Good Ol' Grateful Deadcast
Season 9, Episode 2
From the Mars Hotel 50: China Doll
Archival interviews:
- Jerry Garcia, by Ben Fong-Torres, KSAN, 1975.
- Jerry Garcia, by David Gans & Blair Jackson, Conversations with the Dead, 4/28/81.
- Jerry Moore, by David Gans, 1/19/08.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [From the Mars Hotel] (2:42-2:56) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: In early 1973, Jerry Garcia wrote a new batch of songs in preparation for the studio album the Grateful Dead were to record later that year and made demo recordings for his bandmates. Among them was one of the most delicate pieces of music he ever created.
AUDIO: "China Doll" (Demo, 1973) [From the Mars Hotel 50] (0:10-0:27) - [dead.net]
JESSE: And it somehow became even more delicate when the full Grateful Dead took it on in the studio for From the Mars Hotel in 1974.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [From the Mars Hotel] (0:25-0:39) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It's a perfect little song. And it's—again, like so many Grateful Dead songs—unlike any other Grateful Dead song.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [From the Mars Hotel] (1:04-1:18) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Last episode, David told us about listening to Mars Hotel over and over when it got stuck in the cassette deck of his father's car the summer when he was 16.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Having heard this song when I was 16 years old, stuck in the car and hearing it hundreds of times and getting to know the nuances of it… I'm not a musician, but [I was] wondering: what are they doing?
AUDIO: "China Doll" [From the Mars Hotel] (1:46-2:00) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: Why is this song—this beautiful little ballad, objectively—why is it hitting me so hard? I've talked to a lot of people about "China Doll," and it does the exact same thing to them.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [From the Mars Hotel] (2:26-2:40) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It's a powerful jewel in the Garcia/Hunter songbook. And while there's nothing else quite like it, it didn't come totally from nowhere. Garcia and Hunter first got quiet in late 1968 with a series of songs destined for Aoxomoxoa — "Rosemary," "What's Become of the Baby," and "Mountains of the Moon."
AUDIO: "Mountains of the Moon" [Aoxomoxoa] (0:21-0:34) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: They were more baroque art-songs than folk tunes, and—with the exception of "Mountains of the Moon"—none made any foothold in the Dead's live sets. A year or so later, they created what I hear as the first song in a progression that would in some ways unfold from the harpsichord-dappled "Mountains of the Moon" to the harpsichord-dappled "China Doll."
AUDIO: "Black Peter" [Workingman's Dead] (0:12-0:31) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was "Black Peter," from 1970's Workingman's Dead. We explored that in its own Deadcast episode in season one, and we've gone into depth about all of the songs I'm about to mention. Starting in 1970, Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter mined out a thread of increasingly quiet music.
AUDIO: "Brokedown Palace" [American Beauty] (0:47-1:03) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Many of the songs would become known as Garcia's "ballads." In the folk music sense, they're not. Many-verse epics like "Terrapin Station" and "Reuben and Cérise" are in the folk ballad tradition. The progression from "Brokedown Palace" into "To Lay Me Down" towards "Comes a Time" and "Stella Blue" is one towards the pop ballad. We've used this quote from Elvis Costello before and we might well use it again.
ELVIS COSTELLO: I don't know whether that was ever Jerry or Robert Hunter's ambition to be brought into the Great American Songbook. But if you only took the songs from… well, maybe from the record before American Beauty, there's a few there… but particularly from Workingman's Dead and [From the] Mars Hotel, if you only took those songs, they belong in the Great American Songbook.
JESSE: Elvis Costello had fallen fully in love with the Dead when he saw them perform the songs that became Europe ‘72 at the Bickershaw Festival. Check out that episode. But he stayed on the Bus.
ELVIS COSTELLO: The most beautiful melody Jerry ever wrote, "Stella Blue." I'd say it's the most beautiful. I always heard Mel Tormé singing it. I always wished Mel Tormé would have done a version — I think he would have killed that song. In a good way. He would have absolutely taken it to a whole other audience.
AUDIO: "Stella Blue" [Wake of the Flood] (4:25-4:55) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
ELVIS COSTELLO: And then these other incredible songs, "Scarlet Begonias" and "China Doll," which would be up there with "Stella Blue." Just the exquisite melody, and the tenderness of the singing.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [From the Mars Hotel] (0:25-0:40) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: From the start, Jerry Garcia obviously conceived of a quiet setting for Robert Hunter's lyrics, a mournful piece in D minor. You can hear his early demo for "China Doll" on the new 50th anniversary edition of From the Mars Hotel. His demo from early 1973 doesn't have any drums, perhaps knowing that no drum machine could approach the sensitivity of Bill the Drummer. It follows its own rhythmic logic. It does have a solemn organ part.
AUDIO: "China Doll" (Demo) [From the Mars Hotel 50, 1973] (0:00-0:14) - [dead.net]
JESSE: As the great composer Nigel Tufnel once put it:
AUDIO: "Sketch in D Minor" [Mach, Spinal Tap] (0:34-0:43) - [YouTube]
NIGEL TUFNEL [Spinal Tap]: In D minor, which I always find is really the saddest of all keys. I don't know why, but it makes people weep instantly to play it.
JESSE: One reason for setting the song in the saddest of all keys is its solemn lyrics. When Blair Jackson spoke with Hunter in 1988 for The Golden Road, this song came up, and Hunter told Blair that "one of my original titles for it was ‘The Suicide Song.'" We'll let Jerry Garcia's isolated vocals highlight some of the individual lyrics here.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Garcia Vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (0:14-0:27)
JESSE: Hunter said of the next line, "it's almost like a ghost voice." In his printed lyrics collection, A Box of Rain, the next line is printed in italics.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Garcia Vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (0:32-0:36)
JESSE: Hunter referred to that line and this next one as "a little dialogue."
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Garcia Vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (0:37-0:40)
JESSE: On the page, that last line of the first verse, the entirety of the 2nd and 3rd verses, and the first half of the 4th are contained inside quotation marks.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Garcia Vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (2:13-2:27)
JESSE: And after that, the quotation marks end and it returns to italics, again suggesting two characters in dialogue.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Garcia Vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (2:31-2:44)
JESSE: A china doll, it should be noted, is a delicate porcelain figurine, popular in Germany from the late 19th through early 20th centuries. Along with the scene-setting narration at the start, it's a trialogue, of sorts. But it's hard to say who or what is in conversation. There are voices on both sides of the veil, perhaps, or maybe it's all a metaphor, something happening on a Wes Anderson-like stage set. Blair suggested that there was an empathy to the italicized voice.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Garcia Vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (3:03-3:08)
JESSE: Hunter called that voice, "sort of like a guardian angel. Who knows who or what that is? This is a dangerous area for me to be talking about — the metaphysics of my lyrics. You don't want me to start passing judgments on this." Something else musical happens in that moment. From the City College of New York, Shaugn O'Donnell.
SHAUGN O'DONNELL: For me, it really rhymes a bit musically with "[Mississippi] Half-Step," a song that unfolds in A minor for the most part, and then you have a big apotheosis at the end that shifts to A major. And here you have the same kind of thing with this ballad in D minor that then brightens up tremendously at the end with the D major — the shift from the F natural to F sharp.
JESSE: David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The minor to major, it hits me so hard on an emotional level. It's like the darkness, and then the light comes on. I think we all hear music in almost a visual sense, the colors. I hear "Scarlet Begonias" in red, and it's not because of scarlet — I just do, it's how I see. I see "Estimated Prophet" in blue. And I see "China Doll" as a song that's more kind of chiaroscuro. So, I see it in the dark and then the light comes on.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [From the Mars Hotel] (2:58-3:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Hunter continued, "I know to some degree what I intended there [in "China Doll"], or I know what some of the resonances in there seem to be to me, even if I can't put too good a logical head on it. It seemed right. I trusted it. I had to." Hunter told Blair: "I think it's a terrifying song. And then it's also got some affirmation of how it can be mended somehow. There's a bit of metaphysical content in there which I kind of leave open, not that I subscribe or don't subscribe to it. At the time it resonated right. That song is eerie and very, very beautiful the way Jerry handles it."
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Garcia Vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (3:36-3:43)
JESSE: The song debuted in early 1973, played almost exclusively at first as a gorgeous coda to the original extended "Eyes of the World." We focused on that pairing a bit during our season on the Here Comes Sunshine box set. They recorded it in its live electric arrangement at the Record Plant that summer for consideration on Wake of the Flood, which you can hear on the expanded 2004 edition, but It didn't make the cut.
AUDIO: "China Doll" (Studio Outtake) [Wake of the Flood 2004 expanded edition, 8/8/73] (0:20-0:33) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: My guess is that "Stella Blue" won out in the slot for achingly quiet Garcia song. But I'm going to also guess that song had an influence in a different way. Imagine you'd written a song as delicate as "China Doll," and your band was scheduled to play in some of the biggest, boomiest venues in the United States. You, too, might want a Wall of Sound.
AUDIO: "China Doll" (Studio Outtake) [Wake of the Flood 2004 expanded edition, 8/8/73] (3:27-3:59) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
Cow Palace, 3/74
JESSE: Volume 24 of the original Dick's Picks series is from March 23rd, 1974, a show that was advertised as a "sound test."
PHIL LESH [2/24/74]: See you next month at the Cow Palace, I hope.
JESSE: In a sense, every single Dead show could be billed as a Sound Test of sorts, especially since they switched over to the so-called Alembic PA on February 9th, 1973, which we discussed at length last season and which we'll discuss more this season. Its most easily discernible characteristic was lack of front-stage vocal monitors along with noise-canceling double microphones. The system continued to change and grow. We caught up on its evolution up through last time with Brian Anderson, who is working on a new book about the Wall of Sound titled Loud and Clear, out next year from St. Martin's Press. In early December 1973, it underwent a major change.
BRIAN ANDERSON: The Boston Music Hall, that was the first instance that they stacked up everything behind them on scaffolding.
JESSE: And in early 1974, the band decided on a pair of further tests — one on their home court at Winterland in the heart of San Francisco and one elsewhere, someplace that would test the newest system's capabilities. They pondered maybe bringing it up to the Portland Coliseum, but settled on a venue closer by.
AUDIO: Rolling Stones Cow Palace ad [KFRC, 1966] (0:00-0:24)
RADIO HOST [1966]: KFRC presents the only 1966 San Francisco Rolling Stones concert! Tuesday, July 26th at the Cow Palace. The Big 610 urges you to buy tickets early for this unforgettable experience. Tickets on sale now at the Downtown Center, Sherman Clay in Oakland, and the Cow Palace.
JESSE: The Cow Palace in Daly City was—and is—a tried, if not exactly true, Bay Area venue, at least in the sense that it's always been kind of a harsh toke. Opened in 1941, along with livestock contests, car shows, circuses, pro sports and other events, it had also held all manners of pop music. As we just heard, it's where local mega-pop station KFRC presented their really big shews. Teenage Bobby Weir saw the Beatles there with high school friends in the summer of ‘65. There's a pretty hilarious account of the Merry Pranksters' own separate experience at the gig in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. From a sound perspective, it was the kind of worst-case scenario the Grateful Dead had to face increasingly at their new level of popularity. Richie Pechner was on the team responsible for fabricating and setting up the system.
RICHIE PECHNER: That venue was probably one of the harshest at that time, one of the harshest venues to play in. It's cavernous.
JESSE: Richie had watched Bear orchestrate the changing shape of the system on the tours in late 1973.
RICHIE PECHNER: Experimentation was going on, live. He would say, "Okay, I want these cabinets set up in this configuration." But the limitation there was that we were working in smaller venues on an existing stage. We'd have scaffolding delivered, and we'd have to figure out how to place the cabinets at the second level, because the thing was growing vertically at the time. Eventually, it became very vertical, in terms of the final setup. So some of those shows were just total experimental setups, to either prove or disprove that it improved the quality of the sound.
JESSE: Richie Pechner and the sound team turned into a virtual assembly line.
BRIAN ANDERSON: You had folks like Richie Pechner and so many others who were cutting lots and lots of wood — a lot of late nights, cutting that fine 14-ply Danish Birch, which is what they settled on. That was the material that they settled on to build all the cabinets in the Wall of Sound, and that stuff is basically bulletproof. But, at the time, it was only being shipped into the Bay Area in limited quantities. They would go over to MacBeath Hardwood in Berkeley and pick up whole pallets of that stuff. Basically, the entire load that would come into MacBeath, the Dead would buy all of it. So they were cutting and fabricating so much wood, building out those cabinets at Front Street. Initially, they didn't have a ventilation system there, so there was a lot of sawdust and that stuff started creeping into some of the electronics and some of the instruments. I think they very clearly realized that: Oh, shit, we need to kind of like separate this stuff.
RICHIE PECHNER: At some point during that period, Ram Rod came back from… I can't remember where, he'd gone to do something with the Allman Brothers. They wanted a guitar system like Jerry's, you know, same cabinet setup. We talked about it and said, "Well, we could do that, but I don't know if we could do that while we're using the Grateful Dead's resources" — to build a guitar system for another band. So we formed a separate company, Ram Rod, Rex [Jackson] and myself, and a friend of Ram Rod's, I can't remember the guy's name. Anyway, we formed a little company called Quality Control Sound Products, which basically was a separate entity so that we could build the systems for other people.
BRIAN ANDERSON: By that point, the Dead and their road crew had purchased and built their own staging and scaffolding for the Wall of Sound. Prior to this, they had so much fear that, at certain venues, stuff would go through the floor. It was beginning to not be safe. So they built their own custom staging and custom scaffolding to hold this entire apparatus. I think at the Cow Palace they had, finally, enough space, enough elbow room to really set that thing up proper and let it rip. And by let it rip, I guess I mean turn the volume up to two.
JESSE: The Wall of Sound was about clarity, not volume. But also some volume. There were still a few major components of the system in development in March, including the piano PA. We'll talk more about the central vocal cluster next episode. At the Cow Palace, hanging above Billy Kreutzmann was a vocal system made of smaller component speaker stacks. Michael Parrish had been privy to the developments in the Dead's system since 1969, but from the audience side, a true Bay Area head.
MICHAEL PARRISH: It's amazing the Cow Palace is still there. They did livestock shows there. When I was a kid—we would go every year—they had this Boat and Sports Show, where they had all these boats. I remember that's the first place I ever tasted yogurt, the yogurt stand there.
JESSE: Michael had seen two of the three shows at Winterland in February and was ready for the next round.
MICHAEL PARRISH: The Cow Palace was only a month after the Winterland shows. My impression is that [it was a] much bigger venue — the few thousand people who would usually go to any Dead show already had tickets, but they didn't come close to selling out early on. I believe it was KYA, the AM Top 40 radio station, started giving away tickets because they needed to fill up the hall. And again, for it to be a Sound Test, if it was only half full, it wouldn't really have that effect. So it was the first show that sort of had this sense of what one experienced post-In the Dark — people really had no idea of what the Dead were about or why they were there. There were a lot of people calling out for "Casey Jones," and a lot more drunk people. It was very apparent in the hall, and Weir alludes to it.
JESSE: Steve Beck left us this memory at stories.dead.net, where you can still leave your Wall of Sound and Mars Hotel stories for stuff we haven't gotten to yet.
STEVE BECK: There were people jumping up on the stage doing various things, trying to talk to the band members during songs. One guy tried to put the Europe ‘72 Bozo mask on Phil as he was playing.
AUDIO: "Beat It On Down the Line" [Dick's Picks 24, 3/23/74] (0:46-0:54) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
STEVE BECK: You can hear his response to that on the Dick's Picks recording of the show. That's what prompted Weir to say a little later on: "You can sure tell the ones who won their tickets over the radio."
AUDIO: "Deal" [Dick's Picks 24, 3/23/74] (0:12-0:19) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
BOB WEIR [3/23/74]: You can sure tell the ones who won their tickets over the radio…
MICHAEL PARRISH: Again, maybe it sort of fits in with what they were going to be dealing with with the larger halls that year. I mean, on the East Coast, they could fill any sized room they wanted to, but it wasn't necessarily as true on the West Coast. They did have sound problems.
JESSE: Well, it was only a test. Richie Pechner.
RICHIE PECHNER: The show's known for blowing out the system when it was turned on. I think there was miswiring and it shorted out the PA. So the show is basically, acoustically, not perfect.
JESSE: Sometimes it's hard to know what's causing what on a tape, but on the audience recording you can hear Garcia's guitar go from crisp to muffled in the first few seconds of the opening song.
AUDIO: "U.S. Blues" [audience tape, 3/23/74] (0:14-0:28)
MICHAEL PARRISH: I could tell during the show that they were tweaking things. The volume of different parts of the band seemed to be… I don't know, maybe it was sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, thinking that that was what they were doing and that's what it sounded like. But it certainly did seem like the sound was being adjusted on the fly a little bit.
RICHIE PECHNER: One of the things that came out of this was: well, you can take the best sound system in the world, and if you take it to the wrong place, it's not going to sound good. I think the only thing people remember about that was that it sounded awful.
JESSE: That's not all that they remember. There was a pair of significant debuts, though the first has an asterisk.
AUDIO: "Cassidy" [Dick's Picks 24, 3/23/74] (0:00-0:18) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow's "Cassidy" was released on Ace in 1972, which we went into in depth on our "Ace 50" episode.
MICHAEL PARRISH: It was a very different arrangement. I remember Weir grabbed a different guitar, a hollowbody guitar, to play that. It didn't quite seem to work. It was really cool that they were playing it, but I think the arrangements they did post-retirement were a whole lot better.
JESSE: After this show, it would go back on the shelf until 1976, when it was rebooted in a new key. The other debut had no such issues.
AUDIO: "Scarlet Begonias" [Dick's Picks 24, 3/23/74] (0:22-0:33) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: "Scarlet Begonias" was an instant Dead classic, which we'll get to in due time. Our friend David Gans experienced the Sound Test, too.
DAVID GANS: When I was a young Dead Head in the early ‘70s, one of the most amazing things [was] I went and saw the Dead at the Cow Palace in March of 1974. And there was this moment in "China Cat Sunflower" when they get to the bridge, that E chord in the bridge. And Phil hit this note that rattled the whole building. A week later, my buddy Feldstein had a reel of that show. When we listened to it on the tape, it distorted the tape, too. And it was like: Oh my god, that's so cool!
AUDIO: "China Cat Sunflower" [audience tape, 3/23/74] (2:09-2:18)
JESSE: Using the latest in modern technology, we've degraded that recording just slightly to make it sound more like David's memory. A few days after the Sound Test, the San Francisco Chronicle published a photo of the band soundchecking at the Cow Palace. It was captioned the Wall of Sound. It's the first and only time in 1974 that I've seen the Wall of Sound called that in print. It was never the project's formal name, but it stuck — though didn't go into common usage until about a half-decade later. Still, it was a wall, and people called it that. Steve Brown of Grateful Dead Records.
STEVE BROWN: And then we did the soundcheck at Cow Palace in ‘74, that was the time when people started referring to it as the Wall as I remember, Dead Heads and the crew and people. Just because they had to put it up, and it took hours. Once you could see it drawn, that was it: ‘It's a wall! We have all these speakers, holy shit.' That got the name [established] pretty early on.
JESSE: Journalist Brian Anderson.
BRIAN ANDERSON: And then, of course, in 1974, right around the Sound Test at the Cow Palace, you get some local reports that refer to a "Wall of Sound" — capital W, capital S. John Wasserman, who was a local Bay Area reporter, published this story in the days after the Sound Test where he refers to a Wall of Sound. I think that's even included in the title or the subtitle of his article.
JESSE: It's possible that John Wasserman was the first to call the Dead's system the Wall of Sound, or possibly the editor at the Chronicle who provided the headline. Or perhaps Wasserman was just passing along a phrase he heard backstage. It had been used in popular music for years, coined almost a full decade before the Dead's usage, and credited to Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who used it to describe Phil Spector's production for the Righteous Brothers in late 1964.
AUDIO: "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" [The Righteous Brothers] (2:56-3:21) - [Spotify]
JESSE: From then on, the phrase was in circulation, often deployed by music journalists in different contexts.
BRIAN ANDERSON: I have found newspaper clippings going back to the early ‘70s that refer to the sound waves coming off of the stage coming out of the Dead's rig as a wall of sound. Now, that's not the same as the moniker that would be given to this gigantic sound system by fans later on. But it is curious that already in the press folks were using that phrase to describe what was going on. And they were definitely using it in a way that was distinct from referring to the Wall of Sound that was Phil Spector's production techniques in that same period — late ‘60s, early 70s. Mickey refers to how they were playing within a wall of sound. He refers to that in a number of different places.
JESSE: Andy Leonard was the vice president of Grateful Dead Records and witnessed the Wall in 1974.
ANDY LEONARD: The Wall of Sound was awesome. It was a live animal when it became the thing that finally was the Wall of Sound that everybody sees the pictures of. I just remember being in awe of those guys, Kidd and Joe and those guys, going up in the rigging during the show with the Allen wrench in their teeth and changing a blown speaker cone while everything was going. I thought: holy shit…
JESSE: In 1973 and 1974, the Grateful Dead were undergoing a period of rapid expansion, with new companies being formed left and right to help support the band's growing operation — something Andy realized around the time he got to the Bay Area.
ANDY LEONARD: There were guys working for the Grateful Dead through the ancillary companies that either staged it, built it, maintained it, hauled it or ran it, who I didn't know. I just got there, and then I realized — a lot of these other guys just got there, too. They may have come from Alembic or they may have come from one of the trucking crews, or they may have come from a rigging crew that everybody knew because they worked for Bill Graham. There's a million different places where these guys showed up from, but I didn't know ‘em. So I kept thinking: man, there's a lot of guys on this project.
Grateful Dead Records
JESSE: By comparison there were fewer people working for Grateful Dead Records, the band's new label. That didn't make it any less of an ambitious project than the Wall of Sound. They were attempting to hand-engineer their own path into record stores. Label president Ron Rakow had hired Andy to work for Grateful Dead Records in mid-1973.
RON RAKOW: Andy Leonard is brilliant. He's a photographer, he's the real deal. He's a lot of things. I hired him. He didn't have any money, so he came to Marin County. You can't be in Marin County without a car, so he got two junk BMWs, took them apart and made one good one out of it. Took it apart-apart. Andy Leonard, he's something else.
ANDY LEONARD: I was a fairly serious black-and-white photographer, sort of half in the art world. I paid the bills doing other stuff with the cameras. I actually had a show that was to be hung with Danny Lyons in Andover. I got sucked up by the mothership and never went to my own opening. [laughs] So, that was the death knell of my professional photography career. That was supposed to be my coming out party, but I was actually cross-country in my BMW, setting up distribution networks for the Grateful Dead record company.
JESSE: Like the Wall of Sound, Grateful Dead Records was an evolving beast with its own masterminds, personalities, and politics — and one mostly unified mission. Andy Leonard came into the Dead world by way of Bobby Weir and Andy's Wesleyan classmate, John Perry Barlow.
ANDY LEONARD: I think that Bobby wanted somebody that he knew that wasn't already in the soup to look over the record company on his behalf. As we all know, Rakow and Garcia are the juice behind 80% of the projects that happened during that time. It was a two-edged sword. There was what Garcia wanted to do, and Rakow was going to help him do it. Or maybe it was Rakow's idea, and then the project was to get everybody else to think that was a good idea. Because Phil and Bobby and Billy were deciding that they want to start their own record company, they were kind of riding along with this stuff that Rakow—who is brilliant—threw on the table, and went that way. I think Bobby felt like he might get trampled. I never had this conversation with him, but we were buddies and I could count. I'd seen the elephant. I wasn't going to be blown away by anything that I was about to see, and I wasn't gonna let anybody steal large amounts of money or hurt my friend. And I'm useful, from time to time. I ended up doing a lot of the production and a couple of record covers and some of the PR. It was a small company.
JESSE: So in 1973, he set up shop at the record company house in San Rafael.
ANDY LEONARD: I was the vice president of the Grateful Dead Records. My office was on the porch, and Rakow's office was looking over the street. We would talk to each other from our desks.
JESSE: The groundwork that Andy Leonard helped lay in 1973 would set the course for what the Grateful Dead did in 1974 and 1975 especially. The first piece was record distribution.
ANDY LEONARD: You couldn't get the A-level record distributors because they were kind of tied up with the big record companies, and they weren't going to make anybody real happy to tell Warner Bros. that they were selling the Grateful Dead record, which was in direct competition to Warner Bros. last year. So we were down the list a little bit and, in some of the smaller cities, that produced some fairly shaky folks. Josh Belardo and I used to fly around the country and talk to these guys. That's something Ron would have been very good at, but he couldn't do 18 or 19 of them from where he was sitting, because he was busy.
JESSE: But his role naturally evolved.
ANDY LEONARD: I'd been helping set up the distribution, which we needed first. Then, all of a sudden, we needed products and we needed art and the covers and all that stuff. Then we needed publicity, and then we needed and then we needed… so it kinda… my job description moved around a lot.
JESSE: The same season that Grateful Dead Records debuted, so did the world's first major oil crisis, which had a direct impact on sourcing material to press records.
ANDY LEONARD: It was a question of: ‘Okay, you're gonna have music here any second now. Do you have any vinyl to put the test pressings on that doesn't have ground-up record labels on it from old records?' ‘No.' "Okay. So we'd better go down to Tijuana at night and get some virgin vinyl." ‘Right, okay…'
JESSE: Which they did.
ANDY LEONARD: From Los Angeles, that's not a big deal. But at that point, in order to get vinyl, they were grinding up old records and PVC pipe and stuff. You'd get a little tick every time you ran over a piece of paper. We at least wanted to get the DJ copies out with clean stuff. This is [the] oil crisis, it was in that timeframe.
JESSE: We're going to need album art too, Andy.
ANDY LEONARD: What about cardboard? Is there enough cardboard out there? Who's doing the separations? Who's doing the printing? Has Alan [Trist] got everybody straight on the copyright? I mean, it was: what do you need today? It was a pain in the tail, every step of the way. There was something that we didn't know about, or they weren't gonna give us credit for. I was bringing home record covers that had fluorescent paint on them, to see if we wanted to pay for fluorescent Grateful Dead record covers.
JESSE: In 1973, they released Wake of the Flood, which became their highest charting LP to-date at #18, decidedly not a failure. In 1974, they shifted to the next level.
ANDY LEONARD: It was no longer a science experiment. We were no longer shooting from the hip. We had to be a little more careful about what stuff cost. I could go to one of the big outfits in Los Angeles. Now, they don't know the Grateful Dead from a hole in the wall in Los Angeles, if they run a big printing company and do packaging for the industry. But if I show up and go, ‘Okay, look, I want you to do X-Y-Z for us, and we need 300,000 of them, and we need them yesterday at about 4:30… oh, by the way, I don't have all the artwork here…' You do that the first time, and you really kind of have to talk them into it. The second time, when you show up, you've got credit; they've got somebody to help you with the artwork; they know what you're looking for, two-thirds of what you need. It was ever so much simpler.
JESSE: So, when starting one record company, why not two? Ron Rakow.
RON RAKOW: Jerry and I had this idea. I forgot what the idea was. But he said, "You know what we should do? We should go into business, just us." So I said, "Well, I can't do that." "Why not?" I said, "Because the language of business is accounting and you can't speak it. So I would have a nervous breakdown." So he said, "Are you telling me I'm stupid?" I said, "No. I don't think you're stupid." I laughed. He said, "Well, do you know accounting really well?" I said, "I used to be an accountant. That was how I got through college — I was an accountant in Chinatown, in New York. So he said, "Well, teach me accounting then."
So I left his house and went to San Francisco State University and bought the elementary accounting textbook, the workbook. And I went back there and he started on it. And three weeks later, we were reading financial statements! I went down to Merrill Lynch — at that time, they gave you financial statements in beautifully prepared books. I got about a half a dozen of them, I took them up there and we went through ‘em. He had a great time. He loved it. Everything else is bullshit. The only thing that's important in business is the numbers. So that's what happened — that's how we started Round Records.
JESSE: Assembled in early 1974, around the time of the Sound Test at the Cow Palace, Round Records would officially launch later in the spring and serve as an outlet for the band members' side trips for the next several years.
RON RAKOW: Jerry and I were 50-50 partners in Round Records. There was nothing that he didn't know and there was nothing I didn't know.
JESSE: To paraphrase the old joke about what happens when you let one Dead Head crash on your hotel room floor, what followed is what happens if you go into business with a charged up Ron Rakow. Over the next few years, there would be many businesses.
RON RAKOW: We started it and we owned it 50-50. We started a publishing company, we owned that 50-50. Then we started a movie company, and we owned that 50-50. Then we started the second record company by just reserving the name with the state.
JESSE: But at the core of the spinoff universe was Round Records.
RON RAKOW: The plan was to build a real record company, and using the Grateful Dead to lever from.
JESSE: And at the core of Round Records was Jerry Garcia. In early 1974, before the Grateful Dead themselves got to work on From the Mars Hotel, Garcia got to work on what would become his second solo album.
AUDIO: "Let It Rock" [Jerry Garcia, Compliments] (0:30-0:52) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Now known as Compliments of Garcia, it was a totally new kind of album for Jerry Garcia, and a new kind of creative challenge. Ironically, just as the Dead were unveiling their own Wall of Sound, Garcia made his only album channeling the original Phil Spector-style Wall of Sound, acting as a session player and vocalist on his own record. It was recorded in LA, a place where Garcia hadn't made a full album since the Dead's debut. Personal manager and new Grateful Dead booking agent Richard Loren accompanied him to Devonshire Studios for the sessions.
RICHARD LOREN: I was in the studio for the recording. It was a great experience, the Compliments album — in LA, seeing Jerry in another whole element.
JESSE: Producing the album was Garcia's compatriot, John Kahn. Ron Rakow.
RON RAKOW: The first Round Jerry record… if Jerry was in the studio, Kahn was there. He was the producer. He and Jerry were real close. Kahn was just great. He had some problems, and the nature of them are well known. But he was a fabulous guy and smart as a whip, and Jerry loved him. There was nothing he wouldn't do for Jerry, and so on.
JESSE: It was an album of entirely cover songs. Here's how Garcia described it to David Gans and Blair Jackson in 1981, now in David's wonderful book, Conversations with the Dead.
JERRY GARCIA [4/28/81]: Most of those songs I didn't know either, so I went in there as a studio vocalist. Most of them I only heard one or two times. That was one of the few times when I didn't really go on a trip about the material. I let John do the material selecting, except for a few suggestions. "Russian Lullaby" was one of mine.
AUDIO: "Russian Lullaby" [Jerry Garcia, Compliments] (0:49-1:07) - [Spotify]
JESSE: The end of Garcia's last quote was a little garbled, but he pointed out that Irving Berlin's "Russian Lullaby" was his own choice. Also one of my favorites.
JERRY GARCIA [4/28/81]: ‘See yourself through somebody else's eyes' is what it's like. And since John and I share such similarities of taste… he and I have really, really parallel tastes, musically. Something that I like, John is almost sure like it. We're very like each other, musically. It's one of the reasons I've been playing with him all this time.
I wanted him to have something to do, really. I enjoy working with him. It's one of those things that he can do and it's one of those situations that doesn't happen to him much in the other parts of his musical life.
JESSE: For the album, Kahn wrote the first of several songs he'd write with Robert Hunter, the album closer "Midnight Town," a songwriter bonus.
AUDIO: "Midnight Town" [Jerry Garcia, Compliments] (1:36-1:54) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Besides John Kahn on bass and Merl Saunders on organ on a few cuts, Garcia was working with session players.
RICHARD LOREN: All those incredible studio musicians… Michael Omartian playing piano and organ. God, it was great to hear Jerry actually perform in that way. A lot of Dead fans don't like it because he just couldn't trip out. He was forced to actually play the solo over the bass track and everything else, and then do a vocal overdub. It was very constructed, like they do in LA.
JESSE: It was also the beginning of Garcia's relationship with drummer Ronnie Tutt, then taking care of business in Elvis Presley's band. This is just two months after the Compliments sessions.
AUDIO: "See See Rider" [Elvis Presley, Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis] (0:00-0:12) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Tutt, King.
AUDIO: "See See Rider" [Elvis Presley, Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis] (0:40-1:00) - [Spotify]
JESSE: They'd be onstage together within a few months, though it would take a little while longer for Tutt to join Garcia and Kahn on the road.
RICHARD LOREN: It was open-ended sessions in the studio. Once a musician would go on a fade, he'd get into a song — "Oh yeah, let's play that one!" And they'd all just jump in. It was great. There were so many outtakes on there, an amazing number of outtakes.
AUDIO: "Lonesome Town" [Jerry Garcia, Compliments expanded edition] (0:22-0:57) - [Spotify]
JESSE: It was the kind of album that Garcia couldn't have made in San Francisco. Here's Garcia speaking with Ben Fong-Torres on KSAN in 1975.
JERRY GARCIA [1975]: It's never happened up here, the recording scene hasn't, because the recording companies have never put any bucks into San Francisco. They haven't opened up kind of… there's no authority up here, so there aren't people doing a lot of work. It works two ways. The disadvantage is that there isn't a big recording scene in San Francisco. The advantage is — that there isn't a big recording scene in San Francisco. [chuckles]
JESSE: If the recording studio is sometimes considered an instrument of its own, then the instrument Garcia and Kahn used to make Garcia's album produced a sound that could only have been made in LA.
JERRY GARCIA [1975]: In LA, all those studios have to keep working, so they grind out miserable commercials and jingles and all this other crap. Saturday morning TV shows for kids soundtracks, cop show themes and all the rest of that crap. It's just this totally mechanical music, and I think most of the players out here really don't want to do those kinds of sessions. Everybody's just as happy to not have them, really.
JESSE: Though the bulk of the sessions took place in LA, there was some work that could only be done back home in the Bay Area. Neither version of Ricky Nelson's "Lonesome Town" made the cut, but the acoustic tape in San Francisco is a rare studio cut with David Grisman, Vassar Clements, and Garcia's old bluegrass tape collecting buddy Sandy Rothman.
AUDIO: "Lonesome Town" (Acoustic) [Jerry Garcia, All Good Things: Jerry Garcia Studio Sessions] (0:21-0:55)
CBS Studios
JESSE: That was recorded at San Francisco's CBS Studios. And, whether intentional or not, Jerry Garcia once again did side work at the studio where the Grateful Dead would soon be recording. While kind of random, both of Garcia's trips there were instructive of ways the pop world was changing in parallel to the Dead.
JERRY GARCIA [1975]: Columbia is kind of a good studio, but it's so sterile and it's just a drag to be there.
JESSE: Opened by Roy Segal in 1970 as a Bay Area outpost for Columbia Records, it took until 1973 for any Grateful Dead related activity to occur there — a lifetime in Garcia years. He's sometimes credited with banjo on this track by Art Garfunkel, but is listed under guitar on the album itself.
AUDIO: "Down in the Willow Garden" [Art Garfunkel, Angel Clare] (1:45-2:10) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That's "Down in the Willow Garden" from Art Garfunkel's solo debut, Angel Clare, recorded at CBS sometime in 1972 or 1973. In 1981, when Blair Jackson and David Gans interviewed Garcia for BAM, he told them about the session, which turned out to be a bit of a culture clash but also illustrates different ways of making music. Thanks, David and Blair.
JERRY GARCIA [4/28/81]: One time, I did a session for somebody… Art Garfunkel. It turned out that it was like every little note—every lick and every moment of what I was doing—was an overdub, in a sea of overdubs. He wanted me to play my own stuff. It wasn't that he wanted me to play a part, but he definitely wanted to discuss every thing that happened. And it was one of those things where everything that I did I did four or five times. Once wasn't enough.
JESSE: Cerebral might be a word to describe Art Garfunkel's process.
JERRY GARCIA [4/28/81]: My spirit, the feeling that I go in with to the studio, is to be basically helpful if I'm working for somebody else. And that's something that I always imagine they are best able to decide. I'm not in a position to advise them. I'm basically there to play as well as I can, and then let them make the decisions later whether they want to keep it or not. And then, usually, my experience is something along the lines of — later on, when the record finally comes out, I don't really remember which of my overdubs it is that I'm hearing. It's not nearly as emotionally important to me as it was when it was happening. It's part of the learning process of making records and all that. It's part of what's interesting about working with other people.
JESSE: One aspect of CBS Studios that Garcia would take advantage of, both with his solo album and with the Dead, was the location of the Studio Instrument Rentals rehearsal space directly across Folsom Street. One of the first locations outside LA of the still-active S.I.R. practice spaces, artists would use it to tighten up their songs before heading into CBS to track. It was at S.I.R. in the spring of ‘74 that Jerry Garcia encountered a future bandmate. This is Garcia speaking with Ben Fong-Torres on KSAN in 1975.
JERRY GARCIA [1975]: My little band, we were rehearsing over at S.I.R., and the Tubes were in the big rehearsal thing.
AUDIO: "White Punks on Dope" [The Tubes, s/t] (0:55-1:09) - [Spotify]
JESSE: The Tubes, including Vince Welnick on keyboards, were literally getting their act together.
JERRY GARCIA [1975]: Their rehearsal scene is more stringent, like a Broadway play. They rehearse like a bar at a time, their moves. They have… at 7 o'clock, it's the dancer call; at 5:30, it's the band call, the principals and so forth. It's just like a Broadway musical — it's that tight. They rehearse it maybe even harder and maybe even tighter. They're very serious on the level of what amounts to stagecraft. I can dig that. It's just like a musical or a play. The fact that they can do it with some wit and enjoy it, that's tremendous.
JESSE: Though the Dead had CBS signed out starting a few days after the March 23rd show at the Cow Palace, most of the first week was spent by Garcia finishing up his solo album. On March 30th, 1974, the Dead began tracking their first song for From the Mars Hotel.
Next Stop Mars
AUDIO: "Scarlet Begonias" [From the Mars Hotel] (0:00-0:11) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The Dead's rehearsals for From the Mars Hotel would be less stringent than the Tubes, but become part of how the album was made. Each afternoon they would convene at S.I.R., run down what they were going to record that evening, and then head over to CBS. Steve Brown of Grateful Dead Records was a production assistant.
STEVE BROWN: And it was a thing of coming in around dinner time, so I would have to take orders from them about what they wanted for dinner, then go over to Original Joe's on Taylor Street and pick up the dinners in my van and drive back over and bring them to the studio. Phil would bring in his French wine and stuff. ‘Wait a sec, we're supposed to be working here! This is like a dinner party! What is going on?' So they go through this whole thing of eating and then… of course, you eat that kind of food, you drink that kind of wine, and ‘Oh, yeah, now we're gonna work…' It went late into the night oftentimes. But there was plenty of substenance to keep people awake.
JESSE: To help explain the tale of the tape, we once again welcome back transfer engineer Brian Kehew.
BRIAN KEHEW: These tracks sound very pristine and almost clear, but almost plain Jane to me. They don't sound full of hippie vibe and amazing coolness. They're cool, and it's still them. But the same way a photographer can take different pictures of the same face, we're hearing the Dead through different filters of the studio that will be in the production. I'm sure CBS was fairly corporate, they were fairly established in doing high level, high-quality work — so, it does sound good. But some of the roughness, the weirdness and even the character that I heard on the earlier stuff is not as strong here.
AUDIO: "U.S. Blues" [From the Mars Hotel] (4:11-4:33) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And while it may sound a little slicker than earlier Dead albums, there was still some heady experimentation happening.
BRIAN KEHEW: It's an interesting window of them pushing the envelope of what was technically possible in studios.
JESSE: In part because of the rehearsals at S.I.R., in part because of other factors, and in part just because everything has to be more paradoxical with the Dead — compared to the Dead's previous few studio albums, there is more tape, but less music.
BRIAN KEHEW: So there are different levels of what we call master tapes. A master means it's the original recording; it's not a copy of a previous recording. Now, a master can also mean another thing in recording: if I do 10 attempted takes of "Stairway to Heaven," and I like the seventh one, then that version is called the master, and that's the one that you make the record from. In the case of all the previous work, starting with Workingman's Dead and things like that, when we go into the master tapes, we often have outtakes that are original tapes, and then the master tape was simply the fourth or seventh version of that, which they added overdubs to and mixed. But in this case we have additional reels, and quite a few of them. It was a really thick and dense project to go through, just from the numerous rolls of tape that showed up. Now, they were doing something that was quite different.
JESSE: The first reason for the tape explosion was that they were backing up as they went.
BRIAN KEHEW: And it's not uncommon, but they were doing safety tapes. So those are a copy — they are no longer a master, they're simply a duplicate. An archival thing, if you want to call it that, or a safety tape. What if somebody accidentally erases Phil's bass part, hoping to punch in a guitar solo, and they hit the wrong track? Sometimes these things happen. You could go back to the safety roll, and grab the original bass part and try to line it up again.
JESSE: And in fact, we'll be getting to a few interesting bits that Brian pulled out of the safety reels. But they weren't the experiments that made the Dead take up twice as much tape as usual.
BRIAN KEHEW: And then we have these reels, which I was astounded by. They were called sync reels: synchronizing or synchronous reels. And it means you have a second machine running, and it's literally in sync — it's synchronized to the first machine. When the first machine starts, the second one starts. If the first machine wobbles and slows down a bit, the second machine copies that motion. Hopefully, it's done very steadily. But the reason they did that was to give you more tracks. And so, as anybody found since the days of the Beatles—working with 4-track, and then they wanted 8-track, and then 8-track became 16—this is a very, very early use of synchronized tape machines. In fact, it's the earliest one I've ever seen in my life.
JESSE: Steve Brown remembers it well.
STEVE BROWN: And that's when we took the two 16-tracks and hooked them together. We were able to get the 32 tracks — we had two sync tracks from the machines, but 30 tracks filled. I kept all that stuff that I had to write in every night, stuff we were doing on each song.
JESSE: Thanks to the track sheets from Steve, plus copious amounts of other paperwork, it's possible to pinpoint a good deal of the studio sessions for Mars Hotel.
BRIAN KEHEW: It's not brand-new ideas. In the Beatles days, their technical wizard, Ken Townsend, had synchronized two audio tape machines together before by printing a simple code on one track of a 4-track machine, so they had three tracks of music left. And then they controlled the second machine. They had two 4-tracks linked together for "A Day in the Life," and they did it on "Fool on the Hill" and a couple records. But it was so troublesome, so difficult, that they decided not to do that much more.
JESSE: On the other hand, the Dead committed.
BRIAN KEHEW: They would fill up 16 tracks. They would… well, probably one of the tracks would be that code. And so the code would also be printed on the second machine, so that they could be compared.
JESSE: For reference, here's what a bit of that sync code sounds like, if you listen to it.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Sync Code, From the Mars Hotel] (0:03-0:06)
BRIAN KEHEW: And all it did was just make sure the second machine stayed in time with the first. Each machine has 15 audio tracks left for music, giving them a total of 30 working tracks, which is pretty cool. This is more than they needed in almost every case. But what it allowed them to do was just a lot of messing around. You could keep three guitar tracks and put maybe four more down, see which ones work. Or even multiple vocals, and then choose between which parts of the vocal you wanted. They weren't even going crazy with it — on these sync reels, I might have six or eight tracks. They're not using all the available 15, nor did they really need it. I think on some of these, the record's not more complicated than the previous albums. But it gave them some options.
JESSE: In fact, the advance of 32 tracks turned out to be about eight steps too far for 1974. In early July, two months after the Dead wrapped the sessions and a week after From the Mars Hotel came out, the first band began using a 24-track studio.
AUDIO: "Killer Queen" [Queen, Sheer Heart Attack] (2:16-2:26) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Queen's Sheer Heart Attack was the first album made with a 24-track, and it'd be another few years before 32s became the norm.
STEVE BROWN: There was really a good feeling about: this is going to be a good album. The energy was really good. Everybody was feeling like, ‘Hey, we got some good shit here. We're gonna be able to do this.'
"China Doll"
JESSE: The work on the album's second song, "China Doll," started simply enough.
BRIAN KEHEW: It has Take 5 complete on the 18th of April. And so, that is all we get.
JESSE: The band had recorded the song for Wake of the Flood in 1973 and played it numerous times live since. They had it down.
BRIAN KEHEW: It says Take 5 on the box. So what I'm assuming is that they had other tapes that were either not complete, but they threw them out or erased them later. And again, if there is an issue with tape, you can easily record over a tape that you're not going to use again. People feel a little weird about that, like it's not virgin. But honestly, if you roll the tape back and you sing your vocal twice, it's not virgin, either — you've wiped over the first vocal. It's not a problem, there's nothing left on the tape. So to take a tape back and record over it, reuse it, they might have done a reel of "China Doll"s.
JESSE: The core take of "China Doll" features a really lovely Grateful Dead quartet — Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir on acoustic guitars, Phil Lesh on what might be upright bass or probably just a very warm electric tone, and Keith Godchaux on harpsichord.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Raw Take, From the Mars Hotel] (0:01-0:32)
JESSE: Steve Brown.
STEVE BROWN: I would have to write down each one of the takes. And then, when Jerry would listen to them and such, he would then tell me how to be able to get a sense of which one of those takes was the one.
JESSE: One thing that gives the studio version of "China Doll" its glow is that there is no backbeat clicking out a regular sense of time — only accents, much like the magical 1969 versions of "Dark Star." Similarly, with the presence of the harpsichord, it's one of the only songs that channels the tonal palette of "Mountains of the Moon," almost bringing Garcia and Hunter full circle.Here's what most of Billy Kreutzmann's parts sound like on "China Doll."
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Drums, From the Mars Hotel] (1:25-1:34)
JESSE: And in case you weren't sure where that was in the song.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [From the Mars Hotel] (1:20-1:28) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: There's an overdubbed electric bass part weaving through the song, too. And it's the first sign that something is about to change underneath.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Electric Bass, From the Mars Hotel] (1:26-1:48)
JESSE: The song begins to transform during the third verse. This is where the guitar solo goes in the live versions. But on the studio take, the solo is more like an accompanying part and functions to help move the song towards its conclusion. Dig it, if you will, in isolation.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Jerry Guitar Solo, From the Mars Hotel] (2:11-2:41)
JESSE: I think it's a phaser that's adding the extra Robert Fripp-like awesomeness. It's kind of the screaming opposite of everything else in the arrangement. And yet it works.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Jerry Guitar Solo, From the Mars Hotel] (2:42-3:08)
JESSE: Now what if, hear me out, while blowing your mind with that, they also did this.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Background Vocals — doubled, From the Mars Hotel] (2:47-3:02)
JESSE: With that mini choir guiding the song from minor to major, we've arrived at the coda. And here's where Steve Brown's paperwork gets fun. It's "China Doll" that he's specifically describing here.
STEVE BROWN: When he wanted to change something on one of the takes, or have him do another take based on something that he described… This is where I learned about Jerry's seeing music. He saw music. He would give me verbal descriptions of something physical, as an idea of how this should be. So, he says, "It has to have a calliope sound to it, and it has to have something that is flying in the sky more…" And so I'm seeing him see his music. It really blew my mind. It's like, he doesn't just listen to music — he sees it. And I was… it became… wow. Now, I can see music too. He opened a door wide on me, because I'm sittin' there next to him, writing down the notes as he says it, and you can see what he's saying.
JESSE: I'm going to guess that the calliope reference grew out of this lyric in the song.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Garcia Vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (1:33-1:46)
JESSE: A hurdy gurdy is a pretty far-out sounding medieval instrument where a mechanical bow plays a violin controlled by a hand crank. It sounds like this.
AUDIO: "Reverse Dance" [Andrey Vinogradov, Distant Calls] (0:00-0:15) - [Spotify]
JESSE: A calliope is a steam-powered organ, often used in circuses and in carousels. It sounds like this.
AUDIO: [Steam Calliope] (0:00-0:13)
JESSE: Neither was probably readily available at CBS when the band was doing overdubs, but what they created evokes the dreaminess of those instruments. Keith Godchaux plays harpsichord on the basic track.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Harpsichord, From the Mars Hotel] (0:08-0:29)
JESSE: For the song's coda, Keith Godchaux laid in a harmonium, a small hand-pumped drone organ.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Harmonium, From the Mars Hotel] (2:56-3:10)
JESSE: For extra wheeze, Keith also added notes from the bass pedals of an organ. Almost ambient.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Organ Bass Pedals, From the Mars Hotel] (3:20-3:36)
JESSE: And my favorite overdub, as well, a celeste — a piano instrument that uses the keys to strike small pitched bells instead of strings.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Celeste, From the Mars Hotel] (2:56-3:26)
JESSE: Two more layers of jaw-dropping vocals for good measure.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Background Vocals 2, From the Mars Hotel] (3:07-3:28)
JESSE: Combined with everything else going on, it's one of the loveliest sound combinations on the Dead's studio albums, to my ears.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [From the Mars Hotel] (2:57-3:23) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: All that and they actually didn't even spill onto the sync reel. Brian Kehew.
BRIAN KEHEW: I have a note here which is interesting: it's the only tape where they use Dolby noise reduction. And most people know about Dolby from their cassette decks or from a Spinal Tap joke here and there. But Dolby was simply a way to keep the tape hiss that's inherent in all analog recordings down low. And I'm surprised, but maybe because "China Doll" is such a sparse and quiet and gentle song, that's when you really would hear noise. But something much more rocking, "U.S. Blues" or something, you're never going to hear a tape hiss because it's just a loud song. The tracks themselves are really quite loud, and the noise is always down in the low, low stuff, like a quiet song.
Take Up Your…
JESSE: A delicate song with delicate parts, maybe the most delicate song the Dead ever recorded in a studio, and intended to be performed on the biggest sound system in the world. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: There's some amazing live versions. May ‘74 has some great live versions. It's still a brand-new song, they'd just come out of the studio recording it. Those, to me, are the best consistent live versions of it.
JESSE: When the band hit the road with the Wall of Sound, the "China Doll" guitar solo moved back to its place after the third verse. There are a few versions where Garcia employed the same amazing split signal phaser tone for the solo, like this one a few weeks later in Missoula on May 14th, the first version after the sessions, now Dave's Picks 9. It almost sounds like there's a third guitar player up there.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Dave's Picks 9, 5/14/74] (2:18-2:54)
JESSE: When it debuted, "China Doll" was virtually the second half of a suite with "Eyes of the World." In 1974, it most often functioned the same way, though also served as a quiet coda to the full "Weather Report Suite" and occasionally "Dark Star." They played it for the last time in the original one-drummer formation on October 19th, 1974, the night before they took more than a year off the road.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [The Grateful Dead Movie OST, 10/19/74] (5:20-5:55)
JESSE: The song returned in 1977, and was in and out of the repertoire for years.
DAVID LEMIEUX: China at all. I think the album version is the best version. Reckoning also is the other one. Friends vocals are just beautiful on the reckoning. Maybe it's the harpsichord, I don't know.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Reckoning] (0:26-0:47) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It was a centerpiece of the band's acoustic sets in 1980 and the subsequent Reckoning live album, the only times where Brent Mydland played harpsichord onstage.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Reckoning] (4:14-4:46) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The studio original would inform the keyboard sounds of nearly all future versions, like this 1983 take from In and Out of the Garden.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (1:37-2:04) - [dead.net]
DAVID LEMIEUX: "China Doll" is one of those songs that always came as a surprise, usually after "Drums/Space." Occasionally it came out of "Playing in the Band," maybe in the pre-"Drums" [era]. But it was always a surprise. It was a real thrill to see — ‘we got the song, the rarity.' Where I feel it works a little better is when I have headphones and I'm in a kind of meditative state, where I'm maybe going for a walk in the woods or something. That's where I love my "China Doll"s.
JESSE: It's not an easy song, but lends itself to the right kind of musician. Suzanne Vega performed it on 1991's Deadicated.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Suzanne Vega, Deadicated: A Tribute to the Grateful Dead] (0:35-1:00)
JESSE: And I'm quite fond of the live version by Dump, there's one the Dennis's Picks cassette.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Dump, Dennis's Picks 1, 3/10/15] (31:15-31:48)
JESSE: Oteil Burbridge made the song his own in Dead and Co. and recorded it for his solo album, Lovely View of Heaven.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Oteil Burbridge, Lovely View of Heaven] (3:41-4:07) - [Spotify]
JESSE: But I stand with David Lemieux on the beauty of the studio take, so let's end today's episode by hanging out a little more at CBS, and listening to the music the Grateful Dead made in the studio in 1974.
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Raw Take, From the Mars Hotel] (0:00-0:05)
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Jerry Guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (0:05-0:14)
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Garcia Vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (0:14-0:27)
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Bob Guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (0:30-0:47)
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Harpsichord, From the Mars Hotel] (0:49-1:08)
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Bass, From the Mars Hotel] (1:09-1:31)
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Electric Bass, From the Mars Hotel] (1:31-1:57)
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Drums, From the Mars Hotel] (1:57-2:14)
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Jerry Guitar Solo, From the Mars Hotel] (2:15-2:47)
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Background Vocals — doubled, From the Mars Hotel] (2:47-3:01)
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Harmonium, From the Mars Hotel] (3:01-3:08)
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Background Vocals 2, From the Mars Hotel] (3:08-3:27)
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Organ Bass Pedals, From the Mars Hotel] (3:28-3:37)
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Garcia Vocal, From the Mars Hotel] (3:37-3:45)
AUDIO: "China Doll" [Celeste, From the Mars Hotel] (3:45-4:10)