- 7/6/2025
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00:00MUST HAVE A TICKET!
00:30Every time I go on stage, I walk on stage with the knowledge that anything can happen.
00:57The important thing is to be open, not to go in with any preconceptions about whether
01:07it's going to be bad or good, depending on how the sound check went.
01:15We always try to keep it as open as possible, and that's what we learned from the acid test.
01:21What the LSD experience teaches you is that all things are possible.
01:32And that's how the Grateful Dead played.
01:34You know, Phil certainly doesn't play what one would describe as a conventional bass.
01:47He ended up inventing a whole way of being a unique rhythm guitar player.
01:54But there's nobody who ever came anywhere close to Jerry in terms of being able to manifest
02:04the psychedelic experience musically.
02:11Having taken LSD, you become this person that's aware of the fact that life only has a certain
02:19amount of predictability to it.
02:23Jerry was a master at setting up a kind of musical expectation and then dragging you off in
02:31another direction.
02:32The Grateful Dead went into the music for the adventure.
02:57And they went into it having had that experience with the Bassett tests, in which you treated
03:06your audience like partners.
03:10That's why they did things like spend an unconscionable amount of money on the sound system, because
03:19that's the link between them and the audience.
03:23It was the sound.
03:28Jerry wanted to put a better quality of sound out to the people, and all the guys did.
03:35So we built this thing together that became the most unbelievable PA that you could imagine.
03:45And we called it the Wall of Sound.
03:52The Wall of Sound?
03:54I loved that thing.
03:57I mean, it was the best PA ever.
04:03That was the best sound I can possibly imagine.
04:08And it was also the biggest.
04:11It was absolutely apocalyptic.
04:14It was like the voice of God.
04:18Oh, yeah.
04:37We built that PA.
04:39We did that ourselves in our spare time with our own two hands.
04:44I learned to weld.
04:45Healy showed me we welded the first horns together that we carried ourselves.
04:50And at the heart of the dream of it was Owsley, our Barrett, and his sound design.
05:00Genius.
05:01That's a gleeful sound of our PA as it warms up.
05:05Hey, Barrett, there's not going to be another fucking word sung until any goddamn monitors work.
05:10That, ladies and gentlemen, is Bear. None other.
05:13Bear was a mad scientist.
05:15A little bit of a mad scientist among many other aspects.
05:19Augustus Owsley Stanley, or better known as the Bear, made probably the best LSD that has ever been made.
05:29Ooh, that was particularly powerful LSD.
05:32You know, Jimi Hendrix wrote Purple Haze in honor of a brand of LSD that the Bear made.
05:37He more or less fueled the psychedelic revolution, or whatever you wanted to call it.
05:42In a way, yeah, it changed the consciousness of the Western world.
05:45It certainly fueled us in our little explorations.
05:48When the Grateful Dead started, Owsley bought them all their own equipment with his acid money.
06:01He had sort of adopted us from the film or acid test start.
06:06He put a lot of energy and, yes, money into the Grateful Dead.
06:10In the early days, what there was in PAs was just so inadequate.
06:16We realized that if we were going to play for larger crowds, we were going to need a real delivery system.
06:22And if sound was the product of all of this work, it better be fucking good, man.
06:31Bear's dream was to have a system that you could hear for a mile.
06:37No distortion between the string and the speaker.
06:40That was his holy grail.
06:42At first, that was just a fantasy.
06:45But then, Bear started seriously thinking about how it could be done.
06:50The first thing was he moved all the speakers for everything behind the band.
06:57So we don't have any complicated interference.
06:59He built differential microphones, which are two microphones connected out of phase.
07:03You sing into one of them and the one that's out of phase eliminates all of the feedback.
07:09We found that dispersion of speakers is much better if they're placed vertically together than if they're spread out.
07:18And so that led to the thought of, okay, it had to be large and tall to push air so that you could hear it for a mile.
07:29Phil Lesh, he had a stack 32 feet high.
07:34Why was it 32 feet?
07:36Because that's a standing-based wave.
07:38So everything was based on some kind of deep science thing.
07:41We built this thing together that became the most unbelievable PA that you could imagine.
07:49But by the time we got to 74, the wall of sound was making us crazy.
08:00We had to get up at 6 in the morning.
08:038 o'clock, we had to be at that hall convincing the union guys that what we were bringing in was something that was needed.
08:15They never saw rock and roll shows with these kind of things.
08:22Three trucks full to the brim with all this heavy gear.
08:2610 o'clock, the trucks were empty.
08:29It took us till noon to stack the 500 speakers.
08:35Wired it up all afternoon.
08:40The band came in about 4 o'clock and sound checked.
08:44And then the doors opened at 7.
08:51And then they played till 1 or 2 in the morning.
08:53It took us four hours to take it out.
08:55There's 6 a.m.
08:56We're driving to the next place.
09:02I'm sure we could have made it more efficient and easier to set up and everything.
09:09We didn't give a shit.
09:10We were going to do it.
09:14And we were going to blow it out until we couldn't do it anymore.
09:19It doesn't matter when that happens.
09:21While we got it, we were going to do it.
09:24The Grateful Dead are dumb.
09:26You have to understand something.
09:27They make fabulous music.
09:30Wonderful, amazing music.
09:31The best music of any band I've ever been involved with.
09:35Fabulous.
09:36And they came to business decisions.
09:38Stupid.
09:41Sam brought a professionalism to the office, which was needed at that time.
09:47But he ran up against the fact that he was not dealing with a hierarchical organization.
09:54I was brought in to manage the publishing company.
09:59But our roles within the Grateful Dead family actually overlapped a lot, you know.
10:05We all did a little bit of everything.
10:07And Sam found that you're dealing with a collective.
10:12These were not music business professionals.
10:15It was a nightmare.
10:18Nightmare.
10:19First off, I didn't know how to make decisions.
10:22Everybody had a voice.
10:24And everybody's voice was equally listened to.
10:27When I first went to a meeting with the Grateful Dead, there was all these people there.
10:30There were so many fucking people, it was ridiculous.
10:33They were all part of this amorphous blob of people called the family.
10:37It had the characteristics of an open system.
10:40I don't deal with families.
10:41I deal with rock and roll bands, you know.
10:43One that cared a lot about the employees.
10:46I don't deal with old ladies.
10:47I don't deal with friends of the band.
10:49One person says no, then it's not on.
10:51Whatever, I deal with musicians.
10:52You know, you want me to do this, I'll do it.
10:54But I ain't gonna deal with all these other people.
10:56What is the 12th?
10:58The 10th!
10:59I say the 12th.
11:00I say that man's right.
11:01I say that man's right.
11:03What's a camel?
11:04I don't fucking know.
11:05It's a horse designed by a committee.
11:09I didn't want to fucking sit there anyway.
11:12This is Steve.
11:13I'm at the meeting.
11:14Everything's gone to pieces, man.
11:15People are screaming out of turn.
11:17The whole place is burning down, man.
11:19I'm a great believer in telling people this is what needs to be done.
11:24But of course that didn't endear me to a lot of people in the Grateful Dead.
11:29So eventually I said, good luck, and left.
11:35Sam knew how to treat the crew, and he had the experience to take us through those years of our first growth spurt.
11:43But by the time we got to 74, he was gone.
11:47Well, who was in charge?
11:49Well, I'm so glad you asked that, because I came up with this, man.
11:52Because we would hear that a lot of times from promoters.
11:54Who's in charge here?
11:55We'd hear it from cops.
11:56Who's in charge here?
11:58And I came up with this saying.
12:01I said, the situation is the boss.
12:05There were times when I was in charge of everything.
12:09There were times when Jerry was in charge of everything.
12:12And then at another time, it would be somebody else.
12:16It would be a truck that had a blown carburetor.
12:19The carburetor was the boss at that moment.
12:21There's mosquitoes on the river.
12:22Fish are rising up like birds.
12:26It's been hot for seven weeks now.
12:32Too hard to even speak now.
12:34Did you hear what I just heard?
12:36Say it might have been a failure.
12:41In 74, we took the wall of sound over to Europe, which was about impossible.
12:47If you think the United States couldn't deal with it, Europe, they couldn't deal with it at all.
12:53They didn't know why you had to bring this much sound equipment.
12:56What were you thinking?
12:59There's a band out in the front way.
13:03They're high sipping every time.
13:06We worked so hard.
13:10Exhaustion was setting in.
13:12And cocaine was leading the pack now.
13:17We were in such a drug-fueled world.
13:20We didn't have anybody telling us no.
13:23And God forbid if somebody did.
13:25If it was your old lady or your wife, she was gone.
13:29If she tried to do it as much as you did, she was gone.
13:32You both were gone.
13:34Everybody was crazy.
13:37Oh, yeah.
13:40Backstage, it was total chaos.
13:43People were doing heavier drugs.
13:46The cocaine came in.
13:48The heroin came in.
13:50The booze came in.
13:52It was everywhere.
13:53You realize, of course, that we're engaging in illicit activities here.
13:57You had to have a lot of discipline.
14:00We didn't have a lot of discipline in some ways.
14:06When we went to Europe in 74, it was getting really crazy.
14:21And everybody, I think, was getting too deep into the rock and roll fantasy world.
14:31I don't give a hell what anybody believes, man.
14:32Every drug that we took, we used for self-exploration.
14:41Nitrous oxide puts you in that place where you're at rapture of the deep, basically.
14:55So your body is living off of nitrous.
14:56We're made to live off oxygen.
14:57So your brain goes to this place where it's letting go of reality and consciousness.
15:08And you're dying.
15:10You're gratefully dying.
15:14That's why you laugh.
15:16Because it's funny, man.
15:22You understand everything at that moment, man.
15:25Everything makes fucking sense.
15:27This thing happens.
15:28Oh, that deal of music on this thing.
15:31And you and your leg and your arm.
15:33Bam.
15:34Oh, there's glasses.
15:35Wow.
15:36And then you come out of it and you can't get back there.
15:38You can't go back to that spot.
15:40But yet you know for the rest of your life that there is that high place.
15:47If you're taking drugs just to hide from the world, you're going to become a hidden person.
15:54If you take drugs to find the world, you're going to become a vibrant human being.
16:07One of the things that I don't think people have properly appreciated about the culture of the Grateful Dead is our utter comfort with paradox.
16:18You know, we were never an either or kind of a culture.
16:24We were always both and.
16:29The Deadheads, you know, they had a very strong sense that there were good guys and bad guys and they knew they were.
16:34There is good and there is bad.
16:39Good.
16:41Bad.
16:43With us, it wasn't so clear.
16:46You know, we had a, we had Hell's Angels hanging around for ages.
16:52You know, and those are people who don't even try to be good guys.
16:56Sacramento's coming down, San Jose's coming up, Navy City's coming in, Richmond, Frisco will be here.
17:04Good night.
17:13And here's a good friend of ours right here from San Francisco.
17:16Hey, how come we didn't have a cake fight, Bobby?
17:19Cake fight!
17:21Is this your guitar?
17:22I mean, at one point I complained to Garcia about what I thought was the unnecessary presence of all the angels thugging it up backstage,
17:32making everybody kind of nervous and making it even harder for women in a scene that was already misogynistic to the max.
17:42And he said, well, you know, I don't think that good means very much without evil.
17:48Which is true.
17:52Uh, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to always have a seat for evil at the table.
17:59Ran into the devil, baby, lonely 20 bills.
18:04Spent the night in Utah in a cave up in the hills.
18:09Sit out and runnin', but I take my time.
18:11A friend of the devil is a friend of mine.
18:14Higgin' home before daylight.
18:16Just like death's asleep tonight.
18:19Hell's angels have happened because of freedom.
18:23They're free to happen.
18:28And, and they're a manifestation of what freedom is, in essence.
18:32Yeah, and that you have an Altamon.
18:42Somehow I feel that you're being maybe too forgiving.
18:45I'm not, I mean, you know, what's to forgive? There isn't any blame.
18:49There is no blame?
18:50No, man, there isn't any blame.
18:52Because who are you gonna blame? You have to blame everybody, you know.
18:55We're all human beings, we're all on this plan together, and all the problems are all of ours.
18:58Not, some are mine and some are theirs.
19:06You know, if there's a war going on, I'm the responsible as anybody is.
19:10If somebody's murdered, I'm responsible for that, too.
19:15At some point or another, somebody has to say, there can be no Hell's Angels.
19:19You know, and who's gonna say that?
19:23It's just, you know, it's not what I'm interested in doing.
19:25The question is how to work it out, man.
19:29How to, how can you have freedom and still work it out?
19:32There was a strong belief, primarily on Garcia's part, that it was important that it be leaderless.
19:50He did not want to be the leader, never mind that, that he was, and there was no way around it.
20:04And, you know, oftentimes bad things happen because he wasn't willing to, he wasn't willing to assert what was basically pretty obvious.
20:13Jerry once said to me, when I was getting a little excited about pulling off some project or some idea, he said, you know, don't try to do anything with the Grateful Dead.
20:35You know, because the collective, in a way, was a classic example of following the doubt.
20:47The way things went down were the way they were supposed to go down and, you know, nobody really knew what that was.
21:00Because nobody wanted to be in charge and nobody wanted to say no to anything.
21:18It became pretty clear that we had become a fully dysfunctional family.
21:23I don't want to get into the whole drugs thing, but it just got unbearable.
21:32It got unbearable on Keith and me as a husband and wife, as a couple with a child and Keith and I were burning out.
21:44At one point, Alan Trist went completely crazy. I mean, the sanest guy in the whole scene, basically.
21:55My susceptibility to what we call around here the Marin spin was probably likely to kill me.
22:03And I was out of Dodge for a period there until I became more connected with a gentler approach to self-abuse, if you've got to put it that way.
22:17It was difficult. Just trying to limp along.
22:23I mean, remember, they were spending incredible amounts of money on the sound system.
22:29And they paid the crew, which by now had gotten to be a respectable size, radically more than any other employees in this year of rock and roll.
22:38They were supporting lots of people, including their own families, and it's too much. It's all too much. That's not tenable.
22:51You know, and it finally just, it reached a point where in late 74, everybody sort of simultaneously came to the conclusion that it just, it just wasn't worth it.
23:10And we broke up.
23:13It was decided somehow that we would take a break.
23:19And if you're going to do that, then it's probably a good idea to do some farewell shows.
23:32And so we booked these last four or five shows at the Winterland.
23:35I don't know if you're going to miss me when I'm gone.
23:47I want to miss your baby from rolling in your arms.
23:54And somebody on the management side came up with an idea, well, let's make a movie out of it.
24:13Take one.
24:15Jerry really loved that because he's always wanted to direct a movie.
24:17So this was his chance. So he kind of jumped on that.
24:20We had something like 11 camera crews ostensibly making a movie that was going to sum up our work.
24:30And that was going to be the end of it.
24:41But it was kind of fraught with weirdness from the beginning, not surprisingly.
24:45The film's sound mixer kind of went belly up mentally speaking during the actual recording.
24:55At the end of the last show, he was found cowering under the soundboard.
25:02I don't know why I never have.
25:05I'm not sure I even want to speculate.
25:07I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train.
25:20I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train.
25:26I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train.
25:33I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train.
25:36I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train.
25:39Something that wasn't in the movie was behind the scenes.
25:43There was actually kind of a war going on between the Acid Heads and the Koch Freaks.
25:48heads and the coke freaks you know so one of the manifestations of this that was really hilarious
25:55was that rex jackson positioned himself right at the top of the stage there and he wouldn't let
26:01you go on stage unless you took another dropout mirroring bottle his thing was well i'll tell you
26:08what i'm gonna do tonight steve i'm giving everybody who comes up these stairs they're
26:12gonna get acid you know they're just get lsd up the ass and then they better fucking behave
26:17themselves you know whatever but he wasn't working and it was getting crazier you see
26:23he was trying to hold on to the camaraderie of the early grateful dead and sure it was a great
26:32way to keep the coke freaks off the stage but it was also a great way to make the music become
26:37increasingly more psychedelic
26:47i did not want to take a break i was so into it and it was just developing and it was getting
27:03better and better and better and i was having a time of my life
27:06my fear was once we took a break it might not come back together again
27:14and grateful does best thing ever happened to me until i met my wife
27:20and i did not want to let it go not even for a minute
27:27so
28:05Are you going to do one?
28:17Uh-huh.
28:18Are you going to do another set?
28:19I don't think so.
28:20I'm too tired.
28:21I can't do another one.
28:22Yes.
28:23Oh, no, folks, please.
28:29Oh, no, folks, please.
28:36What should we do?
28:38Are you guys doing in the morning?
28:40What?
28:41No.
28:42We're at it, man.
28:44Something two in the next minute.
28:46A piece of it.
28:47You're short.
28:48That's it.
28:49Anything short.
28:50From 1967 on, it was constant.
28:58We average 80 shows a year on the road.
29:03I guess people were just getting tired.
29:08Well, what happened was that everybody sort of went their separate ways to let things
29:15cool out.
29:18Never wasted a job.
29:20And that period of rest really kind of saved us.
29:26It's not just a momentary fatigue that you're running down and you look back on your lifestyle
29:31and you can pretty clearly see what's been doing it to you.
29:34Then Prudence decrees that you're going to have to alter your lifestyle or you're not
29:39going to make it very far.
29:41I don't think that I can really fairly expect to live for a long time if I'm on the road
29:45six months out of the year.
29:50That's hard on you.
29:59When the Grateful Dead took a break, we didn't stop for a second, not me and Jerry.
30:04We just went right into the Garcia band.
30:06We kept going.
30:11We were playing nightclubs night after night, putting all our energy into it.
30:29You see, Jerry just wanted to be a guitar player.
30:32He wanted to play as much as he could.
30:36So we never stopped for one second.
30:39Ladies and gentlemen, the deadhead of the world, the Grateful Dead!
30:51When we came back together, everybody had a bigger bag of tricks to bring back to the fold.
31:00And that was really a golden era for us.
31:06You could pretty much walk into a show and expect that we were going to achieve liftoff.
31:12We were...
31:14We were...
31:15We were pretty damn reliable.
31:17We were moving.
31:25That period, the late 70s, were extraordinarily productive.
31:29that period the late 70s were extraordinarily productive and some of the most popular shows
31:45that we've ever played are from that period at the same time something wasn't right
31:53that's just from my perspective but something fundamental there was a there was a there was
32:02a kind of hole in the whole thing somehow
32:04we did do the Egypt thing which I think was a huge huge thing for creating a sense of solidarity
32:19and mystical purpose for just about everybody but God it was just there was all manner of wickedness
32:30as darker drugs moved into the scene it became more about trying to protect your brothers
32:42from falling too deep into things that you knew about I was a street wise kid and I knew everything
32:50that happened when he fucked around with heroin but Jerry he got caught up in it
32:56the more that you kill the more it will take
33:00there's a thin line beyond which you really can't fade
33:07fire
33:09fire on the mountain
33:12fire
33:15fire on the mountain
33:19fire
33:21fire
33:22Jerry was the epitome of the Grateful Dead the heart
33:26and the soul of it
33:29he was responsible for being the guy to keep this whole machination that we have built
33:35going
33:36and it's hard to live up to that
33:40the drugs that go along with being that person are not conducive to health and life
33:49You know, we were asking ourselves to maintain a kind of creative openness and leaning into it-ness, you know, passion, all that stuff.
34:04As we got older, it just got harder. And it was all kind of gathering ourselves up for what was going to be, what turned out to be our big decade, which was the 80s going into the 90s.
36:46guitar solo
37:16guitar solo
37:46guitar solo
38:16guitar solo
38:46guitar solo
39:16guitar solo
39:46guitar solo
40:16guitar solo
40:46guitar solo
41:16guitar solo
41:46guitar solo
42:16guitar solo
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