Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  “But I actually really enjoyed Keith,” she continues. “He was a trip and sometimes he was very sweet. He definitely fit for a while. I thought he had a number of different talents.”

  By the end of the year, though, Garcia had dissolved the Jerry Garcia Band, and his relationship with Keith was strained. “Jerry caught him stealing something inside his briefcase; his drugs or something,” John Kahn said. “He was inside Jerry’s briefcase and then he was gone [from the JGB] right after that. I’m sure he would have been gone anyway. It was in the works that they were going to split up. But Keith would burn me and Jerry out of drugs all the time. He made Jerry mad for a period of time and it culminated in that.”

  Garcia was beginning to have his own problems with the Persian, too. “Jerry had been kind of quiet, but at least he’d been home,” Mountain Girl says. “But he was definitely a little subdued, so I guess he was getting into some stuff. At that point I didn’t see it at home really; that came a little later, but I could tell something weird was happening.”

  Deborah Koons said that she hung out with Garcia again in the spring and summer of 1978 and found him “very unstable. He was bouncing around, staying different places.” By this time Deborah had enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute, which took up a lot of her time, “and the farther away I got from that whole scene, the better I felt, so I just kept going. I didn’t see him again for fifteen years.”

  Again, it’s difficult to gauge the effect Garcia’s drug use might have had on his playing at this time—there is no noticeable drop-off in the quality of his performances. Shows were generally a bit shorter than they had been, but they were not lacking in focus or energy. Indeed, in the few videos from 1978 that are in circulation among traders, Garcia is tremendously animated. In a black-and-white video of the Dead at Duke University in April 1978, Garcia is smiling, gesturing, doing Pete Townshend “windmills” on his guitar, even joining in on the drum solo as if he’s been possessed by the spirit of Gene Krupa. And the one cover tune Garcia introduced in the spring of 1978 showed that his puckish spirit was intact. The Dead’s version of Warren Zevon’s playfully macabre “Werewolves of London” (which had just come out on Zevon’s second album) was a howl—literally.

  The band continued mainly to play large gigs—including stadium shows in Santa Barbara (where Zevon was among the opening acts), Kansas City and Eugene, Oregon—but in the summer of ’78 they also played their first shows at the 9,000-seat Red Rocks Amphitheater, outside of Denver, which would become one of the Dead’s magical “power spots” over the next decade. Set high on a hill amid towering rock slabs, with a magnificent view of Denver across the distant plain, Red Rocks was right out of a Zane Grey novel—it was the most overtly Western environment the Dead played in; the perfect place for a band that sang about outlaws, saloons and gamblers. It was its own world, completely cut off from civilization, and for band and Deadheads alike it was both haven and heaven.

  Shortly after the Dead’s first shows at Red Rocks in July 1978 the band started working on their second album for Arista, Shakedown Street. It was Garcia’s idea that they work at Club Front—he had enjoyed making Cats Under the Stars there. No one was anxious to go to Los Angeles after their experience making Terrapin Station. At Club Front they’d be close to home; it was their place.

  The band agreed to use an outside producer again, but this time they went outside traditional production circles and selected a musician who had also produced a couple of his own band’s records—Lowell George of Little Feat. “We chose Lowell George because we wanted someone who understood band mechanics,” Garcia explained in 1978.

  Lowell George was truly one of rock music’s great spirits—a big furry bear of a guy who always seemed to have a smile on his face. He was also one of the finest slide guitar players of all time, a soulful and expressive singer with a gruff, bluesy voice, and a gifted songwriter with a truly warped and unusual perspective on the world. Little Feat and the Grateful Dead were simpatico in the same way that the Allman Brothers and the Dead were: they loved to jam, they drew from many of the same musical sources and they enjoyed getting high and playing for dancing crowds. But whereas the Dead and the Allmans seemed to connect most on some mutual psychedelic plane, the Dead and Little Feat met on a polyrhythmic plane: No one played funky, syncopated N’awlins-style rock ’n’ roll better than Little Feat, and they also had their share of quirky shuffles—a little like the Dead, but with a bluesier edge.

  “I really liked Lowell a lot,” Bill Kreutzmann said. “Whereas Keith [Olsen] always wanted to be the director-producer type and wear the higher hat—to work in the upper office, so to speak—Lowell was really like a member of the band more. If we were working on a song and he didn’t feel it was going right, he’d just grab a guitar and come into the studio and show us how he felt it. That was one of the ways he’d communicate, and it worked great. I had a tremendous amount of respect for him.”

  Most of the songs on the record had never been played live by the Dead. The exceptions were “Fire on the Mountain”; Weir’s Latin-flavored retooling of the old Pigpen vehicle “Good Lovin’”; and a revamped version of “New Minglewood Blues” that Weir called “All New Minglewood Blues” (though it actually wasn’t so new).

  Garcia had three new songs to contribute to the album. “Shakedown Street” was the Dead’s original contribution to the age of disco—after all, 1977–78 was the heyday of Donna Summer, the soundtrack mega-hit Saturday Night Fever and dozens of one-hit wonders who lit up the disco dance floors with a song or two and then were never heard from again. Conversely it was also the era of “disco sucks,” and more than a few Deadheads were horrified when they heard “Shakedown Street” for the first time, particularly coming on the heels of the group’s lamentable disco version of “Dancing in the Streets.” The disco-haters needn’t have worried, however. Just as the “disco” “Dancing in the Streets” became a fascinating vehicle for some intense rhythmic jamming when the band played it live, “Shakedown Street” developed far beyond its steady rhythmic pulse in concert. It gave the band a chance to explore the funky R&B side of their roots, which had been nearly dormant since Pigpen’s departure. The big jam in the last third of the song would’ve done Parliament/Funkadelic proud.

  “If I Had the World to Give” was perhaps the most straightforward love ballad that Hunter and Garcia ever wrote together. On the surface it seemed almost like a traditional pop love song from the ’40s or ’50s, but Garcia’s musical setting was salted with some chord choices that lent the piece a certain sadness, and lyrically there was a hint of darkness amid the bliss. The Dead played the song live only three times, possibly because Garcia had considerable difficulty negotiating its difficult vocal leaps. That’s a shame, because all three versions packed a powerful emotional charge, with Garcia reaching deep down in his soul during his raw, screaming guitar breaks. The version on Shakedown Street was technically very strong—Garcia felt it “came out really nice”—but it didn’t quite have the visceral quality the song had live. Who knows what it might have become if Garcia had kept playing it through the years?

  “Stagger Lee” was a tune that worked well both live and on the record. Like “Dupree’s Diamond Blues” and “Casey Jones,” it was a case of Hunter and Garcia embellishing a venerable song tradition. There are “Stag-O-Lee” and “Stack-O-Lee” songs dating back more than a hundred years, and everyone from Mississippi John Hurt to Doc Watson to Dr. John covered versions of the story/song through the years. In most of the different “Stagger Lee” songs, the title character is a bad dude who kills a fellow named Billy Lyons after Billy steals Stag’s Stetson hat.

  Hunter’s telling of the story is wonderfully colorful. His setting is “1940 Xmas eve with a full moon over town,” and instead of stealing Stagger Lee’s hat, Billy DeLyon wins it in a dice game and then gets blown away. Hunter adds an ineffectual policeman named Baio to the tale, but the central character is really Billy’s wife, Delia, who is
bent on revenge.

  As Stagger Lee lit a cigarette she shot him in the balls

  Blew the smoke off her revolver, had him dragged to City Hall

  “Baio, Baio, see you hang him high

  He shot my Billy dead and now he’s got to die”

  “Stagger Lee” was Hunter and Garcia’s last stab at bringing the oral tradition of narrative storytelling into the present day. It was also one of their most successful attempts.

  The other new songs on the album were Weir and Barlow’s humorous testosterone-fueled rock rave-up “I Need a Miracle,” another wispy, romantic ballad by Donna called “From the Heart of Me” and a strange little percussion excursion titled “Serengetti.”

  The sessions for Shakedown Street were—like Lowell George himself—extremely loose, especially compared with Keith Olsen’s demanding studio regimen. (Which is not to imply that Olsen didn’t like to party with the band; he did, but he also asked more of the group than Lowell did.) There were many long, unproductive days and nights in the studio—sessions that were frittered away getting high. Lowell and Garcia were each independently using both coke and heroin (mainly lots of the former), and the band as a whole was in a bad period in terms of substance abuse.

  The band fell behind schedule making the album and because of commitments to tour with Little Feat, Lowell was unable to work on the record after the basic tracks were recorded. This may have actually been a good development. Midway through the project Garcia told a writer, “Really, it’s better to work without a producer at times. I’m not happy with all the basic tracks on this—but I’m never completely happy.”

  The group had hoped to have the record completed by the end of August, because looming in mid-September was the Dead’s greatest adventure yet: a trip to Egypt for three concerts at the foot of the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx. The album could wait.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Desert Stars Are Bright Tonight

  he notion of the Grateful Dead playing at the pyramids had been tossed around in stoned conversations almost since the band started. The fantasies didn’t stop there, either: Why not play Machu Picchu and Easter Island and the Great Wall of China and Stonehenge? Imagine what it would be like if the Dead brought their music to ancient, spiritually high places! Perhaps they could tap into the mysterious power of those spots, stir up a few ghosts from the collective consciousness—channel an Inca healer or Druid priest or Egyptian king. At the very least it would be a blast for the band and family and the hearty fans who were willing to make the long journey.

  “I’m into the psychedelic archaeology of the ancient world,” Phil explained, “the structures that mark the channels of earth energy and places of power. No matter what anyone thinks they might be, there is definitely some kind of mojo about the pyramids. When you get there you find out there is power.”

  The idea inched toward becoming reality after Richard Loren visited Egypt in 1975. As he explains, “When I lived with Marty Balin for the first three weeks that I came here [in 1970], Marty was an avid reader and an avid fan of Egypt. He introduced me to Egyptology and Egypt as a country, and I fell incredibly in love with it. I read all Marty’s books about it and it became a real hobby for me. The first chance I had to take a vacation from the Grateful Dead I went to Egypt for three weeks. Then I went a second time the next year. I was on a horseback ride with a friend near the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx and I remember riding along and then all of sudden I turned around and I saw this stage to the left of the Sphinx and I saw the pyramids and it dawned on me, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if the Grateful Dead could play in Egypt?’ I brought the idea back with me and I took it to Jerry first. He thought it was a great idea and that we should go for it, so I presented it, with Jerry, to the Grateful Dead. ‘Yeah, man, that’s far-out. Great, great, great!’ We put together a committee to try to make this happen, and that committee was comprised of Alan Trist and myself and Phil Lesh, who was the band’s representative. Jerry got totally into Egyptology and the mysteries of the pyramids, of course. And my office became Egypt for that period. It took two years to get there from when the idea came up in January of 1976.”

  No rock ’n’ roll band had ever played at the Sound and Light Theater in Giza before—it was used mainly for a dramatic tourist show about the pyramids and the Sphinx, and occasionally for concerts of Egyptian music. But there was a stage and seating for about a thousand people, and that’s what had caught Loren’s eye. The Dead faced numerous obstacles in gaining permission to play the gigs there, but early in the process they managed to find a couple of allies in American diplomatic circles who wrote letters to the Egyptian ambassador in Washington and the minister of culture in Cairo to lay the groundwork for a formal request.

  “Then Phil and Richard and I got on our suits and we flew to Washington and went to the Egyptian embassy and we had a big meeting there with the ambassador,” Trist says. “This was our big hurdle—if the Egyptian ambassador in Washington said it was okay, then we could go on to the next step. The meeting went very well, and the thing that pulled it off really was Phil. The Egyptian ambassador had a crucial qustion in his mind which was very simple: ‘Why do you want to play there? You’re a rock ’n’ roll band—what’s this all about?’ And Phil’s answer was, ‘Because as musicians we have learned that playing in different places and in different cultures influences our music in ways that we treasure.’ Well, you could see the ambassador light up and smile. He loved that answer, because it was so genuine. It was totally from a musical perspective and not loaded up with political stuff or cultural stuff or commercial stuff. It was very pure. And it was pure. Our wanting to go there had nothing to do with money or detente or any of that.

  “So after we had the ambassador’s blessing, the three of us went to Cairo and we spent two or three weeks there seeing the minister of culture, the minister of information, the director of the Sound and Light Theater and all these other officials. It took forever to get all these appointments done. The minister of culture would say, ‘I’m having a sauna at four o’clock. Meet me there.’ And we’d go there and he’d already have gone off somewhere else. It took days to get anything done. Then Richard and I went back to Egypt two more times after that trip to work on logistical things.”

  Finally, the Dead won over everyone they needed to, and the gigs were scheduled for September 14, 15 and 16, 1978. As part of their agreement, the Dead could not take any money out of the country after the shows—all proceeds from the concerts went to the Department of Antiquities (which was involved in the protection and restoration of ancient sites in Egypt) and to the Faith and Hope charity for handicapped children, a pet project of the wife of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, who, as fate would have it, would be in America trying to negotiate a peace agreement with Israel at the time of the shows. Arista Records agreed to contribute some money for the trip, and paid for multitrack recordings to be made for a live album.

  The band warmed up with two shows at Red Rocks at the end of August (where they debuted “I Need a Miracle,” “Stagger Lee,” “Shakedown Street,” “If I Had the World to Give” and “From the Heart of Me”) and then a big moneymaking concert at Giants Stadium in northern New Jersey to help defray some of the costs at the Egypt trip. Of course if a rock band made an excursion like that today, the venture would probably be underwritten by some corporation in conjunction with MTV or a cable television channel, but that was not the Dead’s way of operating, then or later. In fact, everyone in the Dead family paid most of their own way there. And a tour of Europe was booked for after the Egypt trip to make the trip east even more worthwhile.

  On September 4, more than two hundred Grateful Dead family and friends flew on a chartered jet to New York, where they picked up the band and crew, and then made their way across the Atlantic to Paris and on to Cairo. For nearly two weeks the Dead and their friends took over the Mena House hotel, a luxurious (for Giza) four-story building a stone’s throw from the Great Pyramid. Days were spent wan
dering ancient sites in small groups, learning to ride camels, lounging by the Mena House pool, dining on local specialties, smoking hashish and preparing for the shows. Quite a collection of fellow travelers were along for the ride: Owsley, Kesey, Babbs and assorted Merry Pranksters, Deadhead basketball star Bill Walton, writer-humorist Paul Krassner, David Freiberg, John Kahn (who was in charge of recording the shows), Bill Graham (there as a tourist instead of a promoter for a change) and a few hundred fans from all over who’d scraped together enough money to make the trek. Among the Dead family no-shows were Rock Scully, who had been out of the scene for a while, and Robert Hunter, who Garcia joked was “too mean” to go. “That rat,” Garcia said. “He was too stingy to buy a ticket. He convinced himself it wouldn’t be important.”

  “It was probably the most exciting thing a lot of us had done,” Mountain Girl says, “because it was really, really different. Europe at least you can be assured of certain things, but in Egypt, forget it. It’s a really different culture. It was truly the third world, with salesmen on every corner and donkey dung underfoot, bad water and great hash from the taxi drivers at really high prices. There was a lot of sexual harassment for the women. Lots of petting and fondling and grabbing. I had men stop me on the street and ask, ‘How much do you weigh?’ Because there, the bigger you are the better; big gals are in,” she laughs.

  “It was overwhelming,” Trist says. “There wasn’t one minute that we weren’t naturally on a high day after day. People could hardly sleep because the energy was so intense. So that was the context of the gig. On top of all this, the music was almost incidental; or certainly the context of other things going on was much greater than any other gig I’d ever been to.”