Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 9, Episode 5
From the Mars Hotel 50: Scarlet Begonias
Archival interviews:
- Robert Hunter, by Monte Dym & Bob Alson, 12/28/77.
- Owsley Stanley, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 1/13/91.
- Robert Hunter, by Denis McNamera, WLIR, 3/1978.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [From the Mars Hotel] (0:00-0:10) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: I mean, c’mon. That’s what I call an irresistible opening.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [From the Mars Hotel] (0:11-0:22) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The Grateful Dead debuted “Scarlet Begonias” in March 1974, recorded it exactly one week later, and released it on From the Mars Hotel in June. It was an instant Dead classic, so much so that we’re going to break format and share this story from Geoff Gould, who saw two early performances of the song that spring before the album had even been released.
GEOFF GOULD: When they played it at Santa Barbara, it was like a total bomb had dropped. People in the stands were like: What the hell just happened?
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [From the Mars Hotel] (0:52-1:07) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: What a song. What! A! Song! There's a lot of perfect Grateful Dead songs, but “Scarlet Begonias,” it's got everything. It's one of those songs that everybody who’s playing on it has found the absolute perfect part for themselves in it.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [From the Mars Hotel] (0:52-1:07) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: From Vampire Weekend, please welcome drummer Chris Tomson.
CHRIS TOMSON: It’s the platonic ideal of a Grateful Dead song: an amazing Garcia/Hunter composition; a lot of idiosyncratic instrumental tics, [Bill] Kreutzmann high within that; some lyrical nuggets.
JESSE: What starts as something like a love song shifts gears when the narrator is knocked sideways into personal and cosmic revelation with a lyric that embodies crazy psychedelic wisdom, inevitably earned enormous cheers at Dead shows and became one of Hunter’s most revered.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [From the Mars Hotel] (1:48-2:07) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: Hunter’s lyrics are top of his game. “Scarlet Begonias” has got everything I want — it's got these visual motifs that are up to anybody to interpret how they see that song. You can just dream up whatever you want based on those lyrics.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [From the Mars Hotel] (3:05-3:29) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Though it was only four-and-a-half minutes, with a whole 47 seconds of outro, it was never released as a single, but it became one of the Dead’s greatest hits. Three years after it was written, “Scarlet Begonias” would connect with “Fire On the Mountain” starting on the band’s spring 1977 tour, becoming one of their most beloved pairings and resulting in maybe the single most famous performance of any Dead tune, one so famous that even non-Dead Heads can name it.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Cornell 5/8/77, 5/8/77] (4:25-4:52) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But we’ll loop back to Cornell ‘77. There’s a lot packed into “Scarlet Begonias.”
Island Time
JESSE: To get into the story of “Scarlet Begonias,” we’re going back before it jammed into “Fire On the Mountain.” We’re going back to before it was even “Scarlet Begonias.” Let’s rewind to the week that Wake of the Flood came out in October 1973.
AUDIO: “Lively Up Yourself” [Bob Marley, 10/29/73] (1:19-1:45)
JESSE: That was Bob Marley and the Wailers, live in San Francisco in October 1973, performing at the New Matrix, later known as the Stone. That tape is from the later part of their run, but on one of the first two nights—October 17th or 18th—before the Dead launched their tour in Oklahoma on the 19th, nearly all of the Grateful Dead crowded into the club to catch the Wailers. Please welcome back, Ron Rakow.
RON RAKOW: Garcia went, Keith and Donna went, Bobby went. The whole family went. I talked to Keith about it, he was excited we're going, [telling me], “you should go.”
JESSE: Rakow couldn’t make it, he was very likely off promoting Wake of the Flood, coming back to experience the beginning of the gas crisis, as we heard at the end of last season. Jerry Garcia had already been covering Jimmy Cliff in his band with Merl Saunders, but the Dead as a whole were clearly feeling the affinity between their music and the new generation of reggae coming from Jamaica.
RON RAKOW: We loved Bob Marley. We just did. You probably did, too!
JESSE: It was about two months after this that the story took a twist. I wanna thank Henry at the Kingston to Cali podcast for nudging us towards this story. Check out their deep history of California reggae through the Osiris Podcast Network.
RON RAKOW: I very, very seldom took a vacation in my Grateful Dead [days]. I just worked. But Christmas of 1973, Emily and I flew to Panama City and took a taxi across the peninsula to the other side of the Canal, got on a sailboat with these kids and went around sailing the San Blas Islands and got really high. These were wealthy kids. One of them was the scion of a family in Indianapolis that owned that big nutrition company. And the other kid’s family owned Land’s End, which sold clothing and catalogs.
JESSE: And, already having a sailboat, naturally, they had a radio phone on the boat.
RON RAKOW: And so I called in to the Grateful Dead office to see what was going on every third day or so. I was having the time of my life, being in shorts all day long, doing business on a sailboat in the middle of nowhere. Anyway, I call in to the Grateful Dead office, and there's a message from the lawyer, whose name was Hal Kant, that Bob Marley's contract is up and he wants to talk. So I called on a radio phone from the San Blas Islands to the Bahamas, and I had a cursory opening conversation. I did talk to him, but I mostly talked to a white guy.
LEE JAFFE: That would have been me.
JESSE: We are so happy to welcome to the Deadcast, for the Wailers-side perspective, the likely white guy in question — the artist and filmmaker, Lee Jaffe.
LEE JAFFE: I had become friends with a musician called Jim Capaldi. He was in a group called Traffic.
AUDIO: “Light Up Or Leave Me Alone” [Traffic, The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys] (0:31-0:40) - [Spotify]
LEE JAFFE: We had become really good friends, and he introduced me to Bob. I was visiting him. Traffic was doing a series of shows in New York at the American Academy. And then after one of the shows, I went to visit Jim at his hotel and Bob Marley was there. They had a cassette of the unreleased first Island Records [Bob Marley & the] Wailers album, Catch a Fire. I was completely blown away by it.
AUDIO: “Stir it Up” [Bob Marley & the Wailers, Catch a Fire] (0:36-0:48) - [Spotify]
LEE JAFFE: Bob was in New York to buy equipment for his band. And I just hung out with him and helped him. At that time, there was one block of music stores in New York on 48th Street. It was just solid music stores and everybody—from somebody buying their first guitar, or you’d bump into Carlos Santana or David Bowie—just everybody went there to buy gear. And I spent a few days with Bob, going around haggling with the sales people and helping them get equipment.
JESSE: From there, Lee Jaffe became part of the Wailers’ circle, joining them in Jamaica, staying initially with Island Records’ founder Chris Blackwell, who was still struggling to create a presence for Bob Marley overseas.
LEE JAFFE: At that time, Island Records with all their success had a very minor presence in the US. They were licensing all their records to Capitol Records, the distribution, and all they had was like this one tiny little office within the Capitol Records offices in New York — no promotion, no support or anything. Chris asked me if I'd be interested, they needed help to arrange for a North American tour. And I thought, well, there's nothing more important I could be doing in the world and trying to get this music out.
JESSE: The Wailers spent 1973 touring the world and elsewhere, playing Max’s Kansas City in New York on bills with Bruce Springsteen.
LEE JAFFE: I basically did everything on this tour, from arranging the passports and the visas, the plane tickets.
JESSE: In October, the tour hit the west coast, where the Dead saw the Wailers at the Matrix. But when they did, they just stayed semi-anonymous members of the crowd, and didn’t introduce themselves.
LEE JAFFE: I'm emotional right now, hearing this. I didn't know. I didn't know they were there.
JESSE: It wouldn’t be the last missed connection between the Grateful Dead and Bob Marley.
LEE JAFFE: The little commercial radio airplay that we had in the U.S. was basically only from two channels: WBCN in Boston, and KSAN in San Francisco, where I managed to arrange for us to do a live performance from the Record Plant for KSAN.
AUDIO: “Get Up, Stand Up” [10/31/73] (1:00-1:29)
JESSE: The Wailers broadcast live from the Record Plant in Sausalito on Halloween 1973, just a few months after the Dead had wrapped the Wake of the Flood sessions there. It’s one of the classic Wailers tapes. By then, the original Wailers had splintered, and Marley was pondering moving away from Chris Blackwell’s Island Records.
LEE JAFFE: There was a lot of… there was tremendous pressure on Bob, on what to do next. He had two albums with a lot of critical acclaim and commercial failures. There was uncertainty. What was the next band? Who would be in it? And what would a record contract look like? He asked me if I would go see if there'd be any interest from any record label. We had some notoriety in the Bay Area, and I had heard that the Dead were starting their own record label. So, I reached out to them. And it was incredible — they were all about it.
JESSE: The way Lee made contact with the Grateful Dead was the logical way a tour manager might find the Dead — through promoter Bill Graham.
LEE JAFFE: I just thought it was all Bill Graham. But I kind of remember this name, Ron Rakow.
JESSE: While Rakow was away living a fabulous island-hopping life, Bill Graham apparently began to make plans. It’s hard to know how all of this would have played out for real, but my guess is that Bill Graham envisioned himself as Bob Marley’s manager and would enlist help from the nearest major independent record company.
LEE JAFFE: Bill Graham was like, “Well, we want to do this. Bob will be the only other act on Grateful Dead Records. We’ll help him produce the record. The Dead will play on the record.” They basically offered everything. They had total reverence for Bob as an artist, for what he represented, for the message of his music.
JESSE: Let’s, uh, take a moment to process all of this. The detail of being the only other artist on the label grounds this story in early 1974, possibly before Graham would’ve been aware of the impending launch of Round Records, a detail which will matter to our story again momentarily. In February 1974, Lee Jaffe made it to Winterland, where he saw the Grateful Dead and the Wall of Sound.
LEE JAFFE: I was there with Bill Graham, sitting in the balcony in the first row. It’s hard to remember if Bob was with me. We had gone to San Francisco on another trip. I had hooked him up with Taj Mahal to do some recording.
AUDIO: “Slave Driver” [Taj Mahal, Mo’ Roots] (0:20-0:34) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was Taj Mahal doing Bob Marley’s “Slave Driver,” featuring Family Man Barrett playing what’s credited as “ska piano” on the same track as Merl Saunders. But the basic tracks were recorded at CBS in San Francisco, and Barrett was maybe overdubbed in Boston. Lotta strands here. But for lots of reasons, I think Lee Jaffe was probably flying solo at Winterland, mainly this.
LEE JAFFE: I don't remember meeting the band.
JESSE: Had Bill Graham been wooing Bob Marley, I have no doubt he would’ve brought him to meet the Dead. Still, nice to imagine Bob Marley in the balcony at Winterland hearing this…
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Dave’s Picks 13, 2/24/74] (0:25-0:43)
LEE JAFFE: I had never seen them before, and I was seeing them in their element, in the best possible way I could see them. And it was fantastic. They were iconic, they were amazing. They were at the height of their artistic powers, in San Francisco. I was seeing them at their best, with Bill Graham. It was fantastic.
JESSE: Those are the February 1974 Winterland shows we discussed in the first episode of this season, a trial run for the almost-ready Wall of Sound. So far, everything Lee Jaffe and Ron Rakow remembered has been pretty much compatible, if you accept that Rakow was on a boat in the Caribbean for two months. He doesn’t think it was nearly that long, so here we get to a few divergences and one kind of lovely cosmic convergence. First, let’s return to Ron Rakow, somewhere in the Caribbean Sea.
RON RAKOW: I mostly spoke to Hal Kant, and had Hal Kant go back and talk to those guys.
JESSE: If the Dead’s attorney Hal Kant was already involved, it seems likely that they’d already gotten to the point of discussing actual contracts. There were probably at least two levels of deals on the table: Bob Marley signing with Bill Graham for management, and then signing with Grateful Dead Records. This is pretty much the only way to reconcile Rakow and Lee Jaffe’s versions of what unfolded.
RON RAKOW: It was real business. It was all about money, and the Grateful Dead thing was not about money. Money was part of it. Who would want to be in that spot with those guys? Being disdainful of the people in the record company is part of the hustle. I didn't want to be that guy. Would you like to be that guy? No way. And, after two phone calls from the boat, I realized that this was not something I would enjoy doing. This was real business. If I wanted to be in real business, I would have stayed on Wall Street.
JESSE: The Grateful Dead had set up their own record company, but the stories burst equally with what-ifs and mighta-beens and WTFs. Round Records, co-owned by Rakow and Garcia, was on the verge of existence. Grateful Dead Records, co-owned by the band and Rakow, was the going concern.
RON RAKOW: It was a rare moment of wisdom. And that was the decision. It never went before the band. I never discussed it with Jerry. I discussed it with Jerry when it was a fantasy: “Let’s get Bob Marley and have him be in our world,” that way. We thought we would make them connect like we connect, and that’s not the way it works. That’s not what’s going on. It would have been different. Somebody would have had to be that villain. It was a fit economically, but not a fit socially. And it was the same on both sides. There was no rancor at all.
JESSE: Interestingly, Lee Jaffe’s memoir remembers Marley rejecting the deal in almost exactly the same language — “it seemed like a good fit for us politically, the spiritual side seemed too far away.” The memoir goes on to say that the name “Grateful Dead” was simply incompatible with Rasta philosophy and theology. The timelines kind of blow away from one another here, too. Rakow says he was back in time for the February shows at Winterland, meaning the Dead’s part of the deal was perhaps already off the table and Graham was still pursuing Marley even without them. Here’s how Lee remembers it.
LEE JAFFE: And I remember flying back from San Francisco with Bob, and we were talking about it. I explained to him, and he understood what it meant. It meant a lot of money, right away. They were gonna give him a big advance. He wouldn't have to think about food for his family, basic things that had been such a struggle for him for so many years. You have to realize, he had had hits in Jamaica in the ‘60s, and he had moved to Delaware to his mother’s house and he was working sweeping floors at an auto factory. Bob Marley! So it went for years like that for him, and here he was finally getting some critical success with the Island albums, outside of the Jamaican diaspora. But still no money. So I remember flying back from San Francisco — it was either we had seen the Dead or it was from the Taj Mahal thing, discussing it. Bob said to me: “Well, I can't be on a label called Grateful Dead, because I'm gratefully alive.” And that was the end of it. He re-signed with Island Records, and made the Natty Dread album.
AUDIO: “Lively Up Yourself” [Bob Marley, Natty Dread] (0:30-0:42) - [Spotify]
RON RAKOW: You see what I mean, about how far apart we would have been? Both of those stories are true. When I said I didn't want to do it, I think they said it at the same time to the same people, because there was never a tale. It never came up again.
LEE JAFFE: Bob’s been struggling from the time he was born. And now he's like 27 years old and he’s still struggling, figuring out how he's going to feed his kids. And he's offered the whole popular culture world: total financial security for the rest of his life. And he said he couldn't do it because he was gratefully alive. That said so much. It was a relief for me, because I didn’t see how it was going to work.
JESSE: Whatever went into the decision, the phrase Gratefully Alive really does say so much. Bob Marley was a Rasta, but he’d been around the Jamaican music scene long enough to understand what was what on the business end of the business, and decided that he was better off with Chris Blackwell. And we never got to hear the Barrett Brothers’ crazy rhythms through the Wall of Sound.
LEE JAFFE: Bob was honored to have them offer that, just as musicians and as artists. It was just two very disparate cultures, compatible in a lot of ways. That's why it was so enticing.
JESSE: And that’s the story of how the Grateful Dead and Bob Marley almost became business partners. But business or no business, Jamaican music would flood into the Grateful Dead’s sound even more very soon. Like, for example, the song we’re here to talk about today. It’s probably no surprise to say that Jamaican music fed into “Scarlet Begonias,” but we also have to make a stop in the British countryside.
AUDIO: “The Budgie Song” [Over the Hill, Ratbite Fever] (1:20-1:47)
Bristol Girls
JESSE: That was the British band Over the Hill, who had a tangential but unusual Grateful Dead connection in early 1974. As the year got going, the Dead began to lay the groundwork for the European tour they had planned for September. One prong of this was making sure that products from Grateful Dead and Round Records were available in Europe. The Dead had the perfect representative for just such a task. Like Ron Rakow, he began his year with some adventures in the southern climes. Please welcome back, from Ice Nine Publishing, Alan Trist.
ALAN TRIST: I went on an advancing promotional trip for ‘74, in advance of the tour. I remember taking with me a special Halliburton case that I got, which was stuffed with Wake of the Flood albums, which I then gave out to various record companies and press offices in Europe in preparation for the tour. Basically saying: Hey, the Grateful Dead are coming over here… and you know what, they started their own record company, and here's their first record! That was pretty exciting doing that, advancing, being able to show the Wake of the Flood album to the people in the business over there.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Wake of the Flood] (1:00-1:23) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Alan took the long route, stopping in Mexico. In early March, he dispatched a letter to Ron Rakow at Dead headquarters. After asking if Ron and Emily had a good time in South America, he wrote, “I had a great time in the Yucatan, mushrooms for breakfast at Palenque followed by space/time warp contemplation of ruined stone energy generation. I propose the new science of psychedelic archeology.” Plenty would take up that call in the next decades. When I showed Alan this note, he confirmed that, yes, “the magic mushrooms in the meadow below the archaeological site were the size of dinner plates!” Back in England, Alan made camp at Vicarage Farm in Bedfordshire, where a new band called Over The Hill was getting their act together. Alan offered his assistance.
AUDIO: “Ratbite Fever” [Over the Hill, Ratbite Fever] (0:25-0:47)
JESSE: That was “Ratbite Fever” by the band Over The Hill, whose sole documentation is a self-titled bootleg compact disc released in 1990. Singing somewhere in that chorus, probably, is Robert Hunter. Sometime in late 1973 or early 1974, the Grateful Dead lyricist had moved to England with his partner Christie Bourne.
AUDIO: “Ratbite Fever” [Over the Hill, Ratebite Fever] (1:14-1:30)
JESSE: The lost story of Robert Hunter and Over the Hill is fascinating, but we’re going to have to bookmark it for a different episode, except for one key detail.
ALAN TRIST: Hunter went to London during that period, in ‘74. He lived in London for quite a while.
JESSE: Here’s how Hunter remembered the period to Monte Dym in late 1977.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: I lived over on Queen's Gate for a while, about a block from the Victoria and Albert Museum. And that was a real nice time, because I’d just get up every morning and go right off to the V&A for about an hour or two. It’s the best collection of [inaudible] in the whole world. It's not a museum of painting — it's a museum of all the things that the British have collected from their imperialistic ventures over the last couple hundred years. A Stradivarius under glass and that. Anything you want to go and dig on is there.
ALAN TRIST: I was in London at that time, too, and Hunter was there. I remember visiting him at the house that he rented. When I visited him in London, he was with Christie in that house.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: I wrote pretty continually while I was there. I wrote “Scarlet Begonias” there. Funny thing, over in Bristol… the original name of that was “Bristol Girls.”
JESSE: He described the writing process on WLIR in 1978 and how the song started much longer.
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: It was originally pages and pages long. There was a very, very involved story there. It was like quite a plot. And it finally got honed down to just the basic moves. I've just been learning how to perform it with a single guitar, and it's a lot of fun. It's really a pleasure. It was originally called “Bristol Girls,” and there’s one line in it that I’m using: “Look all around this whole wide world, never find nothing stranger than a Bristol girl…”
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Robert Hunter, 8/8/84] (0:11-0:24)
JESSE: That was Hunter performing the song with its “Bristol Girls” tag in 1984, thanks to Alex Allan and his site Whitegum for pointing out that variation.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: I've heard a rumor back that I stayed overnight in somebody's house over there, which I didn't do, which somehow relates to that song. It’s mysterious. I don't know, I can't explain it, this mysterious trip, because somehow it seems almost as though I did, in another body or something. Because I can't deny the rumor that I heard back. It seems strangely true. And yet, I didn't.
JESSE: But the story is a bit more literal. We’ll let a solo Robert Hunter version guide us, from his 1991 live album, Box of Rain.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Robert Hunter, Box of Rain] (0:10-0:32)
JESSE: Not long after Robert Hunter moved to England, in the winter of 1973-1974, along Grosvenor Square in Mayfair, London, he met the woman who would draw the cover art for the sole album by the band Over the Hill, then the girlfriend of one of the band’s guitarists. Andrew Shields left us his thoughts on the song.
ANDREW SHIELDS: His concession that it could be an illusion allows for the possibility that his ideas about her might be all in his mind. His uncertainty at that first moment colors the feelings of certainty that he goes on to express. “I knew without asking she was into the blues… and I knew right away she was not like other girls.” In the end, the lesson he's learned the hard way. The light that he's been shown is to not make his own desire for a woman into something he knows about her.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Robert Hunter, Box of Rain] (0:45-0:59)
JESSE: They both had partners at the time and it would take almost another decade but, listener, Robert Hunter married her.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias,” [Robert Hunter, Box of Rain] (1:11-1:23)
JESSE: Hunter told Blair Jackson in 2004, “In the song the character flees… But it didn’t end [in real life] the way the song ended; I’m still with her. I have to say, that’s her special song. [It was written in England] for that girl, really.”
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Robert Hunter, 10/10/13] (0:07-0:22)
JESSE: It’s hard to say exactly when Robert Hunter wrote the lyrics to “Scarlet Begonias,” but it was almost certainly in February or early March 1974, because by March 23rd, the Grateful Dead were playing it onstage at the Cow Palace, now Dick’s Picks 24.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Dick’s Picks 24, 3/23/74] (1:54-2:13) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Jerry Garcia told Blair Jackson a little bit about the song’s musical inspiration in 1991. “It has a little Caribbean thing to it, though nothing specific,” he said. “It’s its own thing. I wasn’t thinking in terms of style when I wrote that setting, except I wanted it to be rhythmic. I think I got a little of it from that Paul Simon ‘Me & Julio Down By the Schoolyard’ thing.”
AUDIO: “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard” [Paul Simon, s/t] (0:27-0:36) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Garcia continued, “A little from Cat Stevens – some of that rhythmic stuff he did on Tea for the Tillerman was kind of nice.”
AUDIO: “On the Road To Find Out” [Yusuf / Cat Stevens, Tea For the Tillerman] (1:00-1:14) - [Spotify]
JESSE: “It’s an acoustic feel in a way, but we put it into an electric space, which is part of what made it interesting.”
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [submix of Garcia acoustic guitar and vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (0:29-0:42) - [dead.net]
JESSE: In our “Unbroken Chain” episode, we discussed a note that Jerry Garcia sent to the artist Robt. Williams with a demo tape and one-line descriptions of each song on the album in progress, written on March 21st, two days before the live debut of “Scarlet Begonias.” Which makes me wonder if there’s a demo or rehearsal version of “Scarlet Begonias” still to be discovered somewhere. Garcia described it as “up-like R&R with Jamaican flavor.” “Scarlet Begonias” isn’t exactly a reggae song, but I don’t think it’s coincidental that Jerry Garcia wrote it a few months after seeing the Wailers. We’ve spent a bit of time on the Deadcast talking about the Dead’s legacy as a progressive rock act, and how that differs from the classical and jazz complexities of so-called prog rock. “Scarlet Begonias” might be even more progressive than “Unbroken Chain” — an integration of Jamaican ideas into California rock vocabulary. It was in the air, and it became a wonderful new voice for the Dead. From Vampire Weekend, Chris Tomson.
CHRIS TOMSON: I was thinking of the Dead being this ideal conception of a band. Like, at the rehearsal studio, can you imagine someone coming in and dropping “Scarlet”? ‘I wrote this tune over the weekend, I got a new one we should try…’ And then it's fucking “Scarlet Begonias.”
JESSE: We can sort of imagine that. Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: All of these new songs that Garcia and Hunter were writing—and Bobby [Weir] and [John Perry] Barlow—were just coming out of the woodwork. Every time we would come to rehearsal, Jerry [would go], “Well, I have this new song” — and it would be “Scarlet Begonias.” And hearing “Scarlet Begonias” for the first time…
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Garcia lead vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (0:17-0:26) - [dead.net]
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: And then them having that kind of longevity, the way that the songs are written, the way that Hunter had this special way of putting words together that fit everybody. And you could make it your own, to where they're pretty much eternal in that the music never stops. It keeps going on and on for years, and decades and decades and decades. It's music that I believe is not going to have its end. It is Other, and I think it’s going to outlast a lot of things.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Dick’s Picks 24, 3/23/74] (1:06-1:20) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was a little bit more from the debut performance on March 23rd, 1974 at the Cow Palace. From Vampire Weekend, Chris Tomson.
CHRIS TOMSON: I was just listening to the Cow Palace [performance]. To me, as someone who thinks a lot about construction of songs and how songs evolve, there is a magic of a demo that I just find so amazing, to hear where these songs start. And so the debut of “Scarlet Begonias” is one of those moments for me. They kind of had the parts—they had obviously rehearsed it—but it's not like when they're playing it a couple years later, they [had already] played 20, 40, 60 times. And there is inevitably… even with the best of songs, you have things you figure out, you have tricks that you rely on, whatever it is. Those first couple of performances, there's something that's always gonna be magical about them, because there's a lightness. I would imagine there were nerves. Even if it's not like, ‘Oh, we're gonna mess this up,’ but more like, the first time you're doing something it’s very natural.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Dick’s Picks 24, 3/23/74] (3:28-3:58) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And here’s how the song sounded a week later at CBS Studios.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Basic Instrumental Tracks, From the Mars Hotel] (3:11-3:36) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That was the core ‘74 Dead recording the basic take of “Scarlet Begonias.” It was a song the Dead were obviously way excited about. The track sheet notes, reel 1, take 2, March 30th — exactly a week after the song’s debut at the Cow Palace, and the first complete song they tracked at the From the Mars Hotel sessions.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Basic Instrumental Tracks, From the Mars Hotel] (3:36-4:00) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Brian Kehew transferred the session tapes for the recent release of Angel’s Share recordings.
BRIAN KEHEW: On these recordings, most of what we hear is very, very close to the record. These sessions don't involve a lot of experimentation, and they're really not far from the mark when they start recording, at least for what we've heard. They have spent their time in pre-production, instead of messing around in the studio and speeding up and slowing down, they have really dialed in each one for tempo and even arrangement, as far as the basis of each track. And “Scarlet Begonias” is a good example of that. It's them working through the song a few times.
ROY SEGAL [3/30/74]: Roll the tape.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” (Takes 1 & 2) [From the Mars Hotel: The Angel’s Share] (0:02-0:32) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BRIAN KEHEW: It sounds about the same each time. It's very interesting to hear things without vocals because you can really pick out things like the bass parts and things that were not as obvious before. So I really enjoy hearing instrumentals.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” (Takes 1 & 2) [From the Mars Hotel: The Angel’s Share] (7:19-4:43) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: As usual, it required a little discussion to get the tempo right. Lesh and Kreutzmann are skeptical they might be playing too fast for Garcia to fit in all the words.
BILL KREUTZMANN: Too fast!
PHIL LESH: It’s a little breathless. Go ahead and sing a verse to yourself and play the chords.
BILL KREUTZMANN: That’s too fast.
JESSE: But Garcia loops the groove ‘til they get it.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” (Takes 1 & 2) [From the Mars Hotel: The Angel’s Share] (13:02-13:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: There were a few reasons why it made sense to speak with drummer Chris Tomson on this episode, one is the way that “Scarlet Begonias” starts.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Drums, From the Mars Hotel] (0:05-0:17) - [dead.net]
CHRIS TOMSON: The snare intro, he's already kind of front and center, with the little fill that starts it. And then yeah, he’s just kind of reacting, that intro before the vocals come in. He’s really trying to, his right hand on the hi-hat feels like it’s keeping time with those eighth notes. And then the kick-snare syncopation is just kind of all over the place, in a great way.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Drums, From the Mars Hotel] (3:12-3:35) - [dead.net]
CHRIS TOMSON: There is no “part.” It’s a linear thing that he’s possibly improvising. I love that it's really off-kilter, hits the downbeats when it needs to. But, really, he's doing his own really interesting thing that, to me, adds to the beauty and the wavy-ness of the whole song.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Drums, From the Mars Hotel] (3:36-4:01) - [dead.net]
JESSE: At the end of the master take, Garcia’s excited to listen back.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Room Mic, From the Mars Hotel] (4:21-4:33) - [dead.net]
JERRY GARCIA: Well, we’ve got a couple to listen to while we eat.
JESSE: Ironically, it might be one of the only Dead songs that ended cleanly live but not on the studio version. They added a fade-out later.
CHRIS TOMSON: There's an excitement to it that feels like they capture it and got from start-to-finish really quickly. I think maybe that drumbeat kind of speaks to that. If they'd spent two months in the studio refining “Scarlet Begonias,” all those idiosyncrasies and those weird syncopations probably don't make it through.
JESSE: Once they had that groove, and that take, there was some accentuation and ornamentation. The Dead were a decidedly one-drummer band on From the Mars Hotel, but “Scarlet Begonias” was a machine that required percolation.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Cowbell, From the Mars Hotel] (3:17-3:22) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Aaaaand, more cowbell.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Cowbell, From the Mars Hotel] (3:59-4:04) - [dead.net]
JESSE: A conga part comes in there, too.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Conga, From the Mars Hotel] (3:40-3:45) - [dead.net]
JESSE: But there are five—count ‘em, five—different keyboard parts on “Scarlet Begonias,” and they all act as rhythmic layers. On the basic track, there’s Keith Godchaux’s piano, which they recorded through a mic but also through the Carl Countryman piano pickup, with less leakage from the rest of the band. Here’s from the pickup track.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Piano pickup, From the Mars Hotel] (0:17-0:28) - [dead.net]
JESSE: There’s some harpsichord accenting those climbs.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Harpsichord, From the Mars Hotel] (2:00-2:11) - [dead.net]
JESSE: And during the outro.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Harpsichord, From the Mars Hotel] (3:38-3:49) - [dead.net]
JESSE: There’s some B3, too, making for a nice scene change that feels part like Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now” and part like church.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Organ, From the Mars Hotel] (1:26-2:11) - [dead.net]
JESSE: We’ll listen to a composite mix later, but can’t resist the urge to combine the organ, vocals, and acoustic guitar that appears for the chorus.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Lead vocal, organ & Garcia acoustic guitar submix, From the Mars Hotel] (1:26-2:11) - [dead.net]
JESSE: During the outro, the organ isn’t doubling the main riff, so much as providing padding.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Organ, From the Mars Hotel] (3:40-3:59) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Brian Kehew.
BRIAN KEHEW: The surprise for me was the synthesizers. It's not that you can't hear them on the record, but I have to give them a big compliment — they had a little, not very large, not very fancy, but good-sounding Roland synthesizer. And they were using it on several of these tracks. But you don't really hear synthesizer sticking out in the music here.
JESSE: This is Keith Godchaux’s Roland synthesizer under the first verse of “Scarlet Begonias.”
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [K. Godchaux Roland synth, From the Mars Hotel] (0:17-0:45) - [dead.net]
BRIAN KEHEW: It's mostly Keith, but Jerry actually does quite a few little synth tracks in there. And they're mostly playing similar parts, but they're very musical. They sound like a plucked sound or an organ or a flute or something.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Garcia Roland synth, From the Mars Hotel] (0:17-0:45) - [dead.net]
BRIAN KEHEW: So we have a date of 4/29, three days after the sync reel was actually made, that Jerry and Keith are adding synth parts to “Scarlet Begonias.” On that sync reel, for example, on this specific song, pieces did get used that were added on the extra tracks. And then later on, when they went to mix, they put up both machines and they used those parts.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Synth submix, From the Mars Hotel] (3:40-4:03) - [dead.net]
BRIAN KEHEW: So the sounds they're choosing are not to show off that ‘we have a synthesizer,’ or ‘we're cool,’ or ‘we're state-of-the-art with other new bands’ — they're actually just doing very tasteful parts, as if it was an organ or if it was flute. I think that's kind of interesting all throughout this record. There are moments when the synthesizer pops up and in my ears went — wow, that's cool. Didn't quite realize that it was a synth before.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Synth & piano submix, From the Mars Hotel] (4:05-4:23) - [dead.net]
JESSE: It’s one of the most natural Dead grooves Jerry Garcia ever came up with, perhaps one of the reasons it was destined to become one of their most legendary songs. But at four minutes and nineteen seconds long, along with “Dark Star,” “Scarlet Begonias” might be the best example of a Grateful Dead song with several hundred micrograms of untapped energy coiled into its studio take.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Bass, Drums, Piano, Garcia Electric Guitar, Weir Electric Guitar submix, From the Mars Hotel] (3:39-4:02) - [dead.net]
JESSE: From the City College of New York, musicologist Shaugn O’Donnell.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: There's something very composite about the way they perform it. It's really the fingers on the hand, in that it sounds like it's one musical object, but everyone's just contributing a tiny, tiny snippet. So it kind of blossoms in a way.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Bass, From the Mars Hotel] (0:05-0:17) - [dead.net]
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: It's the fast “Row Jimmy.” It comes out of that same new language, but it's not brand new anymore for them. So it's got a sort of Jamaican island vibe of sorts. It's another one that sounds like it could have existed on Wake of the Flood because Bobby's doing a lot of the same kind of pizzicato arpeggiations and things, to outline what's what's happening.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Weir guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (0:05-0:17) - [dead.net]
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: Wake of the Flood in general really is the big jump in Weir’s playing, in terms of really second violin parts — for lack of a better analogy. It's single-note lines, and he'll do pizzicato, palm muting, clicking. It’s very supportive and integrated. This one is the one that takes the next steps from the earlier record.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Weir guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (0:58-1:15) - [dead.net]
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: It's still already in the Grateful Dead composite language, and seems to be written specifically for that style of play, as opposed to — this is a chord chart, and we could do other arrangements.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Weir Guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (3:38-4:00) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The song’s musical cleverness is in the rhythm and dynamics. There’s nothing fancy about the transition climb between the bridge and the final set of verses, except that it rolls over slightly longer than you expect it to.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [From the Mars Hotel] (1:54-2:11) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But played together with a dramatic destination courtesy of Robert Hunter, it adds up to something wonderful. To me, the guitar break that builds up to this portion of the lyrics is a pretty joyous approximation of a cosmic flash, creating a moment that is both ephemeral and infinite where the sky lights up and everything is changed forever, as paradoxical as Hunter’s lyrics. Before the narrator can fully visualize and articulate this cosmic flash, we get a swell 30 seconds of guitar solo. They recorded this right over the original guitar part. You can tell because, at first, you can hear the rest of the band in the room with Garcia, and then they disappear when the punched-in part starts.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Garcia guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (2:40-3:15) - [dead.net]
JESSE: And then.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Garcia lead vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (3:11-3:15) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The Wind in the Willows was a 1908 children’s book by the British author Kenneth Grahame; “Tea For Two,” meanwhile, was a hit 1924 song by Vincent Youmans and Irving Caesar from the musical No, No, Nanette. Here’s Marion Harris’s hit version, recorded 100 years ago this spring in June 1924, exactly 50 years before “Scarlet Begonias.”
AUDIO: “Tea For Two” [Marion Harris] (0:47-1:03) - [Spotify]
JESSE: “Tea For Two” is about finding a world away from the world. It’s a place, maybe, where the scarlet begonias grow.
AUDIO: “Tea For Two” [Marion Harris] (0:27-0:45) - [Spotify]
JESSE: The mystical swarming forces of nature getting their act together to perform a 50-year-old pop hit is perhaps the least remarked-upon paradox of “Scarlet Begonias,” but it sets the tone for one of its central lyrics.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Garcia lead vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (3:17-3:22) - [dead.net]
JESSE: This is the core of “Scarlet Begonias” and, in a sense, nearly any set in which the Dead performed it and perhaps even From the Mars Hotel as a whole — the moment of aha revelation where the band almost forces the listener into ecstasy. It’s the second time it happens in “Scarlet Begonias,” counting the “once in a while you get shown the light” lyric. As a songwriting move, it doesn’t feel accidental but core to the world-shaking shift at the center of the song. Here’s the harmony part.
Sky Yellow/Sun Blue
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Background vocals, From the Mars Hotel] (3:12-3:22) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That lyric, “the sky was yellow and the sun was blue” is the inspiration to a longtime pal of the Deadcast, the artist and misfit Steve Hurlburt. For years, Steve has used the Grateful Dead as a launch point and medium for surprising angles on the music and the culture. We’ve linked to his work at dead.net/deadcast, including the documentary Dreadheads and easily my favorite cover of “Victim or the Crime.”
AUDIO: “Victim or the Crime” [Accident of Birth] (0:35-1:00) [YouTube]
JESSE: Since 1996, Steve has been commissioning fine artists to create pieces using the prompt “the sky was yellow and the sun was blue,” and this fall will publish an art book Sky Yellow / Sun Blue: The Art of Scarlet Begonias and the Ecstatic Vision of the Grateful Dead collecting the paintings and accompanying essays.
STEVE HURLBURT: I had just moved into a new house. I had a bunch of blank walls in the house. And for some reason, I thought, Well, I need some art, and “the sky was yellow and the sun was blue” is kind of a cool lyric. There's colors in it and it's trippy.
JESSE: Out of context, the lyric is a simple inverted image that anybody with nearly any understanding of English might grasp.
STEVE HURLBURT: I came down to Jazz Fest that spring and I was wandering around the arts and crafts section there. I saw a guy, he had his tent, and he had pottery and paintings. I liked the paintings. He had his easel set up outside of his tent and he was painting this great picture. It had birds and fishes and snakes and wild colors in it. I liked it a lot. So, on impulse, I just went up to him and said, “Would you do a commission for me?” And he kind of looked at me sideways because I'm sure he's heard that a bunch of times… you know, a commission. He looked at me sideways and said, “Well, what do you have in mind?” So I said, “Well, there's a song by the Grateful Dead called ‘Scarlet Begonias.’ There's a lyric in the song: ‘the sky was yellow and the sun was blue.’ I would like for you to do your style and paint ‘the sky was yellow and the sun was blue,’ sign it, date it.” And for some reason, I said, “Give me an artist statement.” He thought about it for a second. And he said, “Okay”—and this was around noon time—“come back at the end of the day.” So I came back four hours later, and he had this incredible painting called “the sky was yellow & the sun was blue.”
JESSE: From there, Steve’s collection was born, though it took a while to manifest into something more than art for his own walls. It’s important to note that the people who made the paintings weren’t Dead Heads, and in many cases didn’t hear the rest of the song. His forthcoming book will have 40 interpretations, all titled “the sky was yellow & the sun was blue.” One that I find quite striking, and which I think channels something powerful about “Scarlet Begonias,” is a cityscape with airplanes falling out of the air.
STEVE HURLBURT: That's a favorite one of mine. It was done by an LA artist named Tony de Carlo. He passed away about four years ago I think, could have been more. I wasn't able to talk to him to tell him about this whole book project. He was from LA, Hispanic, gay. He put the words in the painting, and he put the words in both English and in Spanish. And this is in his artist statement, he chose the word fue for “was,” and he mentioned in his statement that the form of that verb and the way he used it meant something was a certain way, for a split second, and then it changed back to what it originally was.
JESSE: The usage in this painting is religious, capturing the moment of crucifixion, but that interpretation—something was a certain way, for a split second—is also the definition of one of the great hippie verb-forms of the ‘60s — to flash.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Garcia lead vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (1:32-1:39) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Except, after the singer’s cosmic flash, where he’s shown the light, the whole world and everybody in it seems to be changed.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Garcia lead vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (3:24-3:36) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Since pretty much the moment I first heard the lyric in high school, I’ve visualized the strangers-stopping-strangers as an infinite line of R. Crumb characters like Flakey Foont—there he is again—lined up to infinity in opposite directions against a wild colored sky, like players on a youth sports team lined up after a game.
STEVE HURLBURT: I did a bunch of interviews with Dead Heads in the parking lots at Dead & Company [shows] last summer. I talked to like 300 people and got, as you can imagine, all kinds of answers: silly, stupid, profound, short, long. Everything.
JESSE: The range of answers is a pretty good representation of the different ways people experience the Dead’s music. Steve shared a few with us, and you can check out the others in his Sky Yellow/Sun Blue book.
JOE [from Trenton]: Negative inversion, refraction.
ROSS [from Asbury Park]: The whole entire song is all contradictions, things that can't be. It starts off: “As I was walkin’ ‘round Grosvenor Square” — you can't square a circle. “Sky was yellow [and the] sun was blue” is not a possible thing.
ALEX [from Columbus]: To me, it brings back almost a mystical dreamlike memory, not necessarily one in my own mind. That whole flipping of the dynamic of familiar things in your life being different colors, it just gives me an off-kilter feeling, but in a good way.
BOBBIE [from Oregon]: I can honestly say that when I [saw] that color I was giving birth to my son. The sky out of [the window] of my delivery room, in the middle of the night.
BILL S. [from California]: I used to have a joke with my best friend since I was 12… he used to say: “the sky was yellow, and your mother was blue.” In New York City, best friends would make fun of your mother and I felt it was a tribute to him — like, Hey, I'm thinking about you during this song. It shows our love when we make fun of each other.
UNKNOWN: The concept of reality really doesn't exist. It's all relative.
REEDER [from Boulder]: Honestly, I don't know if I have a set meaning for it. But when they play it, I love the reaction of the crowd on that part. It's one of the rowdy parts of the song. I don't know, it just means everything's going great.
JESSE: Unlike “Loose Lucy,” which—as we talked about last episode—turned from a silly song about friends with benefits into a metacantric thank-you to the band, I’d argue that the meaning of “Scarlet Begonias” communicated itself perfectly.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Garcia guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (3:37-3:54) - [dead.net]
JESSE: At the end of the song, there’s not a big jam nor even a guitar solo. There is, however, a Donna Jean solo.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Background vocals, From the Mars Hotel] (3:40-4:08) - [dead.net]
JESSE: It’s her only improvised spotlight on a Dead album.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Background vocals, From the Mars Hotel] (4:09-4:29) - [dead.net]
Album Promotion
JESSE: The band started playing “Scarlet Begonias” in March 1974, finished recording it in April, mixed it in May, released it in June, and spent the summer supporting their new album. One of the family members assigned to promote From the Mars Hotel was the great tie-dye artist Courtenay Pollack.
COURTENAY POLLACK: There was Grateful Dead Records and Round Records, but they’re both out of the same company. I was the lead promotion man for the southeast of the country. The reason for that was they had [been] busted down in New Orleans. They didn't come back for years, and all those fans felt abandoned — they were pissed off. The idea was to not send some northerner down there to try and promote the Grateful Dead and get them back in the fold. It was to send this British guy down there. Because of my English accent, it wasn't like I was a Yankee.
JESSE: The week the album came out in June, the Wall of Sound crossed the Mason-Dixon line, where Ned Lagin and Phil Lesh debuted a set of Seastones music at the Miami Jai Alai, now Dave’s Picks 34, a show we’ll touch on soon.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [Ned Lagin & Phil Lesh, Dave’s Picks 34, 6/23/74] (4:55-5:14)
COURTENAY POLLACK: I started at the Jai Alai Stadium in Miami. My area went across as far as Texas and up as far as Philadelphia. I had that whole section of the country. I’d set up a city a couple of days before the band would play that city. So, I would precede the band by two or three days, set up city-by-city. I'd go in advance to the next city, find a phone booth—a real old phone booth, where you’d go in and look at a phone directory—and I would look up the radio stations, all the FM stations. I would plot them on my map around the city and figure out a route. So if I could get appointments, one after another, I could go to a number of radio stations in an evening. And during the day, I could do the distribution centers. So I’d plot this from a phone book on the map, make the calls, kick them off with times and stuff like that, then go into the city and get a hotel that was central. Then I'd start my tour and do these live talk shows for a couple of evenings and the distribution centers.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [From the Mars Hotel] (1:19-1:31) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
COURTENAY POLLACK: With all the free stuff and the posters and imagery, I would create three-dimensional effects for promotion. There was the individual Garcia album, and then there was the Mars Hotel album, and then there was the Robert Hunter album.
AUDIO: “Rum Runners” [Robert Hunter, Tales of the Great Rum Runners] (0:37-0:50) - [Spotify]
COURTENAY POLLACK: That was my only tour in promotion. It worked. We got the venues full, did the live radio stuff and everything. It really set the towns up.
JESSE: Andy Leonard of Grateful Dead Records had a pretty similar experience in a different region of the country.
ANDY LEONARD: The thing that almost killed me in that timeframe was that I was doing some advancing stuff, to go get the town that the band was about to show up in set up, so that there would be a buzz at the record store. We don't want to go pump the record stores up the day the Grateful Dead leaves town — you kind of need the stuff in the front row at the record store. So we were doing some of that stuff, and then what I would try and do is I would try and stay and see what was going on with the band, because there was publicity stuff we were doing at the shows. I had to make sure everybody got handled that that were our new distributors, because nobody in the Grateful Dead organization knew who any of these guys were. Some guy with a black trench coat buttoned up to his neck shows up at the New York gig and says, “I'm your distributor.” So, [Steve] Parish isn’t going to let him on stage, so I had to make sure that everybody got seen to that way. And then, of course, I'd like to stay and have a beer with the band, and then, of course, I had to leave to get to the other town that they were headed for before they didn't do the same thing all over again. I almost killed myself.
JESSE: In late July, the band played at the Capital Centre in Landover, outside Washington DC, a hep place to be seen as Watergate wound towards its inevitable conclusion.
COURTENAY POLLACK: I'd meet up with the band after the gig and we’d go out to dinner. We played Washington and we went out to a late-night dinner. We found this really fancy place and of course we're all just dressed like rock and rollers. We go up the steps and into these grand doors, and [they say]: “Oh, sorry, you guys can't come in here, you have to have a jacket and tie.” And I said, “Well, it's so late. who really cares?” He said, “You… I mean… Richard Nixon eats here.”
RICHARD NIXON [8/8/74]: Throughout the long, difficult period of Watergate, I felt it was my duty to persevere.
COURTENAY POLLACK: And I said, “Well, if you’ll let him in, you’ll let anybody in! Come on, men.” Oh my, this guy. And what are they gonna do? So they put us in a private dining room away from any observers. We could do what we wanted back there, which we did.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Tack piano, From the Mars Hotel] (1:34-1:39)
COURTENAY POLLACK: I was out for six weeks or so. And then I came back home. I was pretty worn out by then, being on the road, not having my routine and not doing my creative work. There was a certain creativity in that, but being on the road is not easy — as most people know.
Scarlet ‘74
JESSE: While the representatives of Grateful Dead Records did their best to make From the Mars Hotel and its songs into classics, nobody could do that better than the Dead themselves. And, in most cases, succeeded. “Scarlet Begonias” started making meanings and blowing minds almost right out of the gate. As we heard at the beginning of the episode, Geoff Gould saw it a few weeks after they finished the album, but before its release, at the Santa Barbara show on May 25th.
GEOFF GOULD: I don't literally almost remember the actual performance of “Scarlet Begonias” in Santa Barbara as much as — this thing just kind of happened, and when it was over, everybody was just going: Wow, what was that? What was that? It was just crazy. Looking back on it, that's such a shocking sort of thing for the Dead. They were so organized and so precise.
JESSE: Those early versions are tightly packed, not even cracking five minutes.
GEOFF GOULD: If you think of “Scarlet,” it’s kind of like a wind-up toy: really, really tight, and then it goes — doiiiing.
JESSE: Adding to the precision was that they nailed the ending they missed in the studio.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [5/25/74] (4:00-4:30)
GEOFF GOULD: I did get to see them [play “Scarlet Begonias”] later on at the Hollywood Bowl. It had already kind of unsprung a little bit, and became much more relaxed. “Scarlet Begonias,” over time, you can just see how they just couldn't keep up that perfection.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [7/21/74] (4:26-4:56)
The Wall, 7/74
JESSE: Later in the ‘70s, Geoff would co-found Modulus, an instrument building operation that would intersect with the Dead in ways that we’ll detail later. But in 1974, he was just a Bay Area head.
GEOFF GOULD: I was not one of those out on the road people, but you’d [have] some friends and a troupe of people. We’d just kind of ended up in Santa Barbara, and would go farther to go to Los Angeles.
JESSE: It was a period when Geoff and other Bay Area Dead Heads were starting to venture a little further afield to see the band. The Hollywood Bowl is where Pigpen had performed with the band for the last time, two summers before. Interestingly, another Bay Area fan in the house was Kevin McKernan, Pigpen’s younger brother. Please welcome back the keeper of the Pigpen archives, Sully.
JIM “SULLY” SULLIVAN: We went to the Hollywood Bowl for the Wall of Sound show, and we didn’t have fuckin’ money, didn’t have tickets or anything. We were some of those guys. But we had Kevin with us, man. We pulled up in my ‘61 VW van, a bunch of skels, and Kevin says, “Okay, come on, let’s go.” So we parked, walked over, and there’s Rock [Scully] helping supervising, unloading fuckin’ all the boxloads of trucks. We got there a day early. Kevin said, “Hey, Rock, get us in. What’s the story?” And of course, Rock always had a soft spot. So he picked out four tickets and said, “Behave…” [laughs] We go in to the band area, and there’s all this food — we’re fuckin’ starving, man. So we start eating, and fuckin’ Parish comes in and goes: “What the fuck do you think you’re fucking doing! Get the fuck outta here!” [laughs] Back then, he looked like a 10-foot tall grizzly bear. We just backed the fuck out. “Okay, sorry, man…” He was a fuckin’ monster, man. Great guy. What a thankless job.
JESSE: As one of the only fully new Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter songs penned for 1974, “Scarlet Begonias” might be heard as one of the pieces of Grateful Dead music that the Wall of Sound was there to present. And visually, anyway, there’s no show that represents the Wall of Sound more than the Hollywood Bowl gig on July 21st. Please welcome back journalist Brian Anderson.
BRIAN ANDERSON: Outdoor shows like the Hollywood Bowl, for instance — very iconic gig. Probably the most widely seen visual of the Wall of Sound, I would argue, came out of that show. There's a very beautiful technical drawing, kind of a schematic, that Mary Ann Mayer created of the sound system at that show. That was included in one of the newsletters that went out that year to the fans. That rig was huge.
JESSE: The Hollywood Bowl show was the debut of one of the Wall of Sound’s lesser remembered components, though it’s right there in the photos and the poster. The Wall of Sound was actually six different sound systems — one for each of the instruments, and one for the vocals, though those weren’t its only components. In our “Unbroken Chain” episode, we discussed the debut of the vocal cluster in May, and in our “Loose Lucy” episode, we got into Phil Lesh’s new Mission Control bass, itself considered part of the system. Thanks to David Gans, we’ve got more from his 1991 interview with Owsley Stanley, which you can read in his book, Conversations with the Dead.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: It was all from the same design basically worked out with [Ron] Wickersham and [John] Curl . We split up all the jobs: One guy made this, one guy [made that], and I ran right through the development of the small system for the piano. That was my compartment in those days.
JESSE: For the early part of 1974, Owsley spent his time devising a special piano system for Keith Godchaux, using an untested new technology. Crew member Richie Pechner helped fabricate many of the speakers for the Wall.
RICHIE PECHNER: I was one of the people that didn't think it was a great idea. [laughs] Once again, Bear knew a better way. His idea was he was going to use this new product, Hexcel — this laminated aluminum panel, lightweight. One of the things that became obvious was the Wall of Sound system was very heavy. Every part of it — the wooden cabinets were heavy, the center cluster was heavy. It was heavy equipment. Bear figured out that he could make a piano cluster. We always had a piano system, but it was just stacked like it was pre-Wall of Sound, like in the Boston [12/73] pictures. So, he wanted to consolidate that into cabinets like the center cluster, like the vocal PA. Which sounded like a great idea, but he wanted to go down this road of this new composite material because it was new technology… blah blah blah, whatever. But there had been no experimenting with the material, in terms of putting speakers in it and using it as the cabinet. So he went down this road and had this thing made, and it took months. It was going to be ready way before then, never was. Then, finally, he gets it ready for the Hollywood Bowl show. He puts it up and we're plugging it in and everything and — what a great idea! [chuckles] It was too tinny. It sounded a little tinny, because the cabinet was made out of metal.
JESSE: Bear.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: That was more high tech. The other one was the one Sparky Raizene built. He built it out of wood. It worked — it didn't have the efficiency that a rigid cabinet had, but [based] on its size, we probably would have had a hell of a time moving it.
RICHIE PECHNER: The center cluster, even though it had this three-quarter inch square tubing, an iron frame inside, it was all open, and it was encased in wood. The sides and the back were wood, so you still had that warm, wood reverb coming out of the back of the cabinet. But the piano cluster that Bear made was all metal. I think it was probably a fatal flaw from the get-go, but nobody knew it. And he certainly didn't believe it. I can't remember how many thousands of dollars [were spent], but that was it.
JESSE: Well, you know, research and development and all.
RICHIE PECHNER: Truly, if it was R&D, he would have made a small cabinet and tested it.
JESSE: Yeah, prob’ly. Bear’s piano system was only used at the Hollywood Bowl, gone by the time they headed east later that week. While we’re on the topic of experiments that didn’t totally work out, let’s call back to what Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay told us about the phase-canceling microphones that allowed the band to sing without monitor wedges in front of them.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: We had these things called phase-canceling microphones — because the sound was so huge, that things would start feeding back in the monitors. That’s why we had these phase-canceling microphones, but they sounded like crap. I hated it. I just hated the sound of those mics. They just squeezed all of the life out of the vocal, all of the tonality of the vocal. That's my opinion. But it was hard, that was a hard thing.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: It was a problem with the differentials. We eventually figured out the problem with the differential was that a great deal of the lower frequency information from the human voice is radiated by the chest itself. So you're singing on a microphone that you're on; the other microphone, which is down here, is getting powerful radiation from the vocal box and from the chest. So not only you're getting the vocal radiation out of your mouth and from the head cavities, but you're getting a similar amount at the same phase into the differential microphone, and it is canceling the power in the bottom of the voice. It comes out thin, it’s variable to compensate for, it's unpredictable — because the microphones were differential all the time.
JESSE: D’oh, sorry Donna! Bear kinda messed that one up. However, if you are thinking of constructing a genuine phase-canceling Wall of Sound, or even a genuine hedgerow of sound, we offer the following from its designer.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: It wasn't until the whole system had passed into history… I'm sitting there one day with one of the mics—I still think I have a couple of them—and I'm looking at it, and all of a sudden, I realized what was missing, I know how to make them differential.
JESSE: Oh yeah?
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: Instead of having a single differential summing amplifier, which is fed the signal mic and the ambient mic, all the time differentially, you need two summing networks. You need to split the signal mic and split the ambient mic.
JESSE: Personally, I just would’ve turned them upside down, but that’s probably why I don’t work for Alembic. But Bear did a little bit of myth-busting about the phase-canceling microphones that we’re going to include here because it corrects an inaccuracy.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: A lot of people thought the differential microphones were to control feedback. They weren't. The system didn't feed back, even with an omni mic. They were to get rid of leakage.
JESSE: Which is a subtly different but very real problem.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: When people weren't singing in the microphone, the microphone would get so much instrument sound that the the main PA would be driven almost to clipping with just that, with just leakage. There was no room. So if one guy wasn't singing and the other guy was, unless those mics were dropped out, you couldn't hear it — you couldn't hear anything! It was just all this blegh noise, leakage. Because everything was behind the band or going directly into the mics.
JESSE: Hence the phase-cancelers. It was a problem that Dan Healy would solve later with gates, triggered by floor mats in front of the microphones, but they weren’t there yet. We’ll return to the Wall of Sound’s adventures on the East Coast next time. But, by the time they hit Hartford on July 31st, now Dave’s Picks 2, Scarlet Begonias regularly approaching a libertine eight minutes long, and it opened a show for the first time.
Scarlet, then Fire
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Dave’s Picks 2, 7/31/74] (1:38-1:53)
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Musically, it blows my mind every time. It ends with one of the greatest little hooks that Jerry ever wrote. On the album, that hook fades it out. Whereas—here’s what I love at the Dead—when you see the song live with that hook, then it goes into that big, big jam.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Dave’s Picks 2, 7/31/74] (3:49-4:29)
JESSE: I’m a fan of the vocalizing Donna Jean does on these versions, something she did on the album. Like when Pigpen would front the band, I think it allowed them to get to a different space than they did otherwise. This Hartford version we’re listening to is just eight minutes, but potent.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Mid-’74, when they started really stretching it out, those to me are my favorite versions of “Scarlet Begonias.”
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Dave’s Picks 2, 7/31/74] (5:36-6:06)
DAVID LEMIEUX: By August, in Europe and then in October, they're really stretching it. It's like they want somewhere to bring this song.
JESSE: Here’s some of the October 19th version from Winterland.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [The Grateful Dead Movie OST, 10/19/74] (9:00-9:35) - [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: Listen to those tremendous versions from Winterland ‘74. There's a great one in October, in The Grateful Dead Movie, where it's “Scarlet” into a nice big long jam. [Mickey hasn’t] written “Fire [on the Mountain]” yet… they haven't brought “Fire” to the band yet.
JESSE: I’m not entirely positive, but I think “Fire On the Mountain”’s first draft might actually have come a few months before “Scarlet Begonias.” It was written at Mickey Hart’s ranch in Novato as fires in the nearby hills encroached. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to dig deeper down the line, but—thanks to Deadcast correspondent Dave Perlis, working on a new book titled Morning In Marin, great title—I think those nearby fires occurred in September 1973, though the song would take a few iterations to get to the Dead. “Scarlet Begonias” was its own special conversation in 1974 — one drummer, no other song attached. You can watch the great October 19th version from Winterland on the bonus disc of The Grateful Dead Movie.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [The Grateful Dead Movie OST, 10/19/74] (10:35-10:58) - [YouTube]
JESSE: They didn’t play it during their four isolated shows in 1975, but “Scarlet Begonias” was in the repertoire when they returned in June 1976 and never left. There was one microscopic addition to the song when it came back. See if you can hear it.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [June 1976, 6/11/76] (1:56-2:15)
JESSE: There was a new word in there, “once in a while you get shown the light” changes to “once in a while you can get shown the light…” There was also the more macroscopic change of having a second drummer. David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The ones in 1976 as well, because it's the same thing where they don't have “Fire” yet. So, they had nowhere to bring it. If you listen to one from Detroit, October 3rd 1976, Cobo [Arena], they bring that jam to places that are just unreal, and then they lock into a groove that's unlike anything they ever did.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 10/3/76] (10:26-10:56) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That’s on the 30 Trips Around the Sun box set. Though it didn’t make it to the final album, the Dead recorded “Fire On the Mountain” for Terrapin Station in early 1977, released on the Beyond Description box set.
AUDIO: “Fire On the Mountain” (Studio Outtake) [Beyond Description] (1:07-1:28) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: Finally, in March of 1977, “Fire On the Mountain” made its appearance, instantly joined with “Scarlet Begonias.” A marriage made in heaven. It’s just perfect.
JESSE: When they paired “Scarlet Begonias” and “Fire On the Mountain,” “Fire On the Mountain” wasn’t only new to the Dead repertoire via several evolutions we’ll save for another day, but the drummers had spent time tightening their groove at the behest of producer Keith Olsen. That tightness and newness seemed to reflect backwards and reinvent “Scarlet Begonias” in the spring of 1977, as well. Here’s the beginning of what’s perhaps the most famous single performance of any Dead tune, from Cornell ‘77. Go Phil, go.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Cornell 5/8/77, 5/8/77] (1:30-1:42) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Starting in spring 1977, the jam became an almost independent vehicle of its own.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I've always looked at “Scarlet”/“Fire” as three songs: “Scarlet,” “Fire,” and then the jam in-between, because it's unique every time, in the moment. “Scarlet”s can run nine, 10, 11, 12 minutes long, and then you get the “Fire on the Mountain” after that.
JESSE: One of my favorite things about the Cornell version is the almost baroque variation Keith Godchaux plays on the piano under the final verse, which turns into a cool anticipatory flourish as they head into the jam. It sounds like a part of the song, but he never played it like this before or after.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Cornell 5/8/77, 5/8/77] (6:35-6:58) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The addition of “Fire On the Mountain” didn’t change anything about the “Scarlet Begonias” jam except its intention. Musicologist Shaugn O’Donnell.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: You can go right from the end of “Scarlet” to [“Fire”], and I think part of that is why it can be as big as they want it to be — because there's no real work to travel to the place, harmonically. You don't have to get to a new location, and you don't even have to reinterpret the chord you're ending on — it's a B, and you're in B Mixolydian, and that's where you are. So, you're starting at the place where you're getting to, and you're completely freed up. There's no worries. You just have to be inventive with the language in that musical space. And so there's a lot of relaxation — it's automatically fun. There's no stress.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Cornell 5/8/77, 5/8/77] (9:14-9:44) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: There's something about the anticipation of arrival there that the audience brings to it. It could easily become kind of a self-indulgent end jam that then gets rip-corded at some point, because there's nowhere to go. But because it has a destination, you can direct it there as soon or as long as you want.
JESSE: Part of what makes the “Scarlet Begonias” jam so powerful, I think, is the way it not just illustrates, but has the potential to activate the kinds of crazy inversions suggested by the lyrics. Michael Kaler teaches at the University of Toronto Mississauga, holds Ph.Ds in religious studies and ethnomusicology, and is the author of the fabulous new book from Duke University Press titled Get Shown the Light: Improvisation and Transcendence in the Music of the Grateful Dead.
MICHAEL KALER: The William James definition of religious experience, or one of its four aspects of religious experience, is the passivity of the recipient. He defines religious experiences as involving ineffability. You can’t really accurately describe it. A noetic aspect, the feeling that you’ve learned something. It’s transitory, it doesn’t last forever. And the recipient is to some degree passive — you can’t actively generate it. They can put themselves in a good condition for it, but ultimately, it's not up to them whether it comes down. So that [passivity] in the title Get Shown the Light I think is appropriate for that.
JESSE: I’d never thought about the passive voice at that point in “Scarlet Begonias,” nor had I noticed, for that matter, that it turns active in the second part of the phrase. That “if” in “if you look at it right” is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, as they say.
MICHAEL KALER: You can set up favorable conditions for getting shown the light; it's not totally a spontaneous, random thing all the time. Although I guess it can be, sometimes. But with the Dead, I definitely think they developed their own improvisational approach to rock music as a way of setting up the conditions for the sorts of experiences that they had at the Acid Tests. But I don't think they ever felt that they could control it. They were like: we can set the table, and then if the guest shows up, that's awesome, the table’s set. But it doesn't compel the guests to show up.
JESSE: One aspect of the Grateful Dead experience shared by the musicians and audience, I think, is what Michael is describing — creating the conditions for some kind of light to arrive. The Dead had different strategies for this.
MICHAEL KALER: It would fit into what I call it the book like dance tunes or groove tunes, where the improvisation is set up to enable an audience to keep dancing and sort of keep grooving — as opposed to really going out there, like in “The Other One” or “Playing in the Band” or “Dark Star” or something like that.
JESSE: They’re different ways of inviting transcendent experiences. One easy trick—and by easy, I mean not easy at all—is to make the musicians and audience forget about everything else and just dance. But “Scarlet Begonias” jams often manage the pretty amazing feat of staying danceable while bending and warping before resolving into “Fire On the Mountain” — which I imagine might also translate unconsciously to anybody dancing to it as its rhythm threatens to break open. It’s a musical tension that I think pairs pretty magically with Hunter’s lyrics to make “Scarlet Begonias” function like very few other dance tunes in the Dead’s songbook, getting far afield without losing a pulse, like this 1983 version on Dick’s Picks 6.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Dick’s Picks 6, 10/14/83] (11:52-12:18) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: When we do the song timings of “Scarlet”/“Fire” for instance, on a Dead CD, the “Fire On the Mountain” index doesn't usually begin until we actually hear Phil kicking into Fire On the Mountain.”
JESSE: On the Chicago ‘77 version, that starts exactly here.
AUDIO: “Fire On the Mountain” [May 1977, 5/13/77] (0:00-0:13)
JESSE: And once through “Fire On the Mountain”…
DAVID LEMIEUX: And they'd end “Fire” with the ending of “Scarlet Begonias,” coming all the way around. I used to trade a lot of tapes with people who labeled their tapes “Scarlet”/“Fire” and back into “Scarlet,” because they go back into that closing hook, that closing riff. I didn't label my tapes that way, but it was very cool that they did that.
AUDIO: “Fire on the Mountain” [Cornell 5/8/77, 5/8/77] (14:30-14:58) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: For the next 18 years, “Scarlet Begonias” into “Fire On the Mountain” was of the most awaited of the band’s second half set-pieces, a jam that could get far out without ever losing its fundamental danceability and good vibes. The Cornell ‘77 version got love from a great audience tape but became infamous when an excellent Betty Cantor soundboard went into circulation in the ‘80s. We’re going to shout out a few classic versions, but this is how and why “Scarlet Begonias” might be considered a Grateful Dead-style greatest hit — not because it’s a single song that people love, but because it’s got tons of versions with infinite shades and meanings. We’ll hold “Fire On the Mountain” stories for another day. We know you’ve got ‘em.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Dave’s Picks 8, 11/30/80] (0:52-1:04)
JESSE: New Yorker writer Nick Paumgarten is connected to a certain version of the song, but I have to assume that—like “Scarlet Begonias” itself—there are lots of other variations on this story to be found with other versions.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: I'm known for liking the Fox Theater 11/30/80 one. I think it’s tremendous. To me, it’s my favorite, and it’s better than all comers. And I know that some people think otherwise.
CARL SHOWALTER [Fargo]: I'm not gonna debate you, Jerry.
JERRY LUNDEGAARD [Fargo]: Okay.
CARL SHOWALTER [Fargo]: I'm not gonna sit here and debate.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: I think the propulsive energy of it, the “Scarlet” right out of the gate, and then the big solo is great.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Dave’s Picks 8, 11/30/80] (8:09-8:39)
NICK PAUMGARTEN: The transition from “Scarlet” into “Fire” is just big and busy. And they turn on a dime, which they rarely did in the two-drummer era.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Dave’s Picks 8, 11/30/80] (11:01-11:34)
JESSE: It’s now on Dave’s Picks 8.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: The Fox’s Den… it was a cult that existed at the prep school I went to, St. Paul's, New Hampshire. I guess a student there before my time had gone to see the show and had a tape of it, and it became this sort of talismanic, worshiped tape that people would listen to. Very quickly, some students—in the way that school boys will do—built up a little set of rules around it, or so-called commandments. The Four Commandments, one of which was: “Thou shall not press stop, pause, fast forward, rewind during the transition.”
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Dave’s Picks 8, 11/30/80] (11:38-11:44)
AUDIO: “Fire On the Mountain” [Dave’s Picks 8, 11/30/80] (0:00-0:13)
NICK PAUMGARTEN: You had to listen to it every year on that date. I think there was something about having to smoke weed whenever you listened to it. It was written out, like stenciled on a poster board. And it was like this: every year, the Fox’s Den was the [room of the] Keeper of the Fox, the earliest-generation version of this audience tape recorded by Dr. Bob Wagner. And that person was the Keeper of the Fox’s Den, and it was all kind of samizdat, sort of done under the radar against the rules of the school, and passed down every year from graduating seniors to the up-and-coming head who was most deserving of being the Keeper of the Fox’s Den.
JESSE: There must be dozens of equivalent cults out there, a multiverse of Fox’s Dens for different “Scarlet”s.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: It's one of those Dead songs that sort of sounds different every time. There's this idea that the Grateful Dead are improvising everything and it's never the same twice, no show is alike. But, frankly, a lot of the songs always sound more or less alike. I mean, they're obviously playing freely, but they have their parts and it has a certain feeling. “Scarlet” is the song [that] sometimes [has] that so-called Jamaican feel that Garcia is writing about in those notes, that really comes out — it's really stop-and-go, a real reggae thing, using the percussion to emphasize that. Other times, it has this sort of driving majestic thing, sometimes fast or sometimes slow. It has a lot of different moods.
JESSE: Our buddy Nick Rubin, DJ Rubes from The Bunny Radio and WTJU in Charlottesville, left us this story that’s a good reminder of why “Scarlet Begonias” is a pretty good introduction to the Dead.
NICK RUBIN: In 1984, I was living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I was a sophomore on the JV soccer team at my high school, and on the bus to one of our games I was sitting next to my friend Steve Smith, who was listening to something on his Walkman. When I asked him what he was listening to, he said, “The Grateful Dead.” Now, earlier that summer, I was at a tennis tournament, and this kid named Dan Benthal and I were talking about music and having a great time. He asked me about the Dead, and I said, “Well, they’re heavy metal, right?” Because I didn’t know — I thought they were metal because of the skeletons and stuff. He said, “No, they’re happy music!” And I was like, okay… So, when Steve said the Grateful Dead, I asked him if I could listen to it. And he gave me his headphones in the middle of the 4/13/84 “Scarlet”/“Fire” at Hampton Roads.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [4/13/84] (9:33-9:53)
NICK RUBIN: Now, I didn't realize this, but I had heard the Grateful Dead — I had heard “Truckin’” on the radio, I had heard “Casey Jones.” But I'd never heard “Scarlet Begonias.” And when I put on those headphones, I thought: Oh my god, it is happy music. And that was the beginning of my love affair with the Grateful Dead. It all started on the soccer bus on some back road in North Carolina.
JESSE: Not long after that performance, in 1984, “Scarlet Begonias” began a brief period where it found destinations other than “Fire On the Mountain,” notably “Touch of Grey” at first. Here’s how it sounded in Eugene in 1984, exactly seven years after the Cornell ‘77 version.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [5/8/84] (10:50-11:02)
AUDIO: “Touch of Grey” [5/8/84] (0:00-0:22)
JESSE: “Fire On the Mountain” wasn’t permanently dislodged, but at least once or twice for the next half-dozen years, “Scarlet Begonias” would find alternate routes. We’ve posted a link to the “Scarlet Begonias” page at JerryBase, where you can see every version and where they went. We know a lot happened in the later ‘80s, but we’re going to jump forward a taste here. People like spring ‘77, but other heads might also point you to spring 1990.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [So Many Roads: 1965-1995, 3/22/90] (0:45-1:08) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Steve Silberman was one of the producers of the So Many Roads box set, which remains one of the greatest five-disc condensations of the band’s entire career. He and his co-producers didn’t choose a classic ‘70s version, or even a classic ‘80s version, but went with one from the newly blossoming MIDI period in 1990.
STEVE SILBERMAN: Listen to the “Scarlet”/“Fire” from Copps Coliseum. Dick Latvala personally gave that track to me to put onto So Many Roads. And the way that he did it was ideal: we were at the Fillmore, and it was a Dick Latvala night at the Fillmore. He looks at me and he’s like: “This is the ‘Scarlet’/‘Fire’ that you should put on the box set.” And it was a heavily MIDI-ed out “Scarlet”/“Fire.” It’s unbelievable! It swings like mad.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [So Many Roads: 1965-1995, 3/22/90] (6:29-7:01) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
Begonias Are Free
JESSE: While “Scarlet Begonias” probably isn’t the most covered Dead song, it’s perhaps the most famous Dead cover. From Vampire Weekend, Chris Tomson.
CHRIS TOMSON: My first thought about “Scarlet Begonias” is I think it's probably the first Dead song I ever heard — but it was the Sublime version.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Sublime, 40oz. to Freedom] (0:15-0:37) - [Spotify]
CHRIS TOMSON: Growing up in central New Jersey, in the ‘90s, the Dead were present to some extent. My dad had a very classic record collection: Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty were in there, but he was more of an Allmans guy, if I had to say. But Sublime was massive [with] my peers at school. I feel like I heard “Scarlet Begonias” and was like, “Oh, that’s a cool song.” And then someone went, “Oh, yeah, that’s a Dead cover.” And then I was like, “Oh yeah, of course,” like I knew what I was talking about.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Sublime, 40oz. to Freedom] (1:53-2:23) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Charming. Released on 40oz. to Freedom in 1992, the album has gone at least double-platinum in the old-school record industry sense. There are currently two versions of Sublime touring, and “Scarlet Begonias” remains in their repertoire. Of course, it’s a staple of Dead-leaning bands everywhere.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Phish, 12/2/83] (6:05-6:35)
JESSE: That was Phish, performing it at one of their very first shows, in 1983. A while back, I interviewed guitarist Trey Anastasio for the Osiris podcast Alive Again. We talked a bit about the Dead, too, and you can hear more of that in our “Playing Dead” episodes. Phish have a long and complex relationship with the Dead’s music, a starting point on a long journey, one of several acts that played important parts in their formation.
TREY ANASTASIO: When we started, the Dead played in the gym that year, in 1983 — which is 10 feet from wherever our first show was. Harris Millis [dining hall at University of Vermont] is, I could jump out and touch the door of Patrick Gym where the Dead played in 1983, months before our shows. We were 18, and the Dead were the band that played in the gym. They played the most iconic version of “Scarlet”/“Fire” ever played by that band in that gym. Go listen to it. I like the one from the audience, better than the soundboard.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [4/13/83] (6:29-7:01)
TREY ANASTASIO: It's the best guitar playing I've ever heard. It was the best guitar playing ever. And every 18-year old is gonna play [the songs of] the band that played in the gym — that's how you start. The other band that played in 1983 in the gym was Talking Heads. I was there in the 10th row, watching Talking Heads — with Tina, real Talking Heads. And we played a Talking Heads song. That's okay. The Beatles played covers, Bob Marley played covers, everybody plays covers when they're 18. And you can play covers throughout your career. But the work of starting to find your own voice as an original artist begins, then. Or, you're missing an investment [by] making your economy and your life on a previous generation’s youth.
JESSE: Phish charted their own path pretty quickly and stopped playing Dead tunes within three years of their formation, but internalized the vocabulary and syntax. By contrast, that’s not at all how Vampire Weekend started. Drummer Chris Tomson had listened closely to bands like the Dead and Phish, but hadn’t exactly played it.
CHRIS TOMSON: Funnily, I didn't actually really play drums before I ended up in Vampire Weekend. I had fooled around half-jokingly and played the drum beat for “Chameleon” 20 times in high school, the Herbie Hancock song. We couldn't find a drummer when Vampire Weekend was starting. I was supposed to be the guitarist. And from that “Chameleon” experience, I was just like, “Oh, well, I play drums.” And then I’ve sort of been figuring it out ever since.
AUDIO: “Connect” [Vampire Weekend, Only God Was Above Us] (0:40-0:51) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was “Connect,” from the brand-new Vampire Weekend album, Only God Was Above Us. Jumping over the cover band phase thanks to Ezra Koenig’s songwriting, they would eventually work their way backwards into playing Dead covers.
CHRIS TOMSON: Like a lot of people, Ezra Koenig, our songwriter, I don’t think he ever hated the Dead or anything, but he wasn’t into it.
JESSE: Condensing a bunch of the story, Ezra Koenig saw the California Dead band with the very clever name Richard Pictures.
CHRIS TOMSON: I think feeling that extra level to whatever that the magic of the Dead atmosphere is, I think seeing Richard Pictures play at Old Towne Pub in Pasadena—a very specific bar—there was a bit of an aha moment—
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Cornell 5/8/77, 5/8/77] (3:35-3:44) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
CHRIS TOMSON: — for Ezra that was like: this is so awesome. How can we foster this relationship? How can we foster this attitude when people are coming to a show, not knowing what to expect and really excited?
JESSE: Without getting too heavy-handed about it, I’d suggest that part of what Ezra caught was the same “happy music” message that DJ Rubes picked up on during his school trip in 1984, coded in a deep way into “Scarlet Begonias.” We’ll let another podcast go through Vampire Weekend’s tours show by show, but it’s resulted in lots of variations showing up in the band’s setlists and taking themselves seriously as a living, breathing band that might change with the times.
CHRIS TOMSON: I have no problem with playing to a click track, so I'm not in any way speaking ill of anyone that plays to click track. But I do think that for Vampire Weekend to be the size we're at, I do feel like we've kind of grandfathered in some weird pre-algorithm notions of what being a band is, and what being a band could be. To play Madison Square Garden largely just, like, counting in, and ‘maybe this is gonna be this is gonna be faster than yesterday's performance of the song,’ I don't know… ‘my heart rate’s going a little faster, so this one's gonna be faster, too.’
JESSE: A few Dead covers have popped up in their sets, including a bit of “Cumberland Blues” as part of their Cocaine Cowboys corn-hole medley, as well as this sweet performance of “Peggy-O” on SiriusXM recently, with Chris on guitar, and Amber Coffman duetting with Ezra Koenig.
AUDIO: “Peggy-O” [Vampire Weekend ft. Amber Coffman, 4/24] (0:38-1:06) - [YouTube]
JESSE: But the Dead’s biggest influence on Vampire Weekend might be invisible.
CHRIS TOMSON: In the COVID era, the prior COVID era, a lot of ideas were flying around, one of which was someone in Bobby’s camp—Bob Weir—got in touch with us, Vampire Weekend, and was like, “Hey, we're probably gonna do these Ace 50th anniversary shows. We were thinking maybe you guys could be the band. Bob plays with you, maybe there’s a joint set.” It was a nebulous idea, but still, with a lot of time on our hands, Chris, Ezra and I spent a good month or two in this studio, just playing Ace. Trying to learn all the songs, really get into the parts. Hearing Ezra sing “Greatest Story Ever Told,” like the “Moses came riding up on a quasar” — hearing Exra sing that was a very treasured memory for me.
JESSE: We’re gonna have to imagine that one for now.
AUDIO: “Greatest Story Ever Told” [Ace] (0:00-0:15) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
CHRIS TOMSON: That was the first real, very specific [experience I had of] getting into Kreutzmann mode. And like, whatever, the plans change — it just sort of didn't happen. But I feel like playing Ace definitely got me a little closer to sort of seeing some of his tics and a little bit more of where he was coming from in that moment.
JESSE: With some Kreutzmann vocabulary in hand, it also contributed to the formation of a fun new band. Along with guitarist Dave Harrington of Darkside and Alex Bleeker of Real Estate, Chris is now the third member of Taper’s Choice we’ve featured on the Deadcast.
AUDIO: “Walking Around (outro)” [Taper’s Choice, The History of Taper’s Choice Volume One (Taper’s Choice)] (0:00-0:22) - [Bandcamp]
JESSE: That was the “Walking Around (outro)” from The History of Taper’s Choice Volume One (Taper’s Choice).
CHRIS TOMSON: The Taper’s thing is exactly what I dreamt about doing when I was 16. I think that it feels very fun and fresh, accessing that part of myself.
AUDIO: “Walking Around (outro)” [Taper’s Choice, The History of Taper’s Choice Volume One (Taper’s Choice)] (1:47-2:13) - [Bandcamp]
JESSE: The Dead’s influence isn’t only wide, but deep. We’ve posted links to both Vampire Weekend and Taper’s Choice at dead.net/deadcast. It’s probably easier to hear the Dead in the latter. But it’s been especially fun hearing Chris talk about the Dead precisely because Vampire Weekend doesn’t sound too much like them at first listen. For young musicians navigating the world together and making creative choices, the Dead are both a veritable school of music unto themselves, but also a not-exactly-practical model of the endless microscopic choices made by a group of friends also navigating the world together.
CHRIS TOMSON: The Dead will forever be the best case study of what a band could be or should be. As a high schooler in ‘99, and I think for many people [who are] teenagers now in 2024, having this distinct 30-year body of work to track, to dig into, to find the live debuts. How did the song change? The music's good, which makes it all work. But if you like music history and sort of the nuts and bolts, the Dead are just far and away [the best]. Any way you want to look, any way you want to turn the cube and investigate, the Dead have a great storyline.
JESSE: Let’s spin that cube backwards one more time, back to “Scarlet Begonias” a week after the Dead first played it, and feel all the jams yet to come as we go back to CBS Studios and move through the song piece by piece. Bill the Drummer, if you will…
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Drums, From the Mars Hotel] (0:05-0:17) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Garcia lead vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (0:17-0:26) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Organ, From the Mars Hotel] (0:28-0:40) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Weir guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (0:40-0:57) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Garcia acoustic guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (0:57-1:10) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Bass, From the Mars Hotel] (1:10-1:27) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Piano, From the Mars Hotel] (1:26-1:44) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Background vocals, From the Mars Hotel] (1:43-2:01) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Harpsichord, From the Mars Hotel] (1:59-2:15) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Garcia Roland synth, From the Mars Hotel] (2:18-2:40) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [K. Godchaux Roland synth, From the Mars Hotel] (2:40-3:10) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Background vocals, From the Mars Hotel] (3:11-3:22) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Cowbell, From the Mars Hotel] (3:22-3:38) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Conga, From the Mars Hotel] (3:40-3:53) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Background vocals, From the Mars Hotel] (3:50-4:08) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Garcia guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (4:06-4:33) - [dead.net]