Work on the Grateful Dead movie continued all through the winter and spring of 1976, with Susan Crutcher and her team putting in long hours at the Mill Valley film house assembling a massive rough-cut version—the first one ran nearly five hours, long even by Grateful Dead standards. Another expensive and time-consuming element was added to the film when it was decided to open the movie with a short, trippy animated sequence by a young San Francisco filmmaker-animator named Gary Gutierrez. Those seven mind-blowing minutes ended up costing $250,000.
The Dead had been in fairly dire financial shape for a while, and their return to the road, scheduled for June, wasn’t going to do much to rectify that. After all, they had decided to play multiday runs in small theaters in just a few select cities. The movie was getting closer to completion but it still needed more cash. Mickey Hart had gone way over budget on an album he was making with the Diga Rhythm Band, a wondrous all-percussion ensemble he was a member of. There was pressure in many different sectors of the Dead organization to find more money, and in some circles there was the belief that Ron Rakow’s wheeling and dealing was no longer helping the Dead; a few even suspected that he had been lining his own pockets, an accusation that was never formally made or proven.
“Everybody wanted to trust Rakow because Jerry did,” says Emily Craig, who was Rakow’s wife at the time. “Jerry’s vote was greater than the sum of everybody else’s. If he wanted to do something, that’s what was happening. But nobody ever really trusted Rakow, and rightfully so.”
“The big mystery to me is how he was able to gain Garcia’s trust and somehow form an alliance with him,” Dave Parker says. “That was the single most negative event that happened to me in the whole time I worked for the Dead—having to deal with that fact; that Rakow and Garcia essentially became partners, and there was a kind of separation between Jerry and the rest of the band at that point.”
The friction between Rakow and certain bandmembers and key players in the Dead organization came to a head in May 1976 when Rakow went down to Los Angeles to collect a $275,000 recording advance check from United Artists. Instead of turning the money over to the Dead, Rakow put the check in his own account and split the Dead scene completely. It’s an event that still draws emotional responses from the participants twenty years later.
“There was a sizable check that Rakow had gotten from the record company, and he had some kind of manipulation that he was going to do with the money,” Parker says. “I basically was instructed that I had to trust Rakow with this money. It was at Jerry’s insistence that he be given this level of trust. There were some meetings with the band [before Rakow got the check] and a couple of bandmembers had expressed concern to me about what Rakow was doing. Billy was probably the most concerned. Phil was very concerned as well. They all were to a degree, but essentially the way it came down was that Jerry said, ‘This is the guy I want to be doing this stuff. I just want it that way.’ It was like an ultimatum. I felt very strange about that.”
In Rakow’s telling of the story, he was in the offices of United Artists’ Mark Levinson picking up the check when a phone call came through from Rakow’s lawyer telling him that the Grateful Dead’s attorney said that Rakow had been fired. “I told my lawyer that the call he got has no status and this call does not compute,” Rakow says, so he took the check. From his perspective, it was money that was owed him for long and faithful service, plus he had obligations he had to take care of:
“What nobody knows is that the movie was being made partly by money that I had personally borrowed from a very heavy connection of drug dealers,” Rakow says. “Now, I wasn’t going to leave that scene and not pay back that bread before I left. The Grateful Dead had a friend named Cousin David—it was a cover name—and he ran a boutique smuggling operation from Mexico. By boutique I mean he had three or four small planes with seven or eight guys; a real buccaneer when drug smuggling was a small business run by really soulful people who had strong feelings. And he was interested in helping us get that movie out. And our cash flow was terrible—nobody was working. They stopped working October 21, 1974. I left in May 1976. The day I left, we owed Cousin David $47,000, which we had used to make payroll at the film house. The only one that knew what my particular thing was, was Jerry. He knew I owed this guy forty-seven grand. We talked about it. I wasn’t going to leave and depend on somebody like Hal Kant [the Dead’s lawyer] to see that my personal debts were paid.”
Rakow says he put another $40,000 toward completing costs for Hell’s Angels Forever and “I helped the Rolling Thunder guys buy some land in Ruby Valley that the Native Americans live on.” He also bought (for himself) a sizable collection of original copperplate negatives of photographs by Edward S. Curtis, the premier photodocumentarian of Native Americans in the nineteenth century.
“I’m not a lawyer, and I never looked at the books, but it seemed pretty illegal to me,” says Richard Loren. “Rakow says the Grateful Dead owed him money, and that’s probably true, but if you can’t convince them to give it to you, then is it okay to steal it?”
A year and a half after the imbroglio, Rakow told a writer, “I didn’t like the way they treated me. I felt ripped off and I wanted to make sure they felt totally ripped off, and I think they did.”
“He bragged about it to me extensively,” Mountain Girl says. “He thought he’d really run a big score. I was shocked.”
Not surprisingly, Rakow’s departure had a devastating effect on everyone in the Grateful Dead organization. Not only did it mean the loss of critically needed income, it created a rift between Garcia, who was Rakow’s greatest supporter, and the rest of the band.
“Jerry had gone to bat for Rakow in a way, and he’d never say it, but it must have affected him,” Loren says. “He had to look the band in the face after Rakow was gone. You’re sitting down with the other musicians and it was like a ‘He was your guy’ kind of attitude.”
“Ultimately, nobody wanted to go as far as suing about this,” Parker says. “Some of the band and some of the rest of us didn’t feel that what had happened was right, but Garcia had a certain ambivalence about it, and if he had come down strongly one way or another it might have made a difference. But as it turned out there was some going back and forth among lawyers and the way it finally came down is the band decided not to go after him for the money legally. Basically to accept his claim that he was somehow entitled to it. I think they didn’t want to get involved in a big legal showdown—going to court, getting all that publicity. It just kind of faded away. And Rakow got away with it.”
This sort of crisis might have broken up less stable groups, but the bond between the Grateful Dead members was such that they just kept plugging along, no doubt feeling battered, bruised and pissed-off. The anti-Rakow forces were happy to be rid of him, and now the focus could switch completely to the band’s imminent return to the concert stage.
The Dead rehearsed extensively before the tour began in early June. After all, they needed to get used to the idea of playing together regularly again after a year and a half in separate orbits. They also had to bring Mickey Hart up to speed—though he’d played with the group at the four gigs in 1975, he still had five years of the band’s evolution to absorb, and the band had to adjust to Mickey’s being back in the group, too. Weir said that with two drummers in the band again it became a little harder to “turn the corner” in jams, and Kreutzmann noted, “Things maybe didn’t flow quite as easily for a while. It was a little more cumbersome, which I think you’d expect, but it smoothed out over time.”
“Everyone was playing slow,” Mickey said. “The songs had slowed down and then we started to build up steam again. I was out of shape. Billy and I hadn’t really played together for years. This looks easy to some people, but the reason you don’t see two drummers playing together very often is because it’s not easy. It’s not just being good, and it’s not just putting two drum sets up on the stage.”
The band’s sound on that first tour
was quite a departure from the wide-open approach the group took in 1973–74. Sets were shorter, there wasn’t nearly as much free-form jamming, the tempos were slower for the most part and there was almost no real “space” music. Deadheads weren’t complaining, however. They were happy to have the band back on the road, and there were lots of new songs to enjoy: all the material from Blues for Allah, which hadn’t been played outside the Bay Area; revivals of old Dead songs like “Saint Stephen” and “Cosmic Charlie” in different, slower arrangements; cover tunes like Reverend Gary Davis’s “Samson and Delilah” and a completely reworked disco arrangement of “Dancing in the Streets”; and numbers from Garcia’s and Weir’s solo albums and band repertoires, such as “The Wheel,” “Mission in the Rain,” “Might As Well” and Weir’s “Lazy Lightning” and “Supplication” (which he’d played with Kingfish).
There were many popular Dead tunes that didn’t immediately follow the group out of retirement, too: “Dark Star,” “China Cat Sunflower” > “I Know You Rider,” “Uncle John’s Band,” “Jack Straw,” “China Doll” and “Casey Jones.” But they all reappeared over the course of the next three years.
In the fickle, transitory world of conventional entertainment, a year-and-a-half layoff is a long time—enough for some people to assume that the act is washed up, or to forget about them altogether. It’s the “What have you done lately?” syndrome. But with the Grateful Dead the opposite happened: the intense loyalty of their fans actually increased during the band’s time away from the road, as people came to realize just how important the group was to them. In addition, during the Dead’s hiatus the underground Grateful Dead tape-trading network had blossomed and, in effect, gone public when a few New York–area Deadheads started a newsletter/magazine called Dead Relix (later simply Relix), devoted to disseminating information about Grateful Dead tapes and taping.
Surreptitious taping from the audience on recorders smuggled into concerts had been going on at some Dead shows since the late ’60s, but the number of tapers increased each year, and the quality of the tapes improved as well. Between audience-made concert tapes and the numerous Dead shows that had been recorded from FM radio broadcasts, there were many tapes in circulation among traders by the mid-’70s. This encouraged more people to collect tapes and to become tapers themselves. Since every show was different and certain nights were unquestionably magical, why not try to capture that magic? Though bootleg albums occasionally turned up on the black market, the great majority of tape transactions in the Deadhead world were trades only—a code of honor specifically prohibited the buying or selling of Dead tapes. This ethical standard remains in place today and has spread into non–Grateful Dead taping circles.
Garcia, for one, was always sympathetic to the tapers, having been a bluegrass taper himself in the mid-’60s. “I think it’s okay,” he said in 1975. “If people like it they can certainly keep doing it. I don’t have any desire to control people as to what they’re doing and what they have. There’s something to be said for being able to record an experience you’ve liked, or being able to obtain a recording of it. Actually, we have all that stuff in our own collection of tapes. My responsibility to the notes is over after I’ve played them. At that point I don’t care where they go,” he added with a laugh. “They’ve left home, you know.”
Five of the twenty-five shows on the Dead’s June–July ’76 “comeback” tour were broadcast on FM stations, and tapers at the shows generally found the Dead turning a blind eye to their activities. There were occasional confiscation sweeps through the tapers’ ranks by less sympathetic members of the Grateful Dead road crew, but by and large Dan Healy condoned the practice; in fact, he took an interest in how the tapes sounded, because in a sense they reflected on his work mixing the band. In 1976 there were only a handful of tapers at most shows, but it seemed their numbers increased exponentially each year.
As it happened, the early-summer theater tour turned out not to be a sign that the Dead were returning to smaller venues on a permanent basis. By August they were back to playing small stadiums and giant arenas—in early October they even played two shows at the enormous 55,000-seat Oakland Stadium (which they did not sell out) on the same bill as the Who. Except for a New Year’s Eve concert at the Cow Palace, the group took a break from touring from the middle of October through the third week of February 1977. (At one point they had hoped to go to Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii in the late fall, but once again it was deemed financially unfeasible.) Which isn’t to say they were inactive. Garcia, naturally, was busy almost constantly, gigging on the West Coast with the JGB, working to complete the film and, beginning in January, recording the next Grateful Dead album.
The Dead’s commitment to United Artists ended when the band formally dissolved Grateful Dead and Round Records in the fall of 1976. At that point the Dead started shopping for a major record label that would pay them big bucks and grant them complete artistic freedom in exchange for the next few Grateful Dead albums. Waiting in the wings for just such a moment was Clive Davis, departed from Columbia Records and now boss of his own New York–based label, Arista. Davis had wanted the Dead to record for him since the late ’60s, so when they were ready to sign with a major label again, he courted them heavily, earning points with the Dead’s managers—particularly Richard Loren, who’d worked with Davis on the Rowan Brothers’ Columbia discs—and John Scher, who, beginning with the Dead’s return to the road in mid-’76, acted as a business advisor to Garcia and the Dead, and produced or co-produced nearly all of the group’s shows east of the Rockies.
“The prior period had been the culmination of that process of taking on everything and doing it all ourselves—the record company, the Wall of Sound, booking, our own travel agency,” Alan Trist says. “There was nothing, with the exception of tickets, that we weren’t doing in-house, and of course we did that later. Then, after the hiatus, the philosophy that Richard and Jerry and myself were in accord on was completely different: ‘Okay, let’s just do what we do best—be a band, and we’ll get other people of our own choosing to do everything else.’ So we hired producers to do the records, hired John Scher to do the booking on the East Coast, Bill Graham to do the West Coast, let Arista do publicity. But it didn’t mean that the basic Grateful Dead head had changed. We’d just learned some lessons about taking on too much.”
CHAPTER 15
Some Rise, Some Fall, Some Climb . . .
uring the first week of December 1976 Robert Hunter had a flash of inspiration: “I wrote ‘Terrapin, Part One,’ at a single sitting in an unfurnished house with a picture window overlooking San Francisco Bay during a flamboyant lightning storm,” he recalled in his book Box of Rain. “I typed the first thing that came into my mind at the top of the page, the title: ‘Terrapin Station.’ Not knowing what it was about, I began my writing with an invocation to the muse and kept typing as the story began to unfold.”
Let my inspiration flow
In token rhyme suggesting rhythm
That will not forsake me
’Til my tale is told and done
“On the same day, driving to the city,” Hunter continued, “Garcia was struck by a singular inspiration. He turned his car around and hurried home to set down some music that popped into his head, demanding immediate attention. When we met the next day, I showed him the words and he said, ‘I’ve got the music.’ They dovetailed perfectly and ‘Terrapin’ edged into this dimension.”
The suite of songs and instrumental interludes that became known as “Terrapin, Part One” represent a culmination of sorts for the Hunter-Garcia writing partnership—a place where their deep folk roots blossomed into a mythic dimension outside of time, space and place; ancient yet eternal; a swirling galaxy of images, ideas and archetypal characters.
The opening section of the suite, “Lady with a Fan,” established the character of the storyteller, who spins the centuries-old tale from the British folk ballad “The Lady of Carlisle” (which had bee
n sung in Appalachia at least since the nineteenth century, and was popularized in late-’50s folk circles by Mike Seeger and the New Lost City Ramblers). The story of “The Lady of Carlisle” is a simple one—a lady is torn between loving a brave army lieutenant and a brave sea captain. To choose between them she throws her fan into a lion’s den, saying whoever retrieves it will “gain a lady.” The lieutenant declines. The sailor fearlessly goes in among the lions, picks up the fan and returns it to the lady. As she offers herself to him, she says, “Here is the prize that you have won.”
In Hunter’s deft, poetic retelling, the characters are summoned up out of the storyteller’s fire (around which we are all presumably huddled) like visions:
Shadows of a sailor forming
Winds both foul and fair all swarm
Down in Carlisle he loved a lady
Many years ago
Here beside him stands a man
A soldier by the looks of him
Who came through many fights
But lost in love
While the storyteller speaks
A door within the fire creaks
Suddenly flies open
And a girl is standing there
Upon throwing her fan in the lion’s den, the lady asks the essential question:
“Which of you to gain me, tell,
Will risk uncertain pains of hell?
I will not forgive you
If you will not take the chance.”
Garcia: An American Life Page 44
