So Many Roads

by David Browne

  So Many Roads

  ALSO BY DAVID BROWNE

  The Spirit of ‘76: From Politics to Technology,

  the Year America Went Rock & Roll

  Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel,

  James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970

  Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth

  Amped: How Big Air, Big Dollars,

  and a New Generation Took Sports to the Extreme

  Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley

  Copyright © 2015 by David Browne

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, Third Floor, Boston, MA 02210.

  Designed by Timm Bryson

  Set in 12 point Fournier by The Perseus Books Group

  Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  978-0-306-82171-4 (e-book)

  Published by Da Capo Press

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FOR MY MOTHER, RAYMONDE LELLA BROWNE

  who instilled in me a love of reading and writing and tolerated all those years of loud records (by the Dead and many others) in our home.

  CONTENTS

  Tuning Up (Or, Intro)

  PROLOGUESan Francisco, February 16, 1970

  CHAPTER 1Menlo Park, California, October 27, 1962

  CHAPTER 2Menlo Park, California, May 26, 1965

  CHAPTER 3Palo Alto, California, December 18, 1965

  CHAPTER 4San Francisco, October 2, 1967

  CHAPTER 5San Francisco, November 2, 1969

  CHAPTER 6London, May 25 and 26, 1972

  CHAPTER 7Reno, Nevada, May 12, 1974

  CHAPTER 8Mill Valley, California, February 19 to March 4, 1975

  CHAPTER 9Englishtown, New Jersey, September 3, 1977

  CHAPTER 10New York City, October 31, 1980

  CHAPTER 11Berkeley, California, Late February to Early March, 1984

  CHAPTER 12Salinas, California, May 9, 1987

  CHAPTER 13Pittsburgh, April 3, 1989

  CHAPTER 14Boston, September 20, 1991

  CHAPTER 15Noblesville, Indiana, July 2, 1995

  EPILOGUENew York City, March 30, 2009

  Bidding You Goodnight (Otherwise Known as Acknowledgments)

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  TUNING UP (OR, INTRO)

  Leave it to the ever-perceptive Mountain Girl, also known as Carolyn Adams, to articulate one of the goals for this book better than I could at the time. During one of many research trips to various points on the West Coast, I visited MG at her home in Oregon. It wasn’t the first time she welcomed yet another writer wishing to pick her brain about the Dead and her relationship with Jerry Garcia.

  As we sat down at her dining room table, a tape of a vintage Dead concert playing in the background, I told her I was also in search of not merely the story and music of the band but a bigger picture as well—their fascinating dynamic. To clumsily show what I meant, I put my two hands together, interlocked my fingers, pulled them apart and joined them together again.

  “Oh, that’s the mystery!” she said, picking up on what I was trying to get at. “How those guys did what you just did with your fingers. How did they get together and relate to each other?” Then she partly answered her own question: “They really worked on it. They wanted it badly. They were glued to the enterprise.”

  The how and why of that enterprise has captivated me since I first discovered the Dead’s music. Actually, I saw the Dead before I heard them. In the early seventies, when I was just a little kid, I came across one of those early rock history books in a local library in my New Jersey shore town. Flipping through it, I came upon a photo of the Dead circa 1969, the lineup that included both Pigpen and Tom Constanten. They looked like a welcoming bunch of hippie-cowboys, and I was as intrigued by the photo as only a kid who grew up with Old West myths and pop music could be. One of the albums in my fledgling record collection was Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà vu, so I knew Garcia’s name and photo from the liner notes, thanks to his guest role on “Teach Your Children.” But I needed to know more about his day job.

  Not long after, I received my first FM radio, and if memory serves, one of the first songs I heard on it, by way of WPLJ-FM in New York, was “Casey Jones.” “Oh,” I thought, “that’s the Grateful Dead.” I loved the groove and lead guitar in the song—and couldn’t believe I heard the word “cocaine” in a song on the radio—and I soon bought my first Dead album, Workingman’s Dead (home, of course, to “Casey Jones”). From that point on I kept up with the new releases, and even when I swerved into other artists and genres in the decades ahead, from indie rock to Celtic folk to electronica, I often found myself circling back to the Dead: from the time that college buddy taught me how to play the riff to “China Cat Sunflower” (so much fun that we played it over and over for maybe a half-hour) to the phone call I received in 1987 from an editor at Rolling Stone asking if was interested in reviewing their new album, In the Dark. I’ll also never forget the sight of another college buddy, a guy named Phil, who wore a Dead yarmulke during the Jewish holidays—and these were in the late-seventies infancy days of rock merchandise.

  Having grown up hearing singer-songwriters and folk rock, I naturally loved Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty, and Garcia, three of my first Dead-related purchases. (I’m also one of those people who feels the Dead made many, many terrific albums, even though, as I learned, the musicians themselves generally disparaged their studio work and only thought their songs truly came to life before or after they appeared on vinyl or CD.) I thought I had the Dead figured out, but, of course, I was wrong. From hearing their albums to eventually seeing them live, starting in the eighties, I realized what a wide swath they cut in music and the culture. Their forays into country, bluegrass (Garcia with Old and in the Way), experimental music (Lesh with Seastones), and improvisation (good chunks of concerts and live albums) helped introduce a naïve kid like myself to those styles and approaches. From record to record, side project to side project, you never knew what you would get with these guys, and that was part of the fun (and sometimes the exasperation). At least they weren’t predictable. For me the Dead also refuted the argument that England has given us the legendary rock bands (the Beatles, the Who, the Rolling Stones) while America has largely contributed classic solo performers (Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Dylan, Springsteen). The Dead were a great band, and very much American.

  In the many, many years since my introduction to the Dead world I saw the band live and also kept up with its post-Garcia off shoots. Starting in 2008 I was fortunate enough to interview the surviving members for numerous stories for Rolling Stone, where I found myself on the—pardon the pun—Dead beat. Each man was never less than sharp, opinionated, and candid about the band’s past and present, which, in a public-relations-manipulated world, was absolutely refreshing. They called it as they saw it, and it was easy to respect that.

  In some ways those conversations were the launch point for this book, which presented
me with the most daunting challenges of my career. So much has been written about the Dead: in print, online, in liner notes, you name it. The books, articles, websites, blogs, and academic papers devoted to them are mountainous. Longtime historians and journalists have written authoritative, superbly researched accounts that every Deadhead should read and study. What in the world could I, a relative outsider, bring to this story?

  A different structure, for one. When I ran the idea of doing a Dead biography (pegged to their fiftieth anniversary) past my wife, Maggie, an always astute and insightful editor, she had an immediate idea: fifty years, fifty vital days. A great if overwhelming idea, it nonetheless sparked something: What if one painted a selective portrait of the band—its music, its members, and the times around them—by making each chapter about one significant or representative day, using it as a window into what was happening with the Dead during that period? Given the colorful, multihued characters and settings that comprise the Dead saga, I tucked the idea in the back of my brain and began my research. In the end I went with a somewhat curtailed version of that concept (not quite fifty, but enough). I’m sure every Deadhead or band or family member will have their own ideas about which days should have been selected, and I welcome feedback. But for me these were ones that give this epic saga some shape, and these are the tales I heard along the way.

  Of course, the Dead story is not just many days but many stories. Their narrative takes in the rise of an alternative culture; the changes in rock ’n’ roll as music and business; the role of technology, especially on stage; the beginnings of a shared community that would lead to social media. In the late seventies Bob Weir bristled when the TV interviewer pegged the Dead as “a sixties band.” He was right to be irked: as my research began making clear, the Dead mirrored their times—from the free-living sixties to the rehab-friendly eighties—more than they probably ever intended.

  As Mountain Girl also suggested, it’s also a story about people: young men from disparate musical and cultural backgrounds who joined together, helped transform the sound of popular music, grew together into older men, and shunned responsibility yet had it thrust upon them in any number of ways. It’s about the ways in which they coped with that success and each other as time, lifestyles, and financial weight pressed down upon them. It’s not always a serene story: as I learned over three years and interviews with over a hundred friends, family members, musical colleagues, business executives, and employees, the Dead world was inordinately badass, and only the heartiest survived. Their story is comedy, drama, and tragedy all in one. As Mickey Hart told me, “We all played well when we got to that group-mind place. When the music played, everything made sense. When the music stopped, things started getting weird.” I hope you enjoy this particular ride.

  Pigpen, manager Jon McIntire, Garcia, and Weir at the Fillmore East in New York, a few days before the start of the Workingman’s Dead sessions.

  © AMALIE R. ROTHSCHILD

  PROLOGUE

  SAN FRANCISCO, FEBRUARY 16, 1970

  The target-practice gunfire had silenced, the women who fed and tended to them were home, and their Hells Angels buddies were swaggering around elsewhere. On this chilly, drizzly day the members of the Grateful Dead straggled in from different parts of Marin County, crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, and buzzed an intercom at a purple door on Brady Street. Tucked away in a grimy, industrial section of San Francisco, the building didn’t remotely hint at rock-star glamour, and squatters had taken over a crumbling building next door. To attain the proper head-shop mood at Pacific High Recording, the bandmates lit candles and draped multicolored cloths over their amps, brightening up the burlap sacks the studio owner had hung on the walls.

  Starting in 1966 outside Los Angeles and continuing in the Bay Area two years later, the West Coast had been rattled by a series of unsolved murders attributed to an anonymous slasher calling himself, with cinematic flair, the Zodiac Killer. The killings had freaked out many in the Bay Area, and Jerry Garcia, the Dead’s lead guitarist and reluctant leader, was among them. During at least one drive home to his rented house in Larkspur he’d stopped at a red light, glanced over, and wondered whether the person who’d pulled up alongside him was the killer. “Please don’t murder me,” he thought, words that would wind up in the song they would be putting on tape that February night at Pacific High Recording. “Dire Wolf,” a wintry tale of mangy animals and a card game in the woods, may have been born of fear and murder. But Garcia’s folkish melody was sprightly and jaunty, as if he were daring the Zodiac maniac to come after him. Onstage at Winterland a few months before, he’d even dedicated one of its earliest performances to “the Zodiac.”

  The Dead weren’t easily startled; after all, they’d already witnessed plenty. They’d met in and around Palo Alto over the course of the last decade and, by sheer will if not always musical aptitude, had transformed themselves from folkies, blues fanatics, and classical-music players into a rock ’n’ roll band. Along the way they’d been busted and endured jail time. They’d fought with record company bosses. They’d laughed and gotten high together, but they’d also flashed moments of anger and frustration with each other. At one point a few of them had fired some of the others, although the split lasted barely a few weeks.

  Little of that turmoil seemed to derail them; if anything, troubles only made them stronger. About two weeks before, the band had been in their hotel rooms in New Orleans, partying after a show, when a barrage of narcotics cops burst in, resulting in drug-charge arrests of most of the band and some of their crew. Eventually they’d dodged that bullet as well: the head of their label would spring them by contributing to the reelection fund of a local politician—hardly legal, as he would later admit with a laugh. According to drummer Mickey Hart, even the arrests worked to their advantage. “We became famous for getting busted, and every time we did, we raised our price,” he says. “After we were busted we had a meeting with everyone, girls and wives, and said, ‘We should double [our concert fees].’ Back then just getting your name known was a big thing, and we never got any press.” One of their most popular songs, ‘Truckin’,” would even emerge from the whole mess.

  The musicians who began assembling at the studio on Brady Street were more complex than their public images. At twenty-six, his face encircled by a mustache, beard, and Brillo-pad-thick head of dark hair, Garcia exuded a beatific papa-bear openness, like a particularly benign guru. (The year before, Rolling Stone, a relatively new counterculture magazine that wedded a love of rock ’n’ roll with deep journalistic reportage, had put Garcia on the cover by himself, the first major signal that the guitarist was becoming the group’s public persona.) At twenty-nine, bassist Phil Lesh had an easy laugh and could flash a prankster’s grin, but his shag haircut and glasses lent him the look of a hip but strict professor, and aptly so: beneath that affable exterior lay a taskmaster and perfectionist. At twenty-two, Bob Weir was the most classically handsome and gracious of the bunch—the women in the audiences couldn’t get enough of his pony tail and girlish frame—but beneath his calm-river exterior was a genuine eccentric, heard in his pick-and-strum approach to rhythm guitar and his unapologetic penchant for practical jokes.

  The rhythm section players were comparatively clear-cut. Setting up his collection of percussion instruments, including maracas and congas, was Hart, twenty-six, who combined the mustache and hat of a Cossack with the bucking-bronco energy of the Brooklynite he was. Bill Kreutzmann, the other drummer, was the least hippie-looking of the bunch, although his surly ranch-hand smirk made him almost as charismatic as Garcia; at twenty-three, Kreutzmann was already on his second marriage.

  In terms of public image versus private life, however, none of the Dead had anything on Ron McKernan, the singer, harmonica player, and keyboard player known affectionately as Pigpen. The previous year he’d shown up for a photo shoot in a scrunched-up cowboy hat and carting along a firearm and bullets. Riding horses on one of the band’s ranches, Pigpen, all
of twenty-four, looked the most natural in that role—less like a musician and more like a posse member about to give chase to a bank robber—but as everyone learned, he was actually the most sensitive of the bunch. When one of the women who crashed at their home woke up in the middle of the night and saw Pigpen in her doorway, she needn’t have worried; he came over and put an extra blanket on her.

  The road they were traveling was still full of potholes. They were largely broke and in debt to their record company to the tune of almost $200,000. Their small but loyal road crew was stretched to the limits by slapdash planning that saw the Dead sometimes playing consecutive shows hundreds of miles apart. One of those busted with them in New Orleans was their sound engineer and former financial backer, whose future—both personally and with the Dead—was now uncertain. Some within their scene—a world that appeared loose and mellow but was, in fact, guarded and suspicious of outsiders—were growing wary of their new business manager, who happened to be related to one of the band members. Thanks to any number of in-flight pranks—like the time Weir pulled out a fake gun and “shot” Pigpen and Lesh, after which a pillow fight ensued—every airline except TWA had banned them. That fact hardly surprised one journalist, who accompanied them on a commercial flight and saw them openly sniffing cocaine off a knife being passed around their seats.

  And yet for all the drama and craziness, which were as much a part of their world as quality weed, the Dead were preparing for a wilder and bigger ride as the decade began. Their newly hired road manager was promising them more work and better organized tours, and he had the experience and brazenness to make it happen. They were on the verge of moving into a new building, a shingled two-story house in San Rafael, complete with a few palm trees on the property, that would become their base of operations for over three decades.