Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  According to Garcia, “It took us a good two years of pretty hard ferreting to find out who are the real actors in the environmental movement on a global level, especially having to do specifically with the rain forest. Once you find those, it’s easier to focus on what you’re going to do and what you’re going to raise money for and so on.” Most of the money was earmarked for three groups involved in direct action on rain forest issues—Greenpeace, Cultural Survival (which deals primarily with people indigenous to the rain forests) and the Rainforest Action Network.

  On the morning of the Dead’s first Madison Square Garden concert, Garcia, Weir and Hart, along with representatives from each of those organizations and the head of the United Nations Environment Program, held a news conference at the UN to articulate their concerns. Garcia tried to explain why the notoriously anti-political Grateful Dead had gotten involved:

  “We’ve never really called on our fans, the Deadheads, to align themselves one way or another as far as any political cause is concerned because of a basic paranoia about leading someone. We don’t want to be the leaders, and we don’t want to serve unconscious fascism. Power is a scary thing. When you feel that you are close to it, you want to make sure that it’s not misleading. So all this time we’ve avoided making any statements about politics, about alignments of any sort. This is even true of the notion of giving, and things like that—mercy. But this is, we feel, an issue strong enough and life-threatening enough that inside the world of human games, where people really torture each other and overthrow countries and there’s a lot of murder and hate, there’s the larger question of global survival. We want to see the world survive to play those games, even if they’re atrocious.”

  Given all the extramusical activity surrounding the Garden run, it’s not too surprising that a few of the shows were slightly sub-par, and that by the time the benefit concert rolled around, the band seemed a little tired and Garcia’s voice was almost completely shot—the entire night he could hardly manage much beyond a scratchy croak. Fortunately, there were plenty of other musicians on hand to take up the slack, including former Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor, New York singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega (a favorite of Garcia’s), Bruce Hornsby and Philadelphia soulsters Hall and Oates. The concert was not the complete artistic success it might have been had Garcia not been fatigued and plagued with throat troubles, but it earned more than $600,000 for the rain forest groups and generated plenty of publicity for the cause.

  On the Dead’s fall 1988 Southern swing, Garcia premiered a new song, “Built to Last,” which became the title song for the Dead’s next album a year later. A pleasant midtempo tune, it seemed to be Hunter’s meditation on the Dead’s longevity, at once directed at the band and, through Garcia’s voice, its fans:

  There are times when you can beckon

  There are times when you must call

  You can take a lot of reckoning

  But you can’t take it all

  There are times when I can help you out

  And times when you must fall

  There are times when you must live in doubt

  And I can’t help at all

  Three blue stars / Rise on the hill

  Say no more, now / Just be still

  All these trials / Soon be past

  Look for something / Built to last

  Shortly after the tour, the band began working on the follow-up album to In the Dark, even though at that point they barely had a full album’s worth of material: three Hunter-Garcia tunes (“Foolish Heart,” “Believe It or Not,” “Built to Last”), three Brent Mydland–John Barlow songs (the rowdy rockers “Blow Away” and “Gentlemen Start Your Engines,” and a pretty ballad dedicated to Brent’s little girls, called “I Will Take You Home”) and just one Weir-sung effort, “Victim or the Crime.” At first the band tried the same recording approach that had worked so well on In the Dark, cutting basic tracks live onstage at the Marin Vets, but there was something about the new songs that didn’t lend themselves to that method. So they abandoned that hall and moved out to secluded northwestern Marin County to private, rural Skywalker Ranch, where producer-director George Lucas had built a state-of-the-art recording studio that was already becoming famous for its huge “live” room. By year’s end, though, not much serious work had been done on the record and the bandmembers were already talking about trying some other approach.

  At the first Dead concert of 1989, at Kaiser Convention Center in February, Garcia introduced a song that would quickly develop into one of the greatest works of his “late” period. “Standing on the Moon” was another simple, achingly slow ballad (which immediately put off fans hoping for the next “Scarlet Begonias” to emerge), a poignant meditation on isolation, detachment and, ultimately, companionship. On the literal level, it depicts an astronaut on the moon, “watching” the travails of the Earth hundreds of thousands of miles away:

  I see all of Southeast Asia

  I can see El Salvador

  I hear the cries of children

  And the other songs of war

  It’s like a mighty melody

  That rings down from the sky

  Standing here upon the moon

  I watch it all roll by

  All roll by, All roll by, All roll by

  By the song’s conclusion, though, the homesick main character longs to be “somewhere in San Francisco / On a back porch in July / Just looking up to heaven / At this crescent in the sky.” And in the emotional close of the song, Garcia sings, “Standing on the moon with nothing left to do / A lovely view of heaven / But I’d rather be with you / Be with you / I’d rather be with you. . . .” The song would build dramatically during this coda, with Garcia repeating “be with you” over and over again, a blast of Van Morrison–style raving that never failed to excite the crowd.

  Hunter said, “‘Standing on the Moon’ was one of those neat, sweet quick things, like ‘It Must Have Been the Roses,’ where the whole picture just came to me, and I grabbed a piece of paper and got it down. No changes, no nothin’. Out of the head of Zeus, full-born and clad in armor.”

  “Every once in a while Hunter delivers a lyric that is just absolutely clear in its intent,” Garcia commented of the song. “I thought it would be really nice to do a song that you only have to hear one time and you’ll get it. You don’t have to listen to it hundreds of times or wonder what it’s about. . . . There’s something I like about it very much. It’s an emotional reality; it isn’t linguistics. It’s something about that moment of the soul. To have those words coming out of my mouth puts me in a very specific place, and there’s a certain authenticity there that I didn’t want to disturb.”

  The Dead’s spring 1989 tour was generally quite strong musically—particularly the newer material, which the band had been honing in the studio. But again there were numerous incidents outside their concerts that tainted the tour and earned the Dead even more bad press. In Pittsburgh there was a rock- and bottle-throwing melee as 3,000 people without tickets fought with police. In Cincinnati there were more than seventy arrests. There was fighting outside Irvine Meadows Amphitheater again. Even in the Bay Area, which had been spared most of the major problems associated with the overpopulation of the Dead scene, there were enough ugly incidents outside shows in 1989 that the Dead were effectively banned from the three nicest venues they played: the Greek Theater, Frost Amphitheater and Kaiser Convention Center. In the ’90s, hometown shows would be played exclusively in the drab Oakland Coliseum Arena and the 20,000-seat Shoreline Amphitheater, forty minutes south of San Francisco.

  That spring, too, the Dead abandoned their effort to cut their new album at Skywalker Ranch, and the action moved to Club Front and a different recording technique: building up from strong rhythm tracks, with each player recording separately and alone—the antithesis of recording together as a group.

  “What we did,” Garcia explained, “was we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the right tempo for the tu
ne was going to be, and then we took a piece of tape and a dumb-shit drum machine, and set up a basic feeling for the tune on a drum machine; like an enhanced click track. . . . So we set that up and ran it the length of the tune. So say a tune has two verses, two bridges, an instrumental bridge, another sung chorus. We set the length of the rhythm track to that idea, and then Bob and I and Phil and Brent would work together with that to get a sense of how the song would hang together. Then, once we had essentially established the length and the tempo, we started working on it individually. So Bob would go home and work on his guitar part until he felt he had one that was really successful, and so on.”

  This process went on for several months, as the bandmembers continually changed their parts in relation to each other’s new musical ideas. This way, rather than having numerous different takes of each song, everyone essentially worked on a continually evolving single take. The main advantage to working this way was that the players could work at their own pace and to whatever degree of perfection they desired. Because they weren’t ever all playing at once, each of them could really listen to the parts the others had played and put more thought into what they were trying to accomplish. As Garcia said, “The process of developing and updating, based on what you hear and what effect your part has on everybody else’s playing, was speeded up tremendously by using slave reels [work copies made from the master tape].”

  Garcia and John Cutler produced the record, which meant they were the ultimate arbiters of when the potentially endless process of overdubbing reactive parts was actually finished. Considering this method of working, the finished album, Built to Last, sounded surprisingly live; or at the very least like a band all playing at once. Garcia proclaimed himself very happy with the record, even preferring it to the mega-successful In the Dark.

  “[Built to Last] is a lot more considerate of the material, and it’s much more of a record in that each song has its own personality in a more controlled kind of way,” he said shortly after the CD was released. “The fundamental sound of things is better, and also, the space in which they occur [the ambience] is better. It has better vocals and better songs, too. And the songs have an energy we haven’t been able to get in the studio for quite a long time.”

  The final song list for the record had changed considerably as the album evolved. Garcia dropped “Believe It or Not” and added “Standing on the Moon” in addition to “Foolish Heart” and the title song. Bob Weir contributed “Victim or the Crime” and “Picasso Moon.” The big surprise was that Brent had four songs, the most of anyone: “I Will Take You Home,” “Blow Away” and two new songs, the ecology-minded anthem “We Can Run” and the snaky, dramatic “Just a Little Light.”

  “You always go with whatever your strong suit is, and in this case it was Brent that had the good songs—I mean, more of ’em,” Garcia said. “Brent’s getting to be more comfortable with the band. He sees it being as much his band as everybody else’s. So it’s just the thing of getting over the ‘new guy’ thing.”

  Still the “new guy” after ten years?

  “Ten years, right,” Garcia laughed. “He’s been pretty conservative about getting comfortable in it, but now—I mean, [on] this record it’s nice to be able to show off what he can do on a lot of different levels. And his contribution to this record is really outstanding all over. Not just his tunes and vocals, but everything else—all the keyboard parts and just ideas and general stuff.”

  The album also benefited from the judicious use of MIDI technology, which allowed the musicians to move away from the regular timbres of their instruments into exciting new realms. MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a system that allows different electronic instruments and devices to share information, often in the form of prerecorded “samples” of sounds, which can be called up and manipulated by a controller such as a guitar, keyboard or a drum pad. So, at the flip of a switch, Garcia’s guitar or Brent’s keyboard could sound like a fiddle or a saxophone or church bells or wind—the possibilities were limitless. Garcia called MIDI “a whole new language.” Since Bob Bralove had joined the band’s technical staff in mid-1987, he’d worked with each player individually to develop his MIDI system. Brent and the drummers were the first to be up and running, but by the spring of 1989 the guitarists were experimenting with MIDI sounds onstage, too—at first they used special MIDI guitars during “space” (always the band’s great testing ground) before switching back to their normal axes.

  In one night’s “space,” Garcia might toy with the sound of a massive pipe organ; in another he became a third “drummer” for a few moments. He played MIDI panpipes and bassoon and ethereal choral washes that made his guitar sound like the breath of angels. “I’ve started to do some stuff on ballads that’s kind of interesting,” he said in the early fall of ’89, “where I’ll add little [MIDI] voicings against the guitar so it’s not actually adding to the guitar note, but sort of adding a halo around the sound. Some of it is very subtle.”

  After initially using his MIDI sounds exclusively during “space,” Garcia began incorporating new sounds into some regular Grateful Dead material. On “Let It Grow” and “Mexicali Blues” he would often use a trumpet sound and mimic mariachi phrasing. The jams in “Bird Song” and “Playing in the Band” lent themselves to breathy “flute” flights by Garcia. If he occasionally overdid the MIDI effects in fall ’89 and spring ’90, it was only because he was excited and amused by the novelty of it. And when Garcia, Lesh and Weir would go wild during “space,” dialing up one bizarre sound after another, the results were often hilarious. But they could just as easily turn ominous and downright frightening, too. It was difficult for the audience to tell who was playing what when the players dove deep into the MIDI zone, and that became part of the band’s special fun: to mess with the crowd’s expectations by having Phil, for instance, play a flute sound while Bob was somehow causing the basslike earthquake rumble.

  Garcia’s MIDI “trumpet” made it onto two songs on Built to Last: on Brent’s “I Will Take You Home,” which was essentially a “trumpet”-piano duet; and the title song, where Garcia’s high-pitched part sounded like a Baroque piccolo trumpet—“that Purcell ‘Trumpet Voluntary’ sound,” he said.

  * * *

  In the spring of 1989 Garcia had told a writer that seeing music in a stadium is “not a pleasant experience generally. I don’t see why anyone would go to more than one of those shows myself.” Nevertheless, when the summer of ’89 rolled around, the Dead booked a number of stadium shows in the East and Midwest to satisfy ticket demand. To their credit, the band did what they could to make these cold, impersonal venues more hospitable: They developed a bigger sound system to deliver louder, cleaner sound. They hired a Polish artist named Jan Sawka to design colorful banners and cloth panels to hang from the huge stage’s proscenium and wings. Lighting director Candace Brightman devised some new lighting schemes to creatively illuminate the stage and Sawka’s giant panel paintings of trees, suns, moons and odd faces. Like so many bands that make it to the stadium level, the Dead added large video screens to bring the action closer to more people. And at each stadium they booked an opening band they knew most Deadheads would like—Los Lobos, Bruce Hornsby and the Range, or 10,000 Maniacs.

  The tour itself was a grand success, though two of the stadium shows (in Buffalo and Washington, D.C.) did not sell out. Actually, this was considered good news among Deadheads, because it was the first sign that the craziness that had been following the Dead since the summer of 1987 was finally beginning to subside. In general, there were fewer crowd problems on the tour than on the previous two summer outings, in part because it rained so much that hanging around the shows was too unpleasant for many people.

  The Dead played sensationally for most of the summer, particularly once the stadium part of the tour ended. Their concerts at a brand-new rural Indiana amphitheater called Deer Creek, and at the beloved Alpine Valley, were consistently inspired. Garcia’s playing was char
ged with electricity: with each tour following his coma in ’86, he became increasingly forceful and confident, his fingering faster and more dexterous, his solos more tonally varied, imaginative and well-constructed. Some of the best playing of Garcia’s career occurred between 1988 and the spring of 1990, and the rest of the band was right there with him—always getting stronger, constantly upping the intensity level of the whole.

  When the Grateful Dead got on a roll like this they were an unstoppable force of nature. When they were playing their best they entered a zone that can be described only as a form of perfection—where every note felt both technically and emotionally right, and the musicians’ individual parts and rhythmic choices meshed seamlessly to create a great, ever-changing gestalt. It wasn’t something the Dead could conjure exactly, because it depended on innumerable factors—the moment-to-moment disposition of each player; whether his equipment was functioning properly so that he could hear himself and the others; the appropriateness of the song selections to the overall feeling of the show; each member’s sensitivity to what everyone else was playing; the responsiveness of the crowd. But when it was happening and everything was clicking, it was apparent to just about everybody; you couldn’t miss it. The Dead used to say that at those times, the music played the band, meaning that as a group they were operating beyond cognition and intention—beyond the mechanics of simply playing well—to a nearly effortless state of grace, where the music was speaking through them rather than from them. It was completely tangible to both band and audience, yet also inexplicable. It had to do with being in the moment completely and surrendering to the course that the music was taking.

  Garcia struggled to explain it in a 1990 interview: “For me, the experience is one of tremendous clarity. I can see the people in the audience and everybody in the band and there’s nothing between me and it; my own thoughts aren’t between me and it, my own effort isn’t between me and it; my ambition, all of my personal baggage. . . . That is to say, it’s not like thinking, it’s not cerebral, but it’s not purely emotional, either. I experience it as a kind of transparency, and it’s very, very easy when you get to that place. It’s impossible to make a wrong decision. In fact, the music is kind of playing itself in a way because I’m not making decisions about where I’m gonna be anymore or where I’m gonna end up or how long a phrase is gonna last or any of that. I’m just goin’ with it and everybody else is, too.