The Grateful Dead Pt. 2: The Ballad of Pigpen and Old, Weird America—an Origin Story

Double Elvis Emers yourself in herbal essences new Moroccan organ oil elixir infused with pure organ oil, just one drop. Deliver us up to 100 hours of hair nourishment with the indulgent scent of a Moroccan garden. Herbal essences new Moroccan organ oil elixir spark quality hair repair without the price tag. Try it now. Herbal essences Serf is prepared to smoothness nourishment with regimen use versus non-conditioning shampoo. Discrease land is a production of double Elvis. The stories about the grateful dead in their early days as a band specifically about their harmonica player Pigpen are insane. A band known for their drug use Pigpen did not get high. His bandmates would smoke grass and he would drink booze. His bandmates would drop LSD and he would drink more booze. His bandmates would play improvisational electric music and Pigpen would play the blues. Ron Pigpen McCurnen was obsessed with the blues. He was one of the band's strongest links to the traditional American music they loved. In part because Pigpen was committed to living the life of his blues musician heroes. Part of this meant dedicating himself to the canon of pre-imposed war black American music, but it also meant the steady diet of cheap highly potent alcohol known as rock gut supplemented with even cheaper barbeque and hot links. A diet that did him in at the age of 27. But prior to that Pigpen made great music. That music you heard at the top of the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my mellow charm called mellow open door blues MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to Mrs. Brown you get a lovely daughter by Herman's Hermann's. And why would I play you that specific slice of peacock cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on May 5th, 1965. And that was the day the warlocks played Magoo's pizza parlour in Menlo Park, California, taking the first step for what would become one of the most culturally influential bands of all time. The Grateful Dead. On this episode, Grass, LSD, Rock Gut Blues, the end of Pigpen in the beginning of the Grateful Dead. I'm Jake Brennan and this is The Scrake's Land. Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir in Phil Lesh, we're sitting in the back of a car that belonged to a friend of Bob's. They were getting high on one of Neil Cassidy's joints. Cassidy, the inspiration for Jack Caroax, Dean Moriarty character and his groundbreaking novel on the road, was a hero to all of them. Smoking his dope was seen as a privilege. Jerry and Bob had just played their second show in their new electric band The Warlocks. Phil had just seen the first rock and roll show of his young life. He was a friend, a fellow musician, but not part of their band yet. His mind was blown, and the energy of it all was unlike anything he'd ever experienced. It was a different type of gas from the cinj of the newly electric Bob Dylan's explosive lyrics that Phil heard on the radio, the postal truck he delivered mail from. And different still from the energy of the Beatles' backbeat and clanging electric guitars he watched on his television set on the Ed Sullivan show for a far. Up close and personal, live electric music was something else entirely. It was enough to set a brain on fire. Smoking Cassidy's dope, they were all on a post show high, and the performance was a success, sure, but that didn't matter. What made the moment special was that they felt an unspoken connection to something they held in the highest esteem, tradition. Specifically, the tradition of American music. That night, May 12, 1965 at Wagu's Pizza Parlor in Menlo Park, just south of San Francisco. The warlocks burned the join up with Chuck Berry, Haaland Wolf, and Freddie King covers. Jumped up blues numbers played with the energy of pent-up white teenagers desperate to shake some action. Like Garcia, weir, their drummer Bill Kurtzman, embassist at the time, Dana Morgan, didn't arrive at Rock and Roll from Dylan in the Beatles as so many of their peers would. They instead arrived on the proper course of Rock and Roll lineage, just as Dylan and Lenin and McCartney had, via Blue Is It Country, and for Garcia and company via Bluegrass and Jug band music as well, music that predated and informed and led to the creation of Rock and Roll. Prior to the formation of the warlocks, Jerry Garcia bought Weir in a long list of others put in time with Jerry's Jug band Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. Jug band music was traditional black party music, a genre that dated back to the early 1900s. Its originators, the Memphis Jug band Gus Cannon's Jug Stalkers and the Dixieland Jug Blowers traditionally featured in a ray of acoustic and makeshift instruments, wash tub bass, juice harp, harmonica, washboard, stove tops, acoustic guitar, piano, and of course the jug. Stoneweirer Glass and bloated into by its player to create a deep wild buzzing sound. Jug bands were hopped up, energetic, intended to drive the party. Jug band music directly influenced the English skiffle groups of the 1950s and went on to influence the Beatles. And of course, Jug band influence can be heard in the American blues, bluegrass, and folk that ran from Ma Rainey to Bill Monroe to Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan. Nick could now, in 1965, be heard in the music of the warlocks as well. Their set that night was modern by bluegrass and jug band music standards. They played Dylan's, it's all over now, baby blue, Rufus Thomas's walk in the dog and slin harpo's on a king bee among others. But it was all part of the same tradition. A tradition that Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and their early bandmates were now a part of. The tradition of Old Weird America. Dylan, Rufus Slim, their songs were part of the deeper lineage, a history of music that linked all the way back to traditional slave chance in field haulers, music that after the Civil War evolved into traditional ballads and breakdowns about bad, bad men. Stagger Lee, the loner, the pimps, the end of Billy Lions, railroad bill feared by breakmen everywhere, train robber extraordinaire, tom devil creeping up into unsuspecting girls' beds under the cover of night, and Willie Brennan, the highway robber, bold, gay, of English descent from out on the more. These men were legends, folk heroes desperate to survive their own demons and an America that didn't want them. An America that shut them out because of the color of their skin, the class they were born out of, and their refusal and or inability to conform to the standards of civilized society. Their legends were born of murder, robbery, bootlegging, and other violent acts of rebelliousness. The mythology of these men detailed half a centuries worth of rough and rowdy ways in song. Their casualties among them and their like, little Sadie who caught a bullet from a 44-smokeless, biola Lee whose fate inspired violence worthy of a life sentence, and the Knoxville girl, the victim of an unexpected delthwack from a blunt stick to the skull by a psychotic lover who then drugger by her golden curls down to the riverside and proceeded a beatered death. Outlaws, scoundrels, men who were in league with the devil. It is perhaps this story tells a good fortune that those three qualifiers all make up the old English origin of the word Warlock, but it is merely the humorous coincidence of Cosmic Americana, minus the Tolkien magic Warlocks are bad men, just the same as Outlaws, scoundrels, rounders, and ramblers. They are all part of the same musical alchemy that runs from Tommy Johnson to Led Zeppelin to Jeffrey Lee to Slayer to Jack White. What's the actual difference? They are threaded by the same spirit. The sorcerer is alchemy. Their musical alchemy, the pharmaceutical alchemy, white lightning, reefer, the opium gong, junkheads, moochers, sniffers, and hudshee-coochers, the men with the jive. Preacher drank some ginger, said it was because of the flu. That old man's been lion, he's got the Jake Lake too. Tell it to me, tell it to me, drink corn liquor, let the cocaine be. Cocaine is going to kill my honey dead. Drugs liquor, magic murder, killers, thieves, loose women, and other sort of characters. Old, weird, America. This was the tradition of the Warlocks. This was the tradition of the music they played that night in Magus. Weird. And they didn't mind. It suited them just fine. Because 22-year-old Jerry Garcia, 17-year-old Bob Weir, 19-year-old Bill Krutzman and 25-year-old Bill Lesh, were all weird as fuck. At a time when other kids were aged were taken solely by mob tops, beach blanket bingo, and the ensuing space race, these kids were, by comparison, into some weird shit, mainly music from way off the grid. Garcia, with his jug band and bluegrass obsession, Weir, with his Garcia obsession, Krutzman's New Orleans and R&B obsession, and Lesh, by the time he intended his first rock show that night, was already deeply obsessed with classical avant-garde composition. But as weird as they all were, they're all still just kids. Kids from diverse backgrounds, working middle and upper-class socioeconomic backgrounds, they were children of the straight world no matter how much they fancy themselves otherwise. And their approach to the music they were into at that young age was more scholarly than hand to Mow. None of them lived the tragic lives of the anti-heroes portrayed in the folk songs they loved and performed and that influenced them. They mined what they could from those men, from the myths and the legends of folk, but otherwise they lived relatively straight lives, how the atlases that were quickly falling under the dominant influence of cannabis and LSD experimentation, but nonetheless straight in comparison to Stagger Lee and Railroad Bill. And the members of the warlocks, despite their youth, knew that by the rights of tradition, and because of who they were as people and the nature of the music they played, that they were indebted to tragic old-weird Americana. But the warlocks were looking to learn and play music, not die or end up in jail. All but one of them. Whereas Pigpen, someone asked from the backseat, inquiring about the fifth missing member of the warlocks, Ron McCurnen, aka Blue Ron because of his obsession with the blues, aka Pigpen because of his funk, aka Pig because his bandmates were not without a sense of humor or brevity. The answer came from in-between hits of Cassidy's grass. Oh Pig, he's probably down by the train tracks drinking junk. Innovation Innovation is moving fast across every industry, with AWS AI. From Formula One insights to smarter power grids and personalized learning, AWS AI is how leaders stay ahead. This episode is brought to you by La Barra Mobile, the smarter mobile network. You get reliable coverage, excellent customer service rated 4.8 on trust file and plans starting from just £5 a month. But here's the big one. Unlike the big mobile networks, La Barra won't increase the price of your plan each year. It's flexible too, with 30-day rolling contracts. That's why they're which recommended mobile provider three years running. Switch today at La Barra.co.uk At EDF, we don't just encourage you to use less electricity. We actually reward you for it. That's why when you use less true and peak times on weekdays, we give you free electricity on Sundays. How you use it is up to you. EDF, change is in our power. How so to shift weekday peak usage by 40% for an hour to 16 hours of free electricity service. The bread truck barreled down the side of the mountain above Palato. It's driver, Tani, a black man who'd rather do without a stop by the white buzz he suspected were on his tail and an unmarked car. Pushed his truck to the edge of the speed limit. He believed his truck to have magical powers, so he named it the seventh son. And the truck lived up to its name. It had survived this run before down the mountain side from the bootlegger in La Honda, filled to the brim with as much high power at illegal Hooch Tani and his partner could afford. Whiskey at only a dollar fifty a gallon was worth the risk. His partner and crime had fave in the truck and in Tani behind the wheel, downshifting and makeshift Jake Briggs to save Doe on worn pads for the bread truck no doubt. More Doe, more Whiskey, Tani was smart. And so was his partner, Pigpen. They'd make it down without incident and take some of their stash out to the railroad yard and post up by the tracks with Pig's harmonica, Tani's acoustic, Drink Junk and Play the Blues. Drinking quote unquote junk was a reference to the type of alcohol pigpen, harmonica player for the warlocks preferred. The lowest quality booze in wine he could get his hands on. Bootleg Whiskey, White Port and Lemon Juice, a sweet wine known as Ombre and of course, Night Train. This constituted most of Pigpen's diet and the other part was filled by hotlings, pigs feet and cheap barbecue. Food and drink that he knew as heroes to bluesman he worshiped, lightning Hopkins, T-bone Walker, Howling Wolf, Lived off him. Pure rock gut didn't matter. It was part of the life, like the bootlegging and hanging out by the tracks playing music. As was everything about Pigpen, particularly the way he looked. I like the rest of the warlocks. Pig did not look at all like anyone or anything even remotely connected to the straight world. He wore greasy denim, so greasy his jeans stiffened. The grease on his jeans was second only to the tremendous amount of grease in his black hair. Leather jacket, a bike chain from a Harley permanently bolted onto his wrist in a big bad boyle marking his chin. He was the wild one without Brando's physical attractiveness and he could have cared less. Little Walter was an archetype, not a little richer. Blue and Lonesome and funky like Fred McDowell was slid and funky also like the filthy peanut's character he drew his nickname from. Unlike his bandmates and the warlocks, Pigpen wasn't interested in smoking grass or expanding his mind with LSD or really anything that preoccupied the imagination of the middle class. Pigpen was almost solely interested in blues. He grew up with him. His old man was a Boogie-Wiggy pianist who later turned in his heavy right hand for a gig as a rhythm in blues DJ for the Bay Area's KRE radio station. The old man spun records under the name Cool Breeze and his son, Young Ron, was knocked out by those records. He made the short leap backward from Elvis Presley to Arthur Crudow. Elvis was cool but barely rated amongst the originals. For every white version of a rhythm in blues song, be it Elvis Presley or Pat Boone or later The Beatles or Bob Dylan, there was almost always a more interesting, authentic black version of the song. And thus, one of the earliest versions of White America's concept of hip-ness took root in Pigpen. To be hip in the early 1960s for young white musicians, meant you were into the blues and that you identified with the plight of black Americans. It was the same as it was for the Beats in the 50s whose own hip-ness equation was answered by the subculture's affinity for early jazz, specifically bebot musicians. So as a young white teenager who was in almost nothing but blues music, Pigpen, when he wasn't hanging in playing with the warlocks, hung out almost exclusively with Tony, a black man in black populated East Powell, Alta, blue is blues, nothing else. The railroad yard, it was rhythm, not just romance. The sound of the big trains tracked Pigpen's harmonica, his vocal in Tony's acoustic guitar. The world was suddenly smaller and the magic of history was suddenly less esoteric. Alongside those old freight, Pigpen rooted himself into his own place in time. He felt connected, at one with the tragic and cosmic continuum of old weird America. The Pullman Porter saw the fellow black man working his way through the private rail car he was assigned to, and knew immediately the death had blown in through his door. He lowered his gaze, went about his business, waiting on his wealthy passengers, and ignored the man. The man was moving quickly, toward the front of the train, brazenly with a sidearm out in the open, down by his right thigh, all casual. It went unseen, coupled with his determined stride, and the passengers were none the wiser, so they were allowed to live along with the Porter for now. The Porter knew who he was, railroad bill of course. He of the vendetta against the big railroads, he was the only black man not wearing a Pullman uniform, who was either stupid enough or brave enough to enter the White's only first class train car in 1895. But the opulent Pullman cabin wasn't his final destination. He was headed to the jackpot, the freight car, because that was where the loot was. Sheriff McMillan, Stinsonville, Stewart, they all met their demise at the other end of railroad bills rifle, and so too would whoever stood in his way on this day. Railroad bill made his way into the freight car, and there were two pinkertons on guard. Bill immediately shot one and then instructed the other to open the safe. He did as he was told, and then filled Bill's gunny sack with all the cash and gold and silver bullion that would fit. When he was done, railroad bill dispassionately emptied another blast from his rifle right into him. He reloaded and made his way to the engine car at the front. He ordered the breakman to halt the steam-driven locomotive. His loaded shotgun pointed into his face made it clear, railroad bill was not fucking around. The breakman gripped the heavy brake levers, pulled on the safety trigger, and heathed the levers down with all his might. And as the train slowed, railroad bill made his way to the sideboard of the engine car and jumped into the night, fleeing away from the train with the loot and bolstering the myth of railroad bill in the process, a myth that would echo down through the ages and out of pig's harmonic a decades later. The train barreled through the yard, the fire and the trash can burned passively, warmed northern California spring air, a bottle of night train between them on the ground. Tani beat down accrued rhythm on his acoustic, the one to the five again and again. He added time perfectly with the rhythm of the old train, sneaking its way past them. Pigpen blew into his heart, came up for air after his solo and leaned into the lyrics. Railroad bill standing on the hill, he never worked and he never will. Ride, ride bill ride. Sounded about ride to Pigpen. We'll be right back after this word, word, word. Idle money lies in your current account picking crumbs out of its belly button wondering, should I eat them? But when you start investing with monzo, your money's always busy. It turns on regular investments, invests your spare change and tops up your stocks and shares iso. It even helps you make sense of risk and return. Monzo, the bank that gets your money moving. You could get back less than your invest, monzo current account required UK residence 18 plus T-Sex. The bartender Larry took his eye out and placed it on the bar. It was glass, of course. Like the many tumblers and martini glasses stacked into various towers behind the stick. There were hardly any pint glasses or stemware. Beer and wine were rarely served. This was a booze joint. When Larry took his eye out, met the joint was jumping which tonight it most certainly was. The in-room, a singles joint for the recently divorced, a stopover place for flight attendants and a must stop for traveling salesmen between San Francisco and Palo Alto. The bar was where you went if you were middle-aged, horny, and hadn't quite given up yet on your chances of getting laid. Plusch reds on pitch black interior, the in-room was decidedly adult, and it was also part of the West Coast's small, the mid-sized circuit rooms for touring artists, Marvin Gaye, Jackie De Shannon, and the coasters where they all put in work on their paths up and down the coast. Someone decided the warlock should be the house band, warm up for the headliners, and keep the joint buzzing and the boo is flowing. Five, fifty minutes sets a night, six nights a week. It was real work, five sets a night, and by the estimation of all in the band, the pig pen, the only way to work through it was while experimenting with their new favorite pastime, LSD. The drug had recently made its way to the West Coast via Ken Keezy's married pranksters, and during the warlocks early days, everything about LSD appealed to them, especially as it pertained to their musicianship, finding themselves as a band and learning how to write their first songs. Purgarsia, LSD, combined with electric music, was total freedom. It was a liberation from the demanding rigidity of bluegrass precision playing, and he carried the clarity of his banjo playing along for the trip while the rest of the group melded their own influences, classical avant-garde, R&B, rock, and the blues with Garcia's bluegrass. The parts have been fused into one hole by the spark of acid and electric instrumentation. Out behind the inn room, railroad tracks weave their way north and south, while the band perform they could hear the passing trains. They latched into the rhythm, and the pig pen rode that old Tommy railed as harmonica, and sometimes with his organ while Garcia Lesch cuts out a weird channel their latest obsession, another train entirely. Jazz Althel saxophone is John Coltrin who had been dominating their collective musical imagination. Train, as he was referred to, provided a vision of improvisation for Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesch. Train would vamp on one chord, which from a practical standpoint for Lesch, who had literally just begun the play's instrument, the electric bass guitar, made all the sense in the world. And Train's genius wasn't that he as a soloist would improvise. It was that he would allow his highly qualified side men to improvise along with him. The root chord vamping along was their platform, the song's melody their through line, and their own creative imaginations, the steam powering their live performances far the fuck out, down previously on her track, before inevitably returning back to the station from their trip together as one, after achieving dizzying heights of collective improvisation. It was during this heavy time at the in-room where the warlocks were their first song. Of course, it was called caution, do not stop on the tracks. Garcia Lesch, we are Christmas, they knew they were on to something they all did, except Pig Band. Pig is the only non-LST in grass, devotee, hung back, and waited for his moment. When it would arrive, he'd dig into the parts of the set where the bands and improvisation took a back seat to more traditional blues numbers, aimed at making sure the crowd was still there with them. Howling Wolse version of Little Red Rooster, Jr. Wells version of Good Morning with a schoolgirl. Pig Pens beloved blues had been reduced to becoming the functionary bridge between the traditional music that first inspired the group, with this new weird Americana the Grateful Dead were alchimating at the in-room back in 1965. For Pig Pens, this trip was getting strange and it was only about to get stranger. They needed a new band name, a downtown New York art band had beat them to the vinyl press with the name the Warlocks, though they too would eventually abandon the moniker for another name, the Velvet Underground. But at the time for Garcia and Co, a new name was needed. They were at Phil Lesch's house, bandying about potential band names, all of which were utterly ridiculous. Garcia grabbed Lesch's dictionary, closed his eyes, opened it to a random page, pointed with his index finger, opened his eyes, and there it was in black and white. The Grateful Dead. Without even knowing the meaning, the juxtaposition of those two words immediately spoke to the group, and when they read the meaning of the phrase, it was sealed. The Grateful Dead is a folktale about a hero who comes upon a dead man, a dead man who left nothing behind, who has no family to pay for his funeral. The hero, expecting nothing in return, pays the dead man's funeral dead. Later, the hero comes upon some impossible task, whereupon the dead man, from beyond the grave, grateful for the death the hero paid for him, comes to the hero's assistance, helping him overcome his impossible task. I.E., the Grateful Dead. It's a story about karma, about paying it forward, about a generosity of spirit that was evident in the band's hip origins, demonstrated in their improvisational playing style and in their personalities. The name was perfect. So too was the newly christened Grateful Dead's timing. The West Coast, San Francisco in particular, was undergoing an evolution from its specific and bohemian subculture into the big bang of the hippie movement, a movement that would not only dominate the rest of the 60s, but also go on to be the single most influential cultural movement this country has ever seen. Ken Kizzi's acid tests were sweeping the subculture on the West Coast. These were the days before LSD was officially made illegal, and at Kizzi's tripped out parties up and down the coastline, in rooms painted fluorescent and lit by strobe lights, black lights, and flooded with visuals from video loops on repeat, and with the news psychedelia being improvised by the Grateful Dead as Kizzi's acid test house band, the crowd was eclectic, turned on in strange. Hip college kids left over beats from the beginning of the decade, hell's angels, poets, whoever was as Kizzi in his band of traveling Mary Prankster's categorized as being, quote, on the bus, a phrase they coined while traveling the states in 65 and 66 in an effort to spread the gospel of LSD. The acid tests were mostly West Coast localized version of Kizzi's roving tour. The acid tests were meant to enlighten the nation and subvert square society. It was a wild scene to say the least. For Kizzi and the rest of his Mary Prankster's, the idea was simple, spread the message, and get on the bus, bring the trip to wherever the people demanded, and in February 1966, that meant Watts Los Angeles. The acid party was about to hit the road, and so too was its house band, the Grateful Dead. Someone had found an old run down warehouse in Compton, Kizzi thought it perfect. Word got out that the acid test was coming to LA. Hundreds of kids looking to get turned on showed up. The acid mixed with cool aid and served as punch was particularly strong that evening. LA Compton Watts, this was not San Francisco, not the hate, not even the in-room and far the fuck away from Mugu's. This was dark. Maybe it was the potency of the LSD that night or the set that the band was putting out there. Death have no mercy in this land, banging powerfully through the band's new sound system, designed by Chief Head and LSD chemist Augusta Salsley Stanley. Maybe it was the scores of LAPD circling the warehouse with its curious young party-goers, wild-eyed and manic. Young women with their skirts too short, talking gibberish, young men with their hair too long, talking jive. LAPD cruisers circled the warehouse. Welcome to the show, the only show in town. The long-haired freaky people up to God knows what in that warehouse. The cops were all tuned into the same radio frequency in their cars. Their windows opened, the clapback from the patrolmen squawking into and out of the radios, escaping out into the urban nighttime air, creating a literal feedback leap of ignorance and square-dome. Inside the band played on. Normally the acid test gigs were freeing, but something about that night had the band on the run. Frustrated by their inability to lock in, scared like the crowd of the cops lurking outside with the Billy clubs, their guns and their punitive discriminatory very unhyp ideas about justice. The dead lurched on stage. Pigpen was apart from the band. Drunk, not stoned, and unable to latch onto whatever his bandmates were failing to latch onto themselves. A woman in the audience began to freak out, too much acid, and the band stopped playing and then Pigpen heard it. Through all the madness, familiarity, the sound began of a passing freight train out behind the warehouse. He looked into the crowd, and saw the woman freaking out, saw the men trying to cool her out, saw them fail. He caught her eye and grabbed the mic on its stand, and in time with the rhythm of the passing train out back, Pigpen blew wrong, saying out. I want to know, do you feel good? The woman was struck with silence, and the crowd began to come to focus on Pigpen. Again, a little bit louder now. I want to know, you feel good! She mowled the word yes, the constricted pig, the train carried on, and saw the pigpen. The crowd freak out, chickencluded, responded in unity with OES. In this time, the crowd was rapturous, oh yes! Pigpen left loose, and I want to tell everyone that I was strong, no, there's many things you gotta do one more time, you gotta think about your neighbors, you gotta think about your friends, you gotta think about your brothers, you gotta think about your sisters, and everybody that means something to me. You then pointed to the freak out, chick who's by now enraptured with the sermon and blurred it out. Somebody a little lost? Somebody lost a little bit of finship, I want to know that you know what I'm talking about. I said I want to know, you know what I'm talking about. Now tell me one more time, do you feel good? Then if you can, you better get on up out of this place, because shit's about to get me. And with that, pigpen walked off stage and into the L.A. Air. By now, the cops had the warehouse surrounded. They'd play saw horses around the exits to corral the kids as they split. Pig was dejected, and the gig was a bust, and the party was a bust, and now if he wasn't careful, he might very well get busted. As he made his way out back out towards the tracks, he came upon Ken Keezy wrestling with a giant barrel of red glowing cullade, and there were numerous cops shuffling about wondering what he was up to. Keezy bent down by the sewer drain on the side of the road, pulling the barrel down with him and emptying its contents out and into the drain. Thus getting rid of the remaining batch of LSD, literally right under the notices of the cops. Pigpen could not believe how strange the trip had become. And just a year later, his band, the band he'd started with his close friend Jerry Garcia, would go on to sign to Warner Brothers Records. They'd record numerous albums, two of them great, working man's dead in American beauty, and those two albums being the ones that he'd closest to the band's old weird Americana roots. Ironically, in an effort to write a pop hit for Warner Brothers because the bulk of the material on their other releases was like the Watts acid test too far out for the record buying public, and admittedly too far out for Pigpen as well. He was like an American Brian Jones not recognizing the value of the very band he and his hipness essentially created because he was too fucked up. And by the time 1973 rolled around, everything had changed. The hate community was scattered, all that money had changed everybody. Janice was gone, oh, did three years earlier. She and Pig used to split half a gallon of southern comfort every night they were together during their on-again off-again relationship. They used to make so much noise in Pig's bedroom that band members he used harder drugs wondered how they could ball all night while so gone on booze. It seemed like an eternity ago. The band was now settled into something resembling a professional groove, writing music regularly, recording it, and then going out on the road to promote it like professional musicians. They even succumbed to traditional promotional tactics of the Behastiv Warner Brothers. Weird as fuck pro Mosher, but nonetheless part of the music industry machine all the same. They weren't part of the straight world, far from it, but they were now part of the music machine whether they liked it or not. And despite their far out acid inspired oral explorations on record and on tour, the new Weird America the grateful dead were creating and living it. They were a world apart from the old Weird America that inspired them in the beginning. Traditional American music was tragic. The grateful dead were becoming an institution, beloved, lovable, tripped out teddy bears, a far cry from the bad men that inspired the ballads and breakdowns of the warlocks, railroad bill Willie Brennan and Staggalee. But the grateful dead were still indebted to that tradition, and the bill was about to come too. Tragedy was the currency. Death was at the dead's door and death had no mercy in this land. July 1972, Pigpen's drinking had spawned out of control one too many times. He wasn't quite out of the band, but he wasn't quite in it either. The dead were touring, but he couldn't keep up anymore. His drinking was so bad that physically he had flare-ups of internal bleeding and his playing suffered greatly. At a time when the band was exploring the further reaches of improvisation, his place in the band was suspect to say the least. Rock Scully, the band's manager, called him out on tour for falling asleep on stage. And after that, Pigpen was forced to take some time off to try to regain his health. The band was certain he would recover, but Pigpen knew better. He was in his Marin County apartment fixing to die. It separated himself from his girlfriend, his family, his band telling them, I don't want you around when I die. On March 8, 1973, Pigpen, in the throes of an internal hemorrhage from cirrhosis of the liver, a similar cause of death that killed Jerry Garcia's hero Jack Carrowack. Lay back in his bed and contemplated the new set of lyrics he was working on. Seems like all my yesterdays are filled with pain. There's nothing but darkness tomorrow. If you're gonna do like you say you do, if you're gonna change your mind and walk away, don't make me live in this pain no longer. You know I'm getting weaker, not stronger. When he closed his eyes that last time, he knew what he was doing. He knew where he was going, and he knew why. It was tragic and necessary as the dead had come to. Ron Pigpen McCurden generously paid it and his band, the dead, would forever be grateful. Tragedy of befallen them, their very own bad man had broken down, and now the ballad of Pigpen will forever be sung as an integral piece of the Grateful Bed's origin story, rooting the lore of the band firmly in the tradition of Old Weird America. His tombstone says, once and forever remember of the Grateful Bed. He died at 27, and that is a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is the Scraight Slant. The Scraight Slant was created by yours truly and has produced and partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelampod.com. If you're listening as a disgrace land all access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelampod.com slash membership. Members can listen to every episode of Discretsland ad free, plus you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month, weekly unscripted bonus episodes, special audio collections, and early access to merchandise and events. Visit disgracelampod.com slash membership for details. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook at disgracelampod and on youtube at youtube.com slash at disgracelampod. Rockerola.