Good Ol' Grateful Deadcast
Season 9, Episode 4
From the Mars Hotel 50: Loose Lucy
Archival interviews:
- Jerry Garcia, by David Gans & Blair Jackson, Conversations with the Dead, 6/11/81.
- Robert Hunter, by Amir Bar-Lev, Long Strange Trip, 7/14.
- Phil Lesh, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 7/30/81.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [From the Mars Hotel] (0:00-0:17) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The first side of From the Mars Hotel closed with what kids these days call "a bop."
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [From the Mars Hotel] (0:18-0:28) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: "Loose Lucy," it's a party song. I love it. I think it's a great song. It gets everybody up and dancing. And this arrangement of it, the peppy ‘74 arrangement, is so much fun. I just can't get enough of it.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [From the Mars Hotel] (0:33-0:48) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: "Loose Lucy" is a song that would change over time, both its arrangement and, in a way, what it meant.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The lyric "thank you for a real good time" — it's our lyric. It's the Dead Heads' lyric, thanking the band for a real good time. And here's the band, singing it back to us, thanking us for a real good time.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [Spring 1990, 3/28/90] (1:25-1:50)
DAVID LEMIEUX: That's not what they're doing, thanking Loose Lucy for a real good time, but [that's] the way I interpreted it.
JESSE: More than a half-century into the collective history of Grateful Dead music, a lot of pieces of their repertoire and lore have ended up with a bit more gravity and different meanings than they were almost certainly intended. That's kind of the story of "Loose Lucy" that we're going to tell today, and by extension From the Mars Hotel as a whole. But to get there, as we often do, we're going to reset slightly to try to get back to how Dead freaks heard the Dead's music in 1974. In the early 1980s, Lee Ranaldo would co-found one of my all-time favorite groups — the game-changing Sonic Youth.
AUDIO: "Eric's Trip" [Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation] (0:03-0:15) - [Spotify]
JESSE: But in the early 1970s, he was a serious long haired Dead freak. We talked with Lee about his experiences at the Watkins Glen Summer Jam last year, and we're stoked to welcome back Lee Ranaldo. He bought From the Mars Hotel immediately upon its release in June 1974.
LEE RANALDO: I had no idea it was a real place. We thought of it as a hotel on the planet Mars. What I really remember focusing on was the album cover, which was so mysterious with that backward writing and all that stuff on it. I just remember being fascinated by the colorful, spacey look of both the front cover and that group shot on the back cover, where they're all kind of like cartoon characters. It seemed very modern for them somehow at the time, especially after Wake of the Flood, which had an image that harkened back to like old gravures. I love that Phil stepped up, I really loved "Unbroken Chain." I thought that his two songs were wonderful.
AUDIO: "Unbroken Chain" [From the Mars Hotel] (0:54-1:09) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
LEE RANALDO: "U.S. Blues," in that moment in time—coming up on the Bicentennial, all that stuff—just had this very interesting quality to it. I think people were really psyched to hear that song because it seemed to speak to the moment we were living in somehow, in a political way that the Dead didn't usually venture into.
AUDIO: "U.S. Blues" [From the Mars Hotel] (1:31-2:01) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
"Loose Lucy"
JESSE: We'll reconnect with Lee's adventures as a young Dead freak later this episode. "Loose Lucy" wasn't a heavy song, with a pretty clearly conveyed message of fun, the kind of song that made it possible for Mars Hotel to soundtrack summer cross-country trips. "Loose Lucy" had a slightly different kind of contemporary political undercurrent, written a month or two after California ratified the Equal Rights Amendment in November 1972 and debuted the day after Oregon and Minnesota did the same. If the synthesizers make "Unbroken Chain" sound like 1974 but also the future, the lyrics make "Loose Lucy" sound like 1974 but also… 1974. From the New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: The language of "Loose Lucy" is so caught up in that kind of biker culture. Beatnik culture. It seems like it's set in a certain time, in a certain point of view.
JESSE: I think this is maybe the lyric Nick is thinking of.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [From the Mars Hotel] (0:12-0:16) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
NICK PAUMGARTEN: It's pretty shocking to hear that come out of Jerry Garcia's mouth, too, for a guy that was pretty picky about the things that he would say on stage. When Garcia sings about sex, which is pretty rare, there's something kind of sassy about it — an ironic distance that just doesn't bother me as much as Weir doing it.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [From the Mars Hotel] (0:51-1:02) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
NICK PAUMGARTEN: Sort of back alley, dirtbag, druggie, biker Grateful Dead. I've always liked that whole vibe.
JESSE: Deadcast hero Corry Arnold has a theory that I've never seen supported, but is plausible enough to float here — that "Loose Lucy" was written with the intention of giving it to the far raunchier Pigpen to sing. I can kinda hear it. From a groove point of view, "Loose Lucy" is another in a series of cartoon boogies that Garcia would begin to write in 1971 especially.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: It has that ramshackle thing—a jalopy on square wheels—that I love about all of these songs. "Ramble On Rose" has it, "Tennessee Jed" has it, tons of them have it.
JESSE: The reason for that lurch is this unassuming little bar of 7/8, mid-verse.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [From the Mars Hotel] (0:15-0:19) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That little lurch has surely triggered raised eyebrows and probably a few off-mic discussions in any band that's ever tried to perform it. But the playful arrangement supported playful lyrics.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: It's cheeky. I like it when the Dead is cheeky. It's an important part of all rock and roll bands.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [From the Mars Hotel] (1:59-2:19) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The scarcity of raunch came up in conversation with Jerry Garcia, Blair Jackson, David Gans in 1981, now in Conversations with the Dead. Thanks, David. This is Blair's voice starting.
BLAIR JACKSON [6/11/81]: There is very little stuff about open sexuality.
JERRY GARCIA [6/11/81]: I've never been attracted to songs of that sort, I guess. It's mostly because most of them have real dumb lyrics.
BLAIR JACKSON [6/11/81]: "Loose Lucy" is about the only one —
JERRY GARCIA [6/11/81]: There's a few.
BLAIR JACKSON [6/11/81]: — that hints at a raunchy side.
JERRY GARCIA [6/11/81]: Some of "Scarlet Begonias," in a way. "It Must Have Been the Roses" is a weird sort of love song. There's others, too. Oh, I think "Candyman" is pretty blatant, shit…
AUDIO: "Candyman" [American Beauty] (0:29-0:53) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: One might point to "Loose Lucy," the song, as being the product of the late sexual revolution; or as the Coen Brothers once put it, the new freedoms. But it might just also be a product of contemporary attitudes.
MAUDE LEBOWSKI [The Big Lebowski]: Do you like sex, Mr. Lebowski?
JERRY GARCIA [6/11/81]: Sex, love or any of that male-female stuff.
JESSE: I think it's a measure of how Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter thought about the Dead that sex showed up more in the songs that Jerry Garcia chose to sing with his side projects.
AUDIO: "Let's Spend the Night Together" [Jerry Garcia, Garcia] (0:31-0:55) - [Spotify]
JERRY GARCIA [6/11/81]: I've never thought about it one way or another. But I've had women libbers tell me, especially back in the ‘70s — nobody's told me that for a long time, say that this stuff was, like, men talking to men.
DAVID GANS [6/11/81]: I think you can see that in Hunter's writing a lot.
JERRY GARCIA [6/11/81]: Definitely. It's very much masculine, on that trip. He's like, acting out… He's definitely more masculine a person.
JESSE: And it's not like there's not karmic payback in "Loose Lucy" either.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [From the Mars Hotel] (0:51-1:02) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
NICK PAUMGARTEN: "Loose Lucy" brings back that schlemiel thing — it's the same guy almost from "Tennessee Jed." Things keep happening to this guy.
JESSE: In Bob Sarlin's 1973 profile of Robert Hunter in his book Turn It Up, titled "Invisible Song-Poet," Sarlin paraphrases Hunter speaking about (as Sarlin puts it) "a Dead character who can be found in many of the songs on Workingman's Dead and American Beauty, their next album. This character is indeed a workingman and an underdog, and is expressive of the group personality." Sarlin cites "Dire Wolf" and "Cumberland Blues" as versions of the Character. I wouldn't say the characters in "Tennessee Jed" and "Loose Lucy" are continuations of that, but maybe share a universe with that Character.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: But he's also kind of a rounder, and a hapless ladies man. This guy gets beat up all the time.
JESSE: I imagine him as one of the not-quite-innocents always asking Mr. Natural for advice in R. Crumb comix, maybe friends with Flakey Foont.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: Anyone who brags about having sex all night with someone is gonna get two black eyes, he's gonna get it upside the head. That's basically the idea.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [From the Mars Hotel] (2:22-2:45) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The song was introduced at a chipper bounce in early 1973 with much of the Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter material that constituted Wake of the Flood.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/9/73] (2:16-2:36) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That was from RFK Stadium on June 9th, 1973, now on the Here Comes Sunshine box set. A few weeks later, the band slowed it down a bit more for their July performances before recording it in the studio in August. I'm not really sure why, but for the duration of the year it became a bit bluesier. Maybe they thought they needed a tune at that tempo to fit in with the album they were making.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" (Studio Outtake) [Beyond Description (1973-1989), 8/7/73] (1:01-1:24) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was an unfinished studio take of "Loose Lucy" included on the Beyond Description box set. The song didn't make the album but they kept playing it through their fall tours and into 1974. "Loose Lucy" wasn't on Jerry Garcia's original list for Mars Hotel either that we discussed last episode, but they recorded it anyway and now leaned into an even faster tempo.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" (Alternate Mix) [From the Mars Hotel: The Angel's Share] (0:07-0:25) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Maybe they got to the studio and decided they needed another uptempo number. Brian Kehew is the engineer responsible for transferring the recent Angel's Share outtakes.
BRIAN KEHEW: I'm looking at 4/5 as the earliest date, but also 4/8 showed up. The copy tape of the master, the original takes, was made on 4/20 — no joke intended. But many of these copy tapes were made in the same day, so I think that was a breakpoint where they stopped and said, "Hey, we've kind of got what we need. Let's back up a lot of these master takes and, before we start doing overdubs, we'll make a safety copy of the tape in case something happens." And the sync reel as it was with "Money Money," was done on 4/27 to do options there.
JESSE: As you may've noticed, there's not much of "Loose Lucy" on the Angel's Share, yet the surviving tape is labeled "take 16."
BRIAN KEHEW: It's evidence that they were treating unused tape as available tape — unused, not used for the record. As in: you can have this, you don't need to spend money on that; you can use one of our old tapes.
JESSE: By 1975, when the Dead were taking a break from the road and weren't exactly flush with tour cash, the members were working on solo albums, and all the extra takes of "Loose Lucy" might seem less relevant.
BRIAN KEHEW: Don't forget that in this time period—not the Beatles, not Hendrix, not Sinatra—no one had gone backwards into looking at outtakes. All that mattered was the master take and the released mix of it. They didn't even want a different mix of something. They wanted one version of a record that was essentially perfect.
JESSE: As with the session tapes for "Unbroken Chain," the original "Loose Lucy" recordings were probably nationalized into the greater pool of Grateful Dead tapes available for projects, which would require and shed a trail of reels for years to come.
BRIAN KEHEW: I'm looking now at the "Loose Lucy" sync reel, which was done on 4/27. That's the date of that one, or at least the data appears to be dated. They have that slide guitar, left and right.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [Garcia Slide Guitar — Left & Right, From the Mars Hotel] (2:25-2:32)
JESSE: Played by Jerry Garcia, the slide part is a fun way to ornament the groove without overlapping with Garcia or Weir's other guitar parts. It's more color than flash. The ending is about as excitable as the slide part gets.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [Garcia Slide Guitar — Left & Right, From the Mars Hotel] (2:55-3:24)
JESSE: From a guitar point of view, "Loose Lucy" is a cool way to hear Garcia and Weir build a groove together. Here's Garcia's core part.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [Garcia Guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (0:07-0:22)
JESSE: And here's Bob Weir's part, fitting around that.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [Weir Guitar, From the Mars Hotel] (0:07-0:23)
JESSE: Keith Godchaux played Rhodes.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [Rhodes, From the Mars Hotel] (0:07-0:23)
JESSE: Phil Lesh's bass line wasn't your typical Motown groove.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [Bass, From the Mars Hotel] (0:07-0:22)
JESSE: They might not've had a second drummer in 1974, but Bill Kreutzmann added a solid tambourine pulse underneath the whole song.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [Tambourine, From the Mars Hotel] (0:10-0:15)
JESSE: Perhaps the most subtle colors in the final mix are a pair of Roland synthesizer parts, once again played by Keith Godchaux and Jerry Garcia, both overdubbed on April 29th. They both play the same notes but with very different keyboard sounds. Here's Keith.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [Godchaux Synth, From the Mars Hotel] (0:41-0:48)
JESSE: And Jerry, sounding more like a secret room in the original Legend of Zelda.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [Garcia Synth, From the Mars Hotel] (0:41-0:48)
JESSE: And together, this is from the outro.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [Godchaux & Garcia Synth submix, From the Mars Hotel] (2:58-3:15)
BRIAN KEHEW: They're not even that different; they're kind of related parts, like each guy took his stab at the idea, but they maybe liked both of them. It's fascinating. I do find that a lot of these tracks have Jerry on synthesizer — not the Keith doesn't play, he definitely does. We've never thought of Jerry as a synth wizard, but I'm sure he could get around on a normal keyboard, since they weren't much different in those days.
JESSE: Garcia also did a second vocal take on the sync reel. Here's the first vocal take they kept. We'll compare the ending to see what Garcia might've been focusing on.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [Garcia Vocal — Take 1, From the Mars Hotel] (2:53-3:20)
JESSE: And the second take.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [Garcia Vocal — Take 2, From the Mars Hotel] (2:53-3:20)
JESSE: If you guessed they used the second take to fill out Garcia's vocal for the ending, you were correct.
AUDIO: [Bell dinging sound effect] (0:01-0:03)
Anton Round
JESSE: The Dead had a production schedule to keep. Recording in April and mixing in May, they had to get it out by their June tour. While they were making noise in the studio, the head of their record company was starting to make noise on their behalf about upcoming projects. Please welcome back, from Grateful Dead and Round Records, mid-'70s editions, Ron Rakow.
RON RAKOW: Everybody thinks everything in the Grateful Dead was decided and discussed and analyzed. That's not the way it was. It was a bunch of total fucking lunatics: half of them stoned, the other half were drunk, and half of the other half were frigid.
JESSE: Last episode, we discussed how their record company, Grateful Dead Records, had spawned a second record company, Round, co-owned by Jerry Garcia and Ron Rakow. In May 1974, just as the Dead were putting the finishing touches on From the Mars Hotel, it was time to roll Round into the world. A letter was dispatched to the Grateful Dead mailing list:
"Dear Guerilla: We're doing it… appearing in yet another manifestation, but by now you should be expecting that."
RON RAKOW: This is my early systemizing of the fans to do the work. This is the record company parallel to the Dead Heads [mailing list and newsletter]. The Dead Heads were being run by Eileen Law.
JESSE: In the ‘70s, Dead Heads was the name of the band's newsletter.
RON RAKOW: We had our own separate mailing list. I was building something from the ground up. There was a lot of internal reluctance to participate.
JESSE: Though they shared infrastructure, Round Records was a separate business from Grateful Dead Records. The mailing contained a 7-inch record with some new music, a "Sampler For Dead Heads," as it read. But while it was music from the Grateful Dead, it wasn't music by the Grateful Dead.
AUDIO: "Turn On the Bright Lights" [Jerry Garcia, Garcia] (0:00-0:24) - [Spotify]
JESSE: And the other side of the first Sampler For Dead Heads featured music from a voice not heard on record since the "Dark Star" single.
AUDIO: "Keys to the Rain" [Robert Hunter, Tales of the Great Rum Runners] (0:06-0:28) - [Spotify]
JESSE: RXR-101, the first release in the Round catalog, would be Robert Hunter's Tales of the Great Rum Runners, a tale we'll save for another day. From Grateful Dead and Round Records, please welcome back Andy Leonard.
ANDY LEONARD: Round Records was a scale model project. But as far as I was concerned, the music was just as real. When we produced Wake of the Flood and it worked, it's not like the coffers were full, because that had been done with a loan. What we did have at that point was confidence and inertia. So, everybody that had had one sort of corked up produced it. And we thought: We know how to do this, this is not that hard. We're not going to do 300,000 Hunter albums. Let's go. It wasn't that hard. There were smaller projects pinging right through there, and the Grateful Dead would then go and do whatever they did to percolate the next one. One never knew what would be produced when.
AUDIO: "When the Hunter Gets Captured By The Game" [Jerry Garcia, Garcia] (2:18-2:40) - [Spotify]
ANDY LEONARD: If you're going to release a Ned Lagin album, Seastones, or something that is cool — that's why we made it. But you know that it's going to have a limited audience compared to a Grateful Dead record when you call the distributors and you go, "Okay, here comes another one." It doesn't work as well if you say, "I'm gonna send you 40 copies, and I want you to do some advertising and go down and beat up the record store and see if you can get ‘em in the front." For 40 copies? No. But if you go: "Okay, look, Round Records just coughed up three or four records and they're coming through" — then the volume on this is going to grow.
JESSE: We're celebrating From the Mars Hotel, but its sibling albums, being sent into American reality almost simultaneously with the market-force of the Grateful Dead, were Jerry Garcia's second solo album and Robert Hunter's Tales Of the Great Rum Runners, all released in June 1974. We talked a bit about the recording of Jerry Garcia's solo album during our "China Doll" episode. Ron Rakow.
RON RAKOW: The cover of the first Garcia solo album put out on Round Records — it had a really good cover by Victor Moscoso. It was Jerry playing his guitar, duplicated on a sand dune or a desert, and birds were flying over his head. And it just said Garcia: one word, Garcia, on the top. And then we put it out.
JESSE: There was no proper title, other than Garcia.
RON RAKOW: And then, 20 years later, I'm doing something else, someplace else, and I read some major criticism about that album being called Garcia because there was a prior album put out by Warner Brothers, called Garcia. I didn't care. George Foreman had five sons and he named them all George. So, what's the big deal?
JESSE: But people do like names.
RON RAKOW: Compliments was a tag that went on this plastic that came off when you opened the record, because we sent them out to the radio stations.
JESSE: From Grateful Dead Records, Andy Leonard.
ANDY LEONARD: That was hysterical. We were so concerned about bootlegging at that point — it was actually embossed in the cardboard. It was put on the demo, DJ copies, the pre-release copies, to make sure that nobody would sell them. It was done after the album cover was complete. It wasn't done to all of them, obviously. I think everybody just sort of decided that was cool.
RON RAKOW: A clever guy that worked for me had a moment of cleverness. His name was Steve Brown. He's the one that came up with Compliments.
JESSE: Big ups, Steve Brown. Back to that letter that was sent out to Dead Heads in 1974.
RON RAKOW: "Remember, you gorillas are our guerillas and we love ya, but we only want you to do stuff if you dig it. Dig it? See ya! Anton Round."
JESSE: So who was this Anton Round character? You may've already guessed the answer. Please welcome back, Round Records co-owner, Ron Rakow.
RON RAKOW: Well, the origin of Anton Round is my tuckus.
JESSE: He also had a brother, Roland.
RON RAKOW: Roland, Roland A… I needed a character. You know in the sales game what the words "third-party influence" mean? A stranger who has nothing to do with the buy-and-sell between the salesman and the potential buyer, who gives an opinion that's favorable to the seller, or the buyer, is a person that one can employ to offer third-party influence. He has no win or lose, he has no dogs in the fight, but he's giving an opinion, that third-party influence. Well, third-party influence is the most effective sales tool there is, after the free sample. I needed third-party influence. Who was I going to go to? Everybody that I would go to that would be credible had an ax to grind, and they wanted me gone so they could grind their ax. Well, I had to come up with third-party influence — so, I invented Anton Round. And I already had a company called Round Records! What the fuck? It's simple.
JESSE: Robert Hunter was none too pleased with the arrival of Anton Round onto the scene. In 1988, he told Blair Jackson, "When we formed Round Records, Ron Rakow took the mailing list and sent out these horrible little promo postcards signed ‘Anton Round,' and I thought it was the sleaziest looking Hollywood bullshit you'd ever want to see. I was outraged at this. ‘How dare you use this for commercial purposes?' I was told that the list was now to be used for this sort of thing and basically that the list had been taken over. I said, ‘Count me out.'"
AUDIO: "Mad" [Robert Hunter, Tales of the Great Rum Runners] (0:23-0:30) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Ironically, the Anton Round postcard had been in promotion of Hunter's own album.
RON RAKOW: You want to use it for crass business stuff? Yeah, that's true, I did. [chuckles] Right!
JESSE: Anton Round took on a life of his own.
RON RAKOW: Round was the name of the company, Anton went with that really nicely. And I made up a story that Anton Round was a 93-year old retired multi-trillionaire business guy, and he would find people that he felt were interesting to him and mentor them. In the past, he mentored Bill Graham—which is how he got to me—and Ray Kroc, who went on to found McDonald's, and one other guy of that stature. Three guys like that.
JESSE: Oh really?
RON RAKOW: I got sued, or threatened to be sued, by the estate of Ray Kroc. Mrs. Kroc got one of the mailings — somebody in her family was a Grateful Dead Head, and they got the Anton Round letter in the mailing for the new album release. So, she turned it over to her law firm, and the law firm called me and said, "If you don't stop, cease and desist"—it's called a cease and desist letter—"and, further, advertise that this was fake; and re-circularize everybody that got it that this was fake…" So I called him back and I said, "Hey: you're dealing with hippies. I don't think you know what that means. But I will stop doing it. And, if you want, I'll write a letter of apology to Mrs. Kroc. I won't do it anymore. But if you want me to recirculate anything or do anything like that, I'll have to send you a bill for how much it costs because we don't have any money. We're lucky we can keep the door open." So they said, "No, we're not coming up with any money. It will be satisfied. You give us assurance that you're not going to do that again — that's okay." That was the end of that.
JESSE: I can find no paper trail, published or otherwise, in which Anton Round says he mentored Ray Kroc, but maybe it was another stub. I'll keep digging, though.
Promotions & FREE STUF
JESSE: There was a whole spectrum of marketing tactics thought up by Grateful Dead Records. Steve Brown.
STEVE BROWN: I came up with ideas that we could use to promote the albums. When we did Mars Hotel, I came up with the Mars Hotel soap bars that you'd get in a hotel —when you open it up, it would be like this black soap. That would be weird.
JESSE: Steve Brown would end up becoming the public face of what turned out to be perhaps the most effective idea of all.
RON RAKOW: The best idea of all was the Free Stuf booth. That was the best idea that worked, the Free Stuf booth. I designed it and Ram Rod built it. It was a table with the legs folded up inside it, and it said: "Free Stuf Booth." Ram Rod made it personally. It was really cool, and Steve Brown took it around. When you folded it up, it was four feet high by eight feet wide. We signed people up to join our fan club, and the number of fan club members went from 13,000 to, 20 months later, there were 93,000.
JESSE: The Free Stuf booth was covered in vivid colors by master tie dye artist Courtenay Pollack.
COURTENAY POLLACK: We did the promotion booth. They were eight foot by four foot slabs of plywood. I put a frame around the eight foot, and basically made it so that they would fold into a suitcase. Eight foot by four foot, a rectangle. So I could actually pick up one in each hand and carry them to wherever we were setting them up.
JESSE: Steve Brown.
STEVE BROWN: It was a booth that was designed with big signs that said "Grateful Dead Commercial Message" — which I actually have, still here in this house. The tables that went in front were all hung with Courtenay tie-dye in the front. And the four panels that were behind me were [depictions of] the seasons, also done by Courtenay tie-dye. Huge. These were like four foot by six foot panels. Really nice, beautiful.
COURTENAY POLLACK: In the top squares, the four-by-four squares—there were four of them—when the things were opened up and stood side by side, they created a 16 foot by eight foot high booth. The top half of the backs of each of these eight-by-fours. It was four season mandalas, and I resin-ed them into the back of the plywood, so that they had that wet look. Really bright, brilliant color. Of course it added a lot to the weight of the things, this mass of resin. We had all our free stuff folded into these cases. I picked these things up, and they must have weighed close to 100 pounds apiece.
STEVE BROWN: We knew that, when we went to these concerts, if we had had a booth that would have people sign up to be on our mailing list, if we could get to them that way with what we were doing—where we're going to be playing, what the records are that they're working on, when they're gonna come out—we could give them little postcards or flyers, little pictures of the albums that had already been done or were being done.
JESSE: One thing to emphasize is that it really was a Free Stuf booth — they weren't selling t-shirts or any kind of merchandise. Really just hanging out.
STEVE BROWN: May ‘74 I think is when it went on the road. Then our whole 1974 tours, including Europe and stuff.
JESSE: In May of 1974, the Dead had hit Reno—now on the From the Mars Hotel 50th anniversary edition—and then performed a trio of shows in the Northwest—now on the Pacific Northwest ‘73-'74 box set—all of which we discussed last time. They played outdoors in late May in Santa Barbara, followed by a massive Day on the Green at home in the Bay Area at Oakland Coliseum Stadium, alongside the Beach Boys and the New Riders of the Purple Sage. It was the only outdoor Bay Area show with the Wall of Sound.
AUDIO: "Tuning" [6/8/74] (1:00-1:20)
BOB WEIR [6/8/74]: If you want to drift back by the tie-dyes back there, there's an information booth. You can stand in front of the information booth, stand there at home plate, get chills up and down your spine as you think — This is the home plate where the world champion Oakland A's come to bat every afternoon when they're home.
COURTENAY POLLACK: I remember this one time, it was a stadium. From where I entered to where we had to set them up was about two city blocks away, around the stadium. I had to walk these things around the passageways to this far remote corner where they'd come up for the concessions and food and drinks. [That was] where I set this stuff up. That was quite the labor of love, hauling those things around.
STEVE BROWN: You always had this kind of thing at any trade show, something where there'd be a table or a booth. There'd be people handing out information, signing you up for their mailing list and stuff. It wasn't a new idea, but at a rock and roll show—where it was colorful, and you had cool stuff to talk [about] and people to talk to—it was always a special kind of place for people to seek out. I always felt like it was a good idea that worked well. We'd have to get some people to help. These guys were Dead fans, staying in a hotel or motel somewhere. From the hotel bathroom, they would take one of the cloths that they give you, and they brought with them an iron-on… not even an iron-on, it's a thing you could make the color go through.
RICH: A silkscreen.
STEVE BROWN: That's it.
JESSE: Part of Steve's collection, which you can see in my book, Heads, is the result of Dead Head handiwork, burned onto a hotel hand-towel of Baron Wolman's 1969 portrait of Garcia with his arms crossed captioned, IGNORE ALIEN ORDERS. Steve's pad is truly a museum. When Rich and I visited, it blew both of our minds.
STEVE BROWN: That box right there, it's a mirror box actually. It's got lights underneath the glass in there. And that double scroll you saw over there in the hallway that is done by David Best, that sat in there. And this was mounted on the front of those panels that were behind the table at the booth. When you lit that up, you'd look into there, and because the mirror's shaped a certain way, it's an infinity box. So, it's double skulls as far as you can see…
JESSE: Whoaaaaaaaaaa. [swirling reverb]
STEVE BROWN: David Best is the same guy that does the temples at Burning Man and has done a lot of the art cars that you see racing around there over the years. He was one of the original guys to actually start doing that kind of thing up there, with Larry Harvey and stuff.
JESSE: Along with the piles of mail constantly pouring into the office, it was the most direct line of communication they'd built yet.
COURTENAY POLLACK: We had free stuff to hand out, which was great. Everybody loves free stuff. People would ask questions and, to the best of our ability, we'd answer them. I was able to jump from one subject to another to another to another in my mercurial fashion, and do what we call promotion — which was essentially a goodwill thing, out of that promotion booth. It was quite effective.
STEVE BROWN: It was really nice because they'd come up with things that had to do more or less with certain venues that they wanted them to play, or places that they knew that the Dead should look at to go to and play. They would ask questions about the music and about the albums. They would want to know if there was a chance that they could get tickets for certain shows that are coming up, and just generally ask questions about the personal things of each of the band people. So you had to have people there to talk to them in ways that would be friendly and nice. And the more we did that, the more it just started to feel like it was really a cultural thing that was happening — a societal grouping of folks that were becoming these serious Dead Heads.
Quad Bass & The Wall, 6/74
JESSE: The Wall of Sound hit the road for real in the middle of June, with a schedule intended to drop them from the Midwest through the South, up the East Coast, and then back to the Midwest for the 4th of July and on homewards. As From the Mars Hotel was getting pressed up across the country, the tour leg opened on June 16th, back at the Fairgrounds in Des Moines where they'd played the previous May. The ‘73 show is on Here Comes Sunshine. The ‘74 appearance is on Road Trips, Vol. 2, No. 3.
AUDIO: "Greatest Story Ever Told" [Road Trips Vol. 2, No. 3 bonus disc, 6/16/74] (0:53-1:04)
JESSE: At the Des Moines show, the Wall of Sound underwent its next evolution. Please welcome journalist Brian Anderson, working on a book about the Wall of Sound to be titled Loud and Clear.
BRIAN ANDERSON: I think the biggest change as the Wall of Sound got rolling into the spring and summer of 1974 was really just the scale of the whole thing. They had worked out eliminating the inner modular distortion for the most part, the feedback-canceling microphones. They had figured out the staging and the scaffolding. So, from there on out, I think it just got bigger. Early 1974, at those Winterland shows, the whole rig was on the order of 40 tons. But then by summer, and by the end of the year, they were looking at 75 tons worth of gear. I've even heard secondhand that it was pushing 80 tons' worth of gear. Just a staggering amount of gear. They had the woodworking and carpentry workflow by that point. I think that was pretty dialed in, so they could just crank out the speakers. They just kept growing that thing, especially considering the number of outdoor shows that took place that spring and summer.
JESSE: There was one member of the Dead, especially, who encouraged them to push their technological envelope.
BRIAN ANDERSON: Lesh was just stoked on everything — ever the avant-garde student and audiophile, searching for the perfect sound.
AUDIO: "Eyes of the World" [Road Trips Vol. 2, No. 3, 6/16/74] (0:00-0:24) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was the sound of Phil Lesh playing "Eyes of the World" in Des Moines in June 1974. In Des Moines, Lesh followed Jerry Garcia into the realm of custom instruments, playing his new bass onstage for the first time, a 4-string quadraphonic Alembic named Osiris by its creators, Rick Turner and George Mundy. These days, it's known as Mission Control, capable of far more than your average bass. Today, we are happy to have with us Jason Scheuner, a lifelong music professional with an interest in vintage Dead gear. A half-decade ago, Jason became the owner of Mission Control, and knows as much about the inner workings of the instrument as anybody outside Phil Lesh and the bass's original creators.
JASON SCHEUNER: Mission Control was built not for the Wall of Sound, but it was built as part of the Wall of Sound. It was so far ahead of its time and it was so expensive to build. It was built in 1973 and in 1974 — it took a little while to build it. But it cost, in 1973, $35,000 — which in today's money is almost a quarter of a million dollars. Apparently, Phil got a little bit of ribbing from some of the crew guys that his bass cost more than their homes.
BRIAN ANDERSON: His quadraphonic bass was essentially a part of the sound system, in that he could throw individual strings to different clusters of his towering 32-foot tall stacks — 32 feet being the height of the standing bass waves. I've had Dead insiders liken that effect to the iconic five-note theme from Close Encounters—bum, bum, bum, bum, bum—in that the notes were sort of ping-pong-ing around the venue. Very, very trippy stuff.
JESSE: The Osiris/Mission Control bass would be Lesh's main, though not exclusive, instrument for the next five years. In 1981, Phil Lesh talked a bit about his experiments in quad with David Gans. Phil credits the idea of the quad pickup to one of his fellow bassists.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: This was Jack Casady's idea, to have a pickup for each string. As far as I know, Jack never did it, but I have two instruments that have this. I even had a setup that was capable of using it for a while, especially in that big system — that big, tall system, the rocket gantry system is what I called it.
JESSE: Something fascinating to me there is how Phil refers to the Dead's 1974 sound system, a continuous point of interest to me. We now call it the Wall of Sound, and there's a newspaper clip from the era that calls it that as well, but I think it took a while to catch on. In 1981, Phil Lesh doesn't use that phrase. He calls it "the big, tall system" that he compares to the support structure for rocket ships. In 1974, quadraphonic was the next big sonic dream. Stereo had really only become prominent in the music industry in the early 1960s. By the end of the decade, experiments in quad were happening in various scenes, which can be read as a technological counterpart to the immersive multimedia happenings that had become part of the arts worlds in the years after World War II and often involved varieties of surround sound. The Dead would experiment with quad in various ways, including a performance on San Francisco television in 1970 where viewers were encouraged to create a quad effect in their homes by tuning into separate FM radio stations. In 1973, Pink Floyd had toured with their version of a quad sound system, and Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and Owsley Stanley checked out their gig at Radio City Music Hall in March 1973.
JASON SCHEUNER: Pink Floyd and a few other bands had played with quad sound, where they were using two left and right mains and then left and right mains and in the back, playing with spatial relationships within a room or a stadium or an arena. I believe it was Phil that came up with the concept of actually making an instrument quad-capable.
AUDIO: "Eyes of the World" [Bass, Wake of the Flood] (4:49-5:07) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That was the sound of Phil Lesh's first quad bass in action, his modified Guild Starfire known as Big Brown, deployed during the outro on the Wake of the Flood version of "Eyes of the World." There are virtually no known photos of the From the Mars Hotel session from the spring of 1974, but I'm guessing he plays it there, too. The new bass had a new name, which connected with both Phil Lesh's Nudie Suit and his appearance on the back cover of Mars Hotel.
JASON SCHEUNER: On the back of the headstock is an inlay of Osiris, which is perfect because Osiris is the king of the dead. And the original namesake of the bass is actually Osiris; when they built it, it was called Osiris. It was the Dead Heads that came up with the term Mission Control, because what they saw was — Phil would push a button on the bass or he would turn a knob on the bass, and they would hear it affect the Wall.
PHIL LESH [The Grateful Dead Movie]: It has lots of different filters on it, and the capability of switching from one kind of sound—like the same sound coming from all the speakers—to one string coming from each, half of them, each one of these stacks. In other words, these strings are from four different sets, so it bounces around.
JASON SCHEUNER: If you've seen The Grateful Dead Movie, [there's] the scene where they focus on the bass and they talk about the functions of it, and then there's the whole funny part with the cameraman.
PHIL LESH [The Grateful Dead Movie]: [sound of feedback] I'm not trying to do that on purpose. The camera! [gesturing to camera operator] Yeah! Bring it back, bring it back, bring it back. Nah, c'mon, c'mon… what are you doin?
JESSE: One of the bass's chief architects is in the scene, too.
JASON SCHEUNER: It's George Mundy that's sitting on the stage talking about the bass when the back's off, and you can see the guts inside.
GEORGE MUNDY [The Grateful Dead Movie]: Most basses or guitars that you hear have one or two good tones on ‘em. This bass has many, many good tones, and can simulate the sound of other basses.
JASON SCHEUNER: It was about having as much variety as possible in your palette of tones from one instrument. Mission Control is the product of everything they learned from all the modifications of Big Brown, in building it from scratch with all the information that they had learned. And so, for Mission Control, the quad pickup—instead of being between the neck and bridge pickup—is a skinny pickup instead of a full-size pickup, and it's between the bridge pickup in the bridge. Rick Turner explained to me that, by placing it there, they were able to get much more distinct separation for each string. It was much more articulate in the quad mode.
AUDIO: Phil Lesh plays Mission Control [The Grateful Dead Movie] (28:17-28:34)
JESSE: The Osiris bass was a singular instrument, and so for the next four or five minutes we're going to talk about knobs. Also buttons. And some connectors. This section is for my buddy Bubba.
JASON SCHEUNER: If you look at Big Brown and you look at Mission Control, you see that there are a ton of knobs. In fact, people are always drawn to the number of knobs on the bass. And the truth is that the knobs are actually fairly simple. What you have is, you have one knob that's a master volume. And then for each pickup, you have what they call a state variable filter. Alembic did a lot of development on the state variable filter, and they came up with basically a filter called the Super Filter. And the Super Filter has a master volume for the individual pickup, plus a blend of the filtered sound vs. the unfiltered sound. Then there is the choice of a frequency adjustable cue — so the width of that frequency is affected, right there just at that frequency, or how many of the neighboring frequencies it would affect.
PHIL LESH [The Grateful Dead Movie]: Getting a little carried away there.
AUDIO: Phil Lesh plays Mission Control [The Grateful Dead Movie] (28:38-28:52)
JASON SCHEUNER: And then there's also high pass, low pass and bandpass filter selection. So you have five knobs that are basically a state variable filter for each pickup. But those filters were so powerful that, if he made an adjustment on the fly, you would hear it in the PA. And they put all of that stuff into the bass because Phil thought he would want the ability to make those adjustments on the fly while he was playing. What they figured out was it was a bit of a distraction — so, it became a set and forget kind of thing. Only on a handful of recordings do you hear Phil making adjustments with the knobs. But when you do, it's pretty obvious. Any adjustment to those filters or any choice of outputs with the buttons on the front would have a drastic effect on the sound coming through the Wall of Sound.
JESSE: Alright, that covers the knobs. What about the buttons?
JASON SCHEUNER: When you see all the buttons on Mission Control, those white buttons, those were all preset outputs — for mono, stereo, quad, quad plus mono, quad plus stereo. Apparently there were like 16 different presets. And the reason that they had to build all of that into the base itself, and the reason that they had to run the quad system the way they did in 1974, is because consoles were limited to 16 channels. The biggest console that basically you could build at that point [was] to take four Ampex MX-10 mixers—which the Grateful Dead used for years, Bear was a huge fan of those—and you could link four of them together and get a 16-by-two mixer, which at the time was huge. But if you've got 16 channels for the Grateful Dead, it's not like you can devote four or five of them to Phil. These days, the way that the modern consoles and PA systems work, you would never have built all those presets into the bass, which cost an incredible fortune to do at that time. And you wouldn't necessarily spread things out to different individual arrays of speakers. What you would do now is to take the four quad channels, and then also either the neck and bridge, or a sum of the neck and bridge in mono, and just pan them across the soundstage. You would use five or six inputs on the console — which, these days, consoles have 24, 32, 48, 56 channels, huge numbers of inputs. So there's generally enough extra inputs where you could really do something cool with it. So it was not just ahead of its time. It was light years ahead of its time.
JESSE: Naturally, a quad bass needed a whole output system of its own to even plug it in.
JASON SCHEUNER: The output is actually an 18-pin Lemo connector. And there's literally 18 pins worth of output. Now, you only use 10 of the 18 pins. But there's actually 10 functional outputs from the instrument, and the connectors that were used were actually built for the CERN laboratory over 50 years ago. And George—the aforementioned George Mundy—before he came to work at Alembic and then wound up working for the Grateful Dead, had actually worked for the CERN laboratory. He was aware of these really complex connectors, and he actually searched for some of these connectors to use for the bass.
JESSE: And from there?
JASON SCHEUNER: You go from this 18-pin cable into a power supply box. And then the power supply box has outputs for the neck and bridge pickups at quarter-inch, which can also be summed to mono. And then there are four quarter-inch outputs for the quad, one for each string, and they can also be summed to mono. So even though it's the quad pickup, you can listen to it as a mono pickup. There's a lot of different output configurations that you can achieve, hence the 16 presets that were built into it originally.
JESSE: As it turned out, maybe you didn't want to spread 4 bass strings across the whole speaker system. This is from David Gans's 1981 interview with Phil Lesh.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: I used it maybe two or three times for about two minutes each. Just during the period of the gantry system. When you're doing that, the band can't really comprehend — they can't work with it because they can only hear part of it. There's a delay, of course, coming in — because it was, 1-2-3-4, like that. Real tall, 36 feet tall, something like that. There's a delay, and the band can't work with it musically. So I just abandoned it. It was a great idea, and I still have the instruments. With the right output jack and boxes, it works like a charm.
JESSE: Though quad basses didn't become any more common than quadraphonic LPs, Phil Lesh's work with Rick Turner and George Mundy at Alembic had a profound influence on the next generations of electric basses.
JASON SCHEUNER: Rick Turner sort of rewrote the book on how to build instruments. What he did was, instead of using a bolt on neck or one-piece neck, he would take different combinations of tonewoods that were chosen for very specific reasons. He would cut them into strips and glue them together and laminate these necks. And instead of the neck catching at the body, the neck would go all the way through the body, where we get the term neck-through. And then they would also take very specifically chosen combinations of tonewoods and sandwich them together to make what they called the wings of the bass, or the guitar. Then the laminated sandwiched rings would be glued on either side of the laminated neck-through portion of the instrument — which is also the way Wolf was built, and the way Alembics are still built today. At that time, that was basically just unheard of, just wasn't done. As soon as it was done for Phil and Mission Control hit the stage in all these big venues and high-profile situations, it triggered a response from the rest of the music industry. Almost immediately, people like Stanley Clarke, [John] McVie from Fleetwood Mac, [Rodney] "Skeet" Curtis from Parliament-Funkadelic—which was a gigantic band at that time—and John Entwistle from The Who and John Paul Jones all gravitated toward this type of construction for their instruments, and started getting instruments made at Alembic.
JESSE: From there, the influence spread outwards.
JASON SCHEUNER: When you look at all of these incredible instruments that were played by all these incredible musicians and bands, starting in the mid-'70s, that's a direct result of what Turner did and developed and how he built things at Alembic, and how Alembic went about creating instruments. Phil's influence on those instruments became sort of the new standard for boutique guitars and bass guitars. There are countless companies out there that are following the legacy and the pioneering, visionary attitude of somebody like Phil Lesh, without having any clue where it actually all came from. People that are educated, they know, but there are a lot of people out there [for whom] that's just become the standard. Within the music industry, that construction technique, is referred to as the "hippie sandwich," because it was obviously the hippies, the folks at Alembic, that did this first. And because they were literally sandwiching these layers of wood together, it became known as the "hippie sandwich."
The First National Bank of Boston
JESSE: That's an expensive sandwich, but 1974 was the peak of the Grateful Dead's imperial period, a more literal phrase than most when applied to them. Along with their music itself, they were pushing at the boundaries of live sound, recorded sound, the instruments used to generate both, and the economic and physical means by which it was distributed. For about two years, the Grateful Dead were as independent as it's possible to be for any American artist in any creative field, let alone operating on a national scale. And, with one Grateful Dead album released, one coming, and the impending launch of Round Records, at least one person was thinking about how to push it to still the next level. Ron Rakow.
RON RAKOW: The record company came with the most major capital base extent, the First National Bank of Boston. It took me years to figure out why they took us on. I mean, that's a really, really staid bank. It was, at the time, a $20 billion bank. That's still not a small bank.
JESSE: The story begins like lots of Cadillac Ron's stories, with a hyper-specific memory.
RON RAKOW: I was in room 1234 at the Sheraton Hotel, on Boylston Street in Boston.
JESSE: It was September 1972, and the Dead were at the Boston Music Hall.
RON RAKOW: So I call up the First National Bank of Boston, and I say, "I'm with an orchestra. We happen to be playing in town and I'd like to come in and discuss with you doing factoring for our [records]. We're going to issue our own records, and I'd like to talk to you about it." And he said, "What is the name of this orchestra?" I said, "The Grateful Dead." He said, "Really?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Okay, hold on a second. I'm gonna give you one of my people." So I get this guy, his name was Jim Dollar[d], of all things. It turns out he's the guy at the First National Bank that's in charge of weirdness. If something is too weird for everybody else, it goes to Jim Dollar[d].
JESSE: That was his real name — James Dollard, with a D at the end. By August 1973, Rakow was in Dollard's office, making proposals.
RON RAKOW: Every time I went back east, I went into that bank, and I made friends with everybody across departments. Everybody. So I got the Grateful Dead to become the hottest item inside that bank. That was one of my big priorities.
JESSE: A 1974 Wall Street Journal piece was titled, "The Image Is Hippie But the Grateful Dead Also Know Business." It quoted Jim Dollard as saying, "Frankly, I was very skeptical at first, but I was much impressed with Ron Rakow and his research." Dollard said that working with the Dead was "one of the most interesting relationships I've had in this business."
RON RAKOW: And then I come up with an idea. I hit Dollard with it, Jim Dollard. And I say, "Look, we're going to be in town for three or four days, the next time we come to town. Why don't we have Jerry and me come for lunch and meet the head of the bank?" He said, "Oh, you know, we have our own lunch room for that. Our dining room is on the 12th floor." I had a good solid nine months of action with those guys before we had this lunch. June ‘74 was when we had our lunch. They were at Boston Garden. We were staying at a hotel in Cambridge.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [6/28/74] (0:47-1:07)
JESSE: That was Phil Lesh playing "Loose Lucy" on Mission Control, from the same week that From the Mars Hotel hit stores, the Dead at Boston Garden — June 28th, 1974, a show now mostly on Dick's Picks 12.
RON RAKOW: I asked Jim to arrange… "I'm not going to bring Jerry in just to meet with ordinary people. I want the senior executives of the holding company: not just your division, but the whole bank." He said, "Oh, no, don't worry about it. If we do this, it'll be royalty. There'll be royalty."
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [6/28/74] (2:04-2:20)
RON RAKOW: So we're in the private dining room. There were two or three liveried waiters: tuxedo pants, a white shirt with a white vest, and a white bow tie, and they're serving us. We have a before-lunch cocktail, and we're all mingling. We didn't drink, and they didn't allow alcohol, so we all had Clamatos. I separated from [Jerry] at this thing — that's the way you do it when you're trying to get known by a bank. You don't clot with people you know, you clot with people you don't know. That's the purpose for being there. Anyway, Jerry comes over to me during the course of this pre-lunch thing, and he whispers in my ear: "Back up the truck. This is backstage…" and walked away. And I know what that means…
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [6/28/74] (2:21-2:31)
RON RAKOW: Okay, so we sit down, and the seating is amazing. The chairman of the board sat at the head of the table, alone. He's the senior guy. On his left was the president of the First National Bank of Boston, the bank. And then next to him was the president of the factoring division that we used. And then it goes down the line. It was totally hierarchical. On his right was Jerry, and then there were those officers of various divisions all down the line. And I mean, there must have been, oh, 12, 13, 14 people in the room. When we finally sit down to have lunch, everybody is silent.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [6/28/74] (2:32-2:49)
RON RAKOW: And the chairman starts to talk. He says, "Jerry, my daughter… we do the banking for the Berklee School of Music"—this is how he started—"and my daughter came to me, and she wants to play the clarinet. So I called the president of the Berklee School of Music, and I told him what she wanted, and he said, Start her on the violin.'" So Jerry laughed. He didn't laugh — he cackled. He had a cackle. He had this cackle. He said, "I'm a father. When my kids ask me for something that they want to do, I don't change the dot on an i or the line on the t. I give them exactly what they say they want. So if they say they're going to quit, I remind them, they asked for exactly what they got." So the banker guy said, "You know, that's really a good idea." [Jerry] said, "If somebody gave me a clarinet, when I wanted to play the guitar, I would probably be in another business now." "That's really wise. I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna do exactly what you said."
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [6/28/74] (3:12-3:24)
RON RAKOW: Then the next guy, the president of the bank, the First National Bank of Boston president, says, "Jerry, I'm building an entertainment studio in my house. We do the banking for EPI Speakers. Do you think that's good enough for a top-flight entertainment studio?" So Jerry leans over and says, "Hey Rak, what's the name of that company we trade records for speakers with?" I said, "EPI." So Jerry said, "I have them in my house. They're great. We trade records with them for speakers." So the guy, he swells up. You can see it. And then the guy said, "Well, they want me to EPI 50s." Jerry said, "Rak, what's the ones I have in my house?" I say, "They're EPI 50s, Jerry." So he says to the guy, "That's exactly what I have in my house stereo system." And I swear to god, I thought the guy was going to explode. He was going to have the same speakers as Jerry Garcia, that he has in his own house! The whole lunch went like that.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [6/28/74] (3:25-3:43)
RON RAKOW: So the lunch goes like that, and the lunch is breaking up. Jim Dollard comes up to me and whispers to me: "Everybody is expecting you to ask for something. You have to make an ask." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, we are a bank, we lend money. Ask for something." I said, "Okay, okay. Tell them I want a two-and-a-half million dollar line — no financial disclosures, no nothing. Just on our signature, period. We'll sign a note, and if I need money, I'll call you and you'll put whatever I asked for up to two-and-a-half million into our bank account." He said, "Well, that's really an easy ask, I can do that on my own limits." So it wasn't even really a big deal, but he had something to say to them. And it was in the right neighborhood, it was in the millions. Then it became obvious that we were in a spot where we could do a lot of stuff. They knew that we were not stupid, and we were on a fast track. Jim Dollard told me, "You guys are limited by your own imagination. We are going to fund you guys, no matter what it takes." We get into a limo to get back to our hotel, and I say, "Do you know we're there, Jerry — we can make the big mistake now. We can flame out. This can be…" And he said to me, "Don't lose confidence. There's nothing you can do that can affect anything that I consider important in my life, win or lose. Nothing." What does that mean? He said, "Can you make me play better?" I said, "Don't be ridiculous, no." He said, "Can you make me play worse?" "No." He said, "That's all I care about."
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [6/28/74] (4:07-4:34)
RON RAKOW: The big part of it is — they had a problem, and we were the solution. I knew nothing about this problem for several years after this happened. Their problem was this: they had a big bank with $20 billion of other people's money. And they had to invest that money and make the spread between what they paid the people who invested the money in their bank, and what they got for investing the money. Right? That's banking, right? To have people sufficiently trained to be able to authorize lines of credit… like Jim Dollard—I didn't know this—had a $4 million dollar line of authority, to lend $4 million without speaking to anybody. That took years. Their big problem was to get somebody to have a $25,000 line of credit usually involved between $200,000 and $300,000 in training expenses. What would happen, once they got somebody up to that level, is they would quit, because the bank was boring. Staid. Nobody young wanted to be associated with that bank. And all of a sudden, they come up with the hippest band in the United States, the Grateful Dead. They're flooded with applications from graduates of every major school in the United States. Flooded. That's why they did it.
JESSE: Well, if you can't be part of the problem, be part of the solution, amirite?!
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [6/28/74] (4:24-4:50)
On the Road with Mars Hotel
JESSE: In the early summer of 1974, at virtually the same moment that Garcia and Rakow were making friends at the Bank of Boston, teenage Lee Ranaldo—seven years from co-founding Sonic Youth—was getting ready to go on the road himself.
LEE RANALDO: Mars Hotel came out early summer ‘74, right when I was graduating high school, I want to say. That was a pretty momentous summer for me. One of the same buddies that I went to Watkins Glen with and I took a summer-long, post-high school, pre-college trip across the country. We did a huge massive circle around the United States: we hit the West Coast up in Seattle, and drove the coast road all the way down to San Diego, with heavy stops in San Francisco, in particular, and Los Angeles.
JESSE: Lee's story is a great reminder of how From the Mars Hotel functioned when it came out.
LEE RANALDO: Mars Hotel was kind of the soundtrack of that trip. We had my old Volkswagen [Beetle] that we had painted "California or Bust" on the back, with a Stealie face underneath it on the trunk.
JESSE: We've heard about David Lemieux's experience listening to From the Mars Hotel, on a cassette stuck in the car tape deck, and we've heard about Nick Paumgarten's, experiencing it on its first CD release in the mid-1980s. Lee Ranaldo had still another.
LEE RANALDO: We had an 8-track player, one of those aftermarket 8-track players that you installed underneath the dashboard with a couple screws and wires. We had a bunch of music, but Mars Hotel was really the main record of that summer. We played it to death.
AUDIO: "Realistic 8-Track" (0:00-0:01)
AUDIO: "U.S. Blues" [From the Mars Hotel] (0:00-0:19) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
LEE RANALDO: Man, we rocked that record all the way across the country. It meant a lot. It just seemed like such a bright record after Wake of the Flood. It just seemed like such a bright, summer-y record, full of life to it.
JESSE: There's a reason why Lee and his buddy may've gotten that vibe off the album.
LEE RANALDO: We had the 8-track tape tape of it, so I think there was a period when I didn't really know the correct order of the songs on that record, because of the way that 8-tracks mixed up the order sometimes, to make the sides even. I was looking at the tracklist this morning, and I was surprised to see "China Doll" in the second position. It wasn't my memory of it coming that early in the sequence. Maybe that's from listening to the 8-track.
JESSE: Pretty much. On the 8-track, "China Doll" is moved to the end of the album, just before "Ship of Fools." In the second slot is Phil Lesh and Bobby Petersen's "Pride of Cucamonga."
AUDIO: "Pride of Cucamonga" [From the Mars Hotel] (0:55-1:18) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And I have to say, while I understand why they'd want to space out the two slow songs on the album, moving "Pride of Cucamonga" up and "China Doll" down really does give it a summertime glow. Either way, the car was equipped.
LEE RANALDO: We had been doing a little weed dealing in high school and we brought like half a pound of weed with us on that trip, stuffed into the side panels of the VW. We had this funny pipe that someone gave us as a parting gift. It was suction-cupped onto the dashboard, and it had two long plastic tubes coming off it — so we could both be hitting off it at once, which was kind of funny.
AUDIO: "Pride of Cucamonga" [From the Mars Hotel] (2:23-2:39) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
LEE RANALDO: The Haight was the first place we went, so we went and hung around in the Haight. I think we strolled by 710. I seem to find myself strolling past it almost every time I'm in San Francisco with a little time to kill. We went to some all-night hippie party in Marin County — I don't know how we found out about it, I think some girl in San Francisco had told us about it. We drove up there, and you parked your cars up on this bluff. You had to kind of climb down in the dark through this ridge to the beach where the party was. When we got back to the car in the morning, the car had been broken into and a bunch of minor stuff had been stolen. They tried to rip the tape player out of the car and could not get it free of its screws. We found the tape player hanging off the bottom of the dashboard, like it had tried to be wrenched out of there, but they didn't make it. They stole a bunch of the 8-tracks, but the Mars Hotel was not stolen. So I think for the second half of that trip, it was one of the very few 8-tracks we had in the car, so we really just played the hell out of it. We thought it was kind of a miracle that, being the favorite of those 8-tracks that we had along with us, it was the one that got left behind and that the tape player didn't get stolen.
JESSE: The dual pipe did not survive the trip.
LEE RANALDO: We were making time, going north out of Santa Barbara and had the stereo thing in full effect. The cops were going by us in the other direction. We're both going 60 miles an hour and, a minute later, they're behind us with their lights flashing. And we're like, "Oh shit…" We were stopped just outside of Santa Barbara by the CHiPS, the [California] Highway Patrol. They really got a kick out of discovering that pipe. They were calling it a stereo model, which was kind of funny. Actually, at that point, we were down to like the last ounce of weed and they were really playing… two cops, one being the friendly guy and one being the total asshole. They were like, "We're gonna search your car, and if we find anything, you're gonna go to jail. But if you give it to us, we'll get you off easier." So we actually turned over our weed to them and watched them dump it out into the wind on the Pacific Coast Highway there. They took the pipe and split. So, they let us off.
AUDIO: "Pride of Cucamonga" [From the Mars Hotel] (3:11-3:28) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
"Loose Lucy" Returns
JESSE: Ironically, as Lee and his friend hit the West Coast, the Dead were traversing the East, and they managed to miss each other. But he'd certainly catch them again, though it might not have been until 1976. By then, "Loose Lucy" was gone from the repertoire and stayed on the shelf for the next decade-and-a-half. Listener William Cunningham left us this story about when he caught the Dead at the Cap Centre in Maryland in March 1990.
WILLIAM CUNNINGHAM: We were in college, I was about 19 years old. We used to talk on the way to the show about songs that we really wanted to hear. For some reason, I kept talking about how the song I really wanted to hear was "Loose Lucy." Now, we were too early in our Dead experience to realize that they hadn't played "Loose Lucy" since about 1974, so there's pretty much zero chance that we were gonna get to see it. But then lo and behold, midway through the first set, they bust out a slow [version] of "Loose Lucy."
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [Spring 1990, 3/14/90] (0:30-0:52)
WILLIAM CUNNINGHAM: Jerry Garcia, in all the 100-plus shows I saw, I've never seen him grin the way he grinned when he started playing that "Loose Lucy." I'm sure everybody who was there can remember he just looked like he was having the time of his life.
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: There weren't that many songs in the canon that changed so much. "They Love Each Other" of course, went from really fast to really slow. "Friend of the Devil." "Loose Lucy" had a pretty dramatic transformation: the 1973 arrangement, the bluesy arrangement, the 1974 arrangement. I am a little bit more partial to this one, to the faster one, because it's a little different from anything else.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [From the Mars Hotel] (1:19-1:33) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: To summarize: it was uptempo in early 1973, slowed down in later 1973, then sped up even faster at the album sessions in 1974, which we just heard. Like I said before, I'm not exactly sure of the reasons for any of these, but it underlined that it was an easy song to adjust to the Dead's needs. If they needed a faster or slower tune to go in the setlists or for an album at that particular moment, they could just readjust "Loose Lucy."
DAVID LEMIEUX: When they brought it back in 1990, it was almost like a hybrid of the two, at least early on. It kind of became more of the slower 1973 arrangement.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [Spring 1990, 3/28/90] (3:43-4:11)
JESSE: That was from Nassau Coliseum, March 28th, 1990, also on the Spring 1990 box. It wasn't so much that the tempo was that different in the ‘90s but that they straightened out the groove with a firmer backbeat. Here it is from Albany, March 27th, 1993 on the 30 Trips Around the Sun box.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [30 Trips Around the Sun, 3/27/93] (1:04-1:23)
JESSE: We've spoken in the past about how Dead songs could accrue new meanings over time, separate from how Robert Hunter might've intended them. "He's Gone" was written in early 1972, an epistle from Robert Hunter about being robbed blind.
AUDIO: "He's Gone" [Europe ‘72] (0:45-0:57) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It might be seen as a takeaway lesson from the Wall of Sound that, just because the audience can perfectly hear every syllable to a song and nuance of how they're delivered, doesn't mean that Robert Hunter's lyrical intent would become the final word in how a song was received. The great novelist William Gibson once said, "The street finds its own uses for things," and he could be talking about how Grateful Dead fans interpret lyrics. There are some pretty clear places where Robert Hunter's lyrics have communicated and maintained their intent unambiguously over decades, a point he made neatly to Amir Bar-Lev in Long Strange Trip.
ROBERT HUNTER [Long Strange Trip, 7/14]: "Shall we go, you and I, while we can? Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds…" What is unclear about that?
JESSE: And perhaps there's nothing unclear about "Loose Lucy" either. But whether it is or isn't maybe isn't the point, which is never quite where you arrive at anyway — except that Dead Heads seem to have very quickly found their own use for the chorus.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [3/28/90 audience tape] (2:00-2:18)
JESSE: This is from the audience tape of March 28th, 1990 at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, less than two weeks after the song's return, a demonstration of the chorus's power to put the title character into the background. This might be obvious, and conversely I don't think it's controversial to point out that the crowd isn't singing to "Loose Lucy," they're singing back to the Dead.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [3/28/90 audience tape] (6:07-6:30)
JESSE: Grateful Dead scholar Rev Carr wrote about moments like this in his wonderful chapter, "Where All the Pages Are My Days: Metacantric Moments in Deadhead Lyrical Experience," published in the collection The Grateful Dead in Concert. In it, he uses the phrase metacantric to describe the moments in Dead songs when the lyrics seemed to be describing what Dead Heads were experiencing when they heard them live, in a room filled with other Dead Heads.
AUDIO: "The Music Never Stopped" [One From the Vault, 8/13/75] (0:50-1:10) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But "Loose Lucy" is a metacantric moment where the context of the song's performance disappears the rest of the lyric and changes the meaning, pulling out the chorus as if it were a hit single separated from the rest of the album. It's no longer about the foibles of sleeping around, but the joy of the communal Dead experience. It's not exactly fair to call "Loose Lucy" an example of "mission creep," because the Grateful Dead were certainly an open-ended project, but "Loose Lucy" is maybe one marker of how the meaning of the Grateful Dead as a whole shifted from the Acid Tests through the next decades and on into the 21st century, for both the band members and the people listening to their music. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I know that, to me, it was our song. I saw them play it a lot from ‘90 and onward. Always a thrill to see it live, because it had been gone for 16 years. I saw a good one in Buffalo later on, a really good one in Buffalo. I found it was one of those songs, kind of like "U.S. Blues," with an ending — Jerry would keep bringing in the "yeah, yeah, yeah, thank you for a real good time," bring it higher and higher. And when Jerry's voice did that Jerry voice cracking thing, it was because he was singing so hard with so much joy.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [7/16/90] (6:29-6:52)
DAVID LEMIEUX: My mom would be like, "Oh, was it a good show?" I'd be like, "Yeah, it was a great show. Jerry's voice cracked during ‘Loose Lucy.'" That's what showed that the band was 100% into it. It was always one of the songs that was extremely welcome. Partly because it's a great song, but also it's the rarity of it — both in terms of the time I was seeing the Dead, but also in terms of the fact that they hadn't played it in 16 years. So it was one of those songs that had a bit of a cache around it that not all songs had.
JESSE: Robert Hunter was reticent about putting his lyrics onto paper at first, preferring to let Dead Heads have their own interpretations. Some editions of Live/Dead included a beautifully illustrated lyric book, and Blues For Allah had the words, too. But "Loose Lucy" demonstrated that it didn't actually matter if the lyrics were right or not. They meant what they meant and that's all that they meant.
AUDIO: "Loose Lucy" [From the Mars Hotel] (2:55-3:18) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]