Part 14 (1/2)
When Gaye reeed, it was in 1971 with the self-written, self-produced, politically the On The record not only forced soul music to deal with the unpopular realities of a hardened sociopolitical scene (though Sly Stone had also started to do the sa the first albums to establish a soul-pop star as a n The effect was seis (successfully) for the same brand of creative autonomy that Gaye had achieved with Motown's factory-minded structure, while such other venerable R & B artists as the Te social-minded soul-rock that had been inspired and in no sh achievement
But Gaye refused to remain adherent to that one aesthetic-political epiphany, and in many ways that made for a varied but also wildly unsettled late career In 1973, he turned his attention to purely erotic matters with Let's Get It On, which introduced a manner of sexual explicitness to mainstream pop that, for such inheritors as Prince, certainly had tree to Anna Gordy was coh end, and the divorce settlement (which caused Gaye to file for bankruptcy and eventually leave the United States for asyluium) was the subject of his most personal work, the two-record Here, My Dear, which the singer released to satisfy his overdue ali him over the record's contents) In 1981, Gaye released his final Motoork, In Our Lifeti meditation on love-and a tortured, hell-fire vision of death
By all accounts, Gaye was a despairingthis period (by his own admission, he once attempted suicide by overdose of cocaine), and when he left Motown for Columbia in 1982, even his staunchest adht Love (1982) was not ant, stylistic rebound, it was also the most hopeful and celebratory work of his career Gaye wrote, arranged, produced, and perforht Love seemed merely a reprisal of the sex theer clearly pursued physical and spiritual notions of fulfillment on the album as if they were ard sex as a way of reneill and spirit after debilitating e way of asserting his religious desires ”Apparently beyond sex is God” he told Mitchell Fink in a 1983 Los Angeles Herald Examiner interview ”So one has to have one's fill before one finds God”
It is not likely that Gaye found his fill before his sudden, grievous death, nor is it likely that he was even close to peace of race Just the saenious and alluring sensibility Gaye's 1983 tour of A more than a wildly enjoyable comeback: It see hissense of all those counterpoised notions of joy and anger, pain and ecstasy, thatfor over two decades
He was a e fro to illuminate a new, even rapher David Ritz suggests, Gaye wanted nothing more than a way out of the madness and pain of his life-but perhaps he may have found that way in kinder terms, had his life not been blasted fro loss, wewith Sam Cooke's terribly foreshortened brilliance-the most hurtful of soulcan blunt such pain, it is the wonderful and transcendent legacy of Marvin Gaye's h it was his friend Sotta dance to keep fro,” it is in such times as Gaye's s
no sirateful dead There is a road, no siht
And if you go, no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone
FROM ”RIPPLE,”
ROBERT HUNTER AND JERRY GARCIA
He was the unlikeliest of pop stars, and the e, he wore plain clothes-usually a sacklike T-shi+rt and loose jeans, to fit his heavy frame-and he rarely spoke to the audience that watched his every uitar lines-complex, lovely, rhapsodic, but never flashy-as well as his strained, weatherworn vocal style had a subdued, colloquial quality about thee, he kept to family and friends, and when he sat to talk with interviewers about his remarkableways ”I feel like I',” he said once, ”and a lot of people are watchingme to stuuitarist and singer of the Grateful Dead, lived at the center of one of popular culture's most extraordinary epic adventures-was bemused by the circumstances of his own re-nown
And yet, when he died on August 9, 1995, a week after his fifty-third birthday, at a rehabilitation clinic in Forest Knolls, California, the news of his death set off immense waves of emotional reaction Politicians, newscasters, poets, and artists eulogized the late guitarist throughout the day and night; fans of all ages gathered spontaneously in parks around the nation; and in the streets of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury-the neighborhood where the Grateful Dead lived at the height of the hippie epoch-the streets for blocks around Across town, at San Francisco City Hall, a tie-dyed flag was flown on the s were lowered to half overnment that had once feared the movement that the Grateful Dead represented, and that now acknowledged the band's pilgrie across the last thirty years to be one of the most notable chapters in the city's modern history
Chances are Garcia himself would have been embarrassed, iven towords in his last interview in Rolling Stone, in 1993, he said: ”I' I' they burn it all with meI'd rather have my immortality here while I'm alive I don't care if it lasts beyond me at all I'd just as soon it didn't”
Garcia's fans and friends, of course, feel differently ”I think that Garcia was a real avatar,” says John Perry Barloho knew the late guitarist since 1967, and has co-written s with Bob Weir ”Jerry was one of those y of his ti the history books He wrapped up in himself a whole set of characteristics and qualities that was very appropriate to a certain cultural vector in the latter part of the twentieth century: freedoment, playfulness of intellect, coence, and aesthetic development I mean, he was truly extraordinary And he never really saw it himself, or could feel it himself He could only see its effect on other people, which baffled and dismayed him
”It made me sad to see that, because I wanted him to be able to appreciate, in so that Garcia liked better than so, and lively and fascinating You know, anything that he would refer to as a 'fat trip,' which was his ter And he wasn't really able to appreciate himself, which was a pity, because, believe me, Jerry was the fattest trip of all About the most he would say for himself was that he was a competent musician But he would say that I re with MIDI-he was using all these MIDI sauitar, and he sounded like Miles Davis, only better I went up to him, the first time I ever heard hi trureat fucking trumpet player' So, he knew”
JEROME JOHN GARCIA was born in 1942, in San Francisco's Mission District His father, a Spanish irant named Jose ”Joe” Garcia, had been a jazz clarinetist and Dixieland band leader in the 1930s, and he named his new son after his favorite Broadway co of 1948, while on a fishi+ng trip, Jerry saw his father swept to his death in a California river ”I never saw hi Stone in 1991, ”but I reht I just barely remember the sound of it”
After his father's death, Garcia spent a few years living with his -class districts His grand to Nashville's Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts on Saturday nights, and it was in those hours, Garcia would later say, that he developed his fondness for country music for and rass's principal founder, Bill Monroe When Garcia was ten, his ht him to live with her at a sailor's hotel and bar that she ran near the city's waterfront He spentto the boozy, fanciful stories that the hotel's old tenants told, or sitting alone, reading Disney and horror coh science-fiction novels
When Garcia was fifteen, his older brother, Tiff-the same brother who, a few years earlier, had accidentally lopped off Jerry's right-handwood-introduced him to early rock & roll and rhythm & blues music Garcia was quickly drawn to the hhewed textures, but what captivated hiuitar sounds-especially the bluesy mellifluence of players like T-Bone Walker and Chuck Berry It was otherworldly-soundinghe had heard before Garcia decided he wanted to learn how to make those same sounds He went to his uitar for his upcoot hhh, no, no, no! I railed and raved, and she finally turned it in, and I got a pawn-shop electric guitar and an a this sa in the Bay Area, and it held great sway at the North Beach arts school where Garcia took some courses, and at the city's coffeehouses, where he heard poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Rexroth read their venturesoh-school kid and a wanna-be beatnik!” he said in 1993 ”Rock & roll at that time was not respectable I mean, beatniks didn't like rock & rollRock & roll wasn't cool, but I loved rock & roll I used to have these fantasies about 'I want rock & roll to be like respectable music' I wanted it to be like artI used to try to think of ways tothat fit in with the art institute, that kind of self-conscious art-'art' as opposed to 'popular culture' Back then, they didn't even talk about popular culture-I it, you know? It was coht it was, like white-trash music or kids'in Palo Alto, hanging out and playing in the folkpart tian's Music Store, where he met several of the musicians that would eventually dominate the San Franciscoband, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Chauitarist named Bob Weir and a blues aficionado, Ron McKernan, known to his friends as ”Pigpen” for his often unkeroup played a pen becahtnin' Hopkins tunes
Then, in February 1964, the Beatles made their historic appearance on the ”Ed Sullivan Show,” and virtually overnight youth culture was imbued with a new spirit and sense of identity Garcia understood the group's proht! For the first time since Elvis Presley-and the first tiely rejected conte too trivial and inconsequential-pop hly exhilarating possibilities that even the ultra-serious, socially aware folk scene could not offer This became even more apparent a year later, when Bob Dylan-who had been the folk scene's reigning hero-played an assailing set of his defiant new electric music at the Newport Folk Festival As a result, the folky purisan to see to Garcia and , the ensemble was transfor band members dropped out, and t an's Music Store, on drums, and on bass, a classically trained musician named Phil Lesh, who, like Garcia, had been radicalized by theideas,” Garcia told Rolling Stone in 1993 ”Ito be the next Beatles or soh of that kind of crazy faith in ourselvesThe first tie crowd of people froh school, and they went fuckin' nuts! The next time we played, it was packed to the rafters It was a pizza place We said, 'Hey, can we play in here on Wednesday night? We won't bother anybody Just let us set up in the corner' It was pandemonium, immediately”
It was around this tian an experis that would forever transform the nature of the band's story Certainly, this wasn't the first tis had been used in music for artistic inspiration, or had found their way into an American cultural movement Many jazz and blues artists (not tomarijuana and various narcotics to intensify theirfor several decades, and in the '50s the Beats had extolled marijuana as an assertion of their nonconfor up in the youth and music scenes in the mid-1960s were of a much different, more exotic, sort Veterans Hospital near Stanford University had been the site of govern that induced hallucinations in those who ingested it, and that, forre those who had taken the drug at Veterans Hospital were Robert Hunter, a folk singer and poet ould later beco partner, and Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and So on an idea about group LSD experiues, called the Merry Pranksters, dedicated to this adventure Kesey's crew included a large number of intellectual dropouts like himself and eccentric rebels like Neal Cassady (the inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's On the Road) and Carolyn Adams (later known as Mountain Girl, who eventually married Garcia and had two children with hi parties at a house in the nearby town of La Honda, to see ould happen when people took LSD in a situation where there were no regulations or predetermined situations At Kesey's invitation, the Grateful Dead-as the Warlocks were now called-beca experiments, known as the Acid Tests The Dead would play for hours as the Pranksters filious revelations to group sex The Acid Tests were meant to be acts of cultural, spiritual, and psychic revolt, and their importance to the development of the Grateful Dead cannot be overestimated The Dead's music, Garcia later said, ”had a real sense of proportion to the event”-which is to say that so would seem to overshadow the event, and at other times, it would function as commentary or backdrop to the action of the event itself Either way, the band did not see itself as the star of the party; if there were stars, they were formed from the union of the music and musicians with the audience and the spirit and shape of as happening, from moment to moment-which meant that there was a blur between the performers, the event, and the audience
Consequently, the Acid Tests became the model for ould shortly become known as the ”Grateful Dead trip” In the years that followed, the Dead would never really forsake the philosophy of the Acid Tests Right until the end, the band would encourage its audience to be involved with both the music and the sense of kinshi+p that came from and fueled the music Plus, more than any other band of the era, the Grateful Dead succeeded in enic experience-ed to prove both chilling and heartening in the same moments In the process, the Dead made music that epitomized psychedelia at its brainiest and brawniest, and also helped make possible the sort of fusion of jazz structure and blues sensibility that would later help shape bands like the Allman Brothers
”I wouldn't want to say this music ritten on acid,” says Robert Hunter, who penned some of the album's lyrics ”Over the years, I've denied it had any influence that way But as I get older, I begin to understand that ere reporting onand experienced-like the layers below layers which became real to me I would say that Aoxomoxoa was a report on what it's like to be up-or down-there in those layers I guess it is, I'll be honest about it Looking back and judging, those were pretty weird times We were very, very far out”
BY 1966, THE SPIRIT of the Acid Tests was spilling over into the streets and clubs of San Francisco-and well beyond A new co sis, ht-Ashbury district, a run-down but picturesque section of the city adjacent to Golden Gate Park, where Garcia and the Grateful Dead now shared a house In addition, a thriving club and dance-hall scene-dominated by Chet Hel up around the city, drawing the notice of the media, police, and various political forces In part, all the public scrutiny and judght difficult and risky But there was also a certain boon that came from all the new publicity: The un to draw the interest of East Coast and Britishof artists like the Beatles and Bob Dylan-the same artists who, only a year or two before, had exerted such a roups like the Grateful Dead For thatan impact on not just pop and fashi+on styles, but also on social ue of the times Several other bands, of course, participated in the creation of this scene, and soer Service, and Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, would make music as inventive and memorable as the Dead's In addition, nobody should underrate concert promoter Bill Graham's importance to the adventure; he was an often acerbic character, but he would ee as an invaluable and scrupulous caretaker of the community that he served
Still, it was the Grateful Dead that became known as the ”people's band”-the band that cared about the following that it played to, and that often staged benefits or free shows for the coht's moment had passed, it would be the Grateful Dead-and the Dead alone ainal San Francisobnds-ould still exemplify the ideals of caroups long relinquished, and that many subsequent rock artists repudiated in favor of more corrosive ideals
The San Francisco scene was remarkable while it lasted, but it couldn't endure forever Because of its reputation as a youth haven, the Haight was soon overrun with runaways, and the sort of health and shelter problems that a community of mainly white middle-class expatriates had never had to face before In addition, the widespread use of LSD was turning out to be a little less ideal than so people seeency rooms of local hospitals could not accommodate them all By the middle of 1967, a season still referred to as the Suly There were bad drugs on the streets, there were rapes and murders, and there was a surfeit of starry-eyed newcohborhood without anythe scene to feed and nurture the and tried to proe nue You could feed one thousand but not twenty thousand We were unable to convince the San Francisco officials of as going to happen We said there would beafter, the Dead left the Haight for individual residences in Marin County, north of San Francisco
By 1970, the idealis the Bay Area ely evaporated The drug scene had turned creepy and risky; iven way to violent rhetoric; and the quixotic dreaether by the virtues of love and ed, first by the Manson Family murders, in the suic and brutal event at the Altamont Speedway, just outside San Francisco The occasion was a free concert featuring the Rolling Stones Following either the exaestion of the Grateful Dead (there is still disagreeels as a security force It proved to be a day of horrific violence The Angels battered nu, as the Stones perfor black e ”It was completely unexpected,” Garcia later said ”And that was the hard part-the hard lesson there-that you can have good people and good energy and work on a project and really want it to happen right and still have it all weird It's the thing of knowing less than you should have Youthful folly”
The record the band folloith, Workingman's Dead, was the Dead's response to that period The record was a state and badly frayed sense of community in both America and its counterculture, and as such, it was a work by, and about, a group oftested and pressured-at a time when they could have easily pulled apart from all the madness and stress and disappoints like ”Uncle John's Band”-a parable about America that was also the band's confession of how it nearly fell apart-and ”New Speedway Boogie,” about Altaive,” Garcia sang in the latter song, in a voice full of fear, fragility, and hard-earned courage Workingman's Dead-and the record that followed it, American Beauty-e and talent to stick together, and to ful fro to a job,” Garcia said ”It was so we did to keep our minds off some of these problems, even if the man's Dead and American Beauty were records that explored the idea of how one could forgetimes Says Robert Hunter: ”When the Jefferson Airplane caainst them It may have been true, but look at the results: blood in the streets It see the power of their ability to send the troops into the field, and I wanted to stand back frorenades and knives and blood in the street Stand way back There's a better way There has to be education, and the education has to come from the poets and musicians, because it has to touch the heart rather than the intellect, it has to get in there deeply That was a decision That was a conscious decision”
Sometimes, adds Hunter, it was difficult to hold on to that conviction ”When Araph due to go on the back which showed the band with pistols They were getting into guns at the ti It wasn't anything revolutionary; they were just enjoying shooting pistols For exaold record and went and shot it up
”I saw that photo and that was one of the few times that I ever really asserted uns on the back cover' These were incendiary and revolutionary ti that state violence of that time I knew that we had a tool to do it, and we just didn't dare go the other way Us and the Airplane: We could have been the final match that lit the fuse, and ent real consciously the other way”
In addition, with their countryish lilt and bluesy iman's Dead and American Beauty were attempts to return to the musical sources that had fueled the band's passions in the first place ”Workingman's Dead was our first true studio album,” Garcia told me in 1987, ”insofar as ent in there to say, 'These are the limitations of the studio for us as performers; let's play inside those liht-ahead songs and not get hung up with effects and weirdness For me, the models were music that I'd liked before that was basically simply constructed but terribly effective-like the old Buck Owens records from Bakersfield Those records were basic rock & roll: nice, raw, siood vocals and substantial instruman's Dead was our attempt to say, 'We can play this kind ofwe do as well as we do anything' ”
In a conversation I had with Robert Hunter in 1989, he revealed so in that period, andawareness of ere doing,” he said, ”but Jerry's mother had died in an auto American Beauty, and there's a lot of heartbreak on that record, especially on 'Brokedown Palace,' which is, I think, his release at that tis, I think, has a lot to do with that experience When the pathos is there, I've always thought Jerry is the best The et inside some of those lines and turn thes entirely his There is no e than the bittershen it's truly, truly spoken”
WITH Workingman's Dead and American Beauty, the Grateful Dead hit a creative peak and turned an i, the two records sold better than anything the group had issued before, and as a result, the band was able to begin working its way free ofdebts it had accrued More is to perfor audience With the next albuinally entitled Skullfuck, until Warner Bros, balked), the band issued an invitation to its fans: ”Send us your name and address and we'll keep you informed” It was the sort of standard fan club pitch that countless pop acts had indulged in before, but what it set in est sustained fan reaction in popto The New Yorker, there were 110,000 Deadheads on the band's roup had a devoted and far-flung following that,else, simply wanted to see the Grateful Dead live One of the aphoris like a Grateful Dead show,” and though that adage sometimes backfired in unintended ways-such as those occasions when the band turned in a protracted, ely out-of-tune perforhts when the group was on, propelled by the double dru uitar's and Lesh's bass, the Grateful Dead's verve and iination proved matchless
It was this dedication to live perfor, that forroundwork for the Grateful Dead's extraordinary success for a period of more than twenty years Even a costly failed atte label in the early 1970s, plus the deaths of three consecutive keyboardists-Pigpen McKernan, of alcohol-induced cirrhosis of the liver, in 1973; Keith Godcheaux, in a fatal car accident in 1980, a year after leaving the band; and Brent Mydland, of a morphine and cocaine overdose in 1990-never really deterred the Dead's roup enjoyed its first and only Top 10 single (”Touch of Grey”) and albuh was almost beside-the-fact in any objective assessment of the band's stature The Grateful Dead had been the top concert draw in America for several years, and they rarely played to less than near-full capacities In so the 1980s, in fact, the band often played to collective nationwide audiences of more than a million (sometimes twice that amount), and while it would be difficult to calculate with any absolute certainty, there is a good likelihood that the Grateful Dead played beforeact in history But the nature of the band's success ell beyond big nuh finances: From the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, the Grateful Dead enjoyed a union with its audience that was unrivaled and unshakable Indeed, the Dead and its followers for fellowshi+p that pop music has ever produced-a commonwealth that lasted more than a quarter-century
At the same time, Jerry Garcia and the other members of the Grateful Dead paid a considerable price for their singular accos after the 1970s (the band released only two collections of all newto the sort of songwriting iman's Dead and American Beauty so notable, the Dead lost the interest of e pop audiences of the last two decades To the band's fans, the Dead's roup's improvisational bents melded with their audience's willful devotion, to achieve the sort of bouts of musical-comed to equal As a result, for many years, the Dead tended to play out their career, and s, al a roup functioned as the only ongoing force to keep faith with the drearoup's detractors, though, the Grateful Dead often appeared as little more than a 1960s relic, a band frozen in the sensibility of exhausted ideals, playing to a gullible cult audience that, like the group itself, was out of touch with the changing temper of the tiroup of ”nostalgiafacile reminiscences to an audience with no memory of its own”
Garcia and the other members of the Dead heard this sort of criticism plenty over the years, and it had to have cut deep into their pride ”It's ia' act when you've never quit playing,” said Robert Hunter ”For years and years we drew an audience of nineteen- or twenty-year-old kids Can you have a nostalgia for a time you didn't live in? I think some of our music appeals to some sort of idealish to s continue to exist over the years”