LISTEN TO THE RIVER: FOX THEATRE, DECEMBER 1971

GOOD OL' GRATEFUL DEADCAST

Season 4, Episode 2

Archival interviews:

- Jerry Garcia & Phil Lesh, KQRS, 10/19/71.

AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Listen To The River, 12/9/71] (0:10-0:24) - [dead.net]

BOB WEIR [12/9/71]: Hiya folks, and welcome to St. Louis. First thing we’re gonna do is get a level on our monitors here, so we know what we’re doing.

JESSE: That was Bob Weir, welcoming the crowd to their own city at the Fox Theatre on December 9th, 1971, the very first notes of the brand new Listen To The River box set, capturing seven St. Louis performances from 1971, 1972, and 1973. Grateful Dead archivist, legacy manager, and box set curator, David Lemieux.

DAVID LEMIEUX: The selection process is always very complex. People are always quite often suggesting doing a Greek Theatre box set, or a Red Rocks or some of the kind of classic Grateful Dead places. And, while I think that's interesting, I always find it…. it's the wrong way to approach something, to approach it based on the venue, based on the city. And don't get me wrong, there's some phenomenal Greek shows and Red Rocks and stuff. But I've always been of the mind to start with the music first and foremost.

JESSE: It’s not just that the Dead played frequently in St. Louis. It’s that they frequently played classic shows in St. Louis. Was there something in the water?

AUDIO: “Brokedown Palace” [Listen To The River, 12/10/71] (4:32-4:56) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: They’re three classic sets of shows with a plot arc all their own.

DAVID LEMIEUX: It tells the story of what is this, 22 months, so it's less than two years of the Grateful Dead's history, and it shows the transition between going from the Pigpen / Keith era, to the Keith and Donna era, right through the Wake of the Flood era. So it kind of covers three very distinct albums — of Skull and Roses, Europe ‘72, Wake of the Flood and then the beginning stages of the stuff that would appear on [From the] Mars Hotel.

JESSE: Without giving anything away, alongside seven monumental Grateful Dead performances, it’s a story that includes, between 1971 and 1973, surprise jams, bikers, research, development, premonitions of technologies to come, pedal steel guitar, connections to the deepest roots of American music, two LSD labs, and one bar mitzvah. Let us now set our mind dials for December 1971.

AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Listen To The River, 12/9/71] (0:26-0:50) - [dead.net]

DAVID LEMIEUX: The ‘71 shows I think are classic examples of the Skull and Roses-era Grateful Dead, which is the countrified rock and roll. This is not live Dead, this is not Anthem of the Sun. And there were some, some of those songs you've got, well, you've got the other one. But this is truly a rock and roll band.

AUDIO: “Big Railroad Blues” [Listen To The River, 12/10/71] (0:00-0:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: In 2017, a number of recordings returned to the Grateful Dead’s tape vault, including parts of the Fox Theatre shows that begin the new box set.

DAVID LEMIEUX: I find that these two shows are extremely accessible. I've always loved 12/10, but we didn't have the whole show. We had a reference copy of one set. And then the other set in the master reels, but when that tape came back with the Cornell batch and all those, it kind of opened the door to that show now being a prime consideration. It was the return of the missing reel, the missing set from ‘71, that allowed us to look at doing a seven show box set.

AUDIO: “Sittin’ On Top of the World” [Listen To The River, 12/10/71] (0:33-0:51) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: The Grateful Dead played lots of shows in lots of towns, but, as we discovered when putting these episodes together, the band’s relationship with St. Louis really did run incredibly deep. In 1971, the Dead were still mapping their own version of the United States. Their home was the road, and on the road they were still looking for new places to call their own. One place they loved was the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, NY, which we talked about at length last season on the Deadcast. Another was the Fox Theatre in St. Louis. Like the Fillmore East, it was a movie palace that was perfect for rock shows. Unlike the Fillmore East, it still showed movies. Sam Cutler, the band’s tour manager in the early ‘70s, remembered it lovingly.

SAM CUTLER: What was happening in America was… you poor Americans are a bit slow sometimes. You didn't realize how good those rooms were. So people would turn ‘em into warehouses. I don’t know, you know what I mean? There was literally like, the Fox Theatre in St Louis — fantastic, beautiful fucking cinema! But what a room! Perfect. So there's a lot of places like that around America. Unfortunately, quite a few got pulled down. But not any longer, because what civic authorities in various towns realize is if you have a Fox Theatre or a Capitol Theatre, right, that can lead to the regeneration of a downtown area. Every time there's a show in there, 3,000 people are coming into a downtown area that was otherwise, you know what I mean? Falling on its ass.

JESSE: Last season, we trucked along with the Spring ‘71 tour that yielded the live album Skull and Roses. We had Sam read a press release that he wrote about that period, and he pointed out one of the deep dissatisfactions with that particular tour.

SAM CUTLER: That writing refers to was booked by an agency in New York that didn't have a fucking clue. I mean, that was one night in Boston, and the next night in North Carolina — 2,000 miles away, you know what I mean? You had the day off in between, to make the journey and get there. And so it was crazy. Yeah, the routing was horrible. When you book tours for bands, man, human beings are involved. I know it's difficult to imagine that musicians are human, but they are, actually. And so the tours have to match the expectations of the bands, the economic situation. It’s a lot of considerations, none of which were really being particularly well-handled by the agency at that time. So we decided to do it in-house, basically, with me doing it. So yeah, it was a lot of extra work for me. But also, it was… I wanted to do it, because I wanted it to be within our control, the control of the family, of the band and myself, thinking that we could do a lot better job than some guy who’s sitting in a little office on Broadway in New York. You know, who’s booking this kind of theoretical group of people called the Grateful Dead.

JESSE: Over the course of 1971, Sam Cutler took over the Dead’s booking entirely, eventually leading to the formation of his company, Out Of Town Tours.

SAM CUTLER: What I did was look at America as a kind of logistical problem. My trip with America was — well, what we need to do is pace ourselves. Either on the West Coast or the East Coast or in the Midwest, and then have a base and then move out from that base to other places. You know what I mean? And then return to that base. So we minimize the amount of travel that we had to do. The problem of America is the problem of distance, the tyranny of distance. You can end up, if you don't book things properly, just drivin’, thousands of fucking miles. Ridiculous, go to ridiculous lengths. So, New York's a natural, isn't it? You know what I mean? St. Louis was also a natural, so you tended to the southern Midwest from St. Louis, but then at the same time Chicago is only 300 miles from St. Louis. So, 300 miles got to be nothing for a drive or a flight. I mean, mostly, the band flew, because less time in the maw of transportation. But you have to think about trucks, trucks have to drive, you've got tons of equipment on him. But three hundred miles for a truck driver is nothing less than four or five hours, you know?

JESSE: By December 1971, the Fox Theatre was burned into the Grateful Dead’s itinerary. Here’s Phil Lesh at the start of the December 9th show.

PHIL LESH [12/9/71]: While we’re testing our monitors, there might be something that can be said about trying to be nice to this place. In other words, don’t stand on the seats or kick in the walls, or rip out the ornaments. Seeing as how this is the only place we like to play around here. And if we can’t come back here to this theater, we won’t come back to this town. Which means you’ll have to go to Kiel Auditorium and listen to Grand Funk Railroad.

AUDIO: “Closer To Home (I’m Your Captain)” [Grand Funk Railroad, Closer To Home] (4:02-4:23) - [Spotify]

JESSE: The Dead had played around St. Louis for years, debuting at the Armory in May 1968. Like a lot of big and small towns across the country, St. Louis developed its own countercultural scene in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, with a hip neighborhood or two, an underground newspaper, a freeform radio station, and a bushel of head shops and boutiques, maybe near a local university. It was a network that both mirrored and connected to what had emerged a few years earlier in the Bay Area, all of which the Dead tapped into both consciously and instinctively when they hit the road. It took them a few years to find their zone in St. Louis. St. Louis University student Tony Dwyer would wind up as a local member of the Dead’s family.

TONY DWYER: You've got the shit that's happening in New York. And the stuff that's happening in San Francisco, and then you got St. Louis in the middle. And we didn't have communications then the way there is now. And they'd read the East Village Other, they’d read whatever paper was coming out of San Francisco. And it was a really hip crowd in St. Louis, that sort of synthesized what was going on on either coast. And they really outdid themselves. They took it a step further without even realizing it. They were envisioning what was going on on the East Coast and what was going on on the West Coast. And some of the shit that happened was just incredible: the art, the music, everything. It wasn't recognized at that point, for sure. In St. Louis, at that time, it was really easy to be a big fish in a small sea. I think I was 21, 22 when I bought my first house there, in the Central West End. People could do shit. People started businesses, people did all sorts of stuff that was all kind of counterculture related.

JESSE: Joe Schwab is the owner of the incredibly cool independent St. Louis record, Euclid Records. If you live in St. Louis, Euclid’s is your jam. He watched St. Louis’s counterculture era as a kid.

JOE SCHWAB: At that time, the Central West End, where it was located in St. Louis, was just a very bohemian kind of area that had sort of spawned from LaClede Town. LaClede Town was like late ‘60s, and that was kind of the first of the real hippie-type areas which had spawned from Gaslight Square, which was kind of the Beatnik area of St. Louis at the time. And all of ‘em were kind of located in the Central West End of the city. And it just kind of moved to different areas, this bohemian kind of thing. I didn't know much about LaClede Town, and Gregg Allman came in my store one time, and he and Duane had lived there, on their way from the South out to the West Coast.

JESSE: Tom Wood saw the Dead in St. Louis starting in 1970.

TOM WOOD: The big huge city park in St. Louis, Forest Park. There's a building on top of a hill — it's called the Pavilion. On Sunday afternoons, bands, live rock bands would play at the Pavilion. So it was a happening, it was like St. Louis's version of Golden Gate Park or something, where there'd be a band set up, people would show up, family-friendly, bikers would show up even too. And there’d be a happening. That was a regular thing I think from maybe 1971, ‘72, ‘73, ‘74.

JESSE: Bob Simmons saw his first Dead show in May 1970 at Meramec Junior College, a few months after a chance meeting in Golden Gate Park with Phil Lesh.

BOB SIMMONS: Quicksilver Messenger Service played at Forest Park, a free concert, and it was kind of word of mouth. I had heard that Janis Joplin came in and gave a free concert, but I missed out on that one. Actually, the Grateful Dead in 1969, they played a free concert at Washington University at the Quadrangle. I missed that concert. I wasn't aware of it. But I had gone to the Quadrangle in Washington University to hear other music that was coming in.

JESSE: Playing for free outdoors was a time-honored rock tradition that the Dead had helped pioneer in Golden Gate Park in the ‘60s. It was also a sound promotional strategy. In many towns, the Dead played for free outdoors before moving on to ticketed gigs, one way they built their reputation as a people’s band. They didn’t play Forest Park, but they did do a free show at the Washington University Quadrangle in April ‘69, released as Volume 12 in the Download Series. Went pretty well.

AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Download Series 12, 4/17/69] (7:21-7:32) - [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: Mostly.

JERRY GARCIA [4/17/69]: They’re taking our road manager to jail.

PHIL LESH [4/17/69]: They’re taking our road manager to jail if we play anymore. So we ain’t gonna let our road manager go to jail.

BILL KREUTZMANN [4/17/69]: We like our road manager a lot. He’s a real good guy, and you people are really good too.

BOB WEIR [4/17/69]: Thank you.

JESSE: In May of 1970, when the Dead played at Meramec Junior College in Kirkwood, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, then on their first national tour, also played for free at the Washington University Quadrangle. No road managers were harmed. One reason for the Dead’s frequent returns to St. Louis was likely also manager Jon McIntire, a St. Louis native with deep ties to the city. The Dead got a taste of the city’s big room for rock when they opened for the Iron Butterfly at the cavernous Kiel Auditorium in April 1969, a beloved show to local Dead freaks, right in the heart of the psychedelic Live/Dead era — but not particularly a venue at which the Dead nor the heads felt welcome, nor one they could yet fill on their own for that matter. A few months later, an old movie palace downtown presented its first rock concert.

AUDIO: “Goin’ Back to Miami” [Wayne Cochran] (0:00-0:22) - [YouTube]

JESSE: In the audience for Wayne Cochran one of the nights was St. Louis University student Tony Dwyer.

TONY DWYER: The Fox Theatre was a block away from St. Louis University. And it's a 4,503 seat room. Fucking beautiful. And it hadn't had a full audience since Doctor No, or Goldfinger or something back in the early ‘60s. And somebody there decided — they were in Las Vegas, and they booked Wayne Cochran and the CC Riders for a week. And the show is a complete failure. And we got a note from Edward Arthur, from Arthur Enterprises, who owned the theater and said: “Anybody at St. Louis University in the student body is welcome to come.” Free of charge, just come on over and see the show. So I get there now like 150, 200 freakin’ people in a 4,500 seat room. And I'm listening — Wayne's got a great band, he was a great entertainer. But I'm walking around everywhere: in the mezzanine, I'm in the balcony. So I'm looking around, look at this place. And I said, “I want to fill this fucking place at some point.”

St. Louis gets pretty gray in February, March, that kind of shit. They want something to happen. And they have a thing called Greek Week, where all the fraternities and sororities do shit. And it can be anything from debauchery to we did a series of Jean-Luc Godard movies. And this and that. I said, “I think we ought to do a concert.” And everybody said, “Yeah, well, that'd be cool, we could do that in the gym.” And I said, “No, the fuckin’ gym? Not the gym — we’re gonna do it at the Fox.” And everybody started throwing out ideas as to what band they wanted to see: The Shirelles or fuckin’ 13th Floor Elevators, whoever it was. And I suggested no, what would be appropriate would be the Grateful Dead at the Fox.

It comes the day that they're to arrive, and somebody needs to pick up the band. And a buddy of mine, one of my fraternity brothers said, “You can use my VW bus to go get them.” And it came time to go get them and we couldn't find them. So we didn't have the keys. And a buddy of mine said, “Don't worry about it.” And we hardwired the bus and went to the airport to pick them up. And of course back then there wasn't TSA, there wasn't any of that bullshit. You pulled up to the curb and got out of the car and went inside.

The airport was basically empty. We're walking down, and here are six or seven guys walking off a plane. And it's the band and Owsley — gentlemen, here we are. Let's go do it. And Pigpen comes up to me and slaps his hip. He's got a fringe pouch with a pint of Old Grand Dad or something and said, “You know, me and Billy, we just drink. These guys are the ones who got in trouble last night, got busted in New Orleans.”

So anyhow, we go to the airport Hilton, and Garcia and Weir and I think Owsley wanna go see the theater. It's like two or three o'clock in the afternoon now. So we go there, and of course, there's no staff at that theater. So we go in the front door. And Garcia goes by and there are these bunch of elderly ladies, these octogenarians working the concession stand. And they're preparing for the evening. And Garcia turns to one of the ladies and he says, “Bet you're gonna sell a lot of popcorn tonight.”

I'm standing in the lobby of the theater and this guy walks in. He's got long reddish blond hair. He's about six four, and one of his legs is about four inches shorter than the other. And he's limping in, and he's got an overhead projector and a box full of shit. And I said, “What can I do for you?” He said, “I don’t have a ticket.” I said, “Yeah, okay. Well, what can I do for you?” And he said, “Well, I'd like to do a light show.” And I said, “Okay, how much do you get?” And he said, “Well, I'll do it for nothing.” If that’s the case, that's the greatest light show I've ever seen. Come on. And he goes up, he's got this fucking overhead projector. This projector, you probably wouldn't know about those — those overhead projectors that professors use to do notes in 300-seat auditoriums. This fucking guy goes up there with his oil and water and dye and whatnot, and puts on a fucking show that was ridiculous. And the next day in the [St. LouisGlobe-Democrat, the morning paper, the fucking upperfold is a picture of the stage with this light show going on — “Grateful Dead Invade St. Louis,” or whatever the fuck it is.

JESSE: Along with sound engineer Owsley Stanley, soon confined to the Bay Area due to the bust in New Orleans just before coming to St. Louis—check out our "Truckin’" episode—Ram Rod was the only crew member that night, arriving late with the gear. They’d been busted, but nothing was confiscated, though there’d be some exaggerated stories about that in later years. But Owsley was there in full force.

TONY DWYER: So we're running late and — fucking Owsley, he's running around. He's up in the mezzanine within his oscilloscope. He's got white noise running everywhere. At any rate, all these guys that were involved in my fraternity we had these guys basically acting as... they were kind of overseeing what's going [on] in the audience. They were security guards, kinda. And a buddy of mine and I dosed ‘em all. And these guys were, I'd say two-thirds of the fraternity were in pre-med. And I think the next day, a third of them switched to chemistry. They were… I mean, we changed their lives, and for the better.

JESSE: Owsley’s recording of the Dead’s Fox Theatre debut, on February 2nd, 1970, can now be heard as Dave’s Picks, Volume 6 — Tom Constanten’s last show as a member of the Dead.

AUDIO: “Mason’s Children” [Dave’s Picks 6, 2/2/70] (0:17-0:41)

JESSE: The Fox didn’t become a regular home for rock music in St. Louis though. John Ellis was on the bus early.

JOHN ELLIS: Most of the concerts were held down at that time at Kiel Opera House and Kiel Auditorium. I think what happened is it was probably easier to get business done at the Opera House or the Auditorium because that's where the normal channels were all set up with the union stage crew and all that stuff. To me, it's odd that the Fox wasn't used. The next rock band to play there was Traffic, and that was in June of 1970. That was a spectacular show because they were touring in support of John Barleycorn. And it was only the three-piece band, which was the last time they ever toured just the trio. And then after that, there were no more Fox shows again until the next time the Dead came.

JESSE: The played the nearby Mississippi River Festival in the summer of 1970, and the Kiel Opera House that fall.

JOHN ELLIS: The first time it was hard to get tickets to see the Dead was October 24, 1970. That's when the post-Workingman’s Dead new fans came along.

JESSE: And then they returned for two more nights in March of 1971 — one of which is on the 30 Trips Around The Sun box set.

AUDIO: “Caution” [30 Trips Around The Sun, 3/18/71] (10:30-11:00)

JESSE: It was during these March 1971 performances in St. Louis that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch first reported on the Dead’s deep love for the Fox, attributing a quote to Dead manager Jon McIntire that the Fox was “a boss place.” But the story didn’t attribute another quote: “One source suggested that Fox, which opened January 31st, 1929, might well sort of become a Fillmore Midwest -- between the two famous Fillmore rock halls on the East and West coasts.” We’ll get back to that idea.

The Grateful Dead spent the ‘60s as the most underground of underground bands. Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, both issued in 1970, had put them into the radar of the mainstream and more importantly, financial solvency. Their fanbase was expanding every which way. Clusters of Dead fans were emerging and finding each other, as Thom Pallazola remembers.

THOM PALLAZOLA: I'm not technically a Dead Head. I'm technically Dead Freak, because I was really early on their mailing list.

JESSE: With the release of Skull and Roses in the fall of 1971, the Dead established their newsletter. “Dead Freaks Unite,” the announcement read. We heard more about that during our Skull and Roses season, but it’s a subtle distinction between Dead Head and Dead freak. Freak was one of a few terms that some of our longhaired forebears might prefer to be called, rather than “hippie.” Remember that as Thom recounts how he got to the Fox Theatre in December 1971.

THOM PALLAZOLA: I don't know if you saw the Netflix documentary called Crip Camp. Oh, anyway, fabulous thing, not anything about the Dead. But about something that was going on at that time. And I was involved locally in the same thing, which was I worked for the Easter Seals camp for children, they call it a Dead time for crippled kids. And it was pretty amazing. Because it was really just a bunch of freaks that were trying to have these kids have fun. And it was through that I kind of got more… I knew of the Dead and everything. But it was through that, that I got more involved with it and went to that show.

JESSE: And with the release of Skull and Roses, the numbers grew even more rapidly.

DAVID LEMIEUX: They had this album that had come out that was heavily promoted. Warner Brothers got really behind Skull and Roses, and then they hit the road. They were playing these smaller theaters where they probably could have played bigger places.

JESSE: In September, Warner Brothers issued the self-titled double-live album known as Skull and Roses, which we talked about last season, with unprecedented promotions. Throughout the country, record stores declared it Grateful Dead Month. As a negotiating tactic, the Dead had threatened to call the album Skullfuck, using the gambit to extract a $100,000 marketing plan from Warner Brothers to buy airtime on radio stations in order to broadcast over a dozen shows from the band’s fall tour. Calculated for inflation, that’s over a half-million dollars.

Live radio might have been the perfect medium for the Dead in 1971 — getting their music out to new audiences, promoting their new album, and playing even newer music at the same time. Several decades before artists began streaming their tours, the Dead were beaming theirs out on their airwaves.

SAM CUTLER: The other thing that we did in New York and in many other markets, of course, was to make the music available: sell the tickets to the show, and then make the music available over FM radio. So people that couldn't get to the show, or didn't know about the show could hear it on radio. So it's easy to reach many, many thousands of people via radio.

JESSE: Of course, live radio broadcasts had been a staple since the 1920s, a defining part of careers ranging from bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe to jazz titan Charlie Parker and far beyond. The practice had died off a bit in the rock era, but, just like the Dead embraced the swing era ballrooms, the Dead also embraced live broadcasts — going live from the Carousel on freeform KMPX on Valentine’s Day 1968. They experimented with broadcast media whenever they could, including a pair of televised performances from Winterland in 1970, with quadraphonic sound provided by radio stations. The Grateful Dead loved live radio and rightly so. Deadcast hero Corry Arnold of Lost Live Dead has posted an incredible multi-part history of the Dead and FM broadcasts.

The first broadcast of the Fall ‘71 tour was a full 5-hour extravaganza on KQRS in Minneapolis, with a full set by the New Riders of the Purple Sage, presumably paid for in part by their label, Columbia, to promote their own new record. In between sets, it featured interviews with both Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh, conducted during the soundcheck, setting the stage for both the show and the fall tour to come.

JERRY GARCIA [10/19/71]: This place is going to be transformed when the show starts, you know, when we get playing tonight. So it's kind of groovy to get an idea of what kind of vehicle is being used. Do you know what I mean? It’s like a road test.

JESSE: The tour opener was also the debut of Keith Godchaux, the Grateful Dead’s new piano player, which we went into in-depth during the last episode of the Grateful Deadcast. For the tour’s first few legs, during October and November, Pigpen was absent.

JERRY GARCIA [10/19/71]: Pigpen is sick, that’s the main reason for not being on this tour. And, you know, when he's well, when he's well again, and we get into our next set of practices, whatever that is, you know. Several of the… actually Pigpen didn't really play that much, organ on that many tunes, or anything like that. He was mostly more into just doing what he does, singing.

JESSE: This next little bit has an off-mic appearance by road chief Ram Rod.

KQRS INTERVIEWER [10/19/71]: Do you have any idea how many pieces of equipment, individual pieces of equipment, the Grateful Dead brought with ‘em?

JERRY GARCIA [10/19/71]: How many pieces do we have, Ram Rod?

RAM ROD [10/19/71]: 150 pieces.

KQRS INTERVIEWER [10/19/71]: Plus 22 people, nine of whom are going to play. And this is really quite an organization, isn’t it?

JERRY GARCIA [10/19/71]: Right. All these guys and the woman here on the stage, you know, we've all been through a lot together...

JESSE: For Phil Lesh, the band and equipment assembling onstage represented something wondrous.

PHIL LESH [10/19/71]: It's come around to me, it's come full circle. We’re sort of beginning a new cycle, a new leveling off, a new plateau or starting to climb again, you know what I’m saying?

KQRS INTERVIEWER [10/19/71]: Do you feel this musically now, or just as a touring unit? Or everything’s coming together —

PHIL LESH [10/19/71]: Everything. Everything's coming up on every level, where you can't separate the music from what goes on. Both in our heads and in the world.

JESSE: And, indeed, in their memoirs, both Phil Lesh and Bill Kreutzmann would heap praises on this period of the band between when Keith Godchaux joined in late 1971 and when the band took their break from the road in 1975. It was also getting hard to avoid the fact that, by the fall of 1971, the Grateful Dead were one of the most popular bands in the United States. The days when they could play small theaters were clearly numbered. Many of the shows on the band’s fall 1971 tour were two-night stands, and sometimes more, in cities where they probably could’ve played in bigger rooms. Keep that in mind when contemplating this next bit of audio, which was included in the setbreak entertainment at the Minneapolis tour opener.

AUDIO: “A Message For Roger” [Robert Hunter] (0:00-0:25)

JESSE: That’s Robert Hunter, probably, a bit of Prankster-y audio that aired during at least one set break of the fourteen broadcast shows. Weirdly, some of those effects were also playing in the background during the interviews we just heard.

AUDIO: “A Message For Roger” [Robert Hunter] (0:32-0:52)

JESSE: The set break entertainment was only taped for one other show on the tour, so it may well have aired again. Or perhaps there were further episodes. But if it is in fact Robert Hunter, it provides a psychedelic missing link between the weirdness of “What’s Become of the Baby” and the “Parables of St. Dilbert” that soon started appearing in the Dead newsletter.

AUDIO: “A Message For Roger” [Robert Hunter] (3:02-3:14)

JESSE: In early December, Pigpen rejoined the Dead on the road, and the band played at the sold-out Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden in New York to 5,000 fans and, in some estimates, up to another 3 million listening at home on WNEW. Then it was off to St. Louis and the Fabulous Fox Theatre.

The last broadcast of the Dead’s Skull and Roses tour was from the Fox Theatre in St. Louis, December 10th, 1971, on KADI, a five-hour New Riders and Dead extravaganza presented by Spectrum, the city’s largest head shop. Tom Wood grew up near the Spectrum’s original location in Kirkwood.

TOM WOOD: The building that the Spectrum rented for their shop was directly across the street from the Kirkwood City Hall. So at that time, KSHE 95 was the only rock station in town. The only one — that was it, one. KSHE. So KSHE was always promoting concerts, and they’d say, make sure you pick up all your supplies at the Spectrum. Blah, blah, blah, they were always pumping up the Spectrum. So KSHE organized a pig roast in the backyard of the City Hall. So everybody went to this — roasting a pig, get it? You know, in 1970 or ‘71.

JESSE: But Spectrum moved and expanded. Thom Pallazola.

THOM PALLAZOLA: The head shop that I used to hang out at was one called Spectrum. Gene Grace, who owns Spectrum—and I still know Gene—he loved audio equipment, and we sold him a lot of audio equipment, and he and I became friendly with each other. That was a place you could go. That was before Webster had built up, and it was really a small hippie capital. Now it's a conservative area. It's so funny how things turn like that. He had this head shop, it was — he ended up owning almost this whole street, and kept opening up more and more rooms on this thing. Black light rooms. He had an incredible amount of different rolling papers. And I'll never forget he did a — my father used to do, we would do all-night sales, where we were open all night. Midnight Madness sales. And Gene loved the idea, so he did one time. So I'm over there late at night. And it was so funny, I mean I'll never forget this, he says “Come here, Tom.” And so I come over. He says, “Come on back here.” He takes me behind the counter of the rolling papers. And he hands me a shopping bag and says: “Take all you want.” And I didn’t buy papers for I don’t know how many years.

BOB SIMMONS: KADI simulcasts the Dead on that night at the Fox.

KADI PERSONALITY [1973]: KADI — the rock of St. Louis.

BOB SIMMONS: KADI. That was an FM station that came on as well, after KSHE.

JESSE: When the Dead arrived in town in December, the St. Louis Outlaw reported on drug prices in their Dope Scope column. “Mescaline, purple caps, real fine, $2 / a hit. White caps, light trip, good. Acid, windowpane, new batch, supposedly pure.” No prices cited. The Outlaw got a brief interview with Garcia and Mountain Girl before the Friday show. “I follow astrology, but it’s more earth-consciousness, calendar-consciousness, solar consciousness. I respect the physical limits of the universe,” Garcia clarified for the Outlaw.

But lots of towns had freeform radio stations and hip communities and underground newspapers. Speaking of which, enormous thanks to the State Historical Society of Missouri and especially David McMullin at the New York Public Library for helping facilitate the transfer of microfilm of the St. Louis Outlaw. Public libraries are the best. But St. Louis had one more thing that made the city particularly attractive to Jerry Garcia — Scotty’s Music, arguably the pedal steel capital of the known universe.

TONY DWYER: The day of the first show, I wound up with Garcia and Mountain Girl at Scotty’s Music, out in Overland, Missouri or somewhere in the suburbs. Scotty’s Music was, Scotty was a pedal steel player. And Garcia wanted to go out and um, Garcia I think had an Emmons pedal steel and a Sho-Bud amp or something like that.

JESSE: Jerry Garcia made some unlikely pals in his lifetime. One of them was DeWitt Scott, the late founder of Scotty’s Music, opened in Overland, Missouri in 1963. The store was legendary, as Euclid Records owner Joe Schwab recalls.

JOE SCHWAB: Scotty’s was the world headquarters for steel guitar. If you go out to Scotty’s, out on Midland, you might run into Curly Chalker, or Buddy Emmons or Doug Jernigan, all these just incredible steel guitar players there. Everybody who was anybody on the steel guitar, hung out at Scotty’s.

JESSE: We are so pleased today to welcome Scotty’s son Michael Scott, president of the Pedal Steel Guitar Hall of Fame.

MICHAEL SCOTT: Scotty’s was the very first steel guitar shop in the country. Probably the world as well. Scotty, being a country player, he was actually on the Grand Ole Opry at age 18 with Hank Williams Sr. He's been playing country all his life.

JESSE: In the late ‘60s, the store began hosting its legendary steel guitar conventions.

MICHAEL SCOTT: The very first one, it was actually a show. It was in 1968. We had like 35 people show up and man, we were busting buttons on our coats. We thought we were really doing good. But it grew to the International Steel Guitar Convention. And we would have between 3 and 5,000 people in-house, and upwards of 3 million on the internet. It was truly the largest convention of its type in the world.

JESSE: Scotty left behind an unpublished memoir, and wrote a little bit about his friendship with the Dead. Michael agreed to read some of it for us. I think this story refers to the band’s show in October 1970 at the Kiel Opera House, back to back with the Kiel Auditorium.

MICHAEL SCOTT: “I was at my store, Scotty’s Music in St. Louis, and a whole bunch of longhaired people came in. And all I said to them was: howdy. I didn't know who they were. They got really friendly and in fact, invited him to Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis for their soundcheck. I went down and there was ZB Steel Guitars, ZB standing for Zane Beck, sitting on stage with a Sho-Bud amp and a guy who was playing it. He asked me to sit down and play some. I did. This guy was sitting on the floor looking up, and when I hit a lick, he would say: far out! And ask how I played that.” Of course, he showed him as he would any other person. “I still didn't know who the band was. I went to the concert that night, and I found out that it was the Grateful Dead. And the steel player was Jerry Garcia. Jerry, he set up a chair, just a few feet from him on stage. He said he was enjoying the show until the guy tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around and it was Bob Heil from Marissa, Illinois.” Now, I've known Bob Heil all of my life. Literally. And Bob said to him: “Scotty, turn around.” He did, and there was no one behind the stage anymore. Bob said, “Nobody is allowed behind the stage when the Dead are playing.” So he got embarrassed and got off the stage.

JESSE: Scotty’s became a regular hang for Garcia in the early ‘70s, to the point that local heads almost knew to expect him.

TONY DWYER: I wound up there with Mountain Girl and Jerry. And there's a picture of the two of us and I'd asked him that question, and I can remember it vividly. And it was about his pedal steel playing, because obviously that was the topic in the room. And I asked him a question as to why when he played with the New Riders he was so laid back, whereas when he played with Crosby, Stills and Nash and did “Teach the Children” that he ripped it. And typical Jerry, as modest as he was, he said, well, the New Riders are not my band. So I'm just laying back. And he said, Crosby, Stills and Nash asked me to rip it. So I did. It was that simple.

JESSE: We’ve posted that picture of Garcia and Tony Dwyer at Scotty’s.

TONY DWYER: We spent the morning there, and then I went back and I sat in the front row seat at the Fox. And, bear in mind, I had nothing to do with the show. I sat there and watched every piece of equipment be moved. I watched soundcheck. I watched everything. I don't think I ate for the two days. At any rate, I was there the entire time.

JESSE: Lots of the Dead fans who saw the band at the Fox had seen movies there growing up, including Bob Simmons.

BOB SIMMONS: The Fox was built in 1929. My family is from St. Louis. I'm sure my mother, who was born in 1919, I'm sure she went to the Fox. I'm sure my grandparents went to the Fox. The first time I went to the Fox, I vividly remember it was 1956. There was a monster dinosaur movie called Rodan that played.

AUDIO: Rodan trailer (0:09-0:29) - [YouTube]

BOB SIMMONS: They also would have this Wurlitzer Organ that would come up. It was below ground, and then it would rise up, like on an elevator stand. It would have an organist perform before the movies, and maybe in between movies if there were, say, a double feature.

THOM PALLOZOLA: My father knew Stan Kann, who was the person that played the Wurlitzer there. There's one of the largest Wurlitzers in the world, is in the Fox Theatre. And Stan Kann was a character around town. And because of my father's involvement with audio — our family had been involved with audio since 1938, so we know all the people that like stereo equipment, and Stan Kann was one of them. And he was quite an interesting character. So through that, I was able to go and see stuff at the Fox. It was a movie theater for a while and I mean, it was a grand movie theater.

BOB SIMMONS: When you walk into the Fox Theatre, it's special. It's not just a regular movie house. It's very ornate inside. The seating, the upholstery is red. Like the red of my shirt. Or if you think of a rose—like American Beauty—it's that kind of red. The lighting when you walk in, is kind of soft; they'll have lights on the wall, like sconces. And the feeling that you get when you walk in, it's like some type of a temple, like maybe an Asian-type temple. But for me as a guy, even walking in to see the Grateful Dead in, say, 1971, if I had a hat on when I walked in, I took it off. It almost felt sacred. And when the Dead performed there, I think they sensed the same thing. This place was meant for art. It was just a beautiful setting and the acoustics there are terrific. When you walk into it, even though some of it might be worn, it was still special. You knew that it had life in it.

JESSE: And some of the fans seeing the Dead at the Fox might even still be seeing movies at the Fox. The week the Dead came through in December ‘71 featured a horror double feature.

AUDIO: The House That Dripped Blood trailer (1:36-1:49) - [YouTube]

JESSE: With the weather dipping below freezing outside, it was time for the Dead. We’re going to blend the two nights a little bit. Tom Wood.

TOM WOOD: It was General Admission. And so we get in line in the afternoon, right, and as soon as they open those doors, man, there was a flood of young kids running to the seats And you'd run in, and there'd be a hundred people running full-speed, to get the center section, row 10, or row 15. And that's where I sat most of the time, you were just way up close. And the smell of patchouli, and the smell of incense, and the smell of herb, is just like such a sensual thing that when you're a kid, it's like this is a whole different world. This is not the world that I have to go to school in, or that I deal with. This is its own thing. This is the Grateful Dead Carnival Tent.

JESSE: Bob Simmons.

BOB SIMMONS: The orchestra pit from the stage was maybe I'm guessing about 15 or 20 feet across, and then there was a railing. And then there was like a walkway until the first row of seating. And in that walkway, that might have been maybe 20 feet wide or so. So listening to the Dead concert, if you got there early, you could get up close.

JESSE: The shows followed the same format as they had for the last year and a half, beginning with Sam Cutler explaining how the night would go. This is from the broadcast on the second night.

SAM CUTLER [12/10/71]: The evening this evening is gonna be begun by the New Riders of the Purple Sage. And after they play first, we’ll have a short break, and then the Grateful Dead will be playing. If you haven’t dug it already, take a look up above your head and look at that lamp up there. It’s really beautiful.

JESSE: Totally, Sam.

SAM CUTLER [12/10/71]: It’s my pleasure to say thank you for welcoming us to St. Louis, and to ask you to welcome the New Riders of the Purple Sage. The New Riders.

AUDIO: “Workin’ Man Blues” [New Riders of the Purple Sage, 12/10/71] (0:00-0:10) - [archive.org]

BOB SIMMONS: David and Linda Hibbenstreet. They were close friends with my girlfriend, myself. Anyway, David and Linda, we grew up together from about the age of 13. And so my birthday was on December 9. David and Linda were getting married on the 11th. And so on the 10th, we went to see the Grateful Dead along with the New Riders. When the New Riders were playing, we were up close to the stage too. And probably somewhere midway through their set, they kind of took a pause or whatever. And I called up to the stage and I, again, I was maybe thirty feet away from Marmaduke, John Dawson. I said, hey, we've got a wedding here tomorrow. And he looked over and he saw, and he announced that David and Linda were getting married the following day. And so with that I could add my friends, David and Linda, they now live on the southwest coast of Ireland. This coming December 11, they’ll be celebrating fifty years together. They got a good start the night before, with a great performance by the New Riders and the Grateful Dead.

JESSE: Happy birthday, Bob! Happy anniversary, David and Linda!

JOHN DAWSON [12/10/71]: This one goes out especially for David and Linda. Anybody else that likes it too.

JESSE: When the Dead hit the stage on the first night, Bob Weir took the liberty of introducing the band. I love this.

BOB WEIR [12/9/71]: And now, ladies and gentlemen, here they are, straight from Madison Square Garden and famous New York, the Grateful Dead! One, two, three, four…

AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Listen To The River, 12/9/71] (3:10-3:30) - [dead.net]

JESSE: Man, they sound so good. The shows in early December 1971 mark the beginning of one of my favorite Grateful Dead lineups, with Pigpen and Keith Godchaux playing side by side: Pig on B3, Keith on piano. It reminds me of The Band, with Garth Hudson on organ and Richard Manuel on piano. Though they don’t do it on every song, it’s totally working on this “Truckin’,” channeling a bit of the album recording.

AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Listen To The River, 12/9/71] (3:30-3:59) - [dead.net]

DAVID LEMIEUX: I look at the setlists and they're very much Skull and Roses-centric — “Bertha,” “Wharf Rat” and all those kind of things.

AUDIO: “Bertha” [Listen To The River, 12/10/71] (0:05-0:31) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: One could almost make a full alternate version of Skull and Roses from the two December ‘71 shows at the Fox. But one big difference was that fresh new two-keyboard lineup, with Keith Godchaux’s piano playing giving “Bertha” a very different feel than the version just released.

AUDIO: “Bertha” [Listen To The River, 12/10/71] (0:44-1:08) - [dead.net] [Spotify]

JESSE: One song from Skull and Roses, played both nights at the Fox, had received a new twist since the versions recorded in the spring. “Playing in the Band” had a brand-new jam. This is from the December 10th show.

AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Listen To The River, 12/10/71] (3:08-3:38) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: But it was a brief jam. By a year later, the song would regularly crack 20 minutes. At the Fox, as it was through the fall of ‘71, the jam was all of 60 seconds. But they were a sweet 60 seconds!

AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Listen To The River, 12/10/71] (4:20-4:49) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

DAVID LEMIEUX: And then you've also got a fair amount of great old Pigpen stuff, “Good Lovin” and things like that.

AUDIO: “Good Lovin’” [Listen To The River, 12/10/71] (0:37-1:05) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: Unfortunately, I think Pig may’ve needed a second opinion, but this 18-minute version of “Good Lovin’” is a centerpiece of the December 10th show. It features some great Garcia and Godchaux jams.

AUDIO: “Good Lovin’” [Listen To The River, 12/10/71] (5:10-5:40) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: And some solid Pigpen, here exporting a standby part of his “Turn On Your Lovelight” rap.

AUDIO: “Good Lovin’” [Listen To The River, 12/10/71] (12:09-12:39) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: Ever wonder what box back nitties are? Short answer: sexy ladies garments from the early 20th century — probably a mishearing of middies, a verse Pigpen borrowed from Lightnin’ Hopkins. Aric Ahrens wrote a scholarly examination of the term. Pigpen may’ve been sick, but when he came back in December 1971, he began what was perhaps his most creatively present time in the band. Over the course of that year, as both Pigpen and Weir introduced new songs into their own songbooks, the band’s setlists began to alternate almost evenly between the three lead singers.

BOB WEIR [12/5/71]: Well here’s yet another new song that I guess most of you haven’t heard. That’s a cue for you pirate recordists out there, to get your tape machines spinning, because here it comes.

JESSE: That was Weir during the New York broadcast in early December, introducing one of a few songs Pigpen had debuted since the Skull and Roses dates. Debuted in July, “Mr. Charlie” was co-written with Robert Hunter, destined for Europe ‘72. At the Fox, Pigpen played it in his first slot on both nights; here from the 10th.

AUDIO: “Mr. Charlie” [Listen To The River, 12/10/71] (0:51-1:11) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: Along with an alternate version of Skull and Roses, one could also program an album of brand-new unreleased songs, nearly a dozen fresh to the Dead’s repertoire since their last visit to St. Louis in March. A trio from Garcia’s just recorded but yet unreleased solo debut, which we delved into last season, plus a few that would be on Weir’s album, Ace, the next year, and a further bunch that became the core of the Dead’s Europe ‘72, all of which we hope to get into in greater detail down the line. The fans at the December ‘71 Fox shows would’ve been hearing “Brown Eyed Women,” “Mr. Charlie,” “Jack Straw,” “Sugaree,” “Tenneesee Jed,” “Ramble On Rose,” “Mexicali Blues,” “Loser,” and “One More Saturday Night,” all for the first time. They’d all be available on official albums within the next year. One that wouldn’t is “Comes a Time.”

AUDIO: “Comes a Time” [Listen To The River, 12/10/71] (2:00-2:24) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: Gorgeous music by Garcia and Hunter, debuted that fall, played for a year, then mysteriously shelved until after the band’s mid-’70s hiatus. I love Garcia’s vocal performances on nearly all of these versions. Just heartbreaking. Earlier in the fall, during the tour’s first leg, they played the song with an additional verse. This version is from Chicago on October 22nd, on Dave’s Picks 3.

AUDIO: “Comes a Time” [Dave’s Picks 3, 10/22/71] (5:05-5:26)

JESSE: Whereas the tone of the rest of the lyrics features a somewhat passive narration, this verse has a far more direct and present narrator, perhaps one reason they got dropped after the tour’s first leg.

AUDIO: “Comes a Time” [Dave’s Picks 3, 10/22/71] (5:27-5:49)

JESSE: Another newly debuted song that Pigpen sang both nights at the Fox had only appeared for the first time just three days earlier, and only existed in the Dead’s repertoire for a grand total of seven performances, a rare seasonal number.

AUDIO: “Run Rudolph Run” [Listen To The River, 12/10/71] (0:00-0:29) - [dead.net] [Spotify]

JESSE: “Run Rudolph Run,” of course, was popularized by local titan Chuck Berry.

AUDIO: “Run Rudolph Run” [Chuck Berry] (0:39-1:08) - [Spotify]

JESSE: Though Chuck Berry was a great songwriter, “Run Rudolph Run” is credited to Marvin Brodie and Johnny Marks, Johnny Marks also being the author of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” and other songs with a similar theme you can probably guess.

BOB SIMMONS: Chuck Berry grew up in St. Louis. Looking back on it, it’s “Run Rudolph Run,” “Johnny B. Goode.” They were playing homage to Chuck Berry.

JESSE: Oddly, the December 1971 Fox shows are among the very few in Dead history to not include what my pals Rob and Steve on 36 From the Vault call the Triple Berry: “Johnny B. Goode,” “Around and Around,” and “Promised Land.” The band would come closer on future trips through town, but the Dead were always paying tribute to Chuck Berry, whether in St. Louis or not. Find your nearest local Bob Weir, and he’ll probably pay tribute to Chuck Berry if you give him a half dozen songs. But the Dead didn’t need Chuck Berry tributes to make their St. Louis visits special. They just sort of were. The vibe was just there.

BOB SIMMONS: I saw Jimi Hendrix, I saw Cream, I saw The Doors. The feeling of those performances as well, they were awesome. The feeling with the Dead was different. It was like, these guys, they put their clothes on in the morning, they did whatever they had to do during the day. And then they picked up their guitars and instruments. And then they just started playing. There was no pretension about them. And another aspect of the Dead that I listened back on that I really enjoyed at that time — somebody breaks a string. And so, or maybe the monitors are too loud or something like that. And so Bobby will come on and say, hey, we're trying to get the perfect sound here, or whatever. It was all a joke. It was so casual and informal. And maybe on a certain night, they're taking some breaks between the songs or whatever. It was all just really peaceful and enjoyable, just very relaxing. But yet, the energy was so high. They were gearing up for their next song, figuring out what they wanted to play. And then when they break into it's just beautiful.

BOB WEIR [12/10/71]: Well, we all just went through our first equipment malfunction, you’ll all be pleased to know.

JESSE: The December 10th show also contains a mega-rarity — praise for the sound system.

JERRY GARCIA [12/10/71]: The monitors sound beautiful. Just beautiful.

JESSE: After an aborted semester in Arizona, John Ellis was back in St. Louis for the December ‘71 shows.

JOHN ELLIS: By ‘71, their style had changed so much that they were morphing, once again. But they were morphing into a style of professionalism, and shorter songs and less jams. So that was... that took some adjusting.

BOB SIMMONS: When I first caught on to the Dead, I felt like I was missing something from the years prior. I wish I would have caught on earlier. As I look back on it now, I really was happy that I found him at the time that I did. If you go back and listen to the soundtracks, it’s all different styles of music. And the transition of music from when I'm hearing Pigpen, to the final time I saw him at the Fox Theatre. And now Keith is coming on with a piano. And the style of music that Keith was playing, and how he was adding to the Dead's performance in the direction that they were going.

PHIL LESH [12/9/71]: We’re gonna take this opportunity to introduce our new piano player, Keith Godchaux.

BOB SIMMONS: This was totally new to me that Keith had joined. I didn't know that Pigpen had health issues. Pigpen did perform on December the 10th, 1971. I always really enjoyed having Pigpen in the mix — his persona, his voice, his organ. It was just a beautiful facet of the Grateful Dead. And then finding out that Keith is joining too, and piano, that added a new energy in itself.

AUDIO: “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad” [Listen To The River, 12/10/71] (2:43-3:13) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: That was from the December 10th, 1971 show. We explored that energy at length in our last episode, titled “Enter Keith Godchaux.”

BOB WEIR [12/10/71]: I might take this opportunity to tell all you folks here tonight that this is really a nice theater.

JESSE: The Dead really loved the Fox.

BOB WEIR [12/10/71]: It’s one of the very few finest in the country, if not in the world. And it’s a good place to have a rock and roll show. And the owners of the theater hope that you won’t be careless and rip it up, so that we can keep coming back and other groups can keep coming here.

JOHN ELLIS: One time when I was there and probably was ‘71, it would make sense, Weir was talking to the audience and people were standing on the seats. Part of the issue among the Dead community is always that there's always new younger Dead Heads showing up at the shows, right? And that happened immediately when I started going to see ‘em.

JESSE: By the early ‘70s, there were some rumors running around town.

JOHN ELLIS: They were really strong rumors, but nobody had any information about it. It was just… there was no meat to the bone, other than: did you hear the Dead are going to buy the Fox? And then of course it became urban legend, but there's nothing to back it up. The Dead obviously in 1970 were not in financial condition to do anything, except tour.

SAM CUTLER: Yeah, right. I mean, yeah, it would have been if they'd had a spare $20 million, which I never… oh, they loved the Fox. They didn’t want to own it, man. No, nice fantasy. They’d have loved to have owned a 747 probably. But again, a fantasy.

JESSE: The rumors, however, were very real. The local underground newspaper, The St. Louis Outlaw, even commented on it in their write-up of the December ‘71 shows. “There is that old rumor that the Dead are going to announce buying the Fox, but on Friday they announce they have no intention of buying it,” writer Jan Garden reported. It’s not clear exactly where they announced this, but there’s lots of chatter just off-mic that you can kinda hear on Jeffrey Norman’s new mastering job. But, whatever the rumors, Tony Dwyer gets right to the bottom of it for us.

TONY DWYER: Yeah, there was talk. Oh, yeah, they're gonna buy it. Yeah, they loved the theater. There's no fucking way because number one, it wasn't for sale. I tried to buy it. I tried to get a lease on it to do one hundred shows a year and they wouldn't even let me do that, because they had a guy named Dion Peluso, who was the manager of the theater and he'd been there since 1935. And he was a movie exhibitor, and that was it. And Edward Arthur, who owned the theater, Arthur Enterprises owned it, yielded to him and said, “The guy's been with me forever.” There was no way. At that point, it was not for sale.

JESSE: Maybe in another incarnation, as Bob Weir once said. The tapes for the St. Louis shows were engineered by road crew member Rex Jackson, the namesake of the charitable Rex Foundation.

DAVID LEMIEUX: 1971 were recorded to 10-inch tape, but also at 7.5 IPS. So you get an hour and a half on a reel. So each show is two reels, which is good for us because there's no tape cuts. As an archivist, it would be amazing if every show the Dead had recorded from the era was on 10-inch reels even if it was all 7.5 IPS, which all the 7-inch reels are 7.5 inches per second. But that means that every 45 minutes we get a cut, whereas with a 10-inch reel, you're talking an hour and 32, 33 minutes, which is much better for that. I don't know what the process was on that tour, in particular. But certainly, Rex I as far as I know, learned a heck of a lot from Betty in the recording. I know that for instance earlier in ‘71, there are some Rex recordings that were, you know, very much Betty had her hand in them. So I don't know what her responsibility was at the shows, and I don't even know if she was there. I think so. But they’re Rex's recordings, but certainly with some Betty input. And you’ll hear that, they sound phenomenal. So it always came down to the handwriting to determine who do we credit on the album.

JESSE: But Rex wasn’t the only person taping, as Thom Pallozola remembers.

THOM PALLOZOLA: That's your show that KADI broadcast. At that time, my family had a high-end audio store. Flip Stereo Place, it was a family operation. One of the people that worked at the Easter Seals camp with me and bought a reel-to-reel. And he had it all set up because we all went to the Dead show. He had it all set up, had somebody that would turn it on so that he could record it. He probably still has it somewhere.

JESSE: Recordings of the Dead’s fall ‘71 broadcasts became the cornerstone of early tape collections as well as the source for the next wave of bootleg LPs.

THOM PALLOZOLA: Before there were tapers, there were bootleg records. I have a lot of their bootlegs — I had a gentleman who came around our store all the time and had these albums. And so I bought all the Dead bootlegs I could. I know that it's maybe not necessarily the finest of practices, but when that's all you got and you want more, it's like okay, I'm buying these things. So they were really great to have.

JESSE: Oddly, the December 10th Fox broadcast never did seem to turn up on bootleg LP back in the day. Maybe it really did serve one of its intended purposes, giving people a source for their own recordings. But in December ‘71, the Dead played music in St. Louis at a few places besides the Fox.

AUDIO: “Scotty’s Jam #1” (2:31-2:54)

JESSE: It was during that trip through town that Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Marmaduke, and maybe some others rolled through Scotty’s for a jam session. Scotty was a taper, too.

AUDIO: “Scotty’s Jam #1” (4:31-4:48)

JESSE: This is Michael Scott, reading from his father Scotty’s memoir.

MICHAEL SCOTT: “Both bands came to the store and we had a kind of off-the-wall jam session. Sometimes Buddy Cage would play the steel, and then I would play. At that time I owned Lloyd Greene's old double-neck Sho-Bud with the yellow streak in the front. And that was the guitar we played on.”

JESSE: You can hear Marmaduke singing John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

AUDIO: “Take Me Home, Country Roads” [12/71] (0:23-0:45)

MICHAEL SCOTT: “Any time they would get within 200 miles of St. Louis, they would call me and I would take my reel-to-reel tape recorder to the motel and took several tapes to the Steel Guitar Convention with me. And after their concert, we would listen to them for the rest of the night. I took pictures and even put up a mic and recorded that jam session.”

JESSE: It went deep. Garcia never made it to the Steel Convention, but did get to absorb it from afar. While one of the Garcia Scotty’s tapes is out in the universe, others—and many, many, many of Scotty’s recordings by other artists—live in the vault of the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame, which, at the moment, means they live in storage. The Steel Guitar Hall of Fame is looking for a new home, and can be reached via ScottysMusic.com, if you’ve got any ideas.

And there was still more music to be made before leaving St. Louis in December 1971, as we discovered. I poked around with various St. Louis pals and pals of pals, seeing what they remembered. Dig, if you will, what Joe Schwab, owner of Euclid Records, told us.

JOE SCHWAB: When I was in junior high school, there was always this legend that the Grateful Dead had played at some bar mitzvah. That they kind of crashed the party, and gone on and played a show. And I liked it. I liked the idea of it, it sounded good. I bought into it. And that's fine. And so when the box set was coming out, and I was thinking about that show, I started thinking about this bar mitzvah rumor. And I'm like, it's time to pull out the mythbuster thing, and let's try and figure this out. Did this really happen?

JESSE: I’ve heard my share of Grateful Dead rumors, and I’d never heard a dang thing about the Dead crashing a bar mitzvah. But well, inquiring heads wanna know.

JOE SCHWAB: I knew that there was a connection with where I had gone to school, I'd gone to junior high school at East Ladue Junior High, and that's when the rumors were hitting. And so I kind of just sent out a Facebook post and said: “Okay, anybody know about this, let me know.” And of all people, my friend, Fred Heller, longtime friend, contacts me and he goes: “Uh, my brother, Doug was the drummer.” And I'm like: “Are you kidding me? Doug was the drummer?” Okay, we got something here. We got a lead.

JESSE: Joe came back with a name — Richie Gerber. And plugging the name Richard Gerber into a commercial database with handy free access provided by the New York Public Library, I was able to learn that, indeed, a Richard Gerber had been born in St. Louis in the first week of December 1958, on schedule to enter manhood in early December 1971. With that, please join us in welcoming to the Deadcast, Richard Gerber, now an attorney in St. Louis.

RICHARD GERBER: This was my bar mitzvah in 1971. The party was on a Sunday night, it was a kids’ party only; the adult party was the night before. I was not at that time into rock and roll yet. I don't even know if I knew who the Grateful Dead were at that time. I was more into the St. Louis hockey season and stuff like that. So we had a party of about 100 13-year olds at the Hilton at the airport in St. Louis.

JESSE: When in town, the Dead stayed in the St. Louis Airport Hilton.

TONY DWYER: They owned the place. When they would get there and they had 20 rooms, they own the fucking place. Who else is going to stay at the airport Hilton in St. Louis? And the dining room was there, everything was there.

JESSE: You can hear Marmaduke excuse himself on the Scotty’s tape to head back.

JOHN DAWSON [12/71]: The airport Hilton. It’s not far.

JESSE: Along with traveling rock stars, another thing that airport hotels host is bar mitzvah parties.

RICHARD GERBER: We had a local band that plays St. Louis parties and so forth. They were playing a large room. It was on the main floor of the hotel, a large ballroom.

JESSE: They were called Spring Rain, and they were soon to become legends at Ladue Horton Watkins High School. Please welcome bassist Mark Slosberg.

MARK SLOSBERG: We were all 10th graders. The guitar player and I had been studying with the same teacher, and we were best buds for years. And then when we formed this, I switched over to bass, and he stayed on guitar. Steve Fisher was kind of our singer, sound man, producer, and John McSweeney who plays into the story very importantly, because he was the blind piano player, Bruce and myself. And then Doug Heller, Doug was the drummer. And there was a lovely soprano woman that we were all friends with from the new high school. And it was called Spring Rain, and it was all our first band. We practiced in my parents’ living room, and we totally destroyed it. The living room was never the same after that. I mean, we practiced a lot! And we were all very serious, and we played a lot of Carole King, and James Taylor and a little Crosby, Stills and Nash and then we spiced it up. Steve did things like “Blue Suede Shoes.” We had, like, different sets. And he did this stuff that got the kids out on the dance floor. And at the time, there were a lot of bar mitzvah bands in the neighborhood. But we were probably the most popular, and we worked regularly.

JESSE: Drummer Doug Heller.

DOUG HELLER: There were a couple guys who, from fourth grade through like junior senior high school, we stayed together. And then different guys came in and out over the years. Fourth grade, we played the school talent show and then we played one or two birthday parties that year.

MARK SLOSBERG: I think I probably had American Beauty or Workingman’s Dead or both, and was into those songs. But they weren't part of our repertoire, we hadn't sort of moved into that kind of music, or tried it or anything like that. So we knew who they were. And we liked the music, but it wasn't part of the thing. Steve was the only one who was driving at this point, so it would be his car to haul all the equipment around.

STEVE FISHER: I think I was the only guy driving. I had my dad's yellow Pinto wagon, right? Yellow with the fake wood on the side. We had gotten a PA together from Altec Lansing and some music store there in town. I ended up becoming a sound guy for… and that's what I do professionally. I mix sound for sports: I do like Super Bowl, US Open tennis, US Open golf, about a million and one basketball games, you name it. So that was my start.

DOUG HELLER: It was just another party. But it was a sizable one. It was in a big room at the airport Hilton in St. Louis.

RICHARD GERBER: And about maybe 50 feet down the lobby way was a bar. And my sister, her and a couple of her girlfriends were there at the party also. They were hanging around the lobby. They happen to be attractive cheerleader girls at the time, and they were well aware of who the Grateful Dead were. I know that my sister liked the Grateful Dead a lot. And there were people hanging around the bar. One of the band members, and I'm not sure which one, but one of the band members from the Grateful Dead started a conversation with my sister and with her girlfriend. That conversation went on for about 15 minutes. And according to my sister, she thought they were trying to pick the two of them up. And my sister talked to this gentleman, another member of the Grateful Dead, and some other guys in another band, I think it was the New Riders of the Purple Sage, talked them into coming over to the ballroom and saying hi. And just introducing themselves, and maybe playing some music — because they heard, you could hear the music in the bar, and they were talking about that. So my sister also was going to try to get them to pick up a guitar and play a little bit.

MARK SLOSBERG: My sister Jo comes up to me while I'm playing, and says: “Mark, Mark, the Grateful Dead are here.” And I said, just like any big brother would do, “Go away, Joanne, I'm trying to play.” And she says, “No, they really are here! Look!” And she points to the door. And it's sort of like a Marx Brothers movie. You know, there's four heads in the doorway, kind of thing. And there they were.

RICHARD GERBER: My sister actually came in and said, “I got a surprise, somebody that wants to come in and meet you.” I thought it was going to be Gary Unger of the St. Louis Blues. And I say, who is this guy? So anyway, they went ahead and played, and I was probably in back, throwing a soccer ball around with some friends in the back, not even paying attention to who these guys were.

MARK SLOSBERG: I always tell it that they heard scratchy rock and roll, scratchy rock and roll band, came down the hall to hear what it is.

RICHARD GERBER: A lot of people knew who they were right away. The band members certainly knew who they were. And the band members started to talk to them. My sister asked the band members if it would be okay if they would use their instruments and play for a few minutes.

STEVE FISHER: The person who we're playing for says, “Hey, well, could you invite ‘em into play?” And we said well, sure. So we go and say: ‘Hey, would you guys play for us?” And they said, ‘Yeah, we don’t wanna interrupt you guys, we'll play during your break.” And we're like: whoa! So, they come in and they kind of reorchestrate during that little break.

MARK SLOSBERG: Garcia was the only one who wasn't there. But everybody else was there, plus Marmaduke.

RICHARD GERBER: About 20 people lined up at the payphone booth in the lobby and called all their friends.

MARK SLOSBERG: All of the kids ran out to the lobby and used payphones in those days, because it was long before we had anything remotely like cell phones. The venue at the airport Hilton was about 15 minutes away from where we all lived. So they all call their older brothers and sisters. So within about 20, 25 minutes, there were high schoolers that were starting to arrive in the lobby.

RICHARD GERBER: There must have been 200 people there from high school, all watching the Grateful Dead play.

MARK SLOSBERG: It was really Keith, Kreutzmann, Lesh, Weir and Marmaduke. That was the lineup. So they played New Riders tunes. They played, I don’t know, two, three New Riders tunes that I wasn’t familiar with. Those were songs I didn’t know, and I only came to get into the New Riders after that. They played a couple of these tunes. We were in the middle of a set. I mean, we were doing a job: it was like a two-hour gig, let's say 6:30 to 8:30, or 7:30 to 9:30, something like that. I always held that what they were most interested in was… John McSweeney was sort of the rock of our band. We were all just emerging musicians at the time. John was really good. And as a blind piano player, I think he held a special interest for them. They may have been just drunk enough to think they were looking at the next Stevie Wonder, or somebody. I mean, he really was good, and he held the band together at that time. And so they were very interested. And of course, John's mother was there because she had to drive him to the engagements. He remembers he was really sick that night, and wouldn't have gone to the job, but wanted to be a pro and showed up. And of course he's happy that it happened. And then we had to get back and play a second set, because we still had a contract to play.

STEVE FISHER: We had this little theatrical twist to it, that we would call it Screamin’ Steve, yours truly right? So Screamin’ Steve would come out. Basically, we’d do a set and then the band would take a break, and I’d go in the bathroom and get dressed up. I had like this black leather jacket, black wingtip shoes with white socks, pulled up my pants really high. My waist was up around my chest, I think, and grease my hair back with water. Anyhow, we've come back and we do this thing. But the band was in the back of the... I mean, imagine a banquet room at a Marriott or whatever it was, and a bunch of 13, 14-year old Jewish kids run around for the bar mitzvah, and the band’s hanging in back, having just played a number or two. But they were howlin’! I came out as Screamin’ Steve, I was so into it going: holy shit, they’re in the back, laughing! I had a cigarette, like lit my ciggy, right, just lit lip. It was sort of all taken from the Sha Na Na stuff that was happening about that same timeframe. It's like okay, we got to do a thing like that. And they were howling! I mean, they were in the back row, just like whooping it up. At the time, I was probably just intimidated as shit. But with a little hindsight it’s like: hey man, these guys, these guys are doing their thing.

MARK SLOSBERG: Somehow or other, a blues jam started up. And we all kind of jammed together on a blues. Because of course the only thing we would have known together. We all ended up on different instruments at different times. And it was just the straight 12-bar blues. John may have started it as part of one of our sets, and then they sat down. I gave my bass to Phil Lesh. At the time, I don't think he'd ever played a fretless bass. He commented on that, that it was interesting. And I think Doug said he gave up his drums to Kreutzmann.

DOUG HELLER: I didn't recognize them. I mean, I later heard some of the names of who was there. The drummer, so he's like, I'll take your, you know, I'll play your… so that was one thing that I was not thrilled about, like, “Okay, here are the sticks.”

MARK SLOSBERG: I'd love to tell you that it was this phenomenal set. But we certainly weren't doing a lot of improvising in those days.

STEVE FISHER: Because we talked to Weir afterwards in the bar, us with our Coca Colas, and him with his beer, right? And he was talking to John, and I was… I came over to the table there, and we were chatting it up some. He was telling us about Scotty’s Music. Scotty’s is the only pedal steel place in the Midwest of repute. They had a little recording studio, there at that place. Weir said, “You guys should get in, you know, make some recordings and stuff.” I remember Weir in particular, he was talking about, he was… I swear to God, the guy was… look, he was telling us to, like, behave, not take drugs, talk about Janis Joplin. Said, “look, junk is bad.” It was like a PSA man, I’m not kidding. And he’s only, what, 72 or something now. So he’s got six, seven years on us. So he’s not that much older, it’s like one of our fucking sibs. The biggest memory I have is driving home that night with my little PA stuff in the back of the Pinto, and pulling it out. And I was the youngest of four, my brothers and sisters were all away at school. And I come home, I’m pretty buzzed! Pretty excited, that buzz from getting high — just like hey man, exciting! I go, my parents are long asleep. I knock on their door, I’m sure they’re goin’ — oh shit, he’s wrecked the car right? “Well,” I say, “wow, you won’t believe what happened.” “What happened?” “Well, I played with the Grateful Dead!” That’s nice… boom, bed.

RICHARD GERBER: It was definitely all over the school newspaper, whenever that came out. And certainly it was the talk of the school and the high school for years to come.

JESSE: We’ve posted a news clipping from the Ladue High School Panorama.

RICHARD GERBER: There [were] a lot of photos, and we had those photos for years. Again, once I went away to school, I would tell people the story. And once I got into the Dead, I would tell people the story, they wouldn't believe it. So every time somebody would come over, I have to show them the album. So we must have 40, 50 pictures. However, they're gone. And we think that album, but not all the albums, were lost in the fire. My mom had a fire about 20 years ago in her condominium.

JESSE: He’s gonna go down for another look, and we’ll let you know if anything comes back.

RICHARD GERBER: I do remember a picture of I think it was… I don't know who it was. Because it could have been one of the guys from the New Riders of the Purple Sage. And to be honest with you, they all looked alike at the same time. Everybody had the long stringy hair, and had a mustache and a beard. But anyway, somebody was… she was on a chair. And this guy was standing behind her, trying to teach her how to play the guitar.

He was taller, lean, very long brown hair, down past his shoulders. I thought he had on glasses with kind of a tan shade to them. Sometimes guys would wear the shaded glasses — not sunglasses, but regular glasses, or with a dark tint to them, tinted glasses. Does that sound like anybody?

JESSE: That does match the description of Bob Weir. But really, that’s crazy — the Grateful Dead crashing Richie Gerber’s bar mitzvah, on December 12th, 1971, in between the Fox Theatre shows on the new Listen to the River box set, and their next gig in Ann Arbor on Tuesday, December 14th. There’s a whole lot more about the Dead and St. Louis in a new post on the crucial Grateful Dead Guide blog. See you next time — same band, same river.