Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 7, Episode 3
Bear’s Choice 50
Archival interviews:
- Jerry Garcia & Mountain Girl, by Dennis McNally, Jerry On Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews, 1986.
- Owsley Stanley, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 1/13/91.
- Bob Weir, WAER, 9/17/73.
JESSE: In the summer of 1973, the Grateful Dead put out their fourth live album in five years: History of the Grateful Dead, Volume 1: Bear’s Choice.
AUDIO: “Hard to Handle” [Bear’s Choice] (0:00-0:24) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It was different in several key ways from the double albums Live/Dead and Skull and Roses, released in falls of 1969 and 1971, respectively, and the triple LP Europe ‘72, released in fall 1972. For starters, Bear’s Choice—as most people know the album—was a single disc. And unlike their previous live albums, it included a side of acoustic music.
AUDIO: “I’ve Been All Around This World” [Bear’s Choice] (0:34-0:59) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Though the music on Bear’s Choice was recorded in February 1970—barely three years old when the album came out—it was the first official archival Dead release. With so many other archival albums released subsequently, and even so many Dead live albums already on the market, both legal and otherwise, when it came out in 1973, I can say from personal experience that it’s easy for Bear’s Choice to slip through the cracks of the Dead’s discography. Not today. Another way to say that is that Bear’s Choice is also an easy album to underestimate. But it’s also a special musical place all its own, and that’s where we’re going today.
AUDIO: “Wake Up, Little Susie” [Bear’s Choice] (0:00-0:22) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Please welcome back good ol’ Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I remember getting that album when I was probably 15 years old. And by then I'd heard—from the live canon—Live/Dead, Skull and Roses, Europe ‘72, Dead Set and Reckoning. So I then got Bear’s Choice and expected it to sound similar, multitrack, et cetera. I put it on, and I certainly was not disappointed. But I was in awe of how different it sounded.
I've never thought of the album as History of the Grateful Dead, Volume 1, with the parentheses — it’s just Bear’s Choice. I see the title, when we see it on internal documents, and I’m like, Oh yeah, that’s what it’s called. But it’s just Bear’s Choice. Just as we all have our other phrases for Skull and Roses, it’s just the way it is.
The Bear
JESSE: The Bear in question was Augustus Owsley Stanley the Third, aka Owsley, aka Bear. Known for being the world’s first and best underground LSD chemist, he was also the Grateful Dead’s primary sound engineer in 1966 and again from 1968 through 1970. Please welcome back to the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, from the Owsley Stanley Foundation, Owsley’s son, Starfinder.
STARFINDER STANLEY: He started using Bear as the nickname, which he'd had as a teen. When he hit puberty, he started sprouting chest hair before all of his friends. They teased him that he was turning into a bear. He could be gruff at times, so it did suit him. So he started using that name as well, and in part it was just kind of a wink — those that know, know, and those that don’t should be as confused as possible.
JESSE: We’ve done a few special Deadcasts about Owsley known as Bear Drops, once in 2020 and one in 2021, going into some of the myths and legends and tapes. Recommended! Despite being their sound engineer from nearly the start, Bear’s Choice was the first chance Owsley had to apply his ideas to disc.
STARFINDER STANLEY: These are really some of the early Sonic Journal recordings, the first ones that came off the reels and were put out on vinyl. I know that Bear looked at it as his tribute to Pigpen, after Pigpen died. There are a lot of heads that never knew Pigpen because he was early days. There are a lot of people who encountered the Dead in the ‘80s and ‘90s and have that kind of later-Dead experience — and Pigpen’s music was such an integral part of where the Dead came from, how they developed their sound, that combination of Jerry's fiddle tune/bluegrass banjo/guitar approach and Pigpen’s blues. That soul and that gritty bar band — that's the Dead that Bear encountered and fell in love with. It’s so much a part of their DNA. I think this is a really important album for people to listen to because it gives you more insight into those roots.
JESSE: It would be Owsley’s first proper credit on a Dead album. Compared to the other official live Dead LPs, Bear’s Choice is raw. Pigpen even admits to making a mistake in the first verse of the first song.
AUDIO: “Katie Mae” [Bear’s Choice] (1:05-1:35) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
STARFINDER STANLEY: It has to be real. It has to represent what happened. There is so much power in that truth of the music as it emerged. And you can't fix it because it's not broken, right — it might not be perfect, but it's real. That was one thing that Bear always came back to with his recordings: this can't be fixed because there's nothing to fix. This is the way it happened, and you have to honor that, because if you don't, you lose something. And you may not realize what it is, but it's tangible and it's substantial.
DAVID LEMIEUX: And again, as a 15-year old, I couldn't really articulate what I was hearing: am I dead center? Am I on the stage? That wasn't how I saw things. But it sounded different, and it sounded incredible. It was, again, it was unlike—this is what I love about the Dead—every tour, every year, every era is so different. And this album was so different from any other live album. And yet, it was still clearly Grateful Dead music. So, even at 15, it was so remarkably different from the other five live albums I’d heard. I loved it immediately from Day 1. And then the artwork… everything about that album to me—and so much Pigpen on Side 2—just blew me away.
JESSE: There were a few shifting sets of circumstances that shaped the album that became Bear’s Choice. The first was the circumstance known as Lenny Hart. When he was managing the Grateful Dead in fall of 1969, he signed a three-year extension of the band’s contract with Warner Bros. and pocketed the money, locking the band to the label through the end of 1972. The second circumstance was that, by the time Europe ‘72 came out in November, the Grateful Dead had also decided to launch their own record company, Grateful Dead Records. Here’s Bob Weir’s rather unsexy explanation of the album on WAER in 1973.
BOB WEIR [WAER, 9/17/73]: We had a commitment to Warner Bros. and, for the sake of expediency, I guess what we did was gave them some old tapes that we found and we had for a while that Bear had collected.
JESSE: Getting out of that commitment to Warner Bros. required executing some very Grateful Dead-like math, which Jerry Garcia explained to Rolling Stone. “We weren’t contracted for it originally,” he said, “but we had [to] give it to them in order to make Europe ’72 a triple-LP. We could have been cut loose if we gave them two single records, rather than one triple album. We ended up giving them four discs instead of just two just to be able to go to Europe.”
The third circumstance, or maybe the fourth, was that in the summer of 1972, Owsley had been released from federal prison. The band assigned him the task of assembling an album from his recordings, which he took to with his usual zeal.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Two weeks ago, or three weeks ago, I was in the Vault just checking out what master tapes were in there for future projects. And I knew these tapes were there, but I really scrutinized the tracklist, and it was an original version of Bear’s Choice. I guess presumably it had always been in the plans in earlier ‘73, as a get-out-of-the-Warner Bros.-contract-ending thing.
JESSE: I’ve mostly lost track of the circumstances by now, and it’s impossible to know how this one played in, but—back in 1966, before the Dead signed with Warner Bros.—they agreed to a contract that resulted in the 1970 releases of the unofficial live albums Historic Dead and Vintage Dead.
AUDIO: “Stealin’” [Historic Dead] (0:32-1:00)
JESSE: The shows were recorded at the Avalon Ballroom, probably in December 1966. The Dead weren’t psyched with their release by a subsidiary of MGM Records in 1970. And they were probably even less psyched in early 1973 when a different subsidiary of MGM repackaged the recordings on a new LP titled… the History of the Grateful Dead.
AUDIO: “I Know You Rider” [Vintage Dead] (0:19-0:50)
JESSE: I really have no idea how one played into the other, but it seems impossible to be a coincidence that Pride put out a record titled History of the Grateful Dead in February 1973 and the Dead followed with their own record with exactly the same title only a few months later. It was during that window that another circumstance shaped Bear’s Choice: the death of Ron “Pigpen” McKernan at the age of 27 in early March 1973. We spoke extensively about Pigpen over the last two episodes of the Deadcast. Bear’s Choice is often rightly remembered as a tribute to him, but it didn’t start out that way.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The first side did not include “Katie Mae.” They were in development on this project, and then Pig died right in the middle of it. That's when I think the “Katie Mae” got put on there as well, to further make this a Pigpen tribute album.
JESSE: The original tracklist for the album included “Dire Wolf” and “Smokestack Lightnin’” on the first side; the second contained “Monkey and the Engineer,” “Little Sadie,” “Wake Up, Little Susie,” “Black Peter,” and concluded with “Katie Mae.” With “Katie Mae” moved to the top and the entire second side given over to Pigpen jams, Bear’s Choice became a tribute to Pigpen when it was released in the summer of 1973.
AUDIO: “Smokestack Lightnin’” [Bear’s Choice] (1:08-1:36) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Despite being hand-produced by the preeminent LSD chemist of the 1960s, coming packaged with some of the most lysergic album art in the Dead’s whole catalog, and being drawn from one of the more psychedelic weekends in the band’s history to date, the music on Bear’s Choice was paradoxically as grounded as the Dead got. The final circumstance, as it turns out, was the band themselves. According to late Dead archivist Dick Latvala, he once asked Bear why no psychedelic jams made it to the album and Bear told him, “I submitted over a hundred different ideas, and every one was rejected, and this was the one that got through.” Transforming it into a Pigpen tribute was a good assignment for Owsley.
STARFINDER STANLEY: I wish I had met [Pigpen]. He was such an important person to my dad. They were such wonderful friends, brothers really. It's funny because Pigpen didn't like acid; my dad didn't like drinking, and Pigpen loved drinking. Yet, they still had that deep-soul connection. His persona was so gruff and rough and Hells Angels-y, just a tough guy. But he was, from all reports, such a sweet guy, just gentle and quiet and thoughtful. And I think that probably is one thing that my dad loved about him, that duality of the nature of who he was.
AUDIO: “Smokestack Lightnin’” [Bear’s Choice] (2:13-2:38) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
The Fillmore East
JESSE: There was one thing that Bear’s Choice had in common with Skull and Roses — they were both products of the Fillmore East. And that’s no coincidence. We discussed the Dead’s relationship with the venue in a pair of episodes in season 3 — about Side D of Skull and Roses, followed by a bonus Late Show at the Fillmore East. Let’s go back to the Fillmore East and get into the music on Bear’s Choice. Why hello there, Mike Wallace.
MIKE WALLACE [60 Minutes, 1969]: If you were puzzled by the hypnotic effect that today’s rock musicians have on the young—not just on their taste in music, but on their fashions, their manners and morals—spend the next several minutes with us in New York’s East Village at a place called Fillmore East.
JESSE: Joining us today is Deadcast comrade Allan Arkush, who worked at the Fillmore East in various capacities in the stage crew and light show from not long after its opening in 1968 through its closing in 1971.
ALLAN ARKUSH: I went and pulled out my vinyl of Bear’s Choice, which was an original pressing of it. And I put it on my system, which is a very good system, and it was remarkable how good it sounded — I mean, inordinately good. And the sense I got of the space of the place, and the time of night, was really overpowering to me.
AUDIO: “Black Peter” [Bear’s Choice] (0:32-0:59) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
STARFINDER STANLEY: That's the magic of Bear’s recordings, his Sonic Journals. He didn't just catch the sound — he catches the place that the sound happened in, the whole experience of being in that room.
ALLAN ARKUSH: It's remarkable how great it sounds, and the presence. It feels like you're there. It really does. I think that's a tribute to Bear working with the best sound house, ever.
JESSE: The house system at the Fillmore East was designed by Bill Hanley, a genuine pioneer of live sound who’d created the system for the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals starting in the late 1950s and had moved into the world of rock when he was drafted to build audio for the Beatles’ 1966 return to Shea Stadium. His speaker system for the Fillmore East is one of the few that Owsley and the Dead deemed to be for-real. The band’s relationship with the venue went deep.
ALLAN ARKUSH: If you think of the fact that they're touring all the time, think of the Fillmore East as their pit crew. And so Owsley, he could set up there with people who respected him. No union problems.
JESSE: The soundboard at the Fillmore East was located in a balcony box on stage-left, the right side if you’re in the crowd. There’s a classic photo of Bear running sound from that position. In the fuller version of the photo, you can actually see Allan Arkush standing next to the side door just under the sound engineer’s box, taking in the show with fellow crew member Danny Opatoshu. But the core of the venue’s sonic operations was actually underneath the stage. This is a good place to point out a really amazing project by a music fan named Keith Mueller. Using blueprints for the Village Theater, he’s created an animated walk-through of the venue, occasionally fitting in photos. It’s, like, pretty wow.
ALLAN ARKUSH: When you walk in the theater, there’s a center aisle, and I believe a far right and a far left aisle as you're facing the stage. You walk down the far right aisle and it came toward a curtained area. That's where one member of the stage would be, and you had to have a pass to get further than that. So you went through there, and as you went through this little hallway, to your left was the whole stage and the backstage area. But if you kept going to the back wall, there was a staircase continuation, which took you downstairs. And it opened up to the whole under-the-stage area. You saw that as you went around into this big open… to the left was all the tech stuff. They had built shelving into it and desks, work areas, and that's where they hung out. That's where they did all their work. To the right was kind of an open storage area.
JESSE: And this is where we’re gonna hang out today, basically, under the stage at the Fillmore. In a few ways, it was just as important as the stage itself.
ALLAN ARKUSH: So, the left area was also where the super secret—I think it was a TEAC—tape player was. There was a line from the board through there to that tape player, and that's where I guess the Dick’s Picks came from. And almost every show was secretly taped.
JESSE: That’s not where Bear’s Choice comes from, but many of the other Dead recordings you’ve heard from the Fillmore East very likely do. Bear’s Choice was almost certainly recorded by the venue’s soundboard overlooking the stage. But even Bear’s choice was to hang out with the gang underneath the stage.
ALLEN ARKUSH: That was also where Owsley spent a lot of time when he came to the Fillmore East. Any bit of electronic equipment that they didn't have, they could get to them within an hour. Because we were downtown, we were near Canal Street, which is where all the electronic stores were.
What I remember about him is that he was always in motion, that he was always very, very busy. He was always rigging something up or doing something. He would take his equipment down there with the soldering guns and everything. There were all these tech Dead Heads all working together like crazy, and throwing ideas back and forth — which is why he was allowed to mix on the house mixing board. Other groups that would bring sound people, they didn't know anything. They were just like a friend of the band, and they weren't allowed to touch the board. Whereas Owsley was totally trusted.
One of the things that Bear did that no one else did was that, before the soundcheck, he would do a pink noise and a white noise generator on the stage. Now, that was something that the guys at the Fillmore knew all about, because on Sunday nights, in the first year or two, they were refining the sound in the house. So they would get up there—I would be on the stage crew, just helping; I didn't have anything to do with this, I didn't know what they were doing—and they would generate white noise. It would fill the speakers and they’d go around the house and measure it, and measure the quality of it. Then they would add padding to certain parts of the room to help that, because they had two challenges. When you went straight back towards the lobby, the divider between the lobby and the Fillmore was glass. And you had an overhang, and they refused to be handicapped by the overhang — that was like the hill they were gonna die on. Whereas, as you know, in every other rock theater you've ever been to, if you're sitting under that overhang, it's echoey and everything. So, they put padding everywhere. They were doing that so that when Bear would come in, he would double-check and make any adjustments. Then Jerry would come in and Jerry would play on the stage, and Bear would go around with a Nagra tape recorder — the best of all, that's the perfect tape recorder. That's what they recorded movies on. And they had a special and obviously super microphone, because those guys were like: if it isn't gourmet, it's gone. He would record Jerry in various places in the house and in places that he would normally think would be problematic, because of the shape of the room. Then they’d go back and they’d listen to it, to figure out if there was anything they could do.
JESSE: Thanks to the magic and generosity of David Gans, here’s Owsley talking about exactly the process that Allan describes and how it led to Bear’s Choice. This is from the 1991 interview included in Conversations with the Dead. For a whole lot more from this, check out our “LA ‘66” episode.
OWSLEY “BEAR” STANLEY [1/13/91]: My idea about the sound man is that he has to become transparent. A recordist is different, and I was always a recordist. But a sound man running the house sound system, he’s only an assistant to the musicians. If he’s a total, contributing musician and a member of the band, that’s fine. If he’s not, he should make himself so transparent as to not be there. My way of doing that was by constantly playing the tapes back, making the tapes exactly like the house. I’d listen to the house, listen to the tape, listen to the house, listen to the tape, and get the earphones to sound just like the house—walk around the house, walk all over, walk up onstage—make the sound in the headphones as close as possible to what I was experiencing in the hall. I’d play the tapes back to the band and they could tell you whether you’re right or not, whether that’s what they would do. So I’d become as transparent as possible.
After every show, we’d gather in the hotel and play back the night’s gigs. That’s why I was recording all the time. That’s how Bear’s Choice got made. It got made because we were always taping. There was always a tape. If it wasn’t a reel-to-reel, it was a cassette. There was always a tape being made. Something that could be played back. Something that could be listened to. That was how I was learning. They were telling me when the balance was right, when the balance was wrong, when this didn’t sound right, when that didn’t sound right. They were critiquing their own performances, and so forth and so on. We would find a weakness and we would try to correct it, on and on and on and on. They taught me, I taught them, they taught themselves. We all learned. It was a learning matrix in which everything was a constant flow of ideas and so forth. And there was no isolation. Everybody was involved.
JESSE: At the Fillmore East, the soup was thick.
ALLAN ARKUSH: There was this whole mix of people. And the dressing rooms are small, so there was a lot going on backstage.
JESSE: The big workshop area underneath the stage also became Pigpen’s hangout when the Dead were in town.
ALLAN ARKUSH: That's where they put Pigpen’s couch, and a lamp and a table. And they may have even put… I know I put a cooler down there.
JESSE: Pigpen’s hangout under the stage mirrored his homelife at 710 Ashbury a few years earlier, when he occupied a room off the kitchen. Here’s how Jerry Garcia described it to Blair Jackson in the great Pigpen tribute by the Golden Road: “You’d go in there and there might be a half-a-dozen hippies and some black people hanging out, drinking wine and listening to Pigpen do whatever he was doing. He was a real crackup. People’d be hanging on his every word.” It was under the stage that Pig received visitors from the Hells Angels, whose clubhouse was only a few blocks away.
ALLAN ARKUSH: When the Angels were there, they would go underneath the stage and hang with him or there'd be hanging around backstage.
JESSE: This next story happened during the Dead’s January 1970 trip to the Fillmore East, now on Dave’s Picks 30. We at the Deadcast certainly don’t endorse what Allan’s about to describe, but it happened.
ALLAN ARKUSH: Not just when Owsley was there. In general, Ramrod, [Steve] Parish, [Rex] Jackson, a couple of them would walk around and have these little Visine bottles. Inside the Visine bottles was acid. So, if you wanted to be dosed, you held out your beer can—or if they saw a beer can of someone who needed to be dosed in their mind—they would hit it. So, that was like a constant buzz around that time. If you knew that they had been dosed, they would put a little dent in it, okay. At some point during that weekend, Bill, who had been flying back coast-to-coast, comes backstage while the Dead are playing. Behind the screen are a couple of Dead roadies and the Hells Angels, twirling — doing that Grateful Dead twirl. He turns to Jonathan Kaplan and he goes, “When did this start?” Jonathan goes, “Bill, I have no idea…”
Bear’s Choice
AUDIO: “Dancing in the Street” [Dave’s Picks 30, 1/3/70] (0:32-0:48)
JESSE: That was “Dancing in the Street” from Dave’s Picks 30, the show Allan was just talking about, and the Dead’s last trip through the Fillmore East before the recordings that became Bear’s Choice and Dick’s Picks 4. In between those two sets of shows, the Dead and their crew got busted in New Orleans in late January, dropped a band member, and began production for a new album. The bust was a violation of Owsley’s probation and thus confined him to California. The shows at the Fillmore East would be the last road gigs Bear recorded for more than two-and-a-half years. When he reached for his Sonic Journals in early 1973, they may’ve been relatively fresh on his mind. In a sense, they represented something close to the most-evolved version of Bear’s ideas about audio before he was forced to take a break. Here’s how he remembered it to David Gans in 1991.
BEAR [1/13/91]: Bear’s Choice is an example of the tapes where I was trying to make myself as transparent as possible. And it’s very interesting, there’s only like 16 mics on the stage. Period. I just moved the mics around until the sound coming to the hall was like the sound on the stage. And if it meant one mic here and one mic sort of halfway between there and there, and only two mics on each drum set, or if I moved them all around, I got it so that I got a coherent, lifelike sound that was out in the hall like if I was standing on stage, that was on the tape like it was in the hall. And then I tried to make myself as little as possible, so that it was mostly just the band.
JESSE: Naturally, our friend Gary Lambert was there. Please welcome back to the Deadcast, the co-host of The Golden Road on SiriusXM and a Dead Air near you, the esteemed Gary Lambert. My first interview prompt for Gary was, “holy shit, you were at the February 1970 Fillmore East shows?”
GARY LAMBERT: Oh yeah, that was pretty well into my first year of complete fanaticism. I had really taken the plunge all-in in ‘69, after first seeing them in ‘68, and had already been to some multi-show runs and had seen several shows in some multi-show runs. So when those tickets for Fillmore East went on sale, I remember two things distinctly. I was indignant that the Dead were getting big enough that I couldn't automatically wind up somewhere in the first 10 rows, because it was actually becoming a thing. I heard about those shows on very short notice. I think the ad ran in the Village Voice, or wherever the ads customarily ran, and they kind of slid by me. So I actually ditched school early to run down to Fillmore East in a cab and get some tickets, and I got decent seats for all the nights. The other notable thing about that ticket on-sale was I'm pretty sure that it was the first shows that I bought tickets for in which the prices at Fillmore East had gone from a top of $5 to $5.50, which was considered the apex of capitalist greed and avarice. And Bill Graham was vilified, as he was so often by the Lower East Side freak scene — as we know, mostly unjustly, because he ran shows better than anyone else and gave you incredible value for your dollar.
JESSE: And, yes, that meant that Gary was going to both the early and late shows.
GARY LAMBERT: My greatest immersion in excess had happened the previous fall. They played two nights in Fillmore East in late September of ‘69, two shows each. And then there was a night off—or they played somewhere else, I can't remember—and then they played three nights of two shows each at the Cafe Au Go Go. I saw 10 shows over the space of six nights, with one night off in the middle.
JESSE: The three nights at the Fillmore East in February 1970 would become legendary for numerous reasons, and we discussed them a bit in our Fillmore East Late Show bonus episode. But to recap, the first legendary part of the shows was the opening act.
AUDIO: “Mountain Jam” [Allman Brothers, 2/11/70] (1:14-1:44)
JESSE: Grateful Dead, meet the Allman Brothers. That was “Mountain Jam” on February 11, 1970 at the Fillmore East, now available from the Owsley Stanley Foundation. The Allmans had first appeared at the Fillmore in December 1969 and quickly became a favorite of the Fillmore crew. Along with sets by Arthur Lee and Love, a band we at the Deadcast dig more than Owsley did, the shows also included massive psychedelic versions of “Dark Star” and a power jam with members of the Allmans and Fleetwood Mac. The Fillmore crew was in heaven.
ALLAN ARKUSH: The Fillmore tech people invented a headset system that could be used during a concert to communicate and be heard over a band. No one had ever done that before. So you had stage left [and] stage right sound, a lighting designer, spotlight operators, me running the light show, and Tom Shoesmith in the light show all on this system — all coordinating the show and, on some nights, giving a running commentary on what we thought of the band and their music. You really don't want to hear what we said about Sir Lord Baltimore. We were talking about the bands, and that's why the shows were so tightly run. We would say, “Okay, we're like 20 seconds away from the end of ‘Whipping Post’ — they're building here. When they get to the peak, go to black on everyone but Gregg.” So then those big chords, and the lighting designer would call it out: “3, 2, 1 — black!” Everything goes off, and a blue spotlight on Gregg's face as he goes: “Sometimes I feel…” — and then everything kicks in. It was like a Broadway show that was in the moment.
AUDIO: “Whipping Post” [Allman Brothers, 2/14/70] (6:44-7:18)
JESSE: But while they loved the Allmans, they were stone Dead freaks.
ALLAN ARKUSH: Those six times the Dead appeared in ‘69 to ‘70 built to that weekend. We knew their set really well. So when they come up on the stage and they're playing acoustic, it was such a treat. To hear the evolution of them and the material that became Workingman’s Dead, which was being worked out during that period, made us all feel like part of it.
GARY LAMBERT: [The February 1970 Fillmore East shows] stand tall in the overall cosmology of things, do they not? It’s spoken of with such awe, by the people who weren't there as much as the ones who were there. I’m really glad that some of it was finally immortalized on Dick’s Picks 4. Even if you take away the guests and the massive jams and all that, it was notable in that it was the first time—in my experience, at least—that we saw the Dead have a little interlude where they played some acoustic instruments on stage. That was really great and really a treat. Hearing Bobby and Jerry singing “Wake Up, Little Susie” was an absolute gas. We got the first solo acoustic Pigpen moment most of us had ever seen beyond Palo Alto. That was really wonderful.
JESSE: In December 1969, Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir played a few mini acoustic sets to open Dead shows because of delayed band members. In early 1970, they started doing it more deliberately, first with acoustic mini-sets late in the evening. Usually, Garcia and Weir would run through five or six songs before beckoning Pigpen out for a few solo numbers. The February 1970 Fillmore East shows marked the Dead’s East Coast acoustic debut. At the Fillmore East, all the bands played early and late shows, running through all three acts, clearing the house, and doing it again. With a ticketed time of 11:30 and two acts before them, that means that the first side of music on Bear’s Choice all took place between roughly 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning. As with money, time worked differently in the 1960s.
GARY LAMBERT: It was a call back to their folk roots. And considering how uncompromisingly and relentlessly psychedelic they had been not many months before, to have that stuff turn up was really kind of a revelation and a harbinger of what was to come. This is just a few months before Workingman’s came out.
JESSE: Though Bear’s Choice begins with a Pigpen tune, we’ll let him hang out on his couch under the stage a little bit longer. Consider, though, that through most of the first side of Bear’s Choice, Pigpen was probably chilling just below his bandmate’s feet.
“Dark Hollow”
AUDIO: “Dark Hollow” [Bear’s Choice] (0:31-0:58) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Dark Hollow” has become an acoustic standard for Bob Weir, still in his repertoire a half-century later, but the version on Bear’s Choice—February 14th, 1970—is actually the debut of the Dead’s version. Before the song starts you can hear Weir suggest it off-mic, and Garcia’s reaction.
BOB WEIR [2/14/70]: Do you want to do “Dark Hollow”?
JERRY GARCIA [2/14/70]: Do you know the words?
JESSE: Another small thing about Bear’s Choice is that it’s the first of the Dead’s live albums to include bits of the musicians bantering back and forth. For fans without access to live tapes, it was a first small peek at their personalities. Here, Weir and Garcia riff on the wonders of guitar capos.
BOB WEIR [2/14/70]: Let me, uh, put on this device here. I’m strapping on an insidious device, known in common circles as a cheater… a cheater, I always liked that name.
JERRY GARCIA [2/14/70]: That’s the vulgate.
JESSE: Still one of the only times I’ve heard the word “vulgate” in action. Much of “Dark Hollow” comes from older sources. Consider, for example, Buell Kazee singing “East Virginia Blues,” from 1927, collected by Harry Smith on the Anthology of American Folk Music.
AUDIO: “East Virginia” [Buell Kazee, Anthology of American Folk Music] (2:17-2:48)
JESSE: Clarence Ashley recorded a similar song called “Dark Holler” in 1929, but the version the Dead played didn’t come together into the form of “Dark Hollow” until 1958, when Bill Browning released it as a b-side to “Borned with the Blues.”
AUDIO: “Dark Hollow” [Bill Browning, “Borned with the Blues” 7-inch single] (0:43-1:06)
JESSE: While Bill Browning is credited as writer, he was perhaps more a curator, circulating the song into the bluegrass world. In 1981, Jerry Garcia told our friend Ken Hunt that, “me and Weir got into our little duet version of it and it's more or less loosely based on Clarence and Roland's [White's] duet version. They used to do a duet version in the Kentucky Colonels.”
AUDIO: “Dark Hollow” [Kentucky Colonels, Live in Stereo] (0:23-0:41)
JESSE: That was the Kentucky Colonels in 1965 from the archival release Live in Stereo, but surely Garcia learned it from hearing the Colonels in-person sometime before that, perhaps even taping it himself. It was part of Jerry’s pre-Dead repertoire, sung by Sandy Rothman with the Black Mountain Boys a few times in 1964. The Dead themselves would include “Dark Hollow” in their 1980 acoustic sets, too, and release it on Reckoning, helping to lock its place as a post-revival folk standard, though it had a slightly more filled-out arrangement than the 1970 duo versions.
AUDIO: “Dark Hollow” [Reckoning] (3:14-3:47) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Weir wasn’t done with capo jokes. This one doesn’t quite translate without the visual, which we’ll let Gary Lambert explain.
JERRY GARCIA [2/14/70]: Ouch.
BOB WEIR [2/14/70]: That’s a Bill Russell double-action capo, they call it. You can use a finger tryin’ to use it.
GARY LAMBERT: Weir says, “Yeah, you can lose a finger if you're trying to use one of those things,” and Garcia gave him an amusing sidelong glance.
JESSE: Jerry Garcia’s solo cover spotlight also survived to the Reckoning era and beyond.
“I’ve Been All Around This World”
AUDIO: “I’ve Been All Around This World” [Bear’s Choice] (0:31-0:59) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “I’ve Been All Around This World” was also recorded February 14th, the last night of the run, and has even muddier, folkier origins than “Dark Hollow.” Our friend Alex Allan has done some work on those songs, as well as various Mudcat threads. The song seems to have come together from numerous sources along a single melody. In one reading, the first verse makes it a fighting song from Kentucky, but there’s nothing else in the song that quite follows up that thread. Jerry Garcia probably learned it from the Grandpa Jones version, recorded for King Records in 1943.
AUDIO: “I’ve Been All Around This World” [Grandpa Jones, Complete King Recordings 1943-1956, Vol. 1] (0:35-0:53) - [Spotify]
JESSE: One thing I like about Garcia’s version is the way his voice evokes the soulful and beautifully mellow country-blues hero Mississippi John Hurt. When I started researching this episode, I assumed that’s where he must’ve learned the song. I love the quiet groove on the 1980 acoustic version from Reckoning.
AUDIO: “Been All Around This World” [Reckoning] (2:33-3:03) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: There’s actually footage of the very Dead performance that made it to Bear’s Choice. It’s black and white and a little bit shaky, probably shot from the stage-left balcony aisle, but nonetheless you can watch Garcia and Weir play this very recording. One takeaway is that Garcia and Weir are wearing the Fillmore East sports jerseys that the venue ushers wore.
GARY LAMBERT: They were kind of like softball shirts. Bill probably gifted the band with them and they decided—in a rare spasm of onstage uniformity—to put them on.
JESSE: The video actually leads to some questions. There were lots of film students around the Fillmore East, including Allan Arkush, but he’s not even sure where it comes from. There’s an Amalie Rothschild photograph from the late show that seems to depict a bearded guy in the front row, at the foot of Pigpen’s B3, pointing a boxy early video camera towards the stage at an angle that matches some of the video. Except Phil is wearing the Fillmore East jersey in the footage from the early show, and a white t-shirt in this photo, making it from the late show — which I mention because it means there might also be footage of the late show still out there. More questions than answers, as we like to say around here.
“Wake Up, Little Susie”
JESSE: There’s no question where Weir and Garcia learned their other cover on the album’s first side.
AUDIO: “Wake Up, Little Susie” [Bear’s Choice] (0:00-0:22) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The Everly Brothers had a smash number one hit with “Wake Up, Little Susie” in 1957, when Garcia was 15 and Weir was 10.
AUDIO: “Wake Up, Little Susie” [The Everly Brothers, The Very Best of the Everly Brothers] (0:16-0:32) - [Spotify]
AUDIO: “Wake Up, Little Susie” [Bear’s Choice] (0:40-0:56) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: When the Dead’s harmonies are mentioned, the influence of Crosby, Stills and Nash often comes up. But Everly and Everly were probably just as big an influence on the Garcia/Weir vocal blend. “Wake Up, Little Susie” was written by the husband and wife songwriting team of Felice and Boudleux Bryant, authors of other hits for the Everly Brothers and many others, including “Bye Bye, Love,” “All I Have To Do Is Dream,” and “Rocky Top.” Unlike those, and any of the other songs on Bear’s Choice for that matter, “Wake Up, Little Susie” was banned in Boston for being, you know, wink wink.
AUDIO: “Wake Up, Little Susie” [The Everly Brothers, The Very Best of the Everly Brothers] (0:47-1:06) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Next thing you know, they’ll start freaking out about rainbows or something. The Dead’s version of “Wake Up, Little Susie” is from the late show on February 13th, 1970. As with “Dark Hollow,” it’s the first known Grateful Dead performance. It was a staple of the Dead’s acoustic sets that year, with Weir and Garcia playing it one more time in 1983. The first side of Bear’s Choice closes with the album’s only original song.
“Black Peter”
AUDIO: “Black Peter” [Bear’s Choice] (1:36-2:01) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Black Peter” would have been mostly new to the Fillmore East crowd, give or take anybody who’d been at the January shows. The song had debuted in December, just before Altamont. The version they played in January was electric.
AUDIO: “Black Peter” [Dave’s Picks 30, 1/2/70] (2:09-2:34)
JESSE: That was from Dave’s Picks 30, from January 2nd, 1970. Played at nearly every show in that period, it was a song of which the Dead were rightly proud. Allan Arkush.
ALLAN ARKUSH: I think that the performance of Jerry on “Black Peter” really sums up the ambition of that record and what the Dead we're doing. It's an intimate song, about a day like any other day, but it's a day that you're dying. And to hold 2,500 people like that, and there's not a cough in the room — his performance is as if he's sitting in the room with you, you know? And it sounds like that: you feel the room when you listen to that recording. It’s about as beautiful a live recording as I've ever heard.
AUDIO: “Black Peter” [Bear’s Choice] (4:46-5:12) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
GARY LAMBERT: It conveys the intimacy and how, again, how lucky we were to be seeing them in this small theater with a great PA. They were sitting in chairs, playing that acoustic set; I think when they did the acoustic sets later in the year they stood up. But it was like being in a folk club that was only slightly larger than a folk club.
JESSE: At the moment it was performed for Bear’s Choice, it represented the leading edge of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s unfolding songwriting partnership and would provide a heavy moment on Side B of Workingman’s Dead. The story of “Black Peter” is one we dealt with pretty extensively in the first season of the Deadcast. To summarize briefly, there was an evening in June 1969 when Robert Hunter got dosed with way too much acid at the Fillmore West. Here’s how his housemate Jerry Garcia described the situation to Dennis McNally, which can be heard in the Jerry On Jerry audiobook, available from Hachette.
JERRY GARCIA [1986]: Hunter was lying on Market Street—
MOUNTAIN GIRL [1986]: It wasn’t even Owsley’s fault —
JERRY GARCIA [1986]: He said lobsters from the ninth dimension were devouring downtown San Francisco.
JESSE: To find out how Robert Hunter’s vision of lobsters devouring downtown San Francisco resulted in writing “Black Peter,” check out Episode 6 of the first season of the Deadcast. “Black Peter,” of course, was not only on Workingman’s Dead but—unlike anything else on Bear’s Choice—would remain a staple for the rest of the Dead’s career. We traced its history in that episode, too. But here’s how it sounded on Workingman’s Dead, recorded within a month after the Bear’s Choice performance.
AUDIO: “Black Peter” [Workingman’s Dead] (3:25-3:55) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
“Katie Mae”
JESSE: Alright, it’s time to get Pigpen from his couch under the stage. Pigpen’s solo acoustic tune begins Bear’s Choice, but would come after the Garcia/Weir acoustic segment in the actual show. Here’s some of the audio that comes just before the needle drops on Bear’s Choice as Garcia introduces Pig.
JERRY GARCIA [2/13/70]: We’re gonna have somethin’ new for New York — we’re gonna have Pigpen do a little solo tune out here with the guitar.
[audience cheers]
PIGPEN [2/13/70]: Ham I only done this once before… and I can’t even see the… can’t even see the… ah, thank you. Now I can see the strings.
JESSE: It was Pigpen’s hour. Late at night at the Fillmores East or West or the Family Dog were perhaps the closest the band would ever approximate to late nights at a kitchen table in Palo Alto or 710 Ashbury, where they knew they were among friends chill enough for Pigpen to hold court. Pigpen didn’t do much talking onstage outside his raps in “Turn On Your Lovelight” and “Good Lovin’,” so I love the little of him bantering with the audience at the very beginning of Bear’s Choice.
PIGPEN [2/13/70]: What do you think I’m tryin’ to do, man?
[audience laughs and applauds]
PIGPEN [2/13/70]: Let me make my mistakes on my own. I don’t need your help! Let’s get this thing stuck up here, let’s see what happens…
JESSE: And when Pigpen starts playing, he makes his mistakes on his own, and it’s late at night wherever or whenever you’re listening.
AUDIO: “Katie Mae” [Bear’s Choice] (1:50-2:18) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: As Phil Lesh wrote in his memoir, Searching For the Sound, “Never was Pigpen more at home than with a bottle of wine and a guitar, at home or at some party, improvising epic blues rant lyrics, playing Lightnin’ Hopkins songs.” Here’s what the 1946 original sounds like.
AUDIO: “Katie Mae Blues” [Lightnin’ Hopkins, The Complete Aladdin Recordings] (0:08-0:37) - [Spotify]
JESSE: What might not be apparent now, more than three-quarters of a century later, is that “Katie Mae Blues” was a song for dancing. Listen again to Wilson “Thunder” Smith’s piano with a groove far behind it.
AUDIO: “Katie Mae Blues” [Lightnin’ Hopkins, The Complete Aladdin Recordings] (1:40-2:12) - [Spotify]
JESSE: It was big on jukeboxes throughout the Southwest. Pigpen’s version is a subtle reinvention.
AUDIO: “Katie Mae” [Bear’s Choice] (4:04-4:34) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Even during the Dead’s acoustic sets in 1970, Pigpen didn’t do his thing too often, playing “Katie Mae” a dozen times. Besides maybe the Family Dog, he may have been the most comfortable at the Fillmore East, though, where he performed solo acoustic three times, expanding to a proper three tune mini-set of his own by the final time he did it later that summer. Pigpen’s other two songs on Bear’s Choice, constituting the entirety of Side B, were both long-lasting in the Dead’s repertoire, played regularly before and after 1970. Fix yourself a drink or a jazz cigarette and flip the LP.
“Smokestack Lightnin’”
AUDIO: “Smokestack Lightnin’” [Bear’s Choice] (0:00-0:31) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Smokestack Lightnin’” was a different kind of late night vibe.
AUDIO: “Smokestack Lightnin’” [Bear’s Choice] (1:07-1:37) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The song first turns up on Dead tapes in late 1966, and it’s especially hard to guess its repertoire history based on the versions that survive, turning up nearly every year for a few performances, usually in close proximity, but with only eight known recordings before the Bear’s Choice take. It also includes some co-leads by Bob Weir.
AUDIO: “Smokestack Lightnin’” [Bear’s Choice] (7:32-8:02) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
ALLAN ARKUSH: So I'm listening to the electric part of that album, because now I’m attuned. And I’m hearing that Jerry's guitar has a sharpness to it. I've been listening to all the box sets that are being sent out; I've been listening to Dead ‘77, ‘83, and I'm listening to this and there's a bite to the guitar. Do you know which electric guitar he was playing that weekend?
JESSE: Why yes, Allan, that’s one we can field — Garcia was playing a 1963 Rosewood Fender Telecaster he’d switched to the previous October, one of his first turns towards the Bakersfield Dead sound of the early ‘70s. “Smokestack Lightnin’” as we know it was written and recorded by the great Chicago bluesman Howlin’ Wolf in 1956.
AUDIO: “Smokestack Lightnin’” [Howlin’ Wolf, Moanin’ in the Moonlight] (0:00-0:30) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Wolf had been playing the song in some form since the 1930s when he was performing in the Mississippi Delta. But some of its lyrics were floating verses that hopped from feel to feel. In our Europe ‘72 season, we learned that “It Hurts Me Too” is genetically related to the Mississippi Sheiks version of “Sittin’ On Top of the World” among other songs. It turns out “Smokestack Lightning” has some jug band genetics, too.
AUDIO: “Stop and Listen Blues” [The Mississippi Sheiks, Stop and Listen] (1:14-1:47) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was the Mississippi Sheiks, one of the great jug bands of Memphis, with “Stop and Listen Blues.” The Howlin’ Wolf song became a blues standard, covered by John Lee Hooker, the Yardbirds, the Allman Brothers, and 1980s, ‘90s, and beyond Bob Weir. This is Weir doing it June 24th, 1985 in Cincinnati, at present the only officially released Grateful Dead version post Pigpen.
AUDIO: “Smokestack Lightnin’” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 6/24/85] (0:13-0:40)
“Hard To Handle”
JESSE: The final song on Bear’s Choice might be heard as a double tribute.
AUDIO: “Hard to Handle” [Bear’s Choice] (0:00-0:24) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: As I hope I don’t have to point out, “Hard To Handle” was originally by the fabulous, incredible, no words too-high-to-describe Otis Redding.
AUDIO: “Hard to Handle” [Otis Redding, The Immortal Otis Redding] (0:00-0:28) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Written in the studio by Redding along with Stax collaborators Allen Jones and Al Bell, it began as a send-up of guys who quote “baaaaadasss cool” in the words of Allen Jones.
AUDIO: “Hard to Handle” [Otis Redding, The Immortal Otis Redding] (0:29-0:43) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Otis Redding recorded the song in 1967, but it wasn’t released until 1968 after his death, and as a b-side at that. It was a minor hit, and the Dead started covering it in the spring of 1969. It was one of the newer additions to Pigpen’s repertoire after they built his initial songbook in 1965 and 1966. It takes some chutzpah to cover “Hard to Handle” as a honky white blues band from San Francisco, but the Dead made it their own.
AUDIO: “Hard to Handle” [Bear’s Choice] (0:29-0:43) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: There’s Portapak video of this version, too. Do not let me stop you from vibing with the Bear’s Choice version, but I would be remiss not to tell you about the sweet middle jam the song developed the following year, which you can hear on a bunch of versions, but especially the one from the Hollywood Palladium in L.A. from August 6th, 1971, now Road Trips Vol. 1, No. 3.
AUDIO: “Hard to Handle” [Road Trips Vol. 1, No. 3, 8/6/71] (5:10-5:40)
JESSE: That’s dope, let’s listen to a little more of it, specifically when Phil Lesh articulates a set of chord changes under the jam.
AUDIO: “Hard to Handle” [Road Trips Vol. 1, No. 3, 8/6/71] (5:40-6:13)
JESSE: The last version of “Hard to Handle” with Pigpen came in New York, around three weeks after the Hollywood Palladium version. With Pigpen’s influx of new material in late 1971 and early 1972, he never sang it again. The band revived it for a few performances with Etta James in 1982, but we’ll just give those a little wink. “Hard to Handle” wasn’t usually a set closer, and it wasn’t at the Fillmore, but it serves that purpose just fine on Bear’s Choice.
Bear’s Choosing
JESSE: Perhaps more than the music on Bear’s Choice, it was the art that had the most impact.
STARFINDER STANLEY: That's one of those things about this album. It seems like it doesn't get nearly the exposure on some levels, musically as some of the other albums. It's not one of the… when people list their top three, it’s not always present. Yet, the art on it has some of the most persistent and ubiquitous Grateful Dead iconography that's out there.
JESSE: In fact, Bear’s Choice introduced what were perhaps the Dead’s two most famous pieces of art. At the center of the front cover was the skull-and-lightning-bolt logo that became known as the Steal Your Face. The back cover was circled with what have come to be known as the Dancing Bears. Both were placed there by artist Bob Thomas, one of Bear’s oldest friends and lab assistants.
STARFINDER STANLEY: Bob Thomas was a brilliant painter and another brother of my dad, just as much as Pig. He was a perennial housemate, and a talented sculptor, painter, musician, bagpiper. He played Edwardian Renaissance music and in the Golden Toad. There were so many different elements to Bob's talents; he really was, like Bear, a Renaissance man. He just had so many different interests and so many different talents. But Bear always said Bob could paint the patterns that you see when you're tripping, even embed them in his art. If you look at the backgrounds of his art, there's a lot of stuff going on there that's a bit subliminal.
JESSE: Both the front and back covers of Bear’s Choice fall into this category. The front is a riot of red, white, and blue with dizzying lettering that, if I’m reading correctly, says “Good Old Grateful Dead.” In the center is the Steal Your Face.
STARFINDER STANLEY: The skull-and-lightning-bolt — that first came out of Bear’s wanting to figure out a way to be able to identify the band’s equipment cases when they went to festivals. They basically would go to multi-band fests, and everybody would push their gear boxes off to the corner of the stage, and there’d be like 20 big black road cases. They’d all stencil their names on the side with spray paint, but they’d all be in front of each other. So you could only see a letter — you couldn’t tell which band it was. So Bear was like: we need just a picture that we can spray paint, an icon that just… we see any part of it and we’re like, that’s our shit. He had this vision of a circle struck through with a lightning bolt. I think he was probably driving down the road in a crazy storm at night in wintertime, and maybe saw a Do Not Enter / wrong way sign as he careened around a corner in a flash of lightning, and it burned itself into his brain. He had a friend who showed him how to make a quick stencil, a one-piece stencil that you could spray a circle with one stencil, then have a kind of half-moon shape with a ragged edge that you could put over; spray red, then flip it over, spray blue, and the white… So you spray a white circle; spray the red side; flip it over; spray the blue side; and then the white would be around the edges and the lightning bolt in the middle.
JESSE: You can see the early draft on photos of the Dead’s gear in 1969 or so. But like a lot of things, it got more refined.
STARFINDER STANLEY: He thought, Ah, there's all this poster art with this cool calligraphy — wouldn't it be cool if we could write “Grateful Dead” and make it look like a skull? So he went to Bob and said, “Hey, I got this idea. What do you think?” And Bob said, “Let me see what I can come up with.” So he went off for a few hours, and he came back and he said, “Well, I couldn't get the letters to work. But what do you think of this?” And he showed him what we now know and love as the ubiquitous Stealie. Bear always called it the skull-and-lightning-bolt; he didn't like calling it Steal Your Face.
JESSE: The completed skull-and-lightning-bolt logo first shows up on Dead gear in the early summer of 1971, when Bear was serving at Terminal Island, though likely was completed sometime before that. On the back cover of Bear’s Choice were… Bears.
STARFINDER STANLEY: The Dancing Bears, as they're colloquially known, but the Marching Bears, as Bear would tell you they should be known. But that’s neither here nor there. Although it’s funny, because I always have viewed it as an inside joke. Bear was very into many, many different things in his youth, and he studied ballet extensively for a while. So it was not uncommon when he got into the music, and beyond a certain level of stoned on acid, for him to start doing ballet to the music at shows. I’m sure more than once he was pointed to as the Dancing Bear. My kids call them Grandpa Bears.
JESSE: That’s certainly the cutest thing I’ve heard all day. If you look at the credits on Bear’s Choice, you might notice that while the recording credit on the album goes to Bear, the production credit goes to Owsley Stanley.
STARFINDER STANLEY: The album was always kind of around. And I was at that kind of teenage, early teen period of poking through the vinyl and listening to stuff, looking at all the art and reading the notes. And I looked at the back of that one and I was like… wait a minute. “Recorded by Owsley, and produced by Bear.” And I went to Bear, I was like, “Hey who was the idiot who wrote this?” He was like, “Me.” “Wait a minute! I assume you knew you were two different people.” It goes back to… he had been Owsley, and then Owsley became a known name. And so he started to notice that, when he was doing sound, they would call back through the microphone, “Hey, Owsley, fix this,” and heads would start to swivel. The name started to have meaning beyond the music scene. And he valued his anonymity. Bear really was allergic to fame. He didn’t mind being notorious, but he didn’t want to be known. He had a longstanding rule that he did not want his photograph taken. He was very camera shy, to the point that my mom never took pictures of him. We don’t have a lot of pictures from certain periods, because he said no pictures, and she didn’t take pictures.
JESSE: Though Starfinder insists it’s just a side-effect of Bear’s choosing, having the proper name of “Owsley Stanley” on the album itself would also likely make it easier for consensus reality to deal with getting his producer’s residuals.
STARFINDER STANLEY: Bear’s compensation for his contributions to Grateful Dead music was that they considered him to be equivalent to a band member. That is how much the Grateful Dead honored Bear’s contributions to the music. They paid him equal scale.
JESSE: As we know by now, there’s never been an official Volume 2 to go along with The History of the Grateful Dead, Volume 1. Not long after it came out, some Dead Head DJs on WAER asked Bob Weir about it.
BOB WEIR [WAER, 9/17/73]: We tried to at least initiate a sort of a History of the Grateful Dead program via labeling it History of the Grateful Dead, Volume 1. So hopefully they’ll follow suit and say History of the Grateful Dead, Volume 2, Volume 3, and that’s what can name their Best Of albums. But it’s altogether up to them.
JESSE: But Starfinder offers another explanation which I’d not previously considered, which reflects in a fascinating way on Owsley and how he thought of the band.
STARFINDER STANLEY: I think that the reference to Volume 1 was more talking about how this album marked a turning point in the evolution of the band. The band had had its Volume 1, and Bear was really, absolutely certain that the Grateful Dead was an entity that existed beyond the members of the band — that the magic that happened to make that music was a synergistic beast that was independent of its individual components, and that the Grateful Dead would continue on regardless of whether members perished along the way. And they lost more than one. To say that the Grateful Dead ended when Pig died, because Pig was such an integral part of what the Grateful Dead were, he knew that that wasn't what was going to happen. He knew the Grateful Dead would continue. They'd be different, but they still be the Grateful Dead.
JESSE: That is, perhaps the Volume 1 in the title refers to the Dead themselves, and not as a potential series of albums. Bear saw this line of thinking all the way through.
STARFINDER STANLEY: When Jerry died, he was really mad that the band decided, “Nope, we're gonna hang up the Grateful Dead, and we'll be the Dead; we’ll be The Other Ones; we’ll be Furthur; we’ll be a million iterations of something that’s related to, but we’re not the Grateful Dead anymore.” He was hopping mad about that. He was jumping up and down and saying: “No! You are the Grateful Dead! You will always be the Grateful Dead. Even when all of you are dead and gone, there will still be a Grateful Dead, because the Dead is more than that — the Dead is the energy of the experience.” Volume 1 was him saying, “you know, Pig is gone, and the Dead is… “ what is the saying? The king is dead; long live the king? The Dead is dead — long live the Dead.
AUDIO: “Hard to Handle” [Bear’s Choice] (5:31-6:07) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]