The message is clear—love and life are filled with danger and uncertainty, and sometimes the greatest rewards require the greatest risks. In this case, the sailor triumphs and claims his lady love, but Hunter refuses to judge whether his is the smart path: “You decide if he was wise,” he tells us, adding:
The storyteller make no choice
Soon you will not hear his voice
His job is to shed light
And not to master
There, in a nutshell, is an elucidation of Hunter’s role as a poet/lyricist and as the voice of the Grateful Dead—offering nuggets of wisdom in shards of verse and elegant metaphor, but never telling us what to believe or how to think. One could go on to say that this song summed up the Grateful Dead itself. The band’s course was filled with tests, and time after time they ventured into the lion’s den. These experiences defined the band, but did they always take the wise course? Perhaps; perhaps not. Many who chose the more dangerous and mysterious path—Garcia included—did not survive as long as they might have.
Garcia set “Lady with a Fan” to one of his prettiest folk melodies—it could have been played as easily on lutes and flutes as on electric guitars. The next section of the song cycle was a brief instrumental passage that serves as a transition between the telling of the tale and a return to the storyteller, who invokes his muse again as the music rises to a new peak:
Inspiration move me brightly
Light the song with sense and color
Hold away despair
More than this I will not ask
Faced with mysteries dark and vast
Statements just seem vain at last
Some rise, some fall, some climb
To get to Terrapin
What and where is Terrapin? Is it an elusive Holy Grail for which we search our entire lives? A metaphor for heaven and/or nirvana? Is it death and resurrection, or the purgatory of an unending quest for meaning? “I can’t figure out if it’s the end or beginning,” Hunter writes in the song, “but the train’s put its brakes on and the whistle is screaming: ‘Terrapin’!” In “At a Siding,” a short following piece in the suite, Garcia sings, “The sullen wings of fortune beat like rain / You’re back in Terrapin for good or ill again,” as if this is a destination fraught with real or psychic peril.
“Jerry favors a certain type of folk song,” Hunter said when I asked about his and Garcia’s affinity for the kind of timeless folk themes that crop up in “Terrapin.” “He loves the mournful, death-connected ballad, the Child ballad stuff. This is a venerable source that has always spoken to him, and to me as well, which is one reason we got together writing songs—because of that haunting feel that certain traditional songs have. I just eat them up and so does he. It’s a point of absolute mutual agreement. ‘Terrapin’ gets that in spades. ‘Terrapin’ was our attempt to entirely surrender and go in that direction. That’s our little temple of that. It’s full of ghosts.
“It’s archetypal. It hearkens to something in us that is built into us partly genetically and partly by the culture we assimilate, the values built into popular songs. I try to go for something real basic when I write a song. It’s got to have these resonances to me or it’s not right. Unless, maybe, I’m trying to write a rock ’n’ roll song, and then I’m looking for rock ’n’ rollish resonances. But I’m generally deep-sea diving in imagery and getting things that sometimes—as in folk music—you don’t know quite what it means, but it’s resonant.”
“Terrapin Station, Part One” would form the backbone and provide the title for the Grateful Dead’s first Arista album, which they started recording sometime in January 1977. (It was “Part One” because Hunter wrote several other thematically connected songs for the suite, but Garcia elected not to set them to music. Hunter has performed other sections of the suite himself through the years, and the lyrics for the full work are printed in Box of Rain.) At the urging of Clive Davis, who felt that the Dead had the potential to make a great commercial album, the band agreed to work with an outside producer for the first time since a very frustrated Dave Hassinger was driven away from the Anthem of the Sun sessions in early 1968.
“When we went with Arista,” Garcia said, “we went with a spirit of cooperation, thinking, well, we’ve tried things our way; we’ve had our own record company, we’ve produced ourselves—we’ve done it a lot, in fact—and it’d be interesting to try somebody else’s approach totally and see where it takes us, because of the fact that our records—as records—have always been neither here nor there. They haven’t been relevant. We wanted some fresh ears—that was part of the reason it didn’t seem outrageous to us. . . . We’re very conscious of how easy it is to get into your own trip so much that you just don’t have any sense of it, no objectivity at all. It’s easy to do.”
Davis made a number of different suggestions from the ranks of top producers of the day, including a young producer based in Los Angeles named Keith Olsen, who was red-hot in the industry after producing a superb, multiplatinum pop album for Fleetwood Mac.
Garcia and Weir in particular liked Olsen, and at this point in the Dead’s history, with the smoldering, twisted ruins of Grateful Dead Records still vivid in the rearview mirror, the notion of making a more “commercial” record was fairly attractive. Besides, it’s not as if they were remotely close to going “pop”—neither the grandiose “Terrapin” nor “Estimated Prophet,” Weir’s strange new reggae tune in 7/4 time, were going to be AM radio fodder; far from it. But if Olsen could smooth some of the group’s notoriously ragged edges so that more radio stations might find the Dead palatable, perhaps it was worth a shot. So they agreed that Olsen would produce the record at his own Sound City studio in Van Nuys, northwest of Los Angeles. That worked out nicely for another reason, too: at the same time that those sessions were going on, Garcia and Dan Healy, aided by Susan Crutcher, could complete the sound work on the final dub of the Grateful Dead movie at Warner Bros. studios in nearby Burbank. The band, managers and a few Grateful Dead family types took over a wing of the inexpensive Van Nuys Travel Inn for nearly two months, and Garcia worked almost around the clock the entire time he was in Los Angeles.
Olsen had the band rehearse extensively before they began cutting basic tracks for the album, and he quickly learned that after years of improvising together and staying loose enough to follow the music that unfolded before them, the Grateful Dead had a lot of ingrained musical habits—some good, some bad—from his perspective.
“The cutting of tracks in general was very difficult because I was trying to get them to be tight,” Olsen says. “Mickey Hart is a real good drummer but he has a tendency to lean forward on the beat, and Bill Kreutzmann is a real laid-back guy and he lays back on the beat. So where’s the beat? Every single bass and snare drum beat, when you’d hear them together, would sound a little off to me. It was a mess. Mickey has the fire, Billy has kind of a groove. So I said, ‘Why don’t we orchestrate the drum parts? Okay, Billy, you get the hi-hat, kick [bass drum] and snare and an occasional cymbal. Mickey, you get all the tom fills, all the flash, all the color.’ And they did it. That’s the way we recorded.
“Garcia and Weir were both really good,” Olsen continues. “Garcia always played really cool stuff. He never played something the same way twice, but almost everything he came up with was cool. He just had endless ideas about everything. Weir is a real interesting guy in general. I spent seven months with him [recording Terrapin Station and then a solo album with Weir called Heaven Help the Fool]. He’s a sweetheart. He’s very talented in his own way, but definitely only in a Bob Weir kind of way. It’s like all the guys in the Dead are talented in a Dead kind of way. They can’t really run out and do that many other things because outside of that idiom they get lost.”
Olsen says the basic tracks took about six weeks to record, “and we didn’t get one basic for the first three weeks we were there. I kept throwing them away, saying, ‘It ain’t good enough, guys.’ Garcia would say, ‘Reall
y?’ And I’d say, ‘No, Jerry, it’s not good enough.’ Bobby would say, ‘But we don’t play any better than this.’ And I’d say, ‘I’m going to make you play better. It isn’t too late!’”
The overdubbing process also took a long time, because Olsen was such a stickler for mistake-free playing. But, he says, “Garcia had so much fun. He’d be giggling in the control room. When we were doing this double-speed guitar stuff [speeding up the guitar electronically] and these double-speed harmony parts on ‘Terrapin,’ he was just laughing. I never heard anybody laugh so much when they were working. Garcia loved playing more than anything and he sat there and laughed while he was playing. It was great.”
During the period the Dead were recording the album, they played just five concerts—two in Southern California in late February, three at Winterland in late March—and at each of them they played both “Terrapin” and “Estimated Prophet” to universally fantastic reviews from Deadheads. Here were two new songs completely unlike any other in the Dead’s repertoire: “Estimated,” which appeared to portray the thoughts of some delusional messianic zealot—“a guy I see at nearly every backstage door,” Weir said—juxtaposed a dark, ominous, minor-chord reggae feeling with bright, major-chord progressions that were nearly as sunny and triumphant as those in Weir’s “Sugar Magnolia” jam. Garcia got to try out a new pedal effect for his guitar on this song—an envelope filter that gave each note he played a wah-wah-like thwack, depending on his picking intensity. And “Terrapin” was a complex and involved world of its own, moving from the timeless balladic opening to a stirring buildup that had almost martial overtones, finally leading to an explosion of nearly baroque-sounding unison lines and counterpoint that the band would play again and again, changing timbres and tones with each pass, the music swelling to heroic proportions and pulling back unpredictably.
Garcia introduced another major new song at the first of the March Winterland shows, though he didn’t actually have a hand in writing it. “Fire on the Mountain” had been written by Mickey Hart and Robert Hunter for the aborted follow-up to Hart’s first solo album, Rolling Thunder. “That was another Mickey Hart rhythm extravaganza with no melody,” Hunter said of the song’s origin. “He just gave me this track—bop, bop bopbopbopbop . . . —and said, ‘Make this a song, Uncle Bob.’ So I wrote ‘Fire on the Mountain’ to it and recorded over the tracks. I still think he did the best version of it years before the Dead got to it.” There was a literal fire on the mountain that inspired the song—a fast-moving wildfire that threatened Hart’s ranch. The pre-Dead versions with Mickey rapping through verse after elliptical verse were frenzied and ragged but actually suited Hunter’s lyrics perfectly. When Garcia finally tackled the song, he fashioned a melody of sorts for the verses but elected to sing only three, including this evocative middle verse, which, as usual, has metaphorical implications relating to the Grateful Dead:
Almost ablaze, still you don’t feel the heat
Takes all you got just to stay on the beat
You say it’s a living, we all gotta eat
But you’re here alone, there’s no one to compete
If mercy’s in business I wish it for you
More than just ashes when your dreams come true
Fire, fire on the mountain . . .
The main riff was an infectious repeating groove that had a slight Afro-Caribbean bounce to it. Half a year before Garcia started singing it, the groove turned up as an instrumental track he played on called “Happiness Is Drumming” on the extraordinary Diga Rhythm Band album. “Fire on the Mountain” was another song on which Garcia used the envelope filter to great effect. Every note had its own round, fat shape—you could hear the attack and decay—as the lead guitar line danced around, inside and on top of the big groove that the other players created with their own pounding instrumental voices. There are versions in which the envelope filter allows Garcia’s guitar to take on some of the character of steel drums, and others where there’s a hint of viola or French horn. Except for just a few versions over the years, “Fire on the Mountain” was always attached to the similarly driving and polyrhythmic “Scarlet Begonias.” “Scarlet-Fire,” as the sequence was called in Deadhead slang, became one of the Dead’s most popular song combos, perhaps even the most popular.
Many Deadheads regard the Dead’s spring 1977 East Coast tour as one of their finest, and it’s easy to see why. The infusion of new material—three of their all-time best songs—took the music in exciting new directions at the same time that the most successful tunes from Blues for Allah—“Crazy Fingers” and the triumvirate of “Help on the Way” > “Slipknot!” > “Franklin’s Tower”—were reaching new levels of maturity. On that spring tour, too, the group continued to reintroduce songs that hadn’t been played since the hiatus; major songs like “Jack Straw,” “Brokedown Palace” and “China Doll.” And Garcia introduced two very different cover tunes. “Jack-A-Roe,” a peppy old British sea-song about a woman who dresses up like a male sailor so she can go to war at her loved one’s side, had been popularized by Joan Baez during Garcia’s folk days. The rubbery, syncopated “Iko Iko” came from New Orleans’s Mardi Gras Indian (actually, African-American) culture. Sugarboy Crawford cut the song as “Jockomo” in the late ’40s; the Dixie Cups had a fluke hit with a nearly a cappella version of “Iko Iko” in the ’60s; and Dr. John put the song on one of his albums in the early ’70s. It was that version that inspired Keith Olsen to suggest that Garcia cover the song with the Dead.
Working to tighten up their sound under Olsen’s benign whip had a tremendous influence on the Dead. During the spring 1977 tour the playing was crisp and rhythmically assured, as if they’d discovered some new source of power within themselves. Brimming with confidence gained from playing so powerfully, the band was then able to relax enough to open up their jams more in 1977, too. Songs like “Saint Stephen,” “Dancing in the Streets” and even “Not Fade Away” became springboards to all sorts of fascinating and inventive grooves that the band explored with tremendous zest and imagination.
Another reason Garcia seemed so exuberant on the tour was that the Grateful Dead movie—rather unimaginatively titled The Grateful Dead—was finally completed just before the band went out on the road, ending what he called at the time “two years of incredible doubt, crisis after crisis, as the movie was endlessly eating bucks. Every time I thought of something, my mind would come back to the film and I’d get depressed. It’s boiled down to about two hours and ten minutes now, but it sure took a lot of energy.”
The film opened with great fanfare at the giant Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan on June 1, 1977. Predictably, Deadheads loved it and everyone else pretty much ignored it, though it did get a handful of positive and negative reviews in the mainstream press. In some ways the film represents Garcia’s most fully realized tangible work of art. He spent longer on the project than on any other, and it stretched him in many new directions as he was forced to ponder how to communicate the totality of the Grateful Dead experience in both visual and musical terms. How do you show how the Grateful Dead interacts musically onstage? How, without a voice-over narration, do you explain what Deadheads are all about? How do you give some sense of both the tactile trippiness and the transformative power of the music? Imagine what it must have been like for Garcia to wade through all that raw footage that showed him every imaginable perspective of a Dead concert, when he’d only seen it from his own vantage point onstage for ten years—dancers in the audience spinning like gypsies; straight union vendors selling hot dogs in the cramped Winterland hallways; Billy Kreutzmann in action close up as seen over his left shoulder; a security guard dealing with kids trying to talk their way into the show; a wild nitrous oxide party backstage during the concert.
Working on the film “changed my outlook towards the whole thing,” Garcia said shortly after the film opened. “It gave me a greater sense of the unique value of the Grateful Dead, which is something of which I’ve been aware but haven�
��t known how to express effectively and don’t care to. It either is, or it isn’t.
“The film works very well on the contour of it—its energy is a good example of the Grateful Dead experience. It’s a translation of that idea, both coming from what it’s like for me—in my head, as abstract ideas, nonspecific images—and what it’s like for anybody.”
What’s striking, too, is that even though the film was already “out of date” in a sense when it was released—by 1977 Mickey was back and the group really had a very different sound—it was fundamentally true, and more than twenty years later it still communicates the essence of the music and the experience better than any other single work. What it said about the music and the crowd, in its own impressionistic way, is no less valid today than it was in 1977. Garcia could be a very tough critic of his own work, given to sometimes harsh revisionism, but he always spoke fondly of the movie. He remained rightfully proud of it for the rest of his life.
As usual, Garcia didn’t really have any time to savor the completion of the film. “He segued from the Dead movie to mixing Terrapin Station,” says Emily Craig, who worked as assistant to Garcia during the mixing sessions, “and I thought the song ‘Terrapin Station’ had a very filmic approach. They were physically cutting sixteen-track tape in between some very rapidly played guitar notes. It was really exciting and slightly bizarre. They were taking movements of music and treating them as if they were scenes. I think there was a lot of film influence in how that particular song got approached.”
The final overdubbing on the Terrapin Station album had been completed during the spring tour: “I remember working in New York [at Automated Sound],” Olsen says. “They were working at the Capitol Theater [in Passaic, New Jersey] or someplace doing shows and they couldn’t get back in the city until midnight. So we’d start to work at midnight and go from midnight to 9 A.M. Actually, it worked out well—they were ready to roll then. John Belushi [of the TV comedy hit Saturday Night Live] was there a lot, but after he passed out on the floor I barred him. I remember having to step over him when he was passed out.”
Garcia: An American Life Page 45
