Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 7, Episode 2
The Adventures of Pigpen, part 2
Archival interviews:
- Connie Bonner, Bob Matthews and Sue Swanson, by David Gans, 1992.
- Jerry Garcia, by Ben Fong-Torres, KSAN, 1975.
- Jerry Garcia, by David Gans and Blair Jackson, Conversations with the Dead, 6/11/81.
- Jerry Garcia, by Peter Simon, WMVY, 1975.
- Phil Lesh, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 7/30/81.
- Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, by Hank Harrison & Bobby Petersen, 10/6/70.
- Bob Weir, WMMR, 1976.
AUDIO: “She’s On the Road Again” [Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, s/t, 7/64] (1:02-1:35)
JESSE: That was Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions performing at the Top of the Tangent in Palo Alto, California in the summer of 1964, doing “She’s On the Road Again,” originally recorded by the Memphis Jug Band. Ron “Pigpen” McKernan is playing harmonica and singing backup there, Jerry Garcia on lead vocal. Sometime later in 1964, or maybe early in 1965, it was Pigpen who suggested that the members of the jug band grab some electric instruments off the wall at Dana Morgan Music and try playing some rock and roll.
AUDIO: “She’s On The Road Again” [5/66] (2:08-2:40)
JESSE: And that was an early Grateful Dead version of “She’s On the Road Again,” probably from May of 1966. That’s the band we’ll be talking about today — the Palo Alto folk and blues freaks transformed into psychedelic rock heroes. Before we get going, we wanted to shout out Blair Jackson and Regan McMahaon’s tremendous Pigpen oral history from the final issue of The Golden Road in 1993. It was an enormous help as a jumping off point for researching Pigpen’s life. In our last episode, we went pretty deep into the McKernan family archives. We’ll be doing a little more of that today. One document there is a scrap of paper that seems to be a song list in Ron McKernan’s handwriting. Please welcome back Sully, the guide and guardian of the Pigpen archives.
JIM “SULLY” SULLIVAN: “Too Much Monkey Business,” “Who Do You Love,” “I’m A Man,” “Walkin’ the Dog,” a lot of Chuck Berry. “Follow the Sun,” there’s some Beatles in there. It had to be right around that time — “Can’t Buy Me Love.” There was really no provenance, but it’s obviously really early. You can tell it's all folded up, he just folded it up and stuck it in his pocket. When he got home, he probably just shoved it in a drawer. So where? And when? Lost to time. I don’t know.
JESSE: We poked into it a little more in our “Operator” episode in 2020. As musicians around the local folk clubs, the former jug band was already at least a little popular. Even before they’d played their first show, the band had a built in fanbase from the social scene they’d found around folk music, which included some places to practice. This is from David Gans’s 1992 interview with Bob Matthews, Sue Swanson, and Connie Bonner.
BOB MATTHEWS [1992]: In the very early days, prior to really playing anywhere, there was a lot of rehearsal. They played in Sue’s backyard, and they played in my living room one time, I think when my parents weren’t there.
SUE SWANSON [1992]: [chuckles] Yeah, undoubtedly.
BOB MATTHEWS [1992]: I think that was a prerequisite. But the parents found out, and to this day, my mother still reminds me about the Ripple bottles in the garden.
SUE SWANSON [1992]: Was it Ripple, not Thunderbird?
BOB MATTHEWS [1992]: Oh you’re right.
CONNIE BONNER [1992]: I remember the aluminum screw-on top.
BOB MATTHEWS [1992]: Of course, he was so mean looking that you couldn’t take him anywhere. He was the same age we were, which was barely 18 at that point. Probably more like 17.
CONNIE BONNER [1992]: Very worldly.
BOB MATTHEWS [1992]: We could run over to East Palo Alto to Berrone’s Liquor Store —
SUE SWANSON [1992]: Buy anything, man.
BOB MATTHEWS [1992]: Send him in with money and he’d come out with anything that you ask for.
CONNIE BONNER [1992]: Much more worldly than we were.
BOB MATTHEWS [1992]: I used to drink Green Death, Rainier [Ale]. We paid for Pig’s Thunderbird, he’d go out and buy us two or three big bottles of Green Death.
JESSE: Looked at it one way, there was a split occurring inside the Warlocks. We spoke a bunch with Eric Thompson in our last episode. He was part of Jerry Garcia’s picking circle as part of the Black Mountain Boys and a late period member of the Jug Band.
ERIC THOMPSON: May of ‘65, a whole bunch of us moved into this one house on Gilman Street in Palo Alto. So Jerry was still with [first wife] Sara, but mostly he was hanging out. There was this house and [David] Nelson lived there, I lived there, Pigpen lived there, Rick Shubb lived there. And this is the house where, the day we moved in, we all had our first acid trip. Pigpen did not take any LSD. He was not into any of the drugs. He was always just… he was not interested in the other thing at all.
JESSE: It was less than a week later that the new band the Warlocks opened their weekly residency at Magoo’s Pizza in Menlo Park. Even though pot and LSD would become major parts of the local music landscape and that of the Warlocks most especially, Pigpen had found his home — even if he didn’t last too long on Gilman Street.
ERIC THOMPSON: Pigpen was part of that scene at that house on Gilman Street — even though he wasn't into the drugs part, he was into the scene part. Rick Shubb lived there, too. And you know about the Map of the World…
JESSE: I most certainly do. Humbead’s Revised Map of the World hangs on the wall next to my desk. It also plays a major role in my book, Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America. Most people know Rick Shubb as the inventor and still the proprietor of Shubb guitar capos, but Rick is also a brilliant artist. In 1967 and 1968, he and the late great Earl Crabb conceptualized and created Humbead’s Map, sold in head shops and by mail order. It looks a bit like Pangea, a smooshed together continent that maps out the known territories of folk music and the emerging head scene, including the countries of San Francisco, Berkeley, Cambridge, New York City, and Los Angeles. The continent is surrounded by water. The ocean, just off the Right-Downwards coast of Berkeley, is labeled the Wavy Waste. And rising from Wavy Waste with a trident in hand and Neptune’s crown perched jauntily on his head, is the mighty Pigpen.
ERIC THOMPSON: Why would Rick Shubb make King Neptune Pigpen? Because they lived in the same fucking house.
JESSE: When the Warlocks got going in May 1965, Pigpen was one of the first things about the band to make an impression. One early fan was Phil Lesh, who saw the Warlocks at Magoo’s Pizza before he joined. This is from David Gans’s July 1981 interview with Phil from Conversations with the Dead.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: Whenever it was that they were playing, we took acid and went down there — Harrison, myself, Petersen, Jane, my girlfriend. And we came boppin’ in there, man, and it was really happening. 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 anyway — we were all so fuckin’ stoned. And during the setbreak, Jerry takes me off to a table and says, “Listen, man, how’d you like to play bass in this band?”
ERIC THOMPSON: Phil moved into the room across from me. And of course, he'd never played — he was a trumpet player, an avant-garde musician. So Phil has his bass, and says, “Eric, how does this thing work?” And I said, “Well, it’s kind of like the bottom four strings of the guitar. Here’s how you play a scale.” So he says, “Oh, thank you very much,” and went back to his room. And that was all he needed to know! So, it was like I gave Phil his first and only bass lesson.
JESSE: They debuted their new bassist at a gig in Hayward, in the East Bay, at Frenchy’s Bikini A Go Go. In his memoir, Phil Lesh remembered there being three people in attendance, two of them being Sue Swanson and Connie Bonner. Here’s how Sue Swanson remembered it.
SUE SWANSON [1992]: One of my favorite Pigpen stories I think is when they played in Fremont at Frenchy’s —
CONNIE BONNER [1992]: Frenchy’s!
BOB MATTHEWS [1992]: Frenchy’s A Go Go, on Mission Blvd…
SUE SWANSON [1992]: And he didn’t want to play, or he was too young and he’d forgotten his ID. Whatever the reason, we ended up out in the car, the two of us, while the band played. And he told me the whole story of The Hobbit! From beginning to end, while they played in Frenchy’s.
JESSE: Last episode, we discussed Pigpen and Jerry’s involvement in Troy Weidenheimer’s Palo Alto party band, the Zodiacs.
ERIC THOMPSON: The Warlocks began as a blues band. It was really just like an extension of the Zodiacs, except Garcia was playing guitar instead of playing bass, and Garcia was learning all of the Freddie King stuff that Troy could play. So it all built on that, but I will also say this: it was obvious when the Warlocks started, almost immediately, that this was going someplace.
Acid Tests
JESSE: In the fall of 1965, the Warlocks fell deeper into the circle around the novelist Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, who’d been living together at Kesey’s place in La Honda, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. One of the newest La Honda residents was Zodiacs fan Denise Kaufman, who you might know as a member of the righteous band Ace of Cups.
DENISE KAUFMAN: Coming up to La Honda, I was living in La Honda by then. I didn’t go to a lot of gigs of theirs or anything. We were all playing — Jerry, we were playing at La Honda. Mostly around a fire or something, not the band set up playing. Kreutzmann I knew, but I didn’t ever have a hang out with him. I did [hang out] with Jerry a lot, with Pigpen a lot, and with Bobby a lot — and more as time went on, through the years as Bobby and I became good friends. But Pigpen and I would just cruise together — we’d just cruise around Palo Alto or La Honda. I went to his parents’ house with him a few times. He did drink, which I didn’t. So that part was a little different. But he was just kind of kind and shy. We really connected about the music that we loved. I had gone to see Bobby “Blue” Bland in San Francisco. I was going to see James Brown.
He was such a special person. I think he was sort of emulating a lifestyle in a certain way of people whose music he loved so much. I wouldn’t have been drawn to him if he was an outrageous nasty drunk. To me, he was just sweet and kind and thoughtful.
JESSE: There’s a clip we’ve used a few times, which we’re going to use again here, of Pigpen and Ken Babbs in dialogue at the Fillmore Acid Test in January 1966.
KEN BABBS [1/8/66]: Comin’ through one of these days…
PIGPEN [1/8/66]: Hey, there ain’t no power on the stage!
KEN BABBS [1/8/66]: Come on, just keep —
PIGPEN [1/8/66]: No electricity on the stage! Fix it!
KEN BABBS [1/8/66]: This is the captain speaking, we have reached our first emergency and we haven’t even got by the boundaries —
PIGPEN [1/8/66]: How about you rectify it pretty damn quick?
KEN BABBS [1/8/66]: Let’s everybody put their worries and threats to mind and produce some e-lec-tricity for the stage?
PIGPEN [1/8/66]: It’s about time to get it ready…
KEN BABBS [1/8/66]: Yes, because there’s wires all around here, plugged into e-lec-tricity, all around here, and I’ll just reach down, everybody..
PIGPEN [1/8/66]: Hey, man, stop your babblin’, and fix these microphones! We need some power! Power! POWER!
JESSE: And we’ll probably use it again sometime. It’s true, Pigpen wasn’t an acid taker, but he certainly hung with the acid takers, right there alongside his bandmates in traveling with the Merry Pranksters. And like his bandmates, he came away with a bushel of Neal Cassady stories. This is from Pigpen’s 1970 interview with Hank Harrison, now in the Dead archive. This is truly one of the gnarlier audio sources we’ve used on this podcast, so apologies for that, but it’s too cool to not feature. I’ll try to translate the action on the other side of the tape fuzz. This is Pig talking about the Trips Festival, the Portland Acid Test and Neal Cassady.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: One of the major times that I was with him was at the Trips Festival at Longshoremen's Hall. I remember one time on the way to the Portland Acid Test, we all got in the Bus and roared up, it was heading for Portland.
JESSE: The date of the Portland Acid Test is in dispute, sometime in late December 1965 or early January 1966. A truly hit and run operation, with no print documentation that we know of. Some of the most vivid memories are of the trip north, when the Dead actually rode with the Pranksters in Furthur with Cowboy Neal at the wheel to… well, we’ll let Pigpen tell you about the Bus’s destination.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: Neal was driving and he was rapping in the microphone like he always does. Going through the toll gate, you should have seen them toll-takers look at us as we go through. Up by Maxwell, California, we burned out a back wheel bearing and had to stop at a gas station. We were stuck there for nearly 24 hours.
JESSE: Depending how you annotate JerryBase, there might need to be a separate entry for a date in Maxwell, California in this window.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: We took a couple of electrical cords and threw them out of the windows and plugged them into this outlet they had on the side of the gas station, and turned on the tape recorders and the guitars and the whole thing. The whole schtick. Finally we decided it wouldn't work, that it’d take too long — we had to get there, the Bus couldn’t get fixed. So we rented a truck.
JESSE: Eventually, with Prankster ingenuity, they hit the road.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: Rigged up lights on the inside of the box on the back of the truck, rigged an intercom system between the cab and the back, all in a few hours. And took off for Portland.
JESSE: The road hit back, but Pigpen got to witness Cassady in full flight.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: We're roaring up through this winding mountain road, snow drifts eight or 10 feet high on the sides and icy roads and blizzards and all that stuff. And Neal is there with one hand on a bottle of wine, the other hand popping speed, and the other hand playing with Anne [Murphy], and the other hand talkin’ into the microphone, and the other hand driving the train. On and on. And there I was — “Ahhh, give me some of that wine!”
JESSE: The trip up was perhaps more exciting than the trip there.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: It was a good trip. We got, we finally got to Portland and found the place. We went in and it was still snowing. We went in there and set things up. I spent quite a bit of time in the cloak room, sleeping on the floor with about nine other people. Flop… and then they kicked us out at 12 o’clock.
JESSE: Things were getting pretty exciting for the Grateful Dead, though.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: Then we decided: well, what the fuck, let's move to LA. So we went to LA, and I moved out of my parents’ house and —
HANK HARRISON [10/6/70]: The Acid Test down in LA.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: Yeah, that’s when we got hung up on the Acid Test and started moving around and doing stuff instead of being, like, stationary.
JESSE: Members of the Dead would sometimes speak of Pigpen being an anchor, and that was part of his character, too. Denise Kaufman told a slightly longer version of this in our “LA ‘66” episode. Summarizing briefly, it begins at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, and continues with Denise volunteering for a program in LA to study the psychic abilities of psychedelic users, staying with one of the professors running the project.
DENISE KAUFMAN: I was staying in his apartment in Westwood and I didn't really know LA very much. And he’d built this thing in his living room that looked like a coffin. He was painting it and it was a little… he was quite a bit older than I was, and I was like, “Eh, I’m not so sure about this.” And I knew the Pranksters were somewhere in LA, kind of heading up towards the Watts Acid Test, but not there yet. Before cell phones, how did you find people? And somehow, I was able to find Pigpen. I called somebody and they said, “Oh yeah, Pigpen’s staying at this place.” I called him, and he goes, “Well, where are you?!” And I’m like, “I’m in Westwood, Los Angeles, I need to get out of here.” He goes, “I’m coming — just tell me where you are.” He was so wonderful, and he just totally came and rescued me. All of a sudden, okay, I feel more… I’m in my crew.
JESSE: Pigpen was one of the few non-tripping witnesses to the Watts Acid Test. We’ll let him set the scene.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: Big plastic garbage can full of punch, which was loaded…
JESSE: That big plastic garbage can would, in fact be, be the non-proverbial electric Kool-Aid, the night the electric Kool-Aid got its name. We talked about this evening a good bit in our “LA ‘66” episode with perspectives from some of the other participants, but it’s fascinating to get Pig’s version, which puts the story into perspective with the recording. In some ways, this is also the night that Pigpen’s role as the non-tripping band member became solidified.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: By the time that Bear got all the stuff setup and everything halfway workin’, it was like 1 in the morning or something like that.
JESSE: Before the band was fully set up, Pig was on the mic.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: We got into kind of a gospel thing. I was doing a little gospel rap, just by myself. Everybody was getting into it in some kind of rhythmic way.
PIGPEN [2/12/66]: I wanna know, can you find your mind? Oh, yeah!
JESSE: We can tell by the sound of a very high Bob Weir that the band hasn’t played yet.
BOB WEIR [2/12/66]: Doing this, and this, and this, and this —
PIGPEN [2/12/66]: Now, if you have any sense, you’re gonna give him your money —
BOB WEIR [2/12/66]: I want this when I’m singing —
PIGPEN [2/12/66]: But you ain’t got no business to hate that man for doing that, because you know there must be something wrong with him —
BOB WEIR [2/12/66]: Can you get that? Waaah…
PIGPEN [2/12/66]: I wanna tell you about it —
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: There was this chick in the other room….
ACID TEST PARTICIPANT [2/12/66]: Who cares! Who cares/
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: She was freaking out and she was [saying]: “Who cares? who cares?” Stuff like that. Somebody took the microphone into the other room and it went through the tape loop. So, everything she said echoed back on us.
ACID TEST PARTICIPANT [2/12/66]: Who cares! Who cares!
BOB WEIR [2/12/66]: Who cares? Who cares…
DENISE KAUFMAN: That was echoing all through the room. That was like the universal soul cry of the universe. That's what we all wonder…
JESSE: And so it was that Pigpen became the unusual purveyor of good vibes.
PIGPEN [2/12/66]: [half-sung, with gospel fervor] You gotta think about your neighbor… you gotta think about your friend… you gotta think about YOUR BROTHER! You gotta think about your sister… you gotta think about everybody that means something to you… I’m talkin’ about it now… now, that you think that you know somethin’...
JESSE: It was a group effort to bring the Who Cares girl back to earth. Check out the “LA ‘66” episode for more of that story. It’s a role Pigpen would come to play for both his bandmates and the audience in years to come. One of my favorite descriptions is by Jerry Garcia, speaking with Blair Jackson: “He was our anchor. We’d be out of our minds, just YOWWWWGOIINNNNG, and we'd be tethered to Pigpen. You could rely on Pigpen for a reality check. ‘Hey, man, is it too weird, or what?’ He'd say, ‘No man, it's cool.’ Everybody used him on that level. He was like gravity. Hells Angels would be sitting around his room fucked up on acid and Pigpen would be taking care of them. It was so great. Pigpen was like a warm fire, a cozy fire.”
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: After everything was over, we went over to the Watts Towers. But we couldn't get in because [of] the city monument — they had turned it into a thing where you had to pay 50 cents or whatever, a quarter, to get in to see it. The caretaker was there, so we just all wandered around and looked at it. It just got weirder and weirder.
JESSE: The visit to the Watts Towers was a profound moment for Jerry Garcia, especially. There’s a segment about this in Amir Bar-Lev’s essential documentary A Long Strange Trip, which we also referenced. But that’s Pigpen’s version of it. Mostly, in LA, the Grateful Dead got down to the business of being a band. This is how Bobby Petersen remembered their house in LA.
BOBBY PETERSEN [10/6/70]: The lady said that living next door to you was like having a freight train going through your house 90 miles an hour. [laughs]
Pig in the Dead
JESSE: The first original Warlocks song was “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks),” written sometime in mid-1965. The groove they borrowed from “Mystic Eyes” by Them. For the lyrics, Pig reached into his Pig bag.
AUDIO: “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)” [So Many Roads (1965-1995), 11/3/65] (2:06-2:23) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: From early 1966, Owsley made a ton of tapes of the Dead at work, live and in rehearsal. They reveal a few things about Pigpen as the Dead leaned deeper into their songwriting. Here’s how Jerry Garcia put it in 1975 to Peter Simon.
JERRY GARCIA [1975]: Pigpen had influenced a lot of what we were doing just by, because of who he was. And the music had to be able to include him. In a way, Pigpen—technically, at any rate—represented sort of the low water mark. You know what I mean? We couldn’t go past that, because if we came up with anything that was too complicated for him, he couldn't play it. And so everything was structured to be able to be at least includable in Pigpen’s orbit… or else he wouldn’t play, he’d lay out.
JESSE: Some of Bear’s early tapes reveal that while Pigpen’s bandmates were willing to devote themselves to rehearsals of complicated material, Pig wasn’t always into that. And though there was a divide between Pigpen and the band on that front, he continued to contribute in other very musical ways. Though none of the songs would make it onto an official release in that era, he was an integral part of the band’s first attempts at songwriting, including his original “You See A Broken Heart” and at least the lyrics for “Keep Rolling By.” One song that turns up on the LA ‘66 tapes, “Tastebud,” survived right up through the session for the band’s first album in 1967. Pig’s playing some nice blues piano here.
AUDIO: “Tastebud” (outtake) [1/67] (0:16-0:46) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Though Pigpen would play upright piano occasionally with the Dead over the next few years, it was mostly a road not taken. Though there are very few pictures of the Warlocks era, it seems Pig played on a Farfisa duo organ in the earliest days, switching to a Vox Continental after the band’s move to LA in 1966. The band and Pigpen settled into a relationship where he served as a kind of specialist: he sang Pigpen songs. During our “LA ‘66” episode, we spoke with Don Douglas, who served on Owsley Stanley’s sound squad during the LA period and went on to help with some acid making himself.
DON DOUGLAS: Some people have described the early Dead as Pigpen and his backup band, and [it’s] probably how I saw them. This is not to take anything away from the brilliance of Jerry Garcia and the others, but that's kind of how it came across in the beginning. This was a blues band led by Ron McKernan. And besides being a total sweetheart under that crusty exterior, he was sure, for a white guy… damn, he was good.
AUDIO: “Tastebud” (outtake) [1/67] (0:49-1:06) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
DON DOUGLAS: I was over 21 and he was under 21. I was just over 21, he was under 21. And Kim had a 1959 Hilman convertible. And so we'd go out and I'd buy a bottle of Red Mountain—a gallon, a jug—of Red Mountain wine. So, in the passenger seat, Pigpen would have this between his legs to steady it, and I would drive. We’d go carousing around LA. I do not and cannot sing — but drunk, I could sing with him. So we'd like to be wailing away and have a good old time. We would go to places like, for instance, there was a place called The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach. It had a section for people who are 18 to 21. They wouldn't serve alcohol, but of course we were fine by that point. We would sit there and we heard the Temptations. Pigpen said to me, “If you ever want to see what’s happening next, look at the Black acts.” We also went to see a friend of his who played in a 1950s-style dance band, with two-tone jackets and the whole thing. He said, “You will find that fans tend to like one kind of music or another, but musicians like all kinds of music as a rule.” And he was just fine listening to this 1950s dance band. So we would do that, and we would come back pretty late. At one point, we were all up together and everybody but Pigpen was stoned on acid. Owsley and Melissa had their bedroom on the top floor of this house where the electronics equipment was also. We would also sometimes gather there, because it was pretty big. aThey were saying something about guys going out doing who knows what, and I made some joke about a guy looking for an all-night harmonica store. And they ended up using that name, I guess for one of their dances.
JESSE: After LA, the band decamped briefly to Olompali, a palatial estate in Marin County, north of San Francisco.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: We were living in Olompali, and then we ended up living in Lagunitas. And Big Brother lived about a mile or two away from us.
JESSE: Sadly, this is pretty much when Pigpen’s storytelling breaks off, chronologically, on the Hank Harrison interview tape. Thanks to the late Hank Harrison, at least for this one specific thing.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: Of course, you realize that everything I've told you is a lie.
JESSE: That’s still cool, Pig. With Big Brother a mile or two away, Pigpen reconnected with and began an on/off fling and lifelong deep friendship with Janis Joplin. The Dead relocated to 710 Ashbury in San Francisco in the fall. Sue Swanson.
SUE SWANSON [1992]: I heard actually a wonderful story about Pigpen just this week, an Eileen [Law] story about Pigpen. 710 Ashbury Street — we’d all moved up there. She went by to visit and got stuck there. What a terrible fate, had to spend the night, right? We always hated it when that happened. And late at night, she was asleep on the couch in the upper living room. She looks and hears this noise, she looks up and in the doorway is this great looming, hulking figure. She goes, “Oh god, it’s Pigpen, what’s he gonna do?” And he walks over, covers her with a blanket and then walks away. That was Pigpen.
CONNIE BONNER [1992]: That was a sweet man.
JESSE: Connie Bonner.
CONNIE BONNER [1992]: I remember Sue and I washing his hair for him, something that he took great delight in — asking us to help him wash this great long, thick black hair, and bending him over the kitchen sink at 710 Ashbury. He loved it, and we just adored doing it for him.
JESSE: Later in 1966, as well, Pigpen met the person who became the love of his life — a Black woman named Veronica Grant, known most often just as Vee. Vee moved into 710 Ashbury within the year, becoming another one of the band’s housemates. In a ‘60s way, they’d be partners for the rest of Pigpen’s life. With the only TV in the house, their room at 710 just off the kitchen became its own hangout with Pigpen acting as genial Southern Comfort-drinking host. Here’s an anecdote from Eric Thompson.
ERIC THOMPSON: A buddy of mine was at the 710 Ashbury Street house and Pigpen lived downstairs, right by the kitchen. My friend and Owsley were hanging out in the kitchen. Owsley’s kind of opening the refrigerator, and Pigpen comes out: “Hey man, what are you putting in our food!”
JESSE: Here’s Jerry Garcia speaking with Ben Fong-Torres in 1975.
JERRY GARCIA [1975]: One of the things about the Grateful Dead was that we never had that glamor flash that the [Jefferson] Airplane or the other groups that he got involved with—Moby Dick or whatever, Moby Grape. They were always sort of glamorous and sellable, and we never had that thing, that glossy image that could be dealt with on that level. They would see Pigpen and just: forget it.
JESSE: But he was identifiable. He was their first frontman, and his face was emblazoned on the band’s first t-shirts and posters before the band’s first album even came out. In 1992, Connie Bonner’s first Pigpen shirt was still in service.
CONNIE BONNER [1992]: Why, he is immortalized here on this t-shirt! He was the chosen one.
SUE SWANSON [1992]: That’s right.
BOB MATTHEWS [1992]: You're wearing an original Pigpen t-shirt.
CONNIE BONNER [1992]: Absolutely. And a deal at $2.50.
BOB MATTHEWS [1992]: What does the button say there?
CONNIE BONNER [1992]: “Good Ol’ Grateful Dead.”
JESSE: The Warner Bros. marketing department wasn’t quite sure what to do with the Grateful Dead, and they certainly weren’t sure what to do with Pigpen. In 1969, with the release of Aoxomoxoa, they ran a Pigpen Lookalike Contest in Rolling Stone. A few weeks later, they followed up with another full page ad that read, in part: “To be downright brutal about it, Part One of our Pigpen Lookalike Contest that we laid on you a few weeks back is a bust. Not that there haven’t been entries. There’ve been plenty. But so far no one has, via black-and-white or color photograph, captured the panache, the bravado, the insouciance – the true and utter raunch of Mr. Pen. Just to have a mustache doesn’t make it. Just to have long hair doesn’t make it. Blondes don’t make it. Photos with no name and address don’t make it. And the pygmy from Venice, CA who wrote that “contests suck” doesn’t make it.” There were no winners. Later that year, this is how the Warner Bros. marketing department pitched Mr. Pen.
WARNER BROS. LIVE/DEAD RADIO AD [1969]: Hurry, hurry, hurry — step right up and hear the Grateful Dead roll over and play live! Groove to the electrifying guitar wizardry of Jerry Garcia! Grind along with Phil Lesh, the fastest bass player of them all! Gasp at the legendary Pigpen, who knows no shame!
JESSE: The Dead explored many musical paths in their early years, and Pigpen provided the bump and the grind to go along with the jug band adaptations, cowboy tunes, and polyrhythmic psychedelic launching pads. A perusal of the surviving tapes from 1966 and 1967 reveal a half-dozen songs that disappeared from Pig’s repertoire after their first year or so as a band, including Allen Toussaint’s “Pain in My Heart,” Fats Domino’s “Sick and Tired,” the Rolling Stones’ “Empty Heart,” and others. But in those years, the band also introduced a number of Pigpen’s signature numbers. Most of these were still in Pig’s repertoire in 1971 and 1972, generally a good period to hit if you’re looking to listen to some Pigpen. But here’s a checklist of the core Pigpen, with some recommended places to dive in.
There was Slim Harpo’s “I’m A King Bee.” Here it is from Ladies and Gentlemen… The Grateful Dead, April 28th, 1971 at the Fillmore East.
AUDIO: “I’m A King Bee” [Ladies and Gentlemen… The Grateful Dead, 4/28/71] (1:08-1:20) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Elmore James’ “It Hurts Me Too,” which we dove into during the Lyceum episode of our Europe ‘72 season.
AUDIO: “Hurts Me Too” [Europe ‘72] (1:08-1:32) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Junior Parker’s “Next Time You See Me,” here from Hundred Year Hall, Frankfurt, April 26th, 1972.
AUDIO: “Next Time You See Me” [Hundred Year Hall, 4/26/72] (0:00-0:30) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour.” Here’s the Rio Nido dance hall version, from September 3rd, 1967, released on Fallout from the Phil Zone. This version’s over a half-an-hour.
AUDIO: “In the Midnight Hour” [Fallout from the Phil Zone, 9/3/67] (0:16-0:46) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The Olympics’ “Good Lovin’.” Pretty much any of the Europe ‘72 versions are pretty cracklin’. This is Copenhagen, April 14th, 1972.
AUDIO: “Good Lovin’ (I)” [Europe ‘72: The Complete Recordings, Vol. 4, 4/14/72] (0:44-1:19) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man,” released on Skull and Roses in 1971, which we explored on Season 3 of the Deadcast. Side 3, to be exact.
AUDIO: “Big Boss Man” [Skull and Roses] (0:30-0:59) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Of course, Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Turn On Your Lovelight,” from Live/Dead.
AUDIO: “Turn On Your Lovelight” [Live/Dead] (0:13-0:56) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl,” released on the Dead’s debut in 1967.
AUDIO: “Good Morning Little School Girl” [Grateful Dead] (0:41-0:59) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It was a testament to how quickly the Dead were evolving that when they recorded their debut in early 1967, “Good Morning Little School Girl” was Pigpen’s only lead vocal. Not that he wasn’t still singing lots with the band. That same year, he began singing “Alligator,” recorded on Anthem of the Sun, which featured some of Robert Hunter’s first lyrics for the Dead, but also a verse by Pigpen, his first professional songwriting credit.
AUDIO: “Alligator” (1971 mix) [Anthem of the Sun 50] (2:09-2:29) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Later in 1967, the police raided the band’s home at 710 Ashbury. Pigpen and his girlfriend Veronica were among those arrested, despite being among the members of the household who weren’t pot smokers. In fact, Pigpen’s non-use of pot and acid was pretty well known. Columnist Herb Caen, who invented the term beatnik and helped popularized the term hippie, pointed this out. This is Rock Scully reiterating his point at the band’s post-bust press conference while Pipgen glowered next to him.
ROCK SCULLY [10/67]: The statement was that Pigpen does not turn on, and that is a true statement.
JESSE: In the spring of 1968, just in time for an East Coast jaunt in May, Pigpen leveled up when the band began renting a proper Hammond B3 organ for the first time. Here’s how it sounded at the Fillmore East on June 14th, 1968, from the bonus disc on the Fillmore West 1969 box set. The B3 is slightly undermixed, but Pig is jamming along as the band powers from “Turn On Your Lovelight” into “Caution.” Pigpen wasn’t a shredder, but he’s easy to underestimate.
AUDIO: “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)” [Fillmore West 1969 bonus disc, 6/14/68] (1:40-2:05)
TC
JESSE: An oft disputed point in Grateful Dead scholarship is the moment in late 1968 when Pigpen and Bob Weir were nearly kicked out of the band. There’s a long account of the “firing” in Dennis McNally’s book, A Long Strange Trip, dated August 1968, mentioning that the band meeting was recorded by Owsley Stanley. Please welcome back to the Deadcast, DeadBase co-founder Mike Dolgushkin.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: I've heard it. Nobody really comes out and fires them. The general idea seemed to be that Bobby and Pig weren't going to play the live gigs anymore, but they were still going to appear on the recordings. Pigpen mentioned that he had a new song written, and Phil said, “That's great. We'll record it.” Pigpen had also quit drinking, apparently.
JESSE: Not long after, there were a number of shows by groups sometimes known as Jerry Garcia and Friends, sometimes as Mickey and the Hartbeats, starting in October 1968. Pigpen wasn’t involved. There are also a pair of Grateful Dead recordings from the Avalon Ballroom, October 12th and 13th, that don’t feature Pigpen at all. This has often been cited as material evidence of Pigpen’s firing. Mike Dolgushkin points us to a brief eyewitness account on the Internet Archive.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: Someone who went to one of those shows said that Garcia announced — Pigpen’s not here, he’s in the hospital taking care of his girlfriend.
JESSE: In fact, October 1968 is when Veronica Grant suffered a brain aneurysm and nearly died. If the firing happened at all, it’s not represented on tape. Pigpen devoted enormous amounts of time helping Veronica with her recovery, which happened slowly, but happened. When the Dead went to Europe in 1972, Vee missed the tour because she was home in nursing school. Light Into Ashes has a deep look at this period on the Dead Essays blog, with a few pieces that clarify the chronology that have emerged in recent years. Around the time of the alleged firing, Phil Lesh’s old music school buddy Tom Constanten completed his Air Force duty and enlisted with the Grateful Dead. A very aleatoric Deadcast welcome to TC.
TOM “TC” CONSTANTEN: There was a point where even Pigpen’s continuing with the band was in question. I came into the mix just when that was going on. And maybe I provided enough of a diversion that it turned down the amplification of those problems. But they weren't a problem anymore.
JESSE: TC took over B3 duties most of the time for the next year and change, which is a whole other story that we’ll tell another day. But even during this window, Pig would return to the organ occasionally.
AUDIO: “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” [Live/Dead] (0:50-1:20) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The blues were Pigpen’s natural territory, and his playing on “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” still seems not only organic but essential to the song’s power.
TC: It wasn't anything even that contentious. It was just something that happened. I was ready for it. it was acknowledged generally from in front, and it was never a problem. It was never a question. He had a lot of dimensions within the blues — his dad had been a blues DJ.
JESSE: It was the opposite of a contentious relationship, and oddly complementary. The two became road roommates.
TC: The band wasn't big enough that all band members didn't have their own hotel suite at the Ritz yet.
JESSE: It established an ongoing theme with the keyboard players who performed with the Dead in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Ned Lagin spoke with us about how well he and Pigpen got along. And here’s what Donna Jean told us about Keith and Pigpen’s relationship during our Europe ‘72 season.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: Complementary. And Keith loved it — he loved Pigpen too. We were just big Pigpen fans, still are.
JESSE: Apparently, it was just impossible not to love the guy.
TC: It was very different than the image of the biker pirate. Very gentle, very intellectual, very thoughtful. There were a couple of times I got dosed during the gigs, and there was no better person to hang out with. He brought a pegboard chess set and we played chess. I usually beat him — not that I'm very good either. I brought some baseball cards and we flipped cards for fun. All sorts of fun stuff like that.
JESSE: This is from Phil McKernan’s notes on his son, as read by Sully.
SULLY: “He likes to play games, board games, word games. He loved chess.”
JESSE: And Pigpen and TC became roommates off the road, too, sharing a house in Novato.
TC: He did have a bunch of records, several of which he turned me on to — Blind Willie McTell, people like that. He gave me a volume of Albert Ammons boogie solos of sheet music, which I could relate to and I was able to play through and copped a couple of licks from. He was also reading bang-bang action-adventure like Doc Savage and some of the Robert Heinlein science fiction books from the time.
JESSE: The same way that Pigpen shared experiences with his bandmates at the Acid Tests, he was likewise a member of the Planet Earth Rock and Roll book exchange.
TC: He turned me on to Frank Herbert's Dune, for instance. And we're all into reading this and that and the other. Jerry Garcia would bring books with him on tour, and I’d look over his shoulder and see what he was looking at. And I gave him a copy of Hazrat Inayat Khan’s Sufi Message, the volume about music, and it was all very intellectually engaging. Paul Kantner was another one who would bring books on the road; he had a whole suitcase full that they would schlep around for him.
JESSE: For all the enthusiastic sci-fi readers in the Dead’s scene, probably none of them held a candle to Phil McKernan, Pigpen’s father. Poke around for his name on the Internet Archive and you’ll find a number of teenage letters by Phil McKernan to various sci-fi fanzines.
TC: I don’t recall him playing much music at home. And in fact, we didn't have a piano until after I was no longer in the band. We went piano shopping together and we found this really built-like-a-rock Behr Brothers upright [piano]. I think it was a cabinet grand, which is even more massive. I had another cabinet grand later. It looks like an upright, but they call it a cabinet grand because the strings are set vertically, but they’re just as massive and big as if it were a grand piano.
JESSE: After TC moved out, the two remained tight, with Pigpen acting as best man at TC’s wedding. But even if he didn’t have a piano at his disposal, Pigpen was very tentatively showing signs of becoming a late-blooming songwriter after almost getting kicked out of the band.
TC: Oh yes. He took it very seriously and worked on his act.
Let Us Reconsider Pigpen
JESSE: Here’s Jerry Garcia speaking with David Gans and Blair Jackson, now in Conversations with the Dead.
JERRY GARCIA [6/11/81]: Pigpen’s orientation used to be straight-ahead sex — straight ahead, really straight ahead. And he’d get really dirty a lot of times in the blues and all that. That was his trip. He occupied that position. If there was balance in our point of view, then Pigpen used to represent it musically.
AUDIO: “Turn On Your Lovelight” [Live/Dead] (6:45-7:05) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And Pigpen certainly gets wooly; some Pigs do get wooly. By which we mean that some of what Pigpen sang might be considered a little more problematic in the 21st century.
AUDIO: “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” [Grateful Dead] (0:44-1:00) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: A few years ago at the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus in Albuquerque, Kay Alexander presented a paper titled “Let Us Now Reconsider Pigpen,” examining Pigpen from a feminist point-of-view, and a closer look brought some surprises. Welcome to the Deadcast, Kay.
KAY ALEXANDER: The persona that he projects on stage is not angry, or narcissistic or vengeful, or controlling. The women he sings about are strong, independent, passionate women in their own right. He's not saying to any of them, “Oh, honey, I want to marry you so you can cook my meals.” He's saying “I don't know where she's gone, I don't care where she's been, [as] long as she’s been doin’ it right.” He is handing them a type of equity that was atypical for male points of view during the era when he was on stage.
AUDIO: “Operator” [American Beauty] (1:41-2:00) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
KAY ALEXANDER: I only missed him by about a year. I've talked with a few women who were young and saw Pigpen, and [I] asked them how they felt about him, were they moved by the sexual content of his music. And they all felt that this was somebody they kind of wanted to be ravished by. It made them feel adventurous and empowered — it didn't make them feel alienated or intimidated.
AUDIO: “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)” [Europe ‘72: The Complete Recordings, Vol. 6, 4/17/72] (17:49-18:11) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
KAY ALEXANDER: “Her leg up against the wall” — that's pretty explicit. But, what's the first half of that couplet? “I come every time she call.” This is mutual passion: this is not someone being manipulated, this is not someone being coerced. And I think that's a really, really important thing to remember about Pigpen.
JESSE: As the frontman of a ‘60s rock band, Pigpen was never, nor will ever be, a poster-child for 1st, 2nd, or 3rd wave feminism. But when Pigpen did crowd-work, it wasn’t to pick up groupies — it was to match couples. One of the classic all-time versions of “Turn On Your Lovelight” was played at Princeton on April 17th, 1971. It’s a great example of Pigpen in matchmaker mode.
PIGPEN [4/17/71]: Y’all just stand there and talk a little cool… say, uh… say, what’s your name? That’s all you got to do… ain’t no reason to mess around. If it click, it click.
KAY ALEXANDER: I think he recognized other people’s shyness, and what he was trying to do, it feels to me—it felt to me then, and feels to me now—that he was trying to break through into a place of celebration, where it's okay to have these passions, it's okay for us to be in these bodies and enjoy what they do. That's not necessarily the sexual content that was being promoted in rock songs of the era. That's much more part of the blues tradition, that this is life — this is the life we live, we might as well enjoy it.
JESSE: An adorable running thread in Pig’s raps, despite their general raunchiness, is when he extolled the virtues of his special ladyfriend, which he does at Princeton.
AUDIO: “Turn On Your Lovelight” [4/17/71] (10:30-11:00)
PIGPEN [4/17/71]: Now, you just found somebody, didn’t you? You two just found somebody… that’s cool. I ain’t got to find nobody, ‘cause I got my old lady. Ha! And she makes me feel nice! [starts to sing] And one of the reasons she feels so niiice… one of the reasons she makes me feel so good… I’m not gonna tell ya everything, but I’ll tell you just a little bit… I’m not gonna tell ya everything, but I’ll tell you just a little bit…
JESSE: That show also contains one of the all-time great bits of Pigpen storytelling. Here’s how Bob Weir remembered it on WMMR in 1976.
BOB WEIR [1976]: One time, he actually managed to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to somebody for $1 and a quarter. I think it was a “Lovelight” we were doing, and it starts out as essentially a love song. He starts delivering his dissertation and it just got twisted-er and twisted-er and twisted-er, until finally he had some clown out of the audience that he was working with, and he sold this guy the Brooklyn Bridge.
JESSE: Close, it was one of Pigpen’s running narratives in “Good Lovin’” in early ‘71, which might be termed l’il pimpin’. But ultimately this is a family podcast.
PIGPEN [4/17/71]: Sold! Brooklyn Bridge!
JESSE: Ask a taper for the rest. The kind of creativity displayed by Pigpen’s freestyles is a bit hard to annotate and convey, but it’s a mix of old blues patterns balanced with a sensibility informed by the hip comedian Lord Buckley, a thread we explored in our “Operator” episode.
Pig in Flight
JESSE: When the Grateful Dead traveled, Pigpen was a source of curiosity for the press. During their first visit to the UK in 1970, the BBC interviewed Pig backstage at the Hollywood Festival. As the camera crew enters the backstage trailer, they walk by Ozzy Osbourne outside, also on the bill, so imagine Ozzy 10 feet away when this is happening. It’s neither a very revealing nor narrative-forwarding interview, but it does include the sound of Pigpen dropping a lit cigarette ash behind the couch in the backstage trailer.
PIGPEN [5/24/70]: Fillmore East — oww, shit! Damnation! Balderdash… the whole fuckin’ place is on fire…
JESSE: And even before the success of the Dead’s complementary 1970 albums Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, there seemed to be some commercial interest in a Pigpen solo project. It’s probably not what you’d expect.
AUDIO: “I’m A Lovin’ Man” (Demo) [Pigpen] (0:43-1:04)
JESSE: That’s a tiny bit of “I’m A Lovin’ Man” from what Dead scholars have determined to be a mid-1969 demo session for Mercury Records, featuring Pigpen, with Jerry Garcia on pedal steel and Bob Weir on rhythm guitar, alongside some session musicians. We’ve pointed to Corry Arnold and Light Into Ashes’ magnificent research. Pigpen’s country project didn’t quite take. But perhaps it did help focus his songwriting.
PHIL LESH [8/70]: Hey, Pigpen? Let’s do “Operator.”
JERRY GARCIA [8/70]: Where’s that capo? Where’s that capo? [tape pause] …are we rollin’? Okay, let’s start.
AUDIO: “Operator” (Demo) [American Beauty: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-0:43) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: By 1970, Pigpen’s act included the original “Operator” on American Beauty. That was from the Angel’s Share demo released with American Beauty 50 in 2020. Here’s what Bobby Weir told us.
BOB WEIR: “Operator” was sort of from left field as far as like… it wasn't a blues tune, it was a… he used some blues idiomology in some of his lines. But really, musically, it was something else. I'm not sure I could label it, but it was… I wouldn't consider it anything resembling a blues. It was kind of a surprise to me. And I lived with him at that point — I thought I knew the kind of stuff he had up his sleeve. But this… this one came out of nowhere.
JESSE: The year before that, Robert Hunter had written “Easy Wind” for him to sing, which wound up on Workingman’s Dead. He’d also started playing a few folk-blues tunes in the Dead’s acoustic sets, some of which he’d played in the old days. Usually, his sets were pretty short, one or two songs. At the Family Dog in San Francisco, in April 1970, the band was workshopping their Evening With the Grateful Dead format under an assumed name when Pigpen played—by his standards—as a marathon solo set: six songs, nearly 20 minutes. It was released in 2013 as a double LP. It includes the only official example so far of Pigpen’s improv springboard, “Bring Me My Shotgun,” which we heard about last time.
AUDIO: “Bring Me My Shotgun” [Family Dog at The Great Highway, 4/18/70] (0:50-1:30)
JESSE: There are a few shows in that window from the Fillmores East and West where Pigpen played piano during the band’s acoustic sets. They’re worth seeking out. Sometime in 1969 or 1970, he continued work towards a potential solo album, recording a batch of 4-track demos. Some of these tapes are what sometimes circulate as his lost album, though it’s certainly not that.
AUDIO: “Two Women” (Demo) [Pigpen] (2:32-3:01)
JESSE: He remained a part of the Dead’s social fabric, too, playing a role in the legendary softball matchups in 1970 with the Dead Ringers versus the Jefferson Giraffes, which we talked about more in our “Ripple” episode. Here’s what Bob Weir told us.
BOB WEIR: Pigpen had the good sense to not turn out for the team, but he did sit behind the plate and call balls and strikes. And he was impartial — he did his best to be impartial, but there was some back and forth there as well.
JESSE: There are more hints of a potential solo album in this period, referenced in internal Grateful Dead business documents. In one planning document for 1971, for example, Jon McIntire listed it alongside various projects in-progress by Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, and others. And in the summer of 1971, Pigpen introduced two more originals, “Mr. Charlie” and “Empty Pages.”
AUDIO: “Empty Pages” [Dick’s Picks 35, 8/24/71] (0:00-0:28) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was the sad, sweet “Empty Pages” performed in Chicago on August 24th, 1971, now Dick’s Picks 35. In the late summer, there’s even evidence that Pigpen played a solo show in San Francisco, possibly including the accompaniment of Merl Saunders, continuing the theme of Pigpen being friends with Dead-affiliated keyboardists. We’ve linked to Corry Arnold’s great research here.
AUDIO: “Empty Pages” [Dick’s Picks 35, 8/24/71] (1:25-1:52) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
Illin’
JESSE: It was only weeks after that show that Pigpen entered the hospital for the first time. He was suffering from both a perforated ulcer and hepatitis. Here’s Jerry Garcia speaking with Peter Simon in 1975.
JERRY GARCIA [WMVY, 1975]: There was a week or so where everybody gave blood for him, and everything like that. He was in real bad shape. That was when it looked like he was gonna die. Actually, the thing of him getting that ill straightened him out, way more than any talk from us. And he was, in fact, really working at getting himself together.
JESSE: There’s no question Pigpen was a serious alcoholic who needed to stop drinking, but it seemed to exacerbate a number of other underlying and undiagnosed health issues, which his family believes seriously contributed to his physical decline, likely including Crohn's disease. And without discounting anything about his mental health, it rarely seemed to manifest too drastically before that. Here’s how Bob Weir described Pigpen on WMMR in 1976.
BOB WEIR [WMMR, 1976]: He drank himself to death. He liked to drink. I don't think he was so much into escape. He was just into drinkin’.
JESSE: At some point, he moved back in with his parents to recuperate, and also reconnected with his father. Though Phil was proud of his son’s music career, he hadn’t been terribly supportive about the whole dropping out of high school thing. Pigpen stayed off the road in the fall of 1971, returning in the winter looking gaunt, but sounding pretty great. He even had a new holiday song to add to the band’s repertoire.
AUDIO: “Run Rudolph Run” [Listen to the River, 12/10/71] (0:00-0:14) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was “Run Rudolph Run” at the Fox Theater in St. Louis, December 10th, 1971, released on the Listen to the River box set, which we covered extensively on season 4 of the Deadcast. It was the weekend the Dead crashed a bar mitzvah. Included in Pigpen’s papers is the brown spiral notebook that you may have noticed on Pigpen’s B3 in videos and photos of the Europe ‘72 tour. A few pages into it are the rooming assignments dated St. Louis Hilton, December 8th. In case you need anybody — Sam Cutler’s in Room 608, Garcia’s in 606, Hunter in 607, Weir’s in 611, Lesh is in 612, Kreutzmann’s in 614, Keith’s in 620, and Ramrod’s in 601. Parrish is in 617. It also allows to date this notebook as starting during Pig’s return to the road December ‘71.
AUDIO: “Run Rudolph Run” [Listen to the River, 12/10/71] (2:54-3:07) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The front of the notebook has a few interesting details.
SULLY: “Owsley Stanley, Box 2000, Lompoc, California.” “FPC” — whatever that stands for.
JESSE: That’d be Federal Penal Camp. On the opposite side from the room assignments are Pigpen’s chord charts for a trio of the band’s newer songs, introduced that summer — “Bird Song,” “Sugaree,” and “Brown-Eyed Women.” I know we’ve painted a fairly wholesome picture of Pig in these past two episodes, but he is Pigpen, so I will also add the detail that the notebook page contains some Manhattan phone numbers and the address for the Psychedelic Burlesque Funhouse on 8th Avenue, not far from where the Dead played at the Felt Forum in December ‘71. Ooh la la. You can look it up on the World Wide Web.
The surrounding pages contain chords for many of the songs on Bob Weir’s Ace, including “Walk in the Sunshine,” a song Pigpen never played onstage. It contains lyrics for “Mr. Charlie” and “Chinatown Shuffle,” cleaned up neatly and probably not first drafts. There are words for the Dead song now officially titled “The Stranger (Two Souls in Communion),” but Pigpen’s title was apparently “Stranger Here.”
AUDIO: “The Stranger (Two Souls in Communion)” [Europe ‘72: The Complete Recordings, Vol. 19, 5/23/72] (6:21-6:36) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But perhaps most intriguing are something like 15-20 songs that seem to be completely finished from Pigpen’s side — apparently copied over from other sheets, with chord changes. There’s one called “Time To Go,” dated ‘68-’69. But most seem to have been written in 1971 and 1972.
SULLY: He calls this one “Back Home”: “What time it is? I don't know. It's dark outside, and I know it's cold. Doesn't matter what it's like out there because I'm with you, and it's warm in here. Don't speak a time, release your mind. You slip so easy to these arms of mine.”
JESSE: Here’s part of another.
SULLY: “I can sell a glass of water to a drowning man, I can sell pen and paper to a man ain’t got no hands. I can even sell money to a millionaire, sell a man on death row the electric chair, but I can't even give my love to you. I'm all in a mess about what to do. Come on and take it darlin’, it’s here for free. It’s the only thing I’ve got that’s really part of me. I'm like the little shepherd boy, cried wolf too many times. This time you got to rescue me because love at stake this time is mine.”
JESSE: Perhaps ill-advisedly, he joined the band’s Europe ‘72 tour.
SULLY: He was not doing well, but he was not going to miss that Europe ‘72 tour.
JESSE: We discussed him a bunch during our long exploration of that tour, including a number of letters he wrote home, shared with us by Sully. This is a little bit of a letter to his parents from West Germany. All of them give little glimpses into his personality, and I’ll point you back towards Season 5 of the Deadcast for much more.
SULLY: “Hi y’all – In Hamburg, no trouble at all. They stamped our passports upon leaving Denmark, but didn’t entering Germany, didn’t even look on the bus. Room’s o.k, same ol’ European hotel room, little beds, pushable-together, no T.V., stupid radio (I disconnected mine), but good food. Fresh venison from the Black Forest, stroganoff, all sorts of goodies. I had asparagus & ham (ugh! bad choice!) but tasted others, good! Got some plain ol’ white ginseng root from Garcia, ought to be enough to last, & some red root from Alan, which I’m giving back.”
JESSE: Pigpen sang his new songs most nights of the tour. I love Weir’s intro to “Chinatown Shuffle” in Paris.
BOB WEIR [5/4/72]: Right now, Pig’s a gonna do what he willed…
AUDIO: “Chinatown Shuffle” [Europe ‘72: The Complete Recordings, Vol. 12, 5/4/72] (0:00-0:15) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Donna Jean Godchaux hung out with Pigpen a lot during the Europe ‘72 tour, the only time the two were in the band together.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: I never did get to be in the band with Pigpen when he was The Pigpen, the full version of himself. And so what I got to experience was the later version, which… he was so sick. But he was such a presence, and such a sweet man, and just an amazing soul. And to this day, Pigpen… I’m a huge Pigpen fan. Just huge. And I just think he was amazing. Pigpen was the first guy, at least in rock and roll, and as far as I know, that had that freestyle thing like “Turn On Your Lovelight.” He was one of the innovators, so that really was way before his time.
AUDIO: “Turn On Your Lovelight” [Europe ‘72: The Complete Recordings, Vol. 20, 5/24/72] (9:18-9:45) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was Pigpen’s final version of “Turn On Your Lovelight,” May 24th, 1972 at the Strand Lyceum in London.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: When you're doing something that is part of your life, that is who you are, and you get on that stage, it comes to the forefront, forcibly! It just comes out. And I watched Pigpen do that. He was really sick, but his vocals and his ad-libs and his freestyling on that Europe tour were just spot-on. Just spot-on. He was amazing.
JESSE: Though he was obviously not lacking for creativity, the European tour made things worse for Pigpen, contracting another case of hepatitis. What’s clear from Pigpen’s notebook is that he kept working on songs after his last stage appearance with the Dead in June 1972, with compositions dated right up through February 1973. During these months, the Dead crew apparently set up a miniature studio for him with a small cassette player, the very dawn of the compact cassette recording age in the Dead’s world. They fully expected him to recover, though there’s a sad story of Pigpen visiting the band’s rehearsal space not long before he died, and the band being too busy to come out and see him. Jerry Garcia, talking to Peter Simon in 1975.
JERRY GARCIA [WMVY, 1975]: He hadn't been drinking for a year and a half, at all. Zero. But his body was just gone. It was just shot, beyond the point where it could repair itself. That was the thing that finally did it. It wasn't as though he was on some kind of final bender and then killed himself. He was actually on the road to a new, a new persona himself.
JESSE: He’d been living with his girlfriend Veronica. As he got sicker, they heartbreakingly broke up. TC.
TC: Pigpen kicked her out of his house. Yeah, the final defense. I had seen him the week before. Paul Boucher, he was a DJ I knew at KTIM, called me up with the news. He woke me up at 8 in the morning, and my first response was, “Well, I was going to see him later this week. I’ll have to ask him what it was like.” I was sort of half-awake — I didn’t put two and two together yet.
JERRY GARCIA [WMVY, 1975]: We were prepared emotionally for it a full year and a half before, because that was when he first went into serious illness. And then he recovered, and slowly got himself back together and was back in the band. We were working and everything, and then he just snuck away. It was really sort of typical of him. It was typical of the kind of person he was.
JESSE: Despite Garcia’s words, they probably weren’t really emotionally prepared for it. With the instigation of Robert Hunter, Bob Weir hosted what Weir described as “an informal wake-slash-riot.” It was pouring rain, and dozens crammed into the house with many more covering the hillside. Weir later said, “outside it was an orgy,” and he apparently meant that somewhat literally. According to Dennis McNally’s biography, some 500 attended, according to a count made that night.
A few weeks after Pigpen’s death, his father Phil wrote a two-page letter addressed to the Grateful Dead, which survives in the Dead’s archives. It feels too personal to read in its entirety. But, in part:
“The real purpose of this note [is] to express my most profound thanks for that which you all gave Ron that is beyond price and of far greater value than I ever gave him when he was with us in his younger days: you gave him (or, perhaps he found with you) something which many of us never find: a purpose and meaning for life.”
It’s a message from a grieving father, perhaps putting undue blame on himself, in part a fan letter, and mostly a message of love.
JERRY GARCIA [WMVY, 1975]: All of a sudden, it's not the same group. It's a different group. We don’t have that anymore — what we have is a more group-like identity, probably. It’s definitely different. It’s not a question of better or worse, it just is different.
JESSE: It’s impossible to measure what Pigpen’s death did to the Grateful Dead, except to observe the absence of his musical presence. There was a rowdy drunken wake at Weir’s new place in Mill Valley. The week after that, the Dead were back on the road.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I remember Joe Gastwirt - telling me he was at this show. Joe Gastwird has worked with the Dead for 35 years or more, and he was at that Nassau show. And he just said there wasn't a dry eye in the house — every single person in there knew what that “He’s Gone” was for, because the word was obviously out that Pigpen had passed. And even the band, that sadness coming off the band… I think it was a nice touching tribute of the Dead to do that as the second of the show. We know “He’s Gone” isn’t necessarily about the loss — it’s not at all about the loss of Pigpen. But it was a very nice moment. I’ve heard that moment so many times, and you can hear it’s extra poignant. It’s extra meaningful.
JESSE: Written about the swindling manager Lenny Hart, the song’s meaning changed in a flash — a goodbye to Pigpen, and eventually a goodbye to anybody who might need saying goodbye to.
AUDIO: “He’s Gone” [3/19/73, audience tape] (7:25-7:55)
JESSE: Another tribute was published in 1974 by the poet Diane Di Prima of the Diggers. Titled “For Pigpen,” it was the memory of a distant Acid Test. It read, in part:
velvet at the edge of the tongue,
at the edge of the brain, it was
velvet. at the edge of history.
sound was light. like tracing
ancient letters w/yr toe on the
floor of the ballroom.
they came & went, hotel guests
like the Great Gatsby.
and wondered at the music.
sound was light.
jagged sweeps of discordant
light. aurora borealis over
some cemetary. a bark. a howl.
at the edge of history & there was
no time
AUDIO: “The Stranger (Two Souls in Communion)” [Europe ‘72: The Complete Recordings, Vol. 22, 5/26/72] (5:54-6:22) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: One of Pigpen’s closest friends in the Dead scene was sound engineer and LSD chemist Owsley Stanley. Please welcome to the Deadcast, his son, Starfinder.
STARFINDER STANLEY: My dad told me that [Pig] didn't smoke pot often. But he had asked my dad for some pot pretty soon before he died. When they went over to his place after he passed, Bear said he found a half-smoked joint from the pot that he'd given him. And he picked it up and he said he lit it up and took a toke. And it floored him — he said it was one of the most intensely psychedelic experiences that he'd had. And he grew that pot. He knew that pot! That was not what that pot usually did to him.
Pigpen Sings the Blues and Other Tales
JESSE: In the summer of 1973, the Grateful Dead issued an LP titled, The History of the Grateful Dead, Volume One (Bear’s Choice), which was framed in part as a tribute to Pigpen, featuring a handful of performances from the Fillmore East in February 1970. We’ll be discussing it at length another time. But one person who was definitely not ready to say goodbye was Pigpen’s father, Phil McKernan. In the mid-’70s, he began to assemble and annotate all the Pigpen recordings he was able to find, compiling his findings into a notebook and curating the best takes.
SULLY: Ron's dad was documenting… just the boxes of music that were found in his home in Corte Madera. Phil was documenting his son's [journey] — all the different recordings that he had accumulated. And he had the gear to do it. The stuff in his back room there, the few times I ever entered that realm… I'll tell you, man, that guy had the stuff. The reel-to-reels. Cassettes weren’t even really happening much in the early days of course.
JESSE: The notebook is the work of a serious music fan and sessionographer, but also a grieving father. It’s a clearly emotional and meaningful project, containing Phil’s handwritten transcriptions of his son’s vocal extemporizations, multiple projected tracklists, an attempt to date recordings — and some important clues for Pigographers, wondering about what might’ve been.
SULLY: He just… page after page of stuff. Obviously, I only have a fraction of it. I really don't… a lot of the stuff, I have no idea where it ended up.
JESSE: The notebook makes clear that Phil had pretty specific plans for the material.
SULLY: “Pigpen Sings the Blues and Other Tales. Must be in good taste. Not flamboyant.” It was an album cover.
JESSE: And, indeed, there’s a little thumbnail sketch of a projected LP, with room for notes by Phil on the back and a poem by Pigpen’s sister Carol. What’s very, very clear is that the recording that sometimes circulates as Pigpen’s lost album is only a non-definitive assortment of tracks. Phil’s notes indicate that most of the public versions are from 4-track reels dated 1969-1970, seemingly from the collection of Mickey Hart, making this Pigographer speculate that they represent some of the earliest sessions from Mickey’s Barn studio in Novato. In fact, some tapes do exist in the Dead vault. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I think we've all seen it around. It was a recording session… a session… it was not a session. It was Pig and a guitar in a kitchen. We’ve heard those. There are a few other things, for sure, that are on I think 4-track tape. There’s a tape, Pigpen’s last will and testament..
JESSE: This last tape is one of several that hasn’t ever made its way into the world, a six-song recording that was, according to one story, still in the tape machine when Pigpen died — though Phil’s inventory shows a few others listed after. Put another way, there’s still a whole lotta Pigpen left to uncover from pretty much all eras of his musical life. Phil McKernan notes that master of Pigpen’s last tape came from longtime Grateful Dead sound engineer and Pig’s close friend Owsley Stanley. Starfinder.
STARFINDER STANLEY: When I was a kid, when Bear’s tapes were living in the Vault up in Bel Marin Keys. [I remember] going into the vault with my dad and he was going through tapes, looking at things. He’d pull out a tape and he’d look at it, and he’d start talking about the show. He had a memory, he’d pull out a tape and be like, “Ah, yeah, I remember this show.” Pull out another tape, look at it, and say, “Hmm, says ‘weird.’ Could be good.” And he pulled out that tape and looked at it, and he started crying. Literal tears rolling down his face. This was the last tape that Pigpen was working on when he passed, when he wasn’t working on the songs. It just stuck with me. I don’t think I’d ever seen him cry before. But he loved Pigpen so deeply. It was just a horrible loss for him.
JESSE: The tape ends with a song titled “So Long,” and includes the Robert Hunter song “Maybe She’s a Bluebird,” which he would include the following year as the final song on Side A of his own solo debut, Tales of the Great Rum Runners, but apparently wrote it for Pigpen. I can totally imagine Pig singing it.
AUDIO: “Maybe She’s a Bluebird” [Robert Hunter, Tales of the Great Rum Runners] (0:03-0:36)
JESSE: Given its place, it’s hard not to hear a resonance with the lyrics to “Bird Song,” Robert Hunter’s elegy for Janis Joplin.
AUDIO: “Maybe She’s a Bluebird” [Robert Hunter, Tales of the Great Rum Runners] (1:22-1:40)
JESSE: And though we’re saying goodbye to Pigpen, we’re certainly not saying goodbye to his music, now and forever, one of the Grateful Dead.
AUDIO: “Operator” [American Beauty] (1:56-2:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]