Dark Star (19 page)

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
Garcia listened to it and said, “Fine, fine. That's very nice. But it needs a bridge.” So Hunter said, “Okay,” and he scribbled out some more words. No problem for Hunter. He could do it. He could write 'em out. Just turn him on. “Got two reasons why I cry …” That was the bridge. Hunter wrote the words and Garcia came up with the tune for that and that was how the three of us got that song together. Garcia would make Hunter agonize over a single turn of phrase. Over a single word. Hunter would have to sit there and come up with it because it wasn't good enough for Garcia. Garcia couldn't do that himself but he was a judge of it and he appreciated where Hunter was coming from. Hunter was the only guy that he ever wrote with. Except for that one occasion.

David Grisman:
If Jerry came to the East Coast, we'd hang out. If I came to the West Coast, we hung out. I was in a band called Earth Opera and our last gig was somewhere south of L.A. I came up to visit a friend in San Francisco for a weekend right after that. Somehow we ended up in Fairfax at a baseball game between the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane. I ran into Jerry and that was where he asked me to play on
American Beauty
. If I hadn't gone to the baseball game, I would not have gotten asked. He saw me and said, “I got some tunes that you'd sound great on.” Which turned out to be “Friend of the Devil” and “Ripple.” I played two mandolin parts on “Ripple.” It was just an overdub session. No interaction other than a couple of the guys had suggestions. I certainly didn't realize then that these tracks would become landmarks in the Grateful Dead repertoire.

David Nelson:
During the two-year period before all this when I hadn't seen Jerry, he'd gone through a transformation. He had the full beard and he was wearing the Levi shirt and that poncho all the time. He looked beatified. I thought he looked like an angel. Like an angel with a bad streak.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
We played a gig at a benefit for the Hell's Angels. That was at Longshoreman's Hall and the Bear [Owsley Stanley] was our soundman. This night at Longshoreman's Hall, something fucked up with the PA. I don't know what it was. I don't think the Bear knew what it was. But the Bear started whipping out all this shit. Here was the soldering gun coming out. And here were these six-foot Hell's Angels coming up and saying, “Uh, you think you could play some music?” And I was saying, “We need the PA, man. We sing and we have to have the PA.” “Hey, man. Couldn't you just
play
? You don't need the PA. Just play some stuff.” We were saying, “Bear, come
on
. Get this goddamn thing
fixed
.” Eventually he got it on and we actually played a couple of songs for the people. We played for the Angels on a couple of occasions when the Grateful Dead had nothing to do with it. We played for Sonny Barger's birthday party in Folsom Prison.

Sonny Barger:
The Grateful Dead actually had always been our friends. They'd been friends of the Hell's Angels since the sixties. I guess Jerry was the main reason. Jerry liked us and we liked Jerry. Other people in the band sort of came and went but Jerry was always there. Jerry said he was scared of us but I don't believe it.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
In the New Riders, we got Mickey Hart to play the drums and Phil to play the bass. In order for us to go on the Grateful Dead's tour, Jerry needed only two more tickets. He only needed to add my name and Nelson's name to the itinerary. Because everybody else was already in the band. We gave them an opening act for cheap. For the price of two tickets, he got a new five-piece band to open for the Dead.

David Nelson:
Those nights were great. The New Riders would do a forty-five-minute set. Jerry could sit down and play pedal steel. There was no pressure on him because it was not his band and he wasn't singing anything. Then he'd do the acoustic thing in between. That was the Dead actually but me and John would come up and do a couple songs. Then they did the full electric set. It was called “An Evening with the Grateful Dead.” Jerry would be on stage all night long. In those days, the show wasn't over at two in the morning. Sometimes, it was over at like six in the morning. Not every gig. But sometimes.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
The first time we played Fillmore East was “An Evening with the Grateful Dead Featuring the New Riders of the Purple Sage.” Jerry was in heaven. Because he was a picking junkie. If he was ever going to be accused of being a junkie, accuse him of being a picking junkie first. Before he got to be uncomfortable without some heroin in his blood, he got to be uncomfortable without a guitar in his hand. That was his first draw.

Jerry Garcia (1988):
We did our great shows at Fillmore East. We worked for 'em. The crowd was sitting down and they got it out of us. They pulled it out of us. In the Bay Area, it was almost too easy
.

Joshua White:
The Dead started coming to Fillmore East. When it started, the Dead were just this band with Pigpen. Then the Deadhead concept began to develop. So the concerts went longer and longer and later and later and Owsley was around.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
We always stayed around after our set was over to watch the Dead. The real magic was in the days when there were still people allowed on stage. When they still allowed their friends to have backstage passes. It was almost like a church hierarchy. After a while, they evolved it so that nobody got on stage except a band member or a member of the crew like Steve Parish or Kid or Dan Healy or Harry Popick. Only those people. Nobody else. In the days when it was really cool was when everybody was hanging out there. When it got truly apocalyptic at the end, there was this feeling that “Okay, this is a model of how the world could be.” Everybody having a good time and everybody getting off. Everybody going “Ohhhhh
woww
!” during one of those churning ongoing jams.

Joshua White:
It wasn't just the band coming to play. It was the band with their whole environment that they brought with them. People were hanging around to score Owsley acid and then they wanted to do the show on Owsley acid. I remember visiting the light show backstage during the winter of 1970. By then, I had already moved into large-screen video projection. All my former colleagues were still performing the light show for the Grateful Dead at Fillmore East. Sparks were coming out of their heads. They were not people I knew anymore. To me, they were aliens who were so deeply involved in this Dead concert that nothing could distract them. The concerts themselves began to go on until five in the morning.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
In the first days, the length of the sets was due to the LSD because that gave you that unlimited amount of energy. You didn't even know when you were tired and you couldn't go to sleep. There was no fucking reason to even try to go to sleep. Because it was brighter with your eyes closed than it was with them open. There was more noise that way. That was how they evolved into playing these three and four and five hour long sets. In terms of how tired Jerry would get on stage, Garcia was not known for his James Brown imitations. He just stood there and sang. Still, the Dead would try for that magic each time. Sometimes they would get it. The magic of all of them seeming to think together, possibly because of all the times they had played together. Garcia was the one who was the blind leading the blind. None of them knew where they were going. Especially in those spaces. They were just looking around. Garcia would be there playing around with something and Weir would be playing around with something and everybody would be doing five things together on the stage and people would still be listening and saying, “What the hell is going on here?”

Dexter Johnson:
I saw Jerry with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane do a duet show at the Fillmore. Jorma and Jerry just traded licks and it was unbelievable. I remember the light show flashing the words “The Grateful Airplane.” In “Dark Star,” it was like he was finding new notes. They weren't new notes of course but a new way of doing it.

Tom Constanten:
If you listen to, say, “Dark Star,” the reason you won't hear as much black blues is because Jerry's using more pentatonic-type scales. He was not using your flat fives, your flat threes, the little signals that say “blues.” But that was a minor technical adjustment in his own playing. It wasn't like he was saying, “I'm going to adopt this entire style of playing or go with this style of playing.” The trappings or components of a style make more difference to a reviewer or listener. Whereas when you're playing, you're just dealing with mechanical things. You get into the inner kernel that way and there's a lot of stuff that doesn't make any difference. During “Dark Star,” I don't think Jerry would be thinking, “I'm affecting this or that style.” He was merely adapting the mode to the mode of the subtext of the piece. Except to the degree that he might want to make some implication or some sort of reference like “First there is no mountain, then there is....” Throwing in that sort of thing. There were a lot of pieces that sounded real good but they were very hard to fly like one of those World War I biplanes. You had to have a crew of six, each minding these gauges to make sure that it came out okay. “Dark Star” was the opposite of that. It was sublimely easy to fly and it worked wonderfully well and you could go any number of places. Rhythmically, you could superimpose triplet patterns. You could do twoplet patterns. You could take them either direction you wanted to go. For that reason, I don't know if it was even rehearsable. It was only ever a showcase for Jerry's playing to the same degree that ninety-five percent of all the tunes they played were showcases for his playing. In terms of the lyrics, like a lot of the words, they were words that if you were on the psychedelic mountain, you could just let them reflect and refract and do what they do. They would reflect the moment as it was and as you perceived it at that time. “Dark Star” is going on all the time. It's going right now. You don't begin it so much as enter it. You don't end it so much as leave it. Any Fillmore East “Dark Star,” I would recommend.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
After a couple of tours back there, the New Riders got their own record deal. Clive Davis had his eye on Garcia the whole time. I think he recognized that Garcia was the true talent in that mob. He wanted him and the only way that he was going to get him was by getting the New Riders. Like Garcia used to say, man. “Sell out? Sell out! Where do I sign?”

Joshua White:
They had this thing with dosing people. “Whhheeee. Wicked. Awful stuff.” Trying to dose Bill Graham and dose this person and dose that person. Basically, they were all taking cocaine or speed. That's what it really all was. It was a very hypocritical time.

Peter Rowan:
One thing I didn't really like about the Dead was this kind of obligatory dosing that went on. It was a mind-control thing. Being backstage with them, you'd often find yourself high on acid. The rule was, “Go with the flow.” So it was like, “Oh no, the flowers are talking at me again. Not that bass solo now. Oh, no.” I would be trying to go to the men's room and Phil Lesh would decide it was time to kick in some new invention he had that dropped the octave to the center of the earth. The walls would be caving in and all I wanted to do was take a piss.

Joe Smith:
They always said they would get me. They would nail me. They would dose me. Because I couldn't understand their music unless I did. I never did. But I wouldn't eat around them or drink around them. One time in New York, they were playing the Electric Circus in the Village. I was having dinner four blocks away at the Coach House. It was a cold night. One of those wind chill specials and I had on a light raincoat but I wanted to see them. I went running down the street and I was really freezing. I got up the stairs of the Electric Circus and they were on a break. Bill Kreutzmann and Pigpen were there. They were so surprised to see me and they were hugging me and saying, “Jesus, it's cold. You want some coffee?” I said, “Yeah. God, get me some coffee.” As they started to get the cup, I said, “Wait. I'll get my own coffee.” They said, “What's the matter?” I said, “No. I'll get my own coffee. I'll get it. Don't get it for me. Don't do me any favors.” I once inhaled the gas with them. I did that. The laughing gas. I thought, “I've now broken eight of the Ten Commandments.” The Top Ten Commandments.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
Jerry used to be doing up acid behind the stage. Back in the magic days when everybody was able to be on stage, everybody would be stoned on acid and then you'd smoke some DMT. Bear swore to me, and I've heard other people say this, too, that when they were smoking the DMT, the meters on the amplifiers would actually crank up about ten or twenty percent. You could actually see the meter going up when the DMT was being smoked back there.

Joe Smith:
With the Grateful Dead, the use of drugs was so pervasive and innocent at that time. Crack makes you crazy and speed gets you nuts but acid really turned the world upside down so you didn't know where reality let off and fantasy began. My adventures with the Grateful Dead were dumbfounding. They never fired a manager. They never got rid of anybody. When we'd have a meeting, sixty people would show up. Mothers nursing babies. Owsley mixing up God knows what on the side. Everything. It was a phalanx that moved in.

David Nelson:
Jerry was not yet doing coke. Not that I knew about it. I wasn't familiar with that until the New Riders started hob-nobbing with some of the high rollers around the country. I wondered, “What's everybody doing?” Garcia told me, “Oh, it's coke, man. Here. Try it.” I remember thinking, “I don't like this. Oh, no. This is going to be another one of those speed things.” I had written when I was on speed, on methedrine. I was so gung ho when I was doing it and then I'd read it later and it was just drivel. The most self-indulgent self-satisfying kind of drivel you could imagine. Really trivial and it had no substance whatsoever and it was not soulful. And pushy to boot. I hated that. Musically, I thought, “Okay, here go the ideas out the window. Nothing's going to be valid for the time.... How long does this stuff last?” I cautioned myself about it. Nevertheless, I got bit by the same thing that everybody did. It was such a wonderful thing to have that frontal brain activity out there. To have all those thoughts. If you didn't get too self-indulgent with that, it could be useful. Otherwise, I just thought it was nowhere.