Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 9, Episode 8
From the Mars Hotel 50: Ship of Fools
Archival interviews:
- David Grisman, by Jesse Jarnow, Aquarium Drunkard, 2023.
- Robert Hunter, by Monte Dym, 12/29/77.
- Dick Latvala, by George Jodaitis, “Grateful Radio,” WCUW, 3/20/99.
- Phil Lesh, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 7/30/81.
- Bob Weir, A Look Back, Grateful Dead Movie DVD, 10/74
- Bill Kreutzmann, A Look Back, Grateful Dead Movie DVD 10/74
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [From the Mars Hotel] (0:10-0:46) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Well, here we are at the end of From the Mars Hotel, side 2, track 4, “Ship of Fools.” Here’s how Phil Lesh introduced it on June 28th, 1974 at the Boston Garden, now Dick’s Picks 12.
PHIL LESH [6/28/74]: Okay, okay, okay, okay! Now, if you’ll all just shut up a second, we’ll play a quiet, tender, meaningful, sympathetic, heavy-duty ballad — in the key of B-flat…
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I'm a big fan of “Ship of Fools.” It's another unique song in the Dead's canon where it's just just a perfect little song.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [From the Mars Hotel] (0:47-1:21) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Ship of Fools” was debuted in February 1974, almost certainly written with these album sessions in mind.
DAVID LEMIEUX: When Jerry really nailed that solo, when it ripped, it was outstanding.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [From the Mars Hotel] (4:50-5:09) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: When that song was played well… boy, was it good. It was always in a weird slot, which is kind of the second, third or fourth song of the second set, because it didn't come out of anything, it didn't go into anything. It was just kind of one of these songs that was there. And there's not a lot of those in the Grateful Dead second sets: most songs go into something. “Scarlet [Begonias]” goes into “Fire [on the Mountain]”; “Crazy Fingers” goes into “Playing in the Band”; “Uncle John’s [Band]” goes into “Drums.” I've heard some “Ship of Fools”s that have been the highlight of a second set. I think it also would have worked as a first set song very well, because it's a nice little six-minute standalone song.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [From the Mars Hotel] (2:41-2:58) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The tender, meaningful, sympathetic, heavy-duty ballad in the key of B-flat came to occupy a singular place in the Dead’s songbook. It might not be one of Garcia and Hunter’s most famous songs, but it might be one of their best, and unquestionably serves as a perfect springboard to discuss the Grateful Dead in late 1974 as they prepared to retire from the road.
Donna Jean
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [From the Mars Hotel] (2:02-2:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Let’s pause there. Before we embark fully into “Ship of Fools,” we’re going to welcome back one of the voices we just heard, and who we haven’t heard nearly enough from this season, to get her perspective on From the Mars Hotel. I will never ever—ever—get sick of making the following greeting: will you welcome please, on the vocals, Mrs. Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: There's something I want to talk about that I haven't heard people talk about: it’s Ugly Rumors From the Mars Hotel. That's all we ever called it, was Ugly Rumors From the Mars Hotel. We always called it the whole title, but I don’t see that people do that anymore. And the songs that were on that are just incredibly beautiful songs. Imagine hearing “Scarlet Begonias” for the first time in rehearsal… it’s like, what? All of these songs, they're just classics and will remain that way I’m sure, for 100 years or more. Just beautiful songs — “China Doll” and “Unbroken Chain”... ah, beautiful. “Ship of Fools.” Just beautiful songs.
JESSE: Sometime in 1973, the band started practicing at their equipment warehouse in San Rafael.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: I remember hearing “Scarlet Begonias” at Front Street. That's where we would rehearse first of all, and then eventually became a full-blown studio.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [From the Mars Hotel] (1:37-2:05) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: We’ve been referencing back this season to Jerry Garcia’s song-by-song description of Ugly Rumors From the Mars Hotel, written just before they entered the studio. It included eight songs, just like the final album. Not on the list, though, was “Loose Lucy.” In its place was something noted as “DONNA’S SONG - gospel flavor.”
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: I don't remember that at all. I have no idea what that song could be.
JESSE: There are a few potential candidates on the Keith and Donna album that they made the next year. Oh, well. We talked about some other parts of Mars Hotel, though. We’ll send this next bit out to listener Jenny Boylan. Donna agrees with you.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: One of my favorite things that Keith did on Mars Hotel was “Unbroken Chain.” It is just beautiful what he does in that song. It’s just fluid and just gorgeous to me.
AUDIO: “Unbroken Chain” [Piano, From the Mars Hotel] (5:34-6:10) - [dead.net]
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: And I remember Rob Barraco saying that when he heard Keith’s playing on [“Unbroken Chain”], he had been, until that point, basically an organ player — and that's when he kind of turned to the piano.
AUDIO: “Unbroken Chain” [Piano, From the Mars Hotel] (2:18-2:35) - [dead.net]
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: Here's another little aside: Keith hated the song “Money Money.”
AUDIO: “Money Money” [From the Mars Hotel] (3:34-3:53) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: He just hated it. He thought it was so trite. That was one of the things he complained about.
JESSE: What didn’t he like?
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: I think the lyrics, just the whole concept of the song. He just didn't like it.
JESSE: Since it came up, what did you think about having to sing “Money Money”?
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: Well, I thought it was a fun song to sing. And I don't know that I thought much more about it than it was just fun to sing. It was a fun song. It was upbeat, and it was one of Bobby's tunes that he really liked. So, it was fine, it was fine for me. I didn't have any qualms about it.
JESSE: Sarah Fulcher joined Donna at the mic for that tune.
AUDIO: “Money Money” [Background Vocals, From the Mars Hotel] (0:37-0:56)
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: On “Money Money,” yes, [Sarah] was there for that one song. That was fun singing with her, too, because of course I was in a boy band, basically. [chuckles] So, to get to sing with her was fun.
JESSE: On the back cover, the band played the pun of the “Ugly Roomers” with help of Mouse and Kelley, who drew on top of Andy Leonard’s photo of the band posed in the lobby of the nearby Cadillac Hotel.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: Something I noticed today was, on the back where they have the cartoon characters of us — they are all dressed up in these weird things, and I'm, like, Earth Mother or something. I don't have anything weird, except—I had never noticed this before—that right below the hem of my dress is some kind of green fish-like something that I'd never noticed. Was that a foot? Keith obviously had scales all over him… did that mean that I had scales underneath my clothes? I don’t know. It struck me as funny that I had never noticed that before. What is that?! What is that under my dress? What did they mean that to be, anyway? The little baby from the back of the album that I’m holding is now 50… that just blows my mind.
JESSE: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound year was tough for Donna Jean, in part because of having a newborn, and in part because of the Wall of Sound itself.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: For me, just the onstage sound was so loud, and profound. And then combined with the Wall of Sound as well as that, I don’t know how I got through it. Hearing was always just a major issue. I mean, I can’t even stress strong[ly] enough how hard that was. You can’t hear that well because of all the sound that’s around. But the thin little voice that was coming out anyway was so puny… it was not fun. That wasn’t fun. But the band was fun, and the music was great.
JESSE: Part of the Dead’s set-up since early 1973 were the phase-canceling microphones designed by Owsley Stanley. We discussed those microphones’ flaws with some archival audio from both Bear and Donna during our “Scarlet Begonias” episode, but we’ll let Donna get in the last word on the phase-canceling mics.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: The Wall of Sound was huge. Of course, there's so much music coming off the stage, so much sound, that a lot of times we'd get feedback in the vocal mics. And this was supposed to be something that took care of that. But the whole thing about the phase-canceling mics is that it canceled out half of the vocal frequencies, which complete a tone. They were toneless, thin and dull, and completely uninspiring — and I hated them. It only captured a small amount of the frequencies in the human voice. And it was uninspiring and just toneless, is what I would say. I hated those things.
JESSE: Besides the vocals, did the rest of the Wall of Sound sound good from where you were?
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: Well, yeah! Oh my gosh. I mean, how can I complain? I was singing with my favorite band in the whole world, and my favorite music in the whole world.
JESSE: We’ll have tons more with Donna Jean today, but we’ll use that paradox of the Wall of Sound’s puny microphones to pivot us into the song at hand — “Ship of Fools.”
“Ship of Fools”
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [From the Mars Hotel] (3:35-3:54) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The Grateful Dead’s world was becoming untenable, as we heard in our episode about “Money Money,” with the band’s brief Europe ‘74 tour containing both unsettling moments but also inspired music, sometimes connected to one another. As we’ve mentioned, sometime in late 1973 or early 1974, Robert Hunter decamped to England. In our bonus episode on Tales of the Great Rum Runners, we spoke with guitarist John Perry, who went on to co-found the Only Ones and played with Hunter in that period.
JOHN PERRY: Some time after the band set up their own label, I think [Hunter] started to find the mechanics of group politics tiresome. And it may have been that the move to England was a move away from too much politics.
JESSE: Here’s how Hunter himself contextualized “Ship of Fools” to Monte Dym in 1977.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: I might take half a dozen people, incidents, bummers — take “Ship of Fools,” something like that — take a whole bunch of things and just put it all into one crashing bummer of a song. Sometimes you can pick out something, but most of my things are not like sketches of any individual person. I might start off with something in mind, but then the character becomes its own thing in the song, and acquires its own attributes. They may be composite attributes, but they're not often about anyone in particular. Rather, about groups of things.
JESSE: It’s pretty easy to tie that to the state of the Dead. Or, for that matter, the United States as a whole in 1974, or any year since for that matter, which is how a lot of people have interpreted “Ship of Fools” over the decades.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: I tell you what, that song sure has implications today, “Ship of Fools.” It's like: oh, this is our life right now…. But, beautiful song.
JESSE: And, look, Robert Hunter was a pretty private guy, and there were surely other crushing bummers we have no idea about. In Jerry Garcia’s pithy song briefing for Robt. Williams, he described it in four words: “topical song, topical lyrics,” but didn’t specify the topic.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [From the Mars Hotel] (1:26-1:44) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: There’ve been many songs called “Ship of Fools” over the years, including by World Party, Erasure, John Cale, Van Der Graaf, Robert Plant, and others. But in some ways, the Dead had some claim on it. The ship of fools itself is a very old meme, originating probably around 375 BC in Plato’s Republic, and continuing to iterate through rhetoric and art. It was the topic of a painting by Hironymous Bosch around 1490 and, a few years later, the title of an extremely popular satire in German verse by Sebastian Brant in which a fleet of ships sets sail, bound comically and disastrously for the Paradise of Fools. The fleet’s port of origin? Basel, Switzerland. Something else relevant to the Grateful Dead took place in Basel.
AUDIO: Hofmann’s Potion (3:47-4:11) - [YouTube]
MICHAEL JONES (NARRATOR) [Hofmann’s Potion]: 1943: war rages across Europe. In the neutral confines of Switzerland, chemist Albert Hofmann is hard at work at the Sandoz pharmaceutical company’s Basel laboratory. While searching for a cure for migraine headaches, Hofmann accidentally ingests a minute amount of an experimental substance that would change both his life and the world.
JESSE: It was in Basel that Albert Hofmann first synthesized LSD, testing it on himself first accidentally, then intentionally.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [“Dark Star” 7-inch, 1968] (0:45-0:55) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That the Grateful Dead were a ship of fools with a point of origin in Basel seems like a few levels of referentiality too deep, but perhaps not. Robert Hunter knew his German literature. We’re just going to leave it out there. In 2015, the excellent journalist David Browne asked Hunter point blank about whether “Ship of Fools” was about the Dead, and Hunter said, “I debate myself about that one. I could certainly make a case for it, and I could also say that it was a bit more universal. I’m open to questions about interpretation, but I generally skate around my answers because I don’t want to put those songs in a box.” In 1974, just before the Dead took a break from the road, Jerry Garcia spoke of how he and Hunter had been mortified when people took “Casey Jones” as a pro-cocaine song and they set a blurrier course in their songwriting. “If we're going to have misinterpretations, let's have more than one, let's have lots of them!” Garcia told Steve Lake of Melody Maker.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: The Grateful Dead fans took all the songs into themselves. They were able to do that no matter what song it was. They could interpret [them] any way that they wanted, and it was theirs — it became their song. That's the brilliance of Hunter’s writing, and that's the way Hunter wanted it. He wanted interpretation to be infinite, and he accomplished that. He was one of the best at doing that, lyrically, that I ever heard.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [From the Mars Hotel] (3:00-3:17) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But, in 1996, as the members of the Dead were trying to figure out their next steps, Robert Hunter kind of showed his hand in his online journal when he wrote, “I try to speak for what I’ve always felt the spirit of the Grateful Dead to be. A ship of fools on a cruel sea.”
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [From the Mars Hotel] (3:17-3:35) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: I’ve found many reasons to relate to “Ship of Fools” over the years, and I never had to deal with the Grateful Dead or their roadies in 1974. It’s a beautiful allegory, whatever its origins. And it was perfectly framed by Jerry Garcia. From the City College of New York, musicologist Shaugn O’Donnell.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: This one has very, very much a gospel vibe on the record. When the organ comes in, it’s just right.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [From the Mars Hotel] (2:22-2:38) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: The chord motions that happen are very in line with the gospel language. I tend to obsess [over] their harmonic language, and I kind of really like the use of the diminished chords that come in here. And they do some kind of word painting: “strangest I could find” gets the diminished chord, and then it resolves.
JESSE: It’s a song that I’d love to hear an acoustic demo for, which unfortunately doesn’t exist. On the final studio version, Bob Weir played acoustic guitar. Combining it with Jerry Garcia’s vocal, we can almost imagine a demo.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [Submix of Garcia Lead Vocal and Weir Acoustic Guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (0:15-0:34)
JESSE: The fancy chord under “strangest” that you might have to learn how to fret to play “Ship of Fools” is an F-sharp diminished 7th.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: These aren't functional diminished chords. These are just decorative ones — they're purely for the color. It's pretty steady throughout the tune. There's a welding between the progression and the text.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [Submix of Garcia Lead Vocal and Weir Acoustic Guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (1:31-1:50)
JESSE: On the basic track, Jerry Garcia played electric guitar, Bobby Weir played acoustic, Keith Godchaux on Rhodes, Phil Lesh and Bill Kreutzmann in their usual roles.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [Submix of Garcia Vocal & Lead Electric Guitar, Weir Acoustic, Godchaux Rhodes, Bass and Drums, From the Mars Hotel] (0:52-1:09)
JESSE: Garcia overdubbed his lead vocal, of course, a beautiful performance.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [Garcia Vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (1:10-1:28)
JESSE: Angel’s Share engineer Brian Kehew.
BRIAN KEHEW: The line that hits me as maybe a clue is something he says: “30 years upon my head.” Which is, you know, just a beautifully artful way to say I'm 30 years old. But that's because he's a lyricist, and he's a poet, you would say that in such a beautiful way. It's absolutely a spectacular line, even though it's so simple. “30 years upon my head to have you call me child” — so, somebody's talking down to him, as if they know better.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [Submix of Garcia Lead Vocal and Weir Acoustic Guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (1:51-2:08)
JESSE: One of my favorite parts of “Ship of Fools” emerged during the studio sessions, with this very Beatlesque backing vocal by Weir and Donna Jean Godchaux near the very end, which they doubled for extra Beatlesesqueness.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [Background Vocal Stack, From the Mars Hotel] (4:00-4:18)
JESSE: It’s one of my favorite things to listen for in the live versions. Also, of course, the guitar solo.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [Garcia Lead Electric, From the Mars Hotel] (4:55-5:33)
JESSE: There’s some extra percussion on the track, including a tambourine.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [Tambourine, From the Mars Hotel] (1:08-1:16)
JESSE: And for extra heaviness, a track that’s labeled “drum pap.”
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [Drum Pap, From the Mars Hotel] (1:00-1:08)
JESSE: As Shaugn pointed out, there’s B3 organ, for gospel flavor.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [B3 Organ, From the Mars Hotel] (2:47-3:07)
JESSE: There’s acoustic piano overdubbed, too.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [Acoustic Piano, From the Mars Hotel] (3:22-3:43)
JESSE: And like so many other songs on the album, both Jerry Garcia and Keith Godchaux add Roland synth parts, both kinda woozy and dreamy. On the multitrack, it looks like Garcia went first.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [Garcia Roland Synth, From the Mars Hotel] (2:48-3:09)
JESSE: Then Keith.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [Godchaux Roland Synth, From the Mars Hotel] (2:48-3:09)
JESSE: And woozing and dreaming together.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [Submix of Garcia & Godchaux Roland Synths, From the Mars Hotel] (2:47-3:08)
JESSE: Here’s how it all sounds combined.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [From the Mars Hotel] (3:55-4:13) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
Square Records / Round Reels
JESSE: In later years, Robert Hunter would sometimes bemoan the failures of Grateful Dead Records and Round Records as foolish side trips that detracted from the musical focus of the Grateful Dead. But, as we learned on our Tales of the Great Rum Runners bonus episode, even Hunter would admit that he wouldn’t’ve been able to make his own album how he wanted to without Round Records at his disposal. And Round Records had the same initials as its co-owner, the Godchauxs’ neighbor in Stinson Beach, Ron Rakow.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: To this day, I still love Rakow. He was crazy, and did the things that he did — but he was fun. [laughs] On a certain level. In Stinson Beach, Garcia and Mountain Girl, Rakow and [Keith and I] lived walking distance from one another. So, we were always together.
JESSE: Even as the Grateful Dead planned to take a break from the road, the Ship of Fools, or Ships of Fools even, were still asail. I’m pretty sure this next story occurred around the time of the band’s so-called retirement shows. Please welcome back, from Grateful Dead and Round Records, Ron Rakow. Garcia and Rakow were the co-owners of Round.
RON RAKOW: We started Round Records, and we owned it 50-50. And we started a publishing company, and we owned that 50-50. Then we started a movie company, and we owned that 50-50. Then we started a second record company by just reserving the name with the state.
JESSE: A second record company?
RON RAKOW: We started another company called Square Records. I read the Wall Street Journal every day. Always have, even when I was with the Grateful Dead. I’ve read it stoned a lot of times. So, anyway, Columbia Records dropped Vladimir Horowitz. He was on their roster. Vladimir Horowitz was considered by many to be the world's great classical pianist.
AUDIO: “Toccata, Adagio & Fugue In C, BWV 564 I. Preludio, quasi improvvisando. Tempo moderato” [Vladimir Horowitz] (0:29-0:50) - [Spotify]
RON RAKOW: I wrote to him and I said, “We would be honored to represent you in the release of your recorded music, and we would start a label and build it around you” — which is what I did with modern music, and it's called Round Records. And I sent him a sample or two of records that we put out: the Garcia album, and Tales of the Great Rum Runners, Robert Hunter’s album. Anyway, he said that he, likewise, would be honored. So we started to do that, but his business people couldn’t get over the Grateful Dead association. He and I were really in sync, but it never worked with his… I think his wife’s family ran his business, or some weird shit like that. So anyway, I had all the logos and all the stuff for Round Records; I would just make them square, and call it Square Records!
JESSE: Oh, well. Though Square Records didn’t happen, another Garcia/Rakow endeavor from 1974 did. To rewind momentarily:
RON RAKOW: We started a movie company, and we owned that 50-50.
JESSE: Round Reels would take a long while to bear fruit and the next chain of events would shape the next three years of the band’s history, and beyond. Like other things in the Dead’s story, it was the result of their association with the Hells Angels. A young filmmaker had been working on a documentary about the Angels and their New York chapter president approached Garcia about funding it.
RON RAKOW: Sandy Alexander came to Jerry, and Jerry said, “I can’t. I don’t do this stuff. I use Rakow.” So Sandy called me and said, “I want to make an appointment with you and Jerry up at Leon Gast’s office.”
JESSE: In 1973, the young filmmaker Leon Gast met with Garcia, Rakow, New York Hells Angels president Sandy Alexander and committed to making the film that came out 10 years later as Hells Angels Forever.
RON RAKOW: It was in what used to be a very famous building, when I was a kid in the apparel trade. It was a building on Broadway and 38th Street. It was famous for housing very successful ladies clothing companies. That whole business changed, and so there was a lot of space real cheap. And Leon had a big space, real cheap. Jerry and I looked at film every day for a week to decide whether or not we wanted to do the Hells Angels movie. We conceived of Round Reels as our start in the movie business, and the first project was the Hells Angels movie.
JESSE: The timelines are elongated, unsurprisingly. Thanks to Joe Jupille, we know Round Reels incorporated on August 1st, 1974, Jerry Garcia’s 32nd birthday, while the Dead were touring out east.
RON RAKOW: It was an accident, believe me. I never put that together until just now.
JESSE: By the fall of 1973, Rakow and Garcia had already started inquiring about the rights to Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, a precursor to his later acquisition of the Sirens of Titan. But the next year, Garcia found a subject a little closer to home. A band. With a brand new single even.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [From the Mars Hotel] (4:11-4:35) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
The Retirement
JESSE: The Grateful Dead liked to have meetings. And sometimes kept very good notes. When the Dead started 1974, they’d planned to record another album in October. And in June, just weeks after finishing the Mars Hotel sessions, they decided quite sensibly to push those sessions back. Which they did. Until November. But by August, they’d decided to pause from the road for a long while, which we discussed a good deal over the last two episodes. Word of the Grateful Dead’s impending retirement got out into the world. Even before they’d officially decided to take a break, an unsigned item about the Dead’s potential retirement appeared under the headline “Dead to Go Dormant?” in the Oakland Tribune on August 4th, a rumor denied by Andy Leonard. But the rumor was all but confirmed a few weeks later in Joel Selvin’s San Francisco Examiner column, headlined “Is The Dead Going To Die?” From there, it circulated out to the Dead freaks. Back east, Lee Ranaldo had just returned from his summer adventures and was getting ready to begin his freshman year of college.
LEE RANALDO: It was kind of mysterious that they were taking time off and it wasn't very clear at the time. News traveled a lot slower at the time, and it wasn't very clear why they were getting off the road. We’d heard rumors that their trip had just gotten too big and incorporated too many people, and it just stopped being as much fun. But there were darker rumors about maybe drugs having something to do with it, or just a lot of different, unclear stuff.
JESSE: Here’s how Bobby Weir remembered it going down when he was interviewed that October.
BOB WEIR [10/74]: I forgot who came up with the idea originally — might have been Danny Rifkin, for that matter. But after a particularly grinding tour, which had come on the heels of three relatively grinding tours… it's not that the music was bad, the music was real good. But just the airports and the hotels and everything, everybody was real down. We were having a general meeting, and the idea [came up] of: ‘Why don't we hang this up for a while, and take some of the pressure off? I'm getting old.’ Everybody just clamored at that, and it seemed just like the thing to do.
JESSE: Ron Rakow.
RON RAKOW: When they talked about a time period, they talked about two years. They never talked about one year. So, there's that. They were actually talking about stopping being the Grateful Dead, and this was going to tell them whether it was a good idea or not. It was a trial stoppage.
JESSE: Donna Jean.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: We had been touring for so long. And, from whoever’s perspective, it was different why we stopped touring at that time. But for me, it was like: wow, I get to just be a mom and not be on the road — which was really hard. If I left [my son] Zion behind, it was really hard. If I took him on the road, it was really hard. My life was very complicated at that time.
JESSE: After they’d decided to take the break, there was still a European tour. We detailed some of the stress points in our “Money Money” episode. But Donna Jean had her hands full in a very different way.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: When we went to Europe that year, which was in September, my sister went to Europe with us and took care of Zion. He was about eight months old then, something like that. That was really tough, because we got to England and Zion had diarrhea and a fever. There were no Pampers in London. We had to scrounge for baby stuff that we were used to in America. And that was hard. That was really hard.
The Movie
JESSE: The band returned from Europe in late September, with only a run at Winterland on their schedule. It was sometime in these weeks that this unfolded.
RON RAKOW: Jerry came to my office. I could tell something was up because he ran from the staircase into my office, and he started talking to me when he was already in the hall. He gets in and he says, “We’ve got to make a movie. This could be the last time the Grateful Dead ever play.” So I said: “Okay.” And I got on the phone and I raised the money. Without money, forget movies, man!
JESSE: As we like to say, would that it were so simple.
RON RAKOW: We needed a lot of money for the movies — in excess of $2 million, much closer to two-and a-half million. I expected it to be close to that. Well, first of all, the Hells Angel movie, there was so much film shot. I couldn't see it costing a lot more.
JESSE: Steve Brown of Grateful Dead Records could see the logic in the project.
STEVE BROWN: They thought of it as a way to say: if we're going to take the break coming next year—which was ‘75—then maybe we should give them something to be able to go see and hear. But it can be in a theater.
JESSE: But from the start, The Grateful Dead Movie was a Jerry Garcia joint.
STEVE BROWN: Jerry, I think, just really felt — yeah, let's do the Movie. I really felt he was still the “Go” guy on this thing. Everybody else was kind of like, ‘Oh, it’s gonna interrupt us on the stage while we’re playing,’ little things like. That came up a few times, I think this was kind of in casual talk. They weren’t even in the meetings necessarily, just kind of when they were talking about it. And then it came to be.
JESSE: Everybody just called it the Movie, and we probably will, too. It was good that Rakow had established an open line with the Bank of Boston, because Jerry Garcia discovered a habit more expensive than buying and smashing Faberge eggs.
RON RAKOW: Nothing burns up money like movies. I mean, cocaine habits don't burn up money like movies.
JESSE: The Movie was in motion, and—on relatively short notice—they contacted the filmmaker already in the Round Reels stable.
RON RAKOW: That's how come Leon Gast got to be the head of production on the Dead Movie.
JESSE: Leon Gast had a very, very busy autumn. In September and October of 1974, he was responsible for filming three different classic documentaries; I’d watch a documentary just about that. While the Dead had been in Europe, Leon Gast had been in Africa.
AUDIO: “James Brown Intro” [Soul Power] (1:52-2:16)
DANNY RAY [9/24/74]: If you will, let’s all welcome, the world Godfather of Soul, Soul Brother #1: James Brown!! JAMES BROWN! James Brown! James Brown!
JESSE: Like pretty much every other film we’re discussing, the documentary Soul Power took a long time to make it out, but it’s an incredible film about the Zaire ‘74 music festival featuring James Brown, Bill Withers, the Fania All-Stars, Miriam Makeba, and more. Check it out.
AUDIO: “Koni Ya Bonganga” [Franco & T.P.O.K. Jazz Orchestra, Zaire ‘74: The African Artists] (0:23-0:44) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Originally, the Zaire ‘74 festival was supposed to pair with the George Foreman/Muhammed Ali Rumble In the Jungle, which was postponed for a month after Foreman cut himself during training. I’m a little unclear about what unfolded. A lot of the sources say that Leon Gast stuck around Zaire, but he had to have gotten back to San Francisco by early October. Though his incredible Oscar-winning film When We Were Kings concludes with the Ali/Foreman fight on October 30th, I’m not sure that Gast or his partners actually went from Zaire to Winterland back to Zaire. Dissenting opinions welcome. Combined with Hells Angels Forever, that’s four documentaries in-progress. His hands were absolutely full.
RON RAKOW: We had a fellow inside our family of people, Edward Washington, who was a movie freak. He had a lot of connections in San Francisco. Leon just got people that he knew, that he worked with in New York, and bingo. There were some important guys — the Maysles Brothers, or at least one of them.
JESSE: That’d be Albert Maysles. With his brother David, he’d been responsible for Gimme Shelter, and was in the process of shooting the equally legendary Grey Gardens, another unlikely cinematic timeline to align with the Dead Movie.
RON RAKOW: The most important guy on the crew in my world was Don Lenzer. If he is not a famous film shooter [by now], he should be. He was phenomenal.
JESSE: Lenzer had been on the crew at Woodstock and went on to a distinguished career in documentary filmmaking.
RON RAKOW: And the next phenomenal one was Kevin Keating. Kevin Keating was a permanent part of Leon's organization.
JESSE: Kevin Keating also went from Zaire to Winterland. Steve Brown was assigned to brief them.
STEVE BROWN: So I drew a little thing for them [to indicate] how the band moves on the stage, an dtold them where the hot areas are [shoot]. I got to take them around in Winterland to the places where the people that are going to be good for the film [would be], the kind of dancers that you're going to be looking for, that kind of thing. ‘And if you go downstairs on their break, they've got this [tubes] they’re going to be sucking on… And just the crew, not the band…’
AUDIO: nitrous sounds from The Grateful Dead Movie (1:42:25-1:42:40)
JESSE: But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that it would take almost three years to finish and release The Grateful Dead Movie. With any luck, we’ll spend some time down the road discussing the intricate production, but today we’re going to focus almost entirely on the lived experience of what it was like to see the Grateful Dead at their five so-called “retirement” shows at Winterland from October 16th through 20th, 1974, lots of which can be heard on the five-CD box, The Grateful Dead Movie.
Winterland, October 1974
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack, 10/16/74] (0:41-1:02)
JESSE: With the camera crews at the ready, the Dead invested the shows with a little more thought than usual. Ned Lagin.
NED LAGIN: The Movie, five nights at Winterland, was scripted, in the sense that they wanted certain things in the Movie. So they set up certain sequences each and every night. It's why I played every night, and why they had me set up where [I was] — they wanted me set up next to Garcia, et cetera. To the extent that the sets varied, they wanted the choice of going from “Dark Star” into one thing, or “Dark Star” into another thing or another thing into another thing, so they could make a choice. There was some discussion about having an acoustic set or doing some acoustic stuff as well. And, obviously, that didn't happen.
JESSE: At Winterland’s front door, heads passed under a sign that acknowledged they were being filmed by Round Reels for a movie provisionally titled There Is Nothing Like A Grateful Dead Concert. The phrase came from Hunter and Garcia’s old friend Willy Legate, and you can hear this gentleman—who is not Willy Legate—repeat it in the film.
AUDIO: The Grateful Dead Movie (46:02-46:10)
JOHN WILLIAMS [10/74]: Bottom line of the whole scene is, very simply stated: there is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert.
JESSE: Leon Gast and Ron Rakow orchestrated the crew on the ground.
RON RAKOW: He was directing the crew and we were working very close together. He was at the sound booth, and I was behind Jerry. I'm in the Movie a million times. I had headphones and the whole crew had headphones.
JESSE: The Dead didn’t have much choice in the matter, but Winterland was the perfect place to film their retirement. It was home. Gary Lambert, co-host of Tales of the Golden Road.
GARY LAMBERT: It was just, like, one of the all-time great places to see a Dead show — and kind of a dump. It was built as an ice skating arena. It had seats, it had a balcony with seats that were on all four sides. People could sit behind the stage, although not always—they sometimes that section cleared off—and then just a big dance floor. There were little auxiliary bars. I think the first time I ever saw hall dancing was Winterland, perhaps. There were some hallways that people would overflow into. You see that guy dancing during “Sugar Magnolia” in The Grateful Dead Movie, the guy in the cowboy hat.
AUDIO: “Sugar Magnolia” [The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack, 10/17/74] (1:14-1:30)
JESSE: Outside, tickets were taken by Willie, the security guard.
AUDIO: The Grateful Dead Movie (35:20-35:30)
WILLIE [10/74]: Have your ticket out and ready, please! Have your tickets ready! There are two doors. Sir, you cannot carry that bag in, I’m sorry, sir. Thank you very kindly. March right in and have a good time! Have ‘em out and ready, please! Have your ticket out and ready…
JESSE: Michael Parrish had been seeing the Dead since the Live/Dead run at the Fillmore West.
MICHAEL PARRISH: Willie, was that the guy’s name? Bill Graham’s forever ticket taker, the big African American guy who was in the Dead Movie. In the Dead Movie, he’s friendly, you know? “C’mon, come on in!” But usually, he was just kind of grumpy.
JESSE: Rita Fiedler would go on to work on the animation sequence on the Dead Movie and didn’t actually attend any of the shows at Winterland that fall, but this story really catches the vibe of the place.
RITA FIEDLER: There's aspects of the Movie that really, really capture beautifully that concourse where the concession stand rung around the outside. I remember, at one point, I had ingested a substance and I was just sort of drifting around; you could easily go between this sort of concession area to back inside the show, back and forth. At one point, I was near an exit and I really wanted to get some fresh air. And above the door to the exit, it said “No Pass Outs.” There was a cop standing at the door, a security guard, a Black guy. He looked at me, and I said, “I need to get some fresh air.” And he goes, “There’s no pass outs.” And I said, “I’m not going to pass out!” I was high as a kite, but I wasn't going to pass out. I said, “No, really, sir, I'm fine. I'll be right back. I just need to get some fresh air.” So, he let me out. I went out and then I was able to come back in. Even though I passed outside, I didn't pass out.
JESSE: Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: It was 5,500 people, but it somehow felt bigger. And actually 5,500 was what some people considered too big back then. For those of us who have been spoiled by the Fillmores and those kinds of venues, 5,500 seemed kind of cavernous. I made a point of getting there early enough to get a good spot on the floor most times. But it was just a great unadorned dump, and it was just perfect for the purpose of a Dead show in some strange way.
JESSE: I certainly never made it to Winterland, but one way to catch the vibe is to check out the, uh, room tone in the space just before the encore.
AUDIO: “One More Saturday Night” [The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack, 10/18/74] (4:50-5:10)
GARY LAMBERT: I saw lots of bands at Winterland. I saw shows of variable sound quality at Winterland. I saw the famous Springsteen shows in December ‘78, and shows like that. I had a long run there, because I was there right up to the closing night. It could sound terrible — it could sound like a big, echoey, cavernous place, if the sound people didn't have things dialed in right. The Wall of Sound sounded extraordinary in there.
JESSE: Geoff Gould would go on to found Modulus Guitars, but in 1974 was just a serious Bay Area Dead freak.
GEOFF GOULD: I saw every Wall of Sound show in the Bay Area, starting with the sneak previews in February. I also remember, at Winterland, being able to sit up high in the rafters and listen and hear perfectly “Morning Dew” or “Ship of Fools” — the big vocal harmonies. It was really the best.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [Steal Your Face] (6:19-6:41) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
GEOFF GOULD: When I was at Winterland, I would go all over: sometimes in front of the stage, sometimes I'd be in the very last row, just to kind of get a different perspective. I could be up in the rafters and listening to the Wall of Sound, and hearing “Morning Dew” or something like that. It was a very grand experience because you could really hear it — it wasn’t just, you’re far away and everything sounds crappy.
JESSE: Multiple nights of the Dead at Winterland was a cause for excitement no matter what, but Joan Brown was a newly minted San Francisco Dead Head in 1974 and left us this story.
JOAN BROWN: In 1974, I was an eighth grader, and going to Winterland was really not what my parents thought was a great idea for a little girl to do. But there were other parents of my friends that were not so strict… so, I would spend the night at their house, and of course we would all go to Winterland. I think it was in February, the first time I really went to see the Dead at Winterland by myself. It was with a bunch of my little girlfriends. I was hooked — that was it. From that moment on, that’s all I wanted to do and it’s all I wanted to listen to.
AUDIO: “I Know You Rider” [Dave’s Picks 13, 2/24/74] (4:39-5:02)
JOAN BROWN: In the fall of 1974, I went to a private high school in San Francisco called Urban, and Urban was probably about six blocks from Winterland. Urban was a hippie-ish alternative high school for the young and impressionable minds of the Pacific Heights kids in San Francisco. It was kind of a hippie school — we had two classes a day for three hours apiece. Sometimes the kids would smoke in class, sometimes the teachers would smoke in class. Sometimes, the subjects were a little bit off to the left; sometimes they were right in the center. But one thing that happened in October of 1974 [was that] everybody was excited because the Dead were playing multiple nights at Winterland. Everybody was getting tickets, and if you didn't have tickets, you could always wait in line. So [during] the afternoon classes, everybody would go and wait in line to grab tickets. If you're lucky enough to buy your tickets, what we did [was] — during lunchtime, we’d always have a poker game going. Those Grateful Dead tickets were in the pot multiple times and, multiple times, they were won and lost. So, I got to go because I won some tickets in the pot, during lunch, in the poker game.
JESSE: Five nights was a lot.
JOAN BROWN: According to my journal, going to more than one night of a concert was kind of a new thing for me, and I was not really sure how to break it to my parents. But, luckily for me, they were hyper focused on the A's being in the World Series, and they were going three nights themselves to the Coliseum. So I didn't have a lot of explaining to do about where I was going and what I was doing the first couple nights.
JESSE: Across the Bay in Oakland, the A’s were cruising to their third straight World Series victory, with Games 4 and 5 taking place in Oakland on the nights of the first two Dead shows.
JOAN BROWN: Those nights, I went with my friends. We arrived super early because, in those days, I was armed with some Orange Sunshine, which is also referenced in my journal by “O-R” — codeword, OR. We got there early so that we could take the acid and not have to come home to questions by our parents while we were kind of out in the outer space. In those days, they let you in super early and we found seats. At Winterland at the time, if you were a dancer, you went downstairs; if you wanted to be close to the band, you went on the floor; and if you really wanted to see the band, you could go upstairs in the balcony where people just did not stand up during the concert. You sat in your seat mostly. And if you wanted to go down, if you wanted to dance, you went downstairs.
JESSE: Something that Joan drives home — the Dead were a local band for local people.
JOAN BROWN: I'd say half my high school was there, and half the kids from my neighborhood were there, too. So it never felt like… it felt really intimate, and it felt like: this is the place where everybody was. And on Monday, if you didn’t have the story to tell about Winterland and the shows, you really kind of were out of it. You weren’t as cool as you thought you were. But for these shows and the seats that I had—they were the second row on the right-hand side of the balcony—most of the people around me were there for all the nights of the shows, and we kind of had this unspoken agreement that we would save the seats for each other. I was lucky to be included in that group, and also in that group were some really cute surfer boys from Marin, [with] who[m] my girlfriend and I were just thrilled to be sitting there. And these people, for every time that the Grateful Dead played at Winterland, we pretty much had the same group and saved these seats for everybody until Winterland closed in December of 1978. This was a really tight group that we had. I never saw these people outside of going to the Grateful Dead — I never saw them again, just around town. This was the only place that I saw them, and I’ve considered them friends.
JESSE: Strider Brown was our avatar for the Sunshine Daydream gig in Veneta in ‘72, and provided coverage for us speaking about Kezar ‘73. In ‘74, Strider was traveling around in the way that one can do if you’re in your early 20s and it’s 1974. Hey, Strider.
STRIDER BROWN: I had been traveling up in western Canada in late September and early October of ‘74. Me and a friend, Mandy, had gone to visit an old high school friend whose parents are Canadian, lived in Vancouver. And so we were in Vancouver — I’m pretty sure that's where Mandy got word that the Dead were going to be retiring, that they were playing their final concerts in, whatever, a week-and-a-half… I’m just taking a guess. She [made a] beeline down to the Bay Area, and I made my way down at a slower rate, let’s say. So that's why I missed the opening night of October 16th. I did hitchhike from Canada down to the Bay Area to make it for the October ‘74 Dead shows. I had to stop in Eugene on the way south.
JESSE: Dead fans of all stripes descended on Winterland however they could. Jerry Pompili was the house manager at the venue.
JERRY POMPILI: I'm in The Grateful Dead Movie. There's a scene of me talking to Angelo, the Hells Angel, on stage, trying to convince him to move his bike off the stage.
AUDIO: The Grateful Dead Movie (26:17-26:39)
ANGELO [10/74]: He’ll be here at 5 o’clock!
JERRY POMPILI [10/74]: It’s not so much you guys, it’s the people that you guys have had confrontations with during the years. They see someone in here with colors on and they remember the time that maybe they got stomped by seven Angels and goes fuckin’ berserk. I mean, I’ve seen it happen.
ANGELO [10/74]: You know what? Sandy [Alexander]’s flying out here from New York, and, uh, I know he’s not takin’ his patch off. So, he’s coming a long way for nothin’... [laughs]
JERRY POMPILI: And then there's another scene which was shot — it's me, but it's shot from behind. It's at the back door, and there's two Hells Angels trying to worm their way in, and me telling them to go fuck off. What you don't see is two guys with guns standing on either side of me. But hey, you know…
Wednesday, 10/16
JESSE: Geoff Gould.
GEOFF GOULD: The first night, at least, I remember getting there early enough to be in line and to be let in. It was just really fun and joyful to kind of just run into the empty place.
JESSE: We’ve spoken with Jay Kerley a few times, most recently on our Watkins Glen episodes. In the fall of 1974, he’d just made his move to the Bay Area and was ready to see the Dead on their home turf.
JAY KERLEY: I didn't even have a crush walking in the front door. They were so different than East Coast shows — I couldn't believe it. Especially the Wednesday, the first show, the 16th: it went from Seastones into space into “Wharf Rat,” back into space,” into “Eyes of the World.” I was thinking, wow, these West Coast shows are really laid back…
AUDIO: “Wharf Rat” [10/16/74] (16:35-16:45)
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [10/16/74] (0:00-0:16)
JESSE: It’s a candidate for jammiest Dead show ever. After closing the first set with a 31-minute “Playing in the Band,” for the first time on American soil, Ned Lagin’s Seastones transitioned into a full performance by the Dead, first moving into “Wharf Rat,” then “Eyes of the World,” an 85-minute sequence that was a reverse of the Alexandra Palace performance we spoke about last episode.
NED LAGIN: The genesis of the middle set occurred in March of ‘74. It was assumed that half the time—[well,] not half the time—we would segue into the Grateful Dead. It turned out to be 25 or 26% of the time, which is still a sizable amount for a separate or quasi-separate act.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [10/16/74] (11:53-12:13)
JESSE: Jay Kerley.
JAY KERLEY: Winterland got so hot. It was sardine time. And, lord knows, Bill Graham called it his “schvitz” — he sold the tickets, they didn’t rip them at the door, brought them [back] to the ticket window and resold them.
JESSE: Geoff Gould.
GEOFF GOULD: At least the first couple nights, there was also, in San Francisco, a heat wave. It was getting close to 100 degrees — so it was a packed Winterland, pretty sweaty and crazy.
JESSE: Up on stage, it was fucking chaos, even moreso than the usual Grateful Dead gigs at Winterland. Seriously, go watch the Movie. If you track the performances in the Movie chronologically, you can see how many people were crowded up there night after night, culminating in the final show on the 20th where people are almost literally hanging from the rafters. And that’s not to mention a certain roadie, who was allegedly dropping puddles of acid on peoples’ wrists in order to even get on the stage on the final night. Donna Jean.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: It was madness, and it was very lax, as far as who got to be on the stage — and be backstage, as well as onstage, dancing around and doing their thing. That was then… that's no longer now, that's for sure.
JESSE: There’s one amazing short sequence of the Movie where you see a few kids dancing at the foot of Keith Godchaux’s grand piano followed, a few seconds later, by an enormous fireball by the pyrotechnics enthusiast a few feet behind them.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: His name was Boots. He was a pyrotechnic guy. And there was a real explosion.
JESSE: Many real explosions, constantly, through the whole Movie, really. I haven’t tracked which nights Boots Jaffee was blowing flames towards the ceiling, maybe all of them. Hopefully we’ll get to talk to Boots sometime.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: That was his gig, that was his gig. I don't remember if that happened elsewhere, but I know it did, constantly, during that time.
JESSE: The baby Zion Godchaux had made it to nearly every Dead show in ‘74, but missed Winterland.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: When we did the Movie, [with our son] Zion, we stayed in San Francisco [at the Miyako Hotel]. And Zion’s grandparents, Keith’s mom and dad, took care of him at the Miyako while we did our thing. So, he was not at those shows — he was like nine months old, I think, something like that.
JESSE: Exactly like that, actually. The first night was Bob Weir’s 27th birthday, as Phil reminded.
AUDIO: “Happy Birthday” [10/16/74] (1:12-1:44)
PHIL LESH [10/16/74]: Happy birthday to you… happy birthday to you… happy birthday dear Bobby…. Happy birthday, tooooooo, you…
JESSE: Counting the 50 minutes of Seastones and jamming en route into the second set, there were more than four hours of music, one of the longest shows ever. Only four more to go.
BOB WEIR [10/16/74]: And uh, thanks for dropping by, and thanks for being in our movie.
Thursday, 10/17
RON RAKOW: Every day of shooting, Jerry and I went in the afternoon, like at noon — we went and found a clump of crew people and sat around and bullshat with them, smoked joints with them, what have you. They were mostly in a hotel above a [men’s] shop on the main street in Sausalito, and we went there daily and hung out with those guys, talked to them. Kevin Keating and Don Lenzer shot those meetings. Those meetings are incredible. Incredible. They're on film.
JESSE: Lotta film.
RON RAKOW: There's so much great footage there, it's just… I'm thinking particularly of a day that Jerry and I went to meet those guys in the hotel in Sausalito. Somebody said to Jerry, “What's the most important thing that the Grateful Dead’s done for you?” And Jerry said, “Everything. I met Dylan.” That's what he said! “I met Dylan.” He said it like a breathless fan.
JESSE: Garcia had met Dylan a few times, but most fresh on his mind was probably a semi-recent jam session in Stinson Beach.
RON RAKOW: They came up to jam. I don't know what the story was. Dylan was over at Jerry's house, and Mountain Girl told me about it that evening.
JESSE: “They” was Bob Dylan and David Grisman. Last year, I interviewed Grisman for Aquarium Drunkard, and I asked about this story, which took place a few months before the Dead Movie was filmed.
DAVID GRISMAN: I got a call in 1974 out of the blue from Bob Dylan, who—I thought it was a joke—wanted to take a mandolin lesson. So I said, “Come on over.” And, an hour or two later, he was on my back porch.
AUDIO: “If You See Her, Say Hello” [Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks] (4:35-4:42) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was the mandolin overdub that Dylan himself played on Blood On The Tracks’ “If You See Her, Say Hello” in September 1974, just a few months after his lessons.
DAVID GRISMAN: Stayed for three days. I believe we went over to Jerry’s house for that. [Dylan] still owes money for that… about $15 a lesson.
JESSE: Had to throw that story in there. Jay Kerley.
JAY KERLEY: I had a bunch of friends from Connecticut staying with me in my little apartment. Me and a friend of mine from Columbia rented a flat in the Fillmore, and it was all of 75 bucks a month. A “drunkard’s dream, if I ever did see one…” Anyway, we went en masse into Winterland.
JESSE: There was just one problem. Well, three problems.
JAY KERLEY: I was semi-broke when the tickets went on sale, so I got one for the 20th. And then they added the 16th, so I got the 16th. And I didn't have any idea about seeing the other shows. But on that Thursday, the 17th, Strider Brown, my old friend, came to my apartment and said, “What are you guys doing here? Let's go get some tickets.” I said, “What are you talking about? It's been sold out for months now.” And he said, “Oh, they’ve got tickets at the door.”
STRIDER BROWN: I had showed up on the 17th, in the mid-afternoon or whatever. They were looking bummed out, Jay and our other friend, Mandy. I said, “Well, I hear there's tickets for sale at the box office.” I may have gotten that hot tip or whatever from somebody I hitched a ride from down into the Bay Area from, down I-5. We went over there and we bought tickets for, I believe, the following four nights.
JAY KERLEY: My East Coast brain just went: whaaat? We were living like 10 blocks away from Winterland, so we just walked over there. And there was nobody in line in front of the ticket window, and this woman was sitting there looking completely bored. And I went over and said, “Have you got tickets for tonight?” She goes, “Yeah, how many do you want?”Almost fell on the ground. I said, “How about four?” She goes, “No problem, here….” Doink, doink, doink, doink — $6 each. [laughs] I was hip to the trip, and so I went on the 18th and 19th and stood in line for increasing amounts of time. I was able to see all five shows.
JESSE: I love the scenes outside Winterland in The Grateful Dead Movie.
AUDIO: The Grateful Dead Movie (37:00-37:11)
MICHAEL STARR [10/74]: The Grateful Dead. Sure, I have a ticket. You wanna see?
WINTERLAND SECURITY [10/74]: But you can’t stand right there.
MICHAEL STARR [10/74]: I know, I’m just trying to get my space together so that I can go into the show. I just came from a phone call.
JESSE: Been there so many times. In fact, I just came from a phone call and am getting my space together right now. The 17th is when our friend Gary Lambert made his entrance from stage left, or right even.
GARY LAMBERT: I had already [decided] to move to the Bay Area. The timing just worked out that way. In fact, I think the announcement of the Winterland shows probably hastened my trip by a few weeks. But it was really fortuitous timing: I saw four out of the five. I actually landed in San Francisco, the night of the first show on the 16th, on Bobby's birthday. And then I saw the last four in a row.
JESSE: Gary walked right onto a movie set.
GARY LAMBERT: And then there was the phenomenon of the Movie being made while that was going on. There's that famous scene where the guy in the bar is talking about what a load of crap it is.
AUDIO: The Grateful Dead Movie (50:11-50:20)
SAM HUGHES [10/74]: It’s just fucked up though, this fuckin’ film, man. Makin’ cash off everybody. This is the biggest pile of shit I’ve ever seen the Dead ever do. They’re nuts, man.
GARY LAMBERT: I remember there was some disgruntlement about camera placements blocking people’s view. Stuff like that. There was a boom camera which was not like a modern boom camera — it was a guy sitting in a chair on a boom that was manually moved around, and, if you weren’t careful, could knock your head off as it panned down toward the stage. That was a little point of contention there for people who usually had a spot on the floor where they could see everything and were being moved around to make room for that. It seemed minor to me — it didn't really seem terribly disruptive to the enjoyment [of the music] to me.
JESSE: Jay Kerley.
JAY KERLEY: I stood behind one of the cameras three out of five nights. There was a nice little window where I could see through to the stage right next to the camera. And they never really got in my way. You’d see people crawling around the stage with their cameras and stuff like that, but they never got in the way.
JESSE: Naturally, a few of our friends ended up in the Movie. Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: I am actually seen in The Grateful Dead Movie in a couple of shots. Look for me during “One More Saturday Night” — it will expose a little editing flaw, because I'm singing along and my lips are moving about two beats after the notes are actually sung.
AUDIO: “One More Saturday Night” [The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack, 10/19/74] (3:52-4:09)
JESSE: Geoff Gould.
GEOFF GOULD: I’m in the Movie during “Sugar Magnolia.” [chuckles] Some big dude in the crowd, blue work shirt and a ponytail and beard, dancing.
JESSE: After seeing the crowd on the earlier nights, the film crew were able to scout out some talent.
RON RAKOW: There was one very handsome guy, he had a mustache and sort of light reddish hair — brown, light reddish hair. He knew the words to every song and sometimes we had him mouthing the words and Jerry singing them.
JESSE: It says online somewhere that his name is Greg?
RON RAKOW: I think his name is Greg also.
JESSE: Greg, if you’re out there, get in touch at stories.dead.net. They planted him in the front row, and you can see him throughout the Movie.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack, 10/18/74] (1:26-1:46)
RON RAKOW: He danced his ass off and his shirt was really sweaty. And at the end of the night, I took off my film crew shirt and gave it [to him]. We changed shirts. I went backstage and—this is on film—Jerry said, “What the fuck happened to you?” That was a funny moment.
JESSE: There’s a wide spectrum of Deadfreakdom between the curious and the committed. Corry Arnold, who you may know as the proprietor of the Lost Live Dead blog and other endeavors, was at a very particular place in his own arc.
CORRY ARNOLD: I had already seen them twice at Winterland. This was my third time at Winterland, my fifth Dead show. I was kind of conscious of what I was hearing, I had a couple of Dead bootlegs. I remember that I recognized just about every song, but I didn't come out going, ‘What are those songs?’ It was a real conscious experience. They play the first set, they do a long “Playing in the Band,” they take a break. I was used to the break, we’re hanging out. And then the lights come down a little bit, and some people come on stage. One person came on stage — it was a keyboard player. It wasn't Keith…
AUDIO: “Seastones” [10/17/74] (0:18-0:26)
CORRY ARNOLD: And then Phil comes out and he starts tuning up. And we're like, what's this? And they tune up, tune up, tune up… and after a while you go: they're not tuning up...
AUDIO: “Seastones” [10/17/74] (1:48-2:06)
CORRY ARNOLD: And you could feel it coming up from your feet. It wasn't like, I didn’t say, “Gee, I want to go home and listen to this.” But it was weird: no explanation, no discussion, no fucking idea what was gonna go on. And then after 20 minutes, Phil unplugged his bass, walked off stage, and the other guy walked offstage. No one announced, nobody said, “Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for — Seastones!” They just did it. It did add to the weirdness of the whole thing. The next day was Friday, Joel Selvin had gone Wednesday, but because of the time, his Wednesday night report couldn't get into the paper until Friday morning. And in the Friday morning Chronicle, he said, “Between sets, Phil Lesh and keyboard player Ned Lagin played some electronic sounds.” And I went, “Oh, the guy who was on American Beauty.” Selvin didn’t call it Seastones.
JESSE: It was the first public acknowledgment of the electronic performances that Ned and Phil had been staging since late June. The Dead played some of the finest shows of the year. And while we know the Dead returned to the road in ‘76, every night of the Winterland run marked the final versions of certain parts of the Dead’s repertoire. The Thursday show we’re talking about, for example, is the last time they did “Ramble On Rose” with the original vocal arrangement from Europe ‘72, with Lesh singing on the chorus.
AUDIO: “Ramble On Rose” [The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack, 10/17/74] (1:06-1:29)
JESSE: It was the final one-drummer version of “The Other One,” at the heart of the second set.
AUDIO: “The Other One” [The Grateful Dead Movie OST, 10/17/74] (12:12-12:42)
JESSE: And the final single-drummer version of the impossibly quiet “Stella Blue.”
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [The Grateful Dead Movie OST, 10/17/74] (5:47-6:20)
JESSE: Jay Kerley.
JAY KERLEY: Either Thursday or Saturday, the crowd just went nuts at the end of the show, before “U.S. Blues.” Everybody was jumping up and down and yelling with their arms in the air.
AUDIO: “Encore Break” [10/17/74] (1:00-1:07)
JAY KERLEY: Phil came around his stack and looked at this oscilloscope. When he finally got to the microphone, he said, “Congratulations, people, you make more noise than we do.”
JESSE: Strider.
STRIDER BROWN: Being October in the Bay Area, the nights are kind of crisp, and the air quality is usually really good, the breezes off the ocean and everything. Yeah, it was… call it golden memories, definitely.
JESSE: The shows were everything Joan Brown could’ve wanted and more.
JOAN BROWN: For those nights, I was the most free and happy and musically inspired that I've ever been in my whole entire life. The Grateful Dead [to] spoke something in me that I could not believe. I felt like it was such a privilege to be there, and it was such a privilege to look around and realize there really weren't that many girls that liked the Grateful Dead at this time and place. It was really a great time for me as a young teenager to get to know myself, and the Dead were a big, huge part of it.
Friday, 10/18
JESSE: Our ultra-reliable witness Michael Parrish was a seasoned head by then.
MICHAEL PARRISH: It was common knowledge that that was kind of the end, for now at least, for the Dead. But I have to say, I got tickets as soon as I knew they'd gone on sale — Santa Cruz, drove over the Sears in Capitola, which was the nearest place there was a Ticketron outlet. I had no trouble getting tickets. I went to the last three: Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
JESSE: The Friday show included the last full version of the “Weather Report Suite,” with Garcia’s beautiful faux-steel licks on the prelude.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack, 10/18/74] (1:34-2:01)
JESSE: Last “Ship of Fools” for now, too, the version on Steal Your Face.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [Steal Your Face] (3:20-4:03) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Both Friday and Sunday became three-set shows, among the last times the Dead’s flexibility flexed in that particular way. Friday the 18th was goodbye to a few more things. It was the last time that Seastones flowed into a Dead set, and it was a doozy. Ned Lagin.
NED LAGIN: It was already known in advance that at least three of all five nights we would do electronic music, and at least three of those nights, it would segue into the Grateful Dead. The goal was to get “Dark Star,” “Wharf Rat,” "Morning Dew” and some of the others where Jerry liked what I did and how I helped shape the flow.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [10/18/74] (12:57-13:10)
JESSE: The Seastones set on the 18th was a high point for many. Jay Kerley was ready.
JAY KERLEY: The Friday show is my personal favorite. I do have a memory of having a wonderful conversation with this pretty lady, and all of a sudden, Ned comes out. She goes, “Oh, I hate this…” And she runs into the lobby and I say, “Oh, well so much for that.”
JESSE: Michael Parrish.
MICHAEL PARRISH: Ned and Phil into “Dark Star” into “Morning Dew”: that was just transcendent. Probably the musical high point of that week, for sure. I still think that that’s one of the best pieces of music I ever heard the Grateful Dead play.
AUDIO: “Jam” [10/18/74] (10:40-11:04)
JESSE: Geoff Gould.
GEOFF GOULD: Just beyond the crazy bio-sonic sounds, or whatever you want to call it, he’s a good musician, too. Some of them had a really good flow more than others. It was definitely a cool thing — once again, it’s not “Casey Jones.” It takes so many forms. The Ned and Phil Show is a pretty extreme thing, but they’re all a part of where everybody was going.
JESSE: Ned Lagin.
NED LAGIN: October 18th, going from the Seastones through a [“Dark Star”] jam into “Morning Dew.” Garcia and Phil in particular understood the significance of that. And doing that with “Eyes of the World” also had significance. It wasn’t that these people were just playing what came into their heads at the time.
MICHAEL PARRISH: I loved it. At that point, I think I'd already gone down the Charles Ives rabbit hole. It was fascinating. It was so loud, and just so different than anything you would normally associate with even the Dead’s weirdest jams. But again, the way that the Ned and Phil part of that show flowed into the Dead coming out was really just perfect.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack, 10/18/74] (3:01-3:33)
JESSE: In 1981, David Gans spoke with Phil Lesh about this segment, included in his book Conversations with the Dead.
DAVID GANS [7/30/81]: There was one nice time at Winterland, in fact the closing of Winterland, where it sort of drifted in, and Jerry came out on stage —
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: Yeah, that was great, that was great. And then we went into “Dark Star.” That was fabulous, That was fabulous. It’s in the Movie. Ned is in the Movie, but he hasn’t got any credits.
JESSE: That’s also in the category of “getting ahead of ourselves.” In 1974, as the Dead prepared to retire from the road and make their new album, the horizons of Seastones were a bright color in their musical landscapes.
JAY KERLEY: Yeah, that Seastones stuff is just amazing. Seastones into “Dark Star” into “Morning Dew.” I mean, wow! I listen to it once a year, at least.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack, 10/18/74] (8:00-8:18)
JESSE: It was the last version of “Dark Star” until 1978, the last of the single drummer era, and—in that way—the last of a developing thread that had grown from a jam in September 1967 and developed gradually over the next seven years. It was definitely the end of an era.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack, 10/18/74] (8:51-9:18)
Saturday, 10/19
NED LAGIN: On October 19, for the first six or seven minutes of the Seastones performance, I go out and play synthesizer alone. And I used rhythm boxes and computer control—rhythm boxes that I had built from popular electronic circuitry—to generate electronic machine rhythms.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [10/19/74] (1:24-1:50)
NED LAGIN: Today, we take it for granted that people can have electronic drums and electronic percussion. But we no longer have the duality: ‘Oh, it sounds like a machine’ or ‘it sounds like a robot.’ ‘It's robot music,’ or all the derogatory terms that I heard.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [10/19/74] (3:25-3:44)
NED LAGIN: One guy came up—I think it was during the Movie, and there's Movie footage for this—when I was playing solo synthesizer before Phil would come out, a guy came up right in my face on stage and reached out to touch the synthesizer. I just brushed his hand away. He sat there for a while, then he just cooled out. He was in some place…. if he had been angry, I would assume that he would just knock stuff over, been really hostile. He felt more like he was in a very young child[-like] state.
AUDIO: “Seastones” [10/19/74] (6:00-6:12)
NED LAGIN: Garcia said to me, after that he said to me, “You know, it's really far out, really amazing stuff happens when you play. Some of it's cool and some of it's not cool.” He said, “That one was really cool.”
AUDIO: “Seastones” [10/19/74] (6:29-6:43)
JESSE: There were so many departures from the songbook during the Saturday show that we’ll only note a few. It was the last time they played the original uptempo “Friend of the Devil” before it slowed down.
AUDIO: “Friend of the Devil” [10/19/74] (0:18-0:40)
JESSE: From Mars Hotel, it was the last version of “Loose Lucy” until 1990, the final version with Donna Jean Godchaux. Jump back a few episodes for more about that.
AUDIO: “Loose Lucy” [10/19/74] (4:37-4:57)
JESSE: For some reason, they play the first “Mama Tried” since August ‘71, which is a mite sloppy.
AUDIO: “Mama Tried” [10/19/74] (0:41-1:00)
JESSE: Garcia and Donna do Dolly Parton’s “Tomorrow Is Forever” for the first time since ‘72 and for the last time with the Dead.
AUDIO: “Tomorrow Is Forever” [The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack, 10/19/74] (1:05-1:27)
JESSE: Joan Brown.
JOAN BROWN: In 1974, I had mostly just listened to albums with my ear pressed against the speaker. And now as I sat in Winterland, the music hit me. It hit me so much that, even though I was in my seat, I just couldn't even contain myself. My favorite song before these shows was “Let It Grow” from the Wake of the Flood album. After the shows, it became “Scarlet Begonias.”
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack, 10/19/74] (1:56-2:16) - [YouTube]
JOAN MILLER: While most of the other guys in the group were always talking about the guitar and how Jerry was playing, or how Bob was playing, or even Phil — me, as a girl, I was mostly focused on Donna, how she was swaying back and forth on stage. And the joy with which Jerry was playing — I just remember being so captivated by his smile and his expressions, the appreciation that he had [for] playing for the music. That's really what I remember from those shows mostly, is my admiration for Jerry. After those shows, “Scarlet Begonias” was definitely my favorite song. I was always a boogie-er, but this was it for me.
JESSE: And if you check out the bonus disc of the Dead Movie DVD, you can watch the long jammed-out final single-drummer “Scarlet Begonias.”
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack, 10/19/74] (10:59-11:18)
Sunday, 10/20
JESSE: The tickets for the show on the 20th were stamped THE LAST ONE. For reasons we discussed before, there are very few ticket stubs from Winterland shows, but there are several for this run, and Grateful Dead is misspelled — G-R-E-A-T-E-F-U-L. For Dead Heads in attendance, every song might be its last performance.
AUDIO: “Intro” [10/20/74] (0:19-0:29)
BOB WEIR [10/20/74]: And now, ladies and gentlemen, here he is, the 43-year old circus master — Mr. Bill Graham!
JESSE: Bill Graham nailed the dialogue, understanding the assignment and delivering one of his great truths.
BILL GRAHAM [10/20/74]: Thank you, thank you for coming. As it should be, on a Sunday night in San Francisco: the Grateful Dead.
JESSE: Strider.
STRIDER BROWN: The final night — Jay, our friend Mandy, myself, a couple other people, we got seats in the front row balcony on the north side of Winterland. We sat next to Chez Ray, or Ray Sewell, who was down from Eugene with his partner at the time, Joyce, and their fellow partner, Dave, who was also in the restaurant business with Chez Ray. So it was a pretty cool vantage point, in perspective. Certainly, I can say I was high as a kite, and watching them open up with “Cold Rain and Snow” was very exciting.
AUDIO: “Cold Rain and Snow” [10/20/74] (0:00-0:15)
JESSE: The first set contained the final American Beauty song played with the original vocal blend.
AUDIO: “Brokedown Palace” [10/20/74] (5:03-5:39)
STRIDER BROWN: And then seeing the second drumset being set up, that was anticipation, whatever it might be. It was a charged atmosphere.
JESSE: From Grateful Dead Records and Round Reels, Ron Rakow.
RON RAKOW: Two guys came to me that are really heavy in the Grateful Dead and really heavy in my life — two guys, both from Pendleton, Oregon: Rex Jackson, and Ram Rod. We were making a movie in October 1974. We were playing at Winterland, and the night before the last gig, Rex Jackson came to me because I was producing the Movie. He said, “We talked about it”—we, being he and Ram Rod really, and I guess some other guys were around, but he meant he and Ram Rod—“And we’d like to get Mickey up on stage and have him be in the Movie. That’s part of our history.” I said, “That’s a great idea.”
So, they called Mickey the next morning, and Jerilyn answered the phone. She said, “Rex Jackson and Ram Rod are on the phone for you.” And he said, “No, I don't want to talk to anybody that's not in the band.” She said, “I think you should do that. You should take this phone call.” So one time, he easily relented — I guess he just had good feelings about those two guys. And they told him they wanted to come out and get his drum shit and set it up at Winterland. He said, “Is it okay with the other guys in the band?” And they said, “Of course.”
They didn’t even know. The fact is, they didn't even know. Nobody knew this was going to happen but the equipment guys. The equipment guys as a bloc—a political bloc, in a lifestyle, in a tribe—had so much power that they could execute it in this kind of way. It's pretty fucking amazing. The guy that really could have stopped it, and didn't, was Kreutzmann.
JESSE: Feelings were shifting things and would keep shifting, but in that moment, the return of Mickey Hart was no easy thing. In his memoir Deal, Billy Kreutzmann made a point of addressing this night and the sudden reappearance of his erstwhile drumming partner, writing, “I’ve never really spoken publicly about this, but I’ll be clear, here: I objected to having Mickey sit in with us that night and I think I was probably somewhat vocal about that, backstage. I enjoyed being the only drummer and I didn’t want that to change. I got territorial about it. Mickey didn’t know the new material and we hadn’t rehearsed or played with him in years, so I didn’t think that it could possibly be any good—and it wasn’t, that night. Personally, I was insulted that everybody else backstage rallied behind Mickey. The whole situation became really uncomfortable for me.”
RON RAKOW: Kreutzmann was a very, very gracious guy. He really was secure in his position because he didn't stop it. So, Mickey played. But at that point, the band stopped going out on tour. So we didn't know whether Mickey would be included when or if a resurrection happened. Nobody knew — nobody knew, and then it just… happened. If somebody is responsible for that, Mickey getting back into the Grateful Dead, it's Rex Jackson
JESSE: Since Kreutzmann had asked him to leave the band in 1971, also detailed in Deal, Mickey had gradually started to welcome his former bandmates to sessions at his Barn studio, collaborating at different points with everybody but Kreutzmann on various studio projects. Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay had recorded for Robert Hunter’s Tales of the Great Rum Runners, but somebody else may’ve been engineering the session.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: The first time I met Mickey was when we were making the Movie at Winterland. While I was in the band, he played for the first time with the Grateful Dead. I don't think I had met him before that.
JESSE: To heads at Winterland, it was pretty obvious what was about to go down when the second drum kit went up. Jay Kerley was up with Strider Brown in the balcony.
JAY KERLEY: I had some incredible pot that smoked me to a psychedelic state. But as soon as I saw them bringing out more drum risers, I said, “Whoa, something's going on here…” I hadn't taken acid for any other shows. So I ran down to the floor and just said: “Does anybody have any acid?” And the guy in front of me turned around and said, “Here.” Ask and you shall receive. But as soon as I saw a drum riser, I knew that I needed some acid and danced my brains out. For all five nights, really — it was incredible. He came for “Playing in the Band” and then he was there for the third set as well.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [10/20/74] (4:11-4:34)
JESSE: Mickey Hart had a co-writing credit on the song but had only performed on the song’s debut version three years earlier. You can hear Ned’s synths in there, too. Michael Parrish.
MICHAEL PARRISH: That third night was so emotional, because you knew what was happening and then Mickey showed up. You can see it in the Movie, too — you could see that they were really emotional about it as well.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [10/20/74] (12:02-12:28)
JESSE: Ned Lagin was in the mix, too, just as he had been on Mickey Hart’s last show on February 18th, 1971.
NED LAGIN: And after that, the Grateful Dead were retired. So it wasn't like you were joining a band that was like: I was there for the last iteration, playing keyboards in the band. But I was never a member of the band. And my goal, personally, was to play with them because I enjoyed it, but also do my own thing.
JESSE: Jay.
JAY KERLEY: Everybody was really excited about the “Good Lovin’,” having not heard it since Pig died.
AUDIO: “Good Lovin’” [10/20/74] (10:36-10:50)
JESSE: In singing “Good Lovin’” at Winterland, Weir actually became the third Grateful Dead vocalist to sing the song, which had begun as a Garcia vehicle in ‘66 before Mr. Pen took it over in ‘69. Deep into the encore on the 20th, they played a powerful “Mississippi Half-Step” and it’s hard not to hear Garcia leaning into the fare-thee-well bent in the lyrics.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo” [The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack, 10/20/74] (1:38-1:54)
JESSE: In our “Row Jimmy” episode, we unearthed a wonderful story from an old David Gans interview, in which Hunter discusses “Half-Step” as being about his own journey to get on his way and start his life for real. Many rivers to cross.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo” [The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack, 10/20/74] (6:13-6:43)
JESSE: Moving to the Bay Area, Gary Lambert was still working on his unpublished Guitar Player profile of Bobby Weir.
GARY LAMBERT: I saw him the last night at Winterland in October ‘74. There was talk: this is the end, this is the end of the Grateful Dead. And Bobby said, “You ain’t seen the last of us.” We spoke more about that after the tour was over, and after the Winterland shows. There were so many things contributing to it, but he also spoke very optimistically about the future. They were already starting to make plans for Blues For Allah, all of that. Bobby had some preliminary tunes in his head.
JESSE: This is how Bob Weir described it the day after the final Winterland show in an interview conducted for the Movie, included in the Look Back documentary on the 2004 DVD.
BOBBY WEIR [10/74]: Well, I view it as one big continuum. I see nothing ending and nothing beginning right now. I've been working at something for the last 10 or 12 years that I'm just continuing to work on. I'm going to start to focus more on a particular aspect, that being my recording career. But it's my music that I've been working on.
JESSE: Within a month, Weir would debut his new band, Kingfish.
AUDIO: “Lazy Lightnin’” [Kingfish, s/t] (0:00-0:18) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Billy Kreutzmann felt that way too, interviewed a few days after the so-called retirement shows, now in the Look Back documentary.
BILLY KREUTZMANN [10/74]: I think it was played up as a last concert a lot. I just think of it as a cooling period of time, where we can just find our own ways. It's really nice right now, to just be able to sit back for a few months and know that you don't have to make an airplane fly, and that you feel really good, you got a good place to live. That's just, that's all I need. I don't have to worry about the band. The band, I think it'll take care of itself. When the time feels really good, we'll get together and rehearse new material. We'll probably do another album after Christmas, I hope we do. And, this time, I hope we find an engineer that we work with really well.
JESSE: Sorry, Roy Segal. Keith and Donna didn’t get to weigh in on how they felt.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: At the end of the concerts, Keith and I got dosed at the last gig, and that's when the camera crew we're coming out at our house in Stinson Beach to do our interview for the Movie. And everybody got dosed — nobody, the cameramen couldn't work. Keith and I couldn't talk. That's why we don't have an interview in the Movie, [because] we got so dosed that last night.
Tearing Down the Wall
JESSE: The so-called retirement was an attempt to reset and recenter themselves creatively and otherwise. Having just arrived in the Bay Area and seen five Dead shows in a row, Jay Kerley had a healthy music head’s perspective on it.
JAY KERLEY: Everybody was saying, ‘Oh my god, everything's going to end! I'll never see Jerry again!’ That didn't really make a whole lot of sense to me, because sitting in my pocket was a ticket for Halloween with Jerry and Merl. So I said, “Okay, well, I guess I'll just go see Jerry and Merl a million times” — which is what I did. The first show was on a Wednesday. The Sunday before that, Hot Tuna played for free in Golden Gate Park. The weekend after that, Sun Ra played at the Keystone Korner. There was just music everywhere, all the time. I just couldn’t believe it.
JESSE: It turned out to be a pretty life-changing five nights for Geoff Gould.
GEOFF GOULD: It was quite tiring at the end of five nights. You went all five nights, you know? Most of us did go. My wife had just returned from the Peace Corps in Africa, and we knew each other in high school. And so that was our first time being on a date was the first night of the five-night series.
JESSE: Happy almost 50th. The shows also sparked an idea.
GEOFF GOULD: Phil’s playing his bass, and I noticed this huge freaking lamb's wool strap he's got on. And I’m thinking, Boy, that bass must be heavy. At the time, I had started that summer working [at] this aerospace [company] down in Peninsula, Ford Aerospace. We were building satellite antennas, stuff like that. One of the more famous things is the Voyager — it's still out there, that's been great. What I was doing in the daytime was building structures that were lightweight and strong, because when you take something in outer space, it costs a lot of money for every kilogram that you have to lift into orbit.
JESSE: A few episodes back, we noted that—before it got codified into the Wall of Sound—Lesh thought of it as “the gantry system,” after the scaffolding system used to launch heavy objects into orbit.
GEOFF GOULD: It just seemed to me that this bass was really heavy. So I went back and talked to some of my supervisors, and then I contacted Alembic. Basically, what I did was I came back to Alembic, to the repair shop, and brought them a bunch of trinkets. I can’t even remember what: little pieces of stuff, made from these materials. It turns out they were very interested. Rick and Ron came down to visit me at the plant.
JESSE: It was the beginning of a collaboration that would turn into the Modulus instrument company, which we’ll talk about more in the future. Journalist Brian Anderson, working on a book about the Wall of Sound, Loud and Clear, has made it a mission to try to track down as many pieces of the Wall as possible. Please welcome back, Brian Anderson.
BRIAN ANDERSON: The Dead would kind of bequeath some of that gear to groups at their discretion — Bay Area bands, buddy bands that they could sort of trust. So, even in its afterlife, the Wall of Sound was really kind of a valuable resource in that regard. I've also spoken with some other various tech and crew folk who ended up taking little parts of the system for themselves, to incorporate into their home stereo setups, for example. Nothing huge: we're talking maybe a pair of 12-inch speaker drivers or something, or maybe a cabinet or two. So, there was a little bit of that going on as well. In other cases, bits of the Wall of Sound just sort of eked out literally around the globe. A small part of it actually ended up in my living room. I’ve purchased a unit in the most recent Sotheby's auction; to my knowledge, it is a vocal fill monitor from the Wall of Sound, and it weighs 65 pounds. I could crawl into it — it's that big. And it's sitting in the corner of my living room. It's a literal hunk of junk to some eyes, but knowing some of the places it's been, and all of the sound waves that flowed out of it, and the people who were able to experience music flowing through it… it gives me that woo-woo feeling, if you will.
JESSE: Richie Pechner had helped build the Wall.
RICHIE PECHNER: The truth is, they were just cabinets. They were speaker cabinets. So if you were a guitar player and you could get one of Jerry's twin 12-inch JBLs, that was it. People had friends, and it just kind of all got disseminated around. Phil’s bass cabinets — there were so many of those. I mean, you could give them away for a year. Just people that knew people. It wasn’t like they had a sale, per se.
JESSE: One of the bands that inherited parts of the Wall were Osiris, a Palo Alto group fronted by Kevin McKernan, Pigpen’s younger brother. We included this story a few seasons back, but we’ll put it in its proper chronological place now. Please welcome back Osiris roadie, Sully.
JIM “SULLY” SULLIVAN: Garcia really had a soft spot for Kevin, way beyond any sort of standard person that's in the music industry. So Kevin and I drove up to the Dead office, because Kevin was putting together this band with his friends: Scott, the other Kevin and Al and Sam Sheets, and Keith Moore played with him too. Kevin and I drove up in his brother's Studebaker. Kevin… ol’ leadfoot. We got up there and Garcia basically just gave us—or gave him—a whole truck bed full of Mc[Intosh] amps and those speakers, the Hard Trucker speakers that were part of the Europe ‘72 tour, and most likely were in the Wall of Sound. That’s kind of half the battle, is getting decent gear! They started playing gigs. They did free shows at Stanford, the Frost Amphitheater, but also up by the Tresidder Union.
JESSE: Strider and Jay saw Osiris open for Garcia and Saunders on Halloween that year, even. Here’s a little bit of Osiris’s “Hook Line and Sinker.” Thanks, Sully.
AUDIO: “Hook Line and Sinker” (Demo) [Osiris] (0:31-1:01) - [archive.org]
JESSE: More than bands getting pieces of the Wall of Sound were bands influenced by the Wall of Sound. Ron Long left us this awesome story.
RON LONG: We were a Dead cover band around the 1970s, and we lived in Oldsmar, Florida in a place called the Oldsmar Hotel. We felt cosmically connected to the Dead all the time and we went to DC to hear the Wall of Sound.
AUDIO: “Spanish Jam” [Dave’s Picks Bonus Disc 2012, 7/29/74] (1:15-1:32)
RON LONG: We were blown away by the sound. We went back and created our own system with custom JBL-15s on bass reflex cabinets, powered by scrounge-through and vacant-phased linear amps run through an Altec-Lansing glancing mixing board. We stacked the barks and ran all our instruments through the mixer and we killed it in clubs and outdoor concerts. That's how they became the barks.
JESSE: The quality and the intention of the Wall of Sound were obvious, the actual signal chain could be harder to discern — that is, how to create one sound from several individual PAs and no mixer. One band influenced by seeing the PA behind the band was the German group CAN, who we heard from a little bit last time.
AUDIO: “Funf” [CAN, Live in Paris 1973] (2:00-2:29) - [Bandcamp]
JESSE: We’re going to repeat a bit from our Europe ‘72 season, when CAN’s engineer Rene Tinner told us about a photo of the Dead, possibly from Munich ‘74, and how that sent the CAN engineering team down a new path.
RENE TINNER: I got the inspiration from a picture in the paper of their equipment setup on one of those concerts they had in Germany. It inspired my colleague and me to take up that spirit, having a Wall of Sound behind the band.
JESSE: They didn’t have schematics, and could only do that they saw in the photo.
RENE TINNER: We just practically glued any loudspeaker we could find in the studio and mounted it on wood, construction. We had no boxes, nothing on the back — just all these speakers behind the band, no boxes really. Just loudspeakers mounted one to each other. Most of those speakers were pretty shitty speakers, apart from a few JBLs, I cannot even say what it was.
JESSE: In photos of the era, the band is centered around something that looks like the Wall’s center cluster.
RENE TINNER: I doubt it was in the same quality as the Dead’s. I cannot say because I didn't hear. But the inspiration came from having many speakers behind the band.
JESSE: I think that system is in effect on the newest CAN archival release, recorded in Aston in 1977, available from Mute Records. An audience tape, even.
AUDIO: “Vier” [Can, Live in Aston 1977] (3:39-4:09) - [Bandcamp]
JESSE: Perhaps the Wall of Sound’s biggest impact came with two bands you almost certainly wouldn’t expect, including one of the most popular in the world. Big thanks to QueenCityJamz for heppin’ us to this info. The first were underground legends and noted Dead Heads Black Flag.
AUDIO: “Rise Above” [Black Flag, Damaged] (0:26-0:37) - [Spotify]
JESSE: In 1986, days after the band played their last show, they were spotted in the parking lot in Alpine Valley, catching some Dead gigs on the way home. It was sometime on that last tour as well that their soundman Dave Rat convinced them to try stacking the gear behind the band without monitors. He wrote on his blog, “On the upside, the system was incredibly clear sounding while on the downside, it sounded a bit distant and the sound bleeding into the mics was cumbersome enough not to continue with that setup.”
AUDIO: “Paralyzed” [Black Flag, In My Head] (0:24-0:42) - [Spotify]
JESSE: 20 years later, Dave Rat got to try again. By then, he was running sound for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “The evolution of sound systems from giant globs of speakers to finesse full narrow line-arrays created the opportunity to cover large venues with multiple systems utilizing minimal space. The entire Wall of Sound was 26,000 watts, current systems run at ten times that power and are a fraction of the size. Plus we now have the capability of effectively predicting the sonic coverage in a venue based on room dimensions. What this means is that with today's sound system technology, multiple sound systems can be hung conventionally to either side of the band rather than stacked behind them without blocking sight lines creating an inconspicuous yet effective implementation of the concept.” After testing out systems at home using live muli-tracks, Rat first wanted to run three systems, but decided that the addition of a third system was subtle compared to expanding to just two. I’m not sure how long that system stayed in use, but in 2006 anyway, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were touring with a Wall-influenced speaker system.
AUDIO: “Dani California” [Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stadium Arcadium] (0:57-1:20) - [Spotify]
JESSE: The Wall of Sound became legend. But first, it had to earn its name. There are a few in-print references from 1974 to the PA being called the Wall of Sound, but the name didn’t really catch on until sometime in the 1980s. Brian Anderson.
BRIAN ANDERSON: It sort of came after the fact, the tag — Wall of Sound.
JESSE: The next year, Alembic published a paper about what was still just called the Grateful Dead system.
BRIAN ANDERSON: That was published in 1975, I believe, in the [journal of the] Audio Engineering Society of America. That paper was divided into two parts. The first was written by Don Davis of Synergetic Audio Concepts in California. Then part two was by Ron Wickersham of Alembic, and that was presented at the 51st convention of AES, in May of 1975. By that point, spring of 1975, all parties who were involved in this magnificent sound project had had a moment to sort of reflect and just digest everything that had happened. That paper coming out in a respectable journal, that was huge at the time.
JESSE: The system had been an incredible experiment and really quite dangerous.
BRIAN ANDERSON: Another thing that I find so remarkable about the Wall of Sound is that no one died as a direct result of working on this thing. No one got crushed under a heap of speakers; nobody fell three stories off the top of the scaffolding when they were tilting a cabinet way up there; nobody got electrocuted to death. It's amazing that nothing like that happened. If you talk to some folks who were there working on that thing, when they were setting that thing up, that was kind of sober time. No one was drinking, no one was getting too fucked up because the risk was was too high. The margin for error was razor-thin, and they just weren't gonna risk that. But even still, at a time before OSHA standards were really, really, really strict, nobody died as a direct result of working on the Wall of Sound.
JESSE: Owsley did fall off the system at some point, possibly in Oakland, and hurt his arm. But by 1975, the Wall of Sound had disappeared. The Mars Hotel itself wasn’t long for the world either. We got this fun story from listener Gregory Barette.
GREGORY BARETTE: Back in the early 1970s, I used to take any visiting friends to the Hotel Mars in San Francisco. I wouldn't tell them where I was taking them, but it was part of the tourist destination list that I had. We'd hang out in the lobby. Imagine my surprise when I saw the album come out. It reminded me of how I felt when I lived in Turlock, California, and they dedicated an entire side of Europe ‘72 to the people of Turlock, California.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Europe ‘72] (0:00-0:16) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BOB WEIR [5/26/72]: Of course by now, I needn’t tell ya that this next number rose straight to the top of the charts in Turlock, California. Numero Uno, and stayed there for a week or two. They love us in Turlock, and we love them for that.
GREGORY BARETTE: It just goes to show there's only 300 of us in the world. We all just run around real fast.
JESSE: Sometime in 1975 or 1976, the last residents were kicked out of the Mars Hotel, and the hotel was gutted. Ron Rakow was president of Grateful Dead Records.
RON RAKOW: I have the sign that identified the Mars Hotel as the Mars Hotel. I was in my office in San Rafael. Somebody walked upstairs right in — didn't even stop, like he knew everybody, which he didn't. And he said, “I just went to the auction of all this stuff at the Mars Hotel and I want you to have this.” And he gave it to me and turned around and left. I don't even know who the guy's name is.
JESSE: Rakow still has it on the front door of his room.
RON RAKOW: It says: “Hotel Mars, Rooms”—those are all equal-sized big letters, three-inch letters—“By the Day, Week or Month. Hot, Cold Water, Steam Heat in Every Room.”
JESSE: Sometime around then, the crew working on the animated opening for The Grateful Dead Movie caught wind of the impending destruction. Rita Fiedler.
RITA FIEDLER: I lived on Bernal Hill, which is right on the edge of the Mission District. And on the route I took to go over to Mill Valley, I would occasionally drive by a portion south of Market Street where the actual Mars Hotel was. It was on its last legs, so to speak. It had been marked for demolition. And I just took note of it — it was just something you notice as you're driving by. Well, I began to notice that there was more activity, more activity on certain times that I drove by: ‘Oh my gosh, they're really starting to take down this building.’ And I mentioned it to Gary. And I said, “The actual Mars Hotel, it's down there south of Market, and they're really serious about demolishing it. Maybe we should do something about it.” So we scrambled and got a camera, and several of us went down to the site. Because I said, “Gary, really, really, we need to do this. It's gonna happen really soon.” There was actually just the front wall literally standing. So when we got there, that's indeed what had happened: it was the very last push that Gary was able to film. This bulldozer—boom!—knocking down the front marquee that said “Mars Hotel.” All of that. Yeah, pretty dramatic.
Shipping Out
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [June 1976, 6/11/76] (2:27-2:50)
JESSE: The Ship of Fools kept sailing in and out of the mists of Grateful Dead history after 1974, no doubt, a ghost ship where one might find the spirits of Precarious Lee, Cadillac Ron, some friends of Rock Scully’s friends, and the embodiment of every earnestly-intentioned bad decision in the band’s history. Or maybe your own. We’re listening to the Boston ‘76 take, around the time the Mars Hotel got knocked down. A sweet spot for the song is between the band’s ‘76 comeback through 1978, often with a lovely local blend with Donna Jean Godchaux, and lyrics that were always timely. Like Garcia once noted — topical song, topical lyrics. And I’ll add, topical guitar solo, too.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [June 1976, 6/11/76] (3:16-3:36)
JESSE: “Ship of Fools” was a song that never exactly jammed, but Jerry Garcia consistently placed it in the heart of things in the second set. In an interview in 1999 on WCUW in Worcester, late vault keeper Dick Latvala discussed why, even though there was no jam in “Ship of Fools,” hearing it live was still different than listening to it on From the Mars Hotel, even though we recommend doing that, too.
DICK LATVALA [3/20/99]: It's how they play it. Any of their tunes can do something special to you — even “Ship of Fools.” I remember once crying during one, thinking, wow, that is powerful. And I overlook it most of the time, the first set songs that seem [repetitive] or the same every time. Sometimes they aren't the same, and sometimes they affect you in ways that they didn't before, because you hear it differently. It's a matter of education and learning. It's not something fixed.
JESSE: Now that’s what I call musicking. Elvis Costello was seemingly the first outside of the Dead world to take up the song.
ELVIS COSTELLO: I went to Barbados in 1990. I, at the time, was trying to negotiate with the Attractions to try and make a record, and it didn't work out. But at the time that I was planning on doing that, I took what had been the band I played with to Barbados to Eddy Grant’s studio, and we recorded a bunch of rock and roll songs just for fun. It was like a rum-drinking holiday… funny you should mention, it was before I quit drinking. We had a lot of fun: we cut Howlin’ Wolf songs and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins songs, Supreme songs. And I cut “Ship of Fools.”
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [Elvis Costello, Deadicated] (0:30-0:48)
ELVIS COSTELLO: I gave “Ship of Fools” to the Dedicated album. I learned to play that one and “It Must Have Been the Roses,” which I felt were related somehow. Maybe harmonically they are related.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools/It Must Have Been the Roses” [Elvis Costello, Stolen Roses, 8/16/87] (2:26-2:56)
JESSE: Man do we love “It Must Have Been the Roses.” Dig into our Tales of the Great Rum Runners bonus episode if you do, too. We checked, though, and while the songs were both part of the crop debuted by the Dead in 1974, and there’s definitely something similar about how Garcia played them, and there’s a conceptual connection to the waves rollings the ships in “Roses,” harmonically speaking, it’s an entirely vibes-based segue. Still, cool move, EC.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools/It Must Have Been the Roses” [Elvis Costello, Stolen Roses, 8/16/87] (3:55-4:15)
JESSE: Along with “New Speedway Boogie,” it might be the Dead’s most eternally topical song. Unlike “New Speedway Boogie,” the Dead kept playing “Ship of Fools” year in and year out, and it could mean something different every single time, and probably did. David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Buffalo ‘89, there's a great one there as well.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [Truckin’ Up to Buffalo, 7/4/89] (5:18-5:43) - [YouTube]
JESSE: And, since the Ship of Fools is symbolic, we can safely say that it certainly kept sailing. In the 17th century German novel, it was a whole fleet of Ships of Fools set sail from Basel, and we can imagine that, too.
PAUL MCCARTNEY [Yellow Submarine, 1968]: Funny, a submarine remarkably like our own.
JOHN LENNON [Yellow Submarine, 1968]: Uncannily.
RINGO STARR [Yellow Submarine, 1968]: There’s someone here, look.
GEORGE HARRISON [Yellow Submarine, 1968]: And they’re waving.
RINGO STARR [Yellow Submarine, 1968]: It’s a group of fellas.
JOHN LENNON [Yellow Submarine, 1968]: Wave back.
GEORGE HARRISON [Yellow Submarine, 1968]: Maybe we’re both part of a vast Yellow Submarine fleet…
JESSE: The sea is no less cruel today, and the fleet might be even larger, the Paradise of Fools somewhere just over the next horizon.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [From the Mars Hotel] (4:15-4:31) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: David Lemieux had a tape with Mars Hotel stuck in the car tape deck all summer.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It got stuck in there. So I listened to Ace and Mars Hotel… it must have been 100 times in those months. That’s all we had. We just flipped it back and forth, and we didn’t complain. And then, one day, finally I looked in there, and it’s because the little tape curl had gotten stuck on the little door of the tape deck. So all I did was I just kind of pushed it down with a knife or something, and it just popped right out.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [From the Mars Hotel] (4:42-4:46) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: [Tape deck stopping mid-song]
DAVID LEMIEUX: And I was somewhat disappointed, because it meant I now had to listen to something different. I love this album so much, and I got to know it so well. We've been talking about songs that I've heard hundreds of times, and I want to hear hundreds more. I've listened to this album a lot in the last six months, more than I have in any previous six-month chunk for the past few years. But I will get off this recording session with you guys, and I will go listen to it.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [From the Mars Hotel] (4:50-5:08) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It takes a village to make the Deadcast, and it’s a village I’d like to at least hang out in. Besides the production crew that Rich shouts out at the end of every episode, I want to send an extra thanks to the extended research squad, some who’ve appeared on camera, some haven’t, including David Gans, Gary Lambert, Shaugn O’Donnell, Light Into Ashes of Dead Sources, Corry Arnold of Lost Live Dead, Joe Jupille and Tyler and MJ and everybody operating the levers at Jerrybase, Uli Teute and Volki Rupp for mustache forensics, Michael Parrish, what the heck, Cadillac Ron Rakow, Nicholas Meriwether of the Grateful Dead Studies Association and everybody from the Dead Studies caucuses, Ben Easton for help keeping the transcripts straight. Thanks for listening.
AUDIO: “Ship of Fools” [Garcia Lead Guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (5:14-5:36)