by David Browne
Though it was bound to be an historic expedition, the Dead arrived in Egypt in various states of disrepair. Kreutzmann had broken his wrist beforehand. Garcia was suffering from withdrawal from heroin. Their regular piano tuner refused to join them after he felt one of the crew dissed him. “That put a kibosh on the show right there,” says Candelario. “The piano was out of tune. We had some other synthesizers and things, but not the nine-foot Yamaha Keith was used to, and he was bummed about it. That set the whole domino thing up.” To kill all the mosquitoes and bugs in the air, trucks were spraying DDT all around their hotel, the Mena House in Cairo.
During the days leading up to their three shows at the Pyramids, everyone in the Dead caravan immersed themselves in the country and its culture: riding camels and horses, sampling the hashish openly sold on the streets, and visiting the King’s Chamber high up in the Great Pyramid. (With its dusty, freewheeling ambience, the country was almost like an oversized version of Hart’s Novato ranch during its heyday.) Healy and Owsley tried to create an echo chamber in the Pyramids. On the third night of performances, the Dead played during a full eclipse, with the moon and the nearby Sphinx scorching the sky. “That third night we brought the Egyptians down off the dunes in front of the stage,” Hart says. “They parked camels and slowly started coming down.” For most but not all of them the trip ended with a boat ride down the Nile, both to see the sights and to keep the band away from the Nubian porters who were trying to give them pure opiates.
Sadly the music was the least of it. Revealing their oncoming fatigue as well as their various ailments, the Dead played largely perfunctory sets. The shows were so unexceptional that Garcia would nix the release of a live album meant to pay off expenses. (It would eventually be released, but years after Garcia’s death.) Egypt wouldn’t be their first time messing up a high-profile event. They hadn’t played all that well at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967; at Woodstock two years later, rain, technical delays, and hundreds of thousands of eyeballs watching them spooked them enough to result in a choppy performance. In the recording truck outside the Great Pyramid, which had been pulled in through the sand by truck, Betty Cantor was taping the shows as always, but, something felt off. “I thought, ‘This seems typical,’” she says. “It was one of those things, one of those very big shows, like Woodstock, when they didn’t play well. All the big ones, they would screw up. It would always baffle me.” The erratic shows in Egypt, though, were indicative of something more ominous: the mighty Dead were once again starting to swerve a bit off course. In late 1979 the band pulled into New York’s Madison Square Garden for three shows. On the first night a friend of the band laid out some positive-energy crystals onstage. At a previous show the crew had spoken to the friend about it, saying they appreciated the gesture but worried that the more light was added, the more darkness would be attracted. Sure enough, on the second night at the Garden a death threat was called in. The crew seemingly knew of what it spoke.
Tom Davis had an answer when someone at Radio City asked about the sketch with the LSD-dosed urine. “What are you guys afraid of, a little wee-wee?”
Before part of the wall in the Radio City stairwell came down, another issue had to be resolved about the live broadcast of the Halloween show: the matter of two forty-minute breaks. To fill up that time, and to the event producers (Loren and Scher) and director (Len Dell’Amico, who worked at Scher’s Capitol Theater in Jersey), the answer was obvious: skits featuring Davis and his Saturday Night Live partner, Al Franken.
The bond between the Dead and SNL continued to be unbreakable. The Dead were frequent visitors to the Blues Bar, the scuzzy downtown hang-out run by Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, and Belushi and Kreutzmann particularly hit it off. “It was a brotherhood of madmen,” says Parish of the Dead and SNL bond. “We looked in each other’s eyes, and we knew.” During the Terrapin Station sessions Olsen watched as Belushi visited some later New York overdubbing sessions; the comic performed a few cartwheels in the studio, hung out, then passed out. “He drank everything he could and took everything and then passed out in front of the console,” Olsen says. “Everyone said, ‘Don’t bother him—let him be.’”
As writers and performers, the tall, gawky Davis and the short, frizzy-haired Franken couldn’t have been more ideal for the assignment at Radio City. They shared a dark, cynical sense of humor with the Dead (among the rightly revered SNL skits they’d written were Aykroyd’s Julia Child–bloodbath bit and Bill Murray’s “Nick the Lounge Singer”), and both were Deadheads: Davis in particular had been to many shows starting in the early seventies. Thanks to him, the Dead had appeared twice on SNL, first in 1978 and then 1980. (According to Davis’s memoir, producer Lorne Michaels was unsure about presenting the Dead the first time, and then-bandleader G. E. Smith told Davis the Dead were “not happening” at the time.) When Parish ejected Franken and Davis from one backstage area at a Dead gig, they turned the encounter and humiliation into an SNL skit, with Belushi playing “Parish.” To kill time between sets, what better than skits along those lines? “If it hadn’t been for Franken and Davis,” says Rock Scully of the plans for Radio City, “I doubt the Dead would have done it.”
The anniversary shows would officially kick off with a long run of gigs at the Warfield, and Franken and Davis flew in from New York to tape segments in advance, letting the Warfield stand in for Radio City. The duo’s knowledge of the Dead and its music as well as the musicians’ willingness to goof on themselves couldn’t have made a better match. “Jerry’s Kids” lampooned Jerry Lewis’s muscular dystrophy telethons but with acid casualties; a pretend dressing-room visit by Franken and Davis allowed Weir to mock his fondness for his hair and blow dryers. Holding a microphone, Davis walked into the men’s room at the Warfield to see whether people were “doing drugs,” barged into a stall, and found one stoner, played by soundman Healy, who threw up (barley soup substituted for actual vomit). Other skits were rampant with drug and penis jokes, and Garcia mocked his own physical deformity by holding a box that contained his finger. “They made fun of themselves whenever that opportunity came up,” says Dell’Amico of the process of sketch writing for the show. “They’d say, ‘Go for that.’”
The skits pretaped at the Warfield were uniformly riotous, but someone at the Rockefeller Corporation, which owned Radio City Music Hall, wasn’t so taken. Sue Stephens found herself frantically retyping scripts at the last minute with minor but telling changes. On the grand Radio City stage one day Dell’Amico and Franken were deep into rehearsal for a skit in which Franken, in thousands of dollars worth of makeup, would be impersonating former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. With Kreutzmann joining in, Davis would “bust” the faux “Kissinger” for secretly taping the shows.
While they were practicing, “a phalanx of four men in black suits and carrying briefcases” watched by the side, according to Dell’Amico. The director was told to stop filming because the men—Radio City lawyers who supposedly represented the Rockefeller family—wanted to shut down the skit. As it turned out, Kissinger and Nelson Rockefeller were old friends. “I said, ‘They can fuck off,’” Dell’Amico says. “And that was that. I think they looked at the paperwork and said, ‘They’re right, they’re renting this room.’ If you’re working for the Dead, you’ve got muscle because of the money coming in the door.” As Dell’Amico predicted, the skit aired in its entirety.
Early in the months of 1979, when the thought of playing Radio City was merely a pipedream, Kreutzmann and his son Justin, then nine, walked into the lobby of Club Front. Because the space had become a communal hangout, it wasn’t unusual to bump into other band members there, and today it would be Keith Godchaux—bidding farewell. “It’s been nice playing with you,” Godchaux said with a friendly, zero-hostility smile, and he and Kreutzmann shook hands. A few days later the Kreutzmanns returned to Club Front and, in nearly the same spot, met Godchaux’s replacement, whose youth (he was twenty-six), shoulder-length hair, and
beard made him look as much like a Deadhead as a fellow musician.
One night Godchaux asked a friend of the band to take him for a ride to a suspicious part of town. “Are you talking white or brown?” she asked him, meaning cocaine or heroin, and he was caught off guard: “Whoa, how did you know?” he replied. By the time of the Egypt escapade Godchaux’s drug abuse and his and his wife’s on-the-road difficulties were among the band’s worst-kept secrets. Never the band’s most thunderous player or most forceful personality in the band, Godchaux seemed to recede even further into the background as his addiction took over. (He would sometimes have a bottle of Pepto-Bismol on his piano to ease his nerves.) His zoned-out demeanor during the making of Terrapin Station barely changed as they recorded Shakedown Street; during the final stages of recording John Kahn wound up playing some of the keyboard parts himself.
Always more outspoken and opinionated than her generally subdued husband, Donna began confronting Keith about his hard-drug use; combined with the stress of trying to raise a young son, Zion, on the road, the couple was coming undone. Tales of their screaming matches backstage and a notorious car smashup outside Club Front were commonplace. During the Egypt trip Nicki Scully, Rock’s wife, had to talk Donna down during a meltdown over one issue or another. During a Jerry Garcia Band tour in 1978 to promote Cats Under the Stars, Maria Muldaur would try to stand in between the couple onstage so Donna wouldn’t be able to see when Keith would briefly stop playing and give his wife two middle fingers at once, which would often make Donna burst into tears. “Keith and I, we were wasted,” Donna told Rolling Stone in 2014. “We were exhausted. And the band was exhausted with us. Keith and I would be getting along, but then I’d be mad at him. All that kind of stuff in the mix. It was just a constant struggle because we needed to be a family and we were on the road all the time.”
At a group meeting at the Godchaux’s house in 1979 everyone came to a mutual decision: it was time for the couple to leave. “It was a relief, in a way,” Donna said in 2014. “It was sad in another way. But it was what needed to happen. It was turning into being not profitable for anybody, and we needed to go, and they needed for us to go.” According to a source in the Dead camp, the band had already begun auditioning replacements for Keith by then, but one in particular sprang to the head of the line. For his own Bob Weir Band, Weir had hired Brent Mydland, a young but experienced singer and keyboard player. Given the LA-pop feel of Weir’s Heaven Help the Fool, Mydland was a natural for a band designed to promote the album. He’d already worked with two groups, Batdorf & Rodney and Silver, that were both far more soft-pop than the Dead would ever be.
In Mydland the Dead found themselves with another talented but hypersensitive keyboard player. Born in Munich on October 21, 1952, Mydland shared a military-family background with his first boss, Weir: his father, Didrick Mydland, hailed from Norway, moved to the States to attend Trinity Divinity School in Minneapolis, and later joined the army, where he served as a chaplain. Brent was born during one of Didrick’s overseas duties. Once the family moved west when he was a baby, Brent was brought up in Concord, California; during one part-time job arranged by his father, he helped load bombs at a nearby military base.
In 1974 Mydland traveled down to Los Angeles to audition for a slot in the backup band for Batdorf & Rodney, the singer-songwriter duo best known for their cult FM hit “Home Again.” According to John Batdorf, the twenty-three-year-old Mydland who showed up had a “monster singing voice,” an affinity for jazz and blues, and one of the most intense stares Batdorf had ever seen. “Brent had those eyes,” Batdorf says. “Some guys close their eyes when they sing, but his were open. He was a pretty scary-looking guy hitting all those high notes.” Batdorf says the band would kid Mydland for that trait, but they soon learned they could take any ribbing only so far. During one sound check Batdorf sat down at Mydland’s organ and began playing, and Mydland grew visibly upset. “We said, ‘We’re just having fun,’” Batdorf says. “We had to talk him down. You had to be careful what you said or he’d go into a shell. It was very odd. We had to walk on eggshells sometimes.” When Batdorf & Rodney broke up, Mydland joined Batdorf’s subsequent band, Silver, which cut an album for Arista that included a few of Mydland’s songs.
During the Batdorf & Rodney era Mydland met Cherie Barsin, whose sister was married to Batdorf. In no time she and Mydland—then living in a van in Thousand Oaks complete with silverware, pots, and pans—coupled up. Silver’s debut album was released on Arista in 1976—the same year the Dead signed with the label—but when it sold poorly, they were dropped, the band fell apart, and Mydland and Barsin moved north to a house in Concord owned by Mydland’s father. Barsin recalls seeing Mydland butt heads with his dad and grow uncomfortable when he saw him drinking. At his own home Mydland preferred to write songs, listen to jazz and classical records, and play board games like Solitude and backgammon.
The call to join the Weir band came out of the blue, and Mydland quickly landed the job. At a party for Garcia’s birthday in August 1978 Mydland and Barsin were invited along to meet the Dead at the house Garcia was now sharing with Rock and Nicki Scully, and Mydland and Barsin watched as everyone hung out and played guitars. Eventually Garcia emerged from his basement apartment and made Barsin feel immediately at ease by talking to her. A few months later the couple were invited to see the Dead’s New Year’s Eve show at Winterland, where they were told Keith Godchaux was going to leave the band. (Apparently the departure was already on the band’s mind several months before the meeting with the Godchauxs.) Not long after, Mydland was invited to join the Dead.
In light of his musical preferences and background Mydland didn’t seem the obvious choice. Batdorf found it interesting that Mydland, who valued rehearsal and precision, would join the far looser Dead, and Barsin has no memory of ever hearing Dead music played in their home prior to his being hired. (His preferences, she says, were “Chick Corea, Jeff Beck. Nothing with lyrics.”) But the Dead needed a new keyboard player and a rebooted, post-Godchaux sound as soon as possible to continue touring, and Mydland needed a job. “His personality didn’t fit in, but they all accepted him,” says Janice Godchalk-Olsen. “The transition didn’t seem to be much of a debate.”
In April 1979, two months after the band meeting at the Godchaux’s home, Mydland made his stage debut with the Dead at Spartan Stadium in San Jose. As soon as he joined, his predecessor came back to haunt him. “People would yell out ‘Keith!’ and that would piss him off,” Barsin says. “He would say, ‘Are they high, or am I just not that good?’” Yet Mydland’s devotion to the job was instantly evident to those around him. “He put a lot of pressure on himself to be perfect,” Barsin says. “There were jokes about it, like, ‘How do you screw up with the Grateful Dead? Everybody’s high and nobody’s going to know.’ But he was hard on himself. He didn’t want to be a joke. If he could enhance what they did, that was important to him.” Upon landing the job Mydland immediately went shopping for a fresh batch of hole-free T-shirts, and during one camping trip with friends Mydland, who’d grown up water skiing in the Delta area of Northern California, opted out; he didn’t want to risk hurting his hands. The anxiety attacks he’d had as far back as the Batdorf & Rodney days—when Mydland would complain of chest pains or sometimes mysteriously disappear for days, what was known as “The Brent Special”—were at bay for now.
Coming after a period in which Keith Godchaux barely seemed to be playing onstage, Mydland injected the band with musical caffeine. His synthesizers and B-3 organ added upgraded textures to their sound, and his singing bolstered the harmonies, especially now that Garcia’s and Lesh’s voices were beginning to fray. When the time came for the Dead to make their first album with him, Mydland stepped up, writing two songs, “Easy to Love You” and “Far from Me,” the former with lyrics by Barlow. “Easy to Love You” was such a straight-on love song that Arista’s Clive Davis wasn’t sure how it fit in on a Dead album (and rightly so), and as Barlow rec
alls, Davis asked them to revise a few lines to “make it sound more like the Grateful Dead.” (Puzzled, Barlow tweaked a few words here and there to make what was once a straightforward love song sound like what he calls “a bit more obscure.”)
The jolt Mydland could bring to the band was heard when his organ revved up in the chorus on “Alabama Getaway,” the Hunter-Garcia romp that became the first track on the new album, Go to Heaven. (Performing the song on Saturday Night Live after the album’s release, the Dead came to life as rarely before on television, and Garcia spit out his Chuck Berry–derived solos with evident glee.) Thanks to producer Gary Lyons, who’d worked with the likes of Aerosmith and Foreigner prior to the Dead, the album was the most studio-tooled record the band would ever make. Not surprisingly, the Dead didn’t adapt easily to that approach. Once, Lyons spliced a bunch of different Garcia guitar solos into one, thinking it would be a natural fit. When Garcia heard it, he demurred, “It’s nice, but I wouldn’t play it that way.” Weir and Barlow’s songs, “Lost Sailor” and “Saint of Circumstance,” were moody companion pieces that blended soft rock and fusion as well as the Dead could, and the chugging remake of “Don’t Ease Me In,” from their early repertoire, had a jovial bounce. “Althea” made good use of the Dead’s trademark shuffle. But the album’s generic corporate-rock sound made the Dead, one of rock’s most distinctive bands, sound strangely anonymous. Only when Garcia’s voice and guitar slipped out into the forefront did the band sound like their old selves, and fans were put off by the cover photo of the band dressed in Saturday Night Fever–themed white suits. (The humor of the photo, or the fact that Garcia and Hart had gone together to see that movie, eluded them.) “As things got bigger and larger, the stakes went up,” says Hart of this era, “and we stopped exploring so much.”
