The best way to get attention in America is to make a
lot of money.
And we'll talk to millionaire Percy Ross. He thinks everyone
should have money...he likes to give his away.
Will Percy hand out the big bucks tomorrow?
Is money the number one goal?
Yes.
Money changes everything
I don't see anything wrong with it.
The issue of ethics in business
I scare myself when I let my thoughts run
And when they're running
I keep thinking of
PRESSURE!
We're looking for someone who can lie. Yeah! That's right!
Someone without any scruples!
Someone who isn't afraid to screw others for money,
power and fame!
Her mind is Tiffany twisted
She got the Mercedes bends
Corporate raiders defend the cuts they make in the companies
they acquire. They claim American companies have grown flabby
and uncompetitive, with overpaid, oversized work forces
I didn't create these inefficiencies, and as an economic animal
I don't have much choice but to recreate the inefficiencies
into efficiencies
These guys are out there trying to make a buck by doing nothing.
They're putting people out of work
That's really fun for me.
breaks them up and sells off the parts for much more than his
purchase price, sold off the buildings and real estate,
to raise cash.
They're only interested in accumulating a huge pile for
themselves, turning over a lot of money. They're driven only
by avarice and greed, and money is the root of all evil.
They stab it with their steely knives
But they just can't kill the beast
New car, caviar,
Four-star daydream
Think I'll buy me a football team
There's an old expression -- he who has the money calls the tune.
Now we certainly ain't gonna just walk away from that. We?
We, we! We got a real good thing goin'.
We got ourselves a great opportunity!
Now how 'bout it. Wanna do some biniss?
2:16
Money Money (Mars Hotel) 4:21
6:37
0:00
It's a game. The idea is to move the stock as fast as you can
and trade as many of 'em as you can and facilitate your customers
while trying to do all the buying you can...My life is just a
blur. I've been sitting here for 5 and a half years now. You
think you've seen everything and every day there's something new
that happens.
You have no scars on your face
And you can not handle
Money!
Some of the smartest and most respected traders on the Street
have been led from their prestigious firms by federal
law-enforcement authorities. One was even led away in
handcuffs. Men who made millions of dollars and lived lavishly
could not resist the temptations of greed ... cashing in
on the privileged information they had about mergers and
acquisitions.
Don't give me that do-good-good bullshit
More than 40 people have been implicated in the scandal so far,
and 70% of the people that we talked to thought insider trading
was business as usual on Wall Street.
I'm sure you have some cosmic rationale
By God, in America, one of the great things about this
nation is that we can seek profit....gain profit,
that's even better. ...Buy everything. Buy America.
But it never seemed to be enough.
Ivan Boesky wanted attention all the time.
He thought the rules didn't apply to him.
The man in the tan trenchcoat running from the camera
I don't know whether deep down he believed he was doing
something wrong
Money changes everything
I said money, money changes everything
The king of junk bonds
The big takeover specialist
The biggest insider trading scandal in Wall Street history.
Pressure!
Seeing their peers reaching the point of no return
seems to be what's most alarming to youngsters.
Come on! Let's go eat our lunch.
Another crime might break any minute.
Some dance to remember
Some dance to forget
I'm Ronald Reagan, speaking for General Electric
Say, tell us now about this new book concerning brain building.
How does one go about building the brain? Eating a lot of fish?
Exercise? What?
Now this brain building -- is anyone capable of these mental
challenges, or does it take a particular intellect or a
particular kind of intellect?
Oh, I would think any human is capable. Perhaps not any --
I shouldn't have said that ...differences in native intelligence.
Our potential is vast and that none of us are coming anywhere
near reaching it.
Our guest this evening columnist for Parade magazine and
she's coming out with a new book on brain building...
build their brains tonight.
I want to find out. I want to get to the bottom of this...for
quite some long time, all that you knew was what I'd told you.
All I know is...my memory didn't fail me on the fact that I had
agreed to this thing. The only thing I could not recall was at
what point was I asked?
What do you know about the new psychopharmacological type drugs
in the area of increasing intelligence?
I don't know. I only know that that's why I have said repeatedly
that I want to find out. I want to get to the bottom of this and
find out all that has happened... all you knew was what I told
you.
10:46
Saint of Circumstance 3/3/87 HJK 6:57
17:43
Pictures at the White House turned into words -- heated words
from a Republican senator fed up...
He's there for a picture-taking session and you're havin'
your good ol' fling...You're not asking
him things so you can get answers, you're asking things 'cause
you know he's off balance..."
"He doesn't need some cowboy from Wyoming protecting him."
"I'm not! I have fun. I see you come in there and I see you
flunked the saliva test..."
18:29
Ship of Fools 12/17/86 Oakland Coliseum 7:48
26:17 JOHN BARLOW part 1 (3/5/87 interview)
0:00 ...something recent that I like I live in a culturally isolated place. I agree with the people who give out Grammys, I guess...Paul Simon - "Boy in the Bubble" People living in the stone age and in the space age... Anais Nin defines art: "...making the familiar altogether new."
1:21 Boy in the Bubble excerpt
2:49 Let's talk about what it is that motivates you to listen in the first place...
3:49 Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen reads the Gettysburg Address
6:04 Music - that's another matter Why "Feel Like a Stranger" worked the other night
If there's any element of first-person it's gonna be Weir"
Three little kids
In my civilian life I'm real busy...
Music was so absolutely central to everything in our society 20 years ago...not so any more...
"Get Together" versus the Strawberry Alarm Clock
A lot of people don't want content...
Jackson Browne and relevancy Examples, not preaching Change consciousness
and politics will take care of itself
"Throwin' Stones" -- had to be on record. We have the capacity to wipe out all of humanity...
15:21 Dirty Laundry - Don Henley (I Can't Stand Still)
20:53 People just don't seem to be interested in anything but people...
21:59 "The Walls Came Down" - The Call (Modern Romans)
25:39 Talk
26:33 "Language is a Virus" - Laurie Anderson (Home of the Brave soundtrack)
This didn't come through very clearly on TV or radio, but I thought you all might get a kick out of seeing the cue sheet for the midnight countdown soundtrack. This was my second year doing the tape. Peter Barsotti of Bill Graham Presents is the producer of the midnight pageant, andwe worked on the tape together.
HELTER SKELTER
.00 Surf, heartbeat
.25 Foghorn
.29 Cable car bells
.36 Steamship whistle
.42 Cow
.49 nfa
.51 dog
.54 happy baby
1.04 gonna be a long, long, crazy, crazy night
1.10 Terrapin sting
1.17 Piano intro begins
1.25 The loveliness of Paris...
1.35 The glory that was Rome is of another day...
1.43 I've been terribly alone...
1.50 I'm going home to my city by the bay...
2.01 I left my
2.04 HELTER SKELTER!
2.14 til I get to the bottom and I turn around and go for a ride
2.22 Do you don't you want me to love you?
2.34 Tell me tell me tell me
2.39 Good love!
2.49 Led Zeppelin guitar
2.54 Fanfare from All You Need is Love
3.02 This ain't no party, this ain't no disco
3.16 Into the blue
3.22 brass, All you need is love, brass
3.31 Out on the road today I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac
3.38 God damn, well I declare, have you seen the like?
Gans: That's because the high level is taking care of itself, so your consciousness can't really get too much more involved.
Garcia: That's the thing about it.
Lesh: That's where consciousness is a burden.
Garcia: That's the stuff! The ones I love are the ones when it's slippery. The best of everything is all around. I don't know how to explain it, but it's just like, easy. Oh, boy, I love those! It's just the coolest feeling in the world. It's really the best. It's just so special.
Lesh: You can't put your fingers in the wrong place. It's impossible. I've tried.
Garcia: It just wigs you out, y'know? "Aww, that's the coolest thing I ever heard..."
Lesh: And you hear it back and it's still cool.
Garcia: That's real special stuff, yeah.... That's all stuff that tells you about the objective nature of it. It's out there; it ain't in here. That's one of the reasons you can trust it.
Lesh: It's finding out that something else exists outside of you.
Garcia: That's the special, great, special treat of life! Hooray!
Lesh: Hooray!
Gans: Especially for a bunch of card-carrying agnostics, looking for something we can latch on to --
Garcia: -- for the cutting edge of Western skepticism --
Lesh: - which turns out to be the cutting edge of romantic idealism. [laughter]
Garcia: It's fantastic. That's the stuff you never would have been able to --
Lesh: -- foresee. [laughs] "Hey, let's smoke some more dope and play some music."
Garcia: Right. [laughs]
Lesh: "My god, this could be art!"
Gans: ... doing some important work there.
Garcia: Well, it's never going to be more important than nothin', and it'll always be the most important thing --
Lesh: No, no -- it's always going to be more important than nothin', and it will never be the most important thing --
Garcia: Oh, sorry. I had that wrong. [laughter]
- 2 -
Garcia: Well, it's truly been fantastic.
Lesh: Yeah. Beyond our wildest dreams.
Garcia: Totally. Way beyond, way beyond, way beyond.
Gans: You never had any expectations of this ? You just fell into it?
Garcia: Yeah, but --
Lesh: Yeah, in the deepest recesses of our --
Garcia: Yeah, hopes, and yeah, right, sure, but never, uh..but never -- this! [laughter] It doesn't let up. It keeps going.
Gans: Every picker dreams of the Grand Ole Opry or whatever, and every rock'n'roller on the Peninsula wanted to be in a big-time band, but this has gotten way out of hand!
Lesh: But we weren't rock'n'rollers...
Garcia: We were looking for something else, in a way.
Lesh: In a way. We were old friends who happened to --
Garcia: We were looking for good times, really, but extra-special good times, with a capital G T... Our kind of good times: good and weird.
- 3 -
Garcia: As soon as we were playing the Acid Tests, you'd look out there and you'd see that guy, and he'd look up and go, "Yeah! I know what you guys are doing. I know what you guys are up to..." And you knew that they knew. And you'd go, "Yeah, you're right!" ... It was one of those things. It was on one -- recognitions, flashes of recognition. No tellin' what, really, but that thing that you recognize, and you recognize it because it's there. I could never say what it was...
Lesh: It's communal, in the sense that it exists --
Garcia: It's in that moment, when that guy looks at you and goes, "Yeah, I get it."
Lesh: You're both in the same place.
Garcia: That's right. You know, and he knows, and that's that moment.
Lesh: It's as close as you can come to being somebody else.
Garcia: That's deep. That is a moment of true knowing.
Gans: Was that something to aspire to?
Garcia: Not necessarily, but it was just a thing that happened.
Lesh: What it is is suspicions confirmed: Yes, there is something like this between people. We've known it among ourselves, and now --
Garcia: -- We've all long suspected it; we've heard rumors of it --
Lesh: -- we know it can happen between us and total strangers. Mostly, it's subconscious. We've trained ourselves in a certain way.
Garcia: That's right. We have had faith in that unspoken, unseen, unknowable in that frontal sense, you know? You've got to trust it, just because of reportage. There are so many people... What they say about the Grateful Dead is so, has that objective ring about it, because they all report it --
Lesh: It's consistent --
Garcia: Right, the reportage is consistent.... It's like flying saucers -- are all these people lying?
Lesh: Are all these people deluded? Are they all drugged?
Garcia: They're all experiencing something.
Gans: It's something more substantial than a leap of faith and less than --
Lesh: No, it's a continual experience.
Garcia: Right. And it's something that --
Lesh: It's renewed every time.
Garcia: -- it's working on some level, and that's the thing that counts.
Garcia: There's nothing to say that we know the most about this that can be known, just because we're it.
Lesh: We're just a piece of it..
Garcia: That's right. We're just a piece of it; we're not it.
Lesh: No! It is informing all of us.
Garcia: That's right. That's exactly right. So our opinions are just that: they are our opinions, in our tradition --
Lesh: And in our position ... in the sense of the main transformer.
Garcia: Yeah. Right. That's our position in the line. But everybody who experiences it, on whatever terms anyone experiences it, is right about it.
Lesh: It's like we're all in orbit around the sun. All of us. By the very nature of that situation, we each look at it from a different way.
Garcia: Right, and its warmth falls on all of us.
Lesh: Yes.
- 4 -
Garcia: I experiment with it all the time, as much as I can with my little part of it. That's one of the reasons why I know it isn't us. It's not something we're cookin' up --
Lesh: Yeah! Who could cook up something like this? Who could have imagined this?
Garcia: Yeah. It isn't like that...
Lesh: None of us, in our wildest dreams.
Garcia: Right. You can't manipulate it or control it the way you could something like a religion. It isn't something I'm doing, and that's what makes it real special. Just the fact that it's not something I'm doing, it's not something I'm causing.
Lesh: Right. We're not responsible for it ...
Garcia: We're not originating it; we're not making it happen.
Lesh: It's got us -- and it's so good. For us -- for me, it's faith. I don't know about the Deadheads, I'll tell you what it is for me. I have faith in this thing, whatever the fuck it is.
Garcia: Yeah, me too. And It's taken me a long time to get it -- I mean, it's taken me a long time to get comfortable with it.
Gans: Does it wax and wane for you like it does for us?
Lesh: Yeah, because it's hard to believe --
Garcia: Yeah, because I'm a skeptic. We all are terrible skeptics -- we've seen the elephant, and we don't believe nothin'! We're the hardest to convince of all...
Lesh: I still believe in it.
Garcia: Yeah!
Gans: It still works.
Lesh: It still works! It's creaky, man! It's slow, it's anarchic, and sometimes it sputters and fuckin' won't start.
Garcia: Yeah, right. It's almost as ornery as humans are.
Gans: But when it pays off, it makes it worth all the dues --
Garcia: Yeah. Comes up triple bars, man. Pours out all the dollars. All the golden yummies.
Deadhead Hour Program #23 Week of January 18-24, 1988
Part 1 25:37
Big Boss Man 12/30/87 Oakland Coliseum (Smith-Dixon)
Cassidy (Weir-Barlow)
Garcia talks about the Rex Foundation 10/12/87
"It's an in-house foundation -- the Grateful Dead's nonprofit subsidiary -- and it 's really designed to funnel money into anything that we're interested in, pretty much -- which runs the gamut from things like Bill Kreutzmann's fight to save the redwood trees to Phil's new-wave English composers. We support all kinds of local charities and that sort of thing, but it's all mostly stuff that's close to the bone-- low-profile, direct-action kind of stuff. That's the most appealing stuff to deal with because it's easy to see that the money is -- that something real is happening. So it doesn't get caught in the overhead scuffle that characterizes a lot of big charity, you know. It's mostly the thing of sifting through the enormous number of people who require help. And finding out things that are most direct and what things work. That's what it's for. And a couple of times a year we do benefits for them to raise money. But we're also starting to open up to the idea that other people could contribute if they wanted to. But it's for good works, however they appear."
Mountains of the Moon Aoxomoxoa (Hunter-Garcia-Lesh)
(Warner Bros. 1790, originally released June 1969)
Program #24 Deadhead Hour Week of January 25, 1988
This program features Deadheads saying what they do for a living. One of them could be you?
Part 1 24:33
My Brother Esau 12/30/86 Henry J. Kaiser, Oakland
Well this job I got I edit magazines. I make mind amplifiers. Headhunter. Marketing Genius. Storyteller I steal stereo equipment. I sell roses. UltraSound engineer. I work for the American Red Cross. I'm an optician -- I make eyeglasses. I help the blind to see. Fix TVs. I'm a professional drug dealer. I just watch. Prophet on the burning shore A librarian. I'm a janitor. I'm a political activist. I am a professional Deadhead, except the only problem is I'm still not being paid for it. I'm trying to make a living from the Grateful Dead, and so far it hasn't worked out at all....I'm a professional journalist. I run a photo lab in San Francisco. I'm a financial planner. I'm a kindergarten teacher. Chemical engineer. I'm an environmental educator and I own an ocean kayaking company. Alternative dispute resolution. I'm in real estate. I work at Bookpeople, a small-press book distributor. I'm a law clerk. I do elementary particle physics.
Easy Wind 2/19/71 Capitol Theatre, Portchester NY
I have a company called Cosmetic Surgery Support Programs. I make masks...masks and costumes. I'm a broadcast standards editor. I'm a contract administrator for the United States Department of Energy. Anthropologist. I slime fish up in Alaska. I'm an officer in the United States Coast Guard. I'm a bike messenger and a musician. Long-distance runner I'm a lawyer... I put criminals back out on the street. I work for a fundraising company in Washing- ton, DC. Very right -- not right...middle right, towards... I'm a political whore, yeah, hahaha. Broadcast journalist. I plant trees in Idaho. I'm a legal proofreader. I'm a bum, apparently. I'm Uncle Sam/How do you do? I'm unemployed. Stephen prosper in his time/Well he may and he may decline I work on the floor of the stock exchange. I'm unemployed, but I'm hoping to become a narcotics officer real soon. I don't do anything. I cook. Ha-ha, I'm an oral surgeon.
Beat It On Down the Line 1/30/87 San Francisco Civic Auditorium
Bernie likes to refer to all this as a "sensory overload"....This is what he looks like....titles create barriers....a sound system.... Bernie is a Deadhead.... "the music that accompanies my life".... Could a Deadhead be an accountant who wears Brooks Brothers suits?.... And in Birmingham, Alabama, Bernie is decidedly different.... When people say you're crazy, I say "thank you."
The Mighty Quinn 5/3/87 Frost Amphitheatre
I'm a painter. I work for the IRS. We're sheet metal workers. We make cooling towers for buildings. I cook pizza. I'm a photographer. I'm an office supply salesman. I'm a student right now. I give people alcohol. Sing. Accountant. Computer programmer -- BORING!
Part 2 32:34
audio collage New Year's Eve 87-88
Minglewood 6/20/87 Greek Theatre, UC Berkeley
Well, I work for a computer network and I kinda freelance with, y'know, different things on the side.I just live.Pound nails.I breathe.I'm waitin' for Bob, man....Weir....doing some electrical work at his house. (from GD movie)Weir: Our highly trained equipment crew ....singin' in the rain...
Day Job
I manage a store. I'm an attorney. Counselor. I'm a student. Computer programmer. Full-time person. I do merchandising. I sell things. Nothing! I won't slave for beggar's pay/Likewise gold and jewels We have our own business, publishing company. I'm almost a psychotherapist, he's a carpenter, and he's an admissions officer for a graduate school. I fix computers. Dance. Very well. And I glitter, even better. I'm a cosmetologist by trade. My husband, he's an airline captain. I'm a gaffer, feature films. I play in a band: Found Objects. I'm a software engineer, Unix. Technical writer. Go to school. Social worker. Lawyer. I had a steady job haulin' items for the mob/You know the pay was pathetic/It's a shame those boys couldn't be more copasetic I play -- play-play- playyyyyyy... I'm a ski bum and a raft guide. I work for Greenpeace. I work for an environmental group. Ah, not too much.
Cumberland Blues 12/30/86 Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center
Professional Deadhead. I just load my gun and mosey down to the bank/Knockin' off my neighborhood savings and loan... I work for Leo's, and I sell gear to people like the Grateful Dead. Hahaha, what do I do for a living? I tell people they can't come backstage, for the most part. Stranger ones have come by here/Before they flew away... I play music. I play. Sell drugs. What do I do for a living? I'm not sure. I pretend to be a chemist. I'm a veterinarian. I'm a computer programmer. I'm a lawyer. I live on Maui and I take it easy. I sweat.
Black Muddy River 6/13/87 Ventura County Fairgrounds
Program #28 Deadhead Hour Week of February 22-28, 1988
Part 1 27:24
Rubin and Cherise Cats Under the Stars (Arista ARCD 8535, originally released 1978)
Keys to the Rain Tales of the Great Rum Runners (Round RX101, 1974)
Bombs Away Heaven Help the Fool (Arista ARCD 8165, originally released 1978)
Ramble On Rose 9/16/78 Sound & Light Theatre, Gizeh, Egypt
King Solomon's Marbles Blues for Allah (GDCD4001, originally released 1975)
ID by Jack
Part 2 30:10
Good Lovin' 4/19/71 Dillon Gym, Princeton University, Princeton NJ
(Resnick-Clark)
Ron 'Pigpen' McKernan was part of Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, way back in the early '60s, and when the musicians switched to electric instruments and became the Warlocks and later the Grateful Dead, Pigpen was right out there in front. There are plenty of old-time Deadheads who'll tell you the band was never the same after the hard-drinking blueser stopped gigging with them in early 1972 due to failing health. Too many years of too much drinking finally caught up with him, and Pigpen passed away in March of 1973. A couple of years ago, when I was putting together the book Playing in the Band, I asked Phil Lesh if he had a favorite Pigpen performance. Without hesitation, he told me to go find the tape from Princeton, 1971, and listen to "Good Lovin'."
Program # 30 Deadhead Hour Week of March 7-13, 1988
Featured: music from the Maples Pavilion at Stanford University 2/9/73,
including the first public performances of Eyes of the World, China
Doll, They Love Each Other, Loose Lucy, etc.
Part 1 33:06
Truckin'-> 2/9/73 Maples Pavilion, Stanford University
Eyes of the World->
China Doll
Part 2 23:26
Weir: What all this is is a whole new PA system that we've got worked up. It's going to take a little bit of ironing out. This is sort of the get-the-bugs-out night - that's why we're here.
Lesh: Course, if you've been following us for any number of years at all you'll realize that this happens every place we go, every time we play. We've been trying to do it for a long time now, and - well, hopefully... someday...
Weir: But if it irritates you, tonight's going to get you crazy. On the other hand, toward the end of this evening we hope this all-new PA of ours is going to really stand up and grow some hair.
Lesh: Is there anybody out there who can't hear?
Weir: What can't you hear?
Lesh: Everything.
Weir: Enunciate, please! Listen -
Lesh: What they mean is it doesn't sound like their home stereo.
Loose Lucy 2/9/73
Jack Straw 2/9/73
Weir: We've just located a bug in our new system that sounds like about a 40-foot cockroach.... And we're going to iron him out right now.
Program # 32 Deadhead Hour Week of March 21-27, 1988
Featuring an interview with lyricist Robert Hunter, writer of dozens of Grateful Dead favorites. He's collaborated with Bob Weir and Phil Lesh a few times, but mostly he writes with Jerry Garcia, and he's also put out several albums of his own over the years, including a brand new one called Liberty.
Part 1 28:42
Look into any eyes -- You find by you-- You can see clear to another day
In another time's forgotten space -- Your eyes looked from your mother's face
No more time to tell how-- This is the season of what
Give me five -- I'm still alive -- Ain't no luck -- I learned to duck
God damn, well I declare! -- Have you seen the like?
Their walls are built of cannonballs -- Their motto is "don't tread on me"
Come hear Uncle John's band -- Playing to the tide
Some come to laugh the past away -- Some come to make it just one more day
Whichever way your pleasure tends -- If you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind
Darkness shrugs and bids the day goodbye
Help on the way -- Well I know only this: I got here today
Some folks look for answers -- Others look for fights
The storyteller makes no choice -- Soon you will not hear his voice
His job is to shed light, and
Once in a while you get shown the light-- In the strangest of places if you look at it right
Crazy cat peekin thru a lace bandanna -- Like a one eyed cheshire -- Like a diamond eyed jack
Paint-by-number morning sky -- Looks so phony
William Tell has stretched his bow -- Til it won't stretch no further more
And/or -- It may require a change -- That hasn't come before
Hunter: Well, good evening, David Gans. It's very nice to have you on our program, we've been looking forward to this for a long time. And I'd like to ask you a few questions. To begin with, I hope I don't disarm you, but which came first, the words or the music?
Q: It varies. Considerably.
Hunter: It does. Very good. The second question: How does it feel to be behind a nose such as yours? The whole world has been asking this question, David.
Q: I really don't know how it would feel to not be behind this nose, so I really can't differentiate.
Hunter: That is a good answer.
Do Deny - (Liberty,Relix RRCD 2029, 1988)(Robert Hunter)
Q: When are you going to tour again?
Hunter: I expect to tour in mid or late '89. We have a baby four months on the way right now, living entirely on nervous energy. The end of this interview I'll probably collapse in a heap of exhaustion. I don't have the right kind of energy to go on the road. I want to see my wife through this pregnancy and be around the kid for five or six months. And
then I think I may get itchy to get on the road.
Q: Do you listen to music for pleasure, ever, and if so,
what sort of stuff do you listen to?
Hunter: Yes, I do listen for pleasure. Mostly I've been, for the last year, going through listening to the history of string quartets. I read a book on it, and I'm trying to see who fit where starting with Haydn, and moving up to the present. That's been my pleasure listening. I'm moving into Beethoven piano stuff now.I just Civilization and to not know Beethoven and Bach, Brahms. It seems - if you have the capacity for enjoying it. Life is a bit too rushed, perhaps, to sit down and learn all the sonatas at this point, but I have a great deal of leisure, in the sort of life I've picked out for myself, a certain amount of time at the typewriter and you're burned a little bit. What do you do to refresh yourself? I listen to music.
Q: Any pop music tastes you'd care to discuss?
Hunter: Just picked up the new Nina Hagen CD yesterday, the compilation disk. I'd say for the terminally weird, this is your piece of pie.
Q: Would you like to recommend one particular cut I could play?
Hunter: No, no, no, no, no... She does "White Punks On Dope" in German... (laughs) I'm very fond of the Smiths' work, especially the album Louder Than Bombs. I think Morrissey really has a handle on something. I do admire his work. And the fellow who writes for The Call, does the lyrics for The Call... I don't know his name...
Q: Michael Been.
Hunter: Michael Been. Yeah, he's a hell of a songwriter too. I can listen to his stuff many times and find levels in it, which is something.
Friend of the Devil - American Beauty(Hunter-Garcia-Dawson)
Q: In the BAM interview with Jerry Garcia, he mentioned an additional verse of "Friend of the Devil" that he doesn't perform.
Hunter: You can borrow from the devil
You can borrow from a friend
But the devil'll give you twenty
When your friend got only ten
Q: Any good reason why he doesn't use that?
Hunter: I may not have given him the verse at the time when he lockedit into concrete in his head. I may have given it to him later and said, oh, here's another verse. And he had the form, where it should begin, where it should end, formalized at that point. It might open the song up to being a different sort of ellipse than it is. Perhaps. Perhaps he doesn't like the verse, perhaps he's simply being perverse. Check one, check two, check three... (laughs)
Q: Are there any similar situations, other songs that you've updated, or done additional stuff to, that he's not incorporated?
Hunter: Well, there's the "Terrapin" business, where there's a good deal more where that came from.... That happened to meet very fortunately, Jerry had written some changes and I had just written Terrapin, and we met, and his changes and my lyrics went hand in glove. I think we were both approaching Terrapin Station from different directions and met in the center and there it was. There was something more than uncanny about the way that thing just happened. That song is very meaningful to me.
I wrote it in front of a picture window overlooking the storm-lashed Bay. There was lightning in the sky. It was one of those moments when I just knew something was going to happen. I was sitting there in front of my typewriter, just very, very open to this, there was no furniture in the room, it was a bare room. And I just wrote "Terrapin Station" at the top of the page, and said, well, hmm, what's this about? And I said, "let my inspiration flow," and so actually the beginning lines describe the invocation. A name occurred to me, and then the beginning is an invocation to the muse to deliver further information on this and make it something. Give it sense and color. A magical moment, and the Dead carry it right on into what they do, and the performance of it. But for the record, I don't know. I'm amongst those who's not a fan of the record, but the live performance of it - mmmmmm!
Terrapin 2/26/77 Swing Auditorium, San Bernardino CA (Hunter-Garcia)
Part 2 29:27
Rilke, The First Elegy - Robert Hunter (piano accompaniment by Tom Constanten)
Hunter: You can read the German, and get the cadence and flow of the German. And I tried to approximate the cadence and flow of the German language in it, and I usedPmy German is not strong, and I used other translations, for example, to show me when he'd moved into subjunctive tense, or something, and for idiomatic expressions which I might not be familiar with. And I used a good Cassell's German Dictionary, you know, and broke every word I didn't know down and saw all the shades of meaning. It's a very, very good - Cassell's Classical German Dictionary, because it gives you the meanings of a German word, say, in the 1800s. The shades of variation you'll find in Webster's Complete Dictionary or the complete Oxford, the shades of meaning. Which is very valuable, because I found that many of the words had been mis-translated, I felt, by previous translators, that they made Rilke sound more ambiguous than he was. And I felt very often that the wrong shade of meaning was insisted on, in earlier translations, and just sort of bled on into further translations. So I think I stopped a lot of that with this. That I have offered alternatives to readings which are kind of tried and true at this point and moved on into further translations.
Yellow Moon (Tiger Rose, Round Records RX-105, 1975)(Hunter)
Q: Collaborations with other than Garcia have been quite successful. Why don't you write with the other Gratefuls more often?
Hunter: Um - because Garcia makes it easy. You know, he makes himself available to do it, and when I give him a piece of material he'll either reject it or set it, and he gives me changes, which I will either - which I will set, generally, he doesn't give me anything I don't like. He's been coming over lately and been collaborating. And he makes himself available, he's a genius, he's got an amazing musical sense, and no one else makes themselves available or particularly easy to work with. There's the black hole phenomenon, where you hand a lyric over and it disappears into the void somewhere. And Jerry is conscientious about keeping his communications together on it. I'd say it's almost as simple as that. I'm willing and open to work with anybody who won't give me a
rough time or try to rewrite what I'm doing.
Q: I'm tempted to ask further about the collaboration with Garcia, but
it leads me to ask about the collaboration with Bob Dylan.
Hunter: You couldn't be easier to work with than Dylan - I brought the book, I think it had 15, 17 songs in to the Dead before we made In The Dark, of which several were selected for In The Dark - Push Comes To Shove, Black Muddy River. Perhaps only those two were selected. I took about three of them for the Liberty album, and Dylan took two of them for his album. Set 'em, and sent me a tape. Sounds great. That's what I call easy to work with. He just flipped through the songbook that was sitting there at Front Street, liked these tunes, put 'em in his pocket, went off, set 'em to music, recorded 'em, and... First time I met him he said (Dylan voice): "Eh, I just recorded two of your tunes!" And I said, "Neat!" (laughs)
Q: He didn't even ask first?
Hunter: Bob Dylan doesn't have to ask a lyricist if he can do his tunes! Come on, man! I gotta just say this for the record. You got your Grammies, you got your Bammies, you got your Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame--as far as I'm concerned, Bob Dylan has done two of my songs, and those other things sound far away, distant, and not very interesting.
Bone Alley - Robert Hunter, Liberty(Hunter)
Q: What fiction do you read?
Hunter: I've been making a crack at the Oz series lately [L. Frank Baum]. I've gotten about three of them down. I've been reading Walker Percy; read lately Thanatos Syndrome and The Last Gentleman and The Moviegoer. I just finished the funniest book which I have ever read. It's A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole, who finished the book, could not get it published, and committed suicide. His mother got it to Walker Percy, a smudged carbon copy, and absolutely drove Percy until he read the book, which he did with great reluctance, and found himself totally, totally captured by it. It won the National Book Award, and I recommend it to everyone.
Q: So do you generally read fiction, nonfiction, what sort of stuff?
Hunter: I balance it. I tend to read serious work. I'm reading Noam Chomsky right now... Language and Responsibility. It's partly political and partly language. It's an interview, and gives a fairly good grounding in Chomsky. I just finished Heidegger's What Is Called Thinking, and in and amongst that I was reading Ozma of Oz. I like to keep things balanced a bit.
Tennessee Jed 2/26/77 (Hunter-Garcia)
To order the Duino Elegies, send $15.50 (cloth) or $11.00 (paper) to
Hulogos'i, P.O. Box 1188, Eugene OR 97440
or write to
Grateful Dead Merchandising, Box 12979, San Rafael CA 94913
Liberty is available by mail from
Relix Records, Inc., P.O. Box 92, Brooklyn NY 11229
Program # 33 Deadhead Hour Week of March 28-April 3, 1988
Continuing the interview with lyricist Robert Hunter
Part 1 30:12
<sniff> Drivin' that train
Ten years ago I walked these streets My dreams were riding tall Tonight I would be thankful, lord, for any dream at all
I said my prayers and went to bed That's the last they saw of me..
When I awoke, the dire wolf Six hundred pounds of sin Was grinnin' at my window All I said was come on in
I asked him for mercy He gave me a gun
Well, you know, son, you just can't figure First thing you know you're gonna pull that trigger
I shot my dog cause he growled at you My dog he turned to me and he said
Cats on the bandstand Cats
Catch the Detroit Lightning out of Santa Fe The Great Northern out of Cheyenne >From sea to shining sea
Like a steam locomotive Rolling down the track
(Terrapin) I can't figure out (Terrapin) If it's the end or beginning
(Terrapin) But the train's put its brakes on (Terrapin) And the whistle is screaming
Bound to cover just a little more ground!
Hunter: I was doing an interview on KQED the other day and a guy came out and said "Hey! I heard on your interview there that you were writing some new tunes with Garcia. I sure hope you guys aren't making a record, because you're already popular enough, and I'm having enough trouble with the new fans." Oooooh. And that was a legitimate point of view he was putting forth, you know. And I said "Hey (laughs), I dunno..."
We've entered the mainstream, the radio consciousness now, and I think in certain respects we're turning into Johnny-come-lately media darlings. The flip side of this coin is, The bigger they are the harder they fall, and I'm worried about next year. I don't like what's happening this way. Unless it is organic, organic in the way that critical mass and nuclear reactions are natural. But--oooh, it's a long way down. I mean, we're going up in a balloon ride right now. And the atmosphere only supports a balloon weight up so far. This is really problematic.
Gans: Why do you suppose it happened?
Hunter: I think "Touch of Grey" was a hell of a hot little tune. I think it was very, very well recorded, and released well, followed up with a hell of a video. I think we generally got ourselves a hit, and a hit does what a hit's supposed to do. Propels a band to the top. I think it's as simple as that--we got a hit record.
Gans: What influence does that have on the next record? On how it's done and what they want to do with it?
Hunter: All right. Well, it was successful enough as a recording venture. Everybody in the band likes this record. Nobody faults the recording. The Grateful Dead for the first time did what they should have done all along, got themselves on a stage as though they were playing for an audience, and played live. Without an audience. The tape machine was the audience, and it's a live record. Took it in the studio, processed it a bit and neated up the vocals, but the sound is live because it is live. We did what we should have done. You can't get this with people yowling and carrying on and pressures of performance. You're going to get adifferent thing. This is an ideal way to record, you know, with real cleanliness and separation. And yet live playing.
Gans: Is it safe to say that you didn't set out to write a hit record, it just kinda happened?
Hunter: Well, you know, I wrote "Touch of Grey" seven years ago. So I've been performing that for years. Jerry saw the possibilities in it of being more than I was realizing, and reset it and made a monster out of it, I think.
Touch of Grey - Robert Hunter (unreleased 1982 studio recording)
(Hunter)
Gans: So what has it meant to the Grateful Dead, do you suppose? and to you, this kind of success. You say it's problematic...
Hunter: Well, you know, I haven't seen any money from this yet. You know, you see where I'm livin'. I have, however, contracted to buy something a little bit bigger than this crackerbox. I haven't closed on it yet, and the bank is willing to take a gamble that I'll be makin' some bucks this year. And so I get a house big enough to raise this new kid. But I have not actually laid hands on much in the way of money fromthis yet. I don't know when it comes or how it comes, but anyway, whatever comes, I've got it spent already (laughs). So once again, I'm going to be--actually, for the first time gonna be able to really make this move from one economic level to another. But I'm not gonna see the money. I never do seem to see a whole lot of the money--it kinda... You know, I've been struggling for the last bunch of years. We had a--not had--you know, I drive used cars, stuff like this. All of a sudden, I'm 46 years old, I'll be able to buy a new car and a new house. And I'm real pleased about this. But as far as money goes, there's not a whole
lot more I want. So I'm not really looking, personally, to make the big hits or anything. Because--royalties and stuff over Grateful Dead albums, the way they've got it catalogued now, now that things have moved up a notch, should free me to go ahead and write without financial pressures for a while. That's all I'm praying from it, but then again I bought myself a new house and gave myself a crushing financial pressure. So I don't know. I might have a bigger box to live in. And the same worries, I don't know.
Gans: So what's the problem?
Hunter: About what?
Gans: Well, you mentioned the fact that this big success, this balloon, is problematic. Sounds like...
Hunter: Oh, I see. No, what goes up comes down, and anything that the public suddenly embraces, they let go of that embrace just as soon, that's all. And it's going to be a long way down.
Gans: Well, the only problem with that if you embrace the business of being embraced too much, right?
Hunter: Okay, say you wake up, you wake up every morning, and there's a, you know, a ham sandwich and a chocolate shake beside your bed. And you have your ham sandwich, you have your chocolate shake, you get up and you live your day. You wake up the next day, there's a ham sandwich and a chocolate shake by your bed. And this happens for a year or two. One morning you wake up and there's just a ham sandwich. Hey, where's my
chocolate shake? And then a little while later, you wake up, there's no ham sandwich, there's no chocolate shake. You feel deprived. Maybe I'm afraid that we're going to get the whole stack of ham sandwiches and chocolate shakes and they're going to be taken away from us. And that's true hunger, to wake up in the morning without a ham sandwich and a
chocolate shake beside your bed. Once you're used to it.
Gans: I suppose... I thought you were going to say...
Hunter: Do you think we're above being spoiled? (laughs)
Gans: No, no, no. I don't think very many people in this world are.
Hunter: You know. Do you think we're corrupt?
Gans: That is the question. But I thought you were going to say you wake up with a ham sandwich and a chocolate shake every day, and suddenly you wake up with a ham sandwich, a chocolate shake, and a girl, and God knows what else, you know.
Hunter: Or you wake up with a ham sandwich, a chocolate shake, and a tapeworm. And as long as the ham sandwich and the chocolate shake and the tapeworm are all there at the same time, fine. But you've got the tapeworm, no chocolate shake, no ham sandwich, then you're in real trouble, David.!
St. Stephen-> San Francisco 10/68? (Hunter-Garcia-Lesh)
The Eleven
Note: This selection came from a tape that was broadcast on KSAN in 1976 as part of a very long special on the tenth anniversary of the "Summer of Love." The "Dark Star" that precedes this portion of the tape begins with Weir announcing ,"This is a foxtrot and it's also a ladies' choice," so if you've heard that tape you've heard this one. -- D.G.
Part 2 27:15
Hunter: Did I tell you this story ever? When I wasn't supposed to play anything--I was going around promoting the record, around the country, just for the heck of it. I said, I'll do it, I'd like to go out on the road and this'd be fun to do. Give me the record, I'll go on out and promote it. Did a lot of radio interviews, but they said, fine, but don't play the record!
Gans: Which record?
Hunter: Workingman's Dead. And I said oh, okay. Anyway, I got into BCN, and I was doing an interview right around 10 or 11 o'clock at night, or around midnight. And they twisted my arm, and I said okay, I'll let you play one tune. The first notes of "Uncle John's Band" began, and lightning struck the station, and we went off the air. So we got back on again, I said, no way. (laughs) So BCN almost got a scoop on "Uncle John's Band."
Ramble On Rose - 3/14/82 UC Davis Rec Hall (Hunter-Garcia)
Gans: Would you like your songs to be performed by other singers? And if so, who?
Hunter: Yes. I'd like "When a Man Loves a Woman" to be performed by Frank Sinatra. And I even asked Annette [Flowers, the GD's publishing person] if she would try and find out who his agent was and get it to him. I don't think she took me seriously. I meant it seriously. I think he could do that song a lot better than I do and I think it's right up his alley. And, I mean, I just think when you're talking top singers, top phrasers, people who can really handle a song, Sinatra's top. He invented a genre. I don't care for much of his material. Other singers than that--I wouldn't mind seeing Barbra Streisand do one of my tunes, and I'd love to hear Nina Hagen do Scarlet Begonias in German...
Cumberland Blues - Cache Valley Drifters, Step Up to Big Pay (Flying Fish 220, 1979) (Garcia-Hunter-Lesh)
Gans: I've always wondered why more people don't do your tunes.
Hunter: They're perceived as being Grateful Dead personal property. Or have been. Years ago I answered that question satisfactorily to myself. I said, "Well, why don't people do Grateful Dead tunes?" and I said, "Well, why don't they do Jefferson Airplane tunes? Oh, well, I know why they don't do Jefferson Airplane tunes: they're so tied in with that band and its image, it wouldn't occur to anyone to do it." And then I answered my question about the Grateful Dead songs, by answering that question. I think it will begin happening now, that we're not perceived as sociologically threatening. And we aren't, by the very fact that we're being played on AM radio now. By that very fact.
[The following letter was published in the February 25th issue of Rolling Stone: "Suggested legal definition of 'obscenity': Actions directed toward the suppression of activities that do not palpably harm others. Suggested definition of 'supreme obscenity': Bending the definition of 'palpable harm to others' in terms of one's own moral or ethical beliefs." It was signed Robert Hunter.]
Hunter: I was just sitting there one day at my word processor, and this definition of obscenity suddenly came into my head and sounded--"You know, this is a good way to look at things," I thought to myself. "I know! I'll write it down and send it to Rolling Stone." I wrote it down. I put it in an envelope, I put a stamp on it, I put it out in my mailbox, and ten minutes later the mailman picked it up. It was gone. Rolling Stone called me at the office, and asked, "Say, is this coming from anywhere? Uh, is this relating to anything?" And I said, "No, no, no, it just occurred to me as a correct thing, so I sent it to you." They said, "Oh, well, thank you very much!" It occurred to me that it was a thought worthy of a large audience, and Rolling Stone has a large audience, and I had a stamp and an envelope, and their address, and I didn't want to think too much more about it.
Gans: Well, it was neat. It was a nice surprise.
Hunter: I like to do things fast, like bam-bam-bam-bam-bam, that one hour later I have something in my past that I didn't have before, such as a very oddball letter to Rolling Stone.
Gans: Have you had any further thoughts about the definition itself?
Hunter: No. No, it seems sufficient. I think you could run a country on that precept.
Program No. 35 Deadhead Hour Week of April 11-17, 1988
Featured: Interview with Robert Hunter
and selections from two new Grateful Dead CDs.
One of the best Grateful Dead records of all time isn't really a Grateful Dead album - it's Jerry Garcia's 1972 solo LP, Garcia, which was out of print for more than a decade but is now available on compact disc from Grateful Dead Merchandising. Every song on this record is a classic - Deal, Sugaree, Bird Song, Loser, The Wheel, and To Lay Me Down, which the Dead reintroduced to their concert repertoire on the tour that's just ending -
and there's some classic stuff on there that you couldn't exactly call a song.
Part 1 30:34
Playing in the Band-> 2/26/77 Swing Auditorium, San Bernardino
The Wheel->
Playing in the Band
Gans: How many of your songs do you write for you, and how many for Jerry, or do you just write and divvy them up later?
Hunter: I've written 83 specifically for Jerry, and about 192 specifically for myself, of which I have recorded some 47.
Gans: Are you making up those numbers?
Hunter: Sir?
Gans: Are you making up those numbers?
Hunter: Are you calling me a liar?
Bird Song - Jerry Garcia, Garcia (GDCD4003, originally released 1972)
Hunter: "Casey Jones"-- which album was that on? Is that on Workingman's Dead ? Then I think it was several years later that I went into a station, I think it might have been WBCN, and he took out the record and showed me "Casey Jones," and there was a nail scratch across "Casey Jones." And he said, "the program director did this. He said we are not to play this, because the word 'cocaine' is used in it, and word's coming from the FCC that if any of this kind of stuff is going on, we stand in danger of losing our licenses." I went, "Oops, that 's where my hits go. . ."
Part 2 28:21
To Lay Me Down - Garcia
Hunter: Yes, it is absurd, the feeling that combinations of letters can be taboo. There are combinations of words - such as, you know, "Down with the republic!" - yelled under inciting conditions with Molotov cocktails, which could be, yes, I suppose, could be considered... But individual words, no. I'm intending to use one in a song simply to make my statement about this. One of the songs I've been working with Jerry - not to be shocking or any other reason than Thou Shalt Not Deny Us The Right To Use Words Just Because Children Might Hear Them. The fact that children might hear things is the bedrock stand that censors are taking, and you know, that's what censorship is all about: "My children might hear this." Well, go ahead and use these words around your children, then! You use 'em in the army, you use 'em around your workplace, why be hypocrites? Go ahead, lay 'em on your kids. Just request that they keep their language clean around home, but - I always insisted to my son that we don't use these words at school, because you're gonna get in trouble with the teacher. There's nothing wrong in these words themselves. But I don't want you to use them, because I don't want you
to get in the habit of using them. I want you to have control over your language. I said, I know you talk this way around your friends, and I talk that way around my friends too. Home is where we will learn to how speak the kind of English that you can go out and speak in public. On the other hand, other of my friends don't feel this way at all, and they just--they use the same language at home that they would use in talking to me, and I find it refreshing, and I'm not sure that's not the right way, either.
Gans: But you, for example, use the F word in "Wharf Rat," to perfectly marvelous effect, and so far nobody's dropped dead over that...
Hunter: And you know what, that's the first time that the F word actually ever was used on a recording. But - the legend is that the Jefferson Airplane used it in "Up Against the Wall" ["We Can Be Together," on Volunteers] and it's printed in the lyrics, I believe,
but you go ahead and play that record, and see if you can hear that word. You can't hear that word... But they covered for us. The perception was that they had said it, and, although as I said you can't hear it, so we were covered in a way. We could go right ahead
and say it then. And there we go. We did, as I said, the first 16- track record, and we're the first ones to use the F word. (laughs) What a claim to fame!
Mexicali Blues - Bob Weir, Ace (GDCD4004, originally released 1972)
Hunter: The first thought that I'm trying to run down here that just went click in my head is I can't ever recall a time when it hasn't been changing, and changing, and changing. It seems every year we're into some new phase, and it's just another new phase. The phases tend to be bigger and bigger, is all.... What is different about this phase and another phase - I don't think we'll know until this phase is over and we can look back on it and say... You know, there was a phase when you could say that what was happening was that kids were turning on to Quaaludes, and you were starting to get these dumb-outs at the show. There've been various drug phases that have altered the nature of the audience.
There's a growing conservatism in the country, now, and I think one reason that the Deadheads are growing and jumping aboard right now is we look like an alternative to a grave parentalism which is overtaking the nation. We're not parental. The Grateful Dead do not attempt to be parental. We say, "Do what you want to do." We don't take stands for or against drugs. There are individual stands - some people in this band have been through a few things like that, and they're sharing the wisdom of their information that this leads nowhere. Fine. But we're not taking a group stance.
And there's a group of Deadheads who have an orange umbrella, or something off somewhere, and they're the Drug Free Deadheads, and they invite people to come gather around there. I like that. That's nice. I don't think that you need to be stoned out of your mind to enjoy the Grateful Dead experience. If you are stoned out of your
mind, well, then you're experiencing that too in your own way. I'm not - so long as you're not degenerating, ruining your body, you know, ruining your brain and bashing your head against the wall, I don't want to tell people what to do and not to do, personally. I may personally view it with alarm, but it's not my province to tell other people what to do, except by example.... We're trying to be that - nonauthoritarian. We find ourselves in stadium situations where suddenly we're responsible for any pandemonium that may ensue from things not being regulated properly. Therefore we are forced into that position - and not out of choice, out of necessity. And this may ameliorate our stance a little bit. And there'll be a great deal of resentment as it's perceived that this is happening. It's not our intention. But then any parental authority or authoritarian figure can also say, "It wasn't my intention, but you were making a hell of a mess there..." And there's a bit of paradox of what - the size that we've become face to face with the responsibility we have for the safety and well-being of our audiences. There's a bit of a paradox there, and it must be worked out in each individual situation, and the best that can be done is with the least control that's absolutely necessary to control a crowd. And the minimum authority.
Now I think in some stadium situations - we haven't quite understood all this yet, and we've let forces be more authoritarian, the cop in the parking lot business, which are beyond our control. You have to hire police for those situations or you can't play them in the first place. It's a question of are we going to play or not.And if you hire them, they are going to get out of line. Boy, "If you ever go to Houston, you better walk right, you better not gamble, and you better not fight. Sheriff'll arrest you, boys'll take you down, next thing you know, you're Nashville bound." Walk right, kids, and we can keep this thing going a long time.
Cassidy - Ace
(Weir-Barlow)
Hunter: If all the songs seem to somehow or other come to that conclusion, or they're coming from that place, I think it's reasonable to expect that is my philosophy. And the question is, do I live thatphilosophy? And I try to. I try to be a good messenger of what I'm writing, because it's not going to come to me to write. I have to write what I feel, and how I feel about things, no matter how far out the situations that I take, I think you'll always find that they're relating back to a central philosophy which is growing
in me. And as I get more feedback from the people that it affects, I begin to understand that I do have a philosophy. If you'd asked me a couple of years ago, "do you have a philosophy?", I'd just say Live and Let Live. I think it's getting a bit more detailed than that at this point.I am coming from somewhere. I'm a bit of an alarmist - I'm one of the vanguard, of the first to react to a perceived social malaise. I pick up on these things very quickly - it's my talent to see these things and to address them and to generalize them and to get down on it and to write a, hopefully, an amusing song, that may
illustrate something without, maybe, coming right out and saying it. I mean, there are songs that just come right out and say it, like "Loser," or something. Or "Deal," that just come right out with the line, say "this is the way it is." Or "The Wheel." There was a point, I think really high on that Garcia album, where all those songs occur, where the message was being laid out in no uncertain terms. I tend to do that, I think, a wee bit less these days, and go more for the illustration without the proverb.
Program No. 36 Deadhead Hour Week of April 18-24, 1988
Part 1 31:25
Not Fade Away-> 5/9/77 War Memorial Auditorium, Buffalo NY
Comes a Time->
Sugar Magnolia
Part 2 26:41
Sunrise 5/9/77
Estimated Prophet->
The Other One 5/9/77
Judge: Just what is the purpose of your demonstration there?
Perry Mason: To show how that person took advantage of the fingerprints the defendant had left on the turntable arm. It's a simple matter to turn on a switch, then - using either a pencil
or a nail file - to carefully lift the tone arm, lower it, and start the record playing.
The Music Never Stopped Blues for Allah (GDCD4001, 1975)
Program No. 37 Deadhead Hour Week of April 25-May 1, 1988
Live Grateful Dead recorded October 9, 1982 at the Frost Amphitheatre, Palo Alto. Three of these songs were brand new to the Dead's repertoire (having been introduced a month or so earlier), and later ended up on the Dead's 1987 album In the Dark: West LA Fadeaway, Throwing Stones and Touch of Grey. The versions in tonight's show are somewhat different from the ones we're used to hearing. This is a good illustration of how a song develops over the months and years of live performance. There's a whole different verse in West LA Fadeaway, for example, and the phrasing of Jerry Garcia's guitar figure is slightly different.
Part 1 29:34
West LA Fadeaway 10/9/82 Frost Amphitheatre, Stanford (Hunter-Garcia)
They Love Each Other 10/9/82 (Hunter-Garcia)
Throwing Stones-> (Weir-Barlow)
Touch of Grey 10/9/82 (Hunter-Garcia)
Part 2 28:34
Weir: Well, my stuff all works, but Jerry's stuff doesn't all work.
So we're going to fix it. It'll only take a few moments.
Program No. 39 Deadhead Hour Week of May 9-15, 1988
Live Grateful Dead music recorded at San Francisco's famed Winterland arena Saturday, October 19, 1974. This was the fourth of a five-concert series which was filmed for the Grateful Dead Movie. Highlights include a spectacular and surprising second-set jam, Friend of the Devil done the old way, and a very rare Grateful Dead performance of a song by Dolly Parton.
Some of the songs the Dead played on tour with Bob Dylan last year have turned up in the band's repertoire over the last few months. Tonight's show includes Dylan's version of RStuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,S (from Blonde on Blonde), which Bob Weir is now singing in concert.
Part 1 29:10
Tomorrow Is Forever 10/19/74 Winterland (Dolly Parton)
Friend of the Devil 10/19/74 (Hunter-Garcia-Dawson)
Uncle John's Band 10/19/74 (Hunter-Garcia)
Big Railroad Blues 10/19/74 (Noah Lewis)
Big River 10/19/74 (Johnny Cash)
Part 2 29:42
Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again (Bob Dylan) Blonde on Blonde (Columbia C2S 841, May 1966)
Program No. 40 Deadhead Hour Week of May 16-22, 1988
From Grateful Dead ticket manager Steve Marcus' favorite Dead show of all time, Winterland 6/9/77: Help on the Way->Slipknot!->Franklin's Tower
Part 1 21:17
Weir: We beg your patience for one minute, but it seems -- ah, here they are. They're back again. You see, our vocal monitors were gone, but now they're not. Are they still around? Nope, gone away again!
Black Muddy River In the Dark (Hunter-Garcia)
Robert Hunter: It's just a good look into the deep dark well, and the heart resonances in that area. And a statement of individual freedom, that no matter what happens, I have this black muddy river to walk by. I hesitate to define for you - I could talk for hours about what I mean by Black muddy river, and I don't mean a literal river running around. It's a deeply meaningful symbol to me, and I think just a little thought into like archetypal subconscious resonances gives you all you need to know about what we're talking about here. Past that you're setting it in concrete, and just as soon as that's done, that's not what it meant at all.
Black Peter Workingman's Dead (Hunter-Garcia)
Q: As these things become real issues out there, you know, how are we going to survive in a world of cops, civic upheaval, and ticket scalping, and t-shirt piracy, etc., etc.?
Hunter: Walk right and keep your nose clean.
Q: Says who? I mean, in this world, I'm here to tell ya. . .
Hunter: That's the common knowledge. It's been passed down for the last ten thousand years. The solution to everything: Walk right. Keep your nose clean. Don't meddle too much. And when you see something that's yours to be done, and there's nobody else doing it, that's your legitimate territory. Take it. As Woody Guthrie said, "Take it easy, but take it."
Q: Well, what does that say to young people who are not particularly happy with the options laid out in front of them, who find that a Grateful Dead concert is the perfect place to get completely nuts, and maybe even do something dangerous to somebody else, like dose
them? See, that's where freedom and liberty become a conflict. You know, taking liberties.
Hunter: All right. Along with these other things about keeping your nose clean and walking right, there's the age-old wisdom that's passed down through all Deaddom, which is, don't ever drink anything out of a cup that you don't know where it came from at a Grateful Dead concert,
and avoid suspicious white powders. Never take a white powder that you don't know [laughs] the source of. I mean, this is just little bits of common sense.
But as for solving this other problem - oh no, I can't solve this, this is the biggest one - this is our big, big problem now: what to do with the unruly factor now that's causing a large group situation to become aggregated and exhibit mob behavior. I don't know, I don't know that anybody's ever known, short of imposing absolute authoritarian control - and that is, of course, the opposite of what the Grateful Dead stand for.
Will we be forced to become our own opposites? Interesting philosophical question. Perhaps everyone is. Because we're dealing in large amounts of money, profit-making here, crowds, and like that. I mean, if you want to be spared all these hassles, you go out in the
desert and become a saint and really go for the real true values. See what's to be seen. Commune with your spirit and be, become a saint. Fine.
We are in the marketplace. We have to deal with these things. Well, I suppose even the saints have to deal with the paradox, like St. Anthony had to lacerate himself, he was so horny. He had to beat himself all the time. So who knows? Who knows? I think it's the human
condition. I don't think there's an easy way out, and I do not see the millennium and the jubilee right around the corner here on earth. And Grateful Dead have become, by their very size, a microcosmic example of what's happened in the world at large. Some of you are going to get
killed. Some are going to get run over, some of you are going to get your arms broken, and some of you are going to fry your heads out from being dosed, and short of authoritarian control, lack of Grateful Dead, and lack of any freedom-inducing organization, what you gonna do? You're gonna pay your money, you're gonna take your chances. But be aware, you know. Be aware. Don't come to a Grateful Dead concert feeling that you're just going to melt into the mix and providence is all going to take care of you. Like that. You must be a responsible human being. I mean, back we come to this word "responsible," and all of a sudden I sound parental
when I'm saying this.
I don't see any solution. I mean, each individual has to be straight. Perhaps group pressures can be applied. But once that happens, they turn to factionalism and holier-than-thou attitudes. I don't know, it's a murky mess and the bigger we get the murkier the mess is gonna be. But still, a good time can be had. And generally is.
Black Shamrock Robert Hunter, Liberty (Relix RRCD 2029) (Hunter)
Garcia: "We're having a hard time getting Bob's guitar started."
Part 2 35:27
Funiculi Funicula
Weir: Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!
Help on the Way-> 6/9/77 Winterland (Hunter-Garcia)
You Ain't Woman Enough to Take My Man 5/26/73 (Loretta Lynn)
Bertha 5/26/73 (Hunter-Garcia)
Around & Around 5/26/73 (Chuck Berry)
Midnight Moonlight Old and In the Way (Peter Rowan) (Rykodisc RCD 10009, originally on Round Records)
I Know You Rider is a public-domain traditional song that's been around longer than most of us have been alive. This version is by a great acoustic band called the Seldom Scene, from an album
recorded live at the Cellar Door in Washington DC in December 1974.
Midnight Moonlight, written by Peter Rowan, this version from the one and only album by Old and in the Way (with Jerry Garcia on banjo), released in 1975. The Rowan Bros. did a nice version of the song on an Asylum album (whose name I can't recall), and Garcia does the song with his electric band these days.
Promised Land 12/31/87 Oakland Coliseum Arena (Chuck Berry)
Terrapin 12/31/87 (Hunter-Garcia)
New Speedway Boogie Workingman's Dead (Hunter-Garcia)
Part 2 27:38
Pride of Cucamonga Grateful Dead from the Mars Hotel (Lesh-Petersen) (Mobile Fidelity MFCD 830, orig rel on GD Records in 1974)
jam-> 12/31/87
The Other One
The pedal steel guitar on Pride of Cucamonga was not played by Jerry Garcia. Jerry did play pedal steel for a while, but he had stopped by the time of the Mars Hotel sessions. The part was played by John McFee, a multi-instrumentalist who started out with the Marin County band Clover, played with the Doobie Brothers for a few years, and now plays guitar, fiddle and pedal steel with the band Southern Pacific.
Weir: "And in order to celebrate the event, what we're going to do is, we're going to try to answer that musical question, 'What would happen if the music ever starts?'"
The Music Never Stopped 6/14/76 Beacon Theatre, New York (Weir-Barlow)
The Wheel 6/14/76 (Hunter-Garcia-Kreutzmann)
Lazy Lightnin'-> 6/14/76
Supplication
It Hurts Me Too Europe '72 (Elmore James, Marshall Sehorn)
Might As Well 6/14/76 (Hunter-Garcia)
Part 2 24:58
Silvio - Bob Dylan, Down in the Groove (Hunter-Dylan) (Columbia)
Lesh: Excuse me, but we're a having little ringing here at one thousand cycles. One thousand cycles, ladies and gentlemen. Let's hear it for one thousand cycles. A very important component of
the frequency band.
Weir: The world would be a sadder place without.
Dancin' in the Streets-> 6/14/76 (Stevenson-Gaye-Hunter)
There was some delay in getting the show started at Red Rock on September 7, 1985. The band filled the time with "The Logger Song," a strange little number that turns up every few year (usually when there's time to kill on stage) (I suspect it originated with the Oregon branch of the Grateful Dead family), followed by a smart rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner featuring kazoos, whistles, etc.
Shakedown Street, Crazy Fingers and Samson & Delilah were the first three songs of the second set; One More Saturday Night ended the first set, and the encore was Johnny B. Goode followed immediately by It's All Over Now, Baby Blue.
Program No. 45 Deadhead Hour Week of June 20-26, 1988
Part 1 26:09
Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
3/17/88 Henry J. Kaiser Conv. Ctr, Oakland (Bob Dylan)
"Cool it" with Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir
Estimated Prophet 3/17/88 Henry J. Kaiser Conv. Ctr, Oakland (Weir-Barlow)
Part 2 23:09
jam-> 3/17/88 Henry J. Kaiser Conv. Ctr, Oakland
Goin' down the Road Feelin' Bad-> (trad)
I Need a Miracle-> (Weir-Barlow)
Dear Mr. Fantasy/Hey Jude (Winwood-Capaldi-Wood/Lennon-McCartney)
We Deadheads are a pretty tolerant bunch, and with a few notable exceptions we aren't the kind of people who enjoy telling other people what to do. And I gotta tell you, Jerry Garcia is the LAST
guy who's going to volunteer for laying-down-the-law duty. So if Jerry is talking to you about this big ugly footprint being left behind by the Deadhead hordes lately, you know our scene is in
real jeopardy.
Jerry: We want to be able to come back again to these communities year after year. You're the people who are making it possible for us to do it in the first place; you also have it in your power to make it Impossible to do it. The way to help us keep on doing it is for everybody to cool it, be careful, watch your stuff. There's places to recycle trash. Pick up after yourselves. Watch your behavior. You know - be careful. Use your smarts.
Bob: We travel around a lot. We go to a lot of different communities. And the way we manage to do it without getting tossed out of these communities and never welcomed back is, we don't get in their faces. And you have got to sorta learn from that and not get in their faces either. You've got to recycle your trash so that we don't leave a big mess wherever we go. You've got to be careful what you do with drugs, because they don't want to see it.
Jerry: Don't be uncool. Be careful. Keep your eyes and ears open, that's all. Watch out for who's around you. You never know when somebody's watchin' you. If you're gonna smoke Js, or drink, ordo any of that stuff, be careful about it. Keep it contained. Don't get out of control. If you don't start anything, chances are no trouble will find you. But the trouble that finds you finds us,and also affects all Deadheads. We're at that place now where we're having to cope with the thing of being too successful. There's lots of people that want to come and see the Grateful Dead, and we want to be able to keep on playing, and we want to have the audience that we have, and we want to have everybody stay happy. That includes the local people in the communities we play in, because they're the ones that let us in in the first place. All this stuff fits together, and you can help by being conscious of these things. If you want to know more about it, there'll be places to find out information at the shows. If you really don't know anything at all, just ask an older Deadhead, or a more experienced Deadhead.
Bob: Remember, we're all visitors. And they can kick us out any ol' time.
Jerry: Right. And will. And do.
Bob: We don't have to burn every single bridge we cross.
Jerry: Right.
Bob: Be polite. Be nice.
Jerry: Behave yourselves, for God's sakes!
This isn't just about the people who show up without tickets. There are people following the Dead tour who aren't observing the basic common-sense rules of public behavior. Fun is fun, but there is also the law, your health, and the health of the greater community to consider.
If you're NOT one of the people causing the problem, you can still help by setting a conspicuous example of civilized conduct, at the very least, and if you see somebody doing something that reflects
badly on the rest of us, try and see if you can get 'em to cool it. Believe it or not, there are people in this world who don't give much thought to the consequences of their actions. And when those consequences affect all of us, we have to speak up. There's no excuse for leaving your garbage for others to clean up.
A lot of that pesky garbage at Dead shows consists of recyclable materials, and a group of Deadheads have gotten together with the band to do something about it. Here are Phil Ceretto and Pam Gerwe
to talk about the "Cosmic Recyclers":
Phil: Anybody who is familiar with the Grateful Dead shows knows that in the past couple of years the Dead have become very, very popular, and so there's a lot more people out to see them than evenjust five years ago. And along with more people comes more trash. Places like Alpine Valley, Laguna Seca, Saratoga... these places are getting pretty trashed. Myself and some friends... decided to do a little something about that, and that's what the Cosmic Recyclers are.
Pam: The idea started last year at Alpine Valley. We were just sittin' around looking at all the cans and bottles and we decided to do something about it. We got started on the Spring tour, and passed out some leaflets and passed out some bags and started getting the message out, and now we're ready to do all glass and all aluminum at Alpine.
Phil: We are Deadheads, and we want the Deadheads to participate in this. We're going to have a kitchen there that's going to be serving meals to anybody who wants to give us a hand collecting the cans. If you want to take a ride on one of our trucks and help us collect cans, we'll give you a meal. It's good for people on the tour, to make the shows a cleaner place to be - and more of a cooperative thing than a business.
Pam: It's a real low-budget operation. We got a school bus - we ended up bartering for half of it. We shoveled sheep shit out of a barn. It's waste management all the way. And we're going to be selling t-shirts, so that's another thing people can do is buy our t-shirts. And they glow in the dark!
Phil: I guess this is part of adapting to the new way of doing things. If we can make some of these young folks coming into the shows a little bit more aware of the spirit that got this whole thing started. Let's get that spirit back a little bit. Let's have some of this cooperative spirit.
Q: It seems like a pretty essential thing if we're going to be allowed to keep coming back to these places.
Phil: People want the Dead there. They bring in a lot of money, and it's a lot of fun, but if they look around their city and the place is a dump afterwards, it makes them think twice. Wherever the shows are, keep your eye open for us, or just remember: instead of throwing it on the ground, throw it in a trash can.
Program No. 46 Deadhead Hour Week of June 27-July 3, 1988
Part 1 26:50
On the Road Again -> 10/9/82 Frost Amphitheatre, Stanford CA (Traditional)
Beat It On Down the Line (Jesse Fuller)
Bird Song 5/13/83 Greek Theatre, UC Berkeley (Hunter-Garcia)
Feel Like a Stranger 7/19/87 Autzen Stadium, Eugene OR (Weir-Barlow)
Part 2 26:31
Bill Graham: We thank you for waiting. This is a privilege for us. From Nigeria, the man who's kept alive the art of percussion, and the genius through the years... Would you welcome, please, Baba Olatunji and his Drums of Passion.
Akiwowo (Chant to the Trainman) (Olatunji)
Olatunji and his Drums of Passion (VAI jazz video collection 69046)
Bertha 2/24/71 Capitol Theatre, Portchester NY (Hunter-Garcia)
Big River High Country (Raccoon/WB WS 1937, 1971) (Johnny Cash)
Just Like Tom Thumb'sBlues 11/8/87 Henry J. Kaiser Conv Ctr (Bob Dylan)
Passenger 4/15/78 Wm&Mary College, Williamsburg VA (Lesh-Monk)
NOTES
Garcia's guitar is mixed a little low on Bird Song and throughout the 5/13/83 tape. He must have been pretty loud on stage, because there isn't much of him in the PA mix.
Akiwowo (Chant to the Trainman) "is the song about the legendary conductor when railroad trains were first introduced in Nigeria over five decades ago.... Millions still remember Akiwowo, who always made
sure that his passengers, mostly men and women returning from their farms with their products balanced on their heads, never missed the train, as well as his warm welcome, broad smile and humor. Akiwowo,
now in his eighties, lives happily in the village of Pa-Pa Lanto..." - Babatunde Olatunji, from the liner notes of Dance to the Beat of My Drum (Blue Heron BLU-706-1, 1986). This version was taken from a concert video recorded December 31, 1985 at the Oakland Coliseum, produced by Mickey Hart - who also introduces the program - and directed by Len Dell'Amico, the man behind the controls for So Far and other recent Grateful Dead video. (NOTE: on the record jacket, the two Os have dots underneath them.)
Big River was introduced into the Grateful Dead concert repertoire on New Year's Eve '71. This version is by the San Francisco bluegrass band High Country, from their 1971 debut album. Robert Hunter told me he wrote "It Must Have Been the Roses" for High Country. The band never did play the song, according to mandolinist Butch Waller.
Ornette Coleman and Prime Time (with Jerry Garcia),
Part 2 38:04
Dark Star -> 3/1/69 Fillmore West (Grateful Dead)
St. Stephen -> (Hunter-Garcia-Lesh)
The Eleven -> (Hunter-Lesh)
Gary Lambert, who helped connect Ornette Coleman and Jerry Garcia:
Ornette Coleman is ... one of the most influential and innovative musicians, composers and performers of his generation... In the late 1950s he emerged as one of the leaders of what was called the Free Jazz movement - he, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and a few others. At that time, jazz was very cool and introverted and minimalist - and along came these revolutionaries who just tore up the rules of harmony and melody and rhythm and put them in a different order - not out of anarchy, but out of a desire to express themselves in a completely different way. And Ornette may have been the foremost in forging a new language in jazz.
I had it in my head that if Ornette Coleman ever came to a Grateful Dead concert, something interesting would happen. Through his son Denardo, who is his drummer and manager, I invited them to come to Madison Square Garden for the last night of the Dead's September 1987 run. And Ornette - through the show he just sort of smiled his beautiful, beatific, inscrutable smile and took it all in... Interestingly, he seemed to like a lot of the very pretty, ballad-like music the Dead play. Brokedown Palace really evoked a strong response from him - he really liked the gospel influence in the music. And he loved the way the band could segue from song to song, seemingly through telepathy. He could relate to that very strongly - he said that's what you get from playing together for so long.
About four weeks later Denardo called me and asked if there was any chance that Jerry might want to play on Ornette's next album... In January Jerry flew to New York - for, I think, no more than a day and a half - and went into the studio with Ornette and recorded.
The rest of the album was essentially recorded. Ornette may have rerecorded some saxophone tracks with Jerry - I'm not sure about that - but I know they did do some playing together in the studio. But it was essentially Jerry dropping in his guitar parts wherever he could.
The music [Ornette] plays is something he calls "Harmolodic." That's his own word. It's a system by which the elements of harmony, melody and rhythm are given much more equal prominence in the music. There's very little "backup" musicianship. In fact, a lot of the time Ornette, on the saxophone - which is nominally the lead instrument - is playing the most rhythmically constant stuff in the group, and the bass player may be playing countermelodies, the drummer may be playing what a bass player might normally play... The Grateful Dead have acknowledged that they've been tremendously influenced by the free jazz players.
JERRY GARCIA, interviewed by Jon Sievert for Guitar Player (July '88 issue):
With Ornette and I, I think it has to do more with the sound - less with the intellectual background, y'know, because he and I are about
as different as - in terms of our backgrounds. But there's a complementary quality there. When I hear his playing I hear something that I always wish would be in my playing. There's a kind of a joy and a beauty there, and it sounds right. And even when he does something
outside, it STILL sounds right. His playing has a kind of intelligence, and a kind of sensitivity, and a kind of beauty that I always hope my playing has. But I'm not the one to judge whether it has it or not.
When we've spoken together, in the communicating we've done, his indication about me is that he likes the sound that I get. From my point of view, I can relate to what he's playing, and the music itself - the structure of the music, based on the sound of it - and I play it
just like I play anything else I play: [laughing]I hope it works! I'll do what I can to make it work, and when it seems to be working pretty good then I think I'm in the neighborhood. But the hardest thing in the world for me to do is to judge my own playing. Luckily, when I'm working for someone like Ornette Coleman I don't have to worry about who's judging. It's covered. He's going to make me sound good, no matter what... It's one of those things where I feel protected in a situation. And Ornette is very giving. I don't know when I've worked for a guy that was more...inspirational. I learned so much, and he was so graceful about letting me learn it. A lot of older musicians sometimes, after having gone through years of being burned and bad scenes, y'know, I mean you can get bitter. And some of those guys are bitter. But Ornette doesn't seem to have a bitter bone in his body. He's just lovely... And working with him was a tremendous honor. That's the way I feel about it.
I did three tunes on his album, and what can I say about the tunes? I mean, like I say, his playing is just gorgeous. For me it was the thing of finding a place in there that I felt I could say something rhythmically and tonally. And the places where I would have trouble I'd just say "Hey, Ornette, I'm havin' trouble with this. Can you steer me through this, or give me some sense of what you..." But he would never say "do this," Rdo that," he would say, "Here's a possibility." "Here's something you could do." "Here's another thing you could do" - half a dozen possible things - and then I would play and he'd say "That's neat," yUknow. It was all on the positive side.
Program No. 48 Deadhead Hour Week of July 11-17, 1988
Part 1 21:25
Bertha-> 4/18/82 Hartford Civic Center
Promised Land
Ramble On Rose 4/18/82
New New Minglewood Blues Grateful Dead (Warner Bros. 1689, 1966)
Part 2 35:12
"San Francisco in ruins"-> 4/18/82
The Other One->
Black Peter->
Sugar Magnolia->
Playing in the Band (reprise)->
Sunshine Daydream
April 18 is the anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, and during the second set jam at the Civic Center in Hartford, Phil Lesh stepped up to the microphone and told a tale of "The Barbary
Coast, 1906... the wickedest place in the world..."
Oh Boy 5/22/81 Warfield Theatre, SF (West-Tilghman-Petty)
(Acoustic, with John Kahn replacing Phil Lesh on bass)
Part 2 35:54
Not Fade Away -> 4/5/71 Manhattan Center, New York (Hardin-Petty)
Going down the Road Feelin Bad -> (Trad)
Turn On Your Love Light (Scott-Malone)
This version of Not Fade Away -> Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad is the
one the band used on the "Skull and Roses album" - but they didn't use Turn
on Your Love Light because that song had already appeared on Live Dead.
BEN & JERRY & JERRY talk about Cherry Garcia ice cream
Q: Cherry Garcia ice cream. You like the idea?
Garcia: I'm not that crazy about chocolate chunks in ice cream, you know what I mean? But the cherry is good. It is, it's good! The guys sent me a letter explaining that they were gonna put out an ice cream called Cherry Garcia. They sent me a bunch of like little coupons so I can buy ten million gallons of ice cream for nothin', y'know? The kids loved that! And we tried the ice cream and it was pretty good!
Q: You mean they didn't consult you and ask you like what flavor you'd like?
Garcia: But they did ask me to write something. I was going to send them like a ten-page, single spaced letter, y'know, describing... "Maybe a little smaller... a little less cherry flavor, and possibly a little more sugar, and..." (laughter)
Q: All right, and here they are live in our studio, Ben and Jerry. You just handed me a xerox here; why don't I just read this, and then you can explain to me how it went from there. This was an anonymous postcard, and it said: "Dear Jerry and Ben: We, some avid Ben & Jerry fans in Portland, Maine, and similarly avid Deadheads are petitioning you to name a flavor Cherry Garcia. Sweet cream with chopped cherries.You know it will sell because Dead paraphernalia always sells! We are talking good business sense here, plus it will be a real hoot for the fans! Think about it. We did! Love your stuff." That was dated July 1980 - what, 6? 1979?
Ben: 1984.
Q: Wow, so it took you a couple of years to get around to it.
Ben: We wanted to come up with just the right combination, you know what I mean?...We didn't want to come out with just another cherry vanilla, you know - we didn't think that was befitting of the name. Or Ben & Jerry's. We felt like we had to come up with something kind of unusual.
Q: But you didn't discuss it with Garcia really before hand? At the Carnegie Deli when they name a sandwich after somebody, don't they say "Rodney, what do you want on your sandwich?"
Ben: You know, I was wondering about that actually after we came out with the flavor, whether the Carnegie Deli actually consults with the person. I guess I always assumed that at the Carnegie Deli, that was what the guy was ordering anyhow.
Ben: Well, you know, once you decide you want a cherry flavor, you gotta find the exact right cherry. So you call up all your cherry suppliers and you say, "Send me the best cherries you got." And then you go through each one and you test it out: you mix it up in some ice cream; you see if it has the right flavor. Some didn't have the right flavor; some were not firm enough. We wanted a kind of a crisp cherry that maintained its identity, as they say in ice cream talk, when it was mixed into the ice cream. And of course, you know the biggest question, the thing that kept us from making it for so long, was trying to figure out what to do, outside of just a regular old cherry vanilla. So it was those chocolate flakes that really did it for us... The chocolate was kind of difficult. You know, you want to find chocolate that's kind of soft in ice cream. Most chocolate gets kind of hard. So we formulated a special chocolate. The combination of this big chocolate chunk with the cherries, you know, kind of overpowered the cherries. So we started looking for a different size chunk, and we were actually looking for a different consistency. And I would say the dead end we went down was that we tried for chunks of different consistency and we ended up going back to the same formula, but we made it a flake instead of a chunk.
Jerry: It's funny to hear Ben talk so much about making ice cream, because mostly what he does is eats it! He thinks about it some, but he mostly eats.
Q: Do you find that as your business grows, there are certain things that you delegate and certain things that you won't delegate? Like for example, tasting ice cream?
Ben: Yeah, I would say that you delegate everything except tasting it.
Jerry: Yeah, Ben just called in this morning back to Vermont, and said he'd eaten a little ice cream, and was just checking up on it, seeing everything was okay.
Q: Do you pick up random samples in the Safeway store?
Ben: I came across a pint of Cherry Garcia that didn't have quite enough cherries. I called 'em up and told 'em to turn up the machine. (laughter)
Q: Is there a batch number we can broadcast tonight in case people want to ship some back?
Ben: Well, what happened is when the cherries started going through the machine that sticks them in, you know we started off with cherry halves, and the machine was starting to break them up a little too much so that we weren't ending up with cherry halves in the ice cream.
Q: You mean you don't have Deadheads working on an assembly line hand- slicing cherries and putting them in? (laughter) ... C'mon! We got a community to support here!
Ben: It's an interesting idea, I never thought of that. You think we could hire a contingent of Deadheads to come over to our plant and slice them up?
Q: It depends on how big your parking lot is. (laughter)
Ben: I think that's a great idea! The concept that .... all of the ingredients for Cherry Garcia should be produced by Deadheads, and this could...
Q: So any Deadhead cherry ranchers out there should get in touch!
Ben: Absolutely! The cherry ranchers or cherry pitters, cherry slicers... and then of course the chunk choppers, the people who chop up the chocolate chunks, we would need that too.
Q: You know, you think this is funny. You will be getting calls, requests for job applications, from this very broadcast.
Ben: I think it'd be great!
Ben: People came up with several ideas for celebrity flavors after we came out with Cherry Garcia, but I don't think we have the intention of pushing it, you know? I think once is nice. I think it's for a great band. You know, people came up with an idea like The Almond Brothers. I don't see any more celebrity flavors coming up on the horizon.
Q: You now have a factory up there?
Ben: We do. It's open for tours. It's in a really nice spot, it's on a hill overlooking some mountains. There's a slide show at the beginning and you can go through and see exactly how we make it. You can see us chopping up the Heath Bars....
Jerry: And then there's free samples for everyone on the tour too. That's why I usually go through it!
Program No. 55 Deadhead Hour Week of Aug 29-Sep 4, 1988
Live Grateful Dead music recorded at the Oakland Auditorium (now known as the Henry J Kaiser Convention Center) December 28 1979. Brent Mydland had been playing keyboards and singing with the band eight months and was working in nicely.
