by David Browne
The last show at the Lyceum would be seen as such a high point that a good chunk of the eventual three-record set, Europe ’72, would derive from that night. But some tweaking was necessary. Their vocal harmonies weren’t always in sync—at the final night at the Lyceum they were noticeably wobbly during “He’s Gone”—and with Matthews and Cantor’s guidance, they sang new parts for certain songs over the recorded live tracks. No one would be the wiser about the fixed vocals.
Along with the tapes the Dead also returned with more than a few cracks in their ceiling. They’d never spent so much time on the road with their extended families, and in some ways it brought them closer together. Lesh had never been especially close with Kreutzmann—the two men had very different interests, and Kreutzmann by then had two children—but the two bonded during a long, chaotic drive from Monaco to Paris. Jackson and Cantor grew even closer on the trip as well; by then they were in love. (She and Matthews, who had become a couple years before, had broken up.)
Yet the escapade also chipped away at some of the personal relationships. The men in the Dead were unaccustomed to having their wives or girlfriends along with them on the road; generally the men hit the highway and the women stayed behind and took care of business at home. For reasons both financial and sexual, the Dead men preferred it that way. “The only way they could make money was by doing gigs, and thank goodness they all loved to play,” says Cutler. “When they weren’t playing, they were, ‘What do you do? Stay home with the old lady?’ Everyone would be home for a week or ten days and then want to go back on the road. It was more fun.” As Mountain Girl says of the band’s on-the-road dalliances, “They could play as much as they wanted.”
With Mountain Girl, Frankie Weir, and Susila Kreutzmann along, the groupie factor was cut down considerably. But having loved ones along for that long a stretch did begin to wear on everyone. “It strained some of the marriages,” says Swanson. “It was a little tough. We’re creatures of habit, and the habit was that the boys club would go out on the road. All of a sudden, it’s every-fucking-body. Some of the relationships did really well and had a great time. Others had some problems. It was a lot of together time.”
Mountain Girl particularly felt the exhaustion by their last show. She’d left her daughter Sunshine with her father, Ken Kesey, in Oregon, and wasn’t able to go back home a week early to see her. “By the Lyceum we were so exhausted,” she says. “Jerry and I were not happy. We had been bickering ourselves. We had a couple of arguments, but we made it through.” Mountain Girl grew particularly mad at Garcia when, after a propane heater in the Swiss mountains broke, Garcia playfully lit a match, risking blowing them to cinders. “He lit it and waved it around, and I said, ‘God, stop that!’” she recalls. “We had a few moments like that.”
The strains of the road—and the lifestyle it encouraged—also reared its burnt-out head for perhaps the first time. Cutler was so drained by the stress that he wound up in a Marin hospital with a bleeding ulcer. Yet the person who bore the brunt of the European road trip was Pigpen. On stage the band still awarded him spotlights: at the Lyceum he sang one of his own songs, “The Stranger (Two Souls in Communion),” whose lyric about getting lost on the road of life was especially poignant. (The song would only be performed live a total of twelve times.) His body was smaller, but the gravel in his voice could still be heard when they revved up a version of “Next Time You See Her.” At moments like those it felt like the old days at venues like the In Room, when he was the centerpiece of the band and R&B and blues covers brought them all together.
But away from the venues the ride was far rougher for him—often literally, when it came to the troublesome combination of bumpy European roads, especially in the Alps, and rudimentary tour buses. “He probably should have never gone with us,” Candelario says. “But Pigpen really suffered. The buses were cold, and he was bouncing around in them all the time. People would say, ‘It’s a bummer for Pig.’” But Pigpen insisted on coming—he didn’t want to miss out, and he didn’t want to be without his band, which would only make him feel more useless. “Pig wanted to be with his band,” says Cutler. “He wanted to be happy. He was going to let these guys go on a fantastic adventure and stay home? That would have killed him quicker than the tour.”
Yet he remained cut off in many ways on the trip. Some of the posse—Lesh, Scully, Candelario, McIntire—had their own rooms, but so did Pigpen, which only added to his sense of isolation from the rest of the band. When he ate, which was rarely, he munched on seeds he’d pull out from a small case he carried around. The job often fell to Cutler to watch over him, and the job could be heartbreaking. “I was making sure he had booze on that tour, and making sure he fucking ate, which he never did,” Cutler says. “He was fragile and isolated. He was trying not to die.” (Unlike the others in the band, Pigpen wasn’t able to fix or resing his parts on Europe ’72 since he was too fragile to come into the studio.)
The show and tour officially, finally over, the Dead returned to their hotel for a closing-night party. Buddy Cage and some of the New Riders were invited along and took over part of a massive banquet table. At one point Cage looked over and saw Pigpen sitting by himself at a table in the corner. Cage didn’t know Pigpen very well, but fortified with a few drinks, he went over and invited him to join the New Riders at their table. Pigpen was cordial but passed on the offer. “I really need to be here, but thanks for asking,” he told Cage while nursing a drink.
Cage couldn’t help but flash back to the rules Garcia had explained to him two years before, when he first met him: “He said, ‘There are no rules. You can never tell another band guy what to drink or drug. Never tell another guy what to do. It’ll work itself out.’” As long as Pig was still able to sit on that stage and deliver a version of his previous self, no one would trouble him. Cage returned to his table, and Pigpen stayed where he was, alone for the rest of the night.
The Wall of Sound in action, Vancouver, 1974.
© RICHARD PECHNER
CHAPTER 7
RENO, NEVADA, MAY 12, 1974
The first sign of change was the caravan of trucks that pulled into Reno the day before. For Lesh the moment arrived when he walked onstage for a soundcheck at the University of Nevada’s Mackay Stadium, a college football field that could pack in seventy-five hundred people. After strapping on his specially made quadraphonic bass, he plucked a few strings to test the levels, and out came a colossal rumble that made each note feel like the intoning voice of the Lord. The amplification was so potent that Deadheads who arrived at Mackay early and were standing near the stadium’s entrance saw the water in a fountain rippling with each of Lesh’s thumps. “You played one note through it, and it was like, ‘Oh my God,’” Lesh says. “It was stunning how powerful and clean it was. It was a real ego-booster, I’ll tell you.”
The concept of massively upgrading the Dead’s sound system originated with Owsley Stanley’s relentless desire for sonic clarity. The Dead had already attempted stacking speakers vertically during earlier shows with Owsley; the sound would supposedly be much more coherent than if the speakers were arranged in a horizontal row on the stage. But it wasn’t enough. About six months before the Reno show, during a backstage meeting with Bob Matthews, a more precise and far more elaborate plan began to unfold. Owsley’s dream called for a system that would make each instrument sound as crystal clear as a mountain stream, and the Dead now had the resources to try it. Given how many Deadheads were now showing up at gigs, enough to play larger outdoor venues like Mackay, the time to do it had arrived. With Matthews, Dan Healy, and other technicians and crew all working together, the project began in all its over-the-top madness. “We were talking about the bass,” Lesh says, “and Bear said the bass stack should be 20 feet high, and I said, ‘Okay,’ so that’s how we started.” As crew member Candelario recalls, “We got so big that we had to make the leap. And what does it take to move sound 350 feet? It takes a stack of speakers about 50 feet tall.”
The plan ultimately called for over six hundred speakers—ranging in size from a few inches to fifteen feet tall—piled atop each other in heaven-ascending columns; each instrument had its own column. Collectively the setup would use over twenty-six thousand watts of power. Everyone would sing into two microphones at once: one in phase, the other canceling out leakage. The road crew would have to increase to sixteen. “There was nothing like this,” says Lesh, still the one in the band closest to Owsley. “We had to invent all the technology that made the whole thing possible.” No one stopped them or told them it was too ridiculous. When Sam Cutler heard about it all he could think to himself was, “Whoopie—more madness!” As Cutler recalls, “You don’t think, ‘I don’t know about that.’ You think, ‘Good for them, let’s go for it.’”
Even for the increasingly hard-bitten crew, some of whom had been with the Dead for seven years, the new system could bust their collective balls at once. They would have to build not just cabinets but platforms to hold them. Cutler would have to find a forty-foot truck with air-ride suspension to handle the delicate gear. The cabinets would have to be wrapped in straps and yanked skyward with pulleys. Sally Mann Romano, who’d befriended and worked for Jefferson Airplane (she also married Airplane drummer Spencer Dryden) before signing up for the Dead office, recalls contracts that specified four different brands of acceptable forklifts. “Nothing else would do,” she says. “The wrong stage construction would have meant the stage would have fallen in and someone would have died. People had an image of the Dead as a bunch of acid-dropping navel gazers, and there was some of that. But we worked our asses off.”
The crew would have to start at eight each morning in order to have multitiered scaffolding in place by noon. After a lunch break they’d spend all afternoon wiring the amps and installing the hundreds of homemade speaker cabinets. Scaffolding was needed to set the cabinets in place. “The idea was to give the audience the same sound the band heard onstage, with the monitor system and everything behind the band,” says Parish. “Some of Bear’s ideas, to bring them to reality, would just about kill you. We had to learn how to weld. It was some dangerous stuff you had to do.”
The truth behind Parish’s words became grindingly clear when an embryonic version of what became known as the Wall of Sound was rolled out and tested at the Boston Music Hall on November 30, 1973. One of the trucks of gear arrived late, and Candelario found himself in a unique position: dangling by wires above the audience, attempting to bolt a cluster together with a two-by-four and braces as Deadheads watched him work. “It was a real nerve-wracking performance,” he says. “It was nuts—really crazy. You’re right there with them. That close.” Parish recalls Owsley being “out of his gourd that day. He had us tipping that thing in crazy ways. We were fighting him all day. It seemed to take years off our lives.” As always the crew completed its back-breaking job, but the show didn’t start until midnight.
After ongoing work by the Wall of Sound team, the system made its full public premiere at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in March 1974; it was simply too large to set up at Alembic, the company set up by former Ampex Ron Wickersham and guitar luthier Rick Turner where the band rehearsed. Garcia and Weir each had thirty cabinets; Lesh had sixteen. In this version six bass speakers were bolted through to serve as a pedestal. A cluster of speakers would dangle above Kreutzmann’s kit, and the crew would have to keep tilting them until the correct angle was reached. “We attacked it like a group of killer bees,” Candelario says. By then the cost had mushroomed to over $350,000, a staggering sum for the time.
Dead employees who ventured to the Cow Palace to see the towers—which looked like a skyscraper looming portentously behind the band—were taken aback by its mass. “It was, ‘We bad—yes!’” says Steve Brown, a former DJ and record distribution employee who’d seen the Warlocks and served in Vietnam before working for the band. “It was like a castle behind them. Hearing different pieces of music from different sections was awesome. You could hear Phil’s bass column of speakers, and the vocals were full in the middle. We thought we’d hit on something that would be a new state of the art for everybody.” Another relatively new Dead employee, Andy Leonard, had caught a Dead show at Wesleyan in 1970—he and Barlow had been classmates—and recalled them arriving looking like “a motorcycle gang who’d stolen a bus.” What he saw unfolding at the Cow Palace was altogether different. Watching the road crew soldering and installing scaffolding, Leonard was reminded more of a circus than a standard rock show.
With the Cow Palace test under their belts, it was now time to cart the entire apparatus out on the road; Reno would be the first stop. As Lesh saw for himself, the monolithic structure behind him wasn’t simply the embodiment of Owsley’s fantasy of pure sound; it was also an announcement to the world that the Dead were no longer small time; they had their own touring sound system, their own record company, and their own travel office, and they had more employees than ever. Given how many of their employees were friends, the operation was cozy in one way, a juggernaut in another. During a conversation between Garcia and Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, the two leaders of their respective businesses compared notes on how many people were too many to employ and how to grow a business while retaining its closeness. “As long as you can remember everybody’s name, you can do that,” Garcia told Wenner, “but once you start not remembering, you gotta stop.” But it was becoming harder to keep track of it all. Whether they wanted it or not, the Dead were now an industry.
Fourteen months earlier the band’s new era had been ushered in by a stunning loss. On March 12, 1973, members of the Dead, along with friends, lovers, and overseers, congregated at the Daphne Funeral Home, a nondescript brick building off a main street in Corte Madera. Lying in a casket, his brown cowboy hat atop his head and a wilted yellow daisy his hand, was the startlingly emaciated body of Pigpen.
For at least the previous two years everyone had sensed Pigpen’s health was precarious, that his body was beginning to break down from years of drinking. They all knew he’d been indulging since his teen years (although his sister Carol doubts it began at age twelve, as others have speculated). No one thought his lifestyle was harmful or detrimental to his health; it was simply what he did, how he lived his life. In the months after the 1972 European tour ended, Pigpen moved back into his family’s house near Palo Alto and later into a home in Corte Madera. By then Veronica Barnard was gone (the common feeling was that he’d sent her away because he knew he was dying), and he was living on sunflower seeds and alcohol. Sometimes he would call the Dead office or one of the wives just to have someone to talk with. Either to fulfill his artistic impulses or the contract for a Warner Brothers solo album or both, he began recording songs on a tape deck in his kitchen. Living down the road from him was Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane and now Hot Tuna. Casady didn’t know his neighbor very well, but he had a few short talks with him that intimated things weren’t going well for Pigpen. “I don’t think he was tremendously happy,” he says. “He was watching the band move up, and he was no longer part of it. There was a lot of emotion involved.”
On February 11, 1973, Pigpen rallied himself. On stationery festooned with the cover art of Europe ’72, he penned a letter to a friend in Manhattan. “Just figured I drop you a line & let you know I’m still alive,” he wrote. He said “the rest of the boys”—the Dead—would be playing on the East Coast the following month, but he wouldn’t be joining them. “The Doc says I can’t make it, to [sic] fuckin’ cold anyhow. This time I got to recover right or else the whole trip could fall thru. So I’m coolin’ and playin’ it safe, can’t afford to get sick again!” Flashing some of his old feistiness, he said he was looking forward to another visit to New York: “NYC does have some foxes & I’m lookin’ to get me some! . . . I’ll see you as soon as I make it East again.”
Then on March 8 Pigpen’s landlady called his sister Carol to tell her the news: her brother had been found dead on the floor of his
bedroom on Corte Madera Avenue, a woodsy back road, by band accountant David Parker. Pigpen was only twenty-seven. At his dining room table McIntire took on the grim task of calling each band member and giving them the news, as Sue Swanson sat by his side, holding his hand for support. Mountain Girl had already read it in the paper and was weeping. Pigpen’s official cause of death was an internal hemorrhage; an autopsy revealed that his weight had dropped from 250 pounds to 160. Somewhat confusingly, the band issued a statement attributing his death to “a massive intestinal collapse after he got home from playing our 1972 tour through Europe” and added he was under the care of specialists during the summer and fall: “Pig Pen [sic] told us last Tuesday that he felt fit enough and ready to return to his post as bluesman with the band.” Condolence letters from fans arrived from as far away as Berlin and Hamburg.
