, Rebirth and the Grateful Dead launch into one of the great sugar magnolia sunshine daydreams of their career, and hope is born anew. I once played this music for a very wise woman, an accomplished yoga instructor who is not a Deadhead. When the Dark Star and the El Paso concluded, I turned to her and I inquired, so what do you think?

[Adrian Marin]

She thought?

[Johnny Dwark]

And she replied, wow, you know, it's as though Jerry Garcia was having a conversation with God on God's level of conversation. I don't know of any other music the Grateful Dead played where the conversation that's happening is on that level, that mysterious, that awe inspiring and that thoughtless. It just flows. It's channeled music.

[Sam Field]

Sunshine, Daydream Walker in the tall trees the windows moving like a rainbow.

[David Lemieux]

Being a Sunday in 1972, the dead finished with One More Saturday Night, now with the new answer vocals they'd added when doing the studio overdubs a few weeks previous. You can hear a group in the crowd chant, chanting, we want the dead.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

We want the dead.

[David Lemieux]

Not to be. And come on, you guys already got a lot of dead, but who doesn't want more dead? One other way this benefit was different from the consensus reality version of a big rock show. After the gigs, a few kids commandeered the Stage microphones. Just as it was more or less Ramrod's call for the Dead to play the gig, it was probably also Ramrod's call to start striking the gear.

[Johnny Dwork]

The way things is picking up and moving out and they're shutting down the microphones and everything. That today's his performance is coming to an end. And I'm sorry you've made an earnest plea, but the time has come to say that today's performance has been unexcelled.

[Sam Field]

Strider Brown the band did not have the lights to go past the final song.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

Sue Keasy yeah, because we didn't have any lights. I don't believe so. We pretty well had to be done before it got dark. But dark here at that time of year is nine o'.

[Johnny Dwork]

Clock. David Karanda it was slow, but everybody was very cooperative. And it was just a trickle leaving kind of. It's like air leaving a balloon kind of slowly moving out. And people enjoying that process too, but very tired. I don't remember what time it was. It was dark. There was just a feeling of. That was awesome.

[David Lemieux]

It wasn't too late when the show ended. Sunset was around 8pm it was back down to a more reasonable 86 degrees. Chuck Kesey.

[Johnny Dwork]

The thing about the concert was that nothing bad happened. There were no fights, there were no bad disgruntled people. The neighbors didn't care. Everybody had a good time. And that was our target.

[David Lemieux]

Justin Kreutzman was at the Venita show. Welcome to the Dead cast. Justin.

[Adrian Marin]

Yeah, I remember absolutely nothing about that trip. Let's see, I was two years old. Yeah. So, I mean, the only way, you.

[David Lemieux]

Know, it's photographic evidence.

[Adrian Marin]

It's like Woodstock. I wouldn't have believed it unless you'd showed me in the footage.

[David Lemieux]

There might have been a kid's tent, but Justin wasn't in it.

[Adrian Marin]

Kids tents were for wimps, man. There was no kids tents when I was a kid. Steve Parrish was the minder when I was a kid. It was like, sit on that road case until Dark Star's over. There's a famous. Well, famous in my own mind. A shot of me from the who Dead show in 76. And I've got a big Justin on my T shirt. And that's not out of ego. That's just so my mom could find me because I would wander off during the stadium. It's like, you know, it's like finding your car keys when you go back, making sure that it matches up. This kid with that car, the Venita.

[David Lemieux]

Tape pretty much holds up to Justin's memory.

[Johnny Dwork]

I just got a report from the kids tent that there's all kinds of kids, little baby kids out there along that stage stream. That string of stuff over there that are. Oh, they're in the kid tent. Oh, they've just been left in the kid's tent. So now they want their mothers and.

[David Lemieux]

They'Re crying like crazy.

[Johnny Dwork]

So you mothers, get out there and.

[Sam Field]

Collect your herds right now. Mothers arrive, pick up your kids.

[David Lemieux]

A tiny bit of Anita shows up in Justin's new film, Let There Be Drums, in theaters this fall.

[Adrian Marin]

I probably used a shot of dad holding me at the very end, which.

[David Lemieux]

Was in the rough cut of Sunshine.

[Adrian Marin]

Daydream, but I noticed I got axed when they did the reissue, so they were very nice to send over that clip. And it's just a nice little post show moment of dad and I, so that. That made the drummer doc.

[David Lemieux]

The show has gone on the list of all timers for many heads. Strider had been seeing the Dead hardcore since early 1970 and had a good bit of perspective on their music already, and it definitely made his list.

[Sam Field]

I think it jumped out as an exceptional Grateful Dead concert because of partly the setting and, you know, it was my second Outdoor Dead show. My first Outdoor Dead show was at Yale bowl the year before. But there was just something about seeing it out in an open field with a very open air atmosphere that has never been topped. And even seeing them 10 years later when they played at the opposite end of that same field, the 82 Benita Dad show, it was. It was great. It was fantastic. But there was something about the 72 era that it was, at least for myself, it was a feeling of innocence, even if that was just my own naivete.

[David Lemieux]

For Michelle Lefkowith, the Dead Springfield Creamery benefit and her first commune summer were tied together as part of the same broader transformative experience.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

I really see that as like a big catalyst in my life. I don't think I even had read a book in my life at that point. When I was living there. We tooled around in that and we spent a lot of time at the Springfield Creamery, Big supporters of the Springfield Creamery and Ken Kesey and his brother. And so essentially I became part of that community or, you know, a sense of belonging to that broader sort of collective counterculture. Since I was 12. I started smoking weed and went to school and took LSD most of my high school years. And kind of not political, not really a conscious awareness or a broader awareness of Things just, I guess maybe you could call it somewhat self medicating. But once I was down there, things started to kind of shift for me. Being part of that community, being around people that actually read meaningful books and thought of the universe in a much more esoteric kind of broader sense. I had never even thought like that until I was down there. And all of a sudden I'm like reading books. When I was on adytum, I mean I was like reading Gurdjieff the Fourth Way Ospensky. I was a diehard Rumi fan. I was like suddenly this new free spirit, adventuresome person coming out of just a horrifying, horrible backdrop to actually feeling peaceful and happy.

[David Lemieux]

Michelle and David moved to the Bay Area, but her path took her to India and then back to Eugene, where she took on one of the world's most noble occupations.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

A friend of mine's name is Eric Ward and he started a grassroots organization called Communities Against Hate. And so I started volunteering and basically what I became was a Nazi hunter in Eugene, Oregon. Well, really up and down the i5 corridor. I just had a knack for finding them.

[David Lemieux]

Fuck yeah, Michelle. We posted a link to an interview with Michelle conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It was an epic day that nearly every attendee remembered or will remember for the rest of their lives. Some 20,000 attended, but it didn't exactly turn a profit.

[Johnny Dwork]

We didn't make any money after all this effort and the creamery needed money and the Grateful Dead felt sorry for us and gave us $10,000. That got us into the yogurt world. That was all we needed.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

That basically got us over the edge of where we were.

[David Lemieux]

It did, however, save the creamery. Thanks, Grateful D. After the Springfield CrewMary benefit, the crew packed up the Ampex MM1000 mixing console and sent it back to Alembic headquarters in San Francisco. Four days after the show in Veneta, before heading off to Boulder for the next gig, there was one last overdub session for Europe 72 walk me out.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

In the Morning.

[Sam Field]

Do My Honey.

[Adrian Marin]

As.

[David Lemieux]

We got into in our season five epilogue episode, this was the final piece of their triple lp. But while the Dead got on to their next orders of business, the legend of Anita was only just beginning. The first thing to make it out were the stories. Please welcome to the Dead cast Jay Curley, Old School Dead Taper and Traitor.

[Sam Field]

My next door neighbor had been at the show, and he and Strider actually were some of the people that helped get me into the Dead. Dead plus New York FM radio. They said it was, quote, the best concert they had ever seen, unquote. And that they're very much psychedelic and very sunburned. But yeah, they were just raving about it. And it was at least another year until I got an audience tape.

[David Lemieux]

Tapes were a little harder to come by in 1973. It was a fantastic score. Currently no audience tape of the Venita show circulates. If you happen to have one, please get in [e-mail] yeah, it was.

[Sam Field]

A bit muddy. Give it like a audience tape. But again, I was hungry for every bit of debt I could get and listen to it just a couple of times really because then I started collecting soundboards which sort of pushed that out of the way.

[David Lemieux]

There were actually very few photographs of the Springfield Creamery benefit. There were however, multi track recordings and a documentary waiting to be finished. Producer Sam Field.

[Sam Field]

Yeah, so we moved to Eugene for a year and stayed there through September of 73 when we actually went to Los Angeles for three months to do some of the other post production that you need to go to Los Angeles to do. But while we're in Eugene, we became mildly integrated into whatever mini filmmaking community there was there and, and with a bunch of the other people. Well, with about one week's notice, I don't know that we even had a plan, but. But it turned out there was a editing facility, flatbed machine there, which was exactly what we needed and it was available and the other people that had it only used it occasionally. So it was basically became ours for the. For the year. So it seemed perfect. And it was also apparent that we would need to. That it would benefit us if we could befriend some of the community and get input and, and even narration and things like that. So I don't know, it just all of a sudden instantly seemed like the sensible thing to do. And we were all mildly nomadic and no problem moving there, you know, if that's what we have to do. And pretty cool place anyway, so we did.

[Adrian Marin]

John stuck around for some of the initial post production, but he was out of there pretty quick. Phil and Charlie and a couple other folks really stuck around during the initial attempts to edit something. Unfortunately they didn't get very far because there was a lot of people hanging on and there was a lot of, as I say, editing by acid on committee. It was a real machismo scene too, right? This was one of the things that so frustrated John is that the scene in Oregon was very kind of alpha male. But like any film It's a collaborative piece of work. And once all these other people got involved and they realized they captured lightning in a bottle, you can imagine it was just impossible for that kind of personality. While everybody went to lunch one afternoon, he climbed out the bathroom window of the editing suite and just was out of there because he couldn't handle these personalities anymore.

[David Lemieux]

According to Blair Jackson's 1986 interview with Sunshine Daydream editor Phil DeGuerre, they spent three months getting everything transferred and synced and another six months making a very rough first assemblage of the material, after which they made the fatal mistake of bringing the rough cut to the Bay Area to show to the dead. Sometime in the spring of 73, DeGuer told Blair, we made arrangements to show it to the band and a couple of the business people. But it turned out to be a screening for 70 or 80 people. Wives, girlfriends, friends, all of whom expected to see a movie, which it definitely was not at that point. This was the raw stuff accompanied by a basically unmixed two track. We hadn't even touched the 16 track tapes yet. Well, not surprisingly, the general impression was very negative. We heard a lot of grumbling along the lines of, oh, this was a mistake, we never should have done it. And the band complained that the heat of the day had made their guitars go out of tune. So basically we were discouraged from working on it more. But of course they did work on it more.

[Adrian Marin]

Sam, to his credit, paid everybody at the time a very fair weekly salary for that kind of post production work.

[David Lemieux]

Paul Foster of the Hog Farm and the Acid Test era, Mary Pranksters, had drawn a poster for the show and now contributed titles to the film. The Kens, Keezy and Babs added some new narration.

[Adrian Marin]

They would show some of the rushes and Ken and Ken would sit down with an audio recorder and just riff, right? And so that's where a lot of that came from. A lot of the K and K rap that's used in the concert film.

[Johnny Dwork]

Bring up the lighting backstage, please.

[Sam Field]

Bring up the lighting. If you can't bring up the lighting, bring down the sound. The sound. That's it.

[Adrian Marin]

Lighting coming up. Sound going down.

[Sam Field]

Every once in a while we'd work up a work print version of how far we had the film at the time. And we'd show it once or twice in conjunction with the band just to sort of vaguely gauge presentability or audience reaction or something like that.

[David Lemieux]

Strider Brown caught one of them first.

[Sam Field]

74. There was a Xerox notice around Eugene that Said a screening of the film made at the Renaissance Fairgrounds of the Grateful Dead. So my friend Win and I went to the University of Oregon room to see the early cut version of Sunshine Daydream. I don't think it even had that name yet. There was only one or two other.

[Johnny Dwork]

People in the audience.

[Sam Field]

I'm pretty sure there was a native guy, Jerry LaHaye, who used to live in Eugene. And there was like four of us there. And that was my first time seeing the film. One of the two or three versions.

[David Lemieux]

That are out there, an addendum is that the Prankster adjacent Far West Action Picture Service soon evolved into the Oregon Film Factory, playing a direct role in the production of Animal House a few years later. Definitely outside our range.

[Adrian Marin]

Today I gave my love a story.

[David Lemieux]

That had no end.

[Adrian Marin]

I give.

[Sam Field]

Sorry. Our original plan was to get the film released relatively soon. Sure. In 74 or 75. We thought, well. And then after the band saw it and liked the concept so much, they decided to make their own. They kind of delayed the release, shall we say. And so at some point in there, as we were a little disappointed that we didn't get the quick release that we thought was going to happen, it's.

[David Lemieux]

Hard to reconstruct exactly what happened and when. I've found some ads for Sunshine Daydream screenings in summer 1975 in the Eugene area. By then, though, the Dead were well into the production of what became the Grateful Dead movie released in 1977, directed by Jerry Garcia. At some point, Phil DeGuerre told Blair Jackson they received a letter threatening legal action signed by Bob Weir. So they stopped screening it. The filmmakers were Deadheads and pretty hurt. DeGuerre said, the last thing we ever intended to do is rip off the Dead. So we went down quietly. The Sunshine Daydream project more or less got ghosted, but the stories about the show got out and certainly the tapes got out.

[Sam Field]

In 77, I got a soundboard. I was like, oh, my God. When I used to do my hitchhiking extravaganzas during the summertime, I'd bring those two tapes with me in my backpack. And if my ride had a cassette deck, I'd see if they wanted to listen to it. That's how attached I was. I took it around with me.

[David Lemieux]

Johnny Dwork.

[Johnny Dwark]

In 1978, I was in New York City and I was starting to enfold myself in that classic New York Grateful Dead community that included all of those first generation Deadhead New York characters who were really interesting people. The first bootleg Tapers, the first fanatical Deadheads who would start to tour with them. There was this Deadhead named Big George. Big George recognized my enthusiasm and he sat down one fateful night In August of 1978, my first girlfriend Stacy and I. And he provided for us the appropriate set and setting and catalyst. He curated for us a musical set. And included in this was only the playing in the band Birdsong and Greatest Story, which he had on a hissy cassette. And the cassette that only had this playing in the band Bird Song and Greatest Story on simply said on the cassette cover, Eugene. And once I'd heard this music and had this life changing experience, I wandered around awestruck for the next two months asking every Deadhead, do you know who Eugene is? Like, I didn't know there was a Eugene, Oregon. I didn't know that the show happened in Veneta, which is the town a couple of miles outside of Eugene. The tape just said Eugene. I thought the tape simply came from someone named Eugene. So finally, after a couple of months, I connected with somebody who had the entire show. And that was incredible to me because can you imagine what it was like to be blown away by just the playing in the band Birdsong and A Greatest Story and not having a clue that there was all this other music that was just as or more amazing?

[David Lemieux]

The Dead's relationship with the Eugene area was no shallow thing. With close members of their extended family continuing to migrate northwards through the later 70s and early 80s, including Mountain Girl and Alan Trist of Ice 9 Publishing. Camille Cole became pals with both and.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

MGNI and Alan Trist and several of our friends started a publishing company together after they got up here called Hula Go See. I was one of the organizers, definitely, and we published a book about the Hodads. And Alan and I were both editors and MG, I think, was the office coordinator. I'm not sure everybody had a role and it was a wonderful experience. One of my most fondest memories.

[David Lemieux]

The Dead's relationship with the Springfield Creamery continued too. And in the next years the Crew Marie would book regular non benefit shows in the area.

[Sam Field]

We do, you know, Olden in the.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

Way or Jerry and Grissom or whatever in smaller venues.

[Sam Field]

So we kept up this really good relationship with the Dead and it brought the Dead to Eugene, which everybody loved, of course. Didn't have to go to Portland to see the Grateful Dead. We could bring them here.

[David Lemieux]

The Oregon Daily Emerald noted in 1976 that the Keaveys had tried for several summers to book the Dead. Into Autson Stadium at the University of Oregon in Eugene, but had been denied permits. So in 1982, the dead returned to the same field in Vinita for another benefit. This time it was to help the Oregon Country Fair purchase the property they'd made their home since 1970.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

Sue Kesey the 82 concert was the one that helped the fair get over the final down payment for the land.

[David Lemieux]

Then that was Great Sam Field.

[Sam Field]

In 82, when we had the 10th anniversary of it, the same open field was used. It's just that the stage went to the other end because we learned maybe we'll put the sun at the back of the artists rather than in their eyes.

[David Lemieux]

In 1992, the dead were scheduled to return for two nights to celebrate what was being billed as the third Decadenol field trip. But Jerry Garcia's perilous health forced the band to cancel their late summer and fall plans. Nonetheless, they remain fixtures on the site.

[Sam Field]

There were three or five sort of open fields and the concert was in one of them. And parking took place in a couple of the others. And people found their way into the show. Now, if you were to go back there, the county has actually moved a road. And so sort of the highway between Eugene and the coast is on the other side of the whole property and complex. So that doesn't matter much. But it does mean that where they move the road to is now over next to the open field that the concert was at. And so it is now a parking lot and the city walk from there, take the bus in from there to the actual country fairside. And it's been known all through the years as the Deadlock. And partly because, obviously because of the concert, but also the tower that was constructed for the concert or for the mixing board of the concert, whatever it was, or for the observation platform. But you can see it in the movie where those kind of three trees stuck on the ground and nailed together by some two by sixes. So the tower stayed for decades. And if you actually look at a typical map of the country fair site, it will show Dead Tower in the dead lot.

[David Lemieux]

Sometime in the early 80s, sunshine daydream made the jump to bootleg video.

[Sam Field]

We actually made VHS ourselves, just because we wanted to at least show it at home without having to drag out the big projector and the screen and all that. And, you know, VHS can be copied. And at some point or another somebody made something or showed it to a friend and, you know, promised they wouldn't and did or whatever. So yeah, we became aware that there you know, but we never called it a hole in our security system. We just, we just thought it was a. An extremely clever form of guerrilla marketing and that maybe someday I'll actually teach a course at Harvard Business School on how you should give away a lousy copy for free and then go back and see if you can get somebody to pay for a color corrected version with good sound.

[Adrian Marin]

Sam went off back to Sonoma and pretty much immersed himself in raising a family and working in the aircraft electronics industry. John sort of retreated up to the hippie abyss in Mendocino where he became a farmer, you know, growing some of the best cannabis that you've ever had, as well as writing. And Phil was the one who actually went on to projects in Hollywood. A short time after the concert in Veneta, Sam continued working tangentially with Wickersham and the gang at Alembic and becoming tighter with them and closer with them. And so at a certain point they were looking to expand and change direction. And there was an opportunity there for a little bit of investment to be made and for a new kind of partner to come on board. And Sam took that opportunity and became one of the people who probably grew the best with them over the years, who came in as a sort of non technician. Sam just went on with life as a fan. Went to just about every show he could go to nearby. John definitely retired a little bit more and only went to the ones where he could take the bus and have a nice time with his. With the Hog Farm folks.

[David Lemieux]

As Sunshine Daydream was making it out into the world as a bootleg, Phil Daguerre was beginning to work with the Dead on a number of film related projects. He commissioned their music for the 1985 reboot of the Twilight Zone. We spoke about that a bit in our episode about infrared roses.

[Sam Field]

It got to the point where, you know, should we do something about it? And could we do something about it? And we could have been assholes and tried to collect and trace down every copy, but there was no point. And so it just, it seemed that from a business perspective, we weren't doing very well on collecting revenue, which was the goal from the beginning, because there was significant investment in getting the thing out. And then it just seemed like a great way to let the happiness spread and that people are enjoying it. Great.

[David Lemieux]

The word legend and sound of Sunshine Daydream continued to spread thanks in large part to Johnny Dwork and his colleagues at the Grateful Dead Historical Society of Hampshire College in Massachusetts.

[Johnny Dwark]

Over the years, I started to use the music from 82772 as the basis for my own journey music, first listening to it myself with eye shades on and headphones, and then sharing it with just a few friends. So my friends and I, we started to share this with one another in that reverential setting. And so over the course of the next few years, we started to curate a multimedia experience that was set to our favorite Grateful Dead music, as well as all of our other favorite journey music, the epicenter of which was the music from 82772. And over the next 17 years, we developed a secret, mystical church of the Grateful Dead. And we would invite people into this safe space that we would hold in which people could experience the miracle of this music. And what we found over the years was that in the right setting that was safe, with a great sound system, and with everybody properly prepared and feeling like they were safely held, if you put this music on, people would go through a profound experience that is as good as any Grateful Dead experience you can have where you're not there with Jerry on stage.

[David Lemieux]

Johnny dwark championed the August 27, 1972 show Nupri's Diamond News, the magazine that grew out of Terrapin Flyer, which he distributed on Dead Tour in the mid-80s, as did other Dead zines. The legend was well seated, and in retrospect, it's kind of mind bending that it took some 41 years for the show to be officially released, as it was in 2013. Archivist David Lemieux.

[Johnny Dwork]

The other big challenge was the rap had always been at. It was hot and our instruments were out of tune. And it's the same kind of rap that I've heard about Egypt, which, again, Egypt wasn't that bad. I mean, overall, three nights in Egypt, they weren't a great three night run, but there's certainly some amazing moments. And the tuning wasn't that big a problem. Vanita was the same thing where there were moments where, I mean, things were slightly out of tune. But I mean, it's the Grateful Dead. It's like that stuff is somewhat forgivable only because it's the way we know it. Not the grateful dead in 30 years, but that specific show. As a Deadhead, as a tape trader, it bummed me out when the Dead put out Dick's Picks Volume 8 and they cut Cold Rain and Snow from Dick's Picks eight from Harper College. And it was specifically because there was big tuning problems. I distinctly remember that cauldre. And so because of the tuning in the middle of the song, you can Hear Jerry turning the peg and tuning up. And I won't say I love it about it. I accept that about it and I accept that as part of what that.

[David Lemieux]

Was, copies were out in the world. It could hardly be called finished, though. That was the version that eventually leaked into the public eye.

[Adrian Marin]

Adrienne Marin it was barely even a rough assembly. Unfortunately, based on that, most people thought they'd seen Sunshine Daydream and they had seen the footage which, you know, the minute one frame of that imagery comes up before you, it's forever burned on the retina and you won't forget it. So I can see why people thought they'd seen the movie, but they really hadn't. Until John took his fateful swing at it in the early aughts and finally got it to a version that he had always imagined it could be. He had really spearheaded the process of digging into the footage and reconstituting it and creating of it a real film.

[David Lemieux]

Before he died, producer Sam Field we.

[Sam Field]

Changed the movie after the teaser from vhs, of course, added Birdsong and Sing Me Back Home. So even though everybody had the teaser version, they had to get the real version because the additional songs are so iconic on their own that no one was ever going to just stop at the vhs.

[Adrian Marin]

I had known John for a few years beginning in the late 90s as a result of my work at Camp Winter Rainbow. And I had actually kind of become a little bit disenchanted with the world of film and television. And so from the time that John started knowing me, when I had been in the industry a few years later, he's getting much more anxious to dig into the project. In the really early aughts we had spent a considerable amount of time just dealing with all the trims and outs. And so beginning in about, oh, I don't know, 2006 or so, I really became committed to helping him release it. Somehow during that time that we holed up at a marvelous little nonprofit group in San Francisco that's there no more. In this area that used to be full of post production film houses and at Film Arts Foundation, I began the reconstitution of 20,000ft of trims and outskirts. And then we finished that process up at Sam's. We bought a rewind table, you know, we got a steam deck up there and everything and turned one of Sam's kids bedrooms into a 16 millimeter post suite. It did pretty much start afresh from the ground up when it comes to editing.

[David Lemieux]

In the process, they unearthed a few songs that hadn't been included in the long circulating cut.

[Adrian Marin]

And it was only in the yachts when we began actually finishing the film that he made it his absolute priority goal to unearth that entire cache of footage that recorded birdsong. And it was his absolute baby to devote himself to editing that footage and to making sure that song was presented.

[David Lemieux]

It was a revelation to see the film up there on a big screen and hear the big applause when Naked Pole Guy got pants for the third set, which we'd never been able to see in earlier prints. It's great stuff. A classic concert film as far as I'm concerned, made with genuine love for the music. Totally unslick and homemade in a way that fits the music itself. Johnny Dwark can certainly make a claim to being the music's tender. While it's true that as of 2012, the Dead's 1977 performance at Cornell University is on the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress, in 2016, Johnny helped with the Vanitas show even further.

[Johnny Dwark]

For many years, my colleagues and I have discussed the fate of humanity and how we believe that the music from 827 should somehow be safely preserved in perpetuity as a quintessential example of humanity's ability to bridge the physical and the divine, and also the degree to which humanity has developed both the, you know, the artistic technical prowess and the technology to share visionary experiences with one another. So we eventually came to agree that getting a recording off planet would be the ideal way to preserve this incredible historical document in case society falls right. Well, a few years ago, me being a student of astronomy and cosmology, I came across an opportunity to submit a digital version of the music from 827 for inclusion on the hard drive of NASA's Osiris Rex rocket ship. Naturally, when I saw the name of this spacecraft, my eyes perked up. Osiris is not just the Egyptian God of fertility, life, and agriculture, but also the God of the dead. And Rex, of course, is the same name as one of the Grateful Dead's roadies, Rex Jackson. So this Osiris Rex spacecraft has two missions. First, it has since launched and it touched down on the Bennu asteroid, and it grabbed several pounds of the dust on this asteroid, and it has since brought this capsule filled with asteroid dust from this asteroid, named after the mythical bird the Bennu. And it's returning this capsule to Earth so we can study the dust from this asteroid. And its second mission is to then circle for as long as it exists around the sun and Study the sun. So incredibly, it seemed like there was this great opportunity and I grabbed it and I submitted to NASA the playing in the band Birdsong, Dark Star, El Paso, Sing Me Back Home. And they accepted it. And so now there's a rocket ship that's traveling around the sun for as long as it will last that contains the music from 8 hours, 27 minutes and 72 seconds. And my hope is that if off worlders ever come across this solar system and they start to move towards our planet and they see this spacecraft, that they download the information on this hard drive and they go, okay, so these people obviously know how to tap into it.

[David Lemieux]

The impact of the Springfield Creamery benefit can still be found in dairy cases across the country. But there are two things that differentiate the Springfield Creamery and Nancy's Yogurt from many of their contemporaries in the natural foods world that emerged in the late 60s and early 70s. The first is that they still exist. The second is that they're still family owned. While the so called natural foods world is pretty hard to distinguish from corporate grocery stores these days, the Springfield Creamery is still owned by the Kesey's. When we spoke with them, they were just getting ready for this summer's Oregon Country Fair.

[Michelle Lefkowith]

Now we're going to have a country fair after a two year hiatus. And we all hope that we remember how to do the fair too. Trying to put our booth together, it's like, oh my gosh, you know, for.

[Johnny Dwark]

All of our foibles and our shortcomings, the box set is really incredible evidence that the hippie ethos of striving for conscious community and sacred communion is still a worthy platonic ideal for which to strive. Ideally, I think this is how our scene should be remembered. There's this incredible film of that day, and especially that Dark Star. But I gotta tell you, as incredible as it is to watch that film, watching the film actually takes you out of yourself. And you are watching something that is not inside your mind's eye. So here's my heartfelt invitation. Choose a special evening on which you can put yourself in the proper mindset in a safe, undistracted setting. Lock the doors, turn off the cell phone, turn off the lights. Cue up the China Cat Rider playing in the band Birdsong Greatest Story Dark Star El Paso Sing Me Back Home and the Sugar Magnolia from that show. Put on headphones, turn up the volume, close your eyes and observe where this music takes you. The chances are that you'll have nothing less than a truly profound experience that will inspire confound, elate and amaze like no other music can trigger.

[Rich Mahan]

Thanks very much for tuning in and huge thanks to our guests in this episode, including David Lemieux, Johnny Dwork, Justin Kreutzman, Chuck Keasey, Sue Kesey, Mike Sherwood, Dave Tharp, Joshua Clark Davis, Nancy Hamron, Richard Sutton, Larry Roberts, Jay Curley, David Karanda, Strider Brown, Sam Field, Adrian Marin, Camille Cole, Al Strobel, Dan o', Hykinen, Michelle Lefkowith, Don Whitten and Mango Man. We have a bunch of great episodes planned for Season six, so make sure to subscribe to us wherever you like to listen to your podcast broadcasts. Keep in touch with us by signing up for the official Grateful Dead email [e-mail] and please keep those stories coming, especially any about Madison Square Garden in 81, 82 or 83 by recording yours at stories.dead.net and don't forget to check out dead.net playingintheband jam on executive producers for the Good Old Grateful Dead, Mark Pincus and Doran Tyson, Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.