“When I heard that Jerry had bought a pedal steel,” John Dawson recalls, “I boldly invited myself over to his house to hear what it sounded like. I brought my guitar along and I played him a couple of my songs and he literally sat there and dove into the pedal steel guitar, like jumping into a swimming pool without even checking the water. We had a nice evening and that was really the beginning of the whole New Riders thing.”
Dawson had been on the periphery of Garcia’s world since the Palo Alto days. He had been part of the early acid scene on the Peninsula and was a witness to the birth of the Grateful Dead, but he was never very interested in playing rock ’n’ roll himself, and instead spent hours listening to Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, “getting off on how they used electric guitars to make this real sparse but beautiful sound,” Dawson says. “Their harmonies were crisp and clean and the songs made good sense. If you were a guitar player and you wanted to play country, you had to listen to Don Rich [Owens’s guitarist]. Everybody did, including Jerry, of course. We’d all listen to that Carnegie Hall record that Buck Owens did and try to figure out how [Rich] made those sounds.”
Dawson had seen Garcia on and off through the Dead’s first few years, but it wasn’t until Garcia bought the pedal steel that their musical worlds finally intersected. “At that time, I had a gig at this coffeehouse/hofbrau in Menlo Park called the Underground, playing Wednesday evenings, and I invited Jerry to come down and join me,” Dawson says. “It was just the two of us—me on guitar and Jerry on pedal steel. I would play my own songs and I was also doing covers—Dylan stuff like ‘I Shall Be Released,’ and Merle Haggard’s ‘Mama Tried’ and Del Reeves’s ‘Diesel on My Tail.’ At that point Garcia was already becoming Garcia. He was already a bit of a celebrity. So once the word got out that it was me and Garcia there—and it was more Garcia than me, of course, because no one knew who I was; but it was my thing that Garcia was doing his thing to—we got some pretty big crowds that summer. The teen crowd would come out of the nearby pizza parlor and they’d fill up the place. It got to be a nice little scene.
“At first, Jerry didn’t have the slightest idea what the real steel players were up to. What he played was just his idea of what they were doing and what sounded good to him. He basically just put on the finger picks, turned the thing on and just started playing. He was checking it out: ‘Let’s see, this goes here. If I do this, this happens. What if I do this?’ He didn’t read any books; he just sat down and played it. Pick the thing, step on a pedal, move the slide.
“After a while we decided to make a little band out of this,” Dawson continues. “David Nelson was available. He was living in Big Brother’s warehouse up in San Francisco—he was going to be a member of Big Brother; this is after Janis left, of course. She went on and formed her own band somewhere along the line. But Nelson had always loved country music, so he was up for being in a band. Then we needed a bass player, and [Bob] Matthews tried it and Hunter was interested, but I can’t actually remember ever playing with him. So finally we said, ‘Hey Phil, won’t you play with us? It’s really simple shit—not like the stuff you play in the Dead.’ And Mickey was into it, so he joined. But he was always a little weird to play with because he likes off-rhythms. Billy plays the straight shit and Mickey plays the weird stuff against that. Anyway, we got together and we rehearsed at Mickey’s barn.” The band was dubbed the New Riders of the Purple Sage, after the famous Western novel by Zane Grey (with a nod to a Western swing band called the Riders of the Purple Sage).
By the beginning of June, Garcia occasionally played the pedal steel onstage at Dead shows, too, on songs like “Dire Wolf” and “Slewfoot.” Then, beginning in late August 1969, the Dead played their first few concerts with the New Riders as the opening act. “It was great,” Dawson says. “With simply two additions to the Grateful Dead’s tour you had a whole five-piece band.” It wasn’t until the middle of 1970, however, that the Grateful Dead–New Riders partnership really blossomed on the road.
The Grateful Dead played 145 gigs in 1969, and in no other year did they play such a broad variety of venues. Close to home they usually played the Carousel/Fillmore West, Winterland (where the Dead were still second-billed to the Airplane) and the Family Dog at the Great Highway (after Chet Helms had to close down the Avalon Ballroom). But they also played one-nighters at local colleges and high schools and, at year’s end, a few shows at the “New Old Fillmore”—a short-lived revival for the original Fillmore Auditorium. Out of town, shows happened at large and small colleges, medium-sized theaters, ballrooms here and there (though those were fast disappearing by mid-1969) and, of course, rock festivals.
Ever since Monterey in June 1967 there had been attempts all over the country to put on multi-act festivals, some of them successful, many of them not. The Dead had played a few of them—the Northern California Folk-Rock Festival in San Jose in May 1968; the Newport (California) Pop Festival in August ’68; the Sky River Festival in Sultan, Washington, in September ’68; the Big Rock Pow-Wow in West Hollywood, Florida, in May 1969—and by the summer of ’69 they had a well-established reputation as a good-time, good-vibes live band that always succeeded in getting a crowd up on its feet. (It didn’t matter that no one bought their records. The rap on the Dead was always “You gotta see ’em play live!”) So it’s not surprising that the promoters of a three-day festival taking place on a farm near the upstate New York town of Bethel in the middle of August 1969 would book the Dead, along with two dozen other acts. This, of course, was Woodstock.
It was never easy persuading the Dead to play these kinds of gigs. They were just as happy booking smaller but potentially groovier shows like the Celestial Synapse Celebration at the Fillmore West, where everyone took acid and danced till dawn, or the Expanded Spiritual Music Concert—a psychedelic Easter celebration the Dead were supposed to headline at Miami’s Dinner Key Auditorium but were eventually banned from because Jim Morrison had allegedly exposed himself there. The venue’s director, George McLean, viewed the Dead as “the same type of people and the same type of music as the Doors; it’s this underground pop,” he said at the time. Initially, the Dead were apprehensive about appearing at Woodstock, “but [festival promoter Michael] Lang’s people really went a long way to assuage us,” Rock Scully said. “They went after the Pranksters to be kind of overseers of security, and Wavy Gravy to help feed people and look after bum trips and all that kind of stuff, so eventually they met most of our demands and we believed it might run fairly smoothly.”
In the end, Bill Graham helped talk the Dead into playing the festival, and for his trouble Graham managed to land a then-unknown band he was managing—Santana—on the bill as well. The Dead were promised a hefty (for them) $15,000 for their hour-long set. “There were certainly other bands on the bill that were selling more records than us and could demand more money,” Scully said, “but they really wanted us to be there and thought we should be there—even then back East we were sort of a mythological, sociological movement rather than a musical one.”
The Dead were put on the schedule for Saturday afternoon—after Canned Heat, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Santana, Janis Joplin and Mountain, and before Sly and the Family Stone, the Who and the Jefferson Airplane; heavy company. The promoters put the band up in a Holiday Inn in the nearby town of Liberty, along with the Who, most of the Jefferson Airplane, Richie Havens and a few other acts, but there wasn’t much time for partying there—by Thursday evening, the day before the festival opened, it was obvious that the event was going to be much bigger than anyone had imagined, and with every road approaching the area completely clogged with traffic, the band opted to take helicopters to the concert site a day early.
What they found when they arrived was staggering—people as far as the eye could see, and not just in front of the stage, but everywhere. By Friday night there were close to 250,000 people, and another 100,000 or more hiked miles from cars and buses they abandoned on country back roads and even the New York St
ate Thruway the following day. With tens of thousands of people arriving by the hour, the promoters were forced to tear down the fences and let everyone in for free.
Garcia wandered casually around the festival site on Saturday, high on the Czechoslovakian acid that was making the rounds backstage. He spent some time at the Pranksters’ encampment, where there was a small “free stage” with an open mike for anybody who had a song to sing. The old Prankster bus, Furthur, was parked in a semicircle with other hippie buses next to the stage—this would be its last big road trip before it was literally put out to pasture on Kesey’s Oregon farm. Kesey himself didn’t go to Woodstock; he stayed home and played farmer instead. Mountain Girl was a no-show, too—she was five months pregnant (by Jerry) and wasn’t up for being in a crowded festival in hot and humid New York in August.
Hot, humid and rainy. There were fierce downpours on and off during much of Saturday, turning Max Yasgur’s farm into a giant mud bowl. There wasn’t enough food and fresh water to go around, and the limited number of portable toilets wouldn’t have been enough for a crowd half the size of the one that actually turned up.
No doubt everybody who went to Woodstock has a different survival story to tell, of hardships that rivaled the Twelve Labors of Hercules. Yes, there were bad trips and injuries and thousands of people who didn’t like it one bit and left early, dog-tired and disgusted. Everything we’ve ever heard about the festival is probably mostly true, even the stuff made up by the thousands of people who didn’t go but said they did. The myth—the epic story of biblical proportions!—is all-encompassing enough to absorb every tall and small tale thrown at it, because the essential truth of the festival is not in dispute: the vibes really were good for the most part, people did help each other out and the music by and large was outstanding, occasionally even transcendent.
So that’s some of the myth. But the Grateful Dead wouldn’t be the Grateful Dead if their experience of Woodstock didn’t deviate from that myth. They must have said it in countless interviews: “We sucked at Woodstock.” Through the years the band members have delightedly told the particulars of their Woodstock debacle with a mixture of mock horror and actual glee, as if failing miserably—while high on acid, no less—at the most famous concert of all time was a badge of honor (remember, “Never trust a Prankster!”), or, more likely, part of a great cosmic joke that they were the butt of. All of a sudden the Dead found themselves onstage, several hours late because their equipment was so heavy that it broke one of the rotating pallets it was placed on and had to be taken down and set up again after it was fixed. They’d hoped to go on in the fading light of afternoon to help the trippers make that sometimes difficult transition from day into evening, but instead it was pitch-dark when they hit the stage, and a howling wind was blowing down the hillside, actually threatening to move the huge stage backwards in the mud.
“We were just plumb atrocious,” Garcia said. “Jeez, we were awful! We were on a metal stage and it was raining to boot and I was high and I saw blue balls of electricity bouncing across the stage and leaping onto my guitar when I touched the strings.” To make matters worse, random CB radio signals kept erupting out of the PA while the band played, and “people behind the amplifiers kept yelling, ‘The stage is collapsing! The stage is collapsing!’” Garcia said.
“The thing about Woodstock,” he noted many years later, “was that you could feel the presence of invisible time travelers from the future who had come back to see it. You could sense the significance of the event as it was happening. There was a kind of swollen historicity—a truly pregnant moment. You definitely knew that this was a milestone; it was in the air. As a human being I had a wonderful time hanging out with friends in the music business and sharing great little jams. But our performance onstage was musically a total disaster that is best left forgotten.”
The Dead didn’t have much time to lick their wounds and contemplate the magnitude of their failure at Woodstock, and that’s probably a good thing. Four nights later they played at the Aqua Theater in Seattle, with the New Riders on the bill for the first time, and everyone was all smiles. The crowd dug the Riders’ country-rock and loved seeing Garcia sitting behind the pedal steel, a big grin peeking through his bushy black beard for nearly the whole set. And there was a string of other smaller festivals that summer where the Dead played considerably better than they had at Woodstock. The Bullfrog 2 Festival in St. Helens, Oregon, and the Vancouver Pop Festival both took place within a week of the Dead’s Woodstock appearance; the New Orleans Pop Festival was two weeks later.
Originally there had been plans to put on a three-day Wild West Festival the week after Woodstock at San Francisco’s Kezar Stadium, right next to Haight-Ashbury, but the event collapsed in the face of civic opposition and the ceaseless harangues of various radical politicos who believed the fest was going to be overpriced (at $3 a ticket!), insensitive to the needs and desires of the non-hippie community and a poor excuse to bring dozens of police—“pigs” in the parlance of the Left—into the neighborhood.
That fall, however, a plot was quietly hatched to put on a giant free concert in early December at the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park. Now ordinarily this might seem like off timing for an outdoor show in San Francisco, since December is smack-dab in the middle of Northern California’s rainy season. But there was an ulterior reason for scheduling the show then: in late November the Rolling Stones would be wrapping up their first U.S. tour in three years, and they thought it would be fun to play for free in the city where both the hippie movement and the concept of free rock ’n’ roll in parks had been born. And, oh yes, the Stones were going to film the entire tour, and they liked the idea of using footage from the free show as a triumphant climax for their movie—a one-day mini-Woodstock that would put the Stones at the pinnacle of the rock heap as the ’60s drew to a close. Take that, John, Paul, George and Ringo!
“Originally the idea was nobody would say anything,” Garcia said, “and we’d sneak the Rolling Stones into the park or something like that, [they’d] play for half an hour or forty minutes and then beat it; it would be low-level. But they were making the documentary at the time and they saw it as kind of a photo op.” So when asked about rumors of the guerrilla concert at a press conference in New York at the end of their tour, just two weeks before the event, Mick Jagger spilled the beans and confirmed that the Stones were hoping to play a free concert in Golden Gate Park on December 6.
“That was it,” Rock Scully said. “Within half an hour of that announcement, I got a call from the Park [Department] saying we couldn’t do it. Consequently we had to find a place really quickly to do it because everybody knew that they had just made an announcement in New York City that they were going to play for free in San Francisco and everybody was heading there.” For the next two weeks the organizers frantically searched for a site that could accommodate an expected influx of 200,000 people.
Finally, just twenty-four hours before showtime, Dick Carter, who operated Altamont Speedway, forty-five minutes east of San Francisco in a hilly, windy, sparsely populated part of the East Bay, offered his facility. No one involved with the concert knew anything about Carter or Altamont, but there was no time for a thorough analysis of the situation. On the surface, at least, it must’ve seemed as though the day had been saved—the Speedway area appeared to be large enough to accommodate the expected deluge, and the site was accessible by a multilane interstate highway.
As soon as the venue was announced, the invasion began from every direction. As workers raced against the clock to build the stage, and equipment trucks filled with band equipment descended on the speedway, thousands of people arrived in the dark and staked out positions in front of the stage and on the surrounding hillsides. Luckily there was no rain, but it was bitterly cold that night, so people built bonfires to stay warm. By daybreak on December 6 there were already more than 250,000 people at the site and traffic was backed up for miles on every approach road. In all, about 350,00
0 showed up—or tried to. In the grand tradition of Woodstock, thousands of cars were abandoned along the highways and people hiked miles along the roads and over the grassy hills in the reddish glow of the first morning light. And why not? It was sure to be a helluva show—besides the Stones, scheduled acts included the Dead, the Airplane, Santana, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and the Flying Burrito Brothers.
By the time the concert got going in midmorning, however, it was clear that there had been a major miscalculation. The Stones had hired members of the Hell’s Angels to provide security around the stage (in exchange for gallons of free beer), and apparently the Angels’ idea of crowd control was to use violence and intimidation to keep people in line. Most of the senior members of the motorcycle club were elsewhere that weekend, so the security jobs fell mainly to relative neophytes. Memories of how peaceful the Angels had been when they guarded the generators and cared for lost children at the Human Be-In were quickly replaced by the nightmarish spectacle of tough young bikers high on alcohol, acid, amphetamines and barbiturates wailing on people with pool cues just a few feet from the stage. And the violence took an ugly, surreal turn when Jefferson Airplane lead singer Marty Balin was knocked unconscious during the band’s performance when he tried to stop an Angel from beating someone right in front of the stage.
Shortly after that episode most of the Dead arrived at the site by helicopter. In Gimme Shelter, the film about the Stones’ tour and Altamont made by the Maysle brothers, Santana drummer Michael Shrieve approaches Garcia and Lesh at the makeshift heliport and informs them of the bad scene going down inside the speedway. “Hell’s Angels are beating on musicians?” Lesh asks incredulously. “It doesn’t seem right, man.”
Garcia: An American Life Page 28
