Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 7, Episode 7
Here Comes Sunshine: Des Moines, 5/13/73
Archival interviews:
- Bob Weir, Keith Godchaux, Donna Godchaux and Jon McIntire, WAER, 9/17/73.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (1:27-1:37) - [dead.net]
JESSE: At the start of the Here Comes Sunshine box set, time travelers step out into Des Moines, Iowa, May 13th, 1973, where the Grateful Dead played outdoors at the State Fairgrounds. It was an epic show, one of the longest the band ever played, and we’ve got a suitably epic episode.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (1:00-1:26) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The Dead, by this point, by May, they'd already done two quite extensive tours. They’d done the Midwest tour in February and then the March tour, to April 2nd.
JESSE: They’d hardly taken the 6 weeks off. In mid-April, the band officially formed their own record company, Grateful Dead Records, as we talked about in our first Here Comes Sunshine episode, and Jerry Garcia played extensively with both Merl Saunders and Old & In the Way, as we discussed last time. In Des Moines, the Grateful Dead began two-and-a-half months of gigs that would build to their biggest ever live performance later that summer at Watkins Glen. The Des Moines recording on Here Comes Sunshine represents a pretty major upgrade from what had previously circulated among collectors.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I find the Des Moines show to be something that, start to finish, is the Grateful Dead laying it on the Midwest. They had just done a Midwest tour in February with all this new material. They were playing arenas — it was February, smaller arenas, and here they are [in Des Moines] playing to 15 or 20,000 people outdoors. And they’re saying, “Okay, everyone, this is the new Grateful Dead — get used to it.”
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (6:48-7:24) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Unless otherwise noted, all the music in today’s episode comes from the May 13th, 1973 show in Des Moines. The Dead had just released Europe ‘72 seven months earlier, in November. Since coming back from the Europe tour, they’d introduced a bit of new material—specifically “Stella Blue” and “Mississippi Half-Step”—but, in February 1973, added a major batch of new Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter songs to the book: “Eyes of the World,” “Here Comes Sunshine,” “China Doll,” “They Love Each Other,” “Row Jimmy,” “Loose Lucy,” and “Wave That Flag,” which would become “U.S. Blues.” And they certainly didn’t stop playing their older newer songs, now their newer older songs.
DAVID LEMIEUX: These shows are like 30 and 32 songs per show. In most eras of the Grateful Dead’s history, a show is 22 to 25 songs. These are 33, 32-song shows! They don’t want to stop playing. Some of them are three-set shows — they want to play. And they aren't just little songs: there's 20-minute “Playing in the Band”s, there’s 20-minute “Other One”s.
AUDIO: “The Other One” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (7:50-8:15) - [dead.net]
Music Circuit
JESSE: Like a lot of excellent things, the Grateful Dead’s Des Moines 1973 show began in a record store. Please welcome, from Music Circuit, Steve White.
STEVE WHITE: I had a record store, my wife and I did, for 23 years. [It opened] December 15th, 1971, and it closed July 10th, 1994. It was records, underground music rags that we’d distribute there. It was a head shop, too: pipes, papers, all those things, tapestries. I sold some stereo equipment every now and then. I had a good line on stereo equipment, so people would come in, give me their order, I'd order it from a distributor and then sell that.
JESSE: In the early 1970s, Music Circuit would live up to its name, becoming the state’s most popular independent record store and a central node for live music in Iowa and the surrounding regions. And from the Music Circuit record store came Music Circuit Productions, co-founded by the self-described “country bumpkins,” Steve White, known as Whizzer, along with his friends Jon Hoak and Jim Henneberry. Please welcome Jon Hoak.
JON HOAK: Steve and Jim and I are long, longtime friends. We entered into this together. I think one of the amazing things is we were all very close friends from high school; we stayed friends, we did all this promoting; and here we are, 50 years later, and we're still all very close friends.
JESSE: With a home base at Music Circuit, Whizzer had begun to sell tickets for concerts in neighboring cities and do promotion around them.
STEVE WHITE: The way it started was we wanted to make money. We thought promoting rock concerts would be a fun and quick way to make money. Our history before we promoted this Dead show was one show at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa — REO Speedwagon.
AUDIO: “Sophisticated Lady” [REO Speedwagon, s/t] (0:00-0:24) - [Spotify]
STEVE WHITE: And after we promoted that show, we thought we were big promoters and on the go. So from there, we went on to promote the Grateful Dead at the Iowa State Fairgrounds.
JESSE: The newly formed Music Circuit Presentations certainly aimed big.
STEVE WHITE: The Fairgrounds was perfectly suited. It's the Iowa State Fairgrounds — had a large grandstand, it had camping space for 10,000 people. And somebody had promoted a show there the year before, so that's how we picked them. It's the ideal spot, centrally located in the Midwest.
JESSE: One ongoing theme of this podcast is the way the Grateful Dead seemed to inspire certain streaks of entrepreneurialism and invention and, in some ways, became a magnet for it. Looking through the Dead’s booking in the 1960s, whenever a new psychedelic ballroom opened or festival launched, it was almost required that they book the Dead. Though they weren’t particularly Dead Heads, and Music Circuit didn’t precisely start with the Dead, it would be the Dead that kicked them into gear.
JON HOAK: We started by going to the Iowa State Fairgrounds and saying, “Hey, we got this really great idea.” Here we are a bunch of rookies, and we'd like to promote big rock concerts there. And somehow, they listened to us — they were interested in making money as well. They gave us a couple of dates.
JESSE: There was just one question they had — how did one even book the Grateful Dead? Their first stop was Sepp Donahower and Pacific Presentations, who’d promoted the Dead’s show at the Fox Theater in October 1972, which we covered during our Listen to the River episodes.
STEVE WHITE: We contacted him first at the recommendation from an ICM booking agent that booked the Iowa State Fair.
JESSE: That didn’t work, but it revealed a fascinating tidbit of Grateful Dead information that I don’t think has ever been mentioned. In the Dead’s archives, I noticed a piece of communication between the Music Circuit gang and Sepp Donahower that mentioned a phone call between Music Circuit and… Irving Azoff? Irving Azoff would infamously go on to an illustrious career managing the Eagles and some other musicians you may know about. We were able to ask Sepp Donahower about it.
SEPP DONAHOWER: Irving and I were close from the day he hit LA. I introduced him to the Grateful Dead. I have a SX 70 Polaroid picture of Rock Scully and Irving Azoff in my office, with Irving giving me the finger. That picture is interesting, because it was his introduction to the Grateful Dead that night in my office.
JESSE: So what the hell Irving Azoff was doing negotiating on the part of the Grateful Dead?
SEPP DONAHOWER: Well, I'm gonna tell you a story… Sam Cutler hired Irving. Sam actually pulled Irving into his operation for a short time window. They didn't get along, and then Sam fired him or they split up.
JESSE: If all goes according to plan, we’ll have Sam on sooner than later, but I did email Out of Town co-founder Gail Hellund, who replied: “Yes, Irv did work for OOTT for a short time, less than a week, as I recall, right at our beginning. He couldn't stand our laid back lifestyle. And he was too LA for us. No harm, no foul. Just oil and water.” Well, it does sound like kind of a good light show.
SEPP DONAHOWER: Yeah I can't see those two staying together in a room too long.
JESSE: Music Circuit Presentations must have contacted Out of Town exactly during that tiny window when Irving Azoff was apparently trying to escape David Geffen and Asylum, a few months before he assumed full-time management of Eagles. Whatever it was he was doing at Out of Town Tours that week, it wasn’t helpful to Music Circuit Presentations, who moved on to Plan B.
STEVE WHITE: I contacted Barry Fey and told them about the Fairgrounds. He wanted me to meet him in Lincoln, Nebraska — Pershing Auditorium, where he had an Alice Cooper show he was promoting.
AUDIO: “Billion Dollar Babies” [Alice Cooper, Billion Dollar Babies] (0:27-0:37) - [Spotify]
STEVE WHITE: And that's where I made contact with him. And from there, he went to Bill Graham and put together the show.
JESSE: Barry Fey of Feyline Productions would work with Bill Graham and the Dead for many years. Just as the guys at Music Circuit used the Dead to break into the concert promotion business, it seems Bill Graham was using the Dead to break into Iowa. Jon Hoak.
JON HOAK: And to me, the number one theme that comes out of it is: I can't believe how many people trusted us, had the confidence in us, to do this. We're 23 years old [and], other than Steve, had no real experience in this at all.
STEVE WHITE: We were the three Iowa country bumpkin stereotypes. I’m sure Barry Fey spotted that right off the bat.
JON HOAK: How Barry Fey and Bill Graham took a chance with us it's just mind boggling to me.
JESSE: Though they may have been inexperienced, in 1973, much of the music business was inexperienced. Giant tours that rolled smoothly through the heartland from amphitheater to amphitheater were hardly the norm, and everybody was making it up as they went along.
STEVE WHITE: It wasn't scheduled for the tour. Bill Graham actually talked the Grateful Dead in the packing up, coming to Des Moines as a rehearsal, and packing everything back up, going back to San Francisco, and then starting the tour the following week. I mean, he did us a huge favor. We owe a lot. We owe everything to Bill Graham and the Grateful Dead.
JESSE: The May 13th show at the Fairgrounds was the opening of the band’s late spring touring season, and the opening of Here Comes Sunshine, but the road to Des Moines was anything but direct.
AUDIO: “Truckin” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (0:02-0:19) - [dead.net]
Out of Town
JESSE: Back in San Rafael, at Out of Town Tours, the Dead’s tour manager and now booking agent Sam Cutler was assembling the Dead’s spring ‘73 shows along with his team, a process we’re going to examine a little bit more. Sam surrounded himself with an extremely capable support staff. His first hire was Gail Hellund, then married to Alembic guitar ace Rick Turner. But Gail had been embedded deeply in the Dead’s world for years, starting as a member of the Jefferson Airplane family, and soon involved deeply in the Dead’s business universe.
GAIL HELLUND: There was just Jon McIntire, and me, and Lenny Hart. That was it — that was the whole staff.
JESSE: We don’t have time for the story, but someday we’ll get to how Gail helped bust Lenny Hart’s financial shenanigans and then, with her most excellent memory, helped Jon McIntire rebuild the band’s operations, becoming a member of the band’s ground control at the band’s San Rafael headquarters at the corner of 5th and Lincoln. On the back of Workingman’s Dead, she’s credited as “Cosmic Gail, Lady in Waiting.”
GAIL HELLUND: My daughter was born December 7th, 1971. So I'm the lucky one who got to stay home and do everything for Europe ‘72. When they came back from Europe, Sam called me up and said, “Okay, you've had enough time off now, the baby will be fine. You need to come back to work.” I needed money just like everybody else needed money. So I went back to work. We finally got sick of paying everybody else 10% for everything that we did, and decided to pay ourselves. So that's when we split into all the companies that were at 1330 Lincoln.
JESSE: Gail Hellund had watched the deals go down and was ready to be a part of them.
GAIL HELLUND: We moved down to 5th and Lincoln to take over at 1330 Lincoln. That is when we took everything in-house. And that was the beginning of Out of Town Tours as well. Frankie Weir took over being the travel agent. Out of Town Tours was a separate company: it was 80% owned by Sam, 10% owned by me, and 10% owned by Frances — his girlfriend, Frances Carr.
JESSE: In turn, Gail’s first hire was Rita Gentry, coming from the Sons of Champlin branch of the Bay Area family.
RITA GENTRY: We didn't realize until after she hired me there that we knew each other when we were teenagers. We roller-skated at Skateland-at-the-Beach in San Francisco, and we dated twins. I was like: oh my god, how did this happen? We went from these little virgin nice girls to doing this heavy duty rock and roll whatever together.
JESSE: After the Dead, Rita would go on to a long career working for Bill Graham and recently assembled and published a wonderful oral history, Before I Forget: Moments and Experiences with Bill Graham. One thing that many people, including Rita, brought to the Dead universe was experience in the straighter corners of the music world.
RITA GENTRY: I learned contracts for my very first job at 680 Beach Street in San Francisco. I worked for a guy who booked artists in Reno and Tahoe — club acts, anything from a juggler to you name it. I was living in San Francisco, sharing a house with a married couple. And he managed an act called Natural Act was, which is a band from back in the day. His name was Jack, or John Forchette, aka Jack Rabbit. And Jack Rabbit was my roommate, and his wife. What happened was he got offered to be a booker at Out of Town Tours. And so he said, “We have to move to Marin. Do you want to come with us?” I said, “Yeah, no problem.” He goes, “Oh, by the way, the company I am going to work for, Out of Town Tours, is looking for someone that can do contracts, and you do contracts all the time for artists.” So I said, “Okay, perfect.” And that was my step into the door of the Grateful Dead realm and Sam Cutler.
JESSE: In our Grateful Dead & Co. episode, Rosie McGee described the Annie Leibovitz photo of the band’s professional world.
RITA GENTRY: Gail is sitting next to me with her baby, and Jack Rabbit is sitting next to me on the other side. I feel very honored to [have been] in that photo.
JESSE: Many of the people in the photo could be found working at 1330 Lincoln. Cosmic Gail.
GAIL HELLUND: The first floor was street level, so it was pretty mundane. Except Frankie [Weir] moved in there into one corner and had Fly By Night Travel there, and then George Walker had an office in there, too. He kind of came and went…
JESSE: You know, the Merry Prankster George Walker.
GAIL HELLUND: We were on the second floor of that building, and it was just a totally normal office building. If people got on the elevator there and pushed the second floor by accident, the doors opened in the elevator, and all the lights were covered with tie-dyes. It was totally psychedelic — it was insane. It was like they would just go walk backwards, go back into the elevator and push the button: “Get me out of here! Where am I? I don't know where I am, but it's not right!”
RITA GENTRY: It was always like a cloud of smoke in the elevator. It smelled like weed constantly.
GAIL HELLUND: If you got off the elevator on the second floor, it smelled like pot. Everything was tie-dyed. Courtenay covered every single light fixture with tie-dyes. We all just roamed freely in there, going back and forth to the offices to get anything done. It was really efficient. It really worked well. We had the regular management offices for both the New Riders and the Grateful Dead separately. They had their own offices. Everybody was in 1330 Lincoln pretty much, except the people that stayed down at the main house. And that was mostly, like, Rakow.
JESSE: Down at the band’s once and future office at Fifth and Lincoln, Ron Rakow, Jerry Garcia, Steve Brown and others started to assemble Grateful Dead Records. At 1330, the tours got put together. Rita Gentry.
RITA GENTRY: It was quite a little community. I was always afraid of getting dosed. I was always a Coca-Cola can drinker, and I still drink Coke to this day. And I always would never let my Coke be alone. Owsley would come in and I would just be like, “Oh my God, he's gonna dose me…” It was always in the back of my mind. Luckily, I escaped that thing; it didn't happen to me.
JESSE: Probably a good thing, too, because there was some real work to get done.
GAIL HELLUND: Courtenay [Pollock] was part of what was going on with the tie-dyes. He had a friend named Jerry something or other, who was an accountant, who taught me how to be the accountant for Out of Town Tours. He sat there with books and taught me how to be an accountant. So we did everything like that to be completely self-sustaining, didn’t need to hire other people and pay them. We realized how much we were paying everybody else and said: Nah, we can do all of this. We're smart people. We're all done playing.
AUDIO: “Beat It On Down the Line” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (1:25-1:38) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Another woman in the Out of Town office was Sally Mann Romano, author of the bodacious memoir, The Band’s With Me.
SALLY MANN ROMANO: When I was working for Cutler, the Dead were the number one grossing concert act in America, ahead of the Beach Boys and everything. They definitely were on the ascendancy.
JESSE: It was an era of mega-Dead. Rita Gentry.
RITA GENTRY: There was a conference room, and someone had built this gigantic, beautiful table, a wooden table.
JESSE: I’m pretty sure that Sam Cutler brought that back from Europe.
RITA GENTRY: And then it seemed like each month, a new hand-carved chair would come into that office. I always wondered: what happened to all those beautiful carved chairs? There's a picture in Jerilyn Brandelius’s book too — it's taken of me, and Ramblin’ Jack [Elliott], it’s Jack Rabbit, it’s the manager of Stoneground. That’s one of my favorite pictures, too, because we're actually in the Out of Town Tours conference room. And it's funny because we hardly ever went in that room — the only people that really went in that room, it seemed to me, were the band or the crew when they were having meetings.
JESSE: It was serious biz.
RITA GENTRY: When I think about Out of Town Tours, I think of Halliburton cases. Everybody had a frickin’ Halliburton briefcase — of course with the Dead logo on the thing. Some had rose gold, others on the road crew had silver ones. I always wanted a Halliburton briefcase…
JESSE: So, when the Country Bumpkins proposed to Barry Fey that the Dead play in Des Moines in May of ‘73, and Barry Fey suggested it to Bill Graham, it was Sam Cutler’s phone at 1330 Lincoln that rang, where Graham probably first reached Sally Mann Romano.
SALLY MANN ROMANO: Oh my god, they're like the Twin Towers of hollering. Plus, that hilarious thing of executives, where nobody wants to be the first one to pick up the fuckin’ phone — like having the red phone on the President's desk, Bill and Sam are going to talk to each other. I know that later on the Dead were not all that appreciative of how [Sam] conducted business, but they got it done. Sam made the Dead a lot of money, and Bill made everybody a lot of money. I can only remember seeing Bill lose it maybe only once. I can’t remember who he hollerin’ at, maybe David Crosby or someone like that. But you didn't even want to be in the blast range — you sort of step back. Once he got it flying, it wasn’t a pretty sight. He was just extremely bombastic, when he was in that zone. I believe that you can avoid Bill's wrath if you just don't do just incredibly stupid stuff. Cutler, once he got going, it was going.
JESSE: Rita Gentry.
RITA GENTRY: My experience at Out of Town Tours was very educational — educational in ways of survival, educational in the way of dealing with many personalities. And many male personalities: you had your management staff; you had your road crew; and then you had your peripheral people, husbands, whatever, Hells Angels. You name it, they were there. And so I give credit and hats off to Sam for letting me have that experience, because there was nothing like that. And that was my first experience before Bill of working with somebody, a boss, who yelled and screamed. It's like… oh, my god. I don't come from that background of yelling and screaming. When that first started happening, I was going: what the hell have I gotten myself into? But then once they would get off the phone and stop yelling, they would go back to being their normal self. It was just so weird to me.
JESSE: Sally.
SALLY MANN ROMANO: Part of this deal, too, is there's this network of promoters — the promoter mafia. I mean, not the real Mafia, but you had to work with these people to get booked into the big show, the big spaces. John Scher controlled New York, except for the parts that Bill had. And then Larry Magid had Philadelphia, and I don't remember the guy's name that had Arizona… but these aren't just, like, hippies. They weren't like, “Oh, why don't y'all come play a little…” It was a business, and thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars were at stake, and you had to know. Like in New York, those people would have to work with the freakin’ Teamsters and shit. You couldn’t just be all peace and love. It was the real deal. And that’s something that’s so amazing to me about Bill: on both coasts, he worked with law [enforcement]. People don’t realize, you’ve got all these dopers coming to these shows, you have to be able to work with law enforcement and the Teamsters and other unions outside of New York. And it wasn't just: “Oh, let's go put on a play.” It wasn’t amateur hour. Cutler and Bill, they knew what they were doing.
JESSE: It was an intense working environment. Rita.
RITA GENTRY: I think the women had a real camaraderie within there. I mean I loved Eileen Law, and Gail and I to this day are still friends. And that’s what I’ll say about most all of them in that family, is that we’re still in touch with each other. We may not see each other, but we’ll send Christmas cards, or an occasional text or email here and there, and phone calls. It’s really amazing to me.
SALLY MANN ROMANO: It's fun working with people that are absolutely at the peak of the entertainment industry. We were getting it done, and the band was making boatloads of money and touring. The people around all of these bands, every band that I've ever known, are good at what they do. They take it seriously, or they wouldn't last very long. And everyone, from the roadies… no matter if they get drunk or high on occasion, they know how to do their jobs. They do them well, or you can’t hang. It's just too much at stake.
JESSE: When the yelling was done, there was a lot of paperwork, and that was when it became Rita’s job.
RITA GENTRY: The bookers would book the shows and do the deals, and then they would give me the information. Fortunately—I don’t know where I got this—I came up with a standard contract. Back in the day, you used a typewriter. It was three copies: the white, the yellow and the pink, and you stick it in your typewriter. They would give me the gist of the deals and all that kind of stuff. I would type it up, give it back to them, they would send it to whoever it was booking the show to get signed, and then I had to follow it through to the very end. That was my deal, being the contract mistress.
JESSE: Once the deals were done and the contracts were signed, the tour itineraries would be delivered downstairs to Fly By Night Travel. The Grateful Dead didn’t rely on tour buses in the early ‘70s. They flew commercial. Hey, it’s Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: I was never on tour with them in a bus. It was flying everywhere — it was flying and limousines. Flying, hotels and limousines, and flying and hotels and limousines. And that was… that was where everything was at at that time.
JESSE: We talked about Fly By Night Travel in our Grateful Dead & Co. episode, but to continue with the theme of what it actually required to put on a Grateful Dead show in 1973, we welcome back Rosie McGee, author of the incisive memoir Dancing With the Dead.
ROSIE MCGEE: It was the single most difficult and demanding job I've ever had to this day — to this day. There are no computers on my desk. There's not even a fax machine yet. And here's my list of tools: a telephone headset, plugged into the phone; a typewriter; a 40-column accounting pad; a dozen pencils; several large erasers; and a jar of Bennies. That's it! That's what I had to work with.
JESSE: At some point, an itinerary would arrive from the madhouse on the second floor.
ROSIE MCGEE: We would get an initial list. First of all, a tour with… just randomly, I’m going to say 28 people going to 37 cities. So, with the band and crew having slightly offset schedules, and different travel dates and times, sometimes they’d stay in different hotels. First, I'd get a list, an initial list of personnel and cities and dates from the booking agent, or the band managers — in this case, Sam. I'd start a grid on the 40-column accounting pad — in pencil, of course, because there’s gonna be erasing. There's people on the left, and the dates in the cities across the top. Then I’d put on the headset and I'd call the lead airline, which was the first outgoing flight on the tour. [I’d call] their group desk, and I’d verbally give them the list. There was no quick way to get it to them in writing, so I verbally gave him the list. They had the computers on their end, like a roomful of mainframes. One time, I got to go and visit United Airlines’ mainframe facility at the San Francisco Airport. It was really interesting. But they contacted all the downline other airlines to build the air itinerary, and then they’d call me back. And they verbally gave me what they had, which took about an hour to write down. Then I filled in the spreadsheet based on what they told me: which flight, which date, who is going where and when. And in the meantime, Wilma and I would start researching hotels in the 20-pound paper hotel guide that we had. Literally, it's just gigantic — it’s about eight inches thick, this gigantic book. And we’d start penciling in hotels.
JESSE: During the brief Lenny Hart regime, there were tales of the Dead getting banned from airlines, mostly resolved by the time Fly By Night came into the picture.
ROSIE MCGEE: Hotel banning is more common than airline banning. It's easier to trash your hotel room than to get in trouble with an airline. [laughs]
JESSE: To that end, we interrupt with a brief but relevant story that we’ve held onto for a while and is too good not to include in this space. It happened in the fall of 1972, just days after the Fox Theater shows on the Listen to the River box set and just before Fly By Night earned its wings as legit travel agents. We can’t stress this enough: don’t try this at home, and especially don’t try it at a hotel, like the Marc Plaza in downtown Milwaukee, now the Milwaukee Hilton, where this story took place. To tell it, we have the most excellent lighting director Candace Brightman.
CANDACE BRIGHTMAN: We're doing a gig in Wisconsin, and this would be whenever McGovern was running. So, at this hotel, the other people at the hotel were McGovern, who was running for president, with his Secret Service people. Then there was a butchers convention, and there was a hairdressers convention—mostly gay men—and us. So, right off the bat… [gasps]. So, I grew up in the Chicago area, and [Wisconsin] was where we’d go to buy fireworks, because they’re not legal [in Illinois]. So everybody had fireworks, everybody in the band had bought an enormous amount of fireworks. So we have all these people staying in the same hotel, and so… the fireworks just started going and going and going.
JESSE: And by “going and going,” Candace means inside. The Dead were shooting fireworks inside. According to Dennis McNally’s account, many of the rooms opened up onto the hotel’s central atrium, and fireworks began to shoot across it, sending Secret Service agents ducking.
AUDIO: [fireworks/bottle rockets/Roman candles exploding]
CANDACE BRIGHTMAN: It was just total pandemonium with the fireworks. And also, when you’d get into the elevator, you would get into the elevator with a gay hairdresser and a butcher. The whole thing was just marvelous. Then there was an air shaft: if you opened your windows to see what was going on in the air shaft, a snowstorm of feathers [was falling], because everyone was letting their pillows go. By golly, the feathers would come into your room. So the next morning, the poor dear maids… [laughs]. I was in heaven, because this is my idea of, like, yeah, this is what we’re supposed to be doing.
JESSE: Please hold that last mischievous thought in your head when considering the following action by one of Candace’s employers.
CANDACE BRIGHTMAN: And then Kreutzmann came in and grabbed me and pulled me into the bathroom and lit off a whole hundreds of M-80s, and held the door shut. So, I was stuck in the bath! [laughs]
AUDIO: [fireworks exploding]
JESSE: In Dennis McNally’s immortal phrase, events assumed their own momentum.
CANDACE BRIGHTMAN: So, towards the end, Ben [Haller] and I, who were the main lighting crew—we would drive the truck; sometimes I did, sometimes he did—around two or three o’clock, we thought, It would probably be a good time to get out of here. Because I guess they came and arrested some people and stuff…
JESSE: Specifically, they arrested one person — Keith Godchaux, apparently not so mild mannered. When the police showed up and asked him for identification, the piano player told them, “Fuck you, pig, I’m not showing you no fucking ID.” And so Keith Godchaux went off to jail. Donna Jean.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: That's a true story. Keith and Kreutzmann were… I remember being in the room, and the window was open to the hotel. Were they throwing fireworks out or something? I think it might have been something like that. But was it during the McGovern [campaign]?
JESSE: Yup!
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: No wonder he got arrested. I don't know why Kreutzmann didn't get arrested. He was part of it.
JESSE: He sure was. Somehow, Weir got Kreutzmann to an adjacent hotel where the drummer tuned into what was probably legendary Milwaukee overnight jazz DJ Ron Cuzner, and achieved something like jazz nirvana. Weir bailed out Keith.
CANDACE BRIGHTMAN: So we'd gotten the lights packed up, our own stuff, and drove off. And, as we were… I would say maybe five miles away from the hotel, we were on some highway or an elevated thing, and we look at the hotel and it was just fuckin’... hundreds of fireworks were coming out of the air shaft! It was insane. It just felt wonderful.
AUDIO: [fireworks exploding in the distance]
JESSE: Okay, maybe cross the Marc Plaza off that hotel list, Rosie.
ROSIE MCGEE: We did keep a list of hotels that we couldn't go back to. That started pretty early.
JESSE: Tours could be bendable things.
ROSIE MCGEE: Then Sam would call down and say, “Hey, we're swapping Detroit and Chicago. Baltimore is out, and we're adding three dates at the end.” So I guess I put in my notes: “shampoo, rinse, repeat, many times.” You start to build a tariff for the flights, from the 40-pound tariff book that's so heavy it's on a podium and redo, redo, redo the pricing of each leg of the flight.
JESSE: And, in fact, there was lots and lots of this going during the Grateful Dead’s spring of 1973. In between early May and mid-June, the Dead played the five shows that are now on the Here Comes Sunshine box set, but they also canceled or rescheduled at least another nine that got as far as being publicly advertised and, in some cases, even on sale. We’ll touch on them chronologically as they come up in this series. Thanks so much to the scholars of JerryBase for sorting through this info most righteously, and where you can see it laid out chronologically.
Originally, the Dead were considering opening their touring at the football stadium at St. Lawrence University in New York on May 5th, on a double bill with the great Leon Russell. In late March, the student paper announced that the university had signed contracts the day before and tickets were to go on sale in April. But possibly that was misreported since that’s the last mention I can find of the show. After that, the Dead were scheduled to open their May in the Pacific Northwest: May 3rd in Portland, May 5th in Vancouver, and May 7th in Seattle. And you can see that Old & In the Way booked their first out of town shows around these gigs, which they did play, on May 8th and 9th in Eugene and Portland, the former promoted by the good ol’ Keseys at the Springfield Creamery, Garcia’s last show before Des Moines on the 13th. But, according to local papers, the Dead themselves postponed the Northwest shows because Bill the Drummer cut his finger badly, rescheduling for late June — shows now featured on the Pacific Northwest box set, including this magnificent “Bird Song” from Vancouver on June 22nd.
AUDIO: “Bird Song” [Pacific Northwest, 6/22/73] (4:08-4:31) - [dead.net]
ROSIE McGEE: And eventually, at the end, a couple of days before departure, we would have a marathon night with three of us handwriting tickets, pressing hard to go through the four copies of carbon; stapling four sets of tickets together for each traveler; and, more than once, the ticketing marathon was interrupted by Sam saying, “Detroit and Chicago are back in their original sequence.” And, you know, tough is hardly the word for that kind of work. This was crazy. So that's it — that's what it took, and, somehow, we made it happen. And I about lost my mind on it.
AUDIO: “Promised Land” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (2:22-2:52) - [dead.net]
Getting It Together
JESSE: Meanwhile, in Iowa, the guys at Music Circuit Presentations were starting to get their first dose of rock and roll reality. Jon Hoak.
JON HOAK: I remember the contract that they sent us was a very simple contract. It was two or three pages of contract: very simple, straightforward, easy. And then it had an attachment of an eight-page rider that had on there every detail that they wanted. I remember Heineken bottles, not cans, between 38 and 42 degrees. You had to have barbecued chicken at certain times along the way. You had to have the cars to pick them up. It went on into excruciating detail of everything that they needed.
JESSE: Steve White.
STEVE WHITE: Bill Graham called me six days before the show and wanted to talk about the show and started asking questions. And about the third question, I heard him tell his secretary, “[So and so], get Barry on the phone right now!” So Barry Fey got on the phone, and he goes, “Barry, I got Mr. White on the phone here. He tells me you don’t have anybody in Des Moines helping out with the show. Is that right?” And Barry said, “Well, White’s doin’ the work.” And Bill Graham said, “Barry, White needs all the help he can get! You have to have someone in Des Moines tomorrow morning!” And he emphasized morning. And sure enough, Barry Fey’s guy was here the next morning, putting together a show. We didn’t know what we're doing, if you want us to be honest about it. It’s embarrassing to say — us being great entrepreneurs, when we read that rider, it had Heineken beer and steak and chicken, we thought we were gonna have some cost-saving measures, bring out hot dogs and Old Milwaukee beer. That’s one of the things that [made] Bill Graham tell Barry Fey: “White needs all the help he can get!”
JON HOAK: We were smart enough to know that we needed help: whether it was Barry Fey or Bill Graham or the sound crew or others, we were pretty easy to get along with that way. What we did was we got the venue — we were able to secure that. And, as Steve said, he had a good network in a lot of places, and did a lot of promoting around especially the state of Iowa and in the Midwest.
STEVE WHITE: We'd advertised in Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Omaha. The station, I think it was called Beaker Street in Little Rock.
AUDIO: [introductory sound collage from Beaker Street Radio promo]
CLYDE CLIFFORD: Just remember to say hello to the third man on the two-party line… this is KAAY, Little Rock, I’m Clyde Clifford.
JESSE: Clyde Clifford’s Beaker Street Radio on KAAY in Little Rock was the first underground radio show on a commercial AM station starting in 1966.
STEVE WHITE: We bought a lot of radio — a lot of radio and a lot of music rags, too.
JESSE: But it was ticketing where Music Circuit Presentations not only had their act together, but figured out an innovative system all their own. The Music Circuit record store had sold tickets for numerous local shows, and they had a sense of how that part of it worked — so they built their own network of independent music stores and adjacent heady businesses in the region. Jon Hoak.
JON HOAK: Steve really added value. He had his own record store, Music Circuit, in Des Moines, and he knew a lot of these people that ran these stores. So it was his personal connections that we were really playing off of. I think it’s one of the places we actually added some value, by getting out to such a wide network.
STEVE WHITE: We picked out our own outlets, predominantly record stores all over the Midwest in the cities that I mentioned before. And once in a while, there’d be a music store where they’d sell band equipment, amps, guitars and all that; once in a while, a hip clothing store. But most of them were record stores. We probably had 70 ticket outlets that we set up ourselves. And the way we delivered our tickets was a runner who would go out and deliver the tickets, then get the people to sign the ticket agreement. Then, we had to replenish the tickets, it was the Greyhound bus — that was how we got them to the outlets. But then, on the bus, a lot of times they were returned the same way. Let’s say if we didn’t trust the outlet, we’d send somebody to pick them up. Greyhound bus helped us out a lot.
JESSE: I don’t think it’s a controversial take to say that concert ticketing has gotten pretty convoluted at best in recent decades, and I’ll let you fill in your own adjectives for the “at worst” slot. But if anyone’s looking for a new old system to try out, building a regional ticketing agency over a network of independent record stores sounds like a righteous experiment. But there were other places they needed a bit more help.
STEVE WHITE: We only have good things to say about Bill Graham. Seriously. It’s a good thing Bill Graham had somebody come out, because we were going to pitch a tent on top of the stage, and Bill Graham insisted there couldn't be any poles in the middle. I remember Bill Graham said that if we couldn’t get something, he was going to bring out his $15,000 roof, and we freaked out at the cost of that.
JESSE: Bill Graham’s high billing, a favored technique as the Dead might tell you, eventually resulted in another small piece of rock and roll innovation.
STEVE WHITE: So we hired the Safeway Scaffold Company here to come in and build a roof. And from then, we decided we needed our own roof. We had a ZZ Top concert about two weeks later that was rained out because of no roof. And we designed, patented, and put on the road a state-of-the-art roof as the standard of measure from 1974 to 1978. People all over the country were amazed that these yahoos from Iowa could come up with something like that. But the Eagles toured with it for three years. Eric Clapton was the first one to take a chance on us with that. It was used by other shows throughout the country: Led Zeppelin down in Tampa Bay, Peter Frampton at Richfield Coliseum in Buffalo. That stage and roof was used all over the country for a period of about four years.
JESSE: They might’ve been bumpkins at first, but Music Circuit would come to contribute to the growing rock culture in the Midwest. There’d be some lessons first, starting when the first roadies rolled into town.
STEVE WHITE: They showed up one or two days ahead of time actually. Kidd Candelario did, I think Parrish was with him, two other guys — maybe Ram Rod, I’m not sure. There were four of them, I remember that. And I remember pulling up to the Fairgrounds, and Candelario said, “Look at that marquee! They spelled ‘Grateful Dead’ wrong! G-r-e-a-t-f-u-l!” That was a surprise to us, too, so the first thing we did when we pulled into the Fairgrounds, we got out to change the marquee.
Des Moines ‘73
JESSE: Thanks to the incredible Grateful Dead archives at UC Santa Cruz and the very lovely librarians that tend the paper, we are able to look ever more deeply into the makings of the Grateful Dead in the spring of 1973. I encourage other scholars to get themselves to the special collections room in McHenry Library. Some of the details are mundane, but fascinating. For example, with a pile of airline receipts, we confirm that Fly By Night didn’t assemble the band’s itineraries until May 11th for May 12th travel, with the band and crew arriving the day before the Sunday afternoon show. Steve White.
STEVE WHITE: Back then, the car races at the Fairgrounds happened on Saturday night. They would attract 10,000 people every Saturday night, so they took precedence. We couldn't do a lot of stage building until after the car races ended at 10. And then from 10 until right up to showtime, we were building the stage. But both the Dead and Bill Graham were there, and they sat in the grandstand and watched the Saturday night car races with everybody else, all 10,000 people at the car race.
JESSE: Imagine band and crew at the races in Des Moines on a spring night in 1973. When the races were over, it was time to set up the show. The Fairgrounds had a permanent stage, but it wasn’t quite Dead-ready.
STEVE WHITE: It was a 60-by-60 concrete slab, six-and-a-half feet tall. So the stage was built — it was the sound wings that had to go up. You couldn’t put speakers on it because it would obstruct the car races at the time. So, it wasn't the entire stage. Half the work was already done.
JESSE: Sometime Sunday morning, they were able to see what the Dead had brought.
JON HOAK: What was unique, at least as far as we knew at the time, was the kind of sound system they put together.
STEVE WHITE: We called it the world's largest home stereo, outdoors. All the speakers looked like speakers you’d have in your living room, except there was a mountain of them, both years. The 1973 year, compared to the Wall of Sound in 1974 [when] it looks like they just squished everything together behind the band and added the big speaker, a tweeter cluster, right behind them.
JESSE: The band’s checkbooks also show the rental of an additional system for Des Moines ‘73 from Bob Heil Sound in St. Louis. Bob Glaza had seen the Dead once before, and remembered the hype around the sound system.
BOB GLAZA: I was living in Waterloo, which is about two hours north and east of Des Moines, the Fairgrounds. Everybody was talking about all these speakers piled up on top of each other, and the semi trucks full and all the people that it took to assemble it. So that was kind of a big part of the conversation on — Oh, you don't want to miss this show, you don't want to miss this show.
JESSE: As always, wherever they traveled, when the Grateful Dead arrived in town, it was in a subtly different configuration than the version that had last passed through. Donna Jean.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: If we're talking about ‘73, that's when I got pregnant, in the spring of ‘73. So I did all of those shows up until the end of November, until I was eight months pregnant on the road. I remember telling Garcia — we were in the Grateful Dead office, and we were standing next to the little portable refrigerator in the office. Jerry was eating yogurt, and I said, “Jerry, I’m ‘pregnated.” That’s the way I told him I was pregnant! “I’m ‘pregnated...” He was kind of in the middle of putting a spoon of yogurt in his mouth, and he just kind of shook his head, kind of grinned. “Oh, that’s cool… well, that’s cool.” And then, with Robert Hunter, who was an enigma of a human being… I love him so much, but you just never knew what he was gonna say or where he was gonna be at. So when I told Robert Hunter I was pregnant—I will never forget it—he said, “All women have that right except you.” That was a Hunter-ism. He wasn’t really serious, but he was being Hunter.
JESSE: With a dry cool wit like that, he could be a psychedelic lyricist.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: My perspective is I was so much into being pregnant and having a baby. And then being in one of the biggest rock and roll bands and being on tour… it was not like I was pregnant and sitting at an office doing secretarial work or something. I was traveling and on stage and on planes. It was very intense. It was. I had way double-duty.
JESSE: That’s the period covered by this box set, and several others besides, not to mention a few Dick’s and Dave’s Picks, a few editions of Road Trips, an entry in the Download Series, and one studio album.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: When you have another human being pressing up against your lungs, that's an issue. And so of course it was harder to get a deep breath. I had to just manage as best I could.
JESSE: The Dead’s business records reveal an entwined mess between the band’s professional and personal finances, which we talked about with Joe Jupille in our Garcia ‘73 episode. But it was sometimes a happy mess, with the band helping Donna and Keith not only buy a house in Stinson Beach, but furnish it with a piano.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: That was bought for Keith and me personally, and was at our house in Stinson Beach. It was the most beautiful, beautiful nine-foot Steinway that had the most glorious sound. I've heard a lot of Steinways, and this one was just pristine — the sound was just incredible.
JESSE: That’d be a Steinway Model D, serial # 428912B-2785, in case anybody wants to track down the Godchaux family Steinway. Check out our Donna Jean episode for more memories of that scene. The band also purchased an electric keyboard for Keith that spring. As he put it mildly on WAER that September:
KEITH GODCHAUX [9/17/73]: Yeah, I'm starting to get turned on to different textures.
AUDIO: “Bird Song” [Pacific Northwest, 6/22/73] (5:49-6:10) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That was more from the Vancouver “Bird Song,” some wah-wah on the Rhodes, too. Keith Godchaux’s Rhodes would become one of the subtly defining sounds of the period. Though people track Jerry Garcia’s guitars pretty obsessively, and it’s not too hard to tell when a Rhodes shows up in the mix, the Archives also reveal that Bill Kreutzmann was rocking a new drum kit in May 1973.
AUDIO: “I Know You Rider” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (4:12-4:22) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That’s the sound of Bill the Drummer swinging on a Mahogany Thermoglass Ludwig kit with Rogers Super Ten snare drum, acquired from Frank’s Drum Shop in Chicago for $964.50 minus $647 from an unspecified trade-in, shipped from Chicago to the house at 5th and Lincoln in the first days of May, ready to be broken in at the Des Moines Fairgrounds. It can be seen in pictures of the show.
AUDIO: “I Know You Rider” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (4:34-4:56) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Earlier in the year—the day after the band’s show at Maples Pavilion at Stanford University—the band did a complete gear inventory for insurance purposes. They listed three guitars, totaling a value of $1,200 and one Alembic custom bass, valued at $5,000, around $34,000 today. By the time they got to Iowa, Jerry Garca had some new gear, too, but we’ll get to that. It’s getting near showtime. Promoter Steve White.
STEVE WHITE: We sold 12,000 tickets in advance, three at the door — 3,000 at the door.
JESSE: Promoter Jon Hoak.
JON HOAK: The tickets were priced at the exorbitant amount of $5 in advance, and $6 the day of the concert.
JESSE: That’s roughly $34 and $41 in modern terms.
JON HOAK: We knew there'd be a lot of people coming up that day. It turned out most of it was beautiful weather, which in May, early May in Iowa, is not a guarantee. It could have been doing a lot of really bad things. We knew there’d be people, a lot of people, thousands comin’ up. We didn’t trust anybody to sell and take the money for the cash for these tickets. So we brought in our parents: my parents, Jim’s parents, Steve’s parents were the ones in there. We had no security, nobody guarding this stuff. And 3,000 people were coming up there and buying tickets, giving all cash. And that’s how we did it.
JESSE: They’d played in Iowa in February, but this was their only Midwest stop in the later spring, and lots of people came from out of town like Bob Glaza and his sister.
BOB GLAZA: I remember driving down there thinking: “Well, maybe we're gonna see one of these semis. What will it look like? Is it just gonna be floating on air, or is it gonna be all decked out and fancied out with painting on the side of it?”
JESSE: It wasn’t quite the Dead they met on the road.
BOB GLAZA: We got stopped on the way down to Des Moines. There was a big traffic accident, and we had to stop. And of course, we were a little bit nervous because we were all sorts of crazy high. We thought the police of course were gonna stop us for no good reason. I was living in Waterloo, which was a couple hours away, the concert was a couple hours away. And I remember it was on a Mother's Day — so, we were kind of in hot water with our mothers.
JESSE: As Ralph Kiner once said, “It’s Mother’s Day, so all you mothers out there, happy birthday!”
STEVE WHITE: A renowned nationally known boys glee club showed up to buy tickets — it was the Hells Angels. They were from all [over]… I remember San Francisco, San Rafael, San Luis Obispo, LA, Phoenix, all on the back of their jackets, other parts of the western United States. They pulled up, parked right in front of the grandstand. But we didn’t hear a peep out of ‘em. Security was our friends, and back then, security drank beer on the job. It was a bunch of drunken security that was on the job there that day. Maybe 30 of our friends.
JON HOAK: Between 30 and 50. Yeah, but nobody with any experience or expertise in it. It was crazy, with hindsight. I can remember a number of our friends were backstage, wives and girlfriends and the like. I do remember that my wife at the time was a big Dead fan, and Phil Lesh came off the stage and winked at her. She melted right on the spot. She thought that was the highlight of her life.
JESSE: Joe Gauthier had come into contact with Music Circuit when he helped put on a Dead show at the University of Iowa in February and sold tickets through the record store. He attests to some of the craziness.
JOE GAUTHIER: We were backstage, in the parking lot for the backstage. We’re in a friend of mine’s car, and he spilled a quarter ounce of coke on the carpet in his car. So, that was kind of strange watching people salvage that.
JESSE: It was not quite what the Music Circuit guys expected.
JON HOAK: Chaos. Chaos! We didn't do a good job at all. This is our chance to be big shots; we had all of our friends back there, and it was a mess. We were putting out a lot of fires. We were busy, and we were working, trying to make sure that everything… a big part of it was making sure the Dead themselves were happy, their crew was happy, that Bill and Barry were. They were ordering us around. We were hoppin’ — very little sleep there for a couple days.
JESSE: Whizzer remembers Bill Graham’s presence.
STEVE WHITE: Playing football with Barry Fey backstage… they had a football they were passing back and forth.
JESSE: But it was a day that Bill Graham went to work.
STEVE WHITE: Bill Graham was a stagehand. That was the 1973 year he got in. Again, it was all of our friends that were the stagehands — he saw inexperience, let’s just put it that way. Barry Fey was up making announcements. This was before barricades were being used. Some kid kept grabbing at the microphone. Well, then the Grateful Dead came on to play, and the same kid was grabbing at Jerry’s microphone. Off the side of the stage, like a bolt of lightning, Bill Graham came darting across the stage and did a stage dive into the audience, he went out and grabbed the kid and threw him out of the show.
JESSE: Please welcome, the Grateful Dead.
AUDIO: “Promised Land” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (0:00-0:17) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Every now and then a Dead tape will start the sound out of alignment, as you can hear. That’s one way to tell that this isn’t a pure soundboard mix that captures only what was going into the hall, but rather a submix, run through a mixer and mixed with intention onto a two-track. Oftentimes, the recordist would spend the opening song getting the balance just right. But by the end of “The Promised Land,” things are hunky dory.
AUDIO: “Promised Land” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (2:35-3:01) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Bob Glaza.
BOB GLAZA: It wasn't a super hot day. It was warm enough, but it wasn't really hot. We went in just to find a place to sit. There wasn't any going through…. I'm sure we had a picnic basket, or something to carry food or drink in. And there was no kind of rifling through that to see what you were carrying in. It was all pretty loose, as far as that goes.
AUDIO: “Deal” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (0:15-0:30) - [dead.net]
BOB GLAZA: They had just piles and piles of speakers. And it just… I don't remember it being so loud I couldn't think, but I do remember that the sound was pretty amazing.
AUDIO: “Deal” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (0:40-0:51) - [dead.net]
JESSE: It was a true Dead marathon — 4 hours and 21 minutes of music over three sets. They took their time, not really getting into extended jamming until later in the afternoon, playing some of their newest songs.
AUDIO: “They Love Each Other” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (0:49-1:05) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Jon Van of the Des Moines Register described the scene as “a rock concert that combined elements of circus, a convention of Shriners, and a department store shopping crowd three days before Christmas.”
BOB GLAZA: I remember there was somebody walking around, like in a jester suit or some sort of regalia or costume or outfit, whatever you want to call it. There were a lot of halter tops, there were a lot of long flowing gowns. Most guys walked around without a shirt on. And there were always cool Grateful Dead t-shirts.
JESSE: One semi-new piece of music was what Dead Heads call the “Feelin’ Groovy” transition in between “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider.”
AUDIO: “China Cat Sunflower” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (5:38-5:56) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The Dead had been playing variations on Simon and Garfunkel’s “Feelin’ Groovy” since 1970, usually in “Dark Star,” but in spring 1973 it migrated gloriously into “China Cat,” where it lived until the band took their road hiatus in 1975.
AUDIO: “China Cat Sunflower” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (6:04-6:16) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: This is a tour—unlike a lot of other tours in ‘72 and early ‘73—that is very well documented in photos. These five shows in particular, there are plenty of photos from all five shows. Many photographers — first of all, you’ve got 20,000 people at each of these shows, or more. So, lots of people with amateur cameras, amateur photographers, but then lots of newspapers came out, and professionals. It's a very well-documented era, visually. Unfortunately there’s no film — a little super 8 stuff, but otherwise nothing. But there’s a lot of photos.
JESSE: We will once again shout out the Jerry Garcia Instrument History by Mike Clem on the Grateful Dead Guide, as well as to Uli and Volki, the photo detectives. Their diligent work reveals Garcia playing a few rarely spotted guitars at the Des Moines show. In most of the pictures, Garcia is playing Alligator, the super-custom Stratocaster that we’ve discussed a few times, notably around the Munich stop of Europe ‘72, his primary guitar from mid-1971 to late 1973.
But the Des Moines show is the only time Garcia is known to have played the Eagle, his first custom guitar built by Alembic’s Doug Irwin, commissioned in 1970, built from curly maple in 1971, and apparently not played on stage until Des Moines in May 1973. There’s some particular out-of-tuneness by the time the band hits “I Know You Rider” that made me wonder if it was the sound of a guitar that wasn’t quite ready for battlefield conditions.
AUDIO: “I Know You Rider” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (3:36-3:50) - [dead.net]
JESSE: But just because Garcia didn’t take to the Eagle, eventually passing it along to longtime roadie Ram Rod, he was still quite taken by Doug Irwin’s guitar skills. In the Grateful Dead’s check book for spring 1973 is a $500 check from June 13th—exactly a month later—with a memo note, “deposit on Garcia’s guitar.” It’s the instrument that would become known as Wolf, and we’ll pick up its story another day. But, weirdly, and for reasons that aren’t clear at a distance, Garcia actually played three guitars that day.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It's interesting Jerry playing different guitars just astounds me. I saw so many Dead shows where the thought of Jerry changing guitars… when I see other bands where the tech would run out and give the guitar player a tuned guitar every song, it’s like: what is that? I didn’t understand it. And then the Grateful Dead, all three of them on guitars and bass, didn’t change ever.
JESSE: The other guitar was another singular piece that Garcia played in November and December 1972 and which resurfaced one last time in Des Moines. With giant numbers running up the fretboard, it’s known as the Erlewine Strat, and tell us a little about it, please welcome from Erlewine Guitars, Dan Erlewine. Let’s take another detour, shall we? We’re going to bop back briefly now to 1967.
DAN ERLEWINE: When the Dead played in Ann Arbor, where I was from in those days, they played at West Park and our band opened for ‘em. We had a band, a blues band called the Prime Movers.
AUDIO: “Endless Blues” [Prime Movers, s/t] (4:46-5:09) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was “Endless Blues” from the self-titled Prime Movers release. For you Michigan freaklorists, this particular lineup of the Prime Movers that played with the Dead did not feature drummer Iggy Pop but Jesse Crawford, who later became the MC5’s hype man.
DAN ERLEWINE: And we kind of laid around outside the Be-In show and another band played and talked with Jerry. And he came over to my shop because I had a repair shop and I was making some guitars, and he wanted to come visit. When he came over, I had just finished making a neck for a 1939 Martin D18 body that I had; it came without a neck, and kind of beat up. But it was one of my favorite guitars, and it was the first acoustic neck that I ever made. I had an ebony fingerboard on it, and I had numbers that were jigsawed out of ivory: you had 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 12. And he really liked that — he thought that was great. And he said, “I want to get a guitar from you, and I want those numbers in it.” He wanted a Stratocaster guitar, because I was also making guitars out of this black walnut that I had, electric guitars. That was in ‘67 and we went out to San Francisco at the end of that summer, and I saw Jerry again down in the Haight-Ashbury area, walking the streets of course. He said, “Hey, Dan, I’m still serious about that guitar! I’ll be getting a hold of ya…” But he never really got a hold of me until late ‘69. He finally called me up and said, “I want to get that guitar.” So, that’s when I started making it for him.
When it was finally done in ‘71, we flew to San Francisco and across the Bay City Bridge up into the St. Helena area of California, in the wine country. My wife’s uncle had a ranch in the top of the hills above St. Helena, and Jerry drove up there to get his guitar. We shipped it out on the plane with us, and he drove up in a Porsche. He was just such a friendly guy.
JESSE: There’s some sweet super 8 footage of Dan passing the guitar to Garcia.
DAN ERLEWINE: Jerry’s holding the guitar like this and pointing at it, and another one where he’s handing me money. I charged him 500 bucks for it, and he gave me $900 — which was huge… he was a generous man that way, with money and with luthiers. He supported any guitar builder he met, he was sharing his money.
JESSE: As with pretty much all of Garcia’s guitars, it was tweaked.
DAN ERLEWINE: Really, it's just a Stratocaster, except Jerry wanted a Tune-o-matic bridge like Gibson has, AVRI stock tailpiece. He didn't want a tremolo — he wanted a brass nut, and that was the first brass nut I'd ever made. To me, he invented the brass nut. Or maybe Alembic invented that, I’m not sure.
JESSE: We’ll refer you back to our Side B episode of our Skull and Roses season for a conversation with the late Rick Turner of Alembic and his adventures with fine brass.
DAN ERLEWINE: It had Brazilian rosewood numbers inlaid in it, and the neck was maple, hard maple, a rosewood pickguard, strat pickups. Pretty basic other than that.
JESSE: The guitar disappeared from circulation after Des Moines. Lately Dan’s been making updated models. Though I know the lore, I can’t say my ear is fine-tuned enough to pick out the sounds of the Erlewine Strat versus Alligator versus Eagle. All speculation welcome in the comments on this episode’s page at dead.net/deadcast! Now back to the Dead show.
AUDIO: “Don’t Ease Me In” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (0:00-0:15) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The end of the first set featured a one-time pairing instigated by Bob Weir that worked surprisingly well, tagging “Around & Around” onto the end of “Don’t Ease Me In.”
AUDIO: “Don’t Ease Me In” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (3:33-3:40) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Around & Around” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (0:00-0:18) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Coulda been a contender. For the most part it was quite a groovy day, but not entirely. I’ll throw a content warning here for a little bit of violence. Maybe forward three minutes if you need to. Over to promoter Steve White.
STEVE WHITE: Some kid had bolt cutters and was trying to cut his way through the fence. And Jim, our partner, went and took the bolt cutters away from him. When he turned his back, the kid pulled out a knife and stabbed him in the back. So Jim came walking through the backstage, he had these bib overalls on, and he said, “I just got stabbed!” I kind of looked at him funny, but when I turned around and looked at him, every time his heart beat, blood would squirt out the hole in his pants. I knew who this kid was. I said, “The guy with the long hair and glasses?” He said, “Yeah.”
So, four of us went out in the audience trying to find this kid, and we found him. I came up from… he was a little guy, about 140 pounds. I came up from behind him, put a bear hug on him down by his wrists, and I started picking him up, start to carry him out, and somehow he got his knife out of its holster, and he starts stabbing me with it. But I had his wrists so constrained that the only place that the blade went was into my belt. So, it didn’t poke through — but while he’s trying to stab me, he stabbed himself. His friends all surrounded us — I let him go, he ran through the grandstand, the four of us chased him through the grandstand, down Grand Avenue to the main gate that was closed. He turned around, he said, “I’m gonna waste you four guys if you come any closer.”
All of a sudden, this kid, out of nowhere, comes and tackles the guy and takes the knife away from him. Well, Bill Graham wanted to meet this guy, so we brought him to the Fairgrounds administration building. And Bill Graham says, “That was a very brave thing you did, Mister…” — whatever his name was. Bill Graham always called everybody Mister when I was around him. And the kid says, “I’m from the south side of Chicago. All he had was a knife!”
JESSE: And, yes, Jim was miraculously okay.
STEVE WHITE: He went to an ambulance, checked with some EMTs and they told him he was real lucky, that the knife went in-between an organ, his kidney and his spine. They stitched him up, I guess.
JESSE: But, besides that, I haven’t come across any remotely negative memories of the day, and many were outright magical. Bob Glaza.
BOB GLAZA: Probably my biggest memory was when they played “Looks Like Rain” and went into “Here Comes Sunshine.” There were clouds moving across, at least where I could see, and behind the stage.
AUDIO: “Looks Like Rain” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (5:10-5:35) - [dead.net]
BOB GLAZA: The clouds would cover the sun and it surely looks like rain, and then back and forth. That was pretty cool.
AUDIO: “Looks Like Rain” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (5:42-6:06) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The Des Moines Register noted this moment, as well, in their review, writing, “At times the subject of the jam was the weather. When clouds passed overhead, the musicians got into a chant with their music, ‘it looks like rain, it looks rain.’”
AUDIO: “Looks Like Rain” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (6:14-6:33) - [dead.net]
JESSE: “As the clouds passed, another chant came forth, ‘here is sunshine, here is sunshine.’” Eh — close!
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (1:27-1:37) - [dead.net]
JESSE: At some point in the day, it did rain a little bit, though people’s memories differ on when it happened. The scrupulous reporter at the Des Moines Register noted that at “about 4:30pm, all that singing about the weather backfired, and things turned ugly. Temperatures dropped 10 degrees, a brisk wind started chilling the crowd and a few raindrops fell.”
BOB GLAZA: Iit was a unique kind of rain, just a short-lived rain. Didn't get muddy or anything like that. A very light rain, which is kind of uncommon for Iowa. Usually you get a drenching rain.
JESSE: Whizzer.
STEVE WHITE: It rained. It just stopped raining when the Dead came on. The stage was wet. Jerry was getting electrocuted on stage. He got electrocuted a couple of times.
JESSE: Yikes.
STEVE WHITE: And then the rainbow came out over the stage just as the rain stopped. It was pretty cool.
JESSE: Bob Glaza.
BOB GLAZA: I would say midway through the show. It wasn’t anything dramatic right at the end or anything — I don't I don't remember anything dramatic about it. The most drama, like I say, was when they were playing.
JESSE: Joe Gauthier.
JOE GAUTHIER: They started playing “Here Comes Sunshine,” and there was a double rainbow. Makes me think of the Ice Cream Kid [on the cover of Europe ‘72].
STEVE WHITE: That was something. It was a double rainbow.
JESSE: Jon Hoak.
JON HOAK: It just blew us away when that happened. I think even the band was really taken by that. Iit was very special.
JESSE: Photographer Larry Kasperek caught one of the rainbows.
STEVE WHITE: Jim owned a maintenance company at the time and one of his employees attended the show. The following day, he said: “How did you guys make that rainbow come out over the stage?” He thought it was some production aspect.
JESSE: Promoter and Deadcast guest Peter Shapiro experienced a similar round of wonderment when rainbows appeared over one of the Fare Thee Well shows in Santa Clara in 2015.
JON HOAK: Maybe it's the obvious: it was a great show, and people had a wonderful time and people were rocking to it and they played beautifully. They played for hour after hour with just a few breaks there. It was a magical day.
JESSE: After the “Here Comes Sunshine” and the version of the rainbow that appeared at least in Joe’s stub, the day’s serious jamming started. There’s a 30-minute version of “Playing in the Band” that floats across rolling seas.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (9:34-10:03) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The waves get bigger and storms rage.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (20:30-21:00) - [dead.net]
JESSE: There are no obvious trans-oceanic whirlpools, and the ship emerges, Garcia sounds the Main Ten theme as if to indicate he’s spotted land.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (23:53-23:23) - [dead.net]
JESSE: In the third set, the big jam sequence is quite symbolic of the era, and they’d repeat it a few weeks later in San Francisco — “He’s Gone” into “Truckin’” into “The Other One” into “Eyes of the World” into “China Doll.” We talked extensively about “He’s Gone” in our Netherlands episode of Europe ‘72. By spring of ‘73, it had grown a vocal jam outro that had begun as a studio overdub on the live album.
AUDIO: “He’s Gone” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (8:29-8:54) - [dead.net]
JESSE: In the eyes, hearts, and ears of many, “He’s Gone” had become a tribute to Pigpen, who’d passed away only two months previously, with its soulful bluesy outro. By spring, they’d also built a transition that allowed them to shift up-shift right into “Truckin’,” one of the few places where a count-off and a segue mark might co-exist, and it got tighter as the year went on.
AUDIO: “He’s Gone” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (13:58-14:06) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (0:00-0:11) - [dead.net]
JESSE: We got way into “Truckin’” in our American Beauty season, of course. In Des Moines, Weir substituted a regional variant into the lyrics for what I think was the first time.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (0:40-0:55) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Also geographically accurate, if you pick up Route 80 off the George Washington Bridge in Manhattan, you can take it to Des Moines, almost all the way to the Fairgrounds. That spring, “Truckin’” had also developed a new peak, signaled by Garcia playing a higher octave version of the riff, that they’d also learned to play a little less sloppily.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (5:24-5:50) - [dead.net]
JESSE: It was a period of many duo jams between Phil Lesh and Billy Kreutzmann.
AUDIO: “Truckin’ [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (11:23-11:40) - [dead.net]
JESSE: And an era of many gnarly “Other One” entrances.
AUDIO: “The Other One” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (0:08-0:25) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Sick feedback, Weir. It’s a full 20-minute excursion. It gets into some conversational weirdness en route to the first verse.
AUDIO: “The Other One” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (5:18-5:35) - [dead.net]
JESSE: And the post-verse is a long drumless float, an origin point of latter-day “Space” segments.
AUDIO: “The Other One” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (15:35-15:55) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Out the other side, almost like a crossfade, comes the piece that pins this sequence as 1973.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (0:00-0:32) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Along with “Here Comes Sunshine,” “Eyes of the World” was Garcia and Hunter’s newest set piece. It included the long outro in 7/8 time that the band had developed collectively onstage earlier that year, only played in ‘73 and ‘74, which we’ll unpack more fully in the future.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (13:17-13:40) - [dead.net]
JESSE: And at this performance, as it was at many of its earliest versions, it was “Eyes of the World” moving into the incredibly fragile “China Doll.”
AUDIO: “China Doll” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (0:14-0:47) - [dead.net]
JESSE: In our American Beauty season, we discussed whether or not “Ripple” and “Brokedown Palace” were written to be played together like a miniature suite, and I wonder if “Eyes of the World” and “China Doll” weren’t similarly conceived. Another topic to bookmark in this incredibly rich year of Grateful Dead music. Other memories, by the way, have the rainstorm coming later in the day, with the rainbow emerging during “Sugar Magnolia,” so let’s imagine a stub where the rainbow’s appearing here, too.
AUDIO: “Sugar Magnolia” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (6:54-7:22) - [dead.net]
Aftermath
JESSE: For the Dead, it was a hearty Sunday afternoon in Iowa. Steve White of Music Circuit.
STEVE WHITE: When the show was over, Bill Graham got on the phone to me and he went: “Mr. White, you fucked this show up! You fucked it up, you fuck! You said the only thing you know how to do is sell tickets!” And that I guess is what brought him back the second time… I’m surprised Bill Graham and the Grateful Dead gave us a second chance, if you want to know the truth.
JESSE: Jon Hoak.
JON HOAK: Our arrangement with Barry Fey was that we would split the profits 50/50 with him. At the end of it, Bill Graham says, “We’re gonna do this ⅓-⅓-⅓.” And we go, “Well, we had this deal of 50-50!” He says, “If you ever want to have the Grateful Dead here again, it’s ⅓-⅓-⅓.” We said, “Yes, sir.”
JESSE: And Bill Graham did in fact work with Music Circuit Presentations again, bringing the Wall of Sound to the Fairgrounds on June 16th, 1974, later released as Road Trips Vol. 2, No. 3.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Road Trips vol. 2, no. 3, 6/16/74] (1:23-1:49) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
STEVE WHITE: But after that first year, he was pleased at the second year.
JON HOAK: We learned a lot, and we went from 15,000 to 18,000.
STEVE WHITE: I wonder to this day, if Bill Graham were still alive, if there'd be anything like a Live Nation. I don't think there would be. I think he would have used his power to keep it the way it was, rather than the Walmart of concert promoters now, Live Nation.
JESSE: We can dream, Whizzer. The music ticketing system that Whizzer pioneered continued to serve Music Circuit Presentations all the way through 1990. It was the beginning of an enterprising period.
JON HOAK: In addition to these rock concerts, Steve and Jim and I opened a bar called the Daily Planet and we had a lot of live music.
STEVE WHITE: We brought in some good music: Sons of Champlin, Freddie King, Harvey Mandel.
JESSE: The bar didn’t quite work, but the concert business did. Though Jon Hoak and Jim Henneberry dropped out later in the ‘70s for more traditional careers, all three remain tight, and Whizzer kept presenting with Music Circuit for decades, building the Iowa Jam and bringing countless gigs to the region. The Dead had a gig the week after Des Moines, and so do we. See you next time.
AUDIO: “Big River” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (4:58-4:30) - [dead.net]