Good Ol' Grateful Deadcast
Season 9, Episode 3
From the Mars Hotel 50: Unbroken Chain
Archival interviews:
- Jerry Garcia, by Greg Harrington, 7/10/81.
- Phil Lesh, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 7/30/81.
- Phil Lesh, by Hank Harrison, 1970.
- Owsley Stanley, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 1/13/91.
- Ron & Susan Wickersham, by David Gans, This Is All A Dream We Dreamed, 11/12/14.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [From the Mars Hotel] (0:18-0:37) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Stop me if you've heard this one before: "Unbroken Chain" is one of the most unusual songs in the Grateful Dead's songbook. Written by bassist Phil Lesh with his friend, the poet Bobby Petersen, the third song on From the Mars Hotel was Lesh's first lead vocal on a Dead album since "Box of Rain" in 1970.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [From the Mars Hotel] (0:38-0:51) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It featured an ARP Odyssey appearance by composer Ned Lagin.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [From the Mars Hotel] (0:55-1:09) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: A complex song featuring odd bar lengths and a few time signature changes, "Unbroken Chain" achieved the unusual feat of becoming a fan favorite without being performed live, at least until its breakout in the spring of 1995, more than 20 years after it appeared on From the Mars Hotel. A cassette copy of Mars Hotel once got stuck in the tape deck of teenage David Lemieux, now Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager.
DAVID LEMIEUX: My friends and I, it was always four or five guys driving around, exactly as you'd imagine — with our long hair and our tie-dyes, driving around my dad's Chevy Cavalier. When that song came on, when "Unbroken Chain" came on, we all shut up.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [From the Mars Hotel] (2:50-3:05) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: "Unbroken Chain" is such a perfect song. That's a song that I could hear every day 10 times and never get sick of.
JESSE: One young listener who had a similar reaction a few decades after the album's release is Dave Portner, known as Avey Tare in the wonderful experimental pop band Animal Collective and on his own great records.
DAVE PORTNER: "Unbroken Chain" really stood out to me. I remember it from the early days of being in junior high and listening to that record. It's more like a reverse influence—I don't know if they would have ever heard it—but it has parts that sound like Stereolab to me, kind of like Dots and Loops-era Stereolab or something like that, with Ned's like modular stuff coming in and out there.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [From the Mars Hotel] (2:19-2:33) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Animal Collective would create their own singular relationship with "Unbroken Chain," which we'll discuss later. David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: We did a Best of the Grateful Dead album a few years ago, I think it was called The Very Best of the Grateful Dead, with Rhino. I think there are 17 songs on it. And ["Unbroken Chain"] was a song that I knew with certainty had to absolutely be on there. A few people were a little surprised on the production side, only because it wasn't a hit. It wasn't a song that people equate with the Grateful Dead — it's not "Friend of the Devil" or "Truckin'." All of those were on there of course, too, but "Unbroken Chain" absolutely needed to be on there. It was one of those songs that's just too good not to be on there.
JESSE: "Unbroken Chain" isn't the only song the Dead didn't play live, all the more testament to its enduring popularity among heads.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I think it's grown in stature.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [From the Mars Hotel] (3:05-3:25) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
Meet Bobby Petersen
JESSE: Listeners studying From the Mars Hotel in 1974 might notice an unfamiliar name receiving a songwriting credit alongside Phil Lesh on both "Unbroken Chain" and "Pride of Cucamonga." It was misspelled, as it turned out, but Bobby Petersen, or Robert M. Petersen for songwriting purposes—no Os in his last name—was an important, fascinating, and almost-forgotten figure in Grateful Dead history. We're going to take the scenic route. Please welcome to the Deadcast, your pal and ours, the parent of Bobby Petersen studies, Christian Crumlish.
CHRISTIAN CRUMLISH: I saw my first two Dead shows in ‘84 while I was still in college, and I saw 20 Dead shows in ‘85, or 21, and went out to California to see New Year's. I was really into it at that point. And then the spring of ‘86 was my senior year in college. I went to all the East Coast shows I could get to that spring, and one of them was up in Maine. And, in Maine, they debuted this song called "Revolutionary Hamstrung Blues" that they never ever played again.
AUDIO: "Revolutionary Hamstrung Blues" [3/27/86] (0:43-0:59)
CHRISTIAN CRUMLISH: We sat up all night in the hotel listening to an audience tape one of our crew had made, trying to write the words down and figure out what this new song was, because we figured it was gonna get played more and we'd come to know about it.
AUDIO: "Revolutionary Hamstrung Blues" [3/27/86] (1:00-1:15)
CHRISTIAN CRUMLISH: And somehow word had gotten out that, although Brent and Phil sang it, the lyrics were by Bobby Petersen. So that was when I first heard about Petersen, and I felt a slight personal connection because they never played that song again. There's only a couple thousand of us who ever heard it played live. Even though Phil's output was so small, I was like: who is this Petersen guy?
JESSE: It wasn't easy to find out.
AUDIO: "New Potato Caboose" [Anthem of the Sun] (0:42-0:54) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Bobby Petersen received his first songwriting credits from the Dead in 1968 for his lyrics to "New Potato Caboose," but Anthem Of the Sun merely noted "all selections by Grateful Dead."
AUDIO: "New Potato Caboose" [Anthem of the Sun] (1:20-1:47) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
CHRISTIAN CRUMLISH: I connected the dots to the other songs and thought about this very small corpus of songs. There was always a little bit of lore around "Unbroken Chain." Any song that people like on an album that there's no live versions of—"Rosemary," let's say—that kind of creates a special mystique about certain songs. So I think I started looking at that song, I liked "Pride of Cucamonga." I started digging deeper into these other songwriters besides [Robert] Hunter and [John Perry] Barlow, particularly on the earlier stuff.
JESSE: One of the few places to cover Petersen's history in the murky early days of the band is Hank Harrison's not-always-reliable The Dead Book.
CHRISTIAN CRUMLISH: If you read The Dead Book and if you read interviews with Phil, he'll tell stories about Petersen in those interviews. For instance, Petersen was the first guy who got Phil stoned — he introduced him to pot, from what I understand. And so you can see that there's a sense of debt— that Petersen didn't get rich and famous, but he was this linking figure that without whom Phil wouldn't have ultimately fallen in with the Dead.
JESSE: Petersen was born in 1936, four years older than Phil. In that way, he served a classic scene role — the cooler, slightly older guy who could fill you in on the world as it existed, and also probably knew how to score grass. It didn't take much for Christian to recruit his former roommate Nicholas Meriwether into Bobby Petersen studies. Nicholas is the founder of the Grateful Dead Studies Association. Welcome back, Nick.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: He was not into the folk scene, he was very much into the jazz scene. He had actually already made friends with some members of Ray Charles' band. He had been, for some time, a saxophone player himself. And his whole orientation was toward jazz, not toward folk. He was part of the Kepler's [Books] scene, very much a part of the Kepler's scene. But he's also kind of a loner, so that's why he and Lesh really bond. Petersen had published either a poem or an essay—I think it's probably more likely a poem—about either jazz or jazz musicians, and Phil loved it. And that's how their friendship got started.
JESSE: Here's how Phil Lesh described it 1981 to our friend David Gans, an interview that's now in David's cornerstone book Conversations with the Dead. Phil Lesh hadn't tried smoking grass yet.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: The first people who offered to turn me on were not the kind of people I wanted to get high with. Instinctively, I knew this, so I refused.
JESSE: Good thinking. So who did get you high, Phil?
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: Robert Petersen. He's a poet. We spent most of our time hanging out, reading Henry Miller aloud with one another. That was really fun, man, ‘cause there was no future. I loved Ginsberg, I loved his work. Kerouac was okay, but I expected more somehow from On the Road than what I got out of it on first reading. Re-reading, I got more out of it because I finally met Neal [Cassady], who is the guy. But I loved Ginsberg. I loved "Howl" so much that I started to set it to music.
JESSE: Phil Lesh didn't last at the College of San Mateo, but after transferring to UC Berkeley, he stayed friends with Bobby Petersen.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: I got a place to live and I got a job, and I reconnected with Petersen. That was the most important part. He turned me on — he taught me everything I knew. He had lived a lot. He was four years older than me. And through his experience and his native ability—he was into writing, into literature—he just turned me on to so much. I mean, you can't encompass it.
JESSE: Petersen was connected to the bigger underground around the San Francisco Peninsula. Nicholas Meriwether.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: Petersen was really more a part of the scene than he was an active student. As near as we can tell, he only really was officially enrolled in CSM for one semester. But he hung out there because it was an interesting scene, and that's one of the orbits of the broader Palo Alto Peninsula bohemian scene that Alan Trist was a part of, Jerry Garcia was a part of, Robert Hunter was a part of — the genesis of what becomes the Grateful Dead, in a sense. So, Petersen is part of all of that.
JESSE: In this way, without Bobby Petersen, no Grateful Dead. Petersen was responsible for connecting Phil Lesh with his future bandmates. We are so happy to welcome back Alan Trist, friends with both Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter in the Palo Alto days who later ran Ice Nine Publishing.
ALAN TRIST: Back in Palo Alto ‘60-'61, he was part of our freewheeling group there. He was part of the proto-bohemian group there. He had his notebook, he was a poet then, hanging out with a bunch of artists: Jerry and Phil and Willy Legate, everyone was there. It's hard to say what he was actually doing… I don't remember any particular poems in mind. But we were all doing that thing, trying to find a way t into the future that was less restrictive than the past had been.
JESSE: Petersen was Phil's first friend who moved to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, and Phil followed.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: At that point, I was living at 1130 Haight Street, which was at the corner of Haight and Baker. And those days, the Haight was truly beautiful — this was before anything. It was just a community of people who happened to live there. But all the right people happened to live there somehow, a whole bunch of all the right people. When Bringing It All Back Home came out, you could walk down Haight Street —
JESSE: And hear it coming out of every window. At least, that's how I imagine the sentence ended. The tape side ends there. Bobby Petersen served an important role, as Phil described it to Hank Harrison.
PHIL LESH [1970]: Bobby Petersen was still in contact somehow with Garcia, because he would go and come. On his binges, he would hang out in Palo Alto.
JESSE: In the spring of 1965, Petersen received a key piece of intel: Jerry Garcia had a new band called the Warlocks, playing every week at a pizza place in Menlo Park. This is from David Gans's 1981 interview.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: And then whenever it was that they were playing, we took acid and went down there: Harrison, myself, Petersen, Jane, my girlfriend. We came boppin' in there, man, and it was really happenin'. Pigpen ate my mind — he just ate my mind with the harp. Singin' the blues, man. They wouldn't let you dance, but I did it anyway. And during the set break, Jerry takes me off to a table and says, "Listen, man, how'd you like to play bass in this thing? Because our bass player is not a musician, we have to tell him what notes to play." I said, "By god, I'll give it a try."
AUDIO: "Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)" [So Many Roads (1965-1995), 11/3/65] (0:00-0:20) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Petersen remained a part of the Dead's extended scene. Christian Crumlish.
CHRISTIAN CRUMLISH: Nick—who was very encouraging about this process—he and I went on a couple of field trips. We went to the College of San Mateo and gathered anything we could from their archives: their yearbooks, et cetera, things like that. It's funny, too, because we found a little poster in the library that was talking about famous alumni of College of San Mateo. And they're like: ‘And the drummer from the Grateful Dead!' Some marketing person didn't do all of their homework. But we also went down to the county courthouse as well, the San Mateo County Courthouse, and we got out the case files from his arrest.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: He was arrested in February of 1966 in a little town outside of Santa Cruz, California. And he had a young son at the time — Didrik would have been like a year-and-a-half or so, and Didrik had fallen asleep. And so Petersen parks the car, left his son asleep, and went inside a bar to get a beer. When he came out, someone had called the cops and said, "Hey, there's an abandoned kid" — even though, really, Bobby was only gone for literally a few minutes. But Bobby looks like a hippie, and the larger Santa Cruz area is kind of ground zero for the war between mainstream society and hippiedom. And Bobby looks the part. So, the cops come and find a little jar, a bouillon jar, that has weed in it. And the reason why that's significant is because Petersen fights the case on grounds of religious freedom.
JESSE: So Bobby Petersen got ready to go to bat for the heads of America.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: And he thinks it's going to be this huge case that changes the way the U.S. treats cannabis. They were basing it on the Native American church, peyote rituals, all of that stuff. And Kesey's lawyer, Ken Kesey's lawyer, signed on to defend him. And it was a huge deal: the trial was covered not only in the Santa Cruz newspapers, the San Jose Mercury News, but also in the San Francisco Examiner.
JESSE: Christian Crumlish.
CHRISTIAN CRUMLISH: I read his statement to the judge, which was written out by a writer—by a poet, essentially—in which he was trying to be a test case. He was trying to prove that drug use is both a matter of bodily sovereignty and spiritual freedom.
JESSE: Six months after the arrest, the case of Robert M. Petersen went to a jury-less trial in Santa Cruz in October 1966. It wasn't maybe the best time to argue for a religious right to use LSD or cannabis.
RONALD REAGAN [KRON NEWS REPORT, 1966]: There's nothing grown-up or sophisticated in taking an LSD at all. They're just being complete fools. Anyone that would engage in this or indulge in this is just a plain fool.
JESSE: Oh, um, sure. Though LSD was still technically legal at the time of Petersen's arrest in February, it achieved illegality in early October 1966, just a week before Petersen's trial. Nicholas Meriwether.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: They get a raftload of really significant people to go down and testify on Petersen's behalf, including a really powerful, prominent member of San Francisco's liturgical community. A Catholic priest speaks on Petersen's behalf. David Smith of the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic speaks on his behalf. A whole bunch of people. So, it was a really big deal… and they lose. And then Kesey's lawyer, very wisely, then has an appeal, and the appeal is based on illegal search and seizure. That part works, because the judge concludes that: ‘Look, you weren't looking for car registration or something like that when you opened a jar of bouillon.' So Petersen gets off, but it takes a huge chunk out of his life and leaves him, according to a lot of people, feeling fairly bitter towards the legal system because he really thought he had an airtight case.
JESSE: In court, Petersen presented himself as a poet, and was taking his work quite seriously.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: Petersen did hold jobs off and on, everything from being a short order cook to a laborer. But he was very serious about viewing himself as a poet. If you look at his typescript drafts of what he was doing, and even those manuscript drafts, he's approaching poetry—and writing, in general—seriously. He always puts the date and the place; when he finishes a poem, he dates it, he says where he wrote it. If you look at his revisions, one of the things that I think is most remarkable about his archive is that he paid for early photocopies, electrostatics, of his poems, because that's one of the ways that he revised. He would type it out, photocopy it, and then make manuscript deletions, additions, whatever, emendations on the photocopy.
JESSE: The Dead started working on their first piece of music with Bobby Petersen in early 1967, probably within weeks of his court case.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: Probably sometime in January of ‘67 is when they start working up "New Potato Caboose." The lyrics are fascinating, because it could just be a nature poem. But, musically, it presages what they are going to start doing later that year, which will culminate in "Dark Star." And I think you can hear the genesis of all of that with "New Potato Caboose." That's their first really serious bid towards musical and lyrical excellence.
AUDIO: "New Potato Caboose" [Anthem of the Sun] (1:35-1:50) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: "New Potato Caboose" can be heard as the Dead's first major original composition. They'd aspired to write complex music with early originals like Lesh's own "Cardboard Cowboy," but "New Potato Caboose" was the first one that that they'd keep in the repertoire for more than a few months — melding the Lesh's complex musical vision with the images of the young California poet Robert M. Petersen.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: There's a handwritten copy that got sold at Bonham's at auction several years ago, and it's clearly in Phil Lesh's hand. The auction got it wrong, got the wrong date and said it was in Pigpen's handwriting. It's not. It's very clearly in Phil Lesh's handwriting. And that has the line: "Above Madonna, two eagles hang against a cloud."
AUDIO: "New Potato Caboose" [Anthem of the Sun] (0:59-1:11) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: The reason why that makes perfect sense is because Petersen is living in the Santa Cruz Mountains: he could look out from any one of a number of vantage spots and see Mt. Madonna. So, "Above Madonna, two eagles hang against a cloud" — now, all of a sudden, that makes the entire lyric one of Bobby Petersen's nature poems. And at the time, he's writing a lot of those. That's where his own unpublished poems about Big Sur come from. That's where he's thinking. It's a huge part of his poetic inspiration. He's taking a cue from both Michael McClure, but especially from Gary Snyder. It just fits in every single way.
JESSE: Bobby Petersen's involvement with the Dead helped the Dead to a new direction.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: Michael McClure lives in the Haight and he's going to rock shows. While the band is still living at 710, McClure only lives a few blocks away. [There's] the wonderful story of McClure giving Garcia a sheaf of lyrics, Garcia looking sort of dubious about it, attempting to put them to music, and then finally giving up. That's right at the same time that McClure gave Janis Joplin what became "[Oh Lord, Won't You Buy Me a] Mercedes Benz."
JESSE: Bobby Petersen was the first poet to work with the Grateful Dead, and probably an impetus for Jerry Garcia to draft with his old friend Robert Hunter into service later in 1967. With one songwriting credit on a major label album in his pocket, Petersen's small press poetry career began in earnest around the time Anthem of the Sun was released in 1968.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: His first small press publication was 1968, and that was in a short-lived San Francisco poetry magazine called The Willie. It's interesting, I tracked down the editor who actually remembered that he had to drive… he found out where Bobby was living, and Bobby was camping in a forest north of San Francisco. The editor drove all the way up to meet him at his campsite and, over a candle or a Coleman lantern, read a whole bunch of possibilities and the editor chose two! Two poems, to publish in The Willie. And that's how Bobby's very first small press publication came about.
Petersen goes through this phase from basically 1968 through 1974 of wanting to participate in what poets later dismissively called the "po biz": the sequence of getting things to a small press publisher, then putting together a chapbook, and then maybe eventually getting a major press publication out of it.
JESSE: Put another way — Robert Petersen was a published poet. Robert Hunter was not. Hunter once claimed that the lyrics to "Casey Jones" were written by Bobby Petersen in a dream and Hunter merely looked over his shoulder and copied the words down when he awoke. Though Lesh and Petersen wouldn't be as productive as Garcia and Hunter, his existence wound around the Dead's scene.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: He spent considerable time away from the scene. All of the people who knew him make it a point to mention that he was very gregarious and had a real charisma that drew people to him. But: he also very much appreciated solitude and being by himself, and was really good about being in nature. He would just take off from the scene and be gone for a while. Phil alludes to that: he told me that when he was working with Peter Monk—he was speculating, he couldn't remember exactly why—but he said, "Petersen may not have been around at that point. He would just kind of take off, go off and travel, go to Mexico, go to Oregon or just go off into the woods in Northern California." He would be gone for a while.
JESSE: Though Phil Lesh would receive co-writing credits on several songs in the interim, the next song he sang on a Dead album came when 1970's American Beauty opened with "Box of Rain."
AUDIO: "Box of Rain" [American Beauty] (4:00-4:15) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Bobby Petersen was in and out of California in 1970 when Phil Lesh was working on "Box of Rain." That summer, Ned Lagin—who would play synthesizer on "Unbroken Chain"—met Petersen for the first time. Please welcome back to the Deadcast, as Jerry Garcia once called him, Good Ol' Grateful Ned.
NED LAGIN: I first met Bobby in 1970, summer of 1970, when I was staying at Phil's house for the summer. Bobby would come through there, passing through the Bay Area on one way or another, and that was in Fairfax. Most of the time, Bobby was at Phil's house. He didn't stay at Phil's, but he was there at Phil's, usually in the evening. They drank a huge amount of beer. I never liked beer, so I wasn't a drinker. But I listened to stories and we talked a lot. Bobby and Phil were very close, as I could surmise from youthful Phil experiences. I don't remember how old Bobby was compared to Phil, but Phil was obviously the junior of the two. And they talked for hours and hours, late into the night, about the times that they shared, the people who they knew. And I listened for the most part. They were part of the San Francisco Beat culture, Bobby and Phil, when they grew up. That was poetry and jazz and Beatniks, and all the famous people in the San Francisco culture that preceded San Francisco as a rock Mount Olympus. Before that, it was the Beat culture. Except for maybe Greenwich Village, it was San Francisco.
JESSE: Having an album deadline is a great motivator to finish songs, and it would be nearly three full years before the full Grateful Dead made another studio album. So it was in the summer of 1973 when Phil Lesh prepared two new songs for the album that would become Wake of the Flood.
"Unbroken Chain"
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" (Demo) [Beyond Description (1973-1989), 8/11/73] (0:00-0:15) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That's the demo version of "Unbroken Chain," first released on the Beyond Description box set. Presumably, Lesh finished the song sometime in the spring of 1973. Though some of the images seem as if they might come from Petersen's nature poetry, it feels more akin to Robert Hunter's work, evoking images of the infinite and even psychedelic in a way that—like the chord changes—is impossible to pin down to one linear continuity. And specifically, to my ears, "Unbroken Chain" sounds as if it could be in conversation with Hunter's lyrics to "Box of Rain," sharing many of the same images and even the same central rhyme. In some regards, it sounds like a relatively straightforward song.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" (Demo) [Beyond Description (1973-1989), 8/11/73] (0:35-0:50) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But, as Lesh's demo demonstrates, there were some things that might not be obvious on first listen.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" (Demo) [Beyond Description (1973-1989), 8/11/73] (2:57-3:15) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
PHIL LESH [8/11/73]: This here is the instrumental. The short length of the pause between the parts of this rhythm is correct.
JESSE: The song had a few different sections.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" (Demo) [Beyond Description (1973-1989), 8/11/73] (3:25-3:34) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
PHIL LESH [8/11/73]: D minor seventh. C major seventh.
JESSE: Lotta chords.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" (Demo) [Beyond Description (1973-1989), 8/11/73] (3:54-4:19) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
PHIL LESH [8/11/73]: D minor seventh; C major seventh; G minor seventh; and F. E minor… [continues playing]... more or less.
JESSE: Please welcome back, from the City College of New York, the Deputy Dean of Arts and Humanities, Shaugn O'Donnell.
SHAUGN O'DONNELL: This is maybe the most ship-in-a-bottle tune they have, practically. With a chart, it's playable for the most part. The jam you have to concentrate on and so on. But the song you can't play without a chart because it's not in a key. It has no built-in harmonic drive. They have some other tunes that wander or get ambiguous, but this persistently behaves like it would have been in a key but isn't.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" (Demo) [Beyond Description (1973-1989), 8/11/73] (0:53-1:14) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
SHAUGN O'DONNELL: You arrive at these G chords and they feel like — okay, this is a thing. You're like, Okay, maybe this is a dominant chord and we've arrived here, it's gonna make sense now. And then it reloads and travels through the progression again.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" (Demo) [Beyond Description (1973-1989), 8/11/73] (1:15-1:31) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It's a different kind of song for the Dead.
SHAUGN O'DONNELL: He's not the same singer as the other guys. He's moving the whole time. So he doesn't sit still on the long-held notes or do any vocal performative-type stuff. And that's really different from art song, where there'll be some bits about the voice itself, whereas this is more in the sense of sung poetry.
JESSE: When the full band got the song to the Record Plant in August 1973, things did not go as planned.
AUDIO: "Phil's Song (Unbroken Chain)" ((Take 1) - Not Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel's Share] (4:26-5:01) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
PHIL LESH [8/16/73]: Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
JESSE: They tried.
AUDIO: "Phil's Song (Unbroken Chain)" ((Take 8) - Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel's Share] (4:26-5:01) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
PHIL LESH [8/16/73]: You just simply count: 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3 — da da da, da da da — D minor.
JERRY GARCIA [8/16/73]: What's fun about that?
PHIL LESH [8/16/73]: It ain't fun. It ain't supposed to be fun.
JERRY GARCIA [8/16/73]: Fuck it.
PHIL LESH [8/16/73]: It's just supposed to be right.
JESSE: The band spent some working on it, but perhaps wisely tabled it until a future project.
AUDIO: "Phil's Song (Unbroken Chain)" ((Take 8) - Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel's Share] (5:16-5:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
PHIL LESH [8/16/73]: I think it'd be neat if everybody learned the chords and stuff, before we tried to rehearse the thing…
JERRY GARCIA [8/16/73]: True, yeah. That'd be helpful.
PHIL LESH [8/16/73]: And I don't think us trying to make a tape with all the wrong chords is gonna make a lot of difference.
JESSE: They did the same with "Pride of Cucamonga," another Lesh/Petersen joint that Phil demoed in the summer of ‘73 and which would also have to wait for another day. Steve Brown was a production assistant on From the Mars Hotel and witnessed the 1974 sessions.
STEVE BROWN: The work that it took to do "Unbroken Chain" — whoo, boy! That was a real Mount Everest hike. That took a lot, a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of detail that Phil kind of oversaw.
JESSE: This is actually Steve's voice on the talkback mic during the "Unbroken Chain" sessions, just before Phil's.
34:55 STEVE BROWN [8/16/73]: It's rollin'!
PHIL LESH [8/16/73]: Okay, if everybody'll shut up, I'll be able to…
JESSE: Please welcome back engineer Brian Kehew, responsible for the recent transfer of The Angel's Share.
BRIAN KEHEW: I was looking at the number of tapes: Do I have a count? 1 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12… 12 tapes used. Different days — I'm looking at April 9, Takes 1 to 5, and then 6 to 15. Then the next day, they come back on April 10th, and they do Takes 1 to 32. [laughs] And that means a whole day of the same song… which is not unheard of, nowadays especially. But really, that's a lot of work. The next day, April 11th, they start over again, counting from Take 1, and they do 21 more attempted takes at it. Then they come back April 12th, the fourth day, and do another 13 takes, and Take 11 is the one they keep. That is just a lot of work. Just to put it in reference, I think the Beatles did a comparable number of takes of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" and the song called "Not Guilty," which has the most number of Beatles takes. And it never even came out…
JESSE: And that's not counting the hours they spent rehearsing it across the street at S.I.R. before tracking. There are roughly four hours of takes of "Unbroken Chain," and that's not counting a few reels taped over the next year during the making of the Keith and Donna album.
BRIAN KEHEW: One of the tapes was partly re-used by Keith, doing the Godchaux Special Love Tape, as it's called.
AUDIO: "Farewell Jack" (Session excerpt) [Keith and Donna, Slaughter Block Blues tape] (8:51-9:10)
JESSE: That's a tiny taste of sessions for "Farewell Jack," from the Keith and Donna LP, which ended up on one of the "Unbroken Chain" tapes. For comparison's sake, after the four surviving hours of "Unbroken Chain," the second most amount of tape that survives for From the Mars Hotel are roughly 20 minutes each of tape for "U.S. Blues" and "Scarlet Begonias." The sessions at least went better this time.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" (Reel 5) [From the Mars Hotel sessions]
BRIAN KEHEW: There is so much work put into this, and the only thing comparable we've seen in their history was "Weather Report Suite." And in both cases, the band was really trying and learning and communicating. They'd obviously had these more-epic pieces and a lot of challenges, and doing something that's not as simple as "Loose Lucy." But, in some ways, they really make a record more three-dimensional to have a track like this than a bunch of three-minute boogie songs. So I really appreciate—while it may not be my favorite piece on some of those records—[having] a long extended thing with lots of parts to it.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Bass, From the Mars Hotel] (3:12-3:30)
BRIAN KEHEW: Those types of tracks are the ones that burn bands out. They actually start to test your patience. Imagine doing something, whether it be a dance routine or trying to paint a painting, and you do it, let's see, 15 times the first day; 32 times the second day; 21 times the third day; 13 times the fourth day. That is just a lot of effort. But, many people don't mind it. They're just working harder, and it's getting closer and it's getting better. So, they're not that different, but they do have some developments and some changes from one to the next.
JESSE: Thanks to Steve Brown, some extra paperwork for this session survives. Nicholas Meriwether.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: We don't have a manuscript or typescript draft. What we've got, however, is fascinating. What we've got is a type-written microphone draft that's got, basically, Jerry Garcia's chord changes that he's writing down. This would be an 8 ½ by 11-type sheet with the lyrics in all caps. At the very end, we've got the two repeated choruses: "Unbroken chain of sorrow and pearls," and "Unbroken chain of the western wind." In the penultimate verse, the mic stand draft reads: "Unbroken chain of sorrow and pearls/unbroken chain of the sea." And, of course, what ultimately happens is: "Unbroken chain of sorrow and pearls/Unbroken chain of sky and sea" — which works much better.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Phil Vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (6:01-6:13)
JESSE: With "Pride of Cucamonga," which we'll speak about soon, we're able to compare lyric drafts, but it's hard to know for sure how the lyrics to "Unbroken Chain" evolved.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: One of the points that Phil made in his conversation with me is that Jerry and Hunter worked much more collaboratively — like, Hunter would be in the studio. And this was probably in those early days, but it may have begun with Aoxomoxoa. What Phil said was that Jerry would tell Hunter things. He would say, "I need a vowel here," [or] "I need a word here." And Hunter would provide it. Whereas Phil actually did his own writing. He actually put words into Bobby's lyrics.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Phil Vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (1:16-1:30)
JESSE: They stacked the vocals up in the ending especially.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Vocal Stack 1, From the Mars Hotel] (6:02-6:08)
JESSE: Weir got a spotlight in the first stack.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Vocal Stack 1 with Weir, From the Mars Hotel] (6:49-7:02)
JESSE: Garcia got a spotlight in the second.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Vocal Stack 2 with Garcia, From the Mars Hotel] (6:49-7:02)
JESSE: Be sure to add some chimes.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Chimes, From the Mars Hotel] (5:28-5:35)
JESSE: Track 12 actually has bits of three different keyboard parts. There's a clavinet in the middle.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Clavinet, From the Mars Hotel] (3:13-3:23)
JESSE: A Rhodes during the gentle vocal reprise.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Rhodes, From the Mars Hotel] (5:18-5:30)
JESSE: And briefly a celeste during the outro.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Celeste, From the Mars Hotel] (6:43-6:51)
JESSE: There's a vocal overdub that's almost impossible to notice. Listen here.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [From the Mars Hotel] (6:27-6:42) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: On the tracking sheets, the second sheet of the sync reel is labeled "Donna Ringed End." I think this is the sound of Donna Jean Godchaux singing through a ring modulator to create a drone on the last notes of "Unbroken Chain." You can hear the intake of breath just before the drone starts.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Donna Ringed End, From the Mars Hotel] (6:46-6:51)
Enter Ned
JESSE: But the overdub most people remember didn't come from a regular band member.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [From the Mars Hotel] (0:54-1:08) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Here it is without the rest of the band.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Synth submix (Tracks 2-5), From the Mars Hotel] (1:22-1:28)
JESSE: In 1981, an interviewer in Minnesota asked Jerry Garcia how the sound was made.
JERRY GARCIA [7/10/81]: An ARP Odyssey. A little ARP Odyssey. It cuts right through. It's strangely appropriate, that is. It's nice, and musically interesting. It's such a strange… it's not a sound that you would normally associate with music. It's nice the way it comes in, in an off-the-wall sort of way. And almost any halfway decent hi-fi will throw it all over the place as well. It's nondirectional, in terms of that it could be coming from anywhere.
JESSE: Playing that ARP Odyssey was Ned Lagin, a friend of the band since they played at MIT in 1970. Ned had been sitting in with the band since 1970, playing piano on the American Beauty version of "Candyman." You can hear him on the high-chiming clavichord throughout the February 18th, 1971 performance that's now on the expanded American Beauty.
AUDIO: "Dark Star" (part 1) [American Beauty 50, 2/18/71] (1:11-1:40) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But Ned's own project, Seastones, was an organic and gradual process that began to come to public fruition later in 1974. Later in the month, Ned came to overdub some sounds onto "Unbroken Chain."
NED LAGIN: That was around or in April of 1974. We'd already decided we were going out on the road to play live later in the spring or summer. I got one of the first ARPs, like I got one of the first Fender Rhodes 88s. I got it in February or March of ‘73 and came to California with it. I got it back East. And it's one of the white ones — it was bought to play live mostly, because that's what I was moving to California to do. So it was part of a larger imagined instrument. I had built my own synthesizer boxes. I had interacted with ARP in their original facility, a small brick building, I guess it was in Waltham. It was near Brandeis. I bought some ARP-2500 modules and made my own synthesizer boxes. And before I went to California and then after arriving in California in ‘73, I made some customizations to the ARP itself. I ran some wires inside and plugged into the gate and trigger and VCA that was available.
JESSE: Ned would perform music from Seastones throughout Dead shows starting in June, joined by Phil Lesh and occasionally Jerry Garcia and other members of the Dead. We'll discuss some of that as we go.
NED LAGIN: The ARP would fit in Phil's BMW trunk. I might have gone with Phil… but in remembering it, I think I went by myself, because I think that Bobby rode with Phil.
JESSE: Petersen, that is, not Weir.
NED LAGIN: I think I'm remembering Bobby, but I certainly remember Hunter. There were some chairs… there's the mix board, then there's a space in front of the mix board, and then there's a glass window that opens that shows the studio. There were some chairs in front of the mix board, near where I was set up on my ARP. And Hunter was sitting there the whole time with his notebook, writing. Mars Hotel had two real producers — it said that the Grateful Dead were the producers, but the two producers were Garcia and Phil. Jerry and Phil.
When I went in there, Jerry seemed pretty happy. Jerry, I think he liked the room. And some of the members of the band were less happy with the room and the studio and how it sounded, and that it was a very—how shall I say—tightly run ship. Jerry, Phil and I separately had talked about me potentially adding to various tracks, including Jerry's tracks. Eventually, all that happened was I played on "Unbroken Chain." They set me up not in the room, but in the control room — in front of the board, on the front side of the board.
JESSE: Ned got up to speed on the song.
NED LAGIN: I saw the words when I went into the studio, handwritten. And then I heard, in the setup pass-throughs, them sung — though not all the vocals were done. They assumed, incorrectly or not, they assumed that, being the musician that I was and the training that I had, I could recognize what was going on. For example, it was my assumption, correct or incorrect, that the tune started out in 4/4.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [From the Mars Hotel] (0:38-0:50) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
NED LAGIN: And then, what they called the bridge was in 11.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [From the Mars Hotel] (1:56-2:06) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
NED LAGIN: And then the jam, or what you might want to call a jam, is in 15.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [From the Mars Hotel] (2:55-3:06) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
NED LAGIN: I was playing an ARP Odyssey, and I may have had it through a volume pedal. But otherwise it was just a straight ARP Odyssey. I viewed the tracks that I was doing as part of a larger mix that would flow between more abstraction and more narrative. It was a sound that was constructed with layers of intent and of colors and time spectra. Knowing Phil and having played with Phil, I understood his thinking intuitively. And Garcia as a producer and Phil as a producer of "Unbroken Chain" both trusted my intuition. They ran "Unbroken Chain," and I played a track.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Synth submix (Tracks 2-5), From the Mars Hotel] (1:55-2:12)
NED LAGIN: And they ran "Unbroken Chain" a second time, and I played a second track.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Synth (Track 1), From the Mars Hotel] (3:12-3:30)
NED LAGIN: And they stopped there and said, "Both of those tracks are perfect. You're done."
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Synth (Track 3), From the Mars Hotel] (3:44-3:47)
JESSE: One thing to note is that the longer of those parts, making the chiming sounds that a lot of people compare to an airplane, was actually the combination of multiple mono outputs on the run through a Leslie speaker for two more tracks to create stereo. Here's one of them.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Synth (Track 2), From the Mars Hotel] (1:22-1:28)
JESSE: And another.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Synth (Track 3), From the Mars Hotel] (1:22-1:28)
JESSE: And through the Leslie.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Synth submix (Tracks 4-5), From the Mars Hotel] (1:22-1:28)
NED LAGIN: I had not even gotten started, I hadn't even thought about it. They just really liked the tracks. And then as the scene developed there at that studio, the possibility of me doing stuff on Jerry's stuff sort of evaporated. I'm not sure, I don't remember why. I just remember getting paid more than I've ever gotten paid in my life for anything for doing about 20 minutes of work.
JESSE: Though Ned might not've spent a lot of time on the performance of the parts, they became an indelible part of both "Unbroken Chain" and the Dead's studio catalog. It's not a lot of music, as Ned says, but there's a lot of intention in dem dar parts. (Here are some of Ned's meditations on "Unbroken Chain.")
NED LAGIN: If you slow them down to like quarter speed, you can hear the insides of what it was.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Synth submix (Tracks 1-5) — slowed down, From the Mars Hotel] (0:00-0:15)
NED LAGIN: Gravity creates the concept of weight or weightlessness. Absence is weightlessness. So, we know it as an "attractive" force — Isaac Newton and the apple, falling from the tree and hitting the ground. But with Einstein, you understand that gravity is a force that acts on light and time. And so with the theory of special and then general relativity, we get the concepts of bending time and bending light. If you use those as paralleling visual metaphors with audio metaphors, that's what I meant about creating an audio context in "Unbroken Chain" by doing those two tracks. And the gravitation is one not of the apple falling from the tree and hitting the ground; it's not an attractive gravitation. It's a gravitation of time bending, and light bending — light, in this case, being the light of the poetry.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Synth — slowed down, From the Mars Hotel] (0:16-0:30)
NED LAGIN: Jerry, because of his background in visual arts, got the idea that I was painting the tracks in "Unbroken Chain" as much as I was playing. I was actually playing the ARP keyboard and the faders, but the tracks that I was putting on were part of the poetic painting of the song, rather than the melodic or rhythmic structure of the song itself. So it's counterpoint in a poetic and visual way—and a metaphoric way—as much as it is a musical way.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Synth — slowed down, From the Mars Hotel] (0:31-0:45)
NED LAGIN: There are harmonics and resonances that are visual, but there are harmonics of time and of rhythm. So I'm playing harmonics of time and rhythm for the "Unbroken Chain" rhythm track. Bobby wrote poems where there are emotional and intellectual resonances for each word and each phrase. It was my imagination and desire as a player to capture and produce audio tracks that encompass those emotional and intellectual resonances.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Synth — slowed down, From the Mars Hotel] (0:46-1:06)
JESSE: And now back to speed with the guitar.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Garcia Guitar & Synth (Track 1), From the Mars Hotel] (3:26-4:00)
JESSE: The lyricist dug it, too.
NED LAGIN: Bobby Petersen really liked what I did on an "Unbroken Chain." He told me so, but you could also see it in his eye contact. Someone was listening last year and said that he thought that my tracks were what sunshine sounds like. And I just thought that those were beautiful thoughts. It's a way of getting at what I was thinking about, which is the visual metaphors of the poem. What sunshine sounds like also, to me, reflects the feeling of connectivity, [which was] the meaning that I derived from the song.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [From the Mars Hotel] (4:25-4:55) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
Album Art
JESSE: Around the time Ned made his overdub, the band had just resolved another important piece of business — what to actually call the album and what to put on the front cover. Andy Leonard had arrived at Grateful Dead Records as vice president the year before and wound up coordinating album art for Wake of the Flood in an unexpected way, which would feed into the art for the new album in-progress.
ANDY LEONARD: Bob Seidemann was the acting art director at the point that I got there. I never saw him direct any art… but that's how he was introduced to me. Seidemann was a great shooter: he did some very cool stuff in his day, and he was quite a character. He's an imposing guy. My first job, this is sort of funny: Garcia—or Garcia and Rakow, I was never quite clear on how this worked—had given four or five or six of the hot artists out there who had a tradition with the Grateful Dead—Kelley and Mouse, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin; there were a bunch of guys—each of these guys were given what was considered to be a firm commission to do the first Grateful Dead Records record cover. And each of them, jointly and separately, felt that they were the guy. So they did everything from really complicated four-foot-by-four-foot oil paintings that took a long time, to… and only one of them could be the record cover. So — guess who got to go talk to the other guys?
JESSE: It quickly turned into an adventure.
ANDY LEONARD: That was not a happy place for me. [laughs] Because these were cool guys! Kelley and Mouse, Victor Moscoso, I think Seidelmann might've had a dog in the fight. I had to go tell all these guys no. I have these scattershot memories of facing off with these guys. And some of them were just like: ‘Yeah, well, it's the Grateful Dead. What do you expect? Next.'
JESSE: One of the potential artists was an underground legend that the Dead hadn't worked with before — the incredibly detailed hyperreal surrealist Robt. Williams, spelled R-O-B-T, who came out of the hot rod scene.
ANDY LEONARD: I was a big fan of Williams in any case, because I'm a car guy and he's a car guy, and he's obviously completely mad as a hatter in a brilliant way. I always enjoyed his cartoons and stuff, and the stuff that he did just as art. Like Von Dutch and those guys, they started out painting motorcycle tanks and hot rods. And the next thing you know you've got Rat Fink and all these characters that keep appearing in the comic books. And, from the East Coast, I thought that was just wild. Just wonderful stuff.
JESSE: Williams was one of the artists who'd finished his commission, as Andy discovered when he met up with him in LA.
ANDY LEONARD: It was all done, and it was sitting on a chair when I walked into Williams' house. I was just like: "Whoa, that is cool, man. Look at that — I can't use it… goodbye!" [laughs] And he wasn't pleased, because he had put some time into it — he'd put some time and thought into it. It wasn't on a piece of paper. This was an actual art object. The album was called New Eyes, and it was Little Bo Peep with big brand-new blue eyes and big eyelashes, and she was still holding her cup that said "5 cents" on it that was full of pencils. And over her shoulder there was a cartoon wolf with a little wispy mustache turned up at the end, maybe a top hat or something, with a glint in his eye. It didn't look good for her. Where he got that, I don't know. I wanted it! I was in favor of it. We couldn't use it because the New Eyes lettering in album cover fashion was up at the top, so there was no room to put "Grateful Dead" or to use a different title on that artwork. That wouldn't [have been] possible.
JESSE: At one point, the album that became Wake of the Flood had the working title of Eyes of the World, so it's possible Williams used that as a prompt.
ANDY LEONARD: So we looked at his Lead Sled Mercury or whatever it was for a while, and we chatted about stuff. We're both trying to make believe we didn't want to punch each other — or he made believe he didn't want to punch me. Then we started talking about stuff because he collected some paramilitary gear as a hobby, or did. Somebody, somehow, somewhere had given Garcia a Luger and he didn't know what to do with it. He didn't have any real interest in it. I guess I'd cleaned it or got it open or did something to it for him, so I knew he had it and I knew he didn't have any interest in it. We worked out a deal where Williams got the Luger, and Garcia got the art. Carried it there myself! I was so enthusiastic about getting this particular nasty event in my rearview mirror that I went to the Burbank Airport with my rent-a-car; put it in the short-term parking; gave PSA my $20; flew to San Francisco; got my car out of the parking lot; drove to Stinson; got the Luger from Garcia; went back to SFO; flew to Burbank; got back in my rent-a-car that I put there this morning; went back to Williams' house. Elapsed time was, like, the afternoon. As it was getting dark, we did the deal. I wrapped up the picture in brown paper. I remember carrying it on that flight back to SFO and gettin' the girl to put it in the coat closet for me because there wasn't anywhere else to put it. That night, late, it ended up up in Stinson. That was the last time I saw it.
JESSE: Perhaps somewhere in the Garcia archives is the Robt. Williams painting New Eyes. It was probably 10 or so months after that when they needed album artwork again. The thing that actually triggered the story we just heard was a letter in the Dead's archives from Andy Leonard to Robt. Williams, written in early 1974.
ANDY LEONARD: I had absolutely no memory of having had any contact with him after the debacle of that first album.
JESSE: The letter is fascinating for a number of reasons. It's dated March 21st, 1974 — two days before the Sound Test at the Cow Palace and a week before the Dead began recording at CBS. For starters, the query to Williams included a tape of the album's songs. Andy wrote, "We haven't any ideas one way or the other on the title. Listen to the tape and do us a cover and title."
ANDY LEONARD: I know there was a tape because it's mentioned in there. I have no memory of the tape.
JESSE: The existence of the tape means that there were recorded versions of a few songs that the Dead hadn't yet performed. Along with the tape was a song list from Jerry Garcia along with one-line or less descriptions of each song. "U.S. Blues" is described as "R&R," parentheses "soft."
AUDIO: "U.S. Blues" [From the Mars Hotel] (2:45-2:51) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: "China Doll" is "slow, serious."
AUDIO: "China Doll" [From the Mars Hotel] (3:08-3:21) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: "Unbroken Chain" has the longest description — "medium tempo, ballad, different parts, symphonic in nature."
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [From the Mars Hotel] (6:08-6:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: We'll hear more descriptions from that latter as we get further into the album. The last song included on the list, and maybe also the tape, had a question mark next to it. "Donna's Song," it reads. "Gospel flavor."
ANDY LEONARD: I had no idea what "Donna's Song" was. There's stuff in there that I don't know anything about. It was clearly early days.
JESSE: Hopefully we'll have an answer to that question before too long.
ANDY LEONARD: It looks from that letter like I had pitched a couple of guys, Williams included, to see if they had anything. I don't know who I pitched and I do not remember getting anything back. If anything had come back that was cool from anybody, I'm sure we would've gone with it.
JESSE: In short, when the band started making the album, they didn't yet have a title for it.
ANDY LEONARD: We didn't have a cover. Somebody was gonna have one, there wasn't one, nobody had one. And finally, I had to stamp my foot and go, "Okay, look, you guys —it's late to do the artwork. I can get Salter and Hale to do the screens, and then I can fly to LA and we can pound on somebody's door and get this stuff printed. But it's going to be ugly, and it's going to be expensive, and it's going to be late and we can't do that. So, we need the album cover—at least the art—right now." And I went and cornered Garcia in the studio in San Francisco and said, "Look, man: what do you want to do?" And he said, "Um, I don't know, what do you want to do?"
JESSE: They found their answer a half-dozen blocks away from the studio.
ANDY LEONARD: I had just driven by the Mars Hotel. And I thought, well, this place is weird.
JESSE: The Mars Hotel at 192 4th Street wasn't exactly a tourist hotel.
ANDY LEONARD: And I showed Jerry a snapshot I'd taken of it the day before. And he said, "Okay, that's cool. Do something with that and do something with that. Do something with that." The Mars Hotel photograph at that point was taken — it was a topic of conversation. ‘Isn't that weird?" Look, the Mars Hotel.' And it was a miracle a place didn't fall down, actually. But there were some characters that were living there full-time.
JESSE: Among its many residents over the years was Jack Kerouac, who hid out there briefly on his first trip to San Francisco after On the Road made him a celebrity, mentioned in his book Big Sur in 1962. A decade later, in October 1972, David Bowie and Mick Rock shot a bit of the "Jean Genie" video outside the Hotel Mars.
AUDIO: "The Jean Genie" [David Bowie, Aladdin Sane] (0:39-0:55) - [Spotify]
ANDY LEONARD: As soon as Garcia nodded his head up and down, the next morning, I was out there when the sun came up to take the pictures. I mean, we had no time left.
JESSE: With Mars Hotel in play, the band and their friends began riffing. Production assistant Steve Brown.
STEVE BROWN: We were thinking about calling it Rumors From the Mars Hotel… Ugly Rumors From the Mars Hotel. So we wrote down all the different versions of spelling "rumors."
JESSE: One of the fun documents in Steve's collection is a piece of paper in Steve and Garcia's handwritings.
STEVE BROWN: We'd be sitting there, writing all these different things: my writing, his writing. The Roomers… R-O-O-O-W-E-R-S… RRRHEWMORES [laughs]... and then, here's one with R88merz with two eights! R-8-8-M-E-R-R-Z… [laughs]. And where's another good one here? R-U-N-N-E-R-S… runners! [laughs] And I don't know who wrote this bottom one here, but it's W-R-U-M-O-O-R-S… [laughs] Huh? Ruuuuuoooooomoors... Yeah, no, we had fun! We were getting high. [laughs] And he's drinking a little coffee with a little bit of liquid in it. Yeah, alright… it's late at night, it's 3 AM. We've gotta get outta here, okay…
JESSE: The album needed a back cover, too.
STEVE BROWN: We decided that, for the Mars Hotel, we needed to have a scene where the roomers—the ugly roomers—would be actually seen. And so we put them all in my van, the whole band, and I drove over to Eddie Street to the Cadillac Hotel. I put them into the main lounge / lobby area there, put up some chairs, sat them all in there, and had Andy Leonard come in and take a nice picture of them all sitting there.
I used to drive Jerry home all the time to Stinson or Tiburon or wherever we came from the studio stuff. That went on a lot. But to have all of them in my van was really cool. It was a carpeted van, it had a couch in it and stuff. It was nice. It was a Ford Econoline, all paneled inside and soundproof. It was kind of like taking a paddywagon with the criminals… and they are.
JESSE: Located on the other side of Market Street from both CBS Studios and the Mars Hotel itself, the Cadillac Hotel actually had some Dead ties — Jerry Garcia lived there briefly in 1961 with his buddy John "The Cool" Winter, who was responsible for introducing him to Phil Lesh, part of the same circle of friends as Bobby Petersen. Andy Leonard.
ANDY LEONARD: That was an interesting shoot because those guys really kinda don't wanna… and if somebody wants them to do something like that, then they really don't wanna. But we had to do it, and they knew we had to do it. And there was an extra piece of juice in there because it was their record company this time. So they couldn't really get hissy and walk off because it was Warner Bros. — they couldn't make sport out of it because they'd be making themselves mad, because it was their record company!
Everybody knew we had to do the shoot, but, boy, we had to go fast and get ‘er done. Took 20 minutes. How long can you get everybody to sit down? I walked around with a bunch of five-dollar bills and got some of the boys that had taken over the lobby that lived there. I said, "Guys, look, I've got something for you, but you've got to go outside for half an hour. Here's five bucks." I had to clear out the lobby, and we had to move the furniture. There was some prep time. I didn't want to empty the lobby of the hotel if the band wasn't gonna show up, so it all kind of happened at the same time.
JESSE: On the back cover, the band is lit by the glow of a television.
ANDY LEONARD: I actually had some pretty good experience shooting at stuff lit by the light from the television. You can't use a television — you have to have a television box with a light in it.
JESSE: We've posted links to Andy's original untouched photos — the front and back covers of From the Mars Hotel.
STEVE BROWN: This glass window of my van was in the original picture, in the background. And that was interesting because you had all the regular guests that were staying there — such as they were not guests, but the roomers that stayed in that hotel, the actual Roomers. And here's these Grateful Dead people downstairs in this lobby of theirs, having this whole scene go on. So, that was kind of an interesting situation.
JESSE: Unlike the Mars Hotel, the Cadillac is still there at 380 Eddy Street in San Francisco's Tenderloin, if you'd like to recreate the photo yourself. It was maybe during the photo shoot itself that they decided that it was possibly in bad form to refer to the residents of the Mars Hotel as "ugly rumors."
STEVE BROWN: We decided a lot of these people that are kind of down and out, that are staying in this slum hotel… and it would be kind of not nice to use Roomers from the Mars Hotel.
JESSE: Sometime in this period, the artist team of Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley moved into their new headquarters in San Rafael, known as the Peanut Gallery, alongside fellow artist Victor Moscoso, about a half-dozen blocks from the Dead's office. It put a group of world-class artists in even easier reach. Mouse and Kelley would take Andy Leonard's photo of the Mars Hotel and place it on something like Mars — with rock craters, a lava lake, two moons hanging in the sky, and the glow of an alien civilization just over the visible horizon. Alton Kelley noted to Blair Jackson that they enlarged the Mars Hotel sign, too. If you look closely at the cover, you can still see the shadow of the original smaller sign. The art was an assemblage of an acrylic background painting, Andy's photos, and more pieces placed to connect them.
STEVE BROWN: When they actually took and did the cover of the album, they had it on a four-by-four original art at B Street, over there where they had the Peanut Gallery where Mouse and Kelley worked. I would always go over and check on how the art was coming, how it looked, take pictures of it, Polaroids, and show them to the band. To Jerry, mainly.
JESSE: Hanging on the lobby wall of the Cadillac Hotel, behind where the band sat for the back cover, was a stuffed alligator. But there aren't alligators on Mars.
STEVE BROWN: Kelley and Mouse wound up then decor-ing them as actual space creatures, as it were: making [things] interesting, taking the alligator that was on the wall and adding extra legs to it.
JESSE: The "ugly rumors" phrase was still floating around, too.
STEVE BROWN: They would have "ugly rumors" written in this weird, unreadable lettering. It's on a separate piece laying there, and here's the Mars Hotel, and here's the moon of the Marsscape. And then he would take later and put the actual words up there. Well, I grabbed that and took it, just to see what it would look like up there. Mouse and Kelley are standing behind me, and I hold it up there like that — but I held it up upside down and backwards. And they go: "Perfect!" And it came out that way. That's how it got printed! [laughs] It was this great mistake, adding to art.
JESSE: Andy Leonard.
ANDY LEONARD: 15 years later, I ran into Mouse, some place in a bar in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I said, "Hey, what ever happened to the original artwork of that thing, because it was all pasted together and drawn on?" It shot okay and printed fine, but it was a piece of work — it wasn't a hand painted, all-in-one-piece picture. It was painted-on pictures, and then pictures pasted on pictures. He said, "The UPS truck ran over it." So, I'm waiting to see, at one point in history, if somebody's got the Mars Hotel artwork.
JESSE: The Dead were in the studio through at least May 5th, probably mixing right up until it was time to go on tour. There were some culture clashes, according to some reports. Stephen Barncard, who co-produced American Beauty, stopped by CBS during the sessions.
STEPHEN BARNCARD: Mars Hotel was mixed by Roy Segal, a really old-time CBS guy who moved in from New York. Very grumpy. He really hated that stuff. I remember going to the sessions at Columbia, watching him get this awful face. Everyone's hovering around him, and I went: I'm gettin' out of here. I can't… I just don't even see this.
JESSE: Steve Brown remembers another result of the culture clash, which we don't wish on any engineer, on either side of the generation gap.
STEVE BROWN: At one point, they actually dosed Roy I think… which was kind of cool. [laughs] We got some stuff done, despite his kind of being a little bit, you know, different that night.
Reno & May shows, 5/74
JESSE: The Dead finished mixing the album sometime around May 5th with the tour set to open in Reno a week later. With the studio version of "Unbroken Chain" fresh in their minds, this would have been the time to perform it. Ned Lagin.
NED LAGIN: You did have a question that you asked me before, about whether there was any consideration of doing it live while I was around. There was no consideration of that. They were not planning on doing new tunes extensively because they weren't planning to play extensively. What you have to understand is that, for a long time—meaning, in 1974, but even maybe reaching back into ‘73 in some ways—there was a desire for the Grateful Dead to retire. It hadn't been announced. It hadn't been discussed publicly. But in May of ‘74, it wasn't assumed that the Grateful Dead would have been around a year later. But that's an insider thing, not a public thing. There were murmurs of it, but I knew. By Mars Hotel, I knew something. I knew that these tours were important tours. They might be the last tours.
JESSE: It was a topic that wouldn't be voiced out loud within the Dead until later that summer. With the album done, though, they barely had time to pack. It was time to hit the road.
AUDIO: "Truckin'" [From the Mars Hotel 50, 5/12/74] (4:44-5:02) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That was from the band's first road gig of 1974 in Reno on May 12th, now on the From the Mars Hotel 50 3-CD set. Earlier in the year, Richard Loren had replaced Sam Cutler as the band's booking agent.
RICHARD LOREN: I was asked to book a tour. As soon as I was hired, it came to be that the first thing on their agenda was the sound system, and ‘oh, we have the New York agent to do it.' Jerry gave the nod to me and to Jon, and I booked the motherfuckers. It was hell. Hell! I had to deal with all these fucking different promoters, in every city. Every city had a different promoter. And that was before the era, really, of John Scher, who later on became my tour manager. That tour, I did it all myself, man. I went through hell. I dealt with promoters in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, New Jersey, LA. Dealing with everything: the expenses, the sound system, the requirements, the food. It was more than booking a tour. I booked tours for the Airplane and The Doors, bailed the guys out of jail. I did a lot of that. But this was the big meatball. This was the big baby. I was put to test!
JESSE: Richard had managed Jerry Garcia's career outside the Dead since late 1972, but he was still new to the Grateful Dead mothership.
RICHARD LOREN: It was grueling. It was one of the hardest experiences in my life as an agent, or in anything, because I had to deal with the cocaine cowboys. It was hard. There was a lot of resentment of me coming in after [Sam] Cutler, because Cutler was really very close to all the crew. They were the guys that humped all the equipment. So, when I came in—'Who the fuck are you, man?'—I hadn't been part of the ‘65-'70 get-high-on-acid [thing]. I just came out of the business world of music in New York in 1970 and was dropped into Jerry's thing. These guys, they were just ready to get on me. So, it was a really, really hard tour to put together.
JESSE: Another reason the tour was no picnic to put together was the Wall of Sound. It was a huge pain in the neck right from the start. Here's how Owsley Stanley remembered it to David Gans in 1991, now in David's magnificent Conversations with the Dead. Thanks, David, and Bear.
OWSLEY "BEAR" STANLEY [1/13/91]: The thing was such a monster! It required so many people, so much bureaucracy, so much logistics, so many trucks, so many stages, so many boxes, so much wire, so many amps, it became this huge thing! Because it was very inefficient. It was capable of producing a sound, but we produced a sound with three truckloads of stuff that you could do today with one half of the stuff the Dead carry, normally, as a PA. Just one half of that, or less than one half of that, would produce the same kind of sound — as effective as that if it was configured correctly.
JESSE: It was configured unlike any other sound system, pretty much before or since.
BEAR [1/13/91]: I was out in the hall listening to it or walking around or tweaking something on stage. There was no sound mixer. That big system did not have a sound engineer. That sound mixer was the musicians themselves — to the extent that they could properly hear what was going on, and to the extent that they were communicating with each other, and with the sound technicians who were wandering around out in the hall, was to the extent that the mix was perfect and the sound was perfect.
JESSE: Helping to realize, translate, refine, and inspire Bear's ideas was Ron Wickersham, co-founder of Alembic with his wife, the incredible Susan Wickersham. David Gans spoke with them in 2014 about the Wall.
SUSAN WICKERSHAM [11/12/14]: Bear is a catalyst to bring forces together, is what he is. That's what he's good at. He recognizes talent. He does have some crazy ideas, let's face it. He got us moved to Novato, but he never got me to move to Australia… as much as he tried.
JESSE: Bear became the initial patron of Alembic, who established themselves in late 1968.
SUSAN WICKERSHAM [11/12/14]: Bear said we have to improve the quality of recorded live music. That was his mandate, and that's what we started doing. We had more contact with Bear than we did with a lot of the band. Most of our stuff was done at Alembic or on-site at a show or something.
JESSE: Bear was a driving force.
RON WICKERSHAM [11/12/14]: Bear was into the details, the same as I am. So our interactions [were] on details. He was about every solder joint, every detail of how you roll up the cords, how stuff gets packed for the road. He wasn't just an overview — he was involved. So it felt like, if you leave out the details, then you're not showing what Bear was, what he was about. He could point out the problem. He was good at communicating between what the musicians [wanted] and… there's a musician language, and there's an engineering language. There's no translation table.
JESSE: At first, the Dead rented what was known as the Alembic PA. They didn't break it—well, maybe a few times—but they did buy it.
SUSAN WICKERSHAM [11/12/14]: We didn't own the Wall of Sound. The Wall of Sound was a Grateful Dead project. They owned the Wall of Sound. We engineered it; they owned it.
RON WICKERSHAM [11/12/14]: Prior to that, lots of people played through it. It was just a PA for hire. But then, when it needed to grow faster than we could self-finance it, then the Grateful Dead took it over. The Alembic roadies for the PA became Grateful Dead employees. They bought all the equipment.
JESSE: Ron went on the road with the Dead on and off from late 1972 through early 1974, where he'd scout out a venue in advance and figure out the best way to address its acoustics.
RON WICKERSHAM [11/12/14]: We had this collection of devices that we could array in a completely different way to be optimized for the hall. I would go ahead and set it up in my mind, what I would do. And the promoter and the local scaffolding guys would have the gear, all kinds of gear, to make what we needed. Then the road crew would come and we'd discuss what the plan would be. You can't imagine… I don't think any other road crew in the world was doing this stuff, maybe outside of the big road crews they have for motion pictures, that do these amazing things with big budgets. But with the size budget [we had] and the dedication of the road crew, they would saw wood, make shelving, do the scaffolding construction. And we would make a sound system for that room that was appropriate to the acoustics of that room.
JESSE: Ron wasn't always the most social member of the Dead family.
SUSAN WICKERSHAM [11/12/14]: He's much more comfortable with books.
JESSE: Crew member Richie Pechner, who helped assemble the Wall of Sound, attests to this.
RICHIE PECHNER: I was really close with Ron. When we'd go on the road together, we'd room together. Only a few people would like to get up early on the road, and he and I were two of them. We decided we'd room together so he wouldn't be in somebody's room who was staying up late at night and wanted to sleep in. When we'd go to these different cities, the first thing he do is go to the library, and then look up research on sound engineering over the past 50, 60, 100 years, whatever, and wind up extracting information out of these historical textbooks or reports that often would be kept in some secure place in the library. They weren't part of the public part of the library, but he was able to get access to the documents because he was an engineer. That was fascinating, because he was maintaining that a lot of this stuff had been figured out and nobody had really just applied it to what the Grateful Dead was trying to do. He was approaching his design from existing research and existing experiments. That was pretty interesting to see how he worked that.
JESSE: Originally, Bear's idea for the PA was to mimic a home stereo. But Ron Wickersham helped Bear get to the central idea behind the Wall of Sound, which was a configuration of multiple single-point sound systems, one for each musician and the vocalists.
RON WICKERSHAM [11/12/14]: I taught him the single-point thing — not the idea, because other people had done that. It was a common thing. But what Bear would do is, you didn't hang out on stage or something. You walked around the audience, ran around the audience and listened really carefully to what it was. You could hear these comb filtering effects. And the comb filtering effects in a large hall are enormously bad. They're just crazy. They still happen if you buy the most expensive sound system. It's the interface of acoustics. It's physics, it's not the quality of the individual components.
JESSE: Not only did Richie Pechner help build the Wall of Sound and set it up at shows across the country in 1974, he took many wonderful pictures, which you've likely seen adorning Grateful Dead archival releases.
RICHIE PECHNER: We were literally building it right up until that tour. It was a work-in-progress. It was a kind of design-as-you-go adventure. There were engineers and a lot of input on what it should be. And then, between that and having it made and taken on the road, there was a slight disconnect in that the chain of command wasn't as clear as it could be.
JESSE: Journalist Brian Anderson is working on a book about the Wall of Sound, called Loud and Clear, to be published next year by St. Martin's Press.
BRIAN ANDERSON: They had their custom staging and custom scaffolding that was in effect there. Notably, if you look at pictures of that Reno show, you see that the work that was being done on the modular center cluster was complete.
JESSE: The modular center cluster of the Wall of Sound is the beautiful curved array that delivered the vocals, hung in the center of the stage.
RICHIE PECHNER: The center cluster was actually built at an iron shop down the street, because the inside is all metal. Then we encased it and put the speakers in after the metal frame was made. That was Victor's Ironworks. They make stair rails, handrails, gates, anything that could be welded. Early on it was a blacksmith shop. When his dad had it, it was a blacksmith shop, and it kind of morphed into a metal fabrication shop. The owner at first was a little skeptical of us hippies, coming over and trying to engage him in this thing. But we were paying for him to weld and experiment. He kind of guided us in some of the metal configuration. So we knew what we wanted and he knew how to make it happen. So it was a good experience.
JESSE: And so the crowning piece of the Wall of Sound came together.
RICHIE PECHNER: That center cluster actually was two halves that we bolted together. Actually, two quarters, and it made a half. It was too heavy to make it one piece. There was so much innovation and engineering going on to get that to the point where it was roadworthy. It's just amazing that we were able to pull it off. When you look back on it, some of us knew some things, and none of us knew everything. But to collaborate and pull it off to me just seems like an incredible achievement. Knowing all the ups and downs and false starts and dead-end leads — just everything that goes on, that went on, to get to the point where it was working I think was really an incredible journey.
JESSE: Though the Wall of Sound kept changing, the introduction of the cluster was a turning point.
RON WICKERSHAM [11/12/14]: That final Wall of Sound thing with the aluminum center cluster — at that point, I didn't need to go on the road, because they had to only book that in the halls that were appropriate for that.
JESSE: On May 12th, the Wall got its biggest test yet. It'd been tried at home at Winterland and the unforgiving Cow Palace, but Reno was its first massive outdoor show. There was even a bit of a local panic when word got out about what the Dead were bringing to town. A few days before the Dead arrived, the Reno Evening Gazette ran with the front page headline: New rock concert fear: super powerful sound and it was left to the promoters to explain that, yes, this was the most powerful sound system ever built but it wasn't necessarily the loudest. And when the Dead finally got to town and set up, that was when Wally—
WALL OF SOUND: DO NOT CALL ME THAT.
JESSE: —met the Washoe Zephyr winds.
AUDIO: "Tuning" [From the Mars Hotel 50, 5/12/74] (0:09-0:22) - [dead.net]
PHIL LESH [5/12/74]: You all got some great wind out here, I gotta tell ya. If we could be half as loud as this wind, we would be doing alright.
JESSE: I'll just let the Wall read from Wikipedia here.
WALL OF SOUND: The Washoe Zephyr is a seasonal diurnal wind which occurs across western Nevada just east of the Sierra Nevada mountains. It blows primarily in the summer from mid afternoon until late in the evening from the west to southwest, becoming quite gusty.
PHIL LESH [5/12/74]: Does anybody out there know what time the Washoe Zephyr pulls out of town? Well, pray for it to pull out soon, would ya?
JESSE: The May 12th show from Reno now comprises discs 2 and 3 of From the Mars Hotel 50, where engineer David Glasser also had to do battle with the Washoe Zephyr. After listening to the long-circulating tape, I'm ready to deem David Glasser: 1; Washoe Zephyr: 0.
RICHIE PECHNER: At Reno, there was no soundcheck. We were literally plugging stuff in when the show was supposed to start. And because it was outdoors, there were people in there. Usually you can keep the doors closed while you're setting up. But for an outdoor show, they can't have people rushing in so they let him in earlier. They were literally working while people were hanging out and trying to get a good spot and all that.
JESSE: Steve Brown from Grateful Dead Records was in Reno for the Wall's road debut.
STEVE BROWN: The scariest part was when we took it to Reno and had to put it up there. That was the first time we did an outdoor gig with it., and there were goddamn hurricane winds up there that day. It was really scary. Everybody that had to play on stage with this thing behind them was, like, freaking out. They kept looking over their shoulder. We weren't really sure… it was in this big open field, a big open football field.
JESSE: Drummer Billy Kreutzmann was a bit skeptical.
RICHIE PECHNER: The first time he saw it up, his riser was underneath it. And he said, "I'm not playing under that." But that was a general rule — he didn't move under it when it went indoors. [chuckles] He just said, "I'm not playing under that…"
STEVE BROWN: It was horribly scary for him, I'm sure.
JESSE: And you know, fair.
RICHIE PECHNER: He had inside information. He knew all the people that put it together. Trust me.
STEVE BROWN: The vocal stack that was right above his head… yeah, those were all the vocal things. Those were just dangling, hanging like a big chandelier.
RICHIE PECHNER: We were not convinced that we'd figured everything out engineering-wise, in terms of what would it take to, say, knock over the stacks. So we're all kind of watching and paying attention, maybe a little paranoia would creep in, there'd be a gust and you'd look up: did that move? The last thing you wanted to do was kill a band member…
JESSE: Oh, well, only one thing to do.
AUDIO: "Truckin" [From the Mars Hotel 50, 5/12/74] (0:00-0:12) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The Washoe Zephyr is pretty obvious in the photos of the day. Listener Eric Bray left us this story at stories.dead.net. He left for the show from South Lake Tahoe.
ERIC BRAY: I stood out in front of my place with a big sign, I remember, written on cardboard. It just said "DEAD" on it, or "THE DEAD." So, that's all it took: we got our rides, and we ended up at the show. What I remember about the show was the wind, man. The wind was blowing, and those big Wall of Sound speakers were swaying. We're wondering — Damn, what's gonna happen with those speakers? And also the sound was getting blown around in a strange kind of way, too.
AUDIO: "I Know You Rider" [From the Mars Hotel 50, 5/12/74] (6:00-6:15) - [dead.net]
BOB WEIR [5/12/74]: Playin' out here for you folks on this glorious afternoon, all this wind kind of makes you feel humble.
PHIL LESH [5/12/74]: It might make you feel humble, man, but it just makes me sweat.
ERIC BRAY: I'd taken just a little smidgen of acid—it was more than enough—and I'm sitting up there on the very top of the eastern stands. We were up there and we can hear the sound, we can hear the music, we're dancing around, and the sound was kind of blowing around with the wind. The speakers are swaying.
JESSE: But in the second set, there's some excellent jamming. I love this big descending peak right before the only verse of "The Other One."
AUDIO: "The Other One" [From the Mars Hotel 50, 5/12/74] (6:53-7:20) - [dead.net]
JESSE: And then the full two-part Mind Left Body theme with Garcia on slide acting as a bridge into "Row Jimmy."
AUDIO: "The Other One" [From the Mars Hotel 50, 5/12/74] (19:43-20:13) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Ron Rakow of Grateful Dead Records had a pretty memorable time in Reno.
RON RAKOW: The Grateful Dead played in Reno, Nevada. On the stage during the gig, I proposed to Emily, and we drove to the Chapel of Promise in Reno, Nevada. Keith, Donna and Weir got in the backseat of the car. We walked off the stage, and they got into my car. And my car was not a roomy car—it was a two-door Volkswagen with back seats—and they were singing acapella: "Going to the chapel and going to get married," the three of them in the back.
AUDIO: "Chapel of Love" [The Dixie Cups, The Very Best of The Dixie Cups] (0:00-0:14) - [Spotify]
Pacific Northwest
JESSE: The Wall's second road gig, in Missoula, Montana, is now Dave's Picks 9.
AUDIO: "Scarlet Begonias" [Dave's Picks 9, 5/14/74] (0:04-0:35)
JESSE: But mostly for our storytelling purposes, we're going to let Steve Brown and Richie Pechner tell us a story about the Wall of Sound's first international experience. Take it away, Steve.
STEVE BROWN: We played Missoula, Montana at the university. We go to the hotel after the gig and everybody is told, because we're gonna go to Vancouver: "If you've got personal stash, make sure you give it to the crew to put in the trucks." You take the speakers out, you put the stuff in behind the speakers, you put the speakers back in, you drive the truck into Canada. Real simple. Anyway, we get into the station wagon the next morning and Jerry's sitting there, I'm sitting there. "Now, has everybody got their stuff taken care of? They don't have it with them? It's in the trucks?" Jerry goes: "Yeah, man." Okay… So we get to Vancouver. We get our bags, we get in line, we go through the customs guy. Jerry's in front of me. I'm there with my suitcase, and they put it up on the counter. They open it up. T-shirt, Levis, baggy. Here's this donkey dick-sized kola from a Maui ranch, Maui Wowie, and the guy—he's this older guy—looks at it and holds it up in front of Jerry. He goes, "What is this?" Jerry says, "Oh, a fan gave it to me. [It's] tea?" Well, at that moment, I'm having a grand clong, which is a sudden rush of shit to the heart.
AUDIO: Gong (0:00-0:04)
RICHIE PECHNER: I was five people behind him in the customs line! [laughs] We were going, "Oh, shit…" What a bonehead move! The crew would pride ourselves—in fact, I don't know if I've ever mentioned this for broadcast; doesn't matter now—on, when we were building all this equipment, we would build in stash places into certain pieces of equipment. We knew what the liability was, and we also knew we needed to take certain things with us that we didn't want to be discovered. We would take great lengths to be able to conceal things cleverly, and always got away with it. So, to see that, it was kind of like: what was he thinking?
STEVE BROWN: I'm next in line! I know I'm clean, but look at this guy — he's holding up… and then the guy looks over to the exit doors over there, and there's this hippie standing over there long-haired hippie guy. The e customs guy signals to this long-haired hippie guy to come over. I go, What? And this hippie guy comes over—obviously an agent also—and they both turn their backs to us. They're holding the bag up and he opens it up for this guy to smell. The guy's smelling it, and then the guy happens to look over and do a double take on who it is that's standing there, scared as shit. And it's Jerry Garcia! So this hippie guy, who's an agent apparently, goes to the guy that's found this thing in his bag there, the custom agent, and the custom agent says, "Well…" And the guy goes, "I don't know…" And I'm going — yes! We're out, we're free! We're free! The customs guy wasn't going for it. The customs guy says, "Uh, we're gonna have this security person take you to the back room." And I'm next in line, so they went through my bag really carefully, my suitcase.
RICHIE PECHNER: At the moment, it was like, Oh my god, what's gonna happen now? We knew it was against the law. Nobody was kidding themselves about the danger and the crew took it very seriously when we were on the road, so we took extra care in working things out equipment-wise. So yeah, it was kind of like — oops, somebody forgot…
STEVE BROWN: As soon as I got to the phone, I called the office and they said, "Call Hal Kant." And then Hal Kant called back through the office, and he said, "The deal is to find the most expensive lawyer in Vancouver. Find the main guy, the main big guy there, and get his name." Hal was trying to help from his end. We did [get his name] — it was about 15 hours later, so Jerry's back at the hotel. But what wound up happening is they banned Jerry from Canada for like two years. Jerry was banned from being in Canada for two years! That was the worst of it. But, in any case, we got to play the gig, and nobody got hurt. But the grand clong was definitely one of those moments where — oh my god, this is the end of everything as we know it. Sudden rush of shit to the heart.
AUDIO: Gong (0:00-0:04)
JESSE: But with two off-days between the Missoula gig on May 14th and the Vancouver show on the 17th, there was not only time to liberate their Garcia but actually get everything set up properly. Brian Anderson.
BRIAN ANDERSON: The Vancouver ‘74 Pacific Northwest Wall of Sound show — that was a moment where they actually had time for a soundcheck. They had everything set up, they were able to call the band to come over from the hotel, had some time before the doors open to do a proper experimental, like, "let's get weird" kind of soundcheck. And a lot of the road crew were looking around at each other, patting each other on the back — like, ‘Holy shit, we did it.' That Vancouver stop was definitely another momentous plot point in the life of the Wall of Sound.
RICHIE PECHNER: Everybody could chill a little bit in a tour that had no chill up to that moment. Everything had been hectic and barely able to pull it off by showtime. You could sense this relief, that everybody was feeling really good about what we had done because, boom, we were able to soundcheck it. It sounded absolutely incredible. It was almost like the musicians wanted to, one at a time, come off the stage and go out front and hear what it sounded like. Because we were just going, "Oh, man, this is killer."
JESSE: The Vancouver ‘74 show is now on the Pacific Northwest box set, highly recommended. One small, or big thing, to note is that the PNE Coliseum in Vancouver is where Owsley's original sound system for the Dead met its own final defeat in the summer of 1966.
AUDIO: "Dancin' in the Street" [7/30/66] (0:25-0:52)
PHIL LESH [7/30/66]: We will use a simple syllable to test our microphones to test our microphones tonight. The syllable is: narc. Narc, narc—
MC [7/30/66]: This!
PHIL LESH [7/30/66]: —narc, narc, narc—
MC [7/30/66]: Is!
PHIL LESH [7/30/66]: —narc.
BOB WEIR [7/30/66]: Narc, narc!
MC [7/30/66]: The!
BOB WEIR [7/30/66]: That's what a dog with a hairlip says.
MC [7/30/66]: Grateful Dead from San Francisco!
JESSE: You can hear some of those gigs on a Record Store Day release from 2017. After that, Owsley went off to make more acid and eventually reconceive his approach to live sound. They were still figuring it out.
RICHIE PECHNER: One of the things that became obvious in the first week was — the thing that took the longest was the scaffolding. We'd show up with a 40-foot truck with the PA and we'd have to wait because the scaffolding hadn't been erected in time. That was easily solvable by ordering a second scaffolding setup to leapfrog each gig, so that when we got there the scaffolding was up and we could start setting up the Wall. The frequency of the gigs was based on a previous setup, and it didn't adjust to the new setup, which took longer. It physically just took longer to get it ready once you got to the venue. We were basically behind the eight ball, in terms of getting it set up in the timeframe that the tour had set out. So one of the unique things about that one photo of mine, with the band on the stage, is that it was the first time that we had it set up and running before the doors open, so the band could actually do a soundcheck.
AUDIO: "Promised Land" [Pacific Northwest, 5/17/74] (0:00-0:10) - [dead.net]
BRIAN ANDERSON: I think it was by then abundantly clear, from there on out, that the rig was never set up the same way. Things were just changing at such a rapid pace: how they were loading in and out; how they locked the cabinets together; how they angled certain speakers to enhance the directionality of the sound to fit the space; and on and on and on. In everything that they did with the Wall, they were always trying to figure out how to be more efficient. Everything was always changing. Bob Weir especially was always wanting to try different things, change things up gig to gig. He may also have had a hand in actualizing some of the ported speaker cabinets that you can see on Wall of Sound shows. If you look closely at some of the pictures in his stacks, you can see some of those speakers are actually ported, which is interesting. Garcia, by contrast, had a way of trying to keep a stability when it came to his rig within the rig. He was open to using McIntosh amps of course — the famous Budman amp. But he kind of always liked his Fender Twin, too. He liked stability.
JESSE: There wasn't going to be a lot of stability with the Wall of Sound. We'll return to its story next time.
AUDIO: "Promised Land" [Pacific Northwest, 5/17/74] (2:30-2:50)
Chain, Unbroken
JESSE: From the Mars Hotel was released in June 1974. Surely it wasn't long before a Dead Head wondered when they might hear "Unbroken Chain" live, or if they'd only just missed it. Some Dead Head interviewers asked Jerry Garcia about it in 1981.
JERRY GARCIA [7/10/81]: I don't remember that we've ever done "Unbroken Chain."
JESSE: But that didn't stop it from being a constant topic of speculation among heads. On the Usenet, the rec.music.gdead frequently asked questions file include question 28: "Has Unbroken Chain ever been performed live?"
WALL OF SOUND: No. Apparently, there is a version of "Unbroken Chain" from the Mars Hotel Studio sessions circulating on copies of 12/12/73 from the Omni, but it is not a soundcheck, rather from the above-mentioned sessions in 1974.
JESSE: Christian Crumlish.
CHRISTIAN CRUMLISH: There was always a little bit of lore around "Unbroken Chain." You probably remember there was that rumor that, when they finally played it, that would be the end or something like that.
JESSE: In fact, I have heard that rumor, but I'm not sure I ever heard it prior to the Dead's last show. Did anyone? Get in touch at stories.dead.net. But it still became a legit fan favorite. From The New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: I got to know Mars Hotel when it came out on CD. I think this was like 1986 or something. A friend of mine had a fancy stereo and was the first guy I knew that had a CD player, so that was this new technology. It was this brand-new thing, and he had like six CDs. Because they were new and because of the way they looked—the way they shined, and you get that little rainbow on them—they looked space-age. Now, they're almost completely obsolete.
JESSE: In fact, in 1986, From the Mars Hotel was the only Grateful Dead available on CD, from the Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: We were Dead Heads — we were used to listening to crappy bootlegs and crappy tapes. This sounded great. I thought: oh, digital sound, this is the shit! It's changed everything. I think what originally attracted me to Mars Hotel was just this feast of good sound. Just the immaculate sound of it. There's that jet engine sound, passing from one speaker to the other in stereo, on "Unbroken Chain."
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [From the Mars Hotel] (3:05-3:25) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
NICK PAUMGARTEN: There's something about that that was like… wow! In a way it's like a premonition of the ‘80s, smack dab in 1974. At the time we were listening to this CD, it was the ‘80s, so that was the sound that we were sort of surrounded by in real-time: the chime-y synth years, ‘83 to ‘86, all those gongs and chimes and stuff. Mars Hotel on CD seemed consistent with that era and the way things sounded when you were at the shows, or when you were getting, suddenly, these really crisp soundboards of ‘85-'86. So it kind of weirdly dovetailed with what we were into, and it was a different kind of thing from that woody Americana from the albums that preceded it — which we didn't even get to experience firsthand as much. The sound at those shows was sort of bigger and more modern.
JESSE: It would take another decade or so for the Dead to bring "Unbroken Chain" into modernity. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Breakouts were the best. When you were there, when you heard about it, whether it was "Dark Star," "Help on the Way" or "Attics [of My Life]" or whatever it was, they were the best. But I've gotta say, "Unbroken Chain" could have been the most unexpected breakout — and largely the most welcome one as well.
JESSE: In the spring of 1995, the Grateful Dead finally got back to it.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [soundcheck, 3/95] (0:33-0:50)
JERRY GARCIA [3/95]: What's the first chord there?
PHIL LESH [3/95]: E minor. F major 7. D minor 7. E minor, G.
JESSE: That's from a soundcheck in Philadelphia in March 1995 where they really had to put it back together piece by piece. Phil's son Grahame had requested it, and who was Phil to say no? Two days later, they did it.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I still listen to the audience tape of the breakout in Philadelphia and I get goosebumps listening to it. They end the first set with a typical first set closer, and then they don't walk off stage. And then they go into it— you're thinking, Oh, what's this little thing? When people pick up on the chord progression, and then Phil starts singing… I have goosebumps talking about it!
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [3/19/95 audience tape] (0:00-0:48)
DAVID LEMIEUX: I had friends who saw a lot of shows in ‘95 and they got to see it four, five, six times. I envy that. I wish I had seen it.
JESSE: And the Dead went ahead and played it 10 times in 1995. The song has been in the repertoire of a number of post-Grateful Dead projects, including the Dead, Furthur, and—of course—Phil Lesh and Friends, like the classic shows with Trey Anastasio, Page McConnell, Steve Kimock, and John Molo in 1999.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Phil Lesh and Friends, 4/16/99] (4:05-4:26)
JESSE: Listener and journalist Seth Mnookin shared a pretty powerful "Unbroken Chain" story with us.
SETH MNOOKIN: I started listening to the Dead in high school and I fell for them pretty hard, almost right away. But it wasn't until 1990 that I began doing real touring. I hit five shows that March, including the March 24 Show in Albany that became Dozin' at the Knick,and the RFK show that summer that included just an absolutely phenomenal 25-minute "Dark Star." And so there were also seven or eight official releases that I listened to a ton, including Mars Hotel. My favorite song on the album was always "Unbroken Chain," and there wasn't really anything in second place. I loved everything about it.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [From the Mars Hotel] (4:56-5:10) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
SETH MNOOKIN: Not long after I graduated from college and moved to New York, I developed a heroin habit of my own. And I was high the last time I ever saw the band, which was June 19th, 1995 at Giant Stadium. The first set was rough, but the second set was absolutely brutal.
JESSE: There was an "Unbroken Chain," but it didn't go well.
SETH MNOOKIN: The next two years were incredibly dark ones, so dark that even now, more than a quarter of a century later, it scares me to think about them. A lot of people I knew died during those years.
JESSE: Seth tried to get clean. And again and again.
SETH MNOOKIN: My stint at McLean [Hospital] was the 12th time I had been in some sort of detox facility over the previous 24 months — so, one night on the outside was incredibly risky. I was planning on spending that night with a woman I knew, and I biked to her apartment with my Walkman on, listening to "Unbroken Chain." There's a freedom about biking on near-deserted city streets at night that is almost spiritual. But that night, as I was listening to "Unbroken Chain," I had what I guess I would call now some sort of moment of clarity. Addiction, for me at least, was all-consuming. I couldn't give myself over to anything else when I was in the throes of full-blown addiction, because my top priority was always, always locating, acquiring and using dope. And in that way, looking back, it felt like I was in some sort of prison. On my bike that night, everything about "Unbroken Chain"—its freedom, its ecstasy, the way it conveyed the wonder of human creation and creativity—
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [From the Mars Hotel] (6:08-6:27) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
SETH MNOOKIN: —the blissful commingling of consciousnesses that's part of group improvisation and experimentation—[all] felt like giant arrows of neon, showing me what might be possible if I quit using dope. And, by extension, the pitiful, painful display I'd seen in Giant Stadium a few years earlier was where I would be headed otherwise.
I didn't use that night and flew to Florida the next day, and I haven't used heroin in more than 26 years. I turn 52 in a couple of weeks, which is just a year younger than Jerry was when he died. Apart from the songs on American Beauty and Workingman's Dead, "Unbroken Chain" is one of the few studio tracks I listen to regularly. It always reminds me of how close I came to not being here today, and how grateful I am that I chose a different path.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [From the Mars Hotel] (6:27-6:40) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
What Would I Want? Sky
JESSE: "Unbroken Chain" isn't a song covered casually and it doesn't usually get performed outside the Dead world. We've spoken a lot on the Deadcast about how the Dead's music has seeded artists that followed them, with both their songbook and approach. The righteous band Animal Collective did, however, sample "Unbroken Chain" on their tune "What Would I Want? Sky" in 2009.
AUDIO: "What Would I Want? Sky" [Animal Collective, Fall Be Kind EP] (3:09-3:38) - [Bandcamp]
JESSE: That was four words from "Unbroken Chain," "sky, whoa, I walk" looped over and over until it resembles the phrase "What Would I Want? Sky." To talk about how "Unbroken Chain" seeded a whole new song, please welcome, from Animal Collective, Avey Tare, sometimes known as Dave Portner. Dave's close to my age, one of the last generation to discover the band while they were still the Grateful Dead.
DAVE PORTNER: I got into the Dead via Skeletons from the Closet, the greatest hits, when I was in fifth grade maybe. Got the cassette. I had cousins that were into the band, and it was just one of those things where I would just listen to a lot of the music that they were listening to. I got that tape and, from there, it was just diving into everything. "Touch of Grey" was around that time, so they were kind of visible in a lot of realms. I started to go see them or just had an interest to go check ‘em out in the early ‘90s: ‘91, ‘92, ‘til the end. Seeing the RFK shows. Saw some Philly shows. Spectrum
AUDIO: "Speaking in Swords" [Infrared Roses] (0:00-0:21) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVE PORTNER: I had Infrared Roses. "Space" was huge for me. I remember just being at the RFK shows and that just being such a moment. It was definitely a lot different, say, in the ‘90s, compared to the ‘80s or earlier times when they had been doing it. So, that's cool that way, too. We got into psychedelic and freak-out jammier music really early on. That was a really important part of music to us, the improvisational part. So having the Dead around at that time, to still be able to check that out, was awesome.
JESSE: The future members of Animal Collective got way into the Dead together.
DAVE PORTNER: Liked them a lot, and collected tapes and in high school with Brian. There was a guy that worked at our school cafeteria that was a head and just would make us tapes. And then, simultaneously, got into all the records.
JESSE: But the members of Animal Collective got into a lot of different sounds together, and the group they formed didn't sound much like the Dead, except in spirit.
AUDIO: "Soul Capturer" [Animal Collective, Isn't It Now?] (0:38-1:10) - [Bandcamp]
JESSE: That was "Soul Capturer" from Animal Collective's most recent album, Isn't It Now?. Animal Collective are a psychedelic band in a different way than the Dead, aiming for transcendence with a pretty different sonic palette. But live, Animal Collective transition between songs with unknowns in between, play material they haven't yet recorded, and keep pushing forward. In 2008 and 2009, they assembled their successful album Merriweather Post Pavilion, named after the local amphitheater where, not coincidentally, the Dead played, and they got into the newest phase.
DAVE PORTNER: We were delving heavily into sampling stuff in that time, the Merriweather era. I think Noah [Lennox] definitely started leading the way with the [Panda Bear] Person Pitch stuff, just kind of looping stuff. We were just trying to gather a lot of songs. I would just go through time periods of diving for samples, or diving for a loop that would be cool enough or sound good enough to work for a song. I was most concerned about getting the right beat, having it be a good break or a good beat to get the rhythm going. I'll find the loop and then try to see if I can make a vocal melody over the top of the loop.
JESSE: It's a different kind of songwriting than figuring out chords on a guitar or a piano. During the process, Dave remembered his Dead Head training.
DAVE PORTNER: I'd been into "Unbroken Chain" since hearing the record for the first time in junior high. I just thought one night, oh, maybe I could go to that song. It seemed like an unlikely Dead song to sample — it might be tougher to sample something more popular, say, like "Scarlet Begonias" from Mars Hotel or something like that. I think because it had that kind of reverse bell-plus-modular thing happening, and it keeps coming back in the song… I think I thought of that element in it as a loop, a potential loop. It wasn't like I was necessarily trying to get the loop that I did.
JESSE: Looping has lots of origins, but nearly any history will point back to Steve Reich's pivotal 1965 piece "It's Gonna Rain," where the composer looped a sample of a San Francisco street preacher named Brother Walter until it became a new piece of music.
AUDIO: "It's Gonna Rain (Part 1)" [Steve Reich, Works 1965-1995] (6:40-6:50) - [Spotify]
JESSE: "It's Gonna Rain" and the origins of looping and Minimalism share a peculiar Grateful Dead connection. In 1964, Reich was playing in a new music ensemble with Phil Lesh and Tom Constanten. Reich made his original live tape with a tape deck he shared with Lesh. So, with that in mind…
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Phil Vocal — Looped, From the Mars Hotel] (1:38-1:40)
JESSE: Dave didn't have access to the multitracks, though.
DAVE PORTNER: But then, by chance almost, I grabbed the section that I did, which has Phil saying the word "sky" first, actually. That's the start of the loop, but the more the loop gets going, it gets reversed, so "sky" comes later. In my head, it just became Phil saying: "What would I want? Sky. What would I want? Sky."
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [Phil Vocal — Looped, From the Mars Hotel] (1:38-1:40)
DAVE PORTNER: When I did the chord change in the song, it just worked so well to me. It became so catchy that I couldn't stop, couldn't get it out of my head. I just felt like that was the loop — that was the one I had to use.
AUDIO: "What Would I Want? Sky" [Animal Collective, Fall Be Kind EP] (3:58-4:35) - [Bandcamp]
JESSE: It led, a few years later, to an invitation from Mickey Hart to collaborate at Hart's studio in California.
DAVE PORTNER: I went out there to his home studio, his house, spent some days checking out the music. He gave me a large notebook of Hunter lyrics. We'd listen to stuff he had recorded, just trying to come up with some melodies and some singing, like top lines over it. Yeah, it was a fun time — just to kind of have the freedom to take the songs to where I was staying at night, listen to them and try and work with the lyrics, to be able to come up with some stuff.
AUDIO: "Wayward Son" [Mickey Hart feat. Avey Tare, RAMU] (1:14-1:34) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was "Wayward Son" from Mickey Hart's 2017 album RAMU.
DAVE PORTNER: It's awesome to feel connected to that musically. Their music means so much to me, and it's changed my perception of music so much.
JESSE: The same way that the Grateful Dead are connected in the ‘60s to figures like Steve Reich and in the ‘70s to Ned Lagin, Dave Portner's presence on RAMU connects them to the next waves of musicians, perpetuating itself down through the generations, westward in the wagons, across the sands of time, maybe something about an unbroken chain.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" (Demo) [Beyond Description (1973-1989), 8/11/73] (5:28-6:00) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" (Demo) [Beyond Description (1973-1989), 8/11/73] (6:15-6:19) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
PHIL LESH [8/11/73]: Let me hear the whole thing, would ya? Just through the phones…