Bonus Rerun: From the Mars Hotel 50: Ship of Fools

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 Eds, welcome to Season 12 of The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co-host Rich Mayhan. Thank you so very much for tuning in. In this episode of The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, we drop a timely bonus episode that covers The Grateful Dead's final shows at Winterland in San Francisco before the band's hiatus and the making of the famed Grateful Dead movie, which is playing in theaters everywhere this coming August 14th for meetup at the movies. Announcing The Grateful Dead blues for all a 50th anniversary deluxe edition arriving September 12th. This 3-CD set features the newly remastered album with unreleased soundcheck and concert recordings. The set features almost two hours of unreleased recordings. Among these highlights are rehearsals from the band's August 12th, 1975 soundcheck at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall, including the album tracks Sagan Spirit, Help on the Way, Slipknot, and Franklin's Tower. The collection continues with performances from the June 21st, 1976 show at the Tower Theater in Pennsylvania, spotlighting five blues for all a songs along favorites like Eyes of the World, rounding out the set or selections from Bill Graham's Snack Benefit at Keysar Stadium on March 23rd, 1975. There are also vinyl variants of the original album available including a picture disc and a midnight fire red vinyl edition looks very cool and a 180 gram black vinyl LP. Very cool looking blues for all a 50th anniversary merch is also now available and all of these can be found at Dead.net. If you head over to Rhino.com you can pre-order the Dolly Atmos mixes for blues for all on Blu-ray disc. They were mixed by wizard Stephen Wilson and are ready to blow your mind. All of these fine releases will be out on September 12th via Dead.net and Rhino.com. Head on over to Dead.net slash Deadcast and check out all of our past episodes including the complete seasons one through eleven and you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how you like to listen. Please help the good old grateful Deadcast by subscribing, sharing us with your friends on social media, hitting that like button and if the spirit moves you leave us a review. Thank you very much. Do you have a great story about any of the songs on Blues for Alla? Were you lucky enough to catch the band at one of their two shows in San Francisco in 1975? Then we need to hear from you. Head over to stories.dead.net and record yourself telling us all about it. You just may hear yourself on a future episode of the Deadcast. We have transcripts from many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure and they are available at dead.net slash deadcast dash index. Head on over and feast. The 2025 meetup at the movies featuring the Grateful Dead movie is happening this coming August 14th. It's in theaters across the country and this time around it has been remastered in 4k and will be available at iMacs theaters for the first time. Make sure to grab your friends and grab tickets at meetupatthemovies.com. Make sure to stay until the very end to catch a special performance from those winterland shows that did not make the original movie. Friends this bonus episode of the good old Grateful Deadcast dives into those final winterland shows in 1974 that were filmed and became the wonderful cinematic creation we all know and love as the Grateful Dead movie. Bonus materials for this episode are up on dead.net under the season nine episode eight page which covered ship of fools. So look there if you want to see any of the extras. Get ready to brush up on your behind the scenes knowledge of these shows at winterland and how the Grateful Dead movie came to be before you check it out this August 14th. Here's Jesse Jarno. The Grateful Dead like to have meetings and sometimes kept very good notes. When the dead started 1974 they'd planned to record another album in October and in June just weeks after finishing the Mars Hotel sessions they decided quite sensibly to push those sessions back which they did until November. But by August they decided to pause from the road for a long while. Word of the Grateful Dead's impending retirement got out into the world. Even before they'd officially decided to take a break an unsigned item about the dead's potential retirement appeared under the headline dead to go dormant and the Oakland Tribune on August 4th a rumor denied by Andy Leonard. But the rumor was all but confirmed a few weeks later in Joel Selvin San Francisco examiner column headlined is the dead going to die. From there it circulated out to the dead freaks. Back east Lee Ronaldo had just returned from his summer adventures and was getting ready to begin his freshman year of college. It was kind of mysterious that they were taking time off and it wasn't very clear at the time. News traveled a lot slower at the time and it wasn't very clear why they were getting off the road. We'd heard rumors about like their trip had just gotten too big and incorporated too many people and it just stopped being as much fun but I don't know there were darker rumors about maybe maybe drugs having something to do with it or just a lot of different unclear stuff. Here's how Bobby we remembered it going down when he was interviewed that October. I've forgotten who came up with the idea originally might have been Danny Rifkin for that matter but after a particularly grinding tour which had come on the heels of three relatively grinding tours it's not that the music was bad the music was real good but just the airports and the hotels and everything everybody was real down and we were having a general meeting and and the idea of uh why don't we hang this up for a while and and and take some of the pressure off I'm getting old and everybody just clamored and it seemed just like the thing to do. Ron Rackow. When they talked about a time period they talked about two years they never talked about one year so did that. They were actually talking about stopping being the Grateful Dead and this was going to tell them whether or not it was a good idea or not it was a trial stoppage. Donah Jean. We had been touring for so long and from whoever perspective it was different like why we stopped touring at that time but for me it was like wow I get to just be a mom and uh not be on the road which was really hard if I left Zion behind it was really hard if I took him on the road it was really hard so my life was very complicated at that time. After they decided to take the break there was still a European tour. We discussed some of the stress points in our Money Money episode but Donah Jean had her hands full in a very different way. It's when we went to Europe that year which was in September. My sister went to Europe with us and took care of Zion and that was a he was about eight months old then something like that and that was really tough because we got to England and Zion had diarrhea and a fever you know there were no pampers in London and we had the scrounds for baby stuff that we were used to in America and that was hard that was really hard. The band returned from Europe in late September with only a run at Winterland on their schedule. It was sometime in these weeks that this unfolded. Jerry came to my office I could tell something was up because he ran from the staircase into my office and he started talking to me when he was already in the hall and he gets in he said we got to make a movie and this could be the last time the grateful dead ever played so I said okay and I got on the phone and I raised the money without money forget movies man. As we like to say would that it were so simple. We needed a lot of money for the movies in excess of two million dollars much closer to two and a half million. I expected close to that well first of all the Hell's Angel movie was there was so much film shot I couldn't see it costing a lot more. Steve Brown of grateful dead records could see the logic in the project. They thought of it as I think a way to say if we're going to take the breaks coming next year which was 75 maybe we should give them something to be able to go see and hear but it can be in a theater. But from the start the grateful dead movie was a Jerry Garcia joint. Jerry I think just really felt yeah let's do the movie I kind of really felt he was still the go guy on this thing and everybody else was kind of like oh it's going to interrupt our on the stage and playing and things that kind of little things like that came up a few times I think these were kind of in casual talk they weren't even in the meetings necessarily they were just kind of when they were talking about and then it came to be. Everybody just called it the movie and we probably will too. It was good that Rackow had established an open line with the Bank of Boston because Jerry Garcia discovered a habit more expensive than buying and smashing Faberge eggs. Nothing burns up money like movies I mean cocaine habits don't burn up money like movies. The movie was in motion and on relatively short notice they contacted the filmmaker already in the round real stable. That's how come Leon Gast got to be the head of production on the dead movie. Leon Gast had a very very busy autumn. In September and October of 1974 he was responsible for filming three different classic documentaries. I'd watch a documentary just about that. Well the dead had been in Europe. Leon Gast was in Africa. Like pretty much every other film we're discussing the documentary Soul Power took a long time to make it out but it's an incredible film about the Zaire 74 music festival featuring James Brown, Bill Withers, The Fania All Stars, Miriam Mckiba and more. Check it out. Originally the Zaire 74 festival was supposed to pair with the George Foreman, Muhammad Ali, Rumble in the Jungle which was postponed for a month after Foreman cut himself during training. I'm a little unclear about what unfolded. A lot of the sources say that Leon Gast stuck around Zaire but he had to have gotten back to San Francisco by early October though his incredible Oscar winning film When We Were Kings concludes with the Ali Foreman fight on October 30th. I'm not sure that Gast or his partners actually went from Zaire to Winterland back to Zaire. Descending opinions welcome. Combined with Hell's Angels Forever that's four documentaries in progress. His hands were absolutely full. We had a fellow inside our family of people Edward Washington who was a movie freak. He had a lot of connections in San Francisco. Leon just got people he knew that he worked with in New York and Bingo. I mean they were some important guys. The Maisel brothers or at least one of them. That'd be Albert Maisels. With his brother David he'd been responsible for Gimmie Shelter and was in the process of shooting the equally legendary Grey Gardens another unlikely cinematic timeline to align with the dead movie. The most important guy on the crew in my world was Don Lenzor. If he is not now a famous film shooter he should be. He was phenomenal. Lenzor had been on the crew at Woodstock and went on to a distinguished career in documentary filmmaking. And the next phenomenal one was Kevin Keating. Kevin Keating was a permanent part of Leon's organization. Kevin Keating also went from Zaire to Winterland. Steve Brown was assigned to brief them. So I drew a little thing for them as how the band moves on the stage and told them where the hot areas are to go. And I get to take them around in Winterland and to the places where the people that are going to be good to film. The kind of dancers that you're going to be looking for and that kind of things. And if you go downstairs on their break they've got this E that are going to be sucking on. Which is and just the crew not the band. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. I don't think it's spoiling anything to say that it would take almost three years to finish and release the Grateful Dead movie. With any luck we'll spend some time down the road discussing the intricate production. But today we're going to focus almost entirely on the lived experience of what it was like to see the Grateful Dead at their five so-called retirement shows at Winterland from October 16th through 20th 1974. Lots of which can be heard on the five CD box the Grateful Dead movie. With a camera cruise at the ready the dead invested the shows with a little more thought than usual. Ned Legion. There was some discussion about having an acoustic set or doing some acoustic stuff as well and obviously that didn't happen. At Winterland's front door heads passed under a sign that acknowledged they were being filmed by Round Reels for a movie provisionally titled There is Nothing Like a Grateful Dead concert. The phrase came from Hunter and Garcia's old friend Willie Legate and you can hear this gentleman who is not Willie Legate repeated in the film. There is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert. Leon Gast and Ron Rackow orchestrated the crew on the ground. He was directing the crew and and we were working very close together. He was at the sound booth and I was behind Jerry. I'm in the movie a million times. I had headphones and the whole crew had headphones. The day didn't have much of a choice in the matter but Winterland was the perfect place to film their retirement. It was home. Gary Lambert co-host of Tales of the Golden Road. It was just like one of the one of the all-time great places to see a dead show and kind of a dump. I mean it was like it was it was it was built as an ice skating arena. It had seats. It had a balcony with seats that were on all four sides. People could sit behind the stage although not always. They sometimes had that section cleared off and then just a big dance floor and then there were little auxiliary. There were bars. You know like I think the first time I ever saw a hall dancing was at Winterland perhaps. There were some hallways that people would overflow into. You see that guy dancing during Sugar Magnolia and the Grateful Dead movie, the guy the cowboy had. She's got everything delightful. She's got everything I need. That's the wheel when I'm seeing double pays my ticket when I speak. Outside tickets were taken by Willie the Winterland security guard. Have your tickets ready please. Have your tickets ready. There are two doors so you cannot get in the back of it. I'm sorry sir. Thank you very kindly. Watch right here and have a good time. Have them all ready. Have your tickets ready. Michael Parrish had been seeing the dead since the live dead run at the Film War West. Willie was that the guy's name? Bill Graham's forever ticket taker. The big African-American guy who was in the dead movie and dead movie he's like friendly you know come on come on in but usually he was just kind of grumpy. Rita Fiedler would go on to work on the animation sequence on the dead movie and didn't actually attend any of the Winterland shows that fall but this story really catches the vibe of the place. There's aspects of the movie that really really capture beautifully the concourse where the concessions stand rung around the outside. I remember at one point I hadn't just had a substance and I was just sort of drifting around you could easily go between this sort of concession area to back inside to the show back and forth and at one point I was near an exit and I really wanted to get some fresh air and above the door to the exit said no pass out and there was a cop standing at the door a security guard and a black guy and he looked at me and I said I need to get some fresh air and he goes no pass out I said I'm not going to pass out you know like I was high as a kite but I wasn't going to pass out and I said no I really sir I'm fine I'll be right back I just need to get some fresh air so he let me out so I went out and then I was able to come back in even though I passed outside I didn't pass out Gary Lambert it was 5500 people but it somehow felt bigger and actually 5500 was was what some people considered too big back then you know those those of us who have been spoiled by the film or is and uh and those kinds of venues 5500 seemed kind of cavernous I made a point of getting there early enough to get a good spot on the floor most times but it was it was just it was a great unadorned dump and it was just it just perfect for the purpose of a dead show in some strange way I certainly never made it to winterland but one way to catch the vibe is to check out the room tone in the space just before the encore I saw lots of bands at winterland I saw shows of variable sound quality at winterland I saw the famous springsteen shows in December of 78 and shows like that I mean I had a long run there because I was there right up to the closing night it could sound terrible it could sound like a big echoey cavernous place if the sound people didn't have things dialed in right the wall of sound sounded extraordinary in there Jeff Gould would go on to found modulus guitars but in 1974 was just a serious bay area dead freak I saw every wall of sound show in the bay area starting with the sneak previews in February I also remember at winterland being able to set up high in the rafters and listen and hear perfectly morning dew or ship of fools that big vocal harmonies it was really the best when I was at winterland I would go all over I mean sometimes in front of the stage or sometimes I'd be in the very last row just kind of get a different perspective you know I could be up in the up in the rafters and listening to the wall of sound and hearing like morning and dew or something like that and it just it was a very grand experience because you can really hear it it wasn't just you're far away and everything sounds crappy multiple nights of the dead at winterland was a cause for excitement no matter what but Joan Brown was a newly minted San Francisco deadhead in 1974 and left us this story in 1974 I was an eighth grader and going to winterland was really not what my parents thought was a great idea for a little girl to do but there were other parents of my friends that were not so strict and so I would spend the night at their house and of course we would all go to winterland I think it was in February it was the first time I really went to the debt to winterland to see the dead by myself and it was with a bunch of my little girlfriends and I was hooked that was it from that moment on that's all I wanted to do and it's all I wanted to listen to me in the fall of 1974 I went to a private high school in san francisco called urban and urban was probably about six blocks from winterland urban was a hippie ish alternative high school for the young and impressionable minds of the pacific heights kids in san francisco it was kind of a hippie school that we had two classes a day for three hours piece sometimes the kids would smoke in class sometimes the teachers would smoke in class sometimes the subjects were a little bit off to the left sometimes they were right in the center but one thing that happened in October of 1974 is everybody was excited because the jabber playing multiple nights at winterland and everybody was getting tickets and if you didn't have tickets you could always wait in line so at the afternoon classes everybody would go and wait in line to grab tickets but if you're lucky enough to buy your tickets what we did is during lunchtime we always had a poker game going those grateful dead tickets were in the pot multiple times and multiple times there were one and lots so I got to go because I won some tickets in the pot during lunch in the poker game five nights was a lot so according to my journal I going to more than one night of a concert was kind of a new thing for me and I was not really sure how to break it to my parents but luckily for me they were hyper focused on the a's being in the world series and they were going three nights themselves to the coliseum so I didn't have a lot of explaining to do about where I was going and what I was doing the first couple nights across the bay in oakland the a's were cruising to their third straight world series victory with games four and five taking place in oakland on the nights of the first two dead shows those nights I went with my friends and we arrived super early because in those days I was armed with some orange sunshine is also referenced in my journal by OR codeword OR and we got there early so that we could take the acid and not have to come home to questions by parents when we were kind of out in outer space and in those days they let you in super early and we found seats at winnell and at the time either if you were a dancer you went downstairs if you wanted to be close to the band you went on the floor and if you really wanted to see the band you could go upstairs in the balcony where people just did not stand up during the concert you sat in your seat mostly and if you wanted to go down if you wanted to dance you went downstairs something that jone drives home the dead were a local band for local people half my high school was there and half the kids from my neighborhood were there too so it never felt like it felt really intimate and it felt like this is where the place everybody was and on monday if you didn't have a story to tell about winnell and in the shows then you know you really kind of were out of it you weren't as cool as you thought you were but for these shows and the seats that i had they were like the second row on the right hand side of the balcony most of the people around me were there for all the nights of the shows and we kind of had this unspoken agreement that we would save the seats for each other and i was lucky to be included in that group and also in that group were some really cute surfer boys from marin who my girlfriend and i were just thrilled to be sitting there and these people for every time that the grateful dead played at winnell and we pretty much had the same group and saved this seats for everybody until winnell and closed until about you know december of 1978 so this was a really tight group that we had and i never saw these people outside of going to the grateful debt i never saw them again on just around town this was the only place that i saw them and i've considered them friends strider brand was our avatar for the sunshine daydream gig in venita in 72 and provided coverage for us speaking about keys are 73 in 74 strider was traveling around in the way that one can do if you're in your early 20s and it's 1974 hey strider i had been traveling up in western canada in late september early october of 74 me and a friend mandy had gone to visit an old high school friend whose parents were canadian lived in vancouver and so we were in in vancouver pretty sure that's where mandy got word that the debt are going to be retiring they're playing their final concerts in about whatever a week and a half i'm just taking a guess and so she uh took the b line down to the bay area and i made my way down at a slower rate let's say and so that's why i missed the opening night of october 16th i did hitchhike from canada down to the bay area to make it for the october 74 dead shows and i had to stop a new gene on the way south dead fans of all stripes to center done winterland however they could jerry pompilly was the house manager at the venue i'm in the grateful dead movie there's a scene where me talking to angelo the angel on stage trying to convince him to move his bike off the stage it's not so much you guys it's the people that you guys have had confrontations with during the years they see someone in here with colors on and they remember the time maybe he got stopped by seven angels and goes fucking berserk i mean i've seen it happen it doesn't happen well you know what sanny's flying out here from new york i know he's not taking his patch off so he's coming along and then there's another scene it's me but it's shot from behind and it's at the back door and there's two hell's angels trying to worm their way in and me telling them to go fuck off or well you don't see us there's two guys with guns standing on each side of me but hey you know jeff gould the first night at least i remember getting there early enough to be in line and to be let in and and it was just really fun and joyful uh to kind of just run into the empty place we've spoken with jay curly a few times most recently on our watkins glenn episode in the fall of 1974 he just made his move to the bay area and was ready to see the dead on their home turf i didn't even have a crush walking in the front door they were so different than east coast shows i couldn't believe it especially the wednesday the first show the 16th i mean it went from sea stones into space into warthread back into space into eyes of the world and i was like thinking wow these west coast shows are really laid back so it's a candidate for the jammiest dead show ever after closing the first set with a 31 minute plane in the band for the first time in american soil ned leagin sea stones transitioned into a full performance by the dead first moving into war frat then eyes of the world an 85 minute sequence that was a reverse of the alexandra palace performance we spoke about last episode the genesis of the middle set occurred in march of 74 it was assumed that half the time not half the time the grateful dead would say we would segue into the grateful dead it turned out to be 25 or 26 percent of the time which is still a sizable amount for a separate or quasi separate act so jay curly window and got so hot it was sardine time but uh and lord knows bill graham called it his schvitz because you know he sold the tickets and then they didn't rip them at the door brought them to the ticket window and resold them jeff gould at least first couple nights there's also in tamasisto pretty he wait you know i mean it was like getting close to 100 degrees so it was like a packed winterland you know it's just it was pretty pretty sweaty and crazy up on stage it was fucking chaos even more so than the usual grateful dead gigs at winterland seriously go watch the movie if you track the performances in the movie chronologically you can see how many people were crowding up there night after night culminating in the final show in the 20th where people are almost literally hanging from the rafters and that's not to mention a certain rhodi who is allegedly dropping puddles of acid on people's wrists in order to even get on the stage by the final might donagine it was madness and it was very lax as far as who got to be on the stage and be backstage as well as on stage you know dancing around or you know doing their thing that was then and that's no longer now that's for sure there's one amazing short sequence of the movie where you see a few kids dancing to the foot of keith god show's grand piano followed a few seconds later by an enormous fireball by the pyrotechnics enthusiast a few feet behind them his name was boots he was a pyrotechnic guy and there was a real explosion many real explosions constantly through the whole movie really i haven't tracked witch knights boots jaffy was blowing flames towards the ceiling maybe all of them hopefully we'll get to talk to boot sometime that was his gig that was his gig i don't remember if if that happened elsewhere but i know it did constantly during that time the baby zion god show had made it to nearly every dead show in 74 but mist winterland when we did the movie zion we stayed in san francisco with the miyako and zion's uh uh grandparents keith mom and dad took care of him at the miyako while we did our thing so he was not at the shows he was like nine months old i think something like that exactly like that actually the first night was bob weir's 27th birthday as phil lesh reminded happy birthday to you happy birthday to you happy birthday to you counting the 50 minutes of sea stones and jamming enroute into the second set there were more than four hours of music one of the longest shows ever only four more to go and uh thanks for dropping thanks for being in our movie every day of shooting jerry and i went in the afternoon like at noon we went and found a clump of crew people and sat around and bullshot with them and smoke joints with them and what have you and they were mostly in a hotel above a man's shop on the main street in salsolito and we went there and daily and hung out with those guys and talked to them and kevin peating and don lenz who shot those meetings those meetings are incredible incredible they're on film a lot of film there's so much great footage there it's just i'm thinking particularly of a day jerry and i went to meet those guys in the hotel in salsolito and somebody said to jerry what's the most important thing that's the grateful dead done for you and jerry said uh everything i met dylan that's what he said i met he said it like a breathless fan garcia had met dylan a few times but most fresh on his mind was probably a semi-recent jam session in stinson beach they came up to jam i don't know what the what the the story was dylan was over at jerry's house and mountain girl told me about it that evening they was bob dylan and david grisman last year i interviewed grisman for aquarium drunkard which we've linked to at dead dot net slash deadcast and i asked him about this story which took place a few months before the dead movie was filmed i got a call in 1974 out of the blue from bob dylan who i thought it was a joke wanted to take a mandolin lesson so i said come on over and hour two later it was on my backboard that was the mandolin overdub that dylan himself played on blood on the tracks as if you see her say hello recorded just a few months after his lessons they for three days i believe we went over jerry's house during that he still owes money for that about about fifteen dollars a lesson had to throw that story in there jay curly i had a bunch of friends from canada could stay with me in my little apartment we uh me and a friend of mine from columbia rented a flat in the philmore and uh it was all of 75 bucks a month drunkard's dream if i were to see one anyway you know we went en masse into winterlands there was just one problem well three problems i was semi broke when the tickets went on sale so i got one for the 20th and then uh they added the 16th so i got a 16th and i didn't have any idea about seeing the other shows but on that thursday the 17th uh strider brown my old friend came to my apartment and said what are you guys doing here let's go get some tickets i said what are you talking about it's been sold out for months now he said oh they got tickets at the door i had showed up on the 17th and like you know the mid-afternoon or whatever and uh they were looking bummed out jay and our other friend mandy and uh i said well i hear there's tickets for sale at the box office i may have gotten that hot tip or whatever from somebody i hitched a ride from down into the bay area from down i5 we went over there and we bought tickets for the i believe following for a night to my east coast brain they just went what and so we were living like 10 blocks away from winterland and so we walked over there and there was nobody in line i asked you know and in front of the ticket window and this woman was sitting in there looking completely bored and i went over and having her tickets for tonight she goes yeah how many you want almost fell on the ground i said do you have about four she goes no problem here dunk dunk dunk dunk six dollars each i was hip to the trip and so i went on the 18th and 19th and stood in line for increasing amounts of time and so i was able to see all five shows i love the scenes outside winterland and the grateful bed movie you know the great full dead sure i have a ticket you want to see what you can't stop i know i'm just trying to get my space together so that i can go into the show i just came from a phone call been there so many times in fact i just came from a phone call and i'm getting my space together right now the 17th is when our friend gary lambart made his entrance from stage left or right even i had already determined to move to the bay area the timing just worked out that way uh in fact i say i think the the announcement of the winterland show has probably hastened my trip by a few weeks but it was really fortuitous timing so i saw four out of the five i actually landed in san francisco the night of the first show on on the 16th on bobby's birthday and then i saw the last four in a row gary walked right on to a movie set and then there was the phenomena of the movie being made while that was going on and you know there's that famous scene where the guy in the bar is like talking about what a loan of crap it is it's just fucked up though this fucking deal man make cash off everybody this uh this is the biggest poly shit i've ever seen you dad ever do i remember there was some disc rattlement about like camera placements blocking people's view and stuff like that there was like a boom camera which was not like modern boom cat it was like actually a guy sitting in a chair you know on a boom which was manually like moved around and you were careful could knock your head off as it as it tanned down toward the stage there was a little point of contention there for people who usually had a spot on the floor where they could see everything and were kind of being you know moved around to make room for that it seemed minor to me it didn't really seem terribly disruptive to the enjoyment to me j curly i uh stood behind one of the cameras uh three out of five nights that was a nice little window where i could see through to the stage right next to the camera and they never really got in my way and you see people crawling around the stage with their cameras and stuff like that but they never got in the way naturally a few of our friends ended up in the movie gary lambard i am actually seen in the graceful dead movie in a couple of shots look for me during one more saturday night it will expose a little editing flaw because uh i'm singing along and my lips are moving like uh i think about two beats after the notes are actually sung jeff gould i'm in the movie during sugar magnolia some big dude in the in the crowd uh in a blue workshop and the pony tail and beard dancing after seeing the crowd on the earlier nights the film crew were able to scout out some talent there was one very handsome guy had a mustache and sort of light reddish hair brown light reddish hair and he knew the words every song and sometimes we had him mouthing the words and and jerry singing them says online somewhere that his name is greg i think his name is greg also greg if you're out there get in touch at stories.dead.net they planted him in the front row and you can see him throughout the movie he danced his ass off and his shirt was really sweaty and at the end of the night i took off my film crew shirt and gave it we changed shirts and i went backstage and jerry and this is on film jerry said what the fuck happened to you that was a funny moment there's a wide spectrum of deadfreakdom between the curious and the committed. kory arnold he may know is the proprietor of the lost live dead blog and other endeavors was in a very particular place in his own arc. i've already seen him twice at winterland and this was my third time at winterland my fifth dead show i was kind of conscious of what i was hearing i had a couple of dead bootlegs i remember that i recognized just about every song but i didn't come out going what are those songs i do again it was a real conscious experience they play the first set they do a long playing in the band i take a break i was used to the break we're hanging out and then the lights come down a little bit and some people come on come on stage one person came on stage it was keyboard player it wasn't keith and then phil comes out and he starts tuning up and we're like what's this they tune up tune up tune up and after a while you go they're not tuning up and you could feel it under coming up from your feet it wasn't like i didn't say g i want to go home and listen to this but it was weird yeah no explanation no discussion no fucking idea what was going to go on and then after 20 minutes phil unplugged his bass walked off stage and the other guy walked off stage and no one announced dead nobody said ladies and gentlemen put your hands together for seastone they just did it did add to the weirdness of the whole thing the next day was friday joseph elvin had gone wednesday but because of the time he couldn't his wednesday night report couldn't get into the papers on friday morning and in the friday morning chronicle he said between sats phil lash and keyboard player net legion played some electronic sounds and i went oh the guy who was on american beauty selvin didn't call it seastones it was the first public acknowledgement of the electronic performances that ned and phil had been staging since late june the dead played some of the finest shows of the year and while we know that ed returned to the road in 76 every night of the winterland run marked the final versions of certain parts of the dead's repertoire the thursday show we're talking about for example is the last time they did ramble on rose with the original vocal arrangement from europe 72 with lesh singing on the chorus it was the final one drummer version of the other one at the heart of the second set and the final single drummer version of the impossibly quiet stella blue so it seems like all this life was just a dream jay curly on either thursday or saturday the crowd just went nuts at the end of the show before us blues everybody was jumping up and down and yelling with their arms in the air so phil came around his stack and looked at this oscilloscope and uh when he finally got to the microphone he said congratulations people you make more noise than we do strider and then being october in the bay area the nights are kind of crisp and the air quality is usually really good and the breezes off the ocean and everything yeah it was uh you know call it golden memories definitely the shows where everything jone brown could have wanted and more for those nights i was the most free and happy and musically inspired that i've ever been in my whole entire life the grateful dead spoke something in me that i could not believe and i felt like it was such a privilege to be there and it was such a privilege to look around and realize there really weren't that many girls that liked the grateful dead at this time in place and it was really a great time for me as a young teenager to get to know myself and the dead were a big huge part of it our ultra reliable witness michael parish was a seasoned head by then it was common knowledge that that was that was kind of the end for now at least for the dead but i have to say i mean i got tickets as soon as i knew they'd gone on sale san jacuzco over the sears and capitol which was the nearest place there was a ticket trying to out that and had no trouble getting tickets i went to the last three friday's harry and sunday the friday show included the last full version of the weather report suite with garcy is beautiful faux steel guitar licks on the prelude oh last chip of fools for now too the version on steel your face do Both Friday and Sunday became three set shows. Among the last time the dead's flexibility flexed in that particular way. Friday the 18th was goodbye to a few more things. It was the last time that Seastones flowed into a dead set. And it was a doozy. And Dead Legion. And it was already known in advance that at least three of all five nights we would do electronic music. And at least three of those nights it would segue into the Grateful Dead. The goal was to get Dark Star, Warfrat, Morning Dew, and some of the others were Jerry-like what I did and how I helped shape the flow. The Seastones set on the 18th is a high point for many. Jay Curley was ready. The Friday show is my personal favorite. I do have a memory of having a wonderful conversation with this pretty lady. And all of a sudden Ned comes out and she goes, oh, I hate this. And she runs into the lobby and I say, oh, well, so much for that. Michael Parish. Ned and Phil, two Dark Star and the Morning Dew. That was just transcendent. Probably a musical high point of that whole week for sure. I still think that that's one of the best pieces of music I ever heard the Grateful Dead play. Jeff Gould. It's just beyond the crazy, biosonic sounds or whatever you want to call it. But he's a good musician too. Like some of them had a really good flow more than others. But there was definitely a cool thing. And just once again, it's not Casey Jones. It takes so many forms. The Ned and Phil show is a pretty extreme thing, but it's all part of where everybody was going. Ned Legend. October 18th. Going from the Seastones to a jam into Morning Dew. And then García and Phil in particular understood the significance of that and doing that with Eyes of the World also had significance. It wasn't that these people were just playing what came into their heads at the time. Oh, I loved it. At that point, I think I'd already gone down the Charles Ives rabbit hole. And I mean, it was fascinating. It was so loud and just so different than anything you would normally associate with even the dead's weirdest jams. But again, the way that the Ned and Phil part of that show flowed into the dead coming out was really just perfect. Music In 1981, David Gann spoke with Phil Lesch about this segment, included in his book Conversations with the Dead, which we've linked to at dead.net slash deadcast. It was one nice time at Winterland, in fact, at the housing world, and it sort of drifted in. Yeah, that was great. It was great. It was dark stuff. Yeah. That was fabulous. It was fabulous. It's in the movie. And Ned is in the movie, but he hasn't got any credit. category of getting ahead of ourselves. In 1974, as the dead prepared to retire from the road and make their new album, the horizons of sea stones were a bright color in their musical landscapes. Yeah, that sea stone stuff is just amazing. Sea stones into dark star, into morning dew. I mean, wow, I listened to it once a year at least. It was the last version of Dark Star until 1978, the last of the single drummer era, and in that way, the last of a developing thread that had grown from a jam in September 1967 and developed gradually over the next seven years. It was definitely the end of an era. October 19th for the first six or seven minutes of the set two performance, I go out and play synthesizer alone, and I used rhythm boxes and computer control, rhythm boxes that I had built from popular electronic circuitry to generate electronic machine rhythms. Today, we take it for granted that people can have electronic drums and electronic percussion, but we no longer have the duality, oh, it sounds like a machine or it sounds like a robot, it's robot music or, you know, all the derogatory terms that I heard. One guy came up, I think it was during the movie and there's movie footage for this, when I was playing solo synthesizer before Phil had come out, a guy came up and right in my face on stage and reached out to touch the synthesizer, and I just brushed his hand away and he sat there for a while and then he just cooled out. He was in some place. If he had been angry, I would assume that he would just knock stuff over or have been really hostile. He felt more like he was in a very young child state. And Garcia said to me, after that he said to me, you know, it's really far out, really amazing stuff happens when you play. Some of it's cool and some of it's not cool. He said, that one was really cool. There were so many departures from the songbook during the Saturday show that we'll only note a few. It was the last time they played the original uptempo friend of the devil before it slowed down. For Mars Hotel, it was the last version of Loose Lucy until 1990, the final version with Don Agin God Show. For some reason, they played Mama Tried for the first time since August 71, which is a might sloppy. Garcia and Donna do Dolly Parton's Tomorrow is Forever for the first time since 72 and the last time with the dead. Joan Brown. In 1974, I had mostly just listened to albums with my ear pressed against the speaker. And now as I sat in Winnerland, the music hit me. It hit me so much that even though I was in my seat, all I just couldn't even contain myself. My favorite song before these shows was Let It Grow from The Wake of the Flood album. After these shows, it became Scarlet Begonia's. While most of the other guys in the group were always talking about the guitar and how Jerry was playing or how Bob was playing or even Phil, me as a girl, I was mostly focused on Donna and how she was playing back and forth on stage and the joy with which Jerry was playing. I just remember being so captivated by his smile and his expressions and the appreciation that he had with playing for the music. And that's really what I remember from those shows mostly is my admiration for Jerry. And after those shows, Scarlet Begonia's was definitely my favorite song. I was always a bogear, but this was it for me. And if you check out the bonus disc for the Dead Movie DVD, you can watch the long, jammed out final single drummer Scarlet Begonia's. The tickets for the show on the 20th were stamped the last one. For reasons we discussed before, there are very few ticket subs from Winterland shows, but there are several from this run. And Grateful Dead is misspelled. G-R-E-A-T-E-F-U-L. For Dead Heads and Attendants, every song might be its last performance. Bill Graham nailed the dialogue, understanding the assignment and delivering one of his great truths. Strider. The final night, Jay, our friend Mandy, myself and a couple other people, I know that we got seats in the front row balcony on the north side of Winterman Auditorium. And we sat next to Shay Ray or Ray Sewell, who was down from Eugene with his partner at the time, Joyce. And their fellow partner, Dave, who was also in the restaurant business with Shay Ray. So it was a pretty cool vantage point in perspective. Certainly, I can say I was high as a kite and watching them open up with cold rain and snow was very exciting. The first set contained the final American Beauty song played with the original vocal blend. And then seeing the second drum set being set up, that was like anticipation, whatever it might be. It was a charged atmosphere. From Grateful Dead Records and Round Wheels, Ron Rackow. Two guys came to me that are really heavy in Grateful Dead and really heavy in my life. Two guys, both from Pendleton, Oregon, Rex Jackson and Ramrod. We were making a movie in October 1974. We were playing at Winneland. And the night before the last gig, Rex Jackson came to me because I was producing the movie. And he said, you know, we talked about it, we being he and Ramrod, really. And I guess some other guys were around, but he meant he and Ramrod. We talked about it and we'd like to get Mickey up on stage and have him be in the movie. That's part of our history. And I said, that's a great idea. So they called Mickey the next morning and Gerald answered the phone. And she said, it's a Rex Jackson and Ramrod are on the phone for you. And he said, no, I don't want to talk to anybody that's not in the band. She said, I think you should do that. You should take this phone call. So one time he easily relented, I guess just he had good feelings about those two guys. And they told them they wanted to come out and get his drum shit and set it up at Winneland. And he said, is it okay with the other guys in the band? And they said, of course. So they didn't even know. The fact is they didn't even know. Nobody knew this was going to happen. But equipment guys, the equipment guys as a block, a political block in a lifestyle in a tribe had so much power that they could execute it in this kind of way. It's pretty fucking amazing. The guy that really could have stopped it and didn't was Kreuzmann. Feelings were shifting things and would keep shifting. But in that moment, the return of Mickey Hart was no easy thing. In his memoir, Deal, Billy Kreuzmann made a point of addressing this night and the sudden reappearance of his erstwhile drumming partner writing, I've never really spoken publicly about this, but I'll be clear here. I objected to having Mickey sit in with us that night. And I think I was probably somewhat vocal about that backstage. I enjoyed being the only drummer, and I didn't want that to change. I got territorial about it. Mickey didn't know the new material, and we hadn't rehearsed or played with him in years. So I didn't think that it could possibly be any good. And it wasn't that night. Personally, I was insulted that everybody else backstage rallied behind Mickey. The whole situation became really uncomfortable for me. Kreuzmann was a very, very gracious guy. He really was secure in his position because he didn't stop it. So Mickey played. But at that point, the band stopped going out on tour. So we didn't know whether Mickey would be included when, as and if, a resurrection happened. Nobody knew. Nobody knew. And then it just happened. If somebody is responsible for that, of Mickey getting back into the Grateful Dead, it's Rex Jackson. Since Kreuzmann had asked him to leave the band in 1971, also detailed in deal, Mickey had gradually started to welcome his former bandmates to sessions at his barn studio, collaborating at different points with everybody but Kreuzmann on various studio projects. Donagene Godshaw McKay had recorded for Robert Hunter's Tales of the Great Rum Runners, but somebody else may have been engineering that session. But the first time I met Mickey was when we were making the movie at Winterland. While I was in the band, he played the first time with the Grateful Dead. I don't think I had met him before that. The heads at Winterland, it was pretty obvious what was about to go down when the second drum kit went up. Jay Curley was up with Strider Brown in the balcony. They had some incredible pot that smoked me into a psychedelic state. But as soon as I saw them bringing out more drum risers, I said, whoa, something's going on here. I hadn't taken acid for any of the shows. So I ran down to the floor and just said, does anybody have any acid? And the guy in front of me turned around and said, here. Asking you shall receive. Yeah, as soon as I saw that drum riser, I knew that I needed some acid. And, uh, you know, dance my brains out. For all five nights, really, it was incredible. Yeah, he came for playing in the band and then he was there for the third set as well. Mickey Hart had a co-writing credit on the song, but had only performed on the song's debut version three years earlier. You can hear Ned's synths in there too. Michael Parish. You know, that third night was so emotional because, well, I mean, you knew what was happening and then Mickey showed up. I mean, you could, you can see it in the movie too, but I mean, you could see that they were really emotional about it as well. And after that, the Grateful Dead were retired. So it wasn't like you were joining a band. It was like I was there for the last iteration playing keyboards in the band, but I was never a member of the band. And my goal personally was to play with them because I enjoyed it, but to also do my own thing. Jay. Yeah, everybody was really excited about the Good Lovin', having not heard it since Pig died. In singing Good Lovin' at Winterland, Weir actually became the third Grateful Dead vocalist to sing the song, which had begun as a Garcia vehicle in 66 before Mr. Penn took it over in 69. Deep into the encore in the 20th, they played a powerful Mississippi half-step, and it's hard not to hear Garcia leaning into the fair thee well bent in the lyrics. In our Roe Jimmy episode, we unearthed a wonderful story from an old David Ganns interview, in which Hunter discusses half-step as being about his own journey to get on his way and start his life for real. Many rivers to cross. Moving to the Bay Area, Gary Lambert was still working on his unpublished guitar player profile of Bobby Weir. I saw him the last night at Winterland in October 1974, and there was talk, this is the end. This is the end of the Grateful Dead, and Bobby just said, you ain't seen the last of us. He was very kind, he was very kind, he was very kind, he was very kind, he was very kind. This is the end of the Grateful Dead, and Bobby just said, you ain't seen the last of us. He was very confident of that. And then Bobby talked more about that when we spoke after the tour was over and after the Winterland shows. There were so many things contributing to it, but he also spoke very optimistically about the future, because they were already starting to make plans for Blues Verralla and all of that. Bobby had some preliminary tunes in his head. This is how Bob Weir described it the day after the final Winterland show, in an interview conducted for the movie, included in the Look Back documentary on the 2004 DVD. Well, I view it as one big continuum. I see nothing ending in nothing beginning right now. I've been working at something for the last 10 or 12 years that I'm just continuing to work on. I'm going to start to focus more on a particular aspect, that being my recording career. But it's my music that I've been working on. Within a month, Weir would debut his new band, Kingfish. Billy Quinceman felt that way too, interviewed a few days after the so-called retirement, now in the Look Back documentary. I think it was played up as a last concert a lot, you know? But I just think a cooling period of time where we can just find our own ways. And it's really nice right now to just be able to sit back for a few months and know that you don't have to make an airplane flight, and that you feel really good and you've got a good place to live. That's just, that's all I need. And I don't have to worry about the bad. Band, I think, will take care of itself and the time feels really good. We'll get together, rehearse new material, probably do another album after Christmas. I hope we do. And this time, I hope we find an engineer that we work with really well. Sorry Roy Siegel. Keith and Donna didn't get to weigh in on how they felt. At the end of the concert, Keith and I got dozed at the last gig, and that's when the camera crew were coming out at our house at Stinson Beach. To do our interview for the movie. And everybody got dozed. And nobody, the cameraman couldn't work. Keith and I couldn't talk. You know, that's why we don't have an interview in the movie. Is we got so dozed that last night. The so-called retirement was an attempt to reset and re-center themselves creatively and otherwise. Having just arrived in the Bay Area and seen five dead shows in a row, Jay Curley had a healthy music heads perspective on it. Everybody was saying, oh my God, everything's gonna end. I'll never see Jerry again. And I didn't really make a whole lot of sense to me because sitting in my pocket was a ticket for Halloween where it's Jerry and Merle. So I said, oh, okay, well, I guess I'll just go see Jerry and Merle a million times, which is what I did. The first show was on a Wednesday. The Sunday before that, Atuna played for free in Golden Gate Park. The weekend after that, Sunraw played at the Keystone Corner. And this is like music everywhere all the time. I just couldn't believe it. It turned out to be a pretty life-changing five nights for Jeff Gould. Quite towering at the end of five nights. He went on five nights, you know, and what most of us did go. My wife just returned from a Peace Corps in Africa and we knew each other in high school. And so that was our first time using a date was the first night of the five night series. Happy almost 50th. The shows also sparked an idea. Phil's playing his bass and I noticed this huge freaking lambswool strap he's got on. And I think avoiding that bass must be heavy. And at the time I had started that summer working in this aerospace down in Peninsula, Ford Aerospace. We were building satellite antennas and stuff like that. One of the more famous things is the Voyager. You know, it's still out there. That's been great. But what I was doing the daytime was building structures that were like lightweight and strong because when you take something out of space, it costs a lot of money for every kilogram that you have to lift into orbit. A few episodes back, we noted that before it got codified into the wall of sound, Lesh thought of it as the gantry system. After the scaffolding system used to launch heavy objects into orbit. It just seemed to me that this bass was really heavy. So I went back and talked to some of my supervisors and then I contacted Alembic. So basically what I did was I came back to Alembic to the repair shop and brought them a bunch of trinkets. I can't remember why that little pieces of stuff made from these materials. It turned out they were very interested and Rick and Ron came down to visit me at the plant. Journalist Brian Anderson, working on a book about the wall of sound, loud and clear, has made it a mission to track down as many pieces of the wall as possible. We've linked to Brian's project at dead.net slash deadcast. Please welcome back Brian Anderson. The dead would kind of bequeath some of that gear to groups at their discretion. You know, bay area bands, buddy bands that they could sort of trust. So even in its afterlife, the wall of sound was really kind of a valuable resource in that regard. And I've also spoken with some other various tech and crew folk who ended up taking little parts of the system for themselves to incorporate into their home stereo setups, for example. So nothing huge. We're talking maybe like a pair of 12 inch speaker drivers or something or maybe a cabinet or two. So there was a little bit of that going on as well. In other cases, bits of the wall of sound just sort of eaked out literally around the globe and a small part of it actually ended up in my living room. For I purchased a unit in the most recent Sotheby's auction and to my knowledge, it is a vocal fill monitor from the wall of sound and it weighs, you know, 65 pounds. I could crawl into it. It's that big and it's sitting in the corner of my living room and it's a literal hunk of junk to some eyes. But, you know, knowing some of the places it's been and all of the sound waves that flowed out of it and the people who who were able to experience music blowing through it just sort of, you know, it gives me that woo woo feeling, if you will. Richie Peckner had helped build the wall. The truth is they were just cabinets. You know, they're speaker cabinets. So if you were a the guitar player and you could get one of Jerry's twin 12 inch JBLs, that was it. People had friends and it was just kind of all got disseminated around Phil Space Cabinets. There were so many of those. You can give them away up for a year. People that knew people. It wasn't like they had a say of per se. One of the bands that inherited parts of the wall were Osiris, a Palo Alto group fronted by Kevin McKernan, Pigpen's younger brother. We included this story a few seasons back, but we'll put it in its proper chronological place now. Please welcome back Osiris Rody, Sully. And Garcia really had a soft spot for Kevin to weigh beyond any sort of standard person that's in the music industry. And so Kevin and I drove up to the dead office because, you know, Kevin was putting together this band with his friends, you know, Scott and the other Kevin and Al and Sam Sheets and Keith Moore played with them too. And Kevin and I drove up and his brother Studebaker, Kevin O. Lidfoot, we got up there and Garcia basically just gave us or gave him Hope Truck Bed full of like Mack Pampson and those speakers, the Hard Truckers speakers that were part of the Euro 72 tour and most likely were in the Wall of Sound. You know, that's kind of half the battle is getting decent gear. So they started playing gigs like they did free shows at Stanford, across Ampere, but also up by the Tresitor Union. Strider and Jay saw Osiris open for Garcia and Saunders on Halloween that year even. Here's a little bit of Osiris' hook line and sinker, which we've linked to a dead.net slash deadcast. Thanks, Sully. More than bands getting pieces of the Wall of Sound were bands influenced by the Wall of Sound. Ron Long left us this awesome story. We were a dead cover band in the 1970s and we lived in Oldsmore, Florida in a place called the Oldsmore Hotel. We felt cosmically connected to the dead all the time and we went to DC to hear the Wall of Sound. We were blown away by the sound and we went back and created our own system with Custom JBL 15s on bass reflex cabinets powered by Crown, Sirwin, Vega, and Phased linear amps run through an Alteglancing mixing board. We stacked the barks and ran all our instruments through the mixer and we killed it in clubs and outdoor concerts. That's how they became the barks. The quality and intention of the Wall of Sound were obvious. The actual signal chain could be harder to discern. That is, how to create one sound from several individual PAs and no mixer. One band influenced by seeing the PA behind the band was the German group Cannes, who we heard from a little bit last time. We're going to repeat a bit from our Europe 72 season when Cannes engineer Rene Tinner told us about a photo of the dead, possibly from Munich 74, and how that sent the Cannes engineering team down a new path. I got the inspiration from a picture in the paper of their equipment set up on one of those concerts they had in Cannes. It inspired my colleague and me to take up that spirit of having a Wall of Sound behind the band. They didn't have schematics and could only do what they saw in the photo. In photos of the era, the band are centered around something that looks like the Wall's center cluster. I'm pretty sure that system is in effect on the newest Cannes archival release, recorded and asked in 1977, available for mute records and audience tape even. Perhaps the Wall of Sound's biggest impact came with two bands you almost certainly wouldn't expect, including one of the most popular in the world. Big thanks to Queen City Jams for helping us to this info. The first were underground legends and noted deadheads, Black Flag. In 1986, days after Black Flag played their final show, they were spotted in the parking lot at Alpine Valley, catching some dead gigs on the way home. It was sometime on that last tour as well that their sound man, Dave Rat, convinced them to try stacking the gear behind the band without monitors. He wrote on his blog, on the upside, the system was incredibly clear sounding, while on the downside, it sounded a bit distant and the sound bleeding into the mics was cumbersome enough not to continue with that setup. 20 years later, Dave Rat got to try again. By then, he was running sound for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The evolution of sound systems from giant globs of speakers to finesse full narrow line arrays created the opportunity to cover large venues with multiple systems utilizing minimal space. The entire Wall of Sound was 26,000 watts. Current systems run at 10 times that power and are a fraction of that size. Plus, we now have the capability of effectively predicting the sonic coverage in a venue based on room dimensions. What this means is that with today's sound system technology, multiple sound systems can be hung conventionally to either side of the band rather than stack behind them without blocking sight lines, creating an inconspicuous yet effective implementation of the concept. After testing out systems at home using live multi-tracks, Rat first wanted to run three systems but decided that the addition of a third system was subtle compared to expanding to just two. I'm not sure how long that system stayed in use, but in 2006 anyway, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were touring with a wall-influenced speaker system. The Wall of Sound became legend, but first it had to earn its name. There were some in-point references from 1974 to the PA being called the Wall of Sound, but the name didn't really catch on until sometime in the 1980s. Brian Anderson. It sort of came after the fact, the tag, you know, Wall of Sound. The next year, Alembic published a paper about what was still just called the Grateful Bed System. That was published in 1975, I believe, in the Audio Engineering Society of America. That paper was divided into two parts. The first was written by Don Davis of Synergetic Audio Concept in California and, right, part two was by Ron Wickersham of Alembic, and that was presented at the 51st Convention of the AES in May of 1975. By that point, you know, spring of 1975, all parties who were involved in this magnificent sound project had had a moment to sort of like reflect and just sort of like digest everything that had happened. And yeah, that paper coming out in a respectable journal, that was huge at the time. The system had been an incredible experiment and really quite dangerous. Another thing that I find so remarkable about the Wall of Sound is that no one died as a direct result of working on this thing. No one got crushed under a heap of speakers. Nobody fell three stories off the top of the scaffolding when they were tilting a cabinet way up there. Nobody got electrocuted to death. Like, it's amazing that nothing like that happened. If you talked to some folks who were there working on that thing, when they were setting that thing up, it was like, that was kind of sober time. Like, no one was drinking, no one was getting too fucked up because the risk was too high. The margin for error was razor thin, and they just weren't going to risk that. But even still at a time before, like OSHA standards were really, really, really strict, nobody got seriously injured or died as a direct result of working on the Wall of Sound. Owensley did fall off the scaffolding at some point, possibly in Oakland and hurt his arm. But by 1975, the Wall of Sound had disappeared. The Mars Hotel itself wasn't long for the world either. We got this fun story from listener Gregory Barrett. Back in the early 1970s, I used to take any visiting friends to the Hotel Mars in San Francisco. I wouldn't tell them where I was taking them, but it was part of the tourist destination list that I had. And we'd hang out in the lobby. Imagine my surprise when I saw the album come out. It reminded me of how I felt when I lived in Turlock, California, and they dedicated an entire site of Europe 72 to the people of Turlock, California. Of course, by now, I need to tell you that this next number rose straight to the top of the charts in Turlock, California. Number one, and stayed there for a week or two. They love us in Turlock, and we love them for them. It just goes to show there's only 300 of us in the world. We all just run around real fast. Sometime in 1975 or 1976, the last residents were kicked out of the Mars Hotel, and the hotel was gutted. Ron Rakow is president of Grateful Lead Records. I have the sign that identified the Mars Hotel as the Mars Hotel. I was in my office in San Rafael. Somebody walked upstairs right in, didn't even stop, like he knew everybody, which he didn't. And he said, I just went to the auction of all the stuff at the Mars Hotel, and I want you to have this. And he gave it to me and turned around and left. I don't even know who the guy's name is. Rakow still has it on the front door of his room. It says, Hotel Mars, rooms, and big, those are all equal sized, big letters, three inch letters. Biza, day, comma, week, or month, hot and cold water, steam heat in every room. Sometime around then, the crew working on the animated opening sequence for the Grateful Lead movie caught wind of the impending destruction. Rita Fiedler. I lived on Brunel Hill, which is right on the edge of the Mission District, and the route I took to go over to Mill Valley, and I would occasionally drive by a portion south of Market Street, where the actual Mars Hotel was. It was on its last leg, so to speak. It had been, I think, marked for demolition. And I just took note of it. It was just like a half, you know, just something you notice as you're driving by. Well, I began to see there was more activity on certain times that I drive by, like, oh my gosh, they're really starting to take down this building. And I mentioned it to Gary, and I said, you know, that the actual Mars Hotel, you know, it's down there south of Market, and they're really serious about demolishing that, you know, maybe we should do something about it. So we scrambled, and Gary got a camera, and several of us, a handful of us, went down to the site, because I said, you know, Gary, really, really, we need to do this. It's going to happen really soon. There was actually just the front wall literally standing. So when we got there, that's indeed what had happened, that it was the very last push that Gary was able to film of his bulldozer, boom, knocking down the front marquee that said Mars Hotel, all of that. Yeah, pretty dramatic. The ship of fools kept sailing in and out of the mists of grateful lead history after 1974, no doubt, a ghost ship where one might find the spirits of precarious Lee, Cadillac Ron, some friends of Roxgully's friends, and the embodiment of every earnestly intentioned bad decision in the band's history, or maybe your own. Thanks for listening. Thank you very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Deadcast, friends. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode, Donna Jean Gaccio-McKay, Ron Rackow, Ned Lajan, David Grisman, Elvis Costello, Steve Brown, Richie Peckner, Jerry Pompelli, Jim Sullivan, John Perry, Gary Lambert, Jeff Gould, Joan Brown, Michael Parrish, Corey Arnold, Strider Brown, Jay Curly, Rita Fiedler, Renee Tenor, Lee Ronaldo, Gregory Barrett, Ron Long, David Lemieux, Brian Anderson, Sean O'Donnell, and Brian Quijoe. Extra special thanks to friend of the Deadcast, David Gans, for his ongoing contributions of audio from his interview archive. Executive producer for the good old Grateful Deadcast, Mark Pinkas. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mayhem Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd, and Doran Tyson. All rights reserved.