Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 11, Episode 3
Enjoying the Ride - Bay Area, Part 1
Archival interviews:
- Gilbert Baker, In the Life, 2009.
- Gilbert Baker, by Cleve Jones, GLBT Museum/Gilbert Baker Foundation, 2012.
- Les Earnest, by Jesse Jarnow, Heads, 2013.
- Jerry Garcia & Mountain Girl, by Dennis McNally, Jerry On Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews, 1986.
- Doug Oade, by Jesse Jarnow, Heads, 2013.
- Eric Schwartz, by Jesse Jarnow, Heads, 2013.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Enjoying the Ride, 5/13/78] (0:29-0:52) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Sixty years of the Grateful Dead can be sliced a lot of ways. Thirty years of Grateful Dead music, and thirty years since the departure of Jerry Garcia. Six decades since the very first Warlocks show, which may or may not have taken place at a pizza parlor, a topic we’ll get to. Somewhere close to 2,400 live performances through 1995, by JerryBase’s last count. But a number that’s impossible to pinpoint is the amount of highway miles logged by Dead Heads on tour, which is—very loosely—our topic for most of this Deadcast season. And, more specifically, the enormous new box set, Enjoying the Ride.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Enjoying the Ride, 5/13/78] (0:58-1:16) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Please welcome back, your friend and mine, Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: We never really like to repeat ourselves. We never want to say, “Well, that worked. Let's do it again.” We don't work that way. Just like the Grateful Dead — it's like when they would hit upon a certain riff, they didn't play that same thing the next night. That was in the rearview mirror, and they’re moving forward. And so it's the same sort of thing, where, with every box set, we aim to be very different.
JESSE: Unless otherwise noted, the music we’re hearing today is from the new box. This “Truckin’” is from the Philadelphia Spectrum, May 13th, 1978.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Enjoying the Ride, 5/13/78] (1:20-1:34) - [dead.net]
DAVID LEMIEUX: We've done tours; we've done runs of shows; we've done cities — St Louis — over the years. We've done the Pacific Northwest. So I started thinking about the important places the Grateful Dead played — important, I think, to them, certainly to Dead Heads. And I started thinking of our journey as Dead Heads, seeing the band on the road, the places that we talked about as destinations. Some of them are the places you'd expect: the Greek [Theatre], the Frost [Amphitheater], Winterland, places like that. And then there are the places where you might not expect. Why in East Troy, Wisconsin? Why in Noblesville, Indiana? Why in places like Hartford, Connecticut? Why did they play so often, and why did they play so darn well? I don't have an answer for those things.
JESSE: The story of the Dead and the Heads on tour is another way to look at the story of the Dead, and—with shows from 1969 through 1994—so is Enjoying the Ride.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It's three CDs from each of these 20 venues, coming to 60 CDs. And in a couple of cases where a complete Dead show from one of those venues came to two CDs, we rounded it out with a third disc of music from the same venue from a different year. So it's really a visit to each of these places, and they're all over the country. Several are in the Bay Area — there are a couple from San Francisco, a couple from Oakland. So the Bay Area gets four, as it probably should be, of the venues. New York City gets one, Boston gets two.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Enjoying the Ride, 5/13/78] (2:32-2:57) - [dead.net]
DAVID LEMIEUX: We wanted to make sure that there were Dead shows in here from all eras. And we do: we've got late ‘60s through all of the ‘70s, through the ‘80s and into the ‘90s. We've got a few releases from the ‘90s in here: from ‘91, ‘93, ‘94. That’s kind of how we did it, and it really ultimately came down to, once we had chosen those venues, great music. Period.
JESSE: So, we’re going on tour with Enjoying the Ride, more or less, hopping across the regions that are celebrated on the box. We have a triple-mission in these episodes, which will take us in a few directions at the same time — we want to talk about the shows on the new box set, but also the venues themselves and how they related to the Dead and the Heads, a sort of long-view travel guide to Dead tour. In doing so, we’re also going to be loosely moving through Grateful Dead history at a few different scales. But any history of the Grateful Dead starts on the West Coast, and we begin our tour leg today with a visit to the cradle of the Grateful Dead.
Frost Amphitheatre [8/20/83]
AUDIO: “Bird Song” [Enjoying the Ride, 8/20/83] (0:40-1:01) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That was the Dead at the Frost Amphitheatre on August 20th, 1983, just a short walk from where Robert Hunter once worked at St. Michael’s Alley in downtown Palo Alto 20 years earlier, where an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem hung on the wall and provided the inspiration for “Bird Song”’s first line. Nestled on the Stanford campus, the Frost Amphitheatre was one of the favorite venues of both Dead and Heads during the 1980s. Like all of the band’s shows at the Frost, the two 1983 gigs took place in the afternoon.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The second show is pretty good; the first set's okay. The first night though, they really dug in, and it just had that Frost vibe. It's the band having fun, playing well. It's got a very distinct energy. As Jerry once said about Madison Square Garden, “That place is juiced.” The Frost is not that — it's the picnic back home.
JESSE: Please welcome, Golden Road co-founder Blair Jackson.
BLAIR JACKSON: The early ‘80s were so interesting out here, because we suddenly got these fantastic venues where they would play every year. They played the Greek every year, they played Frost every year, they played Ventura every year. Then, a little later, they added Cal Expo. They were still playing places like the Berkeley Community Theater. They played the Marin Civic Center. So there are all these smallish, all really fantastically interesting, venues that they were playing, and you could see them 20 or 30 times a year.
JESSE: The Frost ‘83 tapes on the new box set come from Dan Healy’s soundboard recordings, which were mixed live with a generous amount of sound from ambient audience microphones.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Enjoying the Ride, 8/20/83] (1:51-2:05) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The Frost opened in 1937, but had a checkered relationship with rock music for a while. The Dead were supposed to play there in September 1971, but the venue banned rock music, so naturally Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders played there not long thereafter on a jazz-leaning bill. But it took until the ‘80s for the Dead to get there.
BLAIR JACKSON: It seemed somewhat far away from the East Bay, but those first two shows in ‘82 it was practically a religious experience just being there. It just seemed like the perfect place for an outdoor Grateful Dead show. The weather was fantastic that weekend. It couldn't have been better. It had a very tiny stage, compared to a lot of venues. It was just kind of this small cement thing down at the bottom of the bowl, which was tree-shaded and [had] steps with grass and all that stuff.
JESSE: Publications like The Golden Road, launched in 1984, helped spread the legend of the Frost, and rightly so. It was chill.
BLAIR JACKSON: Essentially, you could park anywhere. I mean, you could just pull your car over and park in a eucalyptus grove and stuff like that. And through the years that they said, “No, no, you can't do that anymore.”
JESSE: Please welcome back our friend Mr. Completely, aka Tyler Roy-Hart, who you may remember levitating over the Miami Arena in our Infrared Roses episode. He’ll be our third eye on the ground for a lot of this season. He made it to the Frost in ‘88.
TYLER ROY-HART: I got to the next-to-last Frost shows, not the very final ones. I grew up on and around college campuses, so that part was familiar to me. But Stanford is so different — it's all that kind of Spanish-style architecture on the way in. And so it was both familiar and unfamiliar, kind of exotic. Any place with trees is better than any place without trees. That's just a kind of a truism for me.
JESSE: An important factor about the Frost shows is that they took place in the afternoon.
TYLER ROY-HART: There were a couple of guys who had graduated from high school a couple years ahead of me—but from my high school—who had been to all the big West Coast Dead show venues and had talked about what they were and knew all the lore. I had heard that it was the family venue, in the small-f family sense. Like if you're a Bay Area parent Dead Head, and you're going to bring your kids to a show — that's the I think the way I heard it described, it was more like being at a Jerry [Garcia] Band show than a Dead show.
JESSE: The scene matched the lore.
TYLER ROY-HART: Getting in wasn't that bad. It wasn't insane outside, like it was at the Greek. The entry line and the whole kind of freak out about it: ‘Am I gonna get in early enough to get a decent seat? Ahh!’
JESSE: Inside, the vibe was impeccable.
TYLER ROY-HART: I walked in and I realized: Oh, I don't want to be pushy at all here. The whole East Coast going-to-shows thing — if you were on the floor, there was kind of an “every man for himself” thing going on. I just wanted to be there, and I was fine with just sort of being around the periphery, and in the back.
JESSE: The venue has changed a bit since the Dead played there; there’s now a roof above the stage. I’ve only been to the Frost once, more recently. But everything Mr. Completely just said matches up completely to my extremely limited sample size — it’s like a culture that’s been imprinted on the venue.
AUDIO: “They Love Each Other” [Enjoying the Ride, 8/20/83] (4:19-4:37) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The Frost was not only the hometown venue for the Dead, but for Dead Heads at Stanford, including the not insignificant amount of Dead freak computer scientists at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s and 1980s, a topic we got into in our “Long Strange Tech” episodes (part 1, part 2), as well as in my book Heads. One of the people I interviewed in 2013 was lab director Les Earnest, who sadly passed away last summer.
LES EARNEST [2013]: We had some straight folks in the lab, but more hippies. I was generally pretty straight. I loosened up after coming here.
JESSE: As lab director at SAIL, Les was the inventor of the online status update, the digital tool that eventually morphed into contemporary social media, so thanks, Les. Kinda. There were lots of Dead freaks at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab.
LES EARNEST [2013]: One of our staff members planted marijuana in the septic tank outflow area, and then came to me to complain that the deer were eating it all. I said, “I'm sorry, I don't think I can do much about that.”
JESSE: Going to see the Dead at the Frost was a tradition among the Stanford computer scientists. Before we spoke, Les told me he didn’t consider himself a very serious Dead Head. But he still saw them far more than the average American citizen.
LES EARNEST [2013]: Oh, at least one [show] a year, maybe two, something like that. The Frost Amphitheatre things, of course, you sort of bring a blanket, stretch out, enjoy. It was very mellow and enjoyable. People were smoking all around you.
JESSE: Steve Jobs and other Silicon Valley heads could sometimes be spotted there. Tapers loved the Frost, too. I spoke with the legendary Doug Oade when researching my book Heads, and he brought it up.
DOUG OADE [2013]: The environment within which the music occurred is, of course, an important thing, and that would determine our microphone selection: what microphones were used, what pickup patterns. Outdoors was always my favorite. The Frost Amphitheatre, Palo Alto — just unbelievable acoustics there. It's the most relaxed, open and natural-sounding theater I've ever been in.
JESSE: The all-afternoon shows had a nice bonus effect. Blair Jackson.
BLAIR JACKSON: One of the other great things about the Frost that somebody should say is — on a beautiful day, at the end of the show, at 5 o'clock or 6 o'clock, there's no place better than the Stanford campus, which is one of the most beautiful college campuses in the world. And so you’d see all these heads, just kind of wandering around. It was just fantastic. There's palm trees and the golden architecture of these buildings, the nice stone, the warmth in the late afternoon — it's just idyllic. And so that was a bonus, somewhere to hang out when you're high after the show before you want to go home.
JESSE: Not only was the Frost idyllic, but it was an unquestionably the hometown venue for the Dead, and—since it’s the Dead’s 60th anniversary and all—we’re going to use that to use this stopover at Stanford for a quick detour into Dead history. What’s a Dead tour without detours, anyway?
Magoo’s Interlude
AUDIO: “Memphis” [Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, s/t] (0:14-0:37)
JESSE: That was Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, recorded at the Top of the Tangent in 1964, about a 20-minute walk from the Frost Amphitheatre, more or less across the street from the edge of the campus. We got incredibly detailed about the pre-Dead years in our two recent episodes about Robert Hunter’s The Silver Snarling Trumpet (part 1, part 2) as well as our episode a few years back, Jerry Garcia: American Folkie. Garcia played at the Tangent with virtually all of his early acoustic projects. Here he is with his then-wife Sara Ruppenthal in May 1963, from Before the Dead.
AUDIO: “Deep Elem Blues” [Jerry & Sara, Before the Dead, 5/4/63] (0:22-0:41) - [Spotify]
JESSE: The legend of the Dead, of course, is that they morphed from a jug band to the Warlocks and played their first show at Magoo’s Pizza in May 1965, less than three miles west of the Frost. But there are some other perspectives on that. Did you think the Deadcast was going to let the 60th anniversary pass without getting into some obscure Warlocks history? Billy Kreutzmann’s memoir, Deal, swears that the first show took place on April 1st, 1965 at the Menlo School in Atherton, a short walk from Magoo’s.
CONNIE MOSLEY: I don't know if I could put that in that order at all. It came after, in my opinion.
JESSE: We are so honored today to welcome to the Deadcast, Connie Bonner Mosley. Along with her buddy Sue Swanson, Connie was one of the band’s first two fans. She was a Warlocks maniac, and went back even further than that, first making friends with Bobby Weir when he was just a young folkie.
CONNIE MOSLEY: He would come to Palo Alto High School and sit on the lawn at lunchtime with his best friend at the time, Dave Swank, who went to Palo Alto High School. And so Weir would show up, and they would sit and play their guitars at lunch. And that's what I remember, them as a duo. Often, Joan Baez would do that. She would have been a Palo Alto high school graduate.
AUDIO: “I Know You Rider” [Joan Baez, s/t] (0:27-0:55) - [Spotify]
CONNIE MOSLEY: When the Beatles came into our lives, I went straight down to Guitars Unlimited and got to know the owners and rented a guitar. I already knew Bob Weir, and I said I wanted him to teach me Beatles songs. Which he couldn't do — he said they were too hard! And he didn't know how to play ‘em yet. But he taught me “Long Black Veil,” and how to blow smoke rings across the room, because he was one of the best smoke-ring-blowers ever.
AUDIO: “Long Black Veil” [Jerry & Sara, Before the Dead, 5/4/63] (1:56-2:15) - [Spotify]
CONNIE MOSLEY: When I walked out of the cubicle that Weir had filled with smoke, and [where he’d] taught me “Long Black Veil,” Jerry was standing there with Pigpen. And that was my first time meeting Jerry. Pig had been in my high school, so I had seen him in the hallway. He looked exactly like he always did when he walked into Palo Alto High School: vest, buttons, cap. The last time I saw him walking down the hallway of the esteemed Palo Alto High School—next door to Stanford University, where all the student population were sons and daughters of the professors—he came walking down, and he had a girl on each arm. We don't know where he found them. He might have been drinking, might not. But that was the last time I saw him in high school.
AUDIO: “The Rub” [Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, s/t] (0:05-0:19)
CONNIE MOSLEY: I also saw them as Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. This was a big transition, really. Jerry was so deep into bluegrass, and he was so good at it, really articulate at it. And rock and roll just set him free. It was really fun. But I have to give hats off to [Bill] Kreutzmann for that, because he knew how to drive a rock and roll song.
JESSE: And in 1965, as much or more than the founding members of the Warlocks, Connie knew rock and roll.
CONNIE MOSLEY: It's Stanford, which is right across the street from Palo Alto High School, where Billy Kreutzmann’s band played on Friday nights in the freshman dorms. That was fun, because the Palo Alto High School girls would go and dance with the freshmen boys. It would be like doing the Twist, doing the Swim, doing the Monkey — all those popular dance songs, and Kreutzmann had ‘em down.
JESSE: That could’ve been Jay Price and the Legends, an R&B group teenage Kreutzmann drummed with, or maybe the Twilights, or possibly the Epic Instrumental Group, all bands young Billy Kreutzmann was involved with, or maybe even Troy Weidenheimer’s Zodiacs.
CONNIE MOSLEY: He would play sometimes at lunchtime out in the Palo Alto High School amphitheater, the band would play. But that's what their thing was, and they were tight and Billy could drum.
JESSE: Connie was at many of the Warlocks’ earliest practices.
CONNIE MOSLEY: They didn't want to do what Kreutzmann’s band was doing. They wanted to play Rolling Stones, [like] “It's All Over Now.” And I remember “Off the Hook,” because Mick Jagger used to do this thing. When he's saying, “It's off the hook,” he would take his right hand and make this gesture like he was picking up a phone receiver.
AUDIO: “Off the Hook” [The Rolling Stones, The TAMI Show] (0:24-0:37)
CONNIE MOSLEY: We showed that to Jerry, and he started doing that. It just cracked us up. He loved to have fun — that was definitely his number one plan, is Have Fun. And so he would mimic Jagger’s “Off the Hook” movement, he did it with his arm.
AUDIO: “Off the Hook” [The Rolling Stones, The TAMI Show] (0:43-0:50)
CONNIE MOSLEY: I know they did a Lovin’ Spoonful song, “What a day for a daydream…”
AUDIO: “Daydream” [The Lovin’ Spoonful, The Ed Sullivan Show, 3/19/67] (0:05-0:22)
JESSE: The Warlocks debuted sometime in the spring of 1965. Connie was at the very first Warlocks show at Magoo’s Pizza in downtown Menlo Park, which we will continue to date as Wednesday, May 5th, 1965.
CONNIE MOSLEY: They had them up against the front window. So, looking towards the front window, I just remember Jerry sitting on a stool and kind of facing Weir, and not looking at the audience, or people eating pizza. Whatever you want to call it. And afterwards, I said, “Jerry, you need to get rid of that stool and stand up. You play rock and roll. You can't play rock and roll sitting down and looking at the drummer.” And so he got rid of the stool.
JESSE: Lately, the storefront that housed Magoo’s has reopened as a bar called Loretta. Wednesdays are once again Warlocks nights. We have another good reason to confirm that Magoo’s was the Warlocks’ first show, because we spoke to someone who preferred a different local pizza spot.
RON PIETROWSKI: I didn't care for Magoo’s. There was a round table nearby, and that was my go-to pizza at that time and place.
JESSE: Ron Pietrowski was a class mate with a future Warlock, having briefly attended the Menlo School with Bobby Weir, as well as future Kingfish member Matt Kelly, before Weir’s transfer to Menlo-Atherton, where he decidedly didn’t finish his high school career.
RON PIETROWSKI: Matt Kelly and I were classmates. We all played football — C-team, below junior varsity. Bob was a lineman.
JESSE: By the spring of 1965, Ron had dropped out and back into Menlo School.
RON PIETROWSKI: I dropped out and went back my senior year.
JESSE: This puts us square in the spring of 1965.
RON PIETROWSKI: I was studying for final exams in the library and a friend of mine said that Bob Weir was in a band called the Warlocks, and they were going to be playing at the Student Union that night. And I thought, Oh, that's cool.
JESSE: From here, we can date it a little more.
RON PIETROWSKI: I was studying for finals, and graduation was June 3. So finals would have wrapped up probably by May 23rd, somewhere in there. I probably saw them as I was studying for those finals, and finals ran a whole week. So that would put it in the middle of May. It was probably a weekday, but it might have been a Friday.
JESSE: That year, it seemed like finals would’ve wrapped up on Friday, May 21st, so the gig would’ve been sometime that week, besides May 19th, when they were at Magoo’s. The next week, Phil Lesh would come down and see the band for the first time.
RON PIETROWSKI: So I walked over and they had already started playing, and the Student Union is very small, of course; I haven't been back there since that night. The front of the building is a row of these glass doors with push bars on them. You went in on the far right door, and the band was set up with their backs to the front of the door. All those doors, that's where they set up. There was no stage or risers or anything — they were just standing on the floor, wires on the floor and everything. And there were probably 35 to 45 people there, maybe 50 max. It wasn't real loud because it was real small. They were good, for what they were doing — which was R&B covers, radio hits.
AUDIO: “In the Midnight Hour” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 7/3/66] (0:00-0:28)
RON PIETROWSKI: About the only one I remember is “[In the] Midnight Hour.”
JESSE: That’s a version from about a year later, recorded at the Fillmore Auditorium, now on 30 Trips Around the Sun.
RON PIETROWSKI: I don't remember anybody in the band — I don't remember Bobby, I don't remember Jerry. I do remember Pigpen, because he sang most of the songs while I was there. I was there maybe 45 minutes, and he had this presence. It's hard to describe. He sounded like blues guys. He had this growl… it wasn’t really a gravelly growl, but it was a growl. I don't remember a keyboard at all, but when he was playing harmonica, he was kind of lurching around. He was like the lead man of the band.
JESSE: Connie Mosley was there, too.
CONNIE MOSLEY: It wasn't good. Wasn't any fun. It's a college prep [school] for… wealthy young people would come from Chile, Colombia, Egypt, Lebanon, Europe. They had money to send their boys, and — I'm only remembering boys.
RON PIETROWSKI: As I recall, there wasn't much dancing — people mostly standing around just watching them play.
JESSE: Another Menlo School student, though almost certainly gone by then, was Robby Kreiger, soon to co-found the Doors back in LA. The Menlo School didn’t transition into a coed school until 1979.
CONNIE MOSLEY: It just was uptight. Didn't feel very good to not have any girls there. But it could have been a matter of five days later they were at Magoo’s. I know Magoo’s was a big hit. Different vibe, totally.
JESSE: Generally, the Warlocks played Wednesday evenings at Magoo’s.
CONNIE MOSLEY: I remember kind of like a Saturday afternoon; they might have played a little earlier, because the sidewalk was packed with high school kids, teenagers, wherever they came from. And the neighboring shops shut it down: they called the cops, and they said, “You can't have all these people crowding the sidewalks and blocking our business.” They shut it down — so, that was the end of that. But they'd all be peering in the window, watching the band play, but they couldn't fit any more people in the pizza parlor. It was great. It was so much fun.
JESSE: During our Philcast earlier this season (part 1, part 2), we heard the story of how Phil came down to Magoo’s to see the Warlocks a few weeks after seeing the Stones at the Cow Palace, and came to replace Dana Morgan Jr. on bass, a move that got the band evicted from their rehearsal space at the music store that, at least according to public records, Dana Morgan Jr. actually co-owned with his father.
CONNIE MOSLEY: That was what we could do as friends, help them out. And also give them a place to rehearse: my parents’ living room, Sue's backyard. Wherever they needed a place they could rehearse. My parents were gone and weren’t coming home until the next day. Then my mom walked in the front door — and actually, Pigpen saw her coming out from the car with luggage and opened the door for her, because he's the kindest heart you’d ever meet. He helped my mom get the [bags]. My mom was totally enraptured by his help, and by what he was doing in her house. And he looked exactly the same. She loved him because… people loved Pig. He just had the biggest heart in the world, the biggest, kindest heart.
JESSE: Sue and Connie also became the band’s very first roadies.
CONNIE MOSLEY: They didn't have cars, except for Kreutzmann, who always had his own. He took his own drum kit. Weir turned 16 and his parents wouldn't let him drive. And then, three months later, I turned 16 and I could get my mom's car. And then a couple months after that, Sue turned 16, and she got a car for her birthday. So we’d just haul ‘em around. Somebody had to do it — they didn't have a ride anywhere! Hunter's car had broke down. They just didn't have any way to get around.
JESSE: The band got an upgrade.
CONNIE MOSLEY: Bob Matthews got the first sort of… all I can think of is what an old milk truck [looks like]. But when he got that, then — oh, well, we didn't have to borrow mom's car anymore.
JESSE: I could listen to Warlocks stories all day, and hopefully we’ll have more tales with Connie Bonner Mosley in the future. A few years later, she would co-found the band’s official fan club and she remains a hardcore Dead Head to this day. Ron Pietrowski never saw the Warlocks again, but he saw lots and lots of Grateful Dead shows.
RON PIETROWSKI: The Kaiser became a favorite. And then outdoor venues, the Greek and Frost. The shows at the Frost, they were big fun. Being on the Stanford campus, I don't know if they sold beer…
JESSE: These are all venues we’ll be talking about during these episodes. If you saw the Dead at any of them, you might’ve been shoulder to shoulder with some fans who’d seen the Warlocks.
RON PIETROWSKI: I was just a regular schmoe with a ticket.
JESSE: Though the band themselves left the area in early 1966, moving to LA with the Merry Pranksters, their shows at the Frost in the ‘80s reconnected them with their old stomping grounds in Palo Alto and Menlo Park. But by the end of the decade, with the success of “Touch of Grey,” the band had outgrown the place. Back over to Blair Jackson.
BLAIR JACKSON: In ‘87, just the scene outside was so big, there would be a couple of thousand people in the forests, around the eucalyptus groves, around the show, hanging out and trying to sell stuff or whatever. I wouldn't say it was a huge surprise when ‘89 became the last year, just because it was overpopulated outside.
JESSE: Nearby, Bill Graham was working on the problem and, in 1986, unveiled the solution, located an easy bike ride from downtown Palo Alto, or a not-always-so-easy drive from San Francisco. We bring you now to Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View in 1991.
Shoreline Amphitheatre [5/12/91]
AUDIO: “410. Help On the Way” [Enjoying the Ride, 5/12/91] (0:22-0:52)
JESSE: We’ll let a Dead Head TV report from 1988 be our local correspondent.
DEAD HEAD TV CORRESPONDENT [1988]: The Shoreline Amphitheatre was built by Bill Graham and the city of Mountain View with the support of private investors. The amphitheater holds over 22,000 people and features state-of-the-art video screen technology.
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Bill Graham, very famously, designed Shoreline with Dead Heads in mind, which is to say, the parking, the access to parking, the access to the venue, the concessions, all of the things that Dead Heads liked… which is to say, space, ease of getting places, kind security, blue coats of Bill Graham. And so, interestingly, the Dead were scheduled to open the place in ‘86, but Jerry, with his diabetic coma, canceled those shows. The opener ended up being Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Then finally, a year later, October of ‘87, the Dead were able to debut at Shoreline.
AUDIO: “Cold Rain and Snow” [10/2/87] (0:00-0:15)
DAVID LEMIEUX: What we chose is I think a magnificent show from May of ‘91 with the Vince Welnick and Bruce Hornsby iteration of the Grateful Dead. And what a show — the first set is, in my opinion, probably one of the best first sets the Dead played in the ‘90s, where it's relentlessly good. The “Picasso Moon”—I know it isn't everybody's song; I love it—is so head and shoulders above any other.
AUDIO: “Picasso Moon” [Enjoying the Ride, 5/12/91] (1:37-1:52)
JESSE: And that’s just the opening song. The first set also had a bust-out, when Jerry Garcia left-turned from “C.C. Rider” into a Bob Dylan favorite he hadn’t sung for a half-dozen years, and not with the Dead since ‘73.
AUDIO: “C.C. Rider” [Enjoying the Ride, 5/12/91] (3:24-3:32)
AUDIO: “It Takes A Lot To Laugh…” [Enjoying the Ride, 5/12/91] (0:00-0:20)
DAVID LEMIEUX: That “Takes A Lot to Laugh,” the “Deal” at the end. I've DJ-ed some Grateful Dead party things, and I mix it up all the time. But there's a few always-go-tos. And one of my go-tos is that “Deal” on this show.
AUDIO: “Deal” [Enjoying the Ride, 5/12/91] (7:31-8:01)
JESSE: Because of its location in the Bay Area, Shoreline became something of a mythical spot for Dead Heads, so mythical that it’s long been rumored to look like a Steal Your Face logo from above, which it doesn’t really.
AUDIO: “Deal” [Enjoying the Ride, 5/12/91] (9:31-9:54)
JESSE: But despite its location in the heart of Dead country, now adjacent to the headquarters of Google, it wasn’t always the Dead Heads’ favorite venue. Tyler Roy-Hart.
TYLER ROY-HART: I was at the very first Shoreline shows in ‘87, which I really enjoyed — though all the West Coast heads all hated it.
DEAD HEAD TV CORRESPONDENT #2 [1988]: As Dead Heads arrived, they found some of the dustiest parking in America. Water trucks tried in vain to keep the dust under control. Shoreline actually charged $4 to park in this mess.
TYLER ROY-HART: That was during the days of “Dead at the Dump,” that was the famous sticker. And I remember hearing all the rumors about that you could light the garbage methane on fire, up on the lawn.
JESSE: That wasn’t just myth. Shoreline was built on a former dump. It was perhaps for the best that Dead Heads weren’t the ones to break in the venue. According to newspaper reports during its opening season, several fires erupted on the amphitheater’s lawn due to a combination of cigarette lighters and methane leaks, notably at a Santana gig.
AUDIO: “Oye Como Va” [Santana, 8/17/86] (0:22-0:36)
TYLER ROY-HART: I never saw that, so I was skeptical of it. But okay, that's a real thing. That's funny. So I didn't mind Shoreline because I was used to fuckin’ East Coast dumps. I was used to hockey arenas and stadiums.
JESSE: For West Coast heads, used to the general admission paradises at the Frost and the Greek and even Winterland and the Kaiser Convention Center, Shoreline was kinda harsh. Blair Jackson.
BLAIR JACKSON: Through the whole Golden Road years, we developed a large group of folks who would go to shows together. We were a group of, like, 15 or 14 or something like that. Shoreline kind of split us all up.
JESSE: Mr. Completely with the counterpoint.
TYLER ROY-HART: So the idea of: here's this custom-built outdoor amphitheater, and the lawn’s a little steep, and it's hard to get into the pavilion where the sound is really great… but it didn't seem that bad to me. I thought it was kind of cool. And that was before—not long before, but just before—all the big, similar venues on the East Coast were built.
JESSE: Blair.
BLAIR JACKSON: What sheds did to rock and roll, sort of having everybody just being able to wander out and get their beer, which they did — and came back with it, and then they’d talked to their friends for an hour.
JESSE: They did vibe the place up a bit.
BLAIR JACKSON: One year, or maybe it was even two years, somebody brought a bungee jumping concern. Right outside the gates, near backstage and stuff like that. I remember seeing a guy in a dancing bear suit, going off the bungee jumping thing.
JESSE: In the early years, after cordoning off special vending lots at the Greek in Berkeley and elsewhere, Bill Graham tried a new experiment at Shoreline, creating what was one of the first official vending scenes.
DEAD HEAD TV CORRESPONDENT [1988]: Unlike most venues, the colorful vending area was inside the gates of Shoreline. Vendors paid a hefty $300 for the privilege of setting up their booths on the grassy lawn.
JESSE: Dead Head TV knew what was up, though.
DEAD HEAD TV CORRESPONDENT #2 [1988]: The real scene, though, was outside on a small strip of lawn between the parking lot.
Santa Cruz
JESSE: As Blair Jackson pointed out, Dead Heads in California didn’t necessarily have to leave California in order to see many shows a year. But Dead Heads from outside California often traveled there with the express purpose of seeing the Dead, and sometimes catching some Jerry Garcia Band shows while they were at. Tyler Roy-Hart.
TYLER ROY-HART: I went back in ‘90 in the middle of that June tour, that weekends-only June tour, which was fascinating — where there were Jerry shows at the Warfield on the weekdays, in-between the weekend Dead shows. Which is a cool way to tour: I got my first Warfield show in that as part of that run. That was amazing.
JESSE: Another beloved Dead venue, not represented on this box, was the Ventura County Fairgrounds, where the Dead played between 1982 and 1987. One Dead Head I miss very much is the late Eric Schwartz, the incomparable host of Lone Star Dead. I spoke with him for my book Heads, and often have to stop myself from emailing him some silly question. Incidentally, we absolutely don’t endorse you trying this next trick at home, let alone on the road. I’m pretty sure he’s referring to the summer of 1983 here, leading up to the Frost Amphitheatre show that’s now on the box.
ERIC SCHWARTZ [2013]: In between tours, it was like Santa Cruz was the place to go, because the food stamp laws were so lax that you could walk into the office if you had three weeks off from tour, and you were waiting from between Ventura to go to Frost — you could walk in and say, “Look, I have no money. I've never had money. I don't see any money in my future, and I'm hungry.” And they would say, “Okay, here's a bag of beans and a five-pound block of Reagan cheese and potatoes and carrots. And in a couple weeks, we'll assign you a P.O. box at Bonny Doon Beach, and you’ll go and you'll get your food stamps.” And then, a week later, we'd get our food stamps and go buy Mrs. Renfro’s salsa and a bag of chips and sour cream, and then we’d try to get whatever we could buy [so] our price was like $2.01, because they couldn't give you change in food stamps if it was under $1. So you'd just keep buying $2.01 purchases till you had enough for beer. You’d go pay for your beer with your change, and then go back to the beach. It was pretty hysterical. But it was a pretty big scam — I think a lot of Dead Heads wound up just going to Santa Cruz for food stamps for a couple of weeks and getting beer money out of the beef and cigarette money.
AUDIO: “High Time” [Enjoying the Ride, 5/12/91] (4:57-5:20)
Fillmore West [6/69]
JESSE: Of course, the Grateful Dead are also rightly known as a San Francisco band, though they didn’t really become a San Francisco band until more than a year into their career, moving into their communal home at 710 Ashbury in the late summer of 1966. By the next year, it was a tourist destination.
AUDIO: “The Maze” [KPIX, 1967] (19:24-19:41)
MICHAEL MCCLURE [KPIX, 1967]: In Haight Ashbury, doors are for letting people in, not keeping them out. In an apartment like this, the doors swing open often. Here live the Grateful Dead, a popular rock group whose bachelor home life ranges from the bizarre to the beatific.
JESSE: The band made 710 Ashbury their headquarters more or less until 1968, gradually filtering north to Marin County after getting busted in late 1967. The band’s free concert in March 1968 was their last splash as neighborhood residents, though of course they’re associated with it today. David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The first time I went to see the Dead in California was New Year's ‘88 with the Tom Tom Club opening at the Oakland Coliseum. I had just turned 18; my lady friend had just turned 17. So we flew out to California from Ottawa — I remember we flew on Christmas Day, which didn't go over too well with my family, but it was the only cheap flight we could get. And that was when they did a three-night run: [December] 28th, 29th and New Year's Eve at the Coliseum.
JESSE: The New Year’s shows from the following year are repped on Enjoying the Ride.
AUDIO: “The Promised Land” [Enjoying the Ride, 12/27/89] (0:00-0:30)
DAVID LEMIEUX: I definitely did the Dead Heads tour of the Bay Area as much as we were able. These places were important places to the Dead's history. We all knew where they were, and we certainly weren't alone. We'd walk up to 710 and there'd definitely be other Dead Heads out there, getting their pictures taken.
JESSE: Located near Golden Gate Park’s Panhandle, where the band played numerous free shows in 1967 and 1968, 710 Ashbury is a great starting point for all kinds of miniature walking tours, rambles, and adventures. The Haight famously got a little sketchy by the early ‘70s, but has also revived itself a good deal, too. Amoeba Records, across from the site of the Straight Theater, is a crucial stop. Shout out to Booksmith, too. One easy walk is about a mile over to 2400 Fulton, the Jefferson Airplane’s mansion, where they moved in 1968. Our buddy Ned Lagin visited them there in the early ‘70s.
NED LAGIN: When I first met Grace and Paul, they were living across from Golden Gate Park. They had in their living room a torture rack with a stuffed seal. And I was sitting with them in their bedroom, where they had a salad bowl that could have fed like 12 Marines, filled with pot. I felt this thing under the bed that I was sitting on, or the futon that I was sitting on, and I looked under there and there was a white rabbit.
AUDIO: “White Rabbit” [Jefferson Airplane, Surrealistic Pillow] (2:08-2:29) - [Spotify]
JESSE: There’s also the option of dissolving into Golden Gate Park. If you follow one path through the park, you might find yourself at the former site of Kezar Stadium, where the Dead played in 1973 and 1975, now on the Here Comes Sunshine and Beyond Description box sets respectively.
AUDIO: “Blues For Allah” [Beyond Description bonus disc, 3/23/75] (29:11-29:25)
JESSE: Or Lindley Meadows, where they played in September 1975, now on the 30 Trips box.
PHIL LESH [9/28/75]: The connect pronunciation of this next tune is “Truckin’.”
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 9/28/75] (0:37-0:49)
JESSE: Or the Polo Field, site of the 1967 Human Be-In, a free gig with the Airplane in 1969, and their last gig in the Park, at the Bill Graham memorial in 1991.
AUDIO: “Sunshine Daydream” [11/3/91] (0:40-0:53)
JESSE: There’s also the bison paddock. Don’t get lost staring at the bisons. Or, you know, do.
AUDIO: American bison sounds (0:05-0:13)
JESSE: Or perhaps you’ll make it through to the windmills and the Pacific at the far side of the park, and see the spot where the Family Dog on the Great Highway once stood across from the ocean. Ron Pietrowski, who spoke with about the Warlocks earlier, loved this spot.
RON PIETRWOSKI: I really liked the Family Dog on the Great Highway. That was a great, great venue. It was small, and when you walked out, the ocean was across the highway and the fog was always in. You didn't have to worry about parking and this and that. It was easy.
JESSE: In terms of chill scenes to have fun, the Family Dog’s various locations are high on my list of venues I wish I could time travel to. Established as a collective in 1965, one of the original founders Luria Castell actually lived at 710 Ashbury before the Dead. The Family Dog originally shared the Fillmore Auditorium with Bill Graham before setting up camp at the Avalon Ballroom, there through early 1969, creating a reputation for shows that were far chiller than Bill Graham productions, but didn’t pay the bands quite as much. They were gone by the Dead’s final gigs there in April 1969, booked by some ex-Family Doggists, represented on Enjoying the Ride with a bonus cassette. That summer of ‘69, Chet Helms reopened across from the ocean on the Great Highway, a story unto itself. This is from Night at the Family Dog in February 1970.
AUDIO: “I Know You Rider” [Night at the Family Dog] (3:51-4:21)
JESSE: Or you could take the route David Lemieux took, headed east towards downtown.
DAVID LEMIEUX: We always went to Haight-Ashbury, always. And then we went to the Psychedelic Shop, which I believe was on Market Street.
JESSE: The original Psychedelic Shop, opened by the Thelin brothers, briefly operated in the Haight during the period when the Dead lived there. Michael Van Dyke opened its successor on Market Street in 1976, where it occupied two different locations for the next 20 years.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I walked into the Psychedelic Shop, and I remember buying a couple of huge bed sheets—like, queen-size bed sheets—tie-dyed blue. And for years, 15 or 20 years later, when I moved to California—or 12 years later—I still had them, and they became my curtains at my house in San Anselmo, these tie-dyed sheets.
JESSE: Going from 710 to the Psychedelic Shop would send you past various other Dead locales, most notably at the corner of Market and Van Ness. Most of the world now knows it as the Fillmore West. Opened in 1927 as El Patio Ballroom, for swingin’ jazz, Bill Fuller changed the name to the Carousel Ballroom in 1963, when it hosted Irish music and the occasional gig by Johnny Cash, who returned in 1968 after the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service took it over.
AUDIO: “Big River” [Johnny Cash, Bear’s Sonic Journals: Johnny Cash at the Carousel Ballroom, 4/24/68] (0:00-0:22) - [Spotify]
JESSE: You can hear the rest on Bear’s Sonic Journals: Johnny Cash at the Carousel Ballroom. For the first part of 1968, the Carousel was under the managerial auspices of Ron Rakow. Tell us about that, Rak.
RON RAKOW: Oh, the Carousel… that's very interesting. It was a dance hall and no one had it. Except this old Irish guy, [Bill] Fuller, who lived in Ireland. And he put Irish dances on, regular American music dances on, I think, Friday and Saturday night. And 40 or 50 old people used to come and dance around. I got a hold of Brian Rohan, who was an attorney, and we made a deal with them. But the deal got fucked up from the very first. Rohan didn't understand anything. It was amazing. Ralph Gleason wrote the newspaper column on that kind of music at the Chronicle. He called it the worst lease in show business, and it was. And it wasn't designed to be, but it just was. And then I was so far into it, I called Ramrod, who was there at the Carousel, knocking down shit so that the Grateful Dead could play there. This is like Wednesday, [the show was] on Friday. And I said, “You know, the lease is fucked up.” He said, “I don't care. Do it anyway. It'll give us something. Do it anyway.” I don't know why I chose to take my business advice from Ramrod, who'd never had anything even approaching a business in his life. But that's what happened. You know, there are things that happen around the Grateful Dead that are inexplicable, but not to Grateful Dead people.
JESSE: Later in the year, Bill Graham flew to Ireland, renegotiated the lease with Bill Fuller, moved out of the Fillmore Auditorium and reopened the Carousel as the Fillmore West in summer 1968. We’ve talked a lot about the Fillmore West over the course of this podcast, so for a deeper dive into its history, we’d point you towards our Closing of the Fillmore West episode from Season 3. To set the vibe slightly, though, here’s our buddy Michael Parrish.
MICHAEL PARRISH: It's such an unlikely setting, because it was there at Market and Van Ness, and it was over the Buick dealership. So, you've seen the pictures of people lined up, and they go around the block, down Van Ness. You walk in and it's this really narrow staircase, and then you walk up the stairs and they take your tickets.
JESSE: Upstairs, it could be pretty chill for a rock ballroom.
MICHAEL PARRISH: And then you walk in, and it's this really dark, long, kind of relatively low room. Most people are just sitting on the floor. I never even tried the sofas, but they didn't look like something you'd want to sit on. And then up in the back was where the light show set up, at the very back of the hall.
JESSE: There’s a little bit of footage of people chillin’ at the Fillmore, sitting on the floor, in the recent Led Zeppelin documentary, Becoming Led Zeppelin. In late February/early March 1969, about a month after Zeppelin played there, the band played four shows at the Fillmore West that became the core of Live/Dead.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Live/Dead] (1:32-1:50) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And in June, they returned for another four, June 5th through 8th.
AUDIO: “Sittin’ On Top of the World” [Enjoying the Ride, 6/5/69] (0:13-0:34)
JESSE: David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It is that classic Live/Dead sound, just as the Grateful Dead were on the cusp of transitioning into the Workingman’s Dead sound. If you kind of look at the Primal Dead era, defined by Live/Dead and the 1968 sound; and then the Americana Dead, the Workingman’s Dead, it's really June of ‘69 where they start transitioning. It's the very tail end of time where they could still pull off a Live/Dead version of “Dark Star.”
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Enjoying the Ride, 6/5/69] (19:43-20:10)
DAVID LEMIEUX: It's recorded by Bear. Bear’s recordings are so unique: they're so crystal clear, in terms of the mixes. They're not particularly wet and blended in together. You can really hear what everything is, what everyone's doing.
AUDIO: “Cryptical Envelopment” [Enjoying the Ride, 6/5/69] (5:04-5:34)
JESSE: The Americana is starting to come in. The June 7th show begins with the very first version of “Dire Wolf,” a story we told back on the first season of the Deadcast.
AUDIO: “Dire Wolf” [Enjoying the Ride, 6/7/69] (2:04-2:30)
JESSE: This particular run of Fillmore shows had a few different issues that required editing.
AUDIO: “Dire Wolf” [Enjoying the Ride, 6/7/69] (0:18-0:35)
JERRY GARCIA [6/7/69]: Right at this very moment, you’re missing Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan singing beautiful duets on the TV, in color, while this is going on in the back room…
DAVID LEMIEUX: The recordings have problems in certain places. There's a prominent squeal at certain points that we can't do anything about on the master recordings. But what Jeffrey Norman and Plangent [Processes] was able to… I don't want to even say salvage, but they salvaged almost four hours of incredible music from this four-night run. We use three of the nights.
JESSE: But not all the problems were strictly technical.
BOB WEIR [6/6/69]: Well, anyway, we’re sittin’ around —
PHIL LESH [6/6/69]: Ah, one guitar player’s pretty much like another.
JESSE: That’s very convincing, Phil. In 1969, Bill Graham still alternated early and late shows, with three bands rotating over the course of the night. This becomes relevant because on the middle night, Jerry Garcia stepped out between the early and late shows, returned late, and found that Bill Graham had replaced him.
AUDIO: “Smokestack Lightning” (feat. Wayne Ceballos) [6/6/69] (2:34-2:46)
JESSE: Onstage with the Dead was Wayne Ceballos of the band AUM. Garcia eventually arrived. Alright, no problem, but that set isn’t exactly box set material. And then the last night of the run, there was the apple juice.
JERRY GARCIA [1986]: I just wet my lips on that, and that's all, because I heard it’d been dosed.
JESSE: This is Jerry Garcia speaking with Dennis McNally, now in the Jerry On Jerry audiobook from Hachette.
JERRY GARCIA [1986]: Phil had to be led onstage by Mickey. I don’t even know if we played that night… yeah, we played. But we were out of it… that was bad.
JESSE: We went into some detail about this night back in the first season of the Deadcast, because this was the night that Robert Hunter got mega-dosed, leading to the writing of “Black Peter” and some other songs, a topic too broad to get into today. So that knocked the band out of commission for the late show on the final night. But what’s left is some great music.
AUDIO: “Dancing in the Street” [Enjoying the Ride, 6/8/69] (6:22-6:55)
Winterland [3/20/77]
JESSE: In 1971, Bill Graham decided he’d outgrown both the Fillmores East and West. Around the corner from the Fillmore Auditorium at the corner of Steiner and Post was Winterland. Opened in 1928 as the New Dreamland Auditorium, it became Winterland in 1939, home to San Francisco’s Ice Follies. The Dead first played there in 1967, but gigged there especially between ‘71 and ‘78. We’ve hung out at Winterland a bunch on the Deadcast, most especially in our “Ship of Fools” episode, partly about the so-called farewell shows in October 1974.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo” [The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack, 10/20/74] (6:13-6:37)
JESSE: Blair Jackson.
BLAIR JACKSON: The Grateful Dead Movie captures it so beautifully. I think, in every respect, that movie captures the Grateful Dead better than anything anybody will ever write or podcast or whatever. That is the essence of the Grateful Dead, and it captures Winterland really, really well.
JESSE: The show on the new box is technically the first show of spring 1977 — March 20th.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Enjoying the Ride, 3/20/77] (5:15-5:32)
JESSE: David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The March Winterland run is great for the most part, but maybe not throughout. Whereas the March 20 show, it's a show that we've always had on our radar as kind of the next thing we want to do from the spring of ‘77. They played three runs there in ‘77: they played the March, June and December runs, and they're all very different.
JESSE: The Winterland facility may have seen better days, but it was home. Bill Graham organized pickup basketball games and other wholesome preshow activities on the floor of the Fillmore West, and it institutionalized even more at Winterland.
BLAIR JACKSON: They would have a volleyball game, and they would give tickets to the team from the Dead Heads, [if] they could beat them they'd win tickets to New Year's Eve. It's what they would do pre-New Year's at the shows; they would never dare do that at New Year's. But, yeah, it was cool. It's just one of those little Bill Graham touches.
JESSE: Blair was a Winterland regular.
BLAIR JACKSON: It was always slightly oversold. But if you had a spot, which we did… I developed this spot where we always tried to go, kind of on the left hand side, eight or nine rows up in the lower balcony. That was my sweet spot. But sometimes I'd be behind the stage, because that's where the only place we could find a spot. That was always fun in its own way: you're kind of looking down at the crowd, and the sound was always decent enough because they had speakers back there. But yeah, it felt very, very warm and familial, always.
JESSE: March 20th, 1977 was a Sunday night, and the volleyball was almost certainly in full effect on the Winterland show before the show. David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It's on the cusp of spring, late winter ‘77, and it's recorded by Betty. It's a magnificent show, and it's incredibly high energy. It almost has an East Coast vibe to it. They're trying to blow the roof off the place. Really good Grateful Dead music. “Estimated Prophet” as a standalone — it hadn't started branching off.
AUDIO: “Estimated Prophet” [Enjoying the Ride, 3/20/77] (3:28-3:49)
JESSE: They played “Estimated Prophet” all three nights of Winterland, the third, fourth, and fifth versions, one of the brand-new songs they were working on that spring for Terrapin Station. The first night of the run, March 18th, they’d properly debuted “Fire on the Mountain.”
AUDIO: “Fire on the Mountain” [3/18/77] (2:18-2:30)
JESSE: And at this March 20th show, there’s one last standalone version of “Scarlet Begonias,” before they pretty much permanently attached it to “Fire.”
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Enjoying the Ride, 3/20/77] (12:27-12:58)
JESSE: And every show of the run featured Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s brand new epic, “Terrapin Station,” appearing for the first time as an encore, quite a statement for a new song.
AUDIO: “Terrapin Station” [Enjoying the Ride, 3/20/77] (6:54-7:25)
JESSE: Winterland is sometimes called Winterland Arena, and certainly the Ice Follies used it, continuing to appear there all the way through 1976. Dead Heads loved the place.
BILL GRAHAM [10/22/78]: The last five days, sleeping outside — for those maniacs, we want to thank you very much, for being here every night.
JESSE: Before we get into this next story, though, I want to emphasize that people who saw shows at Winterland weren’t only Dead Heads — sometimes they just went because it was fun. Ron Pietrowski, who saw the Warlocks, saw lots of bands.
RON PIETROWSKI: There were other bands that I liked as well, considering the fun factor. Youngbloods were a lot of fun. Joy of Cooking were a lot of fun. Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks were a lot of fun. Commander Cody—this is a little bit later—they were big time fun.
JESSE: Ron was also a Winterland regular.
RON PIETROWSKI: I really miss Winterland. I can't believe they tore that down. Fun is a key word.
JESSE: Last season, when we were focusing on the Dead’s spring 1978 shows, I started researching a fairly historic event that occurred at Winterland during its waning days. At first, I thought it might’ve taken place at a Dead show, though research showed otherwise. And while it’s not a Dead story, I also feel confident in saying that the story wouldn’t have happened without them — both as an influence on the band performing at the time, and on the world they helped create. It’s also a story that could have only occurred because it took place at a general admission venue. The circumstances were entirely created by the vibe of an open floor and people dancing side by side, and sometimes together. It couldn’t have happened at Shoreline. It’s a Winterland story in every way, and since it’s an important and mostly unknown part of people’s history, we’re going to include it here, and because it gives an alternative perspective on Winterland.
GILBERT BAKER [2009]: I'm Gilbert Baker. I'm a vexillographer. Vexillography is the making of flags and I love to sew — that's my craft, and my art.
JESSE: We’re going to be hearing from two interviews with the late activist Gilbert Baker, one from 2009 and one from 2012. He arrived in San Francisco in the early 1970s, serving in the Army, where he was stationed in the Presidio. By the mid-’70s, he was doing occasional work for Bill Graham and other local promoters.
GILBERT BAKER [2012]: I did many shows for the Airplane and the Starship out in the park, and the whole hippie Summer of Love thing. Chet Helms was a very close friend of mine. Dancing, really, to me, is, like music, a form of expression that's so freeing and liberating. And, for our generation, so pivotal.
JESSE: Gilbert Baker was also part of the city’s flourishing gay community.
GILBERT BAKER [2009]: I lived in San Francisco in 1978. It was an incredible place to be. Harvey Milk was alive and my friend, a great inspiration and teacher to all of us. It was a time of incredible empowerment and political organizing and community building and artistic expression. Harvey was always like, “Oh, we have to have a new logo.” And we talked a lot about the pink triangle. The pink triangle was the dominant symbol that we used, but it came from the Nazis: it was put on us, and had a really horrible, negative origin about murder and Holocaust. And Harvey was Jewish. So he always kind of, like me, went, “Ehhh, it doesn’t really work.”
JESSE: Enter Winterland. This is what Gilbert Baker wrote about Winterland in his memoir, Rainbow People. “The Winterland Ballroom at Steiner and Post was our favorite playground. I loved the discos and the Stud Bar, but we went to Winterland to hear live rock ’n’ roll music in the broken-down plaster palace. … The crowd was as much a part of the show as the band. Everyone was there: North Beach beatniks and barrio zoots, the bored bikers in black leather, teenagers in the back row kissing. There were long-haired, lithe girls in belly-dance getups, pink-haired punks safety-pinned together, hippie suburbanites, movie stars so beautiful they left you dumbstruck, muscle gayboys with perfect mustaches, butch dykes in blue jeans, and fairies of all genders in thrift-store dresses. We rode the mirrored ball on glittering LSD and love power. Dance fused us, magical and cleansing. We were all in a swirl of color and light.”
GILBERT BAKER [2012]: I remember being at Winterland, which was the great rock palace up on Sutter Street, seeing Patti Smith. Oh, loved her. And, you know, everyone joining hands and dancing in circles. And really, that informed the idea of: Wow, we're a rainbow of people, and it came from those kinds of incredible moments of dancing, the colors, and all of that music.
AUDIO: “Gloria” [Patti Smith, Horses] (3:04-3:27) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Gilbert Baker’s vision of the Rainbow Flag occurred on May 13th, 1978, seeing Patti Smith at Winterland. But it was a vision born of San Francisco.
GILBERT BAKER [2012]: All of the San Francisco-ness, if you will, really is woven deeply into the Rainbow Flag for me, forever. I cherish that. I right away realized: well, obviously, it goes to the Native American culture. It's very, very prominent in island culture. And I began to understand how the rainbow in history was used as a symbol of hope; was used as a symbol of liberation, in some cases. So it really had a history. Of course, living in San Francisco, the Haight Ashbury and the whole hippie psychedelic movement, which I was heavily influenced by — all of that played into my mind.
AUDIO: “Dancing in the Street” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 4/15/70] (0:00-0:27)
JESSE: That was the Dead at Winterland in April 1970, on the 30 Trips box set. Gilbert Baker debuted the Rainbow Flag during Pride festivities in June 1978, about a month after the Patti Smith show, and about three years after Gilbert Baker’s contributions to the 1975 Unity Fair. It’s not a direct part of Dead history, but adjacent enough, especially given Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye’s confirmed status as Dead freaks. In fact, they opened for the Dead almost exactly a year later, May 12th, 1979, in Amherst. By then, Winterland was a recent memory. While the Dead were moving back into sports arenas in the rest of the country, Winterland wasn’t a sports arena in the modern sense. By the end of 1978, Bill Graham was ready to move on.
BILL GRAHAM [10/22/78]: Some time later, next month, we’re gonna be leaving this place, and we’ve been here for a long, long time. And we wanted to take a minute to let you know that we know what you know about these people. They’re not the best at what they do — they’re the only ones who do what they do. The Grateful Dead.
JESSE: The Dead played the venue’s final night, December 31st, 1978, which you can hear and watch, as The Closing of Winterland.
AUDIO: “We Bid You Goodnight” [The Closing of Winterland, 12/31/78] (0:18-0:51) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Listener Dominic Stefano left us this story about that night.
DOMINIC STEFANO: In 1978, me and my good buddy, Tony, we went to the closing of Winterland, the famous arena that the dead held court at in San Francisco, as we always did every year, for the New Year shows. It's a mind-boggling event, the whole thing. You get the Blues Brothers with Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi playing in the Flying Karamazov Brothers. It's a wild thing.
JESSE: But you never knew who you were going to run into on Dead tour.
DOMINIC STEFANO: But the best part for me was we were staying at the Miyako Hotel up the street. There's a Japanese hotel, and there's a Japanese band: three girls, drum, bass and a guitar. We're drinking Harvey Wahlbangers, and Bill Kreutzmann walks in, sits down, takes over the drum — and he's playing in the Miyako bar with this little band. So that's the way that we essentially rocked out the end of ‘78: listening to Bill play the drums, in a little bar at a Japanese restaurant up the street from the closing of Winterland, one of the greatest places in the world.
JESSE: G’bye Winterland.
AUDIO: “We Bid You Goodnight” [The Closing of Winterland, 12/31/78] (3:55-4:06) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
BILL GRAHAM [12/31/78]: But if it’s okay, we’ll just leave the stage here, we’ll serve you breakfast, put some music on, and we’ll just see what happens. You can stay as long as you like.
JESSE: The Dead would play San Francisco again, at places they loved, including their famous run at the Warfield in 1980, and they’d play places they felt less allegiance to, like the San Francisco Civic Center for a few New Year’s runs, but they’d never again have someplace inside city limits that felt quite like home. For that, they’d have to venture across the Bay, which is where we’ll be headed next time.
HOTLINE [11/24/86]: Thank you for calling the Grateful Dead hotline number. This is a new message as of 24th. The Grateful Dead will be playing at the Oakland Coliseum Arena in Oakland, California on December 15th, 16th, and 17th. There are still plenty of tickets available through all BASS ticket centers.
JESSE: See you there!