Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  “He’s pretty sick,” Garcia said around this time. “But he’s living. He was really, really extremely sick. I don’t really know how sick, because I never hung out at the hospital that much, although I did give him a pint of blood. We all did. He was really fucked up and his liver was full of holes, and then he had some kind of perforated ulcer—just all kinds of bum trips from juicing all those years. And he’s a young dude, man. He’s only twenty-six.

  “From juicing! He survived it and now he’s got the option of being a juicer or not being a juicer. To be a juicer means to die, so now he’s being able to choose whether to live or die. And if I know Pigpen, he’ll choose to live. That’s pretty much where he’s at. For the time being he’s too sick to go out on the road, and I wouldn’t want to expose him to that world. It would be groovy if he could take as long as it takes to get him to feelin’ right.”

  Pigpen stopped touring with the Dead at the end of August 1971 and stayed in California to recuperate until the group’s December ’71 tour. He did, in fact, stop drinking completely and developed healthier eating habits. In the meantime, the band hired a new piano player, a taciturn, somewhat withdrawn fellow named Keith Godchaux. Keith’s background was mostly in jazz, but he and his wife, Donna—a former backup singer from Muscle Shoals, Alabama—were Deadheads, and Donna managed to talk Garcia into letting her shy husband audition for the keyboard slot.

  “The Dead were having a rehearsal and Jerry had told us to come on down, so we did,” Donna recalled. “But the band had forgotten to tell Jerry that the rehearsal had been called off, so Jerry went down there by himself. So Keith and Jerry played, and we played him some tapes of songs that I had written and was singing on. Then Jerry called Kreutzmann and got him to come down, and the three of them played some. Then the next day the Dead practiced, and by the end of that day Keith was on the payroll.”

  After a few rehearsals, Keith’s first tour with the Dead began with a gig at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis on October 19, 1971. From the first moments of the opener that night, “Bertha,” it was obvious that Keith was a good choice for the band. For a guy who had limited rock ’n’ roll experience, and even less playing country, he eased into his role with fluid grace. On the uptempo rockers he could pound away like Johnny Johnson or Jerry Lee Lewis. On country songs he had just enough Floyd Cramer and Glenn D. Hardin in him to be convincing. And when the music went outside, as it did during “Dark Star” at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago two nights after his debut, some of Keith’s jazz chops came to the fore. His presence in the band freed the other players in ways that no one could have expected: Billy Kreutzmann now had a solid rhythmic partner to help him anchor the music, leaving Billy more room for ornamental accents. With Keith’s piano now occupying so much of the harmonic midrange, Weir was able to move his guitar comfortably into higher and lower registers and even further away from strictly chordal lines. And Garcia and Lesh could go farther afield in their intricate melodic and tonal pas de deux, knowing that a firm center would usually be as close as the new guy at the grand piano. Though there were a number of fine shows throughout the first three-quarters of 1971, there was a certain tentativeness to some of the playing as the band adjusted to Mickey Hart’s absence and struggled a bit to reinvent itself. With Keith Godchaux’s arrival, whatever might have been missing was suddenly there, and the fall tour found the band playing both more confidently and more adventurously.

  Once again there was a healthy infusion of new songs into the repertoire for the tour. Six new tunes were introduced that first night in Minnesota, three by Hunter-Garcia and three by Weir—one written with Hunter, one with Bob’s old friend from prep school, John Barlow, and one by himself.

  Two of the three Hunter-Garcia songs were among the most whimsical tunes the pair ever wrote. “Tennessee Jed” and “Ramble On Rose” don’t actually sound that much alike, but they are cousins musically. Both are based around rhythmically irregular, herky-jerky guitar lines that give the songs an old-time quality. Like so many of Hunter and Garcia’s songs from this period, they sound like they could belong to any time in the past hundred and fifty years. Certainly the 1890s didn’t produce anything quite like them—weird, stumbling tunes that lurch forward like happy drunks. But “Tennessee Jed” sounds as if it evolved from some fine old mountain tune, and “Ramble On Rose” sounds as if it were recovered from a player piano roll in a turn-of-the-century Storyville whorehouse.

  As far as the musical antecedents for songs like “Tennessee Jed” and “Ramble On Rose” are concerned, Garcia once noted that “I haven’t the slightest idea. They just come out of my mind. Sometimes I think, ‘Yeah, this is kind of like a record I once heard somewhere,’ but I never find ’em! The rhythms come from my background in rhythm and blues more than anything else. But they also come from a kind of rhythmically hip country and western style—like Jerry Reed and people like that. Memphis more than Nashville. Some of the old California country and western stuff—old Buck Owens—had some nifty rhythmic ideas in it, as opposed to the old 4/4 stuff, just plunking away. ‘Tennessee Jed’ is a cop from that world, although not consciously and it’s not from any specific tune. Just the feel.”

  Both tunes were crowd-pleasers from the start—great to dance to and fun to sing along with on the choruses, which begged for audience participation. These songs also served as light stepping-stones in sets that were already crowded with heavy songs.

  And speaking of heavy songs, the third new Hunter-Garcia composition was an achingly slow, country-tinged ballad called “Comes a Time,” in which a character who has become desensitized to life’s emotional nuances is offered a glimmer of hope:

  Been walking all morning

  Went walking all night

  I can’t see much difference

  Between the dark and light

  And I feel the wind

  And I taste the rain

  Never in my mind

  To cause so much pain

  Comes a time

  When the blind man takes your hand

  Says, “Don’t you see?”

  Got to make it somehow

  On the dreams you still believe

  Don’t give it up

  You’ve got an empty cup

  Only love can fill

  Garcia didn’t play “Comes a Time” a lot in the early ’70s—only about a dozen times each in 1971 and 1972—but when he did, it was always an emotional event, for both the crowd and Garcia, who sang the song passionately, as if it described a moment he knew all too well.

  The fact that Weir introduced three new songs at once reflected his emergence as an important songwriter and frontman for the band, just as Pigpen was receding into the background and Garcia was looking to have some of the weight of the band lifted off him. Garcia’s songs dominated the Dead’s repertoire in the late ’60s simply because he was so prolific during that period. But in the early ’70s the Dead began consciously to alternate between Garcia-sung tunes and numbers sung by Weir and Pigpen. At first, most of Weir’s songs were country cover tunes, such as “Me and My Uncle,” “Mama Tried,” “Me and Bobby McGee” and Marty Robbins’s “El Paso,” or Chuck Berry songs like “Johnny B. Goode” and “The Promised Land.” But by the end of 1971 he also had an impressive collection of songs he’d written: “Sugar Magnolia,” “The Other One,” “Truckin’,” “Playing in the Band” and the three unveiled in Minneapolis—a gunfighter polka (!) called “Mexicali Blues,” written with John Barlow; a supercharged Chuck Berry–style rocker, “One More Saturday Night,” which was every bit as good as the songs it imitated; and, best of all, the dynamic Western tune “Jack Straw,” Robert Hunter’s sprawling, cinematic tale of treachery, deceit and doomed outlaws on the run.

  No longer “the kid,” Weir grew comfortably into his expanded role, with Garcia encouraging him every step of the way: “He’s like the devil’s pitchfork—‘You go out there and tell them a story,’” Weir said, mimicking Garcia. And while the a
udience’s interest in and affection for Garcia did not diminish with Weir’s ascension, a whole new level of Dead fan was attracted to the scene—Weir followers and groupies, who ranged from hippie girls (and a few boys) smitten by his good looks and appealing space cowboy persona to people who dug his songs, his singing and his confident command of his instrument and the stage in general. And by and large, the folks who initially came to the Dead through Weir all became ardent fans of Garcia and the other bandmembers, too.

  The fall 1971 tour also marked the end of Garcia’s membership in the New Riders of the Purple Sage. He was aware that it would be impossible for him keep playing with the Riders and the Dead without eventually burning out and shortchanging both groups. And, as he noted in mid-1971, “The New Riders are actually too good for me to be playing steel with. What they need is a regular, good guy who’s been playing since he was three.”

  David Nelson recalls: “Finally we said, ‘Look, Jerry, we want to be a band. We know you’re not going to leave the Dead.’ My feeling was that I was so thankful that he was so graceful about it. He was ready to go on if we needed him to go on, or stop now if we needed him to stop now. It was all in deference to us. So I said, ‘Let’s wait until we find the killer guy, the guy who really fits in with us.’ Then, on the Festival Express, [Sam] Cutler was taking me through this stadium in Toronto and I couldn’t even see who was onstage but I heard this steel player who was jamming, just kickin’ it, playing some shit. I wondered, ‘Wow, who’s that?’ It was Buddy Cage of Ian and Sylvia’s band. So later when it came down to it, I said, ‘Can we try to get him?’” By that time Cage was working with pop singer Anne Murray and was happy to hitch his wagon to the Riders.

  There was no drop-off of interest in the New Riders when Garcia split from the group, and now they were free to go on tours of their own and not be beholden to Garcia’s schedule. Cage was the perfect replacement, and his presence tremendously energized the group at that critical juncture. It helped, too, that the New Riders’ excellent debut album (featuring Garcia, Lesh and, on two tracks, Hart) had just been released and was an enormous success, selling 70,000 copies in the first week alone. The Dead and the New Riders remained close, however, and still toured together periodically. And Garcia played some banjo and piano on the New Riders’ strong second album, Powerglide, and later produced their first live album, Home, Home on the Road.

  Though later in life Dawson and Garcia rarely saw each other, they were quite chummy during this period, and Dawson has some interesting observations about watching Garcia with the Dead night after night in the early ’70s:

  “Garcia led people by the mind, by the ears. When he was playing great—and he almost always did in those days—he would play with your brain, in that he’d be noodling around and then he’d figure out that you’re trying to anticipate what he’s going to do next, so then, of course he’d go and play some completely different phrase or idea; he’d throw a curveball at you. He loved doing that; that was one of his fine pleasures. And when it worked, you could see what it would do to the crowd. There’d be this big ‘Yeaaah!’ and everyone felt it; you couldn’t miss it.

  “He loved to take musical chances. If you’re going to take chances and go out on a limb . . . well, Garcia lived in the twigs. He’d go out there and sometimes he’d make it back and sometimes he wouldn’t. But he had this sense of how to catch himself on the the next branch on the way down and eventually end up on his feet at the end. It’s a thing that when you’re hearing it, you can follow in your head and actually see where he tried and he either made it or he didn’t, but you’re with him the whole way. And then you add to that the ability of all six of them to move on to something new in a moment—like a school of fish or a flock of birds—and you understand why so many people thought they were amazing.”

  The Dead decided to try an interesting experiment in an attempt to satisfy the tremendous demand for tickets on the November–December 1971 tour and to avoid the nasty gate-crashing incidents that had plagued some of their East Coast shows since the fall of 1970. They arranged with FM stations in nearly every city they played to broadcast the concert, or if there were two shows in a city, to broadcast one of the two concerts. This strategy worked for the most part, encouraging the ticketless hordes to stay home and listen to the Dead on the radio. (In the early ’70s there was not yet a hippie marketplace scene outside Dead shows; that was an ’80s phenomenon.) The broadcasts served the Dead in two other ways as well. They allowed thousands of people who had never listened to the Dead, or never heard anything but their records, to hear the band in their true element—onstage, live, playing two generous sets spanning nearly every style of twentieth-century American popular and folk music, and jamming to their heart’s content; also, the radio shows from this tour were widely taped at home and freely disseminated. These reel-to-reel recordings were many Deadheads’ first tapes of the group.

  “We’ve always been into free concerts,” Garcia said that fall, “and the broadcast was kind of a free concert without any hassles. Ever since Altamont, everything has been so sticky when you try to do a free show. With us, the whole trip is to make music available.”

  Pigpen returned to the Dead lineup in December 1971, paler and thinner than before, his role reduced even further now that Keith Godchaux was in the band. Still, he added percussion and B-3 to some songs, occasionally giving the group a full-sounding double-keyboard attack, and his spirit was still strong. Generally speaking, he steered clear of the numbers that required a lot of his energy—big vocal improv songs like “Good Lovin’” and “Love Light”—but he gave his all on his shorter tunes, and he even had a fun new cover song for the Christmas season: Chuck Berry’s “Run Rudolph Run.” Everyone agreed that Pigpen at less that full capacity was still better than no Pigpen at all.

  “It was okay for Pigpen to lay out,” Phil said. “We kept wanting Pigpen to be there because he was one of us. He really was. But he would lay out and that was okay, too. He didn’t mind. We didn’t mind. There was no ego problem there.”

  The Dead stayed off the road from mid-December 1971 all the way until the last week of March 1972, with just three shows at Winterland in between. Which is not to say that the band was inactive during that period; far from it. The group spent much of that time helping Bob Weir record Ace, his first solo album for Warner Bros.

  “I pretty much knew in the back of my mind what would happen,” Weir said in mid-1972. “I go and get the [studio] time booked and start putting the material together. Everybody gets wind of the fact that I got the time booked, and I may be going into the studio. So, one by one, they start coming around. Lesh and Garcia—‘Hey man, I hear you got some time booked at Wally Heider’s. Need a bass player? A guitarist?’ etc. It’s kind of like the Tom Sawyer routine with the fence. And I say, ‘Wel-l-l, I wanna be careful and get just the right musicians for the record, you know.’ Of course I ended up with the Grateful Dead on the record, which I figured up front. I don’t have any reason to believe anybody thought it’d be any different. And we had a great time making the record.”

  The album contained several songs the Dead had performed for a while, including “One More Saturday Night,” “Mexicali Blues” (both augmented by the Tower of Power horns on the record), a driving rocker called “Greatest Story Ever Told,” with lyrics by Robert Hunter, and a studio version of “Playing in the Band” that far surpassed the crude early live reading on “Skull and Roses.” It still stands as one of the Dead’s finest recordings; that rare studio track that is both powerful and spacey and shows off the band’s formidable control of dynamics. Two other songs on Ace also found their way into the Dead’s repertoire. The syrupy but powerful ballad “Looks Like Rain” debuted in the spring of 1972; and the lovely, folk-flavored “Cassidy” came alive onstage beginning in 1976. In the latter, lyricist John Barlow deftly interwove flashes of Neal Cassady’s life and the birth of Eileen Law’s daughter—named Cassidy—at Weir’s house in West Marin in ea
rly 1972.

  Ace also marked the first time Donna Godchaux sang with the band—in typical Marin hippie-speak, she’s credited on the album with “harmony, the chick vocals.” There was obvious chemistry between Donna and the band during those sessions, so it was not at all surprising that when the Dead next went out on the road, Donna joined them. She sang onstage for the first time at a March 1972 benefit concert for the New York chapter of the Hell’s Angels at the Academy of Music in New York City. At first she sang harmony on just a few songs, but by the fall 1972 tour Donna was completely integrated into the lineup (though there were still long stretches when the band would jam and she would leave the stage).

  Garcia’s first solo album, entitled simply Garcia, was released near the end of January 1972 and, predictably, Deadheads snapped it up by the thousands. A number of FM radio stations played different songs from the record, mainly “Deal,” “Sugaree” and “The Wheel.” Warner Bros. even released a single of “Deal” backed with “The Wheel,” though it was not successful in that format.

  Garcia was also prominent on another album that came out in the winter of 1972, Merl Saunders’s Heavy Turbulence, on Fantasy Records. The album gave a fairly good picture of their club band from this era. The core lineup for part of ’71 and ’72 included former Creedence Clearwater Revival member Tom Fogerty on rhythm guitar in addition to Garcia, Saunders, Kahn and Vitt. On several cuts, Merl’s friends the Hawkins Family singers and saxophonist Bob Drew joined in, too. The record mixed original songs by Merl with cover tunes the group played live, such as the Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” (sung by Garcia) and an instrumental version of John Lennon’s “Imagine.”