Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

by Bill Kreutzmann

We bought a tepee and cut down poles for it at Mickey’s ranch. We loaded them up on the top rack of my old Toyota Land Cruiser. And off we went to Nevada with Rolling Thunder and one of his braves, who was another young person around our age. It was a long drive but we did it in one day. Rolling Thunder’s property had a run-down, wooden house where he would welcome company, and then a separate cabin across the street—his private quarters. He thought of the rattlesnakes under his floor as his friends, which he could communicate with. A part of the rite of passage for him to become a medicine man was that he had to let a rattlesnake bite him on the calf and not take the poison out. That’s part of the ceremony: If it doesn’t kill you, you’re a shaman. You could tell something got him on the leg and probably infected it and all that horrible stuff. But he survived.

  He had another unbelievable thing happen to him: He got caught between two railroad cars by his midsection and somehow he lived through that. He had massive scars on his chest from where the couplers got him. It must’ve been a horrendous accident. There were a lot of accidents like that involving the Native Americans and railroad work. The railroad companies really didn’t treat them well, sad to say. The Central Pacific Railroad ran through Carlin and the town was a classic western railroad town until the 1960s, when mining companies moved in and became the major employer. The Native Americans were used for their labor but hardly treated better than slaves. It’s important to me to mention this because it was just so unforgivable, the string of injustices that Native Americans faced ever since our ancestors came and took their land.

  Rolling Thunder was a Native American traditionalist, practicing the traditional ways. As such, he was a righteous spiritual leader and he helped so many people in the community. People would offer trades for his medicine, or they would give him whatever money they could, but they didn’t have much. Therefore, neither did he. He had to continue working for the railroads. He was the protector of the Native Americans in that area; he was their healer, their medicine man. He wasn’t afraid of the cowboys, even though the cowboys were ruthless. It went beyond racism. It was even nastier. They would shoot at the Native Americans and really do horrible things, just for kicks. But Rolling Thunder would strike back. He told us stories: things that happened to him, things that he had to do to survive; things that he had to do to defend his community and his people. As he talked, you’d realize that the stories all took place right where we were walking. “This happened right here!” There was no guarantee something wasn’t going to happen at any moment.

  There were hot springs that were a fair distance from the highway but which you could still see from the road—it’s pretty flat in Carlin and you can see for a long way. As we were walking there, RT told us about one time when he was with his braves—that’s what he called his friends and family. They were all soaking in the hot springs when a bunch of rednecks crouched down behind the metal barriers along the road and started shooting guns over their heads. Just to rile them up. The next time Rolling Thunder took a group there, he led a little side expedition where some of his braves stayed behind and hid and caught these guys red-handed. They ambushed them and confiscated their guns. Then they took them out to the desert, miles away from anything, took their boots and left them there. They had to hike back. That is, if they made it. We don’t even know. Nobody asked them to call when they got home to say they made it back safe. That’s the kind of heaviness that was there.

  Now, I’m immersed in this. I’m living in this thing. Susila and I go to our first prayer session with Rolling Thunder—to clarify, it wasn’t really a “prayer session” in the Christian sense. Rolling Thunder never called it that. I never prayed in my life before then and it made me very nervous to think that I was going to ask for anything from the universe, or to even believe that you could ask for anything. I was in my early twenties and I had definitely never gone to church with any belief that praying did anything real. This was more about aligning with the Great Spirit. This was something different.

  We took my Toyota and went down a dirt road for miles and miles into the desert. We crossed a creek bed and ended up in an oasis. There were all these beautiful giant green trees that lined the banks of the creek, away from the desolate brush. They were poplar trees or whatever they’re called—with white bark perfect for making canoes out of. We were suddenly in the midst of them, alongside a creek bed. We parked and Rolling Thunder got out first and went ahead of us, then immediately stormed right back and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man in my entire life as mad as he was just then. His face was bright red and you could see the pained shadow that forms when anger clashes with sorrow. It had taken over his entire aura. He was foaming, ferociously mad, and yet there was also a sadness there that was tender around the corners. You could feel his bitter disappointment. A family of eagles lived in those trees, and it takes a few months before young eagles can fly. Well, these redneck sons of bitches came with shotguns and stood beneath the trees and killed all the birds. It was as if somebody came into Rolling Thunder’s church and blew his altar away.

  Eagles are sacred to the Shoshone Indians and when Rolling Thunder got back to the car, he couldn’t even talk. He made us stay in this one area, away from the carnage, and for the next two or three hours he picked up every feather and prayed over every last one. They were scattered everywhere, these white eagle feathers, and he attended to all of them in turn. When he was finally finished making his medicine over these dead animals, he looked a little more resolved. He explained what happened and pointed out the shotgun shells that were littered all around the trees. Then he cleaned up the whole area. He buried all the birds and kept only the feathers that he was supposed to keep.

  We were there for a couple of weeks and had made our camp in an area where three trees formed a natural triangle. Our tepee was set up right in the middle. Before we put it up, Rolling Thunder got down on the ground and prayed and created a protected bubble for us. He told us that if anybody came into that triangle and intended to do us harm, they would leave crazy and confused and might even face death. That was one of his protection prayers that he would use to shield himself from people who tried to hurt him. He’d say, “They can’t mess with you—they’ll go mad out in the desert.”

  Susila reminded me recently that we used to test our protected area—we’d go outside of it and the coyotes would suddenly start to take notice of us. We’d jump back inside the lines and it was like we became invisible. It’s tough to say if something like that is just in your head, put there by the power of suggestion. It sure seemed real. It was real.

  It was actually kind of a funny scene when we first went to put up the tepee, because Rolling Thunder insisted that his braves set it up for us, but it became obvious that they didn’t know how to set it up any more than we did. This embarrassed RT, I think, and he started getting on their case, telling them how to do it and issuing orders. In the end, it was a perfect setup: the tepee was tight as hell, the top flap was adjusted just right, the cover around the bottom was perfectly snug, and this saved our hide one night.

  I knew it was going to be a long haul from Mickey’s ranch, so I took a little bit of street speed—meth—with me, just in case I needed an extra boost of energy. My reasoning was that truckers use speed all the time. But I didn’t end up touching it, and when we set up camp, it was still wrapped in tinfoil.

  So, anyway, one morning, Sue and I were awoken because we heard a pounding that sounded just like double bass drums. Something was hitting the tepee from the outside. Thump, thump, thump. They were blackbirds. Ravens, actually. Crazy as it sounded, I began to theorize that the birds had gotten into the little tinfoil pouch of speed, which I had placed in the crux of a tree the night before. The ravens were having a party—they were high on speed. They were crashing headfirst into the tepee, again and again, as if it were a mosh pit. But luckily the tepee was tight and they couldn’t get in or knock it down. It was tense in there for a few minutes. I was sitting inside, clutching my
.22, knowing that it probably wouldn’t have done me any good. The ravens were straight-up attacking the tepee. It was just like a scene out of the movie The Birds. After things quieted down, I peeked outside. When it was safe, I went up to the tree and, sure enough, they pecked all that speed to pieces. So that just goes to show: Don’t ever give meth to a raven. Not a good idea.

  On a different day, we were just having fun, shooting that .22 rifle that I had brought with me—a .22 becomes little more than a peashooter in a space as vast as the Nevada desert. There’s no power to it. You shoot it at a rock cliff and it would seem like twenty minutes went by before you’d hear the bullet go “ding.” But it was still fun to play around with. So we’re out there, doing that, and suddenly, for whatever reason I got the feeling I should turn around. It’s that intuition you get when someone is right behind you. I turned around and saw two guys walking right toward us, not making a sound. Sue and I got on our feet pretty quickly and I held the rifle at rest. But, without me intentionally doing it, the thing fired off. I swear I didn’t pull the trigger … even though, technically, I must have. The shot landed right between the guys’ feet and it stopped them in their tracks. We were downwind and thought we could smell alcohol on them. When they got closer, we were sure. They were slammed drunk and in a really bad way. That accidental shot had stopped their approach though and, to this day, I honestly believe it was Rolling Thunder’s prayer that protected us and that caused the semiautomatic rifle to go off without actually hurting anyone. If I had tried to do that intentionally, I probably would’ve hit one of them and it would’ve been a whole different end to this story.

  As it stands, those guys backed up and told us not to shoot. “We just wanted to see who you were.” They were just some jive-talking rednecks and they were so completely trashed that you couldn’t really be that nervous; they wouldn’t have been capable of much. It turned out that they had a cabin about a quarter mile from our encampment and were curious about their new neighbors. We walked back to their place and it was a pretty random scene. There was another couple that was staying in a van or something nearby and they started hanging out, too. They were about our age and closer to us in spirit than the drunk fucktards. We struck up a game of horseshoes but the drunks were in such a way that they couldn’t throw well. We kept winning and that pissed them off, all over again.

  Sue saw rhubarb growing in the garden and, out of nowhere, offered to make a rhubarb pie. She cooked it in their kitchen as a peace offering. And it worked—it made everybody happy. Also: It was just an outrageously delicious pie. That worked out pretty well. The lesson we learned there is that wars can sometimes be won with pie.

  During our stay, Rolling Thunder had taught us about eagle feathers and the magic they possess. He made me a wand out of five or six feathers and I used it in healing ceremonies, brushing energy, moving energy, all that good stuff. When we finally left to head back to California, there was no air-conditioning in the Toyota and we had all the windows open. We were discussing everything we had just experienced, questioning what was real and what was imagined. So much of it seemed like fantasy. And yet, all of it actually happened.

  We had all the sacred feathers that Rolling Thunder gave us, folded up safely in a piece of newspaper, underneath the passenger seat. They were secure. All of the sudden, with the windows open and the wind blowing through the car, a feather swirled around our heads. Susila dug into the back, reached under the seat, and got the package with all of the feathers. She made sure it was wrapped tight and placed it under our camping gear. There was no way any more of them were getting out. Rolling Thunder had given them to us as a gift. They held meaning; they were special. But then another feather went flying by. Then another. They started dancing in the wind. I tried to grab them and Sue tried to grab them but we couldn’t hold on to them. Some of them just flew away, back to where they came from, I think. When we went to tell Rolling Thunder about it, later on, he already knew what we were going to say. How does that happen?

  It had really been an amazing couple of weeks. The reason I had to come home, though, was because, the day before we left, I got a telegram from the band. They had sent me a message through Western Union that said, “We need you here. We’re going to start work on our new album.” That album became Workingman’s Dead. Right before I got that telegram, Rolling Thunder and I had made plans to go on a vision quest, up in the mountains outside of Carlin. Seven days with barely enough water and only a little bit of food. We were making preparations when suddenly I had to leave; I had to record Workingman’s Dead. It’s always remained a question in my mind, though—I have to ask myself, “What if I had gone on that vision quest instead? What would’ve happened?” We’ll never know. But I do know this: I did go on a vision quest after all. A vision quest of the Grateful Dead kind. I made it home and went straight into the studio with the band.

  We recorded Workingman’s Dead at Pacific High Studios in San Francisco, the same place where we had those nitrous oxide mixing sessions for Aoxomoxoa. But Aoxomoxoa had cost us a fortune and Lenny Hart had run off with whatever money we had left, so we made a conscious decision to be more economical on Workingman’s Dead and work briskly. The album represented a multitude of changes for the Grateful Dead. It pushed us in a different direction and that, in turn, led us to different places and the whole thing definitely ushered in a whole new era for us. The 1960s were over. Most of the people in the band had stopped taking acid regularly. We were now onto cocaine and other stuff. Welcome to American life in the 1970s.

  9

  In conversation, I often get Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty mixed up with each other, but there’s an acceptable reason for that. I mean, besides the fact that we recorded them pretty much back to back, more than forty years ago. Combined, these two albums represent the Grateful Dead’s “Bakersfield era,” where we were playing music that reflected our lifestyles during a very specific period. We were good ole American boys living in the Wild West. A little bit country. A little bit rock ’n’ roll.

  In 1970—the year both albums were recorded and released—we were beginning to see signs of wear and tear, both inside our circle and out. We had witnessed births and deaths of entire scenes and their accompanying ideologies. We lost Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in the fall of that year, which was tough. There were other losses going on around us then too, involving various band members’ parents—that’s in addition to the father that ripped us off.

  So we had songs like “Dire Wolf” and “Black Peter” on Workingman’s Dead, and then “Brokedown Palace” and “Box of Rain” on American Beauty. Songs that reflected our headspace after we watched the 1960s crash into the wall on a raceway in Altamont. Those two albums also carried some of the biggest hits of our entire career: “Uncle John’s Band,” “Truckin’,” “Friend of the Devil,” “Casey Jones,” “Sugar Magnolia,” and others. These are songs that have gone beyond our own little community and into the American musical vocabulary. They’re on the radio and on pizza parlor jukeboxes. You don’t have to be a Deadhead to know them by heart. And pretty much every Dead tribute band (including most of the “official spinoff” groups) keeps them in heavy rotation in their live repertoires. They’re the standards.

  The Grateful Dead definitely went through a number of transformations and makeovers over the years and it felt like the individual songwriters all went through those changes with the band. The songs were unique to their respective songwriters—and I’m about to say my piece on that—but just as we had a “group mind” with improvisation, we generally shared the same “group mind-set” in regards to what mood we were in, musically, during different periods. During the “Bakersfield era,” we tried to be like a Bakersfield country band—but one that still sounded like we were from 300 miles north of that town, in the northern part of the state. Which, of course, we were. We held to our psychedelic roots but, in the studio, we wanted to try our hand at a more steady approach. That’s what that music call
ed for. Also: it just felt like the right thing for us to do at the time. Forward motion.

  Whenever any of the band members came up with a song and wanted to do it, we did it. Once, anyway. Despite our own preferences, solidarity was important to us, as was the unwavering belief that everyone who wanted to be heard, deserved to be heard. It was the way we conducted business on the stage, in the studio, and even in the office. Every opinion mattered. So, I’ll finally give mine. I liked the Jerry Garcia songs the best. That should come as no surprise. Jerry Garcia’s music with Robert Hunter’s lyrics was the best of what we had to offer and getting to play those songs was the reward for being a good sport about the rest. When I got up onstage every night, all the way to the end, I couldn’t wait to play the Garcia/Hunter stuff. That’s what really got me off. I think most people feel the same about that much.

  Phil’s songs were always the hardest to play. He wasn’t the strongest vocalist and he liked to put a lot of changes in the arrangements. I think he took an academic approach to songwriting, using it as a chance to experiment and play around with theoretical concepts. It was like the band was his guinea pig. Some of the songs came from the head more than the heart. They just didn’t swing. He had this one thing called “Wave to the Wind” which could have been used maybe for the theme to The Love Boat.

  I recognize that most of our fans really love “Box of Rain,” but even that could feel too contrived to me when we played it. It wasn’t an easy song to play, even though that’s the illusion that it gave off. There were often issues with the tempo. Jerry’s songs never felt that way because the groove was always there. I’m not saying this to be mean; I’m just being honest. And keep in mind, I’m generalizing here: Phil wrote some keepers, too.

  The Bob Weir songs were more fun to play, but even some of those could feel a bit too contrived to me. Or clunky. Don’t forget that I played these songs for decades, and I would play them again in an instant. In fact, I still play “The Other One” often, no matter who I’m touring with. And I really connected with “Throwing Stones”—I locked into the message behind that one and I think it’s as relevant today as it was back then. “Lost Sailor,” on the other hand, used to drive me nuts. The words don’t get me at all. I guess they were written by Bobby’s lyricist, John Perry Barlow. It’s just not one of my favorites. However, it used to be fun to play anyway, because Mickey would mock the lyrics, off mic, and make all sorts of funny faces that would entertain the rest of us. There’s always a silver lining, you know?