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- [00:05]
Rich Mahan
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 10 of the Good Old Grateful Dead cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. In this episode of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, we uncover the long lost tape of the Dead and the San Francisco Sufi Choir at Winterland in 1971. Get ready for a musical journey you had no idea even existed. Speaking of musical journeys, we've just announced the 2025 season of Dave's Picks, the quarterly vault releases of classic Grateful Dead concerts now heading into its 14th season. Subscriptions to the 2025 Dave's Pick series are open now at dead.net and subscribing is a great way to ensure you'll be well stocked with killer sounding, professionally mastered Dead shows to help celebrate the Dead's 60th anniversary year. It's just right around the corner. Can you believe it? Check out the benefits of being a subscriber. You get four limited edition numbered releases, a highly collectible bonus disc for each release, which you don't get if you aren't a subscriber. Can't get those a la carte free domestic shipping. They're delivered throughout the year as soon as they're available. And you get early bird pricing only 99.98 for all four of them and that includes shipping a minimum savings of 39 versus purchasing a la carte. And of course, don't forget you get the bonus discs if you're a subscriber. Only 25,000 copies of each show are printed and once they're gone, they're gone. The only way to ensure you get a copy of each is to subscribe. Early Bird pricing ends Friday, November 22nd at 9:00pm Pacific Time. So head on over to dead.net and subscribe to the 2025 Dave's Pick series today. Hey, while you're@dead.net go to dead.net deadcast and check out all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons 1 through 9. You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how you like to listen. Please help this podcast by subscribing, sharing us with your friends on social media, hitting that like button and if the spirit moves you, leave us a review. Thank you very much. You don't know how helpful it is and we do appreciate it. Do you have a great tour story you'd like to share? Well, head on over to stories.dead.net and record yourself telling about that epic road trip, the best show you ever saw, how you met your significant other, and you just may hear yourself on a future episode of the Dead cast. We have transcripts for many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure. Head over to dead.netdeadcast index and check them out. The San Francisco music scene in the 60s and 70s was absolutely as diverse as you could possibly think it was. How else would the composer who wrote I'm beginning to see the light and it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing for Duke Ellington end up working with the Dead? Well, stay tuned. You're about to hear how it all came together. But first, a very special message from us here at the Deadcast and your friend and mine, Jesse Jarno.
- [03:52]
Jesse Jarno
There's a reason why each and every episode of the good old Grateful Dead cast begins the way it does with the introduction for the other one from Newcastle 72. And the reason for that is Phil Lesh. It's a cliche to say that nobody else played bass like Phil Lesh, but but that's because nobody else thought like Phil Lesch as a bassist or any other kind of human. The Grateful Dead's roots in folk music or jazz or bluegrass or R and B are pretty easy to point out through the songs they played and the sounds they made. But it was Phil Lesh's grounding as an avant garde composer that provided the band with a framework that truly went outside and allowed the musicians to translate the expanded possibilities of the acid tests into a tangible musical practice. The Grateful Dead were a work of collective imagination and creativity, and just as much as the notes that Phil Lesh played, it was his vision that allowed the Dead to discover their own horizons and what lay beyond them. Over the six decades of Dead music, they've provided a launching point for countless young artists in terms of finding their own repertoire and strategies, many of which can be learned by carefully listening to the band's recordings and and figuring out what they were doing. But good luck with those bass lines, buddy. To absorb Phil Lesch's contribution requires a different kind of thought. Loesch was more than familiar with Shakespeare's line from Hamlet, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. His bass lines seem to be the musical equivalent, often seemingly at oblique rhythmic and melodic and structural angles to his bandmates, like a light shining from an odd perspective, casting shapes and shadows you've never seen before and never will again. Thanks. That was the Grateful Dead playing Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode at Winterland on March 24, 1971, which became the last track on side three of the dead Skull and Roses live double album released later that year. Our friend Michael Parrish had started seeing the band during the Live Dead shows in early 1969, and he attended and photographed this rather unusual gig.
- [06:45]
Michael Parrish
I was just 17, so I was able to drive. But it was a major landmark that I was able to convince my parents to drive up to San Francisco to see the Grateful Dead at Winterland on a Wednesday night, a school night. And they told me, you have to get somebody to go with you. So this poor friend of mine, Tom, who knew nothing about the Dead and was relatively straight, he said, well, I'll go with you. We drove up in my parents big Impala to, to Winterland and certainly one of the stranger Dead shows I ever went to.
- [07:22]
Jesse Jarno
Go go, go Johnny go go Go Johnny go go Go Johnny go go Go Johnny go go Go Johnny be good. We're gonna use the March 24, 1971 show as a springing off point into a story that features the Grateful Ed in more of a supporting, but one that speaks volumes about who they were. An illustration of how they both sat near the center of a countercultural matrix and helped sustain features. A lost tape and you know how we love those. Part of an even more complex lost story.
- [08:03]
Michael Parrish
We walk into winterland at like 8 o'clock and they had this bonfire going. Winterland is a big wooden building and this bonfire was going like 8ft in the air. It was just terrifying actually. Where's the fire marshal? And how are they able to do this? It was just the weirdest thing ever.
- [08:23]
Jesse Jarno
Another witness was John Tex Coat, who had just gotten back to the Bay Area after going on a cross country bus caravan with Stephen Gaskin and the family that would soon found the Farm, the long running intentional community in Tennessee.
- [08:37]
Alauddin Matthew
When we got back to San Francisco, they played a gig at Winterland. It was kind of a gig oriented toward all the spiritual hippies. It started out with this guy. He was a white guy, but he was like a Tibetan Buddhist guy named Dr. Ajari. And the first thing they did on the stage was have this kind of fire ceremony. I mean, things were so loose back then. They literally lit these fires on the stage and. And this guy walks on these coals and stuff. You know, it's a pan on the stage.
- [09:16]
Jesse Jarno
If you watch the Grateful Dead movie, the in house pyro Boots Jaffe was spitting fire up towards the Winterland rafters. Michael Parrish.
- [09:25]
Michael Parrish
Oh, Boots. Yeah, well, that's nothing. It's like a quick burst of flame. And you knew it was like somebody was a flame eater. But this was a roaring wood fire in the middle of the stage. I mean, it must have been a big pit. I've got pictures of it.
- [09:38]
Jesse Jarno
We've posted links to Michael's photos@dead.net deadcast.
- [09:44]
Alauddin Matthew
And then Yogi Bhajan, the guy that started the Golden Temple, which was really big for a while. They had stores, health food stores and all kinds of enterprise. It was the Kundalini Yoga people. He got up and gave a talk.
- [10:05]
Michael Parrish
It was a benefit for Yogi Bhajan and Yogi Bhajan. If you've ever had Yogi tea, that's his product.
- [10:14]
Jesse Jarno
Yogi teas sweet, spicy blends from over.
- [10:18]
Wavy Gravy
100 herbs and botanicals, bringing you energy, awareness, clarity and a rush of well being.
- [10:26]
Michael Parrish
You've seen Wonderland from the Dead movie. You see how dense it is.
- [10:30]
Jesse Jarno
But.
- [10:30]
Michael Parrish
But somehow they. Well, it was a Wednesday night. I don't think it was anywhere close to sold out. But they cleared out the floor and then there were these whirling dervish dancers, just ecstatic circular dancing. So they cleared out the floor and there were all these people doing that. And it just got stranger after that because next up was the San Francisco Sufi Choir, a large troupe. It's just vocal and there are like probably a dozen people doing these Sufi prayers.
- [11:09]
Jesse Jarno
That was Bismala from the Sufi choir's self titled 1973 debut.
- [11:14]
Michael Parrish
They'd been performing for probably 20 minutes. And then Lesh and Weir and Garcia come out and start playing behind them. You know, very much sort of like what happened at the Egypt shows when they were accompanying Hamza Aladdin and his troupe of musicians. And it was beautiful. It was really just transcendent music. It was extremely beautiful.
- [11:55]
Jesse Jarno
Freedom, freedom, freedom. That was the Sufi choir back by the Grateful Dead at Winterland on March 24, 1971. And today we've got the very fascinating story behind this lost and found tape recorded by the great Betty Kantor in the course of working on the Dead's live album in progress. Unfortunately, we can't play the full tape, but we can get into its remarkable story, which orbits the Dead in a number of ways. Another long reminder that the Grateful Dead existed on a continuum that included many groups and cultural forms besides rock and roll. This tape popped into Our ears not long after the 50th anniversary of Skull N Roses and can be considered maybe a bonus episode for season three of the Dead Cast. Our reason to finally dive into the story is that W.A. matthew, the musical director and chief composer of the Sufi Choir, recently published a fascinating memoir about his extremely ranging life as a musician. We've linked to the shrine thief@dead.net deadcast. But it was and is such a rich musical life that the Sufi Choir's encounter with the Dead doesn't even make the cut in the book. The path to Winterland was a long one. We're honored to welcome to the Dead cast Alaudi and Matthew.
- [13:32]
Wavy Gravy
I was born in 1937 in Cincinnati, which has a very large and segregated black community. I got interested in jazz when I was about 12, and my father, who was a liberal racist, if you know what I mean, like, he didn't even know he was a racist. He had the good sense to find me a really good jazz teacher. He was a very, very accomplished Charlie Parker saxophone player, and he played with a lot of good musicians. And he made his living by playing baritone saxophone, which was the bass guitar of the time, on what's called race records, of which Cincinnati, Ohio, was one of the hubs. And so for the first time in my life, I really got. I got some answers to how music is put together. And so about my third lesson, he waltzed into the living room and he said, listen to this, Bill. And he put a recording of what's called Maynard Ferguson on the turntable. Maynard was a high note. Trumpet player and composer, arranger named Shorty Rogers had written this for the Stan Kenton Band, on which Maynard played lead or played pie part. I should say. I was just absolutely electrified. I went out of my head and out of my house, out of my suburb, out of the life as I had led it in my nice middle class, upwardly mobile Jewish community and just went out into the world. And those few notes that he played, which were the highest notes ever recorded on the trumpet, and I just went crazy. And from that point on, I knew that I wanted to compose music for the Stan Kenton Band. Duke Ellington was the king of it all, and Sand Catton was the king of light bands.
- [16:29]
Jesse Jarno
Precocious young Bill Matthew met Stan Kenton, who encouraged him to send in pieces and very kindly invited him to hear the band rehearse them. It took another half dozen years of education and work for one of the pieces to make the cut.
- [16:42]
Wavy Gravy
I'm 21 at this time. I made a rehearsal finally at the end of 1958. And he played four or five of my pieces and they all got passed in. And he said, come down to this is the Blue Note in Chicago and a rehearsal. And we went to the kitchen afterwards and he hired me. He said, join the band in Las Vegas. We'll be there for a month. Write every day and we'll play everything you write and just absorb the band. Just listen to it. It was at the casino and in the Tropicana Hotel. I think that since bit the dust. But it was the early days of the Strip, all gangster control. Terrible, terrible city.
- [17:33]
Jesse Jarno
By a year later they were recording some of his charts. This is Django from Standards and Silhouette, released in the summer of 1960. To underscore what I said before about the Dead's unusual place on the musical continuum. One of the reasons why WA Matthews Story is so fascinating is because it too zigzagged between evolving creative worlds, eventually intersecting with the Deads on stage at Winterland in 1971.
- [18:18]
Wavy Gravy
Then I played trumpet on the band for a few months and I got very, very unhappy. And Stan knew that I was unhappy with the whole life, everything. I didn't like the guys, they were okay, but they were all smoking dope and drinking beer and getting very drunk on whatever could come their way and reading Playboy. And I was crouched in the back of the bus reading Aldous Huxley. And I was unhappy. So I left the band. But I asked him to write a letter of recommendation to Duke Ellington, crazy person as I was. And he must have written a really great letter because I called Duke about three months later and he answered my call. I said, I'd like to write for your band. Gonna record a couple of my things. To my utter amazement and great gratitude that he did that. And there they are out there in the world. Couple arrangements I wrote for Duke Ellingson. The record was called Piano in the Background. And I wrote don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. And I'm beginning to see the light. And they're good arrangements. And the really good part is that Duke opened the arrangements. He put places in the arrangement where he could play and he just plays beautiful shit. I mean, it's so good.
- [20:09]
Jesse Jarno
He was busy though. If you're a jazz researcher, you'll notice the Bill Matthew byline showing up in Downbeat throughout the early 60s. A serious part of the dialogue as both player and writer. But perhaps his most long term contribution developed over the course of a few years.
- [20:26]
Wavy Gravy
The day I walked off the bus on the Canton band. I went back to Chicago and I got hired as the musical director for the Second City, my old bus from the University of Chicago. And the Second City became enormously successful. And they are we, I should say, are the granddaddy of Saturday Night Live. And of all the improvisational stuff, Alauddin.
- [20:48]
Jesse Jarno
Is not being boastful. Second City would produce many of the legendary comedians and writers of the 60s, 70s and way beyond. One of Aloudin's collaborators at Second City in the early 60s was the groundbreaking Del Close.
- [21:01]
Wavy Gravy
Lesson one, basic hip. Basic to hip is the concept of digging to dig. Mr. Geetz. Romo, how would you define dig? Well, you know, man, like when you dig something. Well, yes, but dig, baby, it's like, you know, when you dig some chick or some cat, you know, when you pick up on something, you dig it, you dig.
- [21:22]
Jesse Jarno
That was from the classic 1961 LP how to Speak Hip by Dale Close and John Brandt, with Close playing the square teacher, an influence on Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and many others. We're going to have to delve momentarily into Del Close because he too, intersected with the Grateful Dead and illustrates a way that the Dead soared in and out of unexpected worlds as they forged their creative identity. After Dale Close left Second City, he ended up in LA, where he was in early February 1966. This is from an interview I did a decade or so back, but I'll make the introduction anyway. Please welcome to the Grateful Dead cast Wavy Gravy.
- [22:01]
Eric Davis
The great Del Close was our roommate and was staying at the house when the Pranksters arrived. We were doing the Phantom Cabaret when the Pranksters arrived. I remember Neal Cassidy came into a performance and I'm with Severn Darden and Del Close, and we just put Neil in the burlap sack, extracted him from the premises because he wouldn't stop talking. He had a portable radio with a tomato stuck on the antenna. I can't believe I'm remembering this.
- [22:41]
Jesse Jarno
File that advice away for the next time Neil Cassidy shows up at your event and won't shut up. The Pranksters, with Owsley and the Grateful Dead in tow, had migrated south after the Trips Festival, which we discussed in our LA66 bearcast. A few months earlier, Wavy Gravy, then known as Hugh Romney, along with Del Close, had staged a psychedelic multimedia event of their own even before the Acid Test started, called the Psychedelic Go Go. Though it wasn't quite as participatory as the Acid Tests.
- [23:13]
Eric Davis
You brought your own head, which is what we later did with the Hog Farming Friends in Open Celebration. We did not supply any psychotropics. It was up to you. And what we provided was a palette to expand your head. It was more like a stand up monologue kind of thing.
- [23:37]
Jesse Jarno
The connections between the improv comedy scene and psychedelics were strong, with Del Close's comedy partner John Brandt acting as one of the distributors for Owsley's earliest lsd.
- [23:47]
Wavy Gravy
If you break the rules of hip, you get put down, that's true. But you break the square rules and they throw you in the slam. And that's a big difference.
- [23:55]
Eric Davis
Dow did interferometry where he stretched plastic under these lenses that caused psychedelic images to appear on the screen. And he also did some liquid things. We had lysurgical go go dancers which were all the divine hippie chicks. Did I wear a jacket made of meat?
- [24:20]
Jesse Jarno
I'm not sure, sir. But Del Close and Hugh Romney joined forces with the Merry Pranksters participating in many of the LA acid tests. Like Ken Kesey and Robert Hunter, Del Close had gotten paid to take acid as a trial subject a few years earlier, but was onto other things. By the time of the acid tests.
- [24:40]
Eric Davis
He was the only one allowed. Well along with Pigpen didn't He was more pig pen. It was more into white Dell had special permission. He only took speed.
- [24:54]
Jesse Jarno
Speed or no, it's a point worth reinforcing. The birth of long form improvisational comedy and long form improvisational rock music happen literally side by side. And it's worth considering the acid tests as events that were equal parts comedy and music. Yes, in the end, nothing but mindless chaos. Even as it started, even with that same old dude, good old mindless chaos hassling Ever Hasling. Check out our Hug the Heat episode for more of that. Both Romney and Close headed to the Bay Area soon thereafter where they joined up with another comedy troupe founded by Second City alums called the Committee, which is where Bill Matthew went to in 1967.
- [25:40]
Wavy Gravy
I got tired of the second city gig, I got tired of Chicago and I had visited San Francisco and I had the same kind of pull that everybody else did. And I took my then family of two kids and then two on the way to San Francisco in 1967. At that time the sister club of the Second City called the Committee Committee Theater, which was very influential in the culture at the time. It had already had a head start. One of my proteges was playing the piano for it and he wanted to go and study and be an academic. I said great. So I took half his gig and got a job at the conservatory teaching keyboard harmony and improvisation and counterpoint.
- [26:26]
Jesse Jarno
It was at the committee that he helped create the Herald, in collaboration with Del Close and Alan Meyerson, the standard structure for long form improvised comedy. It's far from a perfect analogy, but the Herald was to comedy what Dark Star was to music.
- [26:41]
Wavy Gravy
Dale Close and me and Alan Meyers, and made the Herald happen.
- [26:45]
Jesse Jarno
Bill Mathayou even named it the Herald, an oblique reference to a George Harrison line from A Hard Day's Night.
- [26:52]
Rich Mahan
What would you call that hairstyle you're wearing?
- [26:55]
Wavy Gravy
Fur. It was January of 1967. That was the Summer of Love. And things were at their psychedelic peak at that time. And I walked down Haight Street, I thought all you people were my family. It was incredible.
- [27:14]
Jesse Jarno
There were all kinds of eye and ear opening experiences to be had. We'll soundtrack this next bit with some of Viola lee Blues from November 10, 1967. Now on 30 trips around the sun, please remember while listening to W.A. matthews description of seeing the Grateful Dead, that he'd been an arranger for Duke Ellington and a critic at Downbeat for years.
- [27:34]
Wavy Gravy
That band woke me up. This was in 1967, I think. I don't even know where it was. But I went to a late Night Dead concert and I was stoned on marijuana. But I think everybody else in the house was stoned on psychedelics. It was pretty, pretty wild. I mean, you could just feel the out of one's head ness in the air. And the band played a jam for what might have been 45 minutes. They just opened up one of the things they did and they just played. It was one of the peak experiences of my life up to then and up to now. It just. It wasn't even about the band or what they were playing. It was about the scene. It was music that not only permeated the atmosphere and made everything one thing, but brought in from every place everything and made it one thing. It beamed it out and it brought it in. Everybody brought their own experiences into the room, including the Dead and all their music. And everybody in the house and all their life experience experience that came into the room. And then there's the Dead playing and everybody opens up and participates in it. That was spiritual life for me. I had never experienced anything like that. And the music was a vehicle for it. It wasn't that we were listening to the music as we were listening to basically the universe as it was presented to us at that time. And the drugs helped a lot. And so that kind of high, that kind of integrative high, crazy as it was in some of its incoherence. That kind of coherency in the high was a high mark of the. I should say it was a marker of the times of those years. Ten years before that, when I was a total intellectual snob. I would not have thought that rock and roll was going to get me there. It's even hard to call the Grateful Dead rock and roll. They're their own sweet, generous, you know, that's his gravel, Dead music. But the great. The great ones are always that way. The great bands are that way.
- [31:44]
Jesse Jarno
The Grateful Dead's music was by Seekers for Seekers, their jams leaning towards actual openness, somehow capturing the spirit of the cultural moment in their chosen musical form, mirroring the path from accepted structure to the great wide outside. The Dead became a non denominational house band for seekers of all stripes, a position that earned them a certain renown in the Bay Area and beyond. But especially in the Bay Area. There were many paths. And the one Bill Mathayou found didn't fully bend towards rock and roll, though it ran adjacent for a few years.
- [32:18]
Wavy Gravy
Well, I met this Sufi teacher named Sam Lewis. And around Sam Lewis was this wonderful bunch of people. I didn't like Sam Lewis at first. I learned to love him, but I loved the people and there were folkies and folkies were just a notch above rock and roll for me. But, you know, I was sort of changing my mind at that time. I got to San Francisco, I said, wait a minute, something is actually happening here. Something's going down and I'm listening.
- [32:46]
Jesse Jarno
Sufi. Sam Lewis had a deep background to touch on it some. Please welcome back our friend Eric Davis. I strongly recommend his book High Weirdness, Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary experience in the 70s, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast.
- [33:04]
Christopher Kaufman
He's a really significant and fascinating figure because he's sort of intergenerational. He was an old dude when it was hippie times. And so he connects in a way the spiritual explosion of the late 60s to the previous spiritual explosion in America, which was in the 1920s from privilege. Born in San Francisco. His dad was like a VP or something at Levi Jeans. His mom was a Rothschild. And he gets into spirituality really early on, Theosophy and which was kind of more generic and those. But then he made two connections in the 20s that were much more unusual. One is that he started hanging out with the Sufi commune that was in Fairfield Facts in Marin county in like from like 1919. So these guys were like cutting edge because there was not A lot of Sufism of any genre in the west at that point.
- [34:06]
Wavy Gravy
What's your name?
- [34:08]
Sam Lewis
Samuel L. Lewis, born in San Francisco a long, long time ago.
- [34:12]
Wavy Gravy
I've heard the name, go ahead.
- [34:14]
Sam Lewis
And I'm not allowed to speak in any respectable church or peace organization. They all turned me down.
- [34:20]
Christopher Kaufman
I've seen footage of him in interviews, read a bunch of interviews. He just seems like a kind of, not naive, but he's like got a genuine kind of innocent exuberance around spiritual practice that was very infectious.
- [34:33]
Sam Lewis
One of my ways of bringing peace. Say yes to other fellows, not make demands. Say yes.
- [34:40]
Christopher Kaufman
Sam Lewis was the real deal. Seeker of an earlier era, but also tuning into like unusual and strong traditions. He wrote a book or co wrote a book called Glory Roads which is all about these kind of socialist reform movements in California in the 30s. There's not much about spirituality in it, but so he also very much had a kind of social conscience.
- [35:03]
Sam Lewis
Cities of south smog, cities of south pollution. But you can't tell it to anybody. They'll mop you factories, get rid of smoke and charges and so on.
- [35:16]
Jesse Jarno
All this audio is from a cool video of Sufi Sam Lewis at the 1970 Equinox Celebration. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast he wasn't.
- [35:26]
Christopher Kaufman
Just like, oh, I'm interested in studying these traditions. I mean he was a trippy guy, but he got like a vision that he was to go and preach to the hippies. So for him to go into the hippie scene was like, it's not his native world. He wasn't like a hardcore bohemian dude. He was like, okay, there's all these hippies, they're seeking interest in religion. I know all this weird shit. Let's go in and essentially like proselytize this older tradition of like seeker Asian spirituality that's already kind of westernized in certain ways and then bring it into the hippie context. So he started his own order and he became the kind of like lovable grand old man. I never heard anything untoward about him.
- [36:12]
Sam Lewis
Now that I've made you true believers, I'm going to make you true unbelievers.
- [36:17]
Jesse Jarno
The San Francisco Oracle, sometimes called the Haight Street Oracle, was the city's underground newspaper from 1966 to 1968. An often colorful, frequently impenetrable, occasionally jasmine scented print adventure. Maybe more like an art project than an alt weekly page.
- [36:35]
Wavy Gravy
Street Oracle was a great publication. It was all right, man. I, I made sure I got my copy and read it every, every issue. It was what was happening. I just felt that I couldn't be an educated man unless I read the Oracle.
- [36:52]
Jesse Jarno
One of their staffers, Phil Davenport, also happened to be a follower of Sufi.
- [36:57]
Wavy Gravy
Sam, the Haight street paper, the Oracle. I think he worked there towards the end of its life. And when he lived in Marin, I think he tried to publish like in the larger spiritual community. He tried to publish like the Son or the Daughter, the Child of the Hay Street Oracle.
- [37:23]
Jesse Jarno
He rebooted the paper as the San Francisco Oracle of the Spiritual revolution, publishing from 160 Magnolia Avenue in Larkspur, close to where Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter had relocated with their partners at nearly the same time, and began to write the material that became Working Man's Dead and American Beauty. To discuss the new neighbors in Larkspur, please welcome Christopher Kaufman, senior Lecturer in Humanities at Boston University, who came across another tangential but meaningful connection between the Grateful Dead and the Sufi choir.
- [37:56]
Phil Davenport
There are these forums on deadnet related to each of the releases, and I kind of peruse them occasionally. And there was host by somebody on there at one point who said, hey, my brother has this first publication that Robert Hunter had ever issued and said a few more words about it. And it didn't sound familiar to me. I think, like a lot of people, I thought the first Robert Hunter publications were the poems that appeared starting in 72 in the Deadheads newsletters.
- [38:24]
Jesse Jarno
Chris tracked down what turned out to be a few issues of the San Francisco Oracle of the Spiritual Revolution.
- [38:30]
Phil Davenport
Among other things, he had a bunch of old copies of the second Oracle periodical. In those was a bunch of Grateful Dead material. And one of those things was the Starship Grateful Dead piece by. Well, it's attributed to Bob Hunter, so by Robert Hunter. We got it confirmed on a few different fronts.
- [38:49]
Jesse Jarno
The piece's full title is Starship Grateful An Instruction Manual. We've posted a link to this most unusual article@dead.net deadcast.
- [38:58]
Phil Davenport
He's saying right off the bat, hey, this is part of the Grateful Dead world, right? And then you're absolutely right. I mean, the pros, if we can even call it that, it's pretty eccentric. We start out with this sort of string of numbers. The whole thing is subtitled An Instruction Manual. And it's not really clear at the start, at least if the instruction manual is for people who are reading this piece, or if it's something that explains how the Grateful Dead are something that you can use as a way of executing some project, or if the Grateful Dead are perhaps the thing that are employing the instruction manual to guide themselves forward.
- [39:34]
Jesse Jarno
In the early days of the Palo Alto scene, Robert Hunter had been known as a prose writer, though isn't known to have published anything at the time. He continued to write privately through the 60s, including the recently uncovered the Silver Snarling Trumpet. And when Jerry Garcia drafted him for Grateful dead duty in 1967, he found his calling as a lyricist. It was only in the 70s, and mainly the 80s, that Hunter transformed himself into a poet.
- [39:59]
Phil Davenport
And I don't know if he's thinking about himself as a writer. My sense looking at, like his later materials, that he thinks of his work as a poet as somewhat divorced from his work as a lyricist. But I'm not sure that that's the right understanding, or at least that that's the right understanding to bring to what he was doing in the late 60s and very early.
- [40:25]
Wavy Gravy
Roger, we tried to warn you. You should not pull that neighbor. You're out now, out in time, boy. You may never be here again.
- [40:45]
Jesse Jarno
That sum of a Robert Hunter audio piece called A Message for Roger played on at least One of the Dead's radio broadcasts in the fall of 1971. And similarly occupying a confusing place, not exactly music, not exactly radio play, kind of a sound collage, not exactly anything else. Starship Grateful Dead exists in a very in between place.
- [41:08]
Phil Davenport
It becomes this sort of smattering of lines that are broken up in different ways. You really see in parts of it the mark of William Burroughs. The text is pretty chopped up and there's awkward sort of juxtapositions that challenge a kind of easy access into the piece.
- [41:23]
Jesse Jarno
We've also posted a link to Chris's annotations@dead.net deadcast but it intersects with the Sufi choir via the open channel that seekers seem to find in the Bay area in the 60s and 70s especially.
- [41:36]
Phil Davenport
It makes sense in terms of the more spiritual side or mystical side of this incarnation of the Oracle. It settles into a fairly mystical take on what it is that the Grateful Dead offer to listeners. There are also references to a few pieces which are kind of on the fringe of the Dead canon. Like the Cortical Five piece, which may date to this period. May have already existed before Hunter produced this piece of prose. May have come a little bit later.
- [42:03]
Jesse Jarno
Cortical 5 is a title that appears in Working Notes for Oxymoxoa as well as a set of lyrics that appears in Hunter's lyric book A Box of Rain.
- [42:11]
Phil Davenport
There are these receptors in your brain that are important to the effects of LSD on your mind. It seems like given any other sort of context for thinking about what core to that seems like a pretty likely explanation.
- [42:24]
Jesse Jarno
Here's maybe one way to read Grateful Dead. The same way that Sufi Sam and others offered cosmic philosophies and were looking for aligned seekers, so were the Grateful Dead. The oracle was a good place to make your mission known. They were looking for the others, just like the gurus. And maybe if they'd played together, they'd find some among the gurus followers. The Grateful Dead just happened to mostly make music, but Sufi Sam's followers also made music.
- [42:51]
Christopher Kaufman
Eric DAVIS and the main expression of that, that's kind of the funnest thing that he does at that point is to. Is to start these dances of universal peace, AKA Sufi dancing, which isn't like the twirling orders that we associate with Turkey and the classic Sufi orders, but is like hippie sacred dancing. And, you know, it's like line dancing. Simple songs drawn from the world's traditions.
- [43:24]
Sam Lewis
Raise one man, one girl. Make a big circle on your right. I said your partner. I didn't say to hold on to anybody else.
- [43:34]
Wavy Gravy
Your partner only right, because.
- [43:38]
Sam Lewis
All right, partner only. Now stop moving.
- [43:56]
Christopher Kaufman
I've been blessed enough to do it a number of times, mostly at rainbow gatherings and occasionally to extraordinary spiritual ecstatic effects. So I have a great deal of respect for the dances of universal peace, even though they look kind of probably a little dated, a little corny, but in a way that was kind of part of the spirit he had. Like, there was a lightness and a kind of joy to the way that he brought Sufism in and also emphasized music and dance and movement.
- [44:44]
Wavy Gravy
There were about 80 people or 100 people around this guy, and there were about 15 people who could sing pretty well. So I started a choir called the Sufi Choir, and I started to write for them. And I wrote in a kind of a big band, folky gospel style that was very Europeanized. It was full of counterpoint. It was kind of a hybrid of everything I'd known. Om Sri Ram J. Ram J. Ram. Om Sri Ram J. Ram J. Ram.
- [45:32]
Rich Mahan
Om Sri Ram J. Ram J. Ram.
- [45:36]
Sam Lewis
Om Sri Ram J. Ram.
- [45:38]
Wavy Gravy
JAY I don't know if we were the first ones, but we were certainly one of the most exposed ones. The idea was to take sacred phrases, what was called at the time American mantra, Sriram J. Ram JJ Ram and Om Namasot Shivaye, and set them to music. Alhamdulillah was the first thing I said for the choir. It means all praise is due to God in Arabic. And that was our first big hit.
- [46:27]
Jesse Jarno
The Sufi Choir formed in early 1970, debuting later that year, perhaps around the time of the Equinox celebration. We've heard some music from.
- [46:36]
Wavy Gravy
I was Bill Matthew up to the time. That time. But I became Alaudin Matthew and my teacher gave me a Sufi name and a spiritual name.
- [46:44]
Jesse Jarno
We've posted a link to lots of Sufi choir music@dead.net Deadcast Alauddin underscores a point we've been emphasizing. All of these pieces are from their first self titled album from 1973.
- [46:57]
Wavy Gravy
And the choir was beginning to perform and it was attracting people. So I felt just right on the scene. It was a big scene. It wasn't necessarily a rock and roll scene. It was a lot going on. It was a Bob Dylan scene, It was a Joni Mitchell scene. It was a Ram Dass scene. You know. It was extremely eclectic. Which is. That was the point of it. Everything was coming together. It was like a really. It was the ideal melting pot for which America is supposed to be famous. Maybe the last one we had, the guy who managed the choir was a great tenor named Philip Davenport. His Sufi name was Vashist. So Philip Vashist was one of the suppliers for Jerry and the Dead. And that's how I met Jerry Garcia and that's how I met Janis Joplin and that's how I met other guys in the band. And that's how I came to hang out at the Dead house.
- [48:31]
Jesse Jarno
It sings on and on all things Dreaming In God that's one of my favorite Sufi choir pieces from 1973. Alodin's setting of William Butler Yeats Crazy Jane On God. These recordings are from slightly later than the story we're circling in on.
- [48:57]
Wavy Gravy
All these things are going on at the same time. And Mickey Hart liked us very much and we made a kind of a friendship. He really liked the choir. And I got to know Jerry Garcia a little bit just because I was sort of in the same room with Vashis and other people that he knew. And the scene was so liquid in those people were always coming in and going out of rooms, you know. So a lot of mobility.
- [49:28]
Jesse Jarno
The Sufi Choir was welcomed into the musical world of the Bay Area with open arms.
- [49:33]
Wavy Gravy
Mickey liked us and said, you can use our barn anytime and you can record there. We had never recorded except on a cassette player before. And so we did. He gave us the key and said, just use it. We nobody knew how to use that equipment. So I. Where do you turn this eight track tape recorder on this two inch tape recorder. Two inch tape like this. Reels that are this big and where do you turn it on? And so anyway, we figured it out and we made a bunch of recordings there which were terrible. We suppressed them all, but. But he was so sweet to give us that first experience in a real studio. I mean, he had good equipment. One of the guys in the band finally figured out how to run things, and so we did that. And I didn't like to take advantage of them because I thought, you know, I didn't want to be a sort of a leech onto the band. They got enough hangers on. That band had enough hangers on.
- [50:31]
Jesse Jarno
In October 1969, the family dog had hosted what they called the Holy Man Jam, a weekend of events with Timothy Leary, Alan Watts and more. Other events in that mode happened periodically before and after. Each was kind of like a guru off. You were tired of these material things.
- [50:50]
Wavy Gravy
You are tired of this war and this and that. It is you who really want it. There was all these holy men that came to talk, you know, and they said, there are 900 tubes in the body. And whatever they're saying, I don't know this swami and this guru. It's a certain class of teacher from India who heard about San Francisco and thought, I'm going to America and make a killing. And some of them did actually, and made a lot of money and went back to India. So some of those stories aren't very nice. And since we were kind of in the middle between the musical scene and the Sufi scene, somebody had the idea it'd be natural for us to open for the Dead, because the Dead was the big attraction. Vashish, the aforementioned, was set it all up and said, went to the choir and said, how would you guys like to open for the Dead?
- [51:49]
Jesse Jarno
Probably around the time the Sufi choir were invited to open for the Dead, their own teacher, Sufi Sam Lewis, died suddenly.
- [51:57]
Wavy Gravy
He did in 1971. By the time we did the gig, he was gone.
- [52:02]
Jesse Jarno
It would have a heavy impact on Alauddin and the choir, as you can read about in the Shrime Thief, but it also strengthened their resolve. Let's catch up briefly with the grateful dead in March 1971. In mid February, they'd headed east with a batch of new songs and the Ampex MM1016 track with the intention of recording a live album of new material at the Capitol Theater in Portchester. It didn't go as planned. Bam. The more than half dozen new songs were almost all instant Dead classics, if not quite ready for Primetime, a story we discussed over season three of the Dead cast. Ned Lagin performed with them on the entirety of the first night, including the debut of Warfrat. But by the second night, the Grateful lead had been reduced by one with Mickey Hart dismissed from the band, not appearing on stage again with them until October 1974, when invited back by the roadies. The tapes from the Capitol Theatre were scrapped until the multi tracks were revisited for releases like Three from the Vault, the expanded Working Man's Dead and American Beauty, 50 CDs and more. More to the point of our story, the Sufi Choir lost their main sponsor in the Dead.
- [54:15]
Wavy Gravy
We were supposed to have rehearsed, but we didn't. So I just had to talk through some things with Phil Lesh and said, well, you know, we'll do this and then you guys come on and then we'll do this and we'll play together. Phil Lesh knew a lot about music and I always loved his playing too. I loved everybody's playing in that band. Phil Lesh went to Mills and so did I and so we, we had that connection.
- [54:41]
Jesse Jarno
I'm still a little unclear who organized the event on March 24, 1971 at Winterland, featuring the Kali Shigundo Buddhist sect, Yogi Bhajan and the Sufi Choir. As our friend Cory Arnold clarifies, in late 1970, Bill Graham's former assistant Paul Barada took over promoting at Winterland, much to Graham's displeasure. Graham warned local acts not to play there or face the consequences, which the Dead ignored. Barratta was probably gone by spring 1971, though. Lot of mysteries today, cosmic and otherwise. Philip Elwood, the San Francisco examiner writer who'd been covering the Dead for years, filed a report the day after the show, which we'll read from occasionally. He described the crowd as about 4,000 miscellaneous characters, dead fans, freaks, mystics, religionists, spiritualists and a few semi straights who apparently came in expecting a typical night with the Grateful that in concert. Of course. In many ways it was a typical Jerry Garcia Grateful Dead affair, since the strange, incongruous and sometimes outrageous are all part of the Dead's daily lifestyle. First up, per Elwood's report, local members of Kalis Shigundo, a Buddhist sect dressed in oriental style hiking attire, presented ritual segments, including their fire walk. That's when Michael Parish and his friend walked in.
- [56:05]
Michael Parrish
To recap briefly, we walk into winterland at like 8 o'clock and they had this bonfire going. Winterland is a big wooden building and this bonfire was going like eight feet in the air. It was just terrifying, actually. Where's the fire marshal and how are they able to do this? And you know, he was praying and it was just the weirdest thing ever.
- [56:32]
Jesse Jarno
It's a little unclear, but quite possibly up there with the kale. Segundos was a young musician then going by the name Jigme, who'd been one of Aloudin's students at the San Francisco Conservatory. During the fire ceremonies, Jigme's job was often to add a cello drone, though sometimes he walked on the coals himself. Most remember him by the name he composed, Arthur Russell. That's from a few months later, Allen Ginsberg's Pacific High Studio Mantras featuring Reverend Nadjari and Buddhist Chorus with Arthur Russell on cello, his first appearance in a recording studio. The Dead had just finished mixing Skull and Roses there. A few weeks earlier, Arthur Russell would head for New York and become an important connection point between underground musical world's far too vast to explore today, to mention just one point. He even played some cello with Talking Heads, as you can hear on the forthcoming reissue of talking heads 77 from our pals at RINO. I passed out hours ago. I'm sadder than you'll ever know I close my eyes on this sunny day say something once while I say it. In Michael's photos, you can see someone who might be a young Arthur Russell standing in front of the Dead's amps. You can read more about Arthur Russell in a new book by Friend of the Dead cast Richard King travels over feeling Arthur a life. Then came Yogi Bhajan, according to Elwood, dozens at least of whose disciples were in the audience, chanting and swaying. I get high just listening to him, a mesmerized young lady whispered to me, eyes closed, following the incantations, more than half the huge crowd got deeply into Bhajan's thing.
- [59:00]
Wavy Gravy
Not being falsely proud of it, that is.
- [59:03]
Jesse Jarno
Something kind of canceled these days. Can't say I've watched it myself, but there's a brand new HBO documentary series about Kundalini yoga in the United States called Breath of Fire. Backstage at the show, Phil Elwood from the examiner spoke with Jerry Garcia. It's all in the spirit right there, garcia told Elwood, thumping Elwood's chest. We get it from music, they get it in their own way, he said, waving towards the stage. But the spirit's the same. We're all one. After all this buildup, I'm more than sad to report that it was a rough night for Al Uddin and the Sufi Choir.
- [59:39]
Wavy Gravy
It was too long. They'd planned too many speeches. These holy dudes just didn't know when to stop. Spiritual teaching is not known for its brevity. And so, I mean, the real stuff is actually. But anyway, people. People were getting very, very restless. People were really restless. They were walking around the room.
- [60:09]
Jesse Jarno
One of the people walking around the room was a very high, young comedian named Tom Davis, who found his way backstage and introduced himself to Jerry Garcia. The first meeting between the guitarist and the future Saturday Night Live writer and dead collaborator. Well, we're standing here in Jerry's backstage kitchen where he's been fussing around all afternoon.
- [60:29]
Wavy Gravy
No trouble at all, Tom.
- [60:30]
Jesse Jarno
It's just that these days I get such a kick out of preparing party food and beverages.
- [60:34]
Wavy Gravy
I love watching my guests enjoy them. I know you do.
- [60:37]
Jesse Jarno
I can hardly wait. As every musician knows, there are off nights, whether for the musicians themselves or due to factors out of their control, or both. Probably every successful musician had to get through a number of shitty gigs before they evened into the good ones. And though Aludin himself was a veteran, by 1971, the Sufi choirs themselves were a bit green, and this was certainly their biggest show to date. The tape only includes the last part of the Sufi Choir's set, so we'll illustrate this next story with hopefully representative bits from the first Sufi Choir lp.
- [61:30]
Wavy Gravy
By the time it was time for us to go on, everybody was bored out of their gourd. I mean, really bored. They were talking a lot and I hadn't prepared for this. I didn't realize it would be that we were in that such a tight corner. And so I had a longish set, like a half an hour set, which is reasonable. The noise in the place got to be high, and so I cut the slower things and we went to the more uptempo stuff.
- [62:03]
Jesse Jarno
In the name of Allah. Yavata, yavatar Yavata yavata yafata yavata.
- [62:16]
Wavy Gravy
After the first number, I found out that one of the mics was dead. The alto. Alto section could not be heard. That's pretty serious for a soprano. Alto, tenor, Bay Squire. So I tried. I said, help, help. You know, we need tech support. Nobody came. Nobody was listening. It was like nobody in the room was listening. So I started the band on something they knew well. And I rushed back to the board upstairs and I'm like this. I'm trying to find the fader. I'm trying. Where does this mic? And I thought I had it because there were two central faders.
- [63:01]
Jesse Jarno
Down.
- [63:01]
Wavy Gravy
I put them up, but I didn't have it. I rushed back to the stage. The mic was still dead. Everybody reconfigured. And I felt pretty, pretty abandoned by the whole thing. We did one more thing, and then I began to hear. And the crowd. We want the Dead. We want the Dead. We want the Dead. And what started out like a very controlled chant grew into a deafening roar.
- [63:55]
Jesse Jarno
Here's where our tape picks up. It's maybe not quite as bad as Aladdin remembers, though. This can have been fun, but I'm not sure the crowd could even hear him.
- [64:06]
Michael Parrish
We'll be joined on this next number.
- [64:08]
Wavy Gravy
By the Grateful Dead. And so I motioned to them, come on, Come on stage. And so I know it was Phil, I know it was Bob Weir. It might have been Kreitzman, of course, Jerry. So they all came out on stage. We did something where there's call and response and oh, shi Ram J rom JJ Ram. And then the audience is supposed to respond, which they sort of didn't. Didn't we want the Dead?
- [65:11]
Jesse Jarno
It was pretty unusual for the whole Dead to appear alongside another musician. They'd briefly acted as the local fill in band for the Coasters back in the Warlocks days and had backed jazz vocalist John Hendrix on a single called Fire in the City. There was a not totally successful pairing with the Buffalo Philharmonic in 1970. Near the end of that year, Garcia, Lesh and Kreutzman had recorded and performed behind David Crosby as the Dorks. In the next two or three years after 1971, some version of the dead, that is at least the rhythm section in. Garcia would accompany Ned Lagin, the Rowan Brothers, Doug Somm, David Bromberg and Bo Diddley, among others. The appearance with the Sufi choir was undoubtedly new territory.
- [66:20]
Wavy Gravy
And then there's some improvisations and I kept pointing to guys in the band. Okay, your turn. Play on one chord. You know, it's just like a G7 or something. You guys play. They wouldn't play. They were just sort of standing there making rhythmic motions. They wouldn't solo. And that disappointed me.
- [66:41]
Jesse Jarno
It's true that Jerry Garcia and the gang didn't exactly cut loose, but they fill out the Sri Ram chant with a cool pocket. That sounds a lot like the music they'd develop in their single drummer formation over the next few years. With some excellent and prominent bass, the Dead stayed out for three pieces.
- [67:20]
Wavy Gravy
Can we do another number with these guys.
- [67:24]
Jesse Jarno
On the middle of the three pieces? 23rd Psalm. The dead themselves mostly hang back in the circular groove, trying to get comfortable and maybe not fully finding that space. It's the kind of music that might be pretty excellent after a few rehearsals and a more sympathetic microphone setup. The tape isn't as bad as Aluddin's slightly traumatized memory suggests, but it's not the intended result either. But on the last piece, Hallelujah, the Dead and the Sufi choir kind of got it together. You can pretty much feel the band feeling the song out as they go, responding to the rhythms of the vocalist and finding a little glide that sounds somewhat like the brighter corners of the era's dark stars. Hallelujah, Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah, Hallelujah. It builds with a double time vocal layer.
- [70:18]
Wavy Gravy
And in the last piece, there's a hook on it at the end. And so finally the Dead start to play. And so we're just in this dung, ching, ching, chick bong, ching, ching, and over. And it goes on for about a minute. At this point, the crowd doesn't know what to do with itself. So the sound is deafening. It's like a Beatles concert. I mean, you just can't hear a thing. It's just completely deafening. But we're playing together, so they're. For that minute there, the Souvi choir is playing with the Dead. We're all playing together, and it's kind of fun. I mean, I. I heard what was going on, and that was the game, that we'd play this last little hook together.
- [72:03]
Jesse Jarno
The Sufi choir departed from the stage, and the Dead stayed. Michael Parrish.
- [72:08]
Michael Parrish
Okay, the Sufi choir finishes. There's already just like three surreal things in a row. And I think the Dead came on probably 10 or so.
- [72:31]
Jesse Jarno
The Dead opened with two songs that were pretty new to the band's repertoire. Michael, a committed Deadhead for a few years, was experiencing the new version of the band for the first time.
- [72:41]
Michael Parrish
That was the first hint I had that Mickey had. Had left, you know, there had been no announcement in the newspapers that he was no longer with the Dead. One drum kit. What's. What's up with that? It was striking because it was such a different Grateful Dead. And, you know, I mean, in some ways it was the same, but there were all these new songs, you know, I mean, they open with Greatest Story Ever Told. And, you know, what is this?
- [73:09]
Jesse Jarno
Go Go Johnny go Go Johnny go go as we said, the show yielded the Johnny B. Goode on Skull and Roses, but nothing else for the live album in progress. Maybe because of this, we've got Pigpen.
- [73:38]
Rich Mahan
Here, but we forgot to bring an organ.
- [73:41]
Jesse Jarno
The crew had just returned from a run in the Midwest and maybe they needed a break from lugging a Hammond B3 to Winterland. Even when they did have the organ, it was a starker new Grateful Dead in fairly extreme contrast to the out there collaboration that had just occurred. It was a road not followed. Without Mickey Hart around, perhaps the connection withered, perhaps for the best. As far as Aloudin was concerned, though, it wasn't the end of his story with the Dead.
- [74:07]
Wavy Gravy
So I was kind of humiliated and defeated by the whole thing. I thought it was a shock. I got sort of roped into this. It was nice to be on stage with the Grateful Dead, but hey, man, you know, I've seen my light in the sun. I don't need that stuff. And had my days of already. I'm tired of my semi fame. And so I just didn't feel good about it. And the next day there is a glowing rave review about the Sufi choir and the Grateful Dead, saying they'd never heard such beautiful music in their life and that the crowd was a little rowdy, but there was such enthusiasm in the crowd and that they thought the music was really just beautiful, beautiful. And it was so fabulous to see this up and coming choir, blah, blah, blah. And it was great. I thought, well, you never know. So that's my story about the Grateful Dead.
- [75:09]
Jesse Jarno
Philip Elwood of the examiner indeed loved it. He wrote, the Grateful Dead immediately plunged into electric accompaniment for the sufi choir, about 25 voices. It was a glorious, wonderful combination. We'll repeat that big finale because it was pretty glorious there for a moment. For the Dead, the collaboration was part of a growing self recognition that they could reconnect their music directly to spaces outside their apparent idiom of rock and roll. A legacy of the anything goes attitude of the acid tests and in fact a collaboration with one of the parents of long form improvised comedy. Perhaps the most direct musical comparison between the Sufi choir and the Dead pairing came seven years later. One that actually was rehearsed and then performed several times. That was Hamza, El Dean and the Dead at Winterland in October 1978, a pairing that grew from the band's trip to Egypt.
- [76:59]
Wavy Gravy
Hamza was a very close friend for 30 years. For mine, very. A dear, dear intimate brother. I don't know if I introduced Mickey to Hamza or not.
- [77:08]
Jesse Jarno
I may have whether or not he made that particular connection. Laudy and Matthew was and is part of the musical fabric of the Bay Area. Despite what seemed like a bad gig for the Sufi choir, it was Just the beginning.
- [77:21]
Wavy Gravy
We made three records together. One's called the Sufi Choir, sometimes called the Blue Album. One's called the Brown Album or Crying for Joy. And we had Richard Tillinghast, who was a great lyrical poet, as our lyricist. And he was writing beautiful, beautiful stuff for us. And by the time we got to the third recording, it was fucking intricate music. I mean, it was jaw dropping and at the same time, it was just so immediate, you know, so that's the story. And it got very, very polished.
- [78:25]
Jesse Jarno
That was Bell song from the 1976 Sufi Choir album, Stone in the Sky. Eric Davis is a fan of the records.
- [78:33]
Christopher Kaufman
I quite like them. I think they're. There's actually some very beautiful music on them. So it totally makes sense that that would. There would be some kind of overlap with, with. With the Dead scene and the emphasis on dancing and joy and collectivity and, you know, a certain kind of exuberance.
- [79:15]
Jesse Jarno
Alauddin was also an independent music pioneer, establishing Cold Mountain Music to distribute the Sufi choir records. He's a lifer, as they say. And Cold Mountain still operates today, distributing the Sufi choir music. Alauddin's own releases, books, sheet music and more. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast his connections with the Grateful Dead didn't end. After the awkward night at Winterland. The Sufi Choir would share a bill with Olden and the way. In March 1973, the night before the Dead played at Kezar Stadium. No known tapes. And there was one more brush with collaboration, though the outcome was also less than ideal.
- [79:52]
Wavy Gravy
This was a little later, maybe more mid-70s, more like 74 or 75. I don't remember. I suggested somehow, maybe to Phil Lesh. I don't know how this came about, that I write, try to write a song for the Dead. Because I'd written so many songs for the choir. I was sort of poetically dead in those days. I didn't understand poetry and I didn't understand these crazy lyrics that people were writing. And I certainly didn't understand the writing process for rock songs, especially Bob Hunter, who was a genius.
- [80:28]
Jesse Jarno
By this time, Phil Davenport of the Sufi Choir was doing occasional work for the Dead. When the Dead started issuing official songbooks, Davenport got the job, turning the band's recordings into several volumes of simple sheet music arrangements, which are an undersung way that the Dead's music spread alongside their recordings.
- [80:46]
Wavy Gravy
And so somehow I got, maybe through Phil Davenport, My Feast. Maybe I got this sheet of lyrics with a lot of stuff crossed out, all written in ballpoint pen. Of Bob Hunter's, and it was nonsense. To me, it looked like the poetry of John Ash, you know, like super modernist poetry. These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing.
- [81:12]
Michael Parrish
Into something forgetful, Although angry with history.
- [81:16]
Wavy Gravy
They are the product of an idea that man is horrible. For instance, though this is only one.
- [81:22]
Jesse Jarno
Example, that was John Ashbury reading at the living theatre in 1963. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast.
- [81:30]
Wavy Gravy
Modernist poetry all has literary reference, but super modernist poetry just has, like, quotidian reference from anything from the culture. The whole thing seemed totally random to me. So I had the temerity to call up the Dead house and say, is Bob Hunter there? And who's this? This is Alaudian. Somebody named Alaudian wants to talk to you. And Bob Hunter says, I could hear. What do you want? And I said, about that sheet of lyrics that you sent me? He said, yeah. I said, what do they mean? And he said, I have no idea and wouldn't talk to me. And so I put it away. I thought, I can't do this.
- [82:21]
Jesse Jarno
This all pretty much tracks, as they say. Certainly it was never wise to ask Robert Hunter what his songs meant. In 1974 and 1975, as the dead songwriting slowed somewhat, Hunter began to frequently contribute lyrics to other artists. And I wonder if maybe the lyrics were intended for a Sufi choir composition.
- [82:40]
Wavy Gravy
I found it last year, and, man, I'm not gonna mess with it, but, wow, there's so many great lines. It could have been 10 songs. And I think it did make finally, in some form. It made one of their hits, actually. It's just a precious thing, you know, Bob Hunter's scrawls for something that I'm sure he had other versions of and that he made into something else I couldn't make any sense of then. But now, you know, five books later, and lots and lots and lots of poetry later, I think, oh, my gosh, I just didn't recognize it then.
- [83:18]
Jesse Jarno
The Shrine Thief is a fantastic memoir of a life truly spent inside music in a flowing, evolving way.
- [83:25]
Wavy Gravy
So I was a Sufi teacher for a long time. I'm a sheikh, officially in that order. And so I taught for a long time. I even took disciples. And at a certain point, I realized, look, I can either be a musician or I can be a spiritual teacher. So my. My spiritual teacher was Anayat Khan, who was one of the budding musicians of India. And he made the choice to become a spiritual teacher. And so his musical gift was never. Never blossomed because his spiritual Teaching, at which he was a rare gift to the world, took over his life. And I thought, I don't know what kind of quote spiritual teacher I would make, but I don't want this. I'm a musician, man. I'm a piano player. I compose music. That's it. That's what I'm doing.
- [84:25]
Jesse Jarno
In 1987, the same year the Dead hit the charts with Touch of Grey, Aloudin even had something of a hit himself. The album Available Light, one of his few projects recorded for somebody else, in this case the somewhat infamous Windham Hill label. That was to the well from Available Light in the Shrine Thief. Alauddin. Sounds a somewhat regretful note about this project. A little too New Agey for someone who'd spent their whole life as a genuine seeker. I found a copy recently and I find some of it quite gorgeous. The movement catalyzed by Sufi Sam carries on.
- [85:12]
Wavy Gravy
It went through many transformations. It's huge now and worldwide with the Sufi dance circles, they're called Dances of universal peace. There's 71 countries. I forget how many dance groups all over the world. I mean, it's really. It's quite international.
- [85:32]
Jesse Jarno
And for one brief moment at Winterland, the Sufis and the Dead connected in a way that was perfectly Grateful Dead. A flash that only held briefly and went on its way, but beautifully. Ha.
- [86:15]
Rich Mahan
Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. Friends. Most of us don't get to meet our heroes, and I moved away from Marin county before Phil opened up Terrapin Crossroads. Many of my friends got to meet him, hang out with him, and even play music with him. I always enjoyed seeing the photos and hearing the stories. The few times I did go to Terrapin Crossroads, Phil wasn't there, so I never got the chance. My fun Phil story is from the Calaveras County Fairground shows in late August 1987. A group of friends and I were standing squarely in the fill zone prior to the show. Starting right up front, giggling away, we were well tuned up. And then Phil came out to literally tune up. As he stood facing his rig with his back to the crowd, we started a Phil Phil chant. All of a sudden, I could see Phil's concentration break. His shoulders slumped. He gave up tuning his base, spun around and threw out his arms and exclaimed humorously.
- [87:22]
Wavy Gravy
What?
- [87:24]
Rich Mahan
We laughed about as hard as humans can. And then the boys launched into another killer show. Good times. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode. Allow Dean Matthew, Wavy Gravy, Michael Parrish, John Tex Coat, Eric Davis, and Christopher Kaufman. Extra. Special thanks to friend of the Dead cast David Ganz for his ongoing contributions of audio from his interview archive. Thank you for listening. Executive producer for the good old Grateful Dead cast Mark Pincus, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Doran Tyson. All rights reserve.