I always felt like we became this four-armed, four-legged beast, instead of two human drummers. Mickey had a zany kind of energy that was persistently infectious to me; it reminds me of the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a little kid, with all this energy just pouring out purely and without restriction and without agenda, and it’s really a beautiful thing. You add that to his perfectionist side and he ended up with some wonderful stuff.
I’ve recently listened back to some shows we played in the 1990s, particularly the “Drums” and “Space” from the Spring ’90 tour, and there are really a lot of remarkable moments. It sometimes makes me wonder how I can even think about playing in other bands now, after that. Listen to some of that shit. Everything changed when Jerry left, and we’ll get to that in due time, of course. But fuck, man—with Mickey there, we became really good.
He and I also became prankster partners, like the Blues Brothers of the drums. We were playing somewhere in L.A. once, I can’t even remember the gig, but afterward we had a really lame limo driver and he went missing for a moment too long, so we stole the limousine. Mickey put on the driver’s hat and just started driving. I was in the backseat, laughing my ass off. We drove all around and and started to get hungry, so we hightailed it to Canter’s Deli. We were just digging into our food, when the driver came up huffing and puffing. We handed him his keys back. “There you go, buddy. We’re all good, right?” The limo was parked and there was no damage or anything like that. So it was all good, after all. It was all just kicks.
Long before that limo incident though, the band temporarily moved back to L.A.—in November 1967—so we could work on our second album. We scheduled a couple of shows at the famed Shrine Auditorium (where we debuted “Dark Star” on December 13) and blocked out some time at American Studios in North Hollywood.
Once again, we all moved in together, this time at a house that belonged to our friend Peggy Hitchcock’s family. Her family also owned an expansive compound in Millbrook, New York, that became headquarters for Timothy Leary’s intellectual gang of acid dropouts—we visited them briefly, earlier that year, when we had a few days to kill at the end of a brief Canadian tour. But that stay turned into a string of mishaps that ended up in something less than a story. (And it left us feeling less than thrilled about Leary and his whole head trip.)
Hitchcock’s compound in L.A. was a stone’s throw from the famous Ennis House, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. A lot of flicks, including Blade Runner, were filmed on location there. It was a giant fortress with creepy, long slitted windows, perfect for horror films. We mistakenly thought that Bela Lugosi lived inside its veiled walls, but I think that was just an urban legend.
We moved in down the street and found ourselves right at the smog line, so there was often a red cloud, right at eye level from the house, which made it kind of weird. We played really hard in that house, though. I’d practice by myself, then I’d spend hours with Mickey going over drum stuff, and then we’d play full rehearsals with the band. Every day.
In the studio, we recorded “The Other One,” “New Potato Caboose,” “Alligator,” “Turn On Your Love Light,” “Born Cross-Eyed,” and some others. They didn’t sound quite right just yet but we were basically just demoing them. We planned to react to the frenzied and frenetic pace of our debut album by really taking our time with this one until we got it right.
So we traveled to New York City in mid-December and set up camp there for a couple weeks, moving into a friend’s house in Englewood, New Jersey. We’d record all night, every night, at two separate studios in Manhattan. At first, David Hassinger was behind the knobs again but he quickly lost patience with us. Maybe he thought he could cut our follow-up album in a few days’ time, like he did with the first one. He was wrong. Again.
When Weir asked Hassinger to reproduce the sound of “thick air,” Hassinger bolted. He quit. He couldn’t handle us. He wasn’t alone in that. We went through a number of engineers and even studios, in both L.A. and New York. Phil could get rather abrasive and the rest of us backed him up because we were chasing after the idea of a perfect album, having just released a debut that none of us were really all that wild about. Phil became a liability in the eyes of our record label because he had a temper, but he also had a point: You should love your albums. We didn’t love our first one and this was our chance to fix that.
Going into the studio, any studio, was always really hard for me, because it felt contrived. I’m guessing my bandmates all have similar feelings about that because we were never able to make our best music in a studio.
So, yes, you should love your albums, and although we were struggling with that, we could all agree that we loved our live shows. We were playing them fast and furious at this point—in 1967 we conquered all the Bay Area ballrooms. We built off our success from the year before and started to reach out to the great beyond. Wherever we went, we gigged, and we gigged wherever we went. So, naturally, we set up some shows during our time in New York, including a two-night stand at a tumbledown room on Second Avenue called the Village Theater. Snow leaked in through the roof one of those nights and I needed to wear gloves just to get through the gig. When we returned there half a year later, Bill Graham had taken over the place and transformed it into the Fillmore East. To this day, the Fillmore East remains one of New York’s most storied venues, even though it was only open from 1968 to 1971.
Warner Brothers wasn’t very happy with us, but what did we care? Our record contract permitted us an unlimited amount of time in the studio, and we had fought for that unusual clause for a reason. My, how things have changed—there are stories these days of some bands taking a decade or more between releases. With the album that became Anthem of the Sun, we’re talking about a matter of a few extra months. Granted, we burned through a lot of studio time, and that came with a hefty price tag, but we were footing the bill for that. As is standard practice, the label fronted our expenses but we had to recoup them before turning a profit. So they could piss off. We retreated back to San Francisco at the start of 1968, and although we weren’t empty-handed, we had less than half an album and a handful of fragments. Clearly, we were still in an experimental phase.
Back home, we were happy to get back to what we loved and knew best—playing music. Live. In front of people. At some point, it must’ve dawned on us, “Hey, we can’t get the sound we’re looking for in the studio, but we sound great live, so why not overlap the two?” Without a professional producer willing to stick it out with us, we brought in our new soundman, Dan Healy—Bear’s replacement—and went for it. When I say we went for it, I mean we really went for it. Instead of turning the album into a live release, we layered different versions of the same song on top of each other until the notion of infinite possibility revealed itself. One key reason why Deadheads kept coming to show after show after show was that no two performances of a song were ever the same. We couldn’t have done that anyway, even if we tried—but of course, we weren’t trying. Improvisation was both our aesthetic and our ideal, and it was something that we could explore only through experimentation. There just was no blueprint for this stuff.
Many bands, including jam bands, talk about their studio releases as picture-perfect postcards, where they capture the band at a moment in time, and where they capture the songs in their most realized form. But we were always a different band from one second to the next, and a song like “The Other One” was only realized when it was shape-shifting into something else entirely. A postcard wouldn’t work—we were a moving picture. But how do you capture that?
Phil and Jerry were the ones who figured out that we could exploit studio technology to demonstrate how these songs were mirrors of infinity, even when they adhered to their established arrangements. It’s the old paradox of “improvisational compositions.” Jazz artists knew all about the balance between freedom and structure, but a few rock bands were now catching on. Most rock bands, however, tended to head in an opposite direction, afraid of the unc
ertainty of improvisation. We decided that Anthem of the Sun was going to be our statement on the matter.
So, in the Spring of 1968, we started recording all of our shows. We played the album sequence live, twisting and turning it different ways every time, and at every stop along the way. We did a short package tour of the Pacific Northwest with Quicksilver Messenger Service called “The Quick and the Dead,” and we focused our set heavily on the proposed album material. We also couldn’t resist playing our new exploratory showpiece—“Dark Star”—often, taking it to different cosmic places every time, although that tune would be even more problematic to capture on a studio release. We realized this.
We played Jerry’s song, “Cryptical Envelopment” sandwiched around “The Other One,” without a break in the music, and we played the hell out of “Alligator” and “Caution” and even “New Potato Caboose” and “Born Cross-Eyed.” Then, Jerry and Phil went into the studio with Healy and, like mad scientists, they started splicing all the versions together, creating hybrids that contained the studio tracks and various live parts, stitched together from different shows, all in the same song—one rendition would dissolve into another and sometimes they were even stacked on top of each other. The result was Anthem of the Sun, which was finally released on July 18, 1968. It was easily our most experimental record, it was groundbreaking in its time, and it remains a psychedelic listening experience to this day.
Warner Brothers wasn’t so sure about it at first, but I think they got over it. Initially, label president Joe Smith was rather displeased that the album wasn’t ready by February; he wasn’t impressed with our attitude or our methods, and he was fed up with reports of Phil’s temperament. We gave him no choice but to deal.
Just as Jerry proclaimed, “This is the Grateful Dead!” the night Mickey Hart first played with us, the same could’ve been said after the first time anyone listened to Anthem of the Sun. It was the Spring of 1968 and we had arrived.
6
Remember when the Grateful Dead ran a music venue? Because I sure don’t. I mean, I remember the basics—kind of—but it doesn’t surprise me that I don’t remember the details because I was a musician, not a nightclub owner. To this day, I just want to play music, not operate a venue. But it is true that the Dead partnered with Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service to take control of a space in San Francisco called the Carousel Ballroom. Yeah, well—that lasted just a number of months. But it’s surprising that it ever happened at all.
The Carousel Ballroom was at the intersection of Van Ness Avenue and Market Street, on a corner that wasn’t really in any particular neighborhood so much as being the axis between a number of them—the Mission, the Lower Haight, Hayes Valley, Civic Center, SoMa, and downtown were all right there, depending on which way your compass pointed. For many years now, the building has been a Honda dealership. The only music that remains is the radio station that gets played in the background. If that. Twitter’s headquarters is now just down the street and there’s been a basic redecorating of that entire stretch.
During the Carousel Ballroom days, there’s no doubt that the whole area was a bit on the shady side. Also, it wasn’t all that far from the Fillmore or the Avalon and it was in direct competition with both of those rooms. Regardless, I loved the location because it was close enough to the Belvedere house that getting home after a show was never a problem. You could take all the drugs you wanted and still end up in your own bed. Or someone else’s.
A hustler named Ron Rakow, who conned his way into our little circle and who would continue to lead us astray throughout many ventures, somehow convinced all three bands to form a theoretical partnership called Triad, under his stewardship. This was Rakow’s first real leadership role with us. That’s probably why I don’t remember most of it. I mostly remember the music. There was a lot of great music at the Carousel. All three owner-bands obviously played there a lot, along with the usual Bay Area suspects: Santana, Steve Miller, the Charlatans, that whole scene. Our whole scene.
I didn’t really take an active role in the whole Triad enterprise. I just sort of went along with it and was usually told details after the fact. I was hands-off and didn’t sweat the small stuff. At all. But I do remember playing a few really fun gigs at the Carousel, and I also remember seeing some other bands there that really got me off. The business side of it wasn’t that memorable—but watching Janis Joplin take that stage is something I’ll never forget. This one night, I took some PCP and leaned against the back wall, just listening to her—this was with Big Brother—and it was nothing less than incredible. Maybe, on paper, I was some kind of part owner of the Carousel, but during that show, there was no mistaking that Janis Joplin was boss. She owned every one of us in the room that night.
In the very beginning … of our little band, I mean … I suppose you could say that I took on the role of manager for a brief spell, but I don’t even know if we used that word. If so, it was just a name. I didn’t keep a book. I never wrote a thing down. I didn’t really do any business for the band. I just made sure we got paid and then counted and handed out money at the end of the night, when nobody else would do it—or, at least, nobody else that I trusted. Not that I always trusted the people we later hired to do that for us. Turns out, I had good reason to be cautiously suspicious of our managers: we ended up getting burned in a massive way, and we’ll get to that, soon enough.
I never wanted to deal with the business side of things, but I had to deal with the people who did. This one time, in Paris, I fired our tour manager on the spot. I trusted him as a person, but I didn’t trust him to get all of our money from some of the thieves who call themselves promoters. He was a nice guy, bless him, but you don’t always want your manager to be the nice guy. You hire them so that you can be the nice guy instead.
The manager I fired was named Jon McIntire, a real sweet man who we lost not that long ago, darn it. Before he started working for the band, he was a part of the Carousel staff. As with most people who worked there, he got the job because he was one of our friends, and he learned the job on the fly.
As our tour manager, McIntire was supposed to settle with the promoter at the end of the night and get whatever money was called for in the particular contract. After a gig in Paris one year, McIntire wasn’t able to do that. Promoters aren’t always the most honorable guys, especially back then when rock concerts were still like the Wild West and crazy shit could go down at any given moment. Tour managers need to be able to get the band paid, even in situations like when the fucking gig is completely packed, and there are thousands of people there, and the promoter says, “I don’t have any money for you guys.” That was the situation in Paris, and the promoter in question was wearing a sport coat with pockets that were just bulging with money, even as he was telling McIntire that he couldn’t honor the contract, that he had no cash to pay the band.
The way it went that particular time, I had to grab one of our equipment guys—a really big, strong dude—and he and I took the promoter in the back room and locked the door. The equipment guy, Sonny Heard, brandished his brand-new switchblade and then literally grabbed the promoter by the ankles, turned him upside down, and shook all this money out of his pockets. He was completely full of francs. Full of francs and bullshit. He’d made a ton of money off us. We knew how much we had agreed upon, and so we looked in his briefcase—he didn’t dare move—and it was filled with money. So we got paid. That’s why I fired McIntire. Because it was his job to do that and he just didn’t have it in him. I loved him, and everybody else did too, so they all gave me a ration of shit for firing him. I don’t even know if anyone took it seriously because other people remember that McIntire quit after a different night, right around then. I may have been out of line by trying to fire him on the spot, but all I wanted to do was to get the money to the band. We were basically living hand to mouth. You play a gig, you get paid for the gig, you pay your bills. That’s how it worked.
Somebody once
told me that Jerry Garcia always felt a special bond with me because of those early days when I looked after the money and made sure everyone got their due. Jerry knew that it was a very important task, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It just wasn’t who he was. It wasn’t who I was either, but it needed to be done, so I just did it. Well, for a minute or two, anyway, very early on, and that was enough for me. After we hired Rock Scully and Danny Rifkin, I never had to deal with that side of things ever again.
But, perhaps because of something to do with those early dealings, Jerry and I had some unspoken trust where if he went a certain way with a decision, I usually did too. He had some great fucking ideas. The generation we came from wasn’t one that communicated very easily on any deep level—at least not verbally. It probably would’ve helped the band if we did, but that’s hindsight.
Instead, Jerry and I learned how to read each other’s faces. When it came to business proposals—and the people putting them forth—we knew what the other one was thinking. In fact, one time, Jerry even joked with me, “Bill, I wish you weren’t so intuitive.”
There was something that Jerry saw in Rakow that he really liked, like maybe his outlaw spirit, but I don’t know why we hired him to handle anything that had to do with our money. I don’t think we ever formally did, actually—I think we just went along with him. He was always scheming, always trying to sell us a used car, metaphorically speaking. Funny enough, he once struck a deal for us that actually involved each of us getting a real car. Fords. Ford Cortinas, to be exact. Not surprisingly, most of those vehicles ended up getting repossessed and the whole thing ended in disaster. Just like most of his deals.
In 1973, Rakow was the man responsible for the Grateful Dead launching its own record label—two of them, in fact. Grateful Dead Records for albums by the band, and Round Records for solo releases and side projects. Just like the Carousel, Rakow had somehow convinced us all to jump on a sinking ship and try to set sail. Turns out, it was a ship of fools. Also, just like the Carousel, running our own record label is a venture that I remember less about than you might think. Again, I was hands-off with that stuff. But I know it almost did us in. To this day, similarly minded bands have looked to it as a lesson in what not to do. Eventually, we got rid of the label and walked away from Rakow. He was a charming snake oil salesman, but you never hand the keys to your business over to a hustler. I think he believed in all of his get-rich-quick schemes, he just didn’t have the know-how to see them through.
Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead Page 10
