So Many Roads Read online

  As much as the Dead liked Helms (and the Avalon, which was funkier and felt far less formal than the Fillmore Auditorium), the promoter wasn’t always able to pay them on time. Ultimately the Dead had to admit Graham knew how to put on a show (and reward them financially for it), and eventually they too were working for him at the Fillmore West. For a series of shows there in June 1969 they were paid $5,000. The same month they played Graham’s sibling theater in New York, the Fillmore East, and walked away with $7,500. The Dead often exasperated Graham by not always welcoming him as a member of the family, but the band was also pragmatic. “They were smart enough to know that you use what you need from whomever is offering it,” says Kip Cohen, who managed the Fillmore East. “You don’t have to hang out with them.”

  The Carousel might have been a bust, but it did yield one useful outcome: thanks to the operation’s do-it-yourself ambience, many of their friends and coworkers pitched in, and the sight of everyone from Matthews and Cantor to McGee and Frankie helping with the sound system and concessions lent an air of community to the operation. That blueprint would stay with them for the rest of their career. Lenny Hart, Mickey’s oddball father, was now running the operation in his strange, somewhat disorganized way. As a result, Jonathan Riester, a road manager they trusted, had left, and taking over that role was Jon McIntire, a refined and diplomatic Illinois native who’d attended college in San Francisco and had first become part of the Dead’s circle while working at the Carousel. Starting with his musical tastes (childhood memories of listening to his mother play Chopin on the piano at home), the blond, finely dressed McIntire was as cultivated and diplomatic as Lenny Hart was larger than life and untidy. (Rock Scully was still helping to run the operation as well.)

  Although Laird Grant had long ceased being their roadie, plenty of others were willing to lug around instruments and amplifiers for the Dead for minimal pay, if any at all. By the fall of 1969 the Dead had the core members of the road crew that would largely stick with them for the next three decades. Shurtliff, a Kesey associate who hailed from Montana and Oregon, had been among the first to sign up. Called Ram Rod (after cracking “I am Ramon Rodriguez Rodriguez” when the Pranksters needed someone to “ramrod” people into a car), Shurtliff wasn’t physically imposing—he was muscular but of medium height and build—and was a man of extremely few words. Another Oregonian, Donald Rex Jackson, stood over six feet tall, his tree-branch-long arms extending out from broad shoulders, his mustache and shoulder-length hair lending him a Marin-cowboy air.

  Joining up with them at the Carousel was Bill Candelario, the Oakland-born son of a welder who’d lived in nearby Alameda until he was a teenager. Acerbic and swarthy, Candelario was the sort of ready-for-anything outsider always attracted to the Dead. By 1967 Candelario was prowling Berkeley. Soon he found himself hanging around—and working at—the Carousel, helping Jackson and Ram Rod haul in equipment; the welding skills learned from his father came in handy as well. “We did whatever you could do,” Candelario (soon nicknamed Kidd) says. “Whatever was going on, you just jumped in and helped. I was doing everything I could, like helping Ram Rod and Jackson load in up three flights of stairs, no elevator.” As they all learned, working for the Dead could be grueling, back-breaking labor, but there were few places they’d rather be, and the perks of drugs and women were unlike anything they’d seen before.

  The rituals were manifold. When Sam Cutler later took over as their tour manager they’d converge in the dressing room and share a few joints. Back in their hotel rooms after shows another part of the ceremony began. Piling in, they’d play back the tapes of the night’s show—recordings supplied by none other than Owsley himself, who by now had left and returned to the Dead fold after an uneven ride of his own over the last three years.

  The Dead and Owsley had fallen out in the middle of 1966. “My memories are that the band was uncomfortable with having us too involved with them while actively making acid,” says Tim Scully, “while [Stanley] remembers the parting being more over equipment. Both were probably factors.” In December 1967, just two months after the 710 bust, Owsley had been arrested when police found him with LSD as well as STP, and he was charged with conspiracy to manufacture and sell illegal drugs, since LSD was now illicit. Stanley coughed up the money for bail, but as his case dragged on in the California courts, he rejoined the band, recording their shows at the Carousel Ballroom after Dan Healy, their soundman, temporarily departed. In search of audio vérité, Stanley wanted to reproduce the sound, the experience, of whomever was playing at the theater. Rather than electronically alter the sound by using equalizers, he’d reposition or change microphones in order to achieve what he considered the purest, least electronically tainted recordings.

  When the Carousel went under, Owsley began joining them on the road, mixing their sound and taping their shows. To maintain his anonymity, especially now that he was on bail, he resurrected his childhood nickname, Bear. Whenever the band had technical issues onstage they’d normally yell out “Owsley!” resulting in a room full of people turning around and staring at him. Using “Bear” ensured no one would spot him. He also refrained from having his picture taken because, as Hart says, “He was down by law, against the law at the time.”

  To the band’s frequent vexation or amusement, Owsley was a far from standard soundman. Sometimes he’d mix the sound right onstage, standing amid the Dead as they played. During one show at Winterland, a vintage San Francisco ice-skating rink Graham also began using for concerts, everyone had left the venue except Hart and Graham—or so those two had thought. Hearing someone sobbing somewhere in the empty venue, Hart and Graham made their way back onto the stage, where they found Owsley talking to the amps as if they were living creatures. “He was saying things like, ‘I love you and you love me, and how could you fail me?’” Hart recalls. “He was addressing these electronics as if they were a person.” At first Hart and Graham couldn’t help but chuckle between themselves at the sight, but they soon realized how serious Owsley was. “He cared so much for it,” Hart says. “He was so into it.” They both stopped laughing.

  Whether they were amused or frustrated by him, no one could deny Owsley was one of them, and not simply because of their shared lust for psychedelics. Like the Dead, Owsley wanted to do things his way, on his schedule, and with total control. (And like the Dead, he also rubbed some people, both inside and outside the Dead world, the wrongest of ways.) Owsley was now as much a part of their mythology as their lengthy jams, Garcia’s newly bushy beard, or the group-bonding photo on the back of Aoxomoxoa, taken by Thomas Weir (no relation to Bob) at Olompali. (Contrary to later rumor, future rocker Courtney Love was not among those photographed.) Yet Owsley’s most enduring legacy during this period were a logo and his tapes. Because the Dead had begun playing many festivals—after Monterey Pop and Woodstock, multiday gatherings of bands and freaks were popping up around the country—the road crew needed help distinguishing the Dead’s gear from everyone else’s backstage. During a drive Owsley saw a street sign—“a circle with a white bar across it,” he would later write—and thought a lightning bolt instead of a white bar would stand out. With the help of artist Bob Thomas, what emerged was a skull with a bolt inside it—“electricity, lightning, sparks,” as the US Trademark Office filing read—that was first used in August 1969 (but not trademarked until seven years later).

  Dating back to his earliest association with them, Owsley had also convinced the Dead to tape their shows. The recordings weren’t intended merely for historical archiving: they were a form of self-examination, a way for the band to take a careful look at what they’d done correctly or incorrectly over the course of each show. “It was, ‘Hey, dude, you wanna play X, Y, or Z here instead of A, B, and C?” Lesh recalls. “Our music demanded that, and the Bear saw that and made sure we understood how it was necessary. Sure enough, it was very fruitful during the first five or ten years we were doing that.”

  Fruitful, but also occasio
nally brutal. In another groundbreaking move the Dead never played quite the same set—or played it the same way—twice. The results could be transcendent or at times chaotic. “Jerry would rush, and things would pick up when Jerry played fast,” Rock Scully says. “Phil would often turn his back on the audience and be so disgusted that things hadn’t gone his way. Jerry would yell to Bob, ‘Keep it simple—you’re losing them! There’s value in the silences!’ Jerry’s rushing, Phil’s not always keeping that bottom bass happening, leaving it up to Billy’s foot. It all mixed together into a great series of near catastrophes.”

  Listening back collectively to the recordings after shows, the band would assess those recordings and try to learn from them. “We used to sit and listen to everything we did and kick it around,” Weir explained to Rolling Stone after Owsley’s death in 2011, “and say, ‘I’m not gonna do that—that didn’t work,’ or ‘You hear that accident in there? Let’s make something from that.’ That came from his tapes. We questioned everything we did. He instilled or reinforced in us quality consciousness. If you’re going to do something, you have to absolutely achieve excellence and set your internal compass toward excellence and go for that, because nothing else matters.” The process, though, could be rough. “There was always something somebody complained about,” Constanten remembers. Even the people who taped the shows—which, starting in 1970, included Candelario—weren’t spared. “After the show everyone piled into your room,” says Candelario. “All the band members and road crew, everyone smoking and drinking beer, and you’d better damn well have recorded everyone’s part or else they’d complain about you. They were discussing the music and chord changes, and they’d bring out that someone wasn’t playing the part and put the blame on you, that you hadn’t recorded it. You were always under the gun.”

  As Lesh learned during this time, that sense of impatience and perfectionism, much of it coming from Garcia, could also rear its head while they were playing. At a Carousel Ballroom show in early 1968 Lesh was still so rattled by the passing of Neal Cassady—who’d been found near death beside some railroad tracks in Mexico, apparently after he’d attended a particularly wild party, and passed away soon after—that his playing stumbled and stopped, and he caught sight of Garcia staring harshly at him. After the show Garcia expressed his unhappiness even further by either knocking Lesh down or shoving him hard. “That was almost funny,” Lesh recalls. “It wasn’t threatening. I knew that he never did shit like that, and we were all chemically altered at the time. I knew the next time I’d see him he’d be apologetic, and he was.” (McIntire would later remark how genuinely startling it would be when Garcia’s temper would flare up from time to time.)

  The exchange between Lesh and Garcia was more physical than most encounters between the Dead, but moments like those were now part of the band’s gestalt. For every moment of shared group bliss, musically or chemically, came one of tough self-analysis. As long as it paid off—if the musical peaks were reached—then the hardships were worth it.

  At early shows like that, friends like Vicki Jensen would take in the full exploratory power of the Dead. “A piece of their music would take you on a journey, with each musician creating a variety of threads that would magically weave together in sound and movement that would take your breath away in total awe,” she says. “I’d look around at everyone else standing behind the amps with me and the audience, and I could see everyone was totally synced. I would see the musicians’ faces, and I could see they were so completely loving what was happening in each moment. And as all the sounds came back together for that piece of music’s finale that made your soul feel as if it had come home—and looking at their faces and the surrounding energy still crackling from what had just been played—I could see that they were as amazed by what they had created as we who got to hear it.”

  Twenty-five minutes into what would become one of the longest-ever renditions of “Dark Star,” the music began to calm down, like a rain shower that followed a hurricane. Kreutzmann and Hart put a damper on the beats, Constanten soothed his organ, and Garcia took a breather from his frenetic freeboard thrashing. Just over a minute later Lesh resurrected the long-vanquished “Dark Star” opening notes, and the rest of the Dead took that as a cue to return to the song’s central motif. Twenty eight minutes in, Garcia began singing again, and an island of calm returned. With that the song took a graceful bow and came to a close. In the last few moments of “Dark Star” they made peace with the song and with themselves—knowing full well that the tumult could all start up again at any moment, and probably would.

  Pigpen on the Europe ’72 tour bus, Copenhagen.

  PHOTO: JAN PERSSON/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES

  CHAPTER 6

  LONDON, MAY 25 AND 26, 1972

  On the other side of the thick steel door came a loud voice barking out a concise, unmistakable command: “Back off!”

  The drunken or stoned kids who’d been banging on the back door of the Lyceum Theatre in London were about to learn an important lesson. They should have known the area around the stage at any Dead show was, in tour manager Sam Cutler’s phrase, “sacred space,” and they should have known better than mess with the Dead’s formidable crew. But they hadn’t been aware of any of those tenets, and just as in the other European countries that spring of 1972, they were about to receive a lesson in when one did and didn’t mess with the Dead.

  Although the Dead were fifty-three hundred miles from home, one aspect of their world remained the same: Betty Cantor was recording their shows and making sure every note of every performance was skillfully preserved on tape. This time she was in a truck behind the Lyceum, a ballroom that dated back to the previous century. Tucked away on the north side of the Thames near Covent Garden, the Lyceum was past its expiration date, but the white columns at its entrance and the dance floor in front of the stage were reminders that it had once been a swanky dance hall. (Cutler recalls the walls looking like “all gold leaf and crumbly wallpaper.”) Not that Cantor could see much of the hall or its surrounding neighborhood. In order to record the Dead’s first-ever tour of Europe, the band had rented a truck and converted it into a mobile recording studio, and Cantor had to squeeze into its cramped space and supervise the recordings with the help of her colleagues Jim Furman and Dennis “Wiz” Leonard.

  The tour was almost over—only one more show remained before they’d all fly back home—so the night should have been relaxing. But then came the clamor, the shouting, and especially the banging. Something was slamming into the truck, and Cantor was reeling. “What the hell?” she thought. It was, she says, “like being inside a bell when it gets banged on.” The sound was so rattling she was afraid to open the door and look outside, and all she could do was call her fellow crew members from inside the truck with a simple message: “Something’s going on!”

  Buddy Cage had seen it coming. The Dead’s opening act at the Lyceum was the New Riders of the Purple Sage, which had started in 1969 as a Dead spin-off when Garcia and singer-guitarist John “Marmaduke” Dawson, an old friend from the Palo Alto days, had formed an ad hoc band built around Dawson’s hippie-country songs. Unable to dedicate himself fully to both bands and aware of his limitations as a pedal steel player, Garcia had recommended Cage for the slot during the multiband 1970 Festival Express tour of Canada (Cage was a member of the Canadian folk singing duo Ian and Sylvia’s band at the time). “He said, ‘I stink—P.U.,’” Cage recalls. “‘You gotta be the guy to take it.’” Thanks to a contract with Columbia, the New Riders, which also featured another longtime Garcia pal, David Nelson, on lead guitar, were now their own men, playing stoner Bakersfield country rock that had a growing cult following.

  As the Dead played on at this penultimate night at the Lyceum, Cage seated himself on a set of stairs in full view of back doors—each the size of a bay window—that opened to the area behind the theater. He’d already seen the ushers escort four or five rowdies out of the theater, and now he, like Cantor, was he
aring them trying to make their way back in—screaming, pounding on the door, and taking their anger out on the Dead’s truck. Cage wasn’t the only one to hear them; soon enough so did Rex Jackson.

  In the four years since he’d driven down from Oregon, Jackson had become an integral part of the Dead’s crew. He’d shared a house with Cutler; fathered a child with a new member of their community, Eileen Law (a daughter named Cassidy); and commanded the respect of his fellow crew members. When Jackson wanted to put an end to any trouble in the Dead world, be it in the crowd or backstage, all that was necessary was a simple gesture. “He’d poke one finger into the solar plexus, and they’d know, ‘Okay, I’d better not take this any further or my ass is grass,’” Cantor-Jackson says. “He was very intimidating on that level.” Tonight, though, one finger alone wouldn’t do the trick. With both the show and the truck in danger, Jackson took a moment to size things up: he looked up at the doors and the cables that held them in place, rubbed his hands together, and proceeded to lift one of the massive doors right off the cables. As Cage recalls, he was “like a big steed, but far more agile.”

  Moving that part of the door to the next section, Jackson created a portal to the outside. Seeing this hairy mountain of a man before them, the Brits were momentarily stunned—what kind of creature was this?, they surely thought—and barely had time to absorb what was happening before Jackson dispensed with them. Precisely what happened remains unclear. Cage says he punched the kids out one by one, leaving them sprawled on the ground; Steve Parish, then into his second year as part of the crew, remembers the gesture being more intimidation than anything physical. (“Jackson yelled at them, and they ran down an alley,” he says. “There was a rowdy scene, but he didn’t hurt anybody.”) But no one doubts that, after ten or fifteen minutes, the hooligans were no longer an issue. Jackson was, in Cantor-Jackson’s words, “my hero,” and Cutler says it was another example of Europeans encountering what he calls the Dead’s “California western robustness.” Dozens of feet away the Dead continued playing, oblivious to what had happened.