That said, the Grateful Dead opened their short set that afternoon with one of the most powerful songs ever written about the perils of nuclear war, “Morning Dew,” by the Canadian folksinger Bonnie Dobson. The song’s setting is the world after a nuclear holocaust, and it takes the form of a conversation between the last man and last woman left alive:
I thought I heard a baby cry this morning
Thought I heard a baby cry today
You didn’t hear no baby cry this morning
You didn’t hear no baby cry today
Far from being some blatant political screed, however, “Morning Dew” is more evocative and elliptical, a mood piece that’s really its own world. It instantly became one of the Dead’s most popular tunes, and it remained so until Garcia’s death. And in some ways the song exemplifies the kind of ballads Garcia and Robert Hunter would later write—melodically beautiful, even exultant, but lyrically bittersweet and mournful.
Less than a week after the Human Be-In, the Dead, their managers and a few friends, including Rosie McGee and Mountain Girl (who had just moved into 710 with Jerry), drove down to Los Angeles to record the Dead’s first album for Warner Bros. Records. Dave Hassinger, who’d engineered classic Rolling Stones hits like “Satisfaction,” “It’s All Over Now,” “Lady Jane” and “Paint It, Black,” as well as records by the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Yardbirds, Elvis Presley and the Airplane, was brought in to produce the sessions, which took place over four days at RCA’s Studio A in Hollywood—the same studio where Garcia had helped the Airplane make Surrealistic Pillow.
“We went in and did the album very, very fast—less than a week,” Hassinger recalled. “At that time I didn’t know them, and looking back I wish we could have had more time and done some things a little differently. But it was my understanding that these were songs that they’d really played a lot and they wanted to essentially get them down the way they played them live. I’d made two or three trips up to the Bay Area and seen them at the Fillmore, and I thought they were dynamite. What I was after on the album was to capture as much of the energy as I could.”
A month after the sessions, but before the record had been released, Garcia characterized the album as “honest. It sounds just like us. It even has mistakes on it. But it also has a certain amount of excitement on it. It sounds like we felt good when we were making it. It sounds like one of our good sets.”
But by the early ’70s Garcia’s evaluation of the group’s maiden effort had shifted a bit: “At that time we had no real record consciousness,” Garcia said. “We were completely naive about it. . . . So we went down there and, what was it we had? Dexamyl? Some sort of diet-watcher’s speed, and pot and stuff like that. So in three nights we played some hyperactive music. That’s what’s embarrassing about that record now: the tempo was way too fast.”
In terms of the song selection, the record reflected “simply what we were doing onstage,” Garcia said. “But in reality, the way we played was not really too much the way that record was. Usually we played tunes that lasted a long time because we like to play a lot. And when you’re playing for people who are dancing and getting high—you can dance easy to a half-hour tune and you can even wonder why it ended so soon. So for us the whole thing was weird ’cause we went down there and turned out songs real fast—less than three minutes, which is real short.” (In fact, five of the nine songs on the record were under two and a half minutes; very unusual for the Grateful Dead.)
Rushed tempos aside, the album nicely captures some of the breadth of the Dead’s uptempo ballroom repertoire, with a solid mixture of blues- and folk-derived tunes, including “Morning Dew” (shortened slightly for the record); radical rearrangements of the ’20s jug band blues “New Minglewood Blues,” “Sitting on Top of the World” and “Viola Lee Blues”; the Blue Ridge Mountains chestnut “Cold Rain and Snow”; Bay Area folk/blues singer Jesse Fuller’s early ’60s number “Beat It On Down the Line”; and the late-’40s blues standard “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” (which was Pigpen’s lone lead vocal on the album). Additionally, the album featured two frenetic rock ’n’ roll originals: “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion),” written by the group under the fanciful pseudonym McGannahan Skjellyfetti (derived from a novel by pacifist author-artist Kenneth Patchen); and “Cream Puff War,” with words and music by Garcia.
“The Golden Road” is a fine bit of aural fluff dominated by fast, ringing electric guitars and an overdubbed acoustic picked by Garcia, a swirling Pigpen organ line and Garcia’s bright lead vocal, which almost sounds like he’s smiling as sings:
See that girl barefootin’ along
Whistlin’ and singin’ she’s a-carryin’ on
Got laughin’ in her eyes, dancin’ in her feet
She’s a neon light diamond
She can live on the street.
Then the band joins in on the chorus:
Hey, hey, come right away
Come join the party every day.
“‘The Golden Road’ was our effort at nailing down some of that [early Haight] feeling, I guess,” Garcia said. “That was sort of our group writing experience before Hunter was with us. We kept it simple. But what could you say [about the scene]? ‘We took a bunch of acid and had a lot of fun’?”
Garcia’s “Cream Puff War” is much darker both musically and lyrically. It sketches a portrait of a relationship gone bad (presumably not his) in a manner that’s somewhat reminiscent of bitter Dylan tunes like “Positively 4th Street” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” though not nearly as cleverly. Jerry once said he became a lyric writer “only by default. I felt my lyric writing was woefully inadequate.” And about “Cream Puff War” specifically, he said in the mid-’80s, “That’s one of those tunes that’s so old it’s totally embarrassing. I’d just as soon everybody forgot about it.” He tried to: a few months after the first record came out, Garcia dropped both “Cream Puff War” and “The Golden Road,” and he never played either again (much to the chagrin of Deadheads).
Of the album’s nine songs, only two gave the band a chance to stretch out much, “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” and “Viola Lee Blues.” In concert, “Schoolgirl” was always exciting because it contained a solo passage where the band quickened the tempo for a while before falling back to the song’s midtempo shuffle. On the album, the song faded during the uptempo section; still, it was an effective showcase for the band’s considerable blues chops. “Viola Lee Blues” had a similar construction, but rather than suddenly changing speeds, it contained a long middle jam that built slowly and deliberately, almost like a raga, with bandmembers expertly constructing an ascending line that over the course of a few minutes rose to a feverish crescendo of clanging guitars, screaming organ and sheer cacophonous noise.
Live, the group sometimes kept the jam in “Viola Lee Blues” at the climax for upwards of half a minute—an extraordinarily long time for something that loud and furious—before the tension was released by dropping back to the tune’s original gait. Though powerful by any standard, the album version of “Viola Lee Blues” is still tamer than what the band usually unleashed in the ballrooms, where writhing and jerking dancers frequently added to the mounting din with their own ecstatic screams and shouts as the music and earsplitting feedback and human wails joined to create a deafening tidal wave of sound that always seemed to lift the dance hall off the ground. In late 1966 and early 1967, “Viola Lee Blues” was the song that best showed the raging beast inside of the Grateful Dead, the chaotic and unpredictable edge that had been somewhat subsumed since the Acid Tests. Not surprisingly, it was the trippers’ favorite song.
“We’ve always liked the long form,” Garcia said. “For us, taking an idea and just annihilating it worked great in that context, because the dancers loved it. There they were, high on whatever, and they had the energy to dance for hours. So you could take [a song] and [do whatever you wanted to it] and you weren’t violating the dancers’ space and you weren’t failing to ent
ertain them. And they also had the option of stopping whenever they wanted to and going someplace else, and so the whole thing had a sense of free-flow about it. I’ve thought about this: There’s no situation that I’ve been able to come up with that would have allowed the Grateful Dead to do what we used to do; the kind of range we wanted to cover. You couldn’t have done it in a conventional bar, you couldn’t have done it at a conventional concert.”
If the album offered few hints about the direction the Dead’s original material would take over the next year, it at least served as a strong showcase for the Dead’s instrumental prowess. Hassinger and engineer Dick Bogert did an excellent job of capturing the intricacies of Phil Lesh’s dynamic and tuneful bass work and Bill Kreutzmann’s fluid, high-energy drumming, with its subtle cymbal splashes and rapid-fire cymbal-snare combinations that clearly owed more to Elvin Jones than Charlie Watts. But it is Garcia’s guitar that is most prominent in the mix on most tunes, and even on this first major outing the breadth of his playing is readily apparent, as he moves easily from blues to heavily accented country picking, sometimes even within the same solo.
Since the Dead never decided to be a blues band or a country band or a straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll band, or any particular style of group, Garcia had the freedom to take his inspiration from anything that caught his fancy, whether it was techniques he’d enjoyed as a banjo player, or B. B. King, or George Harrison, or sarod master Ali Akbar Khan, or Bakersfield country guitarists like Don Rich (from Buck Owens’s Buckaroos) and Roy Nichols (from Merle Haggard’s Strangers), or even the “hot” jazz of the great Belgian gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt and his violinist partner, Stephane Grappelli. Garcia and the other members of the band reveled in their eclecticism and their personal eccentricities as players, with the result that they each developed a unique instrumental voice in their ceaseless exploration of different kinds of music.
The first Dead album, called simply The Grateful Dead, was released in mid-March of 1967, and it was an immediate smash hit—in Northern California, if almost nowhere else. Warner Bros. dutifully released a single of “The Golden Road” backed by “Cream Puff War,” but there’s little evidence that the record got much airplay on many AM radio stations outside the Bay Area, and the proliferation of progressive, “free-form” format FM radio stations was still a few months away in major cities—KMPX, the pioneering San Francisco FM rock station founded by Tom Donahue, started broadcasting in June.
Still, the album was a big deal in San Francisco, and it symbolized the rising fortunes of the cream of the local bands. Garcia appeared on the front and back covers of the album smiling benignly and dressed in an indigo paisley velour shirt, his long black hair crowned by an American flag top hat. In the credits he was listed as Jerry “Captain Trips” Garcia, a Prankster moniker concocted by Kesey in late 1965, which became an embarrassing albatross around Garcia’s neck almost immediately: “That’s bullshit,” he said of the tag in the early ’70s. Garcia had no interest in being known as the “captain” of anything, let alone people’s trips.
“Jerry was kind of like the patriarch, although that’s not quite the right word,” Rosie McGee says. “I remember very early on going to his house and it was like he was holding court, even back then. I got the impression that, well, I couldn’t imagine him going to hang out at somebody else’s house. People came to his house instead; certainly that was true in the Haight. People gathered around him naturally, and I think it was because of his intelligence and his imagination. Even back then he had charisma. But he was also always very self-deprecating: ‘I’m just a guy who plays guitar.’”
A charmingly innocent description of Garcia, delivered in classic fanzine style, appeared in a spring 1967 edition of the Olompali Sunday Times, a humble but spirited free mimeographed newsletter put out by the Dead’s fan club, The Golden Road to Unlimited Devotion, headed by Sue Swanson and Connie Bonner: “Jer—talented, talented . . . has a lot to say . . . digs girls . . . very open . . . loves orange juice . . . tells the best stories . . . warm . . . hates dishonesty (they all do) . . . owns a pedal steel guitar . . . Leo.” (In the same article we learn that Pigpen has a bright red bathrobe, Weir’s nickname is “Mr. Bob Weir Trouble,” Bill “sleeps a lot . . . eats a lot . . . digs jazz drummers . . . has a shiny new Mustang . . .” and Phil “has a quick mind . . . doesn’t bleach his hair.”)
In late March the Dead played six shows at a short-lived San Francisco nightclub called the Rock Garden. The series is notable for two completely unrelated reasons: it marked the first time Garcia’s mother had gone to see her son play since his folk days; and sharing the bill with the Dead for those shows was the jazzy Charles Lloyd Quartet, who unquestionably influenced the Dead’s musical direction.
It was Jerry’s brother, Tiff, who cajoled their mother to go see the Grateful Dead. “I’d say, ‘Mom, you gotta hear this. Will you listen?” Tiff remembers. “But she was very stubborn and only liked to listen to certain things. She liked easy-listening music. She saw Jerry a couple of times when he was with Sara down in Palo Alto, but she didn’t want to know about the rock ’n’ roll. And then of course there was the whole drug thing and ‘Captain Trips’ and all that. She was a nurse so she knew a bit about drugs. It didn’t surprise her. She wasn’t shocked or anything. She might not have liked it, but she was always proud of him. Then I took her to this place called the Rock Garden, in the outer Mission. The Dead were between gigs and I helped them get work there because I had helped this guy rebuild the club. So my mom went and saw them and she liked them. In fact she went a couple of times. But because of the experience my father went through, the music business wasn’t the best thing you could do for a career in her eyes. She was from the era when a lot of people viewed all musicians as criminals and lowlifes who couldn’t fit into society.”
As for the attitude of the other members of the Garcia clan, Jerry’s aunt Leonor says, “It was terrible during that time because they were calling him ‘Captain Trips’ and we were hiding that from my parents—we didn’t want them to know that he was into drugs and all that. That sort of thing really shocked my mother. For a long time Jerry completely ignored everyone in the family. He didn’t want any part of the family. I think it was because he was into drugs and he knew we didn’t approve. I was even ashamed to admit he was my nephew.”
The New York–based Charles Lloyd Quartet was a significant force in the San Francisco scene because they managed to make free-ranging improvisational jazz that was accessible to rock fans. Lloyd’s band, which, besides the talented reedsman, included pianist Keith Jarrett, drummer Jack DeJohnette and bassist Cecil McBee, was one of the first jazz groups to be invited to play the Fillmore, and Lloyd jammed with the Dead at the Human Be-In, adding breathy flute to a long workout on “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl.” It was Garcia’s idea to book Lloyd’s group at the Rock Garden, and he was such a fan of the group that when he and Phil Lesh appeared on Tom Donahue’s KMPX radio program as guest deejays in April 1967, one of the songs he chose to play was Lloyd’s trippy “Dream Weaver,” a potent dose of acidy jazz from late 1966 that presaged some of the free-floating but intense places the Dead’s music would go in the last part of 1967 and early 1968. “Dream Weaver” is a sort of proto–“Dark Star,” complete with passages of spellbinding dissonance and gently cascading melody streams.
“I think we probably influenced them a bit to start opening up their improvisations,” Lloyd says of the Dead. “When we were at the Rock Garden, we traded sets and they’d all be hanging around in the wings when we played, really listening. Jazz has always been a music of freedom and inspiration and wonder and consolation, and the Dead definitely got something from that.”
By the spring of 1967 Mountain Girl was well settled in 710 and she and Jerry were unquestionably a couple. “It was a happy house, it really was,” she says. “We had a great time. Tangerine was the only girlfriend living there at first. Veronica [Pigpen’s girlfriend] would come by a lot
. She was very sharp-tongued and hilariously funny. The fan club had an office downstairs. It was a lot of mouths to feed. I collected the money from everybody—fifteen dollars a week, except I don’t think Pigpen ever paid, and I was mad at him for that. Then I’d go down to the Chinese grocery store down the street and buy pork chops and brown rice. I was not a good cook. I knew how to make Prankster stew—anything over brown rice, usually just brown rice and veggies. We went through lots of frozen orange juice, too.”
There was a constant stream of visitors to 710 day and night, as each bandmember had his own intimates and acquaintances, “and then all the other people associated with the scene had people they brought around—Owsley and Hank Harrison had their own circles,” M.G. notes. “Rock was the ultimate conduit for all sorts of weird people, like millionaires and people with foreign connections.” Visitors from the Palo Alto days frequently stopped by, and Neal Cassady had his own little space in the attic, where he’d stay for a few days every month or so in the course of his travels.
“As far as I could tell [Cassady] never slept,” wrote John Barlow, a childhood friend of Weir’s (and his songwriting partner beginning in the early ’70s) who first encountered the Beat hero at 710. “He tossed back hearts of Mexican Dexedrine by the shot-sized bottle, grinned, cackled and jammed on into the night. Despite such behavior, he seemed, at forty-one, a paragon of robust health. With a face out of a recruiting poster (leaving aside a certain glint in the eyes) and a torso, usually raw, by Michelangelo, he didn’t even seem quite mortal.
“Neal and Bobby were perfectly contrapuntal. As Cassady rattled incessantly, Bobby had fallen mostly mute, stilled perhaps by macrobiotics, perhaps a less than passing grade in the Acid Tests, or, more likely, some combination of every strange thing that had caused him to start thinking much faster than anyone could talk.”
Garcia: An American Life Page 21
