Blues For Allah 50: Blues For Allah

Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale. Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light-bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable curds of grains, granola, and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly. The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. The official podcast of The Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mayhan with Jesse Jarno, exploring the music and legacy of The Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow deadheads, welcome to season 12 of The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co-host Rich Mayhan. Thank you very much for tuning in. In this episode of The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, we wrap up season 12 with an absolutely mammoth dead cast episode about the title track from The Grateful Dead's 1975 studio release, Blues Ferala. Speaking of Blues Ferala, the 50th anniversary deluxe edition of Blues Ferala is out now. This 3-CD set has the newly remastered album with unreleased soundcheck and concert recordings. There are also vinyl variants of the original album available as well as Blues Ferala 50th anniversary merch. All of these not-to-be missed items can be found at Dead.net. Also at Dead.net right now for a limited time, you can subscribe to the 2026 season of Dave's Picks. The quarterly archival concert releases handpicked by David Lemieux. Early bird pricing is now in effect through November 30th and the first edition ships out on January 30th. 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Well, Grateful Dead have always been known to push boundaries musically and Blues for All of the title track from their 1975 album is perhaps one of the best examples of their adventurous musical spirit ever committed to tape in the studio. You're about to hear all about it and then some along with the story of the album art as well as the September Golden Gate Park gig the band played. Whoo, grab some snacks and buckle up for a doozy. Here's Jesse Giorno. And here we are at the final song on Blues for Alla. It's title track and one of the most misunderstood studio recordings in the Grateful Dead's 30 year history. Grateful Dead Archivist and Legacy Manager David Lemieux. I couldn't believe what I was hearing and I'm reading along with my lyrics sheet and my original pressing of the album. So I'm reading along the lyrics. I'm like, what is going on here? And then they take it way out when you hear the crickets and you take it to these instrumental passages and Jerry doing these the tones he was getting. Wow. Everything David just said opens up into Grateful Dead mysteries that we'll be talking about today from the strangeness of Jerry Garcia's tones to the layer of crickets mixed in with the track to the fact that the band even included printed lyrics with their new album. I don't think there's anything more in the studio more ambitious than this. Certainly Blues for Alla was the most ambitious piece of music on the record, perhaps made even more ambitious by the fact that it was both the album's title cut and nearly 13 minutes long, setting it up for extra scrutiny. In fact, it was the first dead album to even have a proper title cut. We'll also try to answer the question of why the song disappeared before the last of the band's four shows in 1975, that's September in Golden Gate Park. A remarkable event we'll be exploring in some detail in the second half of this episode, but we've got an album to finish first. In terms of the melody and the phrasing and all, it was not of this world Jerry Garcia told Blair Jackson in 1991. It's not in any key or any time. The song has some of Robert Hunter's most always timely lyrics. A lot has been made of the song's words, and we'll certainly get into those, but I think perhaps one of the most important things to consider in the song's story is that it's one of the only examples in dead history where the final title for the piece of music came before the lyricist was involved. The only other case I can readily think of is the 11. And though the lyrics to Blues for Allah are wonderful, I think the song also pushes back at the idea that the meaning of the song is entirely held by its lyrics. We've tried to frame Blues for Allah's massive ambitions throughout this season, where the dead had a goal of nothing less than creating entirely new ways to play music, and Blues for Allah the song might have been the most ambitious of all on multiple levels, so we're going to build slightly to that. Here's Jerry Garcia speaking with Mary Travers in 1975. We've linked to the full interview at dead.net. We'll keep him happy all the time. Some of the fellas make nothing at all, and you can hear him cry. The Blues we play for a long time, jazz. Eastern music, you know, music of the world's just textures, space music, electronic music. We've gone into and come back with something, and then out of those we've developed our own versions of each one of them, and then the synthesis between them, synthesis between them. And we've already dealt with a lot of permutations, so now it's the thing of completely new ones, ones that we invent, as opposed to ones we synthesize. This became the defining mode of the album Blues for Allah, as the dead sought out different ways to break free of their usual patterns. Some of the tricks would stay with them for the rest of their career, and some of them would stay behind in Asus. This was a pretty radical way to make music for the dead, even by the dead standards. They'd written songs for lots of different purposes, pushing lots of different boundaries. From the start, even their attempts at pop songs stretched at forms. In the 60s, they'd made Oximaxoa an Anthem of the Sun, which explored the possibilities of the studio as a compositional tool. But even What's Become of the Baby was what Robert Hunter described as a charming minuet, before the dead decided to run through a mogue synthesizer. And they'd written songs in weird time signatures, but even those were still created with the dead's ballroom audiences in mind. The album Blues for Allah was like a sculpture garden of experimental forms. The soulfulness of a good tune, and a good rendition of it, all that is important. On the other hand, we're doing stuff that's simpler too. It just depends on what feels good, or what's interesting. The tune Franklin's Tower is totally in the opposite world. It's very simple. It has only two changes back and forth. But Blues for Allah is perhaps the most complicated song on the album that bears its name. Not because it's difficult to play, but because it's difficult to even conceive. Almost impossible, really. Blues for Allah might be one of the dead's most imaginative creations. This is Jerry Garcia speaking just a week or two after the band had finished the song, and a week before its only full live performance. It's a song remarkably outside of both musical space and musical time. In a time of further and further out new musical languages for the dead, it might be the furthest, and why it became the title of the final album. Though they would evoke several significant pieces of Middle Eastern culture in the final song, I think the original phrase was more of a stand-in for the new musical languages they were generating. Blues for Allah has altered melodic sequences and totally weird asymmetrical scales that are completely fictitious. They don't occur in Western music at all. They're invented for the sake of the song. So it's like there's a lot of different levels of music to think about at the same time. Blues is sometimes called one of the great American musical styles, but nearly every culture has an equivalent. And though the recordings weren't as widespread in the mid-1970s, there's some incredible desert blues and lots of styles from different regions. This is a little bit from the Tuareg group, Teneruyn, from their 2011 album, Tassili. But the dead were looking for their own sound. As David Dodd's annotated lyric collection points out, the title Blues for Allah was and is also something of a musical pun, almost certainly a reference to the 1951 Charlie Parker Jazz Standard, Blues for Alice. So how did Blues for Allah come to be? We've got a few different origin points, and they all lead back to the smoky air at Aces, over the carport at Bob Weir's house in Mill Valley in spring 1975. Before we drop into this next segment, thanks again to Dan Healy, Robbie Taylor, Kid Candelario, Steve Brown, and anybody else who rolled safety tape at the Aces sessions. It's such a special time traveling privilege to have access to the dead's creative process at this level. And to be honest, I'm gonna really miss it. This is one point of origin. Jerry Garcia, newtling with the Blues for Allah intro riff on March 4th, seeing if it might connect to the song in progress then called Distorto. The pieces don't connect. For the rest of that story, check out our Crazy Fingers episode. There's some evidence that this theme existed by late February, so we're gonna talk about it first. Here's a clear version of that riff from the Master Take, the center of the fictitious musical mode. From the City College of New York, musicologist Chadwick Jenkins. The most radically new thing would be Blues for Allah, which winds up being a dead end. If what we think of as a dead end is what goes on into their live shows, because they just didn't do it live or anything. As on the Sage and Spirit episode, I'd like to consider the song's 1975 iterations as gorgeous standalone objects. On one hand, they don't seem to be part of the dead's continuous history in the 80s and 90s, but to my mind, that doesn't give them any less intrinsic value than a song like Truckin that did get performed hundreds of times in concert. And like Sage and Spirit, as we'll hear, Blues for Allah wasn't entirely a dead end. I can't say I know exactly what the skeleton key is to how it was developed, but it has a kind of underlying logic. It's not really a mode. It's sort of the shifting chromatic thing around some stable note, and everything's grounded around that f, and the eternity comes down to a, and then we immediately get back to f. So it feels like it's f, but then the very next set of lines, the lowest note is f sharp. So there's this weird way in which some things stay static and other things move. And also from the City College of New York, Deputy Dean of the Humanities and Arts, Sean O'Donnell. There's something about the pitch combinations and the tempo. It doesn't feel like it's a piece of music. It feels like it's invoking something. Like, okay, once you finish the sequence of notes, the gaping chasm is going to open up and something's going to happen. There's not the tongue and cheek of the spinal tap. It's like, no, we're invoking that thing that's gonna come out of the ground or from sky and smite you. It's not a tonal melody, and it's not in what would be sort of a typical exotic scale of some kind. He's, it eventually uses all 12 notes, but that doesn't really stand out in any drama way, as it does in Crazy Fingers. But the snippets are all the same kind of snippets of pitch fragments that the early 8-tonalists used when they wanted to be like, we don't want to reference tonality at all. They came up with little groups of notes that were as different from like a triad as possible. And those snippets are in here. Like, so there's, like, I would say it's Bartak Shrovinsky, even the second B&E school before they went serial. I will once again evoke the great German band Cannes, who in the summer of 1975 had just briefly missed being the dead's label mates at United Artists, and were traveling similar spaceways. In our King Solomon's Marbles episode, we heard a bit of Cannes' similar 1974 track, Splash. Also in 1974, Cannes released their Odds and Sods collection titled Limited Edition, which included a number of pieces they labeled EFS, the Ethnological Forgery Series, where they channeled the music of imaginary other places. Limited Edition was only released in Europe, and I don't think the dead were plugged into what Cannes were doing anyway, but I think that might be the best way to understand Blues for Ala on somewhat contemporary terms. Here's a bit of EFS number 27. But then on March 5th, Jerry had an idea that became the core of the Blues for Ala suite. This whole sequence is some of my favorite material from the Blues for Ala tapes, in part because the music is really cool, but in larger part because of how much laughter is involved. Got to pause Jerry right there and point out that Blues for Ala already has a working title, something they'd been developing on tapes that we don't currently have access to. Based on those quotes we just heard from Garcia, I think the title Blues for Ala was meant as a literal musical description of what they were doing, and it's about to take a turn. Back to Garcia's brainstorm. It's a pretty heady concept, with half the band pedaling on individual notes and half the band shifting, then changing roles, if I understand it correctly. And then Phil Lesch counts them in and it gets real. And away we go. The piece of music that the dead just created is called on the album Sandcastles and Glass Camels, and takes up the middle five and a half minutes of the album suite. The first take is only two minutes long. It's a really cool concept, actually not too far from the cellular minimalism of Terry Riley's in C, albeit very much not in C, and with instructions of the piece interpreted differently by each performer. It's fun to hear Garcia so psyched about a piece of music, and this whole conversation is fascinating to hear the grateful led group dynamic in full flight, both musically and extra musically. Engineer Dan Healy comes out of the tiny recording booth in the corner, which you can hear Creak open. That's a fascinating point here too about Overdubs, thinking about this piece of music for a studio album, not necessarily live performance. And here Garcia ties the room together. Two times through the fucker, and then just start into that mode. And just play it until it seems like it might be nice to play Blues for All again. And that's how Blues for All would essentially function during its very brief life. Really, in a matter of minutes, they laid out a good chunk of what would become the album's second side, as well as several of the year's live performances. Not that anything was that simple. They get back to the first part of the piece, trying to find the right feel that will send them into the desert. And after some fiddling around, they find it. They try the sand castles and glass camels jam a few times, and they're all pretty fun to listen to. It didn't always work this way live, so it's pretty nifty to get to hear them riding that original spark. Later, Garcia would call this the Desert Jam, and he was serious about the idea that the concept could support any number of rhythmic or tonal ideas. Around two weeks after that session we just heard, an expanded group of musicians gathered at Aces to rehearse for the March 23rd snack benefit at Kesar Estadium, which we discussed at length in our Slipknot episode. That was the core quintet of the 1975 Grateful Dead, augmented by guests Ned Lajen on roads, David Crosby on 12 string electric guitar, Merle Saunders on B3 organ, and Mickey Hart on drums. It was billed as Jerry Garcia and Friends, but it was the first public progress report from the sessions, and featured nine musicians following the loose rules that Jerry Garcia had laid down. The rehearsal sessions for the snack benefit also revealed that the song now has an ending section. This would gain hunters under eternity blue lyrics by the end of the sessions. Formally, going by the timings on the original blues for a la LP, the name of this section is Strange Occurrences in the Desert. There's some off-mike singing. In practice, the sand castles and glass camels jam got a little chaotic live, but the so-called first day session really enforces the idea that structurally it was built for a theoretically unlimited amount of players, like a modern music composition. In some ways it really was the Dead's version of NC, except deliberately attempting to even transcend the idea of keys, playing the music native to some long lost desert. The snack benefit version, now on the bonus CD to the Beyond Description box, offers a beautiful what-if, even without the 12th string guitar of David Crosby, who had to duck out at the last minute to attend his child's birth. Things get both fascinating and fuzzy with the titling in this window, too. Rolling Stone reported that the suite as a whole at the snack benefit was titled Space Age, but as we've heard they were already using the name Blues for a la to refer to the intro theme. Has anybody ever thought about using the Blues for a la tag as an ominous sound cue in a mystery series? Because we've got a mystery to solve, or at least a cloud to unfog. Virtually every book on the Dead mentioned some version of the story we're about to tell, and I think there's some blurriness to unpack here regarding the title of the piece they were calling Blues for a la. Let's start with Ron Rakow, who came across an article. I think maybe the cover story of Newsweek from February 10th, 1975, the week the session started, titled Oil Money, with an illustration of a coin labeled one petrodollar, like a large quarter with an engraved camel. One of the topics was Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia. Please welcome back from Grateful Dead and Round Records, Cadillac Ron Rakow. The wealth of Faisal every 160 days increased by the net worth of the largest company on the planet at that time, which was IBM. So, and by my calculation, in a short time, three or four years, there was going to be two piles of wealth in the world, Faisal's and the exact same size pile for every other human being on earth, which is as close to world domination as I've ever imagined. So, I felt really bad for Faisal. What game can you possibly play if half of the wealth of the entire world is yours and everybody else is scrabbling over their piece of the other half? What game is there left to play? I felt like, you know, because I was so in love with the game I was playing. I felt like anybody who didn't have something like that was, I really felt sorry for them. And that was mostly everybody. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia had struck the dead as a strangely sympathetic figure. Phil Lesch told Dennis McNally that they felt that Faisal was maybe, quote, more of a humanist than any of his predecessors and that he was trapped by history, by religion. I spoke to Hunter immediately because I wanted to change the title of the album. And Hunter listened to me very benevolently and patiently and then, you know, left and, you know, but I wanted to change it to Blues for Faisal. In 1991, Jerry Garcia remembered this aspect of the band's Faisal dialogue, telling Blair Jackson, we were talking about King Faisal in the studio because an article came up about him in Newsweek or something. And I remember being blown away when it said that Faisal owned a third of the world's wealth or something shocking like that. One guy? It didn't get changed, but very shortly thereafter, one of his nephews or relatives just fucking shot him and Faisal was dead. And the kid was a grateful dead fan from them that went to UC Berkeley. You know, he wasn't a grateful dead freak like we were, but he was an enthusiastic concert goer. One might say an enthusiast? King Faisal's nephew, Prince Faisal bin Masoud Alsad, did in fact come at the King and did not miss on March 25th, 1975, a topic far too tangled to illuminate here. But the Prince had indeed studied at San Francisco State in 1966. And after that, two stints at UC Berkeley. In between, at the University of Colorado, he and his girlfriend were busted selling LSD and hashish. There was a lot of LSD. I was told that by somebody knowledgeable. On March 28th, Herb Cain's column in the San Francisco Chronicle offered an update from the dead sessions at ACES. It reported that the album in progress was called Glass Camels. And as of Wednesday, the 26th, a quote, Phyllis Jerry Garcia original titled Blues for Faisal is now called Blues for Ala, end quote. That is, the assassination of King Faisal maybe didn't inspire the phrase Blues for Ala, but rather inspired the band to change the name of the still lyricalist piece from Blues for Faisal back to Blues for Ala, if it had ever really been called Blues for Faisal. To make matters more confusing, Herb Cain credits the news source none other than Hank Harrison, whose biographies of the dead could be, shall we say, misleading. And it's possible this piece of information was subject to generation loss and could be used to fact check. The band played the full piece in progress again at Winterland at the Bob Freed Memorial Boogie in June, which we talked about in our Crazy Fingers episode. By then, it seems to have received its final name. Joel Selvins Chronicle column reported on the lengthy version of Blues for Ala that opened the band's second half. The sandcastles and glass camels jam made it second live appearance. At its best, the glass camels jam sounds to me like desert flowers blooming in unexpected secret colors. And once again, both the Blues for Ala and strange occurrences in the desert sections are without lyrics. Another memory shared by multiple participants is that Blues for Ala itself was an unwieldy piece, very much a studio creation. Garcia told Blair Jackson, oh, that song was a bitch to do. When we got toward the end of the album, we had some time restrictions and started working pretty fast. But up until then, we'd been pretty leisurely about it. If I'm reading it correctly, the studio tracking sheet for Blues for Ala confirms that it was the first basic track that they recorded to their satisfaction and very close to the last set of overdubs they finished. We'll start with the core quintet Grateful Dead from The Basic Take. The basic track of Blues for Ala begins with a short prelude of the unusual occurrences melody. The date field of the tracking sheet reads first in parentheses, May 22nd, and then July 8th, which I translate to mean that they recorded the basic instrumental structure of the song on May 22nd and then got down to significant overdubs in early July, possibly including the vocals two days before the deadline. The main theme is one of the stranger set of notes in the Dead's songbook, made stranger by the fact that they're playing them in unison. Here's Garcia. And we're playing Keith Gottschow on Rhodes. I think this is the only song on the album that doesn't feature a Leslie rotating cabinet somewhere, but Blues for Ala has plenty of other things making it strange. One of the strangest is that even Phil Lesh plays in unison, in stereo. You doing okay, Phil? During the initial Blues for Ala section, only Billy Kreitzman is allowed to float somewhat. There's a really rich amount of overdubs and other musical activity across all three sections of Blues for Ala. In addition to the harmonic and rhythmic freedom the rules provided, as Garcia imagined, it also provided a space for studio weirdness. Before we delve into it, let's listen to some of the sandcastles jam before they started adding to it. Officially, sandcastles and glass camels begin to three minutes, 21 seconds into the track, and runs for another five minutes and 26 seconds. So, sometime later in June, Robert Hunter returned to join the band for the final sprint to the album's new July 10th deadline. He told Blair Jackson in 1991, Blues for Ala specifically, I remember them saying to me, damn it, we need the line right now. In the same joint interview Garcia points out, the line lengths are all different. Hunter responds, I remember trying to get a scan for that. The first line I came up with, he sings it to the song's melody, was, here comes that awful funky bride of Frankenstein. I've actually always had a hard time wrapping my head around how that lyric fits to the melody, but maybe you can tell. We use this quote in the first episode of the season, but here's Hunter speaking with WLIR in 1978, and I believe he's referring mainly to the song's Help on the Way and Blues for Ala. I was living in England while they were laying down tracks, this is the first time I've ever worked this way, where they put down all the tracks, and so I came in with pretty complete basics to work with and wrote the lyrics to an album that was out of the ver, and I'm not certain that I do my best work that way. Ron Rakow recalls Hunter feeling this way in the moment of creation. I went to the studio, I would pop in all the time, and one time Hunter was there. One whole half of Blues for Ala was the dirge to Ala. The other half was songs, and he said, I hope there's something on here good enough for you to make something out of. You worked really hard, and I don't think my material was up to stuff. I said, man, your material is always up to stuff. Relax, and we're going to be successful our way. That's the way it's going to happen. And I worked very, very hard on this album. I wrote most of these songs, I wrote over 20, 30 times, trying to get them just right, and I believe that my lyric work, my lyrics are overworked on this. It was not just that tendency, you start being a professional artist, and you take a great deal of pride when you do, and you sort of start slipping away from your inspiration in a right, and you start getting bearing down too hard on it, trying to perfect each line, trying to make each one a juror. Hunter was by himself. Hunter was one of the world's great poets. The first line that Hunter settled on actually does evoke something of the conversation about King Faisal being the world's richest man. This is a reference probably to a proverb that appears across cultures, in the Bible as, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. I also hear a reference to the expression, The veil is thin, evoking the border between two worlds. Blair Jackson's rare joint interview with Hunter and Garcia took place in early 1991, just as the first Gulf War was unfolding. Hunter told Blair, I find that song holds up well in the current situation, though it also has a basic naivete, sort of, why can't we just be friends? But some of the lines in there work still. Hunter It wasn't the first time Hunter evoked Allah in a song lyric, though the first time was a little more buried, and connects us to Blues for Allah's biggest competition for most misunderstood studio dead track, 1969's What's Become of the Baby. On one eye stock it was easy to miss, on the other, you can really hear the seeds for Blues for Allah. Hunter Even with King Faisal omitted from the song itself, if he'd ever been there at all, just invoking Allah in a song lyric in 1975 in this matter was a fairly radical move, let alone in a way that still sounds respectful a half century later. There are three vocal tracks on Blues for Allah, I assume stacked together in the mix, all three of them featuring multiple singers sharing a microphone. Only one of the vocal tracks has this little bit of warm-up on the song's introductory tag. Robert Hunter's own annotation in his lyric collection A Box of Rain reads, This lyric is a requiem for King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, a progressive and democratically inclined ruler and incidentally a fan of the Grateful Dead, whose assassination in 1975 shocked us personally. I think that might be slightly muddled chronologically, but perhaps the combination of the working title Blues for Allah and the assassination of King Faisal acted as writing prompts. Like their reinterpretations of folk music, perhaps it was a way to stake one foot in the timeless and one foot in the contemporary. Founder of the Grateful Dead Studies Association, Nicholas Merriweather. In the middle of the Middle East, there's a lot of tumult on the international stage, especially in the Middle East. The Middle East has been at war since, in many ways you could say, for two millennia, but leaving that aside, certainly sent in the post-war era with periodic flashpoints since World War II, and those have been gathering force and ferocity since the 1960s. Dennis McNally's official dead bio, A Long Strange Trip, tells the story of when Hunter showed the lyrics to Barry Melton of the more overtly radical Berkeley combo Country Joe and the Fish. Hunter told Melton, look, I'm political now, are you happy? And the fish responded, That doesn't sound political to me, Bob. That sounds abstruse. Here's another way to look at this, maybe, is that the dead, and specifically Hunter and Garcia, were also self-consciously trying to look beyond the Americana that had defined them since Working Man's dead and American beauty, seeking a set of musical and lyrical signposts that pointed to new horizons. I almost tend to think that it's more a classic case of dead like serendipity. There are large parts of Blues for Allah that don't necessarily have to connect with Faisal's assassination, the idea of the Middle East. It's just that once you drop those ideas into what they are doing, everything kind of makes sense. And the fact that it sort of gets back to the completely spurious Egyptian Book of the Dead quotation that surrounded their name in the mid-60s, that's just kind of icing on the cake. That phrase, the Great Full Dead, does not appear anywhere in the Book of Spells and Incantations and Prayers that we call the Book of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. But the idea certainly is there, and the myth of the Great Full Dead, the Great Full Dead folk motif, certainly has Egyptian and Middle Eastern instantiations and iterations. So the idea that the band might take something as concrete as Faisal's assassination and spin that into what they are already thinking, that makes perfect sense. And that's kind of a cool artistic anchor that I can see appealing enormously. The final lyrics of Blues for Allah have nothing modern about them, a song out of time, both musically and chronologically, and yet always on time. That line is almost certainly a reference to the Arabian Nights, or as it's also known, 1001 Nights, a collection of Arabic folktales from the Islamic Golden Age. Along with the reference to Allah and the Arabic expression in Shala, meaning if God wills it, it grounds the song slightly in a more earthly place. But the phrase Arabian Desert now refers to the desert on the Arabian Peninsula in far Western Asia. In antiquity, Arabian Desert meant what's now called the Eastern Desert in far Eastern Africa, starting east of the Nile. But I think what Hunter, and almost certainly Garcia were seeking, was the place in the desert where geography disappears, the no man's land of the first verse, and the blank terrain could connect through the head of a pin into the Mahavi or the Sahara, or onto the Martian surface, or even to Terrapin. The actual Arabian Desert has music of its own, and within a few years, the dead would be engaged with that too. That was Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, and Hamza Eldin at Front Street in summer of 1978, a session just before the band stripped Egypt, which David Lemieux excavated for the Taper section a few years back. But the sand castles and glass camels the dead evoked were their own, more like a part of the desert that no one had gotten to yet. Over the whole song, some over just the sand castles passage, ranging from simple to some of the most ambitious the dead had tried in years. There's a synthesizer that runs through the whole tune. I'm going to guess it's Garcia, but I could be wrong. And I think it might be a single take as well. It definitely evolves with the piece. Here it is during the intro. And droning along at the edge of the desert, but also reinforcing Garcia's original concept. Like all the other part, it gets weirder as it goes. And deep into sand castles and glass camels, as it turns into unusual occurrences, the synth goes full wash. But much of the song's texture came from an overdub bender by Jerry Garcia and gradually coming back into the fold Mickey Hart. This is Mickey speaking on the Aristey years. I come down to winter land and play it together again, and it was really a turn on. And then I started hanging out at Weir's house when we were doing blues for a la. And that thing started working really well. So there was no reason why not to, you know, just started, we had the chemistry again. And I had done what I had to do. I made my recording studio, built it, learned about engineering and and made a solo record. David Gann spoke with Mickey about it in 1984. Thank you so much, as always, to David for the use of his audio. We've linked to his numerous cornerstone book projects at dead.net slash deadcast, including conversations with the dead, where this comes from. Blues for all was six months, I think in the studio. Yeah, I wasn't there at the very beginning of Blues for all. I don't remember how that happened. The dead's amazing assistant Steve Brown took some credit for that. Mickey was a cool thing because I was kind of pushing for him to come, to be part of it, to do some percussion stuff. I've been working with him up at the barn, when we were doing around record stuff. There was times where I felt, let's get over all that, try to get him back in the fold as it were. If I said, you know, we can get Mickey and Furbry, I was kind of like saying stuff, you know, to Jerry and people that Mickey would be good on some percussion stuff here. And that's where he came back into the band was at Blues for All the Sessions. Yeah. Mickey adds two layers of lard drums to Blues for Alla. There's this in a lower register. And on another track, there are phased lard drums running deep into the glass camels. But that was just the start. We mic'd a box of crickets. David has a pertinent question. How'd you get them? I went and bought them. I had a cricket connection. There are several different work tapes of this section in addition to the master tapes. And my guess is that Garcia and Hart devoted a whole master tape to this section, then reduced it down to two tracks for the final version. And we, it was Garcia and I slowed them up, sped them up backwards at half speed. They sounded like whales. And they sounded like chirping birds. We made this thing called the Desert where I, he was engineering and I was in the studio and I would play all my little percussion things, all my little bells, all my little metal and all the little glass. It was incredible. What an incredible time because we had to be real quiet because I was playing this metal and wood stuff with paintbrush. It had to be so quiet all this stuff was played very softly. Yeah, it was really wonderful. The Desert Zone it's called. And on tracks 15 and 16, it's labeled Zone Desert. And we make this thing called a Desert that went across, you know, in 20 minutes or however long it was. What Garcia did was he gated it with a vocal gate, with a VCA, voltage controlled amplifier. He gated the Desert and he was saying Allah. We'll point out that this idea of using a vocal gate so that Garcia's vocal signal affected the sound of heart's percussion is virtually directly out of the work that Ned Lage and developed for Seastones, perhaps his silent contribution to Bluestra Allah. And the kicker us we let the crickets go on Wears Mountain. We liberated them after the recording session, which we were feeding them peppers and stuff, you know, keeping them alive in this box in 50th. Steve Brown. They were in this cardboard box and we had a mic and they were there pretty much secure and then a few got out and then it wound up being where they did eventually dump them out behind Wears Place on the hill behind there and they were just whole thing of crickets back there forever, I guess, for for poor Bob to have to listen to now. And so we let him go in and crickets and he and we had thousands of crickets and still has them on this place. I mean, for years after that, all he can hear at night exotic crickets. Certainly the crickets who recorded for the album had a better faith than their brethren, who served a few weeks later at the Great American Music Hall, as we heard about last episode, living out their best lives and reproductive cycles on the hillside outside aces. Oh, yeah, about the crickets. Well, yeah, that I don't believe there are crickets in the desert. At least not on this planet. This is the very last thing you hear on track 15 and 16, just moments after the fade out. And we went into the night on that and Jerry and I and Rack out was waiting in the next room, you know, for four or five days, waiting to take the masters down because we were already late, you know, and we were locked up in the in Weirin studio, finishing me, Healy and and Garcia for a week at the end there. I can't straightly go on, man, it was incredible. And somewhere along the line, they bolstered the unusual occurrences in the desert ending, which of course we have to shine some light on. Tucked away on one of Mickey's tracks, we were added some more guitar. And tucked away on the other, Keith added some more roads. Garcia adds a pretty awesome slide guitar part near the end of glass camels, just before they land in the vocals, where he both subtly restates the blues for all a theme, but also presages the searing outro lead. It's there in the final mix. And that outro lead is on the song's basic track, by the way. Once again, there are three tracks of vocals for the outro. Two of them contain the whole gang singing together gorgeously. Here's stacked together. But only one of the vocal tracks contains Mrs. Donagene God Show. Once again, Donagene. And a little surprise at the end of this one. And we have title. One more. And a return of T. Sometime during the final stages of recording, the album aren't arrived with further Grateful Lead serendipity. Nearby the dead's offices in San Rafael was the Peanut Gallery, a loose collective of artists overseen by the great Stanley Mouse. One day, a young artist named Phil Garris showed up with a painting he'd made a year before. Founder of the Grateful Lead Studies Association, Nicholas Merriweather. Mouse said very clearly that it was while he was in charge of that sort of artist collective, and he was the landlord, which he hated, but he was the business guy. Garris showed up as a young artist. Mouse was blown away and slightly annoyed because he thought Garris was so young and so good. So he was like, get this away from me. I don't want to see something this good. You're warning in on my territory. And he was kind of laughing as he's telling it to me, but he was like, no, this is how good he was. I recognized it. And I got the sense that Mouse supported Garris showing it to the band as a possible album cover. It was a short drive across town to the Grateful Lead Office at Fifth and Lincoln. I was in my office one day and my secretary committed, so there's a guy down here as he has a picture he wants to show you, and he carried up this big fucking painting of a skeleton in a red rose with red sunglasses on, playing a violin in a keyhole hole in a castle wall. And that became Blue's Fala. And I didn't even have my wits about me. I should have, I normally like to buy the painting and own it. It never even occurred to me. I was blown away. I never thought about it as a keyhole or a castle wall, but I can see that now. The fuller version of the story is that the Fiddler's sunglasses were actually green in the original, but everybody thought it made him look too insectoid, as Steve Brown put it. Steve brought the painting home and hung it above the foot of his bed, where, for a couple of days, I just stared at the thing until I got the idea that if Phil changed the color of the glasses to match the robe on the figure, it might seem a little warmer. So Gareth's actually made a red overlay for the glasses, and after a few weeks of not being able to come up with anything better, I decided to show it to the band again, and this time they loved it. Great for that archivist, David Lemieux. I love the colors. I love the purple of the sash down here. I love the red. I just, the sunglasses, I freaking love this. I love the back in the band. It's one of those pieces of art that when I look at art, I always wonder, how do they get that lighting effect out of paint? And I think I always look at this green down here, and I'm like, how do they do, how does a good artist do this? There's very little biographical information that I can find about Philip Gareth. He was from San Diego, and did some indie comics later in the 70s, and was briefly involved in the Dead's Art Circle, creating the front covers for Blues for Allah and the 1976 Kingfish album, as well as the two-show Day on the Green at the Oakland Coliseum Stadium with the Who that October. He did a number of Toto covers in the 80s as well. The Fiddler entered the Dead's iconography. Great for that archivist, David Lemieux. The Dead had this huge backdrop that was on canvas, and it was probably 15 feet by 15 feet of the Blues for Allah cover, and they unfurled it at some of the shows in 1976, some of the comeback shows. There's that famous picture of Hunter standing, I guess it's a club front, he's holding a bugle, a trumpet, a bugle, and he's in front of the big backdrop that the Dead had for this. A great shot by superhero Deadhead Ed Perlstein. Who we'll hear from later. By the way, I'll use this as an opportunity to introduce everybody to a tongue twister by my friend Matt. Ready? Deadhead Ed edited it. Now you try. Sorry, David Lemieux is talking about the Blues for Allah backdrop. There's that great picture. And then many years later, when I was working for the Dead, that thing lived at the Grateful Dead office. There was another big change with Blues for Allah. For the very first time, a Grateful Dead album appeared with a lyric sheet. Robert Hunter discussed his take on printed lyrics with Monty Deem and Bob Alson in 1977. I used to think that if I printed the lyrics, that the band would take the opportunity to work so close down even further. And also, I didn't want people to get the whole message right away. I didn't like the lyrics on records. By the mid-70s, though, with more than a half dozen years under his belt as the in-house lyricist, Hunter began to rethink his hardline stance. On Blues for Allah, the lyric sheet actually went a step further than that, which I assume was Hunter's idea as well. The title track filled up a whole side of the LP insert. In one column, the lyrics appeared in English. But it was accompanied in translations in Hebrew by Drorapriar and in Arabic and Persian by Frank Vitter. The blog 52Words did a brief interview with Drorapriar in 2018, which we've linked to at dead.net slash deadcast, where she didn't actually recall much of the project, but remembered that someone from the dead had contacted UC Berkeley where she was teaching. The same can probably be said of Frank Vitter, who is also teaching there at the time. Yet it would also be the dead's last album that included printed lyrics. Ironically, more than most of their previous albums, I'd argue that Blues for Allah, and especially its second side, is precisely the kind of album that Warren's repeated very close listens. On most of the dead's albums, the recordings are idealized versions of platonically existing songs. On much of Blues for Allah, and especially the second side, the songs are themselves the recordings, barely existing outside the album. They reward listening to one version over and over, rather than many different performances. It's a different kind of value, but it took me years of repeated listening to perceive the flow of Blues for Allah, like the way this passage from deep in the glass camel section acts as both the prelude to the unusual occurrence's vocal ending, but also calls back to the song's main theme. In his online journal in 1996, Robert Hunter wrote about being around for the very final stages of the album's production. I followed the record from the studio right into the pressing plant at Columbia, in New Jersey, where Patti Smith used to shrink-wrap records. She might have been working there when I visited the shrink-wrap section for all I know. Sorry to interrupt, but got a fact-checky, Bob. Patti Smith grew up right near the Camden pressing plant, but never worked there, never making it off the waiting list, and was already well on her way in New York by that point anyway. To continue, the ladies on the line were pleased to see someone from the dead, whose record they were rapping. I saw the stampers being made in the acid baths, the goops of vinyl being pressed, the labels attached, and then spot-checked some fresh pressings they pulled every 20th copy in the listening booths, pronouncing them good. Can't remember who I went there with. Probably Bob Matthews. Yes, I think it was. The album's official release date was September 1st, 1975, the same night as the nationally syndicated broadcasts of the Great American Music Hall, which we delved into last time. Welcome, please, the grateful pit. The Great American Show and subsequent radio broadcasts featured the only fully realized version of Blues for A La. It had all the words. Unlike the album version, the frickets are right there in the mix from the very beginning, which I love. It had the final sand castles and glass camels section. I think Hard is on some of the percussion he used on the album, possibly Kreuzmann too. It's also the longest version of any sand castles and glass camels on any tape, nearly 10 minutes long in the middle of a 21 minute version. And it has the only live performance of the unusual occurrences in the desert conclusion with the full vocals. But they never do it again. The album, The Grateful Dead, have always had in them is out. Blues for A La. It's new. It's here now. It's The Grateful Dead. On Grateful Dead, records and tapes, distributed by United Artists records. Blues for A La was as ambitious an album as The Dead would ever make, and it lives without companion in the band's catalog. Where Anthem of the Sun has oxy-moxoa, Working Man's Dead has American beauty, Wake of the Flood has Mars Hotel. The Dead never worked in this mode again. One person who was a little unsure about the decision was Al Teller, who became their new record company boss when the band signed over distribution rights for Grateful Dead records in late June 1975. Please welcome back Al Teller. If I'm not mistaken, it wasn't Blues for A La, the first album they did where they were not doing songs they had already worked out on stage and live concerts. That's a whole different dynamic, which they had to get used to themselves. This was the first attempt at doing it that way. They had to go through their own version of a learning process, whether or not they thought that was what they were going through. I thought that work against how good that album could have been. Had they had the opportunity to work out some of these tunes live, had they worked all these songs in live performances before going into the recording studio, I think the album would have been stronger. For one of rock's legendary touring bands, the band didn't tour behind Blues for A La at all. The Dead followed their muse off the road in late 1974, and a year later that muse remained at rest in the Bay Area. One of the things that artists are always concerned about is the sense of their freedom and independence from a creative perspective. I am a great believer in that, and I gave them all the room in the world. I did not push back in the slightest. I love the album cover. I thought the graphics were fantastic. As I said, I would have preferred the album to have been the result of being on the road, but I know they weren't on the road, so it was what it was. This next bit shouldn't be much of a surprise. And to be perfectly honest, probably my least favorite track on that album was the title cover, The Blues for All the Side. I remember enjoying Side One a lot more than Side Two overall. One of the things that impressed me about them was, I think Rock Out said they had index cards for every dead head, and they would do a mailing to all the dead heads prior to the release of an album. Eileen Law had helped organize the dead's mailing list starting in 1971. By 1975, the dead had graduated from index cards to the next level, an innovation of which Ron Rakow was justly proud. We took the fan club stuff from Eileen and made her in charge of it, and it went from her to a computerization service who did a computerized Alpha Zip mailing list. We could do things by name, number, ethnicity, any which way we wanted. We could do only certain zip codes of certain areas. In 1973 and 1974, especially, they placed a special emphasis on growing the mailing list, sending Steve Brown out with the free stuff booth designed by Courtney Pollock, which we've talked about before. When Steve took over the free stuff booth the first time he went out, I made note, I wanted to see the effectiveness of it. We had a mailing list of 7,300 names with numbers and addresses and so on. After a short while, I think 18 months or so, we had 107,000. Al Teller. You'd always have a good first and second week sale of the record. That's why we're able to get it on the charts very quickly because all the dead heads were out there buying it as soon as it was released, and then it would start to tail off. Here's how Jerry Garcia described the dead's fan base to Mary Travers in summer 1975. We have a small but tight audience, a small but together audience speaking in all of America terms. Whether we could get them to that next level of sales success was really going to depend on the degree to which we'd be able to get a substantial uptake in radio airplay. And there was nothing on the album that sounded as if we were going to have that kind of a singles breakthrough. Record World was stoked on the album and the single, putting the dead on the front cover and calling them the first family of contemporary music. They wrote of The Music Never Stopped, the dead have held out for a long time before getting down to an AM type single, and it looks like this is finally yet, from the more commercial side of their Blues for Allah LP. Given the nature of the group's dedication and lengthy live performances, The Music Never Stops might be more apropos, but this is close enough to satisfy the legion of deadheads who will follow the guys anywhere. The song didn't crack the record World Top 100, though as we've mentioned it did appear on the Billboard chart number 81 with a bullet in late 1975. The album itself fared better, making it to number 12 on the albums chart, their highest placement until 1987. But that was about as far as it got. Global News and Grateful Deadland and a blip in the mainstream. Both the album out in the world, hides were once again shifting in Deadland. We repeat this Jerry Garcia quote from the great interview with Peter Simon from the Spring of that year. I prefer playing live to playing in the studio for sure just as an experience, it's definitely richer, you know, because it's continuous. I mean, you play a note and you can see where it goes, you can see that what the response is, what the reaction is. When you have a group of musicians in the studio, it's not unlike having a room full of plumbers. I mean, what we might be interested in as musicians and what we're doing might not relate to anybody else. In 1976, Bob Weir spoke with WMMR and described one of the reasons the band had stopped touring in 1974. But to me, it kind of better describes the situation the dead had created for themselves at ACES in 1975. Musically, we were getting sort of dangerously inbred. We were starting to play a risk that only the made sense to the musicians on the stage. Nobody else caught it. You know, there were subtleties too fine to catch unless you'd been following it for 10 years every night. And you can't present that kind of stuff to an audience because it can't help but go over their heads. Music Blues for A La is graduate level dead, both for the band themselves and certainly the audience. It's not a song that many people would cover over the years. Guitarist Henry Kaiser was probably the first. Certainly the first to put one on an album, 1995's Eternity Blue with Marilyn Crispelon piano. That's Gary Lambert on bass, by the way. The New York musician Joe Galant recorded it with his massive Illuminati ensemble as part of their Blues for A La project in 1996. This performance from the knitting factory includes David Gans, Bob Ralove, Tom Constantin and others. Music This is what their desert sounded like in 1996. Music In the years after the Grateful Dead, unsurprisingly, Phil Lesh was the first to touch it. Keith Eaton left us this story about catching Phil Lesh and friends in Asheville in 2001. While sitting in the upper rafters, people I knew from tour in the 90s were passing by a guy who I had had many exchanges with over the years from the late 80s into the 90s sat down to meditate beside us during the second set. And in the middle of a dark star, Phil busts out Blues for A La. Music A little more swinging than the original. This show became an official release by Phil Lesh. I can't even believe my face, as my grandfather would say, and I think what on earth is happening. And I look to the left of me and my friend, Olm, hasn't even moved a second, an eyelid. He's just there meditating. Our friend and musicologist, Sean O'Donnell, who discussed how Blues for A La is a song outside of tonality, had slightly different reaction when he saw further perform Blues for A La. I actually heard further do it at Coney Island at the Cyclone Stadium, and I had to go running for the hills. I could not get away. I didn't want to leave from the music, but I had to keep escaping because it was just scary. My third year was elsewhere and I was trying to escape. Music can be a lot of things. Beautiful, sad, exhilarating, funny, sleepy, and also just really weird and outside of this world. It was a place the dead themselves were barely comfortable with on stage. To my years, it's only following the Great American Music Hall show on August 13th that the dead began their pivot away from the plumber-like conversations. In that moment, the dead's world remained fluid, even as Blues for A La emerged into the real universe. By less than a week later, the members of the dead were back at aces, with Mickey Hart now fully reintegrated as a second drummer, and the music had already moved on from the far-out languages of Blues for A La. Music Blues for A la officially hit stores. As the stories usually told, the dead were having so much fun making Blues for A la that it spilled over into their next project. This is how Jerry Garcia described it to Blair Jackson. It was a continuation of what we were doing with Blues for A la. We were having fun in the studio is what it boils down to, and that's pretty rare for us. The energy was there and I thought, I've got a solo album coming up, let's cut these tracks with the Grateful Dead. I've already taught them the tunes. And surely they were having fun, but both Bobby Weir and Jerry Garcia were also under contract and deadline with United Artists for new solo albums, due ASAP. It was reported in a few places that Weir would be making his own album, in addition to an LP with Kingfish. Kingfish would regroup later in the fall at ACES to record their debut. But having to solve Legion of Mary weeks after signing that UA contract, Jerry Garcia needed a band even faster than that. Here he is explaining his new strategy to Mary Travers in early August 1975. This permutation of my solo albums is me using the Grateful Dead as my band, which is different from the Grateful Dead. Grateful Dead makes all its musical decisions on a group level in that sense. There's no leader or anything like this. In this one, I'm going to pretend that I'm the leader and sort of tell everybody what to do. The Dead would record tracks for what became Reflections throughout August 1975. Though it wouldn't make the final album, one very cool piece of the Spring Workshop sessions lingered through to the Reflections micro era, sometimes called the nines, after its time signature. The version on the All Good Things box confirms its real title, Orpheus. In fact, I'm going to propose an alternate side B for the final version of Reflections, consisting only of Orpheus and comes a time. Check out this transition. What's up in here, folks? But we'll have to fall deeper into Reflections some other day. I'm mostly bringing it up because by mid-September, Garcia had a new group, the Jerry Garcia band, featuring John Kahn, drummer Ronnie Tutt, and pianist Nikki Hopkins, debuting on September 18th in Palo Alto. In some ways, it was the formation of the Jerry Garcia band that truly marked the beginning of the Grateful Dead's hiatus, with their final known aces session on September 16th. But before the dead truly went their separate ways for a little bit, they had one more gig, September 28th in Golden Gate Park. Like all four of the dead's public appearances in 1975, their free show at Lindley Meadow on September 28th, 1975, with the Jefferson Starship as worth hearing, you can find it on the 30 trips around the Sun Box. It's also worth looking at again, because of the stories it tells about the dead, their place in the music world at large, and what their new album meant. Technically, the September 28th show was called the New Age Biosentennial Unity Fair, and there's a lot about the Unity Fair that's been forgotten. From the vantage of a half century, the multi-day Unity Fair was the linkage point between the radical movements of the 60s and the radical movements of the later 70s and 80s, with the soundtrack by the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Starship. The road to the Unity Fair is nuanced and fascinating. Here's Jerry Garcia speaking with Mary Travers in August 1975. Altamont did a lot toward making it difficult to have large groups of people get together. It killed something, or virtually killed something that we were very much into, which was free music, you know. So it's been weird for us to see free music, which started out as such a good giving kind of gesture and a good trip for everybody to turn into murder. Free shows had been integral to the Dead's existence, from numerous appearances throughout Golden Gate Park, ranging from the Panhandle, just down the street from their far-out Hate Street pad, to bigger affairs on the Polo Field or elsewhere. When the Dead started touring, they often played a free show in addition to their local paid gigs. We've posted a link to Light Into Ash's work on this topic at dead.net slash deadcast. But things were difficult after Altamont, which had come into existence in large part due to members of the Dead's family. It took a pretty audacious dream to stage a massive free concert in Golden Gate Park in 1975. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the chief dreamer came from a resident of the nearby Hate Ashbury, but perhaps more surprising is the fact that he just moved to San Francisco the year before. Please welcome to the Deadcast from the Unity Foundation, Bill McCarthy. I moved there in 1974, and I moved there because I wanted to make this movie called Darkness to Dawn. And so I moved to the Hate Ashbury. It was a time of renewal, this incredible time to be there. At the end of the 60s, it was really a decline. But then a few years later, people started moving in after they dealt kind of with the drug situation, and there were new shops, and it was really vibrant. I wish more had been written about that renewal because I wasn't there in 66 or 67, but I can't imagine it was much more beautiful than the time that we had in the early 70s. In the spring of 1975, he'd started to plan a fundraising event for his film project when Bill Graham put on the snack benefit at Keys R Stadium. But something amazing happened right before we did our first benefit, and that was Bill Graham, you know, who's the biggest producer in the world, was producing this incredible concert at the old Keys R Stadium at the end of H Street. And he had everyone there. I mean, it was Bob Dylan at the band, and Jefferson Starship, and Grateful Dead, the Doobie Brothers, you name it, they were all there. And it was to preserve education having to do with culture and sports in San Francisco schools. For more on the snack benefit, dig into our Slipknot episode. So I went to the concert, truth be told, I went after taking a little bit of LST, and was waiting to hear my favorite band. I had always been, I believe, the biggest fan of the Jefferson Airplane. I used to go to concerts when I first moved there, I would listen to them, and I had this feeling that I was going to do something with them. I didn't know what it was, but I just had this really intense feeling. We'll point out that it was something like this same feeling that led Donna and Keith Godshaw to the Grateful Dead. It was still a time of high magic. Here we are in 1975, and they had just walked into Jefferson Starship, and they had a song called Ride the Tiger, and in the middle of the song it says, in the summer of 75, the whole world will come alive. And it was like I was hearing it for the very first time. I heard the words, I turned to my producing partner, and remember we hadn't even produced our first event, yes. And I said, did you hear what they said? And he said, no, what did they say? I said, in the summer of 75, the whole world will come alive. So he said yes, so I said someone's going to do that. And he looked at me with dreaded eyes, and he said, who's going to do that? I said, me and you Richard, we're going to do that. And the next day, Richard and myself and two of our friends started calling every political, spiritual, environmental, and cultural organization in the whole day area, and told them that we felt it was time for them to unify. Well, being that we'd never really done anything, some people hung up on us, others said, what have you ever done before? And somehow, by some miracle, we were able to get 45 organizations, many of whom didn't want to be in the same room with each other, and got them to come together to create a unity fair. Now that's what I call riding the tiger. I wanted to Jefferson Starship to headline it. Adding music to the equation was a whole other kind of mathematics. Thankfully for Bill McCarthy's dream, though, in the summer of 1974, free live jams had returned to Golden Gate Park for the first time in a half decade. Music That was Jerry Garcia and Merle Saunders with Billy Kreuzman on drums in Mark's Meadow in Golden Gate Park on September 2nd, 1974. Their final show with Billy the K turned out. It was put on under the auspices of a new organization, the People's Ballroom, who are honored to welcome from the People's Ballroom, Larry Weissman. The People's Ballroom was a program of the White Panther Party of which I was a member. I was in the Bay Area chapter with San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley. If you hadn't guessed already, the 1975 Unity Fair, known to deadheads as 92875 in Golden Gate Park, was a major intersection between the dead in the mid-70s San Francisco Underground and ever-changing counterculture at large. You and you in the head of the Black Panthers want to ask what white people should do for the revolution so you should form a White Panther Party. John did that in Detroit and he also opened it up. So they published a 10-point program for the White Panther Party. Point number one was to support the Black Panthers. And then the rest of the points were pretty much aimed at hippies, you know, free drugs, all various things. And basically any group of people who wanted to come together under those 10 points could form a chapter of the White Panthers. The John in Detroit was John Sinclair, poet, jazz journalist, manager of the MC5, and subject of this 1971 John Lennon protest song. They gave him ten for two, and more miles came, the judges do. We got the got the got the got the got the got the got the got the got the got the got the got the got the got the got the set in. The People's Ballroom idea was John Sinclair's idea. They were looking at it in Detroit more about buying a building and making it a People's Ballroom. We took the idea, and because of our particular circumstances, decided to do it more as an outdoor production company. And the idea was to form a community coalition that would create a nonprofit production company that covered staging, sound, security, and production to basically create an alternative to the capitalist entertainment structure. Because a lot of people, for instance, kids couldn't go see bands a lot because they were mostly in bars and clubs that were selling liquor. A lot of women were reluctant to go places because of the kind of harassment they were getting. So our idea was to create something that would be an open community production company that could do these events. For a few years in the mid-70s, the People's Ballroom resurrected a hallowed neighborhood tradition. Our house was located right on the corner of Coalman Oak, so it was like right next to the Panhandle. When we started, we were doing a lot of Panhandle shows with local bands, such as Ascension, which was an all-woman rock band from The Hate, and Windows, which was kind of a David Bowie-type band that was a couple of gay guys and their friends. And then we would do shows. I think one of our first shows with a larger group was The Sons of Champlain in Marks Meadows. They were serious about the production aspect. We had a stage that we could build, all made out of plywood that we built the whole stage. It was expandable. The small one was like maybe 20 by 30 feet, but we could go up to as large as about 90 feet. Some friends of ours at a recording studio called Receiving Studio had a sound system, and the white panthers in working with neighborhood people provided all the security for the events. The scene in The Hate had continued bubbling on after the dead to camp for Marin in 68. Basically, what you had in The Hate in the early 70s was a lot of communes. The Good Earth commune, which I was a part of, was a very large hippie commune with about 18 houses. There were many other communes, smaller and bigger ones. We had one house on our street that was a 10 apartment giant building that had been completely abandoned, and the white panther party in The Good Earth took over and made it into a living space. It was very much analogous to the 80s, Lower East Side kind of thing where a lot of squats and collectives, and as it was getting cleaned up, the gentrifiers moved back in. We were on rent strike for years against the banks. It was a very volatile, still culturally relevant community. There were far fewer free shows, though. The city decided to not allow music events in Golden Gate Park, and what we did was we went around and got a petition from all our neighbors. We submitted thousands of petitions. We ended up taking the city to court, and we broke the ban. We started with these smaller shows in the panhandle and so on, and then started to move forward with the larger shows. The dead still had several close friends in the neighborhood. That was Merle Saunders' Welcome to the Basement, featuring Jerry Garcia from the 1972 album Heavy Turbulence, and the basement in question belonged to his family house, where he often held practice sessions. Check out our Garcia 73 episode for more on that connection. Merle Saunders lived right around the corner from us on Page Street, and at that time, Jerry was working with him. I think their first show with us was September 2nd, 1974, in Marx Meadows. That was Window and Ascension, which were the two local bands, and Jerry Garcia with Merle Saunders. The girl was the one that arranged that, although prior to that, on August 31st, we also had a Marx Meadows show that had Beau Diddley. And just out of nowhere, we were there building the stage, and Jerry showed up because he fucking loved Beau Diddley, right? And he comes and we say, what's up? We're talking. And he had this joint that he had prepared specifically, and Beau and his sister showed up. We all got high, and it was a great concert. Can't find a tape of Beau Diddley at Marx Meadows, sadly. We spoke earlier this year about Bill Graham's March 75 snack benefit at Kesar Stadium at the edge of the hate. In several ways, it would lead directly to the Unity Fair. Bill Graham wanted to do a show at Kesar Stadium, and because it was in the neighborhood, we asked the dead to reach out to Graham and say, look, you got to talk to the community. You know, we're not going to go along with this unless you can, you know, you need to do, if you're going to like use it, you got to do something with us. So there was a big meeting at the hate aspect neighborhood development company. And I'm pretty sure I know rock was there. Rock was actually someone who had been to our place and we knew him pretty well, you know, just as a person around that he kind of knew what we were doing quite a bit. I think Bob Ware was there and Jerry. I don't think Bill Graham was there, but some of his representatives and then us, the white panthers and a bunch of other neighborhood people. And we worked out a deal where Graham agreed to hire about 100 of us to work the show for pay. The dead, they were aware of what we were doing and in fact, we're so foreign above it. The dead's independent spirit wasn't lost on the people's ballroom crew. I remember that the dead tried to start their own record label and record distribution. I always thought that was like the best thing they could have done. Things might have been a lot different if they would have been able to create a way of doing their own recording and distribution, but it was just too much for everybody. Not every band had moved out of the hate. The airplane had a mansion over on Fulton Street, which was pretty much open to people who knew them. And we lived like maybe four blocks away from there. So we had gone over there a lot and got to know Paul, Candor, Yorma. Yorma and Jack had formed Hot Tuna, so they started playing for us also. Jefferson Starship had relaunched themselves in 1974 and were very committed to free shows as well, including a massive free concert in Central Park in early May to celebrate the release of their hit album, Red Octopus. We'd like to make an announcement about you fellas in the trees right over there. It's not real good for the trees to be up there. Why don't you get out of the trees, please? I'm looking right at you. Why don't you get out of the trees, please? In a few weeks after that, they played a free show in Golden Gate Park, which also included a set by Mickey Hart and Zakir Hussein's Diga Rhythm Band, featuring special guests Jerry Garcia and David Freiberg, which we talked about in our King Solomon's Marbles episode. That too was a people's ballroom joint. After the Hot Tuna show and the Starship show, we were having a hard time having enough ability to get more permits, and that's where the Unity Fair people came in. They were connected with the place up on hate called the US Cafe or maybe the Shady Grove Cafe at 1538 Hate. They had this sheet for the Stars Productions, and they were the ones that actually got the permit to do the Dead Starship show. But they didn't really have any connections to get them to do it, and they had of course no way to build a stage or do anything else. Bill McCarthy. We became in partnership with them, which was kind of interesting in a way because we were actually spiritual meditators, and they were like really, really strong political activists. So it was kind of interesting coming together to say the least. But it all worked out. The idea behind the Unity Fair was it wasn't just going to be music, but like all community groups were going to come out and have booths. The idea was to bring everybody together. The Unity Fair truly did bring together the disparate movements of the hate. They were connected also with the Angels of White who actually lived on our street, and they were kind of like, I guess you call them gay hippies, you know what I mean? So they were all about the flags and like sparkly everything. And I remember we said they used to throw great parties, and that's kind of how we met all these people. Bill McCarthy remembers the introduction slightly differently, but the connection between the Unity Fair and the People's Ballroom would produce some of the city's biggest gay liberation events of the later part of the decade. In 1975, most importantly, the People's Ballroom had an in with the Starship. We went up to the Starship out there playing house, and we were talking with Bill Thompson and Paul Cantner and saying, look, these guys got the permit so we can do this show, like, do you guys want to do it? And Bill Thompson started freaking out about Bill Graham and Bill, we're going to be really mad at us, and we really shouldn't do this. And I remember Paul just looked at him and said, dude, we're doing this. End of story. It's going to happen. And then we just rolled the joint, we all like, got high. We had to do some fancy talking. Park and Recreations was really not wanting the ends that big to play in the park. They had this kind of feeling that the, you know, the summer of love was going to come back or something. So when they said, well, who's performing? And we caught across on the first day we had local bands as well. So I just said just local bands. And I wasn't lying because the Starship mansion was right across the street from the park. There were some bumps in the biosentennial road. So some of we got past that hero. Then the unbelievable thing happened. The Starship song miracles hits number one on the charts. They're right now at this point right before our event, like the biggest band in the world. And it's like, oh my God. But then they called back and said, you know, they weren't going to do it because they were thrown into chaos. So we're having a meeting to scale back the event at the people ballroom, you know, at their headquarters. And right before, I mean, like magic, because it was just right before his walking out the door. This guy calls me Rainbow Star. Now Rainbow Star was a drug dealer for the Jefferson Starship and drove around in a rainbow called Mercedes. He was a real character, but he'd call me like a month before saying, could he, you know, design the stage. And I said, you know what, you can design the stage because first of all, no one else is going to offer to do it. And I don't even know what that means. The Unity Fair ran several days with local bands playing on a smaller stage, which I think is what Rainbow Star designed. So he's asking me, so how's everything with the Starship, the Jefferson Starship? And I said, well, not too good. You know, because they backed out because, you know, because of miracles. And this guy said the thing to me that changed my life all the way till today. He said, I don't care what they said. What do you see? And I burst out into tears because I could see them as clearly as the phone I was hanging in my hand. So he said, I'm going to give you a telephone number. I want you to call this person. And it turned out the person was the publicist. And I didn't even know what a publicist was. But it turns out she was also the girlfriend of Paul Kentman, which I also didn't know. So I got on the phone. She answered the phone. And I just poured my heart out. I said, look, your band is the inspiration for something pretty amazing is going to happen. 45 organizations, many of whom would not be in the same room with each other. The spiritual ones did like the political ones, the environmental ones for coups. I mean, it was just, I mean, how we get it together, I don't ever know. But anyway, she says, well, I'll talk to the band. I didn't think any more of it because I figured, well, yeah, what does that mean? So we get to the meeting and we're talking about how do we scale something back and the phone rings. And it's for Lambert who was so literally people's forum. And he goes into the other room, he comes back up to two minutes later. And this guy is a big guy. And he's shaking back and forth. What is a ghost? And he said to me, McCarthy, I don't know what the fuck you told them, but they're coming and they're bringing a grateful debt with them. Larry Weissman had orders to expand the parameters of their invisible ballroom. Our sound system really wasn't going to be big enough to do it. So I know that the debt agreed to handle the sound. And I remember somebody telling me, you're going to have to make sure that the stage is, it goes out to 120 feet from your normal 90. So we had to build more stuff. The first day of the Unity Fair was devoted to smaller groups playing on smaller stages. There were two stages. And one stage was in one part of the meadow and the other stage was in the other part of the meadow. Only meadow is a pretty big meadow. And so we had two stages running all day. We had all the boosts and displays and all of that, workshops. Local bands for local people. Oh my God, they were real local. There was a doctor, Ijarri, and his mom, Stringban. And he was a physician from Russia who moved here and had this acoustic string band. We talked about Dr. Ijarri in our Sufi choir episode. That was the sect that Arthur Russell belonged to earlier in the decade. Oh, there was Bobby Kent in the Christian Cadillac. There was, I don't know if you ever heard of Freaky Ralph. Freaky Ralph, well, he was a mainstay in the late 60s. He used to open up for a lot of the big acts. The stage featured a gorgeous piece of art that we'll mention briefly because it's yet another connection worth highlighting. It was an incredible banner. It was this triangle, this huge triangle, and to promote unity, we had all these artists working on it. Like somebody would work on one side of it, somebody would put another image in the middle, and it came with beautiful, beautiful piece of art. One of the creators was almost certainly Gilbert Baker, who in 1978 would dream up the rainbow flag while tripping at a Patti Smith show at Winterland, a story we told during our Enjoying the Ride season. He debuted at a Gay Freedom Day in 1978, an event with connections to many in the Unity Fair crew. Late September 1975 was a whirlwind for Larry Weisman. We literally had started building the stage 6 p.m. the night before and just worked all through the night. I was super proud of it. I mean, the stage was like the biggest thing we'd ever built. One hard-learn lesson from Altamont, which Altamont's organizers should have already known, is that if you're having a big free show, you don't announce it until as late as possible. So we had told all the radio stations like a couple of days before, and we said, look, you cannot mention this until one minute after 5 p.m. on Friday when Park and Rec closes, because if you do before that, all hell is going to break loose. Sure enough, somebody just let it loose, and the park called us and they were really pissed off. And they said, even if we're going to have to cancel your rent, we think you can't cancel us again. Thousands of people are coming. For what it's worth, I think only news of the starship broke on the radio. The dead remained a secret. Nonetheless... So we show up at the office of Park and Rec with the people's boardroom, and these guys are all huge, and they're angry. I mean, we're angry too, but not angry at all. So we just kind of stormed in there and told them they had to create, they had to take care of this, because this event was going to happen. There was no way we'd cancel it. And it was so funny, because when we came in, especially with the people's boardroom yelling and ranting, people were hiding under their desks. I mean, they were like, partying, fighting, what the hell was going on? So finally, they acquiesced. Well, it was kind of a fun and traumatic event at the same time. The cosmic consciousness might have been a little wobbly by 1975, but Dan O'Hencklin was picking up the message. Turns out Paul Cantner was low-key obsessed about manifesting something big and weird for 1975. When the airplane released Burk, on that album on the B side is a song called War Movie, where Paul Cantner sings... In 1975, all my people rose from the countryside. I'm not a cultist. I'm not even a fanboy, really, but I was, to that degree, greatest with the airplane. And we're coming up on 1975 and I'm like, okay, I'm going to rise from the countryside. So I went ahead and took an airplane to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and then hitchhiked for Minneapolis to California. You can see why Dan O wasn't about to miss the Unity Fair. Obviously, Gary Lambert was there. I was not a guy who toured a whole lot, but so yes, I pitched a perfect game in 1975. It was hard to beat the setting. So it was just like a beautifully set up and professional show, a beautiful day in the park, the Dead's history with that park, and the San Francisco scene's history in that park, and it was the starship and it was the Dead. And it wasn't like anything close to your, oh, let's set up a flatbed truck and find a generator and do it. It was planned, Larry Weissman. That was the people's ballroom dude. And that was our goal. We felt like just because it's a community thing doesn't mean it can't be professional. So we fried it ourselves on providing just as good as anybody could. It was one of the busiest and most intense days of my life because we had been up all night building the stage. Then we had to help the dead get the sound system up, and then they got the sound system up. And then at that point we're beginning to realize this is really going to be big. And then more and more people are coming. And literally the biggest thing we'd ever handled was maybe 1,000, 1,200 people. And we're looking at like 50,000 people. We've spoken with a great photographer and music head, Ed Perlstein, a few times this season, most recently about getting into the Great American Music Hall last episode. Around that time he made what turned out to be a pretty important life move. I started taking pictures with a good camera in 75, in summer 75. I was pretty poor and I couldn't afford to buy my own so different people would loan me cameras. You'd better believe he was ready for Golden Gate Park, another perfect picture for the year. I ended up getting there really, really early and they actually ended up building the backstage around me. I went there with Bob Marks and so there weren't any like, oh you had to have a pass or something like that. They built the backstage fencing around where I was and so I was there. I talked my way onto the stage telling him I'm shooting for Mickey. I said there he is, ask him and they didn't bother. It was a pretty full day. The Jefferson Starship played first. Larry Weissman. It was overwhelming for everybody involved. I don't think we realized how meaningful it was to the community to have this happen after so many years and so much going on in the hate and redevelopment and the struggle against gentrification. I mean to have the two bands that probably most represented the culture of that 60s neighborhood playing and playing for people who were also committed to the culture. It wasn't like Bill Bram was coming in to do it. It was other people in the neighborhood getting together. So it was very emotional in that sense. And just as much as it was a reaffirmation for the older heads, it was a reaffirmation for the younger heads like Joan Miller. In the fall of 1975 in San Francisco I was a 15 year old teenager who was completely enamored with the Grateful Dead. Any kind of music and it was announced that there was going to be a free concert. I think it was announced for Jefferson Starship and I don't remember it being really publicized that the Grateful Dead were going to be involved too. So my girlfriends and I, we hopped on our 10 speeds and rode down to the Lindley Meadows. And when we got there, the scene was freaks in friend, street characters, kids from the neighborhood, old and new fans of music. And the whole place was just wafting in a cloud of pot smoke. We thought we had died and gone to heaven. We couldn't believe it was free. Just right in our budget. And we moved through the crowd. We listened to some music and it was so much fun and free concert in the park with such great musicians was what a little girl or a teenage girl in San Francisco, that's all she would care about. There were some speakers between the bands. Bill McCarthy. Keith Lampy who was a music writer for Cro-Daddy magazine, but went by the name of Ponderosa Pine because he wanted to save the pine trees. So he would wear a mask as if he was a pine tree and he had these robes that he was a brilliant environmentalist. So he spoke and Peter Berg was one of the original diggers. He spoke as well. One newspaper report mentioned someone speaking on behalf of the San Quentin Six, a story way too deep for today. And while the Unity Fair succeeded at Unity, the afternoon of September 28th belonged to the dead and the Starship. Gary Lambert. They both had new releases out. Starship was becoming, that was red octopus and miracles. So that was a huge moment for them. And again, me being the ridiculous, lucky, lurking bastard, I actually got walked onto the stage by Bobby for that one. So I was watching from behind the amps for most of it. I haven't found myself yet, but I haven't looked that thoroughly at Pearlstein. And I walked onto the stage and I ended up sitting on the front of the stage, basically to Phil's and Keith's side. And just sitting there and I had the best access in the world to take all the pictures that I want for the whole show. Nobody bothered me. So that was quite an amazing experience. I was slightly stage right, just like sort of peering over maybe Phil's bass amp. Some of my most famous pictures were taken in September 75 at the Golden Gate Park free show that the dead did. It was a nice, what can I say, and also getting to look out at the crowd and Lidly Meadow unfolding before my eyes and smelling the eucalyptus in the air. You know, that was kind of your fantasy vision of free music in Golden Gate Park. Jerry Garcia said that free shows had to be free for the band as well. That is, free from all hassles and chill as possible. There's a persistent rumor that the dead took this seriously for the Unity Fair and dosed together for the gig. Larry Weissman. That sounds right to me. And I think it's a good example of how we were making sure that they would be comfortable with doing it. And I do think that that happens, but I can't say for 100% sure. I can tell you that I certainly was about as high as I've ever been in my life, for sure. It was the dead's first show of the year without an introduction by Bill Graham. Like the band's last two appearances, in June and August, it began like this. Right away, the dead are audibly looser than their other recent shows. And it's very possible to hear the band transitioning into the Grateful Dead that would emerge in 1976. It was not a warm and sunny San Francisco day. Jeff Gould soon to found modulus guitars was there. Because Garcia is wearing a leather coat. It's cold and foggy. This is where I live. So if the cold fog, he feels wearing a sweater, you know, I think Bobby's wearing a... I don't know if it's a leather or whatever it was. Garcia is playing the Travis Bean. Jerry Garcia was indeed sporting a new guitar. Here he is talking to Bonnie Simmons on K-San a few months later. Playing this Travis Bean guitar, which is a new brand of guitar, and it's different from most normal ones, and it has sort of a metal neck. I like it a lot. It's very stable and simple. His Doug Irwin guitar, Wolf, had gone in for repairs, returning to action in late 1977. Until then, Garcia would play a series of white-bodied Travis Bean guitars, giving his sound a slightly different bite. But as they move through slipknot, Garcia breaks a string, and after he disappears from the mix, the action trails off. The string pop happens around here. A very San Francisco free show in the park thing happens during this break. Listen to what Garcia plays in the background. Some excellent comedy ensues as Grateful Dead Brand echolocation services kick in, and they try to figure out where the woman is in the crowd. Over there, wave with their hands. That's where the doctor is needed apparently. I don't everybody wave. And we need a doctor backstage for a lady having a baby. Maybe there's even two of them. I like Garcia's off-mic reaction to the next comment. Is there one out there? Not yet. No, yes. Maybe there's one out there, and maybe there's one back here. Everybody's really sure. According to record world coverage of the event, the name of the father was Sunny Place. That's Sunny with an O. But take that with a grain of salt. If anybody from Sunny Place's family is out there, get in touch with us. Dan O'Hencklin was there, going three for four in 75. The Great American Musical Concert was perfect. I mean, it was just perfect. And then came, later that summer, came the Free Concert in Golden Gate Park. And I went down there with all my buddies from the Weasel Band. We were up on kind of a little rise, like a bench. I think there was a word of Denver in them, there were trees, and in amongst all that stuff was a huge statue head, carved of wood, called the Goddess of the Forest. We're looking out over it. It was wonderful. And I was surrounded by all my friends, and we were up in the middle of the gendarmes, and we were, you know, partying on, and just a wonderful memory. The Great American Musical Concert The Great American Musical Concert The Great American Musical Concert The Great American Musical Concert The Great American Musical Concert Having revived it for the reflection sessions, the Dead bring back they love each other for the first time since early 1974, the debut of the Slow Down Arrangement. Gotting from the top, there's nothing you can stop. Lord, you know they made a fine tradition. They love each other. Lord, you can see that it's true. Matt Kelly from Kingfish plays harmonica on The Music Never Stopped and beat it on down the line, his first official appearance with the full dead. Sheklami Later in the set they returned to Franklin's Tower. Jeff Gould. In Franklin's Tower where he says, if you get confused listen to the music play and then he rips off this kind of like, I know what you call it. It's kind of a chord, a metalic shard, it's just a wonderful sound. One watchman hates, one watchman deems. You get confused listen to the music play. Oh, yes. Always enjoy this shot from Phil. You don't hear someone say trucking. That's not how you say it. You don't say trucking. But anyway, we're not going to play that now, we're going to play something else. And Chaser. The correct pronunciation of this to soon is trucking. God willing we'll remember the words. All you folks that know the words, now then real, real vividly. Sometimes this excellent jam is labeled the 11, but it's just a jam in 11. And we say goodbye to one more piece of blues for Allah, the second and final complete performance of King Solomon's Marbles and Stronger Than Dirt or Milk in the Turkey. I think there's a variety of reasons why some of the blues for Allah material didn't become cherished parts of the dead's live repertoire. It required close and vigilant rehearsal, but it was more than that. The dead didn't mind rehearsing sometimes. But Garcia would refer to the 11 with one of his heaviest insults, calling it a musical cop, that it enforced its will on them as musicians and robbed it of its fun. Even the usually fast-flying Garcia doesn't sound too confident after not having played the song in six weeks. And pieces like King Solomon's Marbles could definitely be musical cops. Others like Sage and Spirit and Blues for Allah required not only practice, but an especially sensitive level of communication between the musicians and if playing in public, an attentive audience. But for one more day in the park, King Solomon's Marbles and Stronger Than Dirt sounded for the heads. Maybe more importantly, the energy that the dead and the starship contributed fueled the next phases of San Francisco counterculture. Bill McCarthy. I came across a pretty amazing story from the Bay Area reporter previewing the 1977 edition that Bill is speaking about. Next to an article detailing the year's events, there's a photo of Unity Fair 75, of the grateful dead on stage, but the only character that was on stage was Bill McCarthy. I had put together the headliner of the Bay Area reporter previewing the 1977 edition that Bill is speaking about. Next to an article detailing the year's events, there's a photo of Unity Fair 75, of the grateful dead on stage, but the only caption reads, Unity Fair opens and closes Gay Pride Week. Sure, the dead weren't at Unity Fair 77, but I'm guessing they still felt part of the unity. I put together the headliner for the year before in 76, and there were like, there were about 30,000 people that came to that event, and it was in Golden Gate Park, so it wasn't at the seat of power or anything like that. Well, this year, everything that was happening, and the controversy, and then the Gardner, again, Gardner was murdered like a week or so before the event. So everything was like in a state of flux, nobody knew what was going on. But I said to my board, I said, we have to get involved in this, we just have to. So we put on the Unity Fair, but also we were in charge of the stage, and we put did all of the stage performances for an audience of about 250,000 people, and was headlined by Sylvester. The first Unity Fair illustrates how the dead fit into the long history of radical San Franciscans. The San Francisco music scene continued to flow ever onward, and the dead remained an enormous local institution, but it would really start to change after 1975. The Unity Fair would be the last major free show in Golden Gate Park for many years. In 1976, the People's Ballroom attempted to book a return show by the Jefferson Starship, but fell into a tangle of city officialdom, where the city denied their attempt to get a permit for a show on the polo field, offering them the Claren Park, a location on the far outskirts of town that was a pain in the ass to get to. The People's Ballroom kept on trucking, helping with the stages at many of the big events we were just speaking about. But the Unity Fair 75 represented something special. Larry Weissman. It was the dead's last free show in Golden Gate Park, or anywhere, for more than 15 years, not returning until a 1991 gig on the polo field following the tragic death of Bill Graham. In 1977, the dead asked Robert Hunter to draft some new verses for truckin'. They never sang them on stage, but Hunter often used this verse in his solo performances. After the Lindley Meadows show, The Grateful Lead paused their operations in a way they hadn't before, and this is where we start to lamb this period of Grateful Lead history, with a few appendices and other endings. A few days later, on October 4th at Winterland, Kingfish and Keith and Donna with Billy Kreuzman shared another bill, gearing up for the two bands to do an East Coast tour together later in the fall. In his memoir, Searching for the Sound, Phil Esch describes the aftermath of the Lindley Meadows show as when, quote, the hate has finally began for real. For 10 years, The Grateful Lead had consumed my every waking moment, and much of my dream life as well. Now I was truly at loose ends. No musical projects except the occasional Seastones gig. That was Seastones in Southern California, near San Diego on November 22nd, 1975, and what would be the last performing for the project? It marked a bittersweet closing. In Ned Leagin's Five Years Around the Dead World, he'd helped create a space for some of the band's most furthest out, but also its most intimate music. One of the reasons he's been an honored guest on the Deadcast since before we even launched. And while doing that, he was also busy developing his own voice as a composer, creating the beginning of what was intended to be a much larger body of work. Welcome back to close out the Seastones story, Ned Leagin. And with Jerry and Phil and David, through 1975, I left completely all of the music by the end of 1976. There was no falling out, no confrontation, no fight, no anger, no bad words. Things had been coming to a slow boil as the Dead faced the reality of having their own record companies and no touring income. They sold distribution rights for round records to United Artists in the early summer of 1975, almost exactly as Seastones was hitting stores. For an album of bio music, it had done pretty well, making it into the top 20 in Billboard's FM Action Chart, and even cracking record world's top 200. The early summer recall of Seastones is a firm part of Ned's memory, but I've never seen any evidence of a later United Artists pressing. I think perhaps more likely, the album sold out of its first pressing, and UA simply never repressed it, perhaps because it was in quad. I had been living off of royalties, advanced royalties from round records, thankfully so, and it was expected that that would translate into real royalties from the release of Seastones, which then, those royalties actually disappeared. The accounting of round record is a tangled story unto itself, which we'll save for next season. United Artists had been helpful in the beginning, but the budgeted money eventually went purely through grateful that movie production and other work, and there was no budget for Seastones too or for business supporting us playing live. At first, UA treated Ned like a star, flying him down to LA for a glamorous photo shoot. A story appeared in Billboard, picked up by the Associated Press, and run in newspapers throughout the fall of 1975, with a headline about an album made by a computer. But it's no exaggeration to say that the world wasn't ready for Seastones. Ned was disappointed by its critical reception, or lack thereof, by the new music world. There was no discussion of interactive computer technology and computer software, which I was one of, if not the first to do. There was no discussion of voice and words into sound and sound and becoming words and voice, textural continuities. Even though my words were composed by me to be performed by Jerry, by Grace, and by David, well-known vocalists. And there was no discussion of the music that we were doing and its relationship to overall classic or new music history and music. Since 1975, many of Ned Lajan's core ideas about iterative music generation, nonlinear structures, and ensemble improvisation have become more widely accepted. But in 1975, Ned Lajan needed to make a living. Around Rackow, no bad intentions, and Jerry said that I was going to be in the movie, and I was getting royalties from that, but it turned out to not be true. The Grateful Dead movie had run into numerous problems during its editing phase that kept it from being released until 1977. One of those was that the master 16 track audio recordings had been handled pretty badly, in part because Betty Cantor Jackson was on maternity leave in October 1974. My tracks were lost and garbled, I needed to be replaced. Jerry was happy with jams that came out of Seastone, but I would have to wait six months to a year to do those overdubs, and I couldn't afford to wait to do that time. Ned was coming to a very hard decision. I believed in the music, I believed in those guys, I believed in all of what we were doing, but it wasn't possible. Unless I've been born to a rich family that could finance it. So here's one clear line, I had to pay rent. The Seastone's live ensemble that featured Ned alongside Phil Lesch, Jerry Garcia, David Crosby, and Mickey Hart was proving tough to keep in balance as a focused representation of Ned's compositional ideas. I had certain frustrations that my musical conceptual ideas and my playing and composing was not being discussed or eliminated by the others who knew and made music with me. Jerry and David in particular were emphasizing them wanting me to leave, but I had no existing management or road of booking people or any money to pay for it, given that I wasn't getting royalties from round records or from United Artists. And their personal lives, which I was close to, particularly with Phil and with Jerry, were changing. And so music as a life art process was evolving. In the fall of 1975, Ned Lajin began his exit process. Phil said I was too pure, quote, too pure, meaning too idealistic, that I was believing in, as he said, idealism, honor, loyalty, and wanting the ability to get freedom to stand on my own as a person, as a composer and as an artist. So, feeling for it, I think that he shared. David was very angry with me for leaving, quitting music making, and told me so. I still remember his facial expression and voice. They're understood and we stayed friends for years, for years. We lived close by one another. Ausley Stanley remains one of the undersung engineers of the whole Seastones project, and some of his tapes can be heard on the expanded 2018 version. And so I asked Phil and Jerry and David, I would prefer not to be talked about and not have a public past life, so that I could go and find a job without any notice. And it was the science of respect that I got from everybody that no one ever said anything. I was just allowed to disappear to fly away. By 1976, Ned Lajin would take a job with processor technology and begin his new life. He didn't even have to relocate from Marin County to go from being near the center of the rock scene to being near the center of the tech scene. Ned Lajin has continued to create art, photography, and writing since then, as well as an album of new music, Cat Dreams, and we've posted a link to his Spirit Cat site at dead.net slash deadcast. The final Seastones performances were in November 1975, one at home in San Rafael and one just outside San Diego. La Paloma, we drove down there. There were two sets, which is the only accounting. And two long sets, and only the first set got recorded. And Phil thought the second set was the best playing I had ever done. He complimented me. There was nothing booked after that, and it seemed later that it was okay that I played my best the last time I ever played. I said it was okay that I played my best the last time I ever played. The day after the Unity Fair at Lindley Meadow, Jerry Garcia reported back to work on The Great for Lead movie, a very regular job outside The Great for Lead, and the new Jerry Garcia band. This is from the August 1975 interview with Mary Travers. The film started out as being part of an idea. I couldn't give our audience us without having to send our bodies around to you now. So the idea was if we could capture one really good performance, maybe we would have something like that. Since then, the movie has transmuted the idea of what it is to transmute it. It was taking up an increasing amount of time. Well, we'll be ready. Oh, God, I don't know. I might be working on it for the rest of my life. I hope. Supposedly. Somewhere early this next year, I have a spring, maybe early spring. Sometime in spring or next year, I think it should be pretty dense. And here's an update from early 1976, speaking with Bonnie Simmons on K-San. The movie is sort of at a broadcast stage getting there. The music is mostly sort of cut. And the form of it is coming together. And hopefully we have a March deadline for what we're doing, the editing of it and so forth. Then it goes to the lab sometime in there and gets hung up in that process for I don't know how long. And the sound mixing has to happen and everything. And hopefully the record will be, I mean the record, the movie will be out. And maybe July-ish if we get lucky. They did not get lucky. And the movie would continue to dominate Jerry Garcia's creative world for another year and a half. Finally released in spring 1977. Far too late for it to be a substitute for the actual Grateful Dead. Despite their love of performing live, the Lindley Meadow Unity Fair didn't inspire the dead to return to the road. It was still a problem that needed solving. Here's Garcia speaking with Ben Fong Torres for a K-San special in 1975. The Grateful Dead problem at this point has to do with we want somebody to turn us on with a new idea. We want somebody to supply us with interesting new input in terms of the kind of flat that we'll go out in. And the kind of concert we're asking the promoters to do something creative. You know, turn us on. Give us something that's different than what we've been into. Interestingly, just in the same land in window of ours in late 1975, Bob Dylan and his friends were doing their best to solve something like the same problem. And came up with their own solution. The Role in Thunder The Role in Thunder The Role in Thunder The Role in Thunder The Role in Thunder The Role in Thunder After returning to the road for the first time in seven years and playing arenas with a band on tour 74, Bob Dylan was already sick of the hassle. The Role in Thunder review hit the road in New England in late October 1975, playing only in auditoriums and theaters. The shows were only announced as the collective of musicians rolled into town, a party that lasted through the spring of 76, though they eventually ended up in bigger venues. And if you look closely at the Role in Thunder stage, like really squinted, you could catch a sight of the blues for Ola Fiddler, stuck to Scarlet Rivera's violin. As it happens, our colleague Ray Padgett interviewed Scarlet Rivera for his absolutely crucial Bob Dylan newsletter, Flaggin' Down the Double E, which we've linked to at dead.net slash deadcast, and asked Scarlet the absolutely pressing question of whether or not she was a deadhead. No, I wasn't, but I liked that sticker and I related to the skeleton playing the violin. So I put it on my violin and kept it on the whole time. It was my traveling companion. But seriously, if you're into Bob Dylan with even a fraction of the same passion that's propelled you eight episodes and several hours deep into the Blues for Ola podcast, you want to swan dive right into the Flaggin' Down archive. It may not have been created with the title Blues for Ola in mind, but it also expresses the music inside and a keyhole to worlds beyond. The Blues for Ola Fiddler got around. A trickster in the dead's trickster army, alongside the wake of the flood crow, the jester, the ice cream kid, and other chaos making men. The Fiddler showed up on LSD Blotter, of course, and was spotted there as recently as this past summer of 2025, during a bust in New Zealand. We've got one more place to trace the Fiddler today, and how he ended up in the company of one of the world's preeminent fiddle experts. That was JW Day, one of the many Fiddlers collected on the anthology of American folk music by the legendary alchemist Harry Smith. We've spoken a few times with Raymond Foy, one of Harry's caretakers in his last years. Check out the East Coast episode of Enjoying the Ride for the story of Alan Ginsberg securing a Rex Foundation grant from Jerry Garcia, so Harry Smith could live comfortably. Harry got money from the Grateful Dead, and it really meant a lot to him, that last year that he was living in the Chelsea Hotel. And I used to tease Harry about the connection, because the dead would be in town and all the dead heads would be hanging out at the Chelsea or outside or looking for floor space. And I'd say to Harry, your people are in town, and Harry would say they're not my people. Harry Smith died in late 1991. But after Harry died when I was cleaning his room out, I opened the closet door, and on the inside of the closet on the very back wall was a Grateful Dead poster hanging up. I thought that was very touching. It was a Blues for Allah poster. I don't think he chose it. I think he just happened to come upon it and put it there. Perhaps the Fiddler chose Harry Smith. But the Fiddler was finicky, apparently. Even during the years when the dead regularly flew the Blues for Allah banner behind them on stage, they didn't return to the song itself. On October 6th, 1981, in London, on the night Anwar Sadat was assassinated in Cairo, the night's space segment drifted around the Blues for Allah theme, but never made it all the way there. In 1988, when Jerry Garcia described the Desert Jam to Blair Jackson, he said, It didn't quite work the way I wanted it to, but we did try it in some live jams, and sometimes it worked. We still do this some. Mostly, Bob and I do it in the space jams now. Just the two of us. It's easier to hear the harmonic content. Now Phil's been joining us lately. If anybody out there can point to specific examples of the band approaching the Desert Jam in space segments, get in touch. Keith Eaton left us this story that I think instinctively speaks to the power of Blues for Allah. Impressions fade away over years, but I still won't ever forget how confused I was the first time I ever listened to the B side of the Blues for Allah LP. The LPs, I wasn't supposed to touch. I didn't know what to make of that music. In their own ways, Blues for Allah, both the album and the song, and 1975 as a whole, were high watermarks for the grateful beds' creativity at its most ambitious, from their music to the way they existed in the world. It doesn't sound like anything else before or after. It's not for everybody. It never was. But if you want to engage with it, the 1975 Grateful Dead are waiting for you up at ACES, ready with their instruments and a box of crickets. 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