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[\/et_pb_code][et_pb_text module_class=”article-title” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” header_font=”||||||||” header_text_align=”center” header_text_color=”#111111″ header_font_size=”68px” custom_margin=”40px||||false|false” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n
[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”intro-text” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_orientation=”center” custom_padding=”||0px|||” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n
Sixty years ago, the Grateful Dead<\/strong> embarked on a mission that would freak out label bosses, exasperate producers, and turn on millions to the infinite possibilities of improvised psychedelic rock. David Fricke<\/strong> heads back to 1960s San Francisco, and uncovers the method and madness behind the band\u2019s wildest musical phase. \u201cThe Grateful Dead is an anarchy,\u201d their accomplices reveal. \u201cAnd that was good and bad.\u201d<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”credit-names” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font_size=”14px” text_orientation=”center” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n Words: David Fricke<\/strong><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2025\/08\/HG_Dead_Driving_That_Train-EDIT-sepia-2.jpg” title_text=”HG_Dead_Driving_That_Train-EDIT-sepia 2″ _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text module_class=”image-gallery-caption” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font=”|300|||||||” text_font_size=”16px” text_line_height=”1.2em” custom_margin=”-10px||||false|false” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n Freedom riders: the Grateful Dead get ready to steam out of San Francisco, September 1966 (from left) Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Ron \u2018Pigpen\u2019 McKernan, Bill Kreutzmann, Jerry Garcia.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”text-with-dropcap” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n THE LETTER WAS DATED\u00a0December 27, 1967, on the official stationery of Warner Bros Records president Joe Smith, addressed to Danny Rifkin, co-manager of the label\u2019s biggest investment in the San Francisco scene \u2013 the Grateful Dead. Smith was not happy.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”text-with-dropcap” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n \u201cLack of preparation, direction and cooperation from the very beginning have made this album the most unreasonable project with which we have ever involved ourselves,\u201d Smith wrote of the chaos around the Dead\u2019s second LP, less than half-done after two months at four studios in Los Angeles and New York. Producer Dave Hassinger \u2013 who\u2019d engineered Top 5 albums by The Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane \u2013 had quit, fed up with the Dead\u2019s combative manner. \u201cNobody in your organisation has enough influence over Phil Lesh to evoke anything resembling normal behaviour,\u201d Smith complained to Rifkin, referring to the Dead\u2019s cerebral, iron-willed bassist \u2013 half of the turmoil\u2019s leading wedge with guitarist Jerry Garcia.<\/p>\n It was an inevitable clash of wills in a business overturned by The Beatles\u2019 lavish milestone, Sgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Dead\u2019s deal with Warner Bros, signed in autumn 1966, ensured Garcia, Lesh, guitarist Bob Weir, organist Ron \u2018Pigpen\u2019 McKernan and drummer Bill Kreutzmann full artistic control and unlimited studio time.<\/p>\n Hassinger, hired for their debut album, ignored that, producing The Grateful Dead in four days. Nervous and speeding on Dexamyl, a diet medication, the Bay Area\u2019s hottest improvising dance band zipped through a typical setlist of folk and blues covers in brittle, mostly three-minute blasts.<\/p>\n Aside from a 1965 demo session as the Emergency Crew and a \u201966 single for an obscure local imprint, \u201cwe had no real record consciousness,\u201d Garcia admitted to Rolling Stone in 1972. The Grateful Dead, issued in March, 1967, \u201cwas simply what we were doing on-stage,\u201d played \u201cway too fast\u2026 It was weird, and we realised it.\u201d<\/p>\n The band\u2019s original concept, Garcia confessed in another interview, was \u201cunreasonable\u2026 one LP, two sides, one song\u201d \u2013 closer to the LSD-assisted infinity the Dead sought in performance, pursuing collective transcendence in the R&B and Delta fundamentals of Wilson Pickett\u2019s In The Midnight Hour and the Cannon\u2019s Jug Stompers\u2019 Viola Lee Blues. \u201cIt was a combination of mistake, fate and faith,\u201d Weir said, looking back in 2009. \u201cWe learned to trust ourselves and each other,\u201d while serving the audience. \u201cOur job was to find the beat and get people dancing.\u201d<\/p>\n The second album would go, as Garcia put it, \u201cthat whole other way\u201d. In September 1967, as recording commenced in LA, the guitarist confided his plan for the Dead\u2019s enduring portrait of the ballroom experience in San Francisco\u2019s brief season of acid, licence and community \u2013 1968\u2019s Anthem Of The Sun. \u201cWe\u2019re thinking of doing parts of the next album live,\u201d he told jazz critic Frank Kofsky. \u201cWe\u2019re also gonna try doing stuff with combining live and studio.\u201d The band had \u201csome nice, heavy material and good ideas\u201d.<\/p>\n This time, Garcia warned, \u201cWe\u2019re gonna go in and fuck around.\u201d<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2025\/08\/GettyImages-75958851.jpg” title_text=”Photo of Grateful Dead & Warlocks” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text module_class=”image-gallery-caption” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font=”|300|||||||” text_font_size=”16px” text_line_height=”1.2em” custom_margin=”-10px||||false|false” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n Wizard gear: The Warlocks,(from left) Lesh, Weir, Kreutzmann, Garcia, McKernan, 1965<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”text-with-dropcap” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n THAT\u2019s all they did at first, accomplishing \u201cabsolutely nothing\u201d in LA, Garcia said, then driving Hassinger around the bend in New York. \u201cWe were being so weird,\u201d Garcia noted generously. The producer \u201cwas only human after all\u201d.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n The Dead were now a fiercely polyrhythmic force, adding a second drummer, Brooklyn-born Mickey Hart, after he met Kreutzmann at a Count Basie show, and the two locked like brothers during a Dead gig in late September 1967. This was a newly assertive band of composers too, recording entirely original material for Anthem even as it evolved in shape and detail on-stage. That\u2019s It For The Other One was a wildly swerving multi-part suite with a churning, staccato centre inspired by The Yardbirds\u2019 Little Games.<\/p>\n Garcia described New Potato Caboose to journalist Ralph J Gleason as \u201ca very long thing\u201d without \u201cverse-chorus form\u201d but plenty of \u201cfast, difficult transitions\u201d.<\/p>\n Garcia persuaded Robert Hunter, a poet friend from their teenage years in Palo Alto, to contribute lyrics. In the early 1960s, the two played folk and bluegrass in coffeehouse combos, and Hunter\u2019s reports from his 1962 participation in an LSD-research programme at Stanford University inspired his friend to go tripping. Fittingly, Dark Star, Hunter\u2019s first, crucial submission to the Dead, was a compact rapture in luxuriant, galactic metaphor.<\/p>\n Recorded as a single in New York, it immediately took on light-year dimension in live improvisations.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we were up to in Dark Star was the grit,\u201d Weir claimed in 2005. \u201cIt had contour every night. We\u2019d try to get to the same realms within the tune. But it was also different every night when we got there.\u201d In 2014, Lesh likened the Dead in free flight to John Coltrane\u2019s mid-\u201960s quartet \u201cwhere they would play out on those modes, one root. But there is so much in there.\u201d<\/p>\n A classically trained trumpeter who studied modern composition at Mills College in Oakland, Lesh introduced another key, disruptive element: pianist Tom Constanten, his roommate at Mills. Serving in the US Air Force, stationed in Las Vegas, Constanten took leave to join the Anthem bedlam as \u201can avant-garde handyman\u201d, he says today. Constanten believes his jolts of surrealism \u2013 prepared piano, electronic tape manipulation \u2013 were \u201cthe beginning of the end\u201d for Hassinger. \u201cI\u2019m proud to have contributed to that.\u201d<\/p>\n The tipping point came in New York over Weir\u2019s request for \u201cthick air\u201d in Born Cross-Eyed, a two-minute uproar of shifting tempos, shrieks of guitar and Lesh\u2019s mariachi trumpet. What Weir wanted but couldn\u2019t articulate, as he recalled in Playing In The Band, a Dead oral history, \u201cwas a little bit of white noise and compression\u2026 like the buzzing you hear in your ears on a hot, sticky summer day.\u201d Hassinger didn\u2019t hang around to figure it out.<\/p>\n The Dead were now in charge. Overdubbing and mixing went into the spring of 1968 in three more studios as Garcia, Lesh and the band\u2019s live-sound engineer Dan Healy drew passages from three months of concert tapes for Anthem\u2019s brash alchemy of raw craft, stage impulse and musique concr\u00e8te. The Dead found time as well to reply to Joe Smith\u2019s letter, returning it with a message scrawled sideways in big, block letters: \u201cFUCK YOU.\u201d<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2025\/08\/Grateful-Dead-0016_ss_144-copy.jpg” title_text=”Jerry Garcia” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text module_class=”image-gallery-caption” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font=”|300|||||||” text_font_size=”16px” text_line_height=”1.2em” custom_margin=”-10px||||false|false” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n Trip advisor: Garcia in the mood on-stage at the Artists Liberation Front Festival, The Panhandle, San Francisco, October 16, 1966<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”text-with-dropcap” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n PROMOTER BILL GRAHAM, a lifelong friend of the Dead, summed up their music and mission in a sign posted outside San Francisco\u2019s Winterland when the band headlined the venue\u2019s closing night, New Year\u2019s Eve 1978: \u201cThey\u2019re not the best at what they do, they\u2019re the only ones that do what they do.\u201d<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n In their 60th year, the surviving members continue to do whatever that is. After six months working in clubs as The Warlocks, the Grateful Dead played their first official show under that name at Graham\u2019s Fillmore Auditorium on December 10, 1965. The group formally disbanded 30 years later after Garcia\u2019s death of a heart attack, in drug rehab, in August 1995. He was 53.<\/p>\n The music never stopped. Just as the Dead carried on from the 1973 loss of McKernan to alcohol-related liver disease and keyboardist Brent Mydland\u2019s fatal drug overdose in 1990, Weir, Lesh, Hart and Kreutzmann toured and recorded with separate projects and in states of reunion. Prospects for a 60th birthday event ended with Lesh\u2019s passing in October 2024, at 84. But Weir and Hart were in Las Vegas this spring with Dead And Company, and Weir brings his group the Wolf Bros to Britain this summer.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, in the massive box set tradition of 2011\u2019s Europe \u201972: The Complete Recordings (73 CDs) and 2015\u2019s 30 Trips Around The Sun (80 CDs), Enjoying The Ride \u2013 released on May 30 \u2013 is 60 discs of gigs from Deadhead shrines such as the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, Red Rocks in Colorado and the Fillmore West. The last is represented by three nights of psychedelic prime time in June 1969, two weeks before the release of the Dead\u2019s third album, Aoxomoxoa, a pioneering cosmic Americana as confounding in its execution as its palindromic title, coined by cover artist Rick Griffin.<\/p>\n That LP was nearly the end of the ride. Recording took six months and drove the Dead into perilous debt to Warner Bros. And for a couple of weeks in October 1968, Weir and McKernan were fired. \u201cThe Dead tried it without them,\u201d says the band\u2019s archivist and reissue producer David Lemieux. \u201cThere are studio sessions of the Dead playing with another couple of guitar players, trying things out. But it didn\u2019t last long.\u201d<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”pull-quote” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” header_2_text_align=”center” header_2_text_color=”#111111″ header_2_font_size=”46px” header_2_line_height=”1.2em” custom_margin=”||0px||false|false” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”pullquote-name” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” header_2_text_align=”center” header_2_font_size=”46px” header_2_line_height=”1.2em” header_3_text_align=”center” header_3_text_color=”#111111″ header_3_font_size=”38px” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n The Grateful Dead were an improbable alliance from the start, forged in a post-Beat San Francisco of folk purism and impatient electricity, a Greenwich Village West itching to be a California Liverpool. In 1964, Garcia was a discharged Army veteran teaching guitar and banjo at a music store in Palo Alto, despite lacking two joints on his right middle finger (thanks to a woodchopping accident as a child). Weir, a teenage tearaway from a wealthy, adoptive family, and Kreutzmann, drummer in a local R&B band, frequented the store. McKernan was born to rebellion, the son of a white R&B DJ. Self-taught on piano and harmonica, he wore biker gear, as untidy as his Peanuts nickname implied. He worked at the store with Garcia; played with him and Weir in a jug band; and, in late 1964, suggested a rock group was in order.<\/p>\n \u201cWe got our first gigs because we were a blues-oriented Rolling Stones-style band,\u201d Garcia said of the ensuing combo, The Warlocks. And they were something else too. The son of the music store\u2019s owner was on bass when Lesh saw The Warlocks at Magoo\u2019s, a Menlo Park pizza joint in May 1965. \u201cIt was the sheer, raw, exhilarating sound of it,\u201d Lesh told me in 2014, beaming at the memory. \u201cIt was like I could swim in it\u2026 The next thing that happened was Garcia sat me down and said, \u2018Hey, man, I want you to play bass in this band.\u2019\u201d Lesh had never played bass before.<\/p>\n Garcia didn\u2019t care. They were mutually impressed on first meeting in 1962: Lesh by Garcia\u2019s guitar prowess in the folk clubs, Garcia by Lesh\u2019s intellect and musical curiosity. Lesh took to bass like he was doing Bach, precisely articulated notes in endless, stairstep variations on any given melody. As an electric guitarist, Garcia combined bluegrass picking with a skidding tone and sustain that evoked his pedal-steel guitar idol Ralph Mooney from Buck Owens\u2019 Buckaroos. Peter Grant, who played pedal steel on Aoxomoxoa, had banjo lessons from Garcia in 1964. \u201cHe was showing me pedal-steel stuff on banjo,\u201d Grant says. \u201cAnd listen to Beat It On Down The Line [on The Grateful Dead]. The first three-quarters of the solo is like a pedal-steel break.\u201d<\/p>\n Never just a rhythm guitarist, Weir was a moving, elliptical factor \u201cinbetween the lead and the bass\u201d, as he described it, \u201cintuiting where the hell they\u2019re gonna go and being there.\u201d Kreutzmann was \u201cthe rhythm of the earth,\u201d Hart told Rolling Stone in 1969. \u201cBill feeds that to me, I play off it, and he responds. When we\u2019re into it, it\u2019s like a drummer with two minds, eight arms and one soul.\u201d<\/p>\n McKernan was the Dead\u2019s blues conscience, the original frontman on vocals and a \u201csweet, mellow guy,\u201d according to Lesh, \u201cexcept when he was up there, honking into that microphone.\u201d McKernan\u2019s death at 27 profoundly affected Garcia. \u201cJerry was a little intimidated,\u201d Lesh said, \u201cbecause he knew he had to be the guy now. And that was never his trip. He never wanted to be the guy. It devolved upon him.\u201d<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2025\/08\/Grateful-Dead-0016_04433_09-copy.jpg” title_text=”Grateful Dead” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text module_class=”image-gallery-caption” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font=”|300|||||||” text_font_size=”16px” text_line_height=”1.2em” custom_margin=”-10px||||false|false” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n Beat generation: the Dead enjoy a Panhandle hang in 1967 (from left) Mickey Hart, Lesh, Weir, Kreutzmann, McKernan, Garcia.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”text-with-dropcap” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n DAN HEALY\u00a0 was a young engineer at a studio specialising in advertising jingles, living in a houseboat on San Francisco Bay next to Quicksilver Messenger Service, when he saw the Dead for the first time at the Fillmore in the summer of 1966. It was a lucky break for the Dead, on a bill with Quicksilver. Lesh suffered a fried amplifier during the set; Healy got it working. \u201cJohn ratted me out,\u201d Healy says, laughing, of Quicksilver guitarist John Cipollina. \u201cNone of the bands had any money to buy strings or take an amp to a repair shop. I knew how to fix stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n Healy was not impressed by the din coming through the PA. \u201cI was accustomed to the studio, having control over the sound,\u201d he explains. \u201cPigpen\u2019s singing \u2013 I couldn\u2019t understand a word. He was this gurgling noise.\u201d Healy had an epiphany: \u201cRecreate the studio on an audience-wide scale so everybody could hear the music.\u201d That became \u201ca life-long trip\u201d. The Dead had parted with Augustus Owsley Stanley III AKA \u2018Bear\u2019, their first soundman and main source of top-shelf LSD. Healy got on the desk, serving in different eras into the 1990s.<\/p>\n Anthem Of The Sun was his trial by fire. Effectively banned from any sensible recording facility in LA or New York, Healy and the Dead went into Columbus Recorders, a San Francisco space, with the unfinished 8-track master of side one and \u201cno music for side two\u201d, Healy says. \u201cThey didn\u2019t have songs to record.\u201d To make up the difference, Healy took a 4-track stereo recorder on the Dead\u2019s winter \u201968 road trip up to the Pacific Northwest, back home for Valentine\u2019s Day at the Carousel Ballroom and to Lake Tahoe for a stand at King\u2019s Beach Bowl, a bowling alley. From that stash came the guts of a side two blur combining Alligator, a comic blues with Hunter-McKernan lyrics, and the chugging minimalism of Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks), one of the Emergency Crew demos.<\/p>\n The origin of the latter depends on the teller. Weir remembered hearing Them\u2019s 1965 pneumatic-blues single Mystic Eyes on the radio and a group exclamation: \u201cCheck this out! We can do this!\u201d In his 2005 memoir, Lesh described a train ride to gigs in Vancouver in July 1966, he and Kreutzmann \u201centranced by the rhythm of the wheels clickety-clacking over the welds in the rails.\u201d \u201cCaution,\u201d Lesh wrote, was \u201cone of our simplest yet farthest reaching musical explorations\u2026 one chord\u2026 played at a blistering tempo.\u201d<\/p>\n Both accounts, it seems, are true. The demo was a virtual Xerox of Them\u2019s record. But in concert across \u201966 and \u201967, Caution took off like a ride without end, paired with Alligator in a remarkable prophecy of Krautrock pulse and \u201970s Afrobeat with blues-band fury and McKernan\u2019s hobo-shaman singing. The title, from the signs at railroad crossings, was deliberate. \u201cCaution,\u201d Weir noted, \u201cwas anything but what the tune was about.\u201d<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”pull-quote” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” header_2_text_align=”center” header_2_text_color=”#111111″ header_2_font_size=”46px” header_2_line_height=”1.2em” custom_margin=”||0px||false|false” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”pullquote-name” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” header_2_text_align=”center” header_2_font_size=”46px” header_2_line_height=”1.2em” header_3_text_align=”center” header_3_text_color=”#111111″ header_3_font_size=”38px” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n The prevailing mystery of Anthem is what came from where. \u201cThey kept building on this master 8-track recording,\u201d Lemieux says. \u201cThey brought that to different studios and added to it\u201d \u2013 the call-response of fuzz guitar and kazoos in Alligator; the eerie, underwater treatment of Garcia\u2019s vocal in the martyr\u2019s ballad Cryptical Envelopment, rigged by Healy with the Leslie speaker from a Hammond organ. The King\u2019s Beach tapes \u201cwere heavily relied upon\u201d for Alligator and Caution, Lemieux notes. \u201cBut you can hear things from the Carousel\u201d such as McKernan\u2019s exhortation as the drums roll in Alligator: \u201cCome on everybody, get up and dance, it won\u2019t ruin ya!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe were assembling a stained-glass window,\u201d Constanten observes, a dogged, piecemeal approach documented in an extraordinary artefact: Lesh\u2019s hand-written mix breakdown on yellow legal-tablet paper of everything over each LP side on the master tape. There are sketchy references to source material, but one notation for The Other One confirms excerpts from King\u2019s Beach, a show in Eureka, California and two nights in Portland, Oregon spread across the eight tracks at the same moment. For the edits, Healy often held his thumb on the tape machine\u2019s flywheel to get live reels from different gigs in sync, at matching speed.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve always felt it was Phil\u2019s idea,\u201d Healy says of Anthem, \u201cthe concept of something that was completely ethereal, not contrived, like a walk through the forest. And nobody objected to it. You have to remember \u2013 the Grateful Dead is an anarchy. There weren\u2019t any bosses. And that was good and bad.\u201d<\/p>\n Released as a 45 in April, 1968 with a classy picture sleeve, Dark Star went right into a black hole, reportedly selling only 500 copies, although Constanten says he heard it on the radio in Las Vegas while he was finishing his Air Force time. Dark Star was not included on Anthem Of The Sun because, Lesh said in 1984, \u201cIt just moved too fast.\u201d Hunter made a spoken cameo at the end, reciting a passage about spinning stars and \u201cwaxen wind\u201d. And Garcia is heard on banjo, from an old tape of a lesson \u201cI was giving somebody in \u201962 or so,\u201d he told the British journal Swing 51. \u201cI threw it on the end of Dark Star just for the hell of it.\u201d<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2025\/08\/Grateful-Dead-0016_04818_28-copy.jpg” title_text=”Grateful Dead” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text module_class=”image-gallery-caption” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font=”|300|||||||” text_font_size=”16px” text_line_height=”1.2em” custom_margin=”-10px||||false|false” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n Truckin\u2019 on home: (main) Weir, Garcia and Jefferson Airplane\u2019s Jack Casady at Newport Pop Festival, Orange County Fairgrounds, Costa Mesa, August 4, 1968.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”text-with-dropcap” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n ANOTHER LETTER landed in the Grateful Dead\u2019s mailbox in February 1969, this time on the letterhead of Hugh Hefner, editor and publisher of Playboy. In January, the band taped an appearance for Playboy After Dark, a TV series hosted by Hefner and shot like an exclusive cocktail party. The seven-piece Dead, looking like they came from a hold-up in Tijuana, played two songs from the unfinished Aoxomoxoa: Mountains Of The Moon, a delicate ballad with prominent harpsichord flourishes by Constanten, and a roaring St Stephen, McKernan as a third drummer on congas. As credits rolled, McKernan belted his party piece, Bobby \u2018Blue\u2019 Bland\u2019s Turn On Your Lovelight. In his note, Hefner thanked the Dead \u201cfor having made the taping session as enjoyable to do as I think it will be to watch,\u201d alluding to an extra production touch. The Dead\u2019s crew dosed some of the libations with LSD, including Hefner\u2019s Pepsi.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n In 1972, when asked by Rolling Stone to define psychedelic music, Garcia replied by quoting Lesh: \u201cAcid rock is music you listen to when you\u2019re high on acid.\u201d Aoxomoxoa was made on different fuel. \u201cWe were sipping STP during our session,\u201d Garcia revealed, \u201cwhich made it a little weird \u2013 in fact, very weird.\u201d Also present: a four-foot-tall tank of nitrous oxide with \u201ceight hoses coming off of it,\u201d says Doug McKechnie, an electronic composer who operated the Moog synthesizer used on Aoxomoxoa\u2019s crowning indulgence, What\u2019s Become Of The Baby.<\/p>\n \u201cThey call it \u2018laughing gas\u2019 for a reason,\u201d McKechnie points out cheerfully, \u201cbecause everything is amusing, then thoughtful. But people would black out. I was seeing pluses and minuses and going, Oh, that\u2019s what it all means, then hitting the floor.\u201d One Aoxomoxoa experiment under the influence, Barbed Wire Whipping Party, was a torrent of sounds and chatter that even Garcia called \u201ctotal gibberish\u201d. It remains unreleased but available for testing on YouTube.<\/p>\n If Anthem Of The Sun was Lesh\u2019s pursuit of the ideal Dead on vinyl, Aoxomoxoa was Garcia\u2019s white whale, almost to the exclusion of the band itself. In a November 1968 story headlined \u201cHas Frisco Gone Commercial?\u201d, the New York Times cited \u201cthe expected fragmenting of the Grateful Dead\u201d, Weir and McKernan \u201cstaying behind while the others move deeper into electronics.\u201d It was a momentary breach. Weir is seen in studio photos from Aoxomoxoa, playing guitar. But Rolling Stone\u2019s rave review in July 1969 harshly judged McKernan\u2019s diminished role on the record: the Dead were \u201cmore magical\u201d and \u201cless definable without him\u201d. On the back cover, McKernan was credited as \u201cPigpen\u201d. Constanten played all keyboards.<\/p>\n At the centre of it all was Garcia\u2019s voice: fragile and hermetic in the ballad miniature Rosemary and the starlit suspense of Mountains Of The Moon; brighter and stronger, ringed in harmonies, for St Stephen and China Cat Sunflower; bereft and a cappella, swimming through dark Moog rapids, in What\u2019s Become Of The Baby. Stripped of its science, the song was a medieval lament, an epitaph for the fading utopia in the Dead\u2019s hometown.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was always live,\u201d McKechnie says of Garcia\u2019s vocal in that bleak piece, processed as he sang by McKechnie with filters in the Moog, serial number 4 in Robert Moog\u2019s first line of synthesizers. \u201cThe analogy is it\u2019s the inside of your mouth, and the controls are your tongue. Once it was recorded, it was possible to run it through various things. I don\u2019t remember,\u201d he admits. \u201cThere was a lot of substances involved.\u201d <\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”pull-quote” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” header_2_text_align=”center” header_2_text_color=”#111111″ header_2_font_size=”46px” header_2_line_height=”1.2em” custom_margin=”||0px||false|false” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”pullquote-name” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” header_2_text_align=”center” header_2_font_size=”46px” header_2_line_height=”1.2em” header_3_text_align=”center” header_3_text_color=”#111111″ header_3_font_size=”38px” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n Garcia and Hunter wrote the eight songs on Aoxomoxoa (with Lesh for St Stephen) \u2013 \u201cSome new runes,\u201d as the guitarist told Rolling Stone, \u201cthat I hadn\u2019t really bothered to teach anyone in the band.\u201d Aoxomoxoa was done largely in overdubs. \u201cWe didn\u2019t go about it as a group at all.\u201d And it was recorded twice: on 8-track tape (with a working title, Earthquake Country) to the end of 1968, then on 16-track when Pacific Recording in San Mateo got an Ampex machine in that brand new format. Eight-track work was scrapped; Garcia chose to start again.<\/p>\n \u201cWe would look to Jerry for what he wanted, the ideas he had,\u201d says guitarist David Nelson, an old friend and bandmate of Garcia from their bluegrass days. Nelson played \u201cbackground guitar\u201d on Rosemary, Mountains Of The Moon and Doin\u2019 That Rag and was in the Fillmore-Beach Boys choir for China Cat Sunflower. By the summer of 1969, Nelson, singer-guitarist John \u2018Marmaduke\u2019 Dawson (another LP guest) and Garcia, on pedal steel guitar, were gigging as psychedelic cowboys the New Riders Of The Purple Sage.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was mostly a group of hippies,\u201d Nelson says of Aoxomoxoa, \u201cdoin\u2019 their thing, delighted with this new multi-track recording. We thought of ourselves as brats that got into a studio, trying everything.\u201d<\/p>\n But Garcia was attentive to detail. Peter Grant says Garcia sent him a tape of Doin\u2019 That Rag to learn the tune before going to San Mateo to tape his pedal steel part. With its sliding time and jaunty chord changes, Grant says, \u201cIt was the most complex song I\u2019d ever played.\u201d Recording went fine. Then Garcia called two days later. \u201cHe says, \u2018Pete, you gotta come and do it again. Your part was a half-fret off.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Aoxomoxoa was barely underway the second time when engineers Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor-Jackson carted that 16-track Ampex from San Mateo to San Francisco to capture the Dead live at the Avalon Ballroom. \u201cWe hauled it up the back stairs,\u201d says Cantor-Jackson, one of the most revered engineers in the Dead\u2019s history for the clarity and force of her \u2018Betty Boards\u2019 in the 1970s. \u201cWe got a dynamic microphone into each track on the tape machine \u2013 no board, no nothing.\u201d With more recordings a month later from the Fillmore West, Matthews and Cantor-Jackson compiled two LPs of material for the band\u2019s appraisal. \u201cEverybody had something to say,\u201d she recalls. \u201cBut it was pretty much agreed about certain performances.\u201d<\/p>\n Issued in November, 1969, only five months after Aoxomoxoa, Live\/Dead sold well, lightening the balance sheet at Warner Bros. Recreating the era\u2019s nightly cycle \u2013 from the winding sublime of Dark Star, into the mystic with St Stephen and its whirlwind-rhythm twin The Eleven, then to McKernan at his salacious best in Lovelight \u2013 the album was everything the Dead wanted to bottle on the previous LPs, the unpredictable soaring and sharing with the listener and each other, without the artifice and constraint of the studio. \u201cI always liked to think of Grateful Dead music as electric chamber music,\u201d Lesh said in 2014, \u201cthe music of friends.\u201d<\/p>\n Live\/Dead was also the end of a songbook. \u201cWe got so out there,\u201d Weir reflected in 2005, \u201cwe were pushing the limits of the patience of our audience, at a time when what was becoming popular was Crosby, Stills And Nash \u2013 people who had tunes to offer. We could all sing,\u201d he added. \u201cBut we needed songs.\u201d<\/p>\n By February 1970, three months after Live\/Dead came out, the band was in Pacific High Recording \u2013 practically a home studio, located a few blocks from the Fillmore West \u2013 making its next album, Workingman\u2019s Dead. The Dead finished it in less than two weeks.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2025\/08\/2.jpg” title_text=”2″ _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text module_class=”image-gallery-caption” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font=”|300|||||||” text_font_size=”16px” text_line_height=”1.2em” custom_margin=”-10px||||false|false” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n Knuckling down to make The Grateful Dead with producer Dave Hassinger, RCA Studios, LA, January 1967.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”text-with-dropcap” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n SUNRISE ON\u00a0Saturday, December 6, 1969, arrived on a long, beatific note: a 20-minute drone played by McKechnie on the Moog for the multitude already gathered at Altamont Speedway, east of San Francisco, for a free festival headlined by The Rolling Stones. McKechnie brought the Moog along when he was asked to help set up the sound system. The rest of the day went south, fast: a disaster of organisation and rock-god ego with a murder in front of the Stones as they performed. The Dead \u2013 whose management worked with the Stones on the fateful issue of security by the Hell\u2019s Angels \u2013 didn\u2019t play, leaving as the violence escalated.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n \u201cAltamont was a wound on our culture,\u201d says Cantor-Jackson, who worked the stage that day and recorded the Stones. \u201cIt was the first gathering of that many people in our city\u201d \u2013 estimated at 300,000 \u2013 \u201cand somebody died.\u201d Two weeks later, on December 20 at the Fillmore Auditorium, near the end of the second set, the Dead debuted a song named after the field of battle, New Speedway Boogie, destined for Workingman\u2019s Dead. Garcia sang Hunter\u2019s prayer in the chorus with uneasy optimism: \u201cOne way or another\/This darkness got to give.\u201d Surrender was not an option.<\/p>\n The \u201clong, strange trip\u201d immortalised on 1970\u2019s American Beauty, in the road memoir Truckin\u2019, had a quarter-century to run for Garcia. It is still going on for those he left behind, in and beyond the band. The Grateful Dead never made another studio album in the ballroom-daze image of Anthem Of The Sun or the insular, cryptic spirit of Aoxomoxoa. There was no need. \u201cWe developed the engine, which generated a lot of energy,\u201d Weir said of the ferment that peaked on Live\/Dead. \u201cThen we started working on ways to focus it, without trying to focus it to death.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt was like a dialectic,\u201d Lesh suggested to me in 2014. \u201cAnthem Of The Sun was the thesis. Workingman\u2019s Dead was the antithesis\u201d\u2013 folk- and country-rooted meditations on a counter-culture under siege but not to be denied. \u201cEverything that came after that was a kind of synthesis of those, in varying degrees.\u201d<\/p>\n Garcia retained a fondness for Aoxomoxoa, remixing the album for a 1971 re-release. \u201cThere are certain feelings and a certain kind of looseness that I dig,\u201d he said in \u201972. \u201cIt was when Hunter and I were both being more or less obscure\u2026 a lot of levels on the verbal plane.\u201d The result was \u201ctoo far out for most people\u201d. Lesh remixed Anthem Of The Sun for a \u201971 reissue but later called it \u201ca mistake\u201d. The original mix \u201cis a work of art\u201d.<\/p>\n Dan Healy agrees. \u201cStoned on acid,\u201d the engineer says, Anthem Of The Sun \u201cmakes perfect sense.\u201d More important, he insists, was \u201cthe concept, the stretch out, breaking that record company regimental mould. I can\u2019t tell you how many people said, \u2018You guys are gonna crash. You\u2019ve just blown your whole thing.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cAnd we said, Fuck, we can do this. And we did do it.\u201d<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider color=”#111111″ module_class=”custom-divider” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” custom_margin=”||0px||false|false” custom_padding=”||0px||false|false” global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content”][\/et_pb_divider][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2025\/08\/Grateful-Dead-by-Jim-Marshall-front-cover.jpg” title_text=”Grateful Dead by Jim Marshall-front cover” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n The Jim Marshall photos are taken from The Grateful Dead by Jim Marshall, published by Chronicle Books on August 5, 2025, and available from all good bookshops.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sixty years ago, the Grateful Dead embarked on a mission that would freak out label bosses, exasperate producers, and turn on millions to the infinite possibilities of improvised psychedelic rock. David Fricke heads back to 1960s San Francisco, and uncovers the method and madness behind the band\u2019s wildest musical phase. \u201cThe Grateful Dead is an anarchy,\u201d their accomplices reveal. \u201cAnd that was good and bad.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":2732,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mojo-presents"],"acf":[],"modified_by":"akindell","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2725"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2739,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2725\/revisions\/2739"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u201dWe learned to trust ourselves and each other. Our job was to find the beat and get people dancing.\u201d<\/h2>\n
Bob Weir<\/h2>\n
\u201cIt was mostly a group of hippies doin\u2019 their thing. We thought of ourselves as brats that got into a studio, trying everything.\u201d<\/h2>\n
David Nelson<\/h3>\n
\u201cI always like to think of Grateful Dead music as electric chamber music, the music of friends.\u201d<\/h2>\n
Phil Lesh<\/h3>\n