by David Browne
At a band meeting in 1984 sound man Dan Healy complained he was having trouble seeing the stage thanks to all the microphones being held aloft by audience tapers camped out in front of his board. Tapers had often been nuisances: in the old days Rex Jackson would walk out into the halls, see the microphone cables, and walk up and down the aisles, cutting the cables and stashing them in his bag. During the same period Sam Cutler made sure the contract riders for shows asserted that “employer will not permit recordings of the performance,” although this dictum was largely aimed at unscrupulous promoters who wanted their own bootlegs.
The band had since become more lenient about fans recording the shows for themselves, but the increasing numbers of tapers was becoming an issue. Kidd Candelario, who’d been making quality tapes of shows for years, spoke up. He admitted to being irked by the tapers himself; at some shows friends who had guest tickets would approach him and complain that the tapers had taken over their seats. “The tapers were everywhere,” Candelario says. “They were always picking on people who were there to see a show and have fun and scream and clap. And the tapers were like, ‘You can’t do that—no clapping, no whistling, no yelling.’ They thought they had free rein to do anything they wanted.”
At the meeting someone—no one remembers who—brought up stopping fans from bringing in recording gear altogether. But the band wanted the tradition to continue, so the idea of banning them was quickly shot down. Candelario and Steve Marcus of the ticket office suggested putting the gearheads in their own area, far from the soundboard, which evolved into talk of a regular, separate section for them. Perhaps that would be the best use for the 200 to 250 seats regularly not sold for each show because they were behind Healy and had obstructed views. Everyone, including the Dead, agreed it was the best solution—and also one that provided extra income no one had counted on. With the number of Dead employees continuing to swell, any additional dollars were welcome.
The tapers at the first show with an official section, at the Berkeley Community Theater, weren’t particularly happy: at the last moment Healy moved the soundboard to beneath a balcony, where tapers didn’t think the sound quality was as strong. But the night began the tradition of a small sea of what looked like miniature telephone poles sticking up at Dead shows. At least something in the Dead world was working.
By the early eighties little in pop music resembled a Dead concert. From the music to the audience, there was nothing punk, new wave, or disco about any of it, and the most diehard of fans, whether young or long term, were starting to follow the band around the country. Nothing like it had been seen in pop, even to an established veteran like, of all people, Joan Baez, the folk music institution with the vibrato-rich soprano.
By the time she shared a stage and studio with the Dead—and then entered into a relationship with Hart—Baez had her own scattered history with the band. During the Palo Alto days Garcia’s first wife, Sara Ruppenthal, had met and befriended Baez, then a folk superstar, and Baez had asked Ruppenthal to join her on tour as an assistant. (She declined, opting to stay in the area with Garcia; today Baez has no memory of those encounters.) Almost twenty years later Hart and Baez met and became a couple, sharing, she says with a fond laugh, “different forms of insanity.” The two would go motorcycle riding together, and one time she mounted one of his big Harleys by herself and took off up a hill. “I was a little iffy,” she says of the ride. Her son Gabe became a Deadhead himself, traveling with fans around the country and bonding with Hart over drumming. It was, Baez says, “a family for Gabe,” which she welcomed, given her own relentless touring schedule and time away from home.
While traveling with the Dead after she and Hart had hooked up, Baez took in her first show. Venturing out into the crowd, she accidentally stepped over a kid lying in the aisle, and what she calls her “Florence Nightingale side” jumped out. “I said, ‘I’m going to save this guy,’” she recalls. Picking him up and setting him into a seat, she saw someone walking by with what looked like lemonade, grabbed it and offered it to the half-passed-out fan. “Is there anything in it?” he asked. When she said no, he was shocked: “Oh, shit!” (She didn’t think he wanted to be more stoned.) The crowd, meanwhile, moved in what she calls “Ouija board dancing,” calling it “a roomful of slow-motion robotic weirdness accompanied by the smell of heavy patchouli and drugs.” It was, she says, a learning experience.
Baez was in the midst of her own self-proclaimed “period of confusion.” For the first time in her career she didn’t have a record deal—like many of her peers, she was now the victim of an industry that saw some sixties acts as dinosaurs, especially once MTV arrived in 1981. Since Hart had a studio, the couple decided to make an album using the Dead as her backup band. The idea didn’t seem completely off the wall because both she and the Dead inherently loved folk music, and she had joined the Dead onstage for several disarmament benefits in 1981 along with their traditional New Year’s Eve show. She and Weir dueted on “Me and Bobby McGee,” which the Dead had been performing for some time, although Garcia walked offstage one night in the midst of one of her songs, which Baez didn’t understand.
Working in Hart’s Novato studio, Baez had her own dose of the world of the Dead. She heard rumors of a snake running around the place, and when she started nodding off after long hours trying to record songs, Hart would prod her: “Come on, Belle, you can sleep when you die!” Some of the band members played on the record, and they worked up some cover versions as well as a couple of Baez originals, “Marriott USA” and “Lady Di and I.” “It was a strange combination,” she admits, “but it kind of nudged me out of my comfort zone.” The songs reflected the experience in more ways than one: written by Baez, “Lady Di and I” was an oblique commentary on her relationship with Hart. “It was about a ’hood guy on his motorcycle and the girl is saying, ‘Hey, I’m the same age as Lady Di,’ and comparing the two lives,” Baez recalls.
Garcia mystified Baez, though. One time he was hours late and claimed he’d gotten lost in the fog on the way north. Baez had a feeling he wasn’t comfortable in the situation but couldn’t figure out why. Garcia didn’t end up sticking around for long, and later work shifted to a different studio where Garcia would finally attempt to put down a guitar part for the song they were finishing. “He was way out there,” Baez recalls. “He would noodle and get lost and start finding the part and go off into outer space, and it had nothing to do with that song.” To her amazement, he found the right part in the end, but the process was one Baez was utterly unaccustomed to. “I was feeling quieter and duller and weirder by the minute,” Baez says. Turning to Hart, she said, “What’s going on?”
In a phrase she would long remember, he replied, “You’re getting a contact low.”
The album was never completed nor released, although two of its songs would later wind up on a Baez retrospective, and Hart and Baez ended their relationship in 1982. For years, though, she would be struck by how the band stayed true to itself the entire time and after. “It’s one of the few things that maintained a steadiness,” she says. “Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, myself, Bob Dylan—we’ve all had these crashes, moments of ‘What do I do now? How do I reinvent myself?’ The Dead were probably invented in a special way, and they didn’t really need to change much. I don’t know any group that was so into its music.”
They thought they had a take. Or maybe they didn’t. It was getting hard to tell. They gathered in the control room to hear a playback.
“Is this it?” Mydland asked to no one in particular.
“Not if Jerry wants a new ‘Day Job,’” Lesh cracked. He then turned to Weir and said, “Promise me one more take.” They all looked over at Garcia, who was still enclosed in his booth and noodling on his guitar. “Let him warm up,” Lesh said. “Something might happen.” The only problem was that Garcia had been warming up for a while already; at best it was wishful thinking.
The men straggled back into the recording room
and took another stab at “Keep Your Day Job.” Garcia’s playing was flaccid, and when he was asked to take a crack at vocals, what emerged was a strangulated croak. During his interview with the Daily News Weir had almost predicted what was happening: “Since we haven’t had phenomenal success that way, there’s a certain amount of lethargy simply in going back to a studio. The question is whether the songs are strong enough to pull through studio torpor.”
Observing the scene that day (and taking notes used here) was compact, wiry Dennis McNally, a self-proclaimed “army brat” now entrusted with writing the band’s official biography. A graduate of St. Lawrence University who then received his doctorate in American history at the University of Massachusetts, McNally was fascinated with bohemian culture (his dissertation had been on Jack Kerouac, later the subject of McNally’s first book, Desolate Angel, in 1979), and he attended his first Dead show in 1972. While working as a typist for court reporters after moving to the Bay Area, McNally had the idea of writing a book about the band and, in his words, “plotted to meet” the Dead by sending a copy of his Kerouac biography to Garcia. After writing a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle about the upcoming Warfield fifteenth-anniversary shows, McNally was tipped by Dead insiders to show up at the auditions for the “Jerry’s Kids” skit for those shows, where he finally was able to meet Garcia. (“I said, ‘What are you doing here—you’re obviously too straight to be one of Jerry Kids,” recalls Nicki Scully, who was helping to organize the auditions.) Garcia had not only read McNally’s Kerouac book but also loved it; he later went along with the idea of McNally writing their official history.
In the early stages of researching his Dead book McNally was able to finagle his way into the session and witnessed up close the issues dogging them at the time. “When Jerry started playing, everyone stopped fiddling around,” McNally says. “But the fact is, nobody was in charge. And certainly not Jerry, except on rare occasions.”
Having worked with jazz musicians before, Kaffel realized that the Dead were more jazz than rock in the way they continually tweaked and rearranged their material. Watching the process was fascinating, especially compared to the way most rock bands would simply record the same takes of the same songs over and over. Kaffel knew it would be difficult to approximate the feeling of the Dead’s live performances in a studio, yet he wasn’t prepared for how largely unproductive the sessions were becoming. Managers and Arista types weren’t calling in or stopping by to see how the work was going. Perhaps it was the setting: Fantasy, housed in the corporate headquarters of the Fantasy Records building, had a security guard in its lobby, the polar opposite of Front Street, where “security” amounted to the road crew camped out in the front office. The sessions didn’t appear to have the slightest bit of urgency, and one of Kaffel’s jobs—as it had been with Olsen seven years before—was to corral the band. “It was hard just to get them all in the room together at the same time,” he recalls. “You’d get some of them, and then another one of the guys would be out of there.”
Another factor, dating back years, was their last few experiences making records. They’d never been fans of recording; without an audience to play off and feed off, something felt wrong. Even working with like-minded Lowell George hadn’t panned out as they’d hoped. “Those records are very painful for me,” Hart says. “They were ill-advised. No one was happy being in the studio, and you can’t play Dead music unless you’re happy. We were in a rut in the early eighties. And I didn’t do anything to stop it.” At that point not even Hart’s proactive attitude could help.
By the time they began congregating at Fantasy Garcia was barely the Garcia they had known a decade before. He was now three hundred pounds with swollen ankles; his hair was increasingly white, long, and scraggly, and he seemed easily distracted. It wasn’t unusual for him to arrive late and head for the bathroom, and he didn’t seem to bathe with much frequency. One of his in-jokes around Front Street—“I stink, therefore I am”—was a particularly ghoulish slice of dark humor. Between takes at Fantasy Garcia would wander off again, and it was left to his devoted roadie, Steve Parish, to round him up and make sure Garcia was back at work.
That time had come once more, so they returned to the task at hand, and the troubles continued. Lesh’s headphone cords became tangled up in his bass. Garcia tried singing a lead vocal on a song, but his voice was raspy and off key. Flipping through a bunch of Stax and Volt records in his booth, Garcia turned grumpy, snapping at the others, “None of you seem to remember it tonight.”
“I’m searching for a part,” Weir replied.
“Play a rhythm fucking part,” Garcia snapped back.
The biting side of Garcia, especially during the music-making process, wasn’t new to the Dead and their friends. As Sue Swanson recalls, “He could get pissy with the other band members during practice if someone was fucking up or not getting the notes or the timing right.” As Swanson once witnessed firsthand, Garcia could also ramp up the anger if the time came. Back in Palo Alto in 1965, during one of the Warlocks’ practice sessions in her parents’ backyard, Garcia nearly came to blows with a friend who made some cracks about Swanson’s family. “Cut it out!” Garcia snapped, almost punching the guy. To Swanson the incident showed Garcia’s gallant side: “He really loved women. He was an old-style guy that way: ‘Don’t mess with women,’ ‘the weaker sex,’ whatever you want to call it. With me it was ‘Don’t mess with someone’s little sister.’” But it was also a sign of something he once said to her: “I could be the nicest guy on the block or the meanest guy on the block.” She could tell from the tone in his voice that he meant it.
Equally telling were the conversations Garcia was now having about music. Few doubted he loved playing and singing his songs or other people’s; it was the one place where everything felt right. Garcia was also known for his openness to music that didn’t sound anything like the Dead’s; he’d even tried to appreciate the rap albums his daughter Trixie played for him. But one day in 1984 he and Arkush sat around and listened to Prince’s new single, “When Doves Cry.” Uncharacteristically Garcia glowered: “There’s no bass.” He was right, but Arkush was struck by his response. “An earlier Jerry would have said, ‘That’s cool and interesting,’” he says. “This Jerry said, ‘That’s wrong.’ The walls were going up.”
Days and days into what were proving to be frustrating sessions, Garcia was spending so much time in the Fantasy bathroom that Hart suggested a microphone and recording wires be run right into the john so Garcia could record there. Hart later chuckled at the story, but Garcia, who didn’t like to be confronted with issues about his personal life, gruffly dismissed the idea.
It was time to stop, at least for the day. Nailing a finished version of “Keep Your Day Job” was still proving to be a Sisyphean task, and Garcia wasn’t the only one irritated. During their next break Kreutzmann was clearly irked at something and, in the lounge, began swinging his arms in the air. Thankfully Kreutzmann told himself to calm down, and Garcia, always one to make sure the family held it together, jumped into the fray: he began chatting up Kreutzmann about different rhythm parts for the song and jazz drummers and rhythms, even thumping out a beat on a table to demonstrate how a boogie-woogie rhythm could be incorporated into the song. The tension defused, Kreutzmann gave Weir a friendly hug, and the two returned to the recording room. But Garcia was done for the day, and Parish took him home.
Throughout their time at Fantasy Kaffel tried to edit together different takes of songs for a complete, final version, or something close to it. It was a common enough way to make records, but even that approach wasn’t yielding much. Kaffel thought a few of the songs were starting to come together, but the band never went back and finished them up. “With most bands you do a track and then do overdubs,” he says. “With the Dead we never got to that point. You never got the feeling you were getting stuff done. Everything was always a bit up in the air. You didn’t know if you had something or if you would come back
to it. It’s not like they were checking things off a list.”
The next few weeks would play out along those lines. After a few more sessions, ending on March 10, hardly anything was accomplished. They’d spent almost five weeks in the studio, recording only half that time. (And even then sometimes the players would be only Kreutzmann and Hart putting down drum tracks.) Kaffel would later have no memory of recording any vocals, although one track from that period, an early version of “West L.A. Fadeaway,” would surface years later. For Lesh the sessions were particularly exasperating. “It didn’t amount to anything at all,” he says. “All these people were coming by, and they all brought their stashes. ‘Break it out, break it out, break it out.’ By the time we got through everybody’s stash, we’d been there for eight hours and nothing had been done and everybody wanted to go home. That was a real joke.” As one Dead office employee recalls, “It was called the Fantasy Record, because it was a fantasy.”
Kaffel heard no out-front complaints: no one said he was unhappy, and no one expressed outright anger about what had or hadn’t taken place. One by one the band members simply stopped showing up at the studio for work. It was if the wheels were coming off one spin at a time. The studio sat empty for a few additional days before the Dead’s crew reappeared to box up all their gear and return it to Front Street. By the middle of March the only sign that the Dead had been there was Weir’s bottle of wine, sticking out from the wall as a reminder of what could have been and what wasn’t.
A happy and recovered Garcia onstage during the “Touch of Grey” video shoot.
© JAY BLAKESBERG
