Phil Lesh-Slide Bass (Henry J Kaiser Auditorium, February 20, 1985)

My notes for the Grateful Dead shows from February 18, 19 & 20, 1985

Around 1980 I realized I couldn't remember everything about every concert I had been to so I started writing everything down. Without an internet, or Deadbase, or anything, if you didn't write it down, it was probably gone forever. I wasn't enough of a dweeb to actually take notes during a show, because it wasn't as much fun, but whenever I got home, before I went to bed, I wrote down every detail I could remember. As time went on, more information became available, and some of the things I wrote down are easily accessible now, but here and there I still find some odd nuggets of information that I would otherwise have lost track of.

Looking at my notes for February 18, 19 and 20, 1985, I see that I wrote down that Phil Lesh played "slide bass" on February 20. I distinctly recall this. Of course, distinct as this memory may be, I recall that he played slide during "Minglewood," and of course they didn't play "Minglewood" that night. I didn't see fit to write down which song it was, but knowing how my memory works it was probably "West LA Fadeaway."

By 1980, I had been going to rock concerts for quite a while (at the time, 8 years and counting, as it happens) and once I had discovered the sound of a bottleneck guitar I had always wondered why no one ever used a bottleneck on a bass guitar. I was generally about 50 feet from the stage, so I was really excited when I saw Phil slip on a bottleneck during a song and play a little slide while Jerry soloed away.

Of course, I promptly found out why no one played slide bass: you can't hear it. Something about the sonic properties of a bass guitar insure that the swoopy low notes caused by the slide are lost in the general rumble of the band. The Grateful Dead had as good a sound system as their was, and if you couldn't hear it on their system, you couldn't hear it. But it didn't matter--I had seen someone play slide bass guitar, and I could check that off my list.

Soundcheck, Winterland, February 22 or 23, 1974: Jack Casady

I attended the Grateful Dead show at Winterland on February 22, 1974, but this post is not about something I witnessed. It apparently happened during the soundcheck, and it's not impossible that it happened on the soundcheck of the next day. The source of this is someone's comment on an Internet forum, which makes the truth value hard to determine. Nonetheless, this is such an odd little story that I find it convincing, and it raises some interesting questions, even if I can't be certain it occurred.

This blog is not my research blog (that's elsewhere), so you'll just have to accept that I read this somewhere in an Archive Forum comment thread or who knows where. In any case, some guy who was a teenager in San Francisco wrote about seeing the Grateful Dead's equipment trucks at Winterland in the afternoon during this run, so he and his friends simply walked through the loading dock and sat in the back rows to listen. I have assumed that this took place the first day of the run (Friday, February 22) but of course they could have been tweaking the system on any of the three days.

It may seem incredible to think that some teenage hippies could simply walk unnoticed into a Grateful Dead soundcheck but there is a distinct ring of truth to this, given that Winterland was the venue. Winterland (RIP), at Post and Steiner in San Francisco, was just a few blocks from the old Fillmore, was an ice rink that had been converted to auditorium use, and by the 1970s it was over 40 years old, a crumbling concrete dump in a sketchy part of town. Of course, the joint rocked like crazy and every band sounded 100 times better there. If you weren't good at Winterland, you weren't good. Everybody played classic gigs there: Hendrix, Springsteen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Rolling Stones, Peter Frampton, The Band, you name it.

Rock shows had been put on at Winterland since 1966, so despite the venue's acoustic "properties" San Francisco's finest sound engineers had had plenty of time to figure out how to make the room sing, and sing it did. Bill Graham Presents sound staff knew their stuff, and of course the Dead had played the room dozens of times, so the band and crew knew how to rattle the walls and keep it warm at the same time, a harder sonic feat than it sounds.

In the 1970s, however, Winterland was in a part of town that was not (as they say) a desirable neighborhood, and although it wasn't really a slum it wasn't a nice place. Once, in 1975, my friends and I were returning from a Tuesday night rock show at Winterland (it was Kiss--trust me, it's a long story) and when we got to our car, there was a guy hiding in it. He had broken in, and when he saw us coming, he ducked down. He was pretty surprised when it turned out that it was our car, but he cooly got out and when we said "what were you doing in our car?" he said "looking for something" and calmly walked away. Final score: Streetwise black dude:1, Slackjawed suburban teenagers: 0. The Winterland neighborhood was kind of between the largely African American Fillmore district (across Geary) and the more multi-ethnic Japantown, so the locals had little interest in the hippie rock bands that played the old ice palace.

As a result, if the Dead (or anyone) were soundchecking at Winterland on a Friday afternoon, very few of the locals were likely to be interested in the music. Any Winterland security would probably have noticed any locals, since skinny hippies were in short supply around that part of town. Thus if some hippies were there, and had the calm and luck to walk in and sit down quietly, its possible that they could have gotten away with it simply because so few people would have tried it and they might have looked like they belonged. So I'm inclined to believe the story about hippies just wandering in.

The Soundcheck
While it is well established that the Grateful Dead officially debuted the "Wall Of Sound" at the  Cow Palace in Daly City on March 23, 1974, in fact they had been working on parts of it for some time. The first pieces of the system went "on-line" (not that such a term was in use) at Maples Pavilion at Stanford on February 9, 1973. The February Winterland shows were apparently a final dry run of the Wall. While I don't have any idea about the technical differences between the February (Winterland) and March (Cow Palace) Wall Of Sound systems, I can vouch that the Grateful Dead's sound system was a huge wall looming behind the band, so the system was mostly or entirely complete.

Anyway, the interesting thing about the young hippie's description of wandering into the Winterland soundcheck was what he found there. The hippie and his friends had the couth to stay cool, and headed for the seats at the back of the floor, where they hoped to hunker down unnoticed. There was only one musician onstage, and that was Jefferson Airplane/Hot Tuna bassist Jack Casady, thundering away on Phil Lesh's rig. When they got to the back of the arena, who was sitting there but Phil himself, listening to Jack shake the rafters.

Our protagonists seemed to have discerned that this was the debut of the new sound system, and Phil seems to have wanted to hear what it sounded like. You may recall that one of the design features of the system was a 32 foot high tower of bass cabinets, the better to approximate the actual 32 foot size of a bass note in the air. We forget that the Grateful Dead never got to "hear" the Grateful Dead the way we did, and from the point of view of pure sound that may have been particularly frustrating. I know what Phil's bass sounded like at Winterland, and so do thousands of other people, but Phil didn't.

Also, while we have all heard roadies plunking away at a soundcheck, that's not a true test of nuance and power. By definition, Phil Lesh couldn't sit at Winterland and hear Phil bring the thunder, but he could hear somebody bring it, and who better than Jack Casady? While Jack and Phil's bass styles aren't particularly alike, they share the qualities of power, musicianship and creativity, and Phil would have known what Jack sounded like in his normal configuration, so he could have compared it to his own rig. Since the Grateful Dead were heavily invested in the Wall Of Sound, both literally and figuratively, I find it utterly convincing that just once, Phil wanted to sit in the Grateful Dead's home court and listen to his own bass make it sounds, even if Phil wasn't the one playing it.

Did other members of the Grateful Dead ever sit in the arena during soundcheck and listen to someone else play their instruments? Given the band's commitment to sound, I would like to think Jerry and Bob did it at least once. Maybe they did it February 22, 1974, right before or after Phil...I wonder who their dopplegangers would have been? Jorma? Terry Haggerty? It's an interesting thing to contemplate, if unanswerable.

According to our storyteller, he and his friends were in the back listening raptly to Jack play the bass, sneaking peeks over at Phil who was listening intently himself, when they were discovered by Steve Parish. The boys were hustled out in short order, leaving me only to wonder. Given the excitement of the moment, they do not recall what Jack was playing, but I like to think it was the classic Hot Tuna song "Funky #7." I like the image of Winterland on an empty Friday afternoon, Phil Lesh getting to be a Deadhead of sorts, if just for a few minutes, while Jack Casady lays down a funky 7-beat riff on Phil's bass.

Warlocks Resumes, 1965 (pre Grateful Dead Employment)

The back alley behind 536 Bryant Street in Palo Alto in June 2009. On New Year's Eve 1963, Bob Weir heard banjo music coming from Dana Morgan Music at 536 Ramona, and found music teacher Jerry Garcia waiting for his banjo students. They agreed to form a jug band, and the Grateful Dead saga began.

It is an apocryphal rock-and-roll trope that real rockers don't want jobs. Keith Richard, the legend goes, only had non-musical employment once, as a Postal assistant at Christmas one year, and he was fired after three days for keeping a mouse in his pocket. Bruce Springsteen never had a job at all, as far as I know. Sometime in the late 80s, Jerry Garcia was asked in an interview if he was satisfied with his musical career, and whether he had achieved his professional goals, and Jerry said that his goal had been not to have a real job. From that point of view, his membership in the Grateful Dead had made his career a success "so far."

The Grateful Dead were a bunch of misfits, would be outlaws who did not feel comfortable in the paths that the "straight" world would have mapped out for them. The band members were an early wave of post-Beatniks who wanted something different from their life than the proverbial white picket fence and 2.2 children, commuting to the plant or the office 5 days a week. Indeed, with one exception the band members non-musical history only prepared them for being bohemians, so it is fortunate that the 60s came along when they did. This post will consider the educational and professional activities of the original members of the Grateful Dead prior to the formation of the Warlocks in May, 1965. It will not be a long post.

Jerry Garcia: Garcia had attended Balboa High School in San Francisco, but he dropped out around the 11th grade. After getting into some kind of scrape in 1959, a judge offered him the opportunity to join the Army instead of jail--a common enough choice at the time--and the 17-year old Jerry took the Army. Ironically, he was assigned to a base in San Francisco (at The Presidio), so opportunities to go AWOL were many and tempting. Garcia did discover country music in the Army. If he had been sent to a base in the South, he might have been a better soldier and learned about bluegrass more quickly, but it was not to be. Garcia was given a less-than-honorable discharge, but not a dishorable one (I think it was a General Discharge) in 1960. Not having an Honorable Discharge was a barrier to success in the early 1960s, when many males had served in the Armed Forces.

After his debut with Army buddy Robert Hunter as "Bob and Jerry" at Peninsula School, for which they were paid 5 dollars, Garcia played around folk clubs in various combinations. He did not earn a living from playing live music, or even much money, but he was actually paid. He also occasionally played electric bass with a band called The Zodiacs, who played Stanford Frat parties and the like. Bill Kreutzmann and Pigpen were occasional members of The Zodiacs as well.

Garcia also had a job of sorts doing the lighting at a Palo Alto theater group called Commedia Del Arte, around 1962. I think they were on Emerson Street (possibly on the site of the Aquarius Theater). I'm not sure Garcia actually got paid to do the lights, but he could have put it on his resume.

Garcia's principal source of income was as a music teacher at Dana Morgan Music on 536 Ramona Street in Palo Alto. Garcia gave guitar and banjo lessons to aspiring musicians, mostly teenagers, and probably taught mandolin and fiddle as well. Many people in the Palo Alto/Menlo Park area proudly recall that Garcia taught them guitar. The whole Grateful Dead saga began on New Years Eve 1963, when Bob Weir heard banjo music coming from the back of Dana Morgan's. Garcia was practicing, wondering why none of his students were showing up. Garcia told young Bobby that he was planning to form a jug band, and Weir said "I'm in," and so the story began.

In mid-1965, Garcia and Weir had borrowed equipment from Dana Morgan Music to start the Warlocks. When they pushed aside Dana Morgan Jr, the owner's son, as bassist, in favor of Phil Lesh, Morgan Sr demanded his instruments back and effectively fired Garcia and Weir (who by this time was a music teacher as well). Garcia and Weir moved their students over to Guitars Unlimited on El Camino Real in Menlo Park, and borrowed more equipment. When Garcia and Weir actually gave their final guitar lessons at Guitars Unlimited is unclear--probably late 1965.

Bob Weir: Bob Weir attended various High Schools, but did not graduate from any. I think he briefly attended Menlo-Atherton High School, and some private schools, but I'm not sure where. He seems to have met John Barlow in Prep School in the East. I have been told that his mother asked the future founder of Pacific Free High School (too long a story to go into) to "get him to stop playing that guitar and get him into something that will make him some money," but that did not happen.

When Jerry Garcia made his famous trip across country with Sandy Rothman in 1964, Weir apparently took over his students for a few months. Weir remained at Dana Morgan's, and moved on to Guitars Unlimited. Music Teaching music was (and is) a sort of freelance occupation, and fewer people claim Weir as a teacher than Garcia in the Bay Area.

Weir's only professional pre-Warlocks performances were with Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Band Champions, and it is debatable whether they actually got paid.

An ad for Swain's House Of Music at 451 University in downtown Palo Alto. The ad is from the March 7, 1967 issue of the Cubberley High School paper, The Catamount.

Bill Kreutzmann: Bill Kreutzmann actually graduated from Palo Alto High School in 1965. By that time, he was married and had a child, so while he was able to avoid the draft (as sole support of his family), college was seemingly out of the question. During High School, Kreutzmann had played drums with a pretty successful Palo Alto band called The Legends. The Legends played "R&B," which at the time meant mixing James Brown songs with rock songs, and sometimes played for racially mixed audiences in East Palo Alto as well as the Stanford fraternity circuit. Kreutzmann occasionally filled in as drummer for The Zodiacs.

Kreutzmann also gave drum lessons at Swain's House Of Music, a competitor of Dana Morgan's. Swain's was at 451 University (near Waverley) just a few blocks over from Dana Morgan's.

Ron "Pigpen" McKernan: Pigpen had been expelled from Palo Alto High School in 1964 or '65, for some transgression or series of transgressions. Pigpen apparently had a job as a janitor at Swain's, but he did not give music lessons.

Phil Lesh: Unlike the other Warlocks, Phil Lesh bordered on the respectable. He had graduated from Berkeley High School in 1958, and attended the College Of San Mateo. CSM was a junior college with an excellent music program that included an excellent big band. Lesh played trumpet in the CSM band (Santana's Mike Shrieve was the CSM big band drummer some years later). Ultimately Lesh transferred to UC Berkeley in about 1961. Although University of California admissions were structured to favor California residents and junior college transfers, the fact that Lesh got into UC Berkeley means he had to have been a diligent and successful student. Lesh met Tom Constanten at Berkeley, and the two of them also studied with Luciano Berio at Mills College in Oakland The connection to Mills was probably through the UC music program (although Mills is a Woman's College, male students are admitted to its graduate programs, and there has always been reciprocity between UC and Mills classes). Phil also did some work at KPFA in Berkeley, which (similar to Jerry's stint as a lighting director) would not have been paid, but would have counted as work experience.

Phil dropped out of UC Berkeley about 1962. Unlike the other Warlocks, he had a variety of actual jobs. He worked at a Casino in Las Vegas with Constanten, and he drove a Post Office truck as well. Lesh has recalled hearing "Subterranean Homesick Blues" while driving the truck. Although the USPS was a "straight" job that required a uniform, many beatnik-types liked the work since it often involved being on your own most of the day, and Phil seems to have been no exception. Lesh, to my knowledge, never received a dime for a musical performance prior to performing with the Warlocks at Magoo's Pizza in Menlo Park. He had performed with school jazz ensembles, but those were not (by definition) paying gigs.

The Pacific Coast Stock Exchange building at 300 Pine St in San Francisco. Phil Lesh worked there briefly in the early 1960s as a board marker for Dean Witter.

While dropping out of UC Berkeley made Lesh a "dropout" along with the rest of the Warlocks, he was the only band member to have had to consciously avoid the middle class. Phil has occasionally alluded to various jobs he held between 1958 and 1965 in one interview or another. For a variety of reasons, Phil's most interesting brush with another path was alluded to in an extensive interview with Blair Jackson in The Golden Road. Phil said that through his father he got a job as a "board marker" for Dean Witter at the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange.

A board marker put up qoutes for the stock trading on the floor of the old P-Coast (board markers were the equities equivalents of MQTOs, for those readers for whom that has meaning). Working on the trading floor, Phil would have had to have worn a tie, thus being the only member of the Dead to have had to worn a tie for employment. Phil's presence on the P-Coast was fascinating to me personally, because at the time I read the interview, I too was working on the Pacific Stock Exchange, albeit on the infinitely more exciting Options Floor around the block.

The P-Coast Equities Floor in the early 1960s had a reputation as a stifling place. When I told my options compatriots that Phil Lesh had apparently worked on the Equities Floor twenty-odd years earlier, their attitude was that it was no surprise that he left, the implication being that if Phil had worked on the Options Floor (which opened only in 1976) he might have stayed. While that is unlikely on the face of it, the Equities Floor had its roots in the 19th Century and showed it, so it's no surprise that Phil found it unrewarding. If he had discovered all the risk and reward of options trading, maybe David Freiberg would have ended up as the Warlocks bass player. To answer the question no doubt foremost in everybody's mind, I think Phil would have been a frontspreader rather than a backspreader.

Even in the mid 1980s, I knew some old Equities brokers who had come over to the brave new world of Options. Of course none of them would have remembered the name of any board marker, ever, much less one who only worked there briefly, so it was futile to ask. There were probably a bunch of skinny kids in ties and ill-fitting jackets, many with glasses, and to think that just a few years later one of them would be headlining major performances under strange psychedelic conditions was too much to comprehend. Of course, the old Pacific Coast Stock Exchange building is now an Equinox Fitness Club, and that too was impossible to imagine at the time. Sic Transit Gloria Psychedelia.

Interstices of Grateful Dead Performance (July 19 & 21, 1974)

This is one of those hard-to-be-certain stories, but it's a good one, so I'm going to tell it here. Up until 1974, in California a least, only Jerry Garcia had iconic status, even among Deadheads. I heard this story just a year later, and even then I found it surprising.  Decide for yourself.

When I got to college in 1975, I discovered other, more advanced Deadheads than me, which was a very fine thing. My new compatriots were from Southern California, so in general we had different experiences, which he enjoyed sharing in copious detail. One of my friends (hi Mitch) had a weird, fascinating little story that stuck in my mind. He had seen the Grateful Dead at Selland Arena in Fresno on July 19, 1974, and then again two days later at the Hollywood Bowl (July 21).

My friend did not enjoy the Fresno Dead concert. The hall was unappealing, there wasn't much of a crowd, and my friend did not like their playing. Now, some years later, he admitted--after we had seen a stunning show at the very same Selland Arena on January 15, 1978--that the '74 Fresno show was probably pretty far out and he was simply too inexperienced to grasp that (tapes seem to bear him out--the show was waaay out there). The point was, in his own mind the Dead were tense and unhappy, although that may have been an illusion. The key issue in my friend's mind, however, was that Phil Lesh was not on stage for most of "US Blues." My friend was trying to fathom why Phil would leave the stage for that song. What could have been going on.?

Anyway, my friends went on to see the Grateful Dead at Hollywood Bowl on Sunday, July 21, just two days later. It was a daytime show, and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen opened for the Dead. During their set, my friend was wandering around the Hollywood Bowl, which was a large, sprawling place. In the back of the venue, who should he come upon but Phil Lesh, leaning against a wall watching Cody and the Airmen from near the back of the house. Nobody seemed to have noticed Phil, as he was completely unmolested, nursing his Heineken amidst the Deadheads.

My friend still couldn't believe it was Phil Lesh, so he went up to talk to him. "Hey, Phil" he said, "what happened in Fresno last night? You weren't even on stage for 'US Blues.'" Phil--for it did indeed appear to be him--rather grouchily said "f***in' Garcia--wouldn't even stop for a piss break." No other conversation seemed to be in the offing, so my friend left, contemplating this close encounter.

Did this really occur? Did Phil Lesh watch Commander Cody's set from the back of the Hollywood Bowl? Did Garcia refuse to allow a piss break prior to "US Blues"? Was this a common dispute? Was 'Phil' some sort of impostor? Did my friend simply have a dream, like Bobby Ewing, and repeat it to me the next year? Had there been an Internet, of course, this could have been Tweeted in real time, but instead we are left with this lowly blog post a scant 37 years later.