Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  Garcia’s guitar sound changed somewhat during this era, too. He switched from Gibson guitars to a Fender Stratocaster, which “was a vote for articulation,” David Gans says. “The Fender was good for fingerpicking and it was suited to a lot of the more country-oriented material Jerry was writing and playing at that time.”

  As they often did, the Dead used the opportunity of their first big tour of the year to introduce a number of new songs, both originals and fresh cover tunes. That week in February at the Capitol Theater, five new Hunter-Garcia numbers were played for the first time—all of them songs that would still be in the band’s repertoire when Garcia died nearly twenty-five years later.

  “Bertha” was an immediate crowd-pleaser; a brisk, obviously bluegrass-inspired romp that became a frequent show-opener. It was easy to play (and thus a good song to warm up with), and it got everyone in the crowd up and dancing from the get-go.

  Two of the new Hunter-Garcia songs were filled with cardplaying imagery. As Hunter noted, “I liked the way Dylan handled a deck of cards, and it struck me that it was a pretty basic metaphor. Maybe I played a few too many hands, someone suggested at one point.” In “Deal,” which was initially a slow shuffle, but later became a driving country-rocker, the character appears to be brimming with so much confidence after a streak of winning hands that he feels compelled to offer some advice to his vanquished gambling partner:

  Since you poured the wine for me

  And tightened up my shoes

  I hate to see you sitting there

  Composin’ lonesome blues

  It goes to show you don’t ever know

  Watch each card you play

  And play it slow

  Wait until that deal come ’round

  Don’t you let that deal go down, oh no

  The gambler in “Loser,” however, is in more desperate straits:

  If I had a gun for every ace I’ve drawn

  I could arm a town the size of Abilene

  Don’t you push me, baby, ’cause I’m moaning low

  And you know I’m only in it for the gold

  All that I am asking for is ten gold dollars

  I could pay you back with one good hand

  You can look around about the wide world over

  And you’ll never find another honest man

  “Sometimes I sing that song and it’s a self-congratulatory asshole, sometimes it’s an idiot,” Garcia said of this brooding Western ballad. “The lyrics have the guy an idiot, but the idiot’s version of himself is, ‘Hey, I’m great!’ I can ride that either way and there’s lots of shading in between where it’s both those things at the same time. I love it when a song is ambiguous like that.

  “Hunter is able to write that into just about everything—he’s able to leave just enough out, so that you’re not really sure whose side you’re on, if it’s a matter of taking sides. In ‘Wharf Rat’ you don’t know if you’re the guy who’s hearing the story or the guy who’s telling it. It really doesn’t matter in the long run.”

  “Wharf Rat,” which debuted in the same set at the Capitol as “Loser,” wasn’t from a Western bag particularly, though Garcia’s lonesome, lamenting vocal style on the song probably had roots in bluegrass/old-timey singing—indeed, that was in nearly everything Garcia sang. But the droning A chord that rang through the song like a nervous, jagged pulse, and Hunter’s opening images of an “Old man down / Way down, down / Down by the docks of the city” immediately placed the song in a much different kind of setting from songs like “Loser,” “Deal” or “Candyman.” August West, the down-and-out wino in “Wharf Rat,” was one of Hunter’s most vivid creations—a poor lost soul who’d been kicked around by fate and circumstance:

  Everyone said

  I’d come to no good

  I knew I would

  Pearly believed them

  Half of my life

  I spent doing time for

  Some other fucker’s crime

  The other half found me stumbling around

  Drunk on burgundy wine

  As Garcia indicated, the song has an interesting narrative structure. It switches from the person encountering August West, to West’s own tale of woe and hope for redemption, then back to the person hearing the story, who then wanders the streets pondering, as August West does in the song, whether his own lady love has been true to him. It’s completely unlike any other world that Hunter and Garcia ever conjured—as gritty and realistic as a Dorothea Lange portrait, but also both sympathetic and empathetic, for any one of us could become that wharf rat. It’s also, of course, a very unusual topic for a “pop” song, which is part of what made it so powerful. Coming after rockers like “Truckin’” and “Not Fade Away,” or spacey tunes like “Dark Star” and “The Other One,” “Wharf Rat” was like a downpour of cold rain soaking your clothes and putting you in August West’s tattered shoes. Garcia’s long, open-ended solo on the song would drift out and wander along the docks, each rough-hewn, jangly guitar note a little cry of suffering. Through the years, Garcia usually placed “Wharf Rat” deep in the heart of the second set, a little flash of despair before Weir would send everyone home with some cheery, uptempo rock ’n’ roll song.

  The fifth new Hunter-Garcia tune was a subtle and exquisite homage to Janis Joplin called “Bird Song”:

  All I know is something like a bird

  Within her sang

  All I know, she sang a little while

  And then flew on

  Tell me all that you know

  I’ll show you

  Snow and rain

  Stylistically, the song mixed a folk ballad approach with a little Bakersfield country feeling—the way Garcia would bend the notes in the catchy, flitting eleven-note riff that defined the tune’s outer edges was reminiscent of Roy Nichols’s playing with Merle Haggard, though the choice of those eleven gently bebopping notes was pure Garcia. And the way the song opened up and its jam gradually unfolded, with Garcia slowly but surely leading the band away from the safety of the song’s structure out to unsettled and unexpected realms, owed much more to modal jazz than honky-tonk country. It’s a fascinating fusion of different ingredients.

  Garcia’s interest in country also showed up in two cover tunes he introduced in the spring of 1971, “Big Railroad Blues” and “Sing Me Back Home.” The former was a peppy old Cannon’s Jug Stompers number from the late ’20s that Garcia learned in 1965 off of a four-song British EP Eric Thompson owned. The latter was one of Merle Haggard’s best-known and most poignant songs, a mournful ballad about a condemned man being led to his execution who asks his prison buddy to “Sing me back home / A song I used to hear / Make my old memories come alive / Take me away and turn back the years / Sing me back home before I die.”

  To a large extent, the characters who populate the Grateful Dead’s universe of songs—both covers and original tunes—are a motley, troubled bunch: loners and desperadoes, gamblers and outlaws, drifters and bad guys on the run. Many of them are folks who have made poor choices in life—usually because of greed or lust or both—and now have to face the legal and/or karmic consequences of their actions. No one gets away with anything in this song-world; ironic, since on the surface the Grateful Dead seemed to be getting away with everything in the early ’70s. They were renegades who were making it, pulling a fast one on straight society. But they were also always on the move, and just a step or two ahead of the sheriff’s baying hounds, figuratively speaking. The punishment for living outside of traditional society was some attendant guilt and moral confusion—reflected over and over in the songs—and an almost wistful yearning for the simpler life of a child still under a mother’s wing: In “Big Railroad Blues,” Garcia sang, “Wish I had a-listened whoa what Mama said / Well, I wouldn’t be here tryin’ to sleep in this cold iron bed.” In “Mama Tried,” Weir sang, “Mama tried to raise me better but her pleadings I denied / That leaves no one for me to blame ’cause Mama tried.” And in “Brokedown Palace,”
Garcia, Weir and Lesh wearily sang, “Mama, Mama, many worlds I’ve come since I first left home.”

  But Mama isn’t around to turn these people in the right direction, so the only other choice is to keep on moving down the road in search of greener pastures, a bigger payday, a longer-lasting love—and indeed, that kind of optimism also runs through the Dead’s music: “I’m goin’ where the chilly winds don’t blow” (“Cold Rain and Snow”); “The sun’s gonna shine in my back door someday” (“I Know You Rider”); “I’m goin’ where the water tastes like wine” (“Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad”)—every one of these lines borrowed from well-known North American folk songs.

  * * *

  In the spring of 1971 Joe Smith of Warner Bros. Records offered Garcia a $20,000 advance to make a solo album. Smith was genuinely interested in having Garcia make a solo record—after all, the Dead were all of a sudden a money band with a bright future, and Garcia was the most famous member of the group. But the offer was also an attempt to keep Garcia and the Dead happy as members of the Warner Bros. family. Three thousand miles away, Columbia Records president Clive Davis was making no secret of his desire to sign the Grateful Dead; he’d had his eye on the band, and Garcia in particular, for several years. But the Dead were locked up contractually with Warner Bros. As early as 1970 there had been rumblings in the Dead camp that when their contract with Warners was up they might explore starting their own record company. In the meantime, Davis did manage to get a little piece of Garcia onto Columbia: he signed the New Riders of the Purple Sage.

  “We got the deal with Columbia because Clive wanted Jerry,” John Dawson says. “It’s that simple. He wanted Jerry any way he could get him. But that was cool with me. It was a pretty good deal.”

  Davis was signing a known quantity. The New Riders had cut their debut album at Wally Heider’s in December 1970 and January 1971, so Davis essentially bought a finished record that he knew had commercial potential. And in the back of his mind he probably also believed that establishing a relationship with Garcia through the New Riders might pay dividends for him up the line with the Grateful Dead, should they ever be free from their contractual obligations.

  As for Garcia’s solo album deal, “Twenty thousand dollars seemed like a lot of money back then,” Mountain Girl says. “It was really the first time we had any money. So I went looking for a place to buy for us, and I looked and looked and looked all over and I finally found this house out in Stinson Beach, which seemed like the end of the earth, but it was this fabulous house—oh God, it was nice!—on the Avenida Farallone. It was an incredible find. It was perfect and it cost $60,000. After what had happened to us with the Larkspur house, we weren’t going to pass it up.” At the time, M.G. says, Garcia was earning about $2,000 a month—about a teacher’s salary—“which was a king’s ransom to us—$500 a week; whoa, serious spending power!”

  Stinson Beach is a beautiful little village on scenic coastal Highway 1 just a few miles north of where Mount Tamalpais drops precipitously into the Pacific; about forty twisting-and-turning minutes from downtown San Francisco, thirty minutes from the Dead’s San Rafael office if the weather was good and the traffic gods were smiling on you. The beach itself is a great white crescent, and the surrounding hills—green in winter, gold in summer—are dotted with a combination of small clapboard beach bungalows and more elegant modern redwood houses, their expansive glass windows taking in the spectacular view of the ocean.

  The house that Jerry, Mountain Girl, five-year-old Sunshine and eighteen-month-old Annabelle moved into was high on a hill above the town—not quite as tony as the weekend getaway homes that San Francisco professionals with real money owned, but still a beautiful pad with a fantastic panoramic view. “It had eucalyptus trees and cypresses,” M.G. says, “and a chicken house that had been converted to a little guest lodge, and then we converted that into a recording studio; George Hunter of the Charlatans, who was an architect, designed it, and Laird Grant built it. Somehow, though, it never felt right to use as a studio—the sea air was kind of thick and there was a lot of fog.”

  Though Stinson Beach is fairly isolated from the more populated sections of Marin County where most of Jerry and Mountain Girl’s cronies lived, they still had plenty of friends to socialize with. Ron Rakow lived in Stinson, Paul Kantner and Grace Slick were just a few minutes up Highway 1 in Bolinas, and of course once Garcia landed on the coast his house became a destination and hangout for people in the Dead scene.

  Garcia also spent a lot of time in Stinson with some newfound friends. Mandolinist David Grisman had moved from the East Coast to California in September 1970, along with Richard Loren, who’d worked on the East Coast as a booking agent and tour manager, and a couple of fresh-faced young singer-songwriters whom Loren was managing, Chris and Lorin Rowan, known as the Rowan Brothers. Loren had met Garcia at a September 1970 Fillmore East concert at which Grisman had played mandolin with the Dead during the group’s acoustic set. Garcia would often come down to the beach to visit and jam with the Rowans, and vice versa.

  Eventually Garcia hired Loren to work as his personal agent to help book gigs for Garcia and Saunders and handle his non–Grateful Dead business affairs, “anything that didn’t have to do with the Grateful Dead, that wasn’t being taken care of by Sam Cutler or Jon McIntire or those guys,” Loren says. Loren rented a series of offices in Mill Valley to accommodate his different businesses—the Rowans’ booking and management; his work with Garcia—including one in a house where “Jerry had a room, and I had an office,” Loren says. “Jerry always had a mattress there. He had a key, I had a key. We used it as an office and kind of like a club. John Kahn would come by, and all of Jerry’s friends, most of them apart from the Dead scene, would come by. It was a broad range of people, from Sufis to Hell’s Angels.

  “I think the Dead viewed all of Jerry’s outside bands as a big threat, and it’s really a shame because I don’t think they were a threat,” Loren says. “The Grateful Dead always came first. I used to have a calendar and I’d call in to Cutler’s office and say, ‘Give me all the dates you’re booking for the Grateful Dead. I want to put them in my calendar.’ Then we’d work around that. Jerry always insisted, and I completely agreed, that the outside stuff had to be fit around the Grateful Dead, and not vice versa. We would never ask the Grateful Dead to change a date. Unfortunately, the band didn’t have the wealth it has today and everybody was making not quite enough to be really comfortable, so I think there were some people who felt that the Dead should play more and that Jerry’s solo stuff was getting in the way of them making more; but I didn’t see it that way at all. And I think that what Jerry did on the side helped him be a better member of the Grateful Dead, because it stretched him in interesting ways and, above all, it made him happy. But because I worked in an office away from the Dead scene, I think I was viewed by some as ‘the guy who’s keeping Jerry away from us.’”

  That opinion was more common in 1972–73 than in 1971, but the fact is Garcia was doing a lot apart from the Grateful Dead in that year. In addition to the band with Saunders, Kahn and Vitt, which started to play around a lot that year, Garcia was still the pedal steel player for the New Riders, and he continued to do work on other people’s records, the best of which was probably Paul Kantner and Grace Slick’s Sunfighter, which featured several distinctive Garcia leads.

  Garcia began his own solo album sometime in July 1971. Unlike the approach taken by Paul Kantner and David Crosby for their albums, Garcia decided early on that he would really make a solo album, and play all of the instruments himself, except for drums, for which he brought in Billy Kreutzmann. “Jerry wanted to be very low-key about it,” says Bob Matthews, who co-engineered the project with Betty Cantor. “It was Jerry on his own with a couple of people he liked to be creative with—Billy and Hunter and Betty and me. I felt blessed to be one of those people, and it was a real special record for all of us.”

  The album was recorded over a period of abou
t three weeks in the late summer and early fall of 1971 in Wally Heider’s little Studio D, where Matthews posted a sign on the door that read CLOSED SESSION—ANITA BRYANT to keep away curious onlookers. “It worked for the most part,” Matthews says, “but there were a few people who just couldn’t believe that Anita Bryant [a conservative Republican famous for her anti-gay stance] would be in the middle of the San Francisco rock ’n’ roll scene, so they came in anyway. Still, people pretty much left us alone, which is what we wanted.”

  The way most of the songs on the album were constructed was that Garcia and Kreutzmann initially would lay down acoustic guitar and drum tracks as a guide, and then Garcia would overdub other instruments to his heart’s content—bass, of which he had a rudimentary knowledge, pedal steel on a couple of tracks, electric guitars, piano and Hammond B-3.

  “I don’t want anyone to think it’s me being serious or anything like that,” Garcia said around the time he began working on the record. “It’s really me goofing around. I’m not trying to have my own career or anything like that. . . . In the world that I live in there’s the Grateful Dead, which is one unit I’m a part of, and then there’s just me. And the me that’s just me—I have to keep my end up in order to be able to take care of my part of the Grateful Dead. So rather than sit home and practice—scales and stuff—which I do when I’m together enough to do it, I go out and play because playing music is more enjoyable to me than sitting home and playing scales.”