by David Browne
Although Woodstock had transpired a few months before, Altamont would not be the good-vibes sequel many had hoped it would be. Freaked out by a scene becoming gnarlier and more menacing by the moment, the Dead retreated to a bus behind the stage, deciding whether or not to play. At one point Dead roadie Rex Jackson, an imposing cowboy who was no pushover, was seen walking around with a black eye, which Cutler presumed was delivered by an Angel. (It’s possible he received it when he intervened on Balin’s behalf during the Angels skirmish, and Jackson was smart enough to know not to fight back.) Ultimately, in what even Lesh would call a mistake—and Cutler would sharply criticize as an act of “cowardice”—the Dead decided not to venture anywhere near the stage. As nighttime arrived and the Stones cranked up, the Dead returned to a helicopter and flew off while most of their crew retreated to their equipment truck and drove back to San Francisco, where the band was due to play at the Fillmore West that same night. Soon after, Meredith Hunter, a young African American, rushed the stage with a gun and was stabbed to death by an Angel. The Dead were too unnerved to even show up at the Fillmore, and Graham wound up screaming at the crew instead of the band. An after-party at the theater, which was never firmed up but was pitched to the Dead by a local promoter as “the most memorable evening in San Francisco ballroom history,” never materialized. Given the Dead’s role in the show, paranoia ensued. Some at Hart’s ranch fled, fearing for their safety from angry Angels.
Another reminder of the dark side of the Dead could be found in an office closer to home. A year earlier, the band was fairly dazzled when Hart’s father, Lenny, a former drummer and now self-ordained minister, reappeared in his son’s life after leaving Hart’s mother during their Brooklyn years. With his short hair and southern-car-salesman vibe, Lenny Hart didn’t look much like his son or anyone on the scene. At first Mickey seemed thrilled to have his father around, at least to those who saw their interaction, and Lenny promised to help the Dead’s shaky business operation. At the ranch the previous spring Lenny would spout lines like “I’ve seen the light!” while holding a Bible, and somehow he convinced the band and its entourage he could be their financial savior. In 1969 Garcia had spoken with Rolling Stone writer Michael Lydon about their business and admitted, “Mickey’s father is now doing it. He’s fronting our whole management thing. He’s taken charge. We’ve given him the power to do what we want to.” Garcia added, somewhat less optimistically, “Right now, things are looking good. But the whole thing about money is still something weird.”
Since then the situation with Lenny had only grown stranger. “He looked like the straightest white man you ever saw,” says a member of the Dead world at the time, “but he had a good goddamn rap. Some people, you can’t read truth or falsity in their face.” Jon McIntire, another member of the Dead organization, was suspicious of Lenny, as was Ram Rod. Garcia would tell McIntire, “I believe what people tell me.” But not everyone was convinced. Mountain Girl once said to Hunter, “Why can’t you just trust Lenny? We need a manager who understands business.” Hunter reacted with what Mountain Girl recalls as “utter scorn at my naiveté and unwarranted confidence.”
For the first time the air was filled with the promise of more income. Feeling guilty after the Altamont debacle, Garcia had asked Cutler to be the Dead’s tour manager; Cutler accepted and soon realized the band needed to play more gigs than ever to shore up their finances. Throughout 1969 they would make only a few thousand dollars a show: $5,000 for two nights at the Fillmore West; $7,500 for two nights at the Pavilion in Flushing, Queens; and $1,059.50 for appearing on Hugh Hefner’s TV series Playboy After Dark. “They knew that if they didn’t start to make serious money, the Dead would cease to exist,” says Cutler. “Every penny counted. We were living on $10-a-day per diems.”
It would take Cutler months to get the Dead out of hock. Until then, when the musicians would ask where the money was, Lenny would tell them their “old ladies” had spent it, which wasn’t the case. When some in the organization asked Lenny to show them the books, he hesitated, then eventually turned over ledgers with entries that had clearly been erased and written over. (Lesh and Mickey Hart also confronted him at a Bob’s Big Boy restaurant and realized he also had two different sets of books.) When questioned, Lenny had a habit of veering into extended Bible talk, almost as a way of zoning them out. The thought of dealing forcefully with Lenny Hart didn’t sit right with any of them—Garcia and Weir especially were not the most confrontational—but something had to give.
At the same time, other parts of their operation were to some degree or another in jeopardy. Owsley Stanley, their acid-king soundman and quality-control inspiration, would soon find himself behind bars after the New Orleans bust. Those close to Garcia were beginning to notice that he could unexpectedly fall into grumpy, blackened moods. When Garcia came home at night he’d frequently grumble to Mountain Girl about one thing or another having to do with the band, then ask when dinner would be ready. Although Mountain Girl didn’t know it then, later she wondered whether this was the beginning of what she calls Garcia’s “secret drug life.” Cocaine was already on the scene; in fact, the band would give it a plug in “Casey Jones,” another new song they’d record for the new album. No one considered the drug even vaguely addictive.
Three months after “Dire Wolf” was cut, a few Deadheads managed to slither in backstage at a show at Temple University in Philadelphia. No one knew how, but in the early days of rock ’n’ roll security, crashers were always possible. One of the fans found Garcia and asked what the band was working on, and Garcia boasted about the new album they’d just finished, Workingman’s Dead. “I like it better than any album we’ve done,” he told them.
“That’s all we do, is sit around and get smashed and listen to that album,” the fan said.
Even though the album wasn’t in stores yet, Garcia let that odd comment slide—he was growing accustomed to remarks like that from their budding fan base—and amiably replied, with a smile, “We get smashed and make ’em.”
Sometimes they did; the nitrous tanks at Pacific High were testament to those habits. But something rare and miraculous was happening with these new songs. Everyone in the Dead had complaints about their first three studio albums: too rushed, too overproduced, way too expensive. It was impossible to satisfy them all at once. As they began filing into Pacific High, though, the mood was uncommonly optimistic. “We had pushed the envelope in experimental,” Hart says. “We had to simplify. That’s why that record was acoustic. There wasn’t a lot of percussion. Bill and I played it very straight. Maracas, congas—light stuff.” Garcia would be singing all but one of the songs, and he was eager to, in his words, “boogie” and not be bogged down in the tape-montage experimentation that ran through their last two albums.
From its inception the new album was mapped out. Bob Matthews, who had introduced Garcia and Weir before the Dead was even a glimmer in anyone’s imagination, would be engineering, along with Betty Cantor. Matthews taped the band working on the songs, put the material in what he thought was a proper sequence, then gave a copy to each band member, who practiced the songs in that order. Omitted at the onset was “Mason’s Children,” another song about death and collapse, this one swathed in campfire harmonies and a folk-rock bounce. (Like “New Speedway Boogie,” it had been written directly after Altamont.) “It was a no-brainer,” says Matthews. “It didn’t fit. That was by agreement.”
Hunter and Garcia had crafted indelible songs before, yet something about these new ones, many written at the Larkspur house, had a special cohesiveness, a sustained vision. They were littered with images of hard-working, hard-living Americana types—the miners in “Cumberland Blues,” the jack-hammering highway worker in “Easy Wind,” the careening conductor in “Casey Jones”—along with a mysterious character, “Black Peter.” “Dire Wolf” was set in “Fennario,” an imaginary burgh overrun with the creatures. Like classic folk songs, the tunes were both down to earth and my
thical. Tapping into themes of community, terror, darkness, woozy love, and trains, the songs felt more universal and timeless than anything they’d done before.
By early 1970 less electric, more organic-sounding records were in vogue, as opposed to the post–Sgt. Pepper approach of extravagant sonic creations. Hunter was particularly taken with the music of the Band, but according to Cutler, financial considerations also played a part in their change of direction. Having put themselves in the hole during the making of Aoxomoxoa, the Dead simply couldn’t spend indiscriminately, at least not for a long time. “Garcia and I analyzed what they’d done in the past and why it wasn’t successful and what could be done about that,” says Cutler. “I kept banging on Jerry and saying, ‘Do your album in one bang. Minimal recording cost. Do the two-week album. Just get in there.’ And that’s what they did.”
As they began to record in February, the preproduction work paid off. The sessions began around the time of “Dire Wolf,” paused for more touring, resumed in early March, and wrapped up around March 16. They bore down on two songs in particular. “Uncle John’s Band” had started life as a long band jam on a cassette given to Hunter; he then fashioned lyrics about the band and its scene that were the most hopeful he’d written. (“Goddamn, Uncle John’s mad!” went his first line, perhaps a nod to Garcia’s shifting moods, but Hunter later deleted that line.) “Cumberland Blues,” the mining-story song, had a chugging-locomotive rhythm propelled by Lesh’s bobbing bass. “Dire Wolf” was itself ready to go. They’d been playing it live since the previous June, and Weir had even sung lead on one version. Garcia had taken up the pedal steel guitar with the Dead’s country offshoot band, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and the instrument pranced its way through the song.
The other songs were equally filled with exquisite touches—the “oooh” harmonies in “Dire Wolf,” Pigpen’s warm organ in “Black Peter,” the modest rave-up in “Easy Wind.” But most emblematic of their heightened single-mindedness were their harmonies. The Dead were never known for them; Garcia, Lesh, and Weir each had a distinctive voice with unique creaks and crevices. But the new, folksier approach to their songs begged for vocal blends. Egged on by their friend in esoteric chords and hedonism, David Crosby (also living in a rented house in Novato, the backyard of which was seen on the cover of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà vu), the Dead began working harder than ever on their singing. “They were expected to sing all those parts, and it didn’t go well,” laughs Mountain Girl. “It sounded like cats howling.”
In another sign of their focus, Garcia, Lesh, and Weir decided to have the last laugh and bore down on the singing. “We said, ‘You’re gonna have to sing this right!’” says Cantor (now Cantor-Jackson). “We worked on them until they weren’t flat or sharp and were hitting the notes.” The effort paid off; the mix of voices sounded natural, lending the songs a radiance and a sense of comforting teamwork. A slender brunette with a warm smile, long hair, and sharp ears that had earned her the nickname “Bettar” (as in, “She can make things sound better”), Cantor, then twenty-one, embodied another aspect of the Dead’s rule-breaking approach: she was well on her way to becoming possibly the first woman recording engineer in a largely male business (and in the predominantly male Dead crew). She adored and championed the band and its music—even if she viewed the nitrous tanks in the studio with great skepticism, as she recalls with a laugh years later: “I’m sitting there going, ‘I don’t like this.’ I’m catching the tank as it’s falling over so it doesn’t hit the tape machine. I’m like, ‘Jesus, guys!’”
Everyone in the Dead camp had his or her spiky opinion about every aspect of their organization, but the sessions for Workingman’s Dead marked a rare moment of genuine, yes-we-can Grateful Dead consensus: people seemed happy with the results. Cutler recalls they were “never more focused and on the ball” than during those sessions. “I liked it right off the bat, as soon as I heard the basics,” says Bill “Kidd” Candelario, who had joined the Dead crew two years earlier. Few were more euphoric than Warner Brothers head Joe Smith. The Dead had driven Smith fairly crazy over the previous four years—from overspending to trying to dose him—but when he heard the finished record he was ecstatic. “I had been on their back,” Smith says. “They saw they weren’t getting any royalties. We were sticking with them, but we also said, ‘Please give us something we can sell.’ They wanted to prove they could do it.” According to Matthews, the final bill for the album was less than $15,000. Garcia would never be happy with his singing on “High Time,” thinking he hadn’t nailed it. But when Smith heard the record he gave Matthews a hug and gushed about how thrilled he was to hear the vocals. The feeling behind the album was so optimistic that members of the band stopped by the offices of Rolling Stone to play the record for the staff. “That was a turning point,” Lesh says of the making of the album. “It was kind of exciting to focus, to make such a left turn.”
Outside the studio doors their world could be chaotic, disorganized, and messy. But as this music-making experience showed, they could escape it all. “Being able to do that was extremely positive in the midst of all this adverse stuff that was happening,” Garcia would tell Rolling Stone editor Jann S. Wenner the following year. “It was definitely an upper . . . it was the first record that we made together as a group, all of us. Everybody contributed beautifully, and it came off really nicely.”
As they worked on “Dire Wolf” and prepared for several more weeks of recording, they had the songs, the music, and the hope that they could ward off the bad mojo that threatened to engulf them. It was neither the first nor the last time the Dead would find themselves in that place. As their diffident leader knew, everything could change in the same amount of time it took to strum a chord. It had before; it could happen again.
Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, circa 1961.
PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN; COURTESY JERRYGARCIA.COM
CHAPTER 1
MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA, OCTOBER 27, 1962
He couldn’t have picked a lovelier setting in which to die. On the West Coast the work day was drawing to a close, but Jerry Garcia’s task was only beginning. With his girlfriend, Barbara Meier, he left the Chateau, the three-story home in Menlo Park where he’d been living, and walked to the adjoining Sand Hill Road. From there the two began a long, exhausting hike up a hill. With a pine ridge saluting them to the west, the warmth of the Indian summer afternoon embraced them, and as Meier would recall, the light was “infused with honey.”
To anyone who passed them on the road Garcia and Meier must have seemed a study in contrasts. At twenty, Garcia sported short, thick, dark hair and a goatee that lent him “that Latin lover look, like [actor] Cesar Romero,” recalls one of his later musician friends, Tom Constanten. The image wholly matched the person Garcia was at that moment: part-time music teacher, fledgling banjo picker, budding bohemian. A man of few needs, he was wearing one of the two buttoned, short-sleeve shirts that comprised the bulk of his wardrobe. In contrast, Meier, three years younger than him, was an effervescent brunette with a sun-bursting-through-the-clouds smile. Thanks to models who’d given her their cast-offs after they’d all worked together at photo shoots, Meier, who was still in high school, often dressed in what she calls “elegant baby beatnik crossed with Chanel.” By contrast, Garcia was pure beatnik.
On this late afternoon neither one of them was contemplating clothes or jobs. They were leaving behind Menlo Park and its more prosperous neighboring town, Palo Alto, along with their families, friends, and favorite bookstores and hangouts. If everything happened the way the news reports said it might, none of that would exist after that night anyway.
Like everybody in the Peninsula area south of San Francisco and on the rest of the planet, Garcia and Meier had heard the alarming, apocalyptic news somewhere. Maybe on TV or the newspapers or maybe by way of local, politically conscious friends like Roy Kepler, the former War Resistors League executive director so ahead of his time that he was a co
nscientious objector during World War II. (Kepler ran Kepler’s Books & Magazines, where all the local bohemians and intellectuals gathered to read and sip coffee; the cash register was manned by another local peace activist, Ira Sandperl.) Eleven days before, John F. Kennedy, their vibrant president, had learned of the existence of missile bases in Cuba, each installed with Soviet missiles. On October 22 Kennedy had addressed the nation about the discovery; the following day US ships headed for Cuba just as Soviet subs moved into the area as well. On October 24 Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and not a man known for subtlety, sent a letter to Kennedy that practically had bile spit on it: “You are no longer appealing to reason, but wish to intimidate us.” On October 25 came a testy confrontation at the United Nations between the American representative, Adlai Stevenson, and the Soviet Union’s, Valerian Zorin: “Don’t wait for the translation—yes or no?” asked Stevenson, demanding to know whether the Soviets had indeed placed missiles there.
On October 26 the situation had barely improved and bordered on incendiary: additional photos taken by American U2 planes chillingly revealed construction of the sites, and Khrushchev fired off another letter to Kennedy: “What would a war give you? You are threatening us with war. But you well know that the very least which you would receive in reply would be that you would experience the same consequences as those which you sent us. . . . If indeed war should break out, then it would not be in our power to stop it, for such is the logic of war. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction.” Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s secretary of defense, told his boss that American forces could carry out an air strike “in a matter of days,” but Kennedy was reluctant to attack Cuba. Now, the morning of October 27, the situation had taken another turn for the ominous: the Soviets shot down a U2 plane over Cuba, and Air Force carriers were put in place in the event of war.
