Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 6, Episode 5
IN AND OUT OF THE GARDEN: Madison Square Garden, 9/82
Archival interviews:
- John Perry Barlow, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 1/10/86.
- Jerry Garcia, by Sam Donaldson, Nightline, 9/5/82.
- Jerry Garcia, by Bill Cooper, WRNW, 5/82.
JESSE: The Grateful Dead began September 1982 with one of their periodic incursions into the mainstream. Over to Nightline with Sam Donaldson.
SAM DONALDSON [Nightline, 9/5/82]: Joining us now live from Station KGO-TV in San Francisco is guitarist Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, who played at Woodstock in 1969. He will be at the U.S. Festival or the US Festival in San Bernardino later this weekend.
JESSE: Ah, yes, the US Festival.
US FESTIVAL NEWS CLIP [1982]: I'm at Howard Regional Park in San Bernardino County over the Labor Day weekend. Many critics of the festival said it couldn't be done, that the day of the big Woodstock style music festival was over. But the US Festival proved them wrong. It turned out to be the biggest rock show since Woodstock more than 13 years ago and, in many ways, it was even more successful. And it all began with Steve Wozniak, founder of Apple Computers, who had a dream of uniting America through song and proving that the most important thing in the ‘80s will be our ability to work together.
JESSE: Absolutely, Woz. Back to Sam in the studio.
SAM DONALDSON [9/5/82, Nightline]: Well, now, you improvise a lot — you just get out there and you just go on for 20, 30 minutes, just improvising, and your fans, known as the Dead Heads, seem to love that. Why do you think that is? Why don't they want to hear a familiar song just the way they have a tape of it?
JERRY GARCIA [9/5/82, Nightline]: A sense of adventure, I hope. Something like that. For the same reasons that we do it, to see what’s going to happen. It makes the music unique to each situation as well; if we’re sensitive enough, the music that arrives belongs uniquely to that situation and that audience and that dynamic and so forth.
JESSE: At the US Festival, that situation and dynamic would certainly be unique, with the Dead playing a breakfast set at 9:30 in the morning. It wasn’t ideal, but it was an adventure. Earlier that spring, on WRNW in Rochester, Jerry Garcia articulated some of what made the Dead different from most of the other artists playing on the US Festival — but not as different as you’d think.
JERRY GARCIA [5/82]: We think of ourselves as a live act — I think our fans mostly do too. Records are an interesting thing to do to try things out, but records have their own reality in American [culture]. Like anybody who makes records, we do participate in that idea of a hot single. It’s a neat kind, a nice form of American music, the concise three-minute pop tune. It’s always been a part of what we’ve tried to do, for sure — because, after all, we are Americans.
JESSE: It was certainly an unusual landscape in which to continue to be the Grateful Dead. By 1982, the Dead had outlasted virtually all of their peers. Jefferson Starship was still setting its own space-pop course. That year, Grace Slick rejoined the band and they released Winds ofChange, addressing the post-punk New Wave proto-metal ‘80s in their own way. This is “Out of Control.”
AUDIO: “Out of Control” [Jefferson Starship, Winds of Change] (0:04-0:34) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Okay, that’s actually kinda bitchin’. Winds of Change hit the top 30 with a bullet.
JERRY GARCIA [5/82]: I'm very happy that things are the way they are, and the amount of latitude and freedom we get because of not being tied to that ephemeral success of the single. We're not… because we're not tied to that kind of a program or repertoire, it gives us tremendous freedom, which is… I appreciate it. But, geez, we certainly wouldn't refuse a single, a successful single. Even if it would happen, it would sure be fun.
JESSE: And maybe not out of the question. By some accounts, 1982 was the peak of rock and roll as chart-topping popular music.
AUDIO: “I Love Rock and Roll” [Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, I Love Rock and Roll] (0:40-0:54) [Spotify]
JESSE: In 1982, Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll” spent a month-and-a-half at the top of the Hot 100. So did Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.”
AUDIO: “Eye of the Tiger” [Survivor, Eye of the Tiger] (0:00-0:25) - [Spotify]
JERRY GARCIA [5/82]: We almost always, somewhere in the course of every album we've ever made, there's like the record that our friends and our associates and ourselves, we start thinking, “This is going to be the single.” We think that way.
JESSE: As it happens, Jerry Garcia also co-wrote a ubiquitous top 10 hit in 1982, just a few months after that interview — though it took the Dead a little while to manifest it in the top 10 acknowledged by consensus American reality.
AUDIO: “Touch of Grey” (studio rehearsal) [Beyond Description, 8/82] (0:00-0:25)
JESSE: That’s an early rehearsal version of “Touch of Grey,” recorded in late August 1982, on the Beyond Description box set. It would take another half-decade for the band to get the song out on a record. But it was a hit of a different kind. In 1982, besides incursions like the US Festival, the Grateful Dead were pretty much off the radar. Even to longtime Dead Heads, it might not be obvious what was unfolding. But in 1982, the Grateful Dead were, as the kids say, back on their bullshit — once again building their own reality.
AUDIO: “Touch of Grey” (studio rehearsal) [Beyond Description, 8/82] (5:09-5:43)
JERRY GARCIA [8/82]: Alright, let me… I’ll have to figure out something in the end there.
PHIL LESH [8/82]: It seems like we could get excited about this tune.
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I've always loved the fall tour of ‘82. They started when they did the Veneta stuff in Seattle, and then they hit Florida. They played some great shows in Florida, and then they just moved their way up. They played Boston, they played a great show in Maine, and then a couple of nights at the Garden, they played Syracuse. They played the Carrier Dome that tour, at the end. And it's interesting because, a few months earlier, they played Syracuse in a little arena.
JESSE: This is Garcia on WRNW again from May 1982.
JERRY GARCIA [5/82]: There's a certain rhythm to our touring, typically we go out and do somewhere between, say, 12 and 20 days, right about that. And the pace will be kind of like two shows, and then a day off. And then we'll come home for a couple of weeks. Then we'll go out again for another two weeks, and then we'll come home for another two weeks — like that. That makes it so that we stay hot, we can keep our edge.
JESSE: When the band pulled into Madison Square Garden for a pair of shows just before the autumn equinox in 1982, now on In and Out of the Garden, that describes their touring pattern stretching back the past few months, or far longer if you count Garcia’s side trips.
It’d been a year-and-a-half since the Dead themselves had last officially played Manhattan, at the March 1981 Garden shows we covered last time. But like we’ve been saying, the Dead were a New York band in many regards, playing again and again and again within striking distance of NYC public transportation systems. They passed through Nassau Coliseum in May ‘81 and again in April ‘82. Jerry Garcia brought his solo electric band through the Palladium in November ‘81 and then came through twice more as an acoustic duo with John Kahn in April and again in June. Bobby and the Midnites hit the Palladium in February and again in June 1982, plus five additional shows on Long Island and in Passaic. Between those, Robert Hunter played The Other End on Bleecker Street. If you were really on the ball, maybe you were in the audience for the acoustic Dead set when they played on Tomorrow with Tom Snyder in spring ‘81 or Weir and Garcia when they played on David Letterman the next year. And if you were a super duper insider, maybe you saw the Dead at the Savoy Theater on 44th Street, at their extra-late night session on May 9th, 1981 when John Belushi joined them for vintage oldies like “Twist and Shout” and “Walkin’ the Dog.” And that’s not counting any musical hangs at Belushi and Dan Ackroyd’s unmarked Blues Bars downtown, or when they were supposed to have played on Saturday Night Live for a third time on April 18th, 1981, canceled due to a writers’ strike. Something else happened during this period.
AUDIO: “MTV ID — 1981” (0:00-0:18)
JESSE: MTV launched on Jerry Garcia’s 39th birthday, August 1st, 1981. Happy birthday Garcia, I hope you like it. In the next years, the cable channel would transform popular music in the United States and around the world. And though in 1982 the Dead would debut the song with which they would eventually storm MTV, nearly all of their plans that year—and, really, every year—pointed in exactly the opposite direction. The Grateful Dead weren’t gearing up to record a hot new single or make a video. Sometimes consciously, sometimes not, while they were in some ways simply manifesting their own version of reality, they were nurturing an ecosystem that had started to grow around them as far back as their first year as a band, but had now spun well beyond them.
Tour ‘82
AUDIO: “Shakedown Street” [Road Trips, 4/6/82] (0:08-0:26)
JESSE: That’s “Shakedown Street” from Road Trips volume 4, number 4, recorded April 6th, 1982 at the Spectrum in Philadelphia — a year when the parking lot bazaar outside Dead shows began to expand, and the touring scene around the Dead heated up. The Grateful Dead had wanted to escape the record industry in the mid-’70s by starting their own label, but they actually succeeded in the ‘80s, by simply ignoring the industry for the better part of a decade. At the core was the idea that the Dead now had an audience that really, deeply listened to their music, so much so that it was important to be there wherever and whenever it emerged. Charlie Miller wasn’t taping yet in 1982, but he was listening hard, helping to build that ecosystem as a tape trader — and just as importantly, a tape listener.
CHARLIE MILLER: I did 10 out of 13 on the spring tour in ‘82, plus I also did the two solo Garcias at the Capitol in Passaic. So I saw 12. I got into touring after doing that. I would bring my home stereo — literally. Not just the cassette deck: my home stereo, some speakers and we'd set them up in the room. I would find somebody who taped the shows, and I would give him my cassette deck and ask them if they could make me copies. It was a shitty deck — it was an $89 deck, good for playing on or whatever. So if it ever got stolen, I wouldn’t care. But it never got stolen.
JESSE: Taper Jim Wise.
JIM WISE: Listening to the show after the show is a really cool thing. That was pretty common if I was on tour and we were in a hotel, that night or whatever with headphones. It just was really cool, because it was nice to be able to evaluate what you were doing, how the sound was.
JESSE: A subtle shaking of the Grateful Dead’s stage setup in early 1982 had an unexpected consequence. Steve Silberman and David Shenk’s Skeleton Key: A Dictionary For Deadheads refers to it as The Switch. To make better use of the stage monitors, Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh switched sides of the stage: Garcia moving to the right, Lesh to the left. It placed Garcia directly next to keyboardist Brent Mydland. Formerly of the AOR act Silver, and then the Bob Weir Band, Myland had replaced Keith and Donna Godchaux in 1979, playing keyboards and singing. His instrumental arsenal returned the Hammond B3 to the band’s sound, and his improvisational voice—not quite as aggressive as Keith Godchaux—changed the makeup of the band’s musical conversations. The Switch changed the dynamic even more.
CHARLIE MILLER: That was when I really noticed the interaction between Brent and Jerry growing was on spring ‘82.
JESSE: Along with a new musical bromance, Brent Mydland also got a new keyboard in early 1982, a Yamaha CP-80 electric piano, similar to the CP-70 that Keith Godchaux played between 1977 and his departure in 1979. It ended a distinct era, from 1979 to 1981, where Brent’s sound was often defined by the chiming of his Dyna-Rhodes, like this “Shakedown Street,” recorded October 25th, 1979 in New Haven, now Roads Trips volume 1, number 1.
AUDIO: “Shakedown Street” [Road Trips, 10/25/79] (6:26-6:44)
CHARLIE MILLER: I'm a big fan of the Brent stuff, and I'm a big fan of his sound in ‘83 and ‘84. I hated that piano — when I got on spring tour in ‘82 and he had that piano sound, I hated that. I just thought it had a really lifeless thin sound, like a fake shitty piano.
JESSE: It’s not the best piano sound, but maybe fairly cutting edge for 1982, and I do like having a more traditional piano texture back in the mix, especially for moments like this.
CHARLIE MILLER: Philly, during “Shakedown,” when Brent and Jerry were kind of like doing a riff—sharing a call and response thing, and Jerry would do something, look over and give him a nod, and Brent would do something and go back to Jerry… it was pretty cool watching that.
AUDIO: “Shakedown Street” [Road Trips, 4/6/82] (8:06-8:36)
JESSE: The emergence of the Grateful Dead ecosystem was a collaborative community project, the seeds of which had been planted a decade ago. Dead Heads were rampant, and they were starting to make things besides just tapes. Eric Schwartz was on the road that summer.
ERIC SCHWARTZ: Summer ‘82, we were gone. We printed up 10,000 tape labels, got in the Volkswagen, said goodbye to the parents, high school juniors, and did the whole summer. We started with cross country to the Rainbow Gathering in Council, Idaho, where Wavy Gravy woke us up in our tent, looking for 100 people to carry 100 watermelons on the Fourth of July, at the gathering in Idaho. That's exactly how I remember him: he was thin, he was tough, he had his total patched overalls on, clown makeup.
I met the 100 people that were touring — I became friends with them all. It was just the people that we saw at every show. I started putting their names in my tour book, their addresses and their phone numbers. There was a really tight core. There were probably several tight cores of people. Ours wasn't the only tight core of people, but there were like 60, 80, 100 really tight people that I knew. There was a Syosset, Long Island faction; there was a Boston faction; there were people from the Midwest, and we all kind of converged.
We were still under the radar. There really wasn't any national Grateful Dead terror by the media — ‘impending doom coming to your town.’ We kind of were able to hit and run without too much drama.
JESSE: One of the heads they hooked up with was an optician who went by the name Chris Goodspace. He’d been seeing the Dead since ‘76.
CHRIS GOODSPACE: It wasn't until summer of ‘82 that I decided to head to the West Coast. I bought an old ‘69 Dodge van, fixed it up out of a junkyard and filled it up with some folks. We started heading West and did the whole summer of that tour. I had a good time.
ERIC SCHWARTZ: Chris was just an older dude that had a van, had his tour shit together, and we just latched onto him. We'd all gather after a show, look at our roadmap and go: “Alright, we've got 800 miles to go. Let's pick a campsite. We'll all meet there.” And 90% of the time, we all met there.
CHRIS GOODSPACE: My first sticker was like ‘79 or so. For the summer of ‘82, I did “Happiness is dancing with the Dead.” I didn't have enough room on the sticker, so I made the “with the” one word, so that got a lot of attention. And then I was also… my t-shirts, I had “This Bud’s For You,” “Support Your Local Grower,” which was one I sold on High Times magazine. I stole it from Relix magazine, because on their posters… where they do all the song posters, they had the “Love Light” guy, they had taken them off and I wanted to see him back out in the world. So I did the “Love Light” t-shirts.
ERIC SCHWARTZ: Everybody was biting each other's work, because there was nothing digital. It was all just — there's a poster, we'll take a little piece of that and turn it into a t-shirt.
JESSE: Looked at another way, it was folk art, casually appropriating iconography from Dead albums, underground comix, and from each other without a look back. It was not only a maker culture but a maker counterculture, building its own network to provide an alternative to what was available elsewhere. John Leopold and his twin brother David hit the road that summer, too.
JOHN LEOPOLD: For reasons that my parents still can't explain, they let us drive with these guys we barely knew to go to Red Rocks. We had this complete On the Road experience: we turned on to Kerouac, to Kesey and the Grateful Dead, all that stuff. We went to that show, and not only is it Red Rocks, but they were celebrating the 25th anniversary of On the Road. So at that set break, there was Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kesey and Mountain Girl — all these people that we had been reading about were now live. So we were pretty hooked at that point. The distance between that period of the 60s and what we were experiencing didn't seem that far apart. Those folks were still around. At a show where Kesey might show up, he would have the Thunder Machine out in the parking lot, and people would be gathered around. Or Wavy would show up with the Nobody for President bus.
JESSE: Eric Schwartz.
ERIC SCHWARTZ: I don't think we knew what Robert Hunter looked like till I went and saw a show. We were able to see him and the Garcia Band, and Bobby and the Midnites. So when we weren’t doing that, and Max Creek — being on the East Coast, it was just like five nights a week of Max Creek, and then every Grateful Dead show you could see in between. But yeah, it was all just trying to absorb and learn as much as you can.
JOHN LEOPOLD: For us, it seemed like a very vibrant scene. We look at it now, it's this period where Garcia was going into some spiraling with his drug habit. But for us, they were popping out stuff all the time: Garcia was releasing solo records, and Weir had the Midnites. So there was a whole scene of people.
JESSE: In our last episode, we heard a bit about Grateful Dead tour in the early ‘80s from photographer Jay Blakesberg and others. But as the ‘80s progressed, a number of other small cultural changes occurred that acted in some ways as important counterbalances to MTV. The first was Xerox machines. To talk about the radical power of photocopying and how it pertained to the unfolding psychedelic underground, please welcome from the Harvard School of World Religions, J. Christian Greer.
J. CHRISTIAN GREER: One of the byproducts of this technological revolution was an explosion of DIY publication. It's with the rise of Xerox copying, not only at Kinkos, but within the corporate world — you have a switch from Mimeo and Ditto, this really onerous process, you have a transition to xerography.
JESSE: The big turning point would come with the introduction of the all-night copy center in 1985.
J. CHRISTIAN GREER: It's no exaggeration: towards the end of the 80s, ‘88, ‘89, ‘90, you had no less than 100,000 to 200,000 new fanzines circulating every year. I mean, that's huge — that's just a massive amount of print.
JESSE: But 1982 was an inflection point in the fanzine world. In the spring, Mike Gunderloy launched Factsheet Five, a zine that simply listed other zines, creating essentially a central directory for the emerging network of undergrounds. And, though it wasn’t listed in Factsheet Five, it was in 1982 that the Grateful Dead tour got its own zine. Relix had, of course, launched as a proper magazine for Dead tapers in Brooklyn in 1974, following the earlier North Carolina publication Dead in Words that had been aimed at bootleg LP collectors. But in August 1982 Michael Linnah launched MIKEL, spelled with a k, a one-sheet publication that he copied and distributed at shows. Eric Schwartz met him on tour.
ERIC SCHWARTZ: From what I remember, he was funding his tour by either refereeing or winning bridge tournaments: organizing and getting people to pay for registration fees to play bridge professionally or semi-professionally. He reminds me of the guy from Doonesbury, or Hunter S. Thompson — totally nondescript, complete with the visor and the clamping on the… I don't know if he smoked or not, but that's just how I picture him.
JESSE: Over the next few years, Michael Linnah’s small zine MIKEL was the only publication in the parking lot, keeping heads up to date with setlists, classified ads, tidbits about cover songs, and other information. Sadly Michael Linnah died of cancer only a few years later, but his work is invaluable. Thank you, Michael! By the end of 1982, he’d published nearly 10 issues. We’ve posted a link to scans of Eric Schwartz’s nearly complete collection. If you have issues 6, 8, 9, or 10 from 1982, and would like to help, please get in touch with us at stories.dead.net!
In the same way that MTV would create a new center of gravity for the music industry, the zine network would create a new core for many thousands of parallel and entwined undergrounds, an interconnected subterranean exchange by which readers could find like-minded heads.
J. CHRISTIAN GREER: The story of fanzine culture — within that story, the main characters, the main groups, are psychedelic groups.
JESSE: These groups would exist at the far periphery of the Grateful Dead scene, and provide another kind of counterbalance to MTV — and, in a way, a counterbalance to the Dead themselves, who represented a different kind of mainstream by 1982. Christian’s forthcoming book from Oxford University Press sounds like extremely my scene, and perhaps yours: Angelheaded Hipsters: Psychedelic Militancy in 1980s North America. We’ve posted links to Christian’s website, as well as to his new psychedelic travelogue memoir Kumano Kodo: Pilgrimage to Powerspots.
J. CHRISTIAN GREER: Particularly the Church of SubGenius plays a very important role, as do the Discordians.
JESSE: Founded in Texas in 1980, the Church of the SubGenius was a parody of a religion, or was it? They rallied around the grinning pipe-smoking piece of clip art they named J.R. “Bob” Dobbs.
J. CHRISTIAN GREER: In many ways, the Church was founded on an attempt to really rejuvenate some of the playful, far out mind-expanded creativity that was associated with the Pranksters, and psychedelic culture in general, particularly moving through this Discordian movement — which really, I think, asserted itself in the mid ‘70s with Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shay’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy. But if you know about Discordianism, what is it? Discordians stick apart, they're militantly decentralized. And so I think what you saw with Church of SubGenius is an attempt to channel that energy into a collective project that was, at the very fundamental basis, fun — the very fundament of great time.
SUBGENIUS AD ANNOUNCER [1991]: What the hell do you think you’re doing? Draggin’ your butt through the day, selling your body and soul to a bunch of bland normals, acting stupid so they’ll think you’re one of them?
JESSE: The Church of the SubGenius had their own zine, of course, the Stark Fist of Removal. By 1982, its subscriber list wasn’t very big. One of those subscribers, though, was Ken Kesey, who would be blurbed on the back of the Book of the SubGenius a few years later. And one of its readers, at least, was Jerry Garcia, who is seen holding a copy of the very third issue of the Stark Fist of Removal in a photo from the holidays that year in Oregon with the Keseys.
J. CHRISTIAN GREER: It's easy to forget that this grinning guy, who seems to be sort of cheesy, was really the mask or the face of what I consider to be a strain of militant psychedelic culture. Because if you start looking at SubGenius texts, they were very clear about a repudiation of normal culture, a hatred of work, and the insistence that people cultivate their own what they called “Slack” — which of course, you can't define Slack, everyone has their own Slack.
SUBGENIUS AD ANNOUNCER [1991]: It’s J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, the Living Slack Master and his Church of the SubGenius. Bob brings a new destiny for the abnormal, for Bob comes to justify our sins, to unmask the conspiracy and to get us back the Slack they stole away. It’s Us versus Them — are you gonna fry in Hell on Earth alongside the Pink Boys? Or will you pull the wool over your own eyes and accept Bob into your mind? Repent!
JESSE: And they had their own acid.
J. CHRISTIAN GREER: I dated the earliest form of Dobbs blotter acid to 1981, because I do have evidence that it was circulated at the first major SubGenius convention that took place in Dallas in 1981.
JESSE: A few years after they had their own acid, they had their own mass market paperback, with blurbs from Kesey, R. Crumb, Robert Anton Wilson, and other subterranean heavies.
J. CHRISTIAN GREER: Within the broad or wider world of fanzines, you have a sort of language development. And that language is visual. So you have the Dobbs head — this is, in many ways, the symbol for acid culture in the 80s. However, there's one symbol that's even bigger. And that's the Stealie, that's the Grateful head.
JESSE: By the early 1980s, the Grateful Dead had become the mainstream of psychedelic underground, a big tent for numerous other cliques of weirdos. There wasn’t a lot of overlap between Dead freaks and SubGenii, but there was some. A decade later, a Dobbs-head would appear on backstage passes for the Jerry Garcia Band. Another psychedelic affinity group around the Dead in those days was the Phirst Church of Phun out of western Massachusetts, who built their own Acid Tests around the recording of the August 1972 Sunshine Daydream benefit that we spoke about a few episodes back. Please ring your silent bells and welcome back to the Grateful Deadcast, Dupree’s Diamond News founder Johnny Dwork.
JOHNNY DWORK: I had a connection with the Church of the SubGenius, because I had been ordained by Wavy Gravy as the Rabbi of the Phirst Church of Phun. The Church of the SubGenius and the Phirst Church of Phun were sort of like sister cults. We had flirted with each other from the early 1980s onward. It was very obvious that we were very different from one another, but we were mutually compatible.
JESSE: By then, Johnny had begun his own entry into the zine world.
JOHNNY DWORK: I’d started the Hampshire College Grateful Dead Historical Society and we started to produce Dead Beat magazine, which was more of a zine than a magazine. It was one of the earliest Grateful Dead newsletters that was focused on trying to figure out what Grateful Dead shows are actually available in what quality tapes, soundboard or audience, and how do you actually connect with tapers before the Internet. There was this scene in New York of tapers, this scene of the deservedly legendary tapers, like Jerry Moore, who was the actual cofounder of Relix who was one of the great tapers, and Barry Glassberg, one of the great tapers.
JESSE: In addition to the ecosystem of tapes themselves, which created a linear history for Dead Heads, Dead Beat also began to cultivate something else important — community memory.
JOHNNY DWORK: I was also going down to New York to connect with these tapers — not just trade tapes with them, but talk history with them and try to actually go and put together the definitive list of: what are all of the Grateful Dead shows? What are all of the tapes, and what quality are they all? And so the only way before the Internet that you really could get this information was by hanging out with these people. Of course, because we were analog recording back then, it took you as long to make a tape as it took to run the tape at at play speed. So you had all this time to hang out with these people and talk shop.
JESSE: If the Dead Head scene of the ‘70s became sentient with Relix, zines like MIKEL and Dead Beat brought the self-awareness to the next level, in an era when Relix itself turned its attention to more mainstream music. A few years later, DeadBase and other publications would put it into book form.
Dead ‘82
JESSE: The other huge counterbalance to MTV in the early 1980s was the true ascendance of the cassette tape. In the summer of 1980, the Walkman arrived on American shores from Japan and was an instant success, turning cassettes into a global music format. Without knowing the numbers, it resulted in an explosion of Grateful Dead tape trading over the course of the early ‘80s. During this era, the Dead themselves tried to figure out how to harness the power of the cassette. We are so honored to welcome back, from Ice Nine Publishing, Alan Trist.
ALAN TRIST: The majority of the income for the band came from touring. Unlike many bands of the time, where 75% of their income was from records and 25% was from touring, it was the other way around with the Grateful Dead, always. The Dead Head audience was growing right through the 80s. Merchandising was another item on the agenda, another income source. The demand for these sorts of things in the early 80s was really growing because the Dead Head audience was growing, right through the 80s.
JESSE: In 1982, the band again tapped into their vaunted mailing list and Grateful Dead Productions sent out their first official mail order merchandise catalog, with help from Bill Graham’s Winterland Productions.
ALAN TRIST: There were a lot of restrictions that particularly Hunter and the publishing side wanted to put on merchandising, like don't use the lyrics. We couldn't do much about song titles, hence all those little bears came out with song titles. But definitely, there were issues about what to sell and what not to sell. As always, the Dead were keeping an eye to merchandising decency, could I say, as opposed to racking up the sales.
JESSE: The Dead were more than aware of the incipient taping scene. There’d been talk of putting out archival releases as far back as the early ‘70s, with various internal discussions of tape clubs and even a subsidiary record label called Ground Records. But in 1982, that conversation began again. In the Grateful Dead business archives is a fairly extraordinary memo dated August 13th, 1982, prepared by Alan Trist of Ice Nine Publishing titled “Concert Tape Marketing.” It summarizes a conversation between Alan, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, and others about the feasibility of selling the Dead’s own live tapes.
ALAN TRIST: It was a natural discussion to talk about the tapes as an income source.
JESSE: It’s a radically forward thinking document. We had Alan read many of the salient points.
ALAN TRIST: “Concert tapes could be sold by direct mail through the Deadheads list. Special selections could also be offered: for instance, drum breaks, Bugs of Dada, Phil’s Choice, Egypt, etc., selected from the vault. Such a method of marketing Grateful Dead music is most natural to the Grateful Dead’s creative process. The occurrences of new songs, or the resurrection of old songs, new arrangements, etc., popping up from time to time in concerts, is less forced than periodic compression of new material into an album. Economically, selling Grateful Dead recorded music this way could entirely supplant record company albums and make more money.” Although I might say that last point is uncertain.
JESSE: It’s an intensely fascinating proposal. The proposal goes on to present some math. They estimate 75 shows per year, 40 of which might be approved for release, estimating approximately 1,000 buyers per show, with a total profit of perhaps $200,000 a year, a little over $600,000 a year in today’s terms. The proposal also raised some counterarguments.
ALAN TRIST: “Devil's advocate: although we might reach the same market as regular records do, we would forfeit the chance to reach new markets through the power of record companies and the media.
“Devil's advocate: not everyone, not even all Dead Heads, have tape machines. Some people prefer to buy albums.
“Devil's advocate again: intentional studio recording projects, particularly of new material, can express a coherent concept or aesthetic more fully than a concert or a concert tape.”
I have an after note: “As the concert tape project develops, however, set and concert design might begin to develop such coherence.” That's an interesting possibility that we never explored. “The music industry would not be threatened by the novelty of this marketing technique, for the GD is the only band where every concert is more or less unique.”
JESSE: The Dead had nurtured a delicate ecosystem, as Alan reflects now.
ALAN TRIST: I felt that looking at all the sides of this issue was going to be important because the innovation of tape trading—as long as nobody passed any money back and forth—was a real innovation in the music business. The Dead were outliers in respect to it, probably still are to this day, I don't know about that. But it was that kind of energy, to overturn that and turn it back into a commercial operation, that would have been a change from the direction that we had been going. So I wanted to show both sides of that coin, which had been in discussion in the office for some time. I think the fact that it was addressed, that memo, to Billy and Phil was interesting, because I think they are the two who were concerned most about the way the money was going to flow, and they wanted to keep an eye on the potentials as well.
The band valued the interest the tape trading gave to the Dead Heads. It gave another dimension to the community aspect of the Grateful Dead subculture, you might say. I've since learned that tape trading wasn't just something that happened by mail; local communities would form in different parts of the country around the need to find a venue to trade tapes. So they would meet somewhere: they'd meet at somebody's house or even at larger venues, and they’d set up shop and trade tapes through each other. I think that's a very significant part that would have been lost if the tapes had gone commercial, because of the extension of community in every way, whether it's the parking lot or trading tapes or going on the road together — this is all part of the larger Grateful Dead experience. Generate an energy exchange, which is just what you want. You want that to have an evenness to it. The Nobel [winning] economist Paul Krugman, he famously said in some New York Times post of his that everything he learned about business he learned from the Grateful Dead, he wrote a column to that effect. It's a very challenging thought, but I think it just goes to the thing that if you give your product away freely, in the sense that we just talked about, in terms of community and sharing technical or other kinds of knowledge, you create a loyalty. There's other words one could use probably, but it comes back to that everyone will buy the official releases as well as having it on tape.
JESSE: The Dead weren’t selling their own tapes by fall 1982, but they absolutely continued their commitment to chasing the cutting edge of sound and lights. The newest major contributor was Meyer Sound, run by John and Helen Meyer. In the same years the Dead were making their first forays into live sound, John Meyer was doing the same with The Steve Miller Band. By 1969, he’d invented a new speaker system in his living room. And from here, we’ll let the Meyers pick up the story. We’re so pleased to welcome, from Meyer Sound, John and Helen Meyer, who brought a brochure to the nearby Whole Earth Truck Store, founded by Trips Festival organizer Stewart Brand.
HELEN MEYER: The store was around the corner —
JOHN MEYER: Yeah —
HELEN MEYER: — and we put a brochure in the store.
JOHN MEYER: We gave a demo to Stewart Brand outside, and he put it in his catalogs and said, “Well, if you want something to take your head off, here it is.” So we built the 8-foot horns and Pepperland started to happen.
HELEN MEYER: We were involved in Pepperland in 1969, 1970. Pepperland was a ballroom in San Rafael. When they came to us, they said they wanted to make it the most exciting ballroom rock venue possible, and we got excited because they were excited about doing a quadraphonic sound.
JESSE: Located in San Rafael, Pepperland was just a few blocks from where the Dead would soon take over a warehouse space on Front Street.
JOHN MEYER: They liked the horns that fit into their scheme of roundness, and of course it made the news. We had these big 8-foot horns. They were so powerful. When you build horns that big, they're very, very efficient. They would bounce around the floor as we played music. People would climb inside them — there were people sleeping in ‘em, climbing on top.
JESSE: John would go to work for McCune Sound and consult with Owsley Stanley while the Dead created the Wall of Sound in the mid-1970s, helping to refine the idea with some very pertinent suggestions, which we’ll save for another episode. John and Helen moved to Switzerland for a time in the middle of the decade, where John did research at the Institute for Advanced Musical Studies.
HELEN MEYER: After Switzerland, we decided to start Meyer Sound. And so that was in 1979, and then you started working with the Dead right around the early 80s. The way I think you got more connected with the Dead, after we started Meyer Sound, was your connection with Bear. Because Bear came to an AES meeting, he heard what you were doing and he said: “That’s what the Dead needs.” And it was really there that you two got together.
JOHN MEYER: We took that monitor, which we built with a very high-speed… really kind of what I always wanted to make [with a] studio monitor. We took it to the Starship, because Bear was doing both the Starship, and we did it for Kantner. What was nice about it is that we could mix in drums and things like that. Then they got here and they really liked it. The sound of this is a stage monitor. And so we started [with] that as the first product — we started to build a stage monitor for the Grateful Dead, the Ultra[Sound] monitor. The Dead started using more and more of these Ultra[Sound] monitors, and then we built the more powerful MSL-3 system.
JESSE: In the years following the Wall of Sound, the Dead had used a patchwork of systems, most lately renting systems from the Clair Brothers. In 1981, Dan Healy commissioned a small speaker setup from Meyer Sound.
JOHN MEYER: We built them four, eight, small enough that they could do a show like Berkeley Community Theater. But without telling me, they took it up to the Greek Theater. On the one side, they had Clair doing the thing, and then the other side were these eight speakers we built. We weren't, I wasn't invited —
HELEN MEYER: We didn't even know that they were doing it
JOHN MEYER: It was a shootout. And apparently, we won.
HELEN MEYER: We won!
JESSE: Pretty soon, Meyer Sound was supplying the PA for all of the Dead’s West Coast shows, and became a participant in Grateful Dead board meetings as they started to develop their newest system that would make its debut in the late summer of 1982, leading up to the shows at Madison Square Garden.
JOHN MEYER: The next board meeting, I saw that they were really getting annoyed with the tapers. They had a board meeting about getting rid of the people taping the shows. I said, “Since you invited me, can I put in my pitch?” And they go, “What is your pitch?” I said, “Well, you know, we're in the very beginning of trying to create high-fidelity sound for the Grateful Dead in the audience. We're doing everything in our power to make it a really great experience, like a record experience. And when they're recording like this, it really pushes the envelope, and the fact we all have an archive of our story. We can't just say we're doing it, we're gonna actually have data and I like that, because it'll really keep us on track. We're human after all, and we have someone watching us.”
JESSE: It would be a few years yet before the Dead would officially legalize taping, but big ups to John Meyer for standing up for the tapers. Charlie Miller wasn’t taping yet in fall ‘82, but he was definitely trading tapes and listening hard.
CHARLIE MILLER: That was the first tour with their new PA, the UltraSound PA with Meyer Sound. I just could not believe how unreal it sounded — it was the most amazing, clear, warm analog sound, and I just loved it. It used to be if you wanted it to sound good, you had to be by Healy — you had to be at the soundboard, because everything was hard-panned. One drummer was out of one channel, the other drummer’s out of another channel; Brent was all the way on the right side, Bobby's on the left side; Jerry was in the middle, Phil was in the middle and the vocals are in the middle. But other than that… so if you were in the Phil Zone, you couldn't really hear the keys. It was loud and clear with the JBLs.
JOHN MEYER: As you see the Dead evolve, you'll see, more and more, that the stage stuff got smaller and smaller and smaller over time. We enhanced it more with speakers. But that was a lot of my influence and pushing, because Bear was really… he was kind of forced to agree with me, even though he didn’t like the idea, because you can't blast everybody. You can't do an arena or stadium, and have all the sound come through the performers. It was all kind of aimed at… it’s coming from stereo. Everything was kind of concentrated at the mix position. Bear was also interested in—and the movie people—there’s stereo, and then there's multichannel mono, which is what the movie people were doing. In other words, they'd have a center speaker for voice and they'd have a left speaker for music, right speaker. It's called multichannel mono — it was not stereo. They didn't like stereo, the movie people, and kind of developed it early on as a multichannel mono thing. I liked that better — I said to Bear, “You already started about this, if you think about it. We’ve got Phil Lesh over here, and we’ve got Jerry or whoever coming out over here. We’ve already got a multichannel mono; we don’t have the stereo problem.” And then we can add Phil to that, which is my skill, to kind of filling in, say, to try to enhance that — keeping that as our image, that multichannel image. So wherever you are, Phil Lesh should always be coming from stage left, or right, depending on which way, if you’re the actor or the audience.
CHARLIE MILLER: It was supposed to sound good anywhere in the room, not just by Healy. Once I switched to Meyer Sound, the low end on the recordings became smoother, the high end was just crisper. It had a fuller, warmer sound to it.
HELEN MEYER: We got constant feedback, mostly from Don Pearson and Howard Danchik, because they were out there. Dan Healy a little bit, but mostly it was from Don and Howard. Don was… Don had a lot of ideas, and he would talk a lot about how he could imagine things being better and better. You collaborated on a lot of that, and he was always trying to make things better, John is.
JESSE: The pairing of Meyer Sound with the Grateful Dead was one of the most perfect and seemingly frictionless in the band’s history, a relationship which continued through the end of the Grateful Dead proper in 1995 and on into the band’s spinoffs. At the same time, Meyer Sound became an industry standard, heard in venues across the world. We’ll have more of our conversation with Helen and John Meyer next episode. It wasn’t just the sound that the Dead were bent on improving. In our last season, about Europe ‘72, we spoke with Candace Brightman and Ben Haller about the Dead’s then-new light rig — a pair of light trees that fit into the recording truck. By a decade later, it had evolved. In 1982, Dan English joined Candace Brightman on the road. Please welcome to the Deadcast, Dan English.
DAN ENGLISH: I worked for a pretty well-known lighting company at the time, this company called Morpheus Lights. They're still around, but they were big into touring. I had been on the road for a couple of years with them doing all kinds of bands: Santana, Neil Diamond, John Denver, people like that. So I was sort of on the road, and then Candace was looking around for a new lighting company. She was from the Bay Area, and so was Morpheus — we're in San Jose. She just randomly called in and the boss sent me to go check it out. The first show was at the Greek Theatre, I think in ‘82. I went up and I met Candace; she gave me her vision of what she wanted, which was intriguing, because it was completely different than the kinds of things that we had been doing at the time. Candace was sort of very theatrical in her approach, and she used an interesting combination of very deep colors from very high angles and things. The gold standard was Queen: straight ahead, red, blue, amber, green, big banks of lights. Candace wasn't about that at all — hers was interesting angles, completely different looks, very theatrical presentation. It wasn’t like a disco or anything like that, but it was timed intricately with the music. This was before moving lights.
JESSE: Candace’s set-up had evolved a bit since the Europe ‘72 days of light trees, but mostly they’d just gotten more.
DAN ENGLISH: They had talked about having to take towers out there before. They are very straightforward, can rigs. I think she just couldn't get what she wanted from them as far as — “ Look, I want this interesting design, the way the trusses are, this kind of layout. I want someone to pay attention to me.” At Morpheus, we were very keen on that, doing those kinds of things. We had our own welding shop, we made custom brackets to fly the trusses, custom hang ‘em. And it all kind of came together rather serendipitously, I would say. We did the Greek Theatre, and we went on to do some more local shows. And the first back East tour I did was, I think there's a run that included West Palm Beach and Lakeland, Florida, and then we went up north.
JESSE: That’s the fall 1982 tour that led up to the Garden shows. In addition to the new sound system and the new lights, the tour also had new songs. Archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: They debuted “West L.A. [Fadeaway],” “Keep Your Day Job.” And then a couple of weeks later, they add “Throwing Stones” and “Touch of Grey.” These are two songs that would be huge parts of the 1980s Grateful Dead. The ‘82 “Dupree’s [Diamond Blues]” came back, “Crazy Fingers” came back. These are songs that hadn't been played in a number of years — “Crazy Fingers,” ‘76, came back in ‘82 in July; and then “Dupree’s,” they hadn’t played it since ‘78, and it came back. They're kind of reaching back a little bit and pulling out some songs that I think were very well-received. Because those are deep cuts, “Crazy Fingers” is pretty deep.
JESSE: One way to hear the Dead’s new songs was to be there in person. Or you could track it down on tape from somebody like Jim Wise, then acquire a tape label from somebody like Eric Schwartz. Who needed a record company anyway? The Dead sure didn’t need a record label to sell out Madison Square Garden.
September 20th
JESSE: Johnny Dwork.
JOHNNY DWORK: Everybody knew. Everybody knew that the Grateful Dead played better in
New York, because there was something about the high energy of the Grateful Dead scene in New York that inspired the Grateful Dead to be on their game. You'd go down I-95, and it took two and a half, three hours to drive; you'd go down and you'd see your family, see your friends, you'd set up during the day tape trading. And then at night, you see the Grateful Dead at Madison Square Garden. It was a thing.
JESSE: Outside the Garden, there wasn’t a scene, but you might’ve run into Michael Linnah, who would’ve given you a copy of issue #4 of his one-sheet one-sided zine, featuring a setlist from the US Festival as well as the publication’s first letters column. Charlie Miller was on tour, but stayed at home in Forest Hills when the Dead were in town.
CHARLIE MILLER: The first night, we were at the train station, and we were getting ready to board the train to the Garden. My friend called the “Half-Step” opener; I called “Shakedown Street.” And what was really cool is that, after the lights went down, the first sound that came out of the PA was Phil, when he was tuning, with the opening chord of “Shakedown.” We all knew it was coming, and it was just so awesome.
AUDIO: “Shakedown Street” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/20/82] (0:04-0:24) - [dead.net]
JESSE: We spoke a bunch with photographer Bob Minkin last time. He was there for the Garden ‘82 shows, too.
BOB MINKIN: There was always a lot of energy, especially when they would open with “Shakedown Street.”
AUDIO: “Shakedown Street” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/20/82] (1:16-1:42) - [dead.net]
BOB MINKIN: It was really the perfect opener to be playing at the Garden because of the line: ‘Tell me this town ain't got no heart.” That line alone brought thunder to the place. Because they could be playing in other cities — “Tell me this town ain’t got no heart”... yeah, yeah, okay, that’s nice. When they say that line in New York, it really has a lot of resonance.
JESSE: One of the wonders of the world, a “Shakedown Street” opener at Madison Square Garden, and an occurrence that I thought had happened much more frequently, only four times in the 15 years that the Dead played the Garden — this one in ‘82, again in ‘88, ‘91, and ‘94. Archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The tapes sound incredible too, I’ve gotta say. There's a cleanliness to the tapes, and there's a cleanliness to the performances that I've always really loved. They're not exceptionally jammed out shows; songs aren't particularly jammed up. It's a much more concise Grateful Dead, and I think concise in a very good way. So they're not stretching things out to… a song that they might have another time stretched out to 12 or 14 minutes, they’re maybe keeping them at eight or nine.
JOHNNY DWORK: I was always on Phil's side, several seats up off of the floor. For me, that was the sweet spot, and the reason that that was the sweet spot was because I had given my right ear hearing to Hot Tuna at their legendary all night long late shows at the Academy of Music, which then became the Palladium. Hot Tuna would play, literally, the late show, from 1am till 6am. My sweet spot was closer to the band than the soundboard and a couple of seats up from the floor, so I could sit and see the band play but also get the best mix for the hearing that I had.
AUDIO: “Shakedown Street” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/20/82] (8:12-8:42) - [dead.net]
JOHNNY DWORK: My memory of those shows is this double… it’s two memories that compete against one another. One is my memory at the time of being greatly concerned about seeing the shift in Jerry Garcia's health. When you go back now and you listen to the music from that period of time, it's like: wow, actually, two things are true about that music. One is it was disappointing to see the shift from the sort of psychedelic to the cocaine vibe. But oh my god, that music actually rocks, compared to the music that the Grateful Dead were playing, for example, in the 1990s. So, perspective is everything.
JESSE: There was a whole world of Dead Heads at Madison Square Garden, from urban professionals to tour rats, people making bumper stickers and t-shirts and newsletters, people taking photographs, people twirling, people totally puddled, people at their first rock show, people at their first rock show since the ‘60s, people at their first rock show since the night before, and—of course—tapers. Jim Wise.
JIM WISE: Those were the type of people that I would be mingling my way through as I was getting into the show. There was a whole world of people out there doing their thing, and I was just doing mine. I had much better tickets than I did in ‘81 — I had good floor tickets. So I must have been… I just had better tickets. So the sound was better.
JESSE: For the ‘81 Garden shows, Jim had stationed himself safely at the soundboard, next to Dan Healy. Dan English of the light crew remembered this posse.
DAN ENGLISH: He really liked the ones that were real serious, and he appreciated what they were doing. They'd come talk to us about particular tape decks.
JESSE: Recording in the thick of the venue floor was a different game for Jim Wise.
JIM WISE: Being a taper and recording the shows is a completely different experience than going to the show and just being a fan and trying to enjoy the show. I was always engrossed in taping. I’d probably be obsessing over my tape deck, watching the levels, looking around. If I was in an area where I was trying to be discreet, keeping the mic head level… you’re always looking over your shoulder, you're always looking around trying to head off security, if they happen to come around. Or let’s say the usher was trying to find someone to seat, and they happen to be right next to you — you’ve got all your gear out, you don’t necessarily want that to happen. You always had to be aware of what was going on around you. There was always someone who was just really fucked up or whatever, would come stumbling through and use the mic stand for support as they're walking through your gear. That's when you gotta be like, “Hey, be cool,” and so forth. But once you point out what you're doing to someone as they're coming through, then yes, they're very respectful. I was able to enjoy the show afterwards forever. So if I went through the work of making the recording, it just seems… then sacrificing the enjoyment of actually being at the show was worth it.
JESSE: Thanks so much, Jim! There’d been a bit of turnover in the Dead’s setlists since their last time through. The old Aoxoxomoxoa favorite “Dupree’s Diamond Blues” had returned a month earlier, and was received warmly at the Garden.
AUDIO: “Dupree’s Diamond Blues” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/20/82] (0:21-0:43) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Brent Mydland’s newest song was no longer a new song by fall ‘82, exactly. Mydland would title it “Good Time Blues,” but the name “Never Trust a Woman” stuck. It debuted a year and a few months after the previous Garden shows, a year to the day before the band brought back “Dupree’s Diamond Blues.”
AUDIO: “Never Trust a Woman” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/20/82] (0:43-1:01) - [dead.net]
JESSE: “Never Trust a Woman” would never make it to a Dead album, though the song went in and out of sets through 1990. It was during this 1982-1983 that Mydland began to work on his never-completed solo album. “Good Time Blues” doesn’t seem to have been in consideration, perhaps because it’d already found a bit of a home in the Dead repertoire. At the Garden, the band had some new new songs. Bob Minkin.
BOB MINKIN: “Grateful Dead MSG 9/20/82” — and on my note, I wrote next to it, it says “three new songs.”
JESSE: The first two of those songs came paired together at the end of the first set.
AUDIO: “Throwing Stones” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/20/82] (0:00-0:23) - [dead.net]
JESSE: David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The way they incorporated them, especially something like “Throwing Stones,” where they didn’t quite know where it would live… it was one of those moments in time where such an important song in the Dead's repertoire for the next 13 years, didn't have a home yet. And I love that, I think that's fantastic.
JESSE: “Throwing Stones,” written by Bob Weir with lyricist John Perry Barlow, had debuted three days earlier in Portland, Maine, and the version at the first night of the Garden was only the third ever. Nearly two years into the Reagan administration, it was the Grateful Dead’s most political song, at least in the eyes of its lyricist. Our roving time traveler David Gans interviewed Barlow about it in January 1986, part of David’s wonderful book Conversations with the Dead.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [1/10/86]: We're not real polemical, but every once in a while I'll get on a crank. I decided that I was going to ask the Grateful Dead to do a political song, which I'd never done before and never had any desire to do. What the Grateful Dead does is work on consciousness, which is the best way to approach politics anyway — you change consciousness, and politics will take care of itself. But it seemed like there was a pressing need for everybody to have an anthem all of a sudden, and there still is. We have to be thinking about these things, and I felt like we had to say something very direct and strong. But it took a while before we found something that had the right tone.
AUDIO: “Throwing Stones” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/20/82] (2:02-2:09) - [dead.net]
JESSE: It was a new thing in the Grateful Dead catalog however you sliced it. It even had a little jam where Garcia got to Garcia.
AUDIO: “Throwing Stones” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/20/82] (3:28-3:58) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Five years later, it would follow “Touch of Grey” onto MTV as the Dead’s second video, though with perhaps a little less success. At the Garden in ‘82, the Dead were very much still figuring out what to do with it.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Would it come out of “Space”; would it be a song that would go into “Drums”; is it going to be an end-of-the-first-set song leading into “[Keep Your] Day Job?”
JESSE: On this first night at the Garden, it would land in one of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s three new songs.
AUDIO: “Keep Your Day Job” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/20/82] (0:00:0:25) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Aha, the notorious “Keep Your Day Job.” Shaugn O’Donnell.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: I remember being highly offended by that “Day Job” in real time as it happened. [laughs]
AUDIO: “Keep Your Day Job” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/20/82] (0:27-0:57) - [dead.net]
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: It felt literally offensive, because I was doing exactly the opposite and largely motivated by them. I tried to go to college for two seconds right out of high school in fall ‘81 — that didn't take, even though it was pharmacy school, I left. I was just playing guitar, teaching guitar lessons, playing in bands. It was all about not keeping the day job as much as possible.
JESSE: If Jerry Garcia was keeping up with the Church of the SubGenius’s Stark Fist of Removal newsletter, it seems like Robert Hunter wasn’t. It’s an unusually ‘80s attitude for a Dead tune to take, and at a distance I have to hope that the drop-outs in the Dead were being a bit ironic. “Keep Your Day Job” was anti-Slack. The song stayed in the band’s repertoire for less than four years, one of the few Garcia/Hunter originals never released on an official Dead album, only making it into the properly documented canon in 1996 with the issuing of Dick’s Picks 6. This box set nearly doubles the amount of officially released versions of “Day Job.” In his lyrics collection, A Box of Rain, Hunter noted of “Keep Your Day Job,” “This song was dropped from the Grateful Dead repertoire at the request of fans. Seriously.”
AUDIO: “Keep Your Day Job” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (2:15-2:36) - [dead.net]
JESSE: It’s not thaaat bad. But it was time for the jams.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (0:52-1:17) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The 1982 model of “Scarlet Begonias,” about a dozen bpm faster than the classic 1977 versions. You can hear some of that Garcia/Mydland bromance unfolding during this semi-unison segment as the band shimmers from “Scarlet Begonias” into “Fire On the Mountain.”
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/20/82] (11:17-11:44) - [dead.net]
JESSE: For Bob Weir’s first slot in the second set, he called another tune that was new to the Dead’s live repertoire since their last time at the Garden.
AUDIO: “Man Smart, Woman Smarter” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/20/82] (0:43-1:13) [dead.net]
JESSE: Certainly can’t argue with the message anyway. Most likely, the song was written in the late 1930s by Norman Span, the Trinidadian calypso singer known as King Radio.
AUDIO: “Man Smart, Woman Smarter” [King Radio, Man Smart, Woman Smarter] (0:35-0:56) - [Spotify]
JESSE: But it was Harry Belafonte that added the familiar chorus and popularized the song in the States in the ‘50s. In every issue, the Dead zine MIKEL featured one of their cover songs, and “Man Smart (Woman Smarter)” was tackled in issue #1, distributed over summer tour. “There’s a good version on Belafonte at Carnegie Hall,” MIKEL notes, and helpfully cites the catalog number.
AUDIO: “Man Smart (Woman Smarter)” [Harry Belafonte, Calypso] (0:41-0:53) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Thanks as always to Alex Allan’s thorough song histories at Whitegum.com. In terms of jam highlights, the first night at the Garden in ‘82 also has another piece that had returned to the Dead’s repertoire in 1982.
AUDIO: “Spanish Jam” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/20/82] (0:20-0:44) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The Spanish Jam was a motif that stretched back to the primal Dead era, played often in early 1968 and only really part of the Dead’s vocabulary again in 1973 and 1974. As multiple band members noted over the years, it rooted on the great Miles Davis/Gil Evans collaboration, Sketches of Spain, released in 1960, and specifically a track titled “Solea.”
AUDIO: “Solea” [Miles Davis & Gil Evans, Sketches of Spain] (2:10-2:35) - [Spotify]
JESSE: We’ve linked to the Grateful Dead Guide’s excellent piece on the origins and evolution of the Spanish Jam. The Spanish Jam reemerged in May 1981, and began its second extended life with the band. I love how articulated and deconstructed and weird it got in this era while still retaining its triumphant feel.
AUDIO: “Spanish Jam” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/20/82] (1:45-2:15) - [dead.net]
JESSE: For the night’s encore, the Dead dropped another brand new song. It was the first time most people in Madison Square Garden heard what would become the Dead’s only top 10 hit. For most other acts, it was a song that would result in them headlining venues like… Madison Square Garden.
AUDIO: “Touch of Grey” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/20/82] (0:00-0:31) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Lyricist Robert Hunter, as always, would be fine with any interpretation of “Touch of Grey,” but years later, he told Rolling Stone’s David Browne about the song’s origins. “I’ll give you the blistering truth about it,” he said. “A friend brought over a hunk of very good cocaine. I stayed up all night. And at dawn I wrote that song. That was the last time I ever used cocaine. Nor had I used it for many years before that. Now I listen to it and it’s that attitude you get when you’ve been up all night speeding and you’re absolutely the dregs. I think I got it down in that song.” Hunter had his own version of the song that he debuted in the summer of 1980.
AUDIO: “Touch of Grey” [Robert Hunter, 8/21/80] (2:45-3:10)
JESSE: And, of course, Jerry Garcia earned his co-writing credit with the irresistible chorus, with its space for a neat guitar figure.
AUDIO: “Touch of Grey” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/20/82] (3:41-4:00) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Though it would be the song that sent the Dead into the mainstream for real, for now, it was for heads only. The Dead scene was still pretty low-key, despite the band selling out multiple nights at Madison Square Garden. Johnny Dwork.
JOHNNY DWORK: And then, I should say, that when that when you were done with a Dead show at Madison Square Garden, naturally, you'd have the munchies. There were a couple of places in New York that were infamous for post-Madison Square Garden food adventures. One of them was Wo Hop noodle shop — I think it was on Mott Street in Chinatown. They were open late into the night, and it was this greasy wok place that you had to walk downstairs into the basement to. But they stayed open late, and they had really really, really great chow fun. Sure enough, you'd take a taxi from Madison Square Garden down to Chinatown, and you would be completely surrounded by Dead Heads. I remember being amazed because the first time that I went there after a Madison Square Garden show, Mickey Hart is sitting there. It was the sort of seating that’s family-style, where the seats are not separated — everybody sort of sits together. So you might have… there was just as good a chance that you'd be seated right next to Mickey Hart as not. Nobody made a big deal of it, and everybody was high, and everybody was munching out on really good greasy Chinese food. And I think to this day, Wo Hop still is a thing.
September 21st
JESSE: Sadly, as of the Pandemic, Wo Hop now closes at 10pm on weekends. As Johnny was sleeping off his Wo Hop bender, another head was slugging it through his day job.
JOHNNY DWORK: There's one guy who made that pilgrimage to see the Madison Square Garden shows who deserves a place in the pantheon of heroic Dead Head characters. This guy's name is Richard Petlock. By day, Rich Petlock was a geeky, nerdy certified public accountant who crunched numbers for corporations in the Springfield, Massachusetts area, and he had a super mundane job of doing bookkeeping for big corporations. He put on his suit and tie and his nerdy glasses, and he had this sort of nerdy haircut at the time. He'd show up for this mundane job, day in and day out. But at night, he was like Clark Kent: off would come his suit and the tie, and he was one of the most devoted Dead Heads in Grateful Dead history, because he would get in his car at five o'clock and he would tear us down to the city and he would catch every show at Madison Square Garden. Incredibly, when they went off stage after the second set, he skipped the Encore so he could get out of Dodge quick. And he would drive the two-and-a-half hours back to western Mass where he would get four or five hours of sleep. Then he would go to work at, whatever, 7:00 AM again, in the suit and the tie, and then he would head right back to New York City for the show that next night. He did this for over a decade — I've never known anybody who was more committed to the scene, then Richard Petlock.
JESSE: Jeff Pincus.
JEFF PINCUS: September 21st, 1982. A week before my 17th birthday, I'd seen the Dead four times prior to the Garden show: three times at the Nassau Coliseum, once at Radio City Music Hall. Over the summer I read The Doors of Perception and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and tried LSD for the first time. It was a revelation. It was clear that there was much more going on than I had been told at home or school. I got tickets for the second night of the Garden, and my friend Ellen and I decided that, now that we had lost our psychedelic virginity, the next natural step was to go see the band live, take some acid and see what that was like. We took the train into the city from Long Island. When we arrived at Penn Station, the streets were filled with heads: drumming, incense, tie-dye. We dropped a full hit of the Pharaoh blotter before we went in.
JESSE: In fact, if you’d made it over to Times Square in this era, eight blocks to the north, then at the height of its porn era, you might’ve come across a few adult bookstores that also sold LSD blotter, fresh from Dead tour. A brief turf war erupted. I tell the story in my book, Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America. Charlie Miller.
CHARLIE MILLER: The next night, me and my friend were meeting at the Garden, we have seats next to each other. He was the guy I did the tour with, spring tour in ‘82. And for 9/21/82, I picked up a couple of different blotters on the train and he picked up a couple of different blotters. So, between us, we had all different kinds, and we just switched. I literally ate like four or five different kinds of blotter that night and just had the best, best time ever.
JESSE: Promoter John Scher gave the band an introduction. And Dan Healy gave John Scher some special effects.
JOHN SCHER [9/21/82]: Good evening. On keyboard, Brent Mydland. On drums, Mickey Hart. On drums, Bill Kreutzmann. On bass, Phil Lesh. On rhythm guitar, Bob Weir. On lead guitar, Jerry Garcia. Please welcome back to New York, the Grateful Dead!
JEFF PINCUS: The band took the stage and the crowd roared. They opened the set with “Playing in the Band,” right as we began our lysergic lift off — going for several hours on a psychic musical adventure to places both beautiful and frightening.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (0:25-0:54) - [dead.net]
JESSE: A “Playing in the Band” show opener was unusual enough. In its early days, the song had mainly been a first set closer, but then moved mainly to the core of the second set jam suites. By 1981, the band was occasionally using it to open second sets and jump right into the deep end. And at the US Festival, it moved to the very top of the show. A few days before the Garden, in Maryland, they’d opened with “Playing” and wound its theme throughout the show. On the second night at the Garden, as at Landover, it linked into a song not heard on the East Coast for a half-dozen years.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (10:13-10:38) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Crazy Fingers” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (0:00-0:17) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Recorded for 1975’s Blues For Allah, the delicate “Crazy Fingers” had only survived a few tours into the Dead’s 1976 return, disappearing that fall until the band revived it in Ventura earlier in the summer of ‘82. If it wasn’t quite as nuanced as the early versions, it still brought the Dead to a musical space they didn’t really access otherwise, maybe somewhere between the Spanish Jam and a moody “Other One” prelude.
AUDIO: “Crazy Fingers” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (1:03-1:33) - [dead.net]
JESSE: But it wasn’t just a linkage to “Crazy Fingers.” Weir kept the ball in the air, moving the band into “Me and My Uncle,” a vague echo of some of the early ‘70s segues from psychedelic space into cowboy territory.
AUDIO: “Crazy Fingers” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (9:54-10:04) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Me and My Uncle” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (0:00-0:29) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The first set also included one more new song since the last time through.
AUDIO: “West L.A. Fadeaway” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (0:34-1:03) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Like “Touch of Grey” and “Throwing Stones,” it would take another five years for the Dead to properly release “West L.A. Fadeaway,” another piece of new material for the tape traders to circulate. I hear the blues sleaze as being in an adjacent neighborhood to the grotty grittiness of Shakedown Street, maybe somewhere around the corner from the scene you see on the front cover of that album. And like “Touch of Grey,” Hunter had played it in his solo sets before Garcia adapted it for Dead use. This is from November 18th, 1981 in Washington DC.
AUDIO: “West L.A. Fadeaway” [Robert Hunter, 11/18/81] (1:46-2:16)
JESSE: The early Dead versions had some lyrics that didn’t survive into the final draft.
AUDIO: “West L.A. Fadeaway” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (6:03-6:33) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Something I love in this era is that the band was still playing some of their new songs nearly every night, still deeply excited about them and trying to break them in. After the third-ever version “Touch of Grey” had been an encore the previous evening, the fourth-ever version opened the second set.
AUDIO: “Touch of Grey” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (0:13-0:34) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Marty Meyer, no relation to John, was keeping a setlist that night.
MARTY MEYER: “Touch of Grey,” “Woman Smarter” and “Throwing Stones” are all in there. I was an avid sort of show list maker — I'm a baseball fan, and I always make an analogy between baseball and the Grateful Dead, which is you would get into it and it's almost like a box score, having the setlists, knowing the setlists for the last 12 months or whatever, and then trying to use that to predict the future. So we would always be doing that, and always keeping our lists.
JESSE: We’ll direct you to David Gans’s great essay, “Grateful Dead Concerts Are Like Baseball Games.” Marty caught two of the first four versions. There’s an alternate lyric in these early takes that he took a bit personally.
AUDIO: “Touch of Grey” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (1:06-1:16) - [dead.net]
MARTY MEYER: Definitely was my first time seeing “Touch of Grey.” We always thought it was hilarious. Like, during, you know, the “Touch of Grey”s in ‘82, if you listen to those on the MSG shows, one of the lines is: “So you got your list out — say your piece and piss off.” We always thought maybe that was like, We don’t care about your lists or whatever, we’re gonna play what we want to play and you should enjoy it. But was that us internalizing?
JESSE: Could be. Phil Lesh once told David Gans that the line referred to an intervention the band held with Garcia in Barcelona in late October 1981. Robert Hunter had already written the lyric by then, so perhaps Phil was internalizing too, or maybe remembering an earlier intervention. With Grateful Dead lyrics, everybody’s always right, which is maybe why the final choruses of this song become more inclusive.
AUDIO: “Touch of Grey” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (5:38-5:54) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The second set jam suite leads off with Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow’s “Estimated Prophet,” finding a very nice place.
AUDIO: “Estimated Prophet” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (12:06-12:35) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Charlie Miller.
CHARLIE MILLER: In the second set, during “He's Gone,” somebody sent off an M-80, and the show never recovered. They were doing the “Nothing's gonna bring him back,” and then you hear boom, and the show just lost that whole intense energy thing.
AUDIO: “He’s Gone” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (8:09-8:31) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Well that’s just, like, your opinion, man. The jam continued on for more minutes with a coda before landing almost gently in “Drums/Space.” Whether or not the show is an all-timer, there were still some surprises.
AUDIO: “Space” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (8:07-8:37) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Throwing Stones” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (0:00-0:13) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Bob Minkin.
BOB MINKIN: “Throwing Stones,” coming out of “Drums” into “Throwing Stones,” it should have been like a “Morning Dew” or something. But then wait, they did “Black Peter” after “Not Fade Away”?
JESSE: And after the third “Throwing Stones” appeared in the first set the night before and here out of “Space.” But what was more notable was where it was going.
CHARLIE MILLER: My friend had binoculars, and I was watching Bobby with “Throwing
Stones,” and they got to the “Picture a bright blue ball just spinning, spinning free.” Normally, for the past few nights, they had either got into “Day Job” or “Deal” or something else right there. Bobby looked at Jerry, and he looked like he kind of just shrugs his shoulders and just started clapping, “Ashes, ashes, all fall down.” They just went into it, like they weren’t sure about it, and they just went into it. And they dropped into “Not Fade Away” from that.
AUDIO: “Throwing Stones” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (5:36-6:08) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Not Fade Away” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (0:00-0:27) - [dead.net]
JESSE: It was the song’s first of many singalong outros. Implicit behind the groove of “Throwing Stones” is a somewhat hidden iteration of the clave rhythm known as the Bo Diddley beat. It’s never quite stated directly but tonight Weir states the quiet groove out loud.
CHARLIE MILLER: And at the moment, that was the most amazing thing. Just to add this bam, right into “Not Fade Away.” I was like, Oh my gosh, this is the best thing ever.
AUDIO: “Not Fade Away” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (0:40-0:58) - [dead.net]
CHARLIE MILLER: But I didn't know I was gonna see like one out of every other show for the next, what, 13 years?
JESSE: The “Throwing Stones”/”Not Fade Away” transition became one of the most repeated moves in the next years. Jeff Pincus.
JEFF PINCUS: I remember the sweet sadness of “High Time” and the rollicking “Good Lovin’” that helped bring us back down to earth. The whole experience felt initiatory — not always pleasant, but profound.
AUDIO: “Good Lovin’” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (1:10-1:34) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The “U.S. Blues” encore by itself was nothing new or probably that exciting for most Dead Heads, one of the most common encores since its debut in 1974. But it wasn’t often that the chorus was so literally topical. It was September 21st. The next day was the autumn equinox.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (4:23-4:46) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Jeff Pincus navigated himself back to the Long Island Railroad and eventually made it home.
JEFF PINCUS: My father was waiting up for me when I got home. “How was the concert?” he asked. “Uh, great,” I murmured, as I made a beeline to my room. Life was never the same. Thank goodness.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (4:46-4:56) - [dead.net]