January 1970

The Grateful Dead were in full swing as they rolled into 1970. Having just released Live Dead (November ’69), their financial affairs were as close to tidy as they had been since they had signed with Warner Brothers in September 1966. Their touring schedule, such as it was, involved more or less constant playing: they played almost 290 shows in ’69 and ’70, meaning shows virtually every other day for two years running. December 1969 took them from San Francisco to LA, Texas, Florida, and Massachusetts. They kicked off 1970 in New York before heading back to California, then Oregon and Hawaii, and finally closing out the month in New Orleans. Still in their twenties, the Dead were playing to audiences in the thousands all over the United States.

This period was a high-water mark for the band in general. Musically, they were beginning to move away from the experimental psychedelia that had characterized the two preceding years. While it had yielded some fabulous music and a record-breaking live album, the Anthem/Live Dead years had also seen the erstwhile firing of two band-members including Pigpen, who was otherwise alienated by the influence of LSD on the band’s musical direction and structure. Garcia would later call their music of that period “self-consciously weird.” Meanwhile, the time they had spent on Anthem of the Sun and Aoxomoxoa had put them in severe debt, prompting their grueling tour schedule.

In April 1970, the band would discover that their manager Lenny Hart had been systematically diverting money to a private account set up with his bank-teller girlfriend. While suspicions had floated about for a while (Pigpen’s organ had been repossessed from the stage at a sound-check in December), the other shoe dropped over a missing royalty check destined for Garcia. He and Mountain Girl had had their eye on a house and MG had been calling the business office on Union Street regularly, awaiting the arrival of money owed Garcia for his work on the motion picture Zabriskie Point. When the check arrived, Gail Turner called the Garcias; by the time MG got down to the office, Lenny claimed that no such check had arrived. That was the last straw: RamRod was called in and Lenny was given a few days to get the books in order and turn them over, during which time he fled to Mexico with 150 thousand dollars. Mickey subsequently went into a crippling depression. Phil's father died around the same time, as did Pigpen's mother. Later that year, Jerry’s mother Ruth passed away after a month-long convalescence following a car accident. Janis Joplin, longtime friend and neighbor of the band, died of a heroin overdose in early October, two weeks after Hendrix had taken too many sleeping pills and choked to death in his sleep.

But in January, the band was in great form, getting a lot of mileage out of the by-now-familiar Live Dead material while working up the songs that would yield Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty later that same year. Most shows would incorporate the Other One suite, although it was not always complete; they omitted Cryptical one night and the reprise on another. There was by now, however, a real drum solo that could stretch up to ten minutes, a significant expansion on the initial few bars between Cryptical and Phil’s bomb into the Other One. Drum solos appeared elsewhere as well, most notably in Good Lovin’ but also in Alligator or even Dancin’. Dark Star was frequent, though less so, as was St. Stephen.

Among the newer material in the rotation was Mason’s Children (consistently tight and energetic). Phil introduced it on January 3rd as a song they had written for a film project they had finally bailed on. It was supposed to be shot at a drive-in movie theater, where they would play to parked cars. Dire Wolf appeared almost nightly as well. Jerry was determined to get people to sing along to the “don’t murder me” chorus; he would often introduce the song as a “paranoid fantasy song,” one you could easily sing along to if you wanted. He even went as far as rearranging the tune on February 1st so that it started with the chorus. Black Peter was a near-nightly fixture, as were Cumberland Blues and High Time. Uncle John’s Band made a few appearances, but the performances were still pretty sloppy.

Pigpen was in high form musically, if not physically. Lovelight was well-established by then, so much so that fans in the audience were calling out parts of his “hands-outta-yo-pockets” fix-up rap. Hard To Handle was a regular, and the audience was treated to the occasional Easy Wind and Good Lovin’ as well. He wasn’t always right on point, though since he didn’t care, it came over better than when Weir or Garcia flubbed. The latter two would either mumble or stop altogether, while, Pig just barreled ahead with whatever words came through his head. He might repeat parts of verses or switch the odd word around, but he always sold it. The end of the Live Dead years would open up some room for Pigpen to contribute more songs: within two years he would be breaking out Run Rudolph, Two Souls in Communion, Empty Pages, and a half-dozen other shorter-format songs.

TC’s tenure was coming to a close. He was with the band until they returned to San Francisco in early February. His contributions were less and less evident at this point. The work he had done to color Mountains of the Moon and more introspective versions of Dark Star was less integral as the years went on, and his approach to the shorter, country-flavored tunes was a bit stiff. He was offered a job writing for a musical and he and the band had an amicable parting of ways.

Much of the new material featured three-part harmonies, influenced, Phil would explain later, by Crosby Stills and Nash. Stephen Stills had spent most of the summer of ‘69 living at Mickey’s ranch in Novato and the two bands had spent a fair amount of time together. While Jerry and Bob had a relatively experienced approach to singing, Phil was eager but untrained, and his frequent high harmonies sounded strained in a live setting. Can’t blame the guy for trying. Phil always had a very serious approach regardless of objective merit. I almost laughed out loud after Feedback one night: following a good ten minutes of distorted screeching and rumbling, he stepped to the mic and said, with a tone befitting the flawless completion of Beethoven’s ninth: “Thank you. Goodnight.”

Bob Weir's role in the band was growing significantly. Just over a year earlier he’d been sorta-fired because his musical chops and responsiveness lagged behind Phil and Jerry’s. The tapes from the first shows of January and February (Fillmore East and New Orleans respectively) had Weir very high in the mix, giving a close-up view of what he was doing. I was most struck by just how varied his parts are; each chord change, each shift and modulation, had a distinct Weir-part built around what the others were doing. Historically, Weir has been fairly low in the mix, and when he goes from straight chords to inversions to single notes, it’s easy to lose track of where he is and what he’s doing.

There were two occasions on which equipment issued left some space to fill. The first time, Weir did Monkey and the Engineer solo, with a little Jerry sneaking in towards the end. On January 31st, however, Phil’s amplifier blew out. Weir carried the show with five tunes mostly by himself: Long Black Limousine, Seasons of my Heart, Saw Mill, Bound in Memories, and Race is On (Jerry followed it up with five of his own before they closed with Cumberland).
Let the record show that, after the late-’68 Hartbeats experiment, Weir caught up quick.

Rock and roll equipment in those days was primitive – broken strings were an almost nightly occurrence – and the Dead had yet to start using a professional PA (Alembic would be their first, in spring ’71). Their system in January 1970 was mostly homemade, and Bear had returned to the fold (he and the band had parted ways in August ’66). Bear was a stickler for sound, an electronic mad-scientist type whose continual experiments were hampered by his constant LSD ingestion. On one hand, the soundboard tapes from this period generally sound very good - when everything was running right – but they are often incomplete. There were relatively frequent calls from the stage about tweaking the monitor mix, feedback issues and system hum. Jerry got noticeably cranky on February 1st: “Ah, could you eliminate the ring from the PA please. The ring is most annoying, most annoying.” to which Weir added “What you’re hearing now is the Bear solo.”

Sound issues abounded on the last night of January, at the Warehouse in New Orleans. Like at Woodstock, a grounding problem caused electrical shocks for the singers and they had to stop a while and fix it. Phil cracked: “For a while, we thought the only life around hear was the heat!”
Weir took the opportunity to wax antiauthoritarian: “ I got a statement to make: This seems to be a blatant attempt, by the establishment,” (laughter) “to keep rockers from coming here and, ah, save this fair city for the straight people. Well…”
Jerry: “The revolution’s over…”
Phil: “Go home, folks… Remember, obedience to the law is the only true freedom.”
Weir: “And crime does not pay.”

The exchange was oddly appropriate for the evening: upon return to their Bourbon Street hotel, they found the police crawling all over the place and were all hauled off to the precinct. This was a show bust, by most accounts, and photographers and media did nothing to keep things civil or low key. Phil writes that Weir somehow managed to handcuff an officer to his desk! Pigpen and TC, roommates and both non-smokers, were not arrested. Mickey presented an ID that said Summer Wind (“spiritual advisor”) and so he was not officially booked. Eight hours later, after a phone call by Warner’s Joe Smith to the New Orleans DA promising that the Dead would stay out of New Orleans (and a significant campaign contribution), the band were released on bail. Early that same morning, Mountain Girl had called the hotel looking for Jerry to inform him that she had just given birth to a baby girl: Annabelle. “Sorry honey,” she was told, “the police came and took them away last night.”
Bail had wiped out the proceeds from that night, and they booked another gig on February 1st to make up for it. They would share the bill with Fleetwood Mac, leading to a raucous, 40-minute, all-star-jam Lovelight closer. No mention was made of the legal trouble, though there was a shout-out of sorts. The MC introduced the band: “And now those who made this afternoon possible, the G…”
“The New Orleans Police Department!”


These were the days of adventure, excitement and uncertainty. The GD machine was taking on a life of its own and the band was reaching an adulthood of sorts. The music is strong, tight and forward-looking. We hear the inauspicious beginnings of Uncle John’s Band, early stabs at the China-Rider transition jam, experimentation with arrangements for the new material, top-notch performances of the Live Dead material, some very rare acoustic stuff, and an epic Easy Wind (Jan. 30). My favorite show was Jan 2nd in New York (a Miller soundboard circulates), but the whole series was real interesting. The legendary February 14, 1970 show at the Fillmore East was just around the corner, and Harpur College (5/2) only three months away, so January is worth checking out if only for historical context.


Up next: I heard the Oakland run from February 1990 but there’s nothing of great import to say. I’ll have a post up next week on the first part of the Furthur run. I also bought Rock Scully’s Living With The Dead, so you can expect a review within a few weeks. Cheers.