Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 7, Episode 9
Here Comes Sunshine: Kezar Stadium, 5/26/73
Archival interviews:
- Jerry Garcia & Steve Parish, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 3/10/83.
- Jerry Garcia, by Dennis McNally, Jerry On Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews.
- Bob Weir, Keith Godchaux, Donna Godchaux and Jon McIntire, WAER, 9/17/73.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:15-0:26) - [dead.net]
JESSE: It’s often said that Grateful Dead shows were special because the band played different setlists each night. Of course that’s true. But the songs performed on the five shows of the Here Comes Sunshine box set are largely pretty similar from night to night. There are 13 that the band performed at all five shows, usually amounting to roughly an hour-and-a-half of music, and many more they played at four of the gigs. Not that anybody was being nearly that obsessive about it in 1973. The songs were, and are, just vehicles. But now, 50 years later, when we’re possibly being just slightly more obsessive about it, it’s a pretty good demonstration of how the same set of songs can carry itself differently in different circumstances. Eskimos don’t really have thousands of different words for “snow,” but Dead Heads do have infinite words to describe vibes. And the vibes at Kezar Stadium on May 26th, 1973 were powerful.
AUDIO: “They Love Each Other” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:38-0:55) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Going back to my tape trading days in the mid-’80s, my 1973 collection wasn't huge. And I'll tell you, I had Maples Pavilion, 2/9/73 in Palo Alto, and I had this show, 5/26. And that old saying of ‘I wore that tape out’ — if that was true of me for any show, it was probably Kezar. I listened to it probably more than almost any other show in my collection. Again, I find that it’s a carry-on from the Santa Barbara show, where you’ve also got the Grateful Dead playing to a hometown crowd. They had done Winterland in December of ‘72, and they had done the Palo Alto show in February, but this was a big show — this was as big as the Grateful Dead had played, I’m thinking, in the Bay Area.
JESSE: I’m with the Canadian. I didn’t start collecting tapes until the ‘90s, but this was a favorite. There was something about the way it bottled the sunshine of the early ‘70s Grateful Dead playing outdoors: both the music itself, and the particular quality of Betty Cantor-Jackson’s recording. Unless otherwise noted, that’s what we’re going to be listening to today, a tape that, today, becomes an almost literal embodiment of a Robert Hunter lyric.
AUDIO: “Box of Rain” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:46-0:57) - [dead.net]
JESSE: One of our dream witnesses for the Kezar ‘73 show is the illustrious Mike Dolgushkin, who would go on to co-found DeadBase a decade or so later, but in the spring of 1973 was in the first flush of seeing the Dead all the damn time.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: It just seemed legendary before the music even started. It was just kind of like this epic moment already. And I would say that the Dead certainly rose to the occasion. What I’ve been saying lately to people is that Kezar is to San Franciscans as what Englishtown is to New Yorkers. Ask almost anybody who was at Kezar, and they’ll tell you it was the best show they ever saw.
JESSE: The Dead’s Englishtown ‘77 show, now Dick’s Picks 15, was a massive Labor Day blowout in New Jersey that would mint a new generation of Dead Heads for the later ‘70s and beyond. In 1973, even in their hometown, the Dead were still on the ascendency.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Up until a year-and-a-half earlier, two years before, they were still playing the Fillmore West primarily, and then they kind of got a few shows in at the Berkeley Community Theater, and then finally, Winterland. But even Winterland was only 5 or 6,000.
JESSE: In terms of Dead Head lore, Kezar Stadium is location, location, location — in the southeast corner of Golden Gate Park, just blocks from the end of Haight Street and the Panhandle, where the Dead played many of their famous free shows a half-decade earlier. Kezar ‘73 wasn’t free, but it was the first chance for the slightly younger generation of Dead Heads to see the Dead in Golden Gate Park.
DAVID LEMIEUX: This was 20, 25,000 people in the Haight! You can’t get more home than that, way more home than anything. So it certainly has that vibe. I feel that they played… I think when the Dead had friends and family in the crowd on the stage, backstage, whatever, they took that seriously. They didn’t want to let their friends and family down. When I listen to the Dead playing Bill Graham shows — listen, he was their manager for a little bit, he was the patriarch of producers in the Bay Area. So I’ve always found that when they played Bill Graham shows, they stood a little taller — they didn’t want to let Bill down. And I hear that in the Kezar show.
JESSE: What you might be surprised to learn is that, as of two weeks before the show on May 26th, the Grateful Dead weren’t scheduled to play at Kezar Stadium at all.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (1:15-1:40) - [dead.net]
Dancing on the Outdoor Green
JESSE: The late promoter Bill Graham is high on the list of storytellers I wish we could’ve had on this podcast, both to hear about his incredible work but also for his particular linguistic flair. Bob Barsotti started working with Graham while still in high school.
BOB BARSOTTI: I was going to Berkeley High School in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s. And when I was a junior in high school, [Graham] started doing shows at the Berkeley Community Theater, and it was, what, 1970. The school started a thing called School of the Arts, which allowed the students to just immerse themselves in the arts as long as they finished their academic stuff. I had finished all my academics, so I just spent the entire day every day in the theater building. I’d do costuming and stagecraft and lighting design and radio and broadcasting and different stuff. Whenever there was a show that would come in, if there was a four-man union call, there would be four student stagehands provided to the promoter for free. We were apprentices, learning from the union guys. In that first year that he was doing shows there, it was like the Mothers of Invention, Eric Clapton, Grateful Dead, [the] Who, Joni Mitchell, CSNY… so many shows, all while I was going to high school, in my high school auditorium. We’d do the load-in before that show, and then we’d do the load out afterwards. During the show, we didn’t have a responsibility because the union wouldn’t let us operate anything. So Bill hired us to do security on the front of the stage.
JESSE: In the long term, Bob and his older brother Peter would go on to become Bill Graham’s liaisons with the Dead and the heads. But in the early ‘70s, Bob was just starting out.
BOB BARSOTTI: I graduated in ‘72, and then my first show at Winterland as a paid employee was the Rolling Stones in June of ‘72. And then my first Grateful Dead show was New Year’s Eve that year — I was hired to be the backstage clean-up guy. I went around policing all the half-empty Cokes and beers, to keep it spotless for Bill’s friends, as he told me very clearly.
JESSE: In mid-1971, Bill Graham closed the Fillmores East and West, which we discussed a bunch in our third season. In San Francisco, the former ice-skating rink called Winterland, just a few blocks from the original Fillmore Auditorium, became his home venue.
BOB BARSOTTI: Right when I started working for him, he started doing Berkeley Community Theater, and then we’d do the San Jose Civic Center, and we’d do the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium, and the Santa Cruz Civic, and Stockton Civic. We did all the little civic auditoriums, like 3,000-seaters all around northern and central California. On the East Coast, the band could do a show every night all week long, and all they have to do is travel 50 or 100 miles to the next show. On the West Coast, it’s 500 miles between dates, and there’s only like four of ‘em: L.A., San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and that’s it. So bands were always looking for fill dates, and we were starting to provide them Tuesday and Wednesday nights in these smaller tertiary markets. It really clicked, and the kids loved going there, and the bands loved to play for us. So instead of doing one show with them, we’d do three or four.
JESSE: In a way, Bill Graham built his own touring circuit in California, which can be seen reflected in the Dead’s touring schedules starting in this era. But mostly they were smaller venues. With a new touring circuit well on its way by 1973, Graham needed a Bay Area venue larger than Winterland to stage shows for the new class of arena and stadium acts.
BOB BARSOTTI: 5,000 at Winterland was huge. That was the biggest place we usually went to. There were occasions where he went to the Oakland Coliseum or the Cow Palace, but that hardly ever happened.
JESSE: Mike Dolgushkin had been seeing the Dead since the Berkeley Community Theater shows in the summer of ‘72 and listening to them for longer. So when the Dead announced their big local show for the spring, Mike was ready for it.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: It was scheduled for May 22 and 23rd at the Cow Palace. So we bought tickets for, I think, the first show.
JESSE: As originally announced, the shows would feature the Dead, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and Waylon Jennings, as well as Willie Nelson. The original newspaper ads for the two Cow Palace shows bore an interesting description. “Open floor – start to boogie ‘on the green’ at 5pm.”
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: Yeah, they were gonna spread astroturf or something inside of the Cow Palace. I don’t know what it was they were planning to do.
BOB BARSOTTI: Bill was a huge believer in festival seating — no seats on the floor. Winterland was that way, the Fillmores were that way. And when we started doing the big shows at the coliseums and the stadiums, we had it that way as well.
JESSE: It was also a setup that gave Graham a little more flexibility in how many people might get into the venue, by what means, and how to find room for them inside. The “on the green” language signified open seating, indoors or out.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: But then they rescheduled it for one day at Kezar.
JESSE: Minus Willie Nelson. Bummer. The Dead would have to wait five more years to share bills with Willie. David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Bill Graham, famously with the Fillmore West shows and Fillmore East, paired bands that might not have [made sense together], Miles [Davis] and the Dead. Amongst countless shows, there’s always pairings like, ‘Oh, interesting pairing…’ — but they always worked, because they brought [energy]. And so, to have Waylon Jennings, I always saw that as an inspired Bill Graham touch. And the Dead of course I’m sure loved them, too, but the New Riders crowd, that cowboy Dead… you look at Dead Heads in 1973, and it’s a crowd of cowboy hats and flannel.
AUDIO: “Freedom to Stay” [Waylon Jennings, Lonesome, On’ry and Mean] (0:00-0:20) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Waylon Jennings was certainly an inspired choice to play with the Dead in 1973, and he was on the bill for both nights at the Cow Palace. But the pairing makes more sense to me when considering Graham’s original plans — two shows at the Cow Palace, followed by a massive gig on Sunday, May 27th at the Ontario Motor Speedway outside L.A., in the heart of the Inland Empire where Bakersfield country music reigned supreme, to feature the Dead, Waylon Jennings, and the Allman Brothers Band, billed as A Day On the Green. Tickets were $7.50. Sally Mann Romano of Out of Town Tours.
SALLY MANN ROMANO: People are not getting their money's worth these days. You used to pay five bucks and get 15 hours of the biggest bands in the world when Bill Graham was putting on a show.
JESSE: But even the best laid plans of Bill Graham were subject to constant change. First, in mid-May, without giving any particular reason, Graham canceled the Cow Palace shows and folded the two nights into one afternoon in Kezar Stadium on May 26th, perhaps related to the fact that he’d secured the venue for a Led Zeppelin show on the weekend to follow. But then, with less than a week to go before the Day On the Green in Ontario, Graham pulled the plug, citing noise curfews, though who knows. In Rolling Stone, Sam Cutler was quoted as saying that it was a misunderstanding and the Dead’s shows in Santa Barbara on May 20th and upcoming three-night run at the Universal Amphitheater would be their L.A. gigs for the season. Both explanations could easily be code for lack of ticket sales. It was the second time in six months that the Dead and the Allman Brothers canceled West Coast shows together, a pairing California audiences would never see. East Coast heads would, though, and we’ll meet up with the Allmans soon.
AUDIO: “Deal” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:36-0:53) - [dead.net]
Golden Gate Park
JESSE: Spring 1973 was the beginning of the era of what the Dead members would refer to as mega-gigs. And, as a metropolitan football stadium that housed a professional sports team, Kezar Stadium certainly qualified for that. But it was also in Golden Gate Park, which was far more than just a convenient outdoor place for the Dead to play. As a native San Franciscan, Jerry Garcia felt a deep bond with the park. Here is he speaking with Dennis McNally, now in the Jerry On Jerry audiobook, available from Hachette.
JERRY GARCIA [Jerry On Jerry, Chapter 5]: If you go from one end of it to another, you find yourself in these different worlds. There's places where, all of a sudden, it's real Prehistoric-looking — giant ferns, and everything is weird, weird, ancient things. And then you go walk a little further and, all of a sudden, you're in this pasture and there are sheep grazing, and there's a little pond.
JESSE: I have to imagine that there were some heads who skipped the opening sets by the New Riders of the Purple Sage and Waylon Jennings and spent the first parts of their Saturday afternoons lost in the controlled wilds of William Hammond Hall’s masterpiece.
JERRY GARCIA [Jerry On Jerry, Chapter 5]: It changes, and you're not aware of how it's changing or where it's changing, but it does change. And it has a beautiful, seamless way of doing that. It’s a work, really — it's like a poem. That's a real expression that says the kind of thing that I would like to be able to say. And it says it beautifully, gracefully.
JESSE: Romantically, perhaps, one could start the day with a sunrise meditation on the beach and take a long walk from one end of the park to the other, eventually arriving at the Panhandle and the Haight-Ashbury, where the Dead moved out barely five years earlier. In reality, it seemed like several lifetimes ago. One neighborhood resident who closely observed the changes would play an important role at the Dead’s Kezar Stadium show. We are honored to welcome to the Deadcast, founder of the Haight Street Free Medical Clinic, Dr. David Smith.
DAVID SMITH: One of my professors of medicine said, “Well, David, where'd you go wrong? You were such a promising young medical student.” In other words, I was a rising star in the laboratory, and now I move into this murky world of the counterculture, which made sense in the beginning, but then it became much more dangerous. Of course, psychedelics are a consistent part of this. I took LSD and had a spiritual experience — it totally changed my perception of the universe. I took a dramatic change in my career direction, like a lot of people. We’re all connected, and you can’t reject one part.
JESSE: The Haight Street Free Medical Clinic opened in June 1967 at 550 Clayton, around the corner from the Dead’s place at 710 Ashbury.
DAVID SMITH: I was raised in an environment of discrimination during the ‘30s in the Great Depression, and I saw that same discrimination in these signs, “Hippies, go home.” And so if you think about it, the original Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic’s ”health care is a right, not a privilege” started as a civil rights movement.
JESSE: You may have heard that correct formulation before—that health care is right, not a privilege–and it’s quite possible that Dr. David Smith was the first to say it.
DAVID SMITH: For a marginalized, ostracized population—you don't like their music; you don’t like their hair; you don’t like their ‘make love, not war’—you don’t like anything about ‘em, and therefore you’re going to deny them health care. And those themes, in much broader and different ways, still exist today.
JESSE: To put it mildly.
DAVID SMITH: It was basically, in the beginning, David Smith MD and Associates, doing business as the Haight-Ashbury free clinics. And then later, we became a nonprofit, when the bands, led by Bill Graham, did benefits for us. And then that became Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics, a nonprofit. Publicity was getting out all over the world, and the med students would come from all over the country; they wanted to volunteer at our clinic, take LSD and hear the Grateful Dead. We had this steady supply of really outstanding med students and young physicians. That's why they came out here.
JESSE: For Dr. Smith, it was about science, and he founded the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs in 1967.
DAVID SMITH: I had started studying psychedelics at UCSF. I did my training in pharmacology, in psychopharmacology, and I've studied psychedelics in various animal and human models. I found out that the information that was entering into the public media was inaccurate, so that's why we founded the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs. When I started the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, there was this idea that if you take 100 people who take a psychedelic, one person has a bad trip — the press focuses on the one person that has a bad trip. Well, that’s not what you do in medicine: in medicine, you look at the total population. And the individuals who take it and don’t have a bad trip, the people who take it that have spiritual experiences, the people who take it that have fun, and then those who take it and have an adverse reaction, and you focus on — what was the difference between the total population and the one that had the bad trip.
JESSE: Mike Dolgushkin.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: After the so-called Summer of Love, the Haight really went through the slump. It was flooded with speed and then heroin and all that, and it became kind of a dangerous place to go.
DAVID SMITH: We were right in the middle of it, and it totally changed the nature of the community. And it changed our service delivery. Med students would come down from UCSF to the Clinic, and there'd be flowers and loving and dancing and music. And when speed hit, it became dangerous. We found out that the med students were being threatened, so then they wouldn’t come down. The Haight went from a very peaceful, psychedelic space to a very violent toxic environment. There was pressure on me to close the clinic at that time — [we] started out for psychedelics, and now it’s speed and heroin and violence.
JESSE: In fact, the Free Clinic would expand.
DAVID SMITH: The amphetamine abuser was much more toxic, much more violent. So we had to have a special setting for the methamphetamine abuser. That’s when we got the second facility at 409 Cleveland Street. Then heroin comes along, and we had to get a third facility because, there, it was drug dependence and withdrawal. So the drug scene changed, and as it changes, we had to adapt our services.
JESSE: When Bill Graham came calling, they’d be ready.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: By ‘73, [the Haight] had largely pulled out of that. I used to go down there sometimes. I used to go to Ross Records, where you could find Dead bootlegs and stuff. It was no longer just another neighborhood — it would never be that again. It had become more pleasant to hang out than it had been.
AUDIO: “Bertha” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (1:01-1:18) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Steve Brown of Grateful Dead Records was a native San Franciscan, too. He made the recording of the band’s giant free show on Haight Street, five springs earlier in March 1968, which was also around five blocks from Kezar. He was excited to see the Dead on their shared home turf.
STEVE BROWN: I don't miss that kind of show. And Kezar, where I used to go with my dad to see the 49ers? Yeah, it was sports — it was the high schools and maybe some colleges.
JESSE: The 49ers had moved to Candlestick Park in 1971 and Kezar was mostly abandoned.
STEVE BROWN: No one was doing concerts really there. The most we had were high schools and colleges doing certain events that had to do with having won something, and now they’re out parading and saying, “We’re gonna bring everybody out and thank them and say how wonderful it is that we won this,” or whatever. But it wasn’t a concert place, really. I think it was the first time I can even remember where a big stage was set up, and they had that kind of thing going on. Even when I was in high school and we went over there for events, it wasn’t anything like a big stage thing going on.
JESSE: The move from the Cow Palace to Kezar Stadium wasn’t without controversy. That spring, when the band announced a slate of dates at the biggest venues yet, they’d received some bummed out mail, and that included the move to Kezar. Some of the anger had to do with the steadily rising ticket prices, creeping up to $5 in advance and $6 at the door for Kezar, between $30 and $40 in 2023 money. We’re so happy to welcome back to the Deadcast, our avatar of Veneta ‘72, Strider Brown.
STRIDER BROWN: During the month of May, I stayed at a friend's place in San Francisco on Orchard Street, which is walking distance to Kezar Stadium. Of course I got tickets to go, and Bob Weir had been interviewed on KSAN a few days earlier. I was lucky to hear that interview, and basically the only thing I can really remember hearing Bob Weir saying on that interview was he had never seen Waylon Jennings before, and he was very excited about meeting him and hearing his set.
JESSE: Thanks to Strider for the tip. While I couldn’t find a tape of the interview, which featured both Bob Weir and Bill Graham, I did locate a letter in the Dead’s archive written a few days after by an anonymous angry caller, who felt obligated to write a follow-up letter to Weir to explain his position as a musician and more recent resident of the Haight. The short version is that he didn’t like being told that his town ain’t got no heart, and also that Dead tickets were so expensive.
“I moved here a year ago July,” he wrote, “and [the neighborhood] is alive and floundering as best it can… I tried very humbly to point out that there were a lot of people in the neighborhood of Golden Gate [Park] who could not afford to attend the concert, and felt that it was even a rip off. ‘Tell them not to come,’ came the reply.” The letter writer, named Joe, apparently played in a Haight neighborhood band called Window, and invited Weir to a free street gig they were playing. Window would put out an album a few years later called The Empyreal Ballet. It’s pretty pricey on Discogs these days. Maybe not how they sounded in 1973, but this is from “Dance Through A Storm.”
AUDIO: “Dance Through A Storm” [Window, The Empyreal Ballet] (2:17-2:29)
JESSE: But the message apparently got through. We talked to Bob Student during our Santa Barbara episode. He remembered how he got into the Kezar show.
BOB STUDENT: If you said you lived in the neighborhood, they let you in the side door for free without a ticket. Oh, that's how I got in — I just said, “Yeah, I live on Oak Street.” They just said, “Yeah, come on in.”
JESSE: Somewhere, I can hear Bill Graham sighing. Bob Barsotti.
BOB BARSOTTI: There was nothing official. I know that Bill often would do stuff to quell negative energy outside of gigs. If you had a show that sold out, with so many people outside that they’re going to tear the doors off the building, he’d put a speaker out on the sidewalk and tell everyone to stand across the street to just listen to the music: “Everyone go stand across the street and be peaceful, and nobody attack the building!” Stuff like that. He had a way of trying to get in the middle of things so that we wouldn’t be a burden on our surrounding community. Any of the issues that were happening, we tried to internalize them. So if there’s some kid that lives across the street, and: “goddamnit, I can’t get in, it’s my neighborhood”? ‘Well, come talk to me — we’ll figure it out.’
JESSE: Both Graham and the Dead put in the work. For example, the band had a great sound system but they knew each venue and situation was different and wanted to be ready for Kezar. The week before in Santa Barbara, the system had made its West Coast outdoor debut and Alembic sent Ron Wickersham and Rick Turner to listen, and they observed the wind wreaking havoc on the signal from the stage. A letter from Wickersham to the Dead billing them for the work reveals that, the day after the Santa Barbara show, Wickersham and Turner paid a site visit to Kezar, noted that it was even windier, and arranged for the Dead to try something new and loudly groundbreaking — delay towers. Alembic had been working hard on the PA for several years, and when we spoke with Ron and Susan Wickersham several years back, Ron remembered this show as a turning point.
RON WICKERSHAM: Maybe the culmination of the stereo PA was a gig at Kezar Stadium. One of the big innovations there was having delay towers, before digital delays existed. So John Curl got some Philips CCD chips that were charge carrier devices — it was digital shifting, but the charges were analog charges, so the signals weren’t digitized. By putting several of those chips together, we could sample at a high enough rate to get the audio, the high frequency, not decimated by sampling, and then record it on the little electrostatic charges that went down the shift registers that made a delay doing that gig. That one got a lot of credit for being… by that time, we were paying attention to directivity. That’s another aspect that comes later in the Wall of Sound. If you don’t have the same directivity at all the frequencies, then the sound decays at a different rate.
JESSE: From there, it gets into some pretty thick math. Alembic arranged for the rental of a delay unit manufactured by Eventide Clockworks. Originally, Wickersham had hoped to tilt the array downwards slightly to best angle the sound, though there wasn’t enough time to enact it for the show. He suggested that, in the future, 16 Eventide delay units might be chained together to simulate the tilt. That is, Ron Wickersham suggested an early version of virtual audio modeling.
AUDIO: “The Other One” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (8:34-8:52) - [dead.net]
The Green Tent
JESSE: There’s less than a minute of silent footage from the Kezar show, and while the band isn’t in the footage, there’s a great establishing shot that pans across the stadium where you can see the delay towers. The stage is situated in the west end zone. In the east, though, you can see a green tent with a VW Microbus parked next to it. For the first time, Bill Graham arranged to have medical services at a show, but he did it the San Francisco way. Please welcome to the Deadcast, from Bill Graham Presents, Jerry Pompili.
JERRY POMPILI: In the early ‘70s, when I was running Winterland for Bill, I noticed that, depending upon the type of show, Winterland held a little over 5,000 people, between 5 and 6,000. We would get X number of incidents, something where we had to roll someone to the hospital up the street, or sit in the staff lounge — just deal with shit. Mostly alcohol, sometimes drugs and stuff. Every so often, several times a year, we did shows at the Cow Palace, and the Cow Palace was three times the size of Winterland. And what struck me as curious was even though the Cow Palace was three times as big, we didn’t have three times the amount of problems — we had nine times the amount of problems. That always struck me as, huh, just a kind of thing I tucked away in my head. Then Bill booked the first show at Kezar Stadium, which held 50,000 people, and I went into Bill’s office and I said, “Bill…” — and I told him what I just told you. I said, “The way this works: we’re gonna do a show with 50,000 people, unless we do something, someone’s gonna die.” And Bill picked up the phone and called David Smith at the Haight-Ashbury Clinic, who he had a relationship with, and David put Dr. Skip Gay and Darryl Inaba on the deal. I talked to those guys, and they set the whole thing up.
JESSE: Dr. Dave Smith.
DAVID SMITH: At the beginning, the Fillmore would let clinic volunteers in for free concerts if they were there to help with these adverse reactions. And then Bill Graham started doing benefits for the Clinic because he realized that we were taking care of his population. In other words, people that went to the concerts, that came to the Summer of Love, came to Haight-Ashbury, were the ones that came to the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. It was kind of a community and a movement. But then they started having bigger and bigger concerts.
JESSE: Bob Barsotti.
BOB BARSOTTI: Bill went to David and told him, “You know, now that we're going from 5,000 to 50,000, we need a different set of medical services.” He jumped right in and said he’d put something together.
DAVID SMITH: Bill Graham was the leader, of course. He's the one that talked with us, but it was Jerry Pompili’s idea to talk with us. They needed to have a formal program of Rock Medicine, to improve the services but also to get the insurance.
BOB BARSOTTI: It was, I believe, Skip Gay and a bunch of their doctors who were putting it all together. It was something we'd never seen before, and it really worked well with the stadium environment. It really was a fantastic godsend to have those guys there. It turned out to be so great that we asked him if he’d continue it and do it at our smaller shows. So they started doing Winterland and the other shows we were doing. And that was the genesis of Rock Med.
JESSE: The proto Rock Med tent would also be set up the following week for Led Zeppelin and at many shows to come. It was an extraordinary evolution. What’s also extraordinary is that the doctors from the Haight Street Free Clinic also authored a scholarly paper about those first two weekends in 1973, titled, “A Dash of M*A*S*H: The Zep and the Dead: Head to Head.” To discuss it, please welcome back, from the Grateful Dead Studies Association, Nicholas Meriwether.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: The three authors are George R. Day, Robbie Elsenbaumer, and John A. Newmeyer. George Gay was the director at the time of clinical activities; they’re all at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. Gay was the director of clinical activities; Elsenbaumer was the administrator of the medical section; and John Newmeyer was the epidemiologist. These three guys write this remarkable article. They start out with a brief introduction, classic medicalese — nothing more than, ‘Hey, this is the study.’ And the very first paragraph after that is labeled: “Historical Retrospect & Flashbacks.” Strap yourself in — now you know that you are in for a most unusual academic article.
JESSE: Naturally, we had Nick read some of it.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: Saying: “Scores of psychotropic light years have passed since the idyllic Aquarian Age of the Woodstock Nation. The Avalon and Fillmores East and West have disappeared over The Edge, driven by the non-direction and ennui of their once-teeming crowds, and eased along with the help of the medium and their own chosen Angels. Altamont took a hobnailed boot in the balls, and ego and promotional money, wounded, turned inward.” You don't get this kind of writing, not only in medical articles, but you certainly don't get that in most academic writing. It’s just incredible!
JESSE: Shout out to the lead author on the article, the late Dr. George Skip Gay, who seemingly gave the piece its voice. When I was researching my book Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, I mostly focused on all the incredible hard data this paper presents, which we’ll discuss, too, but had slightly missed some of the more colorful reportage.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: The funny thing about the Rock Med article is the degree to which they actually allow themselves to not write in formal academic prose. It is just littered with wonderful little nuggets of what we would classify as quintessential Dead Head prose.
DAVID SMITH: Skip was a little gonzo — I think that's the best way to say it. He was an outstanding physician and very flamboyant. Skip was so well-known that we could publish the whole article, including the colorful stuff, that wouldn't be allowed into mainstream medical journals.
JESSE: Until getting to the more serious stuff, a lot of it just reads like well-reported rock journalism. “It’s important how you say hello,” they quote Bill Graham as saying. “Graham was in the forefront, making his presence known; opening Kezar’s gates to the early comers just after dawn… handing out free balloons and frisbees.” One of the new fans seeing the Dead that day was Mike Crater.
MIKE CRATER: I was young. I was like 18, and I was in the Air Force. I wasn’t really a Dead Head — I always thought of myself as a freethinker, and collected albums in high school. I had Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty. I didn’t have any live albums. Then I left home and got stationed in Monterey, California. I got [Europe ‘72] when it first came out, and from the opening lick of “Cumberland Blues,” I jumped up and started dancing. I knew that I had to go see the Dead. Then, I saw in the pink section of the San Francisco [Chronicle] that they’re going to play Kezar. I rode the bus from Monterey to Salinas to the Ticketron at the Sears, and got three tickets.
JESSE: Mike Dolgushkin.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: My brother and I and some friends of ours, we drove up to San Francisco, met up at my friend Gary Ross’s place up on Twin Peaks, and then we took the bus down to Golden Gate Park. It was a sunny morning, or it seemed like the sun was kind of breaking through the clouds when we got there. We were sitting out there — we found a spot on the field. I think our friend Steve had gotten out there first and staked out a spot, so we found him.
JESSE: Mike Crater brought two friends he’d made serving in the Air Force.
MIKE CRATER: Two guys that were stationed in Monterey with me. I had some of the shortest hair of anybody in the whole stadium.
JESSE: Sometimes, the long hair is on the inside.
MIKE CRATER: All three of us were quite experienced by the time we got there. I had read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, so I figured I wanted to get with the whole spirit of things. We parked out in Golden Gate Park, and drop on the way, walking towards the main gate. And it was very strong — it’s a miracle I made it inside the gate! Yeah, you’d just sit down and have to stare at a tree or something…
JESSE: Strider Brown was a show veteran by then.
STRIDER BROWN: Kezar was, I’m pretty sure, my 31st Dead concert since the beginning of 1970, and my third outdoor Grateful Dead concert. The first time seeing them outside was Yale Bowl, ‘71. And then, of course at Veneta, in Oregon, in ‘72.
JESSE: Mike Crater.
MIKE CRATER: We went and it wasn't very crowded. It was a big stadium: there were 18,000 people there, we walked right up behind the soundboard and just plopped down on the grass. We were just a bunch of dudes out for the day, we had no idea. We didn’t have blankets or water bottles or any of this stuff that we’d consider essential concert supplies. I laid there, just plastered.
STRIDER BROWN: The New Riders started their set at 10:30 in the morning. And then, with Waylon’s set and then a three-set Grateful Dead concert, it was absolutely an all-day affair.
New Riders of the Green Park
BILL GRAHAM [5/26/73]: Good morning, welcome, it’s nice to be outdoors in San Francisco. Here we go — to get the muscles moving, from Marin County, the New Riders of the Purple Sage.
AUDIO: “It’s Alright With Me” [New Riders of the Purple Sage, 5/26/73] (0:00-0:13)
JESSE: The doctors from the Free Clinic reported: “The faithful Dead Freaks and the sun came early… excitement and a sense of happy anticipation crept over the walls at Kezar. Frisbees were out, and Bill Graham joined in a game of touch football at mid-field (we were warned to watch out for injuries to ‘the old man’).” Strider.
STRIDER BROWN: I like to say that Veneta in Oregon was the last of innocence, but thinking about Kezar, there was some of that feeling indeed. Things in the Bay Area in general by 1974 were becoming somewhat dodgy. Certainly the scene, at least at Kezar that day, was very open — both with the people and being an outdoor concert, and being so close to the old Haight-Ashbury, pretty much on the edge of it.
JESSE: The place was huge by local Dead standards, but it was also homey and open.
STRIDER BROWN: The architecture of Kezar Stadium had that very old style of football stadiums: elongated, relatively low sides. Yale Bowl is that old style of stadium also. But of course, all that changed with super stadiums starting to be built, I think perhaps with Shea Stadium.
JESSE: Mike Dolgushkin.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: There were apartment houses across the street from the stadium. People were up on the roofs and hanging out their windows, and up on the roof of Polytechnic High School, which is across the street, across Frederick Street, people were hanging out up there.
JESSE: One odd historical footnote to the New Riders performance: Betty Cantor Jackson apparently recorded it on a 16-track, presumably Alembic’s MM-1000. In 2018, the tape surfaced via online auction. It’s been mixed down and now circulates. But there’s no real explanation, nor any known evidence that she also recorded the Dead to multitrack that day, though that doesn’t seem unlikely.
AUDIO: “Rainbow” [New Riders of the Purple Sage, 5/26/73] (0:00-0:33)
JESSE: There are some mixed memories of the New Riders’ set, with a few people reporting that members of Waylon Jennings’ band joined for the closing “Willie and the Hand Jive,” but it was just some more local muppets.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: Keith played piano with ‘em, and Matt Kelly came out and played some harp also. I don't remember seeing anybody extra up there besides those two.
AUDIO: “Willie and the Hand Jive” [New Riders of the Purple Sage, 5/26/73] (0:32-0:52)
Waylon
JESSE: Between live sets, the San Francisco Phoenix observed, the house music was by The Band, Van Morrison, and Rod Stewart. I actually kinda wonder how that sounded through the Dead’s system. Up next at around 12:30 was Waylon Jennings, on the verge of breaking through from the country underground into the crossover territory that became known as “outlaw country.” In his memoir, co-written with certified Dead freak Lenny Kaye, Jennings wrote that the gig was the doing of his manager, Neil Reshen. He’d just released Lonesome On’ry & Mean. Unfortunately, no audio survives of his set. One audience member would recall Jerry Garcia and New Riders pedal steel player Buddy Cage watching Waylon’s pedal steel player, Ralph Mooney, from the side of the stage.
AUDIO: “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean” [Waylon Jennings, Lonesome, On’ry and Mean] (0:28-0:44) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Mike Dolgushkin.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: I remember him doing “Me and Bobby McGee,” and that that caused our friend Steve to remark, “Oh, no, now the Dead aren't going to do it.” And I do remember somebody yelling something up to the stage. I couldn't hear what it was, but Waylon replied, “I may be country, but I ain't that damn country.”
AUDIO: “Me and Bobby McGee” [Waylon Jennings, Lonesome, On’ry and Mean] (0:48-1:13) - [Spotify]
JESSE: In his memoir, Waylon didn’t remember the Kezar show terribly fondly. He wrote, “Musically it didn’t work. Deadheads don’t care if it’s Jesus Christ up there. All they’ve come to see is the Dead. I felt older than them; when I walked out, I probably looked like that sonofabitch who’d told them if they weren’t in by eleven o’clock he was going to ground them. My kids were old enough to be among that crowd. In the end, it didn’t matter how the shows went, because the word of mouth whispered like wildfire.” The show with the Dead helped Waylon build buzz among rock fans, and it would be cited in his press clips for years to come. A year afterwards, he asked a San Francisco crowd, “How many of you were at Kezar Stadium? That changed a lot of things right there.”
As happens sometimes when bands cross paths, the Dead learned some excellent road lore. This audio of Jerry Garcia and Steve Parish is from David Gans’s bodacious Conversations with the Dead.
JERRY GARCIA [3/10/83]: Waylon Jennings and his bus driver… the band had been playing poker with the bus driver for years, and losing steadily to him, until finally the whole band, Waylon and everybody, were into him for thousands and thousands of dollars. He ran the whole show! He was like the manager — he ran everything, he owned everything. They were fundamentally working for him. That’s an example of how weird it can get. We found out about that when we played in Golden Gate Park with him [Kezar Stadium, May 26, 1973]—it’s funny as hell.
STEVE PARISH [3/10/83]: I must admit, we tried to do that with the Grateful Dead once, too—we started playing cards, but the only guy that would play with us was Kreutzmann, and he’d only break out five bucks. After he lost five dollars, he’d break everything in the room—and he cheated, too! So we couldn’t get past that. We tried that one too…
JERRY GARCIA [3/10/83]: [laughs] Bill. Riverboat Bill.
AUDIO: “Me and Bobby McGee” [Waylon Jennings, Lonesome, On’ry and Mean] (2:46-3:05) - [Spotify]
JESSE: It was a long day in the sun, and if heads dosed before they went into the show, like Mike Crater, the peaks of their trip occurred during the New Riders and Waylon Jennings sets.
MIKE CRATER: I had to go eat and go to the bathroom and stuff like that. And, somehow, I always made it back to right where I’d been standing before. It was funny how I kind of had a homing path to that place. Yeah, there were people there without any clothes on. To me, it was like: oh yeah, there’s a guy without any clothes on, okay — what’s over here? Now, people would flip out, and they would carry the guy out of the stadium. But it was totally relaxed.
JESSE: Our Deadcast hero David Gans was at Kezar in ‘73, but not entirely present.
DAVID GANS: I don't have a lot of strong memories about Kezar because I had a rough time with LSD that day. I spent a good portion of the show walking around the rim of Kezar Stadium. I famously posted somewhere in the early days of online that I lost an argument with a hot dog that day, and it kind of became one of the memes for that date. But it was Waylon Jennings, which was interesting. A lot of stuff just didn’t register or stick in my memory because I was having this anxiety experience instead.
JESSE: In our Santa Barbara episode, we spoke with Bob Student, who’d just returned from the Army and filmed part of the show with his super 8 camera.
BOB STUDENT: I did see the Dead there at Kezar.
JESSE: But like David, Bob had too much too fast.
BOB STUDENT: I took a little too much acid, and then I came down with the flu at the same time, so I was really sick. Someone brought me over to the sideline, and there were four people from the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic there. Oh, it was terrible — I was sick, I was tripping. They took care of me. A couple hours later, I'm better and I went home. So that's my claim, to be the first patient for Rock Medicine, before they became Rock Medicine.
JESSE: Many years later, Bob would go on to work for Rock Med in non-medical capacities, part of another extended family entwined with the Grateful Dead. “High-noon had brought the acid boom,” reported the resulting paper. “Our tent began to fill with sun and acid overdoses. This was generally a happy and peaceful group, however, and easily managed.” The paper itself is behind a scholarly paywall, but many public and university libraries offer free remote access. Or ask a Dead scholar near you.
DAVID SMITH: The Dead was very psychedelic: LSD, twirling. An individual came in, freaking out, and he says, “I can see the music notes coming out of Jerry Garcia's guitar and into my head…” That type of stuff. [We told them,] “No, no, no, it’s a drug.” We had a talkdown tent.
JESSE: It’s an obvious thing to say that people took LSD at Dead shows, but it’s another to start attending to adverse psychedelic experiences and create a protocol to do so. Hugh Romney, soon known as Wavy Gravy, arguably started the very basics of it at the Watts Acid Test in 1966 and applied them to countless Hog Farm incursions over the years, like when they ran security at Woodstock. The Haight Street Free Medical Clinic prepared seriously and thoughtfully, pooling their shared knowledge of working at past festivals and the Fillmore Auditorium offering talk-down workshops and other tips the night before. Even 50 years later, the territory that Rock Med entered into at Kezar remains seriously contested at best, and virtually outlawed in many places, mostly due to insurance policies and the successors of the RAVE Act which, well, you should look up the RAVE Act, its sponsor, and its consequences. But back in 1973, the Haight Street Free Clinic just went ahead and did it. The work had its hazards. Nicholas Meriwether.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: 13 of the 30 workers at the Rock Med tent at the Dead show get dosed! [laughs] So there's this overwhelming sense in which they take their jobs seriously, but they also had a really good time. But, their point is serious. They conclude that introductory section by saying: “Our purpose then will be to explore the probabilities of what medical and psychosocial problems one may expect, within the churning crucible of the rock concerts of 1973. How to deal with their disparities and in so doing how best to prepare the smoothest clinical management possible.” Nothing but a serious thing.
JESSE: The paper they published would be cited frequently, helping establish both a protocol and basic understanding of running field medical tents at large public events, a service with ramifications far beyond rock concerts.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: What's also clear when you read the article is the degree to which at least one, if not all three, of the authors are huge fans of the Dead. I mean, their admiration for the Dead comes through clearly throughout. So when they shift gears and start talking about the details of the the two individual concerts, when they first introduce the Grateful Dead, they say: “The Grateful Dead has generated over the years a steadfastly loyal following of mellow heads, who express themselves in harmonious crowd reading, dancing at concerts, and a warm acid acceptance of their own private world. The carnival mood of picnicking, sunbathing, dancing, and a sharing of whatever bottled psychedelic experience might be contained in communal jugs of Kool-Aid or orange juice, was well-verbalized by Graham's introduction of ‘If we're going to christen Kezar, I think we’ve got the right bottle of champagne.’ Indeed”—it's a great line—”20,000 flower children grown older with some mixture of their younger counterparts, brought the renewed warmth of a reunion of family to the somber gray, moldering presence of old Kezar.” Again, you're not going to find prose like that in most academic articles, and certainly not in medical literature.
JESSE: But they also provide helpful advice.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: They've got this wonderful breakdown of — this is how we set up a tent; these are the considerations that we thought about, like keeping the drugs that might be of interest to freaks bottled up and battened down. And then they get into the details.
JESSE: It’s a stellar example of freak/straight scholarship.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: They also make it a point to say how many people came by the tent, to thank them for their work.
JESSE: Which, of course, is how those 13 of 30 volunteers got dosed before 1pm. Mike Crater had dosed himself and was doing just fine, thank you very much.
MIKE CRATER: I think it was the New Riders came on, and then another country band came on: country Waylon Jennings! I listened to that, and we’re just starting to come down from the peak. And I hear people saying, “The Dead, the Dead, the Dead!” So we got up and just walked right down in front of the soundboard, and did not move for the entire five-hour show, or whatever it was.
Kezar ‘73
BILL GRAHAM [5/26/73]: Let’s welcome the Grateful Dead, please…
AUDIO: “Promised Land” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:00-0:31) - [dead.net]
MIKE CRATER: I never had any idea that something could sound like that.
JESSE: The Dead hit the stage around 2. Strider.
STRIDER BROWN: The Grateful Dead’s three sets were phenomenal of course. I was somewhere down probably about 50 feet, 60 feet from the stage, in the center.
JESSE: Mike Dolgushkin.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: The band was in a good mood. Jerry had the grins the whole day. They definitely had equipment problems, which I don’t think ever got solved during the whole gig. But musically, they managed to transcend that.
JERRY GARCIA [5/26/73]: Thanks a lot. It’s real nice to be out here.
JESSE: Later in the year, Donna Jean and Weir appeared on WAER in Rochester and talked about the band’s lack of setlist planning.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX [9/17/73]: We go out there and we just do what… we never discuss what we're gonna play.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: We’ve got a few starter tunes, and we’ve got a few ending tunes. And in between, it’s just whatever happens.
JESSE: The band drew from what was freshest on their mind, their developing repertoire, with occasional curve balls thrown into the mix. There were lots of new unrecorded songs in play, as we’ve noted and will continue to note. Between some of the new songs and some of the flavors in the extended jams, the Dead were moving into a new era. But they could also just still lean into being the Cowboy Dead. Mike Dolgushkin.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: It seemed like a lot of what the Dead were doing was kind of like building on that country feel, you know, the New Riders and then Waylon, and the Dead were playing a lot of that sort of thing: “El Paso,” all that kind of thing. “The Race Is On” was in there some place.
AUDIO: “The Race Is On” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:00-0:22) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Weir had sung “The Race Is On” with the New Riders back in 1970, but it was new to the electric Dead in 1973 and with some new players in the mix. One was Keith Godchaux. When the Dead’s spring tour finished in April, Keith and Donna had actually continued on the road with the New Riders of the Purple Sage, singing and playing most nights, with Keith marinating a bit more in country flavors. The other new part of “The Race Is On” was Ms. Donna Jean Godchaux.
AUDIO: “The Race Is On” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:23-0:46) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Donna Jean had parts in lots of the songs that were returning to the repertoire for the first time since she’d joined the band.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: One of the things that I loved singing with the Grateful Dead was the fact that so much of the vocals [were] not like background-voice vocals. It’s ensemble singing. There were background vocals on certain songs and certain parts, but a great deal was ensemble singing. You take Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, and you’ve got ensemble singing on so many of those songs.
JESSE: When new songs came into the repertoire now, there was almost always a part built in for Donna in the place where Phil Lesh once occupied.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: I started doing more vocal stuff because Phil was kind of losing the ability to do his parts the way he wanted to do them, how he wanted to sound. And so I was put in more of a position of doing more vocally than I even was on the Europe trip, because I was really a freshie. I was the freshman of the band — a newbie, is what they called it.
JESSE: For the most part, Lesh would continue to sing his vocal parts through the band’s 1974 hiatus, but Donna took on more and more vocal responsibilities.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: And it translated as well to the next era that included Wake of the Flood and [From the] Mars Hotel and Blues for Allah — just a lot of ensemble singing. That was really fun.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (1:17-1:50) - [dead.net]
JESSE: One way that the Dead concerts stood at a remove from mass culture in this or any era was the inclusion of songs that weren’t yet recorded for albums, and were expected to be experienced real-time, in the moment. Even in his not-great psychedelic space, David Gans couldn’t help but notice the new material.
DAVID GANS: As often happened in recollecting Grateful Dead things, there's just little flourishes or little bits that stick with you. And I remember hearing the dual guitar thing after the first verse of “Row Jimmy.”
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:42-0:49) - [dead.net]
DAVID GANS: And that just sort of registered. Little things like that would help you understand the relationships and how the music was made, and that was one. This was 1973. I’d been playing guitar for four years, and I’d been listening to the Grateful Dead for one. So I was just really beginning to understand how that music worked.
JESSE: It was music for a Saturday afternoon. The report from the Free Clinicians noted that “a large part of [the audience] was sprawled casually on the infield grass, while the dirt track surrounding the field was continuously filled with a flowing, milling, living stream, an ever-changing parade of freaks…” Mostly, it seems like it wasn’t much of a dancing crowd. “Some dancing took place near the foot of the [stage],” they observed.
A writer from the San Francisco Phoenix observed some of the dancers, too, commenting: “For the dozens of ecstatic dancers, it was indeed ecstatic. Gay lib and the gender fuckers and high camp transvestites were scintillating (many worked out just under the platform and to the right).” They were a regular part of the Dead scene in that era. Philip Elwood, the San Francisco Examiner’s veteran Dead correspondent, “This first-ever Kezar rock program brought out a large teenage crowd to mix with the original Dead freaks, now older. Also in evidence was the usual collection of transvestites and histrionics.” It was the peak of the glam era. And while it’s easy to see the psychedelic roots of Ziggy Stardust, it’s not always as easy to see how the glam scene leaked back into the Dead’s psychedelic world — though it certainly did, as at Kezar. Mainly, probably, it was San Francisco, as always, keeping the Dead freaks freaky.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (1:50-2:03) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Mike Dolgushkin.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: During the first set I was hoping for a “Bird Song,” something that they can stretch out on. But they did “Playing in the Band” at the end of the set, and it was a great “Playing in the Band” — one of the best from that time.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (4:10-4:40) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Just listen to that stereo spread. Listen to Bob Weir over in the left channel.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (7:20-7:50) - [dead.net]
JESSE: One slight bummer about this “Playing in the Band” is that Keith Godchaux moves over to Rhodes, which would ordinarily be a good thing, except that it doesn’t seem to be in Betty’s sub-mix until almost the end of the jam. You can hear it pop into the mix about 14 minutes in, but just listen to those sparkles.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (13:53-14:23) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The second set began with the Deadcast’s current theme song.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:16-0:27) - [dead.net]
JESSE: David Gans.
DAVID GANS: The other thing that I really remembered strongly was “Here Comes Sunshine” had this beautiful high [thing that] I think Jerry played at the beginning, the intro lick. It was this beautiful, high-up-on-the neck thing that really wafted out across the bowl. Whatever was roiling my heart that day, I still managed to remember that music.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:33-1:05) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Mike Crater.
MIKE CRATER: I can still remember parts of that show very vividly. I remember Donna sang “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man).”
AUDIO: “You Ain’t Woman Enough” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:07-0:33) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Mike Dolgushkin.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: There was Donna’s song, “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man).” That was kind of a surprise.
JESSE: Donna Jean’s vocal responsibilities had grown since she’d started singing with the band in early 1972. That fall, she and Garcia had done a few duet versions of Dolly Parton’s “Tomorrow Is Forever,” originally sung as a duet with Porter Wagoner, a truly inspired choice. This is from Waterbury ‘72, now on the 30 Trips Around the Sun box.
AUDIO: “Tomorrow Is Forever” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 9/24/72] (0:57-1:16) - [YouTube] [Spotify]
JESSE: Early in 1973, the Dead debuted another country classic by a female songwriter, and this time Garcia didn’t get in the way.
AUDIO: “You Ain’t Woman Enough” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:35-1:00) - [dead.net]
JESSE: “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man)” was a #2 country smash, written and performed by the amazing Loretta Lynn, originally released in May 1966 — on our timeline, after the Acid Tests but before the Dead moved to the Haight.
AUDIO: “You Ain’t Woman Enough” [Loretta Lynn, You Ain’t Woman Enough] (1:09-1:34) - [Spotify]
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: They just wanted me to sing something, and at that time, I was just still in a state of fluctuation about who I am and what I do, how do I manage all of this life that I'm living. And that's just a song that came up. But I started singing it — I don’t remember any more about it, or anything deep about it.
JESSE: But it also must have been pretty fun to really get to front the band for the first time.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: I probably felt good about being able to sing something, yeah. But I didn’t within myself, “Oh my gosh, you’re getting to sing a solo!” I just didn’t have that kind of mentality. And people would ask me, “Well, why don't you do more? Why don't you sing more?” But the thing was, the Grateful Dead needed a certain thing at a certain time — a certain voice, a certain harmony. And that was my place. For a lot of the time that I was in the band, that was my place. For instance, let me give you a little inside thing. We were on stage at one point— I'm sure it was Winterland—and the Airplane and the Grateful Dead, and Grace Slick was standing right next to me.
JESSE: Triangulating a bit, I think the following conversation took place at the Roadies Benefit at Winterland on October 9th, 1972.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: She was inebriated, and she turned to me. The band was playing a song that I wasn't singing on. She said, “Well, why aren’t you up there singing right now?” And I said, “Well, it’s because I don’t want to, Grace.” And that just shut her up — that shut her up. But anyway, I said that to say this: I knew where my place was. I wasn’t out to take over the Grateful Dead, be the big vocalist and take over the band. I was never interested in that. I just wanted to sing with the Grateful Dead!
AUDIO: “You Ain’t Woman Enough” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (2:37-3:02) - [dead.net]
JESSE: This Kezar show is really one of my favorite recordings by Betty Cantor-Jackson. David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Betty—really starting here, but you do hear it much more in ‘77 with her recordings—[made] a little bit more sonic manipulation at the time of the recording. So what she's recorded is what we have, and thankfully, her recordings are phenomenal. Betty was a studio person. Betty had extensive experience on all of the Dead albums at this point, whether they were the live albums that she mixed—recorded and mixed—or they were the studio records that she co-produced. She knew her way around the studio. So, to be in the live setting… I’ve never talked with her about it, but I expect she had some outboard gear — whether it was a bit of compression or a bit of EQ. She certainly had a DVX encoding unit for the spring of ‘77, and only that tour.
JESSE: Even once the shows are picked out for Dead box sets, putting them together for release involves far more than just locating the recordings in the tape vault, almost always involving David working in close contact with engineer Jeffrey Norman.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Let's say we use the show that was recorded by Betty. Her master tape[s], as you know, cut every 46 minutes or so — so her master tape cuts, and it takes 30 seconds or a minute to string up a new tape. So we’re missing [bits]. Thankfully, we have the Kidd [Candelario] recording, and Jeffrey is a phenomenal editor. He does a seamless edit: you can't hear where the edit is perfectly blended, so you're not missing any music. It's just from a different recording. But with headphones in particular, you can hear where the stereo assignments change. It's very subtle, but all of a sudden if, let’s say, Weir might be hard left and Keith is hard right — then, all of a sudden, Keith is center, and Jerry’s on the right. Again, it’s very subtle; you’ve got to have your headphones on. But you will notice it.
JESSE: “China Cat Sunflower” is one of those places where you can hear a patch between sources and can A/B the recordings made by Betty Cantor Jackson and Kidd Candelario. It helps to listen on headphones. At the beginning of this segment, Bob Weir is panned to the left, Jerry Garcia is panned to the right, and Keith Godchaux’s Rhodes is in the middle. Then, for 30 seconds, while Betty is changing reels, suddenly the guitars collapse to the middle before going back to Betty’s fuller recording.
AUDIO: “China Cat Sunflower” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (3:08-3:46) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Big ups to Jeffrey Norman for making this sound so smooth. Mike Dolgushkin.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: There was a nice “China Cat” / “Rider” in the middle that had what’s called the “Feelin’ Groovy” jam. They started to stick that in the middle of it, that was a new thing.
AUDIO: “You Ain’t Woman Enough” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (6:59-7:33) - [dead.net]
JESSE: You’ll wanna hear the rest of that.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: About five o'clock, they took another break. That's when it really took off.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (6:33-7:03) - [dead.net]
STRIDER BROWN: It was during the third set, beginning of the third set, looking behind me and seeing my brother and his seven-months pregnant wife headed out, because, well, of course, seven months pregnant… that's a lot of energy. That was the last time my brother saw the Grateful Dead. The jams were being extended in somewhat of a different manner from ‘72 and earlier. Every year, of course, there's changes in the sound, and even some of the jam structures.
JESSE: Kezar was the Dead’s first Bay Area show since the death of Pigpen less than three months earlier. Out in the crowd was Kevin McKernan, Pig’s younger brother. We’ve posted a touching account of that day by one of Kevin’s friends.
STRIDER BROWN: I'm just glad that I wasn't such a purist that when Pigpen was no longer in the band I [didn’t stop] going.
JESSE: Did you know people who stopped seeing the Dead after Pig died?
STRIDER BROWN: It would have been my brother and his wife. Part of that was the birth of their first son.
JESSE: Well, maybe just a part of it, though coming in and out of the Dead world for any reason at all is totally normal. Inside every Dead fan, there are two are Deads, at least — one that exists in the abstract on recordings, and one that exists in real-time touring somewhere, continuing to sound subtly different every time through town. I think of the core of the band’s third set at Kezar to be the quintessential spring 1973 sequence. It happened three times like this, once in February, in Des Moines two weeks earlier, and at Kezar: ”He’s Gone” into “Truckin’” into “The Other One” into “Eyes of the World” into “China Doll,” one hour and 45 minutes of continuous music, according to the timings on the new box set.
AUDIO: “He’s Gone” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (4:47-5:13) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Mike Dolgushkin.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: They did that bubbly sparkly jam out of “He’s Gone” that really… it really doesn’t sound like too many others. It really [has] a personality of its own.
AUDIO: “He’s Gone” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (11:43-12:13) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Mike Crater knew the tunes from the band’s newest album.
MIKE CRATER: They played a bunch of stuff off of Europe ‘72. They did a long “Truckin’” in there towards the end, maybe in the third set.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (1:45-2:16) - [dead.net]
JESSE: It gets good. This is an example of Garcia and Keith thinking the one is in a different place for a moment, resulting in a tiny moment of ambiguity, before hitting the peak together.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (5:29-5:56) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Mike Dolgushkin.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: “The Other One” was… they went deep on that.
AUDIO: “The Other One” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:13-0:26) - [dead.net]
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: Oh god, Phil’s bass solo. Phil’s bass solo was unreal. I’m hoping, now that that show’s going to get an official release, that that bass solo will take its rightful place in the pantheon of all things Grateful Dead. I never heard anything, before or since, like that. It was like a whole song of its own.
AUDIO: “The Other One” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (1:32-2:02) - [dead.net]
JESSE: It was an era when “The Other One” was more a theme than a song, and we talked about Phil’s Philo Stomp motif in our Listen to the River ‘72 episode. Though looked at from a song perspective, the band goes especially far out on both sides of the first verse here. Sometimes, they blur together. Keith is playing Rhodes during the singing, giving it a slightly different flavor.
AUDIO: “The Other One” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (8:03-8:23) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Another big moment came after the verse.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: That was a really spectacular Tiger that they did.
MIKE CRATER: The Tiger came out. I’m sure you’ve heard of that, where Garcia starts playing a riff over and over, starts stomping on top of one of his pedals.
AUDIO: “The Other One” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (14:13-14:30) - [dead.net]
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: Our buddy Steve said it sounded like it was millions of rats pouring out of the speakers — that’s what it sounded like to him.
AUDIO: “The Other One” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (14:30-14:50) - [dead.net]
MIKE CRATER: To me, it sounded like mechanical spiders were running out of the PA system.
AUDIO: “The Other One” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (14:50-15:07) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Funny, somebody told us before that it sounded like rats.
MIKE CRATER: Oh, yeah, must have been Mikey D., huh?
JESSE: What, do you all know each other or something?
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: Then they go into this really spacey thing after that. It sounds like they've landed on Pluto or something.
AUDIO: “The Other One” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (15:10-15:29) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The “Eyes of the World”/”China Doll” pairing was a complete piece of music unto itself — a piece built for improvisation, a structure that was as dynamic as it was dramatic, a balance of open-ended conversation, odd time signatures, and big peaks resolving into an extended moment of extreme delicacy. Played as a cap on the rest of the suite, it’s an especially big finish, using 20 minutes of new music as the final set piece.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:00-0:23) - [dead.net]
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: They did that seven pattern or whatever you want to call it. They usually cycle through it three times, then they jam some more and went back to it again. That was a particularly good version of it; that was something we all took note of. “Oh look, listen to this, what they’re doing here. That’s pretty cool.”
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (10:03-10:33) - [dead.net]
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: I kept expecting him to go back into “The Other One” which of course they didn't do.
JESSE: They chose the slightly more delicate route.
AUDIO: “China Doll” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (4:13-4:46) - [dead.net]
Zep & Everything After
JESSE: The show was pretty much over by sunset. From the Free Clinic report: “Residual tripping plus the hot sun plus the non-threatening environment of the tent caused these clients to remain longer. Indeed, ten of our cots were occupied at 6pm, at which time the clients, upon being told that we were closing down, readily got up and walked away with a happy ‘What? Me Worry?’ smile on their faces.”
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: The immediate aftermath I remember — we were kind of starting to make our way out of there, and this guy who was just scraggly-looking and just, like, completely zoned came up and just stared at the young lady I was with. He just came up and just stared at her… we just kind of walked on. [Earlier in the day our friend] Gary had disappeared; we didn’t know where he was. So we just went out to make our way up to his house, because that’s where we parked the car. We’re going up Ashbury Street and, up ahead of us, we see Gary walking up the street. He flags the bus down — he tried to get a bottle of wine into this show, but they told him he couldn’t, so he hid it in the bushes. After the show, he went back to the bushes, retrieved the bottle of wine, and that’s what he was carrying when we saw him walking up the street.
JESSE: Some freaks probably got dinner and caught Johnny Winter at Winterland. Mike Crater, who was then in the Air Force, had a pretty heavy day.
MIKE CRATER: I made some life decisions along the way, too. I relocated to California permanently, where I could see as many Dead shows as possible, and still maintain a residence and job and all that kind of stuff.
JESSE: But after the show, it was back to the reality of life on an Air Force base.
MIKE CRATER: We drove right back. Well, only two of us went back — the third guy, we never saw again. We think he stayed downtown, and the Moonies got him. He was definitely AWOL, then came back out, got out, did whatever he had to do, and then went back to the Sun Myung Moon Universal Life Church.
JESSE: Yikes, where’s Wavy when you need him.
MIKE CRATER: I ended up with somewhere close to 300 shows under my belt.
JESSE: Strider Brown hung around San Francisco a little longer.
STRIDER BROWN: When Led Zeppelin played, I believe the following week at Kezar Stadium, I did not go into the stadium to see them. But before that concert started, there was a Dead Head in an apartment right across the street, on the south side of Kezar Stadium, who was blasting Live/Dead out of his apartment windows. So I went up there and partied with them, and I think I even went up on the roof and listened to part of Led Zeppelin’s set. But I’d already seen Led Zeppelin twice anyway, in 1969.
JESSE: Good scene. If you’ve seen the photos of Robert Plant and the dove, that’s from that day at Kezar. Our buddy Steve Brown from Grateful Dead Records was at the Zep show, too, and backstage at that. As a head from the psychedelic days, the amount of alcohol shocked him.
STEVE BROWN: Drunk, yes… I had never seen people, with Zeppelin like that, drink more liquor and still go on stage and play like hell. I was impressed. I said, “They can’t even walk, let alone get on stage and play!” After drinking all this liquor backstage, I was just blown out — I was surprised that they could get away with it. And they did. I was really blown away. I was like, ‘Oh, he’s gonna drink that whole bottle…’ They were getting really drunk. But they got on stage and all of a sudden it was them, doing it.
ROBERT PLANT [6/2/73]: Good afternoon. As we’ve been awake a total of about two-and-a-half hours, it just really seemed that we should be doing what we’re doing right now.
AUDIO: “Rock and Roll” [Led Zeppelin, 6/2/73] (2:50-3:21)
JESSE: As one of Owsley’s favored alchemical precepts goes, “as above, so below.” The Haight Street Free Clinic set up their tent in the end zone once again and treated concertgoers and kept notes on what they saw — some 20,000 people at the Dead show, and 30,000 at Zep. The paper published by the doctors from the Haight Street Free Clinic included “Table 3: Comparison of Major Drug Related Problems.” The results were pretty clear. At the Zeppelin show, they treated 19 people for alcohol related issues, versus 14 at the much-smaller Dead show. At the Zep show, 14 people came to the medical tent having adverse psychedelic experiences. At the Dead: 45. Dr. David Smith.
DAVID SMITH: If you're under the influence of a psychedelic, there was absolutely no violence. There were problems, but they were a very different type of problem. And then Zeppelin came along, everybody's drinking and doing speed — there’s violence and fights. I think that's what Skip wrote “A Dash of M*A*S*H” because he focused on Rock Medicine. I, from the Clinic point of view, wrote a paper that was published in the California Medical Association Journal called “Speed Freaks vs. Acid Heads.”
JESSE: I find it interesting because it clearly delineates that, by 1973, there was no longer a single rock and roll crowd — something that had almost been taken for granted only a few years earlier. Nicholas Meriwether.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: They provide a general summary of impressions. They contrast the difference between the Led Zeppelin audience and the Grateful Dead audience, and they point out that the Grateful Dead audience was uniquely dedicated to the Grateful Dead music. They were mellower, older and more attuned to their life's destinies. They were more into acid but less likely to succumb to “The Terror,” capitalized. And they were more trusting of the medical staff too, and that's something that comes through clearly. And they also have a section which is called “And A Few Final Hints.” And point number two is: “Beware of freaks bearing gifts (especially Kool-Aid or orange juice). Remember Owsley’s warning: ‘Maintain!’” With an exclamation point. Just wonderful, absolutely wonderful. By the way, they never mentioned Owsley at any point earlier in the article. So, the point is, this article is also designed to be read by people who get it.
JESSE: The article appeared in Vol. 5, No. 2 of the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs — by a quirk of scholarly publication, dated Winter 1972. Its publication was almost exactly contemporaneous with Stanley Krippner’s paper on his ESP experiments at the Capitol Theater, which we discussed in the first episode of our Skull & Roses season.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: There's an interesting connection between Krippner’s article and this article, the RockMed article, which is how I abbreviate it in my head even though it wasn’t really called RockMed yet. Both of them are harnessing the energy of a Grateful Dead concert for their own academic purposes. But, in the process, they’re telling us something profound and really significant about the Grateful Dead experience themselves. In other words, they are academic articles that don’t directly address the Grateful Dead experience per se. But they are fundamentally keyed to and work as articles and as studies, precisely because they take the Grateful Dead experience seriously, and end up finding really important things to say.
JESSE: The paper is worth a read for sure.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: It ends up making this just stunning final comment, which I've actually quoted in one of my scholarly articles: “But in the end, one must recall the atmosphere of the day in the crowd… which touched each member of the team… of an overall joyous melding into a flowing unity of life, which unexpectedly worked backward in time to innocent happy days of Hippie Hill, and an Outdoor Rock Concert World.”
JESSE: For Bill Graham and his organization, it became built into their operation as they started to scale into even bigger venues. Bob Barsotti.
BOB BARSOTTI: As we started doing the stadium shows, we brought Rock Med with us everywhere. There was a point when we would be involved in the Arena Managers Association convention every year, because we were one of the bigger promoters. Oakland Coliseum was always heavily involved, and Bob Quintella, the manager of the Coliseum, asked me to go with him a couple of times, to talk with the arena managers about our medical scene and our security. We had a little bit different approach to things than many other promoters, and it was great — we were able to show people this amazing operation, that there's an alternative way to doing it besides ambulances and taking them to hospitals. It’s really trying to treat everybody on-site and send them home with their friends. Works out much better. [chuckles]
JESSE: Like the original Free Clinic, the paper provided a model for others to follow.
DAVID SMITH: We started the national Free Clinic movement, and many of the Free Clinics that started after ours also delivered services to the same population. And so they would come out and they would look at that paper, talk with Skip, go to our trainings, and then they’d go back and set it up in Eugene, Oregon, [for example] — the White Bird Clinic. They have different names, but the Rock Medicine derivatives came from the training from the Haight-Ashbury Clinic. Same way that the Free Clinics that were set up.
JESSE: The rock shows that Bill Graham presented didn’t have too many problems that required heavy security operations, a perhaps simpler and more civilized age.
BOB BARSOTTI: Once in a while, you get a drunk guy who might grab somebody's girlfriend. That’s the only thing that will ever happen the whole time — or a naked guy, took a little too much LSD. And if that happens, bring him over to Rock Med! You don’t have to fill out a report — we’ll take care of him. I can’t tell you how many times the cops would show up with a naked guy and say, “We’re glad you’re here. We don’t have to do a report — take him!”
JESSE: On their list of hints for anybody else potentially organizing a medical tent at a rock show, they offered number 10: “Stockpile a few old clothes. Acid-heads have a tendency to get natural, which tends to freak out your law and order friends. Don’t be caught with your patient’s pants down.”
DAVID SMITH: It's the dissolving of the ego that happens with psychedelics: back to nature. But they sure did like to get naked and dance around. There was no peer pressure to not get naked.
AUDIO: “Me and My Uncle” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:44-0:54) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Though the Dead might’ve been the perfect champagne to re-christen Kezar, and heads got to boogie on the adjacent rooftops as well as the green, the neighborhood wasn’t too psyched about the shows.
BOB BARSOTTI: Everything moved to Oakland eventually, because you really couldn't do a lot of shows in that neighborhood. It was too close-in — neighbors were pretty… it was hard for the neighbors to go through that I think. There’s apartments right across the street! Somebody’s window’s right there.
JESSE: Bill Graham stuck with the branding, though. Mike Dolgushkin.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: Both the Dead and the Zeppelin shows were billed as “Dancing on the Green.” And then, when Zeppelin played too loud and Graham couldn’t use Kezar anymore, he moved the next show to Oakland Stadium with Leon Russell. That was originally billed as Dancing on the Green #3; then, by, I think, the third week of advertising, they changed it to Day on the Green #3.
JESSE: Day on the Green had been the working name for the massive Dead, Allmans, Waylon Jennings super-show in Ontario. Mike Dolgushkin and his crew got a tape of the first Kezar show, of course, which we’ll call out because of a fascinating quirk.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: In ‘74, late in ‘74, I got a tape of the show. That’s when we started… there was a buddy of ours who, during ‘74, had a portable Sony deck that he actually started taping shows on himself. But then a friend of his started getting tapes from other sources. To this day, I don’t know where he was getting them from, but Kezar was one of those. We had an audience tape of Kezar toward the end of ‘74 that was unfortunately missing “Playing in the Band” and “China Cat”/”Rider” because the guy didn’t like the long stuff — he didn’t want to waste tape on the long stuff. But he did have the presence of mind to tape the entire third set.
JESSE: I’ve heard of tapers pausing between songs to save tape — but pausing to skip the jams? Why, I never. Of course, there was another immediate impact of the show. Mike Crater.
MIKE CRATER: I know people have mentioned the way the stage was set up. The stage was set up in the western end of the stadium. It was a bright sunny day.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: For about a week afterwards, you could tell who'd been to the show because we all got sunburned. Everybody's faces were peeling after that, because we had the face into the sun.
DAVID SMITH: If you're dancing around naked and that's what you want to do, that's okay. But if you get a sunburn on your privates and you're in pain when you come down, then we’ll take care of that… that type of thing. We're very medically oriented. And that did happen, by the way. Naked in the sun, and you get a sunburn in places that hadn’t been exposed to sun.
MIKE CRATER: Everybody got a nice red face from staring into the sun all afternoon. You could tell people who'd been to the show because they all had this rosy glow about them.
JESSE: Why, I feel a song coming on.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (10:17-10:51) - [dead.net]