by David Browne
Garcia and Weir still had the same dynamic—older brother and younger sibling—and the way Garcia kept an eye on Weir struck many in the Dead world as a rare instance of Garcia willing to be in charge of anything or anyone. In the pre–710 Ashbury days Garcia always tried to make sure Weir got home on time, especially when he was still living with his rock-wary parents in Atherton. Still, Garcia could be exasperated by Weir’s inability to play a steady rhythm, an outgrowth of Weir’s budding interest in staking his own ground. (Contrary to rumor, he’d never officially taken lessons with Garcia, and for a reason: “If we were going to be working together, I needed to carve out another path,” he later said.) At home Mountain Girl would listen to Garcia vent. “There was a lot of frustration with each other at the way some people would pick up material and execute it well, what the perceived level of commitment was,” she recalls. “Jerry would get impatient with [Weir and Pigpen], that they were behind where he wanted to go. People wanted to be successful faster than success came to meet them, and everyone wanted to blame somebody else.” Hart blames Weir’s musical formlessness at the time on the youngest member’s macrobiotic diet, and to Hart, Pigpen only seemed to want to play shuffles and “wasn’t really participating or showing up.” At a rehearsal as early as 1966 Kreutzmann openly complained about Weir’s “asshole guitar.”
By the summer of 1968 Weir and Pigpen were squarely in the bull’s eye. “It was me who encouraged Jerry to think about those issues,” Lesh admits. “I was more frustrated than him at first. Maybe he wasn’t listening in the same way I was.” Finally Scully heard from Lesh and Garcia that a meeting needed to be called, either to fire Weir and Pigpen outright or at least give them a warning. “I was asked to deliver the news,” Scully says. “I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ It was the upshot of everybody’s frustration over the recording process and what we were going to put on these next albums.” With Owsley along to record the proceedings, the band congregated at the new Potrero Theatre, a shuttered movie theater now being used as the band’s rehearsal space.
Gathering the entire band together, Scully, Lesh, and Garcia hardly minced words when it came to letting Weir and Pigpen know how they felt about their inabilities to improvise coherently. “It seems like the music is being carried to a certain level, then staying there,” Scully told them (in comments quoted in McNally’s A Long Strange Trip). “It never gets any better. Matter of fact, it begins to get worse.”
“So after this weekend we decided that’s the end of that—no more,” said Garcia.
After Weir tried to defend himself (“I’m losing control of words here”), Garcia said, “Here’s where it’s at, man. You guys know that the gigs haven’t been any fun, it hasn’t been no good playing it, it’s because we’re at different levels of playing. . . . We’re just not playing together.” Lesh added, pointedly, “All four of us don’t want to work that way.” Looking back on the meeting, Hart recalls, “It was sad to see that, but Phil had a point.”
Whether the two musicians were actually canned or not would remain a topic for debate for years to come. “Bob thought he was fired,” says John Perry Barlow. “In those days he wasn’t getting a lot of generosity or respect. It was a fit of pique over how spacey he was. Bob meant well, but he could be very frustrating.” Lesh contends that the point was not firing but asserting to Pigpen and Weir that the other four were setting off on their own course for a while. “I’ve heard that Bob thought he was fired,” he says. “But the way we left it was, ‘The four of us are going to try this.’ It wasn’t, ‘If you guys don’t get your shit together, we’re going to do this ourselves.’ It was, ‘We’re going to try it. But you guys have to know the reason we’re doing that is that we feel you’re not on the same page as us.’” Weir himself would later say he did think he’d been canned.
To those who knew or worked for the Dead the situation seemed surreal. “It was horrible, like firing your mom and dad,” says Connie Bonner, who had taken up with (and later married) Bob Mosley of another first-rate San Francisco band, Moby Grape. “It was wrong on so many levels.” But it was done, to some degree. In the aftermath of the meeting Garcia, Lesh, Hart, and Kreutzmann played a few gigs as Mickey and the Hartbeats, a dreadful name that didn’t bode well for their music. (They were, in essence, a power trio with two drummers.) “It sucked,” Lesh says. “It was nowhere. So the next time we all got together to play, it was the whole Grateful Dead, and it was like nothing had changed. In order to have the magic happen, we needed everybody. We couldn’t make it happen without them. That’s what we needed to know. Now we can go back and work with these guys.”
All of a sudden Weir and Pigpen were back in the fold, and the Dead regrouped for more rehearsing. (Trixie Garcia, Garcia and Mountain Girl’s second daughter, would later say that Weir’s dreamboat looks helped save him during times like this—her father knew the Dead needed at least one good-looking member to make sure girls were in the audience.) During one get-together that fall Weir began leading the charge and, once again, fumbled the ball. “Bob, when you do that, we’ll do that,” he was told, and Weir, again, didn’t quite do what was asked. “Someone really got on him and made him feel really bad,” Hart says. “But then we looked at each other and said, ‘We can’t blame anybody anymore. We can’t be a band like this.’ Then no one criticized anyone after that. We tried not to talk about it too much.” They could make mistakes and move on. The new music had almost wrecked them, but it might have saved them too.
As the seventeenth minute of “Dark Star” arrived, they began converging, even if each man sounded as if he were playing a different part of a different song. Garcia reinserted a tease of the original melody but just as quickly discharged a biting solo, as if reluctantly declaring his leadership of the band. A wash of organ rose up with him. Two minutes later all the instruments united into a swirling orgy of sound, Lesh’s bass and Kreutzmann’s drums making a pounding, rattling tumult. About twenty minutes in, a hint of a standard rock ’n’ roll riff emerged from the maelstrom, and Garcia interjected the merest suggestion of a country lick, reflecting his increasing interest in the genre during this period. But those too were short-lived. A minute later the Dead had again powered up into a collective fury, this time unlike anything they’d played during the previous twenty-one minutes. “Dark Star” was now almost a completely different song than the one they’d started earlier—less celestial and elegant, more charged and riled up.
The organ that swelled up and around the song was the handiwork of the first major lineup addition to the Dead since Lesh had replaced Dana Morgan Jr. Now that he’d parted ways with the military, Constanten graduated from album contributor to full-time member. “It was always assumed that if I hadn’t been sucked away by the Air Force,” he says, “I would have been there in the beginning.” In some ways Constanten seemed like the least likely man to sign aboard. With his handlebar mustache, he looked more like a nineteenth-century detective—a descendant of Billy the Kid’s nemesis Pat Garrett—than a rock ’n’ roller. Constanten stood apart from the Dead in other ways as well. Like Hunter before, he’d become a Scientologist, but unlike Hunter, who’d left it behind, Constanten was still part of that group. Due to his beliefs, Constanten refrained from nitrous and even aspirin.
But during a period when the Dead were anxious to steer their music into unknown musical galaxies, Constanten, adept at everything from piano and organ to harpsichord, represented forward thinking. It’s easy to see why Lesh would want his friend and ally in experimentation in the band, and no doubt the August confrontation with Weir and Pigpen helped Constanten’s cause. “TC was our life jacket in case Pigpen wasn’t able to play anymore,” says Scully, “and to bridge keyboards with the new material.” Constanten says the invitation ultimately came from Garcia: “It was Jerry’s call,” he says. “Jerry came to me and said, ‘I think we can use you.’ And if the invitation came from him, it was settled as far as everyone else in the band was concerned.”
&n
bsp; Starting with his first show with the Dead in late 1968, Constanten would take over the organ for certain songs while Pigpen sang. With that change, Lesh was now costeering the band with Garcia, who didn’t seem to argue about it. Neither did Pigpen, who was relegated to thumping on a conga or walking offstage entirely during the sets. (In a sign of cooperation, though, he and Constanten did share a house in Novato, playing long games of chess together.) Gone were the days when Pigpen commandeered the stage for long stretches; during the Lenny Hart period Pigpen’s organ had been confiscated for lack of payment, a move as symbolic of Pigpen’s status in the band as of Hart’s financial shenanigans.
Shortly before Constanten became the seventh member of the Dead they had commenced work on their third album. Named after a palindrome created by artist Rick Griffin, one of the stable of illustrators and artists accumulating around the Dead and the San Francisco scene (the supremely talented Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley were others), Aoxomoxoa took yet another stylistic left turn. By now Garcia and Hunter were on a major collaborative roll, and their songs—“Mountains of the Moon,” “Dupree’s Diamond Blues,” and “Cosmic Charlie” among them—took the band in another direction. The blend of Garcia’s often folk-rooted melodies with Hunter’s vibrant lyrics—loaded up with references to scenic vistas and eccentric characters—made for songs that felt like artifacts unearthed from a fictional psychedelic Old West. The results could be exquisite: played live in the studio by Garcia, Lesh, Weir, and Constanten, “Mountains of the Moon” had a refined beauty and delicacy they hadn’t approached before, and “St. Stephen” and “China Cat Sunflower” felt like instant standards, the latter becoming one of their most recognizable opening licks.
Maybe it was the nitrous in the studio or the STP and mescaline that Hart recalls made for “very high sessions.” For whatever reason, the production sometimes strained too hard to match the whimsy and vividness of Hunter’s words. With its calliope organ and jaunty mood, “Dupree’s Diamond Blues” felt contrived, and Garcia’s drowning-man vocal effects on “Rosemary” and the falsetto moments on “Doin’ That Rag” added unnecessary layers of gimmickry. Even “St. Stephen” had overly twee moments. At times the album was less like a move forward than a leap back to Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, but with a larger production budget. As the sessions dragged on over a period of months, the cost swelled to nearly $200,000, an exorbitant price during that era. (The fees didn’t end either: after the album was released, Pacific Recording, where the album was cut, sued the Dead for $120,750, claiming the band had promised to list Pacific in the credits in exchange for a 20 percent discount on recording costs. When Aoxomoxoa arrived, the name “Pacific” was nowhere to be seen on the record; Scully later said it was intentional. The case had gone to trial and the studio won, but Garcia, under oath, was so articulate about the complexities of multitrack recording that the judge complimented him and called him a good witness.)
In the meantime they knocked out an entire other album that only demonstrated how comfortable they were onstage compared to being in an impersonal recording studio. Something unusual was starting to kick in with the Dead that rarely happened with other rock ’n’ rollers: to develop the songs they needed to shape them onstage, complete with audience feedback. The material had to be painstakingly nurtured, not written and banged out in a studio, and nothing proved that approach better than their live tapes. When the band played the Fillmore West and the Avalon Ballroom in the early months of 1969, Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor put the shows on tape. (Also pitching in were Owsley and Ron Wickersham, an engineer at Ampex who’d met the band during the recording of Aoxomoxoa and went on to work at Pacific Recording, where the album was cut. Eventually he would hook up with Owsley’s 1969 startup company Alembic to make instruments and gear.) Matthews and Cantor then compiled the tapes into the Dead’s first live album. “We did it as a fluke, and we liked it,” Cantor-Jackson says. “Bob and I went into the studio and mixed it and offered it up to the band. They had this contract with how any albums they had to turn in to the label, and we said, ‘Let’s give them this one—and it didn’t cost you a damn dime!’” According to Scully, Garcia, who was starting to feel the pressure of fulfilling their Warner Brothers contract, was more than open to the Cantor-Matthews idea, and when the engineers presented copies of the proposed album to the band, the Dead signed off on what became Live/Dead.
In rock ’n’ roll, concert albums were still relatively rare, and Live/Dead felt particularly risky given the Dead’s previous track record (low album sales) and its double-album length. But the gambit worked on several levels. Just like the studio albums that preceded it, Live/Dead didn’t crack the Top Forty, but it accomplished something the other records hadn’t. An overdub-free vérité snapshot of their concerts, it finally captured the band at its most vibrant and exploratory. “Dark Star,” which took up all of side one, left the obscure single version in the distant dust, and “St. Stephen,” shorn of its production gimmicks, was more direct and euphoric; Garcia’s guitar bore into it in ways it hadn’t on the Aoxomoxoa rendition. On a version of “Turn on Your Love Light,” Pipgen’s essence was captured in all its biker-preacher glory, while “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” was chilling and devastating. “Feedback” was just that—nearly eight minutes of sonic crunch, whistles, and imitation whale sounds that spoke as much to their essence as did the half-minute group-song benediction, the traditional “And We Bid You Goodnight.”
Live/Dead helped their relationship with Warner Brothers, but just barely. When Scully and band lawyer Brian Rohan journeyed to LA to visit Joe Smith at the label’s Burbank offices to ask for more cash for Aoxomoxoa, Smith finally had his chance to vent his irritation with them in person. “I was seething,” Smith recalls. “I said, ‘You sons of bitches—you’re supposed to be able to control what’s going on up there! Get out of my office!’” Smith wound up chasing them down the street after they’d walked out. “I said, ‘Don’t come back here!’ I was feisty.” But the cost-efficient Live/Dead placated Warners, who were able to sell the double album for a slightly higher list price than a standard LP. The resulting sales of the album, released in November 1969, helped wipe away some of the debt incurred by Aoxomoxoa, which had come out only five months before. Live/Dead didn’t make Smith any less wary of the band members, though; he continued to decline any beverage the group offered him, wary of being dosed.
The most important healing might have been within the band itself. Coming on the heels of a fractious year, the album, according to Scully, also served to remind the group that everyone had something to offer. “Live/Dead got everybody to realize,” he says, “how special the band was and how great they were.” After the turmoil of 1968 the Dead needed such affirmation.
As a new decade loomed, the Dead weren’t merely coping with internal friction and record-company collisions; in their own vicinity the business of rock ’n’ roll was intensifying. Helms, the promoter of the Family Dog on the Great Highway, felt like a kindred spirit in many ways. Long haired, bearded, and taken to wearing sandals, Helms had relocated from Texas to the Bay Area in the early sixties and, once there, championed local musicians like the Dead (and his Texas friend Janis Joplin). Helms was now running the Family Dog, a loose-knit group whose goals—part commune, part rock-show production company—embodied the growing duality of the scene.
Locally Helms’s rival was Bill Graham, who would never be mistaken for a hippie. Graham’s life story made even Garcia’s or Pigpen’s feel cushy. Born in Germany, where his mother was gassed to death during World War II, he’d had to flee to France; at age ten, thanks to help from the Red Cross, he was on a boat bound for the States. Raised by a family in the Bronx, he served in the Korean War and, after taking a stab at an acting career, relocated to the Bay Area, where he began working for the San Francisco Mime Troupe and with the Dead at the Trips Festival. Graham had been appalled when the Warlocks changed their name to the Grateful Dead, and he and the band
had been engaging in a particularly intricate dance. Graham was bullheaded, uncompromising, and driven, words that could also be used to describe the collective Dead. Determined that bands at his shows hit the stage on time, Graham could often be seen walking around backstage with a clipboard. The Dead, meanwhile, kept trying to dose him, even recruiting some of their so-called old ladies to put acid on their lips and kiss him. (Ever vigilant, Graham told them to kiss his hair instead, but he was eventually done in by a loaded soda can.)
Helms and Graham had produced shows together at the Fillmore Auditorium, home to an Acid Test and benefits for the Mime Troupe, but they’d had a falling-out over what Helms would call a “breach of faith” involving a booking for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Helms began presenting bands, including the Dead, at the Avalon Ballroom, while Graham booked the Dead at, ironically, a space they’d tried running themselves. By 1968 the Dead had already grown so wary of promoters that they made their stab at running their own enterprise. For roughly the first half of the year the band—in a business partnership with their peers and friends in the local rock ’n’ roll community, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Jefferson Airplane—had taken over and rented out a two-thousand-seat theater in the downtown San Francisco area. Although the Carousel Ballroom was the Dead’s personal sandbox, the enterprise wasn’t built on particularly solid ground. When it came to booking bands, they couldn’t compete with the likes of Helms and Graham, and thanks to a lease agreement that McGee calls “unworkable” ($15,000 a month), the Carousel ran aground soon after it opened. To the Dead’s initial irritation, Graham, who was in search of a new space anyway, took it over and eventually rechristened it the Fillmore West. When Helms lost some of his permits for the Avalon in late 1968, he shifted his operation to the former Playland at the Beach, renaming it the Family Dog on the Great Highway.
