So Many Roads (5 page)

By early 1970 less electric, more organic-sounding records were in vogue, as opposed to the post–
Sgt. Pepper
approach of extravagant sonic creations. Hunter was particularly taken with the music of the Band, but according to Cutler, financial considerations also played a part in their change of direction. Having put themselves in the hole during the making of
Aoxomoxoa
, the Dead simply couldn't spend indiscriminately, at least not for a long time. “Garcia and I analyzed what they'd done in the past and why it wasn't successful and what could be done about that,” says Cutler. “I kept banging on Jerry and saying, ‘Do your album in one bang. Minimal recording cost. Do the two-week album. Just get in there.' And that's what they did.”

As they began to record in February, the preproduction work paid off. The sessions began around the time of “Dire Wolf,” paused for more touring, resumed in early March, and wrapped up around March 16. They bore down on two songs in particular. “Uncle John's Band” had started life as a long band jam on a cassette given to Hunter; he then fashioned lyrics about the band and its scene that were the most hopeful he'd written. (“Goddamn, Uncle John's mad!” went his first line, perhaps a nod to Garcia's shifting moods, but Hunter later deleted that line.) “Cumberland Blues,” the mining-story song, had a chugging-locomotive rhythm propelled by Lesh's bobbing bass. “Dire Wolf” was itself ready to go. They'd been playing it live since the previous June, and Weir had even sung lead on one version. Garcia had taken up the pedal steel guitar with the Dead's country offshoot band, the
New Riders of the Purple Sage, and the instrument pranced its way through the song.

The other songs were equally filled with exquisite touches—the “oooh” harmonies in “Dire Wolf,” Pigpen's warm organ in “Black Peter,” the modest rave-up in “Easy Wind.” But most emblematic of their heightened single-mindedness were their harmonies. The Dead were never known for them; Garcia, Lesh, and Weir each had a distinctive voice with unique creaks and crevices. But the new, folksier approach to their songs begged for vocal blends. Egged on by their friend in esoteric chords and hedonism, David Crosby (also living in a rented house in Novato, the backyard of which was seen on the cover of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's
Déjà vu
), the Dead began working harder than ever on their singing. “They were expected to sing all those parts, and it didn't go well,” laughs Mountain Girl. “It sounded like cats howling.”

In another sign of their focus, Garcia, Lesh, and Weir decided to have the last laugh and bore down on the singing. “We said, ‘You're gonna have to sing this right!'” says Cantor (now Cantor-Jackson). “We worked on them until they weren't flat or sharp and were hitting the notes.” The effort paid off; the mix of voices sounded natural, lending the songs a radiance and a sense of comforting teamwork. A slender brunette with a warm smile, long hair, and sharp ears that had earned her the nickname “Bettar” (as in, “She can make things sound better”), Cantor, then twenty-one, embodied another aspect of the Dead's rule-breaking approach: she was well on her way to becoming possibly the first woman recording engineer in a largely male business (and in the predominantly male Dead crew). She adored and championed the band and its music—even if she viewed the nitrous tanks in the studio with great skepticism, as she recalls with a laugh years later: “I'm sitting there going, ‘I don't like this.' I'm catching the tank as it's falling over so it doesn't hit the tape machine. I'm like, ‘Jesus, guys!'”

Everyone in the Dead camp had his or her spiky opinion about every aspect of their organization, but the sessions for
Workingman's Dead
marked a rare moment of genuine, yes-we-can Grateful Dead consensus: people seemed
happy
with the results. Cutler recalls they were “never more focused and on the ball” than during those sessions. “I liked it right off the bat, as soon as I heard the basics,” says Bill “Kidd” Candelario, who had joined the Dead crew two years earlier. Few were more euphoric than Warner Brothers head Joe Smith. The Dead had driven Smith fairly crazy over the previous four years—from overspending to trying to dose him—but when he heard the finished record he was ecstatic. “I had been on their back,” Smith says. “They saw they weren't getting any royalties. We were sticking with them, but we also said, ‘Please give us something we can sell.' They wanted to prove they could do it.” According to Matthews, the final bill for the album was less than $15,000. Garcia would never be happy with his singing on “High Time,” thinking he hadn't nailed it. But when Smith heard the record he gave Matthews a hug and gushed about how thrilled he was to hear the vocals. The feeling behind the album was so optimistic that members of the band stopped by the offices of
Rolling Stone
to play the record for the staff. “That was a turning point,” Lesh says of the making of the album. “It was kind of exciting to focus, to make such a left turn.”

Outside the studio doors their world could be chaotic, disorganized, and messy. But as this music-making experience showed, they could escape it all. “Being able to do that was
extremely
positive in the midst of all this adverse stuff that was happening,” Garcia would tell
Rolling Stone
editor Jann S. Wenner the following year. “It was definitely an upper . . . it was the first record that we made together as a group, all of us. Everybody contributed beautifully, and it came off really nicely.”

As they worked on “Dire Wolf” and prepared for several more weeks of recording, they had the songs, the music, and the hope that
they could ward off the bad mojo that threatened to engulf them. It was neither the first nor the last time the Dead would find themselves in that place. As their diffident leader knew, everything could change in the same amount of time it took to strum a chord. It had before; it could happen again.

Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, circa 1961.

PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN; COURTESY
JERRYGARCIA.COM

CHAPTER 1

MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA, OCTOBER 27, 1962

He couldn't have picked a lovelier setting in which to die. On the West Coast the work day was drawing to a close, but Jerry Garcia's task was only beginning. With his girlfriend, Barbara Meier, he left the Chateau, the three-story home in Menlo Park where he'd been living, and walked to the adjoining Sand Hill Road. From there the two began a long, exhausting hike up a hill. With a pine ridge saluting them to the west, the warmth of the Indian summer afternoon embraced them, and as Meier would recall, the light was “infused with honey.”

To anyone who passed them on the road Garcia and Meier must have seemed a study in contrasts. At twenty, Garcia sported short, thick, dark hair and a goatee that lent him “that Latin lover look, like [actor] Cesar Romero,” recalls one of his later musician friends, Tom Constanten. The image wholly matched the person Garcia was at that moment: part-time music teacher, fledgling banjo picker, budding bohemian. A man of few needs, he was wearing one of the two buttoned, short-sleeve shirts
that comprised the bulk of his wardrobe. In contrast, Meier, three years younger than him, was an effervescent brunette with a sun-bursting-through-the-clouds smile. Thanks to models who'd given her their cast-offs after they'd all worked together at photo shoots, Meier, who was still in high school, often dressed in what she calls “elegant baby beatnik crossed with Chanel.” By contrast, Garcia was pure beatnik.

On this late afternoon neither one of them was contemplating clothes or jobs. They were leaving behind Menlo Park and its more prosperous neighboring town, Palo Alto, along with their families, friends, and favorite bookstores and hangouts. If everything happened the way the news reports said it might, none of that would exist after that night anyway.

Like everybody in the Peninsula area south of San Francisco and on the rest of the planet, Garcia and Meier had heard the alarming, apocalyptic news somewhere. Maybe on TV or the newspapers or maybe by way of local, politically conscious friends like Roy Kepler, the former War Resistors League executive director so ahead of his time that he was a conscientious objector during World War II. (Kepler ran Kepler's Books & Magazines, where all the local bohemians and intellectuals gathered to read and sip coffee; the cash register was manned by another local peace activist, Ira Sandperl.) Eleven days before, John F. Kennedy, their vibrant president, had learned of the existence of missile bases in Cuba, each installed with Soviet missiles. On October 22 Kennedy had addressed the nation about the discovery; the following day US ships headed for Cuba just as Soviet subs moved into the area as well. On October 24 Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and not a man known for subtlety, sent a letter to Kennedy that practically had bile spit on it: “You are no longer appealing to reason, but wish to intimidate us.” On October 25 came a testy confrontation at the United Nations between the American representative, Adlai Stevenson, and the Soviet Union's, Valerian Zorin: “Don't
wait for the translation—yes or no?” asked Stevenson, demanding to know whether the Soviets had indeed placed missiles there.

On October 26 the situation had barely improved and bordered on incendiary: additional photos taken by American U2 planes chillingly revealed construction of the sites, and Khrushchev fired off another letter to Kennedy: “What would a war give you? You are threatening us with war. But you well know that the very least which you would receive in reply would be that you would experience the same consequences as those which you sent us. . . . If indeed war should break out, then it would not be in our power to stop it, for such is the logic of war. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction.” Robert McNamara, Kennedy's secretary of defense, told his boss that American forces could carry out an air strike “in a matter of days,” but Kennedy was reluctant to attack Cuba. Now, the morning of October 27, the situation had taken another turn for the ominous: the Soviets shot down a U2 plane over Cuba, and Air Force carriers were put in place in the event of war.

By ghoulish coincidence, a recently completed federal government study revealed that Palo Alto could accommodate 37,818 fallout shelters if needed. But if the world were to end, Garcia and Meier were going to be alone, together, in a radiant spot they could call their own for eternity. “If this was the end of the world, a very real probability in our teenage minds,” says Meier, “we wanted to be together, awake, and face it head on.” They didn't bring camping gear or food, just themselves and their fears.

The two had met the previous year in Menlo Park. Meier, then a fifteen-year-old high school student, had been invited for a hike with a friend, who first stopped by an art supply store; on the porch outside was a mysterious man in a goatee, holding a banjo. Initially he seemed reluctant to join them, but their mutual friend later told Meier that
the guy, whose name was Jerry Garcia, was instantly smitten: “Oh, tell her I love her,” he'd told their friend. Eventually he climbed into the backseat of the car and sang the traditional murder ballad “Silver Dagger,” which Joan Baez had popularized on her first album two years before. Meier didn't know who he was, but she couldn't deny his magnetism. “Jerry was singing just to me, and it was so seductive,” she says. “There was this incredible promise in his eyes of ‘I know about worlds you've never dreamed of, and I'll bet you're dying to try them.'”

Although he was just another twentysomething bumming around the area and trying to figure out his next move, Garcia already exuded more than a patina of magnetism. Not long before this October night another transplant, a Seattle kid named David Nelson who was himself mastering guitar, spotted Garcia in a bookstore. Cradling a twelve-string guitar, Garcia was strumming quietly, almost to himself, but at least to Nelson he was the focus of the room. In his open-buttoned shirt, Garcia seemed “incredibly hairy,” Nelson later recalled, and he struck Nelson as “kind of dark and surly,” complete with a stare that zeroed in on his target. Nelson couldn't take his eyes off the guy, and Garcia also seemed preternaturally mature. “Jerry was this guy who to all of us looked like an adult, like a grownup, where we kind of looked like kids,” he told writer David Hajdu. “There's this
man
here, you know. He was very advanced at the time compared to everybody else.”