GOOD OL' GRATEFUL DEADCAST
Season 4, Episode 3
Archival interviews:
- Nick Sand, The Sunshine Makers.
- Owsley Stanley, Conversations With the Dead, 1/13/91.
JESSE: When the Grateful Dead arrived in St. Louis to perform at the Fox Theatre in October 1972 for three nights, starting the day after Bob Weir’s 25th birthday, the stage was set for three classic shows at one of the band’s favorite venues. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Fall of ‘72 in particular is some of the most consistently great Grateful Dead.
JESSE: Whatever it is, these shows have it.
DAVID LEMIEUX: There's something in the air, something magical happening.
JESSE: Or as co-promoter Tony Dwyer of Sky High Associates put it:
TONY DWYER: The ‘72 shows… what a fucking scene that was.
JESSE: Our story begins today a few months before the shows in St. Louis’s heady Central West End. Euclid Records owner Joe Schwab.
JOE SCHWAB: It was a famous boutique that was at the corner of Euclid and MacPherson called the Gypsy Cowboy. Gypsy Cowboy was a very cool place where the hippies would come and hang out and buy their leather jackets and stuff. Herb Balaban, who owned it, decided to do a kind of a 180, and he switched with this little boutique that was next door on Euclid called The Pseudonym, and The Pseudonym is a place where I used to buy records as well, they used to sell ‘em there. And he opened a restaurant there called Balaban’s, which became a huge institution in St. Louis.
JESSE: One of Herb Balaban’s employees was Tony Dwyer, who’d been instrumental in bringing the Dead to St. Louis’s Fox Theatre for the first time in February 1970, and had remained close with the band and their crew.
TONY DWYER: I had been working at a hip clothing store, haberdashery, a hip clothing store in the Central West End of St. Louis — which was the Greenwich Village, the Haight Ashbury, the whatever of St. Louis. I think at the time, I mean, I normally worked in the store. But anyhow, the place was called the Gypsy Cowboy, which the New Riders [of the Purple Sage] named an album after.
AUDIO: “Gypsy Cowboy” [New Riders of the Purple Sage, Gypsy Cowboy] (0:32-0:46) - [Spotify]
TONY DWYER: Any rock 'n' roll band that came to St. Louis, went to the Gypsy Cowboy. I didn't give a fuck who they were. Michael Jackson would show up there. I mean, everybody. Everybody showed up there, to do something. Buy something, hang out. It was a hip store. I mean, it was a really hip store. Herbie did a fucking incredible job. I mean, he had turquoise before anybody did. He had abalone in silver belt buckles. He had fucking Santa Fe leather. He had all sorts of shit going on in there. And it was cool. Herbie knew what he was doing. So anyhow, the New Riders hung out there. Sam knew the store. Everybody knew the store. I'm outside, this is like June, and Herbie had been complaining that he needed the trim on the windows painted, but the guy that he had hired to do it hasn't shown up. So I said, “Well, I’ll do it.” So I went outside on a ladder, and a car pulls up. And Sam and Francis’ car get out. And I get off the ladder and — “Sam, how you doing? What's up?”
JESSE: By 1972, Sam Cutler was firmly in charge of the Dead’s booking. In the spring, he’d brought the band overseas for the legendary two-month Europe ‘72 campaign. That fall, he established Out Of Town Tours, a booking agency to handle the Dead, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and other like-minded bands.
TONY DWYER: He suggested that we have dinner that night. We had dinner at a girl's apartment, Brooks Ogden, who was the manager or something at the Gypsy Cowboy. And we had dinner at her place. And Annie Lyons was a buddy of mine, business partner of mine and I, attended, and we brought some music with us. And of course, it was like, oh, Heads, Hands & Feet, and Spooky Tooth. And we were playing it and all Sam would say, “Well, Garcia would play it better.” And I said, “Well, Mick Jones would have a different idea. But yeah, yeah, I agree with you, Garcia’d play it better.” So we get down to it, and he finds out that I was instrumental in the 1970 show. And he said, “Really? You have an interest?” I said, “Of course I do.” With the Grateful Dead, it was more out of love and devotion than the money, although that was involved. So he said, we'll take this up in a day or two.
JESSE: Sam introduced Tony Dwyer to Sepp Donahower and Pacific Presentations, who had been promoting Dead shows for nearly as long as the Dead were playing outside of the Bay Area. In late 1967, Donahower and a partner signed a deal on the Shrine Auditorium on L.A.
SEPP DONAHOWER: We made this deal with the Shrine, and then Mark and I hopped in our car and drove to San Francisco and went to the Dead's house on Haight Street, and sat down with Rock Scully and Danny Rifkin, and made a deal to bring the Grateful Dead for two nights to the Shrine. And then we also booked the Buffalo Springfield. And while we were up there, we saw this incredible loud wild band called Blue Cheer, who we put on the show, which I think was their first date in LA. And that was the start of it all. And then in 1970, I got together with a friend, two friends of mine that I kind of grew up with, Gary Perkins and Bob Bogdanovich, and we started another concert company called Pacific Presentations. And that one, we started out working secondary markets. Being new young promoters, even in 1970, there was just a couple of established promoters and the agents wouldn't give us the acts in LA. So we had to go to the hinterlands.
JESSE: When Sam Cutler took over the Dead’s booking, Pacific became a partner of choice. They booked the Dead at the Hollywood Palladium in ‘71, and soon thereafter promoted a trio of Dead shows in Texas and New Mexico. Throughout 1972, Pacific Presentations booked the Dead up and down the West Coast, including a pivotal show in LA in June, their first after returning from the Europe ‘72 tour.
SEPP DONAHOWER: One show that was spectacular, I think for them and kind of a coming-of-age show, was when we put them in the Hollywood Bowl as a headline act. They played there once before, on a multi-act show, but this was really they're coming out as a major arena artist. It wasn't easy getting them in there, because at that time the Hollywood Bowl was managed by the Los Angeles Symphony. I called up and said, “We want to bring the Grateful Dead in there” — phone was all silent for a minute. But we got it in there, and it was a great show. And I think that was the last show that Pigpen performed with ‘em.
JESSE: It was the beginning of the years in which the Dead tried to balance playing big rooms and smaller more intimate spaces like Fox.
SEPP DONAHOWER: We would collaborate with Sam. He'd say, “I want to go up to the Pacific Northwest,” or, you know, here, and then I'd go out and canvas the open dates and available venues, feed the information to Sam, and then he would decide, we’d discuss it and decide where the best shots were in terms of intelligent routing, because you got people on the road, and trucks and hotels and all that. The Fox was the venue of choice. He put us together with Tony at Sky High in St. Louis, in order to do shows. And Tony and I became friends, and we're still friends to this day.
TONY DWYER: We being Sky High Associates, my brother Jim, Andy Lyons and myself. My brother is eight years my senior.
SEPP DONAHOWER: Tony was a promoter who spoke the same language as us. He was thorough. We went out and did real thorough jobs. We maximize their business in the market. So we went into it, and that was our job. It wasn't a couple of stoners putting on a show. We might have been stoned part of the time — but we were pretty professional about it, and took pride in being that way and doing a good job.
JESSE: Pacific Presentations and Sky High Associates would co-promote the band’s next trips through St. Louis in 1972 and 1973 — the vast majority of the music on the Listen To The River box set. For that matter, Sepp also produced all the shows on the Pacific Northwest ‘73-’74 box set as well.
SEPP DONAHOWER: Sam turned ‘em into a business, it paid for itself and made some money for the band and kept the ship afloat. They brought some discipline in, he researched dates correctly, got good promoters, got good venues. Yeah, he did a good job, he had great people working with him. His girlfriend Francis helped him, was right by his side, a delight to work with, sharp. [Kidd] Candelario — he had a good crew. They were good, they were top-notch. And I worked with everybody: I worked with the Stones, Bowie, everybody on the planet. Sam’s crew, and the Dead’s crew, was as good as any of ‘em, on a professional level. In some ways, better, because they had a more challenging product to sell, because they didn’t have hit records on the radio.
TONY DWYER: They put Sepp Donahower in touch with me and we co-pro-ed the show. But there was a lot of work to do. And it was easy for me because of love of the band, love of the music, love of the room. And I had a group that worked for me. And I said, this year, we're doing three shows — at my insistence. And Jon McIntire was, he says, “Tony, you’re sure you can do three?” And I said, “yeah, we can do three.” What it took was doing ticket outlets. St. Louis was really a secondary market at best, maybe even a tertiary market. I mean, you're talking about a city with 650,000 people, and it wasn't a big market. So what I did was I got outlets in Champaign, Illinois, in Carbondale, Illinois, Columbia, Missouri. We did all the colleges within 200 miles. We did mail order, and we did a bunch of ticket outlets that were normal ticket outlets. This is way before Ticketron or Ticketmaster, or whatever they call it. That was the way I was going to fill 4,503 seats for three nights. It helped working with Sepp Donahower and people at Pacific. We would talk every afternoon with a ticket pulse, we’d barrage markets with more advertising. We had radio time everywhere, we had print everywhere. We did everything we could. I think Jon McIntire was very pleased with the outcome.
SEPP DONAHOWER: I ended up doing a lot of shows in the Midwest, not just for the Grateful Dead. But lots of shows in Evansville, Indiana and Kalamazoo, Michigan and all over the place. The audiences there, you pull from a wide geographic range. When you're doing your marketing, you look at about, you look at having the word out there and tickets, maybe, 100, 200 mile radius of the city. Because you're pulling in from farm towns and adjoining college towns and so on. So you're not just promoting it in St. Louis. You're going into the general area. And it pays off, because you're bringing a lot of business.
JESSE: Like a lot of people around the Dead, Tony Dwyer took to his work with missionary zeal.
TONY DWYER: I needed to wake people up to the band. And it wasn't happening yet. They had a core audience, but it needed to be expanded. That's why we went into secondary and tertiary markets to sell tickets. Because I thought it is my obligation to expose people to this shit. They don't know about this, they don't know what they're missing. And if I can get two people out of 20 to come that had never seen this before, and they go home, there are going to be 10 more people to come the next time. And that's how the band was built. And St. Louis was instrumental in it. We did a lot of fucking work for that band. I mean, a lot of work, a lot of work to get the Grateful Dead going there. They, of course, did a ton of work. And every time they played there, they were outstanding.
JESSE: Tickets were general admission, $4.50 each—about $28 calculated for inflation, available at the Fox box office, KSHE radio, record stores like Pseudonym near Gypsy Cowboy and Mardi Gras across the river in Belleville—birthplace of Grateful Dead manager Jon McIntire, and a few years later, the band Uncle Tupelo. You could also get tickets at the Uncle Julius stand at Northwest Plaza. It probably helped that the Dead were also still on their way becoming one of the biggest bands in the United States. When they’d headlined the Fox for the first time in February 1970, it was a bit of a stretch. Now, two and a half years later, it was nearly what promoters these days call an underplay. David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: They were also playing a month earlier — Waterbury, Connecticut, at the little Palace, another beautiful movie palace. Stanley Theater in Jersey City, but they were also playing the Springfield Civic. The same tour that, a month earlier, exactly a month earlier, on September 19, the Dead were playing Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City. They were playing the Philly Spectrum a month earlier. These are big places where the connection, maybe in those first couple rows, but certainly the 18,000th person up in that corner, there's not really much of a connection. I think for the band, the finances dictated that they had to play Roosevelt and Philly. And who's gonna say no to that? If you can sell out 20,000 seats in a night and finance a new sound system, you're gonna do it. The Dead certainly weren't getting rich, but they had expenses, and a lot of them — and they had a big staff and a big payroll. So, they're going to play it. But I think given their druthers, playing the Fox would be the place to be. I know that for sure. They would much rather play a place like that. I know, they always lamented, after, like, ‘81 when they lost the ability to play the Stanley Theater and places like that. At that point on, it's just arenas. But in the Fox, I've seen enough pictures taken from the stage looking out. And despite the fact that there's the balcony, and it's really high, there is a connection, there's a way to connect. And I think that really, more than any band I know, that really matters. Having seen for instance, I never saw the Dead in a place like that, but I've seen Weir in places like that a lot — and there's a difference. There's a very big difference to see the band in a sit-down theater where the band can connect with you.
TONY DWYER: The band belonged there. The acoustics were just so fucking ridiculous, and it was the right-sized room. However many seats that is—three nights [times] 4,500—13.5. That was perfect. And they could feel at home in the place. We didn't scale the house, we had general admission. And it's October in St. Louis: it could be 80 degrees, or it can be 20 below zero. And it was somewhere in between, but closer to 20 below zero and fucking raining. And we had people hanging out in front of the place at eight o'clock in the morning. And so this is the first day, everything showed up. And I think we were going to start at eight o'clock. And at nine, we still weren't open.
SEPP DONAHOWER: There was some stupid stuff with the mirrorball. The mirrorball debacle — Tony was dealing with that one. I think I was like, up at the board, worried about the front of the house.
TONY DWYER: And Jackson and Ram Rod and a couple of others are up in the catwalk trying to fucking hang a mirrored ball. And we couldn't open up till we got all that shit done.
JESSE: It's like Chekov wrote: if you hang a mirror ball over the stage on the first night, some cool shit’s gonna go down later. At least, that’s what I think he wrote. Outside, heads were getting restless. Maybe this didn’t happen the first night, but let’s say it did. John Ellis was a local St. Louis Dead freak. He recently helped assemble the Grateful Dead Guide’s massive post about the Dead in St. Louis between 1968 and 1971.
JOHN ELLIS: What the Fox Theatre used to do is — when they really, really started getting popular, there was of course lines around the building, right? And then at some point, they'd let you into the lobby, and then their security would kind of have to hold down that energy of people trying to get in. And I remember one time, me and a couple buddies broke through their line. And we ran through the building because we were familiar with it. And at some point, we're in a hiding closet. And we can hear the stage manager talking to Lesh saying: “You’ve got to help me get these kids out of here and get them back in the lobby.” And they kind of hear us making noise in the closet and the manager like: “you kids get out of here” type of stuff. And Lesh says, “Is it general admission?” And the lobby manager says, “Yeah.” And Lesh goes: “I'd stand my ground if I were you guys,” as he walks away.
JESSE: But it wasn’t only the mirror ball holding things up.
TONY DWYER: Owsley working on the oscilloscope, gettin’ shit going, there’s white noise blowing out the fucking theater.
JESSE: Back on the stage crew for the first time in two years was Owsley Stanley, causing trouble in the name of making things sound righteous, and making wonderful recordings. It’s Bear’s tapes that make up the middle nine discs of Listen To The River. He’d been with the Dead on their first trip to the Fox in February 1970, just days after the Dead’s bust on Bourbon Street. He’d been arrested for making LSD in late 1967, but the New Orleans arrest violated his parole, confining him to the state of California and removing him from active duty as the Dead’s touring sound engineer. That summer, in 1970, he violated his parole again and was off to Terminal Island for two years. On his prison record, his permanent address was listed as Grateful Dead, PO Box 598, Novato, California. In 1991, our incredible Deadcast friend David Gans interviewed Owsley, one of Owsley’s very few interviews, published in David’s essential book, Conversations With the Dead, available in a revised edition from David’s website. They spoke about this period, and many, many, many, many other topics. Tons of thanks to David for this audio.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: When I came back in 1972, [Bob] Matthews had taken over, and Matthews didn’t look at it that way. Matthews saw things in compartments, like a union organizer. Everybody had a job and a responsibility and that was his, and this was his, and this was his, and this was mine. All different, right, all isolated. And this went on for two years. I come back, and there’s this scene that’s totally different, where nobody is going and helping the other guy — “Oh no, that’s my job, that’s your job, well, that’s this job, that’s that job,” right. And all of a sudden, I found that the three things that I did — recording, stage monitors, house mixing; I tried to sit up close to the stage so I could see and hear what was onstage, run the mix onstage from the board, didn’t always work, got better all the time — it was all one job. There were three guys doing that job! Each one fiercely defending his little territory. There was no “I can do this, you can do this, you can do that, and we can switch around” kind of thing. No, it was: “This is mine, this is yours, this is mine.” And every one of those guys that had taken one of those positions, although they said, “Oh, yeah, yeah, come back"— suddenly, there wasn’t a place.
JESSE: Please welcome back to the Deadcast, Bear’s son, Starfinder Stanley, of the Owsley Stanley Foundation. Starfinder wrote a great essay in the new Listen To The River box set about Owsley’s recordings of the 1972 shows.
STARFINDER STANLEY: Bear got out of jail after being gone for over two years, and he came back into a really different landscape than the one he'd left. I remember him saying it was like the Bus had left without him. All of the things that he did were being done by other people who were well-established, and the crew had gotten more insular and more… they had their whole routine worked out. So they didn't really want him coming back and telling them what to do — they felt like they were doing what they wanted to, and what they needed to, and it worked just fine. He was a constant innovator, and innovation takes more time and effort. He was a little bit at ends — came in and tried to figure out where he could fit in, what he could do to contribute. Started making Sonic Journals again.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Pretty soon after he got back, he got out, he started recording. And that's why the fall of ‘72, that's all Bear, and early ‘73. And then after that, my understanding is he started staying home more to develop the Wall of Sound. And that's when Kidd [Candelario] kind of took over. There was a transition period where there were shows — RFK ‘73, there are both Kidd recordings and Bear recordings of that. So Bear was out there because he was part of the team, part of the family and he's an incredible recordist, so he was out recording. I think he was doing other things, too, with the sound. But he was not doing front-of-house sound. So during the shows, he was able to concentrate solely on the recordings. As opposed to in 1970, for instance, before he went away, he was doing front-of-house sound and recording. That's a big, that's two responsibilities to do them both right. So that's why some of the recordings in 1970 kind of lack. And when a tape runs out, he's not right on top of it because he's mixing the house sound. So we might be missing three minutes instead of 20 seconds, as you would find later on, it would be a 20 second reel change, as opposed to not noticing for three or four minutes.
JESSE: Even without Bear’s active participation, it was a psychedelic time in the United States. There was certainly no LSD shortage in St. Louis. In the spring, the Outlaw’s Dope Scope column reported on the availability of “orange barrels, strong & pure, $2/hit, windowpane (back by popular demand), purple microdots, yellow microdots, yellow-double-dome (maybe mixed with speed), and just blue.” That’s not to mention the three kinds of mescaline, and various pills.
Though the ‘60s get all the press, history shows that there was actually more LSD in circulation in the early ‘70s, with some scholars estimating 1972 as the peak of LSD use in the United States. This was in large part thanks to a rogue group called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, responsible for the LSD known as Orange Sunshine — and they were stone Dead freaks. But it was during the summer of 1972 that the government began to really bust them up. Some of those arrested over the summer would be spotted, out on bail, at the Dead’s Winterland New Year’s show. And at that very same show, 1972 going into 1973, a few more members were hauled in by government agents. But they didn’t get everybody. St. Louis head Thom Pallazola.
THOM PALLAZOLA: There was always a rumor that I never was able to find out that for a while, Owsley put a lab here. He wasn't manufacturing, but he had one of his tabbing machines here, or pill machines here for a while. It was either he or somebody part of that organization.
JESSE: Though it wasn’t Owsley, that rumor actually was true. It was Nick Sand. And for a few months in 1972, from summer through the end of the year, St. Louis was perhaps the most psychedelic place on earth.
Owsley had trained a few chemists personally, Nick Sand was one of them. He was a Dead freak also. The Dead’s archives contain a 6-page handwritten guestlist for their New Year’s show the previous year—1971 going into 1972—with Nick Sand receiving a +5, nearly the most additional guests of anybody else on the list. And it was because of Nick Sand that, for roughly six months in 1972, St. Louis was the psychedelic capital of the world. Here’s Nick talking, from Cosmo Feilding-Mellen’s incredible documentary, The Sunshine Makers. I can’t recommend it enough.
NICK SAND [THE SUNSHINE MAKERS]: I went off to St. Louis with a new partner. I made a beautiful laboratory, two-story brick building in downtown St. Louis. I had formed this company, Signet Research and Development. Everybody was very happy that industry was moving into this impoverished area, and I was getting kudos from the mayor. We made a lot of beautiful psychedelics. And we were right out in the open. One more job, one more paycheck. We didn't really accept checks though.
JESSE: The St. Louis lab was located at 2209 Delmar Blvd, a 25-minute walk or 5-minute drive from the Fox Theater. They even had a smaller lab located in their home in nearby Fenton. I was able to contact Nick’s lab partner of the time, and future wife, Judy Shaughnessy, who says that they had absolutely no clue that Owsley and the Dead were in town. To find out what happened to the St. Louis lab, watch the rest of The Sunshine Makers. Really. Do.
It’s actually hard to tell if Nick and Judy’s work had an immediate impact on their surroundings. In the Dope Scope column in the St. Louis Outlaw from that October, the same issue that reported on the Dead shows, there was a warning of an uptick in pills cut with PCP—bad vibes, man—but also reports and ratings on a wide variety of LSD and mescaline available in the area, including Berkeley Blue, White Mescaline, Red Blotter, Chocolate Chip Mesc, Dark Yellow Barrels, Burgundy Tabs, Sugar Cube Acid, and Purple Flats, with prices between $2 and $2.50 a hit — between $13 and $16, in 2021 prices. All of which is to say that St. Louis was well-prepared for three nights of Grateful Dead.
Tony Dwyer and Sky High Associates had indeed gotten the word out. At the University of Kansas in Lawrence, a group of Dead Heads had heard about the shows. Bill Weber wrote a really soulful and fantastic essay about his transformative experiences seeing the Dead in St. Louis in ‘72, titled “Sainted at the Fox,” included in the new Listen To The River box set, and we’re so pleased to welcome him to the Deadcast. Hey Bill.
BILL WEBER: Growing up in the Midwest, if you want to do things, you get used to driving. So I remember, about once a year, we’d drive to New York, or Boston. And occasionally that would be like a, I don't know, an 18, 20-hour drive. But occasionally we'd also drive to San Francisco or something. And that would be like a 30-hour drive. So, you sort of got used to being in your car a lot. So it wasn't that big of a deal to drive from Lawrence to St. Louis. And it was only four and a half hours each way. So that. wasn't as that wasn't a long drive when you grow up in the Midwest. I certainly remember getting there. And I'd never been to the Fox Theatre before. And the experience of walking into that and seeing a couple of thousand Dead Heads there — first off, it felt like I was home when I saw the Dead Heads. And back then, it was a bit unusual to see that large of a number of what I consider to be my tribe. And it felt great — it just felt great. But then the Fox Theatre just completely blew me away. I had never experienced anything like that before. We had some fairly grand movie houses in Kansas, but nothing like the old Fox.
JESSE: One person seeing their first shows at the Fox in ‘72 was Drea Stein, now the host of The Other One, every Tuesday from noon to two on St. Louis’s KDHX.
DREA STEIN: I had heard about the Fox Theatre from my parents. They had gone there to see movies and stage productions, vaudeville, over the years. And then in ‘72, it was basically closed, that was a part of town you did not go into, even in daylight hours.
JESSE: Though the Fox was still showing movies in the early ‘70s, a search for newspaper articles in that period reveals all kinds of sketchy activity. In 1971, burglars had tried to break through the wall of the Fox to get into the jewelry store next door. In early 1972, a few weeks after the Dead had played there, the theater was the victim of arson, with local youth accused of setting small fires. A few movies had to be evacuated.
DREA STEIN: So I lied to my parents about where I was going that night. I had always heard that it was a really neat looking building — you had no clue what it looked like. Walked in there, it was the most incredible thing on the inside, even in its disrepair. Because at that point, it hadn't been restored yet. There's this huge stained glass globe that hangs in the middle, from the ceiling up there. And it's like, I had never seen anything like this. I mean, this thing is just, I don't know, twenty feet across. It's huge. And you're just like: excuse me?
BILL WEBER: It was just so opulent, and so magical. And what was also really special about it was it was a little bit rundown. So it felt like you're going into the past in some way. The sacred past that you could go into to hear your band. It was really great.
DREA STEIN: My brain was very altered on some substances that evening. And I just couldn't quit just freaking out over the ornate, the gold paint on everything, and these giant lions in the lobby. And I mean their eyes lit up. They had stones, like rubies in her eyes, and they're all lit up. And it was velvet wallpaper in the hallways, and these grand staircases. I had never seen anything like that in my life. So yeah, it was just something else.
TONY DWYER: That setup was we had, for security, we had members of the Missouri Rugby Football Union in their jerseys. We had rent-a-cops backstage, and we had St. Louis police department, off-duty guys, at the front door. So of course, all the guys from the Missouri Rugby Football Union are flying. And I've got this kid backstage, and I hand them the guest list. And this guy's like in his middle 20s, overweight Black dude, with an outsize Afro, with his fucking police hat hanging on top of it, right. And he's got the list, and he said: “Mr. Dwyer, don't worry about a thing. Anybody who's not on this list ain't getting in.” And he pulls out a cattle prod. I said, “No, no, no, no. I said, give me the cattle prod, and if there's anybody you have an issue with, come and get me.” So I go back to visit him about an hour later, and I say, “Hey, hey, how you doing?” He said, “Everything’s cool, man. I got a contact high — I could stay here all night.” And I say to him, “You have no fucking idea, no idea how high you're getting tonight.” Anyhow, this kid's got a fucking grin from ear to ear. And he got blasted that night, because he made the mistake of picking up an open Heineken.
JESSE: It wasn’t only the security guards who had to watch out for the band’s crew, as Sepp Donahower remembers.
SEPP DONAHOWER: Their favorite thing was to dose the promoter. They got me a lot, many times. But for some reason, I'm able to maintain, so I think they were impressed. If you could sit there and somebody hits you with a few doses, and you can settle the box office and pay the cops, they're impressed. I think I got the real stamp of approval, because I could weather the storm.
JESSE: Finally, it was show time.
TONY DWYER: I'm standing backstage with Garcia and Weir and Lesh, and we're smoking a joint. And finally, it's now like nine o'clock. And I’m going: guys, what do you think? So they go out to play.
BOB WEIR [10/17/72]: We’re sorry about this delay, but that’s how it is. Or was.
PHIL LESH [10/17/72]: In the technological age…
BOB WEIR [10/17/72]: Hurry up and wait. We’ve been here longer than you have.
AUDIO: “Promised Land” [Listen To The River, 10/17/72] (0:20-0:37) - [dead.net]
BILL WEBER: I don't remember the exact reason for our decision, but we got tickets for the Tuesday and Thursday show, and we didn't have ‘em for the Wednesday. I think we were mainly saving on finding a place to stay, and getting a hotel room and that kind of stuff. I knew by the first song that I was going to all three nights.
AUDIO: “Promised Land” [Listen To The River, 10/17/72] (2:56-3:26) - [dead.net]
BILL WEBER: I wasn't going home. It was just like, no, there's no way.
JESSE: Since playing the Fox Theatre for the first time in February 1970, the Dead’s configuration had been subtly different nearly each and every time they came through town. The February 1970 show was the first without keyboardist Tom Constanten. Their next times through included sets by the acoustic Dead and Jerry Garcia with the New Riders of the Purple Sage. When they came back in March 1971, Mickey Hart had been furloughed. In December of 1971, they’d returned to the Fox with a new piano player, Keith Godchaux. Now, in 1972, they were here with new vocalist Donna Jean Godchaux and without Pigpen.
BOB WEIR [10/17/72]: You may have noticed Pigpen’s not with us this evening. He’s still home convalescing from a long, serious illness, and hopefully he’ll be back with us next time.
JESSE: Sadly, Pigpen wouldn’t make it back to the stage with the Dead. There was all kinds of craziness happening during the three shows in St. Louis. Thom Pallazola told us this story. His memory places it in 1973 at the Kiel Auditorium. But Tony Dwyer is absolutely certain it happened one of the years at the Fox — so we’ll just file it right here, a piece of blurry folklore.
THOM PALLAZOLA: Hippie Bob's a barber. So this guy has really long hair, but he was a barber. But he was also a car and motorcycle enthusiast. And it was one of his choppers was up on stage in memory of Duane Allman.
TONY DWYER: Some gang member showed up with it. Garcia was into the Hells Angels at the time, and whatnot. And this guy rode his motorcycle up on the stage, but I can't remember what show it was. I do remember the incident, there’s no question about that. And the guy did, he had Grateful Dead graphics on his gas tank.
THOM PALLAZOLA: He may still be a barber. If you can find a barber shop in Baldwin on Clayton Road, that would be his shop.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Each of the nights of the ‘72 shows have very distinct personalities. The shows certainly do take you on a trip. So the first night in ‘72, there is no “Dark Star,” there’s no “Other One,” and that's very rare for 1972, to not have either of those. But what you do get is an incredibly well-played, perfectly executed Grateful Dead show, minus one of those two big jam vehicles, is a major “Playing in the Band.”
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Listen To The River, 10/17/72] (8:58-9:28) - [dead.net]
DREA STEIN: I'd never heard music performed like that before. I remember “Playing in the Band” went on forever. And I was just like, nobody takes it to this limit!
JESSE: Since the band’s last visit to the Fox in 1971, the improvisation in “Playing in the Band” had broken out from a one-minute meltdown to now stretched over fifteen minutes and jumped into hyper-space nearly every version, including both of the first two nights at the Fox in ‘72.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Listen To The River, 10/17/72] (17:32-18:02) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Since the last time the Dead had been through St. Louis in December ‘71, both Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir released their solo debut LPs, Garcia and Ace, respectively, each with a bunch of new songs that went right into the Dead repertoire. When the Dead showed up in St.Louis in October 1972, the release of Europe ‘72 was still several weeks away. There were new songs they’d written even since then as well: the latest model Grateful Dead, like “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo.”
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo” [Listen To The River, 10/17/72] (0:40-1:07) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Another piece of jamming that the St. Louis ‘72 shows featured in a big way was “Bird Song,” played all three nights, and performed on the first night as the show’s second song.
AUDIO: “Bird Song” [Listen To The River, 10/17/72] (0:35-1:00) - [dead.net]
JESSE: We explored the writing of “Bird Song” in our episode on Jerry Garcia’s solo debut last season. But to get even further inside the song’s beautiful improvisation, we proudly welcome musicologist Graeme Boone, who teaches at Ohio State University. I met Graeme at various Grateful Dead conferences, where he has charted out and analyzed the mechanics of the Dead’s improv in “Bird Song” and “Dark Star.”
GRAEME BOONE: Here's a song that is like a recollection of Janis Joplin, a memorial to Janis. And there is so much emotion going on in that situation. And this song captures so many things about loving someone and losing someone and about the specialness of Janis. I'm reading this into the song, but it's a very poignant song. And it's a song that when you hear them playing it, when they come up with a song and start performing it in public, you can feel that. And yet, it takes on all these different qualities: it can be celebratory, it can be elegiac, it can be almost angry with intensity. I almost feel like it follows the seasons of the year: there are autumn “Bird Song”s, there are spring “Bird Song”s. And so there's a lot of joy in it, and it's a song that carries you along into a very special place in the Dead's music. And the early ‘72 “Bird Song”s are marvelous, because this is this place of emergence, where it just is being remade every day. It's just a wonderful, wonderful thing to follow those recordings. It's a beautifully arranged song. And it's kind of a duet between Bob and Jerry, the way it's structured at the beginning. And Phil has this really interesting kind of dancing around the progression. He's really free, where in “Dark Star,” he's so focused. A lot of the song is about closure, about how they, the progression is kind of closed, whereas “Dark Star” is kind of always open. “Bird Song” has a feeling of closure to it in the riff, in the structure of the verse and chorus, and in the entire song. And they take this wonderful jam to close the song and then conclude with this beautiful return to the instrumental theme of “Bird Song.” So you really know when you're coming to the end of that song, whereas with “Dark Star,” you don't know if you're in the song at certain points. And yet, they share a lot of elements. And there are moments in some of these “Bird Song”s where they're drifting into “Dark Star.” And you could feel them kind of playing notes that — “uh, just a minute, what’s going on?” And then they pull away from that, because of course this isn't “Dark Star.”
JESSE: These are three early autumn “Bird Song”s.
GRAEME BOONE: They really make a set, a nice set of “Bird Song”s, because they're similar in a lot of ways.
JESSE: We had Graeme do what he sometimes does at scholarly conferences, and do guided listens to short segments of the jams, to get into the musical mechanics of some of this improvisation. We start with a bit from “Bird Song” from October 18th, the middle night.
AUDIO: “Bird Song” [Listen To The River, 10/18/72] - [dead.net]
GRAEME BOONE: So right away, you have — a beautiful duet between Jerry and Bob. They're playing almost exactly the same thing. And Keith is commenting behind them, very pretty, and Billy's coming in. Now listen to what Phil is doing — he's in the background. And he's doing really interesting things that are offbeat—on notes that could be unexpected—but they’re played beautifully, with the flow of the music. Now notice the beat structure: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12; a one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. So something wonderful about this song is that it has this eight-beat structure, but in the verse, Jerry stretches it out to twelve. And that creates a really interesting sense of diving in and exploring a moment. And again, that's really poignant for anybody who hears about this music. As his voice goes up through the scale, he's also drawing out the cycle to a 12-beat cycle. Whereas, almost all a “Bird Song” is often in kind of an eight-beat cycle.
JESSE: Even playing the same song on the same equipment, three nights in a row, each version had subtly different textures and variables, sometimes both mundane and musically cool at the same time. This is the third night — October 19th, 1972.
AUDIO: “Bird Song” [Listen To The River, 10/19/72] - [dead.net]
GRAEME BOONE: So Jerry’s in the middle of a nice solo here with the band. Everybody’s contributing. Phil’s very active, dancing beautifully around this progression. And Keith is also putting in some filigree. Jerry gets into this somewhat insistent riff for a minute, gets the band going, up to the high register. Everybody going along — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Jerry builds back down to the mid range. Jerry goes another insistent riff, hanging out on a single note. Getting everybody going, then another high note. Nice climax — but maybe broke a string, because he's about to drop out, which he does here. And then we have a really nice passage where Keith is soloing over Phil and Bob. He's not playing powerfully, not playing loudly or aggressive. This might have been an unexpected solo for him. But he's doing some really nice things with turns, with repeated motifs, some really nice little ornaments, and Billy's right there behind him. Fantastic, coming from Billy.
JESSE: And a little bit from the first night, October 17th.
AUDIO: “Bird Song” [Listen To The River, 10/17/72] - [dead.net]
GRAEME BOONE: So, these guys are jamming away. I don't know if you can hear it, but there's a kind of a one… seven… one… seven… one…. and you can hear Jerry playing a little bit, with some riffs that are a little bit like his “Dark Star” riff. And there Bob comes back in, rescuing “Bird Song” if you want, by playing the “Bird Song” riff. Jerry here is going into some high harmonics, which he loves to do in “Bird Song.” He also does it in “Dark Star,” and other places. Beautiful bent high-note harmonics, almost like a bird, right, a bird soaring in the sky. So can you hear that, the place that was “Dark Star” and “Bird Song’ touch on the same feeling? One… bom bom bom bom, bom, bom, bom…
JESSE: It wasn’t the only time the Dead approached “Dark Star” on the first night at the Fox. This is from early in the second set, just after “Bertha.”
AUDIO: “Bertha” [Listen To The River, 10/17/72] (6:27-6:43) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Jerry’s suggestion doesn’t go any further than that. I love being able to hear the atmosphere of the Fox Theatre on these vivid recordings by Owsley Stanley.
DAVID LEMIEUX: They're not PA tapes. It was a full array of inputs. Bear kind of explained it to me once. When Bear would explain things to me… he was an incredibly intelligent guy. I'm always of the mind that when somebody explains something to me, I asked him, “can you please explain this to me like I'm a six-year old?” Because I will get it then. But Bear didn't do that. But if you listen to the fall of ‘72, for instance, every show sounds exactly the same, similar to the spring of 77. Betty's recordings from May ‘77, they all sound the same. Which is to say that she was recording for the tape, not for the hall. She wasn't doing that. So Bear’s recordings are incredibly uniform through the fall of ‘72. So yes, he was getting a full array and doing a mix specifically for tape, had nothing to do with what was going out. And nor did it necessarily reflect the sound in the hall that a PA tape would. There's lots of PA tapes that we have over the years, particularly the ‘80s, where there's no bass in the mix, because there was so much bass coming through the subs, through the stage. Or there's very little Jerry guitar because it's a small venue, like the Warfield and there's so much guitar coming right off the stage that it's pretty low in the mix, the lead guitar. So with Bear’s recordings, that's not the case at all. Everything sounds pretty darn amazing, and consistent.
STARFINDER STANLEY: It was just bringing the lines in and getting them to two tracks. He wasn't running the PA, so he wasn’t mixing the house sound. At a certain point, there were decisions being made at the soundboard that would affect the sound that he was recording. So what he was doing was capturing the performance of the sound system; however, it was being mixed by the front-of-house. Bear was very, very, very rigorous about not altering, not EQ-ing. He would use an oscilloscope and he would take the inputs, and he'd make sure that everything had proper presence in the mix as it went to the recording deck. But he wouldn't EQ it, he wouldn't change anything other than the levels. He was just bringing it all in.
TONY DWYER: Somebody comes down, I’m backstage, and somebody comes back to me and says: “Tony, Sepp wants you up in the office.” So I go up there, and there are the two cops that were at the front door that were frisking everybody for contraband.
SEPP DONAHOWER: St. Louis narcs, actually. Like, police officers, doing the frisking of people coming in. They didn't arrest anybody — these cops get it, throw it in the trash can, tell ‘em to go in. So by the end of the night, there is this enormous quantity of drugs, at these trash containers that were in the front doors, They were taken into the little office off the front entry to the theater.
TONY DWYER: And they had the equivalent of 33 gallon plastic bags of you name it, paraphernalia, fucking… greatest drugs in the world. And it's all laid out on this, like, 20-foot conference table.
SEPP DONAHOWER: I kind of remember talking to this one St. Louis cop. I say, “What are you going to do with that?” And the guy looked at his partner, kind of back and forth. And they said, “I don't know, you figure it out,” and turned around and left.
TONY DWYER: So I get back there and Tony says, “Sepp, what do you want?” And I start filling my pockets with shit. And Sepp says to the cops: “What are you guys gonna do with this shit? And the cops say, “Oh, we're not going to do anything — that's up to you guys.”
SEPP DONAHOWER: It was like one of these huge trash bags filled with pot, cocaine. mescaline, you name it. Oh my god. Then anyway, we took it all back to the hotel and I gave it away to everybody.
TONY DWYER: We wind up with these 33 gallon bags filled with paraphernalia and drugs that go back to the hotel that night. Back to the airport Hilton. It was just crazy. Crazy, crazy shit. Yeah, there was everything there. So we go back to the hotel. And of course Owsley’s got tapes. And of course, everybody wants to listen to the tapes for the show for the night. I mean, now it's like two o'clock in the fucking morning, and we're listening to the tapes.
STARFINDER STANLEY: The early Sonic Journals, he absolutely buttonholed the guys at the hotel that night. After the show, he'd sit ‘em down, make them listen to the tapes, because he really wanted to them to hear while it was fresh in their minds what had just happened. He wanted to hear them to hear the other side of it and say, “Hey, this is what they got. This is what you were trying to give ‘em.”
JESSE: By 1972, it’s hard to say if he was still buttonholing the band exactly. But it was an era in which the band would sometimes rent an extra hotel room under the last name “Nagra”—after the tape deck—for after-show listening soirees. It definitely gave Bear some food for thought. The Owsley Stanley Foundation has spent the last few years beginning to archive and release Bear’s vast accumulation of Sonic Journals, most lately the stunning Johnny Cash — At the Carousel Ballroom, recorded at the Dead’s own ballroom in San Francisco in April 1968. Hawk [Semins], a friend of Bear and Starfinder since forever, has been spending a lot of time with Bear’s tapes and has spent some time thinking about this period too.
HAWK SEMINS: One of our theories is that that gave him the bandwidth to be able to think about the problems more holistically that they were facing, with respect to sound reinforcement. And it was one problem after another that they tried to solve that eventually evolved into the Wall of Sound. And that became I think his crowning accomplishment from this particular era, which may or may not have come from an inability to find his place.
STARFINDER STANLEY: He joked that he couldn't get his old job at the mixer back, he set out to make the mixing job obsolete. Because the purpose of the Wall of Sound was to make it so you didn't need a front-of-house mixer, because you were giving the musicians complete control over the sound. But that was always part of Bear's vision, realizing that what the musicians could hear on stage while performing was not at all what the audience was getting. And for Bear, that was a real problem, because he felt that it was really important for the musicians in real time to be connected to what they were giving the audience so that they could craft their art more finely.
HAWK SEMINS: Tracking that potential incongruity between what’s happening on the stage and what the band is hearing, what the audience is hearing, is part of the whole reason for making the Sonic Journals that OSF is trying to preserve in the first place. That's the evidence — that's what he could take back to the band and say, “Listen to this, is that what you intended?”
JESSE: In the fall of 1972, the band was beginning to jump into arenas. Bear may have come back at the wrong time to get back to work at the mixing board, but exactly the right moment to help the Dead face down bigger and more unforgiving acoustic spaces. In rooms like the Fox Theatre, though, one of the band’s all-time favorite places to play, there might not have been room for much improvement. For Bill Weber, it was perfect.
BILL WEBER: The first show I remember just being great. I really, really loved it. Scott and I decided that we would try to find a place to stay, and we would try to find tickets for the next night. Somehow, we went out and found… I remember we got a room in a dormitory, there must have been a university around there or something close by. But we… I don't know how we got a room in a dormitory. But we got a room for two nights. I remember that. And got up the next morning, and I remember we went to the Arch in St. Louis, we went to the top and looked over all the town. And then we went over to the Fox to try to find tickets.
JESSE: The shows were sold out. Bill Weber and his friend Scott weren’t the only people turning up at the Fox looking for tickets that week. Remember Spring Rain? The teenagers that the Dead jammed with at Richie Gerber’s bar mitzvah in December ‘71? We told their story on the last episode of the Deadcast. Bassist Mark Slosberg.
MARK SLOSBERG: The Grateful Dead came to the Fox again the following year, and we said, “Oh, well, let's go to the back door, and let's see if we can rekindle the relationship and see if anybody remembers!” Oh, my God, we were shut down so fast at the back door. That concert did not happen. I think, obviously, things were changing for them at that point. They had gone from, sort of, I don't know, an iconic band of the 60s, to this Grateful Dead engine that they became. And it seemed like it happened right around that time, things were really happening. So there were tons of security and all that — and who were these 16-year-olds that are trying to sneak in the back door, saying that they played with the Dead at a bar mitzvah? I mean, that that didn't happen.
BILL WEBER: I've always been sort of a shy kid. But somehow, I got the nerve to take Scott and I… we went backstage to see if we can find a way into the show. And I recognized Owsley from Rolling Stone magazine pictures. And I saw him and the crew loading equipment on and off the truck. As I mentioned in the article, in my notes, I was talking to him and was saying: “Is there any way to get in?” If I remember right, he hemmed and hawed, but I had, Scott and I had met some young girls in the front of the theater when we were looking to get tickets. And I said, “Owsley, we can introduce you to some girls we just met.” He goes, “Oh yeah, that sounds nice.” So we brought the girls up, and he let us in. And it was a general admission show, so we got to pick up the seats for the Wednesday night show.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It’s deep Grateful Dead, where they go for it and they… they nail it. And I find that middle night is truly a wonderfully special show. 10/18. Probably the one of the top two or three shows in this box set, maybe to some people, the top show in the box set — 10/18/72. It was always a little heavy on the Weir channel, the Weir’s guitar was a little high in the mix. And Jerry's guitar was a little lower in the mix than where it normally might have been. And even 10/17 and 10/19 are exactly where they should be. Whereas 10/18, I don't know what was going on with the recording with Bear. The mix was a little different. But it turned out it was more of, less of a mix issue than simply a channel issue. So what Jeffrey [Norman] did is he brought up the channel with Jerry, and actually blended a little over to the, to the Bob side. So it actually sounds perfect. When you listen to 10/18/72, it's as it should be heard, which is again a credit to Jeffrey. He certainly didn't make it mono or anything like that. But Jerry is where he should be in a 1972 recording, Bob is where he should be, nice and prominent, but not overpowering. So that was really the only show that had any… I won't even say serious problems, that had any problems. So it sounds fantastic now.
JESSE: Bob Simmons had been keeping up with the Dead for over two years, only finding out about the changes in personnel when the band walked onto the stage.
BOB SIMMONS: 1972, when the Grateful Dead performed at the Fox Theatre, then I realized Pigpen was no longer there. Keith was taking care of the keyboards, piano.
AUDIO: “Promised Land” [Listen To The River, 10/18/72] (1:34-1:52) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The middle night was the 46th birthday of local titan Chuck Berry, and the Dead played “The Promised Land,” perhaps in his honor. But that was actually fewer Chuck Berry songs than they played at most shows in 1972, including the night before and night after. And as Chuck Berry would be the first to tell you, people love it when you shout out their city in songs. Bob Weir shouted it out to St. Louis at all seven shows on the Listen To The River box set. Johnny Cash’s “Big River” is on six of them.
AUDIO: “Big River” [Listen To The River, 10/18/72] (1:39-1:56) - [dead.net]
JESSE: And on the ‘72 and ‘73 shows, there are four performances of Weir’s new song “Black Throated Wind,” co-written with John Perry Barlow. This version is from the following night, October 19th, but we’ll drop it here.
AUDIO: “Black Throated Wind” [Listen To The River, 10/19/72] (2:00-2:26) - [dead.net]
BILL WEBER: The first set was really good. I think one of my favorite songs of the Dead, which has always been the case, is “China Cat.” And if I remember they closed out the first set with “China Cat,” a really beautiful version of “China Cat.”
JESSE: I love Keith’s weird, quiet jazz lead under the intro, eventually finding a cool descending riff.
AUDIO: “China Cat Sunflower” [Listen To The River, 10/18/72] (0:10-0:40) - [dead.net]
BOB SIMMONS: And also, Donna Jean was coming on.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Listen To The River, 10/18/72] (2:22-2:32) - [dead.net]
BILL WEBER: I think of the four times I had seen the Dead before, I had never heard them play “Dark Star.”
BOB SIMMONS: They played on the 17th, the 18th and the 19th of October in ‘72 at the Fox. And I know I went to one of those shows. I did hear “Dark Star” during that time period.
JESSE: That makes it the 18th.
BILL WEBER: And this was the “Dark Star” night. And damn was it the “Dark Star” night.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Listen To The River, 10/18/72] (0:00-0:19) - [dead.net]
DAVID LEMIEUX: The second night — that's when they do the deep dive, that's when they kind of really take over everybody's mind, and do this “Playing in the Band,” “Dark Star,” “Morning Dew,” “Playing in the Band.” The first time they’d really done a sandwich “Playing in the Band” jam quite like this.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Listen To The River, 10/18/72] (2:27-2:52) - [dead.net]
BILL WEBER: I was on some other galaxy for a while. There's something about the way that opens your soul, and opens your mind and opens your psyche, and opens everything, that just blew me away. It was a very special night.
BOB SIMMONS: I do remember the feeling that you almost felt like you were traveling with the song. And the changes that would make, in the space you would be at in the song, and the transitions that would come about.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Listen To The River, 10/18/72] (5:20-5:38) - [dead.net]
JESSE: A few heads remembered the same moment in “Dark Star.” Thom Pallazola was one of them.
THOM PALLAZOLA: They had a mirrored ball. There was a point there where somebody got control of this ball.
JESSE: John Ellis remembered it, too.
JOHN ELLIS: If you talk to anybody that went to those three shows, the October shows from ‘72, the middle night was the mirror ball night.
JESSE: Sepp Donahower credits the Dead’s lighting team—Candace Brightman and Ben Haller—for the special effects that followed.
SEPP DONAHOWER: They were great to work with, Ben and Candace, Ben Haller and Candace. And Ben went on to become a top, top-dog lighting guy in the industry for years, decades, years. They both were great.
JOHN ELLIS: Every one of my buddies, we all experienced the same thing. Even though we're probably all enjoying the same buzz. So they were playing “Dark Star,” and I listened to it yesterday, and you can tell where the music starts to slow down and get weird.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Listen To The River, 10/18/72] (7:56-8:14) - [dead.net]
THOM PALLAZOLA: And they had red, white and blue lights hitting it. And so the whole Fox Theatre… and the Fox Theatre is an incredibly ornate theater, just started swirling with these colors.
JOHN ELLIS: And then it was that quiet part where every once while you're Kreutzmann just kind of goes ‘zing’ across his cymbal? And then the mirrorball started going in the opposite direction.
SEPP DONAHOWER: As the band was playing, I bet you Ben and Candace, who were running the lighting I believe at that time, they might have had the speed pod on the mirrorball, where they're matching what the band's doing.
THOM PALLAZOLA: I don't know if it was because of the moment and because of what I might have been on at that time. But it appeared like somebody was controlling the speed of that ball, and the band was playing and changing their tempo to the speed of this ball in the midst of one of the jams. And I mean, it was something that was kind of burned into my memory.
JOHN ELLIS: Our recollection was they started playing backwards, which meant when I listened to the tape, it's just that they got weirder and weirder.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Listen To The River, 10/18/72]
GRAEME BOONE: Jerry's taking a little solo, using the volume variation that he liked to do. Beautiful, A minor leading to D major, beautiful arrival. Again, D major’s not in the “Dark Star” progression. Now he’s trying out a riff. Keith tries out a little trill. Another riff from Bob. Now, Jerry comes in with a high arpeggio that's reminiscent of the classic “Dark Star” arpeggio. Although it's in a different place. Keith comes in, beautiful motif, reflects the same motif from Jerry. Slowing down. Billy picks it up, and the crowd is roaring. Phil gets into the “Dark Star” progression… and they pick up the pace again. Perfect moment. And it's a beautiful “Dark Star” progression — lazy, sweet. Wonderful return to home.
JESSE: And that’s all before the first verse. The jam has a ton of different sections and ideas and combinations of musicians.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Listen To The River, 10/18/72]
GRAEME BOONE: So worth listening to this interesting jam. Jerry gets into these really fast notes. Bob has been playing along, but he drops out. And there's Keith in the background, dropping out. So it's just Jerry, Phil and Bill. Each one is pushing the other — super intense, Bill’s all over the counts. Jerry’s really exploring those chromatic riffs. Switching it to a wah-wah pedal. Bill settles into a one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six for a minute.
JESSE: The late Grateful Dead archivist Dick Latvala played this “Dark Star” when filling in for David Gans on Dead to the World in 1995. We’ll let Dick introduce the theme he called the Philo Stomp.
DICK LATVALA [4/18/95]: A great, great show in St. Louis, Missouri, 10/18/72. We are just gonna to play a part of it obviously, because we don't have time for this whole show obviously, but it's a “Dark Star” into this jam that occurred in late ‘72. October and November I know for sure it occurred in; I'm not sure any other times. And it's Phil — Phil is the cue. I mean, it is no one else but Phil, he is it. It comes out of a “Dark Star” one time and it's in a meltdown. And you know Phil is playing those deep dissonant heavy chords. He just suddenly is the only one playing — maybe Billy's playing drums a little bit, tinkering around, but you just hear Phil. And it is a theme jam. This is no space meltdown, brain-fry jam. This is a theme, qualifying on the level of “Spanish” themes. And “My Armpit Left the Universe” theme, which we’ll rename, and this Phil theme. We might just call it “Philo” — “Philo Jam”! It’s absolutely divine — it’s as good as it gets, and I think you'll feel the same way.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Listen To The River, 10/18/72] (22:57-23:21) - [dead.net]
BILL WEBER: With Phil doing that bass solo in the “Dark Star,” that was the first time I'd ever heard him do a bass solo and things, so. It really, really stuck to me. Yeah, and I was so happy that we had decided to stay.
GRAEME BOONE: Here we are in this wonderful Phil jam. Loud, strong, really powerful. Bass solo, playing chords, and notes, and suggesting chord progressions here in the key of D. So they've left behind the home original key of “Dark Star.” And the band is coming in around Phil, but he's totally taking the lead. So what's gonna happen next… in the key of D. Ah, this could be the beginning of “Morning Dew.” But it isn’t… Phil takes off into the “Feelin’ Groovy” jam.
JESSE: If the “Philo Stomp” was a new thematic jam, the “Feelin’ Groovy” jam was older, first appearing in “Dark Star” in late 1969. It would appear in “Dark Star” throughout this fall ‘72 tour, but then the theme would jump over into the transition jam between “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider.” We can talk about that another time.
BOB SIMMONS: You felt like you were going on a musical journey. And then maybe they break into “Morning Dew” afterwards.
AUDIO: “Morning Dew” [Listen To The River, 10/18/72] (0:00-0:28) - [dead.net]
DAVID LEMIEUX: We also have done a vinyl release of the big jam, the 80-minute jam that is really the centerpiece of the 10/18/72 show. Because we do know that many want that as their centerpiece show, and that's why we've done the “Playing,” “Dark Star,” “Morning Dew,” “Playing in the Band,” 10/18 80-minute jam as a standalone [release].
JESSE: It was a lot to take in. Between shows that week, Thom Pallazola set out to meet Jerry.
THOM PALLAZOLA: It was ‘72, it was before the ‘72 show. And my buddy Greek, whose real name is Steve Billis, and I decided — we were going to go find Jerry Garcia, see if we could meet him. And so there was two hotels that were up by the airport. There was one that was a high-rise hotel. And then the other one was this, like, sprawling hotel, where it was these quad buildings, where there was four rooms in each one. So we go to the big sprawling one. We go to the front desk, and we say, “We're here to see Jerry Garcia.” And the guy says, “There's no Jerry Garcia here.” And we're like, yeah, right. So we actually snuck upstairs, wandering around smelling for marijuana — because we figured if we found pot, we found the Dead. And never found anything. So it was like, okay, we're up here — let's go to the other hotel. So, we go to the other hotel. We walk in, into the lobby and go up to the guy at the desk and say, “We're here to see Jerry Garcia.” He says, “Oh, okay! He's in room…” and he tells us where he is. And we're like, “Well, how do you get there?” “Well, you go down this path.” And so we actually, we go down there. There's like a sliding glass door and a regular door. So we beat on the door and Garcia says: “Who is it?” And we said, “It's just some friends from St. Louis.” And he literally came out… we spent, I mean, it was the best 20 minutes of my life, spent 20 minutes out on this deck talking with them, rolling our own and enjoying him also. And it was so funny because my friend Greek hated the Dead, loved the Allman Brothers. I was like, “The Allman Brothers are great, but I like the Dead.” So we always fought. So he was totally unimpressed that we’re there on this, like, patio, talking to Jerry Garcia. So he says, “Well, let's get going.” And Garcia says, “Where are you going to go?” And he said, “We're going to go play pinball.” Garcia said, “Where are you going to go?” You know, he says, “I'll come on along.” It was like the only place to play pinball at that time was at the airport. And we said, “We're going just across the road to the airport.” He says, “Eh, I’d go with you guys, he said, but I hate airports.” He says, “I live in them.” So that was it. So we left, and I mean, believe me, I barely was able to walk.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The third night where you do get “The Other One” is, to me, very similar to the first night — incredibly well-played, everything is perfectly executed. Some of the smaller songs are just so incredibly well-played. And then we get “The Other One” later in the show.
JESSE: Check out this great reformulation from “The Other One” into “He’s Gone,” a song released officially a few weeks later on Europe ‘72. Love Bill Kreutzmann’s entrance here.
AUDIO: “The Other One” [Listen To The River, 10/19/72] (15:59-16:23) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “He’s Gone” [Listen To The River, 10/19/72] (0:00-0:16) - [dead.net]
BILL WEBER: The third night — we weren't on the floor. We were there, they had like a lower mezzanine, and we had really good seats on the mezzanine for the third night. The third night, if I remember, there was a really good “Truckin’.” And like I said in my notes too, the “He’s Gone” just really touched me — just really, really touched me. One thing I miss… well, there's a lot I miss about Jerry being gone, but nobody that I've ever heard, in my experience, can pull solos out of the galaxy, can pull these licks that just come cascading down, and appear and arise and flow, and go away. Jerry was doing that a lot that third night. And it wasn’t the exploration of the Wednesday night, of the second night. It was more of these tasty little guitar moments that just appeared and would float away and stuff. And there were a lot of those that night. I remember that.
AUDIO: “He’s Gone” [Listen To The River, 10/19/72] (10:19-10:46) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That night, the Dead pulled out an unreleased song, debuted the previous fall that they hadn’t played since over the summer — “Comes a Time.”
AUDIO: “Comes a Time” [Listen To The River, 10/19/72] (5:17-5:47) - [dead.net]
JESSE: It’s just beautiful. For reasons I can’t discern, after this performance, the song disappeared until it was revived during the studio sessions for Jerry Garcia’s solo album Reflections, released in 1976, and soon returned to Dead setlists after that.
BILL WEBER: There’s also an experience with seeing the Dead multiple nights in a row. And you go through these emotional journeys, that each night can take you someplace different and unique. And one thing that was so gratifying about the third night was it was sort of a resolution to the weekend too. It was like, okay — “we're just going to have fun, and we're just going to take this out.” And so they close up with “Not Fade Away,” and it just… it felt complete. It felt like, okay, I can put this to bed now. And it's an experience I think you only get when you see them multiple nights in a row.
AUDIO: “Not Fade Away” [Listen To The River, 10/19/72] (0:39-1:09) - [dead.net]
BILL WEBER: We drove back that night. I had been struggling for a long time with my sexuality. And I had been very unhappy about it. I'd been very depressed about it. It was a very difficult struggle that I had been going through since I can remember, like, being 12 or something, and here I was, now 19. And that next day, I'm back at Kansas University on that Friday. And that night, I thought: I'm done with this. I'm accepting it, and I'm accepting it full-throttle. We had a gay counseling hotline at Kansas University. And back in 1972, that was a fairly radical thing. There weren't that many places in the Midwest that would have had such a thing, probably Boulder and probably Madison. There are a handful of places that would’ve probably had that. I was, in Kansas University, we did have a gay Student Union back then. And I called them up and I said, “I'm done. I'm done fighting this. I'm gay, and I want to… I'm okay with it now.” And that is a direct result of having experienced those three shows: the liberation, the freedom, the expansion, the acceptance. So much of what the Dead's music is about for me is coming to grips with the way things are. And sometimes that's painful, and sometimes it's joyous. You get there, and there's a redemption in it. I've known of no other rock band that offers redemption like the Grateful Dead. The humanity that Jerry represented, it still touches me, 25 years after he's gone. It just still touches me in such a deep way.
JESSE: Bill Weber’s liner notes for the Listen To The River set are an incredibly beautiful complement to the music.
BILL WEBER: After writing the article, and about my own sort of liberation that I experienced through these shows, I was thinking that there are millions of other Dead Heads that have had their own sense of liberation — and maybe not a sexual one, maybe an emotional one. Maybe one in relationship to others, maybe one in relationship to their work, maybe in relationship to their body, to their age to their… whatever it is, I think they offer that kind of liberation, to tens and hundreds of thousands of us.
JESSE: Not only Bill Weber was out, but he was on the Bus.
BILL WEBER: About a month or two later, they played in Kansas City two nights. And then about a week after that, or two weeks after that, they played in Wichita, Kansas. And I was at all those shows.
JESSE: And stayed on the Bus, making his way to the Bay Area by the 1980s, where he, of course, intersected the Grateful Dead world.
BILL WEBER: I used to do commercial and music video work. And there is a company out in San Francisco called Colossal Pictures. And they did the animation for The Grateful Dead Movie. And they also did the “Touch of Grey” video. Gary Gutierrez was the director on both of those, and I did a lot of work with Gary. So Gary brought me in, and I worked on the “Foolish Heart” video with him. I worked on the “Just a Little Light” video with him. And through them, I also at some point, I met Justin Kreutzmann. And I worked on the Backstage Pass video with Justin.
JESSE: Bill was able to cross paths with Owsley, Garcia, and others.
BILL WEBER: When I was working on “Foolish Heart,” [Robert] Hunter came in for the afternoon and just sat in the edit room with me. And it was just Hunter and I for a long time in the other room together. If you ask me who the most influential people were in the Grateful Dead universe, I think everybody would agree Garcia was number one. Most people would agree that I think. But from my own personal sense of how I relate, Hunter’s number two. His storytelling is what still just cuts through me sometimes. The line that I cry almost every time I hear is: “If I knew the way, I would take you home.” Things like that, nobody else writes stuff like that. So to be able to spend an afternoon with Hunter was really special. And I told him the story of my coming out after the St. Louis shows. And he didn't get excited about it or anything, but I think he really enjoyed my vulnerability and the intimacy I was bringing into the conversation. I never really met any other queer Dead Heads in New York, and I'm not really sure why. But then, in 1988, I moved to San Francisco. And then I started meeting ‘em, and then more and more. And that was another whole sense of liberation for me. It got to the point where there would be a bigger and bigger group of us. What’s really taken off with the queer Dead Heads is social media now. And that has not only connected us or connected me and others with people within our own sphere, our own, our own community. But I know queer Dead Heads all over the country now. And there were these Dead & Company shows in Wrigley. I probably knew 30 or 40 queer Dead Heads there, and we all hook up, and we all get together. And we go to a bar before or after, or have a meal, meet in somebody’s hotel room. But the really great thing is we usually sort of commandeer a fairly big section of the floor. And we welcome everybody in, and it's all types of people, all ages, all types of queers. And it's joyous. It's really fun. And I also think we help influence other people around us, because they see men dancing with men, or women, whatever. And there's a sense of acceptance that I think permeates beyond our group. I just want to give a big shout out to to all the queers out there and in whatever shape, form, size, gender manifestation that exist, and also that queers can also just bring in all the off-beats together in a lot of ways too. So — what the Dead have been really great at doing. I've been tickled pink to be able to write these liner notes, because it's something very personal to me.
JESSE: The previous year, the St. Louis Outlaw had squashed the rumors that the Dead were going to buy the Fox. But nobody ever said anything about just renting it.
TONY DWYER: After the ‘72 shows, my brother and I approached Edward Arthur. And I think we guaranteed them 100 shows a year for an exclusive — and he wouldn't give it to us. He said, “Yeah, I would love that. But I can't walk away from my buddy Dion Peluso — this agent, movie exhibitor.” Dion Peluso wanted to exhibit movies. And he wasn't interested in having guys on the stage.
JESSE: And so it was for the Dead and Fox Theatre in St. Louis — eight shows in three years. One postscript might have taken place fifteen years later, on August 6th and August 7th, 1986, when the Dead were scheduled to return to the Fox — as Drea Stein, host of KDHX’s Other One, recalls.
DREA STEIN: There was one show in the ‘80s that was canceled, because Jerry had the diabetic coma. That was a real heartbreaker. I was scheduled to go home, we purchased tickets together to go to that. Unfortunately, he got sick, and it was like we were both heartbroken.
JESSE: But it wasn’t to be. But the Dead were hardly done with St. Louis, as we’ll hear on our next episode. Keep watching that river.