If things were unsettled, even chaotic, on the home front, musically the Dead were entering a new phase in the fall of 1967, as Mickey Hart became integrated into the lineup and the group began to play more open-ended original compositions in addition to the blues, R&B and jug tunes that had been their stock-in-trade the first two years. The band spent untold hours rehearsing at the old, run-down Potrero Theater, clear across town, developing their new songs, investigating different kinds of beats and grooves, experimenting with dynamics and learning how to move seamlessly from one tune or musical feeling to another. The Dead had always been considered a jamming band, but during this period there was a quantum leap in the complexity of their musical constructions, the ferociousness and abandon with which they charged into uncharted realms, and the originality of their collective vision.
Although the group had occasionally linked two songs in the same key together to form one longer piece—on blues numbers like “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” and “You Don’t Love Me,” for example—the songs the band wrote in 1967 and ’68 were specifically designed to open up and give the band the flexibility to move in whatever direction their inventions took them. The first great jamming vehicle along those lines was the combination of “Alligator” and “Caution,” which rolled from the chunky, syncopated rhythm of the former tune to the locomotive drive of the latter via a long and always unpredictable jam that served as connective tissue between the two. In the fall of 1967 the band also introduced another multilayered original that incorporated several different tempo changes and textural shifts—“That’s It for the Other One.”
The song opens with a lovely midtempo passage called “Cryptical Envelopment,” written and sung by Garcia, and once described by him as “an extension of my own personal symbology for the ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’—the old folk song—which I always thought of as being a sort of Christ parable. Something fuzzy like that; fuzzy Christianity.”
The other day they waited
The sky was dark and faded
Solemnly they stated
He has to die, you know he has to die
Just as the Dead’s version of “Morning Dew” derives much of its power from the stark contrast between the beauty of the melody and the bleakness of the words, the folky lilt and shimmer of “Cryptical Envelopment” is deceptive, masking a darker lyric thrust.
Garcia’s part of the song ends abruptly, and then Hart and Kreutzmann come rat-tat-tatting in together, their drum lines rolling inexorably toward each other until they meet at a single point where they’re joined by Garcia, Lesh, Weir and Pigpen in a fireball blast, which then gives way to the relentless, galloping gait of “The Other One.” “That was sort of a serious, hole-in-the-wall psychedelic explosion,” Garcia said of the song, which was based around a revolving pattern in 12/8 time conceived by Weir and Kreutzmann:
Spanish lady come to me
She lays on me this rose
It rainbow spirals round and round
It trembles and explodes
It left a smoking crater of my mind
I like to blow away
But the heat came ’round and busted me
For smiling on a cloudy day
Comin’, comin’, comin’ around, comin’ around
Comin’ around in a circle
“The Other One” is less a tune than it is a rhythmic shell capable of housing an infinite number of variations within its constantly rotating figure. Lesh and Garcia might chase each other for several bars—stalker and prey—then become intertwined, the bass and lead notes tumbling over each other chaotically, or miraculously fusing together in an intricate upward dance, while Weir’s rhythm guitar cuts deep slashes in the air around them and between them, and the drummers keep pushing the jam forward at a breakneck pace.
Eventually the “Other One” jam would make a final quick turn, like a speeding roadster trying to execute a hard left, the “tiger paws” rhythm (as Weir once called it) would break apart, and the band would fall back into the gentle strains of the last verse of “Cryptical Envelopment”:
And when the day had ended
With rainbow colors blended
His mind remained unbended
He had to die, you know he had to die
That passage then flowed naturally into a series of jams that allowed Garcia to lead the others through a web of different but related melody-based variations rooted in “Cryptical” ’s moderate, loping 4/4. If “The Other One” jam always seemed to be hurtling out of control and headed toward certain calamity, the jams after “Cryptical Envelopment” were more like watching the ocean at sunset, with waves undulating in the twilight, breaking on the sandy shoal and then receding, changing ever so slightly one to the next. That the Dead could create such a complex, colorful and intensely detailed sonic universe within the fifteen to twenty minutes “That’s It for the Other One” usually lasted in those days was a remarkable achievement, unparalleled in the rock world at that point. And when the Dead then attached that song to “New Potato Caboose,” which offered a whole other set of kaleidoscopic musical pictures, and linked that to “Alligator/Caution,” the band could play for an hour or more without stopping between songs, taking the crowd through an amazing series of moods in the process. This had never been done before in rock. Even in jazz, where Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Charles Lloyd and others had been playing twenty- and thirty-minute compositions for some time, there were rarely attempts at fusing pieces together the way the Dead did, much less figuring out on the spot, through inspired improvisation, ways to create transitions between songs that hadn’t previously been joined; no easy feat. The Dead succeeded at this because they dedicated themselves completely and selflessly to developing their sound as a group, and then put in the hours to thoroughly explore every interesting musical possibility that presented itself.
“You can’t play the way the Grateful Dead plays without working at it,” Garcia said. “It’s not something that just happened to us. It didn’t happen overnight, either. There was a long, slow process that brought that into being.”
“The essence of this kind of playing is really to be open to the context you’re in,” says David Gans, author of several books on the band and a guitarist who has played Dead music himself for more than twenty-five years. “When it’s really working something happens and you are a delighted witness to its creation, just like everybody in the audience; you’re just the person who has his hands on the guitar neck and can take something and go someplace with it. So if you’re cruising along in a groove coming out of a song, and you’re looking at a place, like where the signature part of a song starts to drop away and then you go somewhere else, what you’re doing is listening to what the other musicians are doing, and that creates a space into which new music, ideally, will fall. So it’s what you’re doing, but it’s also what the other guys are doing, and it’s trusting each other and supporting each other. It’s not about individual virtuosity as much as it is about how well you keep your periphery open to influence. It’s what makes brilliant new structures emerge out of the void.
“I’ve always thought that part of what made the Dead so great was their willingness to cooperate,” Gans continues. “Although everyone adored Jerry’s solos, the thing that made him such a magical player was how well he blended in and cooperated with the others. Every band needs a reliable source of inspiration, and the glory of Jerry was that for many years he was almost never at a loss for a musical thought, but also never really obsessed with dominating everything. So if an idea needed to come up, he’d be there with one, but it was also an idea that was freely shared. Then somebody else could answer it, and that was the thing—laying out an idea and then listening to what it educed from the other guys. And it was that way with all of them. The job of playing Grateful Dead music is to open yourself up to divine inspiration, to put yourself at the disposal of the collective muse, and that means being a good listener.”
For the musicians, listening to an
d making sense of the tremendous amount of musical information pouring out of the amplifiers and blasting from the drums in the heat of an intense jam required acute concentration, to say the least. Often it was unclear who, if anyone, was perched on the leading edge of the jam, and who was listening to whom at any particular moment. So the way jams progressed depended on each member of the band fitting his part into a fluid musical stream and at the same time trying both to direct that stream and to anticipate where it could or would go next. That meant that sometimes jams would unfold with a mellifluous all-for-one, one-for-all directivity, and sometimes it would be more like a clash of the titans. This is a band that always reveled in its differences and in fact turned them to its advantage.
* * *
The Dead went back to Los Angeles to resume work on their second album, which became Anthem of the Sun, in the middle of November 1967, this time at American Studios in North Hollywood rather than at RCA. Unfortunately, the change in scenery didn’t have much effect on the band. They continued to have problems recording the basic tracks for their new songs tight enough to satisfy either themselves or Dave Hassinger, who was feeling increasingly frustrated by the band’s seeming inability to realize their ambitious compositions in the studio. Basic tracks on “Cryptical Envelopment” and “New Potato Caboose” were completed, but rather than continue on in L.A., Hassinger and the group decided to travel to New York to work in a pair of highly regarded eight-track studios there, Century Sound and Olmstead Studios.
“One of the things that we built into our contract which was unheard of at the time was unlimited studio time,” Garcia said. “We knew we’d have to pay for it, but we wanted as much as we wanted. Our strategy was: ‘We want to play in the studio. We want to learn how the studio works. We don’t want somebody else doing it. It’s our music, we want to do it.’ So what we did essentially was we bought ourselves an education, and the way we achieved it was to spend lots and lots of time in the studio fooling around with stuff—‘Let’s see what happens when you [turn this knob]: “Skrawwwwwkkk!” Oops, that’s not going to work. Let’s try this over here: “Eeee-eeee-eee!” Nope!’ It was a trial-and-error kind of thing.”
And it drove poor Dave Hassinger crazy, to the point where in the middle of the Century Sound sessions he quit the project and flew back to Los Angeles. “I gave up in New York,” he said. “We’d been working a long time on that second album, and they had put down some new tracks in New York and no one could sing them. Nobody could sing the thing, and at that point they were experimenting too much in my opinion. They didn’t know what the hell they were looking for. I think if you experiment you should have at least some sense of what you’re ultimately going after, but they were going from one end of the spectrum to the other.”
After Hassinger left, “We found ourselves with enough music on tape for maybe a third of an album, so we had to figure out what to do,” Phil Lesh said. “But we did have a lot of live performances [recorded],” and it dawned on the band members that they could actually combine live and studio recordings into a sonic sculpture that would sound like, in Phil’s original conception, “a thousand-petal lotus flowering from nothing.” Amazingly enough, Warner Bros. decided to let the Dead finish the record themselves and even allowed them to record in a studio close to home—Coast Recorders, a well-equipped facility in San Francisco. To help them on the technical end the band enlisted Dan Healy, who had replaced Owsley as the Dead’s principal live sound engineer after Bear was busted in the fall of 1967. Healy had been part of the Bay Area studio world before he became involved in the San Francisco rock scene, so he was the perfect choice to help the Dead on their maiden voyage of self-production. Armed with exceptional-sounding four-track live recordings made by Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor in Los Angeles in November 1967 and on a tour of the Northwest in late January 1968, Healy, Garcia and Lesh hunkered down at Coast for the complicated task of constructing the album.
“We weren’t making a record in the normal sense,” Garcia said, “we were making a collage. We were trying to do something completely different, which didn’t even have to do with a concept. It had to do with an approach that’s more like electronic music or concrete music, where you are actually assembling bits and pieces toward an enhanced nonrealistic representation. That is really the sense of what we were doing.”
Indeed, Anthem of the Sun is a carefully constructed montage of live and studio performances that flow in and out of each other and are stacked to very strange effect. Each side is a continuous piece of music with no breaks. Side one opens with “That’s It for the Other One,” followed by a transitional section put together by Phil’s old friend from the electronic music world, Tom Constanten, using some of John Cage’s “prepared piano” techniques—in which gyroscopes and other objects were placed inside the piano to create unusual sounds for a bizarre, even scary, sonic tapestry. As T.C. said, “I was given the interesting task of whipping [the music] up into a greater frenzy, ultimately causing it to explode, and out of the rubble of the explosion and the smoke and the ashes and everything would come the delicious sounds of ‘New Potato Caboose.’” That song is followed by Weir’s unusual “Born Cross-Eyed.”
Side two is a mind-bending meld of “Alligator” and “Caution” that, in addition to opening with a chorus of kazoos (shades of the jug band!), at points features multiple performances of similar but still different passages from different shows, all playing at once, as well as studio tracks that speed up and slow down unnaturally. Solos fade in and out, walls of feedback are erected then torn apart, three or four Pigpen vocals are woven together in parts. “There are places of extreme awkwardness,” Healy admitted later, “but it wasn’t hurting for imagination.” Garcia said, “We mixed it for the hallucinations,” and thirty years down the line, Anthem of the Sun is still a very, very weird album. No question about it, Anthem of the Sun was one for the heads, from the dizzying mix of sounds on the album to the seriously psychedelic cover painting—by Phil and T.C.’s friend Bill Walker—depicting the bandmembers as six heads of an incredibly intricate fire-breathing monster-deity out of Tibetan/Haight-Ashbury mythology.
The album as a whole works as a sort of metaphorical acid trip, with passages of clarity followed by passages of tremendous confusion, frightening and funny moments juxtaposed, fabulous detail emerging from dense sonic squalls and cryptic lyrics that somehow managed to mirror the album’s variegated musical textures. It’s an often dark, even troubling work that couldn’t have been farther removed from the happy bounce of “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion).” This was music made by people who had obviously spent lots of time perched precariously on the psychedelic edge, witnessing heavens and hells worthy of Hieronymus Bosch, and were reporting back on what they’d experienced. Anyone who bought Anthem expecting to hear San Francisco “flower power” in full bloom got quite a shock. But then the Dead were never that kind of band, despite how they might have seemed on a sunny Sunday in the Panhandle playing to blissed-out dancers under the tall eucalyptus trees. This was, after all, the acid band, born out of the chaos of Muir Beach and Watts and the Trips Festival, and always looking for new pathways to the deep beyond.
Driving away Dave Hassinger earned the Grateful Dead what they sought—the autonomy to make records their own way. And it effectively frightened off Warner Bros. executives from further meddling in the band’s affairs. “The record company had a funny relationship with us,” Mickey Hart said. “They were scared of us. They wouldn’t visit us because it was too dangerous. They couldn’t eat anything or drink anything around us because they were afraid everything had LSD in it, so they never really showed up.”
At the same time, the group was establishing their independence in other ways, too. Their tour of the Pacific Northwest with Quicksilver Messenger Service in late January and early February of 1968 was booked without the aid of conventional promoters. And, closer to home, the Dead decided to circumvent Bill Graham and Chet Helms and play exclu
sively at the 2,000-capacity Carousel Ballroom on Van Ness Avenue in downtown San Francisco, which had been taken over by friends of theirs. The Carousel had been a popular venue for big band dances in the ’40s and ’50s as the El Patio Ballroom, and was all but unused by the winter of 1968, though it was still owned by a very successful Dublin-based ballroom operator named Bill Fuller. Ron Rakow, a onetime Wall Street whiz kid who’d moved to San Francisco in the mid-’60s and befriended Rock Scully, Danny Rifkin and, in time, the band, negotiated a deal with Fuller that allowed the freaks to lease the hall for no money down, but a guaranteed rent of $15,000 a month plus a percentage of the gross receipts. The Dead, along with Quicksilver, first played the Carousel on January 17, 1968, a Ben Franklin’s birthday bash that was a rousing success. But the official grand opening came on Valentine’s Day, with the Dead and Country Joe and the Fish sharing the bill for a concert broadcast on KMPX—quite a coup for both the Dead and the Carousel.
Phil Lesh once listed that show as his favorite Dead concert ever; certainly it was one of the best of that era, and one that shows the transition the Dead made around this time from a group that played mainly short cover tunes to one whose sets were dominated by original songs connected by long jams. It was one of those nights when it seemed as though nearly everyone in the place was dosed, which always put an interesting spin on things.
Garcia: An American Life Page 24
