text:
The Warlocks at the Spaceship October 8-9, 1989
I expect in a straw poll of Deadheads, the Warlocks shows would be considered the top-shows of the 1980s (although it's hard to beat Lewiston 9-6-80 and Oakland 12-31-81 for me)
My only Hampton show was the first one 10 years earlier on May 4, 1979 so I was along time and fart away from going to these unbelievable shows.
Here are some tales from this golden road.
Bird Sing, Help>Slip>Franklins, Gimme Dew, Bid You Goodnight
Playin UJB Playin Dark Star Death Dont Attics
Yes, I would love to have been there
Duprees Diamond Reviews
And Unbroken Chain
Labels: 1989, 1989-10-08, 1989-10-09
There's a Riot in Richmond, November 1-2, 1985
Bring out the horses and the hoses, the whiskey and the wine, the Dead are back in town. While the Grateful Dead, played Virginia a total of 37 times, only 5 were in Richmond (2nd to Hampton's 21 shows), the Mosque in 1977, and the Coliseum in 1983, 1984 and these last two. The local police did not appreciate the Comes A Time, China Doll and Morning Dew played over these two nights.
The first night was the show of 1985 according to the Deadbase XI polling, while the second night hardly received a vote. Have fun these were groovy nights, complete with video footage, audio, and a nice contemporary Bill Graham Rolling Stone Interview at the bottom.
The Rolling Stone Interview: Bill Graham
Michael Goldberg, Rolling Stone, 19 December 1985
The P.T. Barnum of rock & roll celebrates his twentieth anniversary
TWENTY YEARS ago, on November 6th, 1965, Bill Graham produced his first concert. It was a benefit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and it featured an eclectic group of artists: poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, the Jefferson Airplane and improvisational comedians the Committee. The show was held at the troupe's Howard Street loft, and thousands of people showed up. In the ensuing months, Graham held two more Mime Troupe benefits. By then, he had discovered an auditorium in San Francisco's Fillmore District – and his calling. "I came to realize what I could do with my life," he said. "I am not an artist. But I had found a means of expression."
Graham was born Wolfgang Grajonca in Berlin on January 8th, 1931. His father died in a construction accident two days later; his mother placed him and his youngest sister in a Berlin orphanage so she could work. His earliest memory is of being taken to an orphanage in France, which is where he was in 1939 when war broke out between France and Germany. Two years later, a Red Cross representative helped Graham and sixty-three other children flee the Nazis. It was a nightmarish journey that eventually landed him in New York. Graham's mother died in a Nazi concentration camp.
Today, the fifty-four-year-old Graham is a multimillionaire who rules over a music-business empire that grosses more than $100 million a year. Though still best known for the hundreds of concerts his company, Bill Graham Presents, stages each year, he also has a management division (Santana and Eddie Money are two of his clients); a technical division; a merchandising company; record-production, music-publishing and film-production wings; and even a food and beverage company, Fillmore Fingers. In addition to presenting nearly every major rock and pop act that comes to the San Francisco Bay Area, Graham has promoted national tours by Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, and he was the producer of the Band's farewell concert, the Last Waltz, and of the American portion of Live Aid.
Graham, who has two sons (David, 17, and Alex, 8) and a stepson (Thomas, 18), has been married once, and is now divorced. He currently owns a home in Marin County, an office-apartment in Manhattan and shares a vacation property in Lake Geneva, Switzerland. His spacious, million-dollar Marin County home, which is where these interviews were conducted, sits on nearly nine acres in the hills thirty minutes north of San Francisco. A quarter-mile driveway, lined with eucalyptus trees, leads up to the house, past an immense, slowly spinning lighted globe and a gigantic skull – both props from some Grateful Dead show – set on the hillside. There's a swimming pool, basketball court and volleyball court. A silver Mercedes 280SE and a brown Jaguar convertible sit in his garage.
Inside the house, Graham is surrounded by his past Framed Fillmore posters. A painting of the stage from the Rolling Stones' 1981 world tour. Photos of Keith Richards, the Grateful Dead, Marlon Brando, Bob Dylan. A shredded black vest that once belonged to Richards hangs in his study. And, in a frame, a tambourine and microphone used by Janis Joplin.
Graham has mellowed considerably since the late Sixties and early Seventies, when he could often be found outside the Fillmore East or the Fillmore West, shouting down some hippie who wanted free admission. Yet he remains extremely sensitive to the accusations that he was, as Graham himself puts it, "a capitalist pig ripoff."
"The minute somebody starts attacking me in that area, something happens to me," said Graham. "I'm like a cobra whose head is rising and sss...." Late in the second session, he talked about what makes him happy these days. At one point, in his deep, gruff voice, he said, "Not to be accused."
You've been involved with rock & roll for twenty years now. How have things changed since you started out?
Rock & roll is now the music of the land. Broadway. Movies. TV commercials. Miami Vice. It's the music of America. It's certainly not the music of the alternative society. Somebody, a guy who used to go to the Fillmore East all the time, had a comment about Live Aid. He said, "Isn't it amazing, Bill. In twenty years, the outlaws became the heroes." Hall and Oates at the Statue of Liberty. Live Aid. Farm Aid. Royalty at Wembley. Rock & roll is in the White House!
Did you ever think, back when you first opened the Fillmore in 1965, that twenty years later you'd still be in the music business, and on such a grand scale?
The scene at that time was in its embryonic stage. Did I know that it was going to be that lucrative? Impossible. I went into it not so much as a way to earn a living – although I had to earn a living – but as a way of life. It was a means of expression. There was no conception of what the whole thing would be like twenty years later. How did you learn how to put on a rock concert?
We have to leapfrog back in time to the mid-Sixties, when there were no rules, no blueprints. The rock & roll business – the weekly concerts, the Fillmore, the Avalon – that all started in 1965. All of a sudden, there was the Fillmore, and there was the Avalon. And oh, those are agents? Is that who you talk to? And the posters and the light shows. There was no rock & roll college. And yet, the promoters that followed... I know a major promoter back East, for example, who stood in the lobby of the Fillmore East and made notes and notes and notes. Well, we didn't take notes.
So you didn't know much about the concert business when you put on the benefit for the Mime Troupe?
I want to show you something. [Graham leafs through a scrapbook from 1965 and stops at a small handbill advertising the Mime Troupe benefit.] A few weeks before the benefit, a man called me, and it turned out to be Chet Helms, who told me he was with the Family Dog [a communal group that later became Graham's chief competition]. He said, "We'd like to donate our services."
Well, when he arrived the night of the show, I asked him where the dogs were. I didn't mean it as a joke. I actually thought that they were a dog act. And the proof is that they're listed right here among the other entertainers: Jefferson Airplane, the Committee, the Family Dog! At the time, that was the extent of my knowledge of the scene.
When you first started presenting concerts at the Fillmore, you coproduced one show – featuring the Paul Butterfield Blues Band – with the Family Dog. But it seems they rubbed you the wrong way.
They ran their business differently than I did, and in a way that in the long run couldn't make it You can't invite so many people in as friends and then be able to conduct your business... If an artist travels thousands of miles, he's owed something. He's owed your awareness that he needs to eat and needs shelter. I'm not relating it to Chet. I'm relating it to anybody. Chet meant well. His image was the exact counterpoint to mine.
On one hand, this hippie – flowery, long-haired Chet Helms. And on the other, Bill Graham – the guy with the clipboard who knew how to deal with city hall.
Chet was a product of that era; I was a product of an earlier era. At our company, at that time and today, you can't do drugs on the job. Why? Somebody has to be clearheaded. And that's us. What I'm trying to do, indirectly, is tell you the difference between Chet and me. I wish the Utopian theory of life could work. But to cross a bridge, you gotta have a coin for the toll. And I think sometimes that was forgotten.
For a long time, the Grateful Dead were trying to dose you with LSD. Eventually, they succeeded. What exactly happened?
That was at the Fillmore West, during my 7 Up era. We'd put plastic barrels full of sodas and ice in the dressing rooms. And they took the 7 Up cans on top in these barrels and used a hypodermic needle to put in their goodies. They figured that sooner or later I'd pick one up. And on one of my trips, just as I habitually would do, I picked up a can of 7 Up. Just about the time they were going onstage, it hit. Rather heavily.
One of the guys, [drummer] Mickey Hart, asked if I would like to come onstage with them. He gave me a drumstick and said, "Feel free to play anything you like, and hit the gong whenever you like." Now, I've always felt as the producer that the stage belongs to the artist. But that night I felt no inhibitions about staying up there. I spent the next four and a half hours onstage with the Dead. I didn't think I'd made an ass of myself. I just had one of the great evenings of my life.
How do you feel about drugs in general?
I have never been a heavy drug user, ever, except there was a week, maybe ten years ago. I was in New York, and it was very late, and I had to get up early the next morning. A friend was with me, and I said, "I don't know how I'll get up." He said, "I've got some coke. Take a little hit." I have never enjoyed coke the way other people have or seem to have. It's just like a bamboo pole up my ass. It will wake me up, but it doesn't take me away. But he gave me a small vial of it. That first morning, I took some, and I felt good. I had a very tough day. The next day, I had another tough day, and I thought, "Thank God I have got a little bit of this stuff." I did that four mornings in a row. The fifth morning, I found myself getting up and automatically going for it I stood in front of a mirror with a nail file, and I put the nail file into the little vial. I saw myself in the mirror, and I knew that I had done it automatically. That woke me up forever, I think. I hope.
You've presented almost every major rock act except the Beatles. Did you ever try to get them to do a show?
In the first year and a half that I was in business, on three different occasions, I wrote letters to Brian Epstein, saying: This is who I am, you visited the Fillmore, ta-da-da-da... I said, If you are ever going to come back to America, I now have so much money saved, and I offer you this amount of money.... Just to have the Beatles play here would be an honor. And when I had saved $10,000, I wrote to them again. I remember the highest amount I offered them was $28,000. But I never got a response.
How much money did bands usually make when they played the Fillmore?
Well, the most significant early-day figure that I remember is for a week of shows with the Jefferson Airplane, Gabor Szabo and Jimi Hendrix, who was the opening act. Jimi made $750 for the week.
How much did the Airplane make?
The headliner would make $2500, perhaps, or $3000, something like that. For a weekend – three nights.
For years you felt you were forced to assume, as you put it when you announced the closing of the Fillmores, "the role of Antichrist of the underground." People hated you because they thought you were ripping them off, charging too much for tickets and so on. They called you names. Swore at you. How did that make you feel?
When people shit on you, it stinks. Who wouldn't be affected by that? To be verbally attacked, psychologically attacked. In the early days of this business, I retaliated very strongly against accusations by challenging people verbally rather than trying to make them really understand. I'd get into a screaming match with the person. There were hundreds of situations where I didn't feel good about what happened. The anger came on so strong. I was engrossed in "you have no right to do this" – whatever you were doing. If you would show me an instant replay of some of those incidents, I could look at myself and say, "What an asshole."
How do you deal with your anger now?
It's almost nonexistent. There are still times when I'll snap, but I'm not as possessed, obsessed. And something happened: The audience changed. The promoter no longer was "the capitalist." In the early years, I would walk through the crowd, waiting for some negative things. Somebody would say, "Money." Or just, "Fuck the pigs! Why do you charge so much? Capitalist ripoff!"
If I had this conversation once, I've had it a thousand times – where somebody says, "Well, why is the ticket price so high? I know if it was up to the artists, they'd play for nothing." And then I would say, "How much do you think the artist makes a night? Their take was twelve times mine." Still, they weren't satisfied, because they weren't concerned with how much the artist made. The artist was a member of their family. I wasn't. I was a businessman. I don't experience that anymore. Now, more often than not, it's "Hey, Bill, great show!"
What's the most memorable show you've produced?
The Mime Troupe benefit was, is and always will be the most exciting night of my life in theater. Here were these filmmakers who met these poets for the first time. And jazz musicians and rock & roll musicians. It was a totally different thing than I'd ever seen. People dancing with people they had never met before. Men and women and kids were just dancing. And all of a sudden, it was six o'clock in the morning – it started getting light – and Allen Ginsberg was doing his mantra chants.
When I think about the past twenty years, I think about the Stones tour, the Dylan tour or Live Aid. I think about the Last Waltz or the closing of the Fillmore or the opening of the Fillmore East. And, of course, the early days. There was a gig with the Butterfield Blues Band and B.B. King, and both Albert King and Freddie King showed up and played.
When the power structure was different, we were able to put on Howlin' Wolf with Janis Joplin, or two one-act plays by Leroi Jones at a Byrds concert at the Fillmore. To see the faces of Grateful Dead fans listening to Miles Davis; to watch a roomful of really hyper Who fans being blown away by Woody Herman. Turning the house-lights on with Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles and the King Curtis band, and the band went into twenty minutes of laying down this incredible beat, and Aretha and Ray both stopped playing and singing, and Aretha just held Ray's arm, and the two of them just rocked back and forth on the stage. [Laughs] That was pretty much nirvana.
Those kinds of shows – where you present a soul or blues or jazz act to the rock audience – rarely happen these days. Rock & roll is much more segregated now. Does that bother you?
More than any single aspect of this business, it bothers me the most, and I miss it the most. In the first six or seven years, I was able to do that. It gave me pleasure, it gave the public pleasure, and it also educated the public and me at the same time. I'd never seen these people perform. I couldn't believe Howlin' Wolf the first time I saw him. The effect of Mavis Staples keeping time by snapping her fingers. Rahsaan Roland Kirk walking through the audience like a Pied Piper, playing two saxes.
But gradually, the struggle was with the power system of our industry.
I can sit here as a producer and say, "Wouldn't it be nice to see Talking Heads and King Sunny Ade on the same bill," but that also takes the artists' doing. If two artists really want to get together, they could. Nothing stops them.
How would you compare the big stars of today – say, Madonna or Prince or Michael Jackson – to the stars of the Sixties? Are there more prima donnas today?
The obvious problem we have with that type of question is that as a producer who's dealing with these people, if I start tearing anybody down by name, I'll lose that relationship.
The days of insisting on a white limousine are gone. Because the stars found out that people pound on limousines. So let's not take limousines; let's take station wagons. They learned through the years. In between, it was difficult. There was an artist we lost because I would not get him a white limousine; the only white limousine was in L.A., and I wasn't about to schlep to L.A. for a white limousine.
There was a certain English group some years ago that asked us for bottles of a highly expensive vintage wine. But I found out after a few visits that they never opened them. So one time I went into the dressing room and said, "Hello, how are you? God, that's a nice wine." And I picked up a bottle as if I were going to open it. And someone said, "Don't touch that bottle!" And I realized one of the leaders of this organization was a wine collector. And he was just gradually amassing this amazing wine collection. From then on I said, "Why should I be feeding your wine collection?"
Let's talk about some of the rock stars you've known. What's your favorite memory of Janis Joplin?
Janis and Grace Slick were the two queens of rock & roll in the Sixties. Dual royalty on the feminine side, both living in San Francisco. Once in the late Sixties, Janis came off her second set and said, "Bill, you wanna hang out, get something to eat?" She had never said that to me in her life. We weren't friends, and therefore it was very unexpected.
We got into her car, which was a psychedelically colored Porsche, and went to an all-night place where you could get food. She had some booze; we got some cheese and salami and crackers and Oreos – just garbage food. Then we went driving across the bridge to an area where you can look at the Golden Gate Bridge from the Marin side. We sat down and talked about how insane life was, how tough it was to pull down the blinds and just be off on your own.
Janis had just become really huge. She'd done a few tours, and she talked about the horrors of the road. The key sentence was "You know, you're in Des Moines, in the middle of a tour and at the end of a gig, the guys go back to the Holiday Inn, and they can go down to the bar and see what's happening. What does a woman do in this society?"
Janis made me realize that in spite of "making it," you could still have great difficulty balancing work and play and joy. In the end, a truck driver can be luckier than Janis Joplin.
What about Jimi Hendrix?
There was a night in New York that is among my favorite incidents of all time. He played New Year's Eve and New Year's Day at the Fillmore East – two shows a night – and they were recording it for an album. It was the Band of Gypsys, with Billy Cox on bass and Buddy Miles on drums. During the first show, he was really having fun, humping, grinding, putting the guitar behind his back. Usually, he would do that later on in the set. First, he would really play. But that night, that stuff started very early on, and it bothered me.
While we were clearing the house before the second show, Jimi came down to my office and said, "How are you doing, man? What did you think?" He never did that. Jimi Hendrix was a very quiet, private person.
There were other people in the office, and I asked them to leave. Then I said, "I'll tell you something. I saw you humping and laying down, playing behind your back. You did all that shit, but you forgot one thing. You forgot to play." And he looked at me like he couldn't believe what I said. He didn't really say anything; he just sat a minute or more. Then he turned to me and very seriously and gently just pointed to me and said, "Bill, you are here for the second show, right?" I said, "Yeah." And he said, "Okay, man. Thanks."
At the second show, he proceeded to play eighty minutes of the most brilliant music, emotionally and technically, that I have ever seen. He moved very little. The audience sat there as if they were watching a ballet. He came off, and the people were applauding, and he saw me standing there. He came up to me and looked very serious and very drenched in perspiration after giving energy that was awesome. He looked straight at me, maybe three inches from my face, and said, "All right?" And just stared at me. "All right?"
And then he went out and did a fifteen-minute encore of nothing but shit, nothing but circus. All the bumps, the grinds, the fire, the humping, guitar behind the neck, somersaults – all of it – as if to say, "Okay, you got yours, now I'm gonna just have fun."
What do you remember about Jim Morrison?
A funny incident happened when he was at the Fillmore. He took the microphone and started swinging it like a lariat, letting more and more of it go. It started swinging over the audience, and I immediately went through the crowd and tried to stand in front of the stage, because I could see that sooner or later he was going to lose it, and I didn't want it to hit anybody. I was standing maybe ten people back, waving my arms, trying to catch his attention, and then he loses it And out of 2000 people in the hall, it hits me right in the head. There's this lump on my head. Afterward, I went downstairs, and we joked about how ironic it was.
The next time he came to the Fillmore, he gave me a gift. It was a psychedelically painted pith helmet – a protective pith helmet that I should wear during the show.
The Who?
In 1970, the Who were playing a week at the Fillmore East There was a grocery store on the corner of the theater, and during the latter part of the performance one night, someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the store. It started to go up in flames. Some of the flames started coming in through the side door of the Fillmore, and all of a sudden, with maybe three or four minutes of the performance left, the fire department started coming in through the front doors. The audience was totally convinced that this was part of the show, and they cheered. Nobody left the building. And then they saw the smoke coming in and thought it was special effects.
The first fireman went down the aisle and jumped up on the stage. Roger [Daltrey] didn't know who they were, and he goes and kicks the guy off the stage. Pete [Townshend] comes over and wants to hit the guy with his guitar. The audience was going crazy and applauding; thought it was the greatest thing they'd ever seen.
Well, everyone was finally evacuated from the building. But the fire department was pissed: Who were these guys kicking us off the stage? And the police were looking for the members of the Who. So I took them to my apartment, which was around the corner. The next afternoon, their lawyer surrendered them to the police. They held them at the station for a number of hours, took some statements. The end result was that they were released about a half-hour before it was time for them to go back onstage at the Fillmore the next night.
How about the Stones? There's a beat-up pair of Keith Richards' boots sitting in a cabinet in your dining room. How'd they get there?
Every time Keith walked onstage during the Stones' 1981 tour, he wore a different outfit, but he always wanted to wear these handmade Spanish boots. After a while, after playing many cities, a little piece of suede came loose, and they had to glue it down. In another city, the stitching or the sole might come loose, and they'd put some tape on it or nail it together. There was tape here, gauze there, glue there, nails... But it got to a point where the boots became a major concern of mine, because he loved them and wanted to wear them all the time. Finally, at Candlestick Park [in San Francisco], the Stones were just about to go on, and the heel snapped off and broke.
I said, "Aw, jeez, do you really want to wear those? Do you have something else?" He said, "Yeah, but I just feel like..." He didn't go crazy. And I said, "Well, I'll try." So I leave the trailer and go out and ask everybody who works for me, "What are you wearing? Let me see your heel." "What do you want?" "Let me see your heel!" I couldn't find anything.
But then there was a guy at a table in the other backstage area who had a pair of boots on, and the heel was just about the same size – a little higher, but the same shape. And I said to him, "Do me a favor. I can't explain it to you now. Let me have your shoes for fifty bucks." He didn't know what I was doing. I got them and took them back to the tech area. Two of the guys got a nail and hammer, shaped the heel down a little and put it on Keith's boot. Up and away it went. He used it. After that date, there was more paper, more glue, more spit, more rubber bands. He always wanted to wear those boots.
On the plane back to New York after the last date, he said, "Hey, Bill, I want to see you for a minute." And we stepped into the toilet area. "Man, I just want to tell you, I really drove you up the wall. Sometimes it was insane. But..." And he had this package wrapped in newspaper with a rubber band around it and a rose attached, and he just said, "Thank you." And I knew what it was. It was the boots.
What was it like working with Dylan in 1974?
At the beginning of the tour, I said to my staff, "I'm not assuming that you don't know who Bob Dylan is, but he's going back out, and he's going to be looked at in every town with adulation and respect and love and affection. It's really going to come at him. He's going to get that all the time. We should just be loose. Some of you may say, 'Hey, Bob, good morning.' But don't make him answer, because he's going to get that in every city. He's going to get, 'Hey Bob, hey Bob, hey Bob.' So just know who he is, and let him have his space."
On the third date, in Cleveland, late one night, Bob called and asked if I could come to his room. Everything seemed quite nice the first few days – getting the kinks out of the lighting and so on. He was blown away by the public acceptance. The encores. So it was the middle of the night I went up to his room, knocked on the door, walked inside, and he said, "Why isn't anybody talking to me?"
Around that time, you also produced national tours for George Harrison and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. In doing that, you essentially took on the roles of both agent and promoter. Agents, as well as other promoters, didn't like that. They felt you were stepping on their turf.
After a few tours, some agents and managers and promoters invited me to a luncheon up in Long Island to discuss the industry. Knowing what this meeting was going to be about, I wanted to make it a little more merry. So I hired some people from Central Casting. And as we're getting into it, these black limousines drive up, and this group of gentlemen – about twelve of them – gets out. They were all dressed in Untoucbables-style clothes – Prohibition-era suits, Stetson hats, spats – and they all had musical-instrument cases.
The door to the room we were in opened, and the first guy, a very large man, stepped in and said, "Everybody sit down. Nobody moves!" The guys spread themselves out around the room, and within fifteen seconds, the first guy leans across the table – and just before they came in, I lit a cigar – and says, "Excuse me, Mr. Graham, is everything satisfactory?" And I just nodded my head. And they all got their musical-instrument cases and opened them, took their jackets off, stuck them in the cases and started to leave. And on the back of each of their shirts was written Bill Graham Presents. I wanted to take the edge off. As if to say, "If you had my shot, wouldn't you take it if you were smart enough?"
In 1971, you were famous. The Fillmore West and Fillmore East were both great successes. Yet you closed them both. Why?
Running the Fillmores had begun to take its toll. I was flying back and forth across the country. I was beginning to lose some acts to bigger places. The business of rock & roll got so big, and the managers said, "You can make as much in one night at the Garden as you can in three nights at the Fillmore."
But one day I got a phone call from Sol Hurok, the great Russian impresario. He was the only person that I really looked up to, so I went to see him in New York. I went in, and there was Mr. Hurok, sitting behind this large marble table with a lot of press clippings on his desk. He looked at them for another few minutes. Then he looked at me and said, "Yes? Oh, you've come." He shook my hand. He looked at me, he looked down at the papers and said, "It says here you've got lots of guts and balls. Is true?" First thing he ever said to me.
His reason for asking me to come was that he had a contract to do a month with the Stuttgart Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House, and they had canceled. He had a free month, and he didn't know what to do with it. He had paid the rent So the idea was that we would present a month of the best rock & roll we could get into the Metropolitan Opera House. Well, I was flabbergasted – this was the citadel of the arts and music world, the most popular facility in the world.
In the ensuing months, some groups said yes, some said maybe, some said no. But I wanted the great artists, and I was having difficulty with a lot of the managers. One night, I was in my office at the Fillmore East, and the manager of [an up-and-coming] group returned my call. I tried to explain to the manager: "The band has to do five nights, and this is all you are going to make. But this is the Metropolitan!" I went through the whole thing, and he finally said, "Bill, you expect my boys to play all week for a lousy fifty grand?"
That was the trigger. This was the Metropolitan Opera House! Look at the opportunity you've got to break through to that fucking yo-yo world out there that doesn't trust you. And you have the balls to say to me that I have no right to ask you to play for a lousy fifty grand a week? You piece of shit I just said to myself, it's not worth it. If I was totally healthy at the time, totally free of problems, it might not have affected me that hard. But it blew my mind. I just said, Fillmore East, Fillmore West – that's it.
Michael Jackson initially wanted you as tour consultant to help run the Jacksons' 1984 tour. One of the Jacksons' advisers told me they decided not to use you because you were "too egoed out." Were you?
For me, that criticism has no foundation. You can always use somebody's personality against them: Well, Bill isn't soft-spoken; Bill may speak his piece if you ask him a question. Your ego, as best as I know what ego means, is a feeling that you have a particular gift for something. I think we are good producers; I think we are ethical people.
Many people's names came into the picture. Mine fell out somewhere early on. The end result was that, as we know, Mr. Sullivan, Mr. King and some other people were involved in that project. Everybody lost. The show lost, the public lost, and Michael Jackson lost... You want to talk about ego? I really don't know the fight game, Mr. King, or the business you're in, Mr. Sullivan. But I know you spat on the public and you spat on the artists. He wanted to make a killing. For the last time, do you want to talk about ego?
How would you have produced the Jacksons' tour?
One thing I would have done was made the ticket price more commensurate with the going price for any major superstar. Maybe twenty dollars, but not double the going rate. I would have used local promoters, and I would have had community involvement because of who the Jacksons are and who Michael Jackson is. At the time, I mentioned x amount of dollars to go toward sickle-cell anemia.
As the tour progressed, the word got out that it wasn't such a hot show. Dates weren't selling out. There was a bad feeling about the tour.
It started at the beginning, with the handling of the tickets. You couldn't buy two tickets. You couldn't buy two tickets. And you had to send your money in way in advance to some place back East, and they sat on your money for months. Sooner or later, an aura surrounds everything.
Woodstock was heralded as a major countercultural event. You were there, but you didn't see it that way.
It was great for some people, but it was a horrific experience for others. I met many people ten, fifteen miles away who pitched their tents or sat in the back of a truck and didn't get any closer 'cause the roads were jammed. And some had driven from Iowa.
I felt badly for those who didn't get what they came for. But it was the forerunner of them all. I always imagined that as Woodstock took place... I had this image of sleeping corporate giants waking up and waxing their mustaches and saying, "Aha! Rock & roll. Very interesting." If hundreds of thousands of people would get together on a farm in upstate New York, that's big business. And Woodstock, more than any single event, heralded the era of big-business music.
Do you think that Band Aid and USA for Africa and Live Aid have brought back some of the Sixties spirit?
Yes, I do. Bob Geldof should be remembered in history for suggesting that a lot can be done if we tap this power source. And the power source is music and the people who make it Give me another element of our society that could have drawn as many people as Live Aid. A sporting event? An international soccer match? I don't know. I'm trying to show what a rare position these artists are in – that a group of people can say: You want to raise $10 million?
When I first saw that film [about the famine in Ethiopia], I thought of doing something, but I never really thought I could do what Bob did. And I realize why. He's an artist, asking another artist. To follow that mania and do what was seemingly undoable – I take my hat off to him.
You were born in Germany around the time of the Second World War. What was your childhood there like?
Other than what my sisters have told me, I have absolutely no direct memory of the first nine years of my life. When my father died, my youngest sister – there were five girls and one boy – and I were put into an orphanage. My mother made and sold hats in a hat shop in Berlin because she had to go to work after my father died. And she would take care of the other four girls. And on the weekends, we would come home or they would visit the orphanage.
In the summer of 1939, a group of French-Jewish orphans went on a two-week exchange with the children that were living in the Berlin orphanage. And this orphanage was southeast of Paris, in Chaumont. During the two weeks that we were in France, war broke out between France and Germany, and the French children perished in Berlin.
Eventually we were moved onto the grounds of a chateau. When the raids really started in Paris and the surrounding areas, we dug shelters beneath the grounds of the chateau. And I remember when the air raids came, we went into these shelters. In the rainy season, they became almost flooded full of water, and we stood in water up to our waists. The biggest fear of my life – I feared them forever and ever – was a little snake and a toad that jumped up at me. This little short snake. I've had a fear of snakes, and anything in the reptile family, all my life.
The raids were pretty constant. And then, as the Germans broke through the lines and it was inevitable that France was going to fall, the International Red Cross sent a man to our community to take all of us south. The whole nation was moving south. The roads were full of cars and carts and people, just walking with their belongings. It was just like in the movies. Everybody fleeing. I remember, outside Lyons, the Germans had these suicide parachuters to demoralize the public. And I saw this happen. These fanatics would parachute into an area of the country that wasn't yet occupied, and they would be throwing hand grenades as they came closer to the ground. I saw the French Resistance forces capture one of these men and put him against a wall two streets away and riddle him with bullets.
And as we were moving, some children ran away. And the group became smaller and smaller. And very little food. We got to Madrid and then went to Lisbon, and in Lisbon they put us on a freighter to Casablanca and eventually across the Atlantic to Bermuda. And on the crossing, we were stopped by a German U-boat. We were on [the freighter] for nineteen days. All we had to eat were cookies and oranges. When we got to New York, they put us in a bunch of barracks run and funded by the Foster Home Bureau. What they did was ask people, preferably Jewish homes, to take young people in.
On weekends, the families would come up to these cottages, looking at us as though they were picking out a pet in a pet shop. And all of us wanted to be taken by somebody. Nine weeks passed. Finally, on the last weekend in November, a family came, a couple with a boy who was two years older than I was. I've always felt that the primary reason that they took me into their home was that the two languages their son was studying were French and German. I was taken by them and began my life in New York City.
Growing up in the Bronx, you spent a lot of time in the streets.
When I first got to the Bronx, I didn't speak English. But to the kids in school, it didn't mean anything that I was a refugee. To them, I wasn't a Russian Jew. To them, I was a German. All they knew was that I spoke German, and Germany was the enemy. And I used to get my head kicked in all the time at school. They would goose-step in front of my house and say, "Nazi go home." My foster brother, who was two years older, said, "Not only are you going to have to learn how to speak English very quickly, you also have to lose that accent". So on a daily basis, he and I sat down and read the newspaper headlines, and I practiced every day with a mirror. Getting rd of za accent ven you go down ze street to ze store. Within six months, I learned English, and I lost my accent
Later, you were in the army, fought in Korea and were awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. You also had started to fine-tune your business skills.
I was on board a ship, headed overseas. I was working in the kitchen. The crossing was, I think, eleven days. Well, I started running a little crap game. And the first night, people had cookies from home to eat. By the second night, nobody had anything. So I made a couple of sandwiches, took them down – people got hungry in the middle of the night – and sold them for a dollar each. I figured out roughly that from apples and oranges and sandwiches and whatnot, I took in about $1400. And from the crap game, I was up about $1300. I was twenty-two years old, and I had $2700 in my pocket. When we pulled into base, they started a game on deck. Well, I lost all the money. I got off in Tokyo without a dime on me.
You also worked as a waiter at resort hotels in the Catskills.
What I learned as a busboy and a dishwasher and a cabdriver, and then eventually as a waiter, is how to be a qualitative surface conversationalist. You get an instinct: Does this person want to talk? Or not talk? You learn to say: How are the greens today? I can't spell golf. I know nothing about golf. But you learn certain words. How many laps did you do? Did you ride the horses today? Whatever it is.
Every morning, I would buy three copies of The New York Times and three of the Daily News. And my guests would come in, and I'd say, "See the paper today?" "Oh, thanks." What did it cost me? Twenty cents or thirty cents. I know nothing about real estate, but I can have a conversation with real-estate people. They leave the table feeling, you know, Bill is really interested in my business. That must have come in handy later on.
You meet them [performers] for a night, and it's not that you're conning them, it's not that you're playing games with them. If there are 60,000 people out front, 99 times out of 100 the act will do an encore. And if they don't, I will find the one way to get them to do that encore. I'll tell stories until the cows come home to get them to do an encore. Or if there are 10,000 people outside making noise, I'll say, "Let me tell you the last time this happened..."
It's like an honest con game. I've always thought of myself as an honest con. Meaning, if it's not going to be bad for you and bad for anybody else – it looks like a con to you, but it's okay.
Your son David, who is seventeen, is a big rock fan. Would you want him to become a musician?
Probably not, because I've seen very few musicians who truly live a balanced life. Most famous artists have difficulty on the private side. And I gave up something that I shouldn't have – the breakup of my family. If my son said, "Dad, I think I'd really be happy running a restaurant, but I also know I'm a very good musician and I can paint. I think I could become a millionaire as a musician and be known by the world. Or I could make a very good living running a restaurant and painting." You might not believe this, but I would choose the smaller financial return, because there are involuntary prices with fame on a level that you might not be able to deal with. If you make it.
Somebody sees Van Halen onstage or Neil Young and says, "I'd like to do that" Look at the odds. How many garages are there with instruments in them? You want to be a musician, understand the odds. Don't give up your dream and your goals, but try to also deal with the most difficult thing for us to deal with – reality. I'm not just saying, be prepared for failure. Even if you are one of those who beats the odds, what do you have? It's a very different life.
For twenty years, you have been totally consumed by your work. One wonders, though, if there's more to life for Bill Graham than putting on the next concert?
Yes, there is. If there is something – not to conquer but to experience – it's the man-woman experience. The ultimate other expression in life. What do you do with your life, and who do you share it with? It's tough for me to believe that any person would say that their choice would be not to share most of their private life with another person. And yet, because of the lives we all live, for one reason or another, it doesn't occur. Some are luckier than others, and they may be laborers, but the loved one is there to share with, through tough times, through good times. I don't think I am any different than anyone else in that capacity.
For me, the missing link is only one. There is nothing else I really need. I'm fifty-four years old, and I'd like to share what I and one other person could have. That stuff, it's been difficult because of the life. It's just obviously not nine to five, and obviously it's time consuming, and obviously, for many years, it's taken the form of the consummate mistress.
© Michael Goldberg, 1985
Labels: 1985, 1985-11-01, 1985-11-02, Dead Classic
Do You Know The Way to Santa Fe, October 17, 1982
There seems to be alot of interest in 1982 latelt, it being 35 years ago and the release of a throve of never before heard audience tapes. This one from 10-17-82 is not from that batch but deserves to be heard nevertheless. Here's a rare New Mexico show with lots of your favorites and a nice rare Goin Down the Road>The Wheel as the late second set downshifter. Please read some local comments about the show and bobs your uncle. Anne Van Arsdal Poore great photos of this show
Mississippi Half-Step
Franklin's Tower
New Minglewood Blues
Me and My Uncle
Mexicali Blues
Man Smart/Woman Smarter
Let it Grow
Samson and Delilah
Good Time Blues
Throwin' Stones
Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad
Wharf Rat
Good Lovin'
Don't Ease Me In
Summertime Jams 1968; Betty Organic and Newport Pop
Here's a groovy little tale from nine years and a day before Englishtown September 2, 1968 from Betty's Organic Farm. Enjoy
Articles from
Sky River Rock Groove
Berry farm hosts Dead, Santana and others
Mud man
"The best freaking scene ever," said one musician. The Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Show was not dampened by the rain that fell over Labor Day weekend, but made creative use of it. And the proceeds went to an assortment of American Indian and Black organizations.
The Friends of American Indian Rights, the principal Indian beneficiary, the Central Area Committee for Peace and Improvement, and the Black Student Unions of the Pacific Northwest were the principal organizations for which the musicians gave their benefit performances. Some of the proceeds are also going to local institutions for alienated youth, such as the Open Door Clinic and the Seattle Free University.
The music started at 9:30 on Saturday morning and ran till after midnight. Sunday's show ran from nine in the morning till five on Monday and Monday's show was of necessity a little disorganized, but after giving everybody four hours to sleep, the festival wound up with one more eighteen-hour slug of music.
Some forty acts, rock, blues and folk, with a few theater acts such as the Congress of Wonders and the S. F. Mime Troupe, were on stage for the marathon event before an audience of around 15,000. Spectators had trooped in from all over to Betty Nelson's Organic Raspberry Farm in Sultan, Washington (pop. 960), fifty miles outside of Seattle, not to be disappointed.
On Saturday it started to rain. All the less reason to forbid the audience to set up their tents in the field of the natural amphitheater. Soon there was a vast modern-day replica of a Civil War encampment, and the clouds of smoke were immense. The police kept their distance, like decent, law-abiding, privacy-respecting public servants, and everybody was happy.
While the audience was gathered like a great camp meeting in the field, the musicans -- all 175 of them -- were quartered in the three floors of the Camlin Hotel. Musicians, it is well known, are musicians because they like to play music, and the concentration of musical trips was incredible.
And who was there? Santana, Dino Valenti, It's a Beautiful Day, James Cotton, the New Lost City Ramblers, Kaleidoscope, the Youngbloods, Country Joe and the Fish, Phoenix, John Fahey, Mark Spoelstra, H. P. Lovecraft, Big Mama Mae Thornton. The Grateful Dead played a magnificent set for their last appearance with the personnel of their recordings.
By Monday the field was soggy with rain, but spirits were high. A Mud Cult arose in the principal puddle, improvising Mud Rituals and Mud Dances. The baptism consisted of taking long run and belly-flopping (with your clothes on) in the mud, alter which you would be covered with mud and embraced by other cultists.
The Mud People also made half a dozen Charges of the Mud Brigade through the Civil War Encampment. Their Mud Chant went something like, "mud (stomp) mud (stomp) we like mud." Mud was, like they say in ads, Happening, so a couple of dozen fans were swinging with it.
Continuity and saccharine rap between acts were provided by Buddha (not the B., you understand, but a San Francisco underground bartender and former KMPX strikebreaker who goes by the name). His longwindedness was one factor in the concerts' running overtime. Musicians got into the habit of telling each other when they were due on stage in terms such as, "We're on at 4:30-plus-Buddha-rap." "The only crummy ointment on the fly," said one.
The kind of festival it was, when a young man wearing nothing but beads got up on stage during Big Mama's set and started dancing in the lightshow, it was not thought strange. Except perhaps by Big Mama, who had registered dismay when she first saw the Encampment that was to be her audience.
As Big Mama turned to leave the stage, the young man found himself facing the microphone, and impulsively said, "Hey, you know what? I just had a real flash. We're all Jesus Christ," and everybody applauded. Then Big Mama came back to the mike and said, "Wow! Wasn't that weird! I'd heard about it, but I never thought I'd see it!"
There was also a great scheduled balloon ascent, and the balloon was lots of fun, everybody played with it the first day. Then on the second day, the balloon went ahead and ascended, but paying no heed to human schedules. And there was a pig, some sort of personage in the festival. He was already a Mud Cultist from in front.
Many a festival would have been ruined by rain, but not a perfect festival, a festival with lots of festival in it. That's what Sky River was, and Lighter Than Air, too. Many thanks to John Chambless, director, and his assistant Stan Maginnis. And especially to Betty Nelson and her organic berries.
(RS 19, October 12, 1968)
s Orgamic
Newport Pop Festival Drags on in Dust and Heat
Dead, Country Joe, Crosby, pie fight weekend's highlights
An estimated 140,000 attended the first and probably the last Newport Pop Festival in California's Orange County Aug. 3-4, viewing, among others, Tiny Tim, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, Grateful Dead, Chambers Brothers, Charles Lloyd, James Cotton Blues Band, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and the Byrds.
The festival was regarded musically successful but on other fronts rather less than pleasing. The performers appeared on a raised stage under a striped canopy, but the young crowds were left sitting or standing in a huge, flat, dusty-dry open field under a broiling sun. Refreshment and rest room facilities were less than adequate and the sound system was not powerful enough to carry the sound to eveyone present.
The highlight of the pop fest on the first day (Saturday) seemed to come when Country Joe closed the bill. The hour was late and Orange County officials were threatening to shut off the electricity when the band went on, finally relenting to give the band time for two songs. As they began their first, "1, 2, 3, 4, What Are We Fighting For," the approximately 40,000 young people still on hand rose as if one, cheering, hands held aloft in the "peace sign." During the second number, a long blues, even the cops on stage were grinning and adlibbing a moderate version of the boogaloo.
The second day's climax came when David Crosby started a planned pie fight with the Jefferson Airplane. In all, 250 cream pies flew back and forth . . . and the thousands of people present stormed the stage to join in.
The musical line-up was an impressive one. Besides those already mentioned, bands appearing were Alice Cooper, Steppenwolf, Sonny and Cher, Canned Heat, Electric Flag, Butterfield Blues Band, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Blue Cheer, Iron Butterfly, Illinois Speed Press and Things To Come.
But admission to the festival was $5.50 per day -- to sit in heat and dust. Most considered it another in the series of pop music shucks.
The Newport Pop Festival -- which wasn't even held in Newport, but in Costa Mesa -- was produced by Humble Harvey Miller, one of L.A.'s Top-40 deejays, and Wesco Associates, basically the same coalition that staged a similarly uncomfortable weekend festival last summer in another Los Angeles dust bin.
(RS 16, September 14, 1968)
Five Years of Mass Dead
I'll be back soon from my little summer holiday, but here is something fun
1985 at the Garden
DEADHEADS; A CONCERT BECOMES A LOVE-IN AS FANS; SHOW THEY'RE STILL GRATEFUL FOR THE DEAD
[THIRD Edition]
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Boston, Mass.
Author: Stocker, Carol
Section: LIVING
PROVIDENCE -- The plaza outside the Providence Civic Center before showtime is a bizarre bazaar. Camp followers selling Grateful Dead T-shirts and bumper stickers share the sidewalk with food vendors as the sweet smells of marijuana and hot dogs with onions mingle in the night air.
Edgy policemen mounted on horses tower over the frolicking crowd like knights from an opposing force. The tide of litter is ankle deep and rising.
The Deadheads, fans of the Grateful Dead, have convened for an audience with their heroes, and the streets of parochial Providence are lined with cars bearing license plates from California, New York, Alabama, Pennsylvania and, of course, Massachusetts.
It has been six years since this band, which came together during the mid-' 60s flowering of Haight-Ashbury, has put out an album, and they've never appeared on MTV. But wherever the Dead tour, they sell out.
Like the few other surviving bands from the '60s, the Grateful Dead hits the road with a history and a hard-to-define mystique. But unlike the Stones or the Kinks, the Dead have always had mixed success with records, have always been primarily a band for live concerts.
After 20 years, theirs has become the most ritualized schedule in the business: every spring, the Providence Civic Center and maybe Portand and Hartford, where the tour is concluding tonight; every fall, the Worcester Centrum and New Hampshire and New Haven.
The band doesn't play Boston anymore because they can't stand the Garden, where, according to guitarist Jerry Garcia, "even the rats wear leather jackets." So every spring and fall, part of the ritual of the Boston faithful is to head out on Route 95, bumper stickers proclaiming their destination, honking their horns and occasionally flashing the peace sign at fellow pilgrims.
The devotion of Deadheads is legendary and, since every show is spontaneous and different, one concert is seldom enough to satisfy them.
John Eschelman, 34, from Pennsylvania, and Jimmy, a 29-year-old Dorchester resident, have planned their spring vacations around the tour. Barbara Lewit, 34, of Berkeley has flown in and rented a car to follow the tour. This is her 290th concert.
There are many Deadhead stereotypes: middle-age insurance adjusters looking for '60s nostalgia; wannabe kids dressing up as hippies for a night; burnouts caught in a "lost generation" time warp, unable to adapt to the '80s.
There are some ofthese stereotypes here. There are also a lot of people here who just like the music.
Like Chad Gifford, a clean-cut, basketball-tall Brown University freshmanfrom Cambridge, whose professional goal, to "earn a lot of money," is suitably '80s. He finds many of the middle-aged hippie Deadheads who follow the tour "pathetic." But he loves the band. "They're the only rock group doing improvisation."
The bulk of today's Deadheads are college and high school age, 18 to 25, just as the band's followers were in the beginning. But there's been an accumulation over time and a lot of fans are well into their 30s. Some bring their teen-age children, second- generation Deadheads.
For the staunchest, a Dead concert is areligious experience. One couple got married during intermission at one of the Portland concerts last week while their friends stood in a circle, reciting lyrics from the band's songs.
A big part of the show is the atmosphere of sharing that surrounds it. Spare food and spare tickets are passed around. The feeling of mellow fraternity is surprisingly reminiscent of the Fenway Park bleachers on a sunny day.
To young fans, this '60s-style sense of all-inclusive community is as beguiling as the music. "You met someone five minutes ago and they're your best friend!" beams 16-year-old Kelly Gill of Eastham.
"It's been going on since the '60s, just with fewer people," says 17- year-old Michael Jacques as he blows translucent soap bubbles into the air. "It" is "when you walk down the street and you smile at someone and they smile back and people want to love each other, not hate each other."
"There's a feeling of trust between fans. Last fall my friend just wandered around after the show until he found someone who had taped the concert," recalls Jimmy. "The guy didn't know us, but he let us have the tapes overnight to copy."
The band itself, which developed much of its improvisational style playing on LSD during Ken Kesey's experimental public concerts called "Acid Tests," is now on a relative fitness kick, according to its publicist, Dennis McNally. He ticks off regimens of jogging and pumping iron. "They're in it for the long haul."
The preoccupation with health is less evident among the fans. Beer and marijuana are a given at the tailgate picnics in nearby parking lots. Ecstasy is the new drug on the scene. LSD is the old one, and surprisingly common.
"If you're young and you want to take acid, you'd want to take it in a place that felt like the '60s," reasoned a 40-year-old Boston fan, matter-of- factly.
"Don't take any brownies from a stranger," warns Jimmy.
Dress is the gypsy regalia of the '60s revisited: army jackets, long Indian print skirts, dirty red bandanas. Peace signs are knitted into caps, drawn on jeans. But they seem more the symbol of an era than a political idea.
"We're for peace -- but we're not antiwar . . . are we?" 17-year- old Diane Branch says, turning uncertainly to T-shirt vender Gretchen Brown, 30, for confirmation.
"You have to decide that for yourself," Brown answers with a rueful smile.
Branch, who wears a commemorative T-shirt with the message "20 Grateful Years 1965-1985," has never been to a Grateful Dead concert. "I came because the Dead's from the '60s."
"We wish we were here then," adds her 15-year-old companion, who has a peace sign painted on her cheek like a fashionable beauty mark.
Many Deadheads wear symbols specific to their band. Some tie dyed T-shirts spout fragments of lyrics: Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world . . . There's a brisk florist business at the edges of the crowd in red roses. Many women wear the flowers in their hair.
One has transformed her face into a macabre skull with heavy black and white greasepaint, looking a little like a theatrical antinuclear demonstrator. Her blouse is partly unbuttoned to display the skeletal black and white rib cage painted down her chest.
Inside the Civic Center, 1,300 skeletons are shaking to the workingman's boogie and the country-ish ballads of the Dead.
Heads are bobbing, shoulders are swaying to the music in an April Fool's Day Dance of the Deadheads.
Chairs are stacked out of the way to make more room for dancing.
Chairs are for piling on coats.
Chairs are for when someone feels faint, and if you sit down, a solicitous neighbor will ask if you're all right.
The body of the audience is young; the bodies on the stage are middle-aged with graying manes, drumming out the rhythms of romantic rebellion. They are the grandfather storytellers evoking such legends as "Cowboy Neal at the Wheel" at a convocation of young braves around the light show campfire.
Not all the music looks to the past. A long drum solo leads into one of the bands' "space jams," using electronic sythesizers and feedback to create deep, abstract whale-like vibrations under an ocean of distortion. Balloons bob sporadically to the surface of the crowd, which bats them softly into the air like porpoises doing their beachball tricks at Marineland.
Eventually, the experimental musical wanderings assume the sounds of a trumpeting elephant dodging jet planes on a landing strip. When the band finally swings into a recognizable song, the crowd coalesces again with relief as it is gathered up again into the palm of the familar.
I need a miracle ev-er-y-day! The Deadheads chant with lead singer Bob Weir.
hey! hey! hey!
I need a miracle ev-er-y-day!
yea! yea! yea!
When the band leaves the stage after three hours, hundreds of lighters are held aloft in the audience like devotional candles, augmented with a sparkler or two.
The crowd tries to linger, to hold onto the evocation but, perhaps as in the '60s, it's too fragile to survive outside the confines of a concert.
Determined ushers clear people from the aisles and shove the civic center doors shut after them. Outside in the chilly night, the realities of the outside world intrude quickly. Stern-faced police sweep the plaza clear of people, and many members of the audience return to their parking spots to find their cars have been towed.
A crowd has gathered at one end of a parking lot.
"I don't know. But it's something wonderful, I bet."
It isn't. At the center, several policemen with nightsticks are subduing a disorderly man said to be tripping on LSD. The red streaks running down the man's face and arms are not bodypaint.
Across the street, 25-year-old Pauline of Attleboro is still aglow from three days of concerts and partying. She relates how only that morning she had met Bob Weir from the band, and, at her boyfriend's request he had bestowed a kiss upon her.
But now her boyfriend is barely conscious and in an ugly mood to boot. And he wants the car keys. And she doesn't want to give them to him.
They go back and forth, but she is still smiling and wearing her homemade crown of red silk roses, still holding onto the magic she feels.
Nearby a group is playing with a Frisbee, and over by the freeway, someone is shooting off fireworks. Ephemeral soap bubbles dance in the street lights and then suddenly vanish.
DEARD AND GARCIA ALIVE AND WELL
Author: Morse, Steve
Section: ARTS AND FILM
THE GRATEFUL DEAD -- In concert through tomorrow at the
Worcester Centrum.
WORCESTER - All eyes were on Jerry Garcia. The bearded soul of the Grateful Dead lapsed into a diabetic coma last summer, but has been said to have made a miraculous recovery. He has changed his diet and taken a more serious approach to life, but the final proof was the way his fingers flew across the fretboard last night.
Garcia was still inscrutable -- and again said not a word to the audience -- but he was magnificent on his instrument. He scored with the intricate space-journeying solos for which he's known, but also rocked as hard as ever, lighting up the sold-out Centrum with his sudden burst on the Spencer Davis oldie, "Gimme Some Lovin'."
Having shed some obvious poundage, Garcia absorbed the crowd's emotional, welcome-back applause and time and again lifted fans out of their seats with swinging sprint solos that paid homage to guitarists ranging from Wes Montgomery to Chuck Berry.
This was as fine a Grateful Dead show as any in memory. The band played with manifest joy at being in each other's company -- and dug back to their roots for a show that was of special interest to their earliest, '60s fans. The cover version of "Gimme Some Lovin' " was a giveaway in this regard, as was a transcendent tackling of the Young Rascals' "Good Loving," which found the hallways stuffed with dancers pirouetting, prancing, stutter-stepping and throwing their outside cares to the wind.
But speaking of the outside, it almost impeded on an otherwise positive show. About 2,000 youths -- in defiance of a radio announcement by bassist Phil Lesh to stay away if they didn't have tickets -- came searching anyway. There were close to 20 arrests by a zealous police detail, and it was not a pretty sight to see a flock of Dead Heads rounded up in a police wagon and shipped downtown.
Even for ticketholders, the act of getting into a Dead concert is not an easy task, if just because of the tensions on the crowded sidewalks outside. But last night was fully worth running the gantlet to get in, for this was a truly memorable performance.
For those who keep track of such things, the Dead's first set was top- heavy with old classics, including "Cold Rain and Snow," "Mexicali Blues," "Minglewood Blues," "Me and My Uncle" and "Bird Song."
The second set took off on a like note with "Feels Like Rain" (as rhythm guitarist Bob Weir led the charge), and on through more classics such as Garcia's virtual signature song, "Black Peter," and "The Wheel," with the proverbially country-wise line that "If the thunder don't get you, the lightning will."
Even the second-half drum solos by Bill Kreutzman and Mickey Hart had more punch than usual. Hart ventured off to a realm of Afro-psychedelia in his pounding of the massive tribal drum he calls "The Beast." Portions also echoed the martial, thunderclap percussion of his solo album, "Dafos."
The entire three-hour evening didn't include any new material from the Dead's next album due this summer, but it whetted one's appetite for the July 3 concert by the Dead and Bob Dylan at Foxborough's Sullivan Stadium. It will likely be the first show of the Dead's summer stadium tour, according to a spokesman. And it should be an exhilarating spectacle, assuming Garcia and his cohorts play with as much grace and power as they did last night. morse ;04/02 NIGRO ;04/03,12:29 GRATF
GRATEFUL DEAD: ALIVE AND WELL 'IN THE DARK'
Date: Jul 4, 1987
The 20th anniversary of the Summer of Love has brought new fuel to the Grateful Dead. The hippie survivors are riding a giddy high, even by their cosmic standards. Last year was their bleakest summer when singer Jerry Garcia lay in a diabetic coma and tour plans were canceled. A year later, they have the summer's hottest tour -- teaming with Bob Dylan and playing the kickoff date for 61,000 fans at Foxborough's Sullivan Stadium today.
The Dead also have something they haven't had in six years -- a new album, "In the Dark" (Arista). The band has always made its money from touring, not albums, but what makes this so special is they finally have an album good enough to be whispered in the same breath as their concerts.
The album will be released to stores Thursday, but it has already been played on local rock stations. The music is vintage Dead -- a mingling of spry rock spiced with progressive R&B and gentle country blues. It is far superior to some of their last studio efforts, including the experimental "Terrapin Station" (1977) and lightweight "Shakedown Street" (1978).
The San Francisco-based Dead have filled arenas for years, but have never had a platinum album. In part, that's because their fans prefer seeking bootleg concert tapes, knowing the group has rarely hit stride in the studio. It was feared the new album would continue that ill-fated studio trend, especially because it was the last album owed to Arista Records -- a label the band has criticized. They have said it took so long to finish the LP because they had no incentive to put it out.
But the Dead have wished to prove themselves since Garcia's health problems. Their concerts have taken on a new life -- and that has spilled over to the album.
Garcia rebounds with an extraordinary performance, starting on the first cut, "Touch of Grey," a zippy song of survival in which he sounds like a carefree Rip Van Winkle: "I know the rent is in arrears/And the dog has not been fed in years/It's even worse than it appears/But it's all right." He later adds like a wise-old mountain man: "Whistle through your teeth and spit cuz it's all right." It's not typical Top 40 music, but it has a euphoric chorus that burrows into your head, along with a chiming, hummable synthesizer line from Brent Mydland.
Garcia's lyrics are again penned by mystery man Robert Hunter, who doesn't like to see his lyrics in print, so regrettably, there is no lyric sheet. Deciphering Hunter's lyrics has always been a Deadhead's pleasure -- and there is plenty to ponder here.
The bluesy "When Push Comes to Shove," which is about being afraid to love, has oblique references to a "shot gun full of silver" and "bullets made of glass." Another collaboration, "West L.A. Fadeaway," a breezy J.J. Cale-type blues number, talks humorously of "looking for a chateau . . . I don't want to buy it, I just want to rent it for an hour or two." And the album ends with the prettiest Garcia/Hunter tune, "Black Muddy River," with a country flavor echoing the Dead's early '70s albums, "Workingman's Dead" and "American Beauty."
The rest of the band is also in peak form. The rhythm section of Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann and Phil Lesh achieves the best sonic production of any Dead album in memory, while co-singer Bob Weir, the group's anchor through the years, is his reliable self. He sings the picaresque "Hell in a Bucket," with its grin-filled line: "I may be going to hell in a bucket but at least I'm enjoying the ride." He then turns serious for a rare Grateful Dead protest song, "Throwing Stones," a slap at bosses who have little regard for their employees.
Traditionally, Grateful Dead albums have been like Jack Kerouac novels. You might have to wade through them before getting stung with a sudden insight. But this album is rich with such moments, suggesting the Dead can still surprise. MORSE ;07/03
JOBE ;07/04,12:23 GRATE04
DEAD, DYLAN 'WING IT' '60S-STYLE
Section: METRO
FOXBOROUGH - The Grateful Dead's Bob Weir said the plan was to "half play and half wing it." Only a few rehearsals had been held with Bob Dylan, who shares this same yen to improvise. Song arrangements, in fact, were still being frantically worked out in the hotel the night before.
But not to worry.
This was a throwback to the '60s, when jam sessions were the rule rather than the exception. And jam they did last night -- with the Dead and Dylan playing a potent 75-minute set that raised each act to impressive new highs.
The Dead didn't just follow Dylan like a normal backup band. They pushed and shoved him dramatically -- driving some songs, laying back on others, yet always giving Dylan the space to vocalize in that snarling, nasal manner so familiar to lovers of the counterculture, new and old.
Looking like a Bohemian outlaw in a raffish beret, metallic silver shirt and chin stubble befitting Tom Waits, Dylan bore down on a number of his most classic songs, including the protest tunes, "Times They Are a-Changin" "Chimes of Freedom," "Masters of War" and "All Along the Watchtower," which drew extra applause in honor of the 4th of July weekend.
Dylan also tore crisply through older hits like the bluesy "Ballad of a Thin Man" and the romantic "I Want You." Plus, he added songs from his born-again Christian period of the early '80s, "Gotta Serve Somebody" and "Slow Train Coming," the last an unexpected highlight as the Dead's guitarist, Jerry Garcia, lit up the stadium with an all-out, barn-burning solo.
Like the Dead, Dylan didn't say a word between songs. The music was all that spoke for him -- and it spoke like a clarion call in this muggy night. He did, however, often show emotion during the songs, smiling or nodding at a particular solo by Garcia, who also played a delicately beautiful pedal steel guitar during the countrified song, "I'll Be Your Lover Tonight."
The Dead played a two-hour opening set that had its ups and downs, but was a special showcase for new songs from their "In the Dark" album, to be released next week. The band actually opened with four songs from that album -- a highly unusual move for a group as casually spontaneous as the Dead.
The band caught fire late in the set, with ageless favorites "Uncle John's Band" and "Truckin,' " showing again what a long, strange trip it has been since the 60's. morse ;07/04 NIGRO ;07/05,18:27 SHOW4
Reproduced with permission o
DYLAN & THE DEAD: DREAM FULFILLED
{A PUBLISHED CORRECTION HAS BEEN ADDED TO THIS STOR
FOXBOROUGH - First, the financial news. Saturday's Grateful Dead/ Bob Dylan concert was the single greatest economic event in the history of Sullivan Stadium. It grossed $1.3 million -- more than any previous concert or even New England Patriots football game.
"I can't tell you how pleased we are. I wish we could do two more dates with these acts," said a beaming Chuck Sullivan, whose family owns the stadium.
But what about culturally? Was this a show to invent new superlatives to describe? That's another story -- and depends entirely on your viewpoint.
If your preference runs to polished songs with on-key vocals and tight pacing, then you might have been in musical hell on Saturday. "Oh, did you hear how off-key they were on that last song, 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door' ?" said one woman who had been professionally trained in music. "Ugghhh! My ears hurt."
If, on the other hand, you enjoy a slice of musical anarchy where the next song might as well be coming from Mars, then you would have found nirvana in Foxborough.
Dylan and the Dead aren't going to win any scholarships to the New England Conservatory, but they were a ragged-but-right alternative to the many safe, homogenized acts that pass for rock 'n' roll bands this summer.
There was an emotional bond lacking when Dylan toured with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers last summer. That tour pitted Dylan, the wily veteran, with a young band that looked up to him as if he were a god. They played well together, but weren't always on each other's wavelength.
The Dead, however, come from the same generation as Dylan, so were not about to let Dylan assume a fatherly role. There was more of a shared spirit in the music, which is not to say the Dead weren't mindful of the impact of the occasion, since this was the first complete set they had ever played with the man.
"Our paths just never crossed through the years. Then last year we played with him briefly a couple of times -- and decided to try a tour. This is really a dream fulfilled for us. I can't wait to play," said Dead singer Bob Weir before the show. He retreated under a backstage tent, adding he had to sit down and calm his nerves.
The concert had another anxious side: "We've never played with acoustic instruments on a stage this size," said Weir. "We're really worried about sound problems."
Some of those problems materialized, but not enough to ransack the show. The problems had been much worse during an opening set by the Dead, who also decided -- perhaps too cleverly -- to begin with four new songs from an album to be released this week called "In the Dark." ("Putting those songs together didn't quite work, did it?" said Weir.)
Later portions of the Dead's set, however, were sterling. Perched on a stage with 12 American flags flying atop the scaffolding in honor of the July 4th holiday, they hit stride with the wrenching blues of "Little Red Rooster," featuring a Martian slide guitar solo by Jerry Garcia, who is apparently fully recovered from the diabetic coma that waylaid him last year. The '60s anthem, "Truckin'," and a punchy Weir protest song, "Throwing Stones," were added shots of adrenalin for the sellout 61,000 fans.
After an intermission, Dylan, who had kept to himself backstage after being flown in by helicopter, skulked on stage and dragged his bootheels as though being led off to hard labor.
But he soon came to life, strumming a pearly white acoustic guitar while the Dead chugged along at his side. The 75-minute set became a Dylan lover's dream, from the opening "The Times They Are A-Changin'," to such rarely played Dylan nuggets as "Queen Jane Approximately" (a heartfelt 1965 love song) and "Joey," a song about Joey Gallo, a gunned-down New York ringleader of organized crime. From the sensitive to the topical, Dylan covered it all.
Besides an emotional resonance, the Dead brought a persuasive shot of funk to Dylan's songs. The Dead's low-down, rumbling percussion, courtesy of double drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, spun songs into more visceral directions than Petty & the Heartbreakers did last year. This was especially true when Dylan started rocking on such songs as "Slow Train Coming" and the timeless "All Along the Watchtower," with its famous line: "There must be some way out of here . . . There's too much confusion. I can't get no relief." That verse found a sea of hands clapping right up to the upper balcony -- and on into the parking lots, where hundreds of turned-away fans held their own celebration.
The symbiosis between Dylan and the Dead was not as great on more reflective, finesse-laden songs such as "Masters of War" and "Ballad of a Thin Man." {CORRECTION: Because of a reporting error, a review of Saturday's Grateful Dead/Bob Dylan concert incorrectly stated that one of the songs performed was "Masters of War." And another song, "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight," which was performed, was mistitled in the review.} Some chord changes were botched, while Dylan, who plans to rejoin the Heartbreakers and tour Israel and Europe with them later this summer, plainly forgot some of the words.
But these setbacks were more than compensated by the intensity felt elsewhere. With the Dead undergoing a revival these days, and with Dylan earning some of his best on-stage notices in years, it was a match made in hippie heaven.
The hippie dream has obviously eroded in recent years -- and wasn't helped by the Saturday behavior of certain rude, aisle-clogging, elbow-swinging Dead Heads who should more appropriately be called Brat Heads.
But musically -- at least for an afternoon -- there was a stage camaraderie that brought back the best the '60s had to offer. This may not have been the cultural event of the year, but it was a time tunnel to an age when bands took chances on stage and didn't settle for rote, soulless entertainment. MORSE ;07/05 NIGRO ;07/06,12:43 CONCERT0
Logged in as: David Davis
DEAD HEADS' 'SECRET' OUT -- IN A BIG WAY
Author: Frank, Robert
FOXBOROUGH - Standing on a tall grass bluff near Sullivan Stadium at 1 in the morning yesterday, a 50-year-old Dead Head smiles with maternal pride and nervous concern at the sea of bright tents, bonfires, tie-dye clothing stands, painted buses, vegetable-burger vendors and beer cans packed into the Sullivan Stadium west lot.
"It's the best kept secret," she whispers.
Hours earlier it was a barren 100-acre parking area, with an incongruous row of porta-potties in the center. But beginning late Saturday afternoon, trucks and buses -- covered with bright decals and murals, and laden with camping supplies -- poured through the gate, as drivers yelled to those already parked, "Welcome Home!"
For the over 10,000 fans camping overnight in a Sullivan Stadium parking lot, Sunday's Grateful Dead concert is only part of the experience. The communal gatherings between shows during the Dead's summer tour are powerful rituals unto themselves.
"This way of life is the best-kept secret in the world," said the elder Dead Head, who wished to remain anonymous. "I hope it is. God I hope so." Yet her secret is out -- and out in a big way.
Grateful Dead followers, known as Dead Heads, have until recently been a somewhat small but devoted group, sharing a quiet love of Dead music and a free way of life. Camping was small, and vending was kept to a half-dozen T-shirts.
But over the past five years, the number of Dead Heads has reached the breaking point. Following run-ins with the police and local officials over the "mob scene" created by fans with no tickets, by campers, and by an escalating commercial vending scene at camp sites, the Grateful Dead are giving their fans a warning this summer. "Summer '89 will be the last chance to find out whether this scene can govern itself and make itself work," band members wrote to fans in a recent letter. "Deadheads have to control the scene so that local people can be comfortable with our traveling circus, or the circus will travel no mo'." The Dead close the letter by saying that Dead Heads should leave behind "nothing but footprints. We're not kidding."
"Big time rock 'n' roll has different rules," said Grateful Dead/Dead Head liaison Peter Lee, who has worked for the band for three years, advising Dead Heads about safety and the responsibility to preserve tours and camping. "You have to pay attention at the fun club. Otherwise the fun club will be no mo'."
Patrolling the grounds, Lee scolds his fellow Dead Heads as he would his pals. Saturday night, four young men climbed a tower in the parking lot, and ignored Lee's flashlight beckons and advice to get down. He lobbed a small rock at the group, and they came down. "Better you hear it from me than someone you don't ever want to deal with," he said. He also told people carrying large nitrous oxide balloons, "Don't do it if it the balloon is bigger than your head."
This peer-pressure attempt to bend the Dead Heads into shape has been one successful way to deal with the growing crowds at Dead shows. But most older fans said they just hope the disruptive new fans will be discouraged by the scene and leave. "Some of these new guys jump in the pudding right away and some don't ever catch on," Lee said. "Hopefully we can bore them enough so they move on to some other kind of rock 'n' roll."
Calling the massive number of new fans "In the Darkies," after the Dead's '87 release, "In the Dark," which he said attracted the new listeners, Lee explained that while he welcomes the "younger brothers and sisters" to the scene, "some of these new people just don't understand respect."
On a strict afternoon diet of milk and cookies, Lee and the rest of the Dead "translator/liaisons" quickly pass off a question about drug problems and Dead Heads. "It's not interesting to us," he says. "Though on the East Coast alcohol is bigger, and that gets people belligerent, the people who cause trouble are an ugly minority."
That ugly minority was visible at Saturday night's camp scene. A 19-year-old man was taken away by police after he overdosed on LSD and started hitting other campers. "Usually we just sit down with them and talk them through the trip," said Dicky Cantrell, a volunteer medic for Dead Head camp sites. "Sometimes these new people come in and just don't know the drug scene."
Though there were also a number of undercover crackdowns Saturday, Lee and other Grateful Dead/Dead Head liaisons quickly spread the word about two narcs operating out of a van on the lot. "Just to let them know little brother is watching right back," Lee chuckled.
A more recent threat to Dead Head life, however, is massive vending. Though vendors at Saturday's Sullivan Stadium "village" set up small displays, larger commercial vendors, nicknamed "tie-dye corporations," have started to appear at most camp sites. "These guys don't even know what band is playing most nights," Lee said. "They've probably never heard the Dead. Some of these people come in with over $100,000 in merchandise. At the last show I saw some salesman with a phone-in credit-card machine."
Another sign of encroaching commercial exploitation of the Dead scene is ticket counterfeiting. There were rumors on Saturday that 5,000 counterfeit tickets had been sold, most at twice the ticket price. "It crushes these people to pay $65 for something that turns out to be a piece of trash," Lee said. Scalpers were also out selling on Saturday.
This commercialization and the overwhelming crowd numbers have turned many fans into watchdogs for their peers. Van Delia, of Syracuse, who has been with the Dead for over 20 years and now tours with his wife and 15-month-old baby, collected trash for campers last night, and was out with others this morning cleaning up around the sight. "I have faith that this way of life will continue forever, for our kids and grandchildren," Delia said. "This music and the freedom it teaches will never die."
FRANK ;07/02 NKELLY;07/05,15:11 DEADHE03
Caption: PHOTO
1. Grateful Dead liaison Van Delia, left, and family in Foxborough Saturday. / Globe photo / Eric Antoniou
2. Some Grateful Dead fans gathered at Sullivan Stadium before yesterday's concert. / Globe photo / Eric Antoniou
THE DEAD OFFERS UP TASTEFUL, DREAMY SET
GRATEFUL DEAD -- In concert with Los Lobos at Sullivan
Stadium last night.
FOXBOROUGH - The day began early for the Grateful Dead. They arrived at the stadium just after noon to tape a song for ABC-TV's "Nightline" to air during its Fourth of July celebration tomorrow. While standing by a backstage bus, the Dead ended up taping an acoustic duet with Los Lobos of Woody Guthrie's stirring "This Land Is Your Land."
Another celebration was held for a capacity 61,000 Dead Heads who jammed Sullivan Stadium to the gills last night. Traffic tie-ups were monumental -- nearly two-hour delays were not uncommon -- but the crowd policed itself well and the most trouble was a few stalled engines and sore feet from having to hoof it from a parking space several miles away.
The Dead played a surprisingly dreamy, tasteful show in this, their first East Coast date of their summer tour. They rarely rocked out, preferring a midtempo, laid-back mood in keeping with the livin'-is-easy pace of this tropical July day.
This was a calmer crowd than the Dylan/Dead hordes at the stadium two years ago on this same weekend -- and the band responded in kind. Their first set, however, was really too low in energy, as if they'd spent themselves during the TV taping. They sputtered through "Playin' in the Band," never found the trigger on Jerry Garcia's bluesy "Crazy Fingers," and only started showing vital signs on Willie Dixon's zestfully erotic "Wang Dang Doodle," which the Dead infrequently perform but might want to do more often.
The rest of the first set, which followed a barely audible set by the unnecessarily timid roots band Los Lobos, clunked and clattered to its finish. Brent Mydland's raspy new tune, "You Can Run But You Can't Hide" was followed by Garcia's brightening "Tennessee Jed," then Dylan's "Queen Jane Approximately," Garcia's slow-blues "Lay Me Down," and closing, finally, with uptempo faves "Cassidy" and "Don't Ease Me In."
"I'd only give that set a C or C-minus," drummer Mickey Hart sighed backstage during intermission. "But hold on. We'll get it together."
And they did, though it took a couple more cover tunes to do it. Strangely, the best song of the first set was a cover of "Wang Dang Doodle," while the cream of the second set likewise consisted of covers. They were Traffic's "Dear Mr. Fantasy" (Garcia got things rolling with a blistering, bent-note, acid-damaged solo) and the Beatles' "Hey Jude," with loud, tuneful harmonies supplied by the crowd.
The final set also had one of the more bizarre "space jams" in memory. The Dead built up to it by starting with "Friend of the Devil," "Truckin'," "She's Gone" and a rather vapid "Eyes of the World," then Hart and second drummer Bill Kreutzmann went off into never-never land with stunning, phantasmic video images coming from having a camera inside one of Hart's drums. It was followed by an even more cosmic, Philip-Glass-take-note guitar duet between Garcia and Bob Weir, while vivid, hallucinogenic-style computer graphics filled the video screens. The Dead goes MTV? Good question. It was seductive for a while, but went on too long.
All in all, a pleasant night that didn't find the Dead playing at their peak, yet still, if that's possible, they justified the ridiculous Route 1 traffic jams. The Dead's own material sounded a little rusty, but they salvaged the night beautifully with their soulful Traffic and Beatles tunes. Those went a long way toward easing the headaches it took to get to the stadium in the first place.
morse ;07/02 NKELLY;07/05,15:47 DEAD3
Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead performs at Sullivan Stadium. / Globe photo / Brooks Kraft
THE GRATEFUL DEAD: BUSINESS AS USUAL
Author: Gilbert, Matthew
Chances are, you've met the stereotypical Deadhead. And chances are, he irked you. Innocently, but forcefully, he held you hostage to his music, which he claimed was more than music: the good old Grateful Dead. "They're a band beyond description," he'd say, reciting scripture. His hissing, ancient bootleg tapes were endless, and distressing, "Dark Star" sidling in and out again like a bad dream. While God spoke to him through Jerry Garcia's effusive guitar riffs, you wanted to go wash dishes.
The more you voiced your dislike, of course, the more this head espoused the Dead, speaking as if they were old friends. "Jerry's tired on this jam," he'd say knowingly, or "You have to catch them on a good night." His walls were plastered with psychedelic posters, his bookshelves with Kerouac and Kesey. And when tour time arrived, every year or so, he was in full flower, on the road, a spectacle of silk-screen and E-Z Wider. Next Saturday, at Foxboro Stadium, you'll find him dancing and trancing, the hero of his own movie.
This Deadhead, of course, seemed like a cartoon. He was a relic, wrapped up in the romance of a brief '60s past. His Fillmore tapes, his yellowed Beat classics, his love-Haight philosophy -- they were a tired nostalgia trip. But in this, the 25th year of the Grateful Dead, it may be time for reconsideration. With all his dusty faith, our Deadhead friend is very much present tense. He and his fellow fiends, it seems, have created a rock phenomenon that is as enduring as it is unique. And each year, thousands of converts join them in their monomaniacal trek down the golden road.
As proof of the Dead culture's vitality, go to a Grateful Dead concert in 1990. Right beside the many diehard older fans, you'll find scads of teen-agers wearing tie-dyed T-shirts and ponytails. Last year, the Dead were the country's fourth-highest-grossing concert act (behind the Rolling Stones, the Who and Bon Jovi). Since the release of their 1988 album, "In the Dark," the band has reached new heights of popularity. For the first time, you'll find their songs on the charts. Once again you'll find Garcia on the cover of Rolling Stone.
At a Dead show, you'll also find that, as a musical unit, the band seems self-rejuvenating. The players and the song list have remained nearly the same for 25 years, but they still find enough inspiration to play sometimes for four hours. Constantly on the road, they are continually experimenting with new sounds and new technology, particularly Garcia's recent affair with MIDI programmed-guitar effects. "Victim or the Crime," for instance, a song on their new album, features a heavy barrage of high-tech guitar riffs that is cutting-edge all the way. And in the last few years, members of the Dead have been seen onstage with Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, Ornette Coleman, the Neville Brothers, Edie Brickell, Bruce Hornsby and Suzanne Vega, to name a few.
How have the Grateful Dead come about their longevity? How has this exercise in anachronism weathered a quarter of a century so far?
There's something embarrassing to nonfans about the devotion of Deadheads. The emotional commitment between the band and its following is passe -- it's too sincere. In the late '70s, when bands such as Talking Heads and the B-52's were at their mocking best, irony became the dominant rock-music sensibility. No one got too serious. The Dead, however, continued on their hippie-rock track. You'd never hear them goofing on sexual roles, for instance, or on rock music itself. They have remained stubbornly out-of-time.
This notion is nothing new to Deadheads. In fact, they seem to revel in the stable history of their band, which was known as "good old Grateful Dead" long before it was particularly good or old. As Dead fans, they consider themselves beyond fashion, explorers of the eternal consciousness -- the consciousness that, at one time, was thought to be found only through use of LSD. They hold dear the legends of carefree figures such as Neal Cassady and the Merry Pranksters, who were immortalized in books such as Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." Such books are their ibles.
The words of Robert Hunter, the Dead's primary lyricist, promote this aura of legend. His poetic songs are loaded with classical allusions -- to the Bible, to American history, to medieval England -- which he plays off. "Light a candle, curse the glare," from "Touch of Grey," derives from the Chinese proverb "It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness." Hunter adapts the Sermon on the Mount's "You are the light of the world" to exhort, "Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world." Such references are everywhere in Dead songs, reminders to listeners of the way things have stayed the same, even while they have changed.
In the music, as well, the Dead exude a certain sense of history. At a Dead concert, there is the feeling that not too much has changed since 1970. Songs that the Dead have been playing since their first years together, such as "Morning Dew" and "China Cat Sunflower," are still in the rotation, just as prominent as the newer material. While most long-lived acts eventually eschew their early songs, the Dead continually pump life into their old standards, jamming them into new shapes and sizes. They are still who they were, in some ways.
Furthermore, most of the cover songs they play are traditional in origin. They precede the existence of the Dead, lending another tinge of the past. "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad," "Cold Rain and Snow," "Morning Dew" -- they're in the American grain. They speak of the Depression, the downtrodden, hopping freight trains. The newer cover songs -- such as a group by Dylan including "When I Paint My Masterpiece" and "Queen Jane Approximately," the Beatles' "Hey Jude" and the Band's "The Weight" -- are, in a sense, newer classics; they update the same American canon.
The stability of the personnel also lends a sense of history to the Dead. Since the very beginning, Garcia has been the eternal Captain of lead guitar; Phil Lesh has been the intellectual on bass; Bob Weir's been the whiz kid on rhythm; and Bill Kreutzmann has been strong and silent on drums. While other band members such as Pigpen, Mickey Hart, Tom Constanten, Keith and Donna Godcheaux and Brent Mydland have provided some flux in the lineup, the center has held remarkably.
In these ways, the Dead form a sort of institution, one that is indeed built to last. They grant a sense of membership, a stable identity to rock fans seeking more than the latest fads -- seeking, in fact, the opposite of trendiness.
For most Deadheads, the intimacy of the concert experience is as important as this sense of tradition. They like to feel as though the band members are their friends. The Dead dress as the Dead, generally in T-shirts and jeans. Their tours, which occur with amazing regularity, have no formal names, like "Steel Wheels" or "Blond Ambition" -- it's simply another Dead show. Once they are onstage, and generally not before that point, they decide which songs they'll play. They try to be completely present for their audiences, unobscured by any prepackaged designs.
Often, the songs they choose to play will tweak their fans. Playing "Loose Lucy" for the first time since 1974, for instance, can create a small sensation, as the information is carried from show to show by fans who follow the group on tour. But more than what they play, it's how they play it. As conventional song structures dissolve into extended jamming, the band members follow their imaginations with their instruments. In a sense, as you sit in the audience you are within the group brain as it discovers the song. "The music plays the band," according to one of their lyrics. It's a pensive style, turning one moment to jazz, the next to blues, the next to African heat; it's all very interior and nonconfrontational. There's a rhythm, but it doesn't affront -- it's usually more of a shuffle.
While Dead songs aren't confessional in nature, there's something personal about the band's performances. If they aren't feeling good, or together, then they may play listlessly. And when it's a bad night, Deadheads know it. Mediocre concerts, with aimless space jams, are a constant threat on the tour circuit. But if there's a spark among the band members, the fans are ignited. The songs are lively, the jams are bright. While most fans prefer to hear a hot show, they are generally sympathetic and forgiving of a bad one. No hard feelings.
This friendly environment is in stark contrast to that surrounding other older acts such as the Stones, and newer ones such as Madonna, who are very big business right now. These performers are under stunning financial pressures. To avoid risk of failure, they tend to produce prefabricated concerts, laden with staging and spectacle. Their tours are exercises in ultra-careful planning, and the goal seems to be to make each show look and sound the same. With formidable music-business machinery, these acts draw their audiences into the arena, deliver the product and send them home with a T-shirt. There is a barrier between the musician and the audience that can be summed up in one phrase: business savvy.
The Dead have managed to transcend this business-oriented band/audience paradigm. Their new-found popularity has occurred without any marketing muscle; it simply happened to them. As businessmen, they've remained loyal to their early ideals of small operations and musical experimentation. This is a band that, upon the release of its first Arista album, "Terrapin Station," didn't play any songs from the album at a concert attended by label boss Clive Davis. This is a band that generally allows fans to tape its shows, even designating areas for tapers. Try holding up a mike at a Stones concert.
The Dead actually attempted to keep their entire operation independent of the established music industry. Back in 1973, with the core group of friends that had formed around them, their "family," they began their own record label, Grateful Dead Records. They stepped up contact with fans, via their Dead Freaks Unite program, and by 1974 there were approximately 80,000 names on the mailing list. They developed their own sound system, a 23-ton "Wall of Sound" they lugged from gig to gig.
None of it was viable. Records from the label -- among them "Wake of the Flood," "From the Mars Hotel," "Blues for Allah" -- sounded high in quality, and the Wall of Sound was loud and precise. But the energy and money it took to keep these monster enterprises moving sapped them. Since then, the Dead as a business have pursued the art of compromise. They make the best of rock realities -- arenas, for instance.
Since the "In the Dark" explosion, many of the band's newer fans have caused trouble at the gigs. They arrive early, stay late, make a mess, flaunt their drug use -- and aside from unpleasant concertgoing, the result has been a lot of bad publicity and busts. A few arenas have asked the band not to return. In response, the Dead launched an all-out campaign to educate their new fans. Fliers on concert "Deadiquette" were issued with all mail-ordered tickets; the band asked that all camping at stadiums stop; they sent radio spots, asking fans to be civilized, to areas on their tour route. They've tried a number of experiments in ticketing and promotion as well, such as announcing shows only a week or so in advance, with tickets available only locally, to discourage ticketless travelers from hanging out. They are trying to keep in touch.
The most obvious paradigm for all this shared consciousness is religous ceremony, not rock concert. And it is not uncommon to hear Dead shows referred to as religious events, or Deadheads as religious fanatics (maybe that's why you can't stand your Deadhead friend). The pilgrimage to concert sites; the ritualistic behavior, which sometimes includes the ingestion of drugs, the host; the preachers on the altar; the martyrs, like Pigpen and Janis; the spiritual lift from the words and the music; the unlimited devotion.
But more acurately, the Grateful Dead are a quasi-religion. The ritual is for ritual's sake; there are no teachings, really. The dominant imperative seems to be to have a good time, en masse, without hurting anyone. The Dead recede from didacticism. Their lyrics, by Hunter or not, seem to keep their roots in the hallucinogenic: What is learned is not exactly communicable, and always beyond judgment, except to someone who takes the same strange trip at the same time. The narratives are captivating but so undefined in space and time that their real-world implications often remain nebulous. When there are messages, they are elliptical and existential, or token and uninspired ("Nothing left to do but smile, smile, smile"). If there is a directive in the lyrics, it's about growing older ("Every silver lining has a touch of gray") or about growing through paradox into spiritual enlightenment ("It's all a dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago").
Aside from a commitment to the survival of the rain forests, the band members tend not to preach in public. Their mode is generally apolitical. In a number of interviews, Garcia has said that he doesn't vote, that he's chosen not to choose from among the lesser of evils.
While the Grateful Dead's music may not suit most tastes, it's hard to deny the appeal of their presence in the rock music business. With their seemingly pure intentions, they are its core of integrity. They play for music, not money, reaching for their audience's ears and not their wallets. Wish your Deadhead friends would wear Walkmen; wish they would all move out West. But after all is said and done, perhaps it's time to be grateful for their endurance.
FOXBORO EXPECTS 61,000 DEADHEADS TOMORROW
ROCK NOTES
The summer concert season has been up and down at the box office, but the Grateful Dead, as usual, seem immune. They've got three of the Top 10 grosses in the latest Amusement Business magazine, totaling $1.4 million in Eugene, Ore.; $1.1 million in Mountain View, Calif.; and $935,000 in Sacramento.
There will be more of the same tomorrow when the Dead launch the Foxboro Stadium rock season before 61,000 fans. The show is "absolutely, categorically sold out," says stadium general manager Brian O'Donovan.
Some words of caution, however:
"There will be no camping whatsoever allowed this year," O'Donovan says. "The Dead are on a big campaign against that so they can continue to play these stadium shows. And people will be checked for tickets as they come into the parking lots. We had upwards of 100,000 people on site last year, many of them looking for tickets, and we don't want that to happen again."
Other Dead-related tidbits:
- OPENING ACT EDIE BRICKELL & NEW BOHEMIANS: They'll start things off tomorrow at 4 p.m. Their new album won't be out until October, but they're expected to preview it. Sources say that singer Brickell will also play one or more concerts in the next year with a group consisting of the Dead's Jerry Garcia, Branford Marsalis, Bruce Hornsby (who just joined the Dead in their Raleigh, N.C., show and plays Club Casino Tuesday) and Rob Wasserman. Their music will be largely improvisational.
- BOB WEIR AT GREAT WOODS: Dead cosinger Bob Weir swings back this way to play with bassist Rob Wasserman at Great Woods on Aug. 23. The acoustic version of Hot Tuna will open. Tickets on sale tomorrow.
URBAN DANCE SQUAD: From Holland with love and mania comes the new group Urban Dance Squad, who debut at Axis tonight. A promo concert video arrived from Arista Records this week -- and was a mind-blower, to say the least. Visually, the group was all over the stage, while their sound was a cross between Soul II Soul and Led Zeppelin. As vocalist Rudeboy said, "I'm intense. I'm happy with that. It makes the world more beautiful." Their new album, "Mental Floss for the Globe," is hit and miss, but their live show looks promising.
LINDA RONSTADT'S GREAT WOODS CHARITY: Singer Linda Ronstadt will play Great Woods on Sept. 1 with Aaron Neville. She's also helping out the Cambridge-based Fearless Hearts for Homeless Children Foundation, the same group Steve Earle did a Nightstage benefit for last year. If you're willing to pay $75 a ticket ($50 is a tax-deductible donation), you'll get choice seating and attend a reception with her. The mailing address: Fearless Hearts, PO Box 1034, Cambridge 02140.
MORE CONCERT NEWS: Danzig, Soundgarden and Corrosion of Conformity will take over Citi and Axis for a metal spectacular on Aug. 15. Canadian rocker Colin James, who has a hot new album with Bonnie Raitt on one track, plays the Paradise Aug. 8. Also, Snap will open for Soul II Soul Aug. 26 at Great Woods.
BOSTON WINS AGAIN: Tom Scholz of the band Boston has won another phase of a lawsuit with CBS Records. In March, CBS was ordered to pay back royalties they withheld when Boston would not deliver them a third album. And this time Scholz won copyrights to the songs on the "Third Stage" album, which CBS claimed to own.
BARRY AND HOLLY TASHIAN: Barry Tashian, once with Barry & the Remains and later with Emmylou Harris' Hot Band, joins his wife and harp player Kirk (Jellyroll) Johnson at Johnny D's on Tuesday. The Tashians' debut album, "Trust in Me," released by the local Northeastern label, is a folk-country gem.
BITS AND PIECES . . . Peter Wolf performed a show with Roomful of Blues in Providence last week . . . Matt Johnson, a New Age/jazz pianist of considerable grace, leads a 10-piece ensemble at the Hatch Shell on Sunday at 3 p.m. . . . Tonight: Steve Wynn and Concrete Blonde at the Channel, Peter Murphy at Citi and banjoist Bela Fleck at Nightstage.
'DEAD HEADS' FIND FANDOM LEADS TO ROCK'S HARD PLACE
Author: Kerstetter, James
FOXBOROUGH - Olaf Stockwell, a devout Grateful Dead fan, is tired of being asked if he sells drugs.
"Just because we're Dead fans, they think we can set them up with something," said Stockwell of St. Catherine, Ontario. "You get real tired of it."
Stockwell and the bohemian Dead Heads, the people who have made following the band around the country their life's work, were accompanied last night to Foxborough Stadium by about 63,000 other fans.
The Volkswagen vans and pickup trucks of the music-loving Dead Heads have been joined in parking lots across the country by Toyotas and Chevys and a mainstream audience since the Grateful Dead's 1987 pop hit "Touch of Gray."
In another sign of its mainstreaming, the band has been cutting back on its drug use -- an integral part of the 1960s Grateful Dead experience -- and that trend is reflected among its diehard fans.
On the front window of the 1972 VW van that Stockwell, 19, and his traveling companions, Moses Berger and Darren, who declined to give his last name, have driven from Kansas to Boston in pursuit of their favorite band is a sign that reads, "If you ask us for drugs, you owe us a nickel. P.S. We don't have any drugs."
As the travelers related their adventures on the road, at least five passersby asked them if they had any drugs to sell. "We're pretty used to it," said Berger, 20, with a shrug.
"Here they come on the stage," Berger said excitedly, as the roar of fans and gentle guitar rhythms streamed out of Foxborough Stadium about 100 yards away. "There's nothing like being at a Dead concert. You have to be there when everyone is dancing and singing and just being together and happy."
Most Dead Heads go to every concert, regardless of whether they have tickets. Hours are spent before the concert trying to get that increasingly elusive seat inside the arena.
But the trio has had trouble getting used to the rowdiness that has greeted them at some East Coast Grateful Dead performances.
"The locals make it real tough for us," said Stockwell, bare-chested and decked out in eclectic Guatemalan hat and skirt. "They come here and stir up a lot. We have to stick together."
Another Dead Head, bearing a striking resemblance to a bearded Willem Dafoe, the actor, stalked up to his fellow travelers with dire news about some hallucinogenic mushrooms. "Some big guys just jumped Sparky and tore out all of his mushrooms and said, 'What if I was a cop?' "
"You guys up for a hoedown?" he asked with growing anger. "We need about 20 guys to do a number here. I'm gonna get bo stick and give a lesson or two here," he said, referring to a staff 5 or 6 feet long used in martial arts.
Berger explained the man's anger over Sparky's plight. "You know, we're on the road all the time, and we have to stick together because we really don't have anyone else to go to. People see that tie-dye and they're going to give you trouble," Berger said.
A spokesman for the Foxborough police said more than 50 arrests were made at the concert.
The three Dead Heads take pride in their "mellow" lifestyle and their drift away from drugs.
"I haven't dropped any acid for about 20 shows now," said Darren, 19, who has seen about 35 Grateful Dead shows since joining the "tour" three years ago.
"Sometimes I like to stay straight and watch everyone else high and watch the energy that goes through the crowd," said Darren, who supports his concert-going habit by selling fruit juice and soda.
LOCY ;07/14 CORCOR;07/16,19:18 CON15A
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
A SPIRITED JAM FOR DIE-HARD DEADHEADS
with Edie Brickell & New Bohemians
At: Foxboro Stadium, Saturday
FOXBOROUGH - The bumper sticker on one gridlocked car summed it up: "Dead shows -- time out from whomever you are." And so it went at Foxboro Stadium, as a sellout 61,000 fans and thousands fruitlessly seeking tickets, left reality behind in this annual rite of summer.
Some took advantage of the jam-packed, inch-along traffic by selling cases of beer for up to $48, parking spaces for $20, sticks of gum for 50 cents and various other substances -- some herbal, some not -- for inflated prices.
But most still came and partied in friendly, timeless Deadhead fashion, sharing their food, their wares and their highs despite police security double the size of a typical show; and despite an edict against camping. (Some Heads camped anyway, though in a more low-key mode than the permissive, circus-like atmosphere of years past.)
The Grateful Dead responded with a show as grand as Saturday's weather, which was far more pleasant than the sauna bath conditions at their stadium date last year and their withering double bill with Bob Dylan three years ago, when water hoses constantly sprayed the crowd.
In spirit, flow and musicality, the show was also much better than last year's sputtering performance when cover versions of Traffic's "Dear Mr. Fantasy" and the Beatles' "Hey Jude" carried more spark than the Dead's own songs. And it was more pleasing than the Dead/Dylan concert, which had its
moments but promised a bit more than was delivered.
At twilight, after a game set by Edie Brickell & New Bohemans (whose angular, sing-song tunes built a promising mood even if they're better heard in a smaller setting), the Dead kicked off with the easy-loping R&B of "Shakedown Street," originally produced by Little Feat's Lowell George.
There were initial sound problems -- and some zaniness in the crowd as a few ticketless fans leaped fences to get in -- but the Dead steered a smooth course with Dylan's "Walkin' Blues," followed by "Far from Me," a recharged "Candy Man," a burning Bob Weir cover of Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile with These Memphis Blues Again" and a change-of-pace country feel with Jerry Garcia's "Ramble On Rose." They then swung into intermission with Weir's rockified "One More Saturday Night," with Garcia adding powerhouse Chuck Berry licks.
But unlike many bands, the Dead were not content. "I'd give the set a B-minus. It didn't feel right," Weir said backstage at halftime. Drummer Mickey Hart gave the set "less than a B-minus," adding that "maybe we're still coming down from our RFK Stadium gig. We even pulled out 'Dark Star' at that one. The Grateful Dead is a beast you can't control, but the great thing is that you always get a second set."
That later set was magical.
A spiritual "Eyes of the World" led to Weir's twisting "Estimated Prophet," Garcia's elegant "Crazy Fingers," then an electrified romp through "Uncle John's Band" and the obligatory space jam in which drummers Hart and Bill Kreutzmann merged Third World rhythms with an exotic video light show controlled from the audience by Larry Lachman on a Fairlight CVI, a computer video device. The sight of a floating skull (the Dead's logo) amid Indian rice paddies was a special flash, as was Garcia's head sitting atop an outer space photo of the earth. That one drew loud applause from the crowd.
The space jam, which lived up to its name, turned beautifully into pianist Brent Mydland's lullaby to his two young daughters, "I Will Take You Home," the only song from the band's last album. "I don't even remember what was on last album," Hart quipped backstage.) And then the Dead rocked through "Goin' Down the Road," Weir's "Throwing Stones" (a rare political rant), a festive "Turn on Your Lovelight," evoking memories of charter member Pigpen singing it at the Boston Tea Party and getting so carried away he fell off the stage.
The encores were the Rolling Stones' "Last Time" and the a cappella "We Bid You Goodnight," taken from a Folkways album by Garcia's bluegrass buddy, Jody Stecker. No band member was around to rank this later set, but it was a straight A from where this writer sat.
SIDEBAR DRUMMER'S DIFFERENT BEAT
Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart is not your average audiophile. His latest project is a series of 12 compact discs on "endangered and vanished musics of the world . . . from Mongolia to the Amazon Basin to the Pacific Rim," he says. The series is in conjunction with the Library of Congress and will come out on Salem's Rykodisc label within the next year.
"I've been poring through 90 hours of Amazon Basin music lately," he says between sets on Saturday. "We're going back to wax recordings and Edison cylinders -- and will regenerate them for the digital domain. A lot of this has never been in the private sector before." (The earliest Library of Congress cylinder is a 1890 recording of music by Passamaquoddy Indians from Maine, which may turn up in the CD series, he adds.)
"There's a lot of rain forest music that's also vanished," he says. "Maybe no one would want to listen to one hour of some of this, but I'll edit different styles onto one CD." And where does he find all the time for this amid band commitments? "I'll sleep when I die," he says with trademark intensity.
MORSE ;07/15 CORCOR;07/17,20:44 DEAD16
1.Jerry Garcia added a change-of-pace country feel to the Grateful Dead concert with "Ramble On Rose."
2. Bob Weir performs with the Grateful Dead at Foxboro Stadium on Saturday.
GLOBE PHOTO / AMY LEVITAN
A long, strange trip: eternal Grateful Dead 26 years of mystique comes to Boston
[City Edition]
Section: METRO/REGION
The operative word will be jam.
For six nights over the next week, Boston's arteries and airwaves will be thick with Grateful Dead. On the congested expressway near the Boston Garden, shiny sedans will mingle with rusty Volkswagens. On radio stations, Dead classics like "Sugar Magnolia" will clog playlists.
Within the Garden itself, some 15,000 crowded fans per night will reinvent a psychedelic Eden, while extra thousands mill about North Station seeking a "miracle," a ticket. And onstage, the San Francisco band that inspires a quasi-religious fervor will weave its bright, celestial funk, jamming on the songs they've been reviving for 26 years and counting.
How is it that the most hippie-passe, most gimmick-free, most idealistic rock band ever is, so far, America's No. 1 top-grossing concert act of 1991?
While fresh mainstream players like Whitney Houston and Guns N' Roses have struggled to fill recession-era concert halls, the graying Grateful Dead sold out six Garden dates in three hours last month. Tonight's Dead arrival comes on the heels of nine packed shows at the even larger Madison Square Garden in New York, where a media circus including a visit from Dan Rather encircled the band.
There is, it seems, something about the Dead that is recession-proof. They are even sturdier than Wall Street at this point. Most rock-era listeners will sneer at the band, damning them as tired '60s relics dwelling on a bygone love-Haight romance. But their fans, known as Deadheads, are profoundly, eternally dedicated.
There are Deadheads who follow the band cross-country, catching every show in every city at sometimes $25 per ticket, talking of the musicians as if they're old buddies. Promoters, aware of the Deadheads' tenacity, are increasingly eager to book their guaranteed full-house shows.
And there are fresh crops of Deadheads every year. While curiosity-seekers come and go, new converts arrive and never leave, college-age youths eager to don the tie-dye and grow the ponytail. Now at shows they sway and boogie alongside the elder statesmen, daydreaming of the fiction of Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey and canonizing free-thinking figures like Neal Cassady and the Merry Pranksters.
What exactly has engaged the unlimited devotion of these fans, young and old? Ironically, it's the opposite of what draws the masses to, say, Madonna. The Dead is a family-like band that has never had financial triumph, or even simple icon status, as its goal. Their mission has always been low-rent and iconoclastic, in league with the working-class characters on one of their most popular early albums, "Workingman's Dead." Musical craftsmanship has always been their priority.
Dead fans revel in the intimacy of the Dead endeavor. For instance, when a Dead show is announced, close to half of the tickets are reserved for Deadheads by the Dead's West Coast organization, then distributed through a mail-order system. Also, at Dead shows there is a section reserved for tapers, whose microphones reach into the air like eager giraffes. The Dead have officially condoned bootlegging, aware of the importance of tapes to their many fanatical archivist fans.
In such small but critical ways, the psychic distance between the Dead and their audience is closed. They are a band of six middle-aged men who refuse to lord it over their fans. Dressed in T-shirts and jeans, they stand unassumingly on the stage, no egos flaring, no limelight, no choreography. Jerry Garcia, pudgy and gentle, emits an undeniable solar force, a dynamism that is far from sexual. But the attention stays on the music.
The music itself is discursive and democratic. There are no backup musicians in the Dead; each band member has the same musical say. The songs, and especially the extended jams within them, are like conversations among equals, with Phil Lesh playing bass to match the two drummers, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, or perhaps carrying on a subtle dialogue with Garcia's lead.
Similarly, no single musical style predominates. Grateful Dead music is an uncanny melting pot of bluegrass, folk, blues, jazz, reggae, experimental "acid rock," African rhythms . . .
Deadheads also thrive on a spontaneity found at Dead shows that flies in the face of MTV-era prefabricated touring. The band draws impulsively from a song repertoire that can take them through six or so nights without a repeat. As they reach back to early, trippy tunes like "China Cat Sunflower" and forward to the more poppish strains of "Touch of Grey," they reward the Deadhead who is attending every show with variety. The Dead also grant themselves the room to jam on songs as long as they like -- sometimes as long as 30 minutes.
With all this flexibility, Dead concerts are free to vary radically in quality. If the inspiration doesn't flow -- the band members are tired, say, or the sound system is vexingly muddy -- then it shows. A bad Dead concert can be like a summer cold: You feel listless and burnt. But a good show, fans will say, makes the bad ones worth bearing.
The concert experience is the cement between the Grateful Dead and their fans. Except for moments on albums like "From the Mars Hotel" and "Blues for Allah," the true Dead sound has evaded their studio efforts; they are first and foremost a performing band. And a Dead concert is a Scene, what some might even call a religious rite. As Deadheads descend on a city, in full silk-screen regalia, there is a sense of pilgrimage. The preachers are at the altar, spiritual lift is in the air, magical hymns are in the ears . . .
The Dead have turned out to be quintessentially American shamans. They are children of technology and freedom, of electric guitars and improvisation. They travel across the country, taking their music and business in new and democratic directions. They offer their fans a dose of group spirit and organic music -- for a night for some, a lifetime for others.
PHOTO; CAPTION:1. Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia in New York this month. / NEWSDAY PHOTO / DAVID POKRESS 2. The Grateful Dead at one of the nine packed concerts the band gave in New York this month. / NEWSDAY PHOTO / DAVID POKRESS
Grateful Dead are `still into the moment'
Start Page: A.1
Section: ARTS & FILM
No Grateful Dead story is complete without telling of the first encounter. A striking first memory came at the Boston Tea Party in the late '60s. Organist Ron McKernan, alias Pigpen, sang his climactic tune of the night, "Lovelight." Wobbly after hours of serious hedonism, he fell off the stage in midsong, splatting on the floor. Helped up by a roadie, he dusted himself off and finished the song as if nothing had happened.
A fitting sign of the band's spirit?
That's life in the Grateful Dead -- the stubbornly determined hippie band that's defied the odds of the fickle pop world, plus the deaths of three keyboardists (Pigpen, Keith Godchaux and Brent Mydland) and the diabetic coma of guitarist Jerry Garcia to keep making music based on instinct, not commercial greed. For rock's greatest antitrend band, the song is still the same.
"What keeps it alive is our approach," says guitarist Bob Weir, whose compatriots -- bolstered since their last visit by new keyboardists Bruce Hornsby and Vince Welnick -- play Boston Garden for six sellout shows starting Friday. "We try to walk out each night with our eyes open, as if we were playing together completely anew.
"I like to think we're a bit more articulate than back in the '60s, but there was a certain brutal honesty about what we were doing then," Weir adds from his home near the band's birthplace of San Francisco, where they often jammed in Golden Gate Park back when Haight-Ashbury was a melting pot of experimentation, not a tourist trap.
"We're more sophisticated now, but we're still into the moment," Weir says. "We're still into deeply improvisational stuff where we have no idea where we're going. We do our best to achieve a sort of hallucinogenic realm and just go there and live a little while."
"Still into the moment" is the key, since juggling continuity and continuous reinvention is what the band's about. But the Dead are not a completely free-form group, whatever some Deadheads like to believe. While they rarely repeat songs night to night, there's more structure than meets the eye. For a typical concert of two 90-minute-plus sets, they plan the first song of the first set and the first four of the second. And they always do their ritualized "space jam" in the second, sparked by dual drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzman.
A few song arrangements have also become formalized, such as "Touch of Grey" (their only Top 10 hit), their many covers of Bob Dylan tunes (they backed Dylan on a live album four years ago) and their country covers, such as "Big River" and Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried."
But improvisation colors most everything else. The one constant through the years, despite personnel changes, is that the Dead can resemble a genre-splitting jazz troupe more than a rock band. Maybe that's because they never fit any pop pigeonhole, since they've ransacked the whole closet of musical influences, from Chuck Berry to Bill Monroe and back again. Certainly that image is enhanced by their latest chemistry with the jazz-trained Hornsby, who studied at Boston's Berklee College of Music; and former Tubes keyboardist Welnick, who's been known to play John Coltrane tunes during sound checks.
"There are times when I get goosebumps with this band," says Hornsby, the well-known solo star who has an open invitation to sit in with the Dead and expects to make 60 of their 80 shows this year, including all the Boston dates. As a teen-ager, Hornsby joined his brother in a Dead cover band called Bobby Hightest & the Octane Kids in his hometown of Williamsburg, Va. He first met the Dead in 1986, after they heard he was doing an occasional Dead cover with his Grammy-winning band, the Range.
"There really is a magic some nights," Hornbsy adds from a tour stop in Cleveland. "One thing the Dead do, which not many bands dare do, is they're willing to wing stuff and play songs with minimal rehearsal. The Dead are a group willing to screw up to get to the great stuff -- and I admire that. There's a certain recklessness. They don't play it safe in that sense. And there's a time when it all comes together. It can be a certain thing the drummers do" with bassist Phil Lesh. "It has its own build; and the ebb and flow is unique. It's a collective thing that just happens. I can't explain it. And that's one good thing about it. It hasn't been whittled down to a formula."
"There's an immeasurable amount of freedom," adds Welnick, who studied at the San Francisco Conservatory and played with the Tubes (anyone remember their hit "White Punks on Dope"?) and Todd Rundgren before auditioning for the band last year, after Mydland's death.
"The Dead are like a cross between a Dixieland band and a progressive jazz band, blues band, country band and folk band," says Welnick. "Kind of folkie-country-bluesy-jazzy-progressive-avant-garde."
That ought to do for definitions. Whatever you call it, don't look for it on MTV, or on any of the image-drenched, computer-programed package tours that have become the rage.
"These days, there's too much importance placed on trends," says Weir. "And music to me is not a matter of fashion or trend. It's a matter of feeling. All too often these days, if you're concentrating on whether something is appropriate for the times or the current trend, you're forgetting about the feeling you're putting into it and what it is you're doing. And the music comes out sounding like that. It may be polished, it may be glamorous, but it's lacking in depth."
The Dead are still led by the R&B-based Weir, whose chunky chords marry a garage-rock feel with a Stax/Volt session; and Garcia, the congenially inscrutable singer/guitarist who grounds the band in country, blues and bluegrass when he's not traversing psychedelic realms. The two trade songs during a Dead concert and, through subtle nods and gestures, urge other members to solo.
"Garcia and I tend to go back and forth and play off of each other a lot," says Hornsby, who moves from piano to accordion on stage. "That's been happening more and more lately. He likes me to get in his face sometimes and enter the fray." Adds Hornsby: "I'm not up there to hang out. I'm up there to push it and some nights to jack up the energy level."
"The nod comes at any time," says Welnick, who grew up in Phoenix and attended Dead shows there. "You never know. It doesn't happen at the same time in every song, or necessarily ever in the same song again. So you don't have preconceived notions of what to play and you just do it for better or worse. Maybe they'll be laying back, so you might play a big synth solo; or maybe play something in half-time, so it doesn't sound so busy."
Sounding busy has reportedly been a problem sometimes for the 1991 Dead. With two drummers, two guitarists and, on many nights two keyboardists, the potential is there for mayhem. "A lot of my input has been to get people to play a little less," says Hornsby. "There's so many people on stage now. It's easy to get up there, get excited and overplay. I'm really aware of it."
"Knowing when not to play is the biggest challenge. . . . And you've got to be careful you don't step on the big fellas," says Welnick, meaning Garcia and Weir.
After all, the big fellas and their rhythm sections have been at this a long time; and it's hard to argue with the Dead's unique brand of success. The group has been the No. 1 concert draw of the last several years in terms of average grosses per show. They're playing Boston Garden for an unprecedented six nights, following nine nights at New York's Madison Square Garden. And the recent tribute album "Deadicated," featuring Dead covers by everyone from Los Lobos and the Indigo Girls to Elvis Costello and Jane's Addiction, only confirms the group's stature among their peers.
"They're an absolute phenomenon -- and it's not based on any obvious thing," says a recently chatty Robbie Robertson, formerly of the Band, who played the legendary 1973 Watkins Glen, N.Y., show with the Dead and Allman Brothers in front of 600,000 people. "They don't have the greatest vocalists or the greatest songs or the greatest musicians. There's nothing you can really pinpoint, except they give off a kind of love that's unique in music."
That uniqueness is about to invade Boston Garden, which is a long, long way from Golden Gate Park. Or is it?
PHOTO; CAPTION:Garcia (left) with newcomers Bruce Hornsby and Vince Welnick.
DAY OF THE DEAD While Garcia & Co. rock the Garden, the lyricist gratefully works at home
THE MUSIC SECTION
"A box of rain will ease the pain . . ."
Tonight, while cowboy-adventurers Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh tread the frontier of rock improvisation at the Boston Garden, one of the most vocal members of the Grateful Dead will be at home sharpening pencils, pruning roses, or possibly playing cards.
He is the official lyricist of the "band beyond description," painter of the images that are essential to the Dead's peculiarly psychedelic but earthbound gestalt. While the band also sings Bob Dylan and Chuck Berry classics, originals by John Barlow, as well as American traditional pieces like "I Know You Rider," the lyrics written by Robert Hunter inevitably form the definitive script of a Dead show.
Some of Hunter's lines, which Viking has collected in a book called "Box of Rain," have slipped permanently into the mass-cultural memory, most notably "What a long strange trip it's been." Others are found among nouveau-American folk classics -- "A friend of the Devil is a friend of mine," for instance, or "Come hear Uncle John's Band by the riverside." Still others, Hunter's most far-flung lines, have given voice to the logic/illogic of LSD: "Dark star crashes / pouring its light / into ashes."
On the phone from his home 25 minutes outside of San Francisco, drawing on light cigarettes through an aqua-filter ("Hot air in, hot air out," he says), Hunter describes the art of songwriting as "freedom within a box. . . . You're in a certain box and you have to make the best you can out of that." In other words, like the Dead's starlit jams, Hunter's lyrics take giant leaps but must fit within a tight rhythmical rhyming structure.
Early in his connection with the Dead, which began in the late '60s, Hunter was a traveling band member. "We used to compose on the road, so there was a purpose for me being there. It was a way to corner people to get songs written." But over the years, he says, the road has become so all-encompassing that "it's best to get work done at home." Either way, he's considered full-fledged Dead, and unlike most nonperforming lyricists, he's listed in the band lineup on album jackets.
Hunter says that working with Garcia and the Dead is a predictably unpredictable process. "Any way that you can think of coming up with a song we've done it. Sometimes a jam during rehearsal has turned into some lyrics, where the whole band and myself have worked together. That's a very fine way. Everybody really feels a sort of common ownership of a song."
"Dark Star," the eternal Dead classic that has yielded some of the most cosmic of jams, was born by such committee, Hunter says. "I had just joined the band. We were in Rio Nido down on the Russian River and I was in my cabin, and I heard this far-out music coming from the hall where they were going to be playing, and I grabbed my pencil and ran over there and started writing."
Other times, Hunter brings his words to Garcia, who then sets them to music. While Hunter composes with guitar in hand, he doesn't play his music for Garcia. "The most effective songs," he says, "come up when Jerry has worked out the changes, and gives me something which is not what I would think of. I used to give him tapes with my version of how something went -- and there came a point when he said, `You know, I'd just as soon not have this stuff. Because it takes a while to get your changes out of my head, man.' " Hunter laughs.
Other times, Garcia or another band member will approach Hunter with a set of chord changes and scat-like phrasing. Hunter will then color in the lyrics. This was the case recently with "So Many Roads," a new, as-yet-unplayed song with Garcia. It also happened with "Box of Rain," which he wrote for a melody by bassist Phil Lesh more than 20 years ago. "I had scat stuff to work with. So that I heard Phil singing, just minus the words. I knew exactly what it would sound like then." The song, highly melodic and plaintive, was written for Lesh's father, who was dying of cancer.
Hunter feels that the song "Box of Rain" has held up since its creation. "You can listen to it many times over the years and it will go ahead and fluctuate with you; it'll change with you. As opposed to say, `Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,' which will probably mean the same thing 20 or 30 years later." Other songs Hunter thinks have withstood the years are "Ripple" and "Stella Blue." "When I'm asked a question about specific songs," he says, "I mostly go blank."
As a songwriting team, Hunter and Garcia have gained a reputation not unlike durable, influential duos such as Mick Jagger-Keith Richards and Elton John-Bernie Taupin. Earlier this year, a tribute album called "Deadicated" featured mainstream artists like Elvis Costello, Suzanne Vega and Midnight Oil performing a number of Hunter-Garcia songs. "I was just knocked out," Hunter says about the best-selling release. "It was like somebody sent me chocolates, roses and a Jaguar all at once. . . . It was just such a pleasure to hear someone else do the material, and to feel that the material did have an independent existence. It validated it."
When the Dead tour -- which is nearly always -- they play the older songs as frequently as the newer ones. A glance at a recent song list will show titles reaching back to the late '60s, such as "China Cat Sunflower," which Hunter mailed to the Dead before he'd even joined up. For Hunter, this causes some creative frustration. "The fire that was, well fine. But it doesn't keep you warm in the present. Not a writer, anyway. It does the band because they're out playing that stuff.
"There's kind of an idea flying around that the band wants new material, and maybe were going to take some time off and get that done this year. And if that happens -- ooh, to have that excitement again. It's something dynamic for me to do. I'm sort of hanging here on the vine turning into a raisin."
Meanwhile, Hunter has "drifted off into other directions," which includes writing songs for a band called Zero, as well as a pair of songs for Bob Dylan. Hunter has also just released a Rykodisc CD called "Box of Rain," a live solo outing on which the songwriter sings a group of his Dead songs (he's toured alone and with bands like Comfort since the late '70s). He has also just published a book of poetry with Viking called "Night Cadre" and finished a long, commissioned poem called "Idiot's Delight" for Hanumen Press, which publishes work by writers like Jack Kerouac and John Ashbery. But his poetic endeavors, he says, are "rather minor compared to the Grateful Dead."
"Night Cadre," which he wrote in a three-year period, "was a way of working out a hard and difficult time. I was trying to put pieces of my life back together and getting into some serious stuff, and that's done. I don't intend to be the world's darkest poet. I've got another book of poetry completed since, and its considerably brighter."
Hunter is perhaps the most well-read of rock lyricists, and his songs are deeply allusive. All over his lyrics are references to American and English history, Chinese proverbs and Biblical events. "Roll away the dew," for instance, the exquisitely enigmatic line from "Franklin's Tower," has its roots in rolling away the stone from Jesus' grave.
"Whatever comes in goes through my own little matrix, and if it impresses me sufficiently, it will probably enter my work somewhere. . . . You digest things and they become your own. And my readers will digest what I do, and it will come out in their work. It's nice. This is the unbroken chain."
But even with his literary links, Hunter remains a unique talent, a sculptor whose finely sanded lines resemble nothing else on the rock 'n' roll landscape. "I can touch that dreamspace," he says. "The stuff you dream is kind of close to consciousness for me, which is a bit of a talent and in normal life it's a bit of a disability. I've got a little tunnel into my subconscious . . . There's a space you get into. I know when I'm there. And I know that I couldn't manufacture it."
PHOTO; CAPTION:Jerry Garcia, left, and Bob Weir, below, are highly visible members of the band. Robert Hunter, far left, performs his magic far away from the madding crowd. / PHOT
The Dead keep it real mellow at the Garden
GRATEFUL DEAD At: Boston Garden, last night
The Grateful Dead haven't played Boston Garden in 10 years, so last night's fever pitch was only natural. Mingling, tie-dyed Deadheads, showing yogic patience under the circumstances, were herded through sidewalk gates and frisked carefully before being allowed in. The process was slow, but served to build the excitement even more. "It's like the World Series has begun," said Garden president Larry Moulter.
For many Deadheads, it was no doubt better than a World Series. It was the opener of six nights of the Dead at Boston Garden -- a precedent-setting run -- and you might have assumed the band would respond with a gritty, rocking celebration.
You would have been wrong.
Typical of the Dead, when pressures build to the bursting point, they respond with a low-key show that almost seems deliberately understated, as if to cool the crowd down before anything gets out of hand. At least it seemed that way last night, as a sold-out concert of 15,000 fans caught a show that was far more cerebral than physical.
If you like long, midtempo jams thick with soloing, you would have enjoyed it. But if you looked for more energy to befit the occasion, you would have been disappointed. "This feels more like a Monday night in Seattle than a Friday night in Boston," a fan next to me said.
The Dead only erupted in the second set with ``Truckin'," then right near the end with their raucous cover of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" and the moldy-oldie, '60s party fave, "Lovelight." Otherwise, most of the night was mellow, with the band focusing more on softer country-blues and svelte vocal harmonies (newcomer Vince Welnick is a nice addition in that regard) than rock 'n' roll.
As they did to start their recent nine-night run in New York's Madison Square Garden, they opened with their survivalist anthem "A Touch of Grey," with singer Jerry Garcia offering his familiar credo: "I will get by/I will survive."
But sound problems reared up immediately (you could barely hear Bruce Hornsby's piano and couldn't hear his accordion). The band used a huge vertical stack of speakers, but the sound didn't start to jell until later in the set. The sound problems -- and the fact that the band wasn't really in sync -- might explain their cutting the first set to an hour (a half-hour below their norm).
The opening set did have its moments, though. The blues standard "Little Red Rooster" had flashes of greatness, from Bob Weir's cutting slide solo to some Sunnyland Slim-style barrelhouse from Hornsby. Garcia's "Jack a Roe" was taken at a smooth gait, while Weir's "Black-Throated Wind" was an artful R&B surprise. Garcia's "Stagger Lee" rode a country-blues groove, then came a stately cover of Dylan's "When I Paint My Masterpiece" and a fairly meandering "Birdsong" to close it out.
At intermission, Weir admitted that the crowd's pent-up, Friday night boisterousness threw him a bit. "West Coast crowds show their appreciation more quietly. You don't get as many war whoops," he said with a laugh backstage.
Mellow grooves also defined the second set: "Help on the Way," Garcia's "Fire on the Mountain" (his most affecting vocal), Weir's "Estimated Prophet," then finally some vintage rock with "Truckin'," with the crowd bobbing to life as huge overhead spotlights shone on them. (The Dead's light show was still first-class, though they didn't use the psychedelic video that's characterized their Foxboro Stadium shows in recent years.)
And then came a delayed, drum-bantering space jam that brought the mood back to a cerebral tone, where it was, strangely, for most of this long-awaited debut night.
PHOTO; CAPTION:GLOBE PHOTO/PAM BERRY / The Dead opened with their survivalist anthem "A Touch of Grey," with singer Jerry Garcia offering his familiar credo: "I will get by/I will survive."
HANGING OUT BACKSTAGE IN THE HIDAWAY OF JERRY GARCIA The Grateful Dead leader shares a few thoughts about music, touring and why he needs a break
It is late Sunday afternoon. Outside Boston Garden, hundreds of Deadheads roam the sidewalks, hunting for tickets, buying tie-dyed shirts and peace buttons, milling around psychedelic hippie vans and listening to street musicians play guitars and bongos. Everyone is biding time until the Grateful Dead give another of their six sold-out Garden shows this week.
Hunkered down inside the Garden is singer/guitarist/guru Jerry Garcia. Now 49 and even more of a legend since surviving a diabetic coma in 1986, Garcia has finished a sound check and retreated to a small, curtained-off, foxhole-like space at the back of the stage. It's known as his space -- he rarely leaves it on concert days except to perform -- and it contains two chairs, an ashtray, a few muted lights and a video and stereo system.
Inside this "office," Garcia speaks candidly about last year's death of keyboardist Brent Mydland, about new additions Vince Welnick and Bruce Hornsby (not a full-time member), about side projects and about the future, which will likely include a six-month Dead hiatus next year. Now back to the foxhole:
Q. So this is your home away from home?
A. Yeah, I can't stand it backstage. Too many geeks.
Q. What's it like returning to the Garden? It's been 10 years.
A. To tell you the truth, I don't remember what it used to be like, so I can't compare it. It's smaller than Madison Square Garden, where we just played, so it's a little like going into a nice cozy little room after that.
Q. How do you rate the shows here so far?
A. I can't do that. To me, it's too much of a personal thing. I get hung up in my own little world and I'm not competent to call 'em. If I look from a judging perspective, I judge really harshly. So for me, I've got to escape that perspective.
Q. Is it more comfortable playing these long runs? You just did nine nights in New York and now six in Boston.
A. There are some things about it that are more comfortable. You don't have to travel a lot, so you take that anxiety completely out of the experience. On the other hand, there's something about playing to an audience in the same place over and over that gets me a little funny. If those runs go too long, I get to feeling really stale.
Q. What about working in the new musicians?
A. It's a very different band now -- and it will be another two or three years before this band becomes something specific. Right now, it's a makeup game. The new guys are trying to learn what the rest of us have learned together; and the rest of us are trying to unlearn what we've learned so we can see what the new guys can offer. . . . I'm not looking for real serious musical experiences now. These are like exploratories. You just have to take the long view. Sometimes we have a good night anyway, but we're still groping. We're still feeling around for the right form. Some things work better than others, but we're making progress.
Q. What things are working better than others?
A. It varies from show to show. It's too early to say, `Well, this song definitely doesn't work; or does work.' It hasn't gotten to that level and hopefully it won't. We're not into accepting limitations at this point.
Q. Is it a style thing, like the rock 'n' roll elements work better than, say, the country blues?
A. No, it hasn't fallen along any lines so far. It mostly has to do with a Grateful Dead feel that's rhythmic in nature and is tough to teach. It isn't exactly a shuffle beat and isn't exactly a straight rhythm. It's an in-between thing, something we invented amongst ourselves early on.
Q. Regarding the tragedy with Brent, how were you struck by what happened?
A. It's always a blow to lose a friend and I find myself losing them more and more frequently now. And for that part of it, nothing helps. It's just pain. You share the pain with everyone else who's experiencing it; and that's about as much as you can do. Then you have to just push on. With us, it was tough, because Brent never really was totally comfortable. I don't think he ever felt completely a part of the band. . . . That may be partly our fault, I don't know. We made a lot of effort to reach out to him; and he was with the band for 10 years. That's a long time . . . But the big thing is we miss him and there's no replacing him.
Q. Was the whole audition process a strain for you?
A. Yes, very much. Trying to teach somebody new so much music so quickly, that's a grind. And for me, going over all that material that I'm already pretty burned out on added to my fatigue. We're now talking about taking some serious time off.
Q. I've been hearing about a six-month hiatus next year.
A. Yeah, we're ready for it. We really are. We've been working real hard for a long time and haven't stopped to take the temperature of the water or anything. We've just been blasting along. So it looks like a hiatus is going to happen.
Q. You stay busy outside of the Dead, too. Do you need time off from that as well? I hear you're coming to the Centrum in November with your solo band.
A. Some things are harder work than others. The Grateful Dead tends to be harder work than the other stuff. The other things are more fun than they are work.
Q. About the whole phenomenon of the Dead, it seems like it's never been more popular. Is there a big responsibility to that?
A. No, I can't honestly accept that as a responsibility. I can't say, `Well, these are my people and I feel this way or that.' I just do what I do -- and I'm always amazed there are people that like it. Why do people like it? I don't know. I just do it -- and try to enjoy it if possible. I don't go on stage with some kind of messianic vision or anything. I'm basically going out there hoping my guitar is in tune.
Q. Ever since the diabetic coma, it seems you've played with a renewed sense of life. It seems you've had more good nights than ever before.
A. Well, that's flattering. But to tell you the truth, I can't remember what it used to be like. Not really. Not in the sense of the quality. But I will say there's something about having a near-death experience that helps you cut through the B.S. . . . A lot falls by the wayside. And how much of that spills over to your playing stylistically is something I'm not able to figure out. But certainly it changed me and must have changed my playing. Most of my energy in life has been to make the line between myself and my playing as invisible as possible.
Q. Are there any more musicians you want to play with? I notice you just made an album with David Grisman.
A. David and I work really well together. I'll play with him again. And I'm going to keep my own band going because it's a really happy combination of musicians. And I love playing with Bruce {Hornsby}. I'll keep playing with him in the Grateful Dead or whatever. Otherwise, I'm pretty wide open.
Q. You must get so many requests to do outside things. You also did a session with Warren Zevon last year. What is your criteria for choosing at this point?
A. Only one -- is it going to be fun? That's the only criteria I ever have.
THE LIFE OF A DEADHEAD For some followers, the long, strange trip never ends
Author: Muro, Mark
Cactus Flower, 45, came from Oregon.
She's a hippie, "plain and simple."
Jay Starman, who quit the University of Buffalo, is 25 and bought a van last month with Julie and Kim to drive to town, like modern-day hobos.
Steve Paschall, 31, from Virginia, came to his "profession" late. It was three years ago that he cashed a last check and headed out to join that free-form family that travels the "golden road to unlimited devotion."
They are all Deadheads, the members of that astonishing tribe of bearded pilgrims who follow America's most durable rock band, the Grateful Dead, and who this week hunkered by the hundreds in their Navaho blankets and tie-dye beneath the shadow of Boston Garden.
Shivering in doorways, clustered around dingy old vans with plates from Montana, they're the city's most noteworthy out-of-towners these days. As the Dead arrived for six shows at the Garden in seven nights this week and last, so did they, trudging the alleys and huddling patiently in the doughnut joints and parking lots along Canal Street, waiting for night, waiting for the show.
Some were college kids; some were aging relics with children. Some had jobs elsewhere; some seemed like Jay Starman, more or less youthful sojourners who "at least for now" are turning a lark into a "total lifestyle." One young woman named Claire said she'd taken a sabbatical from her job at a North Carolina community college to follow the band. "For me, it's a sort of a yuppie nirvana, like going to a monastery," she said. She was staying at the Marriott Long Wharf.
And then there are the hardest-core Deadheads, people like Steve Paschall. Harder-bitten than the others, these are the most grizzled veterans of the yearly circuit who ride the concert schedule as if it were rails, living meal to meal, epiphany to epiphany.
Monday afternoon found Paschall -- wearing frayed cowboy boots and a rotting leather vest -- crouching in a doorway on Friend Street with a backpack, eyeing the drizzle on a day the band took off.
Somehow, Paschall seemed to sum up worlds as he told the story of how he became a Deadhead. Born in Newport News, Va., in 1960, the Jesus-bearded Paschall described his path to ecstatic conversion as a trip out and away from "typical suburbia."
The son of a quality control man for the Anheuser-Busch Co., Paschall reports he was a "kind of different little kid," that he quit Minstrel High in Newport News after one year, and then did "even worse" in an alternative school "for kids who have trouble adjusting and where you call your teachers by their first names." Soon thereafter, he quit that school and left home for good.
By the time he was 17, he'd begun dealing drugs "a little," selling pot and in general "messing around." Not yet did he dig the Dead; he listened to Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Grace Slick, who stood for "living your own life your own way." Sometimes he lived with friends. Sometimes he lived "on the streets, in the woods."
"It wasn't so bad," Paschall says of those amorphous years on the grift. "It's like the Bible says: The birds get fed and people do too."
Finally, in 1984, Steve got busted, and was forced by a patient probation officer to find a trade. Soon he was working as a sheetrock installer in the booming Newport News construction scene. In time he moved into a trailer home and set up a regular little American business.
"Had two guys working for me," he says. "Had tools and a truck." But even so, Paschall says, he felt "kind of like an outsider." And so when he felt better after four months of convalescing from a 1988 back injury, he figured he "needed a break."
The vacation that followed became his life. Just when he was thinking about a respite, along came a buddy with a glittering plan.
"Man, the Dead are in Ohio: We should check it out," said the pal, recalls Paschall, to which Paschall says he replied, "Man, let's go," and so they did.
Neither party had a dime, Paschall recalls; Paschall had to hustle $30 from his grandmother, but no matter, the bus was leaving, "people were kind," and in three days they'd hitched and Trailwaysed their way to the heartland and were settled into camp.
The venue was Buckeye Lake, Ohio, the date July 1988 -- only, to hear Steve Paschall tell it, the occasion was a personal revolution: one of those seminal moments when the road goes golden, lives change and a hitherto entropic existence comes together as never before.
"Man, it was beautiful," remembers Paschall, laughing with pleasure at that first incredible conversion.
"My buddy had this tent, we got in at evening, so we wake up and there's buses around and hippies and VWs, like Woodstock or something. Pretty soon someone gives me a crystal. I was like in amazement. And then, I find $20, so I buy myself a beer and a ticket to the show. Then I go to the show. It's a combination of all different ages and all different kinds: people with feathers, people doing primeval dances, doctors, freaks. God, it was exhilarating. I felt like I was Jesus. It was like I was back with my people again after years in exile. And the music went along with my thoughts. It was like I could make the notes go up or down, as if I had some say in it."
Or, as he put it the other afternoon, rolling a cigarette as the rain spat down on Friend Street: "I'm a born traveler, and the Dead gave me a reason to travel more."
From Ohio Paschall trucked to Miami, saw the band there, went home and did some sheetrocking, then hit the road again to see the band six nights at the Forum in Los Angeles. There, he met a "nice chick from San Fran," saw five shows at the Oakland Coliseum and stayed two months, "writing poems." Eventually he gathered some of his poems into a book called "Flowers and Stones" and started selling the little mimeographed books for $5 to support himself.
In time the road went on and on, as he saw the Dead more times than he can count: in Portland, Ore.; in Eugene, Ore.; in Denver; in Texas; in Minneapolis; in Ohio. Eventually he would travel to the band's California promised land nine times. This year alone, in a time of limited band touring, he's writhed and danced and pulsed and bounced with the band in LA; San Francisco; Charlotte; Ohio; Kansas City on the Fourth of July; Greensboro; Orlando; and "some places I forget about."
In Greensboro, he says, "I don't know where we stayed, but it might have been a hotel."
Hitchhiking to Kansas City, he got picked up in the Nevada desert by Deadheads who drove him all the way.
Always, he says, he relies on the fluid togetherness of the Deadhead road, where he can always score a pint of whiskey or a meal by reading a poem.
No longer does Paschall have a real home, since he lives in a Newport News trailer park "but not in any one unit." But even so he's happy, cosmic, confident he'll sell enough poems to hit tonight's show, or maybe tomorrow's.
PHOTO; CAPTION:1. Deadhead Steve Paschall hangs out in a Friend Street doorway near Boston Garden, where the Grateful Dead are playing. / GLOBE STAFF PHOTO / JOHN BLANDING 2. Deadhead Dave Harris blows bubbles on Causeway Street near Boston Garden. GLOBE STAFF PHOTO / JOHN TLUMACKI
On the fourth night, the Dead spring to life
At: Boston Garden last night
Was it the full moon? The better sound quality? The fact that everyone came to play? Whatever it was, the Grateful Dead jerked to life last night. They reared back for an impassioned show that began on an upward curve, stayed there for long stretches and road home with the rafters rocking as though this were a playoff game.
Yes, if you love the Dead, but didn't go last night, you missed one. And yes, they did the epic, acid-era "Dark Star," a signature tune they had dropped for years.
After three Garden shows that had varying highs and lows, this was a sustained high. Fueled by an exceptional night from Dead anchor Jerry Garcia (his talk of feeling burned out lately was gloriously dispelled), the Dead hit one groove after another. They jumped out of the box with Sam Cooke's "Let the Good Times Roll" (with new keyboardist Vince Welnick shining on a falsetto, Cooke-like vocal harmony) and never looked back.
Singer Bob Weir then bristled through "Feel Like a Stranger" (with terrific cross-harmonies from Garcia), aided by a much more aggressive role from pianist Bruce Hornsby, who took the song out with a gumbo of Russian classical music and Dixieland stomp. The sound mix on his piano has improved dramatically as the six-night run has moved along -- and so has his confidence and will to enter the musical fray.
Garcia, singing as soulfully as you'd ever want to hear, turned the stately country song "Althea" into a total catharsis. (Unofficially, "Althea" is the only song the Dead have repeated in their four nights so far). Then the band roared through the Rolling Stones' "It's All Over Now," with Hornsby taking a rollicking, fist-pounding solo that earned the night's loudest ovation to that point.
Garcia emoted again with gospel fervor on "High Time," followed by the spiralling, chase-evoking "Beat It Down the Line" and churning "Big Railroad Blues." Weir counteracted with a sweetly lyrical cover of Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row," keyed by stately interplay between Hornsby on accordion and Welnick on piano. And to close this one-hour-10-minute opening set (happily longer than most first sets lately), the Dead clipped in with "New Speedway Boogie," as the spotlights bathed the exultant crowd.
The energy level then went even higher. The second set began with the vintage, country-rocking "I Know You Rider" (with Garcia blistering on guitar), shifting wildly to Harry Belafonte's campy Caribbean hit "Women are Smarter" (with a brief Bo Diddley beat from drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann). And catch this next run: "Ship of Fools," "Dark Star" (leading to a tumultuous drum space with Hart wailing mallets at a standup drum as though at a punching bag); "Foolish Heart," "Need a Miracle," "Standing on the Moon," Chuck Berry's "Round and Round" and the Band's "The Weight." Let's just call it a masterpiece and leave it at that.Looking for life among the Dead
Look out the saints are coming through
And it's all over now, Baby Blue
It's not easy to escape Boston Garden after a Grateful Dead show. The Escherian hallways are amazingly convoluted, and the small exit signs hide in the rafters. The car-wash approach is, finally, the best: Hook your wagon to the stream of sweaty tie-dyes and hope they know better. Inch your way.
Friday night, the first night, the terrapin train wound past a screeching free-lance vendor. His red-white-and-blue T-shirts read: "Dead Sox." Flexing his throat muscles and waving his arms, he couldn't have known how poetically just he was. That night, the Grateful Dead had been more sporting event than music show. More Scene than sound.
Beneath waving Boston Bruins flags, the Dead bravely competed with a chorus of fans who know the lyrics to each song on the band's nearly inexhaustible list. Every song, in fact, is now a timeless classic, a cause for raucous applause, from the brooding "Black-Throated Wind" to the ironic "Estimated Prophet." Just the fact that it is really the Dead and they are really playing "High Time" is enough; how they play it seems increasingly less important.
And fans lean on the lines, cheering at truism or booze reference, no matter the context. Oddly, this passage from Bob Dylan's dreary "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" got a round: "I started out on burgundy/But soon hit the harder stuff/Everybody said they'd stand behind me/When the game got rough/But the joke was on me."
In other words, Dead fans seem bent on drowning the band in adulation -- sometimes blind adulation. They sanctify each member, especially Jerry Garcia, who can't rock his guitar in a gust of rhythm without tearing down the house. The moment Bruce Hornsby begins one of his melodic tickles up and down the keyboard, his notes are buried beneath a thousand hands clapping. As the audience sings along, they don't seem to hear Garcia fudging many of his words, blurring them into concert-hall oblivion. They sing for him. On the melancholy "Looks Like Rain" Sunday night, Bob Weir's stunning vocals were crowded by mass singing for much of the song.
What the Dead do best is delicately woven and elliptical. Their most galloping jams ride parallel on a song, or soar away from it entirely. It's a risky, vulnerable art wide open to error. While a receptive audience certainly feeds the Dead's vibe, an aggressively adoring audience can explode it. Ripples, after all, are easily deluged. Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Tuesday nights, Dead fans came on way too strong. There was a palpable, pent-up sense of revelry for revelry's sake, recalling these lines from "The Music Never Stopped": "No one's noticed but the band's all packed and gone/Was it ever here at all?"
This is not to say that the famous Dead Scene has lost its charms. Approaching the Garden, in the shadow of a full harvest moon, the scent of patchouli is sweet and gritty. On Canal Street, veterans and novices commingle and peddle peacefully, in their own and one another's movies. A sense of community dominates, an eagerness to be pleasant all round. It may border on spoof, but there is an undeniable buzz in the air. At a Rolling Stones concert, the buzz is a charge, a more potentially explosive heat. A Dead crowd may be gregarious and self-important, but it is not violent.
The other side of the equation, of course, is the Dead themselves. Unspoiled by their uncanny midlife success, which has made them the highest-grossing concert band this year, they are nevertheless heading toward burnout. An unpopular notion, no doubt, but unavoidable in light of the bulk of the Boston run as of Wednesday (not including energetic portions of Sunday night and a stellar Wednesday). While fans at Tuesday's show could boast they'd heard "Dark Star," a seminal Dead song, could they truly say the jam took off?
For one thing, Garcia has at intervals seemed to be, as his song goes, "Standing on the Moon." He has sounded estranged from onstage musical conversations, slipping and sliding along his own path. His usual fire-fingered riffs are few, and they don't seem to blend with or command the groove. With his long, white-wired hair, he still looks like a lightning rod; but there were few flashes evident through Tuesday. Wednesday came like a miracle, with a brilliant, jazzy dissection of "Playing in the Band" and a forceful "Terrapin Station." Along with Hornsby's rhythmic riffs and Lesh's finely tuned bass, Garcia took off into his best licks so far.
Garcia's voice, too, has been inordinately raw and unharnessed. Friday, in the noisy excitement of hearing "Fire on the Mountain" instead of "Franklin's Tower" out of "Help on the Way," fans may not have caught his scratchy -- if well-intentioned -- crooning. Strong melodies like "Ship of Fools" and "Althea" and more anthemic tunes like "Uncle John's Band" and "Eyes of the World" have been misshapen and torn. "I get hoarse just listening," a friend said behind his hand Friday night.
Aurally, other band members have also seemed slightly disconnected. Ace rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, who plays with deceptive subtlety, has spent as much time adjusting knobs and pedals as he has playing. He's had great moments, as have Lesh and Hornsby, but those moments have been mostly solo, lacking in the tight confluence that distinguishes the Dead. Only on Wednesday did they seem to play fully together, especially Garcia and Hornsby, who exchanged electricity all night. The drummers, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, generally found a fine sync during their nightly dual jam; during the songs, however, they have seemed miles behind the mix.
Naturally, the Garden acoustics haven't helped. To call the sound a black muddy river is an understatement. On Friday night, Hornsby was virtually inaudible; his hands were busy, but to no end. By Wednesday, the sound was markedly improved, though still fuzzy. With such an oppressive system, it must be hard even to imagine risking a complex jam. Only the nightly Space, which comes like clockwork after the drum segment, has consistently beaten the system, rising prismatically and intensely from the ashes. Its unabashed dissonance is actually a relief.
In interviews with the Globe, both Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter have indicated a need for Grateful Dead rejuvenation. While the Dead's business organization is remarkably efficient and fair, a model for the rock industry, the music seems endangered. For every lucid Wednesday night there are two frazzled Fridays. Perhaps new songs will recharge the musicians. Perhaps new songs will build in room for the new keyboardists, part-timer Hornsby and full-timer Vince Welnick; right now they seem squeezed.
Meanwhile, the musical malaise goes unnoticed. On Friday night, a shirtless listener jerked and writhed standing for the entire second set, playing cosmic traffic cop for the jamming action. Forward, he'd wave; now hold it; now onward again. His dance was fascinating and otherworldly, an arrhythmic moonwalk, a vibration vigil. He was at the heart of the Scene. But as the jam worked harder and harder, breathless and refusing to take flight, I couldn't help but wonder: Just how closely is this beautiful dancer listening?
PHOTO; CAPTION:Dhurya, 2 1/2, plays her mother's drum while waiting for last Friday's Grateful Dead concert to begin. GLOBE STAFF PHOTO / JOHN TLUMACKI
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.The Dead bid Boston goodbye with their psychedelic best
Of the six Dead nights at the Garden, I caught three. Friday was the flattest. Tuesday was the best. And last night was . . . well . . . the trippiest, which in this case is a compliment.
How else to explain a final set that began with the mind-bending astral journey of "Dark Star," then swung back to finish "Dark Star" later on? The Dead went places last night that you'd need a round-table of Owlsley, Ken Kesey, Carl Sagan and Neal Cassidy to figure out.
It was an uneven show at the start, but gathered momentum -- and stratosphere -- as it went along, leading to some indescribable, quadrophonic-sound moments that had many of the 15,000 fans scratching their scalps in psychedelic bemusement.
But overall, there was still a solid lifeline of rock 'n' roll -- and a fine continuation of the energy felt Tuesday. The first set spanned a crackling "Jack Straw," a so-so "Cold Rain and Snow," a mixed Bob Weir romp through "Wang Dang Doodle," a surging "Mexicali Blues" (with pianist Bruce Hornsby, who's really earned his stripes this tour, adding another of his wild ragtime/jazz solos), a stunning "Cumberland Blues" (with Jerry Garcia threading silvery runs), a hot "Picasso Moon" (Weir said later it was the first time he remembered all the words to it); and a rare, Phil Lesh-sung "Box of Rain," hurt by some off-pitch harmonies.
The second set saw a buzz-saw drum space (with Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann recalling their jolting "Apocalypse Now" soundtrack), though sagged with a Garcia/Weir/Lesh guitar space followup. But most of the second set was a jewel -- the two-fer "Dark Star," "Saint of Circumstance," "Eyes of the World," "The Other One," "Attics of My Life," "Good Lovin'," "Brokedown Palace" and, yes, "We Bid You Goodnight."
An Academic Star Takes on 'Dark Star'
Assistant Professor of Music Graeme Boone
By SETH MNOOKIN, October 5, 1991
When one thinks of The Grateful Dead, the immediate image brought to mind is that of drugs, tie-dyes and Jerry Garcia, the silver-haired, overweight and unassuming leader of the group.
Yet today, the group is one of the most successful in pop history, precisely because it is able to attract more than just the hippie crowed that has been associated with the band. Indeed, among their audiences are often the most staid of listeners--even Harvard professors have been known to join the swaying, enthusiastic crowds at Dead shows.
Assistant Professor of Music Graeme Boone, however, took his interest in the group a little farther than the average Deadhead. Last October, Boone delivered a comprehensive address on The Dead and one of their songs, "Dark Star" at a conference given by the Society for Music Theory in Oakland, Calif.
Boone--who teaches the popular Literature and Arts B course, "Jazz: An American Music"--says he has had a lifelong interest in The Dead. His paper focused primarily on how The Dead's music plays an intimate role in the Grateful Dead experience of individuals.
The Grateful Dead have created a unique and very free style of their own, a style that allows them to play with originality and excitement, says Boone.
"This is an incredible achievement, to create a style where you have artistic freedom," he says.
"Dark Star"
Boone studied "Dark Star" because he said it raised many issues pertinent to both The Dead's musical style and their place in American popular culture.
"I wanted to show how 'Dark Star' raises some very interesting questions surrounding ambiguity and identity, as well as how it reflects the whole style of The Dead and how The Dead interact with their audience," Boone says.
"Dark Star," which is generally thought of as The Grateful Dead's signature song, originated in the 1960s, when it was often played during Ken Kesey's acid tests.
It begins with a well-situated, easily identifiable them carried out by a very simple chord progression. But then, "slowly, it starts to open up," says Boone. "So while it opens very comfortably, with a firm, definite identity, it soon begins to change, to transform and become very ambigious."
"It can turn very dramatic or romantic, or straight-forward, and then, while this ambiguity is taking place, the audience members at the same time are going different places, experiencing different things," and thus forming individual identifications, he continues.
The net effect of this experimentation, which takes place within a defined structure, is a sense of "being something and yet reaching for something else," Boone says.
"Otherness," Boone explains. "In a sense, all music is like this: reaching for something that doesn't quite exist, but could exist...The Dead's music is very much on the edge of existence," he says.
This sense of pushing the envelope, of breaking boundaries permeates many aspects of The Grateful Dead "experience," according to Boone. This is one reason drugs play such an important role. "Drugs reach through, beyond reality," says Boone.
"Also, the meta-politics of The Dead movement focus on this sense of creating what is not there, of making a better world. There is a feeling of the virtuality of nirvana that permeates many Dead concerts," Boone says.
Beyond their music, another aspect of the Dead's style that is so attractive is their down-to-earth attitude, says Boone. "They wear old jeans and T-shirts, they're overweight and their hair is dirty," he says. In this sense, he continues, "they seem to relate to their audience as equals, and the audience itself is made up of a lot of people who think of each other as equals."
"The Dead seem to be speaking to everybody--they play a lot for you, for the audience," continues Boone. "In this sense, they recall your local corner
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