Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  “It was like hell; it was like a nice afternoon in hell,” Garcia said years later, a fatalistic chuckle in his voice. “The light and everything was just so weird. The light was this kind of baleful red dusk, kind of particulate air, like [if there were] piles of smoking tires; the smell of sulfur. Jeez, it was horrible; it was so hellish.”

  The Dead were scheduled to go on right before the Stones, but at the last moment they backed out of the concert altogether. “We felt that it would not have done any good for us to play, and it would have only prolonged the agony,” Lesh said. “Unfortunately, the Rolling Stones apparently were waiting for sundown [to go on] so they could make a film, and that’s why it went on and on. So it turns out it probably would’ve been better for us to play, just to fill up that time. But when music was happening, the crowd would surge toward the stage, security would beat them back. So we didn’t want to contribute to that.”

  The violence escalated during the Stones’ set, with the Angels beating dozens of people in the crowd for the slightest transgression, and culminated in the stabbing death of a gun-wielding man just a few yards from the stage, as Mick Jagger sang “Under My Thumb.” (The killing is captured in the Maysles’ film.) The show limped to its conclusion, and though many who didn’t see any violence enjoyed the concert, thousands came away from the event dazed and disillusioned.

  “It was completely unexpected,” Garcia said two years after Altamont. “And that was the hard part; that was the hard lesson there—that you can have good people and good energy and work on a project and really want it to happen right and still have it [go] all weird. It’s the thing of knowing less than you should have; youthful folly.

  “It was another big scene. Woodstock was the big beautiful scene and Altamont was the big ugly scene. I don’t really know what conclusion to draw from it, except that big scenes can go either way. You can tie in a lot of stuff about the Rolling Stones and black magic and all the rest of that shit—karma and whatever. But anytime you have a big scene, you have that potential there; the potential for it to get ugly.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Listen to the River Sing Sweet Songs

  iscussion about Altamont dominated the Bay Area rock world for weeks after the debacle, and more than a few people suggested that the Dead were partly culpable for the violence that occurred because of the group’s longstanding relationship with the Hell’s Angels. In the Stones camp there was a concerted effort to shift the blame to Rock Scully for supposedly arranging the Angels’ security-for-beer deal, a charge Scully always denied. At the very least Scully approved of the idea, which most likely originated with Emmett Grogan, formerly of the Diggers cooperative and one of the first to approach the Stones about playing a free show in San Francisco. The Stones’ tour manager, Sam Cutler, who worked closely with Mick Jagger in making logistical decisions, had also enthusiastically endorsed the plan. Whatever the facts—and they continue to be debated in ’60s memoirs to this day—the events at Altamont unleashed a torrent of finger-pointing, hand-wringing, pontificating and deep, dark self-analysis in the counterculture press, a conversation that lasted for years. Altamont was variously described as the death of the ’60s, the death of idealism, the death of rock ’n’ roll, the death of hippiedom—an Old Testament–style cataclysm where evil momentarily triumphs, arousing the wrath of God.

  The Dead didn’t say much publicly in the days following Altamont—what was there to say, really?—but on December 20, 1969, two weeks after the concert, near the end of their second set at the recently reopened Fillmore Auditorium, the group unveiled a new song “about” Altamont. After roaring through what was really the Dead’s grand trilogy for 1969—“Dark Star”> “Saint Stephen”>“The Eleven”—the band fell into the ominous, rumbling introduction to Hunter and Garcia’s “New Speedway Boogie,” which Hunter had been partly inspired to write after reading San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ralph Gleason’s stinging condemnations of the Dead and the other organizers of Altamont.

  Please don’t dominate the rap, Jack

  If you got nothing new to say

  If you please, go back up the track

  This train got to run today

  Spent a little time on the mountain

  Spent a little time on the hill

  Heard some say: “Better run away”

  Others say: “You better stand still”

  Now I don’t know, but I been told,

  It’s hard to run with the weight of gold

  On the other hand, I’ve heard it said

  It’s just as hard with the weight of lead

  Ed McClanahan, essayist and former denizen of both the Perry Lane and Acid Test scenes, nicely described the heart of this strong and unflinching song in a 1971 article in The Realist:

  “Hunter is not of the Altamont-as-Götter-dämmerung persuasion, and he does not agree that the quest after salvation—the voyage that began in the Haight-Ashbury and carried us all the way to Woodstock—has dead-ended at last in the molten yellow hills of California just 20 miles east of where it started, impaled on the point of a Hell’s Angels rusty blade, skewered there like those suicidal Siamese frogs that travel great distances only to fling themselves upon the spikes of some rare thornbush. Rather, the poet suggests, the journey has only just begun, and the way is long and arduous and fraught with peril; Altamont is but one dark moment in the community’s total experience, the first installment of the dues we must pay for our deliverance. On the Big Trip, the poet warns, the pilgrims will encounter suffering as well as joy, and those with no heart for the undertaking would do well to stand aside, because ‘this train’s got to run today.’”

  Two years after Altamont, Garcia said of “New Speedway Boogie,” “I think that song’s an overreaction myself. I think that it’s a little bit dire. Really, the thing that I’ve been seeing since Altamont is that periodically you have darkness and periodically you have light, like the way the universe is in the yin/yang symbol. There’s darkness and light and it’s the interplay that represents the game that we’re allowed to play on this planet.”

  Neither Garcia nor other members of the Dead ever came down hard on the Angels for their role at Altamont. To the contrary, Garcia said in an interview about a year after the festival that the Angels “behaved properly” at Altamont. “I mean, they did just what they would do, so they were not out of character. Also, I don’t think that it was strictly a trip on the Angels, ’cause the Angels in California are surrounded by prospects—people who want to be Angels—and their way of showing that they could be Angels is to come on bad. And they’re the ones who are mostly responsible. Most Hell’s Angels I know are into partying.”

  Though Altamont was unquestionably a blow to the Dead—a surprise kick to the solar plexus—the fact is the band barely missed a beat after the festival, and their gigs in the rest of December and moving into 1970 were uniformly strong and spirited. They were definitely on a roll, inspired no doubt by the slew of new songs they’d introduced since mid-’69. In the late fall of 1969 the group unveiled four more Hunter songs that would make it onto their next album.

  “Cumberland Blues,” with music by Garcia and Lesh, was a tuneful, harmony-filled portrait of a coal miner:

  Lotta poor man make a five-dollar bill

  Keep him happy all the time

  Some other fellow makin’ nothing at all

  And you can hear him cryin’—

  “Can I go, buddy

  Can I go down

  Take your shift down at the mine?”

  Got to get down to the Cumberland Mine

  That’s where I mainly spend my time

  Make good money, five dollars a day

  Made any more might move away . . .

  “On ‘Cumberland Blues,’” Garcia explained, “one part is modeled on the Bakersfield country and western bands—electric country and western bands like Buck Owens’s old Buckaroos and the Strangers [Merle Haggard’s group]. The first part of the tune is that style
. And the last part is like bluegrass. That’s what I wanted to do: a marriage of those styles.”

  The song “Black Peter” started life as a “jumpy little tune,” according to Hunter, but “Garcia really turned that one inside out and made a monster of it.” Garcia slowed the song down to a mournful ballad tempo and played it like a country blues with some Western overtones. Lyrically, it paints a somber picture of a man on his deathbed, surrounded by sympathetic cronies:

  Just then the wind

  Came squalling through the door

  But who can the weather command?

  Just want to have

  A little peace to die

  And a friend or two I love at hand

  It was at the Fillmore West two nights before Altamont that the Dead first played what became one of their best-known songs, “Uncle John’s Band,” also penned by Hunter and Garcia. A month earlier the group had been toying with some of the progressions that would eventually become part of the song: “At that time,” Garcia said, “I was listening to records of the Bulgarian Women’s Choir and also this Greek-Macedonian music—these penny whistlers—and on one of those records there was this little turn of melody that was so lovely that I thought, ‘Gee, if I could get this into a song it would be so great.’ So I stole it! Actually, I took a little piece of the melody, so I can’t say I plagiarized the whole thing. Of course it became so transmogrified when Phil and Bob added their harmony parts to it that it really was no longer the part of the song that was special for me. That was the melodic kicker originally, though.”

  Hunter wrote the words for “Uncle John’s Band” using a tape of the band playing what was essentially the finished tune. “I played it over and over and tried writing to it,” he recalled. “I kept hearing the words ‘God damn, Uncle John’s mad,’ and it took a while for that to turn into ‘Come hear Uncle John’s Band,’ and that’s one of those little things where the sparkles start coming out of your eyes.”

  In its earliest incarnation, “Uncle John’s Band” had a slightly Latin flavor to it, though with its neatly arranged three-part harmonies and bright, buoyant chord progressions it was clearly a part of the American folk tradition. In 1969 there was a well-known precedent for combining those two types of feelings in a song—Stephen Stills’s “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” from the first Crosby, Stills and Nash record, which was all over the radio that summer and fall. Unlike Stills’s opus, however, “Uncle John’s Band” was no simple love song. Rather, Hunter fashioned a song that was effectively an invitation to his generation to learn from the past and move forward together into the future:

  Well, the first days are the hardest days,

  Don’t you worry anymore

  ’Cause when life looks like Easy Street

  There is danger at your door

  Think this through with me

  Let me know your mind

  Whoa-oh, what I want to know,

  Is are you kind?

  It’s a buck dancer’s choice, my friend

  Better take my advice

  You know all the rules by now

  And the fire from the ice

  Will you come with me?

  Won’t you come with me?

  Whoa-oh, what I want to know,

  Will you come with me?

  In 1967 Hunter had invited us to go into “the transitive nightfall of diamonds” in “Dark Star.” In 1968 he had chided “Cosmic Charlie” to “go on home, your mama’s calling you.” But “Uncle John’s Band” was like a friendly outstretched hand that reached into the psychic darkness that was enveloping the culture and pulled the tattered survivors onto safer ground. After all, if the Dead had come through the violence, disorder and disillusionment of the late ’60s with their family intact, with smiling faces and their voices soaring together in song, there was hope for the rest of us, too. Still, Hunter/the Dead were looking for guidance as much as everyone else:

  I live in a silver mine

  And I call it Beggar’s Tomb

  I got me a violin

  And I beg you call the tune

  Anybody’s choice

  I can hear your voice

  Whoa-oh, what I want to know,

  How does the song go?

  The fourth new tune introduced that fall was “Easy Wind,” written by Hunter alone and sung by Pigpen. It was the finest song ever written specifically for Pigpen’s rough-and-tumble onstage persona—it casts him as a hardworking laborer whose mistreatin’ woman “hides my bottle in the other room.” Though Hunter said he originally wrote the song to be like a Robert Johnson blues, once the Dead got hold of it, it became a slinky slice of funk-flavored R&B, full of interesting counter-rhythms and slightly off-kilter guitar parts.

  By the end of 1969 Tom Constanten and the Dead had decided to part ways. T.C. had been a valuable addition to the group during a time when their music was at its most complex, but he was not fundamentally a rock ’n’ roll player, and he also didn’t have roots in the sort of folk and country music that was increasingly part of the Dead’s new direction. It didn’t help, too, that T.C. had become a Scientologist, which “made me a nonparticipant in the chemical sacraments of the time, and that offended Owsley greatly,” he said. “I tried not to proselytize, but I’m sure there’s a certain amount you can’t resist, and that I regret. It probably must have rubbed some people the wrong way.”

  From his standpoint, T.C. felt he was never really able to step out musically in the Dead, and in his spare time he became involved in a music/ theater project called Tarot that gave him more creative space. “I wanted to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond, and Tarot was more edifying,” T.C. said.

  Constanten’s last official show with the group was the final concert of a five-night series in Honolulu near the end of January 1970. But he traveled to New Orleans with the band right after those shows and appeared onstage with the Dead as a “guest” when they played a new ballroom called the Warehouse, with Fleetwood Mac and the Flock. On January 31, after the first of three scheduled concerts there, police raided the Dead’s French Quarter hotel and busted the entire band—except for T.C. and Pigpen—on narcotics possession charges. Also busted were Owsley—whom the local papers crowed was “the king of acid”—members of the Dead’s road crew and various “family” members who were along for the trip; nineteen people in all.

  “After the show,” Garcia recalled, “I went to somebody’s house and hung around there for a long time and rapped, and finally went back to the hotel, and when I got there, [the police] were already pretty much cleaning out everybody’s room. Everybody was gone, nobody was there, and I just happened to be walking down the hall with my guitar. I saw a couple of guys in the room and they said, ‘Hey you, come here!’ and they shook me down.”

  This was much more serious than the San Francisco bust in the fall of 1967. Louisiana had very tough drug laws—kids caught with pot were drawing sentences of five years and more—and the police claimed they had found large quantities of pot, LSD, barbiturates and amphetamines among the band’s and crew’s possessions. Lenny Hart managed to bail everyone out by posting $37,500, on a nonrefundable premium of $3,750, the Dead’s earnings for the concert.

  “The cops made it extra heavy for us,” Lenny Hart told Rolling Stone at the time. “They detained the band, handcuffed them all together and lined them up in front of the building for press photos. The cops were enjoying it, just getting their own things on. They ended up having to spend eight hours in jail; even though the bail was ready right away, they hassled them that long. I don’t think that’s the way police are supposed to handle it.”

  This was Garcia’s first bust, and the news couldn’t have come at a worse time for Mountain Girl, who was back in California: “I called the hotel that day to tell Jerry that I was going into labor and going to the hospital, and the lady at the desk at the hotel said, ‘I’m really sorry, but those guys are in jail; you’ll have to call the police station.’ So I was worried sick about that, and then
I didn’t see him until he got home, which was right after Annabelle was born.”

  Garcia was philosophical about the bust, noting, “I just consider it sort of an occupational hazard. I mean, it’s like if you’re working on a skyscraper—if you’re paranoid about falling, you shouldn’t be working. And that’s like if you’re playing rock ’n’ roll music and you’re paranoid about being busted, you shouldn’t be in rock ’n’ roll music. It’s one of those things that happens; there’s nothing you can do. There’s no profit in worrying about it.”

  Shortly after the bust, the Dead went into Pacific High Recording—the studio where finishing work on Aoxomoxoa had taken place in the spring of 1969—and cut their fourth studio album, entitled Workingman’s Dead, in just ten days. What caused the band to make such an about-face in their working methods? Partly it was the nature of the material—the simpler song structures evidently didn’t require as much fussing as Hunter and Garcia’s psychedelically inspired songs. But a lot of it was economic considerations.

  After Aoxomoxoa the Dead were in debt to Warner Bros. for close to $200,000. The next record they delivered was the live double-LP set Live Dead, released in November 1969 and featuring spectacular performances that showed the early-’69 Dead at their spaciest and absolute best. That record was both inexpensive to make and successful enough that it wiped out about half of what they owed the label, but when the band went in to make Workingman’s Dead, “we didn’t want to incur an enormous debt like we had been,” Garcia said. “So I was thinking, when we go into the studio next time, let’s try a real close-to-the-bone approach, like the way they record country and western records—a few instruments, relatively simple and easy-to-perform songs. It was quite conscious, an effort to say, ‘Let’s not spend a year. Let’s do it all in three weeks and get it the hell out of the way. And that way, if the record does at all well, we will be able to pay off some of what we owe to the record company.’ So that worked very well. And it was a chance to expose a side of us that we hadn’t exposed very much.”