Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 7, Episode 10
Here Comes Sunshine: RFK Stadium, 6/73
Archival interviews:
- Jerry Garcia, by Father Miles Riley, KPIX, 1976.
- Bob Weir, Keith Godchaux, Donna Godchaux and Jon McIntire, WAER, 9/17/73.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (0:00-0:19) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The Grateful Dead finished the spring of 1973 on the East Coast, playing two giant shows with the Allman Brothers Band at RFK Stadium in Washington DC that now conclude the Here Comes Sunshine box set. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The RFKs, on many occasions, have very nearly become their own box set. But we’re very glad that they ended up all being together. We’ve got May 13th through June 10th: four weeks of Grateful Dead, spread over five weekends, with some of the best and most inspired Grateful Dead I’ve ever heard. That goes for everything from Des Moines right through June 10th, the final set with all those guys.
JESSE: The box set captures mellow Midwest sunshine from Des Moines on May 13th; breezy Pacific Ocean sunshine from Santa Barbara on May 20th; and dreamy Golden Gate Park sunshine from Kezar Stadium on May 26th. But the two shows at RFK were a different variety — blazing hot East Coast sunshine, musical and otherwise.
BOB WEIR [6/9/73]: Thank y’all for giving us a chance to get a wonderful suntan.
DAVID LEMIEUX: RFK was really the first time the Dead had played a big East Coast stadium. They’d done Roosevelt, but this was a big stadium — this was an NFL stadium. There was much more involved in that. The construction of the sound system had to be much bigger than anything they’d used up until then.
JESSE: Working on the sound system, and capturing Sonic Journals of that work, was Owsley Stanley, 11 months post-prison.
DAVID LEMIEUX: So Bear was at those shows and recorded. And for those, we also had, I believe, Kidd [Candelario]’s recordings. We ended up opting to go with Bear’s. Kidd’s are incredible as well, but Bear’s, they have a certain Bear quality to them in a very good way.
JESSE: Thanks, as always, Bear. I know we mentioned the length of the Des Moines show a few weeks back, but the second night at RFK truly might be the longest-ever Dead show, counting the jam set at the end — 4 hours, 40 minutes, 47 seconds of stage-time, according to the official track listing on the new box. So for these stadium shows, we have a stadium-sized episode. Don’t forget your sunscreen.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (0:56-1:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
Allmans
JESSE: Co-headlining the weekend at RFK were the Allman Brothers Band. That year, the Allmans released their biggest-ever song, making it to #2 with a bullet.
AUDIO: “Ramblin’ Man” [The Allman Brothers Band, Brothers and Sisters] (0:00-0:25) - [Spotify]
JESSE: But “Ramblin’ Man” and its associated album, Brothers and Sisters, wouldn’t be released until August 1973 — only after the Allmans had spent the summer playing mega-shows with the Dead and without. To help guide us through Allmans territory as it merges with our own, we’re so genuinely happy to welcome Alan Paul, author of a great forthcoming book titled Brothers and Sisters, out later this summer.
ALAN PAUL: None of this stuff makes sense if you look at it through the lens of the more-contemporary music business, or even what developed in the ‘80s and ‘90s that we got used to, where somebody puts out a single then they put out an album, and they toured behind it. They were just sort of doing it as they went. There's a lot of differences between the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers, but one similarity is that they really did still view live performances as their bread and butter.
JESSE: If you enjoy the kind of deep, obsessive territory we cover on the Deadcast, I can’t recommend Alan’s book highly enough. Just like the Dead and the Allmans had lots of similarities and equivalents through their bands and organizations, Alan’s become our unofficial Allmans correspondent and ambassador, plunging down a few rabbit holes in the course of putting this episode together. The Dead and the Allmans first got acquainted at the Fillmore East, shows we touched on most recently in our Bear’s Choice episode. You know, February 1970.
AUDIO: “Mountain Jam” [The Allman Brothers Band, 2/14/70] (3:20-3:50) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was the 2/14/70 “Mountain Jam,” available from the Owsley Stanley Foundation. After those shows, they played together when they could, which wasn’t ever nearly enough. Besides a radio appearance with Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, Duane Allman would only sit in with the Dead once more—in April 1971, again at the Fillmore East—before his tragic death in a motorcycle accident that October. The Allmans continued onward, and the bond between the two bands grew even tighter, starting in the summer of 1972. Please welcome Dead Head Ihor Slabicky.
IHOR SLABICKY: The Dead were playing in Hartford in the summer. You see this organ get put on stage and it’s got a big mushroom painted on it. You kind of know: “Oh man, something’s gonna happen here… that’s not the Grateful Dead’s equipment, it’s the Allmans’!”
JESSE: And, sure enough, Gregg Allman, Dickey Betts, Berry Oakley, and Jaimoe popped out to jam with the Dead in Hartford. The next night, Garcia, Weir, and Bill Kreutzmann returned the favor, joining the Allman Brothers at Gaelic Park in the Bronx for a dope “Mountain Jam.” The summer 1972 jams connected the rest of the band with the Dead, and most especially connected Dickey Betts and Jerry Garcia.
ALAN PAUL: Maybe because Dickey was a little bit more of a shy guy — he wasn't so outgoing, he wasn't the one who jumped up on stage and was always doing sit-ins. Duane would play with anyone, anywhere.
JESSE: With a pair of good jams under their belt, everybody was eager for more. The Grateful Dead had Sam Cutler in their corner. The Allman Brothers had Bunky Odom. Please welcome to the Deadcast, Bunky Odom.
BUNKY ODOM: In March of ‘69, we all got to Macon at the same time. I was a vice president from Phil Walden and Associates. I was never an employee of Capricorn Records. Duane came to me and said, “You’re our man in the office.” I was in charge of the day-to-day.
JESSE: By the summer of 1972, Sam Cutler and Bunky Odom had become pals.
BUNKY ODOM: Sam and I got to talking about doing some dates together. I think I went to San Francisco four or five times and talked to him, [and] Sam came to Macon. We became friends. We talked and decided: let’s try two dates. We put together a date in Houston with the Allman Brothers Band and the Grateful Dead. And we put together a date at the University of Georgia in Athens.
JESSE: All in all, the Dead and the Allmans were supposed to play together seven times in the last months of 1972. But it wasn’t destined to be.
ALAN PAUL: The last show that Berry Oakley played and the only time that he and Chuck Leavell played together was an abbreviated show because it was part of the Don Kirshner Rock Concert. And they played “Ramblin’ Man” — they debuted it.
AUDIO: “Ramblin’ Man” [The Allman Brothers Band, 11/2/72] (1:13-1:39)
JESSE: As it turns out, the Dead were originally scheduled to have appeared alongside the Allmans on the debut episode of Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, recorded on Long Island at Hofstra University on November 2nd. It would’ve been a good time to promote the brand-new Europe ‘72 triple LP. But according to a report by Robert Christgau in Newsday, the Dead canceled because the network wouldn’t let them run their own sound. The bands’ proper shows together were scheduled to open two weeks later in Texas, but then tragedy struck.
BUNKY ODOM: Berry Oakley died. So, the dates didn't get worked.
ALAN PAUL: They included two hours of “open jam” at the end of each night. So those two shows are something that really got away, and the Dead ended up playing in Houston alone.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Houston, Texas – 11/18/72, 11/18/72] (14:25-14:50)
JESSE: That was from the totally mega 26-minute “Playing in the Band” from the November 18th show in Houston, released with the plain title 11/18/72. Oakley had been one of the serious Dead freaks in the Allmans, and Phil Lesh would fly an Eat a Peach t-shirt at a few of the shows in the spring of ‘73. I’m not sure where the University of Georgia show fit in, but the co-headlining gigs would’ve continued out west. David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The December ‘72 Winterland shows were supposed to be with the Allmans. It’s great to hear in the RFK setting, but to have heard it in the Winterland setting — these two bands at the height of their excellence, playing a 5 or 6,000-seat arena, indoors, three nights…
Thankfully, the Dead continued on and played those shows. And I think the Sons of Champlin opened one of them.
BUNKY ODOM: So we had to get the Allman Brothers Band back together. I don’t know how many months it was. They got Chuck [Leavell] in the band and Lamar [Williams] is in the band, and Sam and I started talking again: “What can we do?” “Let's do something big.” We knew we couldn't do it in the South. We knew we had to do it somewhere north of Washington, because those two bands were huge up there.
JESSE: Like the Dead, the Allman Brothers were road warriors. Alan Paul.
ALAN PAUL: They were continuing to grow and get bigger and more popular in these sort of strange murky ways that are hard to define. They just somehow were capturing the moment, and they had this zeitgeist that they didn't exactly create — although, the success of Brothers and Sisters then did create it, if that makes any sense. But they were already riding this sort of wave.
JESSE: The Dead rubbed off on the Allman Brothers in lots of ways, large and small. Earlier this season, we mentioned Susila Kreutzmann’s stores, Kumquat Mae and Rainbow Arbor. She’d made the earliest Dead shirts, and she assisted in making some of the earliest Allman Brothers shirts, too.
ALAN PAUL: She was making some Allman Brothers shirts, I'm gonna guess it was around the RFK show. But she was doing that with Rose Lane Leavell— Chuck's wife, who has a real sense of fashion and, in later years, actually owned a clothing boutique for years in Macon. So it wasn’t a stretch at all for her to be involved in that. They worked on it a bit together, and she told Rose Lane and some of the other Allman Brothers’ wives and girlfriends: “Look, this is cool, you’ve got to do this.” And so they did. They actually started making their own merch, 100% inspired by Susila.
JESSE: The Allman Brothers family discovered the same thing the Dead family did.
ALAN PAUL: So they did start a merch company, but they realized really quickly, like — “Gee, this sucks.” As she did, I believe. There was no real infrastructure, there was no support for it. They were fighting these sort of sexist guys within the band and without the band. They had to go deal with venues by themselves — ‘Can we sell these shirts?’ It just became too much of a headache. And so they started a company: a guy named Ira Sokoloff, in collaboration with Willie Perkins and some of the other Allman Brothers guys, started a merch company called Great Southern.
JESSE: For the two bands’ first big East Coast outing together, they chose a site at the edges of the bands’ respective territories, 200 miles just south of the Mason Dixon Line — Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington, DC.
BUNKY ODOM: And we decided to do it. We said, “Let’s do two nights at RFK,” [with] Larry Magid of Electric Factory Concerts in Philadelphia. Let's see if we can get that together.
JESSE: The Dead had been working with Electric Factory since 1968, and the Philadelphia company had helped the band grow. Our friend Corry Arnold wrote a great piece about the band’s relationship with the promoters. The Dead had only played inside the beltway a few times, the shows at RFK were designed to be regional gigs, attracting fans from the north, south, and beyond.
BUNKY ODOM: The Dead were actually larger than the Allman Brothers Band in the Northeast. And I'm not saying that the Allman Brothers Band didn’t have a following, but the Dead were like God up there. And they still are!
JESSE: Tickets went on sale in early May, a week before the Dead began their spring shows that are on the Here Comes Sunshine box, and only a few weeks before the Watkins Glen Summer Jam was announced, near the end of the month. Another piece in here is one that we touched on last time, which is that the Dead and the Allmans also had a show booked together with Waylon Jennings at the Ontario Motor Speedway in southern California on May 27th — a Bill Graham joint, the day after the Dead’s gig at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco. It would have been Watkins Glen west, estimated to draw around 150,000 people to a speedway to dig the Dead, the Allmans, and another big roots act. Citing a noise curfew, Graham pulled the plug on May 22nd, just five days before. And while we’re on the topic, Rolling Stone’s Artist Calendars column also announced that the Dead would be playing June 2nd and 3rd at Memorial Auditorium in Kansas City, also presented by Bill Graham. Given the band’s eventual destination at RFK, this makes sense on the equipment route, anyway. I can’t find any other paper trail of the gig, but it didn’t happen. The Dead’s gig at Kezar, on the other hand, went great, an instant classic among local heads.
AUDIO: “Casey Jones” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (6:32-7:00) - [dead.net]
[audience cheers & applauds]
PHIL LESH [5/26/73]: Byyyyeee!
BILL GRAHAM [5/26/73]: Once again, really, one of the great, great, great ones — the Grateful Dead, please…
Old & In the Way
JESSE: The Dead had two weeks off after the Kezar show that we discussed last episode. But Jerry Garcia? He did not have two weeks off. In our “Garcia ‘73” episode, we spoke with Richard Loren, who’d started booking shows for Garcia’s side projects, coordinating with Sam Cutler and the Out of Town Tours office. We’ll use this spot to insert our weekly shout to JerryBase.com, which keeps track of all this stuff.
On May 29th and 30th, Garcia and Merl Saunders made their first trip to southern California, playing two nights at the venerable Ash Grove in L.A., presumably booked around the canceled Ontario Speedway show. On June 2nd, they were in San Rafael at Marin Veterans Memorial Auditorium for a benefit for the Henry C. Hall Elementary School, with opening sets by Herbie Hancock and the Pointer Sisters. No tapes, but sweet bill. After that, it was time for Garcia to head east.
JOHN SCHER [6/5/73]: On guitar, Peter Rowan. On bass, John Kahn. On mandolin, David Grisman. On fiddle, Vassar Clements. The banjo player is Jerry Garcia. Ladies and gentlemen, Old & In the Way.
AUDIO: “Old & In the Way Breakdown” [Old & In the Way, 6/5/73] (0:00-0:11)
JESSE: Please welcome back, the legendary Peter Rowan.
PETER ROWAN: When we toured with the Grateful Dead—Old & In the Way on the East Coast, we did one tour—Jerry played with us one night, and then the Dead one night. It was way too much.
JESSE: That does sound like way too much, though it’s hard to argue that Garcia wasn’t totally shredding by the time he got to RFK. He played seven gigs in seven seven days, from June 5th through June 11th — 4 with Old & In the Way, 2 with the Dead at RFK, and then one more with Old & In the Way. And the night before the tour, he met up with the rest of Old & In the Way in Boston, where they met their newest member, the fiddler Vassar Clements, for their first practice together. We discussed it extensively in our Garcia ‘73 episode. During the run up to the RFK shows, East Coast Dead Heads got what turned out to be their only chance to see Old & In the Way. The tour opened in Boston on June 5th, then hit Passaic, New Jersey on June 6th, Garcia’s first visit to the other Capitol Theatre. Bluegrass met the East Coast Dead freak scene for the first time. Howie Levine.
HOWIE LEVINE: We go walking in and we're getting off, and we're walking into the lobby in Passaic. I was the designated driver, but that's okay. I had to wait. We’re walking in, and starting to feel it, and somebody calls my name. It’s friends of my parents who were huge bluegrass fans. They came to see Vassar. They were much younger than my parents. They stop me in the lobby and start talking with me: “Hey, how are you? How’s the parents?” And I’m, like, grasping for reality to talk to these people. After a few minutes, they gave me a big smile and said, “That’s okay… we get it. Have a great time at the show.”
JESSE: Also in Passaic was Deadcast buddy Allan Arkush, back in New York after the demise of Joe’s Lights.
ALLAN ARKUSH: I was living in New York and I went out to Passaic to see it, because I was driving a cab that year in New York. Jerry was touring with Old & In the Way, and they were playing in Passaic. And so I went. I’m hanging out backstage with Jerry and all this stuff, and he introduces me to the guys in Old & In the Way. The mandolin player is David Grisman. I’m talking and I realize that David Grisman had been in a band that I had seen at the Fillmore called Earth Opera.
JESSE: Not long after, Allan headed to Hollywood to make his way in the pictures, landing a job with infamous B-movie director Roger Corman.
ALLAN ARKUSH: I'm working for Roger Corman, editing and so forth. Roger is going to release a movie called Big Bad Mama with Angie Dickinson, which is like Bonnie and Clyde with breasts, and Angie Dickinson and shoot 'em ups and so forth, and they need music. The first thought everyone had is the music like Bonnie and Clyde — bluegrass. So, I get this idea: let me find David Grisman. I know a bluegrass player, so I get a hold of Grisman. He was so good at it that he did a very successful Corman movie called Eat My Dust. Ron Howard pops the clutch and tells the world to “eat my dust.” I wrote that, everybody, so when it comes out. And he did a great score, which he still plays today.
AUDIO: “EMD” [David Grisman Quintet, s/t] (0:56-1:08) - [Acoustic Disc]
JESSE: David Grisman had grown up in Passaic, and had played in the moderately successful psychedelic band Earth Opera, but the Old & In the Way tour put him on the psychedelic map in a new way. Howie Levine.
HOWIE LEVINE: We go in and we’re sitting up close, and I remember at various points staring at Grisman, who is like a serpent. His arms were moving so quickly — it looked like he had five arms. And Jerry with a big smile, and Vassar, who was just totally out of place. He was this straight Southern guy, playing with all these heads and ripping it up. I mean, just tearing the place up. It was so amazing. It was one of the best shows I'd ever seen live. It was that spectacular. And it was because these guys are having fun. You look at the stage, and they had these big smiles. And they’re just having the best time playing music. This is what it’s about.
JESSE: Richard Loren had organized the tour.
RICHARD LOREN: By the time they got to the end of those four gigs they played, it was kind of interesting. We went to Boston, first gig — Jerry was the big star. By the time we got to Virginia, the big stars were Peter and David.
JESSE: On June 8th, the tour hit Virginia for a fair epoch-making appearance at the 8th Warrenton Bluegrass Festival in Lake Whippoorwill. Old & In the Way would become an important bridge into bluegrass’s still-picking modern age, though their sole album didn’t come out until 1975. Warrenton was the first of only two times they appeared on a festival. Peter Rowan.
PETER ROWAN: There's photos of that festival that were taken. There's me with Sam Bush, David, myself and [John] Hartford. We're all in our undershirts on a stage. We are hippie-ed out. And that was the new wave of bluegrass right there in those pictures. Also, Buck White was in those pictures, playing guitar.
JESSE: It was a three-day festival, and even the bill on Friday was just tremendous, to name just a few besides Old & In the Way — Doc and Merle Watson, the Dillards, the Stonemans, Steve Goodman, Del McCoury, and Tex Logan.
PETER ROWAN: Jerry stayed in his motel, he wouldn't come out and do any of the jamming that we did, hanging out backstage. He also felt very vulnerable — there was no security, there never is at a bluegrass festival. People were just wandering around everywhere. I just remember when Jerry came out to play, all of a sudden, from the campground over the hill, came all these guys with black hair and beards and cut-off blue jeans all waving the Jerry Garcia-lacking-middle-finger sign. It was like a cult of mini Jerrys. There were like 30 or 40 of them. I just remember the look on Jerry’s face was like — ‘Oh no…’ That was my remembrance; it may be enlarged by history. But I just remember that Jerry was very uncomfortable being that exposed to so many people. And he had allergies — when you’re playing in the middle of a pine forest and a bluegrass festival, there’s a lot of dust, there’s a lot of pollen.
AUDIO: “Wild Horses” [Old & In the Way, s/t] (0:40-1:01) - [Acoustic Disc]
Sound Tricks
JESSE: That was the version of “Wild Horses” from the Old & in the Way album. Out west, Garcia was just another freak in the freak kingdom, as Hunter S. Thompson once put it. But on the east coast, he was becoming a genuine celebrity. The spring of 1973 saw the beginning of what the members of the Dead referred to as the Mega-Gig. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: You can look at photos of RFK and you can see the prototype of the Wall of Sound. Lots of things would change between then and March of ‘74, but certainly there's a big sense of what the Wall of Sound would become. I think owing to the fact that they were playing a stadium that was bigger than any stadium they played — again, Roosevelt Stadium is big, Kezar Stadium, these are big places; Santa Barbara Stadium, big place. [But] RFK was a whole new thing for the Grateful Dead.
JESSE: In 1976, Jerry Garcia reflected on this period in a television interview with Father Miles Riley.
JERRY GARCIA [KPIX, 1976]: We felt that having reached the end of a certain level, that cul-de-sac that we were talking about—in terms of, for us, [as a] a rock 'n' roll group, a performing musical group—the end of that really is the colossal, what we call the Mega-Gig in the huge stadium.
JESSE: On one hand, they were truly among the biggest bands in the country. While certainly the Dead were bringing in lots of money for their Mega-Gigs, they were putting out a lot, too. Here’s how Bob Weir described it in September 1973 on WAER.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: We make sure that we stay broke. We make sure that we spend anything that comes in.
JESSE: A report from Alembic’s Ron Wickersham written on May 29th, 1973, a few days after the Kezar show and before RFK, specifies a list of Alembic’s in-progress projects for the Dead, including the difference condenser microphones, difference preamp for dynamic microphones, mixer for monitors, delay line-bucket brigade type—don’t know what that is either—Phil Lesh guitar system, PA array, and general maintenance. It was also a period of great expansion for the Dead, as they prepared to launch their own record company, which we got into in our Grateful Dead & Co. episode, and which we’ll detail more down the line.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: We got into sort of a spiral where we had a lot of employees and a huge overhead in this PA that we’ve been building. In order to pay for it all, we had to play bigger places. In order to play bigger places and get decent sound, we had to buy a bigger PA. And in order to buy a bigger PA, we have to make more money and play bigger places.
JON McINTIRE [9/17/73]: Don’t think about that too closely.
JESSE: Manager Jon McIntire was along for the interview.
JON MCINTIRE [9/17/73]: Well, it was like you made the decision to play large halls.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: We did do that.
JON MCINTIRE [9/17/73]: And that was when we started increasing the equipment — that decision came first, and that was caused by the fact that we were drawing more than the small halls could hold. On the East Coast, we were having troubles — like at Boston University, we had a riot. They were small halls. We were being forced into large halls, and so we increased the sound system to come up with that.
JESSE: If you’ve never had a chance to read through the band’s newsletters from the early 1970s, it can be slightly unsettling how homemade and direct they are. There are tour dates, sure. But there are also whole dense pages filled with doodles by Garcia and Hunter marbled with transmissions from St. Dilbert, other pages with psychedelic art by the under-acknowledged Mary Ann Mayer, and a startling amount of financial transparency about their operating expenses. In the newsletter that went out to heads around the time of the RFK shows, the newsletter featured an illustration of the Ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail, alongside a typically thoughtful State of the Changes report from Alan Trist.
ALAN TRIST: The Ouroboros diagram, which was in one of the newsletters, was just a symbol for that very process. So, are we eating our tails here with the sound system, getting too big without understanding — it was all part of that process, absolutely.
JESSE: The State of the Changes read, in part: “We like a variety of concert situations. Ambiance comes in different sizes. We like a small hall, and so do you, and an outdoor gig in the sun, and a large hall when it can be made to sound good (few halls over 6000 capacity aren't sports arenas with novel acoustic and environmental puzzles).” The mega-gigs brought with them their own strange vibrations. Here’s Garcia in ‘76.
JERRY GARCIA [KPIX, 1976]: And then, at that point, the experience for us got to be one that was totally controlled in the sense of — airplanes to motel; motel to gig; backstage, heavy security, nobody near the stage. And what's worse is that it's also reflected in the way those very large venues deal with people. They deal with them in that sort of cattle prod methodology: lots of cops, lots of frisk lines, lots of tightness.
JESSE: Though the tapes are excellent, Weir didn’t think the band really had the stadiums under their control yet when he spoke about it that September on WAER.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: We've never really mastered the technique of playing those big places. I imagine that should be forthcoming, surely, that we master that technique. And then when that happens… we’re also putting our minds, like I say, to work out reasonable ways of playing smaller places without incurring the hassles that we incurred.
JESSE: Over the next decades of the band’s career, all of those things would happen, but on slightly different time scales. The sound system would get bigger, for one. The version the band brought to RFK in June was certainly the biggest yet. One witness we have, who we’re really excited to have on the Deadcast, is Buddy Thornton, part of the Allman Brothers in-house engineering team.
BUDDY THORNTON: The first time I had any interaction with any of those guys was the RFK Stadium gig, DC, June 9th and 10th, ‘73. It was an infamous kind of a thing. I went to RFK and the Dead had their sound system set up — a monster. I’d never seen anything that big. They had some side fills, but they had those big stacks with Phil’s bass rig and Jerry’s… the Owsley Stanley design I guess, those guys. But I didn’t know any of those people until then.
JESSE: The exact nature of the split billing hadn’t been specified in the ads, but worked out that the Dead would open the Saturday show and close the Sunday show, plus different opening acts on each day, which gave the weekend a certain topography. Because they opened on Saturday, the Dead—of course—used the occasion to continue to fine-tune the system. The first members of their sound team had arrived on Wednesday. The band’s itinerary for Friday, June 8th simply read, “A Day of Tests.”
BUDDY THORNTON: Some of us were throwing a football around the [field at] RFK Stadium, right, just hanging out until they opened the gates and let all these kids in. And I remember talking to either… I don't know if it was Ron Wickersham or [Dan] Healy, but somebody was doing measurements with a slide rule, actually. They didn’t have any computers — trying to figure out how far to put the speakers away from the stage. I briefly talked to them about how they were doing their sound; they had some auxiliary speakers, but I’m not sure who did that. There were big black cabinets, and they were located out in the stadium.
JESSE: In the State of the Changes, Alan Trist had spoken of the novel acoustic environments at different venues, and the delay system at RFK was its own custom fix. When we spoke with Ron Wickersham of Alembic a while back, he remembered this show.
RON WICKERSHAM [2020]: There was also another big one in Washington, DC. That one was another tilted one. Everybody said the acoustics were terrible at this place because they had a vertical back wall that was exposed concrete, a vertical back wall. You got the bounce back from that, so we tilted the system physically. Nowadays, we could do it by adjusting phase, like radar. But tilting it, so that we didn't hit that; then, we had delay towers that were tilted up. So they went up, hit the wall, and then went out through the… because it was partially covered seating, but there was a big hole in the middle. So we could get rid of the reflection out through the hole by doing it that way. So those are the kinds of things that we tried to solve.
BUDDY THORNTON: Those phased arrays of speakers were definitely cool. I remember those stacks were a little tilted — I couldn't figure out how they didn't tumble over. I didn’t see any real bracing, but a lot of things they did—and the Brothers, too—were kind of defying gravity at the time.
JESSE: Here we will insert a shout to one of my favorite characters from the Thoughts on the Dead universe, the semi-fictional Grateful Dead roadie, Precarious Lee.
PRECARIOUS LEE: Yo!
JESSE: The Dead’s archives contain a folder with a bunch of undated sketches of the sound system in progress from this era, along with notes about the specific stages constructed for RFK and Watkins Glen, alongside even more pages of calculations that are just totally inscrutable to me. But amid all the calculations is also some psychedelia. One page has a small sketch of the speaker system along with some notes: “Dense knots / floating galaxies in the retina.”
BUDDY THORNTON: And I got to go backstage with Twiggs Lyndon, and I saw how they had the McIntosh amps all interfaced, these giant stacks of speakers. First time I'd ever seen a big rig like that up close.
JESSE: There’s a handwritten gear list from early 1973 in the archives, prepared some time that spring. Pigpen is included, noting he plays a Hammond B-3 through four Leslie speakers. It runs down everybody else’s gear in detail. At the bottom, there’s an asterisk with a note that reads, “all amps have personalities.” Buddy was witness to a rare specimen.
BUDDY THORNTON: When I first head backstage with Twiggs, I hear a note coming out of one stack over here and another note, another string, coming out on the right. So he had it split I think, where he could play the E-A-D-G, and it split so that each was a different string, and he had all these controls on it to do that.
JESSE: Phil Lesh’s quadraphonic bass is the stuff of legend, new in early 1973—specified in the aforementioned gear list—and only deployed very occasionally. Having four strings coming out of four speakers turned out to be slightly more disconcerting than desired, except under certain circumstances. Somewhere in the tangle of the Dead’s gear at RFK was Owsley Stanley. Though he was Old & In the Way’s usual taper, he’d skipped the tour, presumably to keep working on the sound system. At RFK, he was running tapes both nights, and it’s his recordings that we’ll be listening to today. We’ll take a moment to sample them before we dive fully into the show.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/9/73] (3:53-4:23) - [dead.net]
JESSE: With Jeffrey Norman, David Lemieux has overseen the transfer of many Bear recordings.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Bear, quite famously, didn't use EQ very much. He didn't use compression, he didn't add a lot, or any, reverb. Bears recordings are drier. They’re not pejorative terms; they’re just objective terms, and they’re facts. It’s drier. Bear was very adamant that we not manipulate the audio when we master things that he recorded because, in his mind, what he recorded was perfect. It was a perfect reflection of what you were hearing. And I remember a couple of times where, as an engineer, Jeffrey would say, “If I can make it better, with some compression or some reverb or some EQ, I'm going to.” I think that was his notion 15, 20 years ago. But a couple of times, I distinctly remember being in the Dead studio with Jeffrey and we’d put on a Bear recording to master it for Dick’s Picks at the time, and Jeffrey would say, “I can’t improve this — he’s right!” Maybe there are little things you can do. But in terms of the normal amounts of sonic manipulation a mastering engineer would do with a 2-track source tape, there was nothing to do.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/9/73] (4:45-5:15) - [dead.net]
Trekkin’
JESSE: We spoke with a number of Dead Heads for this episode about their experiences at the RFK shows. There were certainly many heads who saw the Dead for the first time at these two gigs. But the Dead had hit the Northeast so relentlessly over the previous seven years that, for many in their growing fanbase, it was just time for the Dead’s seasonal visit. Howie Levine had been seeing them since the FIllmore East days.
HOWIE LEVINE: We saw what I thought was one of the first large shows. We went to New Haven in the summer of ’71. They played in the Yale Bowl, but it wasn't the Yale Bowl — it was like one end of the Yale Bowl. They sort of put the stage in the endzone of the football field, and they played to maybe 10 or 12,000 people — which was pretty big at the time, going from a little theater to the Yale Bowl. We see Old & In the Way on Wednesday, and then Friday night, we’re going down to DC.
JESSE: Ihor Slabicky was another Brooklyn head of the Fillmore East vintage. You might know him from his great Compleat Discography.
IHOR SLABICKY: I ended up basically going by myself, and taking the train from New York down to Washington, DC. So the plan was to go down there for one show on Saturday, take the train and walk from the station to RFK, catch the show and then take the train back. I think the train left New York around 11 o’clock or midnight or something like that, so you pulled into Washington in the morning sometime. There were a lot of people going to the concert on that train, so there were little scenes happening in between the cars, in the vestibules. People would open the window, and they’d have a little party scene going.
HOWIE LEVINE: One of the things we traveled with, reasonably frequently, was a big tank of nitrous — a medical tank of nitrous that we had acquired through some, I guess, devious ways. But we had this giant tank, we said, “Oh great, we’ll take the tank with us.” Of course! You’re going to see the Dead, you gotta take the tank. So we take my friend’s VW squareback, and the three of us are driving down there. On the way down, we’re getting pretty ripped. I remember driving up to the tunnel and seeing “No Compressed Gas” — a sign saying, like, don’t go into the tunnel with tanks of gas. So I’m thinking: “Eh, we’ll probably be okay.” And as I drive into the tunnel, I go, “What if we’re not okay?” And this thing explodes in the tunnel! So now, I’m losin’ it. But we’re good. We get out the other side into some campground in Virginia for the night. It’s peaceful and dark, except for every so often you hear a — [makes hissing sound] — the spray of the tank.
AUDIO: [crickets, then nitrous hissing]
Night 1
JESSE: Have you ever been experienced? Danno Henklein has. We hung out with Danno during our Sunshine Daydream episodes last year. Danno, known to some you freaks as Tee-Pee Dan, traveled down to RFK from Connecticut. Since Veneta, he’d only gotten further experienced. He knew going in that Grateful Dead shows could be powerful journeys. And as he learned on June 9th at RFK, they could be unpredictable. Welcome back, Danno.
DANNO HENKLEIN: We went down there in two cars — seven or eight of us, a mix of men and women. The summer of ‘73 was very turbulent for me because my heart was broken by my first girlfriend. My girlfriend split up with me in the parking lot of RFK Stadium, when we arrived there. But hello, because I wasn’t driving, about a half an hour before we got there… and so I had my heart broken in a heightened state, as we walked into RFK Stadium.
JESSE: Oh, man. The gates opened around noon. Ihor Slabicky.
IHOR SLABICKY: You walked in kind of mid-level. You weren’t on the field — you were mid-level, and you could go down or up. But it was just: grab any seat, anywhere. It was wide open.
JESSE: That is, a giant metropolitan football stadium, run entirely general admission. Don’t see much of that these days.
DANNO HENKLEIN: And so I am walking in there, and it felt like I was walking into a Roman amphitheater, about to be slaughtered on the floor of the amphitheater — with my heart and my mind torn apart. I was holding steady, rock steady and calm as I could be. Already seasoned and ready to withstand whatever fate delivered to me.
JESSE: Brian Schiff had been seeing the Dead since ‘68, though it took a few years to really click.
BRIAN SCHIFF: It was just brutally fucking hot. It was a classic summer Washington, DC day, where it was in the 90s and it was super humid.
HOWIE LEVINE: I remember that lots of people [were] swarming on the field. We were cruising around, went to the field, sat a little bit in the stands just to get a perspective and get a few minutes off our feet. We had a great time, walking around and seeing the show.
JESSE: Alan Paul.
ALAN PAUL: It was 50,000 on the first night, 53,000 on day one I think, which is Saturday, and 30,000 there on Sunday. I do think it is worth pausing to, again, just reflect on getting 80,000-some people to a stadium, six weeks before you're playing in front of what turned out to be 600,000. But they were selling tickets, they thought, for 150,000 — not that far away, in the same region of the country.
JESSE: I think it’d be possible to argue that the weekend at RFK served to build hype for Watkins Glen, what turned out to be a record-shattering festival. The backstage scene at RFK Stadium over the two days in June was predictably bananas. The Dead’s guestlist burst at the seams as normal. And also, they were inside the Beltway. Bunky Odom.
BUNKY ODOM: Caroline Kennedy was there. We took care of her — she came backstage. She must have been, what, 16, 17 years old then? Somewhere in there? She was a big Allman Brothers Band / Grateful Dead fan.
JESSE: Out in the field, people were finding their zones. Ihor Slabicky.
IHOR SLABICKY: When I got to RFK, like, two rows away from where I was sitting is a friend of mine with his girlfriend. They’re from Newark, in New Jersey, so I was like, Whoa! That was a surprise. I ended up hanging out with them, and they were staying at his sister's place. I want to say, not Baltimore, but somewhere somewhere close to Washington.
DANNO HENKLEIN: So we moved down towards the front where we always stood. Sometimes, in these outdoor venues, they used to have a soundboard that was strategically placed. We usually liked to get in front of the soundboard — not right in front, but somewhat in front, halfway to the stage, maybe, from the soundboard. So, there we were.
JESSE: The first act on Saturday was Doug Sahm, the Texas groover, one of the acts in Sam Cutler’s Out of Town touring stable. He started pretty early in the afternoon, around the time the gates opened at noon. Danno was already a fan of Sahm’s instant classic Doug Sahm and Band, released earlier in 1973, and it burned itself deeper under the day’s circumstances.
DANNO HENKLEIN: When he was doing “Faded Love” — oh my god, my heart was breaking. My heart was breaking! To this day, that song is one of my all-time favorites, and I love Bob Wills because Doug Sahm turned me onto Bob Wills at that show, with the album Doug Sahm and Band.
AUDIO: “Faded Love” [Doug Sahm, Doug Sahm and Band] (1:00-1:28) - [Spotify]
JESSE: No tapes have ever surfaced of Doug Sahm’s RFK set, but it’d be great to hear them. And, after Doug Sahm…
AUDIO: “Promised Land” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/9/73] (0:03-0:28) - [dead.net]
JESSE: It was a true co-headlining show, with the Dead in no way curtailing their usual habits, playing two sets over three hours. The only difference is that they forgo the third set they played at the other shows on this box. Phil Lesh hit the stage wearing an Eat A Peach shirt. David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The performance is a revelation because it's just as good as any of the other four in this box, but unexpectedly so. Nobody had really heard it like this, and nobody… the attention that we’ve all given Kezar and June 10th, I had, personally, never given June 9th that attention. Now that I have, I’m bowled over by it.
JESSE: It’s true, the June 10th show has long been held in high and deserved esteem by tape collectors, and June 9th maybe a little less so. But Danno Henklein gave the show his full attention.
DANNO HENKLEIN: Now, the soundtrack of our lives loads slowly as songs become linked with life events.
JESSE: Some people might have Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks burned into their heart for, you know, reasons, but Danno’s got June 9th, 1973 at RFK Stadium.
DANNO HENKLEIN: The concert, as per usual, was a tapestry of darker and lighter themes expressed in the music. It wasn't like candy-coating anything; it was reminding me that — hey, shit happens, man, but there's a good side too. The skull and the rose— those are very important. To me, the skull and the rose linked together symbolizes the triumph of love over death.
AUDIO: “Promised Land” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/9/73] (1:16-1:42)
DANNO HENKLEIN: They used to open with “Promised Land” in those days quite a lot. That was a good opener song. And then “Deal,” a negative theme — the guy’s at the end of his rope. I’m feeling this: I am feeling this in my heart, my mind, and my very body because of the sound waves.
AUDIO: “Deal” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/9/73] (3:06-3:37) - [dead.net]
DANNO HENKLEIN: And then after that, can you believe it? “Looks Like Rain.” Oh my god… my heart is breaking and the raindrops are coming down.
AUDIO: “Looks Like Rain” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/9/73] (5:00-5:24) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Love that Lesh harmony, which lasted though the early fall. Nice sound on the Rhodes from Keith Godchaux, too. Ihor.
IHOR SLABICKY: There were a lot of people trying to climb up onto the stage. It was like 20 feet high or something like that.
SAM CUTLER [6/9/73]: Hey, I’m sorry everyone has to listen to this, but just for the folks down here in the front, right — please don’t keep jumpin’ up. It’s a real drag on the people up here to ask you to get back down. The reason the stage is so high is so everyone can hear and see, okay? So, have a good time. Thanks.
IHOR SLABICKY: They're boosting ‘em up on their shoulders, and a couple people actually got on. They got escorted off really quickly by some of the roadies.
JESSE: One way to spot the difference between photos of the first day at RFK and the second is that, on the 9th, there’s a ring of Christmas lights along the stage’s edge, but fans had apparently ripped them down by the 10th, trying to scale the 20-foot stage and discovering a row of lights when they reached the top. Good spotting, Volki. There’s an invoice for them from the promoters in the band’s archive: $211.25 for “twinkle lights for stage border that were destroyed by crowd.”
DANNO HENKLEIN: And then “Loose Lucy,” which is basically a song about the perils of promiscuity.
AUDIO: “Loose Lucy” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/9/73] (0:25-0:55) - [dead.net]
DANNO HENKLEIN: I love that early version of “Loose Lucy” that they did. That was good old-fashioned rock.
JESSE: The band had debuted Garcia and Robert Hunter’s “Loose Lucy” at Maples Pavilion in February and played it in this bouncy form less than a dozen times. The version from RFK is actually the last of the early uptempo versions. Probably my preferred arrangement, too.
AUDIO: “Loose Lucy” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/9/73] (4:26-4:42) - [dead.net]
DANNO HENKLEIN: They didn't get around to “Big River” until the second set. But of course, when that came through, there it was. I mean, that's it, right there.
AUDIO: “Big River” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/9/73] (0:19-0:35) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Danno could do this all day and sadly had to in real-time at RFK. David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The June 9 show — it is a remarkably tight show, and it’s got jams in it, too. It’s got a really cool second set jam: it’s not your traditional “He’s Gone”/“Truckin’”/“[The] Other One”/“Eyes [of the World]” sort of jam. “Playing in the Band” snuck in there. It’s a pretty cool thing, that second set jam. The tightness of it is remarkable.
DANNO HENKLEIN: They went into “Eyes of the World” right after “Big River” — so I was peakin’, man. The original version of “Eyes of the World” had this break in the middle that was quite a bit of sonic sculpture.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/9/73] (9:38-9:52) - [dead.net]
JESSE: It was a piece of music as dramatic as any as the Dead created, and heads consistently cite it as something they remember from the gigs. Tonight, it opened into the place that Danno needed to go.
AUDIO: “China Doll” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/9/73] (3:38-4:08) - [dead.net]
DANNO HENKLEIN: And then they actually did “China Doll.” That was appropriate because — “Pick up your china doll/it’s only fractured.” They’re telling me: it’s gonna be okay, man. That’s what they were telling me, and I took it to heart. I bloody well took it to heart.
AUDIO: “China Doll” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/9/73] (4:31-4:44) - [dead.net]
DANNO HENKLEIN: After my soul was dragged through the catharsis of all of those Dead songs that were already woven into my soundtrack, and then thrown back in my face with full force by actual life events — then there was a stillness, a calmness, when they went off the stage. And then the Allmans set up and started to come on.
JESSE: Brian Schiff.
BRIAN SCHIFF: There was a huge delay until the Allmans came on. I think they maybe didn't want to play till it was dark out or something.
SAM CUTLER [6/9/73]: Well, a lot of energy’s been put out over the year to bring these bands together. Prior to this day, it hasn’t happened for a while. Everybody from our end of the music is real happy that, at long last, we’ve been able to welcome on the same bill both the Grateful Dead and, now, the Allman Brothers Band. Please welcome: the Allman Brothers Band!
GREGG ALLMAN [6/9/73]: One, two, three…
AUDIO: “Wasted Words” [Allman Brothers Band, 6/9/73] (0:00-0:03)
DANNO HENKLEIN: I have some very rich memories of that. The very first thing that I noticed when the Allmans came on—this was the first time I saw the Allmans—was Dickey Betts coming out. Dickey Betts was quite visible from where we were because he was wearing a pink, or salmon or peach, shirt. And then, all of a sudden, this huge cloud of incense, peach-scented incense, blew out over the crowd.
JESSE: Eat a peach for peace, man. Allmans historian Alan Paul notes that the Allmans almost certainly didn’t have peach incense as part of their stage show. It doesn’t mean that an enterprising Allmans freak didn’t do it, though.
AUDIO: “Wasted Words” [The Allman Brothers Band, 6/9/73] (1:12-1:28)
JESSE: Alan Paul.
ALAN PAUL: It’s sort of astounding for me to look at the setlists at RFK — the Allman Brothers played almost the same setlist two days in a row. It was not exactly the same; some of the songs could be really wildly different on [each] night, but not all of them. It’s sort of wild to me that they were taking that approach, and, really, they stuck with that [approach] more-or-less until Warren Haynes was in charge of the setlists.
JESSE: In general, Dead Heads seemed to dig the newest version of the Allmans. Like lots of heads, Jay Kerley had been listening to the Allmans for years, but it was his first dose of the band post-Duane, which featured Dickey Betts as the sole guitarist center stage, alongside two new additions.
JAY KERLEY: I remember them being really tight. The bass player, he really impressed me. But Gregg Allman — just incredible. I didn't know quite what to expect without Duane Allman, but I was not disappointed. Oh my goodness, that was good stuff.
JESSE: On bass was LeMar Williams, driving differently than the late Berry Oakley. And on piano was Chuck Leavell, which—to my ears—gives this iteration of the Allmans their distinct sound, with Leavell and Betts playing off each other in a way that reminds me a little of Keith Godchaux and Jerry Garcia.
AUDIO: “Jessica” [The Allman Brothers Band, 6/9/73] (8:10-8:37)
JESSE: The Allmans played two sets as well. Before their encore, Sam Cutler returned.
SAM CUTLER [6/9/73]: This is where the scene gets a little loose. Various people from various well-known and unknown outfits will be joining the folks on stage to play a little. Okay, have a good time. Just one last time, to the folks right in the front: don’t climb up on the stage. We’re just going to ask you to get down, okay? Have a good time, thank you.
JESSE: By all reports, nobody joined the Allmans for the “Whipping Post” that followed, but Bob Weir and guitarist Ronnie Montrose joined for the closing “Mountain Jam,” though the mix makes it a bit tough to hear them. Ask a taper, as we say.
AUDIO: “Mountain Jam” [The Allman Brothers Band, 6/9/73] (18:51-19:16)
JESSE: Jay Kerley.
JAY KERLEY: We only had tickets for the first night. But then Sam Cutler got up after the Dead set and said, “Well, if you hang out and pick up a bag of trash, we'll give you a ticket for tomorrow's concert.” So I did that — that was just incredible. It took me like 45 seconds to fill up my bag with trash. [laughs] I wandered outside with my ticket and all my friends picked up trash too. So, they had tickets, and we were all ready for the 10th.
JESSE: Howie Levine.
HOWIE LEVINE: We get out of the stadium. The stadium was like this round thing, plopped in the middle of nowhere. We don't know where our car is — so, we start walking the circle around the stadium, looking for our car. And this is going on for a while. Time is not something you're particularly concerned with until, at a certain point, I realized that we passed the same place in the stadium, like, three times.
JAY KERLEY: I was so exhausted that I passed out by the flagpole and spent the whole night there — right outside the main gate! I was so tired that I just lay down… the next thing I knew, it was morning. I crashed out on the grass. When I went back there for the concerts with the Dead and [Bob] Dylan and Tom Petty, I looked for the flagpole grass and thought: I can’t believe I crashed out there! That’s crazy.
JESSE: Along with the Des Moines show in May, the gigs at RFK were among the first to officially allow overnight camping in the parking lot. There’s some silent super 8 footage of the parking lot and the show on the 10th.
HOWIE LEVINE: So we walked around, we walked out and walked around. I stopped — there's probably a couple hundred people who are doing the same thing, walking around the stadium. There were no signposts: if you didn’t remember that you were in section 12, there was no way… and who paid attention to section 12? You just walked into the show. We—literally, these couple hundred people—had to wait until the entire parking lot emptied, so that you could actually see your car, to get in and get out. It took us a couple hours to get out. But, luckily, there was a tank in the car, so we were able to stay in the lot for a bunch longer: had some people hang out with us. [They] appreciated the respite before having to get in the car and drive. We went back, did our camping thing.
AUDIO: [crickets, then nitrous hissing]
AUDIO: [nitrous hissing]
Brawlin’
JESSE: The co-bill at RFK even trickled down to the opening acts. Doug Sahm, represented by Out of Town Tours, had opened on Saturday. And on Sunday, the openers were labelmates of the Allmans from Phil Walden’s stable at Capricorn Records — Wet Willie, promoting their new live album, Drippin’ Wet.
AUDIO: “Shout Bamalama” [Wet Willie, Drippin’ Wet] (0:03-0:25) - [Spotify]
ALAN PAUL: One of the other similarities between the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead was the relationship they had with the crew, and that the crew had in the overall bigger picture scene, Someone like Red Dog with the Allman Brothers, or Kidd [Candelario] with the Grateful Dead, or Big Steve [Parish], had a level of influence and impact on decisions for the things that went on that's completely unusual. And frankly, it’s sort of bizarre, if you really stop and break it down.
JESSE: In the high heat of Washington DC in the summer, things got a little bit wooly. But what’s rock and roll in 1973 without a few hairy roadie stories? As an employee of Capricorn, Buddy Thornton’s reason for being at RFK was to help record the show.
BUDDY THORNTON: Johnny had hired the Record Plant’s remote truck to come try to record this. So those guys were from the Record Plant. I think Chris Stone of the Record Plant in New York, had been working with Wally Heider’s remote truck; a guy named David Hewitt put that together, and Frank Hubach. They would set up the mics on stage and run the cables and splitters and try to interface with the Dead; that was a difficult thing to do at that time. I was back in the truck, running tape machines while Johnny monitored the levels and so forth.
JESSE: It put the mild-mannered former aeronautical engineer ringside for some genuine rock and roll chaos.
BUDDY THORNTON: I was back in the Record Plant’s remote truck and, during the set change, the canvas over the stage got caught fire. I'm standing on the side as they're doing a set change — one of the lights had somehow overheated. It was close to the canvas and started a fire.
JESSE: When we spoke with Ben Haller of the light crew for our Europe ‘72 episodes, he recalled this incident.
BEN HALLER: I remember one night in Washington DC, they'd hung a net over the backstage — they call it a shade cloth or something. Someone had gotten some bottle rockets and the net caught on fire. Ram Rod was a little drunk. I go around and the idiot promoter had not gotten any fire extinguishers. Ram Rod’s standing there drinking a Heineken, he's a little tipsy. He’s drinking a Heineken, everybody’s going, “Fire extinguisher! Fire extinguisher!” And Ram Rod goes, holds his thumb over [makes shaking motion] and squirts the fire out with his beer. So now the whole crew is shaking beers and spraying the fire out.
BUDDY THORNTON: Mike Callahan, who’s the Brothers’ first sound guy, is on stage with Twiggs and everybody else. Instead of getting a fire extinguisher—they’re looking for a fire extinguisher—he shakes up a beer bottle, squirts and puts the fire out! I think that place could have gone up in flames.
JESSE: Ben Haller and the promoters of the Electric Factory didn’t particularly see eyeball to eyeball. In our Des Moines episode, the promoters of Music Circuit Presentations had received a copy of the band’s rider, a 24-page document that was titled The Book by whoever was charged with compiling it. Without knowing anything really, though, I would speculate the authorship to be crew member Kidd Candelario, who also worked closely with Sam at Out of Town to advance the venues where the band would be playing. Chapter Six of the book is a page devoted to Food & Drink, including the meals required by the band and crew. The evening meal was to be “Steak (good steaks, medium rare; forget the other crap with jello and limp salad and focus on good nourishing steaks.)” We’ll call back to Steve White of Music Circuit here.
STEVE WHITE: We read that rider, it had Heineken beer and steak and chicken. We thought we were gonna have some cost-saving measures, bring out hotdogs and Old Milwaukee beer. That's one of the things that [led] Bill Graham [to tell] Barry Fey — “White needs all the help he can get.”
JESSE: Electric Factory didn’t read the Book, and one of the promoters would wind up with a plate full of pasta over his head, courtesy of a certain irate member of the lighting crew. Along with other tensions, it was why the Dead and Electric Factory parted ways for a few years. Bunky Odom.
BUNKY ODOM: We had problems at RFK Stadium. The bands didn’t have a problem — we had a problem with the road crews. That was the problem at RFK. Any time that the road crews get upset, it upsets the band. As the old saying goes: the worst thing that can happen is the eggs are cold in the morning. And that’s basically what happened at RFK.
JESSE: The bigger incident occurred with the Allmans crew and, in a way, symbolized the tensions between the road warrior Allmans and the hit-making Allmans that were just on the audible horizon with the impending release of Brothers and Sisters.
BUNKY ODOM: These record company people, for some reason, wanted to get on stage. It caused a problem with the band[‘s crew], and a fight broke out. It wasn't a good scene. But it didn't affect the music.
ALAN PAUL: Dick Wooley was the head of promotion at Capricorn. He was basically the guy who got things on the radio. And he was the one, by the way, who pushed and pushed and basically demanded that “Ramblin’ Man” be a single. It was such an anomalous song for the band that they were hesitant for that to be the lead single, but he put it out as a test pressing to radio stations and the feedback was tremendous. So, he pushed it. I tell you that just to give you an idea that he was an important person. He was also apparently the first person to really come up with the concept of a coast-to-coast—and then even international, through military radio—live radio broadcast, which was later that year: December 31st ‘73, New Year’s Eve at the Cow Palace, which became the de facto Allman Brothers/Grateful Dead collaboration.
BUDDY THORNTON: During one of the set changes, one of the Capricorn guys—Dick Wooley was an A&R guy—wanted to come on stage. I guess Scully or Tuffy Phillips, one of the drivers for the Brothers, had been told to not let anyone on the stage. Dick insisted he wanted to go anyway, so they got in a fight. It became really ugly. Dick got hit in the head with a beer bottle.
JESSE: There are a lot of Allman scene politics involved, and once again I’d highly encourage you to read Alan’s book, Brothers and Sisters, when it comes out. It’s hard to find a better encapsulation of the ultra-’70s roadie versus record company battle.
ALAN PAUL: And then the rest of the group jumped on Dick Wooley, and just put a real beating on him — a kicking in the ribs, that type of thing. They pushed him off the stage and then went down and were descending on him. This is where it gets sort of interesting, from a Grateful Dead perspective. Dick said that he was momentarily afraid he was gonna die. Again, could be hyperbole, but that's how he feels years later, and probably how he felt in the moment. A very large Grateful Dead roadie reached down and picked him up, put him on his shoulder, carried him away and threw him in the back of a limousine. Now, a very big Grateful Dead roadie would seem to indicate Steve Parish. I talked to Steve about it. He says he doesn't remember that, and he didn't do it, and I quote: “That was their problem, not ours. I never would’ve gotten involved, just as I would never expect them to get involved in our problems.”
BUNKY ODOM: They got into a fight with Dick Wooley with Capricorn Records, and it didn’t sit real well at all. A couple of them got fired because of what happened.
BUDDY THORNTON: After that is when some of the road crew got fired. [Mike] Callahan, Kim Payne, Tuffy Phillips were all fired — I guess that was June. And that's all I remember about RFK. That became a fiasco for… I still worked for the record company, Capricorn. Then the Brothers did a few more gigs after that. Johnny Sandlin and I had to go out and mix front-of-house for the Brothers then. Fast forward all the way up to Watkins Glen.
JESSE: It’s hard to call it a promotion, exactly, but the fight during the set changeover resulted in Buddy receiving a new job, one that would put him in much closer contact with the Grateful Dead sound team. We’ll hear more from Buddy down the line.
AUDIO: “One Way Out” [The Allman Brothers Band, 6/10/73] (5:28-5:46)
Night 2
JESSE: I’m pretty excited to welcome our next guests as avatars and scene reporters for the June 10th show at RFK. Jim Cooper and Laurie Oliver were New York City music freaks of the Fillmore East generation.
LAURIE OLIVER: We would go to the early show and the late show. We didn't have money for food or the rent, but we went to the Dead shows.
JESSE: With Jim’s instigation, they also became early important tapers, starting in January 1970. He, his girlfriend Laurie, and another pal caught a ride down with a friend from Queens.
LAURIE OLIVER: We were supposed to take our own car, we had this big ‘61 Chrysler, the Space Mobile, and we were ready to go. And these other people said, “Oh, we're going, too, so why don't you come with us?” And we thought, Sure, why not?
JIM COOPER: The first thing we noticed was that there were a lot of firecrackers going off, all over. That continued throughout the whole night, as you can hear on the tapes. Also, when we got up to the gate, there were a lot of teenage kids hanging around who weren’t going to the show; they were just sort of hanging around. I think they were neighborhood kids, a lot of them. Some of them had made holes in the chain link fence and they were charging people five bucks to get in. We didn’t pay any attention to it and went in.
We went first to the infield and set up. We found a good spot. There were people there already, some people, but it wasn’t that crowded yet. So we got a real good spot—maybe 40 or 50 feet from the stage, dead center in the infield—and stayed there for a little while.
JESSE: By mid-1973, Jim was three-and-a-half years into his taping career.
JIM COOPER: I had a couple of friends who were into the Dead and they said, “We're going to get a tape recorder.” They bought a Hitachi — it’s a Hitachi TRQ-222, the big-ass deck with two speakers that could come off. So it had a little amp in it and six D-cells. So I bought one of those in late ‘69, and then started January 3rd, 1970, the Fillmore, getting the Dead. And that was it.
LAURIE OLIVER: There were times you couldn't tape legally then. Even with the Dead, you weren't allowed to tape. So I would take this big tape recorder and I’d put a pillow over me and make believe I was pregnant, and I’d sneak in.
JESSE: Pro tip, thanks Laurie! We are thankful for every single person who rolled tape, officially or clandestinely, in the early 1970s. It’s almost easy to forget that every taper had their own motivations.
JIM COOPER: When I started the taping thing, I just wanted to tape shows and listen to them when I got home. I didn't even think people would want to trade or anything like that. Even now, I love listening to music, but the shows that I was at… it still brings it all back. And that was my intention at the beginning: just to capture that vibe, that feeling, that night or day, because it was wonderful. It was so wonderful.
LAURIE OLIVER: Jimmy mostly did the controls, and sometimes I would be holding mics.
JESSE: Jim and Laurie started to meet some other tapers, too.
LAURIE OLIVER: I never saw another woman doing it. If there were other women, I just wasn't aware of it.
JESSE: They worked as a team.
LAURIE OLIVER: There was one show we went to and I just remember that it was an outdoor concert. At the time, we weren't supposed to be taping, and one of the bouncers came up and he caught us. I distracted him while Jimmy switched the tape and gave him a blank.
JESSE: Jim and Laurie’s tapes are out in trading circles, and if you dig audience recordings, you should seek them out. By 1973, it was time for some upgrades to the rig.
JIM COOPER: I was using the mics that came with the thing, just these kind of plastic Hitachi mics. I used those for like a year or two, started to buy [ones that were a little better]. In ‘73, I started to get better ones — I pretty much borrowed a couple. For RFK, my friend was a musician and he had a pair of AKG D200s. That’s what we used for RFK.
JESSE: But that wasn’t all.
JIM COOPER: We also brought in a couple of poles, like half-inch conduit aluminum poles, and put ‘em together to get the mics up. We had started to get tired of holding the microphones.
AUDIO: “Also Sprach Zarathustra” [2001: A Space Odyssey (Music From The Motion Picture Sound Track)] (0:53-1:16)
JESSE: This was kind of a big evolutionary moment for tapers. From what I can tell, it seems like several tapers landed on the idea simultaneously around 1973 after a few years of more painful methods.
JIM COOPER: We didn't really use anything but my arms until then. Those shows were like marathons — they were hours! [laughs] It’s torture! It’s a torture fest. I’d have to switch arms. Most of the shows though, you couldn’t even put ‘em up in the air.
JESSE: Laurie figured out how to help get the mic stands in, too.
LAURIE OLIVER: Sometimes I had the mic pole down my pants. I was limping along, pregnant supposedly. And that's how I got into shows — I would distract them, and they would think, Oh, this poor pregnant limping lady…
JESSE: The mic stands in the Grateful Dead taper section are now fairly iconic, but Jim and his buddies had to be slightly more DIY to get the gear in.
JIM COOPER: My friend brought in two-foot lengths of aluminum conduit to put wires in. You could put them together, they had screws in them. So, we had those, we brought those — you could poke them in the ground, and that's what we use at RFK. We were at the infield at RFK, and we just stuck them in the dirt.
JESSE: The taping scene was growing, and Jim encountered some others.
JIM COOPER: The Brothers played for a while. During the Brothers, some guys came over to us. They saw that we had poles and stuff, and they asked us to record the Brothers. We weren’t gonna, because the recorder used six D-cells, and we had maybe a spare set, that was it. We knew the Dead were going to play for a long time, so we didn’t do it. These guys… I don’t know who they were, but they were lightyears ahead of us. I think they had a reel-to-reel, and they had a car battery. The problem was their car battery died, so they were out of luck.
AUDIO: “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” [The Allman Brothers Band, 6/10/73] (4:43-5:04)
JESSE: The heat was just as intense as the day before, by all accounts. At some point, there was apparently a brief rain shower, and other heads recall the crowd occasionally being misted with a giant firehose.
JIM COOPER: People were fried, and getting more fried. So my friend who drove us, he and his girlfriend, they did not want to stay in the sun. They went up in the stands to get some shade.
JESSE: It was brutal out there. Brian Schiff.
BRIAN SCHIFF: The place was only half-filled, unlike the first day. It was where the then-Washington Redskins played – and, like I said, the whole place was completely packed. But the second day, there was like nobody in the upper deck at all. Everybody was either on the field or in the lower bowl.
AUDIO: “One Way Out” [The Allman Brothers Band, 6/10/73] (1:05-1:30)
JIM COOPER: It was an insane scene. Think of it: it's this Southern rock band. People were shitfaced beyond belief. We had some acid. We were waiting. We took it, I think during the Brothers. But before that, things were still really, really hot and crazy. And they just got crazier as that started to take effect. But we had the cooler, and that kept us sane throughout the whole thing.
AUDIO: “Ramblin’ Man” [The Allman Brothers Band, 6/10/73] (2:48-3:19)
JIM COOPER: The crowd is just wild. We had the cooler and, somewhere along the line, people started to want to be our friends and stuff. We had this big girl who suddenly shows up, and she sits on the cooler and she tells us, “Just let me have some water, and I'll keep everyone out.” And she did! She sat on the cooler the whole show and kept people away. We were kind of distracted with the taping and everything.
JESSE: As the afternoon began to cool, it was time for the Grateful Dead. Jay Kerley.
JAY KERLEY: It was so hot, and we were living on apples: we had a couple of huge bags of apples that we were consuming. That was our food for the weekend — that, and acid. [laughs] Breakfast of champions! The whole crowd was kind of pie-eyed, cross-eyed. We were getting a little toasty. Then the Dead come out and open with “Morning Dew.” Wow! That woke us up, right away. Oh my gracious…
AUDIO: “Morning Dew” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (0:07-0:36) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JIM COOPER: They opened up with “Morning Dew,” and it was wild. 12 minutes.
JESSE: Howie Levine.
HOWIE LEVINE: Sun started to go down, the Dead came on with a “Morning Dew” that was great. If you were there, it just blew you away. It was spectacular.
JESSE: DeadBase wasn’t around yet in 1973, and while there were obsessive Dead Heads for sure, people weren’t tracking setlists with any degree of regularity. But a “Morning Dew” opener was hard to miss. Brian Schiff.
BRIAN SCHIFF: My experience up to that point, which may be seeing them close to 20 times, it seemed like every show started with “Bertha” or “Promised Land.” And that show, all of a sudden, the show opened up with “Morning Dew” — and it was mind blowing to most of us that that’s what they were playing to open the show. I guess we should have known that it was going to be extra special.
AUDIO: “Morning Dew” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (0:57-1:23) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Even before “Dark Star,” “Morning Dew” had a reputation as perhaps the Dead’s first special song, and in the psychedelic years of 1969 and 1970, they opened shows with it with some regularity. By 1973, it was a statement. They’d only do it once more after RFK, five months later in Denver, a show that’s now on Dick’s Picks 14. Danno Henklein was back at the site of the psychic gladiatorial combat he’d experienced the day before, and naturally still somewhat shaken.
DANNO HENKLEIN: I don't even remember being deeply touched by the music that day, except for the [second] day when they came on with “Morning Dew” and I’m like: ‘Oh my god, break my heart. Now it’s the end of the world.’ There's no such thing as an acid hangover. But when you're a little dehydrated, and it's hot, and you're miserable, and you're running out… and you just had your heart broken, you’re not having a good time. And there I am, and they open with this song about resignation to this unthinkable fate: “I guess it doesn’t matter anyway.” Heartbreaking. Healing on a certain level, but still… the heartbreaking course of last resort resignation.
AUDIO: “Morning Dew” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (10:02-10:32) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: By most other estimations, though, the second night at RFK was an instant winner. Howie Levine.
HOWIE LEVINE: The Sunday show was, in my opinion, way beyond—way beyond—the Saturday show. It was really something else. They really showed who they were.
JIM COOPER: RFK, for post-1970… for me, it's definitely the best overall show that I saw. And I didn't see a ton, but I saw a few in ‘73. I saw the Nassau Coliseum, Buffalo, Boston Gardens in April, that was really good. Then RFK in July, then Watkins Glen, then Roosevelt Stadium, and then, again, in Nassau in September. The RFK on the 10th was spectacular.
JESSE: Not a ton, huh?
HOWIE LEVINE: I guess in my mind it was like showing the Allmans who was really the band that people came for — all those people, probably half of that crowd. It was just tons of fun. A great weekend to basically kick off the summer.
AUDIO: “Ramble On Rose” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (5:49-6:12) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Jay Kerley.
JAY KERLEY: I remember quite vividly during “Jack Straw,” my friend Buddy, who was one of the eight people who caravan-ed down for the concerts… his name was Buddy, and he was flying. He decided to take all his clothes off and was jumping all around. During “Jack Straw,” after they sang “My old buddy, you’re moving much too slow,” he goes: “Yes! Oh my god!” And he ran, sprinted towards the stage.
AUDIO: “Jack Straw” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (4:08-4:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: No use chasin’... good luck, Buddy. One of the other new songs debuted in February makes its only appearance of the spring on the second night at RFK.
AUDIO: “Wave That Flag” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (0:00-0:25) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Wave That Flag” was the first draft of the song that became “U.S. Blues” in 1974. But if the version performed in February was “Wave That Flag” 1.0, it would take some serious tracking to figure out the version Garcia and Hunter had landed on by June, with lots of little bits of doggerel coming in and out of the lyrics over the different versions, perhaps mixed and matched on the fly by Garcia. Alex Allan has some of them over on his Whitegum site.
AUDIO: “Wave That Flag” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (2:07-2:22) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The version at RFK was the final “Wave That Flag.” When the song returned in early
‘74, it had the same basic groove and chorus, with tightened lyric and flow, but those are details for another day. There was also a topical song in the first set on the 10th.
BOB WEIR [6/10/73]: This is a song of our times…
JESSE: The previous day, the race horse Secretariat had set a new record at the Belmont Stakes and won the Triple Crown.
AUDIO: “The Race Is On” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (0:21-0:44) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JIM COOPER: With the Dead, a lot of times the first set would be kind of meandering. You’d get a really, really good song and then, bang, they would do something slow, maybe like “Row Jimmy” or something. But even the slow ones were great that night.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (1:17-1:50) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JIM COOPER: “Bird Song” was spectacular. Just spectacular. “Playing in the Band” was just beyond belief. They were just getting better: every song was getting better is how it was. And they started off great. They started off unbelievably great.
AUDIO: “Bird Song” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (4:37-5:01) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Every “Bird Song” from 1972 and 1973 contains special moments, a mode of improvisation that sounds utterly joyful and life-giving but also yearning and even sad, depending on your ears. The band closed their first of three sets with 30 minutes of jamming, following “Bird Song” with one of the great conversational “Playing in the Band”s, a jewel at nearly every show in this era, with more great Rhodes by Keith Godchaux.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (13:16-13:42) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Brian Schiff.
BRIAN SCHIFF: They just really wanted to play because the first set was phenomenal. Then there was a break and it got dark, and they started the second set. It was also an anomaly when they started with “Eyes of the World.” Every song was phenomenal, played as good as it could have been played.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (1:49-2:22) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JAY KERLEY: I remember the phrase “Eyes of the World,” and then the seven jam. That was extremely unusual, just knocked everybody out. The whole seven jam really just grabbed me by the collar and shook me around for a while.
JESSE: Tonight, the jam in seven landed in another yet-unreleased song. Garcia sings “Stella Blue” with a slightly different approach to the melody at this show, and I can’t tell if it’s an intentional reinvention or because he can’t hear himself. He gets it so well by the second verse that… maybe intentional?
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (1:56-2:28) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Jim Cooper came away with a pretty special audience recording of the show.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Jim Cooper tape, 6/10/73] (5:39-6:05)
JIM COOPER: The thing about the “Stella Blue” and our placement was that, on our tape, you can hear the echo when Jerry sang “Stella Blue” — it echoed, and the timing of the echo was perfect. Just so ethereal. You got shivers when it happened, every time.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Jim Cooper tape, 6/10/73] (6:07-6:37)
LAURIE OLIVER: “Stella Blue” is something that I'll never forget. Because it was… magical. There were fireworks going off, and the “Stella Blue” was just filling the air and echoing. It was something like I’ve never heard before. It was very special.
JESSE: The tape that Jim made of RFK is one with a special quality all its own, worth seeking out wherever you get your audience tapes, everything lightly drenched in the stadium’s perfectly timed echo. But then…
PHIL LESH [6/10/73]: We are gonna tune up real good for this next one.
JESSE: And, for the only time in the five shows on the new box set —
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (0:01-0:23) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JAY KERLEY: And then, of course, that “Dark Star” — oh my gracious, that was amazing.
JESSE: After getting played nearly every other show on the Europe ‘72 tour, the band had begun to deploy “Dark Star” slightly more sparingly on the tours that followed. Not a rarity yet by any means, it didn’t often make sense in daylight, and June 10th was the first time they’d played in darkness since April. Brian Schiff.
BRIAN SCHIFF: “Dark Star” was phenomenal, and I thought it was very, very different.
JESSE: Ihor Slabicky.
IHOR SLABICKY: This was a really nice “Dark Star” too, from what I recall. It was kind of a mellowing down of the whole event: things were really hectic and it was a hot day, a lot of music played. This was sort of a chance for me to sit back and relax a little bit.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (2:18-2:37) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JIM COOPER: That “Dark Star.” Oh man, you've heard that, right? Oh, fuck. Phil… man, the whole night, it was Jerry and Phil kind of trading off each other. And that’s when they were really good: one would play a little note, a little couple lines of something, and Jerry would pick up on it. Jerry would play a couple lines, then Phil would start bombing away.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (2:55-3:25) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BRIAN SCHIFF: It was lots of music before singing, which included Phil doing a bass solo at the beginning of “Dark Star.” And he's just bombing away.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (8:35-9:05) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: On the bass, Phil Lesh. He wrote this. Some Deadologists might label that as the Philo Stomp, the thromping motif Lesh occasionally used in bass interludes in that era. After the verse, there’s all kinds of great moments featuring Keith Godchaux’s sometimes nearly ambient Rhodes.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (17:24-17:54) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: By way of “He’s Gone,” the band gets to “Wharf Rat.” One thing I really like about this version is the way that almost the whole band, and especially drummer Bill Kreutzmann, lay out entirely and stop playing here, and the Dead play this extremely intimate passage of music inside the enormous confines of RFK.
AUDIO: “Wharf Rat” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (3:26-4:04) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And then after that, they explode the virtual confetti guns, and probably a few more celebratory rounds of fireworks and firecrackers if you seek the audience tapes.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (0:00-0:17) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: I mean, gadzooks, right? Pretty sure I’d be high-fiving and hugging everybody in sight after that set, so I can totally sympathize with the way the rest of Jim’s night unfolded from here.
JIM COOPER: After the second set, when they decided they were going to come out and do a little jam with some of the Brothers, my friend and his girlfriend came down and said that she had to take a test in the morning, and they had to leave. And we were like: “what?” I was like, “What?” I tried to talk at that point… I couldn’t believe it.
JESSE: Laurie wasn’t having it either.
LAURIE OLIVER: They said, “Oh, we’re gonna go,” and I'm like, “I'm not going anywhere. No way.”
JIM COOPER: We figured: no problem, we'll get a ride. Hitchhike, no problem. Everyone's going to New York, we'll get a ride.
JESSE: Your loss, dude.
AUDIO: “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (0:48-1:10) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Howie Levine.
HOWIE LEVINE: The end of the second set, some of the Allmans came out and jammed with them. Which was great.
JESSE: Jay Kerley.
JAY KERLEY: That third set really knocked me out because I was a major Dylan freak and they opened with “Train to Cry.” Whoa…
AUDIO: “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (1:14-1:32) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: The Dead with special guests—and I’ve said this before—doesn’t always work. With the Dead, you’ve got the group mind that’s now been playing together for eight years, and Keith for a couple. So, you’ve got the group mind, and to add somebody else to that and play music that is very different from other people’s music — to throw people into that chaos and that fire, it’s not easy.
JESSE: There are a few different accounts of the musicians on stage and seemingly no photographic evidence. Jay Kerley.
JAY KERLEY: I remember Jerry, Billy, Phil. Chuck Leavell on piano. Dickey Betts, Jai Johanny Johanson on drums.
JESSE: It’s a dense sound, and it’s great to hear Betts and Garcia side by side, two tastes that do actually go great together.
BRIAN SCHIFF: That third set ended up being over an hour long itself. They did a Dylan song and they did “That’s All Right, Mama.”
AUDIO: “That’s All Right” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (6:01-6:25) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Betts drew from a very similar well of bluegrass and folk influence as Garcia, not to mention being influenced significantly by Garcia himself, and hearing them side by side is pretty wonderful. And not only two guitars, but two keyboards, with piano and Rhodes playing against each other throughout. Ihor.
IHOR SLABICKY: Especially at RFK, that worked out well. I think that they picked the right songs to jam on as well.
JESSE: Bob Dylan’s “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” was a staple in Garcia’s repertoire with Merl Saunders, as was Arthur Bigboy Crudup’s “That’s All Right, Mama,” and both would be on the Garcia/Saunders album out later that year. “Train To Cry” would return to the Dead’s repertoire briefly in the ‘90s. There’s some dispute about whether Merl Saunders himself was present at this jam. He’s listed in DeadBase as being there, though there’s no audible organ to my ears.
JAY KERLEY: I don't remember Merl, but he might have gotten lost in the mix. I don't know.
JESSE: But just because there’s no organ in the mix, doesn’t mean Merl wasn’t there. There are lots of places where I hear one person playing piano and one person playing Rhodes and can’t tell if it’s Keith or Chuck Leavell or maybe even Merl. Or maybe Merl was playing organ, and Bear didn’t have a chance to route it through his submix. Brian Schiff.
BRIAN SCHIFF: I think he was there, for sure. I remember him being on that stage. Again, let's remember: it's 50 years ago. But yeah, the three who joined were Butch Trucks, Dickey Betts and Merl.
JESSE: When we spoke with Merl Saunders Jr. for our Garcia ‘73 episode, this gig came up as part of the family memory, though Merl Jr. himself wasn’t there.
MERL SAUNDERS JR.: I remember he was on the East Coast and wound up playing a gig with them somewhere, sat in with them, and the Allman Brothers were playing. It was somewhere on the East Coast in the early ‘70s. It was a big show.
JESSE: Sounds familiar. David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Special guests don't always work with the Dead because the Dead are who they are. I feel that this third set super-jam is some of the most inspired Grateful Dead music I’ve ever heard. It reminds me a lot, with some of the same musicians, of 2/11/70, going back to Bear’s Choice from the Fillmore East run where it just worked incredibly well. I think the Dead and the Allmans had a kinship, and they played music in a very similar way — which is to say, they let the music guide them as opposed to rehearsing a piece tremendously, and it had to be this certain way. ‘Well, you know what? If you’ve got to add 12 more bars to your solo, take it. I mean, that’s cool with me.’ I just found that this is one of those cases.
AUDIO: “Not Fade Away” [#1] [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (9:26-9:56) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Brian Schiff.
BRIAN SCHIFF: Then, an unbelievable “Not Fade” and “Goin’ Down the Road [Feeling Bad].” I was thinking if Billy and Butch Trucks did a “Drum” solo… they played almost six hours, and these guys were still playing drum solos. It was unbelievable to me.
AUDIO: “Drums” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (1:41-2:00) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Like I said, there are no photos that we know of, but it was probably more likely Jaimoe. Alan Paul.
ALAN PAUL: Jaimoe also told me, and I believe this is important, there are only three drummers that he ever enjoyed playing with, which is Butch Trucks, Bill Kreutzmann and Buddy Miles. His explanation for that was — “because they listen. And if you do that, it doesn’t really matter if there are 13 guitars, 15 basses, 20 sets of drums. I always love playing with Bill.” And Bill has nothing but great things to say about Jaimoe. So, there was a certain kinship there.
AUDIO: “Drums” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (4:38-5:08) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Though the 16-track in the Record Plant remote recording truck didn’t tape the Dead, the Capricorn engineers switched it back on for the super-jam. This is Dead manager Jon McIntire speaking on WAER later in 1973.
JON MCINTIRE [9/17/73]: To clarify, the Allman Brothers [in] Macon, Georgia have the tapes of the jam that all the musicians did together, and they are open to be able to release it as sort of a benefit for Indian causes. We haven’t heard it yet, so we haven't signed a release or anything such as that. The musicians would go over the quality of it, and then we’d make a decision on that. But the tapes do exist in 16-track form, and may or may not be used depending on how they deem them.
JESSE: It’s a bitchin’ jam, and I don’t usually go for super-jams. But for reasons that will have to wait for another episode, the Dead/Allman relationship didn’t quite last long enough to get the tape out. In the ‘90s, the two camps reconnected again via their tape loving archivists Dick Latvala and, on the Allmans’ side, Kirk West. The two were planning to release a joint box set when Dick died unexpectedly in 1999, and—as David Lemieux mentioned earlier—the shows had come close to release since then. Just like the shows themselves, it took longer than expected to get together.
AUDIO: “Not Fade Away” [#1] [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (10:16-10:36) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
Exit to the North
JESSE: Remember Jay Kerley’s naked buddy, Buddy?
JAY KERLEY: And I never saw him again ‘til after the concert. Somehow, he had snagged a pair of shorts and was standing around, just looking completely blissed out. As I recall, we ate yet more acid, got in the car and drove back to Connecticut. [laughs]
JESSE: They escaped easily. By some accounts, the vibrations were a bit bad outside RFK on the second day of the long, hot weekend. If you’re triggered by content warnings, I suggest you skip forward 30 seconds or so. Cool. So, a brief content warning, there’s a story involving sexual assault. You can skip forward a minute if you don’t want to hear it. Back to the very intense weekend of Danno Henklein.
DANNO HENKLEIN: And here's the final capper to this tragic but transforming event. As we were leaving and walking out of the RFK Stadium, our group of friends that had begun to separate the second day were gathering back together to go to the parking lot, and one of the women that we were with was raped in the shadows of RFK Stadium under some bushes. She was raped at either knifepoint or gunpoint. And then she joined us in the parking lot and looked at us and said: “I was just raped.”
JESSE: And, yeah, that’s just truly awful, a reminder that some terrible things happened on the periphery of Dead shows. Not nearly on that magnitude, but Jim and Laurie and crew had a fairly rough time.
JIM COOPER: We leave, we had our stuff, we figured… again, we’re so confident that we’re going to get a ride. So, we’re out there hitching — we have a sign, “NYC,” and we couldn’t get a ride. Nobody would pick us up, no one stopped. We were there for an hour, a little more. The parking lot was getting empty, starting to get a little weird because it’s getting late. There were still people roaming around who weren’t people who went to the concerts. There were still a lot of teenagers, kind of hanging around. So we started to go to cars that were still around.
LAURIE OLIVER: We had a sign saying “New York,” and car after car passed us. It was quite the shocker that nobody picked us up. Then the parking lot was empty except for one van. And I went over to them and they said, “Yeah, we're going to New York, but we're gonna crash for a while.”
JIM COOPER: We found a little spot with some grass right next to the parking lot. We put our stuff down, and we couldn’t wait to hear that one tape. We weren’t sure exactly which tape it was, but we knew that it was the good one — the one with “Eyes of the World” and “Stella Blue.” So we found it, and we started listening to it —
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Jim Cooper tape, 6/10/73] (0:43-1:00)
JIM COOPER: And, somehow, we fell asleep. We fell asleep listening to the tape. We woke up, because we heard some commotion: it was the people in the van, and they were getting ready to go. And Chris, we heard some commotion, and it was the people in the van. And they were getting ready to go. So I yelled over and said, “You guys going?” They said, “Yeah, we’re going!” So we grabbed our stuff, got into the van, and we go — in the back of the van, put the stuff down, we kind of crashed out a little bit. I think it was a four or five-hour ride back.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Jim Cooper tape, 6/10/73] (1:07-1:33)
JIM COOPER: So after a couple hours, it was getting close to [the time] we had to go to work. So I looked for my wallet to get my work number, and I couldn’t find my wallet. I go through the stuff, and I can’t find… I noticed that this little white valise that I had, with mixtapes and cassettes, but I also had soundchecks from Nassau Coliseum earlier that year… they were doing “Box of Rain,” and there had to be like four, five, six of them. It was one of my favorite things to listen to. I was like: oh, shit. I said, “Artie, how’s your stuff?” And he looked through and he said his microphones were gone. Some of his other stuff was gone. I had a camera, a Minolta — that was gone. The tapes were all gone, except for the tape that was in the machine that we were listening to when we fell asleep. I’m thinking they didn’t take that tape because they didn’t want to wake us up. You know what I mean? They probably figured: If we stop the music, they’re gonna know that something’s different. We couldn’t have been sleeping that soundly…
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Jim Cooper tape, 6/10/73] (1:33-2:12)
JIM COOPER: 50 years later, I can be philosophical. But boy oh boy, I'll tell you, we were really messed up.
JESSE: For a New Yorker, Ihor Slabicky had it about as easy as you can get.
IHOR SLABICKY: I ended up going back with my friends, back to their house, and stayed over there again thanks to their sister. They drove back the next day to Newark, dropped me off at the PATH station, and I took the PATH into New York. I got on a subway into Queens, and that was it.
JESSE: I know that feeling, when your traveling crew dwindles to a gang of one. Headphones and music help.
IHOR SLABICKY: You're on the train, but secretly you're saying — “I saw I just saw the Grateful Dead, and you didn't!” Or something like that. Because that glow lasts for a while.
JESSE: Brian Schiff.
BRIAN SCHIFF: I think we slept in Washington that night, too. I came home the next day, and I probably slept until noon. I wake up, and my mother and father say to me, “What’s going on?” or something, And I say, “I’m getting ready to leave because I’m going to see Jerry Garcia’s bluegrass band!” And they’re like: “Sit down. What are you doing with your life?” I had an incredible liberal Jewish upbringing. Anything I did, they never questioned or criticized me about it. I was a good kid. I was thoroughly respectful to them. I went to school, I went to college — I did all the things you’re supposed to do. But that was the only time they ever really said something like: what the fuck are you doing? You were just there for two days, and you’re going to see them again? And I’m like, “Well, this is completely different. You’ve got to understand, this is Jerry Garcia and David Grisman…”
JESSE: Hey, man, you don’t have to tell us. The Dead themselves headed back west, but maybe not by the route you’d expect. If you’re following along on the recordings, the next shows picked up in Vancouver on June 22nd, now on the Pacific Northwest box set. But it wouldn’t be 1973 without more cancellations, and there are two that would have connected the Dead’s touring route from DC to Vancouver. When the RFK super-jam finished, the Dead thought they’d be playing both, which would continue with the pattern of widely spaced mega-gigs.
The next gig was five days after RFK, on June 15th at Nippert Stadium in Cincinnati, and, in fact, the itineraries in the archives from Fly By Night show much of the crew actually flying to Cincinnati after DC, presumably to do the same kind of intense audio set up they’d done at the other gigs. Tickets went on sale at the end of May, and the show was only canceled the day before the show on June 14th due to “insurmountable problems.” And after that, on Wednesday, June 20th, they’d been supposed to appear at the Denver Coliseum, but that deal immolated under even sketchier circumstances, involving scams and auto theft, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a plan to have a show. Our Deadcast comrade QueenCityJamz found some investigative reporting in the Straight Creek Journal. But what’s more fun than canceled Dead shows are Dead shows that happened.
Six weeks after RFK, the Dead & the Allmans would meet up again at the Watkins Glen Speedway in central New York and make rock history. Many of the Dead Heads we spoke to in this episode would make it to New York in July, too. It was legendary in its own way. But the spring sunshine was its own variety of special — limited edition you might say, becoming something else when summer arrived. It’ll be summer soon enough, and we’ll talk to you then. But what this box set presupposes is: maybe we should just keep hanging out in spring ‘73.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (10:11-10:37) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]