Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 9, Episode 1
From the Mars Hotel 50: U.S. Blues
Archival interviews:
- Jerry Garcia, by Jim Ladd and Tom Yates, 1/5/1974.
- Robert Hunter, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 11/15/1977.
- Robert Hunter, by Denis McNamera, WLIR, 3/1978.
- Owsley Stanley, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 1/13/1991.
- Bob Weir, by David Gans, 3/2/2004.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [From the Mars Hotel] (1:06-1:28) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: If you heard that chorus at a Grateful Dead show, it probably meant one thing — the show was almost over. “U.S. Blues” was nearly always reserved for the end of the evening, played to send the crowd out into the Shakedown Street parking lot bazaar and the world beyond.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [RFK Stadium Washington D.C., 7/13/89] (4:57-5:17) - [dead.net]
JESSE: But on this season of the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, “U.S. Blues” is our opener, because—before it became the band’s all-time most played encore—it led off the band’s 1974 album, From The Mars Hotel.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [From the Mars Hotel] (0:00-0:18) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And that’s where we’re headed on this season of the Deadcast, to explore the wonders of From the Mars Hotel, the second album from the band’s very own Grateful Dead Records. And we’ll be using the album and its songs to tell the story of the Grateful Dead in 1974, their record company, and the innovative PA system that became known as the Wall of Sound. Please welcome back, Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I think of all of the Dead's records—which, I've heard them all, as much as we all have—I think the one album that I know the nuances of more than any is [From the] Mars Hotel. And I absolutely adore the album. I love all eight songs on it, every one of them. But it's the sort of thing that if I hear a different take of it, a different version—an Angel’s Share sort of thing—I will know immediately that it's not Mars Hotel, because I know the nuances of this album, again, more than any I've ever seen.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [From the Mars Hotel] (1:48-2:01) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Recorded in the spring of 1974 at CBS’s Studio A in San Francisco, From the Mars Hotel was the second release from Grateful Dead Records, the band’s own label, featuring five songs by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, one by Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow, and two by Phil Lesh and Bobby Petersen.
AUDIO: “Unbroken Chain” [From the Mars Hotel] (2:51-3:05) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: After making no official Dead studio albums between 1970 and 1973, From the Mars Hotel would be their second in less than a year.
AUDIO: “Loose Lucy” [From the Mars Hotel] (0:34-0:45) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: There’s a reason that archivist David Lemieux knows Mars Hotel so well.
DAVID LEMIEUX: A funny story about Mars Hotel is I took the vinyl and I made a cassette of it, so that both sides of the album could fit on one side. One side was Mars Hotel, and one side was Ace. So, I put it in my dad’s car—this is late ‘86, into early ‘87—Mars Hotel, Ace. It had auto-flip, so when it got to the end it flipped over. You didn’t have to take it out. I listened to it a few times and hit eject, and it wouldn’t come out. It got stuck in the cassette deck! I used my dad’s car a lot, like every day. It was a Chevy Cavalier. I remember because I put a bumper sticker on in ‘88 and it said: “The Fat Man Rocks the Valley,” from when I went to Alpine ‘88. Then when he sold the car, he peeled it off, but the letters had bled through with the sunburn — it had been on there forever. So I listened to Ace and Mars Hotel… it must have been 100 times in those months. That’s all we had. We just flipped it back and forth, and we didn’t complain.
JESSE: Uphill to school both ways, too. With that in mind, one way to think about this ninth season of the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast is that it’s all just a dream in the mind of teenage David Lemieux as From the Mars Hotel loops endlessly on his father’s tape deck. All right heads, let’s dream.
AUDIO: “Unbroken Chain” [From the Mars Hotel] (3:05-3:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: 1974 was kind of a strange time to be an already-legendary rock band from the 1960s. It was the age of David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs.
AUDIO: “Rebel Rebel” [David Bowie, Diamond Dogs] (1:09-1:23) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Queen’s Sheer Heart Attack.
AUDIO: “Killer Queen” [Queen, Sheer Heart Attack] (0:27-0:37) - [Spotify]
JESSE: ABBA’s Waterloo.
AUDIO: “Waterloo” [ABBA, Waterloo] (0:43-0:53) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic.
AUDIO: “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” [Steely Dan, Pretzel Logic] (1:25-1:43) - [Spotify]
JESSE: In fact, 1974 would be the year the Grateful Dead had their first album in the year’s 10 best sellers. But there’s a big catch to that statement: it wouldn’t achieve that for nearly 20 years.
AUDIO: “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)” [Skeletons From the Closet: The Best of the Grateful Dead] (0:00-0:12) - [YouTube]
JESSE: In late 1973, the Dead had released the first LP on their own label, the best-selling Wake of the Flood. Their old label, Warner Bros., hit the market with a new compilation. For veteran Dead Heads, Skeletons From the Closet might seem like a curiosity. Like, who put Rosemary on there?
DAVID LEMIEUX: It was nothing more than Warner Bros. capitalizing off the Dead, and knowing that they'd now lost this band that never sold great, but it sold consistently.
JESSE: With Skeletons From the Closet, Warner Bros. finally got what they wanted out of the Grateful Dead, or any band they threw their resources at — a massive hit. But in 1974, Skeletons From the Closet only cracked Billboard’s top 90. In 1987, around the time of “Touch of Grey,” it reentered Billboard’s Catalog chart and bounced in and out of it through the early ‘90s.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It's gone quadruple platinum, and that’s four million-plus. Whereas, even American Beauty and In the Dark, I think they’re two million, maybe. We think everybody's got that — well, everybody plus everybody else has Skeletons..
JESSE: Skeletons From the Closet was the first place that many, many latent Dead Heads first heard the Grateful Dead.
DAVID LEMIEUX: My brother came home with it. He put it on. This was like in ‘83, ‘84 — I was 13, 14 years old, getting into older music, because none of the newer stuff really spoke to me: Michael Jackson, Duran Duran, Culture Club. It wasn’t my scene, because I was listening to Pink Floyd and Zeppelin and Bowie and a lot of that kind of better, older music. But I hadn’t heard the Dead. My brother brought home Skeletons with that artwork… wow, I couldn’t believe it. “The Golden Road” comes on, and my buddy and I are like… we just looked at each other. I remember that very well. There was a — ‘Dude, this song is wicked good.’
AUDIO: “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)” [Skeletons From the Closet: The Best of the Grateful Dead] (0:00-0:12) - [YouTube]
JESSE: Skeletons From the Closet was a pretty fitting title. In early 1974, as the Dead made plans for the next release on Grateful Dead Records, they were now competing against their own accumulated past. Here’s how Jerry Garcia described it to DJs Jim Ladd and Tom Yates in early 1974.
JERRY GARCIA [1/5/74]: Doing those things in the beginning, the Trips Festival and the early Fillmore shows, are the things that gave us the basic LSD/acid rock, whatever that label was. And then later on, they started calling us acoustic country, something like that — mellow, laid back and all that, because we put out Workingman’s Dead, which had a few acoustic tunes on it. In neither of these instances were those labels having really anything much to do with who we were or what we were doing.
JESSE: By 1974, people were looking for new ways to describe the Grateful Dead, who were then entering their 10th year of constant change.
JERRY GARCIA [1/5/74]: Lately, we're sort of like the psychedelic revival. Now, we represent psychedelic nostalgia, in a weird way. It's all just an effort to keep qualifying the limits of stuff, what they are and what they aren't. And that's all part of that illusion that we've all been sold, and that we're trying to not get into.
JESSE: Like I said, 1974 was kind of a strange time to be an already-legendary rock band from the ‘60s. But it was also just kind of a strange time in general.
RICHARD NIXON [11/73]: People have got to know if their President’s a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.
JESSE: Yeah, whatever, man. 1974 would prove to be the Grateful Dead’s biggest year yet, at least by some metrics. It would also prove to be their most combustible. By the end of the year, it wasn’t exactly clear that there was still even a Grateful Dead. We’ve got many jams ahead, so let’s start slowly and pretend for a minute that the Grateful Dead are just a normal rock band where you can just go through their album song by song and that explains everything. Let’s wind back to Stinson Beach, California, early 1973.
“Wave That Flag”
AUDIO: [rewind]
AUDIO: “Wave That Flag” (Demo) [From the Mars Hotel 50] (0:00-0:24) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That’s the sound of Jerry Garcia in his home studio in Stinson Beach in early 1973, where he recorded demo versions of seven mostly finished songs for his bandmates to learn and consider for the studio album the band were getting ready to record for the album that became Wake of the Flood. Last season, then Grateful Dead Records president Ron Rakow described it.
RON RAKOW: His studio was, oh, 25 feet from the back door to his house—not even—and on a piece of land that was a little higher than the house. So the studio was a really nice one-room building that was very, very nice. Very effective. It was effective for him. I guess you could have an engineer and another person. It was very small. He could do it all by himself. And he did, often, and he put things together. He played everything but the drums.
JESSE: But not all of the demos made the cut for Wake of the Flood. And there’s a reason for that. Some weren’t exactly done.
AUDIO: “Wave That Flag” (Demo) [From the Mars Hotel 50] (0:44-1:05) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That verse, for example, didn’t make it to the final version of the song that this episode is about, “U.S. Blues.” The chorus survived, but the original title didn’t — “Wave That Flag.”
AUDIO: “Wave That Flag” (Demo) [From the Mars Hotel 50] (1:10-1:26) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Wave That Flag” is singular among Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter compositions in that it underwent a near-total lyric overhaul after its public debut. I think this verse might begin with the phrase “ride that train”?
AUDIO: “Wave That Flag” (Demo) [From the Mars Hotel 50] (2:08-2:31) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: When the Dead took the song, it became a natural hippie-rock boogie, in the mode they’d refined on Skull and Roses in 1971, capturing the beginning of their single drummer period. But it’s pretty delicious to hear Garcia play the song himself with a click track, holding down the rhythm on acoustic guitar, adding some country-ish string bends, playing shaker, adding a synth bassline, and singing it more quietly than the soul-belter it’d become.
AUDIO: “Wave That Flag” (Demo) [From the Mars Hotel 50] (4:01-4:21) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: There are very few demos to compare this one to, except for the others recorded alongside it, but “Wave That Flag” even underwent lyric changes between the demo and the first live version in February 1973 at Stanford, with new verses appearing.
AUDIO: “Wave That Flag” [2/9/73] (2:12-2:40)
JESSE: And, in fact, “Wave That Flag” changed with nearly all of its 15 performances in the first half of 1973. Though Robert Hunter was on tour with the Dead for some of this period and may have contributed a few new lines here and there, I suspect that many of the changes were less about carefully tweaking the lyrics than Jerry Garcia finding an order that made sense for him to remember. Many so-called traditional folk songs are comprised of what musicologists call “floating couplets” that might appear alongside any number of melodies. “I Know You Rider” is one of these. Though none of the rhymes in “Wave That Flag” derive from old folk songs, exactly, the effect is like an accelerated version of the process, seeing what might survive.
AUDIO: “Wave That Flag” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (2:30-2:58) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was the final version of the song in its “Wave That Flag” guise, bidding adieu in the nation’s capitol at the height of Watergate, at RFK Stadium on June 10th, 1973, now on the Here Comes Sunshine box. The words to “Wave That Flag” certainly aren’t nonsense, but there’s a playful interchangeability to them. Each little fragment is an impressionistic punchline without a setup. In 1977, David Gans asked Robert Hunter about how the song made it from “Wave That Flag” to its final form as “U.S. Blues.”
ROBERT HUNTER [11/15/77]: There were a lot, a lot of lyrics I wrote to that, for sure. “Wave that flag,” “Pop that bag” — there’s a lot of things you could fill in that way. I think that’s one of the cases of a song finally getting solidified in the studio, like throwing out verses that were [sung] alright on stage, since you can't hear anything, but weren't so good in the recording studio. It may have been one of those trips — sometimes you do change at the last minute, just ain't workin’ for the record. Or you write something a little more hip, or you throw out something that's too seditious.
JESSE: In the case of “U.S. Blues,” it was just as the Dead were starting to prepare to record From the Mars Hotel. It obviously didn’t take a lot of prompting for Robert Hunter to write lyrics that deconstructed Americana, but with the right kind of ears, both “Wave That Flag” and “U.S. Blues” might be heard as a topical song. Besides the oil crisis and Watergate and the slow end of the Vietnam War and, you know, Roe v. Wade, there was another news story running under 1973 and 1974. Well, sort of news.
AUDIO: “This Land Is Your Land” [The Young Americans, The U.S. Bicentennial Special, 1976] (0:03-0:18) - [YouTube]
JESSE: That was the Young Americans singing “This Land Is Your Land.” Freaky times. And, more specifically, Bicentennial times.
DAVID LEMIEUX: This is two years before the Bicentennial. I just felt that it was a song, that it was the Dead’s kind of patriotic duty to write their own American song, but they did it very tongue-in-cheek, as they always do.
JESSE: The American Bicentennial celebration was in the news on a nearly daily basis in 1973 and 1974. And, as Robert Hunter, like any reasonably well-informed popular songwriter was surely aware, there’s only one cure for Bicentennial Fever — more flags!
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” (soundcheck) [Dave’s Picks 42 bonus disc, 2/22/74] (0:23-0:49)
JESSE: That was the Dead soundchecking the song at Winterland in February 1974, a year and a few weeks after its “Wave That Flag” debut, getting ready to unveil its new identity and fixed set of lyrics. Some of the lines carried over from the original, but not all. And now the song had a narrator.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” (soundcheck) [Dave’s Picks 42 bonus disc, 2/22/74] (2:49-3:02)
JESSE: The song is sung by Uncle Sam, or perhaps by America itself — “U.S.” can stand for different things at the same time.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” (soundcheck) [Dave’s Picks 42 bonus disc, 2/22/74] (3:02-3:15)
JESSE: “U.S. Blues” wasn’t a new phrase to Robert Hunter. He’d used it once before. Almost. Hunter told the story to WLIR in 1978.
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: The song that Weir did, “One More Saturday Night,” was originally “U.S. Blues.”
AUDIO: “One More Saturday Night” [Ace] (0:11-0:33) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was “One More Saturday Night,” one of the very few songs in the Grateful Dead songbook credited solely to Bob Weir. But it began life in 1971 as a collaboration with Robert Hunter. The two somewhat infamously had a blowup over a line in “Sugar Magnolia,” but another disagreement might have been even more significant. Sometime in 1970 or 1971, Hunter gave a set of lyrics to Weir titled “U.S. Blues.” Here’s how Weir told it to our buddy David Gans in 2004.
BOB WEIR [3/2/04]: I think he had a verse or something, a sketch that he gave me. I got started working on it, and it all happened in one night — I got up a head of steam and cranked the song out. “One more Saturday night” was his line; I wrote the rest. I used that one line and, as I was writing, the rest of that verse wasn't ringing my lofty bells. I kept intending to work it back into the tune, and then take everything I'd written and submit to Hunter and let him correct it, but he... as far as he was concerned, the song was done, so he took his name off it.
JESSE: As always, we’ve pointed to David’s books at dead.net/deadcast. Back to Hunter’s version of the story from 1978.
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: But he got it into his mind to rewrite the lyrics. He still wanted to call it “U.S. Blues.” I said, “No way, I’ll write another ‘U.S. Blues,’” which I did.
JESSE: It turns this next rhyme into an extra-hilarious self-referential meta-lyric.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [From the Mars Hotel] (3:40-3:54) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: I probably wrote it in England. I was doing a lot of my writing in London at that point.
JESSE: Hunter moved to England sometime in late 1973 or early 1974, and spent the next few years there, first in London, commuting back and forth to California every few months. I’d posit that having written “Wave That Flag,” Hunter remembered his earlier draft and recovered the title. In addition to the encroaching Bicentennial, there was one other Sam that Robert Hunter might have been pondering in the first months of 1974. The storyline we’re about to introduce isn’t necessarily the inspiration for how “Wave That Flag” became “U.S. Blues,” but the timing is too close to discount. For the first time since 1965, the Dead didn’t play on New Year’s 1973 going into 1974. Instead, Jerry Garcia and Billy Kreutzmann jammed with the Allman Brothers at the Cow Palace.
Uncle Sam vs. Uncle John
AUDIO: “Whipping Post Jam” [Allman Brothers Band, 12/31/73] (2:33-3:03)
JESSE: A few days later, the band held its first meeting of the year. According to the meeting minutes in the band’s archives, they mostly discussed the continued expansion of the new sound system, setting up gigs in February at Winterland, the shows where they’d debut “U.S. Blues.” Phil Lesh would be vacationing in Hawaii, the minutes note. Bob Weir was headed to an unspecified location to work on new material. But the first major business of 1974 took place on January 14th: Sam Cutler departed. We’ve spoken a good deal about—and with—Sam Cutler over the past few years of this podcast, including lots of participation from Sam himself. Sam had roadmanaged the Rolling Stones on their fall 1969 tour of the Americas, through the Altamont disaster, and was soon the booking agent for the Grateful Dead.
SAM CUTLER: I was trying to take the Grateful Dead—who were known in San Francisco and on the West Coast, vaguely, and were earning about $2,000 a night—to being a successful band in America. Which I achieved I think, without trying to be big headed about it. That was the same thing Warner Bros. were trying to do. To do that, you need the right record, as well as the right shows, as well as visiting New York 20 times a year.
JESSE: For lots more of Sam, check out our seasons about Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty, Skull and Roses, and Europe ‘72. In late 1972, he founded Out of Town Tours, a booking agency we discussed much last year, during our “Grateful Dead & Co.” episode. Early in 1973, many of the Dead’s operations moved to 1530 Lincoln Avenue in San Rafael, where Out of Town Tours and Sam Cutler set up shop across the hall from Jon McIntire and Grateful Dead management. Sam passed away in 2023, and I’m sad we didn’t get to finish debriefing with him, including the topic of his departure. We can put some of the pieces together, though it veers into office politics. Sally Mann Romano was Sam’s executive assistant at Out of Town Tours.
SALLY MANN ROMANO: When everything blew up with Cutler, it was happening kind of in meetings that involved the Dead and Sam. And so it wasn't out of the open, but it was horrible. You knew that something not good was going on.
JESSE: There are a number of perspectives on what went down and why, and we offer nothing definitive. Ron Rakow was the president of Grateful Dead Records, just down the street.
RON RAKOW: He was a good talker. And I liked Sam, and he could get things done. He was an admirable leader of a crew — he was a great crew leader. He was a great road manager. Terrific. And so there were a bunch of people around Sam that were really, really good people. And he, actually, I think did a good job as a booking agent. But he created—somehow, for some reason—a lot of animosity within the Dead family. All of a sudden, he got tired of putting up with being argued with, I think by guys in the band. He just sort of threw his pencil on the table and walked out as far as I could see. I don’t know how it all went down. It was weird.
JESSE: According to Sam’s memoir, You Can’t Always Get What You Want, the band called a meeting and told Sam they’d found an agent who would take 5% commission instead of the industry standard 10% that Sam was getting.
SALLY MANN ROMANO: Sam got fired, essentially. He had his independent agency, but that was kind of silly. 90% of the operation was the Dead.
JESSE: Sam says he more less nodded and walked out and never spoke with Garcia again. By some accounts, Sam Cutler’s departure was the result of a long-running battle between Sam and Dead manager Jon McIntire. When Lenny Hart had run off with the band’s money in 1970, at the same time that Sam began to take over the road managing and booking, Jon McIntire was assigned to manage the band’s relationship with Warner Bros. and the mainstream culture industries at large. I wouldn’t take the following song interpretation as a literal truth, but in some versions of Grateful Dead history, particularly Jon McIntire’s, there’s a pretty famous Grateful Dead song that was about him.
AUDIO: “Uncle John’s Band” [Workingman’s Dead] (2:59-3:13) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Jon McIntire was gay, and there was an unfortunate undercurrent of homophobia that existed inside the Dead’s extended family. It was by no means universal, nor even a majority attitude, but it almost certainly contributed to tensions. By early 1974, the vibe in the office had gotten pretty bad.
SALLY MANN ROMANO: I think only he and McIntire—and he's not here with us anymore—and a few other people know exactly how that transpired. But it wasn't fun for him I'm sure.
JESSE: And so we present something our buddy David Gans floated when we visited him in Oakland last year. Like Jon McIntire’s theory about “Uncle John’s Band” being about him, what David’s about to say falls into the category of interpretation. We deploy it here as a matter of thought to, you know, tie the room together, and not a matter of fact.
DAVID GANS: There is a whole class of Grateful Dead songs that are epistles from Hunter. I have a theory developed in the last couple of years that “U.S. Blues” became “U.S. Blues” by focusing on the person of Sam Cutler. If the second verse is first-person Sam Cutler, that puts the song in a different frame. “I'm Uncle Sam, that's who I am…”
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [From the Mars Hotel] (1:32-1:45) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Which would make the song a meta-commentary on the power struggle between Uncle John versus Uncle Sam.
DAVID GANS: “Run your life, steal your wife” — I don't know how literal any of it is. But it's just one of those things that suddenly you go: if that's what it is, then think about the whole song in that respect. And if it ain't, too bad, I thought about it anyway.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [From the Mars Hotel] (2:15-2:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It does make a weird amount of sense to me that in early 1974, just when Robert Hunter moved to England, that he might write a song about the Dead’s departing British road manager and frame him as… Uncle Sam. We’ll get into the studio recording of “U.S. Blues” shortly, but engineer Brian Kehew—who recently transferred the Mars Hotel tapes—shares this observation about the studio version of the song that gives it another unexpected British connection.
BRIAN KEHEW: On the tapes, it also says “U.S. Greys,” that’s even seen more often. What's interesting about that is “greys” is spelled g-r-e-y-s, which is the English spelling. Like if you think of the tea, Earl Grey, it's spelled g-r-e-y. So it's interesting that there's a hidden note on the tapes that says “U.S. Grays.” Obviously, “Blues” makes more sense.
JESSE: Interestingly, later on, “Touch of Grey” would also employ the British spelling. Sally Mann Romano had been Sam Cutler’s executive assistant for the past two years.
SALLY MANN ROMANO: It led to me working for McIntire, who I loved more than life itself. We're all on the same floor of the same office building, and I just walked across the hall and sat down and went to work for McIntire as his assistant. I don't remember him asking me or anything, but I'm sure he did. A lot of us got absorbed into the Dead. [It was] when they were really at their peak, in terms of personnel and the number of assorted jobs and hangers on and everything.
Winterland, 2/74
JESSE: In early 1974, despite Sam Cutler’s departure and the closure of Out of Town Tours, there were a number of projects driving job-creation around the Grateful Dead, including the band’s record company and Frankie Weir’s Fly By Night Travel, but it’s time to address the 75-ton Wally —
WALL OF SOUND: DO NOT CALL ME THAT.
JESSE: — the giant and innovative speaker system we call the Wall of Sound, which the Grateful Dead traveled with throughout 1974. In early 1974, at their first meeting of the year, the Dead booked three nights at Winterland in February — and three additional days before that, ear-marked for “sound experimentations.” Nobody was calling it the Wall of Sound just yet, by the way, we’ll get there. We’ll have a number of different perspectives on the Wall over the course of this season, so let’s first zoom back and hear about its origins directly from the source. The Wall of Sound derived in many ways from the ideas of Owsley Stanley, the one-time LSD chemist who turned his dazzling and obsessive mind to audio. David Gans interviewed him in 1991 for his book Conversations with the Dead. We’ve used bits of this interview in our “Bear Drops” episode, and we might repeat a few bits for the sake of linear storytelling. Thanks again David — and Bear.
OWSLEY “BEAR” STANLEY [1/13/91]: My idea about the sound man is that he has to become transparent. A recordist is different, and I was always a recordist. But a sound man running the house sound system, he’s only an assistant to the musicians. If he’s a total, contributing musician and a member of the band, that’s fine. If he’s not, he should make himself so transparent as to not be there.
JESSE: This is the process that led to Bear becoming a taper, which we’ve explored before, especially on our “Bear’s Choice 50” episode. But—naturally—he took the idea much further.
BEAR [1/13/91]: So then, an extension of that is: why not have it in such a way that the musicians have control of everything? Why not? They should be able to. If everything is coming from behind them, and it’s designed in an array so it couples to go out to the far audience, but onstage they’re able to intercept just enough of it so that it’s not too loud, not out of control, and they can adjust themselves, their own vocals, they’re listening to the mix of their vocals and they can adjust the level so that it’s just right — then you don’t need a sound man! He’s the guy who’s out in front, maybe with a walkie-talkie, saying, “Tell Phil to turn up,” or whatever.
JESSE: And while Owsley was at the center of many conspiracy theories over the years, the Wall of Sound is one where he gladly described himself as mastermind.
BEAR [1/13/91]: I was only controlling it like a puppeteer controlling a lot of puppets at once. I couldn’t make my influence felt directly. It was very slippery. The only reason that it happened the way it did was that I figured ways of feeding my ideas and things in through people without directly confronting them.
JESSE: The division of labor sounds pretty chaotic in a very Grateful Dead way — a team of Owsley Stanley, Dan Healy, John Curl, Alembic’s Ron Wickersham, and others.
BEAR [1/13/91]: At one point, Healy was doing piano, at another point I was doing piano, Healy was doing something else, somebody doing something else. It was like, there were three of us that were basically sound men. Wickersham, Dan, and I. It was very difficult to say who was doing what, because there was no sound mixer, because there was no mixing board. And so we were all working with it . . . there was no mixer, so we were all involved in it. And, because of the way it worked out, it happened because of the ideas that I had — which I had because I had an image, I was working from an image. This image was fed in through a lot of different people, through Wickersham, through Healy, through Curl. And I assembled the thing, but it was like remote control. It was very difficult to get it all together, and the result was that I couldn’t concentrate on anything.
JESSE: We’ll have lots more Bear to come, but you can check out that full interview in David’s book, Conversations with the Dead. Another voice we’re going to hear from about the Wall of Sound comes from one of the small village who helped build, transport, and re-build it at every show. We’re so pleased to welcome to the Deadcast, Richie Pechner. Richie had been part of the extended Dead family since their earliest days in San Francisco.
RICHIE PECHNER: I saw them at the Fillmore Auditorium in ‘66. That was the first time I'd seen them, but I was living in the Haight-Ashbury, so they were kind of around. It was kind of part of the culture those first couple of years. I was 18 years old, just graduated high school up in Novato, which is in Marin County, and had moved to the Haight-Ashbury ostensibly to go to San Francisco State College. But the apartment I rented was right off Stanyan Street, so I kind of found myself in the middle of this whole thing that was going on there.
JESSE: Richie was not only in the thick of the stew, he was sometimes helping to ladle it out with the Diggers, the radical mutual-aid anarchists of the Haight-Ashbury.
RICHIE PECHNER: I had been working—or hanging out/working—with this group called the Diggers, which is this notorious group of folks that were into free stuff. They had a free kitchen and a free food store and all sorts of social revolutionary kind of stuff. Anyway, somebody asked through a connection if the Diggers could provide a flatbed truck for a free show in the Panhandle, and the answer was yes. I was asked to go down, pick up the truck, pick up the band and drive it into the Panhandle. So that was my first interaction directly. There were several free shows during that period, and it was just incredible, the amount of people that showed up. It was more or less spontaneous in that it wasn't a publicized show per se. But you know, word got around, and it was pretty memorable.
JESSE: In late 1967, the Digger connection led to some paid work.
RICHIE PECHNER: This fella named Danny Rifkin, he was also enrolled in San Francisco State, but was also working for the band at that time as a road manager. After that Golden Gate Park thing, I saw him several times. And then, early November, he called me and asked me if I'd be interested in driving — they needed an extra driver, they were heading out to New York for some gigs. They needed an extra driver, and he knew of course that I could drive from the Golden Gate Park thing. This is right before finals, and I said, “Oh, Danny, what about finals?” And he said, “Oh” — he had already dropped out of college. I thought about it for a second, and I said, “Sure.” So that was my first hire, so to speak, with the band. I was driving in a five-car caravan from 710 Ashbury to New York City. I'd never been east of Squaw Valley at that point.
JESSE: It was a cold trip, and the Dead made their second visit to New York and their first to the Village Theater, which Bill Graham would take over in a few months and rename the Fillmore East.
RICHIE PECHNER: It was kind of mindblowing to see how the band resonated with the people on the other side of the country, at least for me. I think they'd been there one time before, they did some shows before that, but that one was pretty remarkable. One of the things that I remember was that it was pretty cold. We all had to go out and buy underwear because of course we were from the Haight-Ashbury — we weren't wearing underwear at that point.
JESSE: Richie moved in and out of the Dead crew in the next few years.
RICHIE PECHNER: It was a pretty different scene back in the ‘60s, late ‘60s, early ‘70s. It was much more laid back, certainly less intense. It was kind of like you had friends and there'd be some shows, and you'd go to shows. You'd work, do some work or not do some work. But then when they started experimenting with the sound system, I kind of got involved in that early on. So that was kind of my full employment period where I was on the payroll, traveling with the band and all that.
JESSE: Over the course of 1973, Richie Pechner connected with the band in a deeper way.
RICHIE PECHNER: I got into it mostly through Ram Rod, who I met on that first trip. We became really good friends. He knew of my construction background, because I had moved up to Mendocino and was building houses and stuff in the early ‘70s. So he kind of asked me one day, something about building cabinets or something. I came down, we hung out. He kind of showed me what they were trying to do. One thing led to another, and before you know it we had put together a cabinet shop in one of the rehearsal spaces, to start cranking out cabinets.
JESSE: The Dead were soon crowded out of the Delucca Street space in San Rafael.
RICHIE PECHNER: They had rented it for that, but we kind of took it over. The two weren't very compatible, making a lot of dust and having a lot of musical instruments around. So they got a bigger space and we kind of took over that space to produce all the equipment.
JESSE: The Dead relocated their rehearsal headquarters to a warehouse in San Rafael’s canal district at 20 Front Street, where they’d remain for the next 20 years. Richie hit the road with the band for the series of fall outings booked by Out of Town Tours to help the Dead support Wake of the Flood. It was during these shows that the sound system underwent another major transformation. To discuss it, please welcome to the Deadcast, journalist Brian Anderson, who is currently researching and writing a book titled Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest For Audio Perfection.
BRIAN ANDERSON: I would consider those shows in the end of November, December of 1973 — those are the beginning of the Wall of Sound for me. The Boston Music Hall, that was the first instance that they stacked up everything behind them on scaffolding. Otherwise, it wasn't going to be able to fit the stage at the Music Hall. That was a real sort of landmark moment, when they realized that: Oh, shit, we can do that. Then, over the next couple of days, you get Cincinnati and Cleveland. If you look back at the photographic record of those shows, you can see that the center vocal cluster, sort of the iconic part of the Wall of Sound, was already taking shape in the form of individual speaker stacks.
JESSE: “As above, so below” was Owsley’s alchemical saying that applied throughout the Wall of Sound, tuning the system to be a seamless part of the band. And, so just like the music, the speaker system never stopped changing.
BRIAN ANDERSON: Of course, a big thing about this story is that the configuration of gear was never the same twice. It was different every show, every tour, every city, every venue — it was always different. You get those couple shows, late November, early December 1973, where everything is in back of them for the first time, and the center cluster is starting to take shape. We've got the dual microphone thing going on. But then, later in the month, they kind of go back to just your standard stereo setup: stage left, stage right, PA arrays with no coherent center cluster. So you get a little flash of it right at the end of the year there.
JESSE: We’ve got some related stories about the rapid growth of the Dead’s sound system. Ron Rakow from Grateful Dead Records.
RON RAKOW: There was no budget control on the sound system. The sound system was an invention. I had to raise the money to pay for the shit.
JESSE: Even still, Rakow committed himself to the bit.
RON RAKOW: In New York, Ram Rod came to me and said, “Hey, look, we're using these Mac[Intosh] 250s. They just came out and they're fabulous. And we just bought about 50 government cubes out of a government storage sale. With two handles on them, you could put a whole Mac 250 in one, with foam rubber on the top and foam rubber on the bottom, close this up and you can pick them up. Therefore with a chain of 20 guys, you can have God knows how many of these and load them in fast, in these cubes.” Okay. So, Ram Rod said, “Any time as we go from city to city, call around at the hi-fi stores, find out who sells Macs, and buy up all the 250s you can.” So in New York, I bought four. In Boston, I bought three. In Philadelphia, I bought three. In Chicago, I bought four. In a week, or eight days, I bought 20 of them.
JESSE: I’m going to guess that it was sometime not long after this that the phone rang at the Grateful Dead Records office in San Rafael. The last time our friend Steve Brown told us about an unexpected phone call, it was the FBI calling about counterfeit Wake of the Flood LPs. This time, it was a different government agency.
STEVE BROWN: One of the funnier things that did happen to us, too, at one point, I remember at the office at 5th and Lincoln was when we had made a big huge purchase from McIntosh for all those amps to go with the Wall of Sound, and everything that we needed for the amps that the band wanted to have and the crew wanted to have, these big McIntosh [amps]… we got a call from the Navy. The Navy said, “Listen, we've been talking to the people at McIntosh for these specific amps that we need for our submarines that are over there in Vietnam.” The war was still going on still, this is 1974. And there weren't any available because the Grateful Dead had bought up all of that brand of that particular amp. So, we helped stop the war! [laughs]
JESSE: Many years later, Ron Rakow discovered another result of the band’s buying spree.
RON RAKOW: In the late ‘80s, I'm moving into this house. There's a butler's pantry right next to the dining room and I put my hi-fi system in it. It was a McIntosh preamp with a McIntosh amp, and it was an exact duplication of the home version of the Grateful Dead stage sound system. I ran wires everywhere where I wanted to hear it. Then I closed the door to the pantry after I had the equipment on shelves, and the door was thicker than I expected. The knob cracked the glass plate on the preamp. ‘Oh fuck, I just ruined the faceplate on this preamp. I wonder how much that costs?’ So I called McIntosh in Binghamton, New York, and I asked for the president. I get him on the phone. I said, “I just broke the glass face of the M-74 preamp, and I wonder if you have it, and would you send it to me and not charge me for it? Because you owe me?” So he started to laugh. He said, “What do I owe you?” I said, “Man, are you kiddin’? I was with the Grateful Dead, we put McIntosh on the map.” He said, “Oh, are you the guy that went around in 1974 and bought all the Mac 250s?” I said, “Yeah, yeah, that was me!”
So this guy at Macintosh is telling me this story. He said, “Our inventory is based on having a multiple”—the multiple was seven—“times a week sales. So we put out this amplifier. It didn't sell and, all of a sudden, it starts to sell out all across the country, one day after another. All across the country! So we figured we had the hottest new product ever, and we made a bunch of them. It almost put us out of business. We never sold another one.” So he says, “Rather than me owe you, you owe me! You should pay me 100 times the value of that faceplate, which is 22 bucks. But I’ll send it to you anyway.” So he did, and that was the story.
JESSE: When you look at pictures of the Dead in 1973 and 1974, those cool gray boxes on stage behind every band member with glowing VU meters are the Dead’s McIntosh amps. Imagine them glowing behind the band during all the live musical segments this season. Let’s get back to that Winterland soundcheck.
AUDIO: “Attics of My Life” (soundcheck) [Dave’s Picks 42 bonus disc, 2/22/74] (3:21-3:40) (3:48-3:50)
JERRY GARCIA [2/22/74]: Hold it — is there a limiter on the monitors? Did somebody put a limiter on the monitors?
UNIDENTIFIED DOG [2/22/74]: [barks]
JESSE: That was the Dead and an unidentified dog soundchecking “Attics of My Life” at Winterland before the first of three shows at Winterland — February 22nd, 1974, a song that wouldn’t appear in concert between 1972 and 1989. As you can hear from what Jerry Garcia just said, the Wall of Sound did actually have vocal monitors, they were just located behind the band with the rest of the speakers. Brian Anderson.
BRIAN ANDERSON: They hauled in what was, by that point, around 40 tons of gear into Winterland for a three-night run of shows at the end of February, right in their home court. So they were very cozy there. They knew that terrain. You can make a case for these Winterland shows being the birth of the Wall of Sound as we know it — because it was 1974, and they had sort of specifically called out in these meetings these sound experimentation gigs, and they had greenlit the fabricating of this center cluster. And while the center cluster wasn't done, here it all was on their home court.
JESSE: Richie Pechner.
RICHIE PECHNER: That was right before the center cluster was finished. So if my memory serves me well, the cabinets for the vocal PA were stacked. And they were still the wooden cabinets, not the finished metal enclosure that is dominant in all the pictures of that ‘74 tour. That was the last configuration before it got replaced.
JESSE: In addition to helping build and assemble the Wall, Richie was also an ace photographer and responsible for some of the best documentation of the system. If you’re studying photos, the emergence of the smooth-curved center cluster marks the main visual difference between the December and February versions of the system and what was to come. Our friend Michael Parrish, a Winterland regular since 1969, came up from Santa Cruz to attend two of the February shows and caught some of the new tunes.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Dave’s Picks 42 bonus disc, 2/22/74] (0:05-0:32)
MICHAEL PARRISH: It was in a way sort of a parallel to the show at Maples [Pavilion] the year before, almost a year before. That was where a bunch of new material popped out. They led off with “U.S. Blues,” which was a really very-cleaned-up version of “Wave That Flag.” And they also had debuts of “It Must Have Been the Roses,” “Ship of Fools.”
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [Dave’s Picks 42 bonus disc, 2/22/74] (1:27-1:46)
JESSE: But, just as important as the songs was the sound. As someone who’d seen the Dead at Winterland a number of times, including four months previously, Michael Parrish was well familiar with how the band normally sounded in the former skating rink.
MICHAEL PARRISH: It was a lot bigger. There were a lot more speakers than there were in November, and it sounded really, really good. There was a very palpable difference between the way the band had sounded in November to February. It was sort of amazing to have that entire assemblage in that small room. Part of it was the vocals really sounded pristine. The voice-canceling microphones aside, it really made a huge difference. You could hear everybody separately and clearly, which was an amazing improvement I would say. And then similarly with the instruments, you were able to have much more of a 3-D image of the instruments — which was a little confusing sometimes, because where it was coming out wasn't necessarily where the musician was standing.
JESSE: Most of the three February shows at Winterland were released on Dave’s Picks 13 and 42, respectively, as well as a 2022 bonus disc. The first version of “U.S. Blues” since its transformation is on that bonus disc. Whatever spurred Hunter to focus the lyrics, having Uncle Sam as narrator is a wonderful frame to hang the fun, surreal images, especially if you envision Uncle Sam as a skeleton, an image inevitably realized a few years later in The Grateful Dead Movie. We’ll unpack a few of the new references, which all would’ve been familiar to general audiences in 1974, hardly hidden folk sources. Uncle Sam himself had been a stand-in for the United States since the early 19th century, but it took Robert Hunter to connect him to Elvis, or perhaps Carl Perkins.
AUDIO: “Blue Suede Shoes” [Carl Perkins] (0:00-0:18) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was the immortal Carl Perkins’ original 1955 version of “Blue Suede Shoes,” turned into a massive hit by Elvis the next year, and bodacious footwear for Uncle Sam his bad self. Hunter referenced it in his lyrics the year before to Keith Godchaux’s “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away.” And though neither the Dead nor Jerry Garcia’s side projects are known to have performed “Blue Suede Shoes” at a show, the Dead soundchecked it a few times in late 1973, just before “Wave That Flag” became “U.S. Blues.” This is a bit from December 12th at the Omni in Atlanta.
AUDIO: “Blue Suede Shoes” (soundcheck) [12/12/73] (0:00-0:19)
JESSE: Among the new “U.S. Blues” lyrics, I’m pretty fond of the con-man-like construction of this line.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Dave’s Picks 13, 2/24/74] (2:45-3:01)
JESSE: P.T. Barnum was the great American showman and con artist, Phineas Taylor Barnum, born around the same time as Uncle Sam, known for circus, freak shows, and mermaid bones. Probably he didn’t actually originate the phrase “there’s a sucker born every minute,” but I’m reasonably certain he’d be fine if we attributed it to him. And Charlie Chan. Chillin’ part-time in the problem attic these days, Charlie Chan was a fictional Chinese detective in novels and movies, who countered some mid-century Asian stereotypes while also perpetuating a number of others. Given his proximity to our narrator, we’ll let him slip off, add him to the tally of Uncle Sam’s weird associates, and perhaps just advise you to maybe not go as Charlie Chan for Halloween. Every now and then, Garcia would swap in another character, like this show from January 13th, 1980.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [1/13/80] (1:49-2:05)
JESSE: The Shah of Iran, also probably on the list of ill-advised Halloween costumes these days, but what isn’t, really? All three Winterland ‘74 shows are worth hearing with deep jams, and a few more debuts.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Dave’s Picks 42 bonus disc, 2/22/74] (10:43-11:05)
JESSE: That was Jerry Garcia and Keith Godchaux playing with the lick that would become known as “Slipknot!” in the “Playing in the Band” jam from the first of the three nights. On the second night, the band was showered with marshmallows and roses.
AUDIO: “Sugaree” [2/23/74] (7:27-7:57)
PHIL LESH [2/23/74]: Maybe it would be a good idea to save all these marshmallows for the hungry people that are in the audience next to you.
BOB WEIR [2/23/74]: One other thing — it’s really a drag, steppin’ on roses. It’s really a drag looking down and seeing that you just crushed a lovely rose. So you ought to save the roses that you’re gonna throw up here for later in the show, where they stand a better chance of survival.
[audience cheers]
JERRY GARCIA [2/23/74]: Fuck the roses, save yourselves!
PHIL LESH [2/23/74]: If ya can…
JESSE: If the February shows were a successful try-out, the real sound test was still to come, as Phil Lesh reminded people at the end of the final encore.
PHIL LESH [2/24/74]: See you next month at the Cow Palace, I hope.
JESSE: We’ll visit the March 23rd show at the Cow Palace next time.
“U.S. Blues”
JESSE: So far, 1974 had started out as planned. In fact, the schedule they laid out at the beginning of the year mostly came to pass. “January 9th-31st, rest.” Sure, yeah, no problem. Except for Garcia. We’ll get back to that guy. “February 1st through 17th, rehearse and develop new material.” Seems like that happened, maybe at least a little. And in late March, stretching through early May, just as planned, the Grateful Dead set up shop in downtown San Francisco at Columbia’s Studio A. Steve Brown of Grateful Dead Records was a production assistant.
STEVE BROWN: That was every day every night, and yeah, those were long days. That was down there at the CBS Studios on Folsom Street right across from where we were doing our rehearsals during the day at Studio Instrument Rentals. We’d rehearse across the street and come over. These, again, were some songs that they’d been working on already, so they were kind of halfway there on most of those.
JESSE: On April 15th, they started work on what would become the album’s first single — “U.S. Blues,” labeled “U.S. Greys” on the tape box. Here’s how take 1 sounded.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” (Takes 1-7) [From the Mars Hotel: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-0:22) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Brian Kehew once again did the transfer of the tapes, and we’ll have lots to unpack about the wonders of the Mars Hotel sessions, and we’re going to save the technical details for another time.
BRIAN KEHEW: These tracks sound very pristine and almost clear, but almost plain Jane to me. They don't sound full of hippie vibe and amazing coolness. They're cool, but it's still them.
JESSE: But one aspect of the sessions that differed from previous two Dead albums is that the takes didn’t preserve a lot of in-studio chatter.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” (Takes 1-7) [From the Mars Hotel: The Angel’s Share] (0:30-0:37) - [dead.net]
BOB WEIR [4/15/74]: There’s two —
JERRY GARCIA [4/15/74]: There’s still introductory bars.
KEITH GODCHAUX [4/15/74]: And at the end, how many repetitions?
BOB WEIR & JERRY GARCIA [4/15/74]: Two.
JESSE: And that chatter between Garcia, Weir, and Keith Godchaux is some of the only talking during the “U.S. Blues” tapes.
BRIAN KEHEW: Not that they were poor, but tape was expensive. And it remains a cost factor, those that even want to try it nowadays. You've got to really focus your attention. Also, it is a bit distracting: imagine everything you do—If you want to try something crazy or weird—that someone is recording it. It's going to be captured for posterity.
JESSE: And for reasons we’ll explain next episode, the Dead were using even more tape than usual. Another big difference between From the Mars Hotel and the previous albums we’ve explored is that the band didn’t record scratch vocals as they did live takes, so the raw tapes for the sessions are entirely instrumental.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” (Takes 1-7) [From the Mars Hotel: The Angel’s Share] (0:36-1:06) - [dead.net]
JERRY GARCIA [4/15/74]: One, two, one, two, three, four.
BRIAN KEHEW: There were two complete takes. It's labeled Take 8 as a master.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Room Mic, From the Mars Hotel] (0:08-0:21)
BRIAN KEHEW: This is where they did overdubs and added layered vocals, that “Wave That Flag” part that is the hook. You can just always picture thousands of people singing it, but it's actually nobody singing it. It's funny to hear the song go into that section with no one singing.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Room Mic, From the Mars Hotel] (1:14-1:39)
JESSE: That’s how Take 8 sounded through a room mic in CBS’s Studio A, the sound of your core ‘74 Grateful Dead playing live in a room. David Lemieux has always been fond of Phil Lesh’s contribution.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I remember I was really turned on by the bass part in it. And when he does live, I think it's even better. But he's got this kind of cascading, ascending-descending bass riff on it that I think holds the whole thing down.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Bass Amp, From the Mars Hotel] (0:23-0:41)
JESSE: Here’s how Garcia’s rhythm part sounded.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Garcia Rhythm Guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (1:39-2:07)
JESSE: Weir’s rhythm in that same spot.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Weir Rhythm Guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (1:39-1:50)
JESSE: Likewise, Keith Godchaux’s playing Rhodes on the basic track.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Godchaux Keys Amp, From the Mars Hotel] (1:39-1:50)
JESSE: There are a few overdubs to call out. Here are the fills Garcia played during that verse.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Garcia Lead Guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (1:39-1:50)
JESSE: More noticeable and giving the song some of its distinct sound is the overdub on a tack piano, a regular piano but with some slightly harder objects like tacks creating a plunkier sound, reminiscent of how we probably imagine saloon pianos. Neil Young uses one frequently.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Tack Piano, From the Mars Hotel] (1:10-1:39)
JESSE: But perhaps most interesting is what contrasts with the old-time sound of the tack piano. Both Keith Godchaux and Jerry Garcia overdub Roland synth parts.
BRIAN KEHEW: The surprise for me was the synthesizers. And it's not that you can't hear them on the record, but I have to give them a big compliment — they had a not very large, not very fancy but good sounding Roland synthesizer, and they were using it on several of these tracks. But you don't really hear synthesizers sticking out in the music here.
JESSE: Can you pick them out of the part of “U.S. Blues” we’ve been zooming in on?
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [From the Mars Hotel] (1:32-2:01) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Here’s what Keith is doing.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Godchaux Synthesizer, From the Mars Hotel] (1:40-2:09)
BRIAN KEHEW: It's mostly Keith, but Jerry actually does quite a few little synth tracks in there.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Garcia Synthesizer, From the Mars Hotel] (1:40-2:09)
BRIAN KEHEW: They're mostly playing similar parts, but they're very musical. They sound like a plucked sound or an organ or a flute or something. So the sounds they're choosing are not to show off that we have a synthesizer or we're cool or we're state of the art with other new bands. They're actually just doing very tasteful parts. I think that's kind of interesting — there are moments all through this record when the synthesizer pops up, and my ears went, ‘Wow, that's cool. I didn’t quite realize that was a synth before.’
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Submix of Garcia and Godchaux Synthesizers, From the Mars Hotel] (1:40-2:09)
JESSE: Garcia’s isolated vocal is fun. You can hear some echo on it.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Garcia Vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (3:32-3:58)
JESSE: With the isolated vocals, you can also hear some quiet vocalizing between the proper singing, too.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Garcia Vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (1:16-1:18)
JESSE: But the fun stuff is really the big chorus that really emphasizes the singing along. Here’s the sound of Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Phil Lesh gathered around a single microphone. I don’t think Donna’s singing.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Background Vocals 1, From the Mars Hotel] (4:02-4:23)
JESSE: And as with American Beauty, they employ the old, fab trick of stacking their voices, adding still another layer of gang vocals.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Background Vocals 2, From the Mars Hotel] (4:02-4:10)
BRIAN KEHEW: It's not really angry like a Crosby, Stills and Nash song. Their way of taking down established things was to make fun of them. It's sort of a cynical poke at something, but they also have that it's just couched in a sense of humor. It's not really mean.
JESSE: And while it might have been written with the Bicentennial in the background with a heaping pile of Americana on top, the chorus’s takeaway message is ambiguous and sweet.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Background Vocals 2, From the Mars Hotel] (4:28-4:36)
JESSE: It was the kind of good feeling song that seemed made for the radio, a game the Dead would explore later in 1974 when the song was released as a single. The Grateful Dead were already approaching critical mass in 1974. And, throughout the year, they sold the song their own way — not afraid to use it as an opener, but also dropping it right into the middle of second set jam sequences. The month the album came out, June 1974, it shows up in a few places that might seem surprising to Dead Heads now. Here we are deep in the jammy wilderness…
AUDIO: “Mind Left Body Jam” [Dick’s Picks 12, 6/28/74] (27:27-27:53) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Dick’s Picks 12, 6/28/74] (0:00-0:28) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was from Boston Garden, June 28th, 1974, the day after the album was released, now on Dick’s Picks 12, where the full “Weather Report Suite” unfurls into the Mind Left Body Jam before building slowly towards “U.S. Blues.” They’d take a few minutes to recombobulate. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
“U.S. Blues” Blues
DAVID LEMIEUX: I think it's a great opener. It's a rockin’ song. When I saw The Grateful Dead Movie for the first time and saw how they used it there, I just thought that that was a perfect use of the song. And the way the visuals [worked] — they made a rock video for it! Gary Gutierrez did, with that opener. I just think it's a perfect opener for an album, and a song that has legs to this day.
JESSE: Probably just as much or more than the song’s appearance as a single in 1974, Gary Gutierrez’s animation in 1977’s Grateful Dead Movie cemented the song’s quote-unquote “hit” status and transformed Uncle Sam permanently into a skeleton. By the end of 1974, it had moved into the band’s encore slot, where it stayed almost exclusively for the next 21 years.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I remember reading a review—it might have been in The Golden Road magazine, it might have been Relix, I don't know—but I remember reading a review of a show, and it talked about “U.S. Blues,” and it used the phrase it was a “throwaway song.” They played the “throwaway” “U.S. Blues” as the encore, as they often do. And this is before I’d seen the Dead, and I was almost appalled that anybody would take for granted seeing the Dead do anything. They could come out and tell jokes all night and I'd be happy. I hadn't seen them yet.
JESSE: Last season, we devoted a whole episode to “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away,” the first single from Wake of the Flood, which the Dead played a grand total of a half-dozen times in concert, and posited that—because it doesn’t appear on tons of Dead tapes—it’s off the radar of many Dead Heads. The opposite is true of “U.S. Blues.”
DAVID LEMIEUX: People ask me: ‘When you're listening, what makes a great show different from a good show?’ And I say, “Well, it's the nuances — it's the things that are a little out of the ordinary in the most mundane places.” “U.S. Blues” — I don’t say it’s a mundane song, but it’s never really all that different. It’s just really good all the time.
JESSE: But that doesn’t doesn’t mean there aren’t totally fun ones that stand out.
DAVID LEMIEUX: There's the fun one with [John] Belushi. He doesn't really contribute too much, but it changes the dynamic of what the band was doing that night.
JESSE: That was the night John Belushi cartwheeled onto the stage at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic. Jay Blakesberg’s pictures are cool. Squint your ears and you can kinda hear Belushi.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [3/30/80] (4:34-4:59)
DAVID LEMIEUX: 1988, I got my first batch of Betty tapes, and one of them was the Red Rocks, July ‘78. And during the “U.S. Blues,” Jerry, vocally, goes off, during the “My oh my, oh my.” He screams, he does that Jerry thing.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [July 1978: The Complete Recordings, 7/7/78] (4:40-5:04)
JESSE: It’s now an excellent-sounding official release.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It's way above and beyond. And so Jerry just goes berserk in it.
JESSE: “U.S. Blues” wasn’t a political song but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t political. Like another great songwriter from last century wrote, We live in a political world, and I am a political girl. Sorry for the janky audio in these next clips.
JERRY GARCIA [1/5/74]: We have the basic distrust of all political happenings.
JESSE: This is Jerry Garcia, from the January 1974 interview with Jim Ladd and Tom Yates. It’s not that Garcia didn’t have takes on things. Being 1974, the topic of Richard Nixon came up.
JERRY GARCIA [1/5/74]: Every morning, he wakes up with what must be a sense of total responsibility about everything in America. All this stuff is sitting there, plus he's blowing it, horribly. It must be horrible, it must be just amazing. I feel for the poor guy, man.
JESSE: As the Grateful Dead, they had their own strategy.
JERRY GARCIA [1/5/74]: We don't have any confidence in statements. Everybody's had that dried up. How can you believe words, no matter how neat they sound?
JESSE: And we appreciate that.
JERRY GARCIA [1/5/74]: We're not trying to be right, and we're not trying to tell anybody anything. But we are into stirring up whatever activity we can — sort of using a shotgun approach, the one that just contains randomness. Just because it's so hard to do something nowadays, on a level of language or anything else, that doesn't contain some kind of weird trap in it. And our trip has been to put out things that are trapless as much as possible.
JESSE: With some of that context in mind, we’ll leave off today’s episode with one final “U.S. Blues” adjacent story from a few weeks after the interview clips we just heard. When researching this season, we came across a letter in the Dead archives on the band’s official letterhead addressed to Richard Nixon in the White House. Former Grateful Dead Records president Ron Rakow.
RON RAKOW: We got really, really, really high backstage at Keystone Korner in Berkeley, and that was what happened.
JESSE: Go on.
RON RAKOW: Keystone, Berkeley. Garcia and John Kahn and those guys would play there whenever they wanted to, and they always wanted to. Certainly when Garcia wasn't on the road, once or twice a week, they'd play there — so, I would always go. So we're sitting backstage, they would play for four or five hours. They would play until they can't fucking stand anymore, and then they sit down and get high and go do it again. Well, John Kahn was one of the world’s wittiest guys. I used to love to go there and sit down between him and Jerry and start some shit. So, I started some shit about… we ended up talking about Nixon at the White House, and it was right relevant. And bingo, the next day, I get this idea.
JESSE: So it was that a letter from Grateful Dead Records was dispatched to the White House.
RON RAKOW: “23 January 1974. Mr. Richard Nixon, President, United States of America, White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC. Dear Mr. President, while we are of vastly different socio political persuasions, several of my associates and I had our first political meeting in our 10-year history, and we concluded that your involuntary removal from office would produce a decidedly negative result on the American lifestyle, if in fact anything so diverse could be so collectively described. Therefore, our focus was to arrive at a solution of what is now your problem, and can be everyone's problem. We pass our solution along to you, with only the remotest expectation that you will carry it out — since, while it is brilliant, it is not extremely logical. We have concluded that the problems referred to above would disappear, as if by magic, were you to chrome the entire White House. Sincerely, Ron Rakow.”
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [From the Mars Hotel] (4:10-4:40) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]