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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.
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Foreign.
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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 eight of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you. Thank you very much for tuning in. Well, we wrapped up season seven talking about the RFK shows with the Almond Brothers that are a part of the here comes sunshine 1973 box set and we're kicking off season eight by diving into another Almond Brothers related event. You are about to embark on a two parter covering the famous summer jam show at watkins Glen in 1973 which also included the band. Besides being the 50th anniversary of this historic concert event, it is also the 50th anniversary of the Grateful Dead's monumental 1973 studio album Wake of the Flood. To celebrate this, Rhino has a grand 50th anniversary wake of the Flood release which includes the original album, remastered, some really cool early demos of songs from the album, and six songs from a live show at Magaw Memorial hall at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois on November 1, 1973. There will be special vinyl as well as standard black vinyl CDs and digital versions available. More info and pre orders are happening now over@dead.net head on over to dead.net deadcast and check out all of our past episodes of the Good old Grateful Dead cast, including the complete seasons 1 through 7. You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how you like to listen. And please help this podcast by subscribing hitting that like button. And if the spirit moves you, leave us a review. Thank you, very kind of you. You don't realize how much it helps, but it does. Thank you and 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. Thanks to everyone who has left their stories over@stories.dead.net well, we now want you to tell your stories about Wake of the Flood or any of the songs on it. Got a tale about the first time you heard Eyes of the World? Or a wild tour yarn about that one version of Let It Grow? No story too big or too small? Share those stories over@stories.dead.net and you just may hear yourself on a future Dead cast. Watkins Glenn, the Grateful Dead, the Amond Brothers Band. The band bigger than Woodstock, yet only one day long. Well, a little more than one day, as you'll soon hear. But what did it take to put on a monumental concert of this size? What extraordinary things had to happen in order to pull it off? Inquiring minds such as yours have come to the right place as we're about to dive into all the details with your friend in mind. Jesse Jarno.
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In the summer of 1973, the Grateful Dead played the biggest show of their career. And up until that point and for a while thereafter, the biggest show of any band's career. Over to dan Rather at CBS.
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Four years ago, 400,000 young people gathered for a concert and a happening at a dairy farm in New York State. The vibrations from that event were so heavy that Woodstock became a symbol of the 60s. Today, 120 miles away, there is in the making Woodstock's apparent successor, a thing called Summer Jam.
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Being the biggest festival of the past 50 years, everybody wanted to get in a television news story about it. Garrick Utley on NBC.
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B
The one day concert was called Summer Jam, and it was. There were jams in the roads leading to it. Some people had to leave their cars and walk in from 20 miles away. The concert was held at a Grand Prix racetrack. The music came from a number of rock groups, but the music was only.
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Oh, you betcha. And you guys forgot to name the acts that played. The Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers and the Band. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
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B
You'd always hear Woodstock, biggest crowd ever. And then Deadheads would always say, except for Watkins Glenn.
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C
It was a bit of a point of pride. Woodstock in the summer of 1969 had solidified a template for a giant rock festival. And in the summers that followed, many promoters tried to repeat its success. But the Watkins Glen Summer Jam was not a Woodstock knockoff. It was a group endeavor that took years of groundwork before it could even be conceived. Part of a long term plan by Grateful Dead tour strategist Sam Cutler. As you may have heard, Sam sadly passed away this summer at the age of 80 as we were preparing our episodes for the year. And though we didn't get to debrief Sam about Summer Jam specifically, it was one of his proudest achievements. And it came up multiple times during our conversations over the past few years. Once again, we ask you to please rise and welcome from out of Town tours, Sam Cutler.
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I kept on saying, well, one of the ways we build the Grateful Dead is the Grateful Dead have got to play with other people, but it's got to be like collaborative trips, you know what I mean? Not where the Grateful Dead's second on the bill or top of the bill, whatever. Let's do a collaborative thing like where you play, say with the Allman Brothers.
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Sam's co conspirator in the Allman Brothers family was Bunky Odom from the Paragon Agency.
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B
You got to think about that $10 at Watkins Glenn for those three bands. It's incredible. I'm surprised the people that don't know about Watkins Glenn. Woodstock comes out of their mouth, you know. And I said, wait a minute.
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Promoter Jimmy Koplik.
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People compare us to Woodstock as being bigger than Woodstock. Woodstock was 3 days 40x. We were 1 day 3x. I don't know how you compare the two.
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C
While Watkins Glen hasn't exactly been memory hold, it never quite achieved the same mythic status as Woodstock, which grew around 400,000 people.
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B
In Watkins Glen, New York, hundreds of thousands of young people gathered for an all day rock concert. Estimates of the crowd have ranged from 300,000 to half a million. Or as one person said Today, it was 95 acres of wall to wall people.
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C
Woodstock was three days in minivans. The Watkins Glen summer jam was intended to be much simpler. One day, three bands, 12 hours from the Grateful Dead, Donna Jean Godscho McKay.
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B
That was a party. That's what you call a party. I don't think anybody expected that kind of a crowd. And was it about 600,000 or something like that? Watkins Glen just didn't expect this enormous turnout. As the concert began, thousands were still trooping in, some of them having walked more than 20 miles after police roadblocks stopped their cars. Most didn't seem to mind the hardships. It was around 600,000 people. And that was just like, who does that? And we got to do it and didn't we? We played with the band, didn't we? The Allmans and the band from the.
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Allman Brothers, Chuck Lavelle.
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I remember when the chopper picked us up and we got up in the air and we approached the stage and looked Down. And it was just this incredible ocean of human bodies. I'd never seen anything like it.
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C
Even Jerry Garcia had a good time. As he recalled six years later on wlir.
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That was fun for one of those colossal things. What the heck? It was all those people, you know, promoter Jim Copley, and nobody expected what happened to happen. It ended up being a party. Nobody was gonna stop what was going on. It was, it was a magical day.
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There was and is an entire generation of Watkins Glenn minted Deadheads. It wasn't the first show for Lee Ronaldo, who went on to co found the legendary rock band Sonic Youth, but it was an important one.
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B
It was probably the first trip like that I ever took, like in a car with my friends, without parents and was just like off somewhere. We got there before a shit ton of people got there, just in terms of getting close to the stage. We were 17. I mean like, it was such an amazing experience. There were all night parties going on all over the place and people banging drums and whatnot.
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C
Future science writer and burgeoning teenage Dead freak Steve Silberman was even younger.
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I was just a kid at Watkins Glen. If you left to find a portisan, it's like, how could you even find your blanket again?
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C
Part of the legend of Watkins Glen is the free public sound check that occurred the day before the main show and especially the Dead's performance. But most of the legend of Watkins Glen is Watkins Glen itself.
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B
Promoter Jim Koplik we wanted to do a movie because we knew that's how Woodstock became profitable. They lost money on the event itself. But when Warner Brothers bought the movie rights, they made a fortune. So my feeling was we wanted to do a movie. The Dead refused to do the movie. They said unless we control the cameras, we're not doing it. The almost refused to let the Dead control the cameras. So we never did that. So then we said, oh, well, let's put out a record. Well, both the Ormonds and the Dead said, no, no. If we decide to put out a record, you got nothing to do with it, so it's up to us to do it. So that was very disappointing. They both promised us they were not going to record anything. Later, of course, we found out that they did record everything.
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C
Perhaps owing to the fact that there was never an official documentary or accompanying LP set, Watkins Glen mostly falls into the category of folkloric memory rather than commercialized nostalgia. Kind of a nice place to be, really.
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B
We never, never thought about having 600,000 people. I mean, it was if you Stood on stage. It was like a wave of people, like an ocean. And we pulled it off.
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C
It was an event so big it inspired its own knockoff album. The Heavy Sounds of Watkins Glen, performed by a studio band called the Kings Road and released by the budget label Pickwick Records. It's ideal if you ever need a three minute version of Whipping Post or Dead tunes that sound like Hollow Eyed AI knockoffs with no swing.
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Keep trucking like the two dumb man together oh.
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Just keep choking on Once again, Sam Cutler.
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B
For me, the culmination of my kind of experiences with the band, really, the two things were the Europe 72 tour and Watkins Glen.
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C
After a number of false starts, the Dead and the Allmans had finally been able to pull off a pair of mega gigs at RFK Stadium in Washington D.C. also on the Here Comes Sunshine box set, which we discussed at length last season.
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B
On this day, it's the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers. And on the second day, it's the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead, you know what I mean? And we ended up doing huge fucking gigs that were amazing.
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Those alone had taken a good deal of planning. Bunky Odom from the Paragon Agency visited Sam Cutler at the out of Town Tour offices in San Rafael.
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B
I went back out there five or six times to get things back together. And we decided to do it. Said, let's do two nights in RFK for Larry Maggot with Electric Factory concerts out of Philadelphia. Let's see if we can get that together.
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C
About 80,000 attended the first of the RFK shows and 50,000 came to the second. The Watkins Glen was bigger and it.
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B
Ended up with three bands. You said, well, let's do it with three bands. And we did it with the Grateful Dead, the band and the allmer brothers. And 610,000 people bought a ticket at Watkins Glen, right? So that was. That wasn't by accident. That wasn't an accident. That wasn't, you know, planning by default. That was playing.
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C
Well, they didn't all buy tickets exactly, but we'll get there. There was a lot of planning.
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B
My first trip out there, I didn't know if I was going to drink the water. I had to stick it. I didn't know if I was gonna get dosed. And I went out there and didn't know. And I've never met a finer group of people in my life. I was just treated like one of them, you know? And we got along great and not on an ego. Nobody in our office could have done that but me. And they knew it. Everybody stayed on my way and Sam and I got. It worked out well. Rock Scully helped too, you know.
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C
The groundwork for Watkins Glen had been laid in the summer of 1972 when a delegation from the Allmans jammed with the Dead in Hartford. And the following night, a delegation from the Dead jammed with the Allmans in the Bronx. The young promoters in Hartford were Jim Koplik and Shelley Finkel, Jimmy Koplik, Barry and Dickie.
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B
And I think Jamo also came up to Hartford to play a Grateful Dead show the year before in 1972. And they jammed at the end of the Dead show up in Hartford at Dillon Stadium. I had people meet him on the highway to make sure they drove in and got in properly and everything like that. It was very sort of archaic, the way we did things back then. And they did Johnny B. Goode, but it was really an amazing version of Johnny B. Goode, which I've heard a million times. But still, when you have Dickie and Jerry on guitar and. And Barry and Phil on bass and Jamo and the two drummers on drums, it's sort of special. And being a big Dead fan and a big Allman's fan, it was magical. One of my most treasured memorabilia is my picture of Dickie and Jerry playing that day up in Harvard. And I remember saying that this is something that we should be putting them together on a show because the audience fits, the music fits. And that was really the genesis of the idea of trying to put a show together with them playing on the same bill.
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C
In addition to planting the idea of a joint bill, it also introduced Jimmy Koplik and Shelley Finkel to the right people.
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B
That was the beginning of my relationship with Sam and with the Dead. And, you know, I had never met such a colorful character like Sam Cutler before. The Dead were a bunch of hippies that just needed direction. And Sam was that organizer that made sure everything went forward. And he was great at his job. During his tenure there. They went from a bunch of hippie bands into a real business, which is something that we as promoters really appreciated, even though I was a hippie also, but I was also a business guy. At the same time, Sam Cutler and.
- [16:07]
C
Bunky Odom began planning a series of shows for the ill fated fall of 1972. Well, promoters Jim Koplik and Shelley Finkel began eyeing something even bigger.
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B
At that point, I was 22 years old, Shelley was 28 years old. And we, you know, I was more the music guy, Shelly was more the business guy. And when we came up with this idea, Shelly said, well, the best place to figure out where to put them, because he knew we draw a lot of people, he had no idea what it would end up drawing. Of course, we thought of racetracks, car race tracks, because they already handle 100,000 people on a daily basis when they have the car races.
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C
At first, the promoters had looked at the Great Eastern Exposition center, known as the Big E, outside Springfield, Massachusetts. They'd also investigated the Pocono International Raceway in Pennsylvania, where a festival called Concert 10 had been held the previous summer, drawing 200,000 to see Edgar Winter, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Humble Pie and more. But when neither site was available, Cornucopia Productions set their sights on the Watkins Glen International Speedway, about 25 miles west of Ithaca in New York's Finger Lakes region.
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B
So the closest one to us was Watkins Glen. So Shelley and I went up to Watkins Glen, New York, which we had no idea even where Watkins Glen was at the time. I remember flew into Elmira, New York, and we rented a car and drove over to Watkins Glen. And we met with the owners of Watkins Glen, and they thought it'd be a piece of cake. No problem. We handle a hundred thousand people. What do you want to pay us? We could do this. I mean, it was really easy to put the deal together with the track because they were going to get this way. It wasn't going to interfere with their race week or anything like that. And then let's see if we can get a big date up there. And Shelly Finkel and Jimmy Copley came through with the idea, let's do Watkins Glenn. Okay? So we said, that sounds great. Dahlia's band and the Great one Dead, I would assume. We made the deal with the track sometime in late 72, because it took a lot of planning. It took nine months to get that gig together properly and plan it properly. And that was a result of a conversation I had with Jerry where we wanted to do a big gig again and show people that it was possible and that you didn't have to have, you know, people being killed or, you know, violence or whatever. That could be done right? The sound could be done right. Everybody could be looked after. Everyone could have an amazingly good time, which they did, I'm pleased to say.
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C
One subliminal plot line under the Watkins Glenn Summer Jam was Sam Cutler's redemption for his role in the 1969 Altamonte Free Festival, which he'd spend years living down.
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B
Bunky was definitely the leading person with the Allman Brothers and Sam was certainly the leading person with the Dead. Thank goodness we had Sam and Bunky, because they were both people that understood process and order and things like that.
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C
Sam Cutler even made a trip from out of Town Tours in San Rafael to visit Bunky at the Paragon Agency in Macon, where Bunky was helping to construct not just a Southern rock empire with his stable of bands, but the very idea of Southern rock itself. In his office downstairs from Capricorn Records.
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B
We were in the same building, but we were separate. My office was in the basement of the building. Every musician that walked through the front door came to my office. They didn't go see somebody with Capricorn that came to my office. And I developed a relationship with bands. We went on to manage the Marshall Tucker Band from the beginning, Wet Willie, we managed Dr. John. Probably missing out on somebody, you know. But, yeah, we went on to be a big management company.
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C
But mostly what dictated the shape of the concert was the mutual love felt between the Dead and the Allmans.
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B
Bunky Odom, Dwayne all and Dickie Betts and Barry Oakley, and I can't speak to Greg and whoever. They were very, very, very big fans of the Dead.
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Alan Paul is the author of the fantastic new book Brothers and Sisters, which we've linked to@dead.net Deadcast Telling the inside story of the Allman Brothers legendary 1973 album, still in progress at the time of Watkins Glenn. Welcome back, Alan.
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B
The Venn diagram overlapped quite significantly in a way so that it made sense. But on the left and on the right of that Venn diagram, they each had fans who weren't necessarily fans of the others. And so I do think it's not coincidental that both of these bands were getting more and more popular after they did these shows together. I don't think the musicians were calculating about this type of stuff at all. But I think that the management, especially Funky and Sam, absolutely were, and they saw the vision there. And part of what the Allmer Brothers represented to the Dead, especially to Sam, who, again, was looking at this with the commercial mind that certainly, you know, Jerry wasn't, is that the Allman Brothers were proof of what they suspected, which was, you know, basically, in his words, the freak nation wasn't just in California or the West Coast. It wasn't just in New York. In Philadelphia, you could take it right down the coast. You could go to Florida, you could go to Atlanta, you could go to North Carolina, etc. And, you know, their people would be there. They were everywhere.
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C
And while the Freak Nation was everywhere. They needed one more act to ensure the giant audience.
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B
The promoters had initially booked Leon Russell. They had sort of agreed with him. They paid him a deposit to be the third band. Do you feel that way sometimes?
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C
Solid choice. In the summer of 1973, Leon Russell was huge. That June, he released Leon Live, the triple lp. We just heard some music from the previous November. He'd crossed paths with the Dead for the Thanksgiving jam in Armadillo World headquarters in Austin. And a Dead Almonds Russell Super Jam could have been pretty sweet, too, but not to be.
- [22:38]
B
So we're still talking about it, and we finally got the details worked out. But we went to a final meeting in Mill Valley, Garcia and all over there, and Sam, Rock, Scully and Bill Graham was there. And we got to talking about the dates. And especially we paid a lot of attention to Watkins Glen. We knew Watkins Glen was going to be big. Okay, maybe 100,000 people or so, you know. And we came up with the idea, this is what we want to do. And Jimmy Shelley wanted to put Leon Russell on the show. And Sam and I said right at me, said, no, no, no, there's not but one band we want on the show with us. We want the band. We went back to the Ormonds, and they were fine with that. And then we went to the Daddy. And Garcia was not happy about that. Sam didn't mind it, but Garcia minded it. Garcia felt that if we were going into upstate New York, that's the band's home territory, that we owe it to the band to at least ask them to be on the show. Come on, cripple creep. She sends me in my spring elite she mans me I don't have the spirit she defends me A drunken stream.
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C
If I ever did say woe Also a fine choice. Slight problem, though.
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B
I readily agree to that because I figured they would say no. They're not a touring artist at the time. In 1973, they weren't touring. So I said, okay, fine, we'll ask the band if they want to do it. Well, when they heard that at the request of Jerry Garcia they wanted, they were asked to be on the show, they decided to take it. Well, we couldn't have four acts on the show because there wasn't enough time in the program in order to do four acts. So we went back to Leon Russell's people, and we had to pay Leon Russell money to not play the show. And that was what we wanted. And we invited Bob Dylan to come. That was it. We offered. The band got A certain price, but they were not involved in any negotiations or anything. We gave them a guarantee. We paid them $50,000. Phil Walden had really demanded that the Allman Brothers close, which Bunky was really upset about, because he thought that they had gone really far in the negotiations without anyone making that demand. And then Phil was insisting that Bunky make that demand. And ultimately they were diverted from having to do so because Jerry spoke up and volunteered to go first, which sort of ultimately maybe saved the whole thing. Garcia stood up and said, we'll take the first foot four or five hours to test PA out. That's. I'm quoting him now, to test the PA out at Watkins Glenn. So the dad are going to take the first four or five hours. That sound like the dead. So they gonna take the first four or five hours and the band's gonna play second. All of those bad go close the show. And the concept all along was that the third band, which turned out to be the band, would play first. That only got short circuited because Jerry came out and said we should play first. So they did, and the band became the in between band. And we gave Bill Graham $20,000 to fly in and be the stage manager. We had to go hire Bill Graham to help us put the show together, because the ability to produce the show. We knew we could promote the show, but we didn't know we could produce the show. Producing the show meant renting a stage, building a backstage area, fencing the area, and doing all that sort of stuff. And Bill had history from doing previous outdoor shows. So we hired Bill's company, FM Productions, to be the operations head of the show. In putting the backstage together and fencing and everything like that, we definitely took the risk. We signed the bands, we oversaw everything that happened at the show. But without Bill's sage advice and the brilliance of his FM production team, which put together the staging, it could never have been a success without Bill Graham. And all this is coming together and we gonna do it.
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C
Across the great divide Just grab your.
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B
Hat and take that ride Put yourself.
- [27:03]
C
Upright and bring your children down in 1973, the Allman Brothers were somehow getting both more deadlike, but simultaneously more radio friendly, if such a thing is possible. Both thanks probably to the ascendancy of Dickey Betts, the author of the song that would become their biggest hit, just recorded at the time of Watkins Glen and not yet released.
- [27:34]
B
Man trying to make a living and doing the best I can now when it's time for leaving I hope you understand that I was born a rambling.
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C
Man Brothers and sisters author Alan Paul.
- [27:53]
B
The biggest connection of all, really, I think musical connection were some similarities in Dickey Betts and Jerry Garcia's approach to the guitar. It's not a coincidence because both of them came from sort of a bluegrass background around from somewhat different angles, but they were both really, really rooted in that acoustic music. And when they started playing electric guitar, they transferred some of those concepts. And anyone who's a musician won't understand, like they mixed major and minor keys. They played certain major key licks in places you expected to hear minor. That's sort of the musician talk. But just any listener could understand that the similarities just by the Earth and of course, Jerry and the dad were a little bit ahead of the Allman Brothers in their recording career. And Dickie told me, he said, I always had this concept in my head of what I wanted to do. And the first time I heard Garcia, I thought, oh, damn, that guy beat me to it. So he immediately recognized the kinship as soon as he heard Jerry.
- [28:52]
C
In late 1972, the Allmans added piano player Chuck Lavelle, who brought an instinctive new voice to the band's conversation, comparable to Keith Godchaux's entrance to the Dead almost exactly a year before Lavelle became an Allman. With their double drummers, extra conversational new bassist Lamar Williams and Lavelle's piano plus Betts Garcia adjacent guitar. To my ears, it sounds a bit like the 60s double drumming dead with a Europe 72 double keyboard attack. It's represented well on the September 1973 performance from Winterland, released as a bonus disc with brothers and sisters.
- [29:31]
B
Sam the promoters of Watkins Glen told me when they started to discuss it and book the Watkins Glen show, without a doubt, the Grateful Dead were commercially on top, were a more popular band. But by the time it happened, that was sort of already no longer the case and they were very much on equal footing.
- [30:14]
C
While the Allman Brothers family had ventured a little bit into live sound, their efforts didn't quite match the Dead's high fidelity.
- [30:20]
B
So we're at the meeting how to do things and Garcia would sound. We were talking about how you gonna put Lee Wreck Towers out there to make sure the music is out there.
- [30:36]
C
To the people at the RFK shows. A backstage fight had resulted in several members of the Allman Brothers crew losing their jobs, including their front of house engineer, a story we detailed last season. One of the Allman's new live engineers was Buddy Thornton, who played with Allman's producer Johnny Sandlin back In high school.
- [30:53]
D
I stopped playing, got married and tried to stay out of Vietnam the best I could. And finally got a job with Douglas Aircraft Company out of Huntington Beach. And I was working at the Marshall Space Flight Center. I was taking engineering courses at school at night and working during the day. I drew schematics for the third stage Saturn V simulator. I'm working on the space program in Huntsville. They put me on the Skylab program. So I was helping design the Skylab trainer prototype. Do you remember Skylab? It was a first space station in the US and we were building the trainer in Huntsville, the prototype. So I was working on that. And then the real trainer was going to get shipped to Houston area for the. At the Man Space Center. I was flying back and forth from Huntsville to Texas for about a year on a NASA charter helping integrate that trainer. I got burned out on that. Ran into Johnny. After Dwayne got killed, Johnny was back in Decatur and I talked to him and I didn't want to move to Texas. And he said, well, come on down and make it and help me record music. So I quit and moved to making it.
- [32:14]
C
And within a year he was on the road with the Allmans.
- [32:17]
D
After the RFK shows, Johnny and I went back, started working brothers and sisters, finishing that album, right? But then we'd have to go out and mix front of house for several.
- [32:28]
C
Gigs after the RFK shows in early June 1973, the Dead played a short west coast run at the end of the month before taking nearly all of July off before Watkins Glen. The Allman Brothers band stayed at it with a docket that included their own big Northeast gigs, including two nights at Madison Square Garden. We spent so much time detailing the Dead's evolving sound system over the past few years that it's worth lingering on what the Allmans were working with.
- [32:54]
D
I kind of knew what was going on. But the brother sound system, what I inherited and what was left when Callahan left there was just a mixed match of old sure 4 channel. I think they're M67 Sures. They had a Tascam 8 channel mixer and a couple of old Ampex with big knobs on them. I've got the model numbers just a whole bastardized. It wasn't even a mixing console, you know what I mean? And it was really a mess to sort out and keep the buzzes. But they still had some of the cabinets from what was called Wiley Audio that Butch Trucks had started sometime a.
- [33:43]
C
Few weeks after the RFK shows. In between Allman's gigs, Buddy was Dispatched to the north.
- [33:48]
D
And then one day Johnny tells me I need to go to a meeting up in either Ithaca or Elmira, New York, because they're putting together a big concert for a racetrack, which I had no clue about.
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C
Buddy was ready to learn.
- [34:03]
D
All I know is that Johnny's told me that I had to go to New York and meet with these guys at a hotel and plan how we were going to interface with the dead sound system. I knew nothing about, didn't know any of those guys other than I'd met a couple of them at the RFK gig, right? So I fly in there and.
- [34:30]
B
I.
- [34:30]
D
Think it was either Elmira or Ithaca, New York. I can't remember which holiday. I'm pretty sure it was a Holiday Inn in Elmira because that's where we stayed later when we did the gigs. But I went up there, found the conference room they were in, knocked on the door. I distinctly remember walking in there and because I had short hair and I just had been in a space program recently, I didn't, I didn't look like the normal making hippie, you know what I mean? I walked in, those guys looked at me like. And one of them knew I'd talked to maybe his Healy, Dan Healey, and somebody had clued in that I was going to join them to see what's going on, right from the record company. But they, they gave me a stare, said, come on in, sit over here. They had impressed me from an engineering standpoint. They had blueprints of the racetrack all around the walls, pin on the wall. And so I started looking at these prints of how they're going to lay out trenches, going to the delay towers, where the stage is going to be, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm pretty impressed that they got actual blueprints of this whole thing.
- [35:42]
C
Just as Watkins Glen was the result of Sam Cutler's booking over the previous years, the sound system was also the result of the hard work in those same years by the sound company Alembic. We detailed the evolution of the band's delay tower experiments in our Keyzar and RFK Stadium episodes. Susan Wickersham the biggest trial of all.
- [36:00]
B
Of that was Watkins Glen, culmination of all kinds of stuff coming together.
- [36:04]
C
Alembic's Janet Fuhrman helped orchestrate the delay tower system at Watkins Glen.
- [36:09]
E
In order for that huge crowd to hear what was going on on stage, there had to be sound reinforcement towers. There were two concentric rings of towers. One was a row of four towers that was 100 yards from the stage and a second concentric row of six towers that were 200 yards from the stage. And in order for the sound from the stage to reach the towers and be in sync with the sound coming out of the towers, there had to be a delay of the amount of time it takes sound to go through the air 100 yards or 200 yards. So that was kind of a new thing in rock and roll, having towers like that. And Alembic was in charge of what went on on the stage.
- [36:57]
C
Buddy Thornton, fresh from the Skylab program, was privy to some extremely radical real time brainstorming during the meeting in New York.
- [37:04]
D
Maybe 10 people in the room there, I didn't know any of them, right? I've seen maybe Dan Healy and perhaps Ron Witcham, but. So I sat down on this couch. I sit down next to a guy who is leaning back like this, has mouth open, staring at the ceiling, right? And I'm kind of looking at him like, you know, and he's just. I thought he was maybe asleep or in a trance, and all of a sudden he sits up really quickly and says, I know what I'll do. I'll burn out the goddamn receiver. He had gotten a speeding ticket, right, with the new police radars. And he turned and looked at me like. And he's telling me this, like, I'm gonna burn out their. Their receiver on their. Their radar. They can't give me a ticket.
- [37:54]
C
Then this angry member of the Dead sound team had laid out his plan to somebody who just spent the past few years designing radars.
- [38:01]
D
And I. I said something like, you're gonna need a lot of power. And you got to know what frequency you're on, and maybe you can just jam it. I don't think you can burn in the. The front end there sees route. You're going to need a lot of power, man. And he looked at me like, who the are you?
- [38:17]
B
And he.
- [38:17]
D
And he leans back, he leaves back and goes back, and he's thinking, really, and not paying attention to any of the going on in the room. That turned out to be Owlsley.
- [38:31]
C
Welcome to the team, buddy. We've been waiting.
- [38:34]
D
The next time I saw him, it was on the stage at Watkins Glen, laying on a pile of cables, staring up clouds, right? And somebody told me, that's owls, like. And then Red Dog clued me on how Owlsley had been involved with the Dead and helped design its system. But he also did chemistry. I had no idea he had designed that whole system at the time.
- [38:59]
B
Promoter Jim Koplake it was fascinating to see a guy like Buddy Thornton, who is brilliant in his own way, really going through a learning experience from the Grateful Dead sound guys. Dan Healy was the king. He was it. He knew more about sound than anybody, as far as I'm concerned. And that was one of the reasons that the Dead accepted the show, is we allowed the Dead to control the sound.
- [39:25]
C
The Watkins Glen Summer Jam was announced in early June.
- [39:28]
B
Ira Sokoloff did that poster. Summer Jam. It's a great poster.
- [39:34]
C
Which leads to a question. Where'd the name Summer Jam come from?
- [39:38]
B
Jim Koplik, Shelley and I were sitting around talking about what to call it. And we knew the bands were jam bands and we wanted to in some way have the word summer involved. So it came up with Summer Jam. Even fans did not agree to jam together up until the point until they actually jammed together.
- [39:59]
C
But it might have been the event subtitle that contributed to what unfolded.
- [40:03]
B
Not only was it Summer Jam, but the tagline was A Day in the Country. And when we started to sell a ton of tickets in New York City, we realized, and we didn't expect New York City to be a big market for us going all the way up to Watkins Glen for a one day show. Because, you know, a lot of people call it a festival, and that's because of the amount of people were there, but it was really a concert. You'll never see the word festival on any of our posters or anything like that. It was three acts, one stage. You know, that's a concert, three acts, one stage, but people call it a festival.
- [40:33]
C
Originally, state officials had cleared the way for a concert with an estimated audience of 100,000 around the size that came to a regular race at the Watkins Glen Speedway and put an additional 25,000 tickets on sale. When they realized there was demand by early July, heads were headed towards New York. We spoke with Bob Student in our episodes about Santa Barbara and Kezar Stadium during our Here Comes Sunshine season.
- [40:56]
B
When I got out of the army, what I wanted to do was get a van, drive around the country and pick up hitchhikers.
- [41:03]
C
I've come across a number of accounts of fans traveling a long way to make it to the Summer Jam, including a few from California. We'll let Bob stand in for the long distance heads.
- [41:13]
B
I was traveling around the country, I was just picking up hitchhikers. And I was on the Texas New Mexico border and I picked up these two hitchhikers and they, they asked me where I was going and I said, down the road away. They Said, well, we're going to Watkins Glen to see the Grateful Dead. And I said, that sounds interesting.
- [41:35]
C
A long, strange something, something.
- [41:37]
B
I actually drove into a tornado on the way to Watkins Glen because I didn't have any news or weather report until threw my van off the road. I didn't know it was a storm. I was wondering why all the trucks were pulling over. That's the next thing I know. I get pushed to the medium. And the only damage, it tore off my muffler when I went across the medium and I just threw the muffler in the back of the van. It was three states later I had it put back on.
- [42:09]
C
As Bob's student and his expanding crew pointed east, one of my favorite stories of Watkins Glen was beginning to unfold in Connecticut. Please welcome John Ramsey.
- [42:18]
F
I had a couple of good friends that were real Dead hens. I wasn't. I always liked the Dead, but I wasn't head over heels. I liked a lot of bands, you know, I certainly respected their artistry and what they were doing with their sound system too. But you know, I wasn't a Deadhead by any means. But I love the Allman Brothers.
- [42:33]
C
John had something else going for him.
- [42:35]
F
I was a radio geek the way there are computer geeks these days.
- [42:38]
C
These days John runs a cool website dedicated to Connecticut radio history and has written a book about Hartford radio for the Images of America series. We've linked to both@dead.net deadcast.
- [42:49]
F
Yeah, I've been doing college radio since I was 15 at the University of Hartford and also doing part time work at a commercial country station just to make some money in high school.
- [42:58]
C
We've spoken about a lot of varieties of clandestine activities over the past few years at the Dead Cast and we'd like to introduce a new one today.
- [43:05]
F
So I was 18 years old in 1973 and I was running a pirate radio station in Hartford playing jazz and progressive rock. We were on the air about 12 hours a day, seven days a week. It was called WYBS. We picked the callers because they sounded legitimate but they stood for why Bullshit. WYBS sounds legit, doesn't it?
- [43:28]
C
Even if you think you can guess what happened next, it won't be as amazing as hearing the actual details.
- [43:33]
F
We've been on for a couple of years and then through a mutual friend in high school, I heard about Jack, who was the guy who had the idea for Concert Free radio. Jack didn't have an engineer and didn't have a transmitter to use. So we got together through a Mutual friend and I provided the transmitter and the engineering to hook it all up.
- [43:51]
C
The regular listeners to WYBS would forgive them for disappearing from the Hartford airwaves for a few days.
- [43:56]
F
The one I was I used at home was the one that I actually took to the concert. It was the Korean War surplus 40 watt transmitter. As far as commercial FM stations, that's not much power. They run thousands of watts. But 40 watts, particularly from a high location like Watkins glen, could cover five or 10 miles, no problem. Three or four days before we left to rent the trailer and the guy from the rental place, it was a brand new trailer, said, oh, you're not taking it to that hippie fest up in New York, are you? And Jack said, no, no, I'm taking it fishing with my dad.
- [44:26]
C
There's a great webpage about the adventures of concert free radio with some photos of their trailer parked at home, ready to get outfitted. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast.
- [44:36]
F
It was set up with three turntables and a mixer and a couple of microphones and headphones.
- [44:40]
C
On the back they taped their new call letters, CFR AM fm.
- [44:45]
F
We were stupid because we thought that Watkins Glenn was near the Canadian border. And it's, it's no closer to the Canadian border than I think Hartford is, where I live, maybe a little bit more. But it's not like it's, you know, we thought, oh, upstate New York, it's got to be near Canada, Dom. So we were going to pretend that we were a Canadian station. And all the Canadian stations coincidentally start with C and not W. So we thought it would be a Canadian station doing a remote broadcast right over the line.
- [45:09]
C
They assembled the crew.
- [45:10]
F
We actually incorporated like four or five of the DJs from my station WAPJ. They all came along, they all were easy to convince to come along and run the thing, including one of the guys, Doug, who was one of the.
- [45:21]
B
Deadheads that I mentioned and like a.
- [45:23]
C
Half million other people. They got ready to drive.
- [45:26]
F
I think we left out on Wednesday morning or Tuesday night. I'm thinking we got within maybe 10 miles and the road was jammed. We were on side streets, it was absolutely jammed, just standing still for hours. And I said, that's it, we're never getting any closer. And Mike, who was with us, who was a real wonderful guy and a great personality, I think he could talk anybody into anything. He says, I'll get us in. And he disappears up into the crowd. Well, that's it. We won't see him again. Well, an hour later he comes back with two motorcycle cops and they get a police escort. So we got escorted through the crowds.
- [45:58]
C
Concertgoers started arriving at the site a week before the scheduled date of July 28. On Tuesday the 24th, the promoters made the decision to start letting people into the surrounding grounds. By Wednesday, they estimated that some 50,000 people had already arrived. The Almonds had played over the weekend at Madison Square Garden. Bunky Odom.
- [46:18]
B
So I go up there on a Wednesday afternoon from New York. Great trip through the New York State. Upstate New York, you never been through there. We stayed at Horses Heads and I got up there on Windsor just to see how things were going. They were going okay. They had what you call a real hotel up there. They had these hotels on the side of the road. You see them occasionally, country, just on the side of the road with a little office in front. You got all the house, the rooms around. They weren't the highest. I forgot where the dead stayed and I don't know where the band stayed. I just can't remember. But that's where we stayed.
- [46:55]
C
In his memoir, A Book of Tales, Allman Brothers crew member Red Dog remembered of Watkins Glen. The stage was one you dream of as a roadie. About 20ft high, 80ft wide and 60ft deep, with 25 foot penns wings on each side. A monster stage. And on the opposite side of the stage from the pool was the press area, which soon got its first occupants.
- [47:16]
F
We got into the press area before the press even got there. We were the first people there. And because, you know, CBS and NBC, they're not going to send people up there three days ahead of time. They'll just show up when the thing's happening or try to. So the amazing thing that I remember seeing is driving into was it dawn, I think it was on Wednesday morning, driving into the grounds, seeing a huge stage, seeing the delay towers, which was pretty impressive because I was a sound man on the side. So it's the first time I'd ever seen delay towers. And also seeing the fence with literally a half million people on the other side of the fence. So I was in this huge expanse of emptiness in front of the stage because they hadn't opened the gates yet. And there was like 100,000 people on the other side of the fence. There was also several rows of Porta Potties. And I joke about it looking like that typical in art class or in science class where you see the pictures of the railroad tracks going off in the distance. It's perspective. It's how straight lines appear to merge. There were rows of Porta Potties that were so long that they looked like they merged.
- [48:11]
C
This scored a pretty sweet parking spot too.
- [48:14]
F
We parked right next to the only telephone pole in the press area for two reasons. That had all the electrical outlets on it. And we realized we could put our antenna up on top of the pole. Everybody was itchy to get on the air and talk about what was going on. So we got on right away with.
- [48:26]
C
A library of 200 LPs. Concert free radio 89.9 FM was on the air playing music for the incoming crowds.
- [48:48]
B
Well, the first days are the hardest.
- [49:00]
C
Somewhere on Thursday or so, our buddy Dan O. Hanklin showed up. Burning man vets might know Dan O as TP Dan, part of the continuity between the freak contingent of Dead tour, the Rainbow Family and modern day Burning Man. Dan was part of a cross country odyssey the summer before that passed through the inaugural Rainbow Gathering en route to the Dead's benefit for the Springfield Creamery, which we discussed last summer. In June of 73, Dano had his heart crushed on the first night of the band's RFK shows, which we discussed at the end of last season. But by July, Dano's heart was not weary. It was light and free, and he was ready for his next Dead adventure. Welcome back, Dano.
- [49:38]
B
I hitchhiked out there. Maybe I hitchhiked with a friend. I don't know. I left a day early or a couple of days early, just like I did at Woodstock.
- [49:48]
C
Dano is a veteran of the scene that continued to move around the underground in the early 70s. And for Watkins Glenn, he was organized.
- [49:55]
B
At that time I had several different social groups that I was operating in. And at Woodstock we had a great group that I was with. But occasionally I would run into friends in the crowd. And I decided that this time from whatever friends of mine were still present, were still participating. I wanted them to all be in one place at one time. And I thought, well, how can I do this? And I thought, I'm gonna make a pirate flag. So I took a piece of bed sheet and a Magic marker and I sketched out this Jolly Roger, kind of a naturalistic one. And I still have that flag. I just made phone calls, I did legwork, whatever. I said, go to Watkins Glen, go to the front of the stage and go to the pirate flag. And I will welcome you with open arms right there. Let's all be together at this event.
- [50:49]
C
By the time Dano made it to the site, he'd found a Few friends, and the flag got its finishing touch.
- [50:54]
B
And so as we're walking in, I could see off to my left, a grove of trees. And whoever I was with, I said, wait a minute, and I went bushwhacking into this little grove of trees. And fortunately, there were a lot of very young maple saplings. And I cut a nice, green, flexible young Maple sapling about 2 1/2 inches, 3 inches at the base, 25ft long, trimmed it up and dragged it in there.
- [51:27]
C
You can see Dano's Jolly Roger flying near the stage in many of the photos of Watkins Glen. He got a good spot. By Thursday, the crowd was estimated at close to 100,000, and the organizers realized they had something even bigger than they planned.
- [51:40]
B
But as we're going in, then, the next thing we encountered were all these stacks of bottled water that Bill Graham had provided for the crowd. And people were going up and taking the water, and it was all on pallets. And some of the pallets were empty already, and some of them were not. And those that were not, we moved the water off the pallets and we grabbed four pallets and we dragged them right up to my favorite sweet spot, about 3/4 from the stage, about a quarter from the soundboard right there.
- [52:16]
C
There. Dano made camp. It rained that first night, and the pallets came in handy, I think.
- [52:20]
B
It was kind of muddy. And I just. All I had in those days was a Swiss army knife. That was what I used, the little saw on the Swiss army knife to cut down. And then I sharpened it up and then we rammed that into the ground as far as we could ram it. And we put the four pallets around it so it was right in the center of the pallets. And then we piled our backpacks up around that, and there we are. There we are. We're right there where we want to be.
- [52:46]
C
Bunky Odom.
- [52:47]
B
Then late Thursday, all of a sudden, it's crazy. Traffic is backed up for miles, and I'm not talking about one main two lane highway. There were three cars in the lane trying to get there.
- [53:02]
C
Local police made the decision not to sweep out the area by the stage where people like Dana were already camped.
- [53:07]
B
We stayed at Watkins Glen, and I had access to a helicopter. Jim Koplik. Shelly gave me access to a helicopter at my disposal because that's the only way we could get around. We couldn't move.
- [53:21]
C
Promoter Jimmy Koplik.
- [53:22]
B
Well, we were there three or four days in advance. And when we had people start showing up on Thursday, the show being on a Saturday in the tens of thousands of people. I remember Shelly and I talking about why these people coming so early? I mean, it's still a work week and what are these people doing? And we're not prepared for them. And we have gates set up. And we had prepared. We were prepared to sell tickets at the gate because we didn't want to, because then we thought the gates would come down. So at $10 a ticket, we figured we'll just sell them. Tickets for $10 will come in. We started to get worried on Thursday when people started showing up and we're wondering to ourselves, why are they getting here so early? So we actually went out and started talking to the people and we found out that most of those people didn't even have tickets. So that really worried us because we knew we sold 150,000 tickets in advance. But now it was going to be more than 150,000 people because people without tickets were showing up two days in advance. What's going to happen today in advance? What's going to happen the day of the show? So we knew we had red alert going on probably on Thursday.
- [54:35]
C
Buddy Thornton.
- [54:36]
D
The day before the gig, I fly up to. It was either Elmira. I'm pretty sure it's Elmira. But there was an airstrip close by and. And Willie Perkins was the road manager for the Brothers. So he. Sparks is from the Capricorn Records. He was the other engineer, went up there with us and Johnny. So we get a call from Willie Perkins, say, okay, you guys come down, get in the cars. We got to go out to the. To the airport. I said, airports, what are we flying? He said, well, we're flying in the helicopter to the gig. I said, well, it's only like 15 miles down the road. We're flying. He said, yeah, you know, it's all packed. You can't get there by car, you know. So we're getting these helicopters take off and I see this mass of people. I have never seen them. And I grew up in rural Alabama, man. The whole county didn't have that many people.
- [55:27]
C
Septon hauer of the LA based Pacific Presentation started promoting dead shows in 1967, handled gigs in several regions and had become friends with Sam Cutler.
- [55:37]
B
Sam put Watkins Glenn together. He booked all the acts. I went to Watkins Glen with the Dead. Me and Bill Graham went with the Dead to Watkins Glenn. Didn't get a fly over. We flew in. I remember flying back there with Sam and we're walking into the place and I could see that there's just Thousands of people on every dirt road entering and into the grounds. And I'm looking at Sam and everybody that's walking in is like, got their wallets out going, where do we buy tickets? I'm telling Sam, I said, man, they just should have set up some man gates and started taking money because everybody wanted to buy a ticket, you know, because there was 600,000 people there. And I think the original issue tickets, Sam would know, but I think it was 50,000. A hundred, you know, once those tickets sold out, they didn't sell anymore. They could have sold another 200,000 tickets. And I was kind of looking like, boy, here's a missed opportunity. Because everybody was ready to pay. I was laughing.
- [56:52]
C
Bob Student and others were still working their way onto the speedway grounds.
- [56:56]
B
I rode up to Watkins Glen in my van with 13 hitchhikers in it. And we hit the bottom of the hill and it was drizzling. And I had to get everybody out so I could drive my van up the hill. It wouldn't go up with all the people in it, the two guys from the Texas New Mexico border heading there. And I didn't tell him I was gonna go all the way there until like two days before because they kept getting nervous. Oh, oh, we may have to change vans because we gotta get to Watkins Glen. And then we got there a day early. And then they were upset that I asked them to get out of the van so I could drive up the hill in the rain.
- [57:34]
C
In our RFK episode, we told the story of how Taper Jim Cooper and crew had made an incredible audience tape of the second night, only to have most of their gear and all but one of their tapes ripped off.
- [57:45]
B
That killed me. Arnie and I decided we're definitely going to Watkins Glen and we know how to do it now. So we're gonna do it, you know, good. And that's what we did.
- [57:56]
C
This time they were taking their own wheels. The Spacemobile.
- [58:00]
B
I took my car. I had an old 1960 Chrysler Newport, gigantic. We had to yell at people to get off because what would happen was when you were there at the campsite, you had to drive down or walk down to. I guess there were stores or something, I don't know. And people would hitch rides, they'd jump on your car and go. Had like 10 people on my car at one point. And I'm like, dude, you got to break the springs in this thing. But it was awesome.
- [58:31]
C
Also in the traffic jam was a 17 year old from Long island named Lee Ronaldo. In 1981 Lee would co found Sonic Youth one of the great rock bands of the 80s, 90s and beyond and helped transform the vocabulary of psychedelic music. This is from the classic album Daydream Nation released in 1989. Lee singing Eric's Trip it's about what you might think.
- [59:00]
B
All I see is me that's clear enough, that's what's important to see me. My eyes can focus, my brain is talking. It looks pretty good to me. My head's all straight, my girlfriend's beautiful. It looks pretty good.
- [59:20]
C
Sonic Youth is one of my all time favorite bands and we're thrilled to include Lee's story today.
- [59:25]
B
I went to that concert with two friends of mine, a 17 year old and I want to say the third guy was 16 years old and we had no idea what to expect. I can't. I don't even remember. I have a feeling we bought the $10 tickets or whatever they were, but I don't really know for sure whether we had tickets.
- [59:45]
C
Lee was very much on the bus already.
- [59:47]
B
I saw the Dead for the first time a few months earlier. I saw them at Nassau Coliseum. It was definitely the first tour they did after Pigpen died. So it was. It was early 73 from the time that Working Man's and American Beauty came out. I was getting pretty heavily into them. And then Europe 72 was just like the ultimate, you know, godhead experience for me.
- [60:10]
C
Watkins Glen was not one to miss.
- [60:12]
B
A lot of the road trips I took in the 70s. The car was always a kind of a fixation point, like what car you were in. We drove up in my family's old Ford Falcon with the wood panels on the side, like station wagon. It seemed like the perfect kind of car to go to a rock festival. We loaded up, we brought, you know, whatever we needed for the weekend. We brought some illicit substances of one form or another. We went a couple days early and we stopped the first night at this farm in like Middletown, New York that belonged to my uncle and spent the night there.
- [60:47]
C
After a day spent exploring the gorges of the state park, they plunged into the summer jam.
- [60:51]
B
Traffic we got within, I don't know, I don't remember walking for an endless period of time. But we definitely got to a point where we just pulled the car off the highway and walked from there.
- [61:03]
C
They also got a pretty good spot near the stage, probably within waving view of Dano before the rest of the crowd arrived.
- [61:10]
B
We got there early enough that we were really close. We were off like stage right a bit, but we were Quite close to the stage. We had good listening and viewing vantage points for the weekend. And everybody that got there early kind of like staked out a little territory and we definitely had a good spot where we could see the bands and hear really well. And I think I just remember the first night just kind of like tripping around the site and I don't mean tripping on acid necessarily, but just kind of like wandering around the site and, and like grooving on like all these people sort of milling in, you know. For 17 year olds it was pretty amazing.
- [61:48]
C
Dead cast pal Ihorse Labicki was a true New Yorker and took public transportation.
- [61:52]
F
I ended up taking a bus from.
- [61:54]
B
Port Authority in New York, Port Authority Bus Terminal up there.
- [61:58]
F
That was also a lot of fun.
- [61:59]
B
Because it was one of these all night rides. I think bus left there 11 or 12 o' clock some late at night and you know, get into Watkins Glen the next morning, there's all full of people. I remember one or two people crawled up into the luggage racks to sleep there, which I couldn't imagine doing that.
- [62:17]
F
And the rest of it was just gonna leave.
- [62:19]
B
People were talking about the shows and music and things like that. So it's kind of a bit of.
- [62:24]
C
A party ride also taking public transportation, maybe even on the same bus as IHOR was a long haired teenager on his way to his first Dead show and a lifetime of Deadheaddom. Please welcome back esteemed science writer, author of Neurotribes and co author of Skeleton Key, A Dictionary for Deadheads. Steve Silberman.
- [62:43]
A
The ads were everywhere. I had been sorry to have missed Woodstock because I was too young. I remember seeing the ads for that everywhere because they were up all over Forest Hills and I was growing up in Queens. So I see, you know, three days, Summer Jam, Allman Brothers, the Band and the Grateful Dead. What most excited me about that Bill, was the Allman Brothers. I wanted to go see the Allman Brothers. They were having, you know, sort of a surge on popular radio. So with a best friend of mine, Tom, we arranged to go up on a Greyhound bus or something. And the night before the show he copped out. He said he wouldn't go. And I was so excited to go that I lied to my parents and told them that I was going with my friend Tom. And so I got my sleeping bag together and got on a Greyhound bus and went up to Watkins Glen. I got there, I think the morning of Soundcheck day. The weather was bizarre. And it wasn't just the thunder and lightning because I Remember the night before the soundcheck day? I think it was, or maybe it was the night of soundcheck day. There was frost in the grass. Like this is August, you know, so it was very unusual for there to be frost on the grass. So it was really cold. And of course, my very first, you know, like within an hour of getting there, I lost my sleeping bag and a mudslide. I just remember just a chain of kind of implausibly unpleasant weather happening through the whole thing. And so that also added to the atmosphere of unreality.
- [64:23]
C
At least there was body warmth.
- [64:25]
A
There were already, you know, many tens of thousands of people there. What's freaky is that once you got there and you know, if you were in the middle of the sort of the field there, people would cluster in around you. And pretty soon it was hard to go anywhere.
- [64:42]
C
Eric Nelson and his friends drove from Ohio.
- [64:44]
B
It was a nine hour drive from Antioch to Watkins Glen. I remember that. I think we left early in the morning on the 27th, got there the afternoon and got settled as close to the stage as we could.
- [64:59]
C
We spoke with Eric for our Dead Behind Dead Ahead episode about a pair of mini documentaries he made in 1980 in conjunction with Bill Graham Presents. These days he's the host of the great Dead radio show, the Dead Zone on K Squid in Santa Cruz. But in 1973, he was a burgeoning teenage head.
- [65:16]
B
The key for a lot of people at Watkins Glen, if you put the lens on of 18 year old me in the summer of 1973, it was, oh boy, well, we missed Woodstock because I was 15. Now I can go see these bands and see naked hippie chicks. Oh boy, I'm in there.
- [65:37]
C
The Watkins Glen summer jam was a generational party for the middle part of the baby boom, now reaching their late teens and early twenties. I was going for the event and.
- [65:47]
B
I wasn't going to see the Grateful Dead. I was going to see the band.
- [65:51]
C
And I was going to see the.
- [65:53]
B
Band because I was a rabid Bob Dylan fan and because this event had been billed as a summer jam and it was in upstate New York, I said, oh, well, Dylan will come over from Woodstock maybe and he'll join in the jam.
- [66:06]
C
Tim Meehan had it even easier. He lived in a group house on Long Island.
- [66:10]
B
This gal sort of moved in, didn't really know everybody. We sort of knew this family, but she moved in and she told us about the concert happening of a Watkins Glen because her brother, and that was probably in May of 73, and her brother had just signed a contract to sell 100,000 gallons of spring water to the promoter. And lo and behold, two VIP guest passes were made available to her. And because I was the impetus for the call, I became her date. And it turned out that the guest passes came with a helicopter ride in from Elmira, you know, backstage pass. So we drove up to Elmira and flew in and helicopters, my one and only helicopter ride. And I remember sitting in the jump seat behind the pilot, who was probably a Vietnam era, you know, ex military. And I asked him, hey, when does this thing level off? And he says, it doesn't. That's why we call it a chopper. But it was full of rock and roll types. And it was that point we were in the experience of our life because we're, you know, flying Sound of Music, like over the hills and dales of Upper New York State. We fly into the, you know, the valley or wherever Watkins Glen actually is nestled, and there's, you know, half a million plus people. And that was Friday.
- [67:23]
C
The Grateful Dead were enormously popular in 1973, and their fan base included future members of the government, young musicians, writers, and creative heads of all stripes. To bring us on one slight tangent is our buddy Michael Simmons. You may know Michael's byline from such publications as LA Weekly, Mojo, and Arthur. But in 1973, Michael was just a teenage New Yorker with a band and a wildly cool after school job.
- [67:49]
B
The last semester of high school, the school came up with this idea to give the kids like a work study program. So my work study program was to work at my father's show, which basically meant hanging out with a bunch of freaks and getting high all the time and then writing some bullshit paper about why this furthered my education.
- [68:09]
C
Michael's father was Maddie Simmons. And the show Michael worked at was called National Lampoon's Lemons. Can I have your attention, please?
- [68:19]
B
Can I have your attention? All right, now listen, there's still some people coming in, so for the benefit.
- [68:28]
C
Of you people who just paid to.
- [68:30]
B
Get in, from now on, the Woodchuck Festival of Peace, Love and Death is a free concert, alright?
- [68:42]
C
A free concert.
- [68:44]
B
The original cast was Belushi, Chevy, Gary Goodrow, who had been in Second City, Alice Playton, Mary Jennifer Mitchell, Christopher Guest, of course, you know, who went on to become a very successful film director and writer. There was an amazing cast, extraordinary cast. I was the doorman and then I also was kind of the gatekeeper. You know, if celebrities came, I made sure they got a good seat. But also during the Day I handled rock press and underground press publicity. So for instance, I knew Bob Fass. So I took the cast onto Radio Unnameable.
- [69:32]
C
In the summer of 1973, a month before Watkins Glenn, the Lemmings put out their own self titled debut lp with lots of rock and roll festival humor. Doing the stage announcements, if you didn't recognize that voice was 24 year old John Belushi. Okay, I got a couple announcements. Sunflower Polanski, your insulin has been located. I got it right here.
- [70:03]
B
The Lemmings cast were true freaks. I mean, authentic freaks. And John was a Deadhead. I mean, I don't know if he was a Deadhead in the sense that he followed them around because he was working, but he was a fan, a definite fan of the Dead. In fact, one of our regular audience members was one of the original New York area Tapers.
- [70:28]
C
Michael had seen the Dead in Central park in 68, but he really became a Dead freak when he went to see them with his friends from the Lemmings.
- [70:35]
B
The first time I really got to listen to the Dead was at Nassau Coliseum in March of 73. And I believe it was the first night. It was a Thursday night, I had to go to school the next day. One of the cast members, his girlfriend at the time was a high end drug dealer. And so the entire cast went to see the Dead and she gave everybody a hit of masculine. And John did four. John being, you know, always taking it over the top. And so in the middle of the show, I decided I was gonna take a walk. It's a huge cavernous place where you can hear the music virtually anywhere you are.
- [71:16]
C
I know the circular concourse of the old Nassau Coliseum. Well, this was the Dead's first show at the venue and the first show since Pigpen's death just a week earlier. There's some silent footage of this hallway from a few nights after this floating around on YouTube. The Nassau Coliseum shows in the early 70s were also teeming with cops who were busting heads at the slightest provocation.
- [71:36]
B
And so I wandered around and I'm tripping and you know, it's circular. So I look up and I see John surrounded by six cops. I know John's tripping on four hits of Mescaline and I'm only jumping on one head of mescaline. And I'm really high, so I can only imagine how high John is. So I look up and I'm staring at this spectacle of John talking to a bunch of cops, uniformed cops, and suddenly the cops all break out laughing. I can't hear what anybody's saying, but I can see that the cops are all laughing hysterically. Obviously, John was entertaining them, doing some kind of bit or something, and absolutely had him in his pocket. And John looked down from a higher perch that he was on and gave me the infamous eyebrow that anyone who has seen Animal House would know what I'm talking about. The infamous eyebrow, as in, you and I know how high I am, and you and I know that they have no idea how high I am. And it was fantastic. I mean, it was a work of art. We're gonna bring somebody out to mellow you out.
- [72:54]
E
He's so mellow, he'll make your skin crawl.
- [72:58]
C
Hell, for you people on acid out.
- [72:59]
B
There, it'll probably make your skin peel off your body.
- [73:03]
C
After the spring shows at NASA, Michael was ready for more and made the trek up to Watkins Glen with his bandmates.
- [73:09]
B
We were stoned out of our skulls the entire time. I wrote a song called We Almost Got Busted in Newburgh because we almost got busted in Newburgh. You know, we were like shooting fish in barrel, you know, 10 hippies crammed into a Chevy van with smoke pouring out of the windows. And some local cop pulled us over, walked around the van with a flashlight and let us go. I mean, I guess I would imagine he had probable caused. But for whatever reason, we didn't get busted. No. On the way there, while Michael was.
- [73:48]
C
Getting up to the show, the situation changed even further. By then, the bands had started to arrive. Deadheads stuck on the highway that Friday might have seen some familiar faces in the traffic jam. Todd Ellenberg caught up with some friends the next day.
- [74:03]
B
Some of the folks in that group of people said, hey, Todd, yesterday in the traffic jam, we met the Dead. We even took pictures with him. I said, yeah, right. And I guess a couple weeks later they showed me the pictures. Was like, holy shit, I can't believe it. What the hell? What the hell were the Dead doing in the traffic jam? I figured they were being coptered in or something.
- [74:25]
C
Yeah, us too. But sure enough, there are pictures of the dead stuck in traffic for Watkins Glen by Suki Coughlan. Different than the ones Todd's friends took. Garcia's riding shotgun, Weeder and Lesh in the back. And a few extra passengers are on the roof. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast Chuck Leavelle had joined the Allman Brothers in The fall of 1972, just before the death of bassist Barry Oakley.
- [74:50]
B
My wife and I, Rose Lane, just celebrated our fiftieth anniversary. So we were very freshly married when.
- [74:57]
C
Watkins Glenn went down Happy golden anniversary to the Lavelles.
- [75:02]
B
We stayed in a little motel, Horse Heads, New York. And I remember that Rosie and I were awakened fairly early in the morning with commodities going outside the room. And I went open the door and looked out, and here's all this incredible traffic. And some people seem to be abandoning their cars and starting to walk and hitchhike. And we thought, oh, my goodness. Well, maybe there's more to this than we thought. I think the promoters, Finkel and Koplik, they probably were thinking, maybe we'll have a hundred thousand people, you know, maybe. Maybe 120. But I know that no one expected what happened, which was the 600,000 Allman.
- [75:48]
C
Brothers booking agent, Bunky Odom.
- [75:50]
B
And later that day, on Thursday, a Friday morning, it was Bill Graham and Shelly Jinkel got together and was declared a free concert. And I went to Shelly and Jim and I said, how you gonna have a free concert when you're gonna stop selling tickets? Well, they'd already sold a hundred thousand, somewhere around a hundred thousand. 150,000 tickets at $10. So everything's covered. Friday evening, we, Bill Graham, Shelley and myself sat down and we said, how do we handle this? How do we hold the gates? And the three of us determined that safety was the most important issue. And we had already sold 150,000 tickets. We had already were in the black on the show, money wise. And instead of being pigs, we decided to make sure the event went off right. So we just opened up the gates and said, free concert. Come on in.
- [76:54]
C
Joan Snyder with CBS News.
- [76:57]
B
The event started days before the music began, with young people pouring onto a thousand acres at the Grand Prix Motor Racing grounds. The promoters were allowed to sell only 150,000 tickets at $10 a head to restrict the size of the crowd. But as word spread that this was the big youth event of the year, hundreds of thousands of more cascaded in. To avoid any violence, they've been allowed in free to the concert grounds.
- [77:24]
C
Just as it Woodstock. A few years earlier, it was Bill Graham who convinced the promoters to make it a free show in the name of public safety. And while that was probably the right move in both cases, I'll also note that Bill Graham wasn't technically the promoter at either Woodstock or Watkins Glenn.
- [77:39]
B
It was easy for Bill to say, make it a free show, because it wasn't his money. It was Michael Lang's money at Woodstock, and was Jimmy Koplan and Shelley Finkel's money at Watkins Glen. So. But, but the truth of the matter was Bill was right. And sometimes, you know, the owners, Shelley might me in this case, you know, we see through what I call green eyes, which are money eyes, but Bill sees through clear eyes, which are what's best for the event. And if you're smart, you listen to the people that have the event in mind and not only money in mind. And Shelly and I were smart enough to listen to Bill's wise advice because it was really Shelly's and my decision. When it became a free concert, we would do some money in on percentage. When it became a free concert, we all had to go back to the drawing board. But we worked it out okay. All both bands got some more money. We had to helicopter in. There was no way, given the traffic situation, that we were going to make it in a reasonable timeframe. I remember when the chopper picked us up and you know, we got up in the air and we approached the stage and looked down and it was just this incredible ocean of human bodies. I'd never seen anything like it. And so we asked the pilot to circle around a couple of times so we could take it in. And he did. And I just never seen anything like that in my life. I never imagined seeing anything like that. And that sticks out in my memory very, very strongly. I can close my eyes and look down and see that enormous number of bodies. What an incredible feeling to say, wow, these guys are coming to hear us play. Of course it wasn't just us, but it was the Dead and the band. And I think it was the combination of the three that really made it interesting to people.
- [79:38]
C
In between the helicopter landing area and the encampment of backstage trailers, one had to pass by the press area where they might spot a trailer that read CFR AM FM Concert Free Radio's pirate radio station was in full swing. John Ramsey.
- [79:52]
F
The heliport was further down to our left so that all the band members and people like Bill Graham and Ron Winkersham who helicoptered in, had to walk right by us or go right by us on motor scooters so we could snag them. That's how we met Phil Lesh as he was coming up and invite them in for interviews on the air.
- [80:11]
C
Well, there aren't any surviving air check tapes of Concert Free Radio. There are some great photos of an amazed looking Bobby Weir checking out the setup. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast we dropped.
- [80:22]
F
The pretense of being Canadian. Nobody cared. We told Bill Graham And Bob Weir and I think Ron Wickersham knew. I mean, he was smart enough being a techie. He knew that we weren't licensed. Nobody else cared. The police could care less.
- [80:34]
C
Not only did the people in positions of authority not narc out the illegal pirate radio station, they were thrilled to have them there. And every single party welcomed them with open arms.
- [80:43]
F
The state police were right across the driveway from us in the press area, and they had a huge commissary tent. And in return for us giving traffic reports that their helicopter people provided, we got free food.
- [80:54]
B
And it's.
- [80:55]
F
It's. It's funny. It's gotta be. It tasted like the best food I've ever had. All three meals were just great.
- [81:00]
B
Promoter Jim Koplik, the guys from WPLR and whcn, the two stations that. Two rock stations in Connecticut, I guess, together they sort of formed a pirate radio station there. And we, we used them. They were our friends. You know, they were good because they got word out to people when, you know, when. When the storms are coming in. Not only did we get on stage and warn people, you know, lightning's coming and rain's coming in, but we use the pirate radio station to get word out to people that were listening on the radio that storms were coming in. But they were our friends. They were our buddies.
- [81:31]
C
With the arrival of a few hundred thousand unexpected guests, Bill Graham assigned himself a few extra roles.
- [81:37]
F
Bill Graham would come by several times a day with what we called health and welfare information, which was, you know, the commissary is open here, there's tents over there with water for first aid. You need to go here, et cetera, et cetera. He gave it to us, we wrote it down and put it on the air. I think he was too busy. I doubt that he was shy, but I think he was just too busy to be bothered to be going on.
- [81:56]
C
The air on Friday. Graham also declared that the gate should be opened a few hours before their announced time and that the band should sound check publicly.
- [82:04]
B
And when the three bands did the sound check on Friday, there were hundreds of thousands of people that got to hear a sound check. And it's just something that was happening, and I didn't realize how big a deal it was at that time. I mean, this is its concert. And then, of course, as you may recall, they moved the sound check up a day. And so it was almost like a second concert doing the sound check the night before the actual show. And, you know, that was unusual. You can imagine a sound check with 300,000, 400,000 people.
- [82:42]
C
Lee Ronaldo from Sonic Youth was a teenage concert goer.
- [82:45]
B
All of a sudden, like, there was kind of rumblings from the stage. And then, like, out of nowhere, I don't even remember if there was an announcement or anything about what was going on. The band started playing, and it was kind of amazing that you were just like, wow, the band's doing an early set, or something like that. I don't even know. At the time, being not exactly experienced in the music business, we didn't know that they were sound checking per se. Sam.
- [83:42]
C
Jim Cooper and his crew had been ready.
- [83:44]
B
My friend Artie and I went earlier in the week, so we had a tent. We were set. We knew you couldn't go to the site where the concert was, but we were there. So that on Friday we got the word, hey, there's going to be a sound check tonight. And I was like, wow, kidding. So we went to the gate, and bang, they let us all in. And that was. That was the best.
- [84:07]
C
Jim Cooper and his friends had gone to the next level with their taping at Watkins Glen.
- [84:11]
B
We decided that we needed to step up our game for Watkins Glen. We bought a pair of Sony ECM 22P condenser mics, and we used those still with the Hitachi.
- [84:25]
C
When they got there, they received an unusual notice.
- [84:28]
B
A couple of days before, they were circulating these flyers that said, no taping cords will be cut. It said, I don't have any of them, and I've never seen them again. But Artie and I were like, oh, shit. But, yep, it said, beware, cords will be cut. Blah, blah, blah. Now, apparently the Allman Brothers don't like the taping, but we figured the Dead did.
- [84:50]
C
I've not come across copies of these flyers and would love to see one if you happen to have one. But the Finger Lakes Underground newspaper the New Times published a special edition that week devoted to the concert that included a quote from Dead manager Rock Scully. We've been ripped off for the past year and a half with bootleg tapes. We're not going to bust heads, but we're going to physically stop it. We're going to cut chords. Whatever we have to do to stop it, we will. Yeah, well, good luck with that. Rock the band hit the stage first, and they were definitely running tape. At some point, the sound team decided that what the system really needed was more speakers. Jimmy Koplik.
- [85:43]
B
Then when we realized we had more people and there was more space that needed to be taken care of and we needed to deal with, you know, setting up more sound delays and more speakers from the stage and everything like that. We literally had to go to Macintosh.
- [85:58]
C
Janet Fuhrman was there with the sound engineers from Alembic.
- [86:02]
E
I was there as equipment tech, and I was in charge of keeping everything running. And we set up the delays and fed them to two PA companies that did the two rings of towers. So I was kind of involved in getting all of that set up, but we didn't have enough amplifiers. And what we really wanted was the biggest Macintosh MC2500 power amps. So the day before the show was to begin, and this was the middle of the summer, it was decided that we should try to get them. And since the Macintosh factory was not far from Watkins Glen. It's in Binghamton, New York, where the factory is, I was given the task of getting them. So Sam Cutler, who was the dad's road manager, had also been the Rolling Stones road manager before that. I remember he handed me $6,000 in cash and the use of a helicopter and a pilot. Go get the stuff. So that was my assignment. So I got on a payphone that was located backstage, called up the factory. I reached somebody, explained the situation. They put me in touch with the owner of the company who was at home preparing to go on a summer vacation with his family. I told him what we needed. I said I had a helicopter. I could come pick it up. He said, okay, well, if you can get to Binghamton, I'll take you from there to the factory, and I'll sell them to you right off the floor. So there was a little helipad backstage at Watkins Glen. So off we went, and we landed in the middle of downtown Binghamton. And the place we landed was like a public park right in the downtown area. Helicopters did not normally land there. And so when we landed, it was very unusual. And there was a big crowd, and there were people around wondering what was going on. And there were guys from the local press sticking microphones in my face, asking me what was going on and taking photographs. And flashbulbs were popping. So I met up with the owner of the Macintosh plant, took me to the factory. I was wearing shorts and T shirt. I pulled a wad of money out of my pocket and gave him the 6,000 bucks. He pulled five of these big amps off the production line. They weren't in boxes. They hadn't been completely ready for sale yet. And we loaded them in his station wagon, along with his wife and two kids and two dogs and me and the five amps, we drove back to downtown, loaded all the stuff in the helicopter. When a helicopter is heavily loaded, it can't go straight up. It kind of has to go on a diagonal path. And this helicopter was built for two people, but it had two adults in it and five amps that each weighed over 100 pounds. So it was pretty heavily loaded. And we took off and there was a ring of kind of high rise buildings, maybe five, six stories around this downtown square. And we took up on a diagonal path, and we came so close to hitting one of those buildings. It was, you know, a moment that I will never forget. Maybe you could call it a near death experience. I don't know if the pilot was as freaked out as I was, but we managed to stay aloft. We got back to Watkins Glen and landed, and, you know, I was an instant hero. I got a big round of applause for accomplishing the task. Of those five amps, four of them went into Phil's experimental quadraphonic bass system, where Rick Turner at Alembic had built a special pickup for his bass that had a separate output for each string. And so each string had its own huge sound system, which is pretty overkill, but it was awesome. And that was. That was kind of the beginning of the wall of sound concept of each musician, each instrument having its own sound system so that there would be minimum amount of intermodulation between them.
- [91:37]
C
Joe Gothier had helped put on the Dead show in Iowa City in February and had driven from the Midwest at the invitation of crew member Kid Candelario, still on his way in on Friday afternoon.
- [91:47]
B
Quite a climb up that hill with my, you know, it's just one car, one car, one car, one car, very slow. And I said, on the way up the hill had a Nixon mask on. We were. We were causing people to laugh. We were there in time to watch the helicopters bring in a bunch of new amps from Macintosh, dozen new amps.
- [92:05]
C
Lee Ronaldo.
- [92:06]
B
The almonds came out and played for a while and they sounded great. And at that point, you know, we were immediately anticipating that, okay, the Dead are going to come out next, probably, and the Allman Brothers may have played for like about an hour or something like that. We were inside the delay towers because we were close to the stage. The sound didn't have to be loud enough to carry all the way to the back of the crowd, which made it much more pleasant for the people up front. It wasn't like ungodly loud so that it reached people a quarter mile away. It Was it was all kind of regulated and measured, which I just remember feeling like the sound was really excellent all weekend long.
- [92:41]
C
It was a pretty open backstage scene, if you could find your way there. Joe Gothier.
- [92:47]
B
I had a job as a printing shop back in Iowa City. We had printed these big, I don't know, foot and a half size signs that say Safeway Cab Company. So I slapped one of those on the side of my car. And when we got to the gate to go backstage, I said, you know, I said, I got some people here. They said, fine. They let us backstage with my car. We got backstage and rash for the kid, kid came and gave us some T shirts that were supposedly backstage passes for that show. And it's a little pin.
- [93:23]
C
Things were a little hot and crazed in the New York summer. There are some great pictures of Bill Graham at Watkins Glen in shorts, tie, dye tank top and fedora. So imagine him with that summer look here.
- [93:34]
B
I saw Bill Graham backstage shooting a fire hose at the people trying to break down the fence.
- [93:42]
C
According to den manager John McIntyre, Graham's fire hose tactics served to cool off the crowd more than push them back and did the trick. Meanwhile, Tim Meehan, who'd gotten a free ride through his housemate's brother, was wandering around.
- [93:55]
B
We were issued the VIPs. Got a button, you know, it's about a two inch button. And there were three buttons that you could have. One said the band. It had a logo and a picture of like the band. And the other was the dad or the Allman Brothers. And I ended up with a band button, put it on my straw cowboy hat.
- [94:12]
C
Tim's gonna be our eyewitness to the backstage scene.
- [94:15]
B
They had some trailers and they were no Airstreams. They were like job site trailers that were little truck stop, low rent and raunchy, to quote Tom Wolf. And anyway, I have a picture of Jerry. It's Jerry and I'm sitting at a picnic table and he's looking right at me. He's about six feet away. And behind him is the Allman Brothers trailer. You can see it says Allman Brothers and. And the windows broken to the door, broken piece of glass in it. So things probably got a little rowdy there. Somewhere along the line, Bill Graham was.
- [94:46]
C
Running the backstage and it was full service.
- [94:48]
B
There was an above ground pool, which seemed to me to be bizarre, but there was an above ground. When New York, we call them the Henny Hendon pool because they'd always run these commercials. You can have your above ground pool for $899 or whatever. But there was this pool.
- [95:03]
C
Tim made some great shots.
- [95:04]
B
I have some Greg Allman pictures sitting in front of the trail. I mean, you can just imagine. Now they run concerts a little differently. But the trailers, I mean, there were 55 gallon oil drums that were full of trash. I mean, like they should have been emptied a week earlier, it looked like, but they're just overflowing.
- [95:19]
C
But it was a big place with lots to explore.
- [95:22]
B
After the photograph I took of Jerry, I had a conversation with him. And I asked him if I could go back in the trailer and leave my camera bag on the dashboard or somewhere under the driver's seat because I wanted to go out in the crowd and look for my friends. And he proceeded to have a conversation with me about the. Oh, no, man, you don't do that. He goes, just leave it right there. Put it under the. Under the front wheel. And I was like, I don't know, I got a lot of equipment here. And he's like, dude. He goes, it's like the Times Square theory. What's the Times Square theory? Well, a guy runs around Times Square trying to give out $20 bills, and everyone thinks he's crazy. And they run away and they don't want to deal with them. But then, same guy's got a lot of cash in his pocket, he's trying to hoard it, and then everybody's after him, trying to kill it. So just leave it right there and I'll take it. They won't even see it. And so I. That was my five minutes of conversation with Jerry. And sure enough, I left the bag there and I went out in the crowd. I never found my friends because it was just too crazy. Half a million people. But I went out and wandered out and, you know, punched my way through and see what I could see. And then I came back and of course, my camera was sitting right there.
- [96:26]
C
The organizers had invited the band's old boss, Bob Dylan. But Bob Dylan had parted ways with both Woodstock and manager Albert Grossman and made for Malibu, where the band themselves would relocate.
- [96:37]
B
Soon, Dylan didn't show up, but Albert Grossman was there with the band.
- [96:42]
C
Imagine then Albert Grossman's Benjamin Franklin like visage amid the chaos wrought by Bunky and Sam and a half million music freaks. There's at least one picture of him hanging out backstage with the band. Backstage were a group of trailers for each group, plus a jam trailer, of course, like the Festival Express come to ground at a speedway.
- [97:01]
B
It was like a family back there. The only time the musicians really showed up was the sound check on Friday. And at night you'd have a few musicians, but you wouldn't have a whole band over there. You'd have some members of the band jamming and just getting together. Chuck Lavelle, Everybody was getting along great. It was a very wonderful communal feeling. I didn't have that much personal interaction with the guys in the band at the time. I really didn't know them that well. And, you know, we all obviously had our own separate compound there. But the dead we knew. The brothers had done shows with them before I joined the band, and then we went on to do a number of shows with them after I joined.
- [97:45]
C
There are a few great pictures out there of Chuck and Garcia playing in the jam trailer with access to one of the site's only air conditioners.
- [97:52]
B
I remember it very well, and I do have a copy of it myself, of Jerry Garcia and myself and a couple of others backstage. And we were just going through some ideas about what we might jam on. The only one I remember was Jerry coming backstage and hanging. I don't really think I spent time with Phil or Bob or any of the other guys, maybe Klutzman, because we became friends.
- [98:17]
C
Jams unfolded over the course of the weekend as Donna Jean Gotchau told us about her main memory of Watkins Glenn.
- [98:23]
B
I remember I was pregnant, of course, and our dressing rooms were trailers on the property. And Rick Danko was in one of the rooms, and he was singing Let me wrap you in my warm and tender love. And it was a song that I had sang the background on on a Percy Sledge record when I was 19 years. Time you be mine and let me wrap you in my mo and tender love. So Rick Danko and I sat in there and sang that song together. And that was one remembrance that I had with Watkins Glenn. And he said, you sang on that. How old are you? You know, when did you do this? Because by that time it was pretty old and I was 19 years old. So anyway, that was so much fun, getting to sing with Rick Danko. Of course, he's a great singer, and it was one of those serendipitous moments.
- [99:40]
C
Meanwhile, the crew from the pirate radio station started to explore.
- [99:44]
F
Of the six or seven of us, I was the only one that didn't go out into the crowds. I just didn't like big crowds. And it was shoulder to shoulder. I mean, there was no. It was like Woodstock. There was no room. They all came back and independently said, oh, yeah, everybody's listening to the Station.
- [99:55]
C
Broadcasting from the top of the electricity pole in the parking lot, they discovered their signal was making it out even further than expected.
- [100:01]
F
The AM didn't work very well. It didn't get out very far. But I don't think we cared much because the FM was working so well, because, you know, with fm, the height makes all the difference, and Watkins lands up on a pretty good hill. So we had people that were coming in to see us that had been stuck in traffic 25 miles away that said they were listening.
- [100:17]
C
Pirate radio at scale was largely a European phenomenon, with offshore stations like Radio Caroline blanketing London, but in the United States didn't quite have the same reach.
- [100:27]
F
Radio London and Radio Caroline probably had more, but in domestically, I think we probably had the largest temporary audience of any pirate station.
- [100:34]
C
And though, as we noted, Bill Graham wasn't the promoter, he also assigned himself a few on stage announcing duties.
- [100:41]
B
Chuck Lavelle, Bill just had that personality, and I think he rather enjoyed the role of getting up in front of all those people just before whatever band was going to start and say, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome. You know, he enjoyed that and he was quite good at it. And he made for a great emcee announcing the show. A fine American and a wonderful, wonderful man, Mr. Bill Graham. That's also. This is Sam Cutler, who's very much responsible for a lot of this going on. So let's hear it for Sam Cutler also, please. And the name of the band is the Grateful Dead. As we all know.
- [101:42]
C
Jay Curley was just walking onto the concert grounds.
- [101:45]
B
We got there, oh, I don't know, I guess, Lord knows what time. But anyway, we walked in there and I heard Promised Land, and I said, oh, they're playing Dead tapes. And my friend said, that's no tape, that's them. So we double timed it up to where my friends were, and there's the band in all their glory. In the sound check.
- [102:40]
C
Jay was friends with Dan o' Hanklin and found him easily.
- [102:42]
B
And by Friday, several of my good friends had arrived. And then by the end of Friday, the greater majority of my good friends had arrived and we were all able to join together on this crazy pirate raft in the middle of a sea of people.
- [103:03]
C
Dana was a veteran outdoors person who'd had his ass unexpectedly whooped at the legendary Sunshine Daydream show in Veneta the summer before, and he was better prepared this time.
- [103:12]
B
We talked about Veneta and how hot that was. Well, nothing I think can surpass that. But it was very, very hot and humid Nasty. And so people were definitely, you know, at risk of heat related illnesses. Again, we were much more prepared. You know, I remembered Bonita. I knew it was going to be hot. I'm sure I had plenty of canteens and we had grabbed the bottled water, but we still had to nurse the supplies that we had to get through. My friends were all standing on top of the warehouse kids and me and my buddy showed up and they just said, okay, open your mouth. And caps of mescaline, a tab of acid and more weed. And I was all ready for that Dead show, I'm telling you. And so the first day, Friday, when the Dead decided to do their sound check and just the crowd was very small and was still like clean and nothing, you know, I dare say almost a little bit wholesome. We were just jumping up and down and screaming and yelling and cheering. And we were just as happy as we could be that they were gonna play a special little concert for us. This whole thing is a fraud. We're really clever androids.
- [104:35]
C
The Dead didn't play a full show except by most other band standards, performing two sets over 90 minutes, each with a legendary jam of its own. The Bird song from the first set is one of my favorites, stretching over 15 minutes. Ask a Taper. Remember that anti taping notice we mentioned.
- [105:13]
B
In the first set during birdsong? We noticed this guy coming through the crowd. A big red headed guy with a big red beard. He was going to everyone who had mics up and hassling them. So he came over to us and he hassled us. He wanted our tapes. And it looked like he came from the Dead, you know, I don't know. Or maybe the brothers, I don't know. But I was standing up, we're there kind of holding the mics, and he comes over and starts yelling at us. And I said, well, what? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He goes, give me your tape, give me your tapes. I want your tape. Stop doing what you're doing. Blah, blah, blah.
- [105:51]
C
Jim and Artie weren't to be denied.
- [105:53]
B
The guy comes up to us, he's in our face. Artie goes down to the deck and we had two boxes, two 10 in a box, boxes of TDK, SDS or something. Something good, UDS. So he down there and I'm like, I'm in the guy's face, kind of like asking him questions just to distract him. Artie's down there, he switched the tape on him, gave him a blank, and he took a box of our blanks. And he couldn't Wait to get out of there and go to the next person. He kept looking to see who had him. So after that, we didn't tape the rest of the set. And then the second set, we just kind of lowered the mics so that they couldn't be seen. And it had gotten dark, too. Lee Ronaldo the Dead came out and they played for, what I want to say is, a good long while, and then they stopped. But then a little bit later, they came back again and did a second set, which, like, the other bands played, you know, more briefly. But the Dead really just kind of kept playing and playing. And I just. I just felt like their attitude was, shit. Everybody's here. We might as well play, you know. We might as well play for them, you know. It was just a magical evening.
- [107:09]
C
We spoke with Eric Alden on our Europe 72 season. He'd been in the army and caught the Dead in Frankfurt, the show that's now Hundred Year hall, and picked up seeing Dead shows almost as soon as he got home. Watkins Glenn was already his fourth gig of 73.
- [107:22]
B
There were six of us that drove in the car, and when we got there, we were in a big, long, creeping traffic jam for hours. And the other five guys all got out of the car and walked around and whatever. And I was stuck driving and sitting in this cloud of car exhaust for. It felt like hours. So we got there and we set up our campsite. And I felt like crap, you know, from breathing all this exhaust. And so we kind of sat around and whatever. But, you know, they did the sound check that night, and some of my friends walked up and watched it from in front of the stage. And I just listened to it from our camp, but you could hear it from there. You could hear it all over. And it was cool, you know, it was fun just sort of sitting there in the evening, listening to live music, you know, drifting across the night sky. Jay Curley I remember walking around just amazed. People had card tables set up, selling weed, selling acid, selling cocaine. I mean, it was a. It was a marketplace as well as a humongous party. Bob Student I go to see the people. I go to smell the smells. I go to test out everybody's pot. I tried various drugs. It was nice. They played a lot of background music that we all liked.
- [108:49]
C
Bob had brought his Super 8 camera to the Santa Barbara show and brought it out again at Watkins glen, getting over 20 minutes of footage which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast I wanted more pictures.
- [108:59]
B
Of the crowd, which really became Evident. If you watch my Watkins Glenn movie, I think there's 70 seconds of the stage and 23 minutes of the people. Then there was the guy who was naked jumping up and down. And I think that took away my general rating on that video. And now they say kids can't see it, but I'm just showing you what was going on. And then there's a scene of a VW bus where it says the Bozo Boogie Bus in the Watkins Glen clip. And the next time I seen that bus, I was back home in San Francisco, and it was parked on Haight Street. He was going to another Dead show.
- [109:46]
C
The big highlight of the Dead's day, and for many, the musical highlight of the whole weekend, was something the Grateful Dead were often accused of doing, but rarely actually did. They just jammed Steve Silberman.
- [110:23]
A
The Dead sound check was, you know, in retrospect, easily one of the most beautiful pieces of purely improvised, you know, fast composition, as David Grisman calls it. There's not really anything like.
- [111:06]
C
Was a performance that hit teenage Steve Silberman square in the third eye.
- [111:10]
A
It was just gorgeous. And I knew it was gorgeous at the time, even though I hardly knew anything about the Dead or anything. I mean, I was into them, you know, Uncle John's Band and all that, but I wasn't into into them until.
- [111:25]
B
Watkins Glad.
- [111:56]
C
Lee Ronaldo.
- [111:57]
B
I just remember at the time that it kept feeling like it was gonna go. We were like, oh, they're gonna go into this or they're gonna go into that, you know, but they never did. It just stayed as this abstract jam with no singing. And, you know, at that point, I want to say that the Allmans and the band checked during the daylight. And that by the time the Dead played at least their second set, like, they were under all the colorful lights and everything. And it was a beautiful, beautiful night, as I remember it. And it was just amazing to hear them. It just felt like you were hearing them do brand new music, which, in essence, it was Eric Nelson. It wasn't like you were thinking, ooh, there's a theme reminiscent of Fire in the Mountain in three years from now. It was just kind of a building wash of music. I do remember, though, the generosity of spirit and definitely comparing the Dead vibe and performance on stage with the band who, from day moment they came on stage, didn't seem to really want to be there.
- [112:58]
A
I can't say that I fully understood the significance of the soundcheck jam. But the one thing that is true is that years decades later, when I was asked to co edit the so Many Roads box set with David Ganz and Blair Jackson. The first thing I wanted to put on it was the Watkins Lentz Soundcheck jam, in part because Dick had already told Dick Lavalla, who is my friend at that point, had already told me that it was sort of this orphaned jam and so it wasn't going to end up on. You know, he didn't like the actual performance the following day, so it wasn't going to end up on that, you know. So I was thrilled to rescue it because it was not only as good as I remembered, it was better than I was even capable of remembering.
- [114:14]
C
To date. It's the only bit of the Dead's Watkins Glen performances that have ever been officially released.
- [114:20]
B
Lee Ronaldo Once they stopped, the site was at that point, like, really massively full of people from within it and especially from close to the stage. I don't think we could really tell how many people were there, but it just seemed like. It seemed like the equivalent of what went on at Woodstock. And I think that was kind of the vibe. Like we were too young for Woodstock and we were probably among the younger element of people there. But it just had this feeling of, like, for everybody that missed Woodstock. I remember after the Dead finished, we just kind of like wandering around the site until all hours of the morning, like, visiting with strange weirdos here and there and just like, I don't know, just kind of taking it all in.
- [115:03]
C
There was wildness to discover there was.
- [115:06]
B
A lot of people blasting music left and right from. I don't know what they would have. They weren't boom boxes back then. I don't know what they were playing about it. But there were definitely people that had brought, like, music systems and were playing stuff, especially as you wandered away from the stage and it got a little bit easier to walk around. Like, people in the woods and out in the fields were either playing music with instruments or playing music from recorded sources. But I don't remember radio in particular. But there were definitely people in lots of different little encampments, like playing music and just hanging around, grooving through records and stuff.
- [115:42]
C
There's some wild portapac footage out there involving a giant speaker strapped to the hood of a station wagon and blasting the China cat Sunflower. I know you rider from Europe 72 too, from a tape machine. Jay and the others just slept by the stage. It might have been quieter.
- [115:57]
B
We just rolled out our sleeping bags on the warehouse pallets and crashed out. You just pass out and on Our little pirate raft. I remember lots of people were just passed out, kind of semi horizontal, 45 degree angle, leaning back against the backpacks that were all piled in the middle of the thing. That was very common. I mean, conditions at those events, conditions at Woodstock, conditions at Watkins Glen, are challengingly comparable or of a different order to the conditions that one encounters today at Burning Man.
- [116:33]
C
Well, gangs of people were trying to get in. Buddy Thornton of the Allman Sound Team was trying to get out.
- [116:38]
D
After the first night, I was screwing around doing something and there were helicopters and I'm looking around trying to flag a ride back to the hotel. So there was a limo and the doors open and he's looking at me say, come on, we'll take you. I think it was Kruzman and maybe his wife. So I get in the limo and we're riding through this mass of people and they were looking in the windows and banging on the windows and like that.
- [117:07]
C
And that's where we're going to pause our story tonight. If you're still with us, feel free to climb on the back of Kreuzmann's limo and take your chances or find a place to crash somewhere on site. We'll see you in the morning. And by the morning, I mean in two weeks. Stay hydrated.
- [117:44]
A
Thank you very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode. Sam Cutler, Donna Jean Godshell McKay, Bunky Odom, Chuck Lavelle, Jim Koplik, Buddy Thornton, Susan Wickersham, Janet Furman, Sepp Donahauer, Lee Ronaldo, Steve Silberman, John Ramsey, Tim Meehan, Michael Simmons, Dan Henklein, Eric Nelson, Bob Student, Jim Cooper, Todd Ellenberg, Ihor Slabicki, Jay Curley, Joe Gauthier, Eric Alden, David Lemieux and Alan Paul. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast, David Ganz, for contributing audio from his interview archive. Couldn't do it without you, David. Thank you. Thanks very much for tuning in. Don't forget to, like, subscribe and share an episode on your social media and give us your Wake of the Flood related stories by recording yours@stories.dead.net executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Doran Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.