Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 9, Episode 7
From the Mars Hotel 50: Money Money
Archival interviews:
- John Perry Barlow, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 11/25/82.
- Phil Lesh, by Andy Childs, ZigZag, 9/74.
- Phil Lesh, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 7/30/81.
- Bob Weir, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 1977.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [From the Mars Hotel] (0:00-0:19) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Today we’re jumping into the seventh song on From the Mars Hotel, Bobby Weir and John Perry Barlow’s “Money Money.” As has probably come up if you’ve ever discussed this song, some of the lyrics haven’t aged terribly well.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [From the Mars Hotel] (3:10-3:24) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: My opinion is the song is meant as a tongue-in-cheek song, and I think it works in that regard. I can see why it rankled some people, I certainly can understand that. But I just, I think that I have a good enough sense of the Grateful Dead—of Bob Weir, of John Barlow—to know where it was coming from. Because it's over the top: I just think it's an incredibly fun and funny song. And when you have a song like “China Doll,” it's not a funny song. No, no. And you've got a song like “Unbroken Chain,” it's not a funny song. And so you kind of forget the Dead were… these are pranksters. Don't forget, people: these are pranksters.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [From the Mars Hotel] (0:56-1:10) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: Musically, it's a rockin’ bluesy thing, and Jerry's just ripping it. Bob's guitar, Phil, Billy. It's a Keith ripper, and he's just having the time of his life playing this piano part.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [From the Mars Hotel] (1:46-2:00) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The Dead played it live only a few times, at three consecutive shows in May 1974, between the album’s mixing early in the month and the album’s release in June, before the Grateful Dead dropped it forever. I’m pretty sure Bobby Weir hasn’t sung “Money Money” in the nearly 30 years since the Grateful Dead officially dissolved.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I don't look at this as a seven-great-song album, and one that's just kind of mediocre. I look at it as [eight] great songs, all very different — just like a Grateful Dead show.
JESSE: But here we are, so let’s get into the song that was originally called “Finance Blues.”
AUDIO: “Money Money” [From the Mars Hotel] (3:48-4:01) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
John Perry Barlow
JESSE: “Money, Money” was John Perry Barlow’s second credited lyric on a proper Grateful Dead album, so let’s detour into Barlow land for a moment. Weir and Barlow had been collaborating on songs since early 1971.
AUDIO: “Mexicali Blues” [Ace] (0:50-1:06) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The fruits of their labor could be heard mainly on Weir’s 1972 solo debut Ace, which included five Weir/Barlow songs backed by the Grateful Dead. Check out our “Ace 50” episode. Barlow debuted on a Dead album with “Let It Grow,” the third part of the “Weather Report Suite,” on Wake of the Flood in 1973.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Wake of the Flood] (11:52-12:10) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Barlow was raised Mormon on a ranch in Pinedale, Wyoming. His father, Norman Barlow, was a rancher and a state Senator. Bobby Weir and John Perry Barlow bonded at the Fountain Valley boarding school in the early ‘60s, and Weir spent the summer with the Barlows on the Bar Cross Ranch. While Weir was hanging out with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Barlow had been hanging out with Timothy Leary at the Millbrook estate. The two reconnected on the Dead’s first trip to New York in June 1967. This is from David Gans’s November 1982 interview with Barlow, which you can and should read in David’s book Conversations with the Dead. Thanks, David.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [11/25/82]: I'd been out at Millbrook, taking acid with that bunch, Leary and those people. So, I was aware of what all that meant. It was just that they had an entirely different spiritual overlay on what they were doing, if they had any spiritual overlay at all. It was in the form of a circus, rather than Eastern mystic rite, the way in which we were conducting it. So it was kind of fascinating for me to —
DAVID GANS [11/25/82]: You guys were mystics, and they were pranksters, eh?
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [11/25/82]: Pretty much, pretty much. And then I finally decided that I preferred the combination better, and started going back and forth with it. Then there was a period where I didn't see too much of them. I got sort of serious about college for a while.
JESSE: Barlow had a colorful college career at Wesleyan, recounted with occasional facts in his posthumous memoir Mother American Night. John Perry Barlow was a lyricist, essayist, journalist, and in the 1990s—after he sold the non-proverbial ranch—a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. One of the people he met at Wesleyan was the photographer Andy Leonard, who would go on to be vice president at Grateful Dead Records.
ANDY LEONARD: I accused Barlow once in an irate moment of living an anecdotal life. Given a choice between something that he really ought to do that needed doing and something that would make a really good story, he would go for the good story move every time. And I said, “You know, at some point, it's going to blow up on you.”
JESSE: Barlow was an apocryphal storyteller, but a masterful one, where anecdotes often turned into rhetoric.
ANDY LEONARD: Barlow was on his way across the country, having been hired by the Grateful Dead to be a songwriter because he didn't want to write his book anymore, and New York City was kind of wearing old on him. He put everything in the van—the motorcycle, all the records, all the leather pants—and took off. He was going to move to San Francisco, go on payroll, be a songwriter.
JESSE: We discuss this 1971ish story a fair bit as the background to the song “Cassidy” in our “Ace 50” episode. It was also how Andy Leonard was pulled more fully into the Grateful Dead’s world.
ANDY LEONARD: And the next thing I knew I got a phone call from Wyoming and he said: “I'm at the ranch. My dad is sick — he's had a stroke. The place is a mess. We’ve got to get the hay equipment going.” And there's a long story about why we needed to get the hay equipment going, but it had to happen like that. He called me, he said, “Okay, look”—in his Barlow fashion—“put all your tools in your van. Bring your motorcycle. I want you to go to Detroit. When you go through Detroit, I want you to pick up the manuals for these following diesel motors. And then get here as fast as you can, because we’ve got to get this stuff going. We have 22 pieces of equipment that are broken that haven't been run and have been outside, and we need them right now. Otherwise, I'm going to lose the ranch. So get here. Okay, love you. Bye.” So, I did. We did get the hay crew, actually, through that season, and we got enough hay put out to keep the cows alive through the winter. So I did that, but as soon as that was over—which is snowfall—in October, I went out and said hello to Weir, saw my San Francisco guys and came back home through Mexico and attempted to redo my photography life. And I think it was in that slow winter period that the boys had time to write. I think that's when it happened. Somebody asked me that the other day. And I could honestly say with a straight face — I didn't watch those two guys write one song.
“Money Money”
JESSE: With Barlow on the ranch, and Weir in California or wherever the Dead were, Barlow and Weir didn’t have the luxury of writing face-to-face all too often—like the former roommates Garcia and Hunter—and Barlow would often have to write to order without knowing what kind of music Weir had in mind. “Money, Money” was one of those, for sure. Here’s how Barlow remembered it to David Gans in 1982.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [11/25/82]: There was one called “Money Money” that I had the notion of as being some kind of Mose Allison jive blues thing.
AUDIO: “Ever Since I Stole the Blues” [Mose Allison, Allison Wonderland] (0:07-0:30) - [Spotify]
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [11/25/82]: It sounded like Mose Allison done by the Grand Funk [Railroad] by the time it was done.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [From the Mars Hotel] (1:46-2:00) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [11/25/82]: I was really upset by that, and refused to write any lyrics for him for quite a while. I mean, I went on writing his lyrics — it was just that I had to hear the music first. I got stubborn and decided that my judgment regarding what the music meant was better than his judgment regarding what words meant. That was kind of a silly attitude. The way it works best, and the way it's been working this summer I think, is when both of us are trying to develop something together, and we have the opportunity to spend some time together and get it done then.
JESSE: The song was originally called “Finance Blues,” which is what Barlow called it when he posted his collected lyrics in the 1990s. He noted that he wrote the words in February 1974. Sure, the lyrics are satire.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [11/25/82]: For one thing, the lines were real whimsical. There's a fundamental problem in creating art — A: the only person that you have to please, ultimately, is yourself. B: you really don't have the right to criticize anybody else's opinion of what you've just done.
JESSE: To Weir and Barlow’s credit, there was a long R&B tradition of writing about relationships where money was part of the equation.
AUDIO: “Money Honey” [Jerry Garcia & Merl Saunders, GarciaLive 6, 7/5/73] (6:40-7:11) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was Garcia and Saunders doing Jesse Stone’s “Money Honey” at Keystone in July 1973, now on GarciaLive, Vol. 6. In “Money Honey,” it’s the narrator who gets dumped after hitting up his lady for money too many times. Though the Dead had pulled from R&B before, that particular attitude wasn’t often part of it. “Loose Lucy” is about relationship foibles and promiscuity, but doesn’t accuse anyone of being only in it for the money, a kind of icky accusation to many in the Dead’s audience.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [From the Mars Hotel] (2:21-2:48) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Part of the wink is the song’s singular composition. Please welcome back, from the City College of New York, Shaugn O’Donnell.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: It has a lot of meter shifts. It has as much strange meter activity as “Unbroken Chain,” although you don't hear it that way.
JESSE: As Shaugn points out, in the chorus, Weir’s “she wants money” is in 3 and the answering “what she wants” is in 4, while Weir changes the accents — emphasizing “wants” the first and third times through, and “she” the second and fourth times.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [From the Mars Hotel] (0:30-0:43) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: There's something about the tempo that makes you digest it more easily. You can bop your head through the whole thing, even though it’s having the meter changes take place.
JESSE: Brian Kehew did the transfer of The Angel’s Share session tapes.
BRIAN KEHEW: Also called the “Finance Blues,” at this point. My notes showed that it was actually cut the same day as “Loose Lucy” on the 5th of April. That's interesting because both of them are kind of in the same ballpark: they're both rockin’, they're both fun, they're both with a grin and a smile, kind of good songs. I think that that kind of makes sense that they might have been done on the same day. They pick take 11, which was done on the 5th of April, the same day as “Loose Lucy” was cut. But that was just a basic track. And so, days later, they come back and of course they have made a sync reel, they have a copy made of it. So they're all prepared to keep working. And the sync reel, they would do the overdubs on, was 4/27. On the sync reel, we have Bob's harmony vocal and a new lead vocal.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [Weir Harmony Vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (0:37-0:42)
BRIAN KEHEW: There's a shaker, piano part, organ part and tambourine done on the sync reel. So they did quite a few overdubs on that track, to make it a little more interesting than just the band rocking out. Although, in the end, it does feel like they're just sitting on stage playing for you. It's not a very complicated one.
JESSE: Maybe one of the reasons that “Money Money”’s irony gets lost is that the production feels even slicker than the rest of the album. In fact, Money Money is the only song on From the Mars Hotel to use all 32 tracks of the two synced up 16-tracks. Even “Unbroken Chain” only uses 31.
BRIAN KEHEW: They have recorded his voice with three different microphones at the same time. It's showing on this sync reel that there is actually a Neumann U47 on track 13. But at the same time, they put another mic and recorded that one on track 14 called a U67. And then on the last track of that tape, track 16, at the same time, his vocal was recorded with an older dynamic mic, a very simple mic. And each of those has a different sound. So whatever the concept was, they were going to capture him singing and then maybe pick one, or a combination of two microphones, to get his vocal to sound good.
JESSE: First is the Neumann U47, then the U67, then an Electro-Voice RE-20.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [Weir Lead Vocal — U47, From the Mars Hotel] (0:15-0:20)
AUDIO: “Money Money” [Weir Lead Vocal — U67, From the Mars Hotel] (0:21-0:27)
AUDIO: “Money Money” [Weir Lead Vocal — RE-20, From the Mars Hotel] (0:28-0:30)
JESSE: Weir’s lead vocal was also given a dollop of subtle digital delay—a first on a Dead album, I’m pretty sure—which you can hear here, probably more easily on headphones.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [Weir Lead Vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (0:35-0:47)
JESSE: It has its usual pile of keyboards — the whole song has Rhodes on the live take, plus overdubbed piano.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [Rhodes, From the Mars Hotel] (1:05-1:19)
AUDIO: “Money Money” [Piano, From the Mars Hotel] (1:18-1:41)
JESSE: There’s a B3 on the bridge.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [B3 Organ, From the Mars Hotel] (2:08-2:27)
JESSE: And, later on, some low-frequency ARP Odyssey for extra bass thickness.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [ARP synthesizer, From the Mars Hotel] (2:53-3:07)
JESSE: As Brian mentioned, there’s shaker and tambourine. The tambourine part especially is a pretty good way to hear both those meter shifts and understand how this song was written by a rhythm guitarist.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [Tambourine, From the Mars Hotel] (0:28-0:52)
JESSE: The shaker is steadier. This is some of that same section.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [Shaker, From the Mars Hotel] (0:28-0:38)
JESSE: And there’s cowbell across the whole track, too, mixed very quietly, and it’s backwards.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [Cowbell, From the Mars Hotel] (0:28-0:38)
JESSE: llebwoc eroM! But that wasn’t the most surprising discovery on the “Money Money” multitracks.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [Background Vocals, From the Mars Hotel] (0:37-0:56)
JESSE: There are unmistakably two women singing on that background track. One of them is Donna Jean Godchaux. The other is confirmed in Steve Brown’s production notebook.
AUDIO: “Like A Road Leading Home” [Sarah Fulcher, Sarah & Friends] (0:20-0:49) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was Sarah Fulcher, from her 1972 album Sarah & Friends, produced and arranged by Steve Cropper of Booker T. & the MGs. Perhaps obviously, Sarah Fulcher has never been credited with singing on From the Mars Hotel, but that’s unquestionably her, and that’s not a great outcome, especially on this song in particular. But what’s not obvious, and which I didn’t get until researching this episode and comparing the different releases of Mars Hotel on Discogs, is that nobody was credited at first.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [Background Vocals, From the Mars Hotel] (0:37-0:56)
JESSE: The original Grateful Dead Records release of From the Mars Hotel has credits for the songwriters, but doesn’t mention the musicians by name at all, not even the members of the Dead. What’s more, the tracklist on the back cover is an entirely different order that bears no resemblance to the LP or even the 8-track. The reason is pretty simple — none of those details were settled by the time Andy Leonard had to get it to the manufacturer.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [Background Vocals, From the Mars Hotel] (3:45-4:00)
JESSE: According to Steve Brown’s notes, Sarah Fulcher overdubbed her vocals on May 7th, less than a week before the Dead began their tour in Reno. Sarah appears, too, on Wake of the Flood, in the chorale on “Weather Report Suite.” You can hear her voice at the top of the mix of the background vocals.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Background Vocals, Wake of the Flood] (4:50-5:00) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Sarah had come into Jerry Garcia’s circle of musicians in late 1972, performing with the Garcia/Saunders group through mid-1973, but improvising more than singing backup. I interviewed her a few years ago. Before her solo career, she’d worked with the legendary Texas musician (and Thoughts on the Dead favorite) Roy Head, and afterwards moved to Memphis where she briefly played bass in Memphis’s first punk band, The Klitz, though she’s not on any of the recordings. Check her out on GarciaLive Volume 12, where they do a few of her originals, including “Go Climb A Mountain.”
AUDIO: “Go Climb A Mountain” [Jerry Garcia & Merl Saunders, GarciaLive 12, 1/23/73] (0:26-0:58) - [Spotify]
JESSE: But nobody wrote the guests’ names on the studio tracking sheets during the Mars Hotel sessions. When somebody reconstructed the list in the ‘80s, Ned Lagin and John McFee made the cut; Sarah Fulcher didn’t, a sadly appropriate fate for the song on which she sang, which we now correct with this episode — and on future reissues of the album. Steve’s notebook confirms that Sarah got paid well for her three-hour session.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [Background Vocals, From the Mars Hotel] (2:08-2:20)
JESSE: Money’s not what she wanted so much as, you know, acknowledgement. Thanks, Sarah.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [Background Vocals, From the Mars Hotel] (1:05-1:07)
JESSE: They debuted “Money Money” in Vancouver on May 17th, 10 days after Sarah’s vocal overdub, now on the Pacific Northwest box, sounding pretty faithful, despite having less tracks to work with.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [Pacific Northwest ‘73-’74, 5/17/74] (0:08-0:23) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Except for the third version, on May 21st in Seattle, which was a few clicks slower, they were all even shorter than the album version.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [Pacific Northwest ‘73-’74, 5/21/74] (1:37-1:50) - [dead.net]
JESSE: David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: They only did the three versions in May, three nights in a row. And then they said goodbye to it.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [Pacific Northwest ‘73-’74, 5/21/74] (4:08-4:34) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Here’s how Bob Weir remembered it to David Gans in 1977.
BOB WEIR [1977]: A couple of people in the band didn't like it that well, didn't like the little story. Which, though tongue-in-cheek, was maybe a little too… I don't know. But a couple of folks in the band thought it wasn’t, didn't think it was as funny as I thought it was. Didn't think it was all that funny at all. So, we just put that one away.
JESSE: As the Wall of Sound trucked on to the rest of the spring and summer tours, “Money Money” disappeared into the mists. They really could’ve just written a different set of lyrics and made it something new, but the baby left with the bathwater. We’ll add one more perspective about “Money Money,” told secondhand. Please welcome back the parent of Dead Head sociology, Rebecca Adams, who went backstage for the first time in 1989, when she was bringing UNC students on summer Dead tour. Like a lot of things, we’ve got David Gans to blame. Here’s what Rebecca wrote in her notes at the time.
REBECCA ADAMS: Gans had a tape of some sort to deliver to Jerry. Jerry was sitting at a table with a red-haired man who turned out to be Barlow. David introduced me to Barlow, who was polite, and then to Jerry, as the professor who taught the sociology class. Among other things, Jerry told me I was famous. I remember that, and just being flabbergasted. I was speechless, pretty much. And he asked me about the papers, he meant the class papers. So Jerry said, “Did they tell you their dogs ate them?” And I replied, “No, some of them said they have to go on fall tour.”
JESSE: From this meeting, Rebecca began a friendship with Barlow that would last until the end of Barlow’s life. A few months later, in the spring of 1990, she found herself in a conversation with Barlow about a different early ‘70s lyric that seemed to encapsulate her class. From “Black Throated Wind.”
AUDIO: “Black-Throated Wind” [Ace] (3:46-3:51) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
REBECCA ADAMS: Which was a perfect slogan for my class, right, because it was… it actually captured the whole perspective I was trying to teach them, which is that you see what you're looking for. And if you don't force yourself to look for more than one perspective, you only see one perspective. And you can never find the truth, but you can get closer to it by using different lenses. That was the main takeaway. So, it was a perfect slogan for the class. The conversation I had with Barlow about lyrics was because he didn't want that lyric anymore. He thought it was too pedantic.
JESSE: It was that same spring that Weir debuted a new version of “Black-Throated Wind” without that line, though it returned soon enough.
REBECCA ADAMS: I remember saying, “Well, are there any songs where you're uncomfortable with the whole song?” And he said, “Oh, ‘Money Money’ had to go.” He said, “Once I had daughters, I realized that that song had to go.”
JESSE: It was a few years after the Dead came to the same conclusion, but even storytellers have to grow up. “Money Money” had debuted in 1974, the era when Rebecca was first going to shows, though she never saw it live.
REBECCA ADAMS: That would have been when I was first going to shows. I just think that there was such a low level of consciousness. I don't think we were critical in the way that we would [be] now.
JESSE: The feminist revolution had arrived, it maybe just wasn’t very well distributed yet. Put another way, most rock wasn’t quite measured by those standards. Or maybe it was, given how quickly they dropped it. One way to make the song entertaining, though, is to pretend it’s about the Dead themselves. It’s certainly not, but whatever amount of money the narrator of “Finance Blues” thought that he—or she—or they—needed, it was absolutely nothing compared to what it cost to operate the Grateful Dead in 1974. Not that the chaos starting to surround the Grateful Dead in 1974 was about money entirely, but it was one element in a swirling mess that triggered the band’s decision in mid-August to take some extended time off the road, as we discussed last time. But they had a few more commitments first. In early September, the Grateful Dead crew packed up the Wall of Sound along with a supply of what Steve Brown called “substanence” in its hidden compartments, and got ready to ship out for Europe. Please welcome back Brian Anderson, working on a book about the Wall of Sound titled Loud and Clear.
Europe ‘74
BRIAN ANDERSON: By August, they were starting to have to plan to do something outrageous even by their own standards, which was to take the entire thing with them to Europe. It was just outrageous, taking a sound system that was that large, and had to be broken down into a manifest, into a carne for the port of entries that they were going to be going through. Breaking all of that down, all of the paperwork to make that happen, was just mind-numbing. But they did it somehow, and they brought everything over there for a run of shows.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Dick’s Picks 7, 9/9/74] (0:00-0:10) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was the Dead in London on the opening of their Europe ‘74 tour, September 9th, now on Dick’s Picks 7. They’d been planning the overseas trip since at least the beginning of the year, before Sam Cutler had even departed. But it would be a pretty different experience on all levels than the Europe ‘72 adventure just two years earlier, a two-week, four-city,seven7-show jaunt that saw the band and crew frazzled and fraying. In fact, we’re going to give a heads-up — this remainder of this Deadcast is going to include recurring depictions of hard drug use, violence, violent drug use, domestic abuse, and extreme avant-garde music. Some of this is funny, some of it not so much. It’s all a part of the Dead’s complicated history. Further details about many of these stories can be found in the band’s official biography by Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip, as well as Bill Kreutzmann’s memoir, Deal, and Richard Loren’s memoir High Notes. The Dead weren’t breaking up, but—even as they made some fantastic music—the events on the Europe tour made it abundantly clear why they needed to take a break and make some changes. At the start of the year, Richard Loren replaced Sam Cutler as the band’s booking agent and organized their spring and summer tours in the States.
RICHARD LOREN: In September, after the Wall of Sound tour, the Grateful Dead wanted to do a tour of Europe. I was totally against it.
JESSE: It became a special mission of Rock Scully, who’d served as band manager in the early days but had transitioned to a more freeform job description, which usually involved a good bit of wilding.
RICHARD LOREN: Rock Scully was there — I don't know, he wasn't the manager. He was just one of those guys that hung out with people. Anyway, so he had this guy in Europe who wanted to put together a tour, but he wasn't really a promoter. He was a rock groupie, a rich rock groupie from London. So he and Rock got real close, he was a friend of Rock’s. ‘Oh, I can do the show, I can put on shows, I put on shows.’ I knew the thing was going to be a fiasco. I didn't want any part of it.
JESSE: Here’s how Rock Scully described his state of mind when the band hit London from his book Living with the Dead: “I am as coked up as a Taiwan freighter, and the vibes are getting just as quaky. When your brain crackles and your eyeballs burst out of their sockets, it’s usually a sign that you’re overdoing it just a wee bit. I have to do something, but what?”
RICHARD LOREN: I told Jon McIntire, I said, “Jon, I don't want to be involved with that. I'm not part of that. So that's not happening.”
JESSE: But it was actually happening. The tour was scheduled to begin at London’s Alexandra Palace, the Ally Pally, in North London. Rock Scully addressed the situation a little bit in the audiobook to Living with the Dead.
ROCK SCULLY [Living with the Dead, Chapter 15]: In London, the cocaine frenzy has escalated way beyond even California-style excess. It's beginning to spiral, spinning faster and faster, fueled by jet lag and monster lines of cocaine. As the party goes into hyperdrive, the pirates begin to come aboard one by one. There is some question, too, as to exactly how seaworthy the Goodship Grateful Dead is at this point.
RICHARD LOREN: I said, “Jon [McIntire], because they’re playing in Europe, and I want to go to Europe, I'm just gonna go” — as a public member. I didn’t have anything to do with the shows, because I knew where they were going to be a debacle.
ROCK SCULLY [Living with the Dead, Chapter 15]: Too much good Coke, even for drug veterans like ourselves is just too much. It is sitting around in bowls for Christ's sake. As soon as we begin to turn to what we are actually in London to do things begin to go haywire.
JESSE: Brian Anderson.
BRIAN ANDERSON: Ironically, they had so many people over there with them, but the number of hands on deck to actually set up the Wall of Sound at the Ally Pally pally, or any of the places they hit in Europe, there was a dwindling number of crew that were actually able to do that. So the work was just, like, backbreaking for those who actually had the presence of mind and weren't completely physically burnt out from working on that thing to set up those shows.
ROCK SCULLY [Living with the Dead, Chapter 15]: On top of everything else, everyone is dropping acid at all hours. So some of us are peaking, some coming down, some are on the rag, some irritatingly ecstatic. The ones on the rag develop murderous feelings towards the ecstatic ones. And the ones that are ecstatic are grinding down on the ones on the rag. Crew members are threatening to go home. Things are getting outrageously ragged, and we hadn't even gotten to the first show yet.
BRIAN ANDERSON: In Europe, which presented a whole host of problems. The big [problem] was power. Electricity was always a problem in Europe, whenever the Dead would go over there. The cycles are different over there. So they would include in the packet of materials that everyone would take over, they would have these cheat sheets that broke out power in every country that they would be going to. They were bringing their own power with them.
JESSE: On the first night, one of the band’s generators melted down and they started an hour late, playing one long set instead of their usual two. The situation with the promoters was a bloody mess, with tickets being pirated all across London, according to Rock Scully, and lots of bad accounting at the door. We spoke with guitarist John Perry for our “Tales of the Great Rum Runners 50” bonus episode. He was playing with Robert Hunter in that era, before co-founding the band the Only Ones.
JOHN PERRY: I went to the Alexandra Palace one with the huge PA. Personally, I wasn’t knocked out, but I'm sure plenty of people were. I knew some of the Kings Road people who were involved in supposedly selling the tickets for that. A lot of money, a lot of money got lost via a lot of fairly dodgy people that I knew. I would never have gotten involved with them. When the management systems find it, or think it's a good idea, to use the cocaine distribution system [and] the cocaine distribution people as a useful means of selling tickets, then there can be trouble.
JESSE: As opposed to working with, like, the LSD distribution people.
JOHN PERRY: I think Owsley was probably a better bet than the Kings Road guys they were employing. They were fun to be around, but I wouldn't have lent them sixpence...
JESSE: Richard Loren.
RICHARD LOREN: I went to the London shows, and I just saw a completely coked-up bunch of musicians and crew and everything. It was like, oh my god…. I didn’t want any part of it. They were collecting cash going in the back door. It was so crooked. Nobody got paid, they got totally fucked over. They had promoters screwing them. I had nothing to do with that.
JESSE: But heads could still connect with the Dead’s music. Elvis Costello was in the house.
ELVIS COSTELLO: I went to Alexandra Palace to see the Dead twice around the release of From the Mars Hotel. I can't now remember whether it was before after the record came out. It might have been before, because I seem to recall I went home with the same experiences as Europe ‘72. We had to wait until that tour was finished for that record to emerge.
JESSE: Or maybe just come across your own copy of it.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Dick’s Picks 7, 9/9/74] (2:17-2:50) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Journalist Andy Childs had written an admiring review of the band for ZigZag when they’d played in 1972, followed by a multipart history of the Dead, and, thanks to the excellence of these pieces, he scored a rare interview with Phil Lesh when the band returned.
PHIL LESH [9/74]: Jerry is the guy who will always answer questions. He'll always talk. He's always got something to say. Me, I don't always have something to say, and I don't always want to talk.
JESSE: Thank you enormously for the use of this audio, Andy.
ANDY CHILDS: I went to interview Phil in this house in Chelsea that they were staying at. They’d taken over the whole house. We were in this room, and there were loads of people coming and going then. I got the impression that there was a big family of people with them.
JESSE: We’ve linked to Andy’s current projects as well as his archival work, along with his original interview, review, and features as they appeared in ZigZag. We’ve spent a lot of time this season talking about the songs on From the Mars Hotel and the new music the band was presenting through the Wall of Sound. But, obviously, the songs were only part of it. Until further notice or unless otherwise stated, we’re going to illustrate this next segment with the London ‘74 “Dark Star,” from the middle of three nights.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Dick’s Picks 7, 9/10/74] (1:00-1:25) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
PHIL LESH [9/74]: I think what we do the best is improvise, with some kind of spontaneous structure occurring at the time of the improvisation going on. Structure is necessary — some kind of structure, internal structure, is necessary for music, if it's going to be communicative at all. It just doesn't seem like tunes go past a certain level.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Dick’s Picks 7, 9/10/74] (7:10-7:40) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
PHIL LESH [9/74]: Songs with lyrics, you can only go so far with them. You can't take them into a new realm; you can hardly ever develop. In other words, all it is is the melody and the lyrics and the chord changes. If you're going to have a tune that's comprehensible, you have to be more or less musically repetitive. And I don't know, I personally have just never been into that kind of music.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Dick’s Picks 7, 9/10/74] (8:32-9:09) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Michael Kaler is the author of the superb new book from Duke University Press, Get Shown the Light: Improvisation and Transcendence in the Grateful Dead.
MICHAEL KALER: My understanding is that they have these amazing experiences at the Acid Tests and elsewhere, and they want to keep having these experiences. So they think: Okay, we tend to have these experiences when we're playing in a certain way. Let's build a mode of approaching songs that enables us to play in this way.
JESSE: Throughout 1966 and 1967, the Dead began extending their songs, and then linking them into extended suites especially in 1968 and 1969. Following Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, that was less on their mind, but still part of their syntax.
MICHAEL KALER: By ‘74, they've got other strategies that they can use as well. In some cases, they're writing songs with set improvisational sections, like in “Playing in the Band,” where you don't know how the jam is going to go. They've got a lot more advantages in their pocket at that point . They're much better musicians by ‘74. They've also got an audience, right, that will not desert them. They can go up and do Phil and Ned and Seastones stuff, and their audience still won’t walk out. In ‘66 or ‘67, that might not have been as much the case.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Dick’s Picks 7, 9/10/74] (9:43-10:08) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
MICHAEL KALER: Lesh at least has all this background in sort of avant-garde European-descended art music forms that are leading him in one direction. There's all this jazz rock stuff going on, there’s free improv going on. There's sort of noise rock that’s starting to be a little bit of a thing that one can do. You can kind of imagine them being in that position, going: Shit, eight years ago, we thought the Beatles extending folk songs was radical. What do we want radical to mean for us in this context?
PHIL LESH [9/74]: The so-called avant garde jazz, Weather Report is a really good band. But as far as Mahavishnu [Orchestra] and let’s say even [Chick] Corea, all those guys seem to be… it’s like boogaloo. It’s like super hyper-frenetic boogaloo, and they’ve forgotten how to swing. I might be old-fashioned, who knows, but I really love to hear people swing.
JESSE: With Bill Kreutzmann, there was very little shortage of that in the Grateful Dead.
PHIL LESH [9/74]: I rarely, rarely hear bass players play stuff that's not a pattern. And, in fact, that’s the way people think of it. They say, ‘Okay, you lay down the bass pattern for this one.’ Sometimes they call it the bassline, but it's still very repetitive. So I like to play it more in the sense of the [basso] continuo from the Baroque period. Or the real bass line of classical music, Beethoven all the way up to Mahler — in a way that makes the music move to different places. Even though, in rock and roll music, it just seems to be more convenient to play the root of the chord all the time.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Dick’s Picks 7, 9/10/74] (10:57-11:27) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
PHIL LESH [9/74]: When you’ve got four musicians playing pitched instruments, that excludes the drums, it's really easy to step on somebody else's lines. Sometimes I like to just play in the high register of the bass and let Keith play the bass line. Which doesn't fit as well with the drums, but it's just a different texture.
MICHAEL KALER: There's one quote from the late ‘60s where Garcia—I think in the Ralph Gleason book—says that the ideal situation would be to go on stage with nothing in [their] heads, and just completely free improvise. There’s rhetoric along that line that sounds a lot like Derek Bailey or John Stevens or a British free improv person, free jazz. But [the Dead’s] actual practice was not that.
JESSE: In an interview that same week with Jerry Garcia, Melody Maker writer—and future ECM Records producer—Steve Lake challenged Garcia on the so-called “new forms” that the band was pursuing, and Garcia didn’t have much of an answer, but it was also that seem week that the Grateful Dead took their biggest step into those newest forms.
PHIL LESH [9/74]: Now, there's electronic music — which, that's a whole other world.
JESSE: Perhaps more than any period of their career, including the Acid Tests, the Grateful Dead in 1974 were committed to pushing far past the structures of their songs. Of the core Grateful Dead quintet, nobody was more committed to that than Phil Lesh. We’ll return to this interview with Phil soon. The Dead’s tour was leaning towards chaos. But amid the chaos, one of my favorite sets of music at a Grateful Dead show occurred on the final night in London, but the chaos had to flare further first. Rock Scully places this story on the first night, but the tale of the tape puts it on the third.
ROCK SCULLY [Living with the Dead, Chapter 15]: A shouting match erupts during soundcheck. Just the band and the crew is there, and our head roadie, Rex Jackson, challenges us all to just give it up, gives this impassioned speech. We're tearing each other apart. The band hates the roadies, and we've had it up to here with them. It's a fucking horror, man, and it's too dangerous to be carrying around contraband anyway.
JESSE: Ned Lagin.
NED LAGIN: The first two nights were really fucked up because of the power supplies and London and coke and stuff. So, on the afternoon of the third day, we had a band meeting and crew meeting, and everybody decided to flush all their stashes and take LSD that night, to get away from cocaine and get back to the brotherhood, or sisterhood. The family.
JESSE: Or maybe they dumped it out on the stage.
ROCK SCULLY [Living with the Dead, Chapter 15]: When it is all piled up, it has to be at least a few ounces. Rex sweeps it all together and then Ram Rod puts lighter fluid on it and sets it on fire. We have a bonfire going made out of cocaine, hydrochloride and lighter fluid. It melts down into this lovely waxy blob.
JESSE: Ned.
NED LAGIN: So, that night was an LSD night.
JESSE: Phil.
PHIL LESH [9/74]: Cocaine makes me evil. It makes me hate music.
JESSE: We’re talking about acid now, Phil, stay with us.
PHIL LESH [9/74]: At a certain point, there was none of us who would take any of those drugs. None of us. Like at the Monterey Pop Festival, in ‘67, everybody was as stoned as they could possibly be, except us, as we'd been there before. And nobody wanted to go on that trip at that time. Later on, it came back and we started using it again. I, for instance, do it all the time. Acid, I mean. All the time. I love it. I think it's one of the greatest tools.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN [9/74]: You talking about grass?
PHIL LESH [9/74]: No. Acid.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN [9/74]: Acid. Oh, yeah.
JESSE: Some of the LSD night is on Dick’s Picks 7, but a lot of it isn’t. Ask your local CDR trader. The band opened with the tribute to the woman with “Scarlet Begonias” that Robert Hunter wrote in London seven months earlier.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [9/11/74] (0:34-1:02)
PHIL LESH [9/74]: I think it's one of the greatest tools for learning about yourself. It's my quality knob. I take a few drops of acid and I turn up my quality knob. Listening back to it later on a tape—which, of course, drugs cannot have any influence on the tape—I find that, generally speaking, the quality is just what I thought it was, especially about what I was playing. About the relationship between what I was playing and the whole band, it’s not always that good, because not everybody is always on the same plane, the same trip.
JESSE: And after the first set, things got real.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [9/11/74] (0:00-0:19)
JESSE: It’s never been released, so you’ll have to track it down in full yourself, but what followed was nearly 70 minutes of music, flowing from Seastones into “Eyes of the World” into “Wharf Rat,” with Ned joining the band on Rhodes. It’s a masterful performance with Garcia and Kreutzmann coming out early to join Lagin and Lesh.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [9/11/74] (6:39-6:58)
JESSE: We’re going to use the excuse of this matured Seastones performance from the third night in London to focus on its composition a little bit, continuing on from our Nedcast. Seastones was Ned Lagin’s project, joined by Phil Lesh, Jerry Garcia, and others. Here’s how Phil Lesh described it to David Gans in 1981.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: Actually, I got intimidated by Ned. He must be the only guy in the history of the universe to get a degree in music and molecular biology at the same time, at MIT. Working with a guy like that is slightly intimidating.
JESSE: Nearly two dozen times in 1974, after the Grateful Dead finished their first set of the evening, Ned Lagin’s modular synth setup would come out, including an ARP Odyssey and an Emu Polyphonic synth, controlled by an Interdata computer, along with a Rhodes 88 keyboard. For 15 or 20 minutes or so, Lagin and Lesh would improvise within the parameters created by Ned and his work. We’ve posted a link to Nedbase. And back to Phil in ‘74.
PHIL LESH [9/74]: Ned has a very evolved instrument, which consists of a synthesizer, a modular synthesizer with keyboard, an electric piano and a computer.
JESSE: I love the conception of Ned’s set-up as one continuous instrument, which it was.
PHIL LESH [9/74]: Right now, I'm using a ring modulator and that's it. So the contrast is pretty great because he has—under his control, I should say—virtually an infinite range of sounds in the kind of music that he might play. And I've got a very limited range. So it's really overbalanced. He’ll tell you different, he’d say, “Well, Phil, you just haven't worked with that enough. You can do more than this, more than you have been doing,” and so on and so forth. He’s probably right, up to a certain point. But I know enough about it to know that there's no possible way that one guy with two pedals and a ring modulator can possibly compete with an entire computer-based synthesizer system. That's even the wrong word: it's not a question of competition. It's a question of polyphonic music. I essentially have to be the drone — relating back to Indian music, I have to be the drone, the ground. The preconscious state out of which the synthesizer which he's playing brings thoughts, let's say. So that's sort of the stage we're at now. Listen, you really ought to talk to Ned about the electronic music part of it.
ANDY CHILDS [9/74]: Yeah, I’d like to.
PHIL LESH [9/74]: Hey, Ned!
NED LAGIN: Sometimes I would be using a pre-recorded tape of material or a pre-recorded tape of the prior concert, or part of the prior concert. So the motivic or rhythmic material would be based off of the tape. Sometimes it was motivic stuff that I created earlier that day at the soundcheck or had been floating in my head.
JESSE: Sometimes, if you listen to Seastones tapes, you’re hearing tapes inside tapes inside tapes.
NED LAGIN: Garcia and Lesh and me and others got cassettes after every gig. The night of the gig. They ran several cassette machines. Another Grateful Dead universe anomaly is that the cassettes that I listened to of the gig are not necessarily the tapes that you're hearing today of the gig. Sometimes the cassettes were two stage mics and that was it. So whatever was happening on stage, that's what you got.
JESSE: For Ned, it was a way to keep building.
NED LAGIN: Seastones had its own sources: war in Vietnam and nuclear holocaust, but also biomusic, the new ecology, environmentalism and TV and radio. It was a Finnegans Wake audio of human and non-human biological musical history.
JESSE: It was a most modestly scaled project.
NED LAGIN: What we define as music, it has been enlarged by serious avant garde jazz, serious avant garde classical music. And so, moment-forms—which was a musicological term that eventually was picked up by Stockhausen—[are] like a place. You can describe the natural place in terms of, there's water running through it, or there's trees, or the sky. Those are musicological components. Were there ones that I planned on? Yes. As a composer, and as seeds for improvisation. It was free in the sense of, once you got in the space, you are free to wander around the space, or walk around the space.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [9/11/74] (0:38-0:59)
JESSE: The Seastones performances were meant to be experienced in the venues through the Wall of Sound. Some of the soundboard tapes don’t have all of Ned’s outputs, and many of the audience tapes also contain chatty crowds. To my ears, the September 11th, 1974 recording is the place to go. It’s a fun one to play for fans of experimental music who don’t necessarily think they like the Dead.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [9/11/74] (0:38-0:59)
JESSE: The summer versions of Seastones had mostly stood alone, but by Europe they started to do what they’d planned all along — segue into the Grateful Dead’s performances. To my ears, this is where the lofty themes of Seastones comes into fullest conceptual clarity, and highlights it as perhaps the most articulated and coherent expression of the Dead’s creativity, as they place their music on an arc that lives in the experiential moment-forms of Seastones at one end, moving through the controlled drama of “Eyes of the World,” and finding its way to the narrative of “Wharf Rat” at the far end, with an incredible variety of powerful expressive freedoms between. Billy Kreutzmann’s entrance on this recording is incredibly subtle. Listen for the way his drums are in conversation with Lagin’s ambient synthesizer pulses.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [9/11/74] (1:41-2:20)
JESSE: Hearing Billy Kreutzmann join Ned and Lesh and Garcia in abstraction is a joy. He never runs out of things to do or say, and there’s never a sense that he’s just creating conditions for the groove to arrive. He’s down among the wild Seastones.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [9/11/74] (6:00-6:26)
JESSE: For more than 15 minutes, Lagin pushes the members of the Dead well outside their usual structure, guiding them through moment-forms into the mysteries of life, until very gradually they achieve tonality and work their way into a Dead tune. I love trying to pay close attention to this recording to hear the moment that Kreutzmann flips from open jamming into the groove that will allow them to float into “Eyes of the World.” It’s right around here, about 19 minutes after the tape starts. By this point, I think Keith Godchaux is playing, too, and Bob Weir as well.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [9/11/74] (18:50-19:20)
NED LAGIN: Kreutzmann was a great drummer and had the capability of functioning as a great jazz drummer. Great sense of time, great sensitivity, even though he could be brutish at times, personally. Great sensitivity to the music. Somebody wrote somewhere a couple of years ago online about how I was very conscious when playing closely with Kreutzmann. And yeah, that wasn't by conscious effort — it was by jazz habit. I don't know if he was technically aware of all the great jazz drummers, but he certainly was one.
JESSE: The piece melts gradually into “Eyes of the World.”
NED LAGIN: It was always assumed that, when we flowed into the Grateful Dead, it would be thematically related. It was like taking abstraction, turning it into representational [music] and then turning it back into abstraction. You could have the idealistic positive outlook of “Eyes of the World” shared at the same time with the up-and-down positive-negative view of “Wharf Rat.” Or “Morning Dew,” which was another one that I ended up playing on in a sequence out of “Dark Star.” It was logical for Seastones to flow into “Eyes of the World” in a different way.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [9/11/74] (20:27-21:07)
JESSE: When they finally start playing “Eyes of the World” for real, Ned takes some sweet leads.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [9/11/74] (0:29-1:04)
JESSE: The “Eyes” stretches over 30 minutes, working its way into far-our territory the song didn’t usually find, even in 1974.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [9/11/74] (27:00-27:25)
JESSE: And from there, they landed in “Wharf Rat.”
NED LAGIN: The London audience on the third night were just magical. They were floating: spiritually, emotionally, physically floating. 9/11, people were floating. Their eyes were above their heads. They loved every second of it, abstract or not. Everybody was swaying back and forth.
JESSE: Afterwards, you can hear Garcia laughing.
AUDIO: “Wharf Rat” [9/11/74] (11:22-11:30)
Munich
JESSE: The Dead had placated themselves in London and staked their place as progressive musicians, but it was an uneasy peace. Nonetheless, the Dead’s backstage craziness didn’t change the fact that the Dead were playing for enthusiastic audiences who were savoring the rare chance to see the Dead in Europe. We’re going to turn our attention for a little bit to some of the fans who saw the band on the Europe ‘74 tour. Paul Matulic didn’t go to Europe intending to see the Dead. Thanks for leaving us your story, Paul.
PAUL MATULIC: I launched out of Trieste, Italy, I think in June for a two-month wander on the Europass through Europe. On the very first train ride from Trieste to Venice, I met an American couple that had been traveling around and had to go back to the States for a family emergency. The guy handed me his Interrail pass, and that was a kind of Euro pass that you could buy just for Europe, and it included some countries that the Europass didn't have — central and eastern European countries, and Morocco. As he handed me the Europass, he said, “I think I've heard that the Grateful Dead will be playing in Morocco this summer.”
JESSE: Paul did eventually get to Morocco.
PAUL MATULIC: No sign of the Grateful Dead. But in Fez, an American couple said, “Oh, you're a Dead Head. You’ve got to meet these Welsh cats at our hotel. They're Dead Heads.” I go up to meet them — classic scene. You walk into a room, smoke-filled, a big boombox, many spent batteries, and three Welsh Dead Heads, who confirmed that the Grateful Dead are coming to Europe and will be playing in the UK in September.
JESSE: Getting warmer.
PAUL MATULIC: I just missed the London shows. I hit Amsterdam like a brick wall of hash. And if it weren't for that big hairy freak from Boston, who turned to me and said, “Yes, the Grateful Dead are playing in two days in Munich,” I wouldn't have gone there. Much later in life, I learned that great Joseph Campbell line that says: “Myths are public dreams, and dreams are private myths.” The Grateful Dead became the soundtrack to my private myth and my dreams, and I was soon beginning to realize it that year. Off to Munich we went.
JESSE: I’m aglow to welcome back Uli Teute. If you’ve traded tapes or photos or posters in the past few decades, you’ve probably come across Uli, and he’s an indispensable part of the extended Deadcast family. Uli saw the Dead on the Beat Club television show in spring ‘72, but in spring ‘74, he got to go even further.
ULI TEUTE: I was now old enough to go to shows. I had seen, already, Led Zeppelin in ‘73. I'd seen Pink Floyd — before the Grateful Dead, I'd seen the Pink Floyd, in ‘74. I went to see Emerson Lake & Palmer. I saw the big names. And so of course when we heard about the Grateful Dead, we were all excited. But then it was Munich, and that's just way, way, way far away from here. Because if you live in Freiburg, there's the Black Forest, and there's no highway going from the edge of Munich. You have to go to Stuttgart first and then from Stuttgart to Munich.
JESSE: Even the logistics of getting a ticket were a pain in the tuchus.
ULI TEUTE: To get tickets was just impossible. You couldn't go anywhere in town, in Freiburg and ask: Can you get tickets for us for a show in Munich? No way. So we finally knew a guy who lived as a student in one of my friend’s houses, in a room. The parents still had the address and a phone number. We call this guy and ask him if he can buy us the tickets and send them. He did that, and we sent him the money.
JESSE: When they finally made it to the Olympic complex in Munich, they discovered that some local bands were staging a festival of their own outside the Dead show. It was an occasion.
ULI TEUTE: There’s a stage on the artificial lake. So people are, more or less, swimming on the lake when they are on the stage. And it was organized by the Munich, I don't know, musician organization? I have no clue who was behind it. But they had Munich bands. I do vividly remember Sparifankal, because they were singing in Bavarian dialect. And they were singing “Bluus fo da peamanentn razzia.” It was all crazy.
JESSE: Munich had its own Dead-loving psych band, Amon Düül, but they weren’t there.
ULI TEUTE: Amon Düül was not there. It was Sparifankal, and I do remember Sixty-Nine. And there must have been another band, but I didn't know the name.
JESSE: Germany had its own homegrown psychedelic music scene, which produced bands that many of us American heads love now, but Uli and his friends weren’t totally on board yet.
ULI TEUTE: Isn't there a saying, the prophet is not worth anything in his own country? But then came CAN. And I never really got into it until they had this hit, “Vitamin C."
AUDIO: “Funf” [CAN, Live in Paris 1973] (2:00-2:29) - [Bandcamp]
JESSE: That was from a 14-minute live version of “Vitamin C”, recorded at the Olympic in Paris, a year and fortnight after the Dead recorded much of Europe ‘72 in the same room, and released recently as Live in Paris 1973.
ULI TEUTE: CAN wrote a lot of music for movies. So whenever we knew that CAN music was played, we always watched those movies.
JESSE: Though CAN were influenced by the Dead, as we heard in our Europe ‘72 season, there maybe wasn’t a lot of crossover in the fanbases.
ULI TEUTE: If you were really into CAN, then Grateful Dead was country.
JESSE: And it wasn’t always easy to find out about the bands.
ULI TEUTE: Agitation Free, which I think is one of the best bands coming out of Berlin at that time, I never heard way back [at that time]. I never [saw the albums. I discovered it way later.
AUDIO: “Through the Moods” [Agitation Free, Live ‘74] (11:07-11:36) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was Agitation Free’s “Through the Moods,” from their Live ‘74 album, recorded in February in Cologne. They had at least one Dead fan among them in bassist Michael "Fame" Günther. Not that Agitation Free played the free festival outside the Dead gig either, but woulda been cool. As the festival went on and the European Dead Heads milled, another level of chaos came into the equation.
ULI TEUTE: They were already people standing in line for the Grateful Dead and among them a lot of GIs. And then the stadium,Olympic Stadium, opened, and the soccer fans came out. It was a “lo and behold” sight: they had all their flags, with their colors of their team. And there were these Grateful Dead freaks, looking violent. Because nobody knew at the first moment… the GIs didn’t know, hey, this is the end of the soccer game. ‘What the fuck is this?’ All the circumstances of this concert for me were so special.
JESSE: If you look up pictures of the Olympichalle in Munich, you’ll see it’s a giant open-sided tent. Uli could see the giant speaker system getting ready to mach Schau inside.
ULI TEUTE: I didn't know how tall the equipment was. I could see it from the outside, but I didn't know how much deeper [it was until I went] in the Olympichalle. So when I finally see the Wall of Sound in front of me, I just go: “Oh, no. Oh, wow. Wow! What is this?” And, mind you, I’ve seen Pink Floyd with a quadraphonic arrangement in Colmar, France, just three months before. Led Zeppelin was awful — I had ear-ringing for two days. They were fucking loud. I was sure my ears were not going to survive. But then the most strangest thing happened: the music was never loud [with the Dead]. I could talk to my friends, just like I talk to you, because the music was transparent. It was much like this, whooosh. It was really amazing. Best sound I ever heard. I never heard the Wall again.
JESSE: Paul Matulic had his own astonished reaction to the Wall of Sound.
PAUL MATULIC: The Olympichalle where the Dead played on September 14 in Munich was huge and cavernous. And I doubt there were more than a few thousand fans, Dead Heads, in attendance. I couldn't grasp the dimensions of the Wall of Sound at first when I walked in, because the huge room was cavernous and, with no one on stage, it was hard to actually grasp how tall that stack of speakers was. But when the band stepped out… oh my god, they shrunk the band! It became obvious that this was a monster, monster system. It sure sounded amazing during that first set. I had very little experience at that time with rock concerts in general, so I actually didn't know what your standard lousy sound system sounded like.
JESSE: Sounds like a Dead show.
ULI TEUTE: One guy had a plastic skull and a rose through the teeth, and he had it on a stick. I mean, you wouldn't get into a show nowadays with a stick being two meters above your head. But he walked in with his skull and the rose in between the teeth, and he went totally up front, so you could see it the whole show.
PAUL MATULIC: For this Dead Head, only seeing his second show, I couldn't have been critical at all. The music was fantastic. Because they were playing a lot of their last two albums, I could recognize it. It was the only time I ever heard a complete “Weather Report Suite.” I would have to wait until Furthur to ever hear that again. And the show I thought was very, very hot.
JESSE: Paul had a pretty wonderful experience in Munich.
PAUL MATULIC: After the first set, I wandered back into the theater. And as I said, there weren't that many heads, so you didn't have to walk far before you're away from people. Then you walked a little further and you finally could get to the end of the theater. I remember there was this sloping wooden floor that maybe sloped up to the first row of seats, and it was very dark back there. You could kind of lay back on the slope, and you wouldn't be flat on your back, you'd be just kind of pointing upward. And you'd be staring at the girders of this structure, and there was nobody around you, it was black, and the hash brownies were kicking in. And, all of a sudden, this strange sound came from the stage.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [9/14/74] (0:45-1:00)
PAUL MATULIC: I wasn't completely surprised by Seastones because, before I left from the States that summer, the Dead had done their big kind of early summer tour. A friend had come back from Springfield and talked about the strange sonic weirdness that emanated from the stage after the first set, and was identified as some kind of Phil shenanigans.
JESSE: If people still thought the Grateful Dead were country music, they got a surprise at setbreak, though frankly it was all surprises to Uli.
ULI TEUTE: That concert was the strangest I’d ever been to up to that point. Because first of all, I had never heard about a band playing that long, making a break and having Ned Lagin and Phil Lesh coming up after. I couldn't see Lesh, but I saw Lagin. All that noise, it was so strange. We thought, what the fuck is this? They were done, and now they’re scaring us off?
AUDIO: “Seastones” [9/14/74] (9:30-9:52)
JESSE: Here’s how Phil Lesh remembered it to David Gans in a 1981 interview.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: There were some moments — especially in Europe, there were some moments in Munich. Germans, if they don’t like something, they whistle. So they started whistling because they didn't like it.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [9/14/74] (6:20-6:38)
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: So Ned just picked up on the whistle and he started fucking… he made his synthesizer start to whistle. He whistled along with them. Pretty soon, they were whistling along with him, and they didn’t know it. He has that kind of sense of humor in it anyway.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [9/14/74] (7:50-8:02)
NED LAGIN: A couple of times, things were thrown at the stage when I was playing. All of these were considered by me, but also by Garcia and Lesh, as badges of honor, because [it was] the experience of all true art — which is what Garcia thought I was, and told me so. Stravinsky, riots for Rite of Spring; Ravel, Debussy, people throwing chairs at the stage when they premiered works. Being intensely criticized. These were all badges of honor.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [9/14/74] (13:37-13:55)
ULI TEUTE: The show itself didn't have such an impact on me. I thought it was okay, but it wasn't great. I didn't get to the point that they really carried me away. But everything surrounding the show—the little festival, the end of the soccer game, the Seastones portion, the equipment—everything was so gigantic. To see that with my own eyes, I couldn’t believe it. What definitely changed for me was the fact that I've seen the best sound, ever. I heard the best sound ever, and [saw] the biggest equipment I've ever seen. That is something I couldn't explain to my friends back home to say, “Hey, it was huge. It was huge, huge, huge. You have never seen something like this.”
JESSE: After the show, it was too late to drive all the way back home.
ULI TEUTE: We wanted to sleep on the grass, but that didn't work out because the dew made it all wet. So we slept on the actual road. It was not a paved road; it was a walking path, and we just stretched our sleeping bags there and got in. In the wee hours, I don’t know, suddenly a crash — wahhh! Somebody yelling, and one guy comes up and says, “Hey, he hit me!” Then we realize there’s a guy and he hit us with his bicycle, but he was so fucking drunk that he fell down and never got up again. He just went to sleep! He wasn’t there when we woke up in the morning, but his bike was still there.
JESSE: If this were a Thoughts on the Dead post, there’s only one person who possibly could’ve been riding that bicycle, and we’ll send these next mayhem-filled segment out to the memory of our late friend, Rick. From Rock Scully’s Living with the Dead.
ROCK SCULLY [Living with the Dead, Ch. 15]: In my infinite wisdom and after countless tours, I have calculated that exactly 17 days is the longest we can sail without serious incident. This estimate is based on the flashpoint potential of the most volatile member of the group, Bill Kreutzmann. Anything beyond 17 days at sea puts us in grave jeopardy.
JESSE: I don’t know exactly what day the band departed from their European tour, but it’d been less than 17. Off-duty booking agent Richard Loren had made it to Germany with the band.
RICHARD LOREN: I went to the show in Munich that they did, and they came back late. They partied. I came back and went to sleep at two o'clock.
JESSE: Sleep didn’t last long.
RICHARD LOREN: Kreutzmann came into my room at five o'clock in the morning. Knocking on the door, slammed me against the wall: “You’re fired! You steal money from us!” Because the road crew were telling them that I was a thief. I was the guy that saved their money, nevermind the thief. But they got it into Kreutzmann’s cocaine-fueled head that I was a crook.
JESSE: I’m not sure how the sequence of the evening unfolded, but either immediately before or after this, Kreutzmann had also fired manager Jon McIntire.
RICHARD LOREN: Kreutzmann strangled me, strangled me and fired me. The next morning, Phil Lesh heard about it and he said, “You’re not going to be fired. Don’t worry about it.” So I said, “Well, I’m leaving. I got fired, I’m going.” So, I left the scene.
JESSE: In perfectly cromulent Grateful Dead logic, Richard Loren lost his job as booking agent exactly as the Grateful Dead decided to retire from the road indefinitely and promptly got a promotion of sorts.
RICHARD LOREN: In 1974, at the end of September, I was hired by Weir to be their manager. Weir came into my office and said, “We want you to be our manager.” Because I was the only sane one left.
JESSE: There was more to come. Other squads from the touring party were having a more peaceful easy time.
The Alps
NED LAGIN: For the rest of that Europe Tour—which then, from there, went to Munich, and then we drove around the Alps in Switzerland, and then Dijon, then back to Paris—Phil and I did LSD almost every day.
JESSE: From Grateful Dead Records, Steve Brown.
STEVE BROWN: We were supposed to play in Amsterdam, and that got canceled. When we left Germany, we had time on our hands, so we rented cars and drove through Switzerland. We started from Zurich. We had a Mercedes — it was Healy and Phil and Ned and me in this one car, and we had gotten the little Visine bottles of Owsley’s favorite liquid, which is always nice to just put a drop right on your—[makes sucking noise]—and suck it up. And then we also had really good pot. That was all in baggies and stuff.
JESSE: Steve also had a home movie camera along with him. A few years back, he digitized his silent films of the Europe ‘74 adventures, including a lot of what he’s about to describe.
STEVE BROWN: We were very high when we were driving through the Alps. We'd park and get out and climb up these dams, go up into these areas that we’d visit. We got out and went through these little towns, walked around and stuff. Yeah, we were basically trippin’ pretty good, right through all of Switzerland. We found some places where you could get some nice wine and bread and cheese and stuff. We'd stop occasionally on the way. That was nice.
JESSE: Good work if you can get it.
STEVE BROWN: But we were going to be crossing a border at a certain point in time, and we were pretty high by the time we got there. So it was like: Okay, we're in this movie now, where we have to survive. And so what wound up happening is we stopped before we got to the border, we took all the stash, and we put it underneath the mats on the trunk floor. Hid it all down in there. We just had our suitcases all clear and clean, so if they did check them, the suitcases were cool. Then we had to go one at a time into this little hut, this little house thing, a checkpoint when we finally got to the border. They took us in one at a time — passports, all the usual stuff like that. They came out, they opened the truck, and they start looking at all the stuff that’s in there — but they didn’t lift up the mat. [exhales with relief] So, here we are, just being cool, being cool, being cool. We’re in this movie, and we get back in the car. We drive down, drive down, drive down, many miles down the road. We find this little place to pull over and stuff. We pull over there, and we started just really laughing that we got away with this thing. Phil and Ned are just laughing, and Healy’s opening up the trunk and grabbing everything back out again, so we have it again and can enjoy it. We wound up keeping it free and clear for ourselves at that point all the way into France, yeah. We were able to enjoy it in Dijon, and then Paris. No more border checks until we actually had to fly out of France to go home.
France
JESSE: Coming through wine country, Lesh exchanged some of the surplus agriculture they’d smuggled from California in the Wall of Sound for some French wine.
STEVE BROWN: I can see him coming back in after he did his trade, too. He's coming into the hangar that we played in there, in Dijon, and he's carrying all this wine and stuff.
JESSE: Ned.
NED LAGIN: We arrived in Dijon the day before the concert, after driving through the Alps and very beautiful landscapes with old castles and villages. We were booked into a motel on the outskirts of the city. It was near a highway and some farmland. When we got there, Jerry and Keith and Donna and Bobby were already there, they had already checked in. Some of the guys from the band crew were seemingly very bored and having car races in the parking lot. Phil and I toured around Dijon that day, especially the whole historic original center of the city, which was circular in layout. And then, the next day, we had a soundcheck in the hall. Billy joined us immediately. So it was a trio for a while, and then Jerry, then Bob. It was one of the better afternoon improvised sets that we did.
JESSE: The Dijon gig was way undersold and a tour highlight, now on the 30 Trips Around the Sun box set.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 9/18/74] (1:29-1:46)
JESSE: Lighting crew Ben Haller told us this story.
BEN HALLER: We were somewhere down in Dijon, and all they had was great sandwiches, but they had fabulous sandwiches. We played the concert and, when it was over, the audience just wouldn't leave.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 9/18/74] (4:57-5:09)
BEN HALLER: And finally, we just turned the house lights on. The crew went out, we waved at them, and then we took the equipment down. Put it in the truck. Then the crew went out and waved to the audience, and then they got up to leave. I realized later maybe what had happened was, in Dijon, they didn't have buses at night — so the audience couldn't get home till six or seven in the morning. When we were done, then buses started again [for] the audience. But they watched us take the equipment down.
JESSE: Following the Dijon performance on the 30 Trips Around the Sun box, Ned and Phil had another excellent adventure in France.
NED LAGIN: After the concert, Phil and I were so up. We were invigorated by the music and the audience and especially by the chemistry, the chemistry of the moment, that we decided to check out of the motel and drive to Paris that night. We also wanted to separate ourselves from the Drag Racers from Hell movie, as I characterized it, at that motel, because Dijon had been such a very nice and interesting and sort of cosmic place. It was decided that it was my turn to be the driver. And so, very late at night, we got on the road and I drove at very high speed—maybe, I don't know 170-180 kilometers per hour—toward Paris.
JESSE: We’ll let the September 18th Seastones soundcheck be our traveling music.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [9/18/74 soundcheck] (5:23-5:35)
NED LAGIN: In the middle of what was supposed to be a six-hour nonstop dark-of-night run, we started to hear sounds. It turned out that the tires had heated up so much that the rubber was falling off. We had to get off the highway, somewhere in rural France, at three or four in the morning — pitch black, limping out of the car along a rural road down to a country garage. We woke up this fellow who did not speak English to replace all four tires. I had two years of French in high school but could only speak a few words of French, like “where's the bathroom?” And Phil couldn't speak in French at all, though he was somehow able to negotiate that transaction, because I was, at that point, only able to do one thing: drive. I couldn't talk, I couldn't get out of the car — I was just driving. The mechanic jacked up the car on one of those lifts that elevates the entire car, with me sitting in the car, my hands on the steering wheel. I was still driving in my head.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [9/18/74 soundcheck] (16:36-16:46)
NED LAGIN: The mechanic replaced all the tires, lowered the car and I jetted out of the garage, ready to go to Paris. The whole time, I had been driving virtually while I was elevated on the lift and was really ready. But we weren't going anywhere until Phil paid the bill. So Phil threw money at the man and almost didn’t get the car when I zoomed out of there.
AUDIO: [screeching tires] (0:00-0:03)
AUDIO: “Seastones” [9/18/74 soundcheck] (24:41-24:51)
NED LAGIN: A few hours later, we pulled up to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. It was sunrise, it was beautiful. And Phil and I just stood there, looking around in happiness and amazement. It was just great. We went over to the Paris Hilton and tried to check in. We were in our cowboy boots, unshaven and, as you know, you could see electric bolts coming out of our heads.
JESSE: Barbarians at the gates. Or, depending on your perspective, on the loose in the City of Light. In his book Deal, Kreutzmann recounts a night in which, stranded somewhere in Paris, he decides to hotwire a moped, fails, and concludes that the best way to flag help is to throw it through the nearest shop window.
AUDIO: [large window shattering]
JESSE: You can read the rest in Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead. It was pretty clear that people needed a break, and within a month, that would happen. Many, but not all, of the Grateful Dead’s ambitions would be put on hold — those included both bringing the far-out spaces of Seastones to arena-sized audiences, but also songs like Weir’s “Money Money.” The Europe ‘74 tour didn’t have quite the lasting impact as Europe ‘72, but the parameters for the world of popular music were changing anyway, especially in Europe. Just two years after “Money Money,” came ABBA’S “Money Money Money”
AUDIO: “Money, Money, Money” [ABBA, Arrival] (0:46-1:00) - [Spotify]
JESSE: I drop it here to make funny, in part, but it really could also almost be heard as an answer song to the Dead’s “Money Money.” It was written by men and it’s not like it was the SCUM Manifesto or anything, but it was sung by and from the perspective of a woman. If John Perry Barlow and Bobby Weir wanted “Money Money” to be part of the pop tradition of songs about women and money, “Money Money Money” was a sequel, whether anybody knew it or not.
AUDIO: “Money, Money, Money” [ABBA, Arrival] (1:40-1:57) - [Spotify]
JESSE: It’s a gas, huh?
AUDIO: “Money Money” [From the Mars Hotel] (4:02-4:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]