Blues For Allah 50: Sage and Spirit

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. It's with incredible sadness that we say goodbye to Donna Jean Godshaw McKay. In her remarkable first career, Donna Thatcher was a backup vocalist on sessions for Elvis Presley, Percy Sledge, Cher, and others. Officially joining the Grateful Dead as 1971 turned into 1972, Bobby Weir was the first to call her Donna Jean. And she was no backup singer, but a member of the band's front line, becoming fully salaried in 1973. After starting to write songs on her worlditzer for 1975's Keith and Donna album while raising their son Zion, it was Jerry Garcia who encouraged her to bring original material to the dead. A member of the Jerry Garcia band from 1976 through 1978, she remained a fully vested part of the Dead's music in Mayhem until 1979, and a family member for the rest of her life. It's been the privilege of privileges to include Donna Jean and her laugh as a regular feature of the Dead cast over the past few years, and both can be heard in today's episode. Fairly well, Lige. The Good Old Grateful Dead cast. The official podcast of the Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mayhem with Jesse Jarnau, exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season 12 of The Good Old Grateful Dead cast. I'm your co-host Rich Mayhem. Thank you very much for tuning in. In this episode of The Good Old Grateful Dead cast, we explore not only the delightful Bobby Weir instrumental Sage and Spirit, but we also tell you everything you've always wanted to know about what is probably one of your favorite Dead shows. It's certainly one of ours. The Great American Music Hall show won from the vault from August 13, 1975. The 50th anniversary deluxe edition of Blues For All is out now. This 3-CD set has the newly remastered album with unreleased soundcheck and concert recordings. There are also vinyl variants of the original album available, as well as Blues For All of 50th anniversary merch. All of these not-to-be-missed items can be found at Dead.net. Also, at Dead.net right now, for a limited time, you can subscribe to the 2026 season of Dave's Picks. The quarterly archival concert releases handpicked by David Lemieux. Early bird pricing is now in effect through November 30th, and the first edition ships out on January 30th. A Dave's Picks subscription makes a great gift for the Deadhead in your life, and there's even a cool gift certificate on the website that you can print out and put inside a holiday card. Subscribers are the only ones who get the bonus discs, so don't miss out, order now, and save yourself some bread on a subscription that you'll look forward to all year long. Head on over to Dead.net slash Deadcast and check out all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons 1 through 11, and you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how you like to listen. Please help this podcast by subscribing, sharing us with your friends on social media, hitting that like button, and if the spirit moves you, leave us a review. Very kind of you, thank you very much. We have transcripts from many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure. Head on over to Dead.net slash Deadcast-index and check them out. Well, Blues for Aula is loaded with great instrumentals, and Sage and Spirit is certainly one of Bobby Weir's great contributions to the album. We're going to take you inside this beautiful piece of music, as well as inside the Great American Music Hall for an exclusive industry-only event featuring our favorite band, and Jesse Jarno is at the door, and your name is on the list. Blues for Aula is the permanent home to some of the most unusual pieces of music the Grateful Dead created. Several of the tracks on the album became staples of the Dead's live repertoire, but several didn't. King Solomon's Marbles was played four times, all in 1975, and stronger than the Dirt only appeared in half of those. Blues for Aula's title track, which will be the subject of our final episode this season, appeared three times in some form, also only that year. And Bobby Weir's instrumental, Sage and Spirit, which we're talking about today, would only appear twice on the Grateful Dead stage, and once kind of by accident. We say this all the time, but it's unlike anything else the Dead recorded. You'll notice, for example, no drums. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux. Because they didn't play it that much live, I never really think of Sage and Spirit. It's just such a beautiful piece, and like putting the flute in there. I just love it. Sage and Spirit, it's a freaking great, great little A2. It's sort of a thing where I don't play guitar. I wish I did so I could play this song. That's the thing I would want to play. Like a few songs on Blues for Aula, Sage and Spirit had its roots in material that existed before the sessions at Bobby Weir's Aces Studio began in February 1975. And, like a few songs on Blues for Aula, it was shaped by the unfolding events of the years the sessions progressed. And I think the first time we all heard it was in the Grateful Dead movie in October 1974, where he is playing it as just a way to warm up his fingers. That's Bobby Weir on stage at Winterland, from the soundcheck sequence in the Grateful Dead movie while the piano gets tuned in the background. Which doesn't mean it was remotely finished, just a seed ready to go. Part of why Weir is able to do such unique phrasing is he's got unusually large hands, and Jerry said that in an interview. And when you see him doing it, he's really covering a lot of space in there. As we heard in our Music Never Stopped episode, and especially our episode for the 50th anniversary of Weir's Ace album, he could take a long time to develop his ideas into performable songs. Our correspondent Gary Lambert was working on a story about Weir for Guitar Player Magazine during this window. I got to visit with Bobby not that long after the final Winterland show as part of some interviews I was doing with him. I went to his home, and I'm thinking this must have been November or early December of 74. And he got a preview of the album the band hadn't yet started recording. While I was in Bobby's home, he picked up his acoustic guitar from the cache and played a very rudimentary fragment of what turned out to be Sage and Spirit. You know, just jaw-droppingly beautiful. And he said, uh, something I'm working on. I can't play it, of course. That was a bit of isolated acoustic guitar from the recorded version. Naturally, as an etude, it was designed to expand the player's technique. It also stretched Weir's brain as a composer. There were only really a few fragments of Sage and Spirit on the circulating blues for a la sessions. Here it is in etude form on what's probably March 6th as the coffee brews and the band gets ready to start their workday. But there's a bit from the day before that really grounds the piece in the blues for a la process. So that might sound like a different Bob Weir song, Lost Sailor. And that's an accurate thing to hear there too, but it's also a section of Sage and Spirit. From the sound of things on the tape, it wasn't yet connected to the intro figure that we've highlighted so far, which suggests, at least my years, that another way Sage and Spirit connected to its peers on Blues for a la is that it grew from several instrumental modules that they were individually and collectively trying to sew together, sometimes not always successfully. That sketch of Weir's etude would fall into a not always organized jam that in turn ended in the Blues for a la theme, what might be called the only known jammed out Sage and Spirit. In 1975, Weir was attempting to shape several pieces for the ongoing album sessions. The music never stopped, took a lot of work to get it from a live improv theme to EAC to Hollywood cantata and into its final form. We don't have nearly as much recorded evidence of Sage and Spirit. In fact, those fragments are literally it, though I assume there's much more to be heard on the currently MIA workshop tapes. In between those sketches from March and the final album version in July, there was lots going on in the Grateful Dead's world. As we've heard over the past few episodes, in June, United Artists acquired manufacturing rights for both Grateful Dead and Round Records. Their new contract specified a deadline of July 10th for the project. Al Teller was president of United Artists in 1975. Rolling Stone reported, whether the traditionally deadline unconscious Dead are going to be under the gun at UA, Dead Records president Ron Racco said, listen, we're so deadline conscious now, they couldn't possibly be more strict. The session tapes bear this out, mostly ending after a feverish few recordings from early June, because by the end of the month, they were almost desperately trying to tie up all the loose ends they'd opened over the previous four. By then, they'd mostly moved on to Overdubs. Mostly. That's a session for King Solomon's Marbles from early July, where Mickey Hart is definitely in the room. After the second pass, this happens. I think this might be Rex Jackson talking. What are they here earlier? That is, the Mill Valley Police Department has just shown up in the driveway at Aces. The next few seconds provide us with a few pieces of color. First, how the different Grateful Dead's react when the heat arrives. There's a lot going on during those 20 seconds of audio. Alongside the stashes that are presumably being sequestered off camera, we get a hint at what's perhaps the proper date of this tape. I'm pretty sure this is a correct description of the action. Someone announces they're going to hide in the booth. Phil Lesch is pissed, ever the diplomat. Billy Kreuzman suggests they tell them it's the 5th of July and they're celebrating. Jerry Garcia says to tell the cops that they're honoring the bicentennial in their own way, and Kreuzman volunteers to go talk to them. Always a reasonable idea. Even further off, Mike, Mickey Hart suggests sacrificing Billy Kreuzman. Let's listen to that again. The methods, I don't know. I'll give you my time. I'll send you my time. In our own way, we're celebrating the bicentennial. Billy. The Augusto Lent. Take sacrifice, me and my son. I don't know. I don't get to do that. They've done it. The last year under Jim Hunter, it is all at the last year. Phil Lesch and Jerry Garcia confer. There's still nothing illegal about what we're doing there, so I'm going to do it. I believe there's nothing illegal about playing music. The rest of the things that we're doing, that's not what we're doing. This is a place where I definitely wish the off-mic levels were higher. After that, there's a slight pause in the tape, and then you can hear Bobby Weir wondering if the cops like the music. And then it's back to work, ironing out the finer details of stronger than dirt. Also, some serious conversation about insects. Think about mosquitoes, they have a terrible sense of ejection. Right, right, right. And they're very, very sensitive to vibrations. Every cell is present here. You know, everything. I think they were triggered by carbon dioxide content and moisture and heat. That's the only thing that triggers them. And then they're all gone. Etc. If they don't get the final take during that session, they come very close. So assuming we can date that session as July 5th, we can also say that the session continued into the wee hours, though there was some attrition by the end of the night, when it might have just been Bobby Weir and engineer Robbie Taylor. And they recorded what I believe would be the final basic tracks for the whole album. The tracking sheet for the piece called Etude is dated July 5th, 1975. There are four different microphones on Weir's acoustic guitar. We just heard the Studer Cardioid. This is the Studer Omni. The Lin Cardioid. And the Lin Omni. And Assembled, which is how we're going to hear it for the rest of this segment. From the City College of New York, musicologist Sean O'Donnell, to explain Sage and Spirit, sort of, and answer the question, what even is an Etude? It would be a work that's composed usually to focus on a particular technique. There are ones that work on, say, right hand or peggiation. So you start a pattern and you repeat that pattern over and over as the harmonies change. And Sage and Spirit? It's looser than a composed Etude. Like if you were writing an Etude for someone else, like, you're going to work on this particular technique and you would focus on some component. It's sort of a bob Etude. Like these are bobisms. And I'm going to do them all in a row so my hands are comfortable with my language. Where the music never stopped pointed towards some of the rhythmic language we're would develop in his songs. Sage and Spirit pointed at something else. It's a bit of a different harmonic language and in a way, to me, pointing forward. The same way we have a little bit of his electric sound seems to be pointing to his next phase. It's a more ambiguous harmonic language. Again, the sort of lost sailor realm where it's like we're going to have these loose sonarities and we'll do things over a pedal and we'll make things float so that then we can land somewhere. It sounds more like a compositional technical exercise than, than say a guitar warmup. Although it's a, you have to have facility to play this at all. There's something about it that comes out of the prelude to Weatherport Suite in terms of Bob's language on the instrument, but it's much more freewheeling than that. That feels like a composition there, the prelude. And then this rhymes with King Solomon's Marbles where it's an idea and a free, free flow on a couple of ideas. I think Sean is picking up on one of Sage and Spirit's secrets. Though it sounds like perhaps the album's most classical composition, its actual presentation is an example of the studio as a compositional tool. It might be the first time a grateful led studio track was overdubbed around a solo performance and is definitely the first time since the Anthem of the Sun, Oxamox, Oa era. There's a lot going on under the hood of Sage and Spirit, and of the many overdubs, I don't think all of them made it to the final mix. So let's adjust our ears to a bit of the full picture before diving under. In Dennis McNally's official Dead Bio, a long strange trip, he writes that around midnight one night, Weeder was frustrated with Sage and Spirit, and Saxon flute player Steve Schuster was summoned to aces, and by dawn they had a complete take. I'm not sure if this was the same night as the basic tracks in the appearance of the cops, but it could be. We spoke with Steve Schuster about his saxophone appearance on the Music Never Stopped, and of course asked about Sage and Spirit too. But Steve Schuster also worked as an arranger and transcriptionist, creating lead sheets for the dead and other clients, which we spoke about previously, and he apparently helped Weer organize the different compositional subunits of the piece. There are two pretty different flute parts entwined with one another. Here's a bit of the first. And the second. And combined. And the second. It's a really cool effect, and the parts diverge a bit later in the track and then come back together. Here it is from the ending. And there's an additional Weer part too, playing stereo electric guitar through a Leslie rotating cabinet, the album Sonic Signature. Instead of left and right on the tracking sheet, the stereo tracks are labeled coming and going. It's in the mix ambiantly. And the Listening to Phil Lesh's Stereo part is both a great example of his never the same way once style of playing, as well as the idea that Sage and Spirit was just as much free flow as it was composition. He's in there for sure. Here's Phil from the beginning. In the middle is a beautiful passage of volume swells. In the final segment, as Steve Schuster's flute goes free, the bass nearly gets funky. I definitely hear Keith Godshaw's grand piano in the final picture, but he got two tracks to play with as well, and plays similar ideas on both. Here's one pass at the intro. And the other. The piano is pretty far back in the mix, and I assume they chose one of these performances over the other, or maybe took parts from each take. But it also sounds pretty cool if you play them together. And like everybody but Phil, Garcia gets two different guitar parts. The first, and the one that's in the final mix, I think, is a long, beautiful take of quiet volume swells, sounding very much like a bowed string instrument. Here it is layered with Lesh's volume swell part. Garcia's other part is more upper register. Even with his other part during the quiet ending weirdness. It would have given the final song a different flavor had it been used. One thing the song didn't have was a name. So sometime in July, as the final album was being assembled, Weir came up with a title that, in a way, connected it to one of his earlier songs. Cassidy was named in honor of both Neil Cassidy, but also Cassidy Law, daughter of Eileen Law, born at the Roccarocca Ranch in the summer of 1970, as Weir worked on the changes to what became Cassidy. Sage and Spirit, on the other hand, was named after Sage and Spirit Scully, daughters of Nicky Scully and Rock Scully, one of the dead's first managers, housemates at 710 Ashbury, and who still worked for the dead in various managerial and freelance capacities as both organizer and disorganizer. Please welcome to the dead cast from Sage and Spirit, Sage Scully. On that time, we lived in Mill Valley, which is where Bobby lived, and I think we lived pretty close. I'm not sure exactly when he wrote the song, but I would have been three when it was released. My dad always told the story of my sister and I jumping on a bed, like in a hotel somewhere, like we were, which we often did. Whenever we would be in a hotel, I would say we were mostly jumping around on the furniture at that stage in life. Rock is really good at telling stories, and a lot of times they're true, and a lot of times they just take you on a cool trip, and they may or may not have happened. So I'm not totally sure. I like to believe that that's what happened, because I think it's really sweet, and it was likely something like that. In Rock's colorful book, Living with the Dead, he writes, Bobby wrote Sage and Spirit, while my daughters, named Sage and Spirit, were jumping on his bed and generally trashing his hotel room. He was trying to play his guitar, and came up with a rhythm for this from their jumping. The flute mimics their laughter. Whether or not that's a literal description, it's pretty easy to imagine Bobby Weir sitting still on a couch with an acoustic guitar and putting together the piece called Sage and Spirit, while all hell breaks loose around him. On the spectrum of loosened hell that existed in the Grateful Dead world, this fell pretty high on the wholesome end. We were definitely little rascals running around in hotels. Even on the beds, we used to play don't touch the ground or something where you have to just jump from one thing to the next. Or like on super cheeky moments, we're putting ice cubes out the window and that kind of thing. In 1975, with the Dead off the road, the family vibes ran higher around Marin County. Bobby was certainly a nice presence in my life at that time when I was that age. He was really kind. He was really good with kids. In that scene, especially, he was almost one of the more straight people, for lack of a better word. I think he was a bit of an anchor for me when I was really little. I thought about it the other day. I think he's more of a hippie now than he was in the 70s. Rock too. Rock especially had an erudite feeling to him. Bobby also, in his tweed suits, a little bit of a cowboy, a little bit of a professional athlete. He was also just really open to having us around when we were little. He was really gracious. Sage Scully can be seen in the Grateful Dead movie, both on and backstage. Around the time, Weir was writing Sage in Spirit. That little girl in that flower dress on the stage is me. I'm pretty sure my mom used to make my dresses. So we have a lot of photographs of those dresses with the flowers. In fact, Sage is at the center of one of the movie's most subtly hilarious, extremely cute and kind of psychedelic moments. My biggest scene and the one that I was the most proud of, and it can even remember when the premiere happened, I was like, I'm in this movie and now I'm like what, six or five or something? And I got all dressed up. I remember putting lots of beads on and stuff. And it was the scene where I'm walking into the catering room and I go up and I've got this plate and I take one thing from either grape or cherry tomato or something and I just put it on my plate and it makes a boink. And Rock and Jerry, they loved a boink. Any kind of comic noise or something to infuse in a moment. So that was my big scene and I actually can remember them talking about the boink and just having a good laugh. Because I think there were a lot of those moments in that movie that Jerry did. Sage and Spirit are both very cool names, together, separately, and as a song title. I was thinking about the song and I know there are obviously no words, but the names originate from the eaching. So when my mom was pregnant, I know she did it with me and I'm pretty certain she did it with my sister's name. She threw the coins for the eaching and then she would read the passage and that's where she found the names Spirit and Sage. And they really suited us. Starting with our fathers, like Rock, he is really special. He is a really special man. He was kind of like a little bit softer and he had a rough road. It was kind of self-induced, but he was graceful. Spirit's dad Ken Goldfinger Connell. And Ken's like 6'3", big, imposing guy, red hair, blotchy skin, like scary looking guy, missing a hand, like right out of the gate you're like, what is that? Ken Goldfinger Connell was a notorious smuggler and has come up previously on the dead cast as the person responsible for overdosing the apple juice at the Fillmore West in June 1969. Pretty far into the chaotic red on that loosened hell spectrum we mentioned. We refer you back to our Black Peter episode. Suffice it to say, he wasn't around much. There just these differences. The Sage and Spirit were just both very, there's a duality there that's really interesting and it has played out throughout our entire life. Even so much as little things like when my mom remarried, I wore like this cream dress and she wore a black dress. That kind of signifies our whole life, like this ying and yang kind of a thing. I never really felt like the song was written for us. I just kind of felt like it was the name was the stono. Sage and Spirit was the last of the album's basic tracks, I think. They spent the next week and a half working on the album's overdubs, possibly more, but not everything was dated. It was off into the land of mastering and album art in other details, which we'll get into in our next episode. But one of the projects was a party to celebrate it. This would become one of the dead's all time legendary shows, August 13th, 1975 at the Great American Music Hall, now one from the vault. And wowie-zowie are we excited to bring you this next segment. Ron Rakow. Now I put that together, I'm hands on on that one. A lot was going on, we were doing a lot of things together. We were making two movies and supporting ourselves as best we could and we just had a new deal with the United Artists. Also a new album. I said to Jerry the entire radio industry is coming to San Francisco for a convention. I'd love to put on a show at that time. So he said do it, I'll get everybody together and he called everybody, he called around and bingo before you know it. He was off doing his time, went and made the deal for the Great American Music Hall and figured out what it would cost and I got a budget. The radio programming forum presented by Billboard magazine wasn't the dead's usual scene, but as we've heard time and time again, 1975 wasn't the usual year for the dead. Wake of the Flood had made it to number 18 on the Billboard Top 100 and from the Mars Hotel up to a robust number 16. With a new deal with a big record label, there was no reason not to aim higher and having every major radio programmer in the country come to your doorstep was fairly easy lifting compared to say going on the road. The Great American Music Hall show in August 1975 became an involved production on multiple levels. There were two parts to it. There's the backstage and what the audience got and what the audience got was a party produced by the consummate party producer I've ever met in my entire life and I would call him my best friend, but he's way more than that. He's my closest brother. His name is Roger Lewis. He was a former partner of Basterds and Company, which is a New York City brokerage firm that was very large. We're going to detour into a semi-forgotten wing of the Grateful Led family in this next segment. Roger Lewis is the most articulate member of what he calls the Pledge of Crew. The Pledge of Crew are the guys that went along, that were always around, that were ready to even do stuff and be helpful, but they essentially were there because it was a good time. Please welcome to the good old Grateful Led cast, Roger Lewis. I got invited to a dead performance. It was probably at the one down on Third Street. That'd be the Fillmore East. I started going down there to those gigs. I met Rackow early on. His New York apartment became the site of some wild, dead-centric parties. I was very fond of the guys in the band too. Jerry was an amazing human being. I wasn't tight with Bill Kreuzman, but I was fairly tight with the rhythm guitar player, Bob Weir. I stayed at Mickey Hart's Ranch for a while. I always liked those guys. They were an amazing bunch of guys. Worked very hard and were very good at what they did. I doubt if any of them ever remember my name. I was not on the level of their music. I was more on a level of party gif. The great conservative pundit, William Buckley, lived in the apartment right below Roger Lewis on Park Avenue in New York City. Hope y'all remember to towel the door. He was a partner in Bastern's. His father was the senior partner of Bastern's. I met Roger before I even left New York. I knew him from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. I didn't know his name or who he was, but I remember his being this. That ended in 1969. It ended because I was beginning a new process in my life which involved the use of psychedelic drugs. I had discovered LSD. I was part of that crew and that didn't work out for Wall Street. Roger sold his seat on the New York Stock Exchange and came to my house to give the money away as a social experiment. I moved out to California and stayed in his home for quite a while. He was friendly with everybody. He was very friendly with the airplane. He was friendly with us. He was a great guy. I was just a guy with some assets and always liked to get to know people and I was friendly. I had no axe to grind. I had no game to play. I ended up being part of a family that was producing and distributing LSD and I went to prison for it. But that had nothing to do with the Grateful Dead. In this perspective, nothing is purely illegal fiction because the story does in fact connect to the Grateful Dead if only by virtue of the fact that Roger Lewis was a member of the Grateful Dead family. My first LSD experience was at Billy Hitchcock's place in Millbrook which is currently being offered at 65 million which is 2,500 acre place. There were several domiciles on that property. One of them is they called the bungalow which was a stone 40 room house. That's where I first took LSD. The 40 room bungalow in Millbrook was the headquarters for Timothy Leary and arguably the center of the East Coast psychedelic scene from 1963 to 1968. The dead played there in the summer of 67. A story for another day. Out West, Roger became acquainted with some LSD distributors who decided to market a new upscale LSD to compete with the brotherhood of eternal loves, Orrin Sunshine. I wrote a bit about the Clearlight family in my book, Heads, a biography of psychedelic America. And you can read more about the remarkable life of one of the Clearlight partners in Keith Martin Smith's book, A Heart Blown Open, the life and practice of Zen master June Po Dennis Kelly Roshi where the dead come up a few times. I bring this up because it makes Roger Lewis the connection point between the dead and one of the other major early LSD families. I was not a partner, but I was in second. Right the next level out from the three. And the two of the three were close to me. I didn't know the third I met him, but I don't remember him. He was in fact a chemist. But he was kept at a distance from everybody and for safety I guess and security. Probably a good thing. Roger did indeed get busted and he was able to pick up some pro tips from elsewhere in the dead family. I was at Weir's house one night for a party and there was there and I had not met him before. He walked up and introduced himself and he said I understand you're going to go to terminal island federal correctional Institute. Which is my I had been. I knew that I was going. It was a matter of turning myself over. And I said, yeah, that's right. He said, well, I just got out. Let me tell you about it and tell you who to talk to. So he filled in the blanks for me very kindly and then I went and spent half a year there. I ended up struggling in 100 pieces of clear light and formed a group. We called ourselves the Laina Jaffa Racing Society and every Saturday we would take us. We're not going to delve really much here, but Roger Lewis ended up in jail as the doubles tennis partner with a member of a certain crime family. Non-psychedelic division. It was Monday, Labor Day of 73, I think. And I had at that time about 15 pieces of windowpane left. And I couldn't give it to someone because if they turned me over, I've been doing five more years. And I didn't want to do that. And I couldn't throw it out because it was not part of my religion. I thought of this stuff as a sacrament. So I ended up taking the 15 pieces and not remembering that it's also finals day of the tennis tournament. So I'm lying in the yard and these guys come over. Hey, you. And I go, what? Mr. B is writing for you on the tennis court. I said, oh, shit, you know, you got to be kidding. No, we're not. So I have to go upstairs and put on my tennis shoes. And I realize, you know, I don't know if you know, but when you first start LSD, you're often not really physically able. And I couldn't tie my own tennis shoes. Roger and Mr. B did not win the tennis tournament. But Roger did make it out of jail in late 1973. Briefly, I decided that I was going to take. I'm windowpane to London and to introduce it to London because they didn't have anything like that. So I took 8000 pieces, two grams to London with me. And I was busy marketing it in London when Scotland jarred intervened and arrested. Back in California the next year, he got to know Bill Graham a little bit better at Winterland. I did a video at Winterland for a while. All I was doing was working, choosing which camera to record and where to move the camera. There were some cameras that were movable and some that were not. I was like the director of video. Sounds fun. I don't think I was ever paid to do it. I just did it. I was not a guy who needed the money. As we like to say, good gig if you can get it. And it wasn't very long after Roger Lewis' return from Brixton that Ron Rackow called him about helping to organize the Dead's gig at the Great American Music Hall. I was very surprised when Ron asked me to do that gig because I was pretty much from a quite well persona, known across the... They didn't give a shit that I was an ex-con but normal polite people did. The job organizing the Great American Music Hall party was pretty much just that. They were introducing an album and they asked me to basically produce a party. I was happy to do it. It wasn't enough to drive in force and there was nothing to create. And then you have all this just... I was doing something that I was clever at and I was good at. Which is basically dealing with people. And I've always been pretty good at that and I've always been willing to do it. Roger's signature is all over the Dead's invoices file from this period, with planning starting more than a month before, contracting Mad Hatter's catering. They asked me to make it basically invitation only not to include the normal crew. And when they said to do that, I did that. I did what I was asked to do and apparently they did it to their satisfaction. But it wasn't to the satisfaction of the people that usually go to Grateful Dead gigs. I'm actually a pretty good party giver. But that was an unusual... My rule if I'm giving a party is if I see you in the day before, you get an invitation and we hope that you're going to come and make it a party. I don't know how to give a party that is exclusive. To me, a party is inclusive. In this case, it was pretty necessary. The Dead were attempting to woo the pop radio industrialists in a club that held under 600 people standing, 450 with tables on the floor, which is how the Great American was set up on August 13th. A point we'll repeat a few times. Ron Rackow. It was like an old time, small town, performance palace. It's a gorgeous place and very much still in action. Like many Deadheads, I've gone to shows there just for the sake of going. Great for lead archivist David Lemieux. I've been to the Great American Music Hall a couple of times and every time I went there I would spend my time looking around and just marveling that this is where one from the vault happens. The venue now known as the Great American Music Hall was built in 1907, just after the Great Earthquake and known as Blancos into the 1930s. Then is the music box until the end of World War II. We're just delighted today to welcome Lee Brinkman, the longtime front of house engineer at the Great American Music Hall. The Great American Music Hall was opened in the fall of 1972 and what had been prior to that a very expensive French restaurant and a mousse lodge. Not at the same time, obviously. It was made into the Great American Music Hall by a couple of friends who had been classmates at the University of Mississippi and had always kind of fantasized about owning their own jazz club. They found themselves by 1972 both in San Francisco. Sam Duvall was a guy who at that time owned a local chain of pizza restaurants called front room pizza. But they were all first in old Victorian antique furniture. They were all set up to look like somebody's front room. Hence the name. And as a result of that, Sam also had a side business. Basically, as he said, going to England buying lots of old furniture, putting it in the container and somewhere mid-atlantic, they magically transformed into Victorian antiques. I started there in April of 1973 working for the club. 47 years and several months later, I was still on their payroll. Lee started his sound career in Denver. Shout out to Queen City Jams, where he worked at the Denver Dog, the family dog's Colorado outpost, before migrating to San Francisco's Avalon Ballroom and the family dog at the Great Highway. Stories we hope to get to some other time. They started booking Merle and Jerry's band. And that is what eventually led to the August 1975 concert. Jerry Garcia first played the Great American in 1973 and made it a regular stop in 1974 and 75, playing there more than two dozen times with Merle Saunders and others. This is Legion of Mary on July 5th, 1975, just after the session at Aces where the cops showed up, and maybe around the same moment that Bobby Weir was recording his basic track for Sage and Spirit. This is now on the Jerry Garcia collection, Volume 1. Jerry and Merle played places that were not much bigger than a broom club. They were out there to play. They were not trying to build a career. They were just enjoying playing with each other. And Merle's sons, their job was to bring in the Hammond Oregon. They were trapping young teenagers. We spoke with Merle Jr. in our Garcia 73 episode. By Jerry base's current understanding, the Great American Music Hall was the site of the final gig by Legion of Mary on July 30th, 1975, pausing Garcia's half-decade partnership with Merle Saunders. There's no tape that we know of of that show. But here they are at the Great American over July 4th weekend. It was a time of great change in Jerry Garcia's world. Little and otherwise. Things were troubled in his partnership with Mountain Girl, a story pretty harrowingly told in biographies by Dennis McNally and Blair Jackson. It was also in early August that he played music with mandolinist David Grisman for what would prove to be the last time for roughly 15 years. Coincidentally, just a little bit earlier on the same afternoon that Grisman found the final piece for his first great quintet, the legendary guitarist Tony Rice. This is from their first recordings collection, available from Acoustic Desk. For a few weeks in August 1975, Jerry Garcia once again belonged to the great musician and the band practiced their collective tuchas off for the Great American show. Emphasis on collective. The dead cast flag is once again at half-mast. But we're honored to have a few memories today about the show that would yield the following introduction for one of our most cherished dead cast guests. On the vocals, Mrs. Donagene Godshaw-McKay. The thing about grateful dead rehearsals, this was something you would take to the bank, is that we may rehearse or we may not once we all got there. Sometimes it would be a full-blown rehearsal and everybody on it and sometimes everybody would just sit around and we would never rehearse. And so it was either one or the other. You never knew what day was going to be which, whether we would be sitting around doing nothing or having a full-blown, really viable rehearsal. The Great American show definitely warranted the full-blown treatment. The band's call sheet showed the dead at ACES on August 7th, 9th, 10th, and 11th. With the album off to get mastered and a second drummer to break back in, there were surely some celebrating, but equally surely some focused rehearsal. On August 12th, they moved the party to the Great American, taking a full day for tech rehearsal. Music Lee Brankman. It wasn't the club booking the Grateful Dead, it was the Grateful Dead office renting the hall. And the standard rental deal at the Great American Music Hall at that time was there was a fee for the use of the hall plus a bar guarantee. We'll come back to that bar guarantee. The dead no longer had the wall of sound at their disposal, not that it would have fit into the Great American, but they still wanted the sound to be just exactly perfect. They brought in sound equipment from McKeon Sound, because this is when the John Mayer Jam 3s were still a fairly new thing. At that time, the music hall did not have a sound system that was flown hanging from the raptors. They had actually built what looked like a big diving platform out from the balcony above the stage. And the house speakers were up there, but for the dead concert, they replaced that with three jam 3s and an arc, angled down as much as was safe. And then they had some smaller McKeon speakers on the side of the stage and the monitors were all from McKeon. And the missing console was a McKeon MM4. This is the time when you couldn't buy a big sound reinforcement console, you had to make one. And McKeon had made one. It was really an excellent console. And Dan Healy drove that and also mixed the monitors from that, because this is, you know, that error was not uncommon to mix the monitors from the front of house console. So Dan was doing in front of house. I was basically the house tech. David Lemieux. And that rehearsal took the way of being a sound check. A Great American music hall the day before on August 12th. So presumably they booked the place a day, a couple days in advance. And they brought the recording equipment and thankfully they recorded the sound check, virtually all of it, the music and quite a bit of the banter. The 24 track came from Wally Heiter San Francisco studio located nearby where the dead had recorded American beauty. Lee Brinkman. The Heiter truck is parked out in the alley behind the club and we ran all the cabling out. That was the normal setup for multi-track recording. Two track recording was usually done by Betty or Bob or whoever was doing it would come into your one of the dressing rooms and set up it there. You can hear during the banter that they were really setting up and it was they would rehearse and they do a song. It wasn't like they had an uninterrupted four hours, six hours to do this kind of stuff. It was like, okay, nobody's doing anything on the stage for the next 15 minutes. Let's run through. And that's what you get. You don't get a full run through of the show. You get the run through of bits and pieces. I'm sure they were running the reels to see what was going on and I don't know how many of those would have been complete takes because I do remember them starting and stopping a lot. So we went back and 16 tracks were mixed down by Brian Keehoo and I think they sound incredible. There's some really, really good music in here and it kind of shows when they do finally play it for an audience, if you want to call it that, the next day. It's a good thing they rehearse because this music is complicated. The new Blues for Olive 50th release includes about 43 minutes of the soundtrack rehearsal, including two mostly complete passes through the Help on the Way, Slipknot, Franklin's Tower Suite, the only in 75 King Solomon's Marble Stronger Than Dirt, Crazy Fingers with a tasty outro jam, and the very briefly lived live arrangement of Sage and Spirit. Even more than the studio version, which I think was more or less arranged track by track as it was recorded, the live version sounds pretty fully intentional, with some gorgeous stulloing by Garcia and thoughtful counterpoint by Phil Lesh. If you like Sage and Spirit, it's totally worth hearing, and imagining lots more grateful bed in this mode. There's some other pieces of the soundtrack floating around as well. If you listen to Keith and Donna band tapes from 75, they play it quite a bit, and Keith has a great voice. It's from the Keith and Donna album, released earlier that year, and the only time the foolish dead seem to have attempted it. Another little fork in the universe. There's also a somewhat topical number, which David Lemieux released by way of the Taper section on Dead.net a few years back. Did somebody say crickets? Or maybe it was the natural slapback of an empty venue. The topicality of course is that'll be the day it was by Buddy Holly and the crickets, and that night the dead were set to feature some crickets in their show. That was an isolated track from the title piece of Blues for Ala. The section titled Sam Castles and Glass Camels tracks 15 and 16, titled Zone Desert on the tracking sheet. Built around the heavily manipulated sound of crickets, a story will focus our ears on next episode, which probably took place in mid-July. With the overdubs fresh in their ears, Mickey Hart set out to reproduce the sound at the Great American. Ron Rackow. the down and perform there for us as well. And we did the same thing right behind the curtain backstage there from the great American, Lee Brankman. My main job was running the long mic cable down to the basement to the box with the cricket set. One of the crew had been dispatched to the scientific supply store in San Francisco, where the schools went to buy the frogs for dissection and the crickets and all of the live thingies that got used in schools. And they bought 12 dozen crickets. And they put them in a cardboard box. And they brought them in the night before. And not knowing they were crickets, I think whoever took the delivery said, OK, put it over there by the walk-in cooler. Don't. And when they came back the next day, all the crickets were dead. Somebody was dispatched to go get more crickets. And they brought back the live crickets. And they had a larger cardboard box. And the idea was to cut a hole in the box, put a microphone in the box, run the cable all the way up from the basement up the back stairs to the mixing console. And we succeeded in that. Ron Racco. Rex got 100 crickets and put them in a box. And then they miced them and moved them around the theater until they got it to where it sounded right. And they finally put the crickets on top of a big motor that's next to a wall downstairs in the basement. And Mickey said, that sounds really good, except there's something going on there. There's like a 60-cycle hum in the sound. So Rex goes down there and he sees a motor plugged in next to the box where the crickets are. And he pulls the plug out. And Mickey said, oh, good. You got it. No, no more problem. No more hum, no more problem. Right? But the crickets were not chirping at the same tempo that the crickets on the album were. Somebody remembered from high school biology that the rate at which a cricket chirps is directly related to the temperature. You can actually tell the temperature by counting how many times a cricket chirps in a minute and multiplying it or dividing it by some formula. So a second hole was cut in the box. And a 40-watt light bulb was put in the hole. And then the hole was gaff-taped shut, as was the box. And the crickets chirped it pretty close to the right speed. Officially, the Grateful Dead hadn't performed since their October 1974 retirement shows at Winterland. Both of their earlier manifestations in 1975 had been under the banner of Jerry Garcia and friends. The Great American Music Hall show was, in a sense, the return of the band. When Schrodinger's box was opened, and the Grateful Dead were found still alive inside. David Lemieux. They played Kizar in March. And then they played the June thing at Winterland, which was OK. And this was a full show, but it was certainly not for their audience. It was a lot of new material. It was all the Blues for Alla material. And Mickey was back. There was a lot. So I won't say there was a lot of pressure on, but they rehearsed. There was even a formal invitation. The original version was a folded over card with the Grateful Dead written in script on the outside. And on the inside, Al Teller, President United Artist Records and Ron Rackow, President, Round Records, cordially invite you to a rare and important musical performance at the Great American Music Hall. It was an industry crowd drawn from the conference that was happening. Billboard's radio programming form held August 12th through 16th, 1975 at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill in San Francisco, was a full industry blowout, which obviously received detailed coverage in Billboard. With lots of wide open collar, tinted glasses and plaid blazers. We've posted a link at dead.net slash deadcast. At the Fairmont, there were performances by Glenn Campbell, who just released his biggest single, Rhinestone Cowboy. But I'm gonna be where the lights are shining on me. Like a rhinestone cowboy. Flying out on a horse, there's a star-spangled road we owe. Whalen Jennings played for the assembled Schmuzerati. The man called Haas had just dropped his new number one country banger. Are you sure Hank done it this way? Ten years on the road, making one night stand, speeding my young life away. Tell me one more time, just so I understand. Are you sure Hank done it this way? Did old Hank really do it this way? Not that everybody was quite as successful. The night after the dead, there was a performance by Dr. Hook, who just dropped the medicine show and released the new album, Bankrupt, including another quartet of songs by Shell Silverstein. We still got a long way down. On the way to the bottom, we make a lot of stops. Yeah, and we meet a lot of fools busting their home. On the way to the top. George Carlin was over at the Fairmount. So was Boz Skaggs and Andy Williams. Andy Williams! There were a few dead-friendly faces in the crowd. K-Sans Bonnie Simmons picked up an award for the best progressive station, and one of the event's keynote speakers was none other than Bill Graham. Wish I could find any coverage of his speech. Billboards only mention of the event at the Great American was a late secret off-site show by the dead. From United Artists, Al Teller. My expectation with the dead was to continue to build on the nice base that they had built, whether we could get them to that next level of sale success was really going to depend on the degree to which we'd be able to get a substantial uptake in radio airplay. And there was nothing on the album that sounded as if we were going to have that kind of a singles breakthrough. But in the mid-1970s, big rock bands didn't necessarily need hit singles. They could still break through with longer album tracks on what was then called progressive radio, an era that was beginning to near its end. United Artists got behind the event at the Great American. In general, those kinds of events are not terribly successful. I've been to plenty of them over the years. My preference in terms of dealing with radio people is to go one on one with them. Look the program director or the music director right in the eyeball, play the record and get a reaction right there on the spot, rather than everybody hanging around, drinking and talking to each other and all that stuff. But it's the kind of thing you do just to basically show that you're your support for the band. This way the radio community knew that we were seriously behind the band, as we would be, of course. While the dead played for the programmers, the band kept themselves decidedly at arm's length. And as Billboard put it, off site. Donna Jean. I remember the grateful dead playing at the Great American. We were just testing the waters with the songs that we had recorded. And it was kind of seeing where it was all going to land. As Billy Kreuzman put it in his memoir, Deal, something about showcasing our new material for radio programmers and the like. You know, stuff I never actually paid any attention to. From the pleasure crew, party organizer Roger Lewis. I've been to many dead shows by that time. And my normal was to go in the back door and get on stage. And so I was familiar with a lot of faces. Even if I didn't know their names. But when you're at the door telling faces that you know are normally welcome, that they can't come in, you know you're not the most favorite kind in the world. You're the shed head that they all talk about. They also could have just registered for the radio programming forum. Only $200 for early registrants and Faraday Datterin invitation. We found a few hardy dead freaks who made it inside the Great American on August 13th, 1975 and can act as third eye witnesses for us. One of our dead cast irregulars figured out a clever hack to get by Roger Lewis's reluctant firewall. I'll give you one guess. Figure it out yet? Please welcome back Gary Lambert. I was incredibly lucky in that an old family friend of mine, the late Jerry Graham had just been hired to replace Tom Donnelly, who had passed away at KSAN. Jerry had run a radio station that my brother had worked in in Western Massachusetts. It's a great little thousand watt anarchic station. And he was also a veteran of Metro Media Radio, the parent company of KSAN. So although he'd been on the AM side of Metro Media where they played Frank Sinatra and stuff like that, but I think they just respected him as a competent radio guy and respected the fact that he had started this indie station. So they picked him to replace Tom Donnelly. And he came out, I believe, maybe in July or June or July of 75. And I went to KSAN a few times to visit and got to know some of the staff there. You know, Bonnie Simmons, who was the music director at the time, became a good friend. And I actually, I knew Blues For All was coming out. I was actually working in a record store in San Francisco. And I knew the rep from United Artists Records, who was handling the debt account. KSAN was the debt's hometown commercial station, having evolved out of the more free-form KMPX a half dozen years earlier. KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, KSAN, K and Jerry said well you know you above all should be at this thing and the entire staff of KSAN had been invited to the Great American Music Hall on August 13th 1975 and KSAN was making this metamorphosis from you know the great 60 San Francisco station into trying to retain that but also move forward musically. So DJs on KSAN were playing some of the earliest proto-punk and glam rock and all that stuff. So a DJ, wonderful DJ named Richard Gossett who I think was one of the first people to play Elvis Costello in the States, he would go to London and bring back these records that weren't available in the States yet and turn the KSAN audience onto them, you know, play Bowie in the New York Dolls and all that stuff had no interest in the Greatful Dead whatsoever. So Jerry said hey why don't you just come to the Great American Music Hall and be Richard Gossett. And anything else you want we're also in Oakland, Emoryville, Mars, Jupiter and just about any place else you can pick us up. Some people even up in Chico can get us on the cable. I don't want to hear stories about that though. I'll have to drive up there and see what the station sounds like in Chico. Security at clubs being incredibly half hazard in those days, I was able to go up to the table and say hi. Richard Gossett from KSAN they did not ask me for ID. They just checked me up and said welcome. So that's how I came to be a few feet away from the stage. It wasn't like other dead shows or at least none since their early days in the clubs. There were tables and they had like large round tables that a bunch of people could sit at communally. Along with Kesar remains among my most memorable and unusual dead experiences ever. It may have been the smallest crowd I ever saw them with the other contender maybe being Cafe Ago-Go. I mean the great American capacity was I think 600. With the seats it was probably reduced to 300 or less. It was a remarkably sparse crowd getting this unbelievable experience and I was just the luckiest bastard in the world to be among them. Roger Lewis hadn't succeeded at keeping everybody out. There were 100 tickets reserved for Grateful Bed Records. I saw friends I knew sort of from the dead scene as well. You know some people I'd known going back to Winterland and all that. So yeah it was but it was just it was it was really being at the coolest private party ever. Deb Triss was one of the Winterland regulars who made it in. You might know her as Downtown Deb, host of the long running Dead Air on KLCC in Eugene. Great American musical. Beautiful. I mean exquisite grand. I guess it had been like renovated or refurbished in 72 and then opened for shows. And Johnny Hagen I knew all the roadies and all this and he was like oh how did how did you get in here Deb? And I was like you know friends in high places. Or high friends in places. The private party was recorded on a 24 track with the Wally Heider remote truck and broadcast nationally several weeks later, not live on the night of the show. We'll be using the radio tape for this next segment where I'll note that some dead heads in the crowd do seem to make themselves known. When the band assembled on stage they were introduced by one of the conference's keynote speakers though technically he had nothing to do with the show itself. Although Great American wasn't Bill Graham's venue he sort of was the pattern familious of the show. You know he introduced the band and all that. Good evening we welcome you on behalf of the group. You should introduce me. So why was Bill Graham on stage? Ron Rackow. Roger was just you know a very rich guy, very smart, very affable guy on the scene, knew everybody for years and years and years. And he asked Bill Graham to come by and introduce the band and told him what was happening. Bill was happy to come. So I met Bill at the door and we made two bets on something and he won both of them. We bet $12.5 on something so he had $25 and we did double or nothing. So he won $50. I think we should thank United Artist and Mr. Ron Rackow. Mr. Rackow. We should make it official Mr. Rackow is the president of Round Records and he asked if I could be here this evening and I said I'd like $12.50 which he paid me at the door. And we flipped double or nothing and I won and he wanted to flip again so I'm being paid $50 for being here. I want to thank him. So he walked on stage very excited to be announcing a grateful debt show for the record industry but much more excited about the $50 bill he just had in his hand than he just won. So he gets up on the stage and he says on the way in I made two bets with Rackow and I won and he paid me $50 and here it is. And he's waiting for the $50 on the stage. And now back to the part you probably know a little bit better. Certainly one of the most beloved of the Bill Graham intros. Unrehearsed and a testament to how absolutely locked together the band was on August 13th, 1975. For the first time in a while they were officially themselves. On the drums on stage left Mr. Mickey Hart. On bass and vocals Mr. Philip Lesh. On rhythm guitar and vocals Mr. Bob Weir. On the drums on stage right Mr. Bill Kreitzman. On the vocals Mrs. Donna Jean Gaccio. On the guitar and vocals Mr. Jerry Garcia. Welcome please to the grateful debt. It's a very opening bill, introing the band while they were playing the opening vav to help and just it just was thrilling. Help on the way have lyrics now. And then they were playing it so beautifully and with such authority because they'd been in the studio making that album. They'd been doing their wood shedding by doing the recording and so it was so sharp and the band was in really great spirits. Downtown Deb. Downtown Deb. It was kind of like a magical situation. The band was like sparkling and I guess refreshed and you know venue was maybe 400 people. Roger Lewis' memory of the night was focused on his hosting duties. I don't think it was just a stadium. I think there were some tables but I can't really see it so I don't remember. I know that I was working my ass off the whole time making it right. Making sure that whatever they needed to be done was done and done well. David Lemieux. It must have been daunting as much as they at this point played so many hundreds of shows. It really must have been daunting to be on a stage playing this stuff for people who are going to judge you for music industry people and radio people. So it's a good thing they rehearsed. I think the show on the 13th demonstrates that they nailed it. Gary Lambert. My sense was the crowd was very enthusiastic and they threw in enough red meat Grateful Dead stuff as well to keep people engaged and they played that stuff really well too. And enough of the stuff from the album was accessible. Music never stops. It's like oh man this thing is great. This thing really feels great live. So no there didn't seem to be a big jaded industry schmoozer factor that I was hanging around anyway. I remember music never stopped being really exhilarating. Lee Brinkman the venue tech doesn't remember the show being packed. The place was not even three quarters full. This was invitation only. It was pre Internet even phone freeze for kind of a new thing. And then at some point word had gotten out and there were some people hanging on the sidewalk hoping for a miracle. Based in part on a note in relics and some of the stories were about to hear. I'm going to guess that this next sequence of events started during the set closing eyes of the world King Solomon's marbles and unfolded into the set break outside the venue. Deadheads were starting to mass. One of them was Ed Pearlstein. We knew enough to go down there and I don't remember the details of how we heard and what was going on. I know it was myself and three or four friends and then some other groups of people came but it wasn't a big scene. Not a lot of people knew. There are maybe 20 people standing outside the music hall. We went around to the back to see if the roadies were there. Maybe they could talk our way in but nothing. So we were standing outside. We knew there was a maybe a hider's truck or some truck outside recording it. We kind of knew that the dead were in there and it was a kind of a record company or suits. The dead were playing because we were they had opened up the doors so we could hear it. Music Some guy comes out well dressed and he walks directly up to me. I mean I was one of 20 you know and I was just leaning against the car right in front. He walks up to me and he hands me an invitation and he walks away. I can't remember if he walked back in or if he left you know and that was he'd give it to somebody else to use. The dead wanted their fans in there and so I was the first dead head in there and the first thing I did everybody was sitting around tables and just sitting at their tables and there was no other activity. I went straight for the middle of the floor where all the tables were and everything and I started dancing. Music It was all round tables with tablecloths and executives sitting around the tables in their suits very straight. It was very weird. Dan O'Hencklin was living north of the city. We found out they were playing at the great American musical so I had checked on down there. He got in somehow though details are a bit blurry making him one of the few people outside the band's immediate circle to attend both the Veneta 72 field trip and the Blues for a la party in San Francisco. We doff our wigs Dan O. And in the great American musical the acoustics were perfect. The crowd was small and they were all great lovers of the band and the playing was pristine. Everything was perfect. Music Music Gary Lambert couldn't help but notice the room starting to fill up a bit more as the night progressed. But there was also room to dance at the sides and a lot of people availed themselves of that. Bill Graham may have been part responsible for that. And I think he was also responsible for letting some dead heads in off the street when word had gotten out that this thing was happening. So they filled up the place. Or maybe it was Ron Rackow. The show was very, very interestingly set up. I invited the record industry and we got the people that were the most grateful dead dance or holic people. Or maybe it was Roger Lewis. That could have been me. But if it was I was told to do it. I wouldn't have done it on my own. I was much more obedient than that. Whoever was responsible, Ed Perlstein was stoked. And then I see a few more of my friends. I heard that the dead started to let the heads in. And so there are a few more people dancing. It was amazing. Ed Perlstein had seen the dead with the wall of sound. But in a small club with something else entirely. I finally heard really good sound at the music hall. I think it was the Meyers set up. The classic Eyes of the World we've been jamming includes multiple shockingly tonal bass solos by Phil Lesh. It also still features the ominous alternating chords that marked the start of the song's original outro jam. Although Mickey had turned up at other stuff. That was the first time we were really getting the rhythm devils back together in some kind of formal sense. But instead of building to the big 7-8 ending, they pause for a drum break and re-emerge into a different piece in 7. King Solomon's Marbles. It does sound like there are some dead heads in the house by this point. And hearing stronger than dirt for the first time, which was really powerful. One artifact of the CD era is that when the show was released on One from the Vault, the set break was relocated from after stronger than dirt to after around and around in order to make the show fit more evenly onto the two desks. We're going to take a short break. We'll be back in just a few minutes if everybody hang loose. In practice, what this meant was that the show's first set with side A of the album slightly rearranged, with it must have been the roses in the middle. This is my personal keeper dead take of the song, so I feel obligated to highlight it as well. Partly because of Keith Gottschow's crazy fingers like Rhodes Tone. And after a few warm-up songs, the second set focused on the album's second side. It includes the only crazy fingers that I think approaches the delicacy of the album version, thanks to Keith Gottschow's watery Rhodes. And off into a jam, a drum segment, and a compact instrumental version of the other one, that nevertheless gets pretty far out for its 5.5 minute running time. The first set of the album was released in the early 2000s, and it was released in the early 2000s. The first set was released in the early 2000s, and it was released in the early 2000s. The first set was released in the early 2000s, and it was released in the early 2000s. The second set was released in the early 2000s, and it was released in the early 2000s. On this evening, the other one was a prelude to one of the show's centerpieces, and I love how they build the set towards this moment. Instead of an explosion, a moment of really quiet and drumless grace. Deb Trist. It was great sublime. That's Sage and Spirit. I mean, I know those kids. Rock and Nicky's kids, Sage and Acacia. There were some traditional trugle to close the set. But the evening built in a sense to another piece that they only played in its fully realized form on this night. Blues for Ala. Dig the Crickets. The Crickets. And then, of course, Blues for Ala brought back the weirdness factor, and Nicky with his Crickets, Deb Trist. It was a wonderful night. Beautiful music. Strange on some of it with this blues for Ala, right? And it was kind of experimental and improv of kind of trust and intuition and crickets. You could hear the Crickets. I assumed it was on a tape loop or something, but way too easy. Besides the Crickets, at least Nicky is on hand percussion too. It's definitely a new space for the dead, and would shape plenty of drums and space segments to come. The Crickets. It was one of the only realizations of the sand castles and glass camels theme. Perhaps the strangest and most next level musical place the dead had found at Aces. So why play this utter weirdness for a room full of radio programmers? We don't have time to delve into the sordid history of radio in the 70s, but by 1975, the formats known as progressive and freeform were reaching their peaks, and there was still an audible class of DJs who would drop the needle on extended or side long tracks. I clench my fist in solidarity. It might be the only time after the Anthem of the Sun era that the dead played every song from their newest studio album in a single performance. After the show, maybe there was a limited amount of meeting and greeting. Yeah, there was a little bit of mingling. I don't remember who all was out there, but I did see enough of Bobby to catch his eye. And then Bobby said, how the hell did you get in here? I said, nefarious means my friend, nefarious means. The band had fond memories of this night. And the crowd had fond memories of this night. We have fond memories of this night, even though we weren't there. Only a very few people don't. One of the few is Roger Lewis. It's hard for him to shake the memory of having to turn people away at the door. But even still, he was one of the contributors to the vibe. One more layer helping the dead manifest a temporary autonomous zone in a room full of mostly corporate company. They didn't, as I recall, pay me for the great American musical. I was happy to do it for nothing, you know, because I was good at it. And I loved putting on a party. I was a functionary, you know, I was like a butler. And of course, there's the pretty infamous story of what happened to the crickets that Mickey brought in. Steve Brown. And he got loose there too. And we heard from Tom, who was the manager at the time, calling us up at the office and stuff saying, you got to come down and get these crickets out of here. Because they're in the great American music hall in the back. Lee Brankman. The problem was, there was no oxygen getting into the box because everything had been taped up shut. So during the show, when the crickets were no longer in the PA, the crickets were either dying or desperately trying to get out of the box. And somehow they managed to open one of the seams of the box and dozens of crickets escaped. We were picking up cricket corpses in the basement of the great American musical for weeks afterward. Ron Rakow remembers it slightly differently. Wait, why did the crickets cost almost seven grand? I'm not sure. He said, yeah, I have one bit of news for you. What's that? He said, you owe me $6,750. And I said, I beg your pardon. He said, one of your guys pulled the plug on the freezer motor and forgot to plug it back in. And I had to throw away a room full of meat. So I had to pay the guy $6,750. That's a lot of meat. That is quite possible, except for one thing. The refrigerator in the basement was never used for food storage. It was only for beer. The stakes would have been in the walk-in cooler upstairs in the kitchen, which is on the same level as the stage. However, it is very possible that same refrigerator was in the corner where the first box of crickets had died. The real VIPs got drink taps, but everyone else, it was a paid bar. And they did not make the bar guarantee. And I don't remember the figure. Yes, just arbitrarily say it was $2,000. And the paid bar had only done maybe $1,600 worth of business. They said, well, we gave you a $2,000 deposit, and your bar only did $1,600. And we paid you $2,000. So we're going to send a couple of our crew over with a van to pick up $400 worth of beer, to which the answer was not in the affirmative. There's no receipt for that one in the band archive, nor any record of the band's crew getting $400 worth of warm beer from the fridge they hadn't plugged back in. In his memoir, Deal, Billy Kreuzman writes about a pretty wild road race over the Golden Gate Bridge after the show. In my mind, that show is a crucial turning point, he wrote. I wasn't high on smack that night. I dabbled with opiates throughout the hiatus, but I stayed away from all that junk for the gig. It was a very bright, clear, expressive night for the whole band. It was also just a really big moment for me personally. It was the first time that I thought we could be a band again. And the first time I thought having two drummers again could work. The members of the band got back to work immediately. The next night, August 14th, Bobby Weir and Kingfish were in Southern California, at the Fox Theater in Venice. I think this was the first monkey in the engineer since 1970. The Keith and Donovan remained busy, which included Billy Kreuzman on drums. They were scheduled to make their Great American debut in August. The story we'll use as an aftermath here, because it also points towards several parts of the Grateful Beds' collective future. Lee Brinkman. Sometime in 1975, I think, the San Francisco Police Department went on strike, and the music hall had a Keith and Donovan show. Because the police were on strike, all the venues were hiring any private security they could get, and we had the bottom of the barrel. Similarly, the 1975 San Francisco cop strike aligns exactly with the Keith and Donobans' debut with the Great American, August 20th and 21st, exactly a week after the Dead show. Possibly because the Dead had played the August gig. Rumor got out that it was really a secret, surprise Grateful Dead concert. There was another factor. The Great American's newspaper ad, listed in the show, is the Jerry Garcia Band, a group that wouldn't actually form for another month. I think the initial advertising was Keith and Donovan, and then it was changed to the Jerry Garcia Band because he had agreed to play with them. There was no Jerry Garcia Band yet, and in August 1975, Garcia joined the Keith and Donovan for a handful of gigs, meaning they were fielding four members of the Dead. There's a tape of the first night of the Great American, August 20th, with a really cool version of Freddie Hubbard's Straight Life, which we'll use for this next segment. Music And of course, the places sold out, they can't let any more people in, and people on the street, oh yeah, we know, it's really the Dead, man. People were, literally, one guy got on the roof and came into one of the skylights to the back stairway. And that meant he dropped about 22 feet onto a narrow, curving stairway and broke the skylight in the process because they had their own sound people working. I was in the office, and there's a fire escape that came up the back of the club to the office, and there were people banging on the door at the top of the fire escape, begging me to let them in. One guy was shoving $20 bills under the door. Michael Parrish We were on our honeymoon up in the Sierras and came back down for that show when it was originally booked as a Garcia Band show. Of course, the Dead had played there a couple of weeks before, and it's like, oh, Jerry Garcia Band, that's interesting. But of course, it really was the Keven Donovan. Michael Parrish I really could have sworn that Mickey was there at that Keven Donovan show and there was an extended drum duet. Michael's memory is correct. Mickey joined the Keven Donovan on the second night, according to a detailed review of both shows in Relics. Putting five members of the Grateful Dead back on the Great American stage just eight days after the Blues for Alla Party. Everybody but we are in Lash. No tape of that one, though. At least that we know about. It was Garcia's last time at the Great American, and as far as I can tell, the last time he was headlined by a member of the Dead. Maybe it was the Crickets, or the refrigerator, or the fans on the roof. The actual Jerry Garcia Band would form in debut in September, which we'll delve into slightly next episode. Blues for Alla hit stores somewhere around August 21st, a week after the Great American show, and barely a month after the last Overdub. On one hand, there were no tours to support it. On the other hand, the music never did actually stop. And on September 1st, Labor Day 1975, Metro Media radio stations around the country broadcast the Great American Music Hall show in its entirety, giving an immediate impact beyond whatever wheels it greased among the radio programmers in the house. In fact, it was an instant classic. Please welcome back Joan Miller, a San Francisco high school deadhead who attended the entirety of the Winterland farewell shows, but couldn't make it into The Great American. In 1975, there was a rebroadcast of the Great American Music Hall concert that the Grateful Dead play a couple weeks after the original concert. It was going to be rebroadcast on our local independent station in San Francisco case and I was 15 years old. And of course that night I had something else to do, but I asked my mother at a portable radio cassette player and a pink 60 minute Memorix tape. I put the tape into the recorder. I asked my mother when at I can't remember what time it was, whatever time it was that the show was supposed to start, press play and record. And after 60 minutes, could she turn the tape over? Well, guess what she did. And I don't I lived on the third floor. My bedroom was on the third floor. She was probably downstairs in the living room and she really ran up those stairs after 60 minutes to turn the tape over. The pink tape to me was a masterpiece. In 1975, I really didn't know a lot of people that had tapes of Grateful Dead concerts, even me, though me and my girlfriends had all their records up to that point. We really weren't tape traders. I don't even know if tape trading was really going on then. But the pink Memorix tape was what we listened to over and over again. When I was 16, I got a VW bug convertible and with portable cassette player and everywhere we went on any San Francisco street when we were riding to school, it was pretty much the only Grateful Dead live concert that I had that was from a manufactured tape from the record company. I knew every note of that tape. I listened to it. I sang to it. I drummed to it on the steering wheel of my car and my favorite Grateful Dead. I'm not a musician, but the change from Help on the Way to Franklin's Tower was where I cranked it up where I thought it was masterful. Corey Arnold remembers the great American music hall Bootleg LP on the streets as early as late September 1975, courtesy of the amazing Corny Phone label under the title Make Believe Ballroom. Ironically, the title was a reference to Martin Block's old time radio show that was one of the first to focus on studio recorded music. In fact, the newspaper columnist Walter Winschel coined the term DJ to describe Martin Block's actions on Make Believe Ballroom. Block's innovation was to play records and dub in crowd noise. Like Joan Miller's pink tape, Make Believe Ballroom was another form that the great American show took en route to becoming part of the Dead's Canon. It was a cornerstone for our departed but always on time buddy Steve Silberman. One of the first Bootleg vinyl discs I got was Make Believe Ballroom, great American music hall 75. And I still remember that. The moment I first heard that, I was in Oberlin, Oberlin College, where I went to school. I was walking across campus one day, and I heard Help on the Way coming from the Ascom dorm, you know, the second floor. And I was like, oh yeah, Help on the Way, I love this, you know. And I was like, wait a minute. This isn't the same performance. What is this? You know, and in fact the Help on the Way Slipknot Franklin's Tower from that show at Great American 75 is still easily, particularly the Slipknot, still easily one of my favorite live performances of all time. So I got that very early on in my Bootleg collecting years. Make Believe Ballroom got around. Keith Eaton left us this story. When I was a freshman in college in 1985, my second roommate, my first was evicted, had with him two Bootleg cassettes. One was for my first show in Portland, Maine in 1982. One was from Red Rocks that year. And the other was a box set of LPs called the Make Believe Ballroom. And having played around with my brother's records and listened to that mysterious music, it just captured my imagination. And it's really difficult to describe how it touched an old memory, sort of the way smell olfactory senses can do that. And I really glommed on to Sage and Spirit. More than the Bootleg LP, or perhaps enhanced by the Bootleg LP, the tapes of the show. Dave Lemieux. It would have been probably in the first 60 tapes I got, which happened fast. So it was early on and it might have been before I heard the album. I'm pretty sure it was. Yeah, I probably got that in 86 or early 87 and got this album sometime in 87. I've rarely met a deadhead who doesn't love the Great American Music Hall show. For lots of reasons, but mainly a combination of the material, the performance, and the recording quality. It's a show I'll even recommend to non-deadheads who might be curious about all the fuss. In 1991, the Great American show found an even wider audience. Joan Miller. I love the music never stopped. I played it over and over again. It was the tape. Of course, the pink tape died at some point. In 1991, I was driving in my friend's car and lo and behold, I knew every note of that concert of that tape. I heard it. I heard it was in the middle of the song. I knew exactly what it was. I said, is this the Great American Music Hall? He said, yes. I said, oh my God, it's the pink tape. Where did you get this? Where did you get the pink tape? He said, Joan, they just released it. It's called One from the Vault. Don't you know anything? I was like, oh my God, I ran out and got it. I've given it to everyone I know and love. It's my favorite, favorite concert of the Great Phil Dead. David Lemieux. I had the tape for years and then the album came out in the CD in 1991. And I thought I was like, and they made a big deal of it saying, you know, we're opening the vaults and that was unbelievable, you know, as a deadhead. But the first show that they selected was a show that was a cornerstone to most people's tape collections. But I remember putting it on and say, I mean, I don't need my tape anymore. It was one of those moments. One from the Vault was the first complete show release from the Dead's tape vault and one of the only archival releases of Jerry Garcia's lifetime. In fact, one of the rarest things about One from the Vault is that it's a performance that everybody in the Great Phil Dead agreed was worthy of complete release and almost singular unity among the musicians. Benny Lander left us this story about One from the Vault. My years since I've come to realize that's more of a one of one show. They never really played like that before or since this batch of songs that were introduced in 75 were a real turning point for the band. The songs from this night on One from the Vault kind of, to me, they're the closest link to the modern day, you know, or it's not so modern anymore, but the 90s jam band explosion, that early fish stuff. With the highly composed sections, you know, to me, the help on the way composed parts, the slipknot jam, King Solomon's Marbles, Crazy Fingers. These are kind of almost borderline prog rock to me. And they share a lot of the DNA of those early fish songs and my favorite other band, God Street Wine, a lot of their early composed stuff. In an era before Dick's Picks, Dave's Picks, or anything besides tape training and bootlegs, the 1975 Great Phil Dead came alive one more time. Sgt. Spirit is absolutely one of the pieces that makes Blues for Aula and One from the Vault special. You can hear bazillions of dark stars and they're all unique, but Sgt. Spirit is more like a standalone object and disappeared from the dead stage immediately, too delicate for any place besides the Great American Music Hall. David Lemieux. They did one live version of Radio City Music Hall, the Halloween thing. Halloween 1980 was the band's first attempt at a live video simulcast, and predictably the rails fell off almost immediately, with Phil Lesh's bass, failing for the first few songs. So we are had just the thing. Sean O'Donnell. So I was at the Calderon and Hempstead for the simulcast of that show. It exactly was what it was. It sort of materialized. Like it started happening, because Bob kind of started it. No one else really knew what to do. Jerry tries to hang. So it was a bit chaotic. It's not quite the same order of musical events as any of the 1975 versions, but that's okay. You'll notice the crowd cheering at one passage, where weir feels particularly confident. And that's because by 1980, weir had recently repurposed that move. Mostly, what stands out to me is the sort of lost sailor seed that's in there. And I feel like that's where the composition goes, eventually. In a 1985 interview, Blair Jackson suggested that some of the ideas you tried in Sage and Spirit, for example, were developed further in Lost Sailor a few years later, and weir confirms that definitely is a case where that happened. We'll have to answer the question about the dog star some other time. Sometimes, new levels aren't what you expect them to be. But Sage and Spirit remains. Just pull out Blues for Olla or One from the Vault, and float in the unknowingness of 1975. But if all the retired, or barely even active, dead songs, I'd bet that Sage and Spirit is probably the one played most by its writer. Weir continued to use it to warm up his fingers for decades, and maybe somewhere, he's even playing it right now. The album version is such a singular studio-built moment. Let's float away into its elements. Thanks very much for tuning in to the Good Old Grateful Deadcast, friends. And thank you, Donna, for sharing your time and stories with us here at the Deadcast. May the four winds blow you safely home indeed. We'd like to thank our special guests in this episode. David Lemieux, Donna Jean Gossaud-McKay, Sage Scully, Ron Rackow, Al Teller, Steve Brown, Roger Lewis, Lee Brinkman, Steve Schuster, Gary Lambert, Deb Trist, Ed Perlstein, Dan O'Hanckling, Joan Miller, Steve Silberman, Michael Parrish, Keith Eaton, Sean O'Donnell, and Benny Land. 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 Pinkis. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mayhem Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd, and Doran Tyson. All rights reserved.