Some of Bobby’s other songs felt like they were drudging along to their finish lines. I hope you don’t hate me for saying this, Bobby, and I think when you play those songs by yourself, they’re strong. But when the Dead played them next to Garcia’s songs, they just didn’t sound as good. I’m sure a lot of people would disagree with me about that. Although … not everyone.
Also, jumping ahead of our narrative for a moment, later on in the band’s career when a keyboardist named Brent Mydland joined the group, his songs were a real change for all of us. They could be fun, but mostly because they were so abstract compared to the Grateful Dead songbook. They were more like pop songs. It was challenging for me to try to play them that way, but I thought we did a pretty good job of incorporating those songs. I went back and I listened to some of them recently and I was pleased with how they sounded. The lyrics—some of which came from Barlow—were more direct than our other songs; Brent was singing straight-up about his love life and about his joys and sorrows. I could easily relate to a lot of that. But I don’t think a song like “Blow Away” was ever really a Grateful Dead song. It was its own thing. Weir’s songs were Grateful Dead songs. Lesh’s songs were Grateful Dead songs. And Jerry’s songs were the very best Grateful Dead songs.
When Jerry would come to us with a new song, it was almost a fully realized entity. He’d show up to rehearsal, sit down with his guitar, and play it for a little bit by himself. The whole essence was already there. He didn’t have to tell you how to play your part. He didn’t have to suggest anything. He already knew what key he wanted, what the changes were, and where they were going to go. He knew the decoration as well as the architecture. He was open to different ideas, out of some kind of grace or duty, perhaps—but he wasn’t easily swayed, because the song was already complete. He worked it out way before he came to rehearsal. Those were my favorites.
You never had to guess anything. You already knew what to play. You could hear all the parts already there, embedded or implied. It was like the music conducted you.
Both Phil’s and Bobby’s felt forced by comparison. It doesn’t mean I’m right—this isn’t about right or wrong. I’m just talking about my own taste in the music that I played for all these years, and the other members of the band have their own preferences and the fans all have theirs, as well. It’s a wonderful thing. Anyway, in my own opinion, all the songwriters had their moments … but nobody could compete with the songwriting partnership of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. That’s all I’m saying.
And jumping back into our story line here, 1970 is really around the time when Robert Hunter established himself as a member of the band in his own right. He didn’t play with us or sing with us, but he became a full-time employee who ranked about as high as any of us on stage. His words became the words of the Grateful Dead, and when people quote us, they’re usually quoting him.
The two 1970 companion albums—Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty—are what really put Hunter in that position. His lyrics worked on a much more elevated level than your typical love ballad or rock anthem—they belonged to literature. I’m not surprised that Bob Dylan, an artist whom many consider to be the greatest songwriter of all time, has used some of his lyrics. That’s our Bob. Hunter, I mean.
Workingman’s Dead was all about discovering the song. Half a year later, American Beauty became all about having the harmonies to do that. The singers in our band really learned a lot about harmonizing by listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, who had just released their seminal album, Déjà vu. Jerry played pedal steel on one of the songs (“Teach Your Children”) on that record. Stephen Stills lived at Mickey’s ranch for a few months, right around that time, I think, and David Crosby enjoyed partying as much as we did. So our circles overlapped.
When we were recording American Beauty, those guys were in the same studio as us, working on various projects and solo albums. There was a lot happening in that studio—Wally Heider’s in San Francisco—all at once. Every room had a band making something historic in it, and we all bounced around each other. In particular, though, I remember Crosby really giving our singers a lot of advice and help.
From the rhythm standpoint, everything had to be suitably simplified that year. For Workingman’s Dead, I had just gotten back from Rolling Thunder’s and I was in a real healthy frame of mind, given all the stuff that had just happened. I brought that strength into the studio with me for those sessions. I made it clear to Mickey, “We can’t use two drum kits on this stuff—it just doesn’t fit.” So Mickey came in with shakers and percussive stuff and I played minimal drum parts. It was more like just laying down basic rhythm tracks. Once we took the songs live, of course, Mickey and I would do our thing with them—but in the studio, the drums needed to be as bare and essential as the music itself. We were there to serve the songs.
Now that we had some more accessible tunes alongside our wilder jam vehicles, we broke apart the live show into different sections. In the Spring of 1970—after we recorded Workingman’s Dead but right before it was released—we started performing shows that we called An Evening with the Grateful Dead. The only other band on those bills was a group called the New Riders of the Purple Sage and, at that time, they were really more of a Grateful Dead side project than their own entity—Jerry, Phil, and Mickey were part of the lineup. Jerry was on pedal steel. They opened for us. Then we played an acoustic set. Then we played an electric set. And then we played another electric set. Do the math: the Grateful Dead played three sets a night (with half the band onstage for four).
Eventually, that morphed into the format we kept for the rest of our career: long, two-set shows, often without even an opening act. It was a lot more music than most bands played in a night.
Many Deadheads considered the first set to be some kind of warm-up, but I never looked at it like that. I took the first set as seriously as I did the second. It was just a different approach. The second set was more open and free, with a lot more jamming and improvisation. It was deep in the heart of that set where wild things could happen at any given moment. It became the portion of the night where you’d be more likely to find one-time-only adventures.
I know that Mickey felt the same way the fans did. He felt the first set was kind of jive and he was always just waiting for the second set to come around. That wasn’t my style, though. I like to be in it, right now.
The first sets were always a lot of fun for me and I always really enjoyed playing them. I take song arrangements seriously. The drummer has the responsibility of setting up various parts of the song by playing breaks that lead into changes that keep the song moving forward. You have to do lead-ins and fills and if you don’t do that in the song, then you’re not playing the song. You’re not expressing its personality.
Take, for example, the traditional ballad “Jack A Roe.” That song has a trick intro. Jerry would play this one particular lick that would drop the song right into the groove. You had no warning for that lick, you’d just have to listen closely to what he was doing and come right down on the groove with him. I’d play threes on the bass drum and I’d play 2/4 with my hands, giving the song this nice kind of New Orleans rotation underneath it. That’s something we’d play in the first set, but that wasn’t just warm-up material. It was something really unique and interesting and a lot of fun to play live. I really took a lot of pride in playing the first sets. There may not have been as much stretching out, but it was still just as cool.
To this day, Deadheads love to discuss our setlists, because—once we built the repertoire—no two sets were ever identical. You could run analytics on them and find all kinds of patterns and translate them into statistics … and from those statistics, make tie-dyed tapestries or fractal maps of the stars or create whole new cosmologies and zodiac calendars or weave them into clothing for unicorns or whatever. And while that’s pulling a lot more out of it than we ever put into it, some Deadheads have found this kind of analysis to be pleasing in the same way t
hat sports fans might enjoy running numbers with baseball. I can see why that might be engaging, but the truth is that our setlists unfolded out of happenstance and chaos. There was no grand master plan. We would often only write down the first and last song of the second set, maybe some other song as well, and just go from there. It wasn’t done with much of a method and most of it was just on the fly. As the spirit moved. I rarely had anything to do with that, directly. I preferred to let the singers figure it out.
* * *
After we did that first “Evening with…” tour, we went on another great adventure that has since become a part of American history. Or, rather, North American history—it took place in Canada. I’m talking about a traveling package tour called the Transcontinental Pop Festival—but you know it as Festival Express, because that’s the name of the documentary. The movie hit theaters in 2004. The actual tour took place in the summer of 1970. It was a traveling single-day festival-style event that started in Toronto and went across Canada—but the thing was, the promoters chartered a train to get all the artists and crew from show to show and that became the main attraction for us, more than the gigs themselves. The gigs were cool, too. But you load more than 100 musicians on a train and it’s going to be full steam ahead, all right. The other bands on board included The Band, Traffic, Delaney and Bonnie, Buddy Guy, Mountain, New Riders of the Purple Sage and, in one of her last great hurrahs, darn it—Janis Joplin.
One thing I want to comment on is that this was the best I ever saw Janis. She was a friend of ours and had come up onstage with us and we played so many gigs with her band and got to watch her perform a lot—but she was at her absolute best on the Festival Express. She was performing at a super-high level, both on stage and on the train. I think she felt really loose and comfortable during that trek, maybe because so much of it was just for her friends instead of for an audience … but she was in her finest element. She and “Marmaduke”—John Dawson from New Riders of the Purple Sage—had a great romance going during the trip. At one point, when the train stopped somewhere for something, a bunch of us disembarked and looked back at the train and we could see Janis and Mamaduke going at it in one of their cabins. They’d forgotten to pull the curtain down, so you could see these two naked bodies making love in there. We started throwing rocks at the window just to fuck with them a little bit, and Janis casually flipped us off and rolled the curtain down and that was the end of that. She didn’t miss a beat.
There were more than a dozen cars on the train, including a dining car, but I hardly remember eating at all. There wasn’t time for it, between all the drinking and whatever else we were doing. The big theme for the journey was alcohol. We had other things too, but we were running on alcohol, even those of us who weren’t usually heavy drinkers. Janis bragged that she got Jerry drunk—which was something worth bragging about.
There were two lounge cars that doubled as music cars. Initially, one was for blues and the other for country, although all lines like that became as blurry as our vision, and just as fast. There were instruments all set up and being handed off or passed around and it was one jam session after another. Janis and Pigpen would drink whiskey together and then sit and sing and it was mind-blowing. I was in awe. I played percussion a little bit here and there, but there were plenty of other drummers there too, and so I didn’t have to play. Just being there was my trip. There were all these different, rotating combinations of blues musicians and other types of musicians that were jamming at all times as we hauled ass across the Canadian landscape through all different kinds of country. All these different scenes.
One of the scenes was of a black and desolate landscape; a horrible, dead area. It looked worse than a wasteland and it was black as death. We couldn’t figure that one out. Looking back on it now, I’m thinking it must’ve been the tar sands that are found in Alberta. I wish that weren’t the case. These days, we know that if we use oil from tar sands, it will put us past the tipping point of climate change. We’re probably past that point already. But tar sands would remove all doubt.
Back on the train, each band member had their own little suite, which leant itself to all kinds of merry craziness. Wasn’t that the whole point of putting us on the rails? Or was that just a by-product? The minute we left Toronto, everything shot up to maximum. Everything was turned up to eleven. Everything was going by real fast, both inside the train and outside the windows. It was the ride of our lives.
We made an emergency stop along the way in a desolate area right after we realized that we had run the train dry—we were all out of booze. We thought, “God, there can’t be anything here.” It might have been Saskatoon. It might have been Chapleau. Maybe it was a Sunday. Regardless, the whole area looked closed. But Canadians must have a really good sense of judgment and value because they put a liquor store near the train tracks and it was the only store still open. With a train full of musicians, everyone threw in some money and had the managers lead an expedition to go into the store and clean it out. We bought every last bottle in the store. Everybody thought that was cool as hell and off we went, down the tracks, full steam ahead. And as if it wasn’t wild before, it was now the best party ever.
We had a couple giant bottles of whiskey that were so big, they came with spigots attached. They had to be at least a couple gallons, each. I remember watching Ram Rod get underneath one and pour a steady stream of whiskey straight into his mouth. It had gotten to that point. So things were pretty rich on that trip. We’d stop, get out, play music, and then load on up. All aboard.
There were some troublemakers at the kickoff show in Toronto who wanted the event to become free, like what happened at Woodstock. To keep the peace and spread goodwill we ended up playing a free set the next day in a public park. Then there was another show where only something like 5,000 people were inside a giant stadium. I think that one was in Winnipeg. It must not have been advertised very well. There were also cancellations at one of two of the scheduled cities, because of last-minute permit issues or the like. So we ended up playing at only a few “real” stops during the week and a half journey. The promoters had to have lost their shirts on the whole enterprise, but they can be at peace knowing they created an extremely cool moment in rock history.
I remember one night we all leaned out of our windows because the northern lights had come out for us, even though we weren’t way far north. They were all white and beautiful and everyone looked up at them in awe, saying things like, “Look at that one!” “Hey, it’s the Marshmallow Man!” “I’m just glad you guys are seeing this too!” And then suddenly Ram Rod got hit with an ember from the old steam engine. Funny, some of the things you remember most. That very night, Ram Rod needed help getting back into his room. Not because an ember had flown into his eye, but because he was so stoned and blackout drunk that he couldn’t even walk. He was on all fours, holding up his room key like it was some kind of memento, but there was no way he going to make use of it without assistance. He wasn’t the only one in that way.
We celebrated Janis Joplin’s birthday at the last stop the traditional way: with birthday cake. In keeping with our own kind of tradition, somebody—within our ranks, I would imagine—had secretly infused the cake with a decent amount of LSD. So it quickly became an electric birthday celebration. Allegedly, some generous pieces of that birthday cake made it to the hands and mouths of the local police who were working the show. “Let them eat cake!” (To be fair, I didn’t have anything to do with that … I was just another cake-eating birthday reveler, that night.)
And that was it for the Festival Express. It was a wonderful time and I think what really made it great was the level of interaction and camaraderie among the musicians, day and night, as we were all trapped on this train careening across the great north. It probably helped that we were all trashed the entire time. Whiskey was in the conductor’s seat on that ride.
I hear they tried some kind of Festival Express–inspired revival tour recently, taking a few mode
rn bands like Mumford & Sons across the United States by rail, and I’m sure that was cool in its own right. But there will never be another Festival Express quite like the one from the Summer of 1970.
Shortly after we got back to San Francisco and got accustomed to the ground being solid beneath our feet once again, we went into Wally Heider Studios to record American Beauty. I already talked about that album, earlier in this chapter, but it might be interesting to note that we munched on psychedelic mushrooms during those sessions. It was always something with us. And it was usually fun.
I know I also already mentioned that there were a lot of other artists all recording at Wally Heider’s during this period, so there was a lot of cross-pollination and a lot of us became session guys for other bands when we weren’t actually in a session ourselves. Just like on the Festival Express, there was a lot of camaraderie and a strong sense of community.
The most memorable session that I took part of was with Little Richard. I don’t think I’ve ever really talked about this before. But, yeah, I played with Little Richard in that very same studio and we were playing some kind of rock ’n’ roll thing and getting totally wasted along the way. Little Richard enjoyed his distractions and, in those days, we all agreed with cocaine, so there was a pile of white powder on the grand piano. It sort of looked like Halley’s Comet had crashed right on the piano. I don’t know how much actually got accomplished during that whole thing because, unfortunately, that drug makes you feel like you’re doing great, but when it’s all gone, you can sometimes scratch your head and think, “Gee, I must’ve lost my drumsticks,” or “Man, we must’ve forgotten to press RECORD,” because there can be little to show for the time spent.
Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead Page 16
