Grateful Dead

Steal Your Face 50, Part 2 supplementary notes

by Jesse Jarnow

As the Grateful Dead put the final touches on Steal Your Face, upheaval at Grateful Dead Records resulted in deposed label president Ron Rakow walking away with $225,000 he believed was owed to him. The turbulence is covered in Dennis McNally’s official biography, A Long Strange Trip.

Before Rakow’s departure, he and Garcia had been working on acquiring the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Sirens of Titan, which Garcia successfully did several years later. Earlier, they’d tried to acquire Cat’s Cradle, but the film rights had already been sold. The late Dennis Rothermel wrote about the full saga of Garcia and Sirens of Titan. 

In 1976, Phil Lesh played in the briefly-lived side jam that went by the varying names Tooloos, Touloos Ta Truck, Too Loose Ta Truck, and other variations, a Marin supergroup that also included Sons of Champlin guitarist Terry Haggerty and veteran keyboardist John Allair. Corry Arnold recently pieced together their chronology. Terry Haggerty continues to gig regularly as well as grow his own strain of Hagalicious marijuana.

Thanks to Steve Brown of Grateful Dead Records, legendary Dead freak photographer Ed Perlstein was invited to the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco to photograph one of the Dead’s rehearsals for their 1976 return to the road. Thanks to his images, we can say that the video often labeled  “July 12, 1976” soundcheck is actually from the rehearsals, which featured Mickey Hart’s second percussion kit to the left of Billy Kreutzmann, and did not yet include the mirrored Eye of Horus kick-drum heads that were used when the tour opened in early June.