Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 9, Episode 6
From the Mars Hotel 50: Pride of Cucamonga
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [From the Mars Hotel] (0:00-0:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And here we come to the most anomalous song on From the Mars Hotel, “Pride of Cucamonga” by Phil Lesh and lyricist Bobby Petersen.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [From the Mars Hotel] (0:21-0:37) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It’s anomalous on Mars Hotel, the only song on the album to sound anything like the country-rock that the Grateful Dead were often associated with. It’s anomalous within Phil Lesh’s own songbook, where songs were usually much more complicated. And it’s anomalous for the Grateful Dead as a whole, one of a tiny handful of songs on Dead studio albums but never performed live — the only one like that on From the Mars Hotel.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [From the Mars Hotel] (0:38-0:55) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It would be Phil Lesh’s last lead vocal on a Dead studio album. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I really love “Pride of Cucamonga.” But to hear Phil sing so joyously—again, this is kind of what I was saying about “Unbroken Chain—that it makes me wish Phil had written more songs, and sung more songs. Musically, it's two very distinct parts.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [From the Mars Hotel] (0:55-1:15) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: The peppy beginning part, and that bluesy middle, which comes out of nowhere. It's like, What the hell is this? And it works. It works perfectly.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [From the Mars Hotel] (2:10-2:21) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: And then the way they come right back into the fun part of the song, the upbeat, happy part of the song.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [From the Mars Hotel] (2:22-2:38) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That’s John McFee on pedal steel. With that, “Pride of Cucamonga” can also be heard as the quiet end of an era that had begun almost exactly five years earlier, in the spring of 1969.
AUDIO: “Dire Wolf” [Workingman’s Dead] (0:00-0:13) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was “Dire Wolf,” debuted in June 1969 and released on Workingman's Dead in spring 1970, the first original Dead song that falls unquestionably on the country rock spectrum, the sound that would color Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty, Jerry Garcia’s Don Rich-influenced lead guitar approach in 1971 and 1972, and how the rock press described the band. We’ve talked about it a bit on the Deadcast over the past few years. Check out our “Cumberland Blues” episode, especially. Not only is “Pride of Cucamonga” the only country-leaning song on From the Mars Hotel, it’s the last original song on a Dead album that might be called Bakersfield Dead.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [From the Mars Hotel] (2:53-3:10) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: On our “Loose Lucy” episode, we talked with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo about his cross-country 1974 road trip with the 8-track of From the Mars Hotel, where “Pride of Cucamonga” was in the album’s second slot, just after “U.S. Blues,” with “China Doll” moved nearly to the end, giving the album flow a much brighter feel.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [From the Mars Hotel] (3:11-3:27) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It's not a song that's overly deep until you really kind of dig a little deep. And you're like, Okay, there's a lot going on in the song. It made me wish Bobby Petersen wrote more songs.
“Done Some Time On Highway 1”
JESSE: Us, too. But, as we’ll hear, there’s a lot packed into “Pride of Cucamonga.” After turning Phil Lesh on to poetry and cannabis in the early 1960s, Bobby Petersen collaborated with Lesh on “New Potato Caboose” in 1967. We went pretty deep into his biography a few episodes back, when we got into “Unbroken Chain.”
AUDIO: “Unbroken Chain” [From the Mars Hotel] (5:10-5:23) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: For a few reasons, mainly that we forgot to include it in the “Unbroken Chain” episode, here’s what the song of the northern saw-whet owl sounds like.
AUDIO: “Saw-Whet Owl Advertising Song” [Voices of North American Owls, Cornell Lab of Ornithology] (0:01-0:09)
JESSE: The reference to the saw-whet owl is arguably the only detail of “Unbroken Chain” that firmly grounds Bobby Petersen in one of the traditions to which he belonged, as a nature poet. But “Pride of Cucamonga” grounds him in the other half — it’s a California song.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [From the Mars Hotel] (3:28-3:45) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Engineer Brian Kehew transferred the session tapes for the new edition of the Angel’s Share.
BRIAN KEHEW: I have to say, it was not lost on me that I was not far from Cucamonga when we were going through these tapes.
KRUSTY THE CLOWN [The Simpsons — Season 6, Ep. 15]: Okay, memorize these funny place names: Walla Walla. Keokuk. Cucamonga.
BRIAN KEHEW: Rancho Cucamonga is the actual name of the place, and it's a very old Spanish place. When the Spaniards came over [to] South America and Mexico and then they came up the West Coast, they were grabbing land, taking things away from the Native American Indian people. But they took one of those sections, and it was called Rancho Cucamonga.
JESSE: If my equinometry is correct, and there’s a good chance it’s not, I think Cucamonga actually is a three-day’s ride from Bakersfield by horseback. But, as we’ll learn, though “Cucamonga” is right there in the song’s title, it’s a bit of a red herring. It’s a California song alright, but most of the action is elsewhere. Please welcome back, founder of the Grateful Dead Studies Association and Bobby Petersen scholar, Nicholas Meriwether.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: He writes that in Ben Lomond, which is in the Santa Cruz Mountains, in 1972.
JESSE: We heard a lot from Nick about Petersen’s background as a poet and lyricist in our “Unbroken Chain” episode, and we’ve linked to various Dead Studies projects at dead.net/deadcast.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: There are two surviving drafts of “Pride of Cucamonga.” One is on an eight-and-a-half by 11 sheet of paper, cut in half. The other is on a full letter-sized sheet. There are only minor differences between the two manuscript drafts — a word here, a word there, nothing really significant. The difference between those versions and what ends up getting recorded and the copyright registration is really quite remarkable. And it speaks to how Phil Lesh edited Petersen’s lyrics in order to make them more singable in some cases, or just more kind of elliptical.
JESSE: The song was completed by the summer of 1973. Lesh recorded a solo acoustic demo at the Record Plant along with his “Unbroken Chain” demo, both of which can be heard on the expanded version of From the Mars Hotel. As far as we can tell, unlike “Unbroken Chain,” the Dead never tried “Pride of Cucamonga” in ‘73. We’re going to use Phil’s demo as a guide for the next part of the conversation.
PHIL LESH [8/4/73]: We’ll try the old “Pride of Cucamonga” again.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” (Demo) [From the Mars Hotel 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (0:00-0:24) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: In the original draft, some of the changes that Phil makes are just to make it more singable. The first line of Petersen's last draft is “standing on the edge of a big empty highway.” Well, Phil changes that to “out on the edge of the empty highway.” It just sings better. The second line originally was “looking at the blood on the moon”; Phil changes it to “howling at the blood on the moon,” which is good.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” (Demo) [From the Mars Hotel 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (0:24-0:41) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
NICHOLAS MERIWTHER: Lots of little changes like that, but Phil excises two entire verses. The original version of “Pride of Cucamonga” is much more specific to Petersen's own life and Petersen's own circle.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” (Demo) [From the Mars Hotel 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (0:42-0:59) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: That line about Muskrat Flats, Peterson wrote it as Klamath Falls.
JESSE: Which in fact is the town on the Oregon border where Petersen was born.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: And a lot of the excisions have to do with making it less sort of elliptically specific about Petersen and his life. The original way that the poem, the lyric, reads is, it's about a guy looking back on all of the highways, all of his travels. Its focus is on Highway 101. Well, Phil eliminates that. The chorus, as Petersen wrote it, went: “Oh, pride of Cucamonga bitter olives in the sun, had me some lovin’, and I've done some time on Highway 101.” And you can imagine, bitter olives in the sun, Highway 101, rhymes. But Phil gets rid of the specificity — no more on Highway 101.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” (Demo) [From the Mars Hotel 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (0:59-1:18) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It reminds me of the move in the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” when Brian Wilson edited out the last two rhyming words from the bridge lyrics by Mike Love. The line originally ends with the rhyme “we find.”
AUDIO: “Good Vibrations” [The Beach Boys] (1:03-1:14) - [Spotify]
JESSE: But more than in “Good Vibrations,” the edit changes the context. With the last line about Highway 101 deleted, the lyric seems to imply that the singer has done some time in jail, which Petersen had, in the early ‘60s, for passing bad checks. But that’s not what he was writing about in “Pride of Cucamonga.”
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: “Pride of Cucamonga” was written, chiefly and essentially, as a tribute to Peterson's dear friend, Laird Grant, who was an old childhood friend of Jerry Garcia's and who was the band's first roadie. Laird is fascinating also because he lived at 710 Ashbury.
JESSE: You can spy Laird Grant, known as Barney, in early pictures of the Dead at 710 Ashbury, distinguished by his pointy hat.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: And Laird was—and is—a strong guy, tough guy. Part of his job was to keep people off the stage at concerts, and also to keep undesirable people, street people, out of 710. There's a fascinating reference — at one point when Charlie Manson was taking an unhealthy interest in the Grateful Dead, it fell on Laird Grant to be the person to keep Charlie Manson out of 710 Ashbury.
JESSE: Someone’s gotta do it. Laird also became the band’s first ex-roadie, quitting in late 1967. But he remained part of the family.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: Laird Grant is Pride of Cucamonga. Here's why that was his nickname: Laird was fond of drinking… there was a brand of basically fortified wines—and just bad wines—called Pride of Cucamonga. They had wonderful wine labels.
JESSE: If I could find an old radio jingle for Pride of Cucamonga wine, we’d include it here. It’s still available from the Joseph Filippi vineyard. We’ll just let the chorus stand in for our missing jingle.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” (Demo) [From the Mars Hotel 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (1:59-2:19) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: Laird’s nickname to Petersen was Pride of Cucamonga because that's what Laird drank. Peterson didn't like the brand. He really liked beer. He didn't like the wine.
JESSE: In a 1972 poem titled “RAIN DANCE ON HIGHWAY 50 - for laird,” Petersen wrote about a trip the two took to visit friends at the New Buffalo commune, founded by poets in New Mexico.
radiator trouble
at emigrant gap
our 1st day
out of frisco
drinking beer &
apple juice laced
with acid
the nevada of
night
with 1 headlight
magic jack-rabbits
& the paiutes of austin
where we slept.
“Pride of Cucamonga” is a sometimes-obscured geography of Bobby Petersen’s west.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” (Demo) [From the Mars Hotel 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (0:59-1:09) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: As Michael Patrick McCullough pointed out on the Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics site, Petersen titled an undated poem, “bitter olives,” which begins like this:
plumas, nomlaki
wagons burning at fandango
pass
those long fires of autumn
pigpen & i saw along
highway 99
bitter olives
in the stare & blister of
sun
And those fires of autumn also resonate with this line of “Pride of Cucamonga,” though the narrator is alone in this version.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” (Demo) [From the Mars Hotel 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (1:24-1:40) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: What were Pigpen and Bobby Petersen doing in the northernmost part of California, and when? That’s a side quest we’re going to have to imagine, but I can’t imagine it was a sober one. Though it’s hard to find copies of Alleys of the Heart, Petersen’s collected poems, assembled and published in 1988 by Alan Trist and Hulogos’i Communications, one can see how the images and scenes of “Pride of Cucamonga” fit into Petersen’s autobiography and the history of the Grateful Dead family as a whole, but mostly capturing fleeting moments in the California landscape. “This is not a light poet you hold in your hands,” Robert Hunter wrote in the introduction. In the Palo Alto scene, years before Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Band was a hoot in anybody’s eye, Bobby Petersen had been the most serious poet among them. Please welcome back, longtime overseer of Ice Nine Publishing and editor of Bobby Petersen, Alan Trist.
ALAN TRIST: When I came back in 1970, Bobby was very much around the scene then in Marin County. I remember he was one of the first people I looked up from the old days, you know? He was part of the so-called Grateful Dead family, and he was always present than anything has happened in the Bay Area — even more so than [John Perry] Barlow, who was at that time on the ranch in Wyoming, so he didn't get back to California often. Petersen had a wide circle of friends in the Bay Area. Everybody knew who he was.
JESSE: In 1980, Alan helped assemble Far Away Radios, the only slim collection of poetry published in Petersen’s lifetime, sold through the Grateful Dead’s newsletter.
ALAN TRIST: I was living in Fairfax and Bobby was also living in a separate part of that same house that I was living in. We would be down at the pub in Fairfax. I do remember all of that coming together, Far Away Radios. Bobby was very excited because he had a lot of work by this time that he’d done. He traveled between New Mexico, Santa Fe, and up to Oregon. He was on that trail, back and forth, looking at all of the great historical places of the American West and the Indigenous peoples. He brought all that conversation into my life, for sure. It was wonderful.
JESSE: David Lemieux has a note, but I’d call this more a launch problem than a design problem.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The whole Oregon thing, and the pronunciation of Oregon, which still gets in the craw of all my Oregon friends: Or-e-gon.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” (Demo) [From the Mars Hotel 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (1:25-1:32) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Eh, ci-cay-da, ci-cah-duh. Nicholas Meriwether.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: Up in Eureka the sky's full of greed
You can smell it for miles around
For a long lost good old boy down on E Street
It's sure's a hard go-round
Well, Phil changes that to:
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” (Demo) [From the Mars Hotel 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (1:42-1:58) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: As pointed out to the contributors to David Dodd’s Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, “Greystone Hotel” is a generic and ironic name used by inmates to describe jail facilities. It resonates with Lesh’s edited lyric about “done some time.” The lyrics that Phil Lesh edited out of “Pride of Cucamonga” are even more detailed.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: There are two missing verses. One is: “Down in Salinas, the Strawberry King” — although, in one of the drafts, he calls it the Lettuce King. Lettuce and strawberries, those are both huge crops down in the Central Valley, Central Coast region.
Down in Salinas the Strawberry King
Serves Pie-In-The-Sky for the lame and wounded only
Brothers on the yard in cold blue clothes know
Soledad means lonely
I copped some spare change in Union Square
And heading for the Golden Gate
But i got lost drinking Tokay wine in someplace
Called the Haight
The Tokay wine, of course, is Pride of Cucamonga, the brand. But you lose those two verses, and you now have a much more elliptical lyric.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” (Demo) [From the Mars Hotel 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (1:59-2:08) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The line “silver apples in the sun” has a few different resonances, mainly an 1897 poem by W.B. Yeats, “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” Almost certainly, Petersen knew the original, but Donovan set it to music in 1971, and we’ll let him do the honors.
AUDIO: “Song of the Wandering Aengus” [Donovan, HMS Donovan] (2:53-3:23) - [Spotify]
JESSE: It was a phrase that many people played with, including the electronic composer Morton Subotnick, once of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, on his best-selling 1967 album Silver Apples of the Moon, an album Phil Lesh surely heard.
AUDIO: “Silver Apples of the Moon” [Morton Subotnick, Silver Apples of the Moon] (0:00-0:15)
JESSE: In 1991, Robert Hunter used the phrase to title a keyboard duet on the Dead’s Infrared Roses album.
AUDIO: “Silver Apples of the Moon” [Infrared Roses] (2:02-2:27) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
“Pride of Cucamonga”
JESSE: In addition to coming from Petersen’s place as a California nature poet, the lyrics to “Pride of Cucamonga” were in conversation in private ways between Lesh and Petersen. We’ve spent a good deal of time on the Petersen part of the songwriting equation. “Pride of Cucamonga,” for the most part, is one of the most straightforward songs Phil Lesh ever wrote for the Dead, “Passenger” being the only real competition. But that “for the most part” also covers this section in 12/8.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” (Demo) [From the Mars Hotel 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (2:14-2:32) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Pride of Cucamonga” was one of the earliest songs tracked at the Mars Hotel sessions at CBS in San Francisco, with basic tracks recorded on April 1st. Engineer Brian Kehew.
BRIAN KEHEW: We have a lot of takes — I think it's take 24 and 25 were combined to make the final on this. The Phil tracks have taken some of the most work, and I don't know that this one is that complicated. But they must have been just shaping it, trying to get it together to make sure that they had what they wanted with it.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” (Take 1) [From the Mars Hotel: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-0:24) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Like so much else of From the Mars Hotel, virtually all of the extra “Pride of Cucamonga” takes were nationalized into other Dead projects during the leaner years to come, so we really only have the master take to play with, which—as you’ll notice—has a lot more Jerry Garcia lead guitar. You can hear it on The Angel’s Share.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” (Take 1) [From the Mars Hotel: The Angel’s Share] (2:13-2:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BRIAN KEHEW: Unlike any other song on this record, there's this breakaway where they get into a different time signature. It starts, like, a crazy organ jam, there's guitar soloing, and it's only all of like eight or nine seconds. And then boom, we're back into this freewheeling country trucker song.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [From the Mars Hotel] (2:11-2:25) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It’s the densest part of the song and there are a lot of overdubs. It’s really only a 10-second section in 12/8 with one extra instrument that’s not anywhere else in the mix. Here’s the isolated Hammond B3 part.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [Organ, From the Mars Hotel] (2:40-2:50)
JESSE: “Pride of Cucamonga” is a fairly simple song, with a core track by the whole Dead.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” (Take 1) [From the Mars Hotel: The Angel’s Share] (0:57-1:22) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: They filled out “Pride of Cucamonga” over the last week in April. By the time they were done, only the bass and the drums survived from the original take. Jerry Garcia’s new guitar part emulated the pedal steel a little bit.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [Garcia guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (0:31-0:50)
JESSE: Weir’s guitar almost sounds like country blues.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [Weir guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (0:27-0:48)
JESSE: Keith Godchaux’s piano just… sounds like Keith Godchaux.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [Piano, From the Mars Hotel] (0:27-0:48)
JESSE: The bassline dances around and through everybody else’s parts.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [Bass, From the Mars Hotel] (0:27-0:49)
JESSE: The answer vocals on the chorus are a fun layer.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [Background vocals, From the Mars Hotel] (1:24-1:43)
JESSE: They stacked the background vocals, adding another layer. I think it’s Phil Lesh, Bobby Weir, and Donna Godchaux, but it’s a great blend.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [Background vocals 2, From the Mars Hotel] (3:56-4:24)
JESSE: Jerry Garcia added acoustic guitar under the chorus, for some extra folk singalong-y pizazz.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [Garcia acoustic guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (1:24-1:50)
JESSE: As we mentioned, Garcia’s electric part is some fun faux-steel guitar, but just regular six-string. Except not regular, because it’s Jerry Garcia. I love where the chorus part ends up, almost like a “Bird Song” riff.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [Garcia guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (1:24-1:50)
BRIAN KEHEW: He's a fine pedal steel guitar player. I know he must have put in thousands of hours to get where he got because it's so hard to play. It's like three-layered chess in a way, compared to playing a six-string guitar.
JESSE: Since June of 1969, the same month the Dead had debuted “Dire Wolf,” Garcia had been doing session work on pedal steel guitar, joining the New Riders of the Purple Sage and appearing on numerous records over the next half-decade. As banjo took over in late 1972 and 1973 during his period in Old & In the Way and the Great American String Band, he played less and less steel.
BRIAN KEHEW: And so he called in the specialist: let's get someone who really can nail it.
JESSE: The specialist in question was someone who’d shared a few bills with Garcia’s bands in recent years.
AUDIO: “Mitch’s Tune” [Clover, Fourty-Niner] (0:00-0:32) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was the Bay Area band Clover with “Mitch’s Tune,” from their 1971 album Fourty-Niner. Please welcome to the Deadcast, pedal steel player John McFee.
JOHN MCFEE: Steel players, it's almost like a secret society. You’ve got to love the instrument to really get serious about trying to play it, because it's not the easiest instrument to play. And so those of us that do it, I think we kind of form a bond.
JESSE: John McFee had arrived on the San Francisco scene around the time Jerry Garcia played on a certain Crosby, Stills, and Nash single and Garcia became the on-call pedal player in the Bay Area.
AUDIO: “Teach Your Children” [Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Déjà Vu] (0:00-0:15) - [Spotify]
JOHN MCFEE: I remember seeing Jerry playing at an insider get-together of [fellow] musicians. I forget what the event was, it was at the Automat or one of the recording studios in San Francisco where there was some… I don't know what it was. There was so much loose stuff going on.
JESSE: But, both being steel players, it stands to reason that the two didn’t cross paths too often in the Bay Area studios.
JOHN MCFEE: As I recall, it was Roy Segal who was engineering and called me. Roy was always very supportive of me as a player, as a musician. I've done various recordings that he was involved with. I was doing a lot of session work back then.
AUDIO: “Wild Night” [Van Morrison, Tupelo Honey] (0:37-1:05) - [Spotify]
JESSE: It was years before I put it together that John McFee was a big part of the magic of Van Morrison’s “Wild Night.”
JOHN MCFEE: I liked Jerry’s playing. I really liked what he did on “Teach Your Children,” and it was definitely an honor for me to get invited to be part of that world. My main recollection is they were so nice to me. [chuckles] They were really supportive. I think Phil had a vision of the general feel that he was looking for from the steel, but they really just gave me the freedom to try to find my way through it in my own fashion. Which is really cool, and says a lot about their spirit and their approach to life.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [Pedal Steel, From the Mars Hotel] (0:31-0:50)
JESSE: John McFee wasn’t the first member of Clover to appear on a Dead album, if you count Bob Weir’s Ace as a Dead album, where Ed Bogas arranged the strings. And John McFee’s not the first member of Clover to appear on the Deadcast either, though Huey Lewis was still truckin’ Nancy’s Yogurt in 1974 and didn’t join Clover until 1976, but you can hear him on our Sunshine Daydream episodes. And John would also go onto play on the classic debut album by Bickershaw-minted Deadcast guest Elvis Costello before joining the Doobie Brothers for the long haul. Like Ned Lagin’s ARP Odyssey part on “Unbroken Chain,” they gave John McFee multiple tracks — a mic-ed amp, a direct line, and a Leslie rotating cabinet, recorded in stereo.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [Pedal Steel, From the Mars Hotel] (0:50-1:07)
JOHN MCFEE: Jerry wasn't there when I was doing my part, as I recall. I think it was Phil and Bob? I forget who all was there.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [Pedal Steel, From the Mars Hotel] (1:08-1:32)
JESSE: Here’s a weird unresolved mystery of the session paperwork. Our buddy Joe Jupille turned up some billing that suggests that Garcia tried doing pedal steel overdubs on May 3rd and 4th. But there’s no sign of Garcia on the tapes, or the sync reel, where the solo is just way too slick.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [Pedal Steel, From the Mars Hotel] (2:51-3:08)
JESSE: A ghost part, then. Phil Lesh recorded his final vocal overdubs for “Pride of Cucamonga” on May 5th, and there’s various bits of paperwork suggesting the band kept tweaking the album in small ways all the way through the end of May, possibly even flying home between gigs, when Steve Brown was on the road and not around to mark down the exact date John McFee was through CBS Studios. Possibly, also, your narrator is extending this story slightly as an excuse to listen to more isolated pedal steel.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [Pedal Steel, From the Mars Hotel] (4:23-4:41)
Television Ad & Radio
JESSE: From the Mars Hotel was in stores within six weeks of the final overdubs, an absolutely unthinkably quick time by 21st century standards, where record releases are bolstered by months-long run-ups with carefully organized track premieres and videos. But the promotion game in 1974 was pretty different. In the summer of that year, as the Dead’s tour hit the East Coast and after the album came out, they began to really get to work on the album’s first single.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [From the Mars Hotel] (0:00-0:19) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: From Grateful Dead Records, Ron Rakow.
RON RAKOW: I hired two guys in New York — Love-Rosen. Their promotion was miniature Louisville Slugger bats. It had the Louisville Slugger logo at the thick end, and then, down the shaft of the bat, it said: “Love-Rosen Makes Hits Happen.” So, I hired those guys.
JESSE: By 1974, the freeform and alternative radio of the ‘60s was becoming an anachronism, though we salute independent radio stations, then and now. The mid-’70s was the height of the radio promotion game, an intricate fiefdom where organizations like Love-Rosen acted as intermediaries between record companies and radio stations, a system some said was no more fair than the payola that was supposedly banned in the early 1960s. We recommend Fredric Dannen’s essential book, Hit Men.
RON RAKOW: It took a long time to get a little rapport with them on a personal basis. And then the next time the Grateful Dead were in New York, their office, believe it or not, was right around the corner from the hotel we stayed at. So I would just walk Jerry over there. We stayed at the Navarro Hotel, which was 112 Central Park South, and we would just walk over there. It blew their mind, that never happened to them.
JESSE: In August 1974, Love-Rosen signed up to work “U.S. Blues.”
RON RAKOW: But they got real close with one record, one single. It got to the most senior people in this chain of radio stations, and they had a meeting in Seattle. It made it to the final, and then something else got the addition. That song was my favorite. It’s the closest I ever came to being a major success. If that had happened… I don’t know, it would have ruined everything, I think.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [From the Mars Hotel] (1:07-1:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: While the Love-Rosen team started working “U.S. Blues” to radio, Ron Rakow also broke new ground for the Dead — a television ad.
RON RAKOW: I found an animator [Spunbuggy Works] in LA through a guy named [William] Chakin, he was the president of Avco Films. They used some good place in LA, and he got the price down reasonably so I could handle it.
JESSE: Hopefully we’ll have this available for streaming on the World Wide Web, but imagine a cloaked figure barreling into castle doors labeled “Mars Hotel” and exploding into a murder of crows, then a single crow, who does battle with a winged serpent and lands in front of the Mars Hotel.
AUDIO: “Mars Hotel Ad #3” (0:02-0:32)
TALKING CROW [1974]: … Grateful Dead!
RON RAKOW: A bird did all the talking. It was the crow that was on the [Grateful Dead Records] label.
JESSE: You can see the From the Mars Hotel television ad in a few different versions on The Grateful Dead Movie DVD. The music was from “Unbroken Chain,” and all three mixes of the ad brought some of Ned Lagin’s “Unbroken Chain” synthesizer to local Bay Area television sometime in the early autumn of 1974.
AUDIO: “Mars Hotel Ad #2” (0:23-0:30)
TALKING CROW [1974]: … Grateful Dead!
JESSE: The ads aired alongside the Creature Feature, Star Trek reruns, the Best of Groucho, the Country Music Awards, Jeopardy!, ABC’s Rock Concert, Kung Fu, and a few different movies, including Bonnie and Clyde. “Unbroken Chain” synth player Ned Lagin saw it.
NED LAGIN: I remember [I was] with my girlfriend, we saw it on TV and I said: “Oh my god, I'm on TV!” What's next, [The] Andy Griffith [Show]?
AUDIO: “Unbroken Chain” [From the Mars Hotel] (4:30-4:37) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
Jai Alai interlude
JESSE: We’ve gotten into Ned Lagin’s story especially in our “Candyman” and “Unbroken Chain” episodes, and of course the bonus Nedcast. His “Unbroken Chain” session was in late April or early May, and joined up with the tour in late June in Miami at the Miami Jai Alai Fronton, where the Dead played the show now on Dave’s Picks 34. You know, Jai Alai.
AUDIO: Jai Alai: The Fastest Game [1978] (2:10-2:25) - [YouTube]
PAT MCCANN [1978]: The world’s fastest game: Jai Alai. America’s new super sport. To play it takes dynamite power, lightning speed, nerves of steel.
JESSE: Jai Alai is a Spanish sport, then making a bid to insert itself as a cosmopolitan spectacle for ‘70s American sports fans.
AUDIO: Jai Alai: The Fastest Game [1978] (2:33-2:46) - [YouTube]
PAT MCCANN [1978]: Jai Alai may soon rank with the nation’s leading spectator sports. For years the game has attracted large crowds in Florida, and enthusiasm for Jai Alai is spreading.
JESSE: If the vibes emanating from these audio clips are doing it for you, we’ve linked to the whole 1978 documentary. Thanks to my friend Matt for hepping me to it. Jai Alai was like handball, except more dangerous.
AUDIO: Jai Alai: The Fastest Game [1978] (8:39-9:11) - [YouTube]
PAT MCCANN [1978]: The ball, or pelota, used for playing Jai Alai is somewhat smaller than a baseball and harder than a golf ball. The core is of handwoven virgin rubber, covered with linen or nylon thread, which is topped by two layers of goat skin. Hurled through the air at speeds of over 150 miles an hour, the pelota can turn into a dangerous, sometimes illegal weapon.
JESSE: Did we mention there was legal gambling too? There was legal gambling. The Jai Alai Fronton also presented another local condition that I think was the reason they didn’t debut Seastones at the June 22nd show.
NED LAGIN: We didn't do it the first night because they were because the Jai Alai is a strange… not strange, but it’s not a usually-shaped venue.
AUDIO: Jai Alai: The Fastest Game [1978] (9:18-9:38) - [YouTube]
PAT MCCANN [1978]: The building in which Jai Alai is played is the fronton, the name derived from the front wall against which the ball is thrown. This wall is made of huge granite rocks, at least 12 inches thick, to withstand the repeated impact of the ball.
JESSE: That is, the Wall of Sound was surrounded by bigger actual walls, made of granite. By June 23rd, the engineers had conquered the Jai Alai. And Ned brought his parents, recently retired to Florida, to the gig.
NED LAGIN: They came in the afternoon when setup was still going on. Jerry and Phil were present on the floor near the stage. I don't remember what Phil or Jerry did, but they walked up to us and said, “Is this your parents, Ned? Why don't you introduce us?” And I introduced them to my mother and my father. My father said something like, “I hope you’re treating my son okay,” or something like that. Phil and Jerry both asked my mom and my father some questions. I don't remember what they wanted to ask — I’m blocking it [out] for some reason today. But they got along really well with both my parents, who were very suspicious of the name Grateful Dead. They didn't have any understanding of whether it was a cult, or something else. They didn't know the music. And everything they heard about the Grateful Dead or knew about the Grateful Dead from hearsay was about Grateful Dead being busted for drugs and being an LSD band, and what that meant: psychedelics and weird, strange stuff. My parents came away from it feeling much better, as most people do when you meet people who have a reputation and then it's actually fleshed out. So, Jerry and Phil did a good job of fleshing themselves out as reasonably coherent, stable citizens.
JESSE: It helped to have reasonably coherent chaperones.
NED LAGIN: One of the questions that they asked Jerry and Phil was: “What's that smell?” But the other side of it, as I thought about it later, was Jerry and Phil were behaving sort of like older brothers to me, in a sense, and/or just good friends. It was an acknowledgment of the friendship that we had, and I'm not sure how many other people's parents they ever met.
Roosevelt Stadium
JESSE: We’ll get deep inside some of the Seastones performances in an upcoming episode, but for now we’re going to follow the tour as the Dead moved up the coast from Roanoke to Landover to Hartford before hitting Roosevelt Stadium — the former minor league ballpark in Jersey City, across the Hudson from Manhattan, where the Dead had played regularly for the past few years. It would prove to be the Dead’s last show in the New York area for two years, their home away from home. Ron Rakow.
RON RAKOW: That was my favorite place to see the Dead, actually. It was a 41,000 seat stadium — that's a perfect size. That's with the infield and everything. The way it was configured, 41,000 people could get in there.
JESSE: The Wall of Sound’s New York area debut was scheduled for August 2nd, but it didn’t go as planned. John Potenza left us this story.
JOHN POTENZA: On July 4th 1974, I turned 14, and I got a ticket to see the Dead at Roosevelt Stadium for my birthday from my older sisters who were Dead Heads. They started me early, taking me to see the Allman Brothers, and I was already well-acquainted with all the Dead albums and even a few live shows. We already had an 8-track with the 2/13/70 “Dark Star” on it. So we set out for the show early on a sunny Friday morning. It was August 2. The crowd was typical: no tie-dye, mostly denim, t-shirts and halter tops. We walked out onto the field and got pretty close to the stage. The Wall of Sound was right there in front of us, rising into the heavens. As a young guitar player, I was in awe.
JESSE: A few of our friends were eyewitnesses. Please welcome back Ihor Slabicky, last heard in our Watkins Glen episodes, in case you were wondering how easy it was to get backstage in those days.
IHOR SLABICKY: I was in school and I was the program director at the radio station. It wasn't even on the air — it was just sort of a local inside-the-building [thing]. I think it went into the cafeteria and some other places.
JESSE: I, too, got my start on a closed circuit radio station.
IHOR SLABICKY: It was maybe common knowledge among some Dead Heads at the time of where [the band] were staying in New York. And so it was very easy to call the hotel and ask for the Grateful Dead rooms or something like that. And whoever answered, you spoke with them. I called up the Hotel Navarro. I think I spoke with Bill Kreutzmann. I said who I was, and I said, “Can I get a backstage pass? I’m from the radio station.” And he said, “Yeah, okay, sure.” I got there sometime early afternoon, not early enough to hear any soundcheck. Maybe 5, 6 o’clock. I just hung around there for a while, watched things and watched people and all that.
JOHN POTENZA: Early in the afternoon, Phil came out and plugged in his bass and started playing. Then Ned apparently started somewhere backstage, and we got about a half hour of Ned and Phil, but nobody had any idea what it was, none of this music. After that, they left and the crowd kept growing, as did the dark clouds in the sky.
JESSE: And please welcome back, good ol’ Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: I decided to take a stab at music journalism, which was kind of fitfully in progress for a few years there. My prevailing thought was: dammit, Bob Weir is an underappreciated guitarist because no one appreciates people designated rhythm guitarists. And he's worthy of an article in Guitar Player magazine. So, I decided to do one on spec.
JESSE: When the tour hit Roosevelt Stadium, our cub reporter was mid-story.
GARY LAMBERT: The tickets said rain or shine. It should always say rain or shine, with an asterisk: rain or shine, but let's not be ridiculous about it. This was intense. Torrential rain and water was puddling up on the stage. There were grounding problems and all that stuff. They waited a long time, and the crowd got wetter, and people were irritable.
JESSE: Ihor Slabicky.
IHOR SLABICKY: I was backstage, and I remember Bob Weir walking up to the stage, which was on metal whatever they call those things there. [Weir was] touching [the metal] and saying he was getting shocks, or at least feeling some kind of electricity. That was kind of a lead-off to them canceling that show.
JESSE: John Potenza.
JOHN POTENZA: Eventually, a torrential New Jersey August monsoon started. The field became a mud pit and finally Bob Weir had to come out and say they were canceling the show. Needless to say, the crowd—ready, if you know what I mean—reacted to the news by starting a riot. Bottles flying, naked guys slithering through the mud, bloody mud puddles full of broken glass.
JESSE: Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: And then the band decided to pull the plug and say, “Look, we're going to come back in a few nights.” And people started, in fairly large numbers, booing and throwing bottles at the stage. Bobby told me that he walked out to see what was going on, and a bottle shattered on the stage and a sizable shard of glass caught him a glancing blow on the forearm. Now, if you're a guitar player, and you have things like tendons and veins, that can be a sobering moment. And he said that [he] could have been much more seriously injured.
JESSE: The cancellation opened up some more time for Gary to talk to Weir for his story in progress. He’d been working on the piece since the fall and had interviewed Weir a few times.
GARY LAMBERT: First one, Boston, December ‘73; then Springfield, Massachusetts in summer ‘74. And then a hotel in New York, on the night of the aborted Roosevelt Stadium show that got rained out.
JESSE: The tapes don’t survive, sadly, but they got to go into depth about Weir’s gear.
GARY LAMBERT: I think Bobby was very pleased with the Wall of Sound in terms of attaining his ideal of playing something approaching jazz guitar in a rock idiom. He could play that [Gibson] 335 with incredible clarity, and still have the power to deliver the sound to the cheap seats. He was aspiring to that kind of sound, I think for quite some time. In some ways, that was the most I've ever loved his guitar sound. In one of our interviews, he talked about the amount of wattage, and he said, “If you gave your average British rocker that amount of power, he'd have you bleeding at the ears.” But the Dead’s intention was not punishing you with volume, but delivering the greatest clarity possible. He had things like an Eventide Harmonizer, and he had a pretty sophisticated equalization system. He didn't use a lot of distortion at that point at all. He said, “The sound of a vibrating string is such a cool thing. Why dirty it up?” That was kind of his operating philosophy back then.
JESSE: Gary also got a little bit of a glimpse behind the curtain.
GARY LAMBERT: Because I was in hotel rooms and stuff, you were starting to see a little of the fraying around the edges. The band was really getting tired. And that, amazingly, years before a “Touch of Grey,” there were deep worries that — this thing is getting too big.
JESSE: So they detoured to Philadelphia for a few days and back. Ned.
NED LAGIN: After Philadelphia, we went to New York to play Roosevelt Stadium. We stayed in the Navarro Hotel, which was around the corner on Central Park South, across the street from where they had the horse carriages. I was told at the time that the Navarro Hotel—or Hotel Navarro, however it's said—was actually owned by The Who. I don't know that to be true — something you might want to look up.
JESSE: I did, and it’s certainly a rumor that’s circulated for a long time, which doesn’t seem to be true in the legal sense of the word, but perhaps in other deeper more meaningful ways than mere property law. Certainly, The Who engaged in some absolutely epic ragers there which, if reported accurately, would have done both cosmetic and structural damage to the building. In his memoir, Rock Scully tells a too-incredible-to-fact-check story about him & Garcia encountering Keith Moon there in ‘77 or so that includes a tale of Moon burrowing through a wall. I want to believe.
NED LAGIN: One of the times when I was coming down in the elevator, I got in the elevator alone, and there was Anthony Quinn. And I had seen Anthony Quinn in war movies like The Guns of Navarone. I had seen him in Zorba [the Greek]. And most interestingly, for me as a kid, my parents had taken me to see the movie Requiem for a Heavyweight, which is about the tragedy of an old boxer.
AUDIO: “Quinn the Eskimo” (Take 1) [Bob Dylan & The Band, The Basement Tapes — Complete] (0:33-0:44) - [Spotify]
NED LAGIN: He was monumental. He’s a big guy. He could have been Grateful Dead crew in a different lifetime. So, we talked in the elevator and elevator rides are not that quick. There's only like four or five or six floors there. No one else got the elevator, and I felt profoundly enriched. As I said before, the 1974 tours were an adventure. This was like in Homer, going to some island and meeting some god.
JESSE: In 1973, the Grateful Dead had saturated the New York area with gigs, just as they had since 1967. In March ‘73, they’d played a few nights at Nassau Coliseum. Over the summer, they played the Watkins Glen Summer Jam, which we got into last season. In September, they returned to the cop-infested Nassau Coliseum. But it was nearly 11 months before they came back, which is approximately 100 gazillion years in Grateful Dead/New York terms. When the day came for the makeup show, August 6th—now in part on Dick’s Picks 31—the Dead arrived in a big way. From Grateful Dead Records, Steve Brown.
STEVE BROWN: When we played in New York, we had the Hells Angels all around us — the Bronx chapter, whatever. We wound up having those guys escort the cars when we'd go through New York. We could go right through red lights sometimes, bikes on either side. Looked like police, only different. It was bad, no matter. It was something to be honored, or else…
JESSE: Ned Lagin.
NED LAGIN: I didn't go with the band. I rode separately in a limo, which went through the crowd. And everybody was wondering: who's that guy? Who's that guy? And then I arrived with the Hells Angels bikes on stage and behind the stage. I arrived with these two girls who I'd met in Philadelphia. That's where the Hells Angel guy said, “I want the girls.” And I said, “Well, it's up to them,” being a proto-feminist. And they said to me, “No, we have to fight for the girls.” And then Jackson and Joe Winslow and Ram Rod said, “No, he's a member of the band.” So the guy was so upset and angry that he went out and stabbed this hippie guy out in the front of the stage. It was just another eye-opening experience for [this] New York Jewish idealist.
JESSE: You may’ve seen some photos of Ned onstage at Roosevelt Stadium. They’re on NedBase.
NED LAGIN: That's [during] the afternoon setup. That's when I was checking out and setting up my equipment. That was actually done by Interdata, the computer company who I got the computer from. It was meant to go in Computer World, the journal for computers back then. You can see in the background there's a banner of Dead Heads who had been there all night and all day waiting.
JESSE: They’d played Roosevelt Stadium before, but this was the biggest gig there yet. Todd Ellenberg.
TODD ELLENBERG: After Watkins Glen, seeing them in Roosevelt Stadium seemed downright homey. I didn't see the Dead at Roosevelt in ‘72, but I saw them again in ‘74 at Roosevelt. ‘73, they put the stage kind of around second base or so. It was really pretty close in. In ‘74, they pushed it way out in the outfield. A lot more people, a lot more people.
JESSE: Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: One of my all-time favorite Bobby lines at Roosevelt—when they made up that show that had had the bottle throwing incident, on August 6—we were standing backstage and looking up at the wall from behind. It looked like the skyline of a small city. I said to him, “Man, when you were starting out playing in pizza parlors, could you ever imagine it coming to this?” And Bobby said, “Yeah, especially considering there were times when we'd have to cancel a gig back then because no one could find an extension cord.”
JESSE: Ihor Slabicky.
IHOR SLABICKY: You walked into Roosevelt Stadium, and this thing’s like 35, 40 feet high behind the band. You’d [think to yourself]: holy shit, this is gonna sound awesome. It sounded like the music was coming out of the sky. You couldn't tell that it was coming out of the speakers or anything like that. It was just coming out of the sky.
JESSE: Highlights from the August 6th, 1974 show are on Dick’s Picks 31, but the whole gig is worth seeking out. Steve Silberman had attended Watkins Glen, but he really got it at Roosevelt Stadium.
STEVE SILBERMAN: I sort of got the improvisational gestalt of the Grateful Dead at Roosevelt Stadium. I remember this specific moment during “Eyes of the World” in the first set. Phil took a bass lead, and I thought — this is the best thing I've ever heard in my life.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Dick’s Picks 31, 8/6/74] (8:46-9:07) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: There were a few big jams in that first set, which closed with a 37-minute version of “Playing in the Band” into “Scarlet Begonias” back into “Playing in the Band.”
STEVE SILBERMAN: There is one mystery that your listeners could help me solve, which is: at 17 minutes and 30 seconds or so, in “Playing in the Band” on the Dick’s Picks release, Jerry starts playing a sequence of notes—[sings the notes]—that he played throughout his career. And I've never heard it called anything, but it's an unmistakable sequence of notes.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [8/6/74] (17:27-17:44)
JESSE: Throughout 1974, Garcia would play with the riff that became “Slipknot!,” and I wonder if that was just another melodic strand he had floating around.
STEVE SILBERMAN: It's a very unusual sequence of notes, because it's not exactly consonant but it's not exactly dissonant either.
JESSE: And back into “Playing.”
STEVE SILBERMAN: Another thing that struck me about the show on 8/6/74 was the so-called sandwich of “Playing in the Band” and “Scarlet [Begonias].” I believe the “Scarlet” starts fairly abruptly; it’s not a segue into it, I think Jerry just does it, just pivots to “Scarlet.” But I did appreciate how that created architectures in the flow of the music — where you could make points longer than a single song, and you could use the accumulated impact of several songs sandwiched together as an element in your spontaneous composition.
JESSE: During the Seastones set, Phil Lesh deployed his new Osiris bass, as Ihor Slabicky recalls.
IHOR SLABICKY: I have an audience recording, it’s out in trading circles. But I think, on that, you can kind of hear four channels. I think it's mostly during the Seatones set with Ned Lagin. That’s where you really can tell.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [Slabicky audience tape, 8/6/74] (13:52-14:15)
IHOR SLABICKY: It was something different, but it was also kind of where I thought the Grateful Dead were heading. Not that they would do that in every single song, but it was sort of like “Dark Star” in a way: musical exploration and visiting new places in Music Land, exploring new places.
JESSE: John Potenza.
JOHN POTENZA: The second set in the dark was like being on a magic old sailing ship creaking through the dark waters, with the band exploring sounds I’d never imagined. Someone hit Bobby's guitar neck with a glowstick during “Truckin’,” but they played on and on.
JESSE: Ira Kaplan, who would co-found the legendary Yo La Tengo in 1984, had seen the Dead at Nassau Coliseum the previous year and returned to see them at Roosevelt Stadium, where he had his own brain-frying moment. We’ve included parts of this story in our “Sugar Magnolia” and “Playing Dead” episodes.
IRA KAPLAN: I remember the Roosevelt stadium show, which got postponed due to rain, maybe because I had a tape of it.
JESSE: Ira brought his younger brother.
IRA KAPLAN: My younger brother, Neil, got into it more immersively than I did.
JESSE: Sup, Neil. Neil testifies to Ira bringing a makeshift mic stand and capturing the gig.
IRA KAPLAN: The Roosevelt stadium show in particular, I really loved it. I’m sorry to say I can’t do it anymore without looking it up, but there was a long “Truckin’” > “He’s Gone” > “The Other One”... was it “The Other One”.... as I said, I’d have to look it up now. And “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad” that I used to just kind of sing to myself, walking, walking, walking, from my house to town, which is like an hour-long walk. This kind of retracing my memory, of the structure of that. That was a really, again, really eye-opening experience.
AUDIO: “He’s Gone” [8/6/74] (11:52-12:08)
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [8/6/74] (0:00-0:07)
IRA KAPLAN: I do remember seeing them do “Sugar Magnolia,” where they did the song except for “Sunshine Daydream,” [which came] an hour later. Just feeling a part of my brain explode. That definitely has been referenced within our lineup at times.
AUDIO: “Sunshine Daydream” [8/6/74] (0:00-0:14)
JESSE: Steve Silberman’s older Dead Head friends were impressed.
STEVE SILBERMAN: I remember coming out of the show, and the people I was with could not think of any other songs that they wish the band had played, because they’d played them all! It was an extraordinarily far-reaching show. After the show was the first time I saw a real Shakedown. I saw a lot of people—or a few, anyway, it didn't take many—selling vinyl bootlegs. It was the first time I'd ever seen Grateful Dead bootlegs in any form. Obviously, there were no cassettes, but they were selling vinyl bootlegs out of their trucks in the parking lot of 8/6/74.
JESSE: Steve Brown remembers an adventurous exit from Jersey City, too.
STEVE BROWN: I remember when we were smoking in the back seat of the limo in New Jersey and we had to take a certain turnpike, a certain route to get back to the hotel. And the contact high with the pot that we were smoking got to the driver, and we totally missed where we're supposed to be going. Jerry had already been busted on the turnpike once before, so this was not a good moment. We had to go another 20 miles or something, to find an exit to turn around and come back. ‘Don't smoke and get the driver high! You're gonna get lost out here in New Jersey!’
AUDIO: “Sunshine Daydream” [8/6/74] (2:33-2:38)
Pausing
JESSE: Two days later, on August 8th, Steve Silberman was back at Roosevelt Stadium.
STEVE SILBERMAN: Two days later, I was back at the same venue to see Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young for the first time. I saw two epic shows in 48 hours, which is unbelievable. I was tripping intentionally this time, because I was old enough to have started doing that by then. But the bad news is it was a hellish show. The music was good, but the conditions were not. Part of it was that it was a very chaotic night. I remember what was said, in Nash's unmistakable British accent: “Nixon's resigned.” Everybody went wild.
AUDIO: “Long Time Gone” [Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, 8/8/74] (0:10-0:21)
GRAHAM NASH [8/8/74]: You did it!
JESSE: It’s an important moment on certain rock culture timelines. Weirdly, Nash’s announcement is missing from the versions I could find, and you can only hear the aftermath, so Steve’s dramatic reenactment will have to do.
STEVE SILBERMAN: Roosevelt Stadium was this very sort of brutalist environment. So Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young came out to play acoustic, and the stage was showered with bottles. And I believe that happened there a lot, because when Weir came out and canceled the show on 8/2/74, people were throwing bottles at him, too.
JESSE: Bad scene, man. Things had been changing at rock shows across the board, especially on the East Coast, for quite some time. The Dead obviously weren’t the only act affected, but it was still drag city. Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: There were starting to be some bad scenes at shows. I was at a couple of shows with people setting off firecrackers: throwing firecrackers towards the stage, throwing other projectiles towards the stage. The crowds were getting a little more rowdy, and I thought maybe it was because, once the Dead started getting more popular, the crowds there were… there was a certain tipping point, in the focus and the expectations of crowds that were coming to the shows. They were getting on FM radio with things like “Truckin’” and “Casey Jones” and that. You had people coming to shows with those kinds of expectations, and the Dead could deliver that stuff. But there were times during the show where you could see the cartoon thought bubble with a question mark in it over the heads of the people who were hearing them go down a wormhole in the middle of “Playing in the Band” or “Dark Star,” and there was a certain restlessness. There was a certain rowdiness, there was a little bit of gate-crashing. All those things happened on a massive scale, years later, but it was starting to manifest.
JESSE: And sometime, probably that same week they got back from New York, the Grateful Dead had a momentous band meeting.
GARY LAMBERT: The band at some point got together and said, “Look, if we are in any way instrumental in causing scenes like that to happen, we might want to take a step back and reconsider what we're doing.”
JESSE: Welcome back crew member Richie Pechner.
RICHIE PECHNER: We had a band meeting and Jerry announced that he wanted to take some time off. Everybody kind of gasped. “What do you mean take time off?” We’ve got this well-oiled machine. But he was starting to feel the effects of constantly touring. But the other thing for him particularly was, he was starting to feel responsible for everybody's job. So instead of being a talented, basically genius, musician, everybody looked to him for work. It's kind of a responsibility that I don't think he ever wanted, or felt comfortable with. And it kind of fucked with them.
GARY LAMBERT: The band was institutionally fatigued with putting up with the incredible expense and size and logistical hazards of the Wall of Sound, hauling that thing from town to town. The crew was burned out. Everybody was that way. Things felt really burdensome, in a way.
JESSE: Richard Loren had become the band’s booking agent when Sam Cutler departed earlier in the year.
RICHARD LOREN: It was really, really difficult. You can imagine: 30 shows, a massive sound system designed by Owsley. Besides the sound of those shows—great quality—it was financially unsustainable and, in my view, it was a colossal mistake. But they got to have their gigantic Wall of Sound, which they had put 12 hours or 15 hours into to put it up, and almost as much time to take down. They had to have a day off in between, and the crew was doubled. Normally, even those guys were getting paid tons of money. Fortunately, I wasn't in management at the time, so I didn't have to deal with the cost, what it cost them to pull it off. It was a difficult time, mostly for the cocaine involved. Everybody was high all the time, and it was just, just… just hell.
JESSE: Richie Pechner.
RICHIE PECHNER: That part was the beginning of a very big shift in the whole culture. Up to that point, it had been pretty much psychedelics and then, when coke came in, it really changed people's behavior. For me, it was kind of an end of an era. I didn't have the stomach for it.
RICHARD LOREN: They were so hard to deal with, every one of them. The coolest nicest guy was Ram Rod. The rest of ‘em, like Barlow called them, the Cocaine Cowboys. They were big, strong, very opinionated, and overpaid to the point that they thought they had more power. And they did have more power than any crew member in the history of crews, for any performer in the history of music, I believe.
JESSE: From Grateful Dead Records, Andy Leonard.
ANDY LEONARD: That whole concept of having a number of heads that were on payroll at that point, that was on Jerry. That's not fair. I know he built it, I know it was all done according to his plan and design, or lack thereof. But it certainly all happened under his auspices, and I think he felt a deep responsibility to keep the ball bouncing, so that everybody and their kids and their old ladies and everybody was going to be okay. That had grown out into the guys that were making the guitars, the guys that were making the speaker cabinets, the guys that were driving the rigs, the guys with the scaffolding company. The crew had grown exponentially [who] were watching Garcia to make sure that the paycheck was coming. I think the pressure really nailed him.
JESSE: Richie Pechner.
RICHIE PECHNER: You go to meetings, and you find out that the payroll is now 40 people, 50 people, we're hiring this caterer, that company. And I think he personally felt responsible to work, so that people could keep their jobs. I think that was really unfair in a way, kind of cruel, that they couldn't figure out a way to sustain itself without having everything fall to him.
ANDY LEONARD: If you've got somebody that's got a speaker company or a guitar company, and they do stuff for the Grateful Dead, that's great. If the Grateful Dead takes two years off, or doesn't order a couple of guitars that year, they're still fine. That would be a great organization. But, like I was saying, this thing was a science experiment, and nobody knew exactly what was going to work. So it was like: ‘Hey, I got an idea.’ ‘Okay, let's do it.’ But there was no plan of: Is that sustainable? What will we do next year? That question wasn't asked. We can do this once.
JESSE: As a science experiment, the speaker system had worked sonically if not quite logistically.
RICHIE PECHNER: After a while, it just seemed like it had gotten too drug-centric for me. People justified it, but the fact is it could have been done without that with better planning. It required more manpower, more vehicles, more planning, to be able to move that giant thing around. The one thing about being on the road is you learn things pretty fast, on what works and what doesn't. When you're home and working on stuff, you’ve got that luxury. But once you're on the road and you're doing gigs, the gig’s gotta go on. So no matter what you didn't prepare for, what you didn't know, you had to figure it out, and get it to work. So that kind of immediacy was probably one of the things that made that whole tour of the Wall of Sound come to an end was that it was unmanageable, basically. It was unmanageable in the way that it had developed. Even though everybody agreed it was the best solution that anybody had ever heard, it was kind of like… we didn't quite get enough manpower or planning to make it seamless.
JESSE: Well, what could have made the Wall of Sound more tenable?
RICHIE PECHNER: With the luxury of hindsight, it's easy to see — if we had maybe four more people, then it would have gone up quicker. And it would have been better all around, no matter what that expense was. But it was kind of learn-as-you-go. We were basically prototyping something we had not experienced before. It just didn't become apparent enough right away to do anything about it. It had a life of its own, and there was never really one person who was the “CEO” over the development of that project. It was kind of ruled by committee and, obviously, some people's voices are louder than others. For instance, Bear had a very large standing in what went on, but that was kind of his personality. But [Ron] Wickersham—also undoubtedly a genius—had opinions, but he just wasn't as vocal. He wasn't as demonstrative as some other people. It was kind of an example of how, in that hippie era, you wouldn't always want to be the person telling everybody what to do with authority, if you actually didn’t have it. You may have had a good idea which everybody wanted to hear — but there was nobody at the top saying, ‘Oh, that's a bad idea. we're not going to do that.’ Maybe you try it until it fails and then you move on.
JESSE: Ron Rakow wasn’t at the band meeting, but heard soon.
RON RAKOW: Jerry just came to my office and said, “We decided to take a hiatus.” First of all, it was not a year off. I don't know where that came from. And when they talked about a time period, they talked about two years. They never talked about one year. They were actually talking about stopping being the Grateful Dead, and this was going to tell them whether or not it was a good idea or not. It was a trial stoppage.
RICHIE PECHNER: The scene in general just turned into what I hoped it wouldn't have. For me, it was just like — yeah, okay, I think I'm done. I basically just went back to Mendocino and kind of stepped out at that point. It was my way, it was perfect timing for me. In the ‘60s, they’d just give you cash. There was no check. If you work, you get money, you get per diem, they’d give you cash. You needed some money, they just gave you cash. It's pretty loose. But by the ‘70s, it was all starting to be paychecks and W2s and all that. And a lot of us had never had W2 jobs before. So when you get your paycheck and they show all these deductions, and then you realize you're getting paid less than you were getting paid before the deductions, there was this resentment. But it was really ill-informed — we just didn't understand how it worked. But anyway, at that meeting, the treasurer said, “So you know that part of your paycheck that you guys always complained about?” Unemployment insurance. He goes, “Just go down to the unemployment office and file for unemployment, because we've been paying into an insurance policy in the event that you don't work.” None of us had ever done that before. I thought it was like some form of welfare; I really didn't know. But when I went into the unemployment office, and they pulled up my record, they said, “Oh, well, you must have a very beneficial company.” And I go, “Why is that?” He goes, “Well, it looks like they've been paying the highest rate into the insurance fund. So you're gonna get” — whatever it was, x “number of dollars every two weeks.” And I said, “Really?” So it kind of facilitated my move back to Mendocino, because I actually collected unemployment for two years. That was during the Nixon period, and he was so worried about his popularity that he extended unemployment benefits twice during that period.
Leaving Cucamonga
JESSE: We’ll be talking a lot about the nuances of the Dead’s touring hiatus, but I can imagine that a break seemed pretty attractive. It’d been 10 years of constant gigging, from May 1965 through August 1974, and it was time to take a break from the road.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [From the Mars Hotel] (3:11-3:28) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But before anybody could wrap themselves around any Mexican grass than usual, they had more business to attend to: a European tour scheduled for September, and Winterland shows in October. Like “Unbroken Chain,” “Pride of Cucamonga” didn’t appear at any of the shows. Unlike “Unbroken Chain,” which was a pain in the tuchus to learn, I’m not sure why they didn’t just go ahead and play “Pride of Cucamonga.” When the band returned to the road in 1976, Lesh was no longer singing. Brian Kehew caught them a half-dozen years later.
BRIAN KEHEW: I saw the Dead at the US Festival, and I was kind of hoping that song might pop up, only because they were like 10 minutes away from Cucamonga. But of course, it's not a live song you're likely to hear.
JESSE: On the Dead’s next album, Blues For Allah, in 1975, Phil Lesh’s songwriting took the form of the instrumental “King Solomon’s Marbles.”
AUDIO: “King Solomon’s Marbles” [Blues For Allah] (0:00-0:16) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: On Terrapin Station, Lesh would write “Passenger” with Peter Monk. But even if Lesh didn’t contribute any original songs to Shakedown Street or Go to Heaven, he considered himself to be in collaboration with Bobby Petersen. Nicholas Meriwether.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: One of the most pithy fascinating things, tantalizing tidbits, in my conversation with Phil was that Phil apparently was working on a third song from around then from around the Mars Hotel sessions. Either he couldn't remember the title, or he just didn't want to tell me. He said he asked Bobby [Petersen] to write them one more song, and Petersen produced this multi-page opus. And Phil said that he wrestled and worked with that off and on for 50 years.
JESSE: Bobby Petersen remained a part of the Grateful Dead’s social circle, with numerous stories of people meeting him at Dead shows in the later ‘70s or ‘80s. In the spring of 1986, 12 years after “Unbroken Chain” and “Pride of Cucamonga,” 19 years after “New Potato Caboose,” the Dead debuted a new song with lyrics by Bobby Petersen, a duet for Phil Lesh and Brent Mydland.
AUDIO: “Revolutionary Hamstrung Blues” [3/27/86] (0:43-0:59)
JESSE: The Dead only played “Revolutionary Hamstrung Blues” once, March 27th, 1986 in Portland, Maine. There’s a studio outtake floating around, too. In the summer of ‘86, the Grateful Dead nearly ended when Jerry Garcia almost died. In early 1987, returning from the Dead’s New Year’s shows in Oakland, Bobby Petersen suffered a stroke and died soon thereafter. “Revolutionary Hamstrung Blues” was gone by the time the Dead finished In the Dark and became top 10 megastars. More than the cryptical “Unbroken Chain,” the cathartic “Box of Rain,” or the psychedelic “New Potato Caboose,” “Pride of Cucamonga” is a postcard from someplace else, from somebody on the way to someplace even further.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” [From the Mars Hotel] (3:28-3:55) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]