Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 7, Episode 8
Here Comes Sunshine: Santa Barbara, 5/20/73
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (0:00-0:19) - [dead.net]
JESSE: There are many things to love about the new Here Comes Sunshine box set, and we’re doing our best to articulate all of them during these six episodes of the Deadcast. But one thing I’ve been appreciating while putting these together is the title. For starters, it’s given us some obvious theme music.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (0:34-1:05) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Of course, “Here Comes Sunshine” was one of the Dead’s newest songs during these five shows, debuted a few months earlier, and people in attendance would have mostly been hearing it for the first time. As we discussed in the first episode of this mini-series, it could be heard as a musical stand-in for the band’s world-building ambitions in 1973. But it also catches the feeling of these specific five shows in a really precise way. Today’s variety of sunshine, recorded May 20th, 1973, at Harder Stadium on the campus of UC Santa Barbara, is the kind refracted through Pacific skies with a breeze off the ocean. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I find the Santa Barbara show to be something very special. It's kind of got that Southern California vibe.
AUDIO: “They Love Each Other” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (0:43-1:02) - [dead.net]
DAVID LEMIEUX: If you look at the setlists of the first three shows, they were consecutive weekends — we get a Sunday, a Sunday and a Saturday. And we get Midwest, Southern California, northern California, and the setlists are very similar. They're very similarly structured shows. You get your big “Playing in the Band”s, you get your “Here Comes Sunshine”s,and, each night, you get—no “Dark Stars” in these three shows—you get them focused on a “Truckin’” > “[The] Other One” jam. And then “Eyes of the World” of course is in there, and “China Doll”s and “Stella Blue”s. They’re very similarly structured — yet, they’re all remarkably different.
JESSE: All the music on the first four of the five shows on the new box set was played outdoors in the full daylight, and the musical differences between the performances might be akin to the differences between types of sunshine, each with its own subtly different configuration of clouds, blue on blue gradients, illumination, and warmth. The Santa Barbara show captures its own particular quality. Our friend Michael Parrish, also a world-famous paleontologist, has appeared a few times on the Deadcast. He started seeing the Dead as a teen at the Fillmore West in early 1969, and you might still run into him at a show.
MICHAEL PARRISH: It's one of the shows [that] I think I have the fondest memories of. It was just one of those days when everything was perfect. It was a sunny day, outdoors at the UCSB Stadium — a little bit of a breeze off the ocean, so it wasn't too hot. And they just played all afternoon. It was really… I kind of compare it to what it was like seeing the Dead in the ‘90s, which isn't really fair. But it wasn't jammed, there was plenty of room for people to move around. I had my camera, I was taking pictures the whole time, and it was just a really wonderful show.
JESSE: Sounds pretty chill, and I haven’t come across any dissenting experiences. But, like sunshine, there are countless varieties of wonderful, and we’re happy to have gathered a sampling of those today. And though it seems fairly obvious that a Dead show in a big stadium with a breeze off the Pacific would be just that, it took some work. Roll the opening credits.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (1:14-1:44) - [dead.net]
Associated Students
JESSE: As we feel obligated to mention nearly every episode — the rock and roll touring industry was still figuring itself out, especially at the scale and quality the Dead were pursuing in 1973. When we dug into the Des Moines show from May 13th, we learned that the local Music Circuit Presentations virtually got their start with the gig, and there are some similarities with the show the Dead played a week later in Santa Barbara, a show put on by Pacific Presentations and Associated Students, UCSB’s student union. Please welcome, from Associated Students, Jim Curnutt.
JIM CURNUTT: I was living in Arroyo Grande/Pismo Beach area, so I’d go south, go north, and go to concerts. I was a real music fan. I was a concert fan in high school: I had gone up to see a couple shows in San Francisco [presented by] Bill Graham, Cream. When I got to UCSB—I think it was probably my third year—I applied to and became the concerts chairman for the university. It was the spring of ‘72. I started self-educating how to work with talent agents and well-respected promoters: Sepp Donahower, and Jerry Perkins down in Los Angeles. I continued to pursue working with Pacific Presentations, and drove down to Los Angeles numerous times. I explained to Sepp that I wanted to do a series of indoor concerts, as well as kickstart a stadium show again, because they had been canceled in ‘69, three years earlier. There was a “riot” at the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert, and the university put a hold on any future concerts in the stadium.
JESSE: As it happens—and because of course—Michael Parrish was at that show, too.
MICHAEL PARRISH: In November of 1969, I was unfortunately unable to go see the Rolling Stones, either at the Oakland Coliseum or—fortunately, I guess—at Altamont. So, as my consolation prize, I got to go down with my brothers to see Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young at that stadium, one of the first outdoor shows they did. There was, we couldn’t really see it where we were—we were up in the stands—but I guess there was a mass rush through the gates. A bunch of people got in and broke down the gates, so they didn't do any shows there for three years.
JIM CURNUTT: They used it for intramurals, they used it for soccer, but there was just no football team. There was no… I mean, a 24,000-seat stadium was sitting [there], and the capacity wasn’t being used.
JESSE: Jim took on the job of concert chairman with a long game in mind. Sepp Donahower of Pacific Presentations had been working with the Dead since 1967. We spoke with Sepp for our Listen to the River episodes and caught up again recently. Please welcome back to the Deadcast, Sepp Donahower.
SEPP DONAHOWER: When we started Pacific Presentations in 1970, I targeted Santa Barbara as a market for us to go into. And I went up and met with Jim, and then we just started working the market.
JESSE: On campus, booking the Dead at the campus stadium turned into a real issue, with the University ombudsman even joining Curnutt in the negotiation process, circulating petitions, and writing to the student paper to declare the Dead to be “UCSB’s favorite band.” The ins and outs of traffic and parking and security are there to read in the Daily Nexus archives.
JIM CURNUTT: So 12 months in the planning and negotiations, we were big with the administration and the police department. We had to overcome a number of obstacles. Security was the main issue; no off-campus ticket sales was another one. And they were saying, at that point, that the capacity could only be 15,000 If we were to do a show.
SEPP DONAHOWER: It was never easy with the stadium, because you have to deal with the campus security, who’s very nervous; the athletic department, because it's their venue. It was easy rolling shows into Campbell Hall and Rob[ertson] Gym because they’re just turnkey venues. The stadium was always a little more work.
JESSE: Things got a little heated. The show was announced in early March, but the contracts still weren’t signed a month later. In the Daily Nexus, a letter appeared under the heading “Demand the Concert!” It read, in part, “In Tuesday’s Daily Nexus there is a suggestion that the Grateful Dead may not perform in May as a result of counter-revolutionary elements in the administration.
“People! It’s time to seize the time and advance the cultural as well as the political revolution. Demonstrate in the Administration building on Friday at 10 a.m. to let Goodspeed know we demand the Grateful Dead. Serve the people! UCSB VENCEREMOS!” Name withheld.
AUDIO: “We Shall Overcome” [Charlie Haden, Liberation Music Orchestra] (0:09-0:18) - [Spotify]
JESSE: If there were any protests, the Daily Nexus didn’t cover them, though they did review when Old & In the Way when they played the Granada Theater in April with fiddlin’ Richard Greene.
JIM CURNUTT: We were going meeting after meeting after meeting, and they wanted a secondary security fencing set up outside this stadium, which we did; new entrance gates; and then a definitive plan for security, which included a lot of the UCSB police officers, a mounted posse. We had 85 student volunteers. We ended up establishing a relationship with a security company called Peace Power, which was the predecessor to National Event Services, and Bob Bartlett, and developed a really good student crew handling the production, the setup, the backstage security.
JESSE: “Dead Negotiations Break Down, UCSB Concert Date Unlikely” read a headline on April 27th.
JIM CURNUTT: The planned date was May 20. And at that point, it had dragged on so long that the Grateful Dead started getting cold feet — they were looking at other cities for that particular date. We had announced the date on March 8, and by April 30, we were on the cliff, either we were gonna get it or not. It was getting shaky in mid-April, and we finally convinced the university to allow the date. They approved it April 30, which was 20 days out from the concert.
JESSE: If we’ve learned anything over the past few years of the Deadcast, it’s that the live music business still worked only a few weeks out in the early ‘70s, with lots of last-minute venue, and even city, changes built into the process. As we mentioned last time, all five shows on the Here Comes Sunshine box set are surrounded by gigs that didn’t happen. Two days after Santa Barbara, the Dead were supposed to open 2 nights at the Cow Palace back home in San Francisco, gigs we’ll unpack next time. But Santa Barbara came close to not happening, until it did.
JIM CURNUTT: So then there was a rush for ticket distribution, advertising, production planning and coordination. It was nonstop. We had had good experiences with some major acts indoors, so our crew was good; Pacific Presentations was great, and we pulled it off. So at that point, tickets… looking back on it, tickets were $4.50 for students and $5 for the general public. We had ticket outlets from San Luis Obispo to the north and Ventura to the south, plus all the Ticketron.
JESSE: With the show locked down, Sepp Donahower and Gary Perkins of Pacific Presentations went into action. By 1973, they had a good amount of experience with the Dead.
SEPP DONAHOWER: I worked hand in hand with Sam putting the Dead on all over the U.S. I was doing a lot of shows with the Grateful Dead at that time, in the mid-’70s time window, because we were good promoters — we were pretty organized and business-like, and we were fun guys and always had a good scene around backstage, whatever. But my partner [Jerry] Perkins and I, we both had MBAs from USC — we weren’t fools. And we spent a lot of time making sure things ran smooth: got great graphic designers to do good-looking marketing, stage passes, make it an uptown operation. And the Dead appreciated that.
JESSE: When Sam founded Out of Town Tours, he brought the game to the next level.
SEPP DONAHOWER: They were always the same people around the Grateful Dead — it just got formalized. I was working with the same people, he just organized it. He had himself and [Kidd] Candelario, and then he had Francis Carr, his sweetie pie working with him, who was sharp as a tack and very good. They did a great job. Everything got organized. And not only that, because things ran smooth, the band started playing better. I think their best recordings are from that mid-’70s window, when they were young and full of energy. As a promoter, I know I’ve got more box sets of Grateful Dead dates than anybody on the planet.
JESSE: Besides the late Bill Graham, that’s really entirely possible. JerryBase doesn’t have a sort-by-promoter-and-official-release option just yet, but we’ll get back to you. The Dead were hugely popular in 1973 for a reason. Ombudsman Geoffrey Wallace’s statement about the Dead UCSB’s favorite band might have been provably true.
JIM CURNUTT: At that point in time and on the campus, people liked the Grateful Dead. And when it was finally put on sale, you could see: 6,000 students out of, I think we had 22,000 on campus, that’s a good percentage of students going to the concert. It sold a lot of albums: the local record store, where I had tickets on sale, they were ecstatic, because people were coming in to buy tickets and buy albums at the same time.
Towards the Show
JESSE: As we mentioned before, our friend Michael Parrish was one of the heads who attended the show.
MICHAEL PARRISH: I was at UCSC as a student — it was my junior year, and there were a whole bunch of people that drove down together, which was really fun. And we ended up staying with some friends in Isla Vista, which is the little bedroom community for UCSB. We wandered over the night before the show to check out the stadium, and the stadium was lit up and they were doing a soundcheck. It wasn't any songs, but it was basically Phil playing with his new toys.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Pacific Northwest, 6/22/73] (12:35-12:49) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That was from Vancouver a month later, on the Pacific Northwest box — not the Santa Barbara soundcheck, there’s no tape of that that we know about. But, hey, verisimilitude.
MICHAEL PARRISH: We weren't able to get into the stadium; you couldn't actually… we were probably 100 feet from the actual stadium. It sounded like it was a long bass solo, and it was bouncing around. It was hard to tell how much was just the echoing of the stadium, or whether he was actually going from speaker to speaker.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Pacific Northwest, 6/22/73] (12:49-13:05) - [dead.net]
MICHAEL PARRISH: And one thing that's interesting about this show is that the previous time the Dead had played at Santa Barbara was in May of 1969. And I don't know if you've read Michael Lydon’s article on the Dead.
JESSE: Yup, the Dead’s first Rolling Stone cover, published the week after Woodstock, with a Baron Wolman photo of Garcia and the headline “Good Old Grateful Dead.” Note to copyeditors: Like “Truckin’,” there’s an apostrophe.
MICHAEL PARRISH: Basically, it was a disaster. They played after Lee Michaels and the Youngbloods I think, and the PA was terrible. So Bear took it apart, and after they played just a few songs, they argued whether he was going to set up their PA or not. And ultimately, they just didn’t play anymore.
JESSE: The next time the Dead brought their PA to UC Santa Barbara, you best believe it worked.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (0:15-0:50) - [dead.net]
Tapes
JESSE: Before the gates open, let’s talk a little bit about today’s tapes. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The new box set has five shows in it—five consecutive shows over the course of four weeks—and we have three recording engineers. We have Kidd doing some of it, we have Betty [Cantor] doing some of it, and we have Owsley, Bear, doing two of the shows as well.
JESSE: The tapes on Here Comes Sunshine sound great. As so often with ‘60s and ‘70s Dead, they’re not soundboard recordings, but special sub-mixes created on the fly by the Dead’s talented self-taught team of audio engineers.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The first three shows in here, the Des Moines, Santa Barbara, and Kezar [shows], there was a lot of overlap — there were two masters. So, we generally were using the Betty recordings, but there were portions of those that were missing, entire sets. The Kidd recordings sound phenomenal — the Kidd recordings sound amazing. As a guy whose background wasn't in the recording world, his recordings… we talk about the clarity of the instruments. And I feel that Kidd’s recordings are really crystal clear: you can differentiate every sound, every instrument, every note.
JESSE: Kidd Candelerio’s tapes are what we’ll be listening to today.
AUDIO: “Big River” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (0:18-0:35) - [dead.net]
DAVID LEMIEUX: Betty's are a little different. They're Betty's.
JESSE: And, for the sake of a quick comparison, this is Betty’s tape of “Big River” from Kezar the following week, with a slightly different sonic picture.
AUDIO: “Big River” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:37-0:04) - [dead.net]
Santa Barbara ‘73
JESSE: There were many shades of wonderful at play at the Santa Barbara ‘73 show, different for every attendee there. It wasn’t a full house, but it was a good crowd.
JIM CURNUTT: The total paid attendance was right at 15,000 — 14,922, and 8,800 were non-students, and 6,200 were students. So, we had a good student turnout, but a good public turnout [too].
JESSE: One of those members of the public, seeing the Dead for neither the first nor last time, was Bob Student. Bob grew up in San Bernardino and started seeing the Dead in 1969 before a two-year stint in the Army, where he thankfully only got sent as far as Hawaii, where he’d served as a base photographer.
BOB STUDENT: When I got out of the Army, what I wanted to do was get a van, drive around the country and pick up hitchhikers. So I got out in 1973, went back to San Bernardino, got myself a van and visited a friend of mine in Ventura because she said she had tickets for the Dead. And that was the Santa Barbara show.
JESSE: It was the beginning of a long adventure with the Dead.
BOB STUDENT: When I went to Santa Barbara, there were less than 30 people out front selling bootleg shirts, weed, doses — 30 people in Shakedown Street, and they were in groups of four or five, hiding from the promoters that would chase them away. When I was on tour, in ‘81 to ‘83, there were about 300 people. When we went to Boise, Idaho, I actually went out down Shakedown Street and counted 300 people — cars, selling t-shirts and everything else. Then again, when I was a Rock Med volunteer in the ‘90s at the Oakland Coliseum, about ‘93, there was a show and there were over 3,000 vendors, selling their phatty burritos and everything else.
JESSE: With the Dead getting bigger each year, they were attracting new fans at every show. At Santa Barbara, one of those was 17-year-old Gary Wulfing.
GARY WULFING: I had American Beauty and one of the first albums I got was the Skull & Roses. I mailed the postcard off, “Who Are You? Where Are You?” and everything, and got on the mailing list and everything. I had never been to a rock concert before! I ended up graduating mid-term in January, and my two buddies from high school invited me. So I thought, Well, that sounds like it’d be fun. And I went down there and just had the time of my life. There were cops inside the place, but they were just standing like security guards and they weren’t bothering anybody. It was kind of like a free-for-all.
JESSE: Jim Curnutt.
JIM CURNUTT: There was no security problem, people were well-behaved, they were having a good time. It was just a beautiful sunny day, and it couldn't be better.
JESSE: They even had shirts made up with a phrase seen on the poster.
JIM CURNUTT: I was reading a comment online from a student we had, of the student volunteers for the security—it was the line monitors—we had given them t-shirts saying “no drugs, no glass containers.” And this guy was… he goes, “This was my favorite shirt, I loved wearing that shirt, and I went on a trip and my roommate stole it.”
GARY WULFING: There are definitely a lot of characters: a lot of people walking around naked, and the band’s playing on. The only way I could describe it is that everybody was just doing their own thing. Nobody was bothering anybody. Even the cops there, they were just standin’ there, just taking it all in: ‘I guess we’re getting paid for this…’
AUDIO: “I Don’t Know You” [New Riders of the Purple Sage, 5/20/73] (0:00-0:28)
MICHAEL PARRISH: As happens so often, the New Riders were opening and it was pretty close to the end of Dave Torbert’s tenure with the band. But they put on a great show. One of the pictures I have—it's kind of funny—is there's a picture of Phil backstage wearing headphones, listening to the New Riders while they're playing. And you can see Marmaduke and Buddy Cage and some of the others, I think Spencer [too], behind the Dead while they were playing. So I think it was sort of an extended family thing. I think because it was only the second time that the Dead had played in California that year, so it probably was a kind of big vacation for most of the Dead family as well.
JESSE: Rosie McGee of Fly By Night Travel took a casual weekend jaunt down to Santa Barbara with her new travel agent privileges and snapped some great photos that you can see in her Dancing with the Dead memoir, and her sumptuous recent collection of photos. Naturally, we had to ask what she remembered about that gig.
ROSIE MCGEE: Nothing. [laughs] I let the camera do the remembering… yeah. No, I don’t specifically remember that.
JESSE: Okay, fair. Rosie had been seeing Dead shows continuously since the very beginning.
ROSIE MCGEE: I'd been, like, what I call the heart of the beast: I’d been in the heart of the beast since 1965. By then, I was like: okay, what else can I do? They were on a trajectory that went on without me for a while.
JESSE: In fact, the Santa Barbara photos would be her last photos of the Dead for a half-decade, a not-quite-end point in the body of photography Rosie began in early 1966. Later in the year, as planned from the get-go, Rosie would leave Fly by Night Travel to tour the world and elsewhere. Her photos of Santa Barbara are great. But, as Rosie was making her exit from the Dead’s world, others were making their entrance. Welcome back to the Deadcast, Al Franken.
AL FRANKEN: My partner, Tom Davis, we were a comedy team, Franken and Davis. And he was a Dead Head before me.
JESSE: The two began their comedic partnership in high school, but Tom wasn’t quite university material.
AL FRANKEN: I was going to Harvard. Tom was not a very good student; in the spring term of my senior year, he just stayed in my dorm room.
JESSE: Tom had been out to California earlier in the year and had his mind blown at the Maples Pavilion, his own first Dead show, a story you can read in his killer memoir, Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss.
AL FRANKEN: Tom basically played frisbee, smoked a lot of dope and therefore fit in very well. And no one… it was funny, we had a whole system to feed him. There was a main dining room, but there was another off dining room. My friends snuck him food, we got him food in the off dining room, until they figured it out. And then it was very circuitous and tricky how we fed him. But we got through the whole term, and then after I graduated, Tom and I and my wife, now my wife, we drove out to L.A. in a Volkswagen van. Tom was a Dead Head at the time. I had heard the Dead, I’d heard some albums, but I wasn’t a Dead Head. So we get to L.A. — when is this concert, by the way, so I can tell you exactly about how long after we arrived that this happened?
JESSE: That’d be May 20th.
AL FRANKEN: Okay, that sounds like a day after we got here. [laughs] Well, I don't know… we were gonna start out in comedy, and maybe we just said, “Okay, let's go to the Dead, maybe take some acid and we’ll get some ideas.”
JESSE: Stranger things have happened people’s first Dead shows, of course. To spoil a few twists, Franken and Davis would land jobs as writers on Saturday Night Live’s inaugural season two years later, sharing an office and a salary. But they had some Dead shows to catch first. Like Al Franken and Tom Davis, Gary Wulfing got himself set.
GARY WULFING: We met these girls, and they were sharing a big plastic milk jug, a gallon milk jug of wine with us. And then when we got down to the bottom, we saw about 20 pieces of blotter acid circling around on the bottom of the jug. Wow, it was on from there…
JESSE: Had you dosed before?
GARY WULFING: Oh yeah, yeah, I had. Otherwise, I might not have known what all those papers swirling around in the wine were…
JESSE: Okay, cool, just checking.
GARY WULFING: I just didn't know what to expect. I just knew I was going to a concert and that I liked certain songs, and, oddly enough, they opened that show with “Bertha,” one of my favorite songs. Still is.
AUDIO: “Bertha” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (0:05-0:25) - [dead.net]
JESSE: So you may notice here that Garcia’s voice is a little hoarse throughout this show.
AUDIO: “Bertha” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (0:26-0:45) - [dead.net]
JESSE: David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I know Jerry's voice is quite shot at Santa Barbara. So, you've got that. I've always found when Jerry's voice is a little lacking—he’s clearly got a cold or something—when that happens, there's a little pep in his step when it comes to his guitar playing. And of course, when any of the five guys on that stage are playing a little better or a little more energetically, the other guys pick up on that.
AUDIO: “Deal” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (0:16-0:32) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Sounds a little uncomfortable. But, about Garcia’s voice in Santa Barbara — funny story. Sepp Donahower.
SEPP DONAHOWER: You see that picture at UCSB Stadium, where Cutler and I are standing on the field, at the entry to the stadium?
JESSE: We have.
SEPP DONAHOWER: At that show, Garcia had a cold — he couldn't sing and could barely talk before the show.
JESSE: Jim Curnutt.
JIM CURNUTT: Jerry had a sore throat. We had ambulances on-site, so we had a doctor on-site.
SEPP DONAHOWER: So I had to get the University of California doctor, the health department there at the university, to write a prescription for cocaine.
JIM CURNUTT: It wasn't our doctor, it was the backstage doctor — Dr. Brown, if I remember correctly. [chuckles] He was a doctor in Los Angeles that Sepp had brought up to sit backstage.
AL FRANKEN: Now that sounds apocryphal. A prescription for coke.
JIM CURNUTT: So they sent the prescription, it was for a narcotic and an atomizer. They were going to spray it down the back of Jerry's throat to anesthetize his throat so he could sing. I sent my roommate down to a pharmacy to fill it, and they looked at him and said, “We don’t carry it in water solutions. We only have alcohol.” So he brought the prescription back and the doctor threw it on the ground. He said, “I said water, not alcohol!” So I had to send him down to another hospital. They looked at him and said, “We can’t fill this until tomorrow.” So my roommate, Jimmy Clark, said, “Well, I’ve got 23,000 kids at the stadium right now, waiting to see Jerry Garcia. Are you going to fill it?” And so they filled the prescription, he came back.
SEPP DONAHOWER: Somebody told me the magic mixture to make so he could sing. So we got this prescription, ran down to the pharmacy and got the bottle of liquid Merck, mixed up a concoction for him to gargle — a lemon, honey, cocaine and whatever. We cleared him up and he went out and sang!
JESSE: We do feel obligated to point out here for both obvious reasons and perhaps less obvious ones that this was pharmaceutical cocaine, quasi legal, and guaranteed not to be sketchy.
SEPP DONAHOWER: I'm telling you, it was really bad. It was like, oh god, he can't sing. It was a realistic and valid use of a drug, with something actually that it’s designed to do from a medicinal standpoint. And it worked.
JESSE: There’s some squeakiness, but it hardly gets in the way of the music.
SEPP DONAHOWER: I remember we took the rest of the bottle, poured it on a plate, let it dry in the sun and snorted it all.
JESSE: Yeah, guess that’ll happen.
JIM CURNUTT: So about six months later, I get a call, a notification from the UCSB Health Department. We hadn't paid for it, and so the bill had come in I think for $4.50 for this prescription. And the Health Department said, “We don't know anything about it.”
JESSE: It was… dealt with.
AL FRANKEN: Okay, alright, alright. But I have my suspicions — I need a little bit more verification on that story…
SEPP DONAHOWER: Years later, on Google or something, I saw a picture of the bottle online. I’m like: oh my god, there it is! Everybody was getting a real chuckle out of that one backstage. Somebody had it for sale on eBay, and it had Jerry’s name on it, the cocaine vial from UCSB pharmacy or something. It was somebody who had it listed on eBay — I used to have a picture of it. It was a nice-looking dark brown bottle.
JESSE: I can’t seem to find any images, but the bottle does seem to be floating out there somewhere. Maybe some World Wide Web conjurer can summon it from the depths. Anyway, that’s why Garcia’s voice sounds like that.
AUDIO: “Deal” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (4:10-4:36) - [dead.net]
JIM CURNUTT: My niece showed up, she was young. She got up on stage with about 20 roses and was throwing them into the audience. I still kid her about that.
JESSE: Michael Parrish.
MICHAEL PARRISH: It was such a good-feeling event. I saw them play better for sure. But that was one of the shows I probably enjoyed the most.
JESSE: Al Franken.
AL FRANKEN: It was one of these outdoor concerts — beautiful day, amazing concert. And that was it for me. That was it, you know? That was it. And from then on, I was an enormous Dead Head.
AUDIO: “Tennessee Jed” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (1:23-1:43) - [dead.net]
AL FRANKEN: Well, the vibe of course is just that, it’s that vibe. But I hadn’t been to a lot of concerts before — so, there's that. So I can't compare it. I've gone to a lot of concerts that weren't Dead concerts since, and I can compare it that way. It’s a Dead show: there’s nothing like a Grateful Dead show. It’s an adventure. You’re there, and this is not like “I’m going to a concert, and I’m going to enjoy the concert, and we’re gonna drive home, and we bought our tickets…” This is — you’re in it for a day and an evening.
JESSE: Michael Parrish.
MICHAEL PARRISH: It was three sets of Grateful Dead music. And they only did that I think four times in 1973. They did it the previous week and Des Moines, and then RFK and also the show of Kezar were all three-set shows. But that was pretty much it for the year.
JESSE: Yup, that’s the new Here Comes Sunshine box set, dude!
AUDIO: “The Race Is On” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (0:22-0:45) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Bobby “Ace” Weir had sung “The Race Is On” by George Jones during the 1970 acoustic sets with the New Riders of the Purple Sage, but it had only jumped into the Dead’s electric repertoire that spring. Not that anybody was really keeping score at that point.
AL FRANKEN: I remember loving the crowd. I remember… I’ve been to so many concerts since that my memory of them isn’t all that different from the memory of the last one. It actually is, because the last one was at Citi Field on this last tour, and that one had a much bigger age range.
JESSE: Bob Student.
BOB STUDENT: I had the brand new Super 8 video camera that I had just purchased to celebrate my getting out of the Army. And I shot six minutes at the show; of course, there’s no sound, and I had it on Super 8 tape.
JESSE: Bob’s footage is now online. It’s really fun. Linearly, it’s only a few minutes, but Bob ran the camera in time lapse for large chunks, capturing some cool phenomena, including the moment the crowd goes from sitting to standing when the Dead come on.
BOB STUDENT: The camera had an intervalometer that you could attach to it and do frames. And that's what I did, I was playing with my new camera.
JESSE: One genius shot is when Bob locates a semi-comatose dude sitting with his arms slung over the railing while, in time lapse, hundreds of concert goers mill by him at fast speed. Really, you could set it to Philip Glass’s score to Koyaanisqatsi.
BOB STUDENT: I set the camera on the rail with a guy who was on the rail. I was a little ways away and set it on the rail. I had been watching him for a little while, and I said, “Let me get a picture of this.” I turned on the intervalometer and tracked the guy a while — how many different shots could I do? I was obviously more interested in the crowd than the individual band members on the stage, because everyone down front was taking pictures of the band. I shot some pictures of the stage, but back then, my only interest on stage was Donna. She was the cutest of the batch.
JESSE: Bob’s short reel from Santa Barbara shows a pretty impressive range of shots for a silent camera, catching lots of cool textures of the scenes, including the breezes off the ocean. Big ups to the heads in lawn chairs parked up close to the side of the stage.
AUDIO: “China Cat Sunflower” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (6:41-7:10) - [dead.net]
JESSE: In the spring, the Dead had moved the so-called Feelin’ Groovy jam into a regular home between “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider,” as we just heard. At Santa Barbara, I like the little melancholic turn they make just before the drop into “Rider.”
AUDIO: “China Cat Sunflower” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (7:36-7:56) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “I Know You Rider” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (0:00-0:19) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Gary Wulfing definitely picked up on the band’s sound system.
GARY WULFING: The sound was really good.
JESSE: The Dead had debuted the newest version of their sound system in February at Stanford. They also debuted a short-lived stage lineup that would barely outlast the shows on this box set and which we forgot to mention last time — from left-to-right: Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Jerry Garcia, Keith Godchaux, a similar arrangement to what they’d switch to in the ‘80s. Though many people associate the noise-canceling double microphones and lack of vocal monitors with the 1974 Wall of Sound, both were in effect by the start of 1973, as Donna Jean told us a few episodes back. But like the Dead’s music, their sound system was also a process, and they were in active collaboration with the techs from Alembic all through the spring. The Dead’s archives contain a report from Alembic’s Ron Wickersham reporting that he and Rick Turner had joined the band in Santa Barbara to observe the new system in action. Following the show in Iowa the week before, it was only the second time that the system had been used outdoors. They observed that same ocean breeze that Michael Parrish remembered and Bob Student caught on his silent film, but they contemplated it perhaps more than the average heads. The Alembic report reads, in part, “One other factor in outdoor gigs is the wind. In Santa Barbara, light winds caused the sound to blow away [from] the intended destination and I found that the beam from the 5[-foot-speakers] was going over the top of the stadium walls and was being blown to a hill about 800 feet at about 45 degrees towards stage left.” Alembic would recommend the construction of delay towers at the even bigger mega gigs to come, a new frontier in live amplification.
AUDIO: “I Know You Rider” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (1:50-2:20) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Michael Parrish.
MICHAEL PARRISH: The first and second sets were pretty much short songs. But they had all of these new tunes to break out. I had seen the premiere of most of those tunes at the show in Maples Pavilion [at Stanford University] back in February. But by now, they'd been road-tested and really sounded just wonderful.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (0:00-0:33) - [dead.net]
JESSE: “Row Jimmy” is one of those Dead songs it took me a little bit to come around to, but hearing the clarity of the 1973 mixes allowed me to finally hear the interaction between the instrumental parts and feel the slow motion groove as something powerful and subtle.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (1:54-2:24) - [dead.net]
MICHAEL PARRISH: I had started slowly trading tapes. I had master FM recordings of the Harpur show, the Winterland 10/4/70 show, Calebration [on KQED]. There were a lot of things that I had masters of, so I was able to trade with people. But there really hadn’t been a huge network that had been set up. I would say that the sort of tape distribution network on the West Coast was really primitive compared to what was happening on the East Coast at that time.
JESSE: We’ll put a bookmark here to discuss the activities of the tape trading clubs that were starting to emerge out east.
MICHAEL PARRISH: One of the things that I'd gotten just a few months before that was part of a tape from the Maples show. It actually had been broadcast on KCSE, the Stanford radio station, just some songs from it. I believe it was an audience tape — it was actually a couple of tapers who were in the studio with the DJ, and one of my friends, who lived in Palo Alto, taped it. So I got it from him.
JESSE: Like a few other things Michael has told us about, that specific recording doesn’t seem to be in digital circulation.
MICHAEL PARRISH: So I had taped versions of a few of the new songs which was really exciting. We’d heard them once, and I remember just being really taken by the new batch of songs. It just seemed like an entirely new thing for the Dead: “Here Comes Sunshine,” “Eyes of the World,” “China Doll,” all being really very different stylistically than anything they've done before that. So it's fun to be able to get out again at the Santa Barbara show to hear them sort of polished and sparkly and new. It was really fun.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (5:43-6:10) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The Grateful Dead’s jam suites had begun to evolve in late 1967 and early 1968 with the multi-part “That’s It For the Other One,” the “Alligator”/”Caution” pairing that often in spectacular feedback squalls, and the sequence that became Live/Dead, centered around “Dark Star,” “St. Stephen,” and “The Eleven.” But by the early 1970s, the suites began to expand. Notably, “The Other One” dropped its “Cryptical Envelopment” intro and outros for good in 1972, besides a brief return in the ‘80s, and the Dead developed a number of songs that might build around the middle section sung by Bob Weir, now known just as “The Other One.” Dig the Side B episode of our Skull & Roses season. In Santa Barbara, the suite began in a familiar happy place.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (0:33-0:54) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Debuted in 1970, “Truckin’” had attached to “The Other One” by the end of the year and, in 1972, grew a jam. In Santa Barbara, they hit the song’s big peak signaled by Garcia’s dramatic high-up-the-neck re-statement of the intro theme, which had taken nearly three years to develop, before solidifying in the spring of ‘73.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (5:53-6:23) - [dead.net]
JESSE: And they detour through the theme of “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” by Blind Willie Johnson, a Garcia motif for years, here played with a slide.
AUDIO: “Jam” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (0:28-0:44) - [dead.net]
JESSE: It’s after the “Nobody’s Fault” jam that the road really opens up and the horizon melts into the sky.
AUDIO: “Jam” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (4:31-4:49) - [dead.net]
JESSE: And then the sky becomes the territory.
AUDIO: “Jam” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (5:36-6:06) - [dead.net]
JESSE: After that, the clouds gather into the triplet rhythmic figures of “The Other One.”
AUDIO: “Jam” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (7:10-7:36) - [dead.net]
JESSE: But “The Other One” is more like an island in the sky, and after the verse, they’re asail again.
AUDIO: “The Other One” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (3:27-3:57) - [dead.net]
JESSE: In 1972, both “Playing in the Band” and “Truckin’” had become full-fledged jam songs for the Dead. “He’s Gone” had begun to link up with the suite at the front end, and “Wharf Rat” and “Stella Blue” both began to link up to the end. In 1973, Garcia introduced a major new second set jam piece. I love this transition from Santa Barbara, as if they’re all collectively blowing the sky back to blue.
AUDIO: “The Other One” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (10:09-10:37) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (0:00-0:22) - [dead.net]
JESSE: It’s easy to hear why Michael was taken by “Eyes of the World,” even before it developed its wild collaboratively written ending.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (9:15-9:40) - [dead.net]
JESSE: You’re perhaps familiar with what’s known as the Distracted Guy meme. In the early ‘70s, Jerry Garcia was a little bit like that with the quiet ballads he played in the spot after “The Other One.” At first, it was “Wharf Rat,” which went a little by the wayside when he and Robert Hunter wrote “Comes A Time,” which went a little by the wayside when they wrote “Stella Blue,” which went a little by the wayside when they wrote “China Doll.” He’d rotate them more in the later ‘70s, but in early 1973, “Stella Blue” had largely been relegated to random and kind of awkward mid-set slots. Not tonight, buddy.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (11:42-12:12) - [dead.net]
JESSE: You can hear the band’s musical question mark as Garcia moves into the “Stella Blue,” the sound of a band without a setlist.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (0:00-0:13) - [dead.net]
JESSE: But once there, they slip into the amazing quiet mode they’d developed as a quintet.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (0:42-1:15) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Naturally, Weir gets the big rockin’ closer slots.
AUDIO: “Sugar Magnolia” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (8:54-9:20) - [dead.net]
JESSE: All in all, it’d been a lovely afternoon.
JERRY GARCIA [5/20/73]: Thanks a lot, folks. We had a pretty nice time here today. Would like to thank y’all for coming…
Afterwards
JESSE: Hope your voice feels better soon, Jer. After more than a year of planning, the show paid off. After paying the New Riders of the Purple Sage some $6,840, and subtracting $8,180 in miscellaneous travel and gig expenses, the Dead walked away with $22,980, around $156,000 in modern terms. It also paid off for UCSB senior Jim Curnutt.
JIM CURNUTT: It was very successful. The administration and the police department were more than satisfied with our planning and execution. Thanks to Sepp Donahower, who stuck to it to keep the Grateful Dead interested, we were able to do it. At that point, I convinced the university that a paid professional was needed to help students organize and promote the concerts. I created a job for myself, or I got the job — and so, for six years, I was working as a student affairs officer. And thanks to the Grateful Dead and Donahower and all that, during the next six years that I was there, we produced over 100 concerts. It was an active university schedule which included three stadium concerts with the Grateful Dead. We had an indoor gymnasium concert with the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia Band and Kingfish played an intimate theater we had on campus.
SEPP DONAHOWER: We brought in the Grateful Dead, Rod Stewart, the Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen… I could send you a show list, but that town has never seen so many great shows. I mean, we had Bruce Springsteen in Rob[ertson] Gym, and he played a three-and-a-half hour set! People still talk about it.
JESSE: As with Music Circuit Presentations in Des Moines the week before, the Grateful Dead’s Santa Barbara show helped launch a promotion career that stretched beyond Curnutt’s time at UCSB. Al Franken and Tom Davis began their Dead Head lives at virtually the same moment they began their entwined professional careers.
AL FRANKEN: I can't remember how many we went to. I do remember in ‘73 going up to San Francisco to Winterland for a set of four shows, and that was a big deal. I think that might have been the first time I went through four shows in a row.
JESSE: Those shows can now be heard on the most excellent, Winterland 1973: The Complete Recordings.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Winterland 1973: The Complete Recordings, 11/9/73] (7:42-8:14)
JESSE: Lots of Dead Heads have commented over the years that the Dead’s extended passages and long shows have created good spaces for brainstorming and problem solving and general unchecked creativity. While Al Franken and Tom Davis might not have come up with any new comedy bits in Santa Barbara, Dead shows did become part of their process.
AL FRANKEN: I did a lot of thinking at these things. I used to do a lot of writing, actually, for SNL, when I was at the concert — I was very free associative. And you feel connected to these people, certainly, but also kind of you just go: Oh, I wish humanity can be like this. Then I would do a lot of thinking during it, and a lot of dancing. But I loved being at the concerts — they were actually productive for me. [chuckles] Sometimes there was a drug involved, too. I wouldn't want to bring a notebook… I guess I could have put a little notebook in my back pocket, I suppose. But I didn't need that; that wasn't what was going on. I was free associating, or working on an idea I had.
JESSE: In 1975, Al Franken and Tom Davis would graduate from being Dead Heads to being in-house Dead Heads in the lunatic-occupied Saturday Night Live writers’ offices on 17th floor at Rockefeller Center. They would be responsible for luring network television to the Dead, when the Dead made their SNL debut in 1978, and provided comedy bits for the Dead’s closed-circuit Halloween 1980 telecast from Radio City that became the concert film Dead Ahead. One of the bits was a pretty incredible tracking shot gag that involved all six members of the Dead.
AL FRANKEN: All the stuff backstage was one take, and then we don't cut until we get onto the stage, right on the stage at Radio City. The first part of it, the going backstage and offending them all and being assholes, all that, was shot in San Francisco.
JESSE: Which meant Al Franken and Tom Davis got to catch a bunch more shows, including the telecast itself. Tough gig.
AL FRANKEN: They did three sets that night and the acoustic set is beautiful.
AUDIO: “Little Sadie” [Reckoning expanded edition, 10/31/80] (1:48-2:03) [Spotify]
JESSE: That was a rare version of “Little Sadie” from Halloween 1980, now on the expanded edition of Reckoning. We explored that more in our Dead Behind/Dead Ahead episode back in 2020, which also included some great storytelling from the late Tom Davis, courtesy David Gans. Once again, I’ll plug Tom’s delicious memoir Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss, which includes some sad, sweet stories about working with Garcia on their never-produced screenplay adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan. Tom would go on to co-write Owsley and Me: My LSD Family with our buddy Rhoney Stanley, also worth a read. By 1973, Michael Parrish had been a pretty hardcore Dead Head already for a few years and was ready to move to the next levels.
MICHAEL PARRISH: Probably that summer ‘73, I was thinking — I should just write to the Dead, and volunteer to help them with the tape libraries, but I thought they wouldn't want me to do that.
JESSE: It actually would’ve been a pretty ideal time to write the Dead to do that. It was sometime in this period in the spring of 1973 that the Dead began to migrate their gear and equipment and other stuff into the Front Street warehouse in San Rafael where their first proper tape vault was born a few years later. We discussed it a bit in our Inside the Vault episode last year. But Michael was industrious and found tapes anyway.
MICHAEL PARRISH: Santa Cruz is set up in this college system where there are separate residential colleges. So I went down and knocked on his door, and it was one of the first really major trades I did with somebody — he had a bunch of stuff from the East Coast and all this stuff on the West Coast.
JESSE: There was a lot to absorb, but the Santa Barbara tape wasn’t yet around.
MICHAEL PARRISH: I didn't have a tape of it for years; it was kind of a holy grail for me. I believe there was an audience tape of it, but I probably didn't get one until sometime in the ‘80s.
JESSE: By the time of the first edition of the Taping Compendium in 1997, only a not-that-great audience tape was out there. For many attendees, for many years, the Santa Barbara show was nothing more than a gloriously remembered Sunday afternoon in the sun. For Bob Student, who’d seen the Dead a few times in the ‘60s, it was the beginning of something new.
BOB STUDENT: And that was the start of my going on summer tour with the Grateful Dead, which started in June and ended up at Watkins Glen for the big show there.
JESSE: We’ll pick up the adventures with Bob and his van soon enough. But we’ll see you next week at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/20/73] (9:45-10:11) - [dead.net]