by David Browne
Back on the road with the Dead, Owsley was still Owsley. After checking into a hotel room, he’d unscrew every lightbulb, replace them with blue or red ones, and light candles. But adding to the difficulties was the role—or lack of a clearly defined one—Owsley had when he hooked back up with the Dead. To erect the Wall of Sound over the course of a tour more hired hands had been brought onboard, and they were rowdier and more boisterous than the band’s original core crew, and each had a specific task. In the early days Owsley had a habit of tweaking the system—say, the EQ settings in the monitors—right before show time. The more tightly synchronized, professional Dead apparatus no longer knew how to handle such idiosyncrasies. “Bear would get these brilliant ideas, but the road was not necessarily the place to make that happen or test that out,” says Candelario. “I learned so much from him, but we were more mechanized and more uniform when he came back out, and it was hard for him.”
Owsley’s quirks—enraging roadside chefs with his desire for super-raw meat, lathering himself up with creams in his hotel rooms—were intact. But, again, they were now seen less as quirks and more as distractions. “I’d be like, ‘We’re leaving for the airport, come on!’” recalls Parish, who always remained fond of Owsley. “He was at his own pace. There was Bear’s world and then there was everybody else’s.” As Weir saw it, “We had a number of new faces on the crew, and Stanley was an acquired taste. A lot of new folks, especially the most country-bumpkin ones, could not relate to this guy. He traveled at a different altitude. There was a fair bit of constant tension there.”
To writer David Gans, Owsley later complained there was “a lot of coke and a lot of beer and a lot of booze and a lot of roughness” in the 1974 Dead operation, adding, “I was very uncomfortable.” And yet there wasn’t much anyone could do to resolve the situation, since the Dead themselves were growing increasingly wary of laying down the law to their hired help. It was soon clear to everyone that Owsley’s days with the band were numbered. Like Pigpen tangentially, he would be another casualty of the larger, more lumbering—and largely more institutionalized—machine the Dead had become. When the Reno show wrapped up an hour later with “Sugar Magnolia,” that machine tore itself down and began the move to the next town and the next outdoor stadium.
Weir, Lesh, and Garcia (back to camera) working up Blues for Allah material at Weir’s home studio, 1975.
PHOTO: ROBBIE TAYLOR/THE BARNCARD COLLECTION
CHAPTER 8
MILL VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, FEBRUARY 19 TO MARCH 4, 1975
First came the jokes about what they would do if the cops showed up at their houses while something illicit was taking place. But on the night of February 19 they knew what they had to do: tap into their collective consciousness and create newfangled songs and soundscapes.
For a decade they’d tried making records in just about any way or place they could. And even with the occasional nitrous oxide tank at their disposal—even when they were fully prepared, as with American Beauty—the experiences rarely sat well with them. In the confines of an airtight studio, with a clock ticking, they tended to grow bored or distracted, and the absence of an audience left them feeling uncertain about what they’d come up with. They’d waste time or, as often happened with Weir, have trouble finishing songs in time to record them. But now they had Weir to thank for finally making them feel at home while cutting a record.
At the urging of Frankie, then still his girlfriend but not his wife, Weir had built a studio in his home in Mill Valley, which he’d purchased in 1972. Life at the Weir home was a scene of post-hippie domesticity, complete with a loving dog, Otis. He and Frankie had recruited Rondelle Cagwin, a kind-faced twenty-two-year-old friend of the band (she had met Garcia at one of his Keystone Berkeley solo shows) to cook, clean, and help run their house. To Cagwin, Frankie was “someone who embraced life with everything she had—she loved poker and one-liners, and Bobby gained a lot from her music-business sense.” Weir struck Cagwin as shy and sweetly spacey, a “beautiful man inside and out,” yet she also sensed how deeply he’d been affected by being adopted. She’d known others who’d been taken in by other families, and in Weir she felt some of the same guardedness. To Weir’s specifications, Cagwin pressed the creases in his jeans.
Attached to the house, above a garage, the studio was equally idiosyncratic. Visitors had to navigate up a narrow, twisty road, then drive up a ramp that had room for only two cars. (To some in the Dead camp the incline felt very Evel Knievel, especially because he’d used a ramp for an unsuccessful jump over Snake River Canyon the year before.) Designed and constructed with the help of Stephen Barncard, the long-haired, bespectacled, and detail-oriented studio engineer who’d worked on American Beauty, the studio, called Ace’s, had a skylight, a triangular-shaped control room not big enough for the whole band, and an open, if cramped, space for the musicians to play. Adding to the homey, tree-house feel of the place, the recording console, at Weir’s request, was made of wood. Seeing the array of old-fashioned knobs used on the recording machines, Lesh, ever the science-fiction buff, exclaimed, “This looks like Buck Rogers!”
The neighbors weren’t thrilled by the low-Richter-scale thumping that oozed out of Ace’s, especially from Lesh’s bass, and a few called the cops to complain. They were also less than pleased to look out their windows and see members of the Dead’s crew parked at the bottom of the street—smoking weed and awaiting word on what gear the band might need to have hauled up to the studio. “If someone wanted us, they’d come down and yank our chain,” recalls one crew member. “But we stayed out of trouble.”
Inside Ace’s, the windows blacked over and no hint of street noise to trouble them, the Dead were oblivious to all of it. That February night, once they’d gathered up their gear and settled into chairs, Garcia began wailing high notes on guitar, with Kreutzmann and then Lesh eventually joining in, making for a clattering power trio. Excitedly Garcia told them about listening to his new favorite album, the Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile. Lesh soon pulled out an acoustic guitar and began strumming melodies that he openly admitted had been ripped off from old folk songs. Even the ever-particular Lesh had to agree the Dead were onto something new and that it couldn’t have come at a more welcome time—the end of an exhausting and often frustrating few months that could have easily spelled the end of the band.
The largesse of the Dead operation had once seemed manageable, but no more. The previous summer at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, New Jersey, Weir was being interviewed backstage by Gary Lambert, a young writer and Deadhead (and eventual Bill Graham employee), and the two gazed up at the Wall of Sound towering above them. “Did you think it would come to this?” Lambert asked. Weir looked skyward and said, flatly, “Yeah, there were times we had to cancel a show because we couldn’t find an extension cord.” (He was most likely referring to the free shows the band did in the panhandle in the sixties, which required their own electricity.) Inflated with carpenters, subcontractors, and other stage laborers, the crew was eating up almost as much money as the Wall of Sound itself. “We were playing hockey halls, and we’d have to go in a day early to set it up,” Weir told Rolling Stone in 2011. “And we were down for a day while that was happening, so economically it wasn’t a viable situation. We were selling out the hockey halls but barely breaking even. We had something like forty guys on the crew.”
At a Marin County hotel in August, shortly after the Jersey show, a meeting of all Dead employees was called. Danny Rifkin—who’d quit as manager years before to travel but had returned to the fold to work with the crew—stood up and informed everyone that the band would be taking a break. He was so nervous that Swanson, who sat next to him, held his hand for comfort, just as she had with Jon McIntire the previous year when he had to make those dreaded calls about Pigpen. Following a few shows at Winterland in October the Dead would stop touring for a while. In a later newsletter to Deadheads, the band looked back at that moment and wrote that they’d gone “collectively insan
e . . . from pressures of traveling and devastating internal and external intrigue.”
The topic wasn’t openly discussed, but a topmost reason for shutting down the operation was to slim down a crew that had grown bigger and rowdier with the arrival of the Wall of Sound. “Everybody was too scared to fire anybody,” says Grateful Dead Records employee Andy Leonard. “The guys from Pendleton had brought so many guys in, and I don’t think there was anyone on the inside prepared to fire all his friends.” Richard Loren, the former booking agent who’d been nicknamed “Zippy” for his East Coast energy, had been Garcia’s personal manager since 1972, and in his temporary new role as the band’s touring manager after Cutler’s departure, Loren found himself bluntly telling Garcia that the Wall of Sound was going to break the band financially. “They had to stop,” Loren says. “They had no choice.” Garcia unhappily went along with the dismantling of the system. The promise of an autonomous era that began with Rakow’s “So What” proposal was prematurely coming to an end. “We had turned into something we never were,” says Swanson. “It was turning into this corporate structure.”
Rock Scully sensed Garcia’s disillusionment with the Dead machinery when he and Garcia were in the San Francisco airport and ran into, of all people, country-pop troubadour John Denver. To Garcia’s amazement, Denver was carrying only a guitar case and a briefcase. “Where’s your band?” Garcia asked. Denver replied that for this particular tour, he didn’t have one; he was merely showing up in cities to play with symphonies, and he opened up his briefcase to show Garcia his sheet music. Afterward Garcia, marveling at Denver’s relatively simple touring life, asked Scully, “Why aren’t we doing that?”
A brief tour of Europe in September 1974 made it all too clear that a respite was desperately needed. If Europe in 1972 had been a working vacation, the trip two years later was simply work. They dealt with scurrilous promoters (one of whom had to be physically threatened before he paid them) and at least one canceled show, in Amsterdam. Meanwhile, the old standbys weren’t working as well as they had. One promoter brought them low-grade coke, which made everyone snort more than usual to attain the same sensation.
As usual, they skirted authority as much as possible. Kilos of pot were stashed into the backs of speakers. A rental car containing a band member or two, a few crew employees, and some illicit goodies passed through the border from France into Switzerland, then stopped directly outside the checkpoint. Everyone went to the back of the vehicle, cracked open the trunk, pulled up the carpet, took out the stash, and had a good laugh. Still, employees like soundman Dan Healy and crew member Rex Jackson were increasingly disgusted with the amount of drugs everyone was consuming and tried to tamp it down. One day Jackson gathered together a bunch of cocaine in a garbage can and set it afire. (“But we still didn’t run out of any—go figure,” jokes Grateful Dead Records’ Steve Brown.) Jackson threatened to leave, and Ram Rod talked him out of it. “The clean Grateful Dead,” Garcia cracked to a friend after Jackson’s coke blaze. The shows themselves were rarely inspired; one night Garcia shot Kreutzmann a “stink eye” for not being on the beat. By the end of the run they’d had enough of the whole operation.
Before they went their ways, permanently or not, they booked five farewell shows at Winterland in October 1974. Some things never changed: members of the Dead’s extended family were tripping hard, and a Hells Angel asked for a special ramp up to the stage to accommodate his motorcycle. (Promoter Bill Graham had little choice but to agree.) All the while a multicamera film crew was documenting the event for a proposed concert movie. The movie would be a farewell to their past, perhaps in more ways than one. As Betty Cantor was listening to the tapes she’d recorded those nights, the oddest thing happened: she thought she could hear Pigpen in the mix, even though she knew he wasn’t there. “I heard the organ, I heard the damn Leslie,” she says. “It was in there and I said, ‘Pigpen’s playing!’” When she was reminded that he’d died the year before, she retorted, in her spunky way, “Well, I know that—but I heard him! I swear!” In some ways they could never escape their past.
Later that night of February 19 more troubling news arrived. Rakow showed up to update them on their business. The Dead, he told them, had sold a total of 359,000 copies of various product the previous year. But they had to cut back whatever expenses they could.
The dream of the Dead’s label was becoming a calamity faster than anyone thought. The bootlegging of Wake of the Flood had been a sizeable setback, but not a crushing one. In its first month out, From the Mars Hotel had sold a respectable 258,000 copies, but the single edit of “U.S. Blues” hadn’t made converts of anyone in the pop world. A year earlier, in August 1974, Rakow had told the Marin Independent Journal that Grateful Dead Records was a “3 and a half to 4 million dollar company.” But tonight the news was sobering: the Dead were hemorrhaging money. Among the band the must-own car became the BMW, several of which would wind up parked outside Weir’s home studio. With their small size, reliable brakes, and overall stability when encountering hairpin turns, the cars were ideal for Marin County, but they also weren’t cheap; a typical model cost $4,200, a considerable sum at the time. The band’s requests for additional funding rarely let up. “They’d come back from the road and there would be a pile of money and somebody would say, ‘I want an advance,’” says Leonard. “‘Okay—for what?’ ‘Umm, I want to put a new board in my home studio.’ ‘Okay, here’s $25,000.’ Then everyone else says, ‘I want an advance too!’ There was a lot of that going on. Everybody had their own personal use for large chunks of money, whether to buy a house or use it recreationally.”
By the second month of 1975 employees of either the band or the label had begun slipping out the back door, some never to return. On the heels of the Wake of the Flood bootlegging, the August 1974 meeting was the second red flag for promo man Belardo. “That gave me pause,” he says. “The company was petering out. The dream was over.” Belardo was also dismayed by the excesses: he once saw Garcia so incapacitated he couldn’t function. To Leonard, the hiatus meant the company would have to rely on solo albums or side projects to move product, and everyone knew that none of those records—a projected Keith and Donna Godchaux album and Lesh’s Seastones, his truly trippy electronic music collaboration with friend and keyboardist Ned Lagin—had the potential to sell as well as a full-on Dead album. “I said to Rakow, ‘There is no Grateful Dead Records, because there’s no Grateful Dead right now,’” says Leonard. “It was pretty clear after that meeting in August that this was not going to grow.” Leonard was gone as well.
In what amounted to a humbling admission of defeat, the Dead had little choice but to hook up once more with a major label, this time United Artists, to salvage Grateful Dead Records. “At the moment of financial crises we had no recourse but to turn our distribution over to the enterprise which could best serve our necessary market interests,” the band announced to Deadheads in one of their newsletters. (They were even starting to talk like the companies they despised.) “United Artists seems as good as any and better in some technical respects relating to contractual obligations and distribution capability.” It was hardly the most excited announcement, but at that point options were limited.
The UA contract did afford them a cash flow they might not have had on their own. Upon delivering their first album to the label, the Dead would receive $300,000 within ten days; each album to follow would earn them a $150,000 advance. The deal also came with restrictions. The first two Dead albums had to prominently feature Garcia (and, to a lesser extent, Weir), but no one else was specified. Garcia would receive a $125,000 advance for two solo albums, with Weir getting $85,000 for a record of his own. If the deal didn’t recoup—if the label didn’t earn its money back—Garcia would be required to make another solo album. Garcia was allowed to play on other musicians’ records, but, as the contract read, “on the condition that Garcia’s name is not featured more prominently than any other artist on such record.” In a sig
n that UA was expecting radio-friendly material, the contract specified that albums couldn’t be more than half instrumental. The paperwork also came with a subtle lifestyle warning: the Dead would be considered in default or suspended if their “voice and/or playing ability should become impaired” or if they became involved in any type of scandal involving “any act offensive to decency or morality.”
The band laughed off the terminology (“it is with a sigh of relief we shake off our perpetual business hassles,” they wrote in a newsletter), but attorney David Hellman, a tax and estate planning lawyer who’d starting helping out band attorney Hal Kant, understood the reason behind United Artists’ last clause. “It was essentially a morals clause,” Hellman says. “United Artists was a little nervous about the group and its reputation. They were new to this group.”
More jarring were the departures of some of the band’s inner circle. Cutler was just the beginning. Exhausted with the scene, Jon McIntire quit during the European tour. (Loren, who’d first met Garcia in 1970 in Stinson Beach, was now promoted to Dead manager.) The departure of Swanson, their beyond-loyal early fan who now tended to payroll and other office work, was a particularly devastating loss. While looking over the bills one day for purchases she realized someone in the organization (not a band member) was taking goods out of Club Front, a warehouse on Front Street in San Rafael, near the Dead’s office, that had become their new rehearsal room. “It was the last straw for me,” she says. Rather than tell anyone in the Dead or management because she didn’t relish the role of being a rat, Swanson decided simply to quit and devote time to her two young children.
