Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 7, Episode 5
Here Comes Sunshine: Grateful Dead & Co.
Archival interviews:
- Jerry Garcia, by Father Miles Riley, KPIX, 1976.
- Bob Weir, Keith Godchaux, Donna Godchaux, and Jon McIntire, WAER, 9/17/73.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:16-0:46) - [dead.net]
JESSE: In 1973, as spring began to bloom, the Grateful Dead were pretty much the biggest band in the land. They’d jumped from clubs to theaters, from theaters to arenas, and—on the five shows on the new Here Comes Sunshine box set—from arenas to stadiums. Over these next six episodes of the Grateful Deadcast, we’ll be taking you deep into these epic shows, but our trip is longer. In 1973, the Grateful Dead manifested as their own virtual solar system — not just a band but a cluster of supporting businesses in various orbits that helped get the music from Marin County to the universe at large.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (1:15-1:45) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Please welcome back to the Deadcast, the fantastic Mrs. Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: For me, and Keith especially, we had just really come on board by the time we went to Europe. I was barely on board — I had just really sang with them, as far as being on tour and that kind of thing, in New York before the trip to Europe. So I didn't have very much of a personal knowledge about how everything was before I joined the band.
JESSE: The Grateful Dead had left for Europe as countercultural heroes and come back as something bigger.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: Being in a band that big was an incredible thing. And especially the Grateful Dead, being more of an underground band taking off like that, it was almost like a starburst or something. It got big so quickly. There was hardly any time to adjust to what was happening.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:41-1:07) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Here Comes Sunshine is the name of the new Grateful Dead box set capturing five stadium shows in four cities. “Here Comes Sunshine” was part of a batch of songs written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, debuted in February 1973, and its lyrics not only the title of the album the band would record in the summer and appear on its first single, but also might be heard as a theme for their most ambitious period ever, in turn the theme of the next half-dozen Deadcasts and beyond. The Dead would start their own record company, spin off their own booking and travel agencies, and nurture businesses ranging from boutiques and artisanal clothing to innovative instrument builders and live sound pioneers. And throughout, they made some pretty excellent music.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (1:13-1:50) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: A lot was going on. They were getting out of the Warner Bros. contract and they were starting their own record company. That took up a massive amount of their time, energy, and money. So, going out on tour several times. But after April 2nd, at the Boston Garden, you'll look at that summer right up until Nassau in September — there is no tour, with the exception of that little six-show [run in June], three in the Pacific Northwest and followed right up by three in LA at Universal Amphitheatre. So, what you get instead is the Grateful Dead doing massive shows — the five in this box, all massive shows, then Watkins Glen and then a couple at Roosevelt [Stadium] with The Band.
JESSE: By sheer size alone, it was a new era for the Grateful Dead.
DAVID LEMIEUX: You get five similarly-sized shows. Des Moines, I think they got about 20,000 people at the fairgrounds, which was a big open [venue], essentially a stadium without cavernous seating. Then you get a big stadium, UC Santa Barbara Stadium, and then you get Kezar Stadium, which is very different from the current Kezar Stadium. If you go to Kezar now, it’s a public running track, basically. But back then, I think the [Forty-] Niners played there before Candlestick [Park] for a little while — so, Kezar was a bonafide stadium. And then RFK [Stadium] with the Allman Brothers.
JESSE: Besides the size, there was another factor shaping these performances.
DAVID LEMIEUX: These are all daytime shows. I’ve always found that there’s a different sound. [At] an indoor show at Winterland, you’ve got the lights — it’s a dark room, with the lights having a big impact on the experience. A big 35-minute “Dark Star” works incredibly well in a situation like that. Whereas outdoors in the beautiful sunshine of Kezar Stadium, on a Saturday in the Haight at 3:30 in the afternoon, “Truckin’” / “[The] Other One” works a little bit better.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (5:54-6:17) - [dead.net]
Ice Nine
JESSE: That was “Truckin” from May 20th, 1973 in Santa Barbara, the second of the shows on Here Comes Sunshine, played in front of a giant crowd on a Sunday afternoon by one of the most popular bands in the United States. But it didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t because of a record company or a hit single, though having a few decent-selling records was part of it. But those had never been the point. One of the remarkable things about the Grateful Dead is that they had an employee whose job it was to consider what, exactly, the point was. Here’s Keith Godchaux and Bob Weir on WAER in Syracuse in 1973.
KEITH GODCHAUX [9/17/73]: One guy, one brilliant guy, working [for us] now, Alan Trist, is truly brilliant.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: Actually, probably the oldest of our intact business organizations is our publishing company, which we were obliged to create for our first record. It's really a good idea in many ways to have your own publishing company. We've gone through a couple of managerial change-arounds and turnovers of one sort or another, but Ice Nine has more or less stuck with us ever since way back then.
JESSE: As ever, we are so pleased to welcome back Alan Trist, longtime director of Ice Nine, the Grateful Dead’s in-house publishing company.
ALAN TRIST: In 1970, I came on board and sorted out Ice Nine, which at that point was a bit of a confusing setup. All of the songs are copyrighted to McGannahan Skjellyfetti, which was an invented for the group as a whole and joint creative [efforts], joint writing.
JESSE: Alan’s appeared on the Deadcast a few times, starting during the “Brokedown Palace” episode during our American Beauty season, as well as throughout our Europe ‘72 shows, to discuss his ongoing role in the Dead’s organization. A close friend of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter from their earliest days in Palo Alto, it was officially Alan’s job to tend to the band’s original songs and register them with the proper rights organizations as needed. But thinking about the Dead and Robert Hunter’s lyrics specifically as one core of the Grateful Dead, it follows that Alan became the center of the Dead’s ongoing think tank.
ALAN TRIST: It was after 1970 when the band came back to California with a new reputation that was much wider, and with new sales potential. That brought the idea of going more independent in all the different ways much closer to us. Things had been going on before, in the ‘60s, with regard to independence questing.
JESSE: Though the Dead signed to Warner Bros., many of their operations had remained independent, beyond Ice Nine. In 1968, along with the Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service, they’d tried running their own venue to compete with Bill Graham, the Carousel Ballroom. Graham took over a few months later. But a few years after that, the Dead had grown into a successful band.
ALAN TRIST: I wrote what you might call position papers for the band as needed.
JESSE: One term that shows up in Alan’s papers as a factor to be considered in decision-making that probably wasn’t showing up on a lot of company’s business plans was questing.
ALAN TRIST: The term questing — the idea of a group vision questing is kind of what we were going on. It's normally associated with an individual vision quest, but there's no reason why a group can't have a vision quest too, and we did. Questing might be in the context of the general feeling in the 1960s and the ‘70s that we could create a new world. Kesey used to say, in regard to what one was doing in life, “always stay in your own movie.” And so staying in our own movie, the Grateful Dead movie, meant working with records, with touring, with music. We weren’t going to be out there being activists in any other way, because it wasn’t our movie. And so everybody was doing that in their movies, and we were doing ours. By questing, I mean: how do we vision quest in our own movie? How to do something that’s creating a new world that the ‘60s were kind of trying to do? Smaller independence allows you to recreate the universe on a step-by-step basis, within your own movie.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (23:11-23:31) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
Kumquat Mae
JESSE: That was a little bit of the “Dark Star” from June 10th, 1973, the sound of several universes busy being born, and perhaps a few busy dying. By now, I needn’t remind anybody about the success of the Grateful Dead’s merchandise sales and how it’s one of the things that ultimately allowed the Dead to shape their own universe. The Dead had sold a few locally made shirts in the ‘60s, like the famed Pigpen design, but merch didn’t come until they really hit the road, and it started as a literally in-house operation and turned into an independent business of its own in an unexpected way. Please welcome back to the Deadcast, the author of the great memoir Dancing with the Dead, and original Dead family member Rosie McGee.
ROSIE MCGEE: I want to give credit to Susila Kreutzmann—or formerly Kreutzmann—because, back in ‘69 or ‘70, Susila had had a baby, Justin Kreutzmann. Justin was maybe six months old or a year old, at the most, and Billy was just starting to go off on the road all the time. Susila wanted to be on the road with Billy more often, and so she created a business from scratch. There was nothing going on around us until she came up with that as a way to be on the road with Billy. She would throw the boxes of shirts in the back of the equipment truck and fly off to the gig. And yeah, she did that, she worked really hard at it, and she had a little baby with her. They'd stick her in the back table in the lobby or something.
JESSE: Somewhat famously, the sound company Alembic came together as a spin-off of the Grateful Dead and their extended family of bands to do custom recording, build and modify custom instruments and amplifiers, and construct custom live sound solutions. We’ll talk plenty about Alembic in these episodes. But, just as serious sound wizards circulated around the Dead, so did serious artists of other kinds — like tie-dye master Courtenay Pollock. Check out our interview with him on the Side B episode of our Skull and Roses season. If you look at photos of the Dead onstage at any of the Here Comes Sunshine shows, you can see a few tie-dyed amp covers by Courtenay, and even a few lingering paisley amp covers that Rosie herself made.
ROSIE MCGEE: He did speaker covers for Alembic and for the band. And every single home in that time period had at least one Courtenay sheet mandala on the wall or on the ceiling, if not three. There was a lady named Sue Gottlieb who made fringe leather purses and vests. Once one was seen and appreciated, a whole bunch more were made. Novato Frank had Native American jewelry that everybody was wearing; Christine Bennett, cowboy shirts, other stagewear and so forth.
AUDIO: “Sugaree” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (2:50-3:20) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That was “Sugaree” from the Des Moines show on May 13th. In the early ‘70s, it became apparent that the Dead’s t-shirt business might be something a little bigger than Susila Kreutzmann wanted to deal with, but not before opening a local outlet.
ROSIE MCGEE: She started a store called Kumquat Mae, in San Anselmo, and it was three things: it was a retail outlet for the shirts, and she started it with Christine Bennett, but it was also a consignment shop for Courtenay and these other artists that I've mentioned, many others. Not just art and craft, but a secondhand store for stuff from people’s kitchens or whatever. It was kind of a potpourri of items. And it was also turned into a place for mostly the women, but not just the women. For people who didn't go on the road, it became a homing place. People would come in and spend the time, spend some time and hang out, nurse their babies and just whatever. It was a very cool place. Susila has not been given enough credit. It has never been mentioned that I know of in that context as having made a real contribution — so, I'm speaking for her.
JESSE: Kumquat Mae was open by the spring of 1972, when the Dead mentioned it in their newsletter, and it became a scene of its own.
ROSIE MCGEE: The store in San Anselmo was very much loosey-goosey. Susila was, and is, an astute businesswoman and she kept it together behind the scenes. It was very tight. But as far as appearance and the kind of store that it was, it was very homey and comfortable: lots of couches and different chairs. It was a big store, a big building. Then, somewhere along the line, she tightened it down and made it much smaller, and moved it to Mill Valley.
JESSE: The later iteration was called Rainbow Arbor and, according to a Rolling Stone article, featured a “more-than-life-size papier-mache statue of the Keep On Truckin' kid out front,” plus more paper-mache inside, “in the form of tree trunks extending from floor to ceiling where the foliage is continued in paint.” The store sold Dead t-shirts made by Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley’s Monster Co., as well shirts Susila designed for the New Riders of the Purple Sage and the Allman Bros. The t-shirts themselves turned into a real business.
ROSIE MCGEE: She eventually sold the business to Winterland Productions.
JESSE: And even that’s an undersell. Winterland Productions became one of rock’s first enormous t-shirt companies, and to hear the late founder Dell Furano tell it, he never would’ve gotten into the business if Susila hadn’t gotten tired of dealing with it.
ROSIE MCGEE: And Susile is also a talented artist. At the time, she was a very great seamstress. She used to make cowboy shirts for Billy, and so she sold some of those. She's gone on to make all kinds of things. I think right now, for the last 10 years or more, she's become a very, very skilled quilter, makes quilts.
Deadpatch
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (7:24-7:57) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was “Eyes of the World” from the June 10th show in Washington DC, on Here Comes Sunshine. While Kumquat Mae and Rainbow Arbor became places for the Dead’s family to congregate, the Dead charged Alan Trist with exploring a project provisionally titled Deadpatch.
ALAN TRIST: It was the idea of: Well, can we have a campus and have our office, our rehearsal hall, our recording studio, all of the facilities we needed to conduct business in one place — in one beautiful place in Marin County? Why not? So, that idea was floated. There was a piece of land which David Parker I think had bought at that point, on Lucas Valley Road. It was an investment, I think probably one of the only investments the Grateful Dead ever made, this tiny part of… this was one possibility, that we could build that facility there. But we said, Well, let’s go a little further. We looked at several other locations around Marin County, mostly in the central area which would be convenient for everybody to get to. I remember 20, 30 people going out — Oh, let’s meet at this place that’s for sale. We’d go out into the woods somewhere and there’d be some useful-looking land — we could do something here. So it was a fantasy that didn’t go anywhere because, like with many things like that, the Dead in the end would feel: let’s not tie ourselves down too much. Let’s rent a truck, not buy one. It was a long time before they actually bought their own truck. So, be light with your possessions.
JESSE: But in another way, the Dead had already established their own campus, setting up a few different bases of operation in walking distance or quick drive away from one another in San Rafael.
ALAN TRIST: It’s all connected in that little industrial downtown area of San Rafael, which is another reason why Deadpatch didn’t happen. We had it sort of, in a different way.
JESSE: It became a virtual company town. In 1970, the band had started renting a house at the corner of 5th and Lincoln, and a few years later took over two floors at 1330 Lincoln. The artists Mouse and Kelley had their Monster Company not far away, and the New Riders of the Purple Sage established their own office. On Front Street, nearby, in the industrial district down by the canals, the New Riders took over a corner of a warehouse and the Dead’s crew started storing their gear in another part. A half-decade later, the Dead themselves would start practicing and recording there full time, naming the place Club Front, a homebase along the house at 5th and Lincoln until 1995. There’s a pretty famous photo from the summer of 1973 that documents the population of the Dead’s company town.
ROSIE MGEE: Every so often there's this photo of the Grateful Dead family on a loading dock [that circulates]. It's an Annie Leibovitz photo with about 60 people in it — three rows of people, and there's kids and dogs and all kinds of people. It was taken in an industrial part of San Rafael, somewhere near Front Street in the canal area in San Rafael. I think they just made a deal with some neighbor. I don't remember exactly, but it was somewhere around there. It wasn't at Front Street because Front Street didn't have a loading dock like that.
It shows up regularly — a couple of times a year, it'll show up on social media, and inevitably people will comment something like: Well, it's no wonder Jerry felt forced to continue when he really didn't want to… there's all those mouths to feed. There's the implication that implies that this group of people—this visual aid of 60 people—are all freeloaders. And they’re wrong. They’re wrong. As I’ve described, that photo was taken for Rolling Stone. They did a cover story called “The Corporate Dead.” All these companies were created around a band that was just about to break out big time.
JESSE: In the 1971 interview that became the book Garcia: A Signpost to New Space, Jerry Garcia summarizes the basic financial principle that drove the Haight-Ashbury scene at-large and the Grateful Dead scene in specific. He called it “hip economics.” He explained, “The whole theory in hip economics is essentially that you can have a small amount of money and move it around very fast and it would work out, but when you have thousands and thousands of people, it’s just too unwieldy.” By 1973, the Dead’s scene encompassed its own hip economy.
ROSIE MCGEE: The first four places that we lived, we were all living together. And it wasn't communal, in the sense that we were a commune; it was communal in the sense that we had no money, and it was the only way that they could survive. So we were all gathered, this group of friends around the band, and it grew out from that. And then things just happened organically. Alembic showed up in 1968, initially an R&D for the electronics and the instruments for the band with Ron Wickersham, Susan Wickersham and Bear, coming up with solutions to electronic issues and sound issues and guitar issues, and it grew from there. So, everything was more organic. I don’t think there was this overview of changing society; I think it was more taking care of business in the best way we can, and we might as well do it with our friends because, at heart of it, we—the friends—were the only ones who really knew what they needed.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (7:58-8:37) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
ROSIE MCGEE: At the heart of it, it was our knowledge of who they were and what they needed to be comfortable — to insulate the band from all those petty realities, so that they could just go on the road and everything would be taken care of properly. And so the thought occurred to some people that if the band was going to need all these services anyway, as they got bigger and went into more traveling, why not have friends in those businesses instead of corporate strangers? You know, “straight people.”
AUDIO: “Hard to Handle” [Bear’s Choice] (0:00-0:24) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
So What?
JESSE: That was “Hard to Handle” from Bear’s Choice, the band’s final release with Warner Bros. It was a kiss-off to their former label as the band set their own independent course on the high seas of Hypnocracy. The Dead’s original contract with Warner Bros. expired at the end of 1969, but was renewed by the less-than-scrupulous manager Lenny Hart to extend through the end of 1972, resulting in a peculiar bit of economics that we explored in our Bear’s Choice episode. By the time Bear’s Choice hit the streets in the summer of 1973, the Dead had initiated a plan that would reshape their world, driven by the vision of Ron Rakow, a longtime band associate who’d dropped out of the finance world to manage the Carousel Ballroom and photograph the Dead. He’d been along for the Europe ‘72 tour and plenty of other trips.
ALAN TRIST: Rakow was around for all those early ‘70s years. He was thinking about that, and the band was thinking about: how do we become more independent of the music business? Or how do we use the resources we have? Ron started thinking about setting up a record company, and he was given that license by the band: “Well, start working on it, Ron.” I spent several… I would run around with him. We’d talk about it, I’d go over to his place, he’d come to mine. I was sort of set as his kind of Number Two to kind of figure this out. That went on for some months, as I remember, and eventually, Ron wrote the So What? papers about how to set up a franchise operation for the dissemination of the records.
JESSE: In the weeks after the band returned from their Europe ‘72 tour, Rakow began to organize a plan and begin the long process of conversation and deliberation within the Dead’s family. Rosie McGee.
ROSIE MCGEE: Ron Rakow had the idea, and he made a presentation to the band about doing their own record company. My involvement was he hired me as a temp to put together the handouts and the package, the slides for the presentation to the band of the record company. And I spent a week with Ron, turning this mountain of ideas into a coherent proposal. It was exactly the So What? papers.
ALAN TRIST: That was brought to the band in a meeting. It was a very interesting meeting — it was in Forest Knolls in Marin County, outdoors in the summer. Ron set up a big blackboard with huge sheets of paper, and he started going through the different parts of what he was proposing. We were all sitting around having a good time, and Ron laid out what he was proposing. I remember at one point there was talk about: Well, we could get some money from this bank, or raise something for that… ? And the band said, No, no, no! We’re not putting ourselves in that position. So Ron went up to the blackboard and just ripped that sheet off, and we went onto other things.
JESSE: Some accounts place Rakow’s flash on Independence Day, 1972, a perfectly cromulent date for an independent record company to celebrate its birthday. Lots of artists had their own imprints on major labels, but true independence, for a major artist to take full control of their operations was—and is—a bold, radical move in any era of music. And even within the idea of radical independence, Rakow’s proposal was fairly radical. The idea was, more or less, to set up Grateful Dead franchises in different cities.
ALAN TRIST: It would have been built around models of local Dead Head action in different cities. I think that was Ron's idea. You find a headshop, for instance, that was selling merchandise, and you would encourage them to expand their operation by taking our albums. That sort of idea. The one I remember that sticks in my mind was the idea of the ice cream van, which would go to all of the concerts, and your local Dead records franchise would sell them right there in the parking lot.
JESSE: Which is certainly a forward-thinking way to distribute one’s records, essentially imagining Grateful Dead-authorized Deadhead-run pop-up shops. I’m going to read a little bit from Ron Rakow’s So What? papers, because I find this an interesting proposal. We’ll punctuate it with bits of the “Playing in the Band” from Kezar, May 26th.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:00-0:21) - [dead.net]
JESSE: “There's this overworked, overtaxed house in San Rafael, where 50 or 60 people come and get charged up, function, share their flashes, share their getting high. There's no reason why that particular set can't be the lever to simplify in the creation of other sets just like that, or similar to it all over the world. The currency is records. That's a currency -- they're well packaged, tradeable, entertaining, and people like them -- they certainly buy a lot of them. …
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (2:49-3:19) - [dead.net]
JESSE: “Imagine then that there's a house in San Francisco, a funky little place; walk into it and see a girl behind a desk with a typewriter… Four cats work in offices in what used to be bedrooms and dining rooms and kitchens and so on. … At about 11 or 12 o'clock, a whole bunch of kids come in. Each one goes to the office of the area that he's concerned about. They spend some time and these kids leave with some Grateful Dead records, and they go out to high schools in Berkeley, or U.C. in Berkeley or the college in San Jose, or a shopping center in the Marina, or Mill Valley, and they sell these records -- exchange [sic] them for cash. Maybe they zip back to the city and get some more, maybe they don't, maybe [sic] they'll do that tomorrow. Perhaps a kid who has been doing that for two weeks and he only had $200 and wanted to go to Europe, and he just sold enough of the last batch of records to get his ticket and get on the plane and split. …
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (12:26-12:56) - [dead.net]
JESSE: “Imagine further, that same set duplicated in Rochester, N.Y., in Brooklyn, in Memphis, just outside Chicago, in Madison, Wisconsin -- anyplace where there's a lot of young folks, we can create little places, which when put together, form a distribution pipeline, into which products that come out of or through the house in San Rafael, go and get disseminated, all over, using every possible business method which will be adapted for this use.”
Ron Rakow did market research, suggesting, “Using 35 franchised spots around the country, we would create a distribution force which covers 90.3% of the national market, as opposed to, for example, the Warner Bros. distribution force, which covers 85.5% of the national market.”
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (17:21-17:36) - [dead.net]
BOB WEIR [5/26/73]: Thank you, thank you. We’re gonna take a short break. Everybody hang loose and we’ll be back in just a few minutes.
ALAN TRIST: And everybody said, Well, let's go take it to the next step. And that's what Ron proceeded to do. I remember after that going around with him to various pressing plants in California, and I think in New York too once, to see how that operation worked: what were the qualities of vinyl that were available, and how would that part of the operation work.
JESSE: There’s some record of a delegation from the Dead paying a visit to Stanyan Records in LA.
AUDIO: “The Marvelous Clouds” [Rod McKuen, Greatest Hits of Rod McKuen] (0:16-0:30) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was Rod McKuen, once the best selling poet in the United States and labelmate of the Dead at Warner, who launched his own independent label in 1970, Stanyan Records. Indie labels had been part of the record-making landscape since the 1940s, though major label consolidation in the ‘60s,‘70s,‘80s and ever since would make them a more urgent concern. The Dead were researching all the options they could dream up. Alan prepared a position paper titled the State of the Changes, synthesizing Ron Rakow’s proposal for Grateful Dead franchises with a few other suggestions that had come up.
ALAN TRIST: There were basically four ideas that were on the table, and that we had been discussing in the office for some months, even years, before. The first was a regular record company. I'm going to quote now: “Well, we know it works after its own fashion, and we're used to the hassle. It doesn't scare us. But it's a ripoff. It's a bummer, from a questing point of view. And in the case of our making a public choice, come December the 31st to align up again, that will be the end of the contract term. We'll probably have definite negative feedback with all consequences that follow from that.”
JESSE: There were plenty of record companies that would be happy to have the Grateful Dead on virtually whatever terms the band dictated. Clive Davis of Columbia had been courting the Dead for years, by some accounts giving a fat contract to the New Riders of the Purple Sage in order to lure the Dead themselves. It didn’t work, but Clive Davis wouldn’t stop trying. “This could take several forms,” Alan’s paper stated, “including record-by-record deals, the Grunt model, the Apple model, etc…”
ALAN TRIST: So that was our thoughts about the record company. Well, we know how they do it, and we're not sure that we want to go on that trip. I mentioned another term in there: the scare factor, which is going to come up in some of these other readings. I should mention that what I may mean there is that when you take on work beyond your own movie, as you defined for the moment, which was touring, and then you take up record production and ticket sales and all of these other things, it's taking on a lot of responsibility in areas that you're not used to. You have to think about who in the team can cover these things, we need to get more employees. So the scare factor is really: whoa, that’s a lot of work — do we want to go there? So we were constantly having to balance that energy that had to be created with the questing direction that was desired.
JESSE: One suggestion was a distribution deal through a discount record distributor.
ALAN TRIST: Another possibility for independent records was a discount house. And here, the man—that is to say, whoever is in charge of things—would be working for us, and would buffer us from a major part of the marketing hassle and the scare. “By itself, it is unlikely that this approach would cover the ground that we need to cover, it is neutral in regards to any questing component.” So that was another way of going, but it didn't have much pizzazz to it. It was just an option on the table.
JESSE: Then, there was Rakow’s idea to franchise the band.
ALAN TRIST: The third one was really the franchise / mail-order kind of idea, which is the So What? papers. And the big question in regards to that is: can we find the right franchises? And will they do the job on a continuing basis? If yes, then we'll do all right, financially. It's heavy on the scare factor, because this is setting up new stuff from the ground up. It’s untested. The degree of hassle involved probably depends on finding the right home office executive group — that's the same people in our own world who could handle this kind of business, and knowing how the rest of us are going to support their effort, which means it would be an extension of everybody's work.
JESSE: The last suggestion is also pretty radical. I’ll read the executive summary: “Annual subscription to the GD: The Bear proposal, also involving total independence.”
ALAN TRIST: The other fourth possibility that was on the table was the subscription model, but the big question here is whether the Grateful Dead record-buying core is a stable enough population for us to count on them to take out subscriptions. Even if it was the only way to get the records. “By making it hard for them, we might just be cutting our own throats. This technique does not seem strong enough in itself.” So there was too much unpredictability in that world for the subscription model to really stand up. Maybe later on it could have worked a lot better: certainly as the Dead Head network became a very stable population, and the newsletters and the list was very established, it might have worked a lot better. But at this time, it was a little crazy.
JESSE: Wow, so, Owsley suggested a plan that artists wouldn’t really experiment with seriously until the 21st century. I can see why it might not have worked in 1973, but the Dead were definitely dreaming as big as ever.
ALAN TRIST: We started having a real mailing list which Eileen Law took care of in the office. It built up very fast. The subscription model might have been associated with that, because here’s an initial list you could work with.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (7:16-7:46) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That was “Mississippi Half-Step” from May 13th in Iowa. The questing factor was a real element both onstage and in business that Alan and the Dead took seriously. The State of the Changes response to the So What papers also makes clear that the Dead considered their questing to be an integral part of what a more modern consultant might call their brand, which might just be another way of saying “integrity.” From Alan’s paper.
ALAN TRIST: “We know that success (that's sales, reputation, image, etc.) due to the quality of the music is strongly reinforced by the ‘how’ of everything associated with the music's dissemination. If the ‘how’ is ‘right,’ the medium is the message. Therefore, our options should be tested against their ‘on-lineness’” with the direction of independence. That was the basic idea. I used the term “online” before there was an online of course. I don’t know what we would call it. What I mean by that is, what the fans wanted was to see in the Grateful Dead was a whole integrated system that not only produced great music that was their lifeblood, but also produced it righteously, to use an old word. And that’s why moving away from the established music business—record companies, agencies, management, touring and so forth—was constantly pushing us, because they were seen as unrighteous. And indeed, they had been very much so, in the ‘50s and ‘60s. They were ripping off all kinds of artists and had a very bad reputation. So to be “on line” with the record companies, that’s not good. But to be “on line” by creating our own way forward, that was the questing we were up for doing.
JESSE: In preparing the So What? papers, Ron Rakow also commissioned a slightly nonscientific survey to be undertaken by a New York City Dead freak who interviewed other potential Dead freaks on the street in June 1972. He came back with 1,100 interviews, and I wish I could see the raw data. The So What? papers summarize a bit, saying the “main response was about money,” with “Very much cynicism about music industry and groups themselves. Large contrast with 3 years ago when groups were looked up to for leadership. Dead sometimes excepted from cynicism, sometimes not.”
ALAN TRIST: Looking at those survey results from, say, a sociological point of view, I don't know quite whether they stand up to any scrutiny. But some of the things that Ron pulled out of that survey, which are in the So What? papers, are kind of interesting in that they express that questing aspect that we were picking up from the Dead Heads, wanting to connect with that. Because some of the people were questioning whether the values of the counterculture then were really being expressed by the Grateful Dead. I was curious to see that, because there was also a change of attitude about the cost of music, to a fan. It certainly was happening in the early ‘70s.
I remember once sitting backstage at a small club with the band—forget the name, [possibly] The Matrix in San Francisco. Before the show, Jerry was walking around, and he came over to me and offered me a hit on a joint. And there was a fan sitting next door who engaged Jerry in conversation. He said, “Jerry, why are… these gigs should be free. They should be free. They were free in the park — they should be free.” And Jerry said the obvious thing of course: “Well, it costs us a lot of money to put on a show. What’s free?” But nevertheless, the question and the attitude that this person had, it was carrying forward from the ‘60s: the idea that everything should be free. It was one of the crazy, outlandish extremes of ‘60s thinking. I think some of Ron’s survey picked up some of that residual thing, which made it even more important for the band, in setting up its record company and its independent ideas, to be very solid in the organization of the activity of the business itself — legally, productive, and from an administrative point of view. And also show to the Dead Heads that we were also moving in the direction that those ‘60s values suggested.
JESSE: So — how to walk that line? To use more modern management terms (sorry): how could they keep their freak colors aloft, but scale it up to stadium size? Or bigger?
ALAN TRIST: “Over the course of the next year, our key decisions will concern the performance of the franchise operation and the gaining of knowledge about the innovative marketing strategy that involves. Secondly, organizational analogues of ‘head-consciousness’”—that's to say the counterculture values we’ve been talking about—”are decentralization (within unity/idea), autonomy, open system, flexible structure, adaptation, and change. If a franchises are to operate with these characteristics, and we with them, it will be at the edge of our control.
JESSE: They were prophetic words, gently and sagely helping the Dead set their course into the new weird waters. The franchise operation wouldn’t manifest exactly as Rakow proposed, at least not on an official level, but it was a place to start.
AUDIO: “The Promised Land” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (0:10-0:37) - [dead.net]
Out of Town Tours
JESSE: That was “The Promised Land” from Santa Barbara, May 20th. You can see great shots of that show by Rosie McGee in her books Dancing with the Dead and her incredible recent anthology of Dead photos.
ROSIE MCGEE: Right after the Europe ‘72 tour, or a few months after, there was a lot of talk and activity. I think Sam Cutler started Out of Town Tours first. But there were discussions of, Okay, the band’s heading into the big time, as far as being on the road a lot and needing all of these services, from booking to travel to everything else.
JESSE: Sam Cutler became the Dead’s tour manager in 1970 and took over booking duties by 1971. Here’s band manager Jon McIntire describing Sam’s evolution on WAER in 1973.
JON MCINTIRE [9/17/73]: Sam Cutler, Out of Town Tours, is our booking agent. He was the road manager, and then he was road manager and booking agent. His booking agency handles more than just the Grateful Dead, and that was consuming more and more of his time. So, right now, Rock Scully’s being the road manager, Sam’s being the booking agent. We switch around a lot.
JESSE: We’ll have Sam back here on the Deadcast soon enough to talk about Out of Town Tours.
ROSIE MCGEE: Sam founded Out of Town Tours after the Europe ‘72 tour, which was quite complex. He did all the arrangements and he tour-managed it. It was an awesome tour de force of management and all of that. He came out of that and my guess is he thought, “Okay, well, I can do all this stuff. Why don’t I make it a business so that I can control every aspect of it, and I don’t have to—as much as possible—depend on other people who may or may not understand what our needs really are?” He was perfect for that. He was, is, smart; he’s financially astute, which the band wasn’t. They needed a boost on that. And to be a tour manager for a major rock band, you have to be brutally streetwise, and Sam’s got that in spades. He is brutally streetwise. You don’t want to get on the bad end of an argument with him, especially when he’s tour managing a band. He’s quick on his feet. So anyway, he started Out of Town Tours.
JESSE: Out of Town Tours announced its formation in the fall of 1972 as the Dead were pondering their new record company. The first obvious act for Sam Cutler to sign up, inasmuch as he was pretty much booking them anyway, was the New Riders of the Purple Sage, who’d recently released their third album, Gypsy Cowboy.
AUDIO: “Whiskey” [New Riders of the Purple Sage, Gypsy Cowboy] (0:52-1:12) - [Spotify]
JESSE: They signed up the New Riders’ Columbia labelmates — the funky new incarnation of Bay Area stalwarts the Sons of Champlin, who put out Welcome to the Dance.
AUDIO: “Lightnin’” [Sons of Champlin, Welcome to the Dance] (0:49-1:09) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Another musician they signed up was none other than Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, the one-time Woody Guthrie protege and authentic Brooklyn cowboy.
AUDIO: “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down” [Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Bull Durham Sacks & Railroad Tracks] (0:41-1:01) - [Spotify]
JESSE: And a little later on, they’d sign the great Texas musician Doug Sahm, once of the Sir Douglas Quintet. The Dead had recently jammed with him over Thanksgiving ‘72 at the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin. Sometime soon thereafter, Jerry Garcia and David Grisman accompanied Sahm on a session that remained unreleased until Rhino Handmade’s Genuine Texas Groover set in 2003.
AUDIO: “From A Jack To A King” [Doug Sahm, Genuine Texas Groover] (0:00-0:21) - [Spotify]
JESSE: If you look at the Dead’s bookings, liner notes, and ephemera from the era, the artists on the Out of Town tour roster intersected often. Sam had an able office staff ready to help keep the new Out of Town world a reality. One member was Sally Mann Romano, then married to Spencer Dryden, former badass drummer for the Jefferson Airplane and, in 1972, employed as badass drummer for the New Riders of the Purple Sage. Please welcome back, Sally Mann Romano.
SALLY MANN ROMANO: I worked with Cutler. As we like to say, he gets in trouble and he calls me his secretary. I was his executive assistant. I was Cutler's girl — I was his assistant.
JESSE: Sally wrote a firecracker of a memoir with one of the greatest titles ever — The Band’s with Me. It’s funny cuz it’s true. An infamous rock character of deliciously ill repute herself, Sally had appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone’s Groupies issue and book. I have to say, the story of how she got the job at Out of Town Tours makes me cringe a little, and when somebody adapts Sally’s book into a prestige streaming dramedy with a bitchin’ soundtrack and blurs the details slightly, Sam Cutler’s job offer will surely be a comically awkward centerpiece, like Mad Men set in early ‘70s Marin County.
SALLY MANN ROMANO: He just showed up at my house one morning at an ungodly hour for rock and roll, like at nine o'clock in the morning or something when Spencer was on the road. It was obvious he was coming over to come on to me. I was like: What are you doing here? And we weren't really friends or anything — I mean, I knew him. But he just showed up, and I made him breakfast. And somehow out of that drop-in visit, I got the job working for him. He asked me if I took shorthand, so I lied and said I did. He just last year found out that I never did take shorthand. I could speed-write, I could remember what he said. But he dictated all of these letters, all that time thinking that I was just firing off the shorthand. It was hilarious. He was kind of fun to work for, but he’s a serious dude. When he wants you to do something, you want to get it done.
JESSE: Rock and roll, or something. But I’m glad Sally did lie, because the Grateful Dead archives contain one of her notebooks from this period, written in hurried but quite legible English most of the time, making it much easier to look over these days. We’ll get to some of that later. Sally had been around the San Francisco ballroom scene since before there was a ballroom scene and had witnessed Bill Graham and the full spectrum of backstage characters. Sam Cutler was certainly one of those.
SALLY MANN ROMANO: I know he gets mixed reviews. He got mixed reviews from me. But, now, 50 years later, I love him like a brother, and I’m really, really happy to have worked for him. Cutler was like… at the time—I think this is true of his whole life—he’s a larger than life character, much like Bill. Not quite as physically imposing as Bill. but he just… these are people that when they walk in the room, people turn around to look. He’s funny and profane, and those are my two favorite qualities. He was a lot of fun.
JESSE: It was a good gig, and thorough.
SALLY MANN ROMANO: The funniest thing about it is I know more now about forklift capacity than probably any woman on earth, just because the Dead’s… this is back when they had the billion-pound sound system, so the contracts specified the forklifts, all of that, the capacity. You couldn’t just show up with some off-brand Japanese forklift. It was intense.
JESSE: The crew of people Sam employed had all been around the Bay Area music scene since the early days.
SALLY MANN ROMANO: Like Rita Gentry, who went to Santa Ana — she did the contracts. I don’t mean she negotiated; she kind of oversaw them. Gail Hellund, who was Rick Turner’s wife, did the books and kept the money straight, thank god. And Chesley was there hanging out all the time.
JESSE: Chesley Milliken had seen the Dead in 1966 and dropped out, eventually working in the record industry, including a spot as the house hippie at CBS Records. He was technically Vice President at Out of Town, handling Doug Sahm and others.
SALLY MANN ROMANO: Chesley was like something out of a freakin’ Irish novel. He was drunk all the time. You managed to have a really good time, doing really hard, good work. I liked that. The fan club was there, and Eileen Law. You just got to hang with such interesting, talented people all the time. And that was a good thing. I just lucked out. I was with the Dead during the golden age of not only the band, but the crew. Later on—I learned this just recently—they got such a bad reputation for being a little manhandle-y and sort of reading their own press or something.
JESSE: Sally had been around the Dead scene for years, but as a member of the Jefferson Airplane family, which brought her a slight outsider’s perspective.
SALLY MANN ROMANO: One of the main differences is, of course, is the Airplane had records that were getting hits on FM radio, and the Dead were not there yet. They had “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love.” That makes a huge difference in your outreach nationally. When they would play Golden Gate Park and stuff, they were huge. But I think it was more, at that time, a little bit more localized.
JESSE: We used this bit back in Season 3, but it bears repeating.
SALLY MANN ROMANO: One of the coolest differences between the Dead and the Airplane is there was much more of that communal family vibe happening with the Dead. People misunderstand about bands: they think everybody sort of hangs out together when you're not on the road. Nothing could be farther from the truth. You've been on the road with these jackasses for six, eight weeks — they’re the last [people] you want to see when you come back. People tend to hang out with their wives or their other friends that aren’t in the band. But the Dead, it’s such an extended bunch of people. And Bill [Graham] putting together the softball games and everything, that was just wonderful. It really was such a wholesome kind of family thing. Frankie Weir, she’s just the most freakin’ ace softball player. She had softball games going out of the Mill Valley Tavern. That was a lot of fun — very different from the Airplane.
JESSE: We’ll throw in one more detail from Gail Hellund, who also worked at Out of Town Tours in the ‘70s, and was part of the Dead/Airplane softball games. We’ll have a lot more from Gail down the line.
GAIL HELLUND: I was at some of the softball games. All I remember is the Grateful Dead girls were really good at softball, too. Everybody would go, “Wow! Don’t let the girls play!” I mean, we’re talking Mountain Girl and Sherry Nelson, people like that. They could hit that ball! They were good.
JESSE: You know, company life in a company town.
SALLY MANN ROMANO: We were all in the same little office building and San Rafael. There were a number of assorted jobs and hangers-on and everything, so the office was a lot of people. The accountants and the fan club were there, and Frankie’s travel agency was on the first floor, Fly By Night.
Fly By Night Travel
JESSE: Frankie was Frankie Weir.
AUDIO: “Sugar Magnolia” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (0:52-1:08) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That was “Sugar Magnolia” from the Santa Barbara show on the new box set, the song written with Frankie Weir as muse. Rosie McGee.
ROSIE MCGEE: Frankie, who was Bobby Weir’s girlfriend at the time, decided — why don't we start our own travel agency? And the main impetus at the beginning was that the wives and girlfriends wanted to be on the road with their guys more often, but they couldn't afford it because of tickets. So if you have a travel agency, you can sell tickets — well, you can pocket the commissions, is what I’m saying. If you’re buying retail from a travel agency, you’re going to pay full price. But if you are the travel agency, you can pay without the commission, and that commission goes into the coffers to run the business. It was really smart.
JESSE: Frankie Weir was quite a character, someone I wish we could’ve spoken with. She was a former Hullabaloo dancer, worked for the Beatles’ Apple Records, and her energy seemed to be a source of inspiration for not only her partner but a number of women in the Dead’s scene. In lots of photos from the era, you can see her boogey-ing just to the side of the stage — and not infrequently, on the stage, right behind the band. Rosie was ready for Fly By Night.
ROSIE MCGEE: I had been working at Alembic for a couple of years already. I was a purchasing agent and office manager. I did the studio time booking for the recording studio that they had, and I was pretty happy there.
JESSE: Rosie had worked in the music scene since before she began dating Phil Lesh in 1966, and—like a number of people in the Dead’s inner circle—worked ably and flexibly at a really wide variety of tasks, including but not limited to tie-dying amp cabinets, photography, working in the band’s office, and handling French interpretation on international trips.
ROSIE MCGEE: In ‘70, ‘71 and ‘72, I did some international traveling, which I had always wanted to do. And it really whetted my appetite: I have total wanderlust, and I love to travel, or I used to in those days. In those days, travel agents—unlike today—had incredible benefits from the airlines. If you had worked as a travel agent for a solid year, you could buy a ticket for the cost of the tax on the ticket: any ticket, any time. And for me, I had this wild wish—like a lot of people in the early ‘70s—to do an around-the-world trip: to go to Nepal, maybe go to India, wherever. I signed up for Fly By Night with the understanding that after one year, my one-year anniversary, I'd be out of there. And so I did: I worked there for a year.
JESSE: They might have been a bunch of dope-smoking hippies who liked to boogie, but it also required some serious interfacing with the adult boundaries of consensus reality for a company called Fly By Night Travel to get off the ground. Great name, by the way, though they had to keep it a little DL.
ROSIE MCGEE: I'm sure it's still true now. But even back then, unlike Out of Town Tours, which was a booking agency, a travel agency is strictly regulated by the feds, the Department of Transportation. So it took extra time, and we had to jump through a whole bunch of regulatory hoops. Here's some of the requirements that we had to have: we couldn't be closed-access; we couldn't be operating in a backroom where nobody could see us. We had to be publicly visible, publicly advertised and accept random walk-in and call-in business, just like any travel agency. We had to have posters on the windows, we had to be in the Yellow Pages. We had to do all that. We had to prove financial viability with financial statements before we could even get our license. And we had to have our name approved, so we had to call it FBN Travel, because Fly By Night wouldn't fly. Privately, we were Fly By Night Travel, and our tagline was “Here today, gone tomorrow.”
JESSE: I know the day of travel agencies has pretty much gone, but it did make me want to book some travel through a bunch of Dead freaks in San Rafael.
ROSIE MCGEE: We had to have a lead travel agent with at least three years of documented experience. So we put in an ad in the local paper—this was in San Rafael, in Novato—and we found a local suburban housewife who had recently retired, or so she thought, from the travel agency business. Her name was Wilma. She was a cheerful, wonderful woman in her 40s. She’d barely even heard of the Grateful Dead, but somehow we talked her into—and she was willing, bless her heart—to take up the challenge of being the straight-laced legal front for our escapade. She turned out to be the perfect hire. She trained me, so I could be the lead agent on the rock band tours, and then she handled any call-in or walk-in random strangers. She was fantastic. She had a great sense of humor, and she thought nothing of having three Hells Angels sitting in front of her desk with their feet up. Anyway, bless Wilma — I never could have done it without her.
JESSE: There are many picturesque sights to see if you feel like checking out Grateful Dead historical spots, from the gorgeous Victorian at 710 Ashbury to the ruins of Olompali. There’s even some charm in seeing in the Front Street warehouse to get some of the context for Gilbert Shelton’s sleazy depiction of the warehouse district on the cover of Shakedown Street. But other than the fact that it hasn’t been torn down, 1330 Lincoln Avenue in San Rafael is and was almost completely unremarkable. At least on the outside.
ROSIE MCGEE: 1330 Lincoln is a kind of early ‘60s, faceless little office building. It could be dentist offices or something like that. So Sam and his cohorts got the upstairs suite for their offices, and we moved into a little corner, a smaller corner office downstairs. And as I said earlier, we had to have posters in the window; we had to have our name on the door; we had to have public [visibility] from the street. And so, occasionally, somebody would walk in. But inside, there were no rules of what it had to look like. So you can imagine, Courtenay tie-dyes… it wasn’t too outrageous. I mean, we had work to do. Over time, we handled tours for the Dead, the New Riders, Jesse Colin Young, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, David Bromberg. For a time, we had Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs, and others.
JESSE: In 1973, as the Dead’s adjacent businesses launched or kicked into higher gear, there was no shortage of clients.
ROSIE MCGEE: We had suspected that this would be a viable business because there was this overflow: all of the spouses, the girlfriends, the friends, anybody not just that wanted to go on tour, but that wanted to take a vacation to Hawaii or whatever. Everybody glommed into Fly By Night travel, and it became a viable business. Meanwhile, Frankie, who was the boss—she was in her back office, hanging out with the Hells Angels that were visiting—she was our, well, civilized, corporate owner and public face when necessary. But honestly, I don't think she ever did a lick of work. You didn’t have to. She put it all together, and we did the work. And it worked.
AUDIO: “Sugar Magnolia” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (6:36-7:00) - [dead.net]
Alembic
JESSE: As the Dead prepared to move into stadiums for the first time with a few tours in arenas under their collective belt, they knew that the move to arenas and stadiums wasn’t the friendliest one. Here’s Bob Weir speaking on WAER in 1973.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: Most of those large places are pretty grim. What we do is we send out an advance man, who looks over the place and ascertains whether or not it’s going to be suitable.
JESSE: That was another job for Fly By Night.
ROSIE MCGEE: There was always somebody advancing the tours. Often, it was Bob Matthews who did that role for a long time. He would go out by himself or with one other person to look at the halls and check things out from a band point of view. It's just a standard thing, advancing the gigs.
JESSE: Here’s Keith Godchaux on WAER. For him, it was a vibe thing.
KEITH GODCHAUX [9/17/73]: As far as I'm concerned, aside from the obvious problems with making a big hall sound good, the major thing that bothers me about playing these halls is people have a much harder time enjoying themselves in that cattle… you get the cattle flash from it.
INTERVIEWER [9/17/73]: Everybody stands up in a crush up front.
KEITH GODCHAUX [9/17/73]: Right. And I think, despite the fact that we’re in the business of making music that sounds good, to me, it’s more important that the people who come to see it enjoy it.
JESSE: And Jerry Garcia speaking with Father Miles Riley in 1976.
JERRY GARCIA [1976]: What we like to do is improve the quality of the experience, both on the level of what we're doing amongst ourselves and how we interact with the audience, what the audience experiences when we're there. In that sense, we're the Don Quixotes of rock and roll: we're doing something nobody else cares to do, which is trying to figure out how to make the experience—which we value, and which our audience values—something that's more in line with what it feels like, which is a positive sort of outpouring of good energy.
JESSE: Alan Trist.
ALAN TRIST: Our engineers knew that there was going to be a technological change, but it wasn't right there, now, when we needed it.
JESSE: David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Dennis Leonard, who to this day is the most talented genius sound engineer/designer that I've ever known — he said, even at that time, that it was the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd who were doing the most amazing stuff with sound. I remember Wiz telling me—Dennis Leonard—in 1973, ‘74, early ‘70s, the only two bands that really cared about the sound were the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd. And those were the ones where they really wanted everybody to have a good experience, as opposed to just being happy to be in the same room as their heroes.
JESSE: The Dead did their homework. There are tales of Jerry Garcia and Owsley Stanley stopping in to see Roberta Flack on an off-night in October 1972 to check out the system put together by their old friend Dinky Dawson, formerly engineer with Fleetwood Mac. The late Dead taper Harvey Lubar told me that he and fellow taper Jerry Moore checked out Pink Floyd’s quadraphonic midnight Dark Side of the Moon show at Radio City in March 1973 and saw Garcia, Bear, and Lesh in an adjacent row. The Dead delegation left at intermission, Harvey said.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Here they are, eight years into this thing they call the Grateful Dead. Maybe there's a career to be had out of this. They're playing stadiums, they're playing bigger places, and the sound system is getting to be really, really good. As the sound system developed better as we led towards ‘74 with the Wall of Sound, I feel that there's the band listening to each other even more than they ever did. Again, it's not just about power, and ‘let's just blow this roof off this place.’ It's about listening to each other. They really started developing in ‘72, where Phil and Billy, for instance, would stay out and do a little duet often during “Dark Star” and during “The Other One.” You can hear the listening, these two guys. And then Jerry and Bob might join them, and Keith comes in…
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (10:03-10:33) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was from the June 10th “Dark Star” at RFK Stadium.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I find that there's a nimbleness, where every note really, really matters — whether it's on a little first-set rocker like “Deal” or “Loser,” a little ballad like that, or it’s the big “Other One”s and the “Dark Star”s and stuff.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (12:12-12:38) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The band debuted the newest iteration of their sound system at Stanford University’s Maples Pavilion on February 9th, 1973, the first show of the year, which also saw the debut of many of the songs that would become Wake of the Flood, and From the Mars Hotel after that, and a gig so legendary that we can’t get totally lost in it.
One controversial aspect of the system was putting the entirety of it behind the band — eliminating the need for vocal monitors, but requiring the invention of new microphones to deal with it. They looked cool, but not everybody was down. Donna Jean.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: We had these things called phase canceling microphones. Because the sound was so huge, things would start feeding back in the monitors, and that's these phase canceling microphones. But they sounded like crap — I hated it. I just hated the sound of those mics. They just squeezed all of the life out of the vocal, all of the tonality of the vocal. That's my opinion. But it was hard. That was a hard thing.
JESSE: And it’s true, if you compare the vocals from the fall of 1972, the last tour with the original tie-dyed monitors, to the first shows of 1973, the first with the new design, there are some pretty stark differences. Some got worked out. Some didn’t.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: You had to eat that microphone. And then that was part of the problem, because you would get kind of a muffled sound because you had to be… hear what I’m saying? It was a muffled sound because your mouth was right there on the microphone. It was just not natural, it didn't sound natural.
JESSE: But it was part of the Dead’s process, which Donna sums up as well as anybody I’ve heard.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: Everything Grateful Dead kept evolving, and you just had to roll with everything. The Grateful Dead was trying to keep up with the Grateful Dead.
JESSE: The company in charge of the new sound system was Alembic. Rosie McGee had worked for Alembic for a few years, most recently at their 60 Brady Street location, formerly known as Pacific High, where the Dead had made Workingman’s Dead.
ROSIE MCGEE: Alembic is a really good example of the organic ebb and flow of these businesses. As things changed with the band, and things changed with the businesses, they morphed as they needed to. Alembic is still thriving, believe it or not, a thriving business all these years later. But their concentration is on custom guitars and basses and a few electronic preamps and other products that they developed.
JESSE: Like Ice Nine, Alembic predated the current wave of expansion, so much so that they had already started to spin off companies themselves.
ROSIE MCGEE: There was a time when Alembic did many things—too many things—and it was at a time when I worked for them. They were doing live recording; they were doing studio recording; they were doing guitars; they were building cabinets, and running PA. They were doing it all in this tiny place on Judas Street. And I don't know exactly when Hard Truckers started, but one of the first elements of Alembic to fall away… I think it was when they moved to Brady Street that the Hard Truckers took over the building of cabinets. It was the first aspect of the business that really was easy to let go — like, Okay, you go over there and make cabinets. It was messy. The original Alembic on Judas Street, you can consider that they’re making cabinets, which means a lot of sawdust and all that kind of stuff, in the same building where they’re doing guitar repairs and other delicate stuff that really can’t take sawdust.
JESSE: I’d love to see a visualization of the Dead’s business network.
ROSIE MCGEE: Part of the counterculture thing is entrepreneurship of likeminded people who patronize each others’ businesses. It could be a vegetarian restaurant or a plant nursery that doesn't use pesticides, whatever. We were in the Grateful Dead bubble. It got bigger and bigger, but we were still so focused on the Grateful Dead and their needs and their trajectory as a band and all of that that we barely paid attention to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, there's a whole bunch of other bands, and they probably all had their own concentric rings of auxiliary businesses.
JESSE: While plenty of bands spawned businesses, and a few had their own imprints at larger record labels, no band in 1973 was pursuing independence at the scale of the Grateful Dead. Here’s Bobby Weir cominatcha from Des Moines.
AUDIO: “Promised Land” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (2:35-3:04) - [dead.net]
Grateful Dead Records
JESSE: Inside the music industry, word had leaked that the Dead had planned to start their own company but hadn’t made any moves just yet. Please welcome back to the Deadcast, your friend and ours, Steve Brown.
STEVE BROWN: A friend that worked for Warner Bros. Records had told me, as a head buyer for a big chain of record stores that I was involved with, that they were interested in maybe having their own record company. Coming at the end of their Warner Bros. one, they decided to consider that. And of course, Ron Rakow had put it to them and made it interesting to them, to read and then decide: hmm, maybe. When I heard about that, I said, “Oh, maybe I should put together [a job application] as a Grateful Dead Head way back when, as some kind of proto Dead Head…”
JESSE: Steve Brown was certainly a proto Dead Head. We spoke with him a bit during our St. Louis ‘73 episode, and we’re so excited to have him back. Steve was so proto that he saw Jerry and Sara at the Top of the Tangent in Palo Alto, the Warlocks at the In Room in Belmont, and made probably the earliest Dead audience tape on March 3rd, 1968 at the free show on Haight Street, not to mention snapping the killer photo of Garcia walking to work that day. Steve had some Dead cred, had played bass in a local band, but also had serious real world music business experience, around radio and records.
STEVE BROWN: I started at 15 in radio at KSFO in San Francisco working for Don Sherwood, the biggest disc jockey in San Francisco for years. The fact that they had me programming music at 16 years old, for six different shows on the biggest station in San Francisco, with the Giants and the 49ers, all this music… and the highest rating of anyone in San Francisco. So here I am, a kid, learning this stuff way back when.
JESSE: Steve’s life from the early ‘60s through the late ‘70s illustrates what it was like to be a head in the record business. And by 1972 he was ready to go work for his favorite band.
STEVE BROWN: Since I've been in the music business for this long now, why don't I see if they might be interested in using me — to be able to be somebody that could help them with their new record company of their own? It seemed pretty daring at the time, just knowing what they were up to in their real life. And knowing that, eh, maybe you could pull off a business like that. So when I did find that out, I got a hold of them at their office and said, “I'd like to come in and talk to somebody there about your record company idea.” They gave me a date to come in; I think it was December, the end of 1972. That's when I thought, Yeah, a nice Christmas gift here. They said, “Well, come on in. It will actually be the very first days of January.” I had my own thing written out and presented it to them. I took it in, real proud — oh yeah, this’ll work, they’ll go for this.
JESSE: Steve had caught wind of the So What? papers and prepared his own response.
STEVE BROWN: It's the Why Me? papers. It was pretty much a business thing that didn’t necessarily have all my personal life in there, but more of the business point. I thought that's what Rakow would go by. But Jerry, I didn’t know.
JESSE: Where Ron Rakow dreamed big, and Alan Trist could thoughtfully synthesize the different far-out ideas and find ways forward, Steve Brown had on-the-ground experience that he was able to bring to the table. And by the table, I mean the actual big table that Sam Cutler had brought back from Europe.
STEVE BROWN: It was a room that they had for their meetings and stuff, a big long table. It was just Rakow and Jerry in there, and me. So we got into a little bit of what they were thinking they wanted to do, and what I had done as far as being in the record industry and knowing about how this stuff gets done. It was something that, when we got to a certain point, Rakow had to go do something else. And it left me with Jerry in the room: this big table, just me and Jerry. It just shifted into growing up and being in San Francisco as youth, what kind of stories we had about each other, having been in San Francisco back in the day. What happened from that point on was nothing to do with business — it was just me and him like that. So it was for half an hour — I didn’t time it, but it was at least that amount of time, or more. Then Rakow came back in. He opened the door, we both got up and walked out. Jerry turned to Rakow and said, “He’s hired.”
JESSE: It sounds like a dream job interview.
STEVE BROWN: It wasn't about what I knew in the business. He didn't care as much about the business as he just did, I think, of how I would be as a person to be with it. We laughed a lot during our talks — I think right away I kind of hit the button.
RICH: Yeah — you guys gelled.
STEVE BROWN: We had a nice feeling together, yeah. And we had a lot of the same things about music together also, which was another part of it. That was important, I'm sure to him, too, how much I knew. He knew that I'd been in rock 'n' roll, that [my band] actually went out and played at concerts a bunch, for about three years or so until I had to go active duty in the Navy. Then I had to run a recording studio for the Navy, which was a whole ‘nother deal.
JESSE: That’s a story we get into a bit in our Listen to the River: October 1973 episode. Finally, on April 19th, 1973, the Grateful Dead officially voted to form their own record company — Grateful Dead Records. It was the 30th anniversary of Bicycle Day, Albert Hofmann’s 1st intentional LSD trip, though that wasn’t yet a recognized holiday. Sometime around then, Steve Brown began commuting from his place in Pacifica to the expanding company town of San Rafael.
STEVE BROWN: We wound up taking over the little house that they used to have as their thing down at Fifth and Lincoln. They just shifted it over to the record company — I don't know if that was Rakow’s doing or what. You pull into the back of the building of the house and park. If Jerry's already there, you’ve got to park around his car. He had that sports car that was from… a European one, he had two of them at different times in different colors. One was gold, and another one I think was blue. So I'd come in the back door, which comes into the kitchen area…
JESSE: The last of the Dead’s tenants seem to have moved out by early 1973, with the electricity getting transferred back to the band’s name.
STEVE BROWN: Just us, night and day. But that's kind of like living there. We had the nice kitchen in there, where the French roast coffee was being made. And Jerry would have his guitar sitting out in the kitchen, playing. If he had some friends come in with another guitar to play with them, I’d go — “Where’s my recorder!”
JESSE: The company wouldn’t get formalized into a business called Grateful Dead Records until later in 1973. The band’s checkbooks show that it was still internally referred to as So What through the spring of the year, at least. Ultimately, the members of the Dead would share ownership of Grateful Dead Records, with Rakow and Garcia co-owning the Round Records spinoff. But Garcia was unquestionably the band member most involved in the project, and the most present at the office.
STEVE BROWN: So I go into the front office, which is the nice big living room office there—it was nice to have that one—and there he is sitting at my desk. He's drawing on my pad, my desk pad. I go, Okay… I sit on over back from there; we talk for a bit, I let him keep doing stuff, which was nice. And you can see it here, hanging on my own wall. wall.
JESSE: Every inch of the cardboard desk blotter is filled with interlocking doodles and illustrations, many by Garcia and many by Robert Hunter, making it a rare visual collaboration between the songwriters. Steve is also an incredible archivist whose collections have been reproduced in many places, with significant chunks living in the Dead’s archive at UC Santa Cruz. Not for the last time, we’d like to thank Steve for his foresight.
STEVE BROWN: So I was feeling very comfortable in the morning there, at the place to work with Jerry being there, and anybody else who was there at the time — mainly the gals that worked there, going upstairs and seeing Rakow. Then Jerry would go upstairs. He would sit in the chair across from Rakow’s desk, and the two of them would get into the kind of, Oh, I like this bad guy Rakow… that was Jerry’s feeling, like I’m with the bad guy.
JESSE: Ron Rakow came to the Dead with a checkered reputation of his own, but he was putting his energies fully into the Grateful Dead.
STEVE BROWN: Rakow, to the whole rest of the crew and to the rest of the people that worked for the Grateful Dead, it was always like — Eh, Rakow… he’s not to be necessarily trusted… we’ve had some problems in the past, with Mickey’s dad and people like that…
JESSE: If Steve filled the role as practical problem solver at Grateful Dead Records, Ron Rakow served the equally real role as commander of the dark arts that the record business often requires.
STEVE BROWN: When I walked in the room, I think they got a little quiet sometimes. But then again, I'd sit there long enough and they had to let loose what they're up to. So it was very comfortable to be there, in a way — having been in the Navy and having been around people that had stuff going on in their world, and having a real openness to allowing me to be part of that. And it grew over time, where I started knowing more than I probably wanted to know. But on the other hand, it also made me walk the path the way that I wouldn't step in any shit either. It was really good to kind of be in touch with what’s going on.
JESSE: No matter how you ingest it, it was a pretty extraordinary gig. Early in his life with the Dead, Steve received a rather unusual employee briefing.
STEVE BROWN: One of the first things that I was handed when I went to work for the Grateful Dead, for their new record company, was the 10 Commandments of Rock and Roll, according to the Grateful Dead.
JESSE: This list, which we’ll resist the urge to recite in a countdown fashion, was written by Robert Hunter himself, synthesized like a cynical winking b-side to the optimism that he voiced in songs like “Here Comes Sunshine.” For a while, I’d assumed it wasn’t written until much later, but Steve’s 1973 start-date seems to lock it down earlier. It’s a little dark, so we’ve added some music from Here Comes Sunshine’s title track, the June 10th version to, you know, balance it out. And so we present — The 10 Commandments of Rock and Roll.
STEVE BROWN: Number 1: Suck up to the top cats.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (0:04-0:10) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
STEVE BROWN: Number 2: Do not express independent options.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (0:11-0:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
STEVE BROWN: Number 3: Do not work for common interest, only factional interests.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (1:21-1:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
STEVE BROWN: Number 4: If there's nothing to complain about, dig up some old gripe.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (1:31-1:41) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
STEVE BROWN: 5: Do not respect property or persons, other than band property or persons.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (2:44-3:03) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
STEVE BROWN: Number 6: Make devastating judgments on persons and situations without adequate information.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (4:30-4:40) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
STEVE BROWN: Number 7: Discourage and confound personal, technical and/or creative projects.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (5:52-6:12) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
STEVE BROWN: Number 8: Single out absent persons for intense criticism.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (6:19-6:38) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
STEVE BROWN: Number 9, Number 9, Number 9, Number 9: Remember that anything you don't understand is trying to fuck with you.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (6:38-6:56) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
STEVE BROWN: Number 10: destroy yourself physically and morally and insist that all true brothers do likewise as an expression of unity.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (7:10-7:33) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The Grateful Dead were all about remaking the world, but Robert Hunter couldn’t help but report from the frontlines of rock and roll as he saw them inside the Dead’s universe. Like Hunter’s lyrics, the meanings were nested. Steve had plenty to do as the record company looked for its wings and tried to figure out how and if they could actualize the concept of franchising the Grateful Dead.
STEVE BROWN: My goodness, I was way over my head when I realized how much more I was responsible for. I thought I came in here for some kind of easy fun. But all of my life had been fun. Like I said, at 15, when I had to go to the radio [station] and be there at 5:30 in the morning, because the show comes on at 6… I was used to having changes of things that I wasn't necessarily going in and ready for. And so when I got to the Grateful Dead, it was like — Okay, alright, okay, I can do this, okay…
JESSE: In this season and beyond, Steve will be our guide to Grateful Dead Records and plenty more, an eyewitness to and excited participant inside the unfolding Dead universe.
STEVE BROWN: Well, talk about the responsibility factor… oh, my god. And it wasn't anybody really else, except all the things I had on my list to get done. And so it was really kind of a challenge. I felt — I’m gonna make this work because I really liked this band. I really like what I feel about their future of making their own records and their own record company, and I'd like to be part of making that happen.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (2:17-2:50) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]