Blues For Allah 50: Crazy Fingers

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 Dead Heads, welcome to 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 flip our Blues for A la record over to side two and drop the needle on track one, crazy fingers. Well, folks, The Grateful Dead Blues for A la 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition is out now. You may have already checked it out, but if you haven't listened to this, it's a three CD set. It features the newly remastered album with unreleased soundcheck and concert recordings. The set features almost two hours of unreleased recordings. Among these are highlights from rehearsals from the August 12, 1975 soundcheck at the San Francisco Great American Music Hall, including the album track Sage and Spirit, Help on the Way, Slipknot, and Franklin's Tower. The collection continues with performances from June 21, 1976 at the Tower Theater in Pennsylvania, spotlighting five Blues for A la Songs alongside favorites like Eyes of the World. Rounding out the set are selections from the Bill Graham snack benefit, which stood for Students Need Athletics, Culture, and Kicks. That was held at Kesar Stadium in Golden Gate Park on March 23, 1975. There are also vinyl variants of the original album available, including a picture disc, a midnight fire red vinyl edition, and a 180 gram black vinyl. Very cool looking Blues for A la 50th Anniversary merch is now also available, and all of these can be found at Dead.net. And over at Rhino.com, you can check out the Dolby Atmos mixes on Blu-ray disc. They were mixed by Stephen Wilson. If you know who he is, you know he's making some of the best surround sound mixes there are out there right now. These sound nothing short of fantastic, and they are ready to blow your mind. Over at Rhino.com. Check out all of our past good old Grateful Deadcast episodes, including the Complete Seasons 1-11. You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform and listen how and where you like to listen. You know you'd be surprised how many of our fellow heads don't know about the Deadcast yet. You could really help us out by subscribing, sharing us with your friends on social media, hitting a like button, leaving a review. Any way you can help spread the word about this to your friends, we appreciate it. Thank you. Do you have a great story about anything Blues for A la related? Were you lucky enough to catch the band at one of their 1975 shows? Then we need to hear from you. Head over to stories.dead.net and record yourself telling us all about it. You may just hear yourself on a future episode of the Deadcast. We have transcripts from many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure. Head on over to dead.net slash deadcast-index and check them out. Crazy Fingers. The track that kicks off side two of Blues for A la is nothing short of an absolute Hunter Garcia classic. The band employs a cool reggae groove that pairs oh so well with Hunter's poetry and that's laid over one of the best chord progressions on the album. Get ready to find out all about Crazy Fingers. Here's Jesse Giorno. Flipping the side on Blues for A la, we come to one of the most gorgeous pieces of music the dead ever created in the studio, Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter's Crazy Fingers. Grateful to that archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux. It's one of those songs I do love the studio version of it as much as I think most live versions or possibly even more. It's a magnificent piece of art. Crazy Fingers is a delicate song and not delicate like the fragile quiet of China doll. Delicate as in a really careful assembly of instrumental and vocal parts. Though the final piece would be credited to Garcia and Hunter, Crazy Fingers was the kind of song and performance that could have only emerged from the situation the dead built for themselves at Aces in spring 1975. A lot of the dead's lyrics are they're all open to interpretation. They're all whatever we get out of them and some more so than others and Crazy Fingers is a song that is surreal. It reminds me a little bit of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds in terms of it is so out there and you can get so much visual out of it too and that's the thing I mean I visualize I think all of the dead's lyrics in one way or another. So, but this one it's a song that I still don't understand and I don't want to. Some of them are a little bit more on the nose like keep your day job. This is not keep your day job. This is a song that has so many ways to interpret it. Love, dream and love. We'll have more to say about this topic deeper in the episode but here's a thought Jerry Garcia floated to Peter Simon in March 1975 as Crazy Fingers began to take shape. I like songs that are more evocative than I say thought provoking. Crazy Fingers was created during its multuous window in Grateful Dead history when they came to the hard decision to sell Grateful Dead and round records to United Artists which we discussed some last time. This episode we're delighted to be visiting with Al Teller then president of United Artists who reminds us of this important point to keep in mind as the real world encroached on the dead sequestered at Aces Studio in Mill Valley. When I was an undergraduate and saw them for the first time or listened to them or read about them for the first time I just like their attitude. They were independent, they had their own way of doing things musically, they had their own way of going about their career and I thought that was very cool. I really felt that if you feel strongly about something and particularly when you're dealing with creative businesses where there are no formulas no matter how often people will pop out of the woodwork claiming they do have formulas regarding creativity the ability to have a belief in yourself and a belief in your vision and the wherewithal to execute it is critically important. Just being around those guys for a very short period of time just reinforced that sense. I was a great admirer of how they went about their musical journey the use of virtually every musical genre in one form or another. I thought it was very very impressive. We'll have more with Al Teller later this episode but now we reset ourselves a slightly earlier in the creative process. Blues for Ala had a few different broader missions as a creative work by the dead. Jerry Garcia articulated them to Mary Travers of Peter Paul and Mary that August. We've posted a link at dead.net slash deadcast. The thing for us musically is where do we go from here without going back without covering ground we've already covered the thing to do for us to do is to start structuring whole new kinds of music to play. We've used part of this quote before but Jerry Garcia spoke to Blair Jackson about Blues for Ala and told him the whole idea was to get back to that band thing where the band makes the main contribution to the evolution of the material. So we'd go into the studio we'd jam for a while and then if something nice turned up we'd say well let's preserve this little hunk and work with it see if we can't do something with it and that's how we did most of that album. What became Crazy Fingers originally had a hard rock and roll feel it was completely different. A lot of it went through metamorphoses that normally would take quite a long time. We sort of forced them through. That was the piece of music that was originally called Distorto the earliest piece of the sessions we currently have access to from February 19th 1975 at Aces excavated by David Gans for the Grateful Dead Hour. It might be the first time they tried it you can hear Jerry Garcia calling out chords. They kept working with the song in February and March and the Distorto only got fuzzier. Here's a bit from February 28th. Can you hear the connection to Crazy Fingers? Please welcome back from the City College of New York the deputy dean of the Humanities and Arts and esteemed deadcast musicology correspondent Sean O'Donnell. The chord sequence is the same the top descending chromatic line is his vocal line in the tune in Crazy Fingers and the chords in the same chord progression. And very quietly as they are trying to resolve headphone issues during the March 4th session Phil Lesch achieves title very quietly mentioning the working name of this piece. I know I think he's called it a rocker when Jerry referred to but it's it's more like that gruff fusion mid-70s fusion distortion. That's Al Dimeola playing guitar on Return to Forever's piece The Shadow of Low from 1972 but the chord sequence was very much in line with the band's idea of creating new languages to play inside. I really feel like he's thinking about collections of notes on this record or at this time or maybe at the studio while he's thinking of ideas he's thinking about groupings of notes to do things that wouldn't be your normal I'm just going to play a pentatonic scale or I'm going to just play a major or minor scale and if it's chromatic in a jazz standards way like okay you know their progression is pushing us this way but then when it starts to use so many of the tones you're like this is going for something different. We talked in the slipknot episode about how part of Blues for Aula involved connecting together different ideas the band was working through at the ACE's sessions. Sometimes those connection points were only passing ideas this is from the March 4th session and there are a few passing ideas happening at once not all of them having to do with Distorto. That's Weir suggesting that he might do Robert Hunter's new solo tune Last Flash of Rock and Roll with Kingfish. He didn't but listen to Garcia and Newdeline in the background. I think this is the earliest appearance of the Blues for Aula theme on the surviving tapes. The ideas didn't really connect and we'll get back to the Blues for Aula theme soon enough. The band had plenty on their hands with Distorto. Here's Garcia talking through the chords. He's still not done with it and has an idea for a B section. I'm pretty sure Lesh and Garcia just implied they were working on a piece by Keith Godshaw and maybe we can pencil him in as the writer for one of the other unfinished grooves we were discussing last time possibly the thing called E to A flat which would have connected at least harmonically to this. Garcia's response is fascinating to me because it implies that they were still thinking of these as workshop sessions with individual songwriters in charge as opposed to attempts at collective composition. Garcia would come up with his own B section. First they try to take it a minutely faster tempo. And that's all we have of Distorto and the piece of music doesn't show up again on the currently accessible session tapes for almost three months by which point it sounds a bit more familiar. Yeah. Sometimes this session is labeled April 2nd and sometimes June 3rd. But I think it's actually from June 4th because the sequence includes two full takes of Crazy Fingers, the second version being the final album take which is marked on the tracking sheet as reel number 121 June 4th take two. Obviously by now the song is pretty much locked in which we'll break down in a moment but at the session start they're still working on the feel. Things were loose but productive it aces. Listen for Garcia singing off mic. Yeah. That's it though. That's a good, that might be a little fast. Just a little fast. So the lyrics to Crazy Fingers were in place by the time they recorded the basic tracks. Not always the case with this album as we heard last episode. Garcia breaks off that take but they're feeling it. Oh also the B section is done. And with that they're pretty much ready. Yeah that sounds starting to sound neat. Let's get one more of them. We have one of the raw session tapes for the final version which we'll refer back to occasionally. So Sean O'Donnell is a big fan of what the piece transformed into. I love that tune. I just, I love it. It's the synthesis of so much of Jerry's past and future. It has like a really traditional structure. This AAB form. Very structured. It has that post-Roe Jimmy Lilt that Reggae Lilt that is there. Somehow the melody comes across like a jazz standard in some ways. Feels like it would be Garcia Van Repertoire in a lot of ways. And then it's this highly chromatic tune that doesn't just flow so nicely. You don't notice that it's really sophisticated in a compositional way. It's sort of becoming out of the let me sing your blues away trajectory of like the cram as much chromaticism in here into the structure of the song as possible. But it it's done so much more fluidly in Jerry's hands. In his memoir Searching for the Sound, Phil Lesh calls Crazy Fingers Jerry's beautiful essay in Smokey Ambiguity. Also from the City College of New York, Chadwick Jenkins. Crazy Fingers would not be possible without Tone Away Ambiguity. Crazy Fingers is the great example, I think, of ambiguity in this on this album. There is a fully diminished chord and that does contribute to it. But the whole thing's ambiguous. You start off with this figure on the G, a sus chord that resolves, if you wouldn't even call that resolving. It just alternates between a sus chord and a triad. When we first hear it on the album, it sounds to me like it's almost like a like a dominant chord. Like I keep expecting it to go to C minor and I feel like the whole piece flirts with this where are we kind of energy. The G kind of wins by fiat because you have that nice little walk down and these things that sort of yell out G to you. And then the very first thing you get is a fairly typical progression for the dead. 5 4 1 in G. But then immediately goes to B flat and creates a sequence out of it and drips all over the place. It's such an odd tune. To me some of that is that fragility of the nature. of the tonal sense of it. You never feel fully grounded but it's not so dissonant that you're like oh we're in some weird place. It's just kind of drifting. Here in the isolated guitar parts, I'd really love to hear this song performed by Jamaican jazz master Ernest Ranglin. As much as the tonal fragility, there's also the construction of its dynamics. It's one where you have to do band rehearsals as opposed to the fill version where you have to go learn your part and then you have to put it together. It's in that sort of road jimmy camp where you all have to be on the same page in terms of the feel of it and where you're putting your one finger on the hand. Every musician in the mix is contributing in significant ways to the picture of the tune. But to my ears, the thing that gives crazy fingers its dreamy glow is Keith Godshaw's roads run through the Leslie rotating cabinet that's one of the signature sounds of Blues for Ala. And Bobby Ace has his guitar dialed to a subtly iry reverb, adding to the song's reggae feel. Which of course Billy Kreitzman is supporting. But crazy fingers is only partly a reggae groove. I'm not sure how to describe what Phil Lesch is doing, but I wouldn't call it an island feel. If I heard this bass part without knowing where it came from, I could maybe guess that it was Phil, but probably wouldn't be able to peg it as crazy fingers. This is what's happening under the intro into the first verse. His playing on the B section is more recognizable. Of course adding density to the outro, surfing under and around Garcia's guitar. This is a fairly dense chord progression, which is part of what makes me say it has a jazz standard kind of vibe where the progression is very tight and directed. And it's not in the overly complex camp where it's different every time it comes around, which is the trouble a lot of Phil tunes or other tunes where it was this way a second ago and now it's this way, whereas this is again that very strict AAB structure, so it's always going to cycle through, it's always going to be the same and as long as you know the progression, you're going to be fine with the notes on the page part of it. So then it's just the locking into a groove that keeps all those styles present that kind of synthesizes. The total picture is a synthesis that's both singularly grateful dead and singular within the grateful dead. While there are other reggae-tinged moments in the dead songbook, none with quite this rhythmic delicacy. With one notable exception, it never quite flowed like this again. On the basic take, the song continued for another minute. Here's how the fade out sounds on the album. And here's a little more of it. You can imagine where it goes from there. The lyrics were finished by then, as we heard before. Your rain falls like crazy fingers, peels of fragile thunder, keeping time. Here's Robert Hunter speaking with WLIR in 1978. Hunter is speaking in a symbolic sense. Please welcome back Christopher Kaufman, author of the forthcoming book from Duke University Press, Clowns in the Barriain Ground, The Grateful Dead, Literature, and the Limits of Philosophy, which we've linked to at Dead.net. The other two characteristics of haiku are the kiraji, known as the cutting word, and the kigo, a seasonal image, neither of which crazy fingers has in literal senses. Perhaps it's most accurate to describe crazy fingers as a series of haiku-like gestures. It's also possible Hunter was remembering an earlier draft that was haiku before getting edited into the song. Speaking with Blair Jackson in 1991, he said, crazy fingers was in fact all written beforehand. It was a page or two of haiku's I've been working on in a notebook. Jerry looked at them and said, hey, this might fit together as a group. But amazingly, we also have two and a half very different lyric drafts for crazy fingers, courtesy of Steve Brown, which indicate that it wasn't quite as smooth a process as that. If Garcia did spot something in Hunter's notebook, that draft is missing. But Steve has a remarkable typewritten document that we've posted at dead.net slash deadcast, where you can read not only a very early draft for crazy fingers, but also some of the lyrics Hunter typed over as he worked. There are seven verses on the sheet, none of them proper haiku, and only the first of them has any firm relationship to the song that became crazy fingers. Your reign falls like crazy fingers, peels of fragile thunder clapping, satisfaction in the wine, a little time, and who can tell? Here's Jerry Garcia speaking with Peter Simon in late March 1975, as Distordo is changing into crazy fingers off camera. My capacity as a person who chooses a lyric to sing is really about as much as I would want to have toward the responsibility of the content. I mean, the fact that those are the things of Hunter's output, which is really pretty enormous, only a small part of it ever gets to be he and I songs, and those get to be, those are usually edited quite a lot from what they originally were. I've been taking things as easy as I can, inventing further dreams to go fulfill. Company is one, a crowd is two or more. I don't think I've ever been alone before. Earlier, Chadwick Jenkins spoke of the song's tonal fragility, and that's of a piece with its lyrics. Haiku is another example of a kind of fragility. The point of a haiku is you have so few words, and you're trying to make some kind of statement that's both imagistic and kind of emotionally moving in this very small space. Fragility just seems like the right word for that song to me in a lot of ways. And this is going to be, this is going to be a weird stretch, but it's almost like kintsuge, right? Like the art of kintsuge, to take another Japanese art, where you have a broken pot and you put it back together with the glue that has the gold in it. So you're taking the fragility of it and making that part of its stability and beauty and so on. And to some extent, crazy fingers work like that. You've got all these harmonic fragments that would work in different ways, that would be cohesive in different ways, that you're taking them and pulling them together, and it makes it all work. And yet at the same time, it's like, you feel the fragmented nature of it. And haikus are kind of like that for me too. One by one, the marks get wise. Everyone gets civilized. I saw the wolf light in your eyes, flicker like a match inside the wind. It was getting thin. See, that's part of my editorial finger in there. That's the editorial hand of Garcy in there. And my feelings about it are that, well, personally, I have this hang up about songs. I'm fascinated by fragments. I'm fascinated by fragments because of my involvement in traditional music. There's a lot of things around that are fragments of songs, old traditional songs. And they'll be like this tantalizing glimpse of two or three verses of what was originally a 30 verse extravaganza. And there's be like two or three remaining stanzas left in the tradition, and that you read them or hear them, and they're just utterly mysterious and evocative. And Steve also hung on to a draft that was much closer to the final verses, and certainly closer to the final rhyme scheme, but still not quite there, which we've also posted at dead.net slash deadcast. There are some fascinating differences. Hunter was in England for lots of this period, and this is all very speculative. So I wonder if Garcia requested that he develop that first draft we just heard, and he came up with the second we're about to quote from, and then Garcia edited from there. I'll read from the draft version, and then we'll hear what it turned into. It's typed in all caps, which is kind of funny for a song that we've been discussing in the same terms as Haiku. Several lines and crazy fingers evoke other pieces of literature. Surely many writers compared the sound of rain to tapping fingers, but in the first line I hear an echo of E. E. Cummings' poem, somewhere I have never traveled gladly beyond, which concludes, nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands. With that, your rain falls like crazy fingers, peels of fragile thunder keeping time, recalling pain that still is to come. Some sing blue. Your rain falls like crazy fingers, peels of fragile thunder keeping time, recall the days that still ought to come. Some sing blue. Hang your heart on laughing willow, straight down to the water, deep sea of love. Hang your heart on laughing willow, straight down to the water, deep sea of love. Lovers of Love return to this sea when they go. There's still a third type written document that Steve held on to titled, Corrections for Crazy Fingers, not an exercise manual. And even some of these corrections got changed before the final version, which will include some of as well. These lines appear, calm as the dawn-red face of the sea, sailors still know. Beneath the sweet calm face of the sea, swift undertow. Love may be sweeter than life, I don't know. Feels like they could be the same. May Lady Lullaby sing each strain for you, soft, strong, sweet and true. Life may be sweeter for this, I don't know. See how it feels in the end. May Lady Lullaby sing plainly for you, soft, strong, sweet and true. Cloud hands reaching from a rainbow, tapping at your window, touch your hair. So swift and bright, cool fingers of light float in air. Cloud hands reaching from a rainbow, tapping at the window, touch your hair. So swift and bright, strange fingers of light float in air. Something I'll flag the next verse is something I only recently picked up on in this period of Robert Hunter's work. A series of lyrics either partly in Spanish or with references to Mexican culture, which also includes Hunter's solo song Keys to the Rain, as well as the first draft of Franklin's Tower, which we missed a few episodes back and will include here. Like Crazy Fingers, there's a similar type written draft in Steve Brown's collection that contains a verse that doesn't quite fit the rest of the rhyme scheme. This performance from 1978 is a reminder that Robert Hunter sometimes had other ideas about how their songs might go. A lighthouse for the sinner. A lamp to light your way there. And the faith that lay you down. In this next scrapped verse, Hunter references Malagena Salarosa, a famous Mexican song. Here sung by the four amigos on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. Malagena Salarosa, Blue Light City Tango, Columbine, or in parentheses, Valentine. Dark as the night, you're still by my side. Shine and shine. Who can stop what must arrive now? Something new is waiting to be born. Dark as the night, you're still by my side. Shine inside. The line about something new is waiting to be born resonates a lot with me thinking about the Grateful Dead in 1975. A deeper echo is William Butler Yates' poem, The Second Coming, written in 1919. What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. But then there's the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, writing from prison in 1931 after being imprisoned by his local fascists. The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. No matter how it's phrased, it's a powerful image of change, destiny, and you know, hope. In the 1970 book about alternative spirituality titled The New Religions, philosopher Jacob Needleman wrote, sooner or later we're gonna have to understand California and not simply from the motive of predicting the future for the rest of the country. Something is struggling to be born here. End quote. It's possible to read The Grateful Dead as symbolizing that on both micro and macro levels, especially during 1975, as they tried to build both new musical forms and run their own record and film companies. Anyway, as Robert Hunter was saying, gone are the lights that flicker and die, changing each dream in midstream. While Lady Lullaby still lies here by me, bells chime out from the sea. Gone are the days we stopped to decide, where we should go, we just ride. Gone are the broken eyes we saw through in dreams, gone both dream and lie. Life may be longer than love, I don't know. See how it feels in the end. While Lady Lullaby sings plainly through you, this much is true. Life may be sweeter for this, I don't know. Feels like it might be all right. While Lady Lullaby sings plainly through you, love still rings true. Midnight on the carousel ride, mirror of changing faces, gold ring glide. When I reach for it, my hand touches yours by my side. And this appears in the amended draft. Never could fathom, or figure, why it slips away when you try. Midnight on a carousel ride, reaching for the gold ring, down inside. Never could reach it, just slips away when I try. Christopher Kaufman has a thought about this line, which I think is appropriate for this period of dead history, when Robert Hunter was feeling alienated enough from the Grateful Dead Collective to relocate to England for a few years. Still on the gestation page of the project, I read the Theodore Sturgeon book, More Than Human, that they were always talking about early on. There's a passage in that that reminded me when I read it of Crazy Fingers. There's this character in this book who can go into other people's minds and is trying to describe what that's like. So here's the quote, he said, as like walking in a tunnel and in this tunnel all over the roof and walls, wooden arms stuck out at you, like the merry go round, the thing you snatched the brass rings from. There's a brass ring on the end of each of these arms and you can take any one of them you want to. So when I first heard Crazy Fingers however many years ago, I didn't know carousels that worked that way with the gold ring, like that was far into me as a 13 year old or whatever I was when I first heard the lyric. But the notion that you're going like inside and there are these rings, these brass rings that you can grab and sort of jumped out at me when I was reading that novel a couple of years ago. And this sounds like the close of Crazy Fingers where you're like reaching for the gold ring down inside and the lyric continues you never can reach it, it just slips away. In both cases you have this internalization and then the presence of this reward and you're on this merry go round thing. Theodore Sturgeon called these group minds, blesches, a combination of blend and mesh, and keep the dead's flesh in mind as we continue through this next segment. For a moment it was possible that they wouldn't be the dead again. The reality was working against them on that front. How was their own flesh functioning? Robert Hunter was contributing lyrics but mostly from a distance. Founder of the Grateful Dead Studies Association, Nicholas Merriweather, who wrote liner notes for Blues for A la 50. Hunter is absence. That's significant too. He's always been there. He's always been part of the stew. His absence is also a part of that larger kind of sense of turmoil and chaos and that has to weigh pretty heavily on at least Garcia. This is the guy that he collaborates with that in many ways serves as a kind of anchor for his own creativity and to have him 3000 miles away at a time when there is no internet and no easy telephone. This is significant too. We'll pop open the overdubs to Crazy Fingers a little later in this episode but between the recording of the master take on June 4th and the overdubs later in the month there was a lot going on beneath the sweet calm face of the sea. Two days after the basic tracks for Crazy Fingers on June 6th came the fully realized live debut of Seastones, Dominican College in San Rafael with an expanded ensemble led by Ned Lajan featuring Jerry Garcia, David Crosby, Phil Lesh and Mickey Hart. Ned Lajan had been a pretty integrated part of the dead's collective musical mind through the first part of 1975 playing during many of the workshop sessions which sometime included Lajan's own compositions like this April 17th tape from Aces minus Jerry Garcia but with David Crosby and John Cipollina of Quicksilver Messenger service. Welcome back composer Ned Lajan. We've linked to Spirit Cats a collection of Ned's visual art writing and music at dead.net slash deadcast. That part of a multi-part work called A Lost Soul and Cipollina's on that and Cipollina now knew that because we had jammed on that at Mickey's years before he was interested in playing piano. Seastones existed in multiple forms. In June 1975 Ned Lajan was celebrating the Seastones album created in multiple drafts and sub-realizations between 1970 and 1975 finally making it to stores in all its quadrophonic glory in spring 1975. The album came together from numerous recording sessions at Mickey Hart's Barn and Elsewhere starting in 1970. We got deeply into the underpinnings of it during our nedcast and I'd also recommend you check out Ned's writings on his Spirit Cats site. All the technology and all the art and the writing of mine and the composition and the playing all all converged to some degree in the 74 tour with Bill and with Jerry but really converged in 75 starting in June. It wasn't just that the musicians were creating music together it's that Ned Lajan devised a signal chain where their signals affected one another. If Crosby or Garcia were playing through a ring modulator either voice or guitar or anything else a delay a voltage control delay or BCA I could feed the other side of it the modulator side of it with a pre-recorded tape and I could turn that on and off or play the on and off or gates and triggers through my digital keyboard the emu. There were some rehearsals at Wears and then at my apartment in Fairfax Bill lived right up the street okay Bear lived right up the street so they were over at my place with my synthesizers set up there and Crosby came by a couple of times which caused some heads to like fall off there they're next people seeing him Garcia came to my apartment where I had the stuff set up but I would work with them individually. Though there was certainly improvisation involved in the live version of Seastones it was also an intentional performance of pieces from the album. There were some goals because I wrote words so there was some goal I'd give them words and they would play with the word and with me and the electronic effect or modulation until we got what we like. Garcia and Crosby both have ring modulators but they also have echoplexes and and they're using through preamps they're using effects pedals well-walled pedals which are really filter pedals and volume pedals. Crosby had his electric 12 string and he had his mic and he had his music stand and he had the modulator there and a couple of other effects that I had designed into the system and Garcia is the same that was electric and I couldn't convince Garcia because of the setup time to bring pedal steel. There were only four musicians on stage at Dominican College. Mickey was brought his entire barn of instruments and then he was forced to use the orchestra pit because he had so many instruments. There was no front of house engineer at the Seastone shows and in Patty Healy's photographs you can see the dead speaker cabinet stacked up behind the ensemble a miniature wall of sound of multiple smaller systems combined into one with the mixing happening on stage. So if they were going through my synthesizer or their their own if you'd look at the setup their speakers were right behind them so they heard themselves better than the audience heard them so one of the things that needed to be corrected there was to have a PA mix the words from the album were part of the words it's sort of indistinguishable in the recording just once again we didn't have anybody mixing Ed Perlstein was one of the Bay Area deadfreaks keeping their ear to the wind for live events that spring and made it to the Dominican College show. I saw Phil Lesh and Ned Lajan do Seastones at Dominican College in June 75 it was very very dark and somebody in the middle of the show used a flash and everybody went oh you know because like it was crazy the sounds were very low and soft and it was trying to keep the audience quiet and let them let them listen and of course dead heads don't like to be quiet. Jeff Gould who founded Modulus Instruments in 1978 was also at the Dominican show and shares a memory with Ed Perlstein. They had a show at the Dominican College in Marin David Crosby was there and that was pretty wild stuff there somebody they're shooting flash pictures it really just fell off in the middle of the Dominican show even they're trying to get to this kind of space and somebody in the audience shooting flash pictures it was not very cool. So how was the show Ned? It was a good starting point it was good it could have been better in a sense but it always can be better so I shouldn't even say that. It was remarkable in that Garcia and me and Crosby were really into it and we played this quiet section that Garcia thought was some of the most beautiful music he'd ever made outside of the Grateful Dead. It was sort of orchestral and it was a version of the seventh section on the album that Crosby and Garcia voices and me on synthesizer organ the longest section of C-stones on the recording. We've talked at a few points this season about how the Dead's activities were parallel with some of their progressive contemporaries in 1975 and we've got another example here. That was Robert Fripp and Brian Eno recorded at the Olympia in Paris on May 28th 1975 around a week before the Dominican College performance of C-stones from the only short tour that Fripp and Eno did together. In some ways the British duo were the closest corollary to C-stones making their live debut under dim stage lights after an extended studio collaboration which included the 1973 classic No Pussyfooting. Much of their music was made by feeding Fripp's guitar into Eno's tape machines to create long and gorgeous tape delays. A few years earlier when he was in Roxy Music Eno had processed his bandmates instruments through his synth but is said he only ever treated them one at a time and even Fripp and Eno's combination of guitar and synth and tape loops didn't match the systemic and organic integration of instruments that Ned Lage had built for the live C-stones performances. It was still beautiful though. They were often tempted to imagine the Grateful Dead as a band out of time. They had to operate in the world just like everybody else. A position they had to think about even more during the years they were operating Grateful Dead and Round Records. A period that was starting to come to an end in June of 1975 as they recorded Crazy Fingers and the expanded C-stones debuted at Dominican College. Here's Jerry Garcia speaking with Mary Travers in August 1975. I think it might have worked had we started at a different year. I think this last year was particularly a drag economically especially on the record industry the whole trip what with the paper shortage you know the covers and all that and vinyl the tremendous escalation of vinyl and all that stuff. The mid 1970s was the beginning of the extended oil crisis that would shift global politics profoundly and in a sense a signal that the on-the-road years were about to get less freewheeling effects were still feeling today both economic and environmental. It was always a tough time to run an independent record company but in 1975 it wasn't getting any easier. Plus the whole sort of collapsing American economy so that this distributors couldn't pay their regular what they what normally they would pay and they take the whole record trip has taken a tremendous beating and since our scene has always been scuffling you know even at its very best always is scuffling we were just but marginally we marginally succeeded for a while. Last episode we discussed what the band had to do to stay solvent which was send Ron Rack out of Los Angeles to seek away to salvage Grateful Dead and Round Records. The day after the C-stones gig we've been discussing and three days after the June 4th crazy finger session on June 7th Record World announced that the dead were looking to sell. We decided that the idea of dealing with all the independent distributors was not really working too well we fell in with the United Artists which has its own distribution and so it's able to absorb a lot of the expense that the distributors individually have to take over. For the first time in a few years the Grateful Dead had a new record company boss. Please welcome to the good old Grateful Dead cast Al Teller then new president of United Artists on his way to becoming a music industry legend. I have a couple of engineering degrees from Columbia University then I went to Harvard for my MBA but you know I've been a music junkie my whole life and while I was getting my MBA the summer job I had between my two years was working at McKinsey and company the big management consulting firm and they assigned me to a study they were doing for CBS Records and which was a you know very good piece of luck for me because when I went into the building and met some of the guys and all that stuff it became clear to me that this is some this is what I wanted to do. I got to beat the senior executives and Clyde Davis offered me a job as assistant when I graduated that's how it started. In direct and intentional contrast to the many characters involved in shaping the Grateful Dead story in the early 1970s Al Teller was the first in several years that one might describe as establishment. I ended up going to United Artists back in this would have been 1974 I was 29 years old at that time I never intended to leave CBS again but the opportunity to be responsible not just for the marketing side of the game but also the A&R side was just too attractive for me. United Artists was founded as an Artist First Movie studio by Charlie Chaplin and others but were purchased as a diversification aspect by the enormous life insurance company the Transamerica Corporation in 1967. In a funny way they were a local company based out of the not at all creepy sounding Transamerica pyramid in downtown San Francisco completed in 1972. They really didn't have a compelling artist ruster at that time and I'd have to be hard pressed to say who they're big I think you know maybe the nitty gritty dirt band we're the circle just curiously enough before I actually moved to California I spent a week or so at the UA's offices in New York where I was living and I remember when I went to the office for the first time in New York there was already a pile of memos and letters for me and at the very top was a test pressing of an album and so I preferred to listen to an album rather than read a lot of memos so I put the album on and it was a test pressing of ELO's El Dorado album it did become a great hit for us so they rapidly became the biggest selling artist at UA working on that album breaking that album was one of the experiences I really looked back at fondly. Al Teller was on his way to a career as a hit maker and would later have massive success with Bruce Springsteen and others. Even though I wasn't a deadhead I was a fan particularly of their of their live performances and I spent the virtually the entire decade of the 60s from 61 to 69 either in college or graduate schools I saw the dead in New York in the 70s a couple of times. Caterpillar music, film or east probably. As a 20-something member of the record industry Al Teller certainly kept track of the dead's efforts. I'm reading the traits and the various all sorts of music publications so I knew what they were up to and if I recall correctly my reaction to that was yeah well of course they would do that or they would try that because they had the great full dead they had been pushing all sorts of boundaries. They never struck me as a band that felt particularly confined by the conventional wisdom of the time and why would that apply to the conventional wisdom of the how you go about conducting business as an artist in the music business. So if it didn't come as a great surprise I wondered how well it would turn out for them because the realities of distribution in the music marketplace certainly at that time were not the easiest and having marketplace weight and gravitas and relationships and an adequate staff all those things came into play and I just wondered how they were going to go about doing it. As we've talked about grateful dead and round records operated profitably for the small record companies they were but the dead themselves needed money to live on an income not provided by even a small independent record company able to put albums into the top 20. We're going to repeat a few Ron Rackow quotes that we used last episode. I started with United Artists was not desirable but they had plenty of money behind them and they needed us the most. I just don't recall exactly how Ron Rackow and I connected I don't know if he reached out to me or some intermediary reached out to me on behalf of them but one way or another Ron and I met and I liked him and we got along and he invited me up to visit with the band which was that was an interesting session was over it was at Bob Weir's house his home studio I think all the guys in the band were there and they were sort of seated in a almost like in a horseshoe kind of fashion and I was on a little piano stool in the middle of them and I had to keep spinning my on the stool to answer various questions that they threw at me. Unlike Joe Smith their last establishment rep Althiller was their contemporary. I was the same age of these guys in fact a couple of the guys in the band I'm sure were actually older than I was I was born in 44 I think a couple of the guys were born a little bit earlier a couple perhaps a little bit later. It would have been nice to Warner or Columbia or Capitol or anybody to get us we had a little reputation it wasn't literally it was a big reputation we didn't sell very much though but uh the United Artists to build a company on us and and so I went at them looking for seven figures in advance and all kinds of stuff and got everything I wanted and I thought in terms of what I was trying to accomplish with the label itself that having the dead associated with the United Artists was a very cool thing to do at that time. It would give us a kind of projection into the consumer marketplace that I thought would be very helpful for us. As far as our corporate parent Transamerica the insurance company at its arms this girl was concerned I couldn't care less what they thought. Of the mini tapes we have from ACES the dead's first meeting with Altheller is not among them. I made it clear that as far as I was concerned you know whatever music they turned out was fine with me. I was not going to push back musically on them whatsoever in terms of the marketing and promotion and stuff like that. I was always just my mindset in general is to be collaborative with an artist. I'm not going to dictate how we're going to do things so I try to put the medias about that. I thought we had a pretty good session. I wanted us to have our own identity in the record company and everybody else wanted that also. And Rackow and I went off to have lunch and we started to outline the structure of what a deal might look like and I scribbled a few notes on a napkin that I was using that the burger I was eating was dripping on the napkin. So it was a burger stained napkin with my notes. We did it on their napkins. It was not a one napkin deal. It might have been a three napkin deal. It's very possible that I pulled several napkins out of the napkin holder. Yes. I think Ron is correct because when I thought about it I said how can I possibly gotten all the points on one side of one greasy napkin. I took it with me back to LA and I went. I'll never forget this. I went into the office of our business affairs head and I dropped the napkin on this desk. I said make a contract out of that. On June 11th Grateful Lead Productions and Grateful Lead Records prepared a contract that I think was preliminary paperwork for their proper UA contract with an actual deadline right there on paper. The first album shall be completed on or before July 10th 1975. In the midst of all of this the Grateful Lead were getting ready to manifest again. As when they popped up at the snack benefit in March Jerry Garcia and friends were set to appear at Winterland and what was billed as the Bob Freed Memorial Boogie to help pay expenses for the family of the late San Francisco poster artist Bob Freed. Not as well known as some of the other local poster artists. Freed did a handful of dead posters including the great Trippin ski from Lake Tahoe 68. He died suddenly of a stroke in January 1975 and several benefit events were organized by fellow artist Wes Wilson. The group of friends that appeared on stage at Winterland was the seven-piece Grateful Dead that would become familiar to fans when the band returned to the road a year later. But that wasn't what was planned. Ned Lajen. The Winterland gig was Jerry Garcia and friends and there was only one friend, Meek. Mickey wasn't supposed to be there at all. As with Mickey's unexpected arrival at the October Winterland farewell it caused rumbling among the rest of the rhythm section. And for reasons separate from the unexpected arrival of Mickey Ned Lajen chose to extricate himself from the gig. Over the next few months he would begin a slow separation from the Dead world which we'll return to later this season. Heads in the crowd didn't know exactly what to expect. Back with more tales from the Golden Road, yours, ours, and his please welcome Gary Lambert. Basically every time Jerry played someplace or yeah there's oh yeah yeah the rest of the band's gonna show up and you know it didn't happen but that that was very common you know deadhead word on the street kind of stuff but uh I I never really came to expect it. Dan O'Henclin who he spoke with about Veneta 72 and Watkins Glen 73 made it to this show too. When I moved west permanently in 1975 I arrived in Monterey on the Russian River around my birthday which is June 16th so it was right around this time of year and my friend not a deadhead in the order that I am or that others that we know are um but still was one of those guys that made it to Watkins Glen he looked at me and he said here happy birthday and welcome back and welcome to your spiritual homeland and it was a ticket with a Bob Freed memorial show. Michael Parrish I produced a Kingfish show at UCSC when we did the show at um at Crown College we had them to dinner so my my first wife cooked dinner and we were all sitting around and the thing that they were all talking about was have you ever seen Trilogy of Terror? It's a really pretty bad set of three horror segments that was broadcast that year um Karen Black was in one of them and they were just all talking about that. Do I make you nervous, Doctor? Karen Black, a major star, creates a television there's a golden chain wrapped around it to keep the spirit from making the doll come to life. Face to face to face with the unbearable unknown Trilogy of Terror but Michael stayed in touch with Kingfish management and soon picked up a good tip. My connection with Kingfish was was helpful I didn't get tickets from them but it definitely said you really want to go see this show so I made an effort and I think it was basically sold out but um there was the local Santa Cruz records store I see records sold tickets and we went down they actually had some so um I was very glad to be able to go to that. Dan O'Hanklin. And we all piled in to the vehicle and headed down to San Francisco and yes my reaction was yes yes yes because then I knew that all the ugly rumors really were false. Gary Lambert. The Bob Freed Memorial Boogie also built as Jerry Garcia and Friends and Kingfish and Keith and Donna I believe and and the mirrors I don't remember the mirrors but there was a the mirrors were on the bill. That'd be mirrors the San Francisco band featuring future K-San DJ Trish Robbins and not mirrors the Cleveland band featuring Velvet Underground taper Jamie Klemick. Michael Parrish. Robbins was the lead singer but she also later became a DJ in the Bay Area. I suspect there was a Bob Freed connection I don't know if she was already a DJ at that point and he pulled some strings I mean it was unusual because that was the only time I ever heard them or heard of them but you know they only played like half an hour or something. That was from an archival self-titled mirrors album released more recently. Their keyboard player had some connections to the next act who occasionally covered one of his songs Keith and Donna possibly the debut of their new drummer Billy Kreuzman. Like Seastones they also had a new album to promote. In a set of Kingfish. It was a pretty different vibe than the snack benefit in March. Gary Lambert. Gary Lambert. Gary Lambert. Gary Lambert. Gary Lambert. Gary Lambert. Well, we went through Graham Central Station in Santana, the Dewey Brothers and all that. It was a much more focused dead family kind of event and with the unannounced dead once again capping it off. Jay Curley and his friends didn't need inside intel. Well, that was another Jerry Grissey and Friends trip, but we all knew that the dead were going to play there for sure. And sure enough, they got a full Bill Graham intro. We'll stick with the excellent Robert Rondo audience tape of this show. This time, Bill Graham seems to have gotten the memo about not calling them the Grateful Dead. I'm going to focus on the Jerry Grissey. The American Diocese is Jerry Bob, Nicky, Phil, Phil and Keith. Can you? Founder of the Grateful Dead Studies Association, Nicholas Merriweather. When we listen to the snack benefit, when we listen to the Bob Fried Memorial boogie, those are in retrospect very clearly Grateful Dead concerts, semi-colon. You can also hear them as something more than that. Here they are opening with the debut of the very song we're talking about today, less than two weeks after recording it for Blues for Allah. We're going to zoom in a tiny bit on this Jerry Grissey and Friends set. Of the four performances from 1975 that might be called the Grateful Dead, this is the only one so far without an official release. But like each performance, it signified changes. Both things going on out of the public eye at ACES, and in how the dead thought of themselves is a live band that performed in public. I don't know. See how it feels to be here. Maybe the love of Icing played for you, soft so cold, sweet and true. It still wasn't officially the Grateful Dead, but with the United Artists' deal on the table, it was getting closer to the moment when they'd have to acknowledge that they were in fact the Grateful Dead. The snack show was a performance of several in-progress new pieces sewn into a suite they were then calling Space Age. The Bob Fried Memorial boogie featured the return of some old favorites. Here's Jerry Garcia speaking with Peter Simon in March, just after the snack benefit. I mean, there are some songs that you can keep doing over and over again, they still live. They still have something that you can really feel as though the song means something to you, and you can do it and feel honest about it. Some material just really lasts that way, some doesn't. Music plays Beat it On Down the Line was one of the oldest songs in the Dead's book, stretching back to their days as Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, and one they could still play without thinking too hard. Probably most of the material had to pass both the honesty test that Garcia mentioned, as well as being able to play it without having practiced it. Probably very few people noticed at the time, but it was the first sign that Phil Lesh was no longer an active vocalist. Music plays That fed the more traditional Dead Head's desires, and those of us with lust for novelty were also wonderfully appeased. It was great to have the familiar Dead back, but the new music was the focus for many. The first set was bookended by new material, and some of it wasn't quite finished. Music plays Another delightful surprise, and we were starting to get some of the song forms that were going into Blue Turala. We got Crazy Fingers, we got, I think, Help and Slip were instrumental at that point. So again, we're getting this wonderful sense of something creative evolving in real time, and it's not the way we used to absorb it from one dead show to another, and seeing these jams coalesce into songs. This was one-off events in which you got a little progress report. Music plays Jay Curley Yeah, first Crazy Fingers, first Franklin, first Help on the Way, without lyrics. But yeah, there was a bunch of new songs there. Music plays Future modulus founder Jeff Gould was there. That was a really good show. That one stands out to me as the summary of Crazy Fingers and Franklin's Tower. It's like one of those things you hear, you know, Roll Away to Do, or Roll Away to Do. Had to write the first time. Music plays In the second set, the audience got something almost familiar. The extended space age piece they'd performed at the Snack Benefit. Music plays And of course they did the whole Blues for All, again, which was just incredible. Music plays Michael Parrish There were some really significant differences in the pacing and everything, but it was more or less the same thing they performed at the Bob Freed show. You know, the last part of the jam part of that show in the second set. Music plays Here's Jerry Garcia speaking with Peter Simon in March. The definition of what we do is we're a live band for sure. We're not anything but that and recording has been sort of gratuitous just because we play music. To be a band in the mid-20th century, making studio albums was almost an accident of technological and historical fate. Though Garcia calls it gratuitous, that doesn't mean they didn't make art. One of the forms that music can go out in is the record, but it's a distinct form. It's not a reflection of what we do. So we just treat it as though it is what it is. This is though if you're an artist you might work in, you might prefer to work in lithographs, you know. But sometimes you do guaches, you know, and lithographs might be what get you off the most. The Bob Freed Memorial Boogie on June 17th was shortly a nice respite for the band because when they returned to ACES, they were under a new deadline to actually finish the project. Based on an archival letter from Ron Rackow and the deal's announcement in the trade press on June 28th, I'm pretty sure the new contract was only finalized on June 27th in LA. The Overdubs for Crazy Fingers all occurred in early July with the new United Artists deal hanging over their heads. And there aren't too many Overdubs, really. Of course, there's the stacked harmony part, not arranged in time to perform at Winterland. The backup vocals for Crazy Fingers are dated July 14th and are the last dated piece of the sessions, though there's plenty of Overdubs without dates. Notably, it's also the only written evidence that the dead immediately blew through their July 10th deadline. Well, we contemplate that. Let's listen to another one of those. The End of the Song is the first place on the album where we hear Keith Godchow on a full acoustic piano, entering about two-thirds of the way through. You can hear Garcia and Godchow talking through the part on the July 5th Overdub session that circulates. Sounds a little like Crimson and Clover to me. Here's the piano entrance on the album. The End of the Song And a few days later, on July 7th, Mickey Hart added bells. They go under the verses of the song. Here's what one verse sounds like. We'll add the vocals for a little context. And the outro. And a rarity. Also on July 7th, Bill the drummer added another kick drum, almost ambiantly, under the whole thing. But that was it for Overdubs. Crazy Fingers was performed at the Great American Music Hall on August 13th, a show we'll delve into next episode, and that version retains some of the globe that blues for a la recording, in large part because Keith Godchow is playing Rhodes. The outro solo sparkled the tiny bit too, hinting at what might come, before sailing into a drum duet. And on the road full time the next summer, Crazy Fingers was in the repertoire. Grateful Dead Archivist David Lemieux Crazy Fingers is a song where you can just let it soak over you. That's how I felt about it. And I felt it was almost meditative. There's no song like it in the repertoire, I don't think. This is a unique song for the Grateful Dead. A beautiful, beautiful piece of art. There's a live version from the 1976 comeback tour on the new blues for a la 50, with a piano replacing the Rhodes. And then from June 22nd, just a simply gorgeous Crazy Fingers, the way it would open with that just incredible intro by Jerry and then Phil doing that cool pattern and then dropping into your rain falls like Crazy Fingers. And then the nice big outro jams often led by Phil. And then the nice big outro jams often led by Phil. This June 76 version is nearly 13 minutes and begins to realize some of the jams potential, a space somewhere between the other one and the Spanish jam. Crazy Fingers What a combination Crazy Fingers into comes a time. I mean, these are two back to back Jerry beauties. Crazy Fingers didn't survive 1976 in the band's repertoire, a new level of blues for a la that they didn't quite sustain. It returned a half dozen years later in 1982 with a slightly modified feel for the newest model, dead. Specifically, Garcia's picking on the intro pattern wasn't nearly as intricate, playing it more like the simplified outro. This is from 1985 at the Frost on the Stanford campus. Now on Dave's picks 49. Crazy Fingers Crazy Fingers The 80s and 90s Crazy Fingers continued to carve their own identity and found their own ways to defy gravity. Here's a bit from Giant Stadium 1991, an example of the outro jam with lots of bass. Crazy Fingers Crazy Fingers was a moody piece, and if not literally ambient music could generate an ambience all its own. I love this story from Blair Jackson from the dead's first revelatory visit to the Frost Amphitheater in 1982. I've gone up to the top of the hill to kind of check it out and all that kind of stuff. And even though we were close to the front, and I said, oh God, they're out on stage. And I remember kind of walking, drifting down as the music was starting and thinking, this is, you know, this is Nirvana. This is the greatest thing I've ever been to. The grateful bed at the Frost playing like, playing crazy fingers. Crazy Fingers Because of how it sat harmonically, it was often linked to playing in the band. And while it might not have been as delicate as it was at ACES, it still provided the band with pathways into the mysteries, like this late period version from Landover 1993. Now on the Enjoying the Ride box. Crazy Fingers But if it wasn't quite clear, we adore the studio version. So we're going to float away today and into the even stranger parts of Blues for Allah's second side. Crazy Fingers Your rain falls like crazy fingers, peels of fragile thunder, keeping time. Crazy Fingers Crazy Fingers You soft, strong, sweet and true. Crazy Fingers So swift and bright, strange fingers of light float in it. Crazy Fingers Gone are the days we start to decide. Where we should go, we just ride. Gone are the broken eyes we saw through in dreams. Gone both dream and lie. Crazy Fingers Crazy Fingers Thanks very much for tuning in to the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, friends. There's a video of Jerry out there, I think, on YouTube, where he's warming up backstage before a show and he's finger picking Crazy Fingers. See if you can find it. It's nothing short of 100% pure Jerry joy. We'd like to thank our special guests in this episode, David Lemieux, Al Teller, Ron Rackow, Ned Lajian, Gary Lambert, Michael Parrish, Dan O'Hinecline, Ed Pearlstein, Jeff Gould, Jay Curly, Blair Jackson, Sean O'Donnell, Chadwick Jenkins, Christopher Kaufman and Nicholas Meriweather. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead Cast, David Gans for his ongoing contributions of audio from his interview archive. Thanks, David. Executive Producer for the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, Mark Pincus. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mayhem Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Doran Tyson. All rights reserved. .