Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 8, Episode 2
Watkins Glen Summer Jam, 7/73, part 2
JESSE: The Watkins Glen Summer Jam, featuring the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, and The Band, was originally scheduled to be 12 hours long, running from 12pm to midnight on Saturday, July 28th, 1973. But by the time dawn broke on July 28th, all three acts had already appeared on the stage, and the Watkins Glen Summer Jam became the largest known musical gathering of humans on the planet.
JOAN SNYDER [CBS NEWS]: They're calling it Son of Woodstock, the biggest rock music gathering in four years, maybe the biggest ever. Estimates of the crowd now crammed together at Watkins Glen, New York range from 300,000 to 500,000 people. Highways leading to the concert were packed for the last few days, with traffic at a crawl or a standstill. At some points, cars were backed up for 15 miles.
JESSE: We delved deep into the origins of Watkins Glen in our first episode, including the long relationship between the Allman Brothers and the Dead, the legendary public soundcheck, and the epic journey many undertook to get there. As the sun rose on Watkins Glen on the scheduled day of the show, promoters Jim Koplik and Shelly Finkel were still far from out of the water. Please welcome back promoter Jimmy Koplik.
JIM KOPLIK: What I remember most about the show day was at the beginning of the day the New York State Thruway was so packed that we were told by the state police that they were closing the Thruway, and that they were telling people to turn around and go home. I remember going up to Shelly and saying, “Well, then we’re going to have to refund everybody their money. And we never took tickets at the gate, so we don't know who's here and who's not here. We're going to end up with all these expenses and have to give everybody their money back. We're gonna go broke! I'm gonna have to go back to law school. I don't know what I'm going to do.” But thankfully, about 15 or 20 minutes later, the New York State Police opened up the Thruway again. So, we didn't have that problem. But that's honestly the most vivid memory for me, is thinking: I'm about to go out of business because the New York State Thruway is being closed.
JESSE: He still had plenty of problems to solve.
JIM KOPLIK: I was 23 years old — I had no idea what was going on. It was way too much for me to handle. So I was running around like a chicken without a head, to tell you the truth. But again, thankfully, I was young enough that I could get from the back of the house to the front of the house without getting tired. I could get in a helicopter and view where the people were. We had to make sure we had enough water for everybody, which we did. We had to make sure we had enough bathrooms for everybody, which we did. We had to make sure that the experience stayed good, which we did.
JESSE: On the day the festival was supposed to happen, many were still en route. Brian Schiff and his friends and their car, the Oy Vega, had broken down en route. They’d hitchhiked with a local, and had stopped to sleep on the way into the grounds.
Saturday, 7/28
BRIAN SCHIFF: So when we finally get to the site, now it's like five o'clock in the morning on Saturday. The way Watkins Glen was sort of set up was, like, all hills. You couldn’t even see the stage from where we were: we were behind hills that were just all people. They did have speaker systems set up every few hundred yards for the sound, but we literally couldn’t see the stage — it was beyond the hills. The funny thing is, my friend Larry was in the food provisions business. He mainly sold eggs and orange juice and butter at the time. So, we’re sitting there and finally they start playing music over the PA. We’re sitting there, and it’s not like RFK [Stadium] where you could move around — we’re sitting there and kind of squashed, just sitting in a gigantic crowd. You can’t see the stage. And all of a sudden, as circumstance would have it, the PA system starts playing “I Am the Walrus” by the Beatles.
AUDIO: “I Am The Walrus” [The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour] (0:46-1:03) - [Spotify]
BRIAN SCHIFF: And when they get to the thing where it says “I am the eggman,” we looked at each other and said, “This is insane. Let’s get the hell out of here.” That was Saturday — Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of the next week was when the Dead and The Band were playing at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, which we had tickets for. It ended up that the Monday show was canceled — which we didn’t know at the time, but we had tickets for all three of those shows. It was like: we’re seeing two of these three bands in a much better venue in 48 hours. This is completely insane.
AUDIO: “I Am The Walrus” [The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour] (3:23-3:40) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Backstage, Tim Meehan was just waking up. He’d gotten a free ride to the festival from his housemate, including a helicopter ride in, because her brother had handled the bottled water concession.
TIM MEEHAN: I got up early—we had a tent out in a back pasture somewhere—and I walked over to the commissary tent. I had my coffee, and there was a dog in the swimming pool. Had to go check that out. It was a German Shepherd. I've since learned that Bill Graham had a couple of German Shepherds. So anyway, Bill Graham was standing next to the pool, talking to some lady, and I understood from their conversation that they were talking about logistics and security. Of course, I didn't quite butt in — I timidly excused myself and apologized for overhearing their conversation and jumping in. But if they needed extra security, I had some friends that were coming up — I was going to meet them on Saturday at noon, and this is Saturday at probably 7:30 in the morning. “I'm going to meet these guys at noon, and one of ‘em just came back from Korea. He’s an Army vet, a tank commander. I’m sure he would appreciate a gig working extra security.” So, sure enough, that came off without a hitch.
JESSE: Others were still coming in. Sociologist Rebecca Adams is one of the parents of Grateful Dead Studies, taking a college class on tour in 1989. In 1973, she was still an undergrad. Welcome back, Rebecca. She’d scored a free ticket to Woodstock in 1969.
REBECCA ADAMS: And I went home and told my parents, “I'm going to Woodstock.” And they said, “No, you're not…” So, this was a big deal that they knew I was going to Watkins Glen — it was kind of an admission that I was old enough to make my own decisions. This was a rite of passage in more than one way for me. The summer of 1973, I was in-between my junior and senior year at Trinity College, and I was working for the public television station during summer vacation.
JESSE: Rebecca had been seeing the Dead since 1970.
REBECCA ADAMS: Even though I identified as a Dead Head—which now has a much different meaning; then, it just meant I liked the music—I didn't feel like this was for Dead Heads only. Everybody was going.
JESSE: Watkins Glen isn’t remembered as a generational event, but it kind of was.
REBECCA ADAMS: On the 27th, we started driving there and we spent the night at Cornell in Ithaca, which was only about 30 miles away from the venue. We thought we'd get up early the next morning and get to the venue early. But when we got out into the traffic, it was almost at a standstill from Ithaca all the way to Watkins Glen. We got out of the car and we were sitting on this railing that was next to the road — I looked down, and there was an entire ounce of marijuana on the ground. I picked it up and the traffic was completely at a standstill. So I walked forward, thinking someone in front of me might have dropped it. And I kept walking forward saying: “Whose is this? Whose is this?” I don't remember if anyone finally took it or what happened, but I do remember that the person I was going to the show with had finally gotten the car moving. And he drove up next to me while I was still trying to find the person who had dropped it.
JESSE: If that was yours, get in touch with Rebecca. But then things really came to a halt.
REBECCA ADAMS: People were parking in the middle of the road and abandoning their cars. I do remember we managed to get it pulled over on the side of the road. I swear, I thought we walked 20 miles — it maybe was only eight or nine miles, but it [felt like] a really, really long way we walked. And we had to leave the car behind. We walked in, and I remember there was no ticket taker. We kind of climbed in through a hedge that was on the side of the road. I remember pushing the branches out of the way, and on the other side were all these people. And then — there we were. The music hadn’t started when we got there. I didn’t miss any of the music on the 28th. But I missed the soundcheck entirely. By the time we got there, everyone was talking about it.
JESSE: Around the time Rebecca poked through the hedge, Tim Meehan’s friends got their new jobs.
TIM MEEHAN: The guys from the Great Neck house were right where they were supposed to be at noon — backstage, on the other side of the fence. Bill’s assistant brought them in, there were three or four of them. She issued them Watkins Glen t-shirts that said “SECURITY” in big letters on it, and then handed them baseball bats. These guys had been camping out on Friday; this is Saturday morning, and they probably smoked their lunch. They showed up and they were by no means looking for blood. But they were instructed to whack the fence in the backstage area — it had a 10-foot hurricane fence. I think it had barbed wire. In some of the pictures, it has barbed wire that leans over one side, makes it hard to climb up. But they were worried that someone was going to climb the fence. They issued these guys baseball bats. They said, “Listen, don’t hurt anybody. But if somebody tries to break through the fence and climb over, and 100 people want to get over, just start whacking the fence with a bat to shake it and freak ‘em out. But don’t hurt anybody.” And my friends are like, “Well, I don't know… alright…”
JESSE: Todd Ellenberg had arrived the night before but was too wiped to make it over to the soundcheck.
TODD ELLENBERG: We went to the concert field and it was packed. I'm just amazed by the mass of humanity — just in awe. And I'm looking around and, all of a sudden, I realized: I have lost my friends. [laughs] I have lost my friends, and that was a bummer. But within perhaps a half hour, I don't remember how long, I found another group of friends from my hometown, including the younger brother of part of our group who we went up there with, and a few other people who I knew pretty well just from hanging out. So I hung out with them the whole day. [laughs] We just found our spot, settled down.
JESSE: Over to Garrick Utley.
GARRICK UTLEY [NBC NEWS]: There are reports of drugs being sold and used in the crowd and some bad trips, like this one. And many of the scenes today seemed like reruns of Woodstock four years ago.
JOAN SNYDER [CBS NEWS]: As at any huge gathering, there has been some trouble. At least five people died in traffic accidents en route to the event. Hundreds of others needed medical care for injuries or drug overdoses, and more than 40 have been jailed for various misdemeanors. No shortage of drugs, mostly marijuana and mostly overlooked by the police, as at other festivals.
JESSE: Allman Brothers front-of-house engineer Buddy Thornton decided to venture out into the grounds.
BUDDY THORNTON: It had rained one night and there were mud puddles all out in the front of the stage there. It's nice and sunny, but it had rained and it was all sloppy and muddy. I’m standing on stage, looking at all these people, and there’s girls dancing around naked in the mud. I’m thinking — shit, man, I’ve got to go check this out. I went down to where the gate is, and there’s a security guard. I showed him my pass, my badge. I said, “I’m gonna go out here, and in 30 or 40 minutes, you’re going to let me back in, right?” So I walked out among all of this craziness, people hocking all sorts of things — stacks of water bottles, porta potties, nothing like I’d ever seen in my life. I’m just a country boy, man. I grew up in cotton fields. I’d never seen shit like that.
GARRICK UTLEY [NBC NEWS]: State Police at the concert say the crowd there today was causing no serious problems. In fact, one policeman said the young people were better behaved than those who usually go to the auto races there.
REBECCA ADAMS: I remember them saying something from the stage that someone had been born, something like that. But for the most part, it was just listening to the music and waiting in between the sets.
JESSE: Danno Henklein was a veteran of the Springfield Creamery benefit, the first Rainbow Gathering, and a brutal psychedelic heartbreak at RFK, which we covered last season.
DANNO HENKLEIN: Sometime Saturday—I don't know what the heck happened—I hurt my foot. I had to go to the medical tent. I'm sitting there waiting, and I can hear the medical personnel in the other room, talking about how they just delivered a baby that was born on heroin, that was born addicted to heroin. I’m thinking about this and I’m like: “Yeah, wow, gee, that’s degen.” And that's what we used to call degen, in many of my circles, as I may have explained to you. In my circles, we were all drug snobs. We disdained heroin, we disdained speed, we disdained alcohol for the most part. The only thing we were interested in was indole-hallucinogens and cannabis. That was it. And I think that was a pretty widespread lifestyle choice among the hippies. It seemed to become blurred later on.
JESSE: The medical tent at Watkins Glen was organized by Dr. Willard Nagle. In the run up, he commented to a local newspaper about the “paucity of advice” around the planning of medical tents at rock shows. If only he’d been in touch with the doctors from the Haight Street Free Clinic we spoke with on the Kezar Stadium episode. He’d have to wait a few more months for their paper about best practices for exactly the situation he found himself trying to manage. Some newspaper reports indicate that Nagle had help talking through challenging trips from members of the Hog Farm, which would also make sense. More modern heads might describe the Watkins Glen scene as “sketchy.”
DANNO HENKLEIN: There was a degen vibe at Watkins Glen. There were a lot of people who were being carried out either because of heat-related illnesses or because of drug overdose problems. I don't remember seeing anybody that was freaking out, but I think it was more to do with overdoses that people were being carried out. It was a very mixed crowd — it was not all a bunch of enlightened psychonauts that were there.
JESSE: Groups of people traveled from all over. Some of those groups included actual musical acts. Rebecca Adams was there with some of her musical pals.
REBECCA ADAMS: Outer Space was there as a group. I don't know if all of them were there, but I know they had backstage passes. So they had some credibility from somewhere.
JESSE: The Outer Space Blues Band was one of the first Dead-inspired bands in the Northeast. And on Jim Cooper’s tape, you can hear Jim’s taping partner talking to a woman about a band she encountered playing out in the campgrounds — Randy Burns and the Sky Dog Band.
AUDIO: “Mary Ann” [Randy Burns and the Sky Dog Band, Still On Our Feet] (0:29-0:47)
JESSE: Their band name apparently wasn’t a tribute to Duane Allman. Randy Burns was a Greenwich Village songwriter who went electric and, by 1973, went acoustic again with Still On Our Feet, released in June 1973, a month before Watkins Glen, what would turn out to be their last album. The Sky Dog Band seemingly took a bus to Watkins Glen to jam for the heads. There are lots of pictures in newspaper accounts of various jam sessions going on in the campgrounds. Our buddy Michael Simmons, stage manager for the Lemmings—who’d seen the band at Nassau Coliseum in March—also went up with his own beat combo.
MICHAEL SIMMONS: I went up with my band — it was called Lawrence and the Arabians. My drummer has a Chevy van, which he used… everybody had Chevy vans back in those days. As I'm sure you've heard, it was the hippie mode of transportation.
JESSE: Back in the spring, Michael had gone to see the Dead at Nassau Coliseum with his friends from the comedy troupe the Lemmings. Check out our last episode for an encounter between certified Grateful Dead freak John Belushi and Long Island cops. Some of Michael’s friends from the Lemmings had gone up, too, including a car with John Belushi and another one of Michael’s friends who had a job backstage.
MICHAEL SIMMONS: This friend of mine, Sally Fisher, was working for the publicist who was promoting the concert. And so I said, “Well, I'll try to find you.” It was 650,000 people — not exactly easy to find people. But I went up to where the gate was, and there was a guard there. I tell you something, man, things were a lot more lax in those days. I just said to the guy at the gate: “I’m a friend of Sally Fisher’s. Could you get her for me?” And he said, “Sure.” So he went and got her and she came over to the gate, which separated the audience from the backstage area.
JESSE: The month before, the Lemmings had released their self-titled debut LP. It was rock and roll comedy, constructed around the conceit of the Woodchuck Festival of Peace, Love, and Death. John Belushi was the MC and clearly knew his festival humor.
JOHN BELUSHI [National Lampoon’s Lemmings, 1973]: Okay, now, the Blue Belladonna has been tested, and it’s real killer stuff — so, get into it. But the Brown Strychnine has been cut with acid. So, watch it! If you wanna do half, see what happens, do the other half, that’s up to you, man.
MICHAEL SIMMONS: And I said, “Hey, Sally, where's John?” And she said, “You won't believe it, but he's in the Dead’s trailer, entertaining them.” So he was doing for the Dead what he'd been doing for the cops at Nassau Coliseum — basically, doing schtick.
JOHN BELUSHI [National Lampoon’s Lemmings, 1973]: I’ve got some special bummer announcements to make. This is for all you Grateful Dead freaks. The Grateful Dead are dead — and they’re grateful. We managed to save Jerry Garcia’s fingers. They’re still moving, all nine of ‘em, so don’t worry.
JESSE: That’s an image that I love — John Belushi, several years before achieving any kind of national notoriety, charming his way into the Dead’s backstage scene. Of course, Belushi and Dan Ackroyd would later open for the Dead as the Blues Brothers, but they were buddies long before then, too, it sounds like, on the sheer force of Belushi’s charisma. We mentioned this story to former Saturday Night Live writer Al Franken when we spoke with him for our “Santa Barbara ‘73” episode earlier this year.
AL FRANKEN: I can easily believe that. He's Belushi. He was a charming, magnetic, bigger-than-life guy. So, that doesn’t surprise me at all.
MICHAEL SIMMONS: She said John was terrified of the helicopter ride. They got choppered in and choppered out.
JESSE: Michael loved the artists playing, but it wasn’t exactly a musical experience.
MICHAEL SIMMONS: One of the things that I find personally interesting about Watkins Glen is that it represented a kind of music that was big in the early ‘70s — a kind of earthy, early form of Americana, between the Dead, the Allman Brothers, and The Band. It just didn’t have a name yet, thankfully. It was very big with young people like me, who had been a little too young to go to Woodstock, but were perfectly aged to go to Watkins Glen in 1973. It just fit right into the pocket of my generation. All three bands had a similar aesthetic in that they weren’t showbands — all three bands were dedicated to the music.
JESSE: Promoter Sepp Donahower from Pacific Presentations had come for the party.
SEPP DONAHOWER: I was standing on the stage looking out — it's like a picture burned in my brain. There were people [all the way] to the horizon. I’m like, whoa! You just looked out and the people went to the horizon.
JESSE: In the ‘90s, Rebecca Adams became friends with Owsley Stanley.
REBECCA ADAMS: I did talk to Bear about Watkins Glen once. He was interested in knowing that I had been there, and he told me he was standing up on the soundboard. But he said that he looked out into the audience, and there was a snake moving through, a big snake moving through the crowd. And what's so funny about that is I just saw a post on Facebook, where some guy claimed he was on the stage and looked out in the audience and saw these snakes going through the crowd! And I just said, “Oh my god — independent verification.”
JESSE: Allmans’ roadie Red Dog wrote that, “When you stood on [the stage] and looked out at the crowd you just saw bodies and bodies and bodies. The ground up front had a slight upgrade for about 200 yards, then dropped off and a lot of bodies disappeared. After about another 100 yards, bodies appeared again. It looked like a big funnel with the little end right in front of the stage.”
Backstage, John Ramsey and the other teens from pirate station Concert Free Radio befriended Alembic sound wizard Ron Wickersham.
JOHN RAMSEY: When I got the tour backstage with Ron Wickersham, I saw [a recording truck], and he said there were two 16-track recording trucks there. I said, “Why two?” He said, “Two separate companies.” One was either the Hit Factory or the Record Plant, I forget which. He said, “We want to make sure it comes out.” Maybe my recollection is wrong, but I strongly remember him saying there were two 16-track recording trucks there, and I saw one of them.
JESSE: Buddy Thornton.
BUDDY THORNTON: The Record Plant truck showed up, they parked out behind the stage. I get out there with Johnny [Sandlin] and check out machines — it’s the same basic setup that we had at RFK I think. I’m back there trying to get tape boxes open and ready to put on the machines, and I hear something about that they’re not going to give us a feed. I said, “What’s going on?” I think Johnny went out there and talked to Dan Healy, and he didn’t want the Record Plant splitter box used, because they thought it was going to degrade the sound out to the house. So they’re going back and forth about trying to convince Dan Healy that it’s not going to screw up the front-of-house. They’ve got ground lift switches on the boxes, those buzzes that you hear in live recordings. These guys knew what they were doing. And finally, he let them split the feeds going to the truck for the Brothers’ set. Now for the Dead, I don’t think they wanted anything recorded.
JESSE: And, as such, there don’t seem to be multi-track tapes of the Dead at Watkins Glen, just the usual 2-track sub-mixes by one of their equipment crew, and even those have some issues. But out in the crowd, it was well covered. Taper Jim Cooper.
JIM COOPER: The next day, when we went for the concert, we got in as early as we could. By the time we got up to the front, most of the good places had people there, but the real good places, it had rained. They had puddles. Watkins Glen was great — they had pallets of Poland Spring water that you could take. You could take as much as you wanted: that’s what saved the day. You take as much as you want. We took a bunch, but then what we also did was take the empty pallets, drag them up there and put them in the prime spot — about 40 feet from the stage, between the stage and the soundboard. It’s funny, in the pictures, there are pictures of the site afterwards, with all the garbage and stuff. You can see the pallets there in some of the pictures. Pretty cool. People would come up on the pallets. They would say, “Oh yeah, wow! Pallets!” We’d say, “Go get more!” It was the best spot. You had an inch or two of water there that you didn’t want to stand in.
JESSE: Not all the tapers were as well-prepared. In those days, many tapers had the names of their tape clubs printed on business cards. According to lore, when temperatures dropped, certain groups of New York tapers who hadn’t been prepared resorted to burning the taper business cards. Jim Cooper was not one of them.
JIM COOPER: For the show, the Dead played first. And it was daylight — I don’t know if they started at noon or 1, but it was early. So, we had the mics up and, first act, we put ‘em up. The crowd wasn’t that dense.
JESSE: Promoters Jim Koplik and Shelly Finkel had a good working relationship with Sam Cutler and the Dead, but they discovered they still had some issues to resolve before the show could happen.
JIM KOPLIK: Sam always said to me, “I'm one of them.” Why I liked working with Shelly was he was a good businessman; why he liked working with me was I was a Dead Head. I got it. I understood it. I knew what they wanted. I did what they did. So when Sam came to me with something that somebody else might think would be unreasonable, I got it, totally. And we did it. Sam spoke for the Dead, and I got it. I was one of them. Sam knew that when it came to money, you speak to Shelly, but when it came to parts of the facility that needed to be done and made the fans happy, he came to me.
JESSE: But there was one problem that might be defined as structural and procedural, as well as political.
JIM KOPLIK: We realized once we called it Summer Jam—and everybody called it Summer Jam—we said, “Oh shit, we’ve got to make sure now that the bands do a jam at the end of the show.” So we went to the Dead first, because we knew they were opening and had to stay around for 12 hours. They wouldn't commit to the jam. The Allmans wouldn't commit to the jam. The Band themselves wouldn't commit to the jam. So the whole day during the show on Saturday, I was scurrying around talking to Sam Cutler, Gregg Allman, Jerry, Bunky, trying to get the bands to jam together. We called it Summer Jam — “We screwed up. If you guys don’t jam together…” They wouldn’t commit to the very last minute, that they would actually jam together. We almost misnamed it.
JESSE: One of his problems was even getting the Dead onstage to begin with.
JIM KOPLIK: Sam, the businessman, saw 600,000 people out in front and said, “You only paid us for 150,000 people — we want a bonus.” So I said, “Well, we only got paid for 150,000 people — so, you really shouldn't get a bonus. And Sam looked at me and said, “We're not getting on stage.” I go, “If you don't get on stage, we're gonna have a riot.” He goes, “I know, that's why I’m saying it. I want $25,000.” So we agreed to get $25,000, which we had on hand, thank goodness. And we said, “Sam, please do me a favor, don't tell anybody that we gave you this extra 25 grand.”
PHIL LESH [7/28/73]: One of the men that made it all possible: Mr. Bill Graham! Just a few words, Bill.
BILL GRAHAM [7/28/73]: From Marin County, California, in Watkins Glen, in New York, here we go — the Grateful Dead!
JIM COOPER: The Dead were great on the soundcheck, but I think it was just too early in the day for this. No one probably slept that night before.
JESSE: Throughout this episode, we’ll be sampling Jim’s audience tapes of the show. Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth was there as a 17-year-old Dead freak.
LEE RANALDO: It was nice because the night before they played in the evening, and they were under the colored lights. Then the next day, they kind of kicked things off in the afternoon. So it was kind of like getting to see them in both incarnations: a daytime Dead set is kind of a different story than under-the-stars-at-nighttime Dead, with all the colorful lights and things.
AUDIO: “Bertha” [Jim Cooper audience tape, 7/28/73] (0:00-0:35)
JESSE: Steve Silberman was there as a teenager, and would become the co-author of Skeleton Key: A Dictionary For Deadheads.
STEVE SILBERMAN: Everybody thinks that the day of the actual concert was really not good because they see it in light of comparison with the soundcheck jam. Even Dick Latvala used to dismiss the day of the concert as not very interesting. It was fine! It was actually a good show.
LEE RANALDO: I just remember they played beautifully. I loved them so much at the time. I remember feeling like it was such an incredibly good concert.
STEVE SILBERMAN: It was a very special moment in their music, partly because of how Keith sounded. He was playing a lot with a Fender Rhodes at the time. It's delicious. I love that incarnation of the Dead.
JESSE: Jay Kerley.
JAY KERLEY: The “Playing in the Band” was a high point. I’d seen that Nassau show, and I had seen the September ‘72 shows, and of course the 6/9 and 6/10 shows. The Watkins Glen show was great and all; it wasn’t as superlative as those other concerts, except for the “Playing in the Band.” I thought that was particularly awesome.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [7/28/73] (12:56-13:26)
JESSE: And though it’s not a show where Deadologists study every note, it was still a show to savor from beginning to end, especially if you were just starting to see the Dead. Todd Ellenberg had seen his first Dead show in September at the Stanley Theater in Jersey City.
TODD ELLENBERG: There's some things I remember very clearly. I remember being really taken with “Eyes of the World” because I’d never heard that before. I definitely just got lost in that. That was amazing. I was like, wow, this is new, and it was really something.
JESSE: We’ll have lots more to say about “Eyes of the World” soon. Todd was also an ear-witness to the band’s experiment with the delay towers, powered by Eventide’s digital timers.
TODD ELLENBERG: We were very close to the first set of relay speakers. It sounded good, sounded very good. It wasn’t like being up front by the PA, but it still sounded good. It was definitely loud.
JESSE: Danno Henklein.
DANNO HENKLEIN: The whole vibe was one of endurance.
JESSE: Danno had made a raft out of pallets several days previously, but they were just barely hanging on.
DANNO HENKLEIN: The crowd was packed. We were packed on our little raft. Everybody was sweaty and greasy and just miserable — and we were digging on the music. That was the one common denominator, and we were pretty much digging on each other. We had a couple of people that were not in our satellite social groups that were very attracted to our little pirate raft that came and hung out with us. Two guys from Great Britain came and hung out with us. I don't know why they were attracted to the Jolly Roger. Perhaps the English pirates were the first ones to use that. One guy was like, “Oh yeah, the Grateful Dead are great… but you know, Yardbirds! They’re a great band, too! They were so good, so good in concert, just like the Grateful Dead!” And I’m like, “Oh, that’s cool, man…”
JESSE: Steve Silberman.
STEVE SILBERMAN: Nobody had water, except there were all these Bota bags going around in the audience, which were these leather bags that would be filled with wine or water. After a while, I was feeling really weird. I had not intentionally taken psychedelics before then, so I was out of my mind, really. It’s like a 15-year old little nudnik, running around with no sleeping bag, tripping for the first time — it’s pretty funny.
JESSE: Rebecca Adams.
REBECCA ADAMS: It was a big expedition to go to a porta-potty or to get water. It was a lot of fun because we knew we were at the biggest party on Earth, but it was also challenging. It was packed, and you had to keep your space. If you didn’t keep your space, it was gone. We could hear it perfectly well, but it was really hard to see. People were on top of anything they could get on top of: the outhouses all had people sitting on ‘em. You went in to use the porta-potty, and there would be all these peoples’ legs over the doors. There was this truck that a lot of people were standing on, too. People were climbing to get better views.
JESSE: Rebecca’s photos include one with people sitting on top of some building related to the racetrack’s infrastructure, but in general it was a mass of humanity swarmed over the speedway. Comparing an aerial photograph with online maps, I think the stage was in a big open field a little bit east of the racetrack itself, just south of where the Natureluxe and Stars luxury glampgrounds is currently located. Rebecca Adams would earn her PhD and become the first sociologist to seriously study the Dead’s fanbase. Though she’d been seeing Dead casually since 1970, in 1973, Rebecca was still making new discoveries.
REBECCA ADAMS: I do remember being surprised by the Confederate flag. There was at least one Confederate flag; there may have been more than one. And I remember someone saying to me, “Oh, that’s the Allman Brothers Band.” Since I’d never heard them live and had no sense of what an Allman Brothers Band [show] would be like, that was new information to me, that Allman Brothers fans were Southern. It could be just that it was regional pride, Allman Brothers pride. Or it could have been just like a pirate flag: ‘We have this Confederate flag because we want to find people who know who are Southern.’
JESSE: I suppose this is a decent time to mention that three flags flew from the Watkins Glen stage itself to represent the three bands — the American flag, the Canadian flag, and the, uh, Confederate flag.
REBECCA ADAMS: Among an older cohort of music fans down here, it symbolized the South and Southern pride, not pride in everything the South had ever done.
JESSE: Still kind of unsettling. Bob Student was there with his Super 8 camera.
BOB STUDENT: The second day, I kind of walked down to where the big structure was with the sound crew, and climbed up there to get some shots. Then, after too many people climbed up, they told us all to get down. And then I actually went to the front of the stage, as far as I could get. You can see some video clips of that. But when you got up close, the stage was like 20 feet off the ground — you couldn’t see anyone. You back up a little bit.
GARRICK UTLEY [NBC NEWS]: Temperature was in the 80s today at the concert and, by late afternoon, food and water supplies were beginning to run low. But that didn't stop the music. It's scheduled to go on until midnight.
JOAN SNYDER [CBS NEWS]: Officials here agree that, mainly, the crowd has been peaceful and good-humored. And it's all very different from Woodstock, where there was a drastic shortage of food, water and sanitary facilities. After that, New York State toughened its requirements for such gatherings. And at Watkins Glen, there was plenty of free water, a thousand portable toilets, and a good supply of food.
JESSE: Deadcast pal Gary Lambert was a veteran of countless Dead shows since 1968, including Woodstock. Watkins Glen wasn’t for him either.
GARY LAMBERT: I revered The Band, utterly. I respected the Allman Brothers. I was never a massive Allman Brothers fan, but I knew they were great at what they did. But the lure of that seemed worth trying out. But I burned out on the hundreds of thousands of hippies, stranded, the first time that it happened. The experience did not improve the second time for me.
I wasn’t there in time for the soundcheck, which of course everyone remembers now more fondly than the show itself. For an event that was considered so monumental, for me it was a kind of an annoyance. Having been to and hated Woodstock, being at Watkins Glen was like: eh, we got suckered into something again.
I got pretty close at one point during the Dead’s set. I was impressed with the sound for what it was. But if you were way off to the sides… people were more than half a mile away from the music. Even though they improved things greatly over Woodstock in that regard—and the Dead insisted on extra measures to make it even better—in a space that sprawling, and with delay towers not as sophisticated as they would become, there was no real way that they could cover all that territory and serve the music to all those people.
BOB WEIR [7/28/73, Jim Cooper tape]: We’re gonna take a short break and we’ll be back in a few minutes, so everybody hang loose.
GARY LAMBERT: I’m a little ashamed to say, but we left at the end of the Dead’s first set. It was just: this is not worth it, getting out of here is going to be hell if we wait for the rest of the crowd. We made all those calculations and we fled. I haven't really regretted it since. Within weeks of Watkins Glen, you could see the Grateful Dead at Roosevelt Stadium. It was the biggest place they were playing outside of Watkins Glen at that point — with The Band, in fact. It was not a really hard question for me to say: do I really want to be here?
JESSE: Brian Schiff and his crew were also trying to make their exit. Their car, the Oy Vega, had broken down en route, and they’d hitched a ride with a local named Ron.
BRIAN SCHIFF: So we start walking down, and here's the really crazy part: We run into this Ron again, because he decided he was leaving too. Finally, we got down to the road, and many, many people had the same idea that we did. But no one could get their car out because, like I said, it was like a parking lot, with all the cars facing in one direction. So everyone is there, but everyone starts breaking into cars: they’re using hangers, they’re using everything you could imagine. I guess most of the cars were locked, but in those days, it was a little easier. Everyone was basically breaking into cars, putting them into gear, taking off the emergency brake and pushing them off the side of the road so that they could turn their car around to get out.
JESSE: Alan Paul wrote the great new book Brothers & Sisters, which features the inside dope on the Allmans and their chaos-making manager Phil Walden of Capricorn Records.
ALAN PAUL: So the Dead is playing and somewhere in there—either while they were playing or in between when The Band was playing—Phil Walden shows up. He comes down in a helicopter and he goes up to Bunky Odom and Willie Perkins, who was the road manager, and he says, “What kind of overage are we getting on this deal?” And they say, “Well, we’re not getting any overage. This was a flat money deal.” He said, “I just came in on a helicopter! Do you have any idea how many people are out there? The hell with this — we’re getting more money!” And they say, “well, it’s a free show.” And Phil apparently goes completely bonkers: “What do you mean free show? We don’t play free shows! The hell with that.” He goes absolutely insane, and he says, “Look, you go figure out a way to get more money, or we’re pulling the band.” So, Bunky says, “Look, let me take care of this.” He goes over to Red Dog and Twiggs Lyndon, who are in charge of the stage for the Allman Brothers. And he says, “We’re not going to leave, we’re not going to pull out of here, but we have to at least be ready to act like we are. So, just be ready to start moving gear when I tell them.”
JESSE: Like Sam Cutler, Bunky Odom got his band more money. Jim Koplik.
JIM KOPLIK: Bunky did it in a very polite manner. Sam threatened us, but we didn't have another $25,000 on us. So I had to put somebody in a helicopter on that Saturday, fly them back to Connecticut, go to a couple of ticket outlets, pick up $25,000, and come back with 25 grand in $20s and $5s and $10s. We dumped it out from a paper bag onto a table, and the Allmans got their 25 grand in $20s, $5s and $10s in order for them to play. I think they took the stage sometime around eight o’clock at night. We spent most of the day in Connecticut. This fella who is no longer with us, Brad, who was our ticket manager, went and collected the extra 25 grand. So yeah, we got [extorted], but we had to do it.
ALAN PAUL: All these years later, I'm interviewing Bunky and I’m interviewing Sam Cutler. Neither of them knew until I told them—they didn’t know!—that the other guys had gotten more money. And both of them were ultimately relieved, because they had carried a certain amount of guilt with them for decades, about sort of screwing over their partner. Bunky and Sam really liked each other. All these years later, they have great respect for each other. Which, again, that’s why they were able to work this out, and why the Allman Brothers and thet Grateful Dead quit playing together after those guys were no longer there. So Bunky literally said to me—I told him the story about Cutler demanding the $20,000—”You know, I never knew that, but I feel really good about that. I’m so glad he got more money.” He said, “What is Sam saying?” I said, “Well, let me call Sam back.” I told Sam about it, once I had gotten the facts about the Allman Brothers payment. And Sam’s actual reaction was: “Good on ‘im!”
JIM KOPLIK: When Brad turned the bag over, his underwear came out with the money. They didn't want to touch the money. I go, “Okay, fine. Don't touch the money.” Then they said, “No, we'll touch the money…”
JESSE: And while the notorious folk-rock shark Albert Grossman was backstage, he apparently didn’t attempt to renegotiate his clients’ contract based on the new crowd size.
ALAN PAUL: Ironically, I think The Band probably had the perfect time, really. They weren't too early and they weren't too late.
JESSE: Perfect might be a strong word for it, but I love the tag-team introduction by Sam Cutler and Bill Graham, ready for the awards show circuit.
SAM CUTLER [7/28/73]: We wanted to make an especially warm welcome to our friends and musicians on stage. We waited a long time to hear music which is real close to our hearts. Bill?
BILL GRAHAM [7/28/73]: It's such a long time — like waiting for good wine, it's worth the wait.
AUDIO: “Back to Memphis” [The Band, Live at Watkins Glen] (0:57-1:26) - [Spotify]
JESSE: The Band released their own Live at Watkins Glen album in 1994, and it sounds great as you can tell, but there’s just one problem — almost none of it is actually from Watkins Glen. That version of Chuck Berry’s “Back to Memphis” is an outtake from Moondog Matinee with added crowd noise. Here’s a bit of the real thing, thanks to Jim Cooper.
AUDIO: “Back to Memphis” [The Band, Jim Cooper audience tape, 7/27/73] (0:48-1:15)
JESSE: We’ll revisit the Band’s fake Watkins Glen album later in the episode. Jay Kerley.
JAY KERLEY: The Dead played to a nice bright, sunny day. And as soon as they got off the stage, the clouds came, and then The Band started to play.
JOHN BELUSHI [National Lampoon’s Lemmings, 1973]: You know what? It’s getting kinda cloudy… you know, I think if we all really concentrated, a million of us, we can make it rain, man! So let’s hear a rain chant, and let’s make it rain, okay? Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain!...
JESSE: Erik Nelson had driven from Ohio, especially excited to see The Band.
ERIK NELSON: Moondog Matinee had not come out yet. Again, chronology: Moondog Matinee would be released in October, a few months later. And The Band came out and did five or six songs, if I recall, that were oldies. So right there, it wasn’t quite what you wanted. I remember vividly the weather getting worse and worse.
JESSE: Steve Silberman.
STEVE SILBERMAN: The Band moment that blew my mind was when the lightning and thunder started during The Band’s set, and you could literally see lightning striking around the arena. And they were still playing.
JESSE: There’s a photo from The Band’s set that I love with the speaker system half-covered in rain gear. Surrounding Richard Manuel’s Steinway is a motley crew of people, looking like drunks at a piano bar. Phil Lesh is leaning on the piano, Bill Graham is covering the electric keyboard with a tarp, and Keith Godchaux stands at the back smiling, seemingly watching Richard Manuel’s hands over his shoulders. The Band’s set was also the occasion of the weekend’s only on-site fatality. Eric Alden.
ERIC ALDEN: There was that weird incident with the parachute guy catching fire. There was more than one guy that parachuted that day. They had flares taped to their ankles, to make smoke as they came down. And then the one guy caught fire and died — which was kind of a downer when you heard it in the crowd.
JESSE: Todd Ellenberg.
TODD ELLENBERG: I remember seeing them come down. A couple of friends in my group, good friends, saw the body in the woods, which was the woods to the left of the stage. One of my friends was really high and started freaking out. My other friend said pushed him away and said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
JESSE: According to local newspaper reports, Willard Smith was a veteran parachutist and instructor — a veteran of some 2,000 jumps, who’d jumped out of a plane armed with flares, which misfired and ended with Smith’s grizzly death. The rain came soon.
AUDIO: thunder cracks from “Too Wet To Work” [The Band] [0:00-0:03]
JESSE: I spoke with the late Harvey Lubar, co-founder of the Hell’s Honkies tape club, when I wrote my book Heads, and I’m happy to have some of his voice here.
HARVEY LUBAR [2013]: After the Dead set, when the Dead play, man, it had to be 95 degrees. And then it started pouring, like Woodstock. If you ever listen to The Band set, you can hear the thunder.
AUDIO: “Too Wet To Work” [The Band, Across the Great Divide] (0:00-0:24)
JESSE: The Band did release part of this segment as “Too Wet To Work” on the Across The Great Divide box set. But given their record with archival releases, I’m not sure that thunder wasn’t overdubbed, just like the Woodstock soundtrack, for reasons we’ll get to. Largely, I don’t hear it anywhere on Jim Cooper’s audience tape.
HARVEY LUBAR [2013]: I had plastic coverings for everybody that I went with. And we made our own little tent. It was see-through, because I’d been to enough concerts to know that people in New York would throw things at you if you had an umbrella, because you’d be blocking their view of the stage. But if you had seet-hrough plastic, and you just put it over yourself, maybe made a hole so you had fresh air coming in, then nobody ever complained.
JESSE: Though there wasn’t a central Shakedown Street of vendors as Dead shows would be known for, there was still bootleg merch around. Todd Ellenberg.
TODD ELLENBERG: We were in back but pretty close, just in back of the first set of relay towers. There were some stands right by us selling t-shirts and head shop items, stuff like that. They were not official shirts — I don't think there was any official merch! Not at that thing, no way.
JESSE: As far as I know, the only official Watkins Glen shirts were the ones produced for the very large community backstage, not sold publicly. Hit us up at stories.dead.net if you’ve got other info.
The rainstorm was The Band’s legendary Watkins Glen moment, when the group exited the stage except for organist Garth Hudson, partially shielded from the rain. Jay Kerley.
JAY KERLEY: It started to rain, so they all left the stage again because they didn't want to get electrocuted. They hung out, everybody was hanging out waiting for the rain to pass. But then Garth Hudson got up on his organ, which was way in the back of the stage out of the rain, and proceeded to play “[The] Genetic Method” for like 45 minutes.
AUDIO: “Too Wet To Work” [The Band, Across the Great Divide] (2:01-2:20)
JESSE: On The Band’s Music From Big Pink, the song “Chest Fever” featured a 40-second organ introduction by the wizard Garth Hudson. Live, it had become a solo spotlight for Hudson, growing ever larger, and on Rock of Ages, the live album the group released in 1972, it received its own name — “The Genetic Method.” The version at Watkins Glen was only eight minutes when caught on tape, but still, eight minutes of Garth Hudson is like 45 minutes on any other planet. Erik Nelson.
ERIK NELSON: A point though from, again, someone who was there: the rain during The Band set wasn't necessarily a bad thing, because everyone was really hot. To get kind of soaked and wet wasn't the worst thing in the world. And once Garth came out to kill time with his magnificent organ solo, no one was feeling a tremendous amount of pain. It clearly threw The Band’s set momentum off.
JESSE: Harvey Lubar.
HARVEY LUBAR [2013]: Not too far from us was a woman with a newborn. And she didn't even have a freakin’ umbrella, with a newborn! So I had these long strips of plastic, and we gave them to her to cover the baby. And we got drenched.
JESSE: Rebecca Adams.
REBECCA ADAMS: The rain was really awful. [chuckles] By this time, we had joined with other people from Trinity. There’s one guy in those photographs, Dick Hass, who has a kind of fishing hat on. He taught me something about going to concerts: he had a milk carton, and he brought all of us his stuff in in[side] the milk carton and sat on it during the rain storm. He gave me one, and I had a poncho. So I sat down on this milk carton with my poncho and just sat there, listening to the music during the rain. We still got really drenched — it was muddy, and there were people—not right where we were, but we could hear them and see them if we walked a little—who were sliding in the mud. We knew from Woodstock that that was something people did, but we did not participate in that. I remember I was soaking. And that’s when I discovered the person I had gone to the show with had not brought the dry clothes in. He had decided that his pack was too heavy, and he left them. I had carried in what I had promised to carry in, so we had food. I don’t remember what, but we had something to eat. So that was not good news.
JESSE: Jay Kerley.
JAY KERLEY: And then The Band came back on, and they went into “Chest Fever” of course.
AUDIO: “Chest Fever” [The Band, Jim Cooper audience tape, 7/28/73] (0:00-0:22)
JAY KERLEY: We were campers, so we had our ponchos; we had our boots. We were ready. But The Band’s set, that’s when the rain happened. After The Band went off, it started getting dark, and it was just misty. It was like down-on-the-bayou time.
JESSE: Sometime in the mid-afternoon, the gang from Concert Free Radio finally achieved their original goals of their station.
JOHN RAMSEY: The whole idea was to broadcast the concerts to the masses, both on premises and off. We didn't know the delay towers were there — a lot of people that went to Woodstock, I'd say 80% of the people never even heard it. I'm being facetious, but the sound was minimal. There were just a bunch of cabinets on the stage. So we wanted to try and help people — if they brought FM radios they'd be able to hear it, and then we’d supplement that with our own programming.
JESSE: So the Connecticut teenagers outfitted their own radio studio in an RV, worked their way backstage, got on the air, and created possibly the biggest pirate station in North American history. But they also made a rookie mistake.
JOHN RAMSEY: We got there and set up at the press area the closest we could get, which was a good 500 feet from the stage. And we didn't have enough cable. I think we brought 150 feet of cable, being naive to thinking we'd be close enough.
JESSE: But they found their savior in Ron Wickersham, founder of Alembic, who’d helped design the delay towers for the festival.
JOHN RAMSEY: We got to meet Ron Wickersham at the festival, who was, I think, the owner, if not the head, of the Alembic sound system. I spent a lot of time with him, and he said to me: “We always wanted to do low-power broadcasts of our concert. The Dead are always very much pro-recording. Do you want to come on the road with us and do that?” [laughs] I had a girlfriend at home, I had family, I had other stuff going on — so I turned it down. Who knows if I’d even be alive today if I’d done that. He said that they wanted to broadcast, but they never had anyone to do it.
JESSE: In the 1980s, longtime radio enthusiast Dan Healy would occasionally send out low-powered FM signals, too. These days, streaming and satellite radio have pretty much solved the problem of perma-casting shows.
JOHN RAMSEY: It wasn't until Saturday, I would say midday—maybe The Band was playing, I forget the order—that Ron Wickersham [came by]. He’d been by a couple times and said, “Well, why don’t you broadcast the show?” We said, “We don’t have enough wire,” and he goes, “We don’t have any wire leftover either, we used thousands of feet of wire. But if you want, you can bring the transmitter up on the stage — we’ll plug it into the board mix.” He gave me a backstage pass, an onstage pass and a special t-shirt. There were three levels of security to get up there, as you can imagine. So we signed off, I grabbed this 90-pound transmitter, which was half of my weight at the time, and lugged it 500 feet and up onto the scaffolding. I was on stage right near all the McIntosh amps, so it was pretty cool to see all of those [McIntosh] 2300s all doing their thing. I climbed up the three or four stories on the scaffolding to put the antenna up there with duct tape. He said, “ I want to give you a feed of the whole mix, but I can’t: we’ve lost the intercom to the soundbooth out front. We’d send runners out there, but they never come back.” [laughs] So he said, “The best I can give you is a vocal mix.” We got a vocal mix. I didn’t listen to it because I didn’t have a portable radio. But people said it sounded pretty good — maybe it wasn’t just vocals, or maybe the vocal mics were picking up other stuff. I’m thinking to myself: I got a tour backstage; I met the roadies of the Grateful Dead, which was pretty impressive; and the spotlight truck’s back there, and there’s a couple of big above-ground swimming pools. But I said to myself: I’m not leaving this transmitter, because I’ll never get it back. So I spent the whole day and night up on stage, and that was fine — I was in shorts and a t-shirt, because it was a hot day in July. That night, it started raining and it got really chilly, so I was freezing up there. But no way was I going to leave it until it was all over and I could bring the transmitter back. I figured I’d never see it again.
JESSE: By the time the sun went down, Steve Silberman really needed to go.
STEVE SILBERMAN: I literally remember not being able to pee for, like, a full day. Maybe the main concert day. The actual performance was good, but at some point, I had to go pee. I couldn't hold it anymore. I was tripping balls and didn't even know what that was. So I'm wandering around — I do remember slipping in and out of thinking that I was back home in New York. I didn't know where I was. And it was dark, and I was dehydrated, all these things. Finally, when I did get to pee, it was in a Port-O-San that was on fire, because people had set the Port-O-San on fire! So I’m literally running into this Port-O-San that’s on fire, peeing more than I ever had to in my entire life…
JESSE: Alan Paul.
ALAN PAUL: Going last and being the final act of the night turned out to be a terrible thing. It rained, it got cold, people were exhausted, people had been out there all weekend. So, to the extent that Phil demanded they go last, it was kind of a stupid demand that backfired anyhow.
JESSE: Jay Kerley.
JAY KERLEY: The Dead had a nice bright sunny day, then The Band had rain, and then the Allman Brothers had fog.
JESSE: Though the Allman Brothers played last, their sets were shorter than the Dead’s, about a half-hour of music less, not counting the superjam. As with the Dead, it was a perfectly solid Allmans’ set. “Come and Go Blues” even made it to their official 1976 live album, Wipe the Windows, Check the Oil, Dollar Gas.
AUDIO: “Come and Go Blues” [The Allman Brothers Band, Wipe the Windows, Check the Oil, Dollar Gas, 7/28/73] (0:07-0:31) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Which means that there are actually sweet sounding multitracks of the Allmans’ set and the superjam beyond. Backstage, Tim Meehan’s friends had gone AWOL from their security jobs and had made it to the free beer.
TIM MEEHAN: We proceeded to party and have a couple of beers from the horse troughs. One of the dudes from the Great Neck house was a guy named PJ O'Connor. He was a tank commander that got drafted and sent to Korea, instead of Vietnam. He was a character: by that time, he'd grown his hair out and had a beard, cowboy hat on. He's walking by in a security t-shirt. We were hanging out back there in this little community of mobile homes or job trailers, and somebody shouted out across the trash barrels: “Hey PJ, you old son-of-a…” And it turns out it was one of his crew that was in his tank in Korea, another Army vet that was now a roadie for The Band. That dude went back in the trailer and produced a bottle of tequila. Within 10 minutes, we’re in this little impromptu courtyard, slugging tequila with Robbie Robertson. He certainly had his share.
JESSE: The Allmans’ set became the backdrop for Steve Silberman’s further adventures.
STEVE SILBERMAN: I decided that I needed to get away from the crowd at some point. The music is going on, so I wander sort of up the hills and away from the crowd. I suddenly come across a Lover’s [Lane], where there are cars parked with local kids, making out in the cars and stuff. And they had their radios on, and loud, tuned to the pirate radio station that was broadcasting the show! What was so wild was that, because of the way that sound travels through the air, I was actually hearing it come out of the car radios slightly before it came out of the valley or the glen behind me. So there was this weird temporal displacement involving the sound delay towers and the car radios that added to an even-more-extreme unreality feeling. Then I walked back — I think I started walking towards the highway. I had decided to hitchhike back, because I don't remember if the highway was still closed. It was hard to get in and out of the glen.
JESSE: Lee Ranaldo.
LEE RANALDO: Especially with the rain break, it really went on. Nobody minded that in the least, everybody was there for and it was great. We were close to the stage and we were not leaving, that's for sure.
JESSE: Erik Nelson.
ERIK NELSON: One of the reasons I have such a little memory of the Allman Brothers set was I had, in my innocence, a quaalude and Jack Daniels cocktail, which pretty much knocked me out for the entire two hours of the Allman Brothers. And I came to as the jam was going, and I was fine and locked in.
JESSE: The superjam—late Saturday night, early Sunday morning—was what many had come for. Though Erik took it for granted that there was going to be a Summer Jam at the end of Summer Jam, Jim Koplik had spent part of the day trying to make sure that actually went down.
ERIK NELSON: Everyone knew there was going to be a big jam. And I, of course, being a Robbie Robertson fanatic, couldn't wait to see Robbie Robertson rule the jam. I was quite disappointed in what wound up happening.
JESSE: Just like Erik, the tapes were a bit messy, making the total picture a little bit confusing to reconstruct. It began around 2 in the morning when Rick Danko and members of The Band joined the Allmans for Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” and the Buddy Holly hit “Raining In My Heart” before members of the Dead came out. Chuck Leavell.
CHUCK LEAVELL: It was a fun experience. I do have one memory of The Band, and that is — maybe it was Danko or Manuel, I’m not sure. But one of them started: [sings] “I was born by the river…” “A Change Is Gonna Come,” the Sam Cooke song. Whoever was singing it, and I can’t remember exactly, but they were well-greased and pretty well-inebriated. The lyrics were being slurred, and it was a pretty sloppy performance. Of course it’s a very slow song, and I remember the audience kind of scratching their heads and looking at the stage, and they started booing. And whoever was singing said, “Oh, you don’t like that one, huh? Okay, okay, I’ve got another one.” And he started the same song again! [sings] “I was born by the river…” It was a humorous moment. That one didn’t go over so well, I’m afraid.
JESSE: On Jim Cooper’s audience tape, people are getting restless for sure. Richard Manuel led them in “If You’ve Ever Been Mistreated” and Rick Danko sang a song that often gets labeled “La Di Da Day,” based on its chorus, but no author has ever been identified. Given that The Band had just recorded their all covers album, Moondog Matinee, I assume they did it at those sessions, and it sounds a bit New Orleans-ish to me. If you can identify it, get in touch.
AUDIO: “La Di Da Day” [Watkins Glen superjam, Jim Cooper audience tape, 7/28/73] (1:20-1:38)
JESSE: Chuck Leavell.
CHUCK LEAVELL: It was such an impromptu thing and there didn't seem to be a real solid plan as to what we were going to do. Does somebody holler out of song in this key, and okay, we go? It was fun obviously, just the fact that we were all playing together in some way, shape or form. So it was a joy to be involved in the jam as well.
JESSE: Jay Kerley.
JAY KERLEY: I remember the jam being really interesting. I also remember Rick Danko — he was really high. In an interlude between songs, he took his wooden chair and put it in the middle of a stage. He had an acoustic guitar and started wailing away at that guitar. Nobody could hear him; barely anybody could see him. But he was having a lovely time in the middle of the stage, whacking away this guitar.
JESSE: There are a few moments on the tape that could map to this, and you can go lookin’ yourself if’n you want.
ERIK NELSON: It had been a long day of music: a lot of sunburned, burned out people, including burned out musicians. I remember looking forward to seeing Robbie Robertson wail, because I felt his playing in his set had been very perfunctory and didn’t sound, frankly, as good as Rock of Ages. As the audio evidence demonstrates, Robbie almost plays nothing, and Jerry pretty much takes it over. Garcia was on I think the entire time. I sensed it then, and you can hear it now, that the traditional Grateful-Dead-blow-big-gig theorem did not apply to Watkins Glen. Their main set on Saturday was good; the soundcheck was spectacular, and Garcia really came to play during the jam.
JESSE: Last episode, Donna Jean told us about hanging out with Danko backstage and singing Percy Sledge’s “Warm and Tender Love,” which she’d sung on when she was 19 years old. Danko and Garcia sang it onstage during the superjam, but I think Donna & Keith may’ve ‘coptered out of Watkins Glen stage left by then, though it’s plenty fun to hear Danko and Garcia duet.
AUDIO: “Warm and Tender Love” [Watkins Glen superjam, Jim Cooper audience tape, 7/28/73] (4:00-4:25)
JESSE: But the real juice came during Mountain Jam.
AUDIO: “Mountain Jam” [Watkins Glen superjam, Jim Cooper audience tape, 7/28/73] (7:11-7:41)
JESSE: Ihor Slabicky.
IHOR SLABICKY: The other thing that I remember is the “Mountain Jam,” the final jam that everybody played on. That was actually pretty good. It was so late at night, but I remember it really sounded good.
JESSE: Steve Silberman.
STEVE SILBERMAN: I remember walking towards the highway as members of the Allman Brothers and the Dead played “Mountain Jam.” Maybe I’m conflating memories, but I believe I saw the first light of dawn.
JESSE: While a few of their New Year’s shows in San Francisco would continue to see dawn, this might’ve been the last truly late-night Dead jam on the East Coast. Todd Ellenberg had been separated from his friends at the beginning of the day, but he’d driven, so he had no worry of being stranded. He just had to find the car.
TODD ELLENBERG: I didn't stay to the end of the jam. It took me a long time to find my way back to where we were camping. I was really lost — I did find the race track though, which was kind of weird. I thought, I'm just gonna wander around all night, maybe I’ll find some place to crash out. By this point, I don’t think I got back to my campsite until 3 in the morning. It was very late. I was all alone, just kind of wandering around.
JESSE: He got back to the Dodge Dart eventually. In the crowd, the end-of-weekend vibes were getting little… degen. Danno.
DANNO HENKLEIN: So the crowd starts to thin out. And of course, being that I was kind of the host of the pirate raft, even though I kind of hitchhiked there, all of my friends left before me except for one other person. The crowd thinned out — there were a bunch of bikers who had actually pulled up in a semicircle in front of us. I don’t know when that had happened. They were all just kind of sitting on their big choppers, relaxing on their seats right in front of us. One of the guys was shooting up with one of those little makeshift works that has a little balloon on the end of it. I’m just looking at this and I say, “This is a real slice of life, huh?” Then they take off, and I turn to my friend and I said, “Oh that must have been speed, right? They’re shooting up speed so they can do the trip? That must be it.” But it was… degen.
JESSE: Tim Meehan.
TIM MEEHAN: It moved into the “Mountain Jam” segment where we all went back. At that point, security had been somewhat lax, so my button didn't matter anymore. My guys were going up on the staging and we were hanging out on the side. But my last cognizant memory of that night was the Allman Brothers playing “Mountain Jam” with the Dead and The Band jumping in with them. I was offstage at that point, but I saw Robbie Robertson almost pitch himself over the stage into this 12-foot mosh pit. Somebody grabbed him by the belt and made the save.
AUDIO: “Mountain Jam” [Watkins Glen superjam, Jim Cooper audience tape, 7/28/73] (10:40-11:10)
TIM MEEHAN: As I was getting back to head to my tent—I had certainly had enough partying, enough festivities—The Band was still playing on, the Allman Brothers were still playing the “Mountain Jam.” I looked up on the staging high up there, there was my buddy, PJ, with his Watkins Glen security t-shirt and his cowboy hat, rockin’ out, dancing on top of the stage.
JESSE: At the end of the night, Sam Cutler returned to the stage.
SAM CUTLER [7/28/73]: I looked at my watch and the time is 3:33. Good numbers to bring the night to end to … Hey, let’s all thank each other and all the musicians one more time for making this such a groovy concert. Thanks to the musicians for playing, and all you people for coming. I want to say thanks to all the people who helped us get it together. Watkins Glen was outta sight. Thank you.
JOHN RAMSEY: When we shut down the transmitter which was on the stage for the jam at the end, like 3 or 4 o'clock Sunday morning, we shut it down and I carried it back to the studio so we could resume broadcasting. For whatever reason, because I’m a radio geek, I’m tuning around the FM radio that we have there while my radio transmitter is warming up. It had to have been a college station — I hear another station say, “You know, normally we stay on all night, but we’re going off early tonight, because everybody’s listening to that other station.” If I didn’t hear that myself… if my best friend told me that, I probably wouldn’t believe it because it’s so ridiculous. But I heard it myself! It had to be some college station that was getting calls, because a given radio DJ doesn’t know who’s listening to what, and a commercial radio station wouldn’t shut off no matter what because they have commercials to run. But if it was a college radio station, they were probably getting a whole bunch of calls from people saying, “Hey, have you heard this other station that’s on?” Then he found out about it and said, “Well, why bother broadcasting for the next two hours? Nobody else is listening.”
JESSE: CFR couldn’t go anywhere anyway, and kept on broadcasting as people started to gather themselves for the trip home. Jay Kerley.
JAY KERLEY: I smoked all my weed during that long, long day, and didn’t have anything more when the concert was over and the lights came up. But I looked in the mud behind our warehouse pallets, and there was eight ounces in nice tight Ziploc-ed bags of weed. There was a half a pound, just sitting there in the mud — I kept one bag and passed seven out. [laughs] Yeah, I couldn't believe it. A whole half a pound, sitting in the mud! [laughs] I’m tellin’ you, that’s what I smoked on Jerry’s birthday a couple days later.
JESSE: Sweet ground score. I’m going to go ahead and assume that Jay found the same immaculate ounce that Rebecca found earlier, still floating around, each successive Dead freak trying to find its owner until it arrived at Jay.
DANNO HENKLEIN: My one friend who was left, we walked out in the morning. We weren’t going to get much sleep. We walked away from the festival grounds, but we knew we had to get some sleep. So we just passed out, right in the grass — in the long five-inch-long grass, which was already wet with dew. No sleeping bags or anything. Fortunately, it was hot, it was warm at night. We got a couple of hours of sleep and then woke up feeling absolutely filthy, cruddy and miserable. Then we hitchhiked back to Fairfield County, from the Finger Lakes.
JESSE: Rebecca Adams.
REBECCA ADAMS: The place was trashed. I remember when we left, you had to walk over the debris. But, in fairness to the people who attended the shows, there was no place to put garbage.
JESSE: One thing that I think is wild about Watkins Glen is that, by the end of the weekend, the front of the stage was covered with graffiti. Degen, indeed. Apparently, there are still legends of cars abandoned in the woods, told every year by sportscasters when the races return to Watkins Glen.
REBECCA ADAMS: There were big piles of garbage. You would walk with your trash and see one of those big piles and put your trash on one of those big piles. But even those were few and far between. People had probably just started those piles out of desperation, to clear some room.
Sunday, 7/29
JESSE: Promoter Jim Koplik.
JIM KOPLIK: The next day, the sun comes up and Shelly and I are standing on the stage. I have a picture of us standing on stage. We looked out onto the field, and I remember looking at Shelly and saying, “We forgot something.” He goes, “What did we forget?” And I said, “We forgot garbage cans.” We had forgotten to put garbage cans in the audience. The place was a mess. It was disgusting. We had made this deal with this cleaning company called Schmatta Cleaners — we were paying them $5,000 to clean up the site afterwards. When they saw the site, and we had not put out garbage cans, they said, “We want $50,000 to clean it up” — which was a ton of money. I mean, the Allmans got $110,000; the Dead got $110,000; and The Band got $75,000. The cleaning company wanted $50,000. So we fought with them to get the price down, and they had us over a barrel. We had no choice. The New York State Health Department came in later that Monday and said, “if you don’t clean this place up, we’re going to arrest you and Shelly.” So we agreed to pay them the $50,000 to clean it up. But that was the memory I have most: it was an absolute pile of garbage out there. 600,000 people had nowhere to throw anything.
JESSE: David Dow with CBS News.
DAVID DOW [CBS NEWS]: The end of what may be the largest mass gathering in American history left in its wake a now-familiar problem: traffic. A crowd estimated at 600,000, clogging the same roads it clogged coming in just a day earlier. In the sea of mud, they leave behind another problem: miles and miles of beer cans and wine bottles. Yet there is surprise here at the relatively small number of serious problems.
JESSE: Over to Ihor Slabicky with a Deadcast News Flash.
IHOR SLABICKY: Leaving Watkins Glen, most of it was downhill. So a lot of cars just coasted out of there. It wasn’t like you’re sitting in somebody’s car and they’re driving. I guess they unlocked the ignition and it was just coasting. It was kind of cool — you’re seeing all these cars and no sound, no engine sounds or anything like that.
DAVID DOW [CBS NEWS]: Police say it may be midweek before the last appreciative rock fan has left here, nother week before the sea of debris is entirely cleaned up. Bigger than Woodstock, they say here, in all dimensions.
IHOR SLABICKY: I went to Watkins Glen with my friend and, after that, we went camping in the Adirondacks. It kind of worked out: we're already at Watkins Glen, and it was just hitchhiking another 100 miles or so up to the Adirondack State Park, which I think took two rides to get there.
JESSE: Rebecca Adams and her friend had to get back to their car. The friend who hadn’t carried the dry clothes from the car into the concert site.
REBECCA ADAMS: I also remember coming back the day after the concert and it was still there — so, it wasn't a total disaster. We drove to my parents’ house in Connecticut and I remember telling my mother on the way into my parents’ house: “He can't come in. I'm finished with him.” [laughs]
JESSE: Steve Silberman was back in New York near the first blink of dawn.
STEVE SILBERMAN: My very last moments of getting home from Watkins Glen are a very funny memory. I stuck my thumb out when I got to the highway and pretty quickly got picked up by a couple of guy friends, guys in their early 20s. They were wonderful, very, very sweet. They drove me all the way to Staten Island, actually. For the first time in my life, I took the Staten Island Ferry to get to Queens or wherever I was going. I remember seeing someone reading [a newspaper]—I can’t remember if it was the New York Post or the Daily News—on the ferry. The big headline said: “500,000 Hippies Drown in Sea of Mud,” or something like that. I was like, I was just there! And I was, in fact, covered in mud for sure. I must have been quite a spectacle. But even though it was not a great experience really being there, it left me with a good feeling. I basically ended up going to 8/6/74 and becoming a Dead Head, stone Dead Head for life, after that. I have a picture of myself taken a week later in Provincetown — and boy, do I ever look happy. I was switched on.
JESSE: Back at Watkins Glen, Concert Free Radio was still on the air.
JOHN RAMSEY: I don't think we left until Monday sometime. We were talking to the police about the roads — we didn’t want to leave. If we left early, we’d just be stuck in traffic for about 10 or 20 hours. So we continued to provide the music and give the traffic reports that the police provided to us. I think we provided a service as people were leaving.
JESSE: Jerry Garcia went straight from Watkins Glen by helicopter to Mount Holly, New Jersey for a sentencing. He and Robert Hunter had decided to drive between shows on the band’s spring tour back in March and got pulled over, where substances were found in what some of us call the Briefcase of Infinite Felonies. On July 30th, Garcia was sentenced to probation and to see a psychiatrist. That same day, the first of three scheduled shows by the Dead and The Band at Roosevelt Stadium was canceled for no reason that was publicly announced, but perhaps due to the hassles of getting their gear down to Jersey City in time for more gigs. For Bunky Odom of the Paragon Agency, the first order of business was sleep.
BUNKY ODOM: I flew out that Sunday afternoon to New York, and I checked in at Essex house and told the switchboard: “I’m not taking any calls. Nope, no calls. None whatsoever. I’m going to get me a bite to eat, and I’m going to bed. Don’t let anybody bother me — I’m not even here.”
JESSE: And the second point of business was actual business — collecting money.
BUNKY ODOM: One reason I had to go to New York was that—I think it was Ticketron—they held the money. I had to be there Monday morning to get the check that Ticketron was going to give us. I don’t know what it was, maybe another $150,000 that I picked up.
JESSE: Sepp Donahower of Pacific Presentations was there as a guest of the Dead and Bill Graham. They stuck around for a few days afterwards to celebrate Garcia’s birthday in Jersey City, then flew home.
SEPP DONAHOWER: When we went home, the band, Cutler, Bill Graham and I were all on a Learjet. I remember freezing our ass off because the heater broke in the plane. Do you know how cold it gets at 40,000 feet? So, man, we're all in there just freezing our asses off in this little Lear, flying back to the West Coast. We had to stop off for fuel in Pueblo, Colorado.
Coda: New Year’s & Beyond
JESSE: Watkins Glen had a number of impacts of varying sizes. Alan Paul.
ALAN PAUL: Both the Allman Brothers and the Dead had also said, “Oh, get Dylan, get Dylan.” Well, Dylan hasn't performed since 1966. So they did put out the offer to Dylan as well, who did turn it down but was aware of it and really was paying attention to it. Apparently, he asked the guys in The Band a lot of questions about Watkins Glen. And the great success of it was a factor in him deciding to come back and do that tour with them in 1974.
AUDIO: “Most Likely You Go Your Way” [Bob Dylan & The Band, Before the Flood] (0:45-1:06) [Spotify]
JESSE: That was Bob Dylan and the Band on Tour ‘74 from the official live album, Before the Flood, though the Dylan heads will tell you to check out the raw tapes. The Dead and the Allmans had one more superjam to unfurl. Bucky Odom.
BUNKY ODOM: The New Year's show was at the Cow Palace. Dick Wooley over at Capricorn put it together for a radio show. I’d sold a radio show to LandLover, which was a clothing company at that time, probably still are. And Pioneer Speakers, they sponsored it.
JESSE: The show had been organized by Dick Wooley, the Capricorn A&R representation who’d been savagely beaten by Allmans roadies at RFK in June.
ALAN PAUL: He was also apparently the first person to really come up with the concept of coast-to-coast and then even an international—through military radio—live radio broadcast, which was later that year: December 31st, ‘73, New Year's Eve at the Cow Palace, which became the de facto Allman Brothers Grateful Dead collaboration.
BUNKY ODOM: And I think to this day, it still had the largest audience of a live radio show in that time. Somebody could have done it better [since]. But at that time, it was a coast-to-coast radio show from the Cow Palace.
JESSE: The Dead had been playing New Year’s shows for Bill Graham every year since 1967, besides 1969 into 1970, which they played in Boston. For 1973 into 1974, it was time for a break.
BUNKY ODOM: This guy comes out from way up in the rafters with nothing but a diaper on. Father Time was Bill Graham! He was Father Time.
JESSE: Chuck Leavell.
CHUCK LEAVELL: That was the first time Bill decided to costume up. I think he wore the diapers as I recall, and floated down from the ceiling of the Cow Palace onto the stage at midnight.
JESSE: It was the beginning of a long tradition that Dead Heads would come to know well — Bill Graham flying in from the back of the venue in some specially hung vehicle. But for Dead Heads and Allmans freaks, the highlight of the tape came when the guests stopped by.
BUDDY THORNTON: A lot of people showed up to jam — I think Jerry Garcia, I don't know who all jammed. It was like herding cats on the sound. Owsley may have used a water pistol to finally get Butch trucks. Butch was hiding his bottle of wine under his drum stool, but Owsley figured out how to squirt him.
CHUCK LEAVELL: That was a crazy gig. Butch Trucks got pretty severely dosed with acid by Owsley on that show. I think he asked Billy Kreutzmann to sit in on some of the songs. I just remember Butch saying, “Man, I was playing my drums and they just started flying away from me! I kept chasing ‘em…”
AUDIO: “Whipping Post Jam” [Allman Brothers Band, 12/31/73] (0:06-0:31)
JESSE: Jerry Garcia and Bill Kreutzmann joined the Allmans for over an hour of jams, with Garcia and Dickey Betts getting deep into conversation.
AUDIO: “Whipping Post Jam” [Allman Brothers Band, 12/31/73] (5:02-5:32)
JESSE: It was during this trip that the Dead and the Allmans made a few final connections.
CHUCK LEAVELL: We became friends and, as we did some shows on the West Coast, Bill [Kreutzmann] and Susila invited Rose Lane and myself to his house. When we were there, we went and hung out and had a great time. So we became pretty good friends back in the day.
JESSE: It led to one of the many subtle ways that the Dead influenced the Allmans. We mentioned this in our RFK episodes, but it probably happened more in this time frame.
CHUCK LEAVELL: We observed what Susila Kreutzmann was doing with the merchandise for the Dead. If you recall, we had a roadie that did our advance work; his name was Gerald Evans, but everybody called him Buffalo. Buffalo came to me and he said, “Hey, man, have you seen that one of their old ladies is selling the t-shirts? Why don’t we do the same thing? That way, we can pay for the girls to come to the gigs. They can take a plane separately from us, if need be, and they can make a dime or two.” So his girlfriend Kathy and my wife, Rose Lane, would haul the boxes up into the stadium. They got the logos, they got the prints done for the t-shirts and sold ‘em right out of the box, up in the stadium. Of course, this was before the days of strict licensing in the concession stands and whatnot. It was just strictly almost a bootleg thing.
JESSE: The business was somewhat forcibly folded into the band’s official merchandise arm, Great Southern, but it was just one of the many ways the Dead influenced the Allmans.
CHUCK LEAVELL: All of us paid very close attention to what the Dead were doing with their audio situation because they were really ahead of the curve. We all admitted that, we all knew that. They had some great technicians that were designing and building cabinets for the band — both the backline material amplifiers as well as the front-of-house monitors. I just remember Buddy and all of our guys were all quite impressed and quite wowed with the way the Dead was handling that.
JESSE: Engineer Buddy Thornton had a productive trip west.
BUDDY THORNTON: That’s when I went out to the Alembic, bought some stuff. When I started working for the Brothers, I went to Alembic. I don’t know who I talked to, maybe Ron, but I bought two preamps that they had built. REally cool. A few cabinets, 15s, and maybe some 12s. Then we started a woodshop in Macon, building our own that were somewhat modeled after the Dead’s system.
JESSE: Allmans biographer Alan Paul.
ALAN PAUL: Dickey was really hip to that. When they started playing shows and he got a load of that—the seriousness with which they took things, from the guitar amps to the whole sound system—he was really impressed. He told Buddy, who was on the road doing front-of-house sound for them. He was the engineer who engineered Brothers and Sisters, and engineered Highway Call, Dickey’s solo album — everything in that era that was coming out of Capricorn Studios. And [Dickey] just said to Buddy: “Figure this out.” Then Healy and some of the other Dead sound guys were happy to share.
CHUCK LEAVELL: From that situation forward, we actually started mimicking, to some degree, some of the backline [that the Dead used]. Specifically, my keyboard rig. I remember Buddy and some of the other technicians on our team designed some cabinets that were sort of modeled more-or-less after some of the monitoring that the Dead had. They sounded great. The Dead were always very, very particular about their sound and about their mixing, and especially about any recording. I admired them for that. We tried in a way to follow in those footsteps a little bit.
BUDDY THORNTON: The final setup that I built, and the guys with me, were these cabinets that we stacked up. Very similar to what the Dead were doing.
JESSE: But New Year’s at the Cow Palace was the closing of a chapter.
BUDDY THORNTON: That's the last time that I know that they did anything with the Dead.
ALAN PAUL: The Grateful Dead took their hiatus in 1974. By the time they came back, the Allman Brothers were virtually breaking up. They were sort of teetering, then they did break up in ‘76. And then when they got back together in ‘78, Southern rock was riding high.
JESSE: It was during the Allmans’ break that the Dead played their next giant festival — at Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey, with the Marshall Tucker Band, also represented by Bunky Odom. But that was it.
ALAN PAUL: Sam Cutler left the Grateful Dead. After they broke up in 1976 for the first time, Bunky Odom never worked again for the Allman Brothers. Those two guys had been really close to one another. They were the ones who worked together to make RFK [Stadium] happen, and they're the ones who worked together to make Watkins Glen happen.
JESSE: Thanks, guys. There was an attempt at a super-show with the two bands over Thanksgiving 1981 at the Tangerine Bowl in Orlando, even advertised with reference to Watkins Glen. But apparently not enough tickets were sold and the show was canceled. Or maybe it was just a throwback to the Ontario Motor Speedway Dead/Allmans gig in May ‘73. Who’s to say? Certainly not me. The bond between the Dead and the Allmans was revived in the 21st century by Phil Lesh, especially, who reconnected with the Allmans individually and collectively, eventually leading to a seemingly permanent blur between the two musical families, exemplified by musicians like Oteil Burbridge, Jimmy Herring, and Warren Haynes, who all exist in both worlds. Woodstock Nation got all the press, but Watkins Glen Nation is still out there, too. Erik Nelson.
ERIK NELSON: I talked earlier about us going and thinking, Oh, this will be our Woodstock. I do distinctly remember a sense of almost anticlimax where: we all went to this thing and there's 600,000 people there. It’s this huge, titanic event, and it faded from memory immediately afterwards. There was a lack of consequence to everything — which, in hindsight now, one can say that's the transition from the unruly, significant ‘60s to the commodified Rolling Stone-moves-to-New-York ‘70s… you don't want to read too much into it, but I think there was a palpable sense of a non-event there. In hindsight, to me, the only real event there was the Dead produced 19 minutes or so of the greatest music of their collective career, without anyone noticing it at the time.
JESSE: By some measures, Watkins Glen marked the end of the original period of counterculture-adjacent rock festivals. The next year, directly inspired by Watkins Glen, California Jam would sell 250,000 tickets with a slightly less-hippie-friendly lineup featuring Deep Purple, The Eagles, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, with help from Sepp Donahower and Pacific Presentations. By the time the Dead played Englishtown in 1977, the site was boxed in with shipping containers. There would be no repeat of Watkins Glen. But for some attendees, Watkins Glen represented a beginning. Lee Ranaldo was finding the path.
LEE RANALDO: It loomed large for me and for my friends who I went with. It was kind of the beginning: that was summer of ‘73, and the next summer, ‘74, between high school and college, one of those same guys and I did a ‘round-the-country, all-summer-long road trip. And so Watkins Glen, to me, was the beginning. The road trip we took in ‘74 was two months long — we were driving across the country for the first time. At some point, somewhere in the Midwest or in the Southwest, I got some model paints and painted a Grateful Dead skull with a lightning bolt on the back of the trunk of the Volkswagen bug we were riding in. I wrote over it in old-timey letters: “California or Bust.” That was funny. On that trip, we stayed in campgrounds a lot. There were lots of freaks staying in campgrounds. Watkins Glen was kind of the beginning of wandering through fields and coming upon groups of freaky longhaired people living this crazy life outside of society to some degree. Watkins Glen was kind of the forerunner of this first trip across the country, and a lot of stuff that happened after that.
JESSE: After graduating from college, Lee would co-found Sonic Youth with Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore. And though their music grew from the New York punk and art scenes that Lee had crossed into the interim, I can totally hear the Dead’s music at the heart of some of my favorite Sonic Youth.
AUDIO: “Angrama” [Sonic Youth, SYR 1] (0:52-1:22) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was “Anagrama,” the first track on Sonic Youth’s series of SYR records from the late ‘90s, celestial improvisations that often orbit in parallel to “Dark Star.” I also recommend “The Diamond Sea” from their 1995 album Washing Machine if you’re looking for an entry point with Watkins Glen deep inside it. It’s hard to say if it’s the cause or the effect, but one reason why Watkins Glen disappeared from the cultural memory so completely is because there was no official commodified documentation of it. We mentioned the knockoff album from Pickwick Records, The Kings Road Plays the Heavy Sounds of Watkins Glen.
KINGS ROAD VOCALIST: Alright, “Casey Jones!”
AUDIO: “Casey Jones” [Kings Road, The Heavy Sounds of Watkins Glen] (0:03-0:23)
JESSE: Though speaking of faked Dead crowds, the next year the California branch of the National Lampoon put out their own Dead-adjacent material, complete with lots of lead bass.
AUDIO: “Cocaine Express” [National Lampoon Radio Hour/Tony Scheuren] (0:00-0:25)
JESSE: “Cocaine Express” debuted on the National Lampoon Radio Hour, written and performed by Tony Scheuren. It’s a little bit on the frozen nose, complete with lots of lead bass and overflowing with drug double entendres.
AUDIO: “Cocaine Express” [National Lampoon Radio Hour/Tony Scheuren] (0:39-0:54)
JESSE: Another way to look at Watkins Glen and its aftermath is that it was the Grateful Dead’s deepest and biggest incursion into mainstream American culture, a time when references to their lore fit into the birth of underground comedy.
AUDIO: “Cocaine Express” [National Lampoon Radio Hour/Tony Scheuren] (1:24-1:57)
JESSE: It was a peak of influence that they wouldn’t match again until the surprise hit of “Touch of Grey” a decade-and-a-half later. It was a period when the Dead were part of the common cultural language, and even if Watkins Glen didn’t become part of the broader culture, it became a bullet point for Dead Heads — biggest concert in North American history? Check.
AUDIO: “Cocaine Express” [National Lampoon Radio Hour/Tony Scheuren] (3:27-3:57)
JESSE: There were various reports about a release of the Watkins Glen superjam for benefit causes, and one Allmans track was on their official live album. Scholars have turned up an acetate that indicates that The Band were slated to release an official Watkins Glen live album in early 1974, titled Is Everybody Wet: The Band at Watkins Glen. We’ve linked to Dag Braathen’s exhaustive chronology of The Band in this era. But its tracklist seems to exactly match the fake Watkins Glen album released in the 1990s. My guess is that the faked version was created late in 1973 or early 1974, shelved, and then rediscovered in the ‘90s and nobody remembered it was faked or knew how to consult Jim Cooper’s tapes to compare it to the real thing. It also means that the fake Watkins Glen album was in some ways a not-quite-dry run for the enhanced Basement Tapes album they would release in 1975, featuring false stereo, overdubs, and a few songs not recorded in the Basement. So it goes. They did put a tiny bit of actual Watkins Glen jamming on the album and it’s pretty great.
AUDIO: “Jam” [The Band, Live at Watkins Glen] (0:26-0:56)
JESSE: We’ll let Sam Cutler have the last word on the matter. A month afterwards, Rolling Stone reported that there would be no Watkins Glen movie, quoting Sam Cutler. "The Grateful Dead are sick and tired of being given cornball ideas for rock movies. The Grateful Dead are delighted that Watkins Glen is only a fond memory and that there will be no further commercial exploitation of what was a tasteful musical trip." End quote. Thanks Sam, for that, Watkins Glen, and everything.
SAM CUTLER: It's easy to not remember that music is a collaborative trip, on every level. Throughout our whole scene: it's a band, it's sound people, it's lights people, it's all the production crew. It's the crew itself, who are working like slaves. God knows how much equipment’s all about. There's a lot of people involved. Everybody has to be on the same page, everyone has to have the same feeling. You know what I mean, man? It’s not all down to me, that’s for sure, but a lot of it was down to me. What it’s really down to is a kind of shared vision thing — that everybody’s really on the same page, getting high in the same way. Which we did. Before every gig, the band and crew would get high together. A little microdose, then go out there and do it.