The Byrds and the Dead

What, you might ask, did the Byrds have in common with the Grateful Dead?
Not much, as it turns out. Actually, the list of differences is pretty long -

The Byrds were a notoriously poor live band, at least until Clarence White joined. Early Byrds audiences could expect shoddy treatment.
The Dead built their reputation as a great live band – for their fans, the poor shows didn’t count, and no number of disappointments could keep them away.

The Byrds were famed for their angelic harmony singing. To this day, a stack of harmonies plus jangly guitars defines their sound.
The Dead emulated this in some of their songs...but in general their singing was not their strong-point, and was even a turn-off for many listeners. (And their guitars rarely jangled.)

The Byrds hit #1 on the charts immediately, and started their career an instant success, only to spiral downwards in popularity for year after year.
The Dead went the opposite direction, not having a big hit single for over twenty years, but becoming bigger and more popular every year regardless.

The Byrds were not a jam-band, but a pop-singles band. Hardly anything they did was even four minutes long. (They made an exception in the later live fuzz-jam versions of Eight Miles High.)
The Dead committed themselves to jamming early and often. Until 1970 rolled around, the commercial idea of hit singles and concise, polished albums was a joke to them. (Though the older they got, the more appealing the idea became.)

The Byrds were not friends before forming the group, and did not even get along. As the liner notes on their second record state, "There is little chance that a song will be recorded without a dozen fistfights and great mouthfuls of awful abuse." Which was the truth. Three years after their first album came out, three original members had quit and one had been kicked out.
The Dead, on the other hand, were a model of stability, and were mostly very close to each other. Aside from the keyboard players, the core members of the band stayed together for thirty years.

The Byrds were the most influential American group of the '60s. (Even the Beatles copied them – their stamp is all over Rubber Soul.) They were pioneers in not one, but three different genres - anyone who's played jangly folk-rock, psychedelic rock, or traditional country-rock has followed in their footsteps.
The Dead's music, in the sixties, influenced nobody outside San Francisco. In fact, they were held up as an example to be avoided!

Nonetheless, I’d like to point out some unexpected places the two bands intersected....

The Warlocks’ studio demo in November ’65 is as close as they ever got to Byrds-type music – in their selection of songs, they were heavily influenced by the ‘folk-rock’ scene around them. Early Morning Rain and I Know You Rider were straight from the folk world; Can’t Come Down was a Dylan imitation; Mindbender and The Only Time Is Now have group vocals that sound like the Warlocks might even have been listening to the Byrds. (Though group harmonies were very common in those days, and the Warlocks were not the most polished singers!) Caution, a copy of a Them song, was the hardest-rocking of the lot.

Both bands were new to electric instruments when they formed. The Byrds, like a thousand bands, formed in the wake of A Hard Day’s Night, churning out copies of Beatles and Searchers songs in quest of that Merseybeat sound, before discovering Dylan and their own strengths. Chris Hillman had been a bluegrass mandolin player, and like Phil Lesh, had never played a bass before, but soon became quite a strong bass player. The Byrds’ drummer Michael Clarke had never played drums in a band (he was hired for his looks, a common tactic in the ‘60s – Jefferson Airplane did the same thing), and started out with them playing on a cardboard box! (As McGuinn says, “Clarke didn’t know how to play the drums, but that didn’t matter.”)
Those of you who are starting new groups can take comfort from the Byrds’ “Preflyte” sessions from ‘64, which are painfully bad and show little sign of the band they would become. We’ve been spared the early Warlocks rehearsals of 1965; by the time our tape record picks up, they’re already fairly proficient, though still quite primitive. Both groups though, had no experience with rock music and had to learn ‘on the job’.

Chris Hillman says, “Everybody came from a folk music background. We all literally learned how to play together… I was a mandolin player and didn’t know how to play bass, but they didn’t know how to play their instruments either, so I didn’t feel too bad about it. None of us were rock & rollers, we were all folk musicians.”
David Crosby pointed out, “The drummer couldn't play...never could. He looked right but he never was a very good drummer… That's one of the reasons I learned to play that chop and smack kind of rhythm because I had to learn how to play drums on the guitar. Somebody had to do it, and so it was me and Chris. [The interviewer adds, “He had a really involved style of playing bass - almost like classical counterpoint more than like a standard bass part. So that probably didn't help in locking in the rhythm.”] I liked his bass work a lot - and I like Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead - another one who does exactly the same thing. The Grateful Dead is like a Dixieland band with about three or four melody lines kind of just loping through the music together.”

Crosby says when he first heard the Beatles, “It absolutely floored me – ‘those are folk-music changes, but it’s got a rock & roll backbeat. You can’t do that, but they did!’”
McGuinn had the same reaction. “I got really jazzed by the Beatles. I loved what they were doing, and they were doing a lot of passing chords… I thought, these are really folk music chord changes…and they made it into a heavy 4/4 beat. I went, ‘Ah! This is really cool.’”
McGuinn soon decided he could do the same thing on acoustic, and saw no problem with playing Beatle songs in folk clubs: “I started experimenting with the Beatle beat and putting it to various folk songs that I knew. I took it down to Greenwich Village and played it for the people down there. They weren't really into it, you know, because they're kind of purist in folk music. They thought it was kind of bubblegummy or something. One guy who owned one the coffee houses put a sign outside that said ‘Beatle Imitations.’ It was kind of embarrassing… I remember telling John Phillips about the Beatles and he put it down like it was lightweight stuff. The folkies didn't get it.”
The mix of folk songs and a rock beat was a bit too advanced for some listeners in ’64! “I was really getting a terrible audience reaction… The folk purists absolutely hated what I was doing. It was blasphemy.”

Some of Garcia’s friends in ’65 were also disappointed that he chose to play rock music instead of sticking with bluegrass. (Garcia himself later explained, “My musical bag had run out – there were no people who were really interested in bluegrass music, and nobody to play with… It was like a bankrupt scene. Musically it was interesting…but you never got a chance to play.”)
A friend of Garcia’s said, “I was thinking, ‘Why would he do this?’ Jerry could play that banjo so good, and he played in those bluegrass bands and I’d gotten to love that. It just seemed bizarre to me that anybody would want to play that electric music if he could play the banjo and guitar and mandolin. I remember being really disappointed that he had any interest at all in playing the electric guitar.”
Even Garcia’s brother was ashamed: “I was surprised when Jerry first told me he was playing with this electric band. It was like he had really gotten down on the ladder after he got married. They had a baby and he was saying, ‘I have to make gigs. So this is what I have to do.’ And I thought, ‘Jeez, this banjo player all of a sudden is lowering himself to play in a rock & roll band? Jerry, what’s happened to you?’ And he said, ‘I gotta make a buck, you know?’”
Chris Hillman ran into an old bluegrass acquaintance after joining the Byrds, looking embarrassed. “I said, ‘Hi Chris, how’re you doing?’ And he kind of held his head down and said, ‘I just joined a rock & roll band.’ I said, ‘Oh.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’m playing bass. I need the money.’”
McGuinn had the same experience: “I remember a lot of resistance in the folk community to going electric. I don’t remember a lot of people who wanted to make that move. I remember telling Bob Gibson, ‘I’m gonna do rock & roll.’ He said, ‘Oh, man, you’re selling out!’ That was the attitude in the folk community.”

Folkies of the early ‘60s had rather negative feelings about pop music. Garcia explained, “I’d occasionally turn on the radio to a rock & roll station, there would be this utter pap, terrible, featureless music. That was really an insult… There wasn’t anything exciting going on, there were no new ideas.” Garcia and his friends paid little attention to the Beatles until the Hard Day’s Night movie hit; Phil Lesh thought they sounded too “clean.”
Sara Garcia said, “We were dismissing them as a pop phenomenon. Lightweight… When A Hard Day’s Night came out, we started changing our minds about the Beatles. They were a trip, and there was something inspiring about them… We could identify with that sort of irreverent off-the-wall zaniness. By the time Help came out…we saw Help twelve times and memorized every line.”
Or as Garcia put it, “All of a sudden there were the Beatles, the Hard Day’s Night movie and everything. ‘Hey, great, that really looks like fun.’ … They were real important to everybody. They were a little model of good times, especially the movies – the movies were a big turn-on… The Beatles were light and having a good time and they were good too… It was like saying, ‘You can be young, you can be far-out, and you can still make it.’ They were making people happy – that’s the stuff that counts.”
Phil Lesh had also independently seen the movie, and he has a funny description in his book of being the only male in a movie theater filled with teenage girls screaming at the screen. As Garcia said, “He went to see the Beatles movie and of course it blew his mind, and he grew his hair long and started going to the early dances, when the Byrds were playing in town.” [Which actually wouldn’t have been til May ’65.]
McGuinn, Crosby, and Gene Clark went to see A Hard Day’s Night together. As Crosby said, “I knew right then what my life was going to be… I loved the attitude and the fun of it; there was sex, there was joy, there was everything I wanted out of life, right there. They were cool and we said, ‘Yeah, that’s it. We have to be a band. Who can we get to play drums?’”
McGuinn said, “We went as a group to see A Hard Day’s Night multiple times and were totally taken with the Beatles. I liked George Harrison’s Rickenbacker 12-string, but I couldn’t find one that looked like his.” Not only did McGuinn buy his famous electric 12-string because George Harrison played one, the rest of the band did the same - “We took notes on what the Beatles were playing and bought instruments like they had.” The band even went so far as to get “black suits with velvet collars, just like our heroes the Beatles.”
Their Beatle emulation paid off – for their first concert in February ‘65, they were billed as “the US answer to the Beatles.” They were very gratified when the Beatles called the Byrds their favorite American band. (The Dead, on the other hand, were much more ‘underground’ in their aspirations and didn’t touch any Beatle material for decades, except for a couple half-hearted attempts at Hey Jude in ’69.)

McGuinn comments on how derivative the early Byrds were: “If you listen to the very early Byrds recordings on, say, Preflyte, you can hear a pronounced Beatles sound. We moved away from that gradually, after getting into Dylan material. We weren’t thinking of making a new musical style at the time, we were just trying to keep a beat... We were coming from a folk background where the beat wasn't really an important factor. But in rock, the dancers would fall down if you didn't keep the beat. We had to learn how to play in rhythm. That was our main concern, really.”
The Dead also soon learned the importance of the beat - Garcia said in 1967, “We still feel that our function is as a dance band – our greatest value is as a dance band and that’s what we like to do. We like to play with dancers. We like to see it, and really, nothing improves your time like having somebody dance. Just pulls the whole thing together, and it’s also a nice little feedback thing. [The interviewer adds, “I’ve heard the people stomping on the floor…everybody’s in the band!”] That’s the ideal situation…when that’s happening, it’s really something special.”

McGuinn and Garcia were both former folkies, and the folk influence lingered long for both of them. McGuinn had a habit early on of borrowing Pete Seeger songs (like Turn Turn Turn, and Bells of Rhymney), and was fond of traditional folk ballads (like John Riley or Wild Mountain Thyme) – Garcia drew from a much wider range of sources; his knowledge of folk music wasn’t used much in the Dead, but came out more in his later collaborations with Grisman.
Both McGuinn and Garcia liked old sea shanties - the song Jack Tarr the Sailor, done in the Byrds' droney-dirge style on their Ballad of Easy Rider album, is the same song as Off to Sea Once More from Garcia/Grisman's Shady Grove album.
McGuinn, in fact, has a Folk Den on his website which he keeps updated with free new recordings of traditional folk songs – a couple recent ones are Goin’ Down the Road and Frozen Logger! (Dylan collectors will note how many of these songs were also done by Dylan in his bootlegged folk wanderings.)
http://www.ibiblio.org/jimmy/folkden-wp/

Though McGuinn’s guitar-playing can’t really be compared to Garcia’s, he had an original, distinctive style – many of his solos (especially from ‘66/67) are freaky classics, and he sounds like he’s inventing a new language. His playing on the Eight Miles High/Why single was a groundbreaking departure, and its influence can be heard all over the Velvet Underground’s first album, recorded just a month after the single’s release. (Lou Reed went to a Byrds show later that year, and claimed in 1968, “To this day, no one has done a better solo than Eight Miles High…the Byrds are divine.”) Another favorite solo of mine is in Change Is Now, an amazing trance drone, and even more its instrumental outtake called ‘Universal Mind Decoder’, which is basically one long, trippy guitar solo.
One thing McGuinn shared with Garcia was that he’d previously played in acoustic folk bands, and this affected how he approached the electric guitar. He’s noted in interviews that part of his guitar style was derived from “a lot of the folky stuff, like the Travis picking.” Some of it came from banjo playing, the ‘rolling’ aspect:
“The sound that I have on the electric 12-string came about because I played the 5-string banjo…so I’d developed a number of rolling pick patterns that I applied to the electric. So if you listen to the rhythm work…you’ll hear a rolling arpeggio pattern underneath. Then we overdubbed the lead break.”
Garcia also said, “My taste in music is kind of informed by the banjo in a way. I like to hear every note. I like the clarity and separation of notes… I work on the electric guitar, the top strings anyway, like a banjo sometimes. My intention with some of my soloing is to get something that's like the banjo in terms of the clarity.”
Here’s the best article on Garcia’s banjo playing and how it related to his electric-guitar work:
http://www.thebestofwebsite.com/Bands/Jerry_Garcia/Misc/Rothman/1_Jerrys_Banjo_Years.htm
(Coincidentally, both players were also apt to quote from Bach's 'Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring' - McGuinn did it in the solo for She Don't Care About Time, and Garcia slipped hints of it into jams now & then, for instance in the 10/19/73 Morning Dew or the 11/30/73 Dark Star intro...)

The Byrds called themselves an eclectic band, who couldn’t be put into one bag. The Dead (though they were singlemindedly psychedelic from ’67-69) soon became expert at jumping from genre to genre with each song. Garcia said as early as ’67, “We’ve stolen freely from everywhere…we have no bones about mixing our idioms or throwing stuff back and forth from one place to another. So you might hear some very straight traditional, classical-style counterpoint popping up in the middle of some rowdy thing.”
The Byrds had a tendency to jumble different styles into one song – a rock beat might suddenly go into a country waltz and back again, and they were equally happy to dabble in jazz lines, spacy drones, string quartets, or pedal steel parts. Of course by 1967 rock music was getting more baroque, so the Byrds were not alone in layering their songs with trumpets & violins & celestes. (They were, though, one of the first bands to use a synthesizer, which in ’67 was truly futuristic.)
One reviewer pointed out in ‘67, “The Byrds’ eclecticism is awesome: C&W, science fiction, light jazz touches, finger-picking rhythms, pop-rock, and touches of strings all play their part on this album. Yet if one doesn’t listen closely, he may not notice even a fraction of the incongruities…and therein lies the Byrds’ ability to assimilate everything that they touch.”
One example of the Byrds’ creative mixing approach is their instrumental outtake of the traditional John Riley, where they speed up the song into a psych-jazz-folk piece, McGuinn playing a continuous skittering guitar solo where the lyrics would be. Their approach to psychedelic rock was very different from the Dead’s, as they stuck to short songs (but not always catchy, and sometimes even freestyle), with heavy reliance on studio effects like phasing and backwards guitars.
Just as the Dead became fascinated by the tempos of Indian music, the Byrds earlier became vocal champions of Ravi Shankar, even holding a press conference in March ‘66 where they showed off a sitar and talked about the influence of ragas on their music. (Ironically, they never used a sitar, though some of McGuinn’s solos were meant to sound like one. Many bands adopted Indian elements around this time – for instance, the Butterfield Band was developing their raga-inspired East/West instrumental - but ‘raga rock’ turned out to be a brief phase.)
The Byrds, like the Dead, were also devoted jazz fans, especially of John Coltrane. The liner notes to their first album state that Chris Hillman “plays John Coltrane solos on the mandolin.” Eight Miles High was, of course, a direct tribute to Coltrane, with McGuinn trying to play his guitar like a saxophone. The Byrds even rehearsed a version of Miles Davis' Milestones (and a snippet can briefly be heard in a TV documentary on youtube), but sadly it wasn’t released, the tape was lost, and no recording survives. (Remarkably, Miles Davis had been the person who convinced Columbia Records to sign up the Byrds! So this may have been intended as another tribute.)
McGuinn commented on the group’s changes: “We knew about getting locked into a bag like so many groups did. They had success for a while and they were locked into their bag, and their bag just fell down and they fell down with it. We would do a Houdini from every bag that we got locked into with handcuffs on. We'd pick the locks and jump out of the bag. Tah-dah! Here we are in the country field; here we are in the rock field; here we are in the jazz field - we're doing a number on the public which they didn't really take too well, but at least we didn't get locked into a bag. We're not folk-rock - you can't say that about us any more, really.” (from this interesting 1970 interview - http://www.vincentflanders.com/roger-mcguinn-interview.html )
So the Byrds were quite an experimental and open-ended band for a time, particularly when Crosby was throwing in his weird songs. If Mr Tambourine Man was the birth of a thousand jangles, the 1966 Fifth Dimension album is the Byrds’ most varied album, where their Indian fascination and space-cowboy-rock tendencies are the clearest – in some songs, McGuinn utters flurries of freestyle-jazz guitar solos, in others they harmonize over sweet orchestrated folk tunes. They stayed in full creative bloom through the next two albums from 1967, Younger Than Yesterday and the Notorious Byrd Brothers – usually considered their best albums, these are smoother, gentler, and more consistent. (The Byrds CD reissues with bonus tracks are essential, as several B-sides and good tracks were left off the albums.)

Both the Byrds and the Dead had a hidden appreciation for country music, and each was to take an abrupt turn into the country style, alarming their audiences. (The Byrds lost theirs, but the Dead fans stayed faithful.) The Byrds went through quite a transition in ‘68, as the psychedelic-folkie Byrds phased out and the country-rock Byrds came to stay.
Chris Hillman said of the Byrds’ psych/folk phase, “That was more Roger’s deal. I would play on it, but it wasn’t something I was involved in…. He had that side of him, musically, that was not my style of music. It really wasn’t something I loved that much. But I was a player, and that’s his material, so I supported it. But I sort of dragged him into the country stuff, so it works both ways.”
Hillman found a supporter when the band hired Gram Parsons (as a jazz-piano player!) - “Having Parsons in the band was great for me. I love country music, and now I had an ally, and we sort of nudged Roger along. Roger never really liked that kind of music…”
McGuinn talked about Parsons after he left the band in ‘68: “He was going to be in the group, but it didn’t work out. While he was with us, which I consider a great thing, he led us into this direction headlong, which we would never have done. We were afraid to commit ourselves. It was a little foreign to us…but we have always jumped around in different forms, so we dove into it.”
(He later gave this famous summary: “We hired a piano player – and it turned out to be Parsons – a monster in sheep’s clothing – and he exploded out of this sheep’s clothing – God! It’s George Jones! In a big sequin suit!”)
McGuinn explained the band’s sudden switch to country on Sweetheart of the Rodeo in ‘68: “It’s sort of a backlash from the psychedelic scene, which I’m personally saturated with. We’ve been somewhat influential in starting that kind of stuff, raga-rock and jazz-rock, before it was really appreciated, and a year later these groups did it up and made a great success with it. Everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon, so we wanted to get off.”
A couple years later, though, McGuinn was getting a bit tired of country: “I’m fed up to the gills with country music. I don’t care if I never sing another country song in my life… It’s not my style, really. I can do a shot, but I don’t feel at home with it, because I’m a city boy from Chicago. I have more of a love for old-time folk and jazz. I was sort of pressured into country music.”

The Dead also famously took a turn away from nonstop acid jams in ‘69/70 and started doing folkier country/rock tunes (which I talked about quite a bit in my acoustic-sets post). Garcia explained, “We were into a much more relaxed thing…and we were also out of our pretentious thing. We weren’t feeling so much like an experimental music group, but were feeling more like a good old band.” Rock Scully also said, “After all those years of mind-gumming psychedelics we were all actually beginning to crave the normal.” Mickey Hart felt much the same: “I thought, what a wonderful thing – acoustic guitars. It was cold out there in the feedback, electric GD world. It was a great cold, a wonderful freeze, full of exploratory moments and great vision, but here we were exploring the soft side… I remember how warm and fuzzy it made me feel.”

By 1970, the Byrds would have a little break in their show for some songs with acoustic guitar & banjo, folk things like Pretty Boy Floyd and Black Mountain Rag, and a Dylan song or two. The Dead were doing the same thing, though their songs were selected from a larger bag and their acoustic sets kept getting longer. (And, for that matter, even the noisy Led Zeppelin had little acoustic sections in their shows by 1970!)
Meanwhile, back in ’68 Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman had left the Byrds and formed a band that would be even more country, the Flying Burrito Brothers. The two bands would play together in ‘reunions’ occasionally. (At that point there were more Byrds in the Burritos than there were in the Byrds!) There was one famous occasion where the Burritos opened for the Dead, which has been released and possibly inspired Garcia to take up the pedal-steel again. Here’s a post about it:
http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2010/03/april-4-6-1969-avalon-ballroom-san.html

Compared to the gracefulness of the Byrds’ albums, it’s surprising to hear the raucous, ramshackle punkiness of their 1967 Monterey show (released on Rhino’s Monterey box set, although I Know My Rider was left out). Unfortunately, we don’t have any earlier Byrds shows (save for a tame Swedish radio appearance). But numerous audience reports describe a live band that was very different than you’d imagine:
“They were so loud – they were just incredibly loud. It parted your hair right down the middle.”
“They were loud…it was deafening in there. I remember being disappointed when I heard their records, actually. The production sound…was all very smooth; it didn’t have nearly the grinding sort of Zeppelin-esque power they had displayed when I heard them live. There was more of the heavy-metal quality to what they were doing…than you might think by listening to the records.”
“The music was loud…the amplifiers were turned up all the way. The Byrds weren’t always musically precise with playing their songs, but they generated a wall of noise which seemed to envelop you.”
“I’d see people get up and leave, because it was so loud they couldn’t stand it. A lot of times, they’d have their amplifiers on stage behind them so loud they were drowning out their own vocals… Somebody’d turn up, and somebody next to him would notice, and they’d turn up a notch or two. It was competitive…a wall of noise up there.”
One TV producer complained to the Byrds that the sound was distorted. “The group looked at me like I really didn’t understand. ‘The music has to be loud, man!’… Each member of the group reached down and turned their speakers back up to full volume… I looked up at the control room window and saw my audio man being blown back in his seat.”
One hostile English reviewer called the Byrds “an appalling racket” - “They were relaxed almost to the point of disinterest… The singers’ voices were totally inaudible, drowned by the pounding thump of the drums and the ear-splitting twang and jangle of the 12-string guitar.”
McGuinn simply says, “We were undisciplined. Most bands could probably play more harmoniously than we did. We would all turn it up to 11 and kind of blast each other out. It was a matter of, ‘I can’t hear myself, man, I gotta turn it up more.’”
It was an era, of course, when rock bands in general wanted to get louder and louder – Hendrix and the Who also blasted their way through Monterey. Part of the philosophy was that the music would be more intense if audiences didn’t just hear the music, but were vibrated by it. The Dead were no exception. (As Garcia said many years later to Grisman, “On this planet, louder is better!”)
Garcia talked quite a bit about dealing with the volume of electric instruments in his 1967 interview with Ralph Gleason – Gleason said, “People get very hung up about the volume.”
Garcia replied, “That’s true. Because it’s very loud! … I think of it as being a sensory overload… We’ve spent two years with loud and we’ve spent six months with deafening! … In order to hear yourself play, you have to be a little bit louder. And you can see what happens. Everybody starts to turn up a little bit, so by the end of the night, everybody’s creeped up so they’re real loud.” (He claimed, “I think we’re moving out of our loud stage,” but that was a couple years off.)

The Dead were always very relaxed and casual onstage, and at least in the early years were friendly with their audiences. They even spoke sometimes! The Byrds, stars from the start, took a similar casual approach to their live shows, but without the friendliness. One reviewer described them: “They didn’t walk on – they wandered on, with that unique air of detached vagueness… They drifted across the stage in a seemingly aimless fashion, but each went to his allotted place and plugged in. Nothing was hurried, everything was casual and slow-paced.”
In a 1965 rock show, this was unprecedented, and some audience members were startled by this behavior. Some were disappointed that the band was “utterly static” and “made no attempt to communicate with the audience” - and even worse, “after each song, they get together…for a long and usually heated discussion about what they’re going to play next.” One former fan wrote, “They were terrible. The sound was awful, they didn’t bother to introduce any of the songs [!], they tuned up onstage [!!], they had no talent or personality.” Some people were shocked that the Byrds would actually start a concert by tuning up for a few minutes: “they were actually tuning their guitars onstage between numbers – most unprofessional!”

Things went downhill from there, though. The Byrds were always remote and aloof onstage, and never really acknowledged or spoke to audiences, but by 1967 they appeared utterly indifferent to the world. (Crosby responded to this by becoming a motormouth onstage, as we hear at Monterey.)
Chris Hillman admits, “We were better in the studio than we were onstage. We became too lackadaisical onstage.”
Reviewers in ’67 complained, “Onstage they seemed bored, tired, brought-down, and completely out of touch with the audience.” “They seemed to alienate themselves from the audience…you felt free to take it or leave it, listen or drift… They didn’t seem really interested in what they were playing.”
Even their old manager admitted, “I never went to gigs anymore because I couldn’t stand being ashamed of the way they played. They played sloppy music.” Their press agent felt the same: “The Byrds, one of the best groups in the world, were again terrible in the Whiskey a Go Go. I cannot work it out. They seem to have a death-wish.”
Crosby, soon to leave the band, took it the hardest: “Roger would stop in the middle of a song to look at his watch and see how much more time he had to do in the set… My band was turning into a shuck… We would tell people that they should come watch the Byrds play, and then the Byrds would come there and be a mechanical windup doll. They didn’t play fuck. We would get through a set – forty minutes long, just barely – of material that we had done so many times we were ready to throw up with it. We were bored, we were uptight, uncommunicative…”
McGuinn explains (though he’s talking more about ’65 here), “We were a better studio band then a stage band, for the simple reason of lack of experience on the stage. We'd been in the studio for a year but we hadn't been on the stage for more than a month or two [sic]. When we first went out on the stage, the little girls were screaming because we had a number one hit, and you didn't have to worry about performing. But when they stopped screaming, they were listening, and that was a problem.”

Crawdaddy magazine had a (mostly incomprehensible) review of the Byrds in 1967, outlining their dilemma:
“Everybody knows that the Byrds are an odd case. Only the Byrds, amongst modern rock stars, have managed to change their status from stardom to cultural heroism. That is, as one 45 after another didn’t make it, their quality still kept up. And this maintained the fierce loyalty of several hundred thousand knowing fans. Not enough to make them traditional rock stars…but enough to keep their name in circulation. So when the Byrds recorded So You Want To Be A Rock & Roll Star [with its screaming girls], there was some real irony at work… Who could possibly scream at the Byrds? That’s just not their thing… The Byrds have sounded so bad live… Everybody knows that they could do it well live… But recently they haven’t bothered. The performance quality has become gratuitous.”

This changed after ’68. Though the studio albums became ever more mediocre, the live band improved dramatically after Clarence White joined. (Changing drummers also helped a lot.) The Byrds may already have become a ‘nostalgia act’ to some extent (McGuinn being the only original member left, and plenty of old hits in the set), and they were never the hottest band on the circuit; but their later live shows are far more enjoyable than the dull stuff they were doing in the studio.
The Grateful Dead were known to mix up the songs from night to night, so no two shows were the same – the Byrds, on the other hand, settled on a fixed repertoire, so on any given tour, mostly the same songs would be performed every night. That was as true in ’71 as in ’66, so it must have led to some creative burnout… (McGuinn was never the most prolific songwriter, being more of an adapter, so good collaborators were ideal for him to produce his best work – and songwise, he didn’t really have them in the later Byrds.)

Garcia never really mentioned the Byrds, as far as I’ve seen (not that he’d have any reason to!) – but in his 1967 interview with Ralph Gleason, they did talk about the dance scene a bit. Gleason felt that the live Byrds didn’t turn him on, and the dancers simply looked ‘freaky’ rather than ‘hip.’ (The Byrds had brought their own retinue of L.A. dancers with them when they first went to San Francisco. Incidentally, when Gleason actually wrote about the Byrds show in May ’65, he wrote, “The wild and exotic Byrd-watchers on the floor at the Peppermint Tree were a gas… It is by no means a formal thing. Everybody goes out there and wails away in his or her own individual fashion, and the dancers generally ignore each other.”)
In ’67 Gleason concluded, “Those bands from L.A. still do it wrong,” saying that they were only ‘studio’ bands. And Garcia agreed – “Why is it that San Francisco is so much groovier a place?” His idea was that “in the early dances, everybody was a part of the band. Everybody was stomping on the floor, and waving their arms around. And that was a good feeling… They don’t have any dance things in L.A. The extent of dancing in Los Angeles is ten feet off the floor in a glass cage… Your car is where you live in L.A. The car radio is where it’s at…because if you don’t have an automobile, you’re not even alive in Los Angeles. And their scene is real isolated – they don’t have a community in L.A. There is no place, there is nothing down there. And that’s the truth. We were down there…”
Los Angeles had quite a negative reputation in San Francisco as a “super-uptight plastic” city. Pigpen pointed out, “The only good thing about L.A. is they’ve got about a thousand television stations.” Garcia agreed, “Nothing much else going on. We stayed in the house there, afraid to go out on the streets.” Phil Lesh had a similarly negative memory of L.A. in his book, calling it an “industrial wasteland, populated only by machines and cops.” They seem to have had a similarly low opinion of the L.A. music scene: “the right look, but zero substance…”

The Dead and the Byrds rarely crossed paths in their tours. For the most part, the only events they both appeared at were big festivals where they played on different days, and probably had little if any contact –
Monterey Pop Music Festival – the Byrds played June 17 ‘67; the Dead played the next day.
Newport Pop Festival – Both bands played on August 4 ’68, among many other bands.
Vancouver Pop Festival – The Byrds played Aug 22 ’69; the Dead may have played on the 24th.
New Orleans Pop Festival – The Byrds played on August 31 ’69; the Dead played the next day.
The one show they played together was the “Rock Jubilee” in Houston on October 5 ’69, along with Poco and Jefferson Airplane. As the shows were delayed by several hours, the Byrds had to play a short set and the plug got pulled on the Airplane at 10pm, so it’s likely the Dead didn’t play for very long either. (Unless they were the reason for the delays!)

There is at least one Byrds show that Jerry Garcia went to watch – at the legendary Ash Grove club in Los Angeles in late August, 1970. This would have stirred up many memories for Garcia – he’d frequently gone to see the Kentucky Colonels with Clarence White & Scotty Stoneman play at this club back in 1965; and the opener for the band was Freddie King, who had been a huge influence on Garcia’s guitar playing. (King played TWO versions of Hideaway during his set on August 25 – which is up at Wolfgang’s Vault in their Ash Grove show collection. The Byrds’ set from August 23, with some country guests, has been bootlegged as the “Ash Grove”. Also on the bill was Robbie Basho, a wonderful fingerstyle guitar-player in the mystical-Fahey vein.) Newspaper reviewers at the show were amazed by King’s hot blues set, but called the Byrds a “somewhat disinterested garage band” who “offered little to get excited about, save for the guitar
wizardry of Clarence White.” (Garcia may have gone mainly to catch up with Clarence…)

SONGS
There were several songs both bands played, mostly covers.

Not Fade Away - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FtWm0AehGk (Shindig ’65)
The Byrds only briefly played Not Fade Away live in the early days, Rolling Stones-style (as a tribute to the Stones). They never recorded it - but in Don’t Doubt Yourself Babe (on their first album) they also borrowed the Bo Diddley beat, particularly in the tremolo-laden outro.

Captain Soul - The Byrds were not much affected by r&b, but this instrumental was based on Lee Dorsey's tune Get Out Of My Life Woman. Coincidentally, that was the same tune the Dead used to revamp Viola Lee Blues (including that famous lick), so there's a strong resemblance. (Actually, these two tracks sound much more similar to each other than to the original. I haven’t heard another version that sounds quite like these two.) If you care to, you can sing Viola Lee to the Byrds' instrumental!

I Know My Rider - This is one folk song they shared. (Hillman: “An old folk song that we were just kicking around. Everybody used to sing that in the old folk days.” McGuinn: “We all knew it from playing around in the Village in different coffeehouses.”) I like the Byrds' arrangement more than the Dead's (it rocks, whereas the Dead just shuffle) - the Byrds were not so thrilled with it, and their version wasn’t released til decades later. The Dead’s jangly ’66 version sounds more like the Byrds, making it possible that one group might have heard the other live early on; but apparently the Byrds took their inspiration from the Beatles’ Paperback Writer!
The song was widespread in the folk circuit, and these are a couple earlier pre-rock examples -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovr7KxeL76Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoM69rZEaIk

He Was A Friend Of Mine – This became something of a traditional song in the early-‘60s folk boom, though different singers tended to vary the lyrics or arrangement. The Byrds’ treatment is openly about JFK, the Dead’s version more a vague death poem, in keeping with Garcia’s taste. (The Dead based their version on Mark Spoelstra’s variation, which I haven’t heard.) The Byrds' vocals are immeasurably better than the Dead's, although their version lacks the guitar solos!
This is the oldest version I know of, recorded in a Texas prison in the ‘30s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35NQkumxbfo
And Dylan’s version - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkk2sEAs7Vo

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue - The Byrds became known for their numerous Dylan covers, but this was the only one the Dead also covered in the sixties. As with many Dylan songs, Garcia made this his own. Though the Byrds recorded this early on, they rejected it, and a very dull remake was released years later on the Ballad of Easy Rider album (in the sleepy late-Byrds style), so their better original version wasn't heard for decades.

Sing Me Back Home - The Dead were latecomers to the country-rock trend. The Byrds had shown some country twinges on their first few records, but in '68 Gram Parsons shoved them wholly into country music, and they picked up this Merle Haggard song. It can be heard on their Live at the Fillmore February '69 album - the Flying Burrito Brothers also did it, and the Dead adopted it a couple years later, Garcia turning it into a slow dirge the way he liked (similar to Friend of Mine).
Haggard’s original - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN5d4TY-wHM
Gram Parsons - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOuhrCRfQJA

Eight Miles High - True, the Dead never played this. But, Garcia and Lesh rehearsed this with David Crosby for a show in December 1970, and an interesting recording survives. The thought of even a quasi-Dead tackling this Coltrane-inspired song is tantalizing. Unfortunately, Garcia doesn’t sound very comfortable with the song, and his solo isn’t as inspired as we might like. (I’d guess it wasn’t played in the shows…)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99iOr6hEV_0 (from 1:20 to 5:10)
After Clarence White joined the Byrds, they started jamming this song out – one example is on the Untitled album; this is a shorter version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKhI09XO5R0 - Eight Miles High, live 9/23/70

TRIVIA
The Dead and the Byrds were both notorious drug bands. One reviewer who met the Byrds in ’65 noticed, “What strikes us is how, er, disoriented they are… Especially in the case of Michael Clarke. At one point, I find him slumped in a backstage corridor trying to assemble his drum kit. An hour later, he’s still at it.” (A problem the Dead also frequently faced in the early days!)
In the case of the Byrds, they denied that Eight Miles High had anything to do with drugs (without much success), but by ’67 the outspoken Crosby was championing LSD onstage at Monterey, and they even wrote a song about speed. (That’s not to mention the evening with the Beatles in ’65 when McGuinn, Crosby, Lennon, and Harrison sat in a bathtub blasted on acid, playing 12-strings and talking about sitars – a night which would later inspire both Harrison’s sitar craze and Lennon’s song She Said She Said.)
I think we can safely assume that the Byrds drifted through the sixties in a haze of pot and acid just like the Dead, Beatles, and most other rock bands, and will say no more about that.

Chris Hillman's song The Girl With No Name was about the young delinquent known as Girl Freiberg, a friend of Crosby’s who also inspired Steve Miller's song Quicksilver Girl, and hung out in the Quicksilver Messenger Service circle. Apparently Hillman also had a run-in with her! There are more details about her here -
http://www.gotarevolution.com/martha.htm
Here’s a picture of her and Pigpen - http://ia351407.us.archive.org/0/items/uploaded/Street_Pig__-tigerbolt-1967pig.jpg?cnt=0
She can also be seen in the photo section of McNally's Dead bio with the Olompali crowd in ‘66, about age 17 and wearing not very much.
She’s also written a reflection on those times –
http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-05-20/news/17246281_1_juvenile-hall-south-africa-redneck

++++++++++++++++++

PART TWO

Although the Byrds and the Dead, as groups, did not hang together socially, there were a couple strong personal connections.

BOB DYLAN
The two bands had a mutual friend in Bob Dylan, though at different times.

The Byrds, of course, were the first rock band to cover a Dylan song, opening many doors. As anyone knows who’s heard of the Newport Folk Festival boos or the “Judas!” cry, folk and rock were separate worlds before ’65, and bringing them together was a huge step. Rock music before ’65 was not known for its lyrics - a large strand of folk music was all about the words, particularly Dylan’s words.
Hunter: “We’ve got to give Dylan credit for being the guy who really opened the door to being literate in music. That was his door and we thank him very much for opening it.”
Garcia: “He sure did. He gave rock & roll the thing I’d wished it had when I was a kid – respectability, some authority. He took it out of the realm of ignorant guys banging away on electric instruments and put it somewhere else altogether… Dylan is the guy who allowed the music to become what some of us hoped it could be.”

McGuinn remembers, “I’d seen Dylan in the Village, and I wasn’t really a big fan of his. He was basically a Woody Guthrie imitator when I saw him in ’61, ’62… I remember him from Gerde’s [in New York] when he was sort of scuffling… I was working and had some bread – he wasn’t. He was into the in-group kind of thing and I wasn’t… I represented a commercial folk-group, and that wasn’t groovy…”
Crosby was also unimpressed by the early Dylan – like many people, he was put off by the singing: “I thought he was a great writer then, [but] didn’t like his voice… I didn’t really get him until Roger translated him for me…he made Dylan come alive for me. All of a sudden I realized the real potential of those songs, because I wasn’t listening to Dylan’s voice, which I found sort of irritating.” (The Byrds initially did not even want to cover Mr. Tambourine Man, but their producer insisted on it!)
McGuinn continues, “Next time I saw Dylan was in L.A. after the Byrds were working together, and we showed him our arrangement of Mr Tambourine Man, and he said, ‘Wow, man, you can dance to that.’ He couldn’t believe the transition it had gone through. In fact, we sang him some of his other stuff at Ciro’s and he didn’t even recognize them. And we got to be friends after a while… He said he really liked what I was starting to do with my music. He thought I’d got my own style going, and he dug it. I didn’t think he would. He didn’t start influencing me until I started singing his material. As I got into it I started to appreciate it. I started to feel what he felt…sort of a rebellious, funky attitude... We had this saving grace that we were doing something with it, aside from just copying it…it was modulated to somewhere else, electrically.”

Dylan was an early supporter of the Byrds. (Of course, thinking of all those royalties couldn’t have hurt!) He was surprised on first hearing them, that his songs could be turned into dance music – “They do it well,” he said at their Tambourine Man rehearsal. He helped convince them that recording Mr Tambourine Man was worthwhile (though he hadn’t even put it on album yet); and at one of their early shows in March '65 he sang and played harmonica for a song or two – his first appearance onstage with a rock group in the ‘60s. (The Byrds look thrilled to be with him.)
He pronounced the next day, “They’re doing something really new now. It’s like a danceable Bach sound. Like Bells of Rhymney. [Which they hadn’t recorded yet.] They’re cutting across all kinds of barriers… If they don’t close their minds, they’ll come up with something pretty fantastic.” (Pretty high praise from him, for a fledgling pop group with no records out!)
The Byrds went on to cover a bunch of Dylan songs over the years – perhaps too many – and became known as Dylan interpreters. On their second album, Dylan was impressed by their cover of Lay Down Your Weary Tune, according to McGuinn: “Hey, this sounds really good. This has some feeling.” (His own version wouldn’t be released for over twenty years.)
McGuinn tells the story of one of Dylan’s suggestions for their second album: “I’m sorry about Oh Susannah. That was a joke, but it didn’t come off, it was poorly told. It was a private joke between Dylan and I, actually. I was riffing with this song – we were trying to rock anything, and Stephen Foster was a funny thing to rock with. Dylan said, ‘Yeah, you gotta do that on your next album, right?’ He didn’t really think I would; he didn’t think I had the guts to do it. So I said, ‘OK,’ and I did it. It was a bomb…it didn’t come out well. We could have done it much better.” (Chris Hillman agreed: “A waste of tape…we were under pressure and rushed.”)
Bad idea, in retrospect, the kind of thing Dylan would do on Self Portrait… But one thing the Byrds had in common with Dylan was the habit of putting innocuous filler on albums when more promising songs were sitting unreleased - and at 11 songs each, their albums were none too long anyway. But this was one result of the band’s arguments, compromises, and the need to record at speed and keep the albums rolling out twice a year: quality control slipped sometimes. (“Politics,” says McGuinn.)

As for Dylan going electric, McGuinn understandably claims, “I think he got his inspiration from us. We had taken one of his songs and done it without sacrificing too much of the aesthetic value, and this confirmed his suspicions that rock was possible for him.” I don’t know if they really influenced him that much (the Beatles and the Animals, and the urgings of producer Tom Wilson, were also in his mind), but it’s notable that he was thinking of switching to rock music at just the time he met them. In fact, his first electric sessions for Bringing It All Back Home in January ‘65 took place the same week the Byrds recorded Tambourine Man! (He recorded the song just five days before they did.)
Michael Bloomfield said of the Highway 61 sessions that July: “He had heard records by the Byrds that knocked him out. He wanted me to play like McGuinn. That’s what he was shooting for…the Byrds sound was what he wanted to get in his sessions.” If so, he didn’t quite get it! But it would become typical over the years for Dylan to enter the studio with one sound in mind and end up recording something completely different.
A few years later in ‘69, Dylan quietly contributed a couple lines of lyrics to the song Ballad of Easy Rider (a song very much in his new ‘pastoral’ style). The Byrds planned to record an album with Dylan in 1970 – as McGuinn said, “We don’t have any concept in mind. He just said to bring some of our stuff and he’d bring some of his. He said he hasn’t been writing much lately…” (At the time Dylan was floundering around in the studio, recording Self Portrait.) But for some reason, they never got together. McGuinn stayed friends with Dylan – Dylan played harmonica on his first solo album; McGuinn played guitar on the Pat Garrett soundtrack in ’73, went on the Rolling Thunder Revue in ‘75/76, guested at the 11/22/80 show, and later on, opened shows during Dylan’s fall ’87 tour with the Heartbreakers.

Dylan’s relationship to the Dead is a bit more mysterious - I’m not sure how much contact he had with the band before ‘86. The earliest contact I know of was when he saw their 7/18/72 show (it’s been said he was even thinking of touring with them, but that seems unlikely). Dylan was also one of the performers at the 3/23/75 benefit show. Sometime around then, he started a behind-the-scenes friendship with Garcia, though neither of them ever talked about it that I know of. (Mountain Girl mentions Dylan visiting Garcia’s home in the early ‘70s.)
Garcia, like McGuinn, was not into Dylan’s early albums. “I never used to like Bob Dylan until he came out with electric music…I sure liked that a lot more.” Garcia liked Bruce Langhorne’s guitar-playing on Bringing It All Back Home, and also liked that “Dylan was getting a little less heavy, he was having a little more fun. That was a nice change. And another thing that turned me on a lot was when I saw Bob Dylan on television, on the Les Crane show [in February ‘65].” Dylan played Baby Blue with Langhorne (a song that struck Garcia right away), and played his usual put-on games with the amused host. Garcia was taken by Dylan’s trippy demeanour and “insane raps. Beautiful mad stuff…we couldn’t believe it.” (The show was taped and bootlegged, and there’s a transcript of the zany banter here, though it doesn’t quite convey the charm of the tape: http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/65-feb17.htm Dylan seems rather giddy,
and isn’t yet as impatient or hostile as he’d be in many interviews over the next year, some of which are also compiled on that website.)
Garcia said later, “Back in the folk music days I couldn’t really dig his stuff, but on Bringing It All Back Home he was really saying something that I could dig… It’s All Over Now Baby Blue, we did that from the very beginning because it was such a pretty song.” Weir also sang She Belongs To Me in ’65; but otherwise the Dead didn’t cover Dylan’s songs much until the ‘80s, when a flood of Dylan songs started creeping into their sets.
Garcia played at Dylan’s shows a few times, much later on (11/16/80, 5/5/92, and 6/25/95) – in the 1980 show, Dylan introduced him: “I’ve played with him a few times before. I’m a great admirer and fan of his and support his group all the way.” Garcia was already doing lots of Dylan covers in his band, but it’s a surprise to hear that he’d ever played with Dylan (Garcia never mentioned it), or that Dylan listened to the Dead. But they seem to have been close already – the story of Garcia’s appearance at the 1980 show is told in Greenfield’s Dark Star bio (page 240). Apparently the idea was just to sell more tickets for the show (Dylan was in his Christian phase and driving people off in droves), but Garcia was excited about going – “I want to go down there and play.” Afterwards, he admitted, “Dylan didn’t know I was coming. But it was worth it. Because it has always been my dream.” It left quite an impression on Dylan as well – at Garcia’s funeral, he simply said to Koons, “He was there for me when nobody was.”

Though the Dylan/Dead tour in 1987 was not a high point for either of them, Dylan called the tour a turning point for him that rejuvenated his approach to live shows – “The Dead did a lot of my songs…they did it better than me. Jerry Garcia could hear the song in all my bad recordings, the song that was buried there.” According to him, the Dead “taught me to look inside these songs I was singing that actually…I couldn’t even sing… I had a hard time grasping the meaning of them… I realized that they understood these songs better than I did at the time.”
Garcia said of Dylan: “He wasn’t writing too much then, still isn’t. I think he was looking for a new direction in which to take his songs… We talked about people like Elizabeth Cotten, Mississippi Sheiks, Earl Scruggs, Bill Monroe, Gus Cannon, Hank Williams. We tried a few of those things out at rehearsal. I showed Bob some of those songs: Two Soldiers, Jack-a-Roe, John Hardy, and some others. Trouble was, Bob seemed to prefer to do these rather than rehearse his own songs.”

One way Dylan and Garcia connected was through their love of traditional music (something they both shared with McGuinn), so it’s time for a little digression into the folk world, and how these musicians got there. Though all of them had been fans of rock & roll’s first boom in the ‘50s, by the time the early ‘60s rolled around they were raving folkies…
Garcia said in ’67, “When Joan Baez’s first record came out I heard it and I heard her fingerpicking the guitar. [McGuinn and Dylan were also impressed by Baez.] I’d never heard anything like it before, so I got into that, and I started getting into country music, old-time white music. Mostly white spiritual stuff, white instrumental music, and I got into fingerstyle, the folk-music-festival scene. I was very heavy into that for a long time, and I sort of employed a scholarly approach and even went into the South with tape recorders, recording bluegrass bands. I spent about three years playing bluegrass banjo; that was my big thing, and I almost forgot how to play the guitar… And then I got into a jug-band, and I took up the guitar again.”
Chris Hillman followed a similar trail: “I really liked the more traditional stuff… As I kept delving into more roots-oriented things, with Leadbelly and the Weavers and Pete Seeger, then I discovered old string-band music – not bluegrass, but old stringbands. And then I heard the New Lost City Ramblers [a group Garcia admired as well] and I just fell in love with the mandolin. I just loved that stuff – my peers thought I was crazy. It wasn’t popular; I was an oddball… The minute I heard Flatt & Scruggs I just went crazy. I thought that it was the most fantastic energy of music I ever heard.”
Garcia talked more about how discovering old folk/blues 78s led him to bluegrass: “Once I found out there was such a world, I met guys who were into 78s and collected them. So I had access to them and I could mine that resource. But I had no consciousness of it before the Folkways stuff came out. For me it was the Harry Smith anthology that showed me that there was this vital, rich, primitive form with these guys sawing away on their fiddles and banjos and singing in these creaky old voices. That was very exciting for me… Getting into that world was like opening a magic door, because I met all these people who had live tapes of bluegrass. That’s what really did it for me, because live, the music sounded so energized and so beautifully detailed.”
McGuinn was a bit less descriptive about his attraction to folk: “Around the time I started getting interested in folk music, rock & roll became more bubblegum. It had less integrity. Folk music offered a good alternative, because the stories were good, the melodies were good, there was a lot of folklore behind the songs. Plus it just had sort of a cool factor to it.” [‘Cool’ meaning underground, bohemian, non-mainstream.]
Garcia had a similar comment: “When I was away from rock & roll it was going through the whole Frankie Avalon, Fabian phase, and all this plastic nonsense. And it didn’t have much vitality. I sort of lost interest in it ‘cause the vitality, the energy in it had gone into other channels. For me, it was in folk music… I didn’t feel that rock & roll was going to be my vehicle for communication. When I got into folk music, I never got into it behind the lyrical content…what I really got into was the instrumental parts... I heard something that was more satisfying to me than rock & roll was.”
Dylan had (briefly) been a rock & roll player in the ‘50s, but flipped: “The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta. I heard a record of hers in a record store…that was in ’58 or something like that. Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustic guitar… From Odetta, I went to Harry Belafonte, the Kingston Trio, little by little uncovering more as I went along. Finally, I was doing nothing but Carter Family and Jesse Fuller songs. Then later I got to Woody Guthrie, which opened up a whole new world… It took me a long time to realize the New York crowd wasn’t that different from the singers I’d seen in my own hometown…people like the Stanley Brothers, on the backroad circuit, playing for a few nights. If I had known then what I do now, I probably would have taken off when I was 12 and followed Bill Monroe.”

Dylan gave a somewhat tongue-in-cheek explanation of the folk lure in ’65: “I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow. Obviously I'm not a hard-working cat. I played the guitar, that was all I did. I thought it was great music. Certainly I haven't turned my back on it or anything like that… Folk music is the only music where it isn't simple. It's never been simple. It's weird, man, full of legend, myth, Bible and ghosts. I've never written anything hard to understand (not in my head anyway) and nothing as far out as some of the old songs. They were out of sight.”
(In one famous ‘66 interview he offered this description: “Traditional music comes from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. There’s nobody that’s going to kill traditional music. All these songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans who turn into angels – they’re not going to die…”)
Garcia also talked about the weirdness of folk lyrics – song verses that were “nonsense insofar that if they have any sense, it’s so deeply symbolic we don’t know what it’s actually about… Not knowing is part of what makes it so evocative. The mystery is part of what makes it interesting to me… It was the power of the almost-expressed, the resonant. It seemed to speak at some level other than the most obvious one, and it was more moving for that reason, since you don’t know what it’s about.”
He mentioned Lord Randall as an example of an old English ballad where the storyline has been boiled down to a few compressed verses: “The versions that made it to Appalachia were like two hundred years after the fact…you only get three or four verses, but they’re so rich in weirdness because they’re the ones that made enough of an impression that they could last through the generations.”
(Lord Randall, of course, was the ballad Dylan had in mind when composing A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, compressing his narrative into a series of images ‘rich in weirdness.’)

Perhaps coincidentally, all three artists took a turn back towards folk music in the ‘90s. Garcia was prompted by playing with David Grisman to pull out a lot of old dusty tunes from the attics of his memory. (Sometimes he’d even drop an instrumental Handsome Cabin Boy into the Dead’s spaces, for instance on 9/22/87, 9/12/90, and 3/17/93.) Dylan also started reviving folk rarities in his live shows now and then, and even recorded two fine acoustic folk albums on his own in ‘92/93, as if the past 30 years hadn’t happened. McGuinn, as mentioned earlier, started his ongoing Folk Den project of recording one folk song every month for the internet public.

Dylan wrote a letter to Garcia in '95, suggesting another traditional-music project:
http://musicalstewdaily.com/2008/11/20/bob-dylans-letter-to-jerry-garcia/
"My record company is doing a Jimmie Rodgers tribute album - you don't have to yodel - there's plenty of songs where he doesn't yodel - but if you want to yodel, that's OK too - Anyway one of the performers on this record will be me and of course the perfect song for me is Blue Eyed Jane and it's included with this letter - Didja hear my version of Two Soldiers? Anyway if it's not too much to ask, think about a Jimmie song - let me know something in some kind of incalculated time - whatever you decide is OK with me - "
(Two Soldiers, of course, was the song Garcia showed Dylan - he recorded it with Grisman, and Dylan promptly put his own version on World Gone Wrong.)
As the Jerrysite says: “Garcia reportedly read the letter backstage at a Dead show before giving it to a tech. With a weakened voice and ill health, Garcia did a session for the tribute album, his last studio recording. [He chose Blue Yodel #9.] Two weeks later he died. ‘Given its connection to Jerry’s last recording session I would say it’s a very important item,’ said Dennis McNally. ‘I don’t know pen-and-ink letters Dylan has written to anyone or to Jerry but I can't believe there’s been many.’”
Dylan would soon write his striking eulogy for Garcia: “To me he wasn’t only a musician and friend, he was more like a big brother who taught and showed me more than he’ll ever know.”

After his tour with the Dead, Dylan started pulling out more rare songs and expanding his setlist. Famously, he started the “Never-Ending Tour,” which some have felt was inspired by the Dead’s example. As Dylan said, “It didn’t occur to me until we did those shows with the Grateful Dead, if you just go out every three years or so like I was doing for a while, that’s when you lose touch. If you’re going to be a performer, you’ve gotta give it your all.” And to some extent the spirit of the Dead seeped into his shows in the ‘90s, as Dylan’s band started jamming out the songs more with long solos. He even did a few Hunter/Garcia covers (Friend of the Devil, Alabama Getaway, West LA Fadeaway) - and when he started closing his sets with Not Fade Away, though he’s a big Buddy Holly fan, it sounded like a nod to the Dead.

A sidenote:
Ironically, Dylan could have seen the Dead as far back as ’65, had his tour schedule been different. At his San Francisco press conference in December, he showed a poster Bill Graham gave him for the Mime Troupe benefit and dance concert at the Fillmore on 12/10/65, featuring the Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society, and ‘many other friends’, saying, “I would like to go if I could, but unfortunately, I won’t be here. If I was here, I’d certainly be there.”
As it turned out, the Warlocks were among the ‘other friends’ who showed up to play. Ralph Gleason wrote an evocative article on the event, which is reprinted at deadlists. (It’s worth remembering that in those days, dances were forbidden in San Francisco without a permit.) Meanwhile that weekend, the Byrds were appearing on the Ed Sullivan show to play their hit singles.
The story according to the Dead books is that the Warlocks came bearing their new name that night – and when Bill Graham refused to list them as the Grateful Dead, they agreed to go on as “Formerly the Warlocks.” I suspect this is a mistaken memory, as Gleason simply calls them the Warlocks, and it was for their next Fillmore show, on 1/14/66, that they first appeared on a poster as the “Grateful Dead (Formerly the Warlocks)”.

CLARENCE WHITE
We’ll let Jerry Garcia introduce Clarence White:
“Clarence was important in my life both as a friend and as a player. He brought a kind of swing - a rhythmic openness - to bluegrass, and a unique syncopation. His feel has been incorporated by a lot of other players, but nobody has ever quite gotten the open quality of his rhythm. In the bluegrass world, the instruments characteristically are on top of or slightly in front of the beat. Bluegrass is a kind of forward-leaning music. Clarence’s playing was way in the back of the beat, and so added an openness that was really breathtaking… Clarence had wonderful control over the guitar. He's the first guy I heard who really knocked me out.”
“Clarence made it look like playing was the easiest thing in the world. He was special, the kind of guitar player who comes along once in a while.”

Garcia first admired Clarence in the bluegrass world, but in the Byrds Clarence was equally adept in playing electric rock music. One fan who saw them in ’69 says, “Clarence White’s style was unique. He had taken his bluegrass roots, electrified them, and added some Don Rich-influenced Bakersfield twang. Then he combined these elements with a unique behind-the-beat syncopated style. Listening to him play that night, I thought he sounded like no other guitar player I’d ever heard. Many of us 17-year-olds were guitar players who were totally awed by the band, especially Clarence’s amazing licks. We had never heard anyone play like that, and what he was doing remained a mystery until years later, when I learned he was playing a B-bender.”
McGuinn confirms that “Jimi Hendrix came backstage once to shake his hand,” telling Clarence how much he admired his playing. Guitar-players would flock to Byrds shows and stand in front of Clarence, staring at him in amazement. Bassist John York jokes about the “wall of guitarists” and says, “He was very adventurous – and fearless – you listen to some of those solos, the way he played is just phenomenal, the energy level. He had fluidity, he had a kind of syncopation where he could just bounce through things, so he could create a rhythm on top of a rhythm. He could create a guitar line that just sounded fierce – so he constantly blew our minds.”
Check out the Byrds’ Live at the Fillmore February 1969 album – the band sounds deceptively ragged and twangy, and McGuinn’s singing is surprisingly desperate. But Clarence’s guitar style (and sometimes McGuinn’s) sears through everything, and he knows when to turn on the fuzz. It’s hard to believe that someone whose first love was acoustic bluegrass picking could pull out these effortless paint-peeling solos – as the show goes on, you can hear the crowd cheering after each solo! Garcia may well have taken note of the way Clarence’s solos leap out aggressively from otherwise calm country tunes.
Of course, Clarence was by nature a non-flashy sideman, stoic in that bluegrass fashion, whose role was to support the songs and back the band – he wasn’t a “lead” guitarist the same way Garcia was, and his solos always stayed within concise bounds, which is one reason he may not be too well-known outside bluegrass & Byrd-fan circles.
One Byrd-fan who saw them in ’70 remembers: “I had not really heard much of him till that show....and proceeded to get blown away....he did stuff I haven't seen anyone do before or since....and what struck me was how motionless the guy was onstage...the hands moving around the guitar and that right heel tapping was the ONLY movement I saw...”
Drummer Gene Parsons says, "When we played together in the Byrds, Clarence was always experimenting with new licks. He'd leave these big holes - these anticipated beats -- and he'd just kind of leave you hanging out in the middle of nowhere. And then all of a sudden he'd come up from underneath, in a totally unexpected place, and really stretch out. That's what was always exciting about his playing. He'd knock you right out of your seat."
Tony Rice, an ace acoustic guitarist and frequent David Grisman collaborator, admits: “I couldn’t play like him. I still can’t play like him. Nobody else can, either.”

Here’s one good introduction to Clarence White –
http://rubbercityreview.com/2010/01/clarence-white/
(And this short page focuses on his early acoustic development –
http://www.musicplayer.com/article/remembering-clarence-white/Jun-06/21228 )
There is lots of live Kentucky Colonels material available, since folkies tended to be ardent tapers – here is a White Brothers bluegrass set from April 1967 –
http://www.wolfgangsvault.com/the-white-brothers/concerts/ash-grove-april-01-1967-2nd-set.html

Clarence was unusual for guitarists in that he excelled in three different playing styles – acoustic bluegrass picking (like Doc Watson), then the twangy Telecaster country style (like James Burton), then heavy rock music with the stringbender (like no one, since he was the first to play one). With the stringbender, a device he and Gene Parsons invented, he could bend the B-string while playing, which made the guitar sound like a pedal-steel with its multiple bent notes. Garcia, like many other players, must have been intrigued by the sound.
Garcia talked about Clarence’s variety: "Clarence was the first guy to get a lot of mileage out of the stringbender. But, he also played fingerstyle cross-picking, which was a big departure for him because he was a flatpicker on the acoustic. He played almost like a bluegrass banjo player on the electric guitar. He also took advantage of the light setup and the Telecaster snarl to get a kind of nasty, biting sound."

In the late ‘50s Clarence started listening to jazz guitarists Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt, and absorbing their playing. Django in particular became a major influence. As one Django site says, “Many of Clarence's signature licks derive from Django's intricate syncopations, arpeggio runs, and frequent use of open strings.” Clarence was amazed by Django’s playing, got a reel of Django solos and studied it intently, learning solos note-for-note off the tape and adopting many of Django’s licks and techniques. One of Clarence’s friends reports, “I know by the time the Colonels had Scotty Stoneman playing with them in 1965 that Clarence was already using Django licks off of that tape. Because some of the stuff he did in Julius Finkbine’s Rag and Alabama Jubilee was directly off this tape of Reinhardt’s stuff.”
Garcia was also a Django fan. Back in ’67 he said he’d been listening to a lot of Django records. Later on he said if he could, “I’d follow around Django Reinhardt, the gypsy guitarist. I have every single one of his records. Most of what he plays is hard to understand, no matter how much I’ve listened to it. Either he’s got fingers a half a mile long or - I just don’t know how he’s doing it. And he played all this with a messed-up left hand. His technique is awesome. Even as good as players are today, nobody has come up to the state that he was playing at - that whole fullness of expression, the combination of having incredible speed and giving every note a specific personality. The other guy I’d like to hear live is Charlie Christian, who had an incredible mind, just a relentless flow of ideas. He was the first guy who played through he changes the way horn players would. He had that sense of where everything goes harmonically. He had
an incredible intensity and a hip tone. To my ears, his playing still sounds very modern.”
Clarence is also said to have studied Joseph Spence, another of Garcia’s favorites. Chris Hillman said of Clarence’s playing, “He got a lot of it probably from listening to Joseph Spence, the Bahamian guitarist who had this incredible sense of time.”

Garcia first became acquainted with Clarence by seeing the Kentucky Colonels (with Clarence & Roland White) in the early ‘60s. Garcia was thrilled with them, and went to see them as often as he could. On their CD Livin’ in the Past, Garcia introduces the Colonels at a November ’64 show as “the best young bluegrass band in America.”
Sandy Rothman talks about their spring ’64 trip together, when Garcia and Rothman decided to travel cross-country taping bluegrass shows:
“During this time we heard about the upcoming tour for the Colonels – they were booked at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island and they were planning to drive across the country in their station wagon (with the bass on top). Jerry Garcia and I had an idea to drive along with them in another car, and they said OK. We left from Los Angeles (in Jerry's white '61 Corvair) and stopped for a few days in Missouri, where Clarence and Roland had some relatives (French Canadians) in the Ozarks. We had lots of parties and played a lot of music together. The Colonels went to the East Coast but Jerry and I went to Ohio and Indiana to see the Osborne Brothers and Bill Monroe. (I wish we had gone to Newport with the Colonels, but I ended up playing guitar for Bill Monroe that summer while Jerry drove back to the West Coast by himself.)
“While we were travelling across the country in two cars, we sometimes changed passengers and drivers in the cars; sometimes we would ride with the Colonels or they would ride with us. One time I remember we decided to pull into a gas station and play the same tune (in different cars) on guitar and mandolin to see if anyone would notice. I don't think anyone noticed, but we thought it was very funny. We tried to make it look like we didn't know each other - both cars just happened to have someone playing musical instruments (and the same song!).”

Ironically, both Clarence and Garcia were soon to shift gears. When Garcia returned from the trip with his stash of bluegrass tapes, having failed to talk to Bill Monroe and dissatisfied with the bluegrass opportunities in the Bay area, he decided to drop bluegrass and start up a jugband with some other folkie freaks, including Bob Weir and Pigpen.
As for the Kentucky Colonels, they also found opportunities drying up over the next year as the folk-music scene changed. In 1965, they were even forced to “plug in” and get a drummer! The band didn’t last long after that. Clarence, though, was eager to embrace electric music:
“It wasn’t so much that I was getting bored with acoustic bluegrass. I could feel so many new things in the air. I wanted to get in the stream of a new kind of music that combined what you could call a ‘folk integrity’ with electric rock.”
“I wanted to electrify folk music. I’d suggested it in ’64, but none of the other guys [in the Kentucky Colonels] thought it was a good idea…”
“I had gotten a demo of Tambourine Man even before Dylan had put it on record [they and the Byrds’ future producer had all seen him play it at that Newport Festival in ‘64]…but most of the guys in the band weren’t interested in doing a song like Tambourine Man. They were more interested in doing straight, old-time bluegrass music.”
“So in ’66 I bought a Telecaster and started playing country music, getting more power and using bigger amps… It was like learning a completely different instrument, and I began to do a lot of studio work. [Clarence did many studio sessions for Bakersfield country acts, and his Nashville West band perked up many ears – including some future Burrito Brothers - so he played a part in California’s slide towards country-rock.] Some of the first sessions I did were with the Byrds, because I used to know Chris Hillman – he was a bluegrass musician, and we’d played together a lot at jams and parties. He got me to do their sessions…then he asked me to join the band.”
McGuinn later claimed, “He always wanted to be in the Byrds. He kinda felt like he missed the boat, because he was doing Dylan stuff with the Kentucky Colonels before the Byrds.” (This might not be strictly true. But Chris Hillman, in his mandolin days, had played a Dylan cover with his bluegrass band in ’64.)

The world was introduced to Clarence’s new style on the Dr Byrds & Mr Hyde album, as he swooped through their menacing version of This Wheel’s On Fire.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av89p1rRSLc (from the Playboy After Dark TV show)
(Ironically, Clarence didn’t like what he played on the album version. “I felt I was faking it… That’s the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done. It’s horrible. I wasn’t ready for it. I wanted someone else to play lead on that.”)

And from the same show, an example of Clarence doing the pedal-steel sound on his guitar in You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gD84jbVV3c

From that point, the Byrds’ shows improved dramatically from their original lineup, while their studio albums kept getting duller. Aside from the Untitled live sides from 1970, a couple live albums have been released - one from the Fillmore in ’69 (half of which is country songs), one from the Royal Albert Hall in 1971 (which has little country, and more of that early-‘70s light-rock feel).
The Byrds’ one step into the jam-band world was Eight Miles High – after Clarence joined, they sometimes stretched it out into a 15-20 minute extravaganza as a show-closer (though much of that was a rather unnecessary drum/bass interlude). This wasn’t really a melodic or exploratory jam, it was more about the funky rhythm - Clarence and McGuinn would play dueling guitars, weaving between Clarence’s hard-edged spirals and blasts from McGuinn’s 12-string, all dissolving in a distorted blur.
According to Chris Hillman, who was always more of a traditional country fan, “The music the Byrds went on to make after that was pretty bad. You listen to the later Byrds with Clarence and it’s so loud. The beauty of Clarence White was…where he didn’t use that pull-string gadget and just played straight out of his amp. It was beautiful. His acoustic playing? Unbelievable. But in the Byrds he fell into that loud rock thing… The twenty-minute Eight Miles High was awful.”

When the Byrds split up in 1973, Clarence played in Muleskinner, a ‘progressive bluegrass’ group with David Grisman & several Bill Monroe alumni – some of whom were playing at the same time in Old & In the Way. Since the two bluegrass bands shared three members, it’s tempting to think how easy it might have been for Garcia and White to play together. What was left of the Byrds finally broke up for good that February, and White decided to rejoin the Kentucky Colonels. He was on tour with the Colonels that July when he was killed by a drunk driver.

For those who’d like to follow Clarence’s career, these are some more pages about his work -
http://www.ebni.com/byrds/memcw1.html (in several sections)
http://www.flatpick.com/Pages/Featured_Artist/clarence.html (focuses on his bluegrass work)
http://www.adioslounge.com/search/label/Clarence%20White (an unmatched, ongoing series covering Clarence year-by-year with sound samples - to read chronologically, go to the oldest posts first)

DAVID CROSBY
“Paul Kantner and I and David Freiberg used to live together, down in Venice. I went and started the Byrds with McGuinn…and then Paul started the Airplane. And then David got together…and started Quicksilver. So I was tapped into each new band that started in San Francisco. And as soon as there was a Grateful Dead, I heard about it…”
“I had heard of them playing down on the Peninsula, there was another name they went under first – the Warlocks. I had heard, ‘There are these guys down there who are really out there.’ That was like honey to a bee to me…I didn’t encounter them until they were full-blown as the Dead.”
“I think I heard about Garcia playing even before that down in Palo Alto, at some little club down there. But as soon as they started playing, we started to hear about them, and then I went to visit 'em when they were still living on Ashbury. I liked them right away, because they were totally outrageous and obviously completely crazed. And that was just my style. I remember thinking, God, this kid Weir is too young to be in this band, isn't he? I mean, do you have like a note from his parents or something?”
“Paul Kantner gave me their first album, and I loved it…I knew they were kindred spirits immediately. I started playing with them early on, when Mickey joined the band, and they had the place up in Novato. I first met them when they were still living at 710, but we didn’t play that time. I just hung out with them, talked, and liked them a lot.”
Crosby was soon impressed by their commitment to their music: “They didn't let the peripheral stuff pull 'em away from it. They didn't give a hoot how much money something made; they didn't give a damn what the reviews were; they were not in it for chicks, glory, money, fame; they did not make the ‘I must be smart - look how many people are listening to me’ mistake; they kept intensely focused on music.”

Crosby was a link between the Los Angeles and San Francisco music scenes - (the only Byrd who was regarded as an honorary San Franciscan, I think). Aside from being in the Byrds, he also played with Buffalo Springfield, shared songs with Jefferson Airplane, and hung out with Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Dead. (Crosby also shared a serious interest in drugs with Garcia, a non-musical issue, but one which would severely affect them both in the decades to come.) After he was kicked out of the Byrds in ’67, Crosby drifted for a while, getting high and hanging out, until CS&N hit sudden superstardom in ’69.
Crosby and Stills spent a lot of time at Mickey Hart’s ranch that year, singing away the days. Garcia said, “Hearing those guys sing and how nice they sounded together, we thought, ‘We can try that. Let’s work on it a little.’ [Hunter added, “We can double-track vocals too, dammit!”] I’d worked in the studio with them [he recorded the pedal steel for Teach Your Children on 10/24/69] and we spent some time hanging out. So it was like an inspiration – here’s a direction we haven’t really explored.”
Crosby says, “They had listened to us a lot… It’s very generous of them to credit us with it, but we never sat them down in a room and said, ‘Okay, now, you sing this, you sing this.’ That never happened. Those guys are brilliant. They knew exactly what they were doing, and they evolved their own version of it. They just credited us to be nice.”

In 1969, Stephen Stills played with the Dead onstage a couple times (on 10/25/69 and 12/10/69), but I don’t recall Crosby appearing. Tom Constanten, though, remembers Crosby playing at the 12/10 Thelma Theater show.

Crosby was asked in his Rolling Stone interview (spring 1970), “Would you dig working with Jerry Garcia?”
He replied, “Man, I would. Now I think Jerry Garcia probably needs me like he needs a third eye. Excuse me, a fourth. He has a third. But I would be just so knocked-out to play, or sing, or do any kind of music with that dude….and he’s not the only one. What about Lesh? Have you really considered what kind of a musician Phil Lesh is? I would like to make a record sometime with him playing classical music on an electric bass. He is certainly one of the most virtuoso string instrument players on the planet. Somebody somewhere, sooner or later, has got to realize that the Grateful Dead is one of the best bands in the world… On a good night, the Dead is as good as it gets.”

As it turned out, he did play with them at several shows over the next couple years - 7/14/70, 8/19/70, 9/10/72, and 12/31/72. He was also present during the 8/14/71 encore, when the Dead played Happy Birthday for him, though I don’t think he plays in that show. He also participated in a jam session with the Dead that was taped that month:
http://www.archive.org/details/gd71-08-21.hartjam.aud.17179.sbeok.shnf (with Cippolina)

In early 1975, when they were working on Blues for Allah, Crosby spent time with them in the studio. “They were trying to rehearse, and I would go over and drag along my Stratocaster and cause trouble. I would go in and they would be trying to record, and I would cause trouble. I would go in and say, ‘Aah, you guys don't have a real rhythm guitar player.’ Which endeared me to Bob forever, I’m sure. But I would go in there and…try to involve myself with them.”
This is one taped date where Crosby led them through rehearsals of a couple of his songs:
http://www.archive.org/details/gd75-03-17.sbd.vernon.10111.sbeok.shnf (with Ned Lagin)
(One of the songs they do, Low Down Payment, was based on a jam on the Eleven. And several years earlier, Crosby’s song Tamalpais High may have come out of the Dead’s Main Ten riff – in one outtake, Garcia even teases the Main Ten.)
Crosby was also supposed to play with the Dead during the 3/23/75 show, but dropped out.

Going back a few years, Crosby had already worked quite a bit with Garcia and Lesh - in December ’70, Garcia, Lesh and Hart formed a short-lived band with Crosby. As Garcia tells it, “We had a little band called David and the Dorks. He was the star, and it was his trip that we were doing. It was right around the time he was in the Bay Area a lot ... we did maybe two or three shows ... they weren't announced or anything; we just went in there on a Monday night and had a lot of fun, and the sound was cool. In fact, that was the core of the band that played on David's album.”
There is a tape of one of their Matrix shows (and a rehearsal), usually dated 12/15/70. It’s dominated by Crosby’s songs, so Garcia is more of a sideman here; but we do get the first versions of two of his songs, Bertha and Bird Song. (Bertha has an interesting early guitar arrangement that was dropped, and a different Crosby harmony.) The highlight of the show is probably Garcia’s final five-minute solo on Laughing, which I would urge everyone to hear.

Garcia also spent a lot of time in the studio with Crosby at the end of 1970, recording If I Could Only Remember My Name. They were part of the Planet Earth Rock & Roll Orchestra (PERRO), a loose collective of members from the Dead, the Airplane, Quicksilver, and CSN&Y – they first recorded Paul Kantner’s Blows Against the Empire album, then moved on to Crosby’s album. According to Crosby, that album turned out to be a Crosby/Garcia co-production: “He gave so much of himself to that record.”
Crosby has said, “Jerry Garcia is responsible for that record a very great deal. He was there night after night after night…thinking, listening, talking - you know, acting as a friend, saying ‘Hmmm, man, what if you, how did you, why don't you try a little more, and....’ And he would play. He played on a lot of stuff. That record is the only place on record, that I know of, that he and Jorma Kaukonen ever played together... That's one of the first times that [Garcia] did pedal steel too. I think the first time he put it on a record was on Deja Vu, on Teach Your Children. [Actually, Garcia had played pedal-steel for Jefferson Airplane’s Volunteers album shortly before.] But he played it on Laughing, too. A beautiful, strange thing that he played. Lesh played great on that, too.”
Chris Hillman has a little comment on that: “We were on tour with the Byrds in 1965 and David was going on and on about the sitar – about how it used sliding scales, it had no frets, and all that. So I said, ‘Listen to this,’ and I hit the radio until I found a Nashville station and some steel guitar. David exploded. He said, ‘I hate that corny, stupid shit!’ And then four years later he’s got Jerry Garcia playing pedal steel on Teach Your Children.”

http://wecouldbeflying.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/jerry-week-day-5-you-know-im-crazy-but-i-aint-real-dumb/ - has a few links, to the live David & the Dorks show, and to a David Gans/Steve Silberman radio show where several If I Could Only Remember My Name outtakes were played – an instrumental Cowboy Movie (with Garcia and Neil Young trading solos), the Wall Song (with a long ending jam), Tamalpais High (a long instrumental outtake where Garcia plays the Main Ten), and Kids & Dogs (the acoustic duet between Garcia & Crosby).
Through the links you can also find these songs mixed in with the “PERRO sessions”, a group of mostly Crosby songs recorded with the usual suspects on a few days in January 1971 (after If I Could Only Remember was finished, I think) – a rundown of the circulating tape is here: http://www.philzone.com/philbase/perro.html
These are unfinished rehearsals - for Dead followers, they’re most notable for the first rehearsal version of Loser (with fiddle), the first version of the Mind Left Body pattern, an alternate Eep Hour, a Jorma & Jerry guitar jam, and Garcia singing the long, hypnotic Mountain Song mantra. (Parts of these are also on youtube, for those who’d like to stream.)

Crosby has talked about the Dead’s jams: “They have always believed in the magic content of music - that anything is possible at any moment. That's why they've always managed to keep their door open to the incredible peaks that they sometimes hit. They hit valleys too. The only dependable grade of music that you can deliver every day is mediocre. They're not interested in that, any more than I am. So they leave the door open wide, and take incredible chances. And as a result, they've hit musical peaks that probably no one will ever touch. They've also played some dogshit, but they know that. They want those peaks, and they keep themselves open.”

This is a good David Gans interview with Crosby (I’ve already quoted a lot of it) -
http://www.dead.net/features/grateful-dead-hour-no-41

AND IN THE END…
Well, to those of you who’ve made it this far in our ramble through some musical cross-currents of the sixties, we’ve almost reached the end. I’ll just wrap it up with a little return to the beginning. The Byrds’ legendary spring ’65 run at Ciro’s club in Hollywood (pretty much their first live shows) also marked the first mass appearance of the ‘freak’ audience that would embrace the Dead and the Acid Trips a year later. A couple descriptions of the scene:
“The Byrds were the catalyst for a new freaky movement that was happening among the artists, the poets, and the freaky film people. Some kind of magic happened…and the streets were lined with people.”
“There were queues up and down Sunset Strip of desperate teenagers, clamoring to get in. The dance floor was a madhouse. A hard core of Byrd followers – wayward painters, disinherited sons and heirs, bearded sculptors, misty-eyed nymphs and assorted oddballs – suddenly taught Hollywood to dance again.”
“There were hardcore fans who followed them around every night… When we arrived in Hollywood and saw the scene the Byrds were into, it was a completely new and revolutionary thing. It appeared to be a giant party with no lines drawn between the show on the stage and the show on the dance floor… We were entering into an exciting new adventure with real beatniks and hippies. It seemed to be a secret community of serious artists and freaks who were drawn together by their mutual love of something we hadn’t experienced before.”

One intellectual Los Angeles Free Press writer wrote this description of the group in April 1965, when they had been playing live for only two months:
“There is only one such group as the Byrds… Their singular method is so unique…the technique and honesty of folk music, the joy and immediacy of rock & roll, and the virtuosity of jazz. It becomes hypnotically imperative to all who hear – reflected in the brushfire emergence of enthusiastic fans who wildly proselytized an experience which indelibly touched them…The Byrds have gone through the Beatles and into a totally novel and fascinating place. They successfully united an audience of average teenagers, Bach, Bartok, and Cage aesthetics, folkniks, sophisticated middle-agers, rock & roll devotees, and serious hippies into one joyous commitment… What the Byrds evoke is an Enlightenment in the full psychedelic sense of the word… They all crossed over to find freedom and delight – and their discovery of it is ours… The mode of dancing which the Byrds incite is a thing of open loveliness to behold and a state of ecstasy to involve yourself
in. Dancing with the Byrds becomes a mystic loss of ego and tangibility; you become pure energy someplace between sound and motion, and the involvement is total. Their first record…just doesn’t compare to the direct gestalt of music, dancers, aura, and communication.”

http://deadessays.blogspot.com


++++++++++++++++++++++++


SOURCES

I’m sorry I have not been able to post for so long. This took a while, though…

This is an essay about the connections between the Byrds AND the Dead, so I left out a lot of background on the Byrds. There were lots of interesting Byrds-stories that could be told – how they started, their quarrels, Crosby’s behavior, etc. – but this was not the place for them.

There are several good printed sources:
Christopher Hjort’s book So You Want To Be A Rock & Roll Star – The Byrds Day By Day was invaluable. One of the best books ever compiled on any band.
Richie Unterberger’s two books on ‘60s folk-rock (Turn Turn Turn and Eight Miles High) are pretty much essential reading if you’re interested in ‘60s music.
Johnny Rogan’s book The Byrds – Timeless Flight was helpful.
(Crosby had this to say about it: “Rogan is not actually a very good source. Johnny Rogan thinks he knows everything, and he speaks with great authority, but he is repeatedly wrong. If you sit down with that book, I can show you 24 mistakes in the first 7 pages. He comes off as if he really knows everything, and he is an opinionated little son of a bitch, but he is continually misinformed. And I would like to go on record as saying "Do not take Johnny Rogan as an accurate source, because he damn well isn't." He can't even spell names, let alone get facts right.”
Of course, Crosby’s memories are not always accurate, either… He has his own autobiography, though.)

On the web, Roger McGuinn has a humorous little intro to the Byrds’ story on his site –
http://www.ibiblio.org/jimmy/mcguinn/ByrdsFAQ.html

This is the best Byrds site (though it is incomplete, and hasn’t been updated in 11 years) -
http://ebni.com/byrds/
It includes detailed album info, and little bios of several of the Byrds, and these classic words: “The Internet was created by a coalition of the military, academia and the defense industry so that Deadheads and Dylanologists would be able to trade tapes more efficiently.”

I feel the Byrds’ story is best told through their own interviews – one good compilation of interviews is here –
http://die-augenweide.de/byrds/speak/

There are lots of Roger McGuinn interviews around the web – these are a couple of the most informative Byrds-related ones –
http://www.musiciansfriend.com/document?doc_id=99541
http://www.ibiblio.org/jimmy/mcguinn/Hornpipe.html
And one with Chris Hillman –
http://www.richieunterberger.com/hillman.html
Crosby interviews are always entertaining, but usually don’t go into the Byrds much –
http://www.stevesilberman.com/crosby/crosby95.html

The MusicAngle site ran a series of interviews with the Byrds -
McGuinn -
http://www.musicangle.com/feat.php?id=67
http://www.musicangle.com/feat.php?id=69
Crosby –
http://www.musicangle.com/feat.php?id=70
http://www.musicangle.com/feat.php?id=71
Hillman –
http://www.musicangle.com/feat.php?id=72
http://www.musicangle.com/feat.php?id=73

The Dead’s quotes come from the usual places.

Constanten on Constanten

"I met Phil Lesh at UC Berkeley in the early '60s when he was 21 and I was 17. We shared musical interests and an apartment in Berkeley. Phil had been at the College of San Mateo playing trumpet in the jazz band, had written some jazz charts for them, and had also discovered some of the Stockhausen pieces I was into. We took a class together with Luciano Berio at Mills College in Oakland. Phil had also been hanging out with Jerry Garcia, who was staying in Palo Alto... Jerry played regularly at a place called the Tangent on University Avenue in Palo Alto."
"Jerry was one of a fistful of interesting people that Phil Lesh introduced me to when Phil and I shared an apartment a block off the UC Berkeley campus in the fall of 1961. Jerry was 19, and I was 17. We freely shared our musical enthusiasms, verbally and by playing for each other. Somehow my music impressed him enough for him to offer me a job a [few] years down the road... At the time we met, Jerry was an accomplished folksinger, drawing his material from the Carter Family, old Appalachian ballads and the British isles."

"In 1962 I went to study in Europe. Berio set up scholarships so I could study with him, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Pousseur in Europe, which lasted more than a year. When I got back to the States in 1964 I moved to the Bay Area."
"Phil and I had our first LSD from the same batch in early '64, when it still came on sugar cubes."
"I played with Phil, most notably at a 1964 concert, under the auspices of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, that featured Phil, Steve Reich, and me. Phil contributed a quasi-concerto for prepared piano called 6 7/8 for Bernardo Moreno, with me on piano. We gave four performances, each unique (although the third night was especially magical, in my memory)."

"Before I could approach rock [music], it had to evolve a little. I could appreciate the simplicity as a musician (easy chord changes = easy money), but as a listener it somehow didn’t do it for me... There were far too many interesting sounds around for me to want to diddle with I-IV-V.I’ve since come to appreciate the earlier blues and rock artists more than I did at the time. I remember at the Woodstock Festival, when Nicky Hopkins came to Pigpen’s and my hotel room (yes, we doubled up back then), they instantly had a lot to talk about - they’d bring up players going back decades, trading stories and impressions with a glowing zest for the music.It was the first time I’d heard some of the names... [And] I’d come to know Phil Lesh and Jerry Garcia in late 1961. Their tastes in music were as exacting as mine, and as they (and others) started to make things more interesting, it got my attention."
"What made '60s rock interesting to me is that the mind-stretching propensities of the experimental composers were brought to bear on the basic structure of rock & roll, so that it was sort of electrified conceptually..."

"I was unable to avoid the draft, so I got stuck in the Air Force for a couple of years."
"I had already received a draft notice, and it seemed like a natural thing that I'd rather program a computer in Las Vegas than an M-16 in Vietnam."
"They started to ship a lot of Air Force people to Vietnam, so I let it slip that I used to be a communist, which effectively killed any chance of my getting a security clearance..." (Unbeknownst to the military, he was also taking acid trips on his furloughs, and using the base's IBM computer to compose music!)
"When I was in the Air Force, I pretty much kept my head down and went along with the program. That, coupled with being reasonably competent at my job - I was a computer programmer - had its benefits. Among those were three day passes - extra time off from your job. By 1967 I had a fistful of these to cash in. It was during some of those breaks that I motored down from Las Vegas - Nellis AFB's locale - to Los Angeles to be at these recording sessions."

"It would have been better, in all sorts of ways, for me to be with the Dead from the start. I sure would have enjoyed it more. As it happened, I was spirited away, to put it malappropriately, into the U.S. Air Force. Still, stout fellows that they were, they held on and waited for me to get loose from Uncle Sam’s clutches."
"There were a couple of times I did get away, on leave or on a three-day pass, to record or perform with them. Other than the embarrassment from the shortness of my hair, I recall exciting times. It was during one of the Anthem of the Sun sessions that Jerry officially invited me to join the band."
"It was like a magic carpet that was there for me to step on, and I would have been a fool not to step on it. It was basically an invitation from Jerry. He said something like, 'I think we can use you.' It was at Columbus Recorders in San Francisco."

"On Anthem, I played prepared piano, did some electronic things, and the opening part of Alligator."
"The idea was that this chaos would come out of the Other One. The final part was an overlay of several live performances, whence it gets that incredible depth - it's a remarkable effect. So they wanted to take that up and swirl it into an explosion, and out of the ashes of that would stealthily enter the warm, misty waves of New Potato Caboose."
TC used a prepared piano: "You put things like screws, coins, or clothes pins inside the piano strings to make them sound different. I did one effect where I took a dime-store gyroscope, gave it a good spin, and put that up against the sounding board of the piano. It sounded like a chainsaw being taken to the piano. Producer Dave Hassinger cleared his seat by a foot and a half when he heard it being done."
"One of my other favorites was obtained by using coins... Then there's a sound like woodblocks that comes from combs stuck on the piano's higher strings. Another I liked was clothespins on the lowest strings, played either with the keys or on a string directly." (He also blended in parts of a tape he'd made of a ring modulator in 1962.)

On New Potato Caboose:
"If you listen to it on record, it was kind of produced with harpsichord and organ in a way that could only happen in a studio. There's one organ segment where Pigpen and I sat side by side to play it, because there were so many notes. As it turned out, it was too impractical to perform live."

"The Anthem album is sort of a bizarre document, a studio attempt to recreate what the band was doing in concert, where one tune would segue into another. Alligator into Caution was a sequence we could embark on and go sailing for 45 minutes at least. The first live album is also an example of that (Dark Star into St Stephen into Eleven), although by that time it was getting modular."
"At the time we were very aware of the gulf between the experience of our performances and our recordings. A live show was so much more fulfilling. We wondered what it was that kept the magic from getting to the grooves of vinyl. Anthem was a deliberate overcompensation, in the sense that we felt that if we raised our sights, maybe...we might have a better chance of hitting the target. And even if we didn’t, it’d be an improvement over the seemingly shrink-wrapped first album. It was like the producer felt he had to "dress us up" to make us presentable. We felt we knew who we were, and were in the best position to represent where we were really coming from."

TC was also able to play a couple shows with the Dead on his leaves - one in Las Vegas in September '67, and one in Sacramento on 3/11/68, opening for Cream.
http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2009/12/september-16-1967-convention.center.html

"I got discharged from the Air Force. It was like returning from exile, or getting out of jail."
He was discharged on Nov 22 '68, flew to Ohio the next day, and played with the Dead at Ohio University in Athens on Nov 23. (Which was actually an unscheduled free show. As deadlists says: "So many students from Ohio University came to the show in Columbus on 11/22/68 - a long drive, about 1 1/2 hours or so - that the band decided to go to Athens and put on a free show for them.")

"It was a case of being an Air Force sergeant one day and a rock & roll star the next."
"I'd heard the albums, I knew the changes, and knew I could land on my feet in improvisatory situations."
"Even though I didn’t come out of an authentic blues or rock background, everyone was supportive. The sixties ethic included being kind on general principle, and I was the beneficiary of that. Besides, the band members, each in his own way, encouraged me."

This was just a short time after Pigpen and Weir had been temporarily 'fired' - TC later thought he might have been "unwitting glue to divert attention to allow them to solidify their positions."
"It amazed everybody that anything happened, because there was so much sniping going on. There was always some sort of simmer."

Pigpen, the organ-player, was bumped to congas when TC arrived.
"On the tunes he did play on, he played more than I usually played. The band at that time had established themselves a lot more, and I was impressed with them and wanted to make sure I put in things that were workable, from the context I could work from."
"I don't think he felt that threatened by me. After all, they already had two guitarists and two drummers, and the interpersonal dynamics among the players were already strange enough... If anything, adding my keyboard stabilized it rather than disrupted it. I never felt any professional jealousy in that situation; it seemed much more like brotherhood and connection. If he did feel jealous he hid it well. Beyond that, it freed him up as a vocalist. He could stand up with a microphone, which he was really good at, and to judge from appearances, he liked. I think Jerry did some things to make Pigpen feel included, like featuring his songs and encouraging him... "
"There was one exquisite gig in Cincinnati where both Pigpen and I played keyboard. He had the B-3 and I had the Continental. The B-3 got repossessed because they didn't pay the guitar bill or something, so I had to play a Vox Super Continental. Our credit was not the very best back then. But I really felt the unfairness of it all, because the B-3 sounded so good and the Continental was so limited... I wasn't too pleased about having to play the Continental night after night, because it really had a hard time cutting through all those guitars and drums."

On the road, TC shared hotel rooms with Pigpen. "We also shared a house in Novato. We got to be as close as two heterosexual males could be. Bless him forever."

TC was soon back in the studio with the Dead.
"On Aoxomoxoa, I provided keyboard arrangements on all of the songs except Rosemary." (Garcia did Rosemary himself as a solo four-track. TC contributed electronic noises to What's Become of the Baby, and came up with keyboard arrangements for the other tracks.)
"I had a better chance to express myself than I sometimes did in concert, because, having my own track, I could ensure not getting mixed out."
"The harpsichord is especially prominent on [Mountains of the Moon]. Not unlike the organ on Dupree’s… It’s nice to be able to contribute something that fits into the mix."
"Everything was essentially subject to Jerry's approval, and he would make recommendations, or ideas would be presented to him and he'd sound it out. Sometimes things would be tried just to try them, so we weren't doing the same thing all the time."

"These were studio recordings. For the band, the situation could not have been more different from concert performance. In this instance, it worked to my advantage. For one thing, levels could be controlled, which meant I could hear both the band and myself on the headphones. Usually onstage I couldn't hear the organ at all. The technology of the times simply wouldn't allow a piano to join in live. But in the studio it was no problem, as can be heard on St. Stephen."
"St. Stephen and China Cat Sunflower were already staples of the live shows long before Aoxomoxoa came out. So the album had no effect on our public’s perception of the tunes, one way or the other, except perhaps to note the stiff, contrived nature of the versions on the album, due to the multitrack recording methods of the time. The live versions always flew, and went over well."

"It was simply a matter of grappling with a nascent technology. Those years marked the early stages of multitrack recording. Anthem was done on an eight-track system. Aoxomoxoa was done on sixteen... Multitrack recording invites you to separate the various parts of the textures and record them individually. Sometimes we’d overdub a single instrument at a time. This led to problems, though. For one thing, there wasn’t the "feel" of a live performance. It was more like building a house. First you pour the foundation - the rhythm section, then add the instruments, and then the vocals. And it was new to all of us. Imagine - you’ve got 14 tracks recorded. Funny how easy it was to think of two more things to add to round out the sixteen. That complicates the mixdown. The mixing sessions amounted to performances, themselves, what with three or more of us at a time with hands on knobs, faders, or whatever, listening for cues…"

Meanwhile, TC wasn't happy with his live sound.
"There were two organs, the Vox Super-Continental, and the Hammond B-3. Neither suited my purposes at all well, although the Hammond was a step up. For one thing, their sounds ranged from barely acceptable to cringeworthy. For another, I couldn't find a place for the sustained sound of an organ in a guitar band context - ahhh, for a piano! Furthermore, the action of an organ keyboard, electronic or not, was sufficiently different from that of a piano, which was all I'd known until then, to be an obstacle to my getting a feel for the music. Basically, I wasn't an organist. A Merl Saunders or a Melvin Seals could've stepped in...but they weren't there. As if that weren't enough, the amplification technology of the times was much kinder to guitars, with their direct pickups, than it was to pianos. All the electric keyboards available then, you might recall, represented some sort of cheesy compromise with the real thing..."
"I didn't like the sound the Continental put out at all. There was something about the Continental in that particular band that grated. The Dead's guitars were these strands of gold and filaments of light, but the Vox was like a hunk of chrome. I had terribly mixed emotions about everything I was playing because the sound didn't please me... I convinced them to let me play a Hammond B-3, which I was able to enjoy a bit more."
He could never use an acoustic piano live because "the guitar would come through the piano's contact mikes louder than the piano."

"I wanted to be able to say something and stay out of their way. You can have all kinds of musical activity side by side, as long as it's in certain prescribed areas of the audible spectrum."
"At the time, the songs were predominantly Jerry's, and the texture of it, with his amplification - I could never really wrest the lead away from him. Which is not to say I wanted to make it a competitive thing, but just that I never felt I had a secure platform to work from."
"The Grateful Dead, as freaky and far-out as they got, were Jerry Garcia's backup band to a large extent. So there wasn't any room... On top of that, there was the amplification problem. There was always a problem in balancing the keyboard volume. You get Jerry Garcia with four Twin Reverbs turned up to 10 - his mezzo-piano was louder than my forte. My major frustration was not being able to find enough turf to even set up a tent in the sonic texture, and scarcely having time when there was a break to make something happen. I'd get to solo sometimes when Jerry would break a string, but even then he'd go back and string his guitar as fast as he could."
"Weir and I got a chance to shine every time Jerry broke a string."

On the Live Dead album:
"It was a dilemma that we were constantly reminded of - how to capture the essence of the concert experience on tape. The first two albums didn't "get it," as far as we were concerned, and it sure didn't seem to be for lack of trying. So that weekend's concerts at the Carousel Ballroom in San Francisco represented the result of grappling with the problem of recording for quite some time."
"This was about the time we were finishing the work on the Aoxomoxoa project, and Warner Brothers was pointing out to us that they had sunk $100,000+ into it and hadn't seen a product yet. So someone had the idea that if we sent them a double live album, three discs for that price wouldn't be such a bad deal, and they went for it. So we started 16-track taping every show. That weekend when Live Dead was recorded was the first one where no one raised an objection to the performances. We were hoping that one of the [shows] along the line would be okay at least, and at the time, we figured they weren't objectionable - not that they were excellent. As I recall, shortly after that...with the pressure off, the band started to play even better."
"The weekend at the Carousel Ballroom was one of those few times that I had a relatively decent stage setup. That is, I could hear the organ in the monitors, and its sound didn’t make my skin crawl. As on other such occasions, however, it was such a surprise to me when it happened that it took some time to adjust to. And I never got that time, anyway. Thankfully, sound technology has progressed since then, but my other problem was timeless. Despite continued efforts, I’d been unable to get a keyboard to practice on at home. Hence, I was learning chord changes on the fly, if at all. And the opportunity to practice, such as I’ve had a taste of since, wasn’t even a dream."

On Dark Star:
"The thing that I liked about [Dark Star] is the proportion of how much it gives you in terms of places to explore, relative to the effort it takes to maintain. It is especially favorable to the performer."
"It's like Dark Star was always there. Like the Clouds of Illusion... It’s remarkably easy to fly. [In another number,] all the way through, you’re counting, preparing, concentrating. No time to enjoy the magic. Dark Star is the opposite. You can relax, even enjoy it from the listener’s point of view, cackle over what you’re planning to spring on them, listen, interact..."
"Certain motifs were integrated over time, almost like an 'aural tradition.' I viewed the piece not so much as something written out, but as a galaxy that would be entered at any of several places... Every performance would be unique... On the best Dark Stars there were a lot of one-of-a-kind moments that were completely spontaneous."
"They were exploratory ventures... It's not so much a set piece, that you know where you are in it and know where you're gonna go, as you're out on an ocean in a boat, and you can choose your landmarks and respond to things and move in certain directions as you wish - of course, always interacting... It's the opposite of what I call the Android Jukebox Syndrome, which you can do wearing a tie and a happy face and you need not be mentally present - which is exactly what we weren't interested in."

"We would play a long extended improvisational piece that went a lot of places. You find jazz players doing that. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. That's part of the chemical thing. But if you're there, you should try...anything could happen, not to mention segues."
"There were choices at any given point, and many of the choices were even made ad hoc on the stage... It was occasionally amusing to see when Weir would be taking the band into one tune and Jerry would be taking the band into another. You would have these tidal frictions of a thought or direction where the band wanted to go..."
"The band practiced all sorts of odd time signatures. [Besides the Eleven] there was also a ten Mickey brought in, and a fifteen that we tried - anything to break out of that square mold of threes or fours. Also, having more than one drummer, if gave them something to do that was more interesting."
"The Grateful Dead were able to rehearse it well enough so that they had a high percentage of things they discovered that worked. Although...some performances are better than others. That's a chance you have to take in courting serendipity - sometimes serendipity comes to grace your performances, and sometimes not. As far as some of the farther-out improvisations and directions, there were already tendencies in that direction among the band members, of which I was happy to be congruently in step with... Conversely, I think I might have had an influence on some of the more simple harmonic tunes the band got into shortly after I left."

Shows often ended with feedback: "[Like] bringing a plane in for a landing at the end of a huge jam. A guitar solo would naturally lead into feedback because you're pushing it for its last ounce of explosive power."

Bear mixed the live sound. "That was the pretext for traveling with the band. Healy would help with the knobs when people got fed up with the Bear. Pigpen described the system as one that worked 100% well, 20% of the time."

Other groups: "I remember a San Diego show where Santana sat in with us at San Diego State. Also, the New Orleans Pop Festival where the Jefferson Airplane sat in with us. There was also one time at a place on Sunset Boulevard called Thelma's...where Stephen Stills and David Crosby sat in with us."

The Fillmore: "Most any show at the Fillmore East was exceptional. The Fillmore East was a magical place to play - the crowd was very responsive. The band had a strong following in New York and it put an edge on the playing. I'd rather listen to any Dark Star from the Fillmore East. They were in a different class."

Playboy After Dark: "It was egregiously silly. Wish we could've done it more than once."

Woodstock: "I was the only one in the band that had a good time, and even that was mitigated because everyone else wasn't. The guitarists were getting shocked from their strings. Bob described his strings as being like barbed wire. The electricity wasn't grounded. We were supposed to spin on a circular stage...but our equipment was too heavy. It didn't work. The stage was swaying back and forth. Phil was visualizing the headlines the next day: 'Huge Rock and Roll Disaster - Thousands Maimed.'"

Drugs:
"The band found early on that too much of a good thing didn’t work. It took a while to find a happy functioning level."
"There were people who were always trying to dose us, and sometimes they succeeded... I remember one time when the band got rather heavily dosed and it seemed like the instruments were painted onto you." (He remembers one night at the Carousel when "four or five different people dosed the apple juice, unbeknownst to each other" - I wonder if this is the same night Phil talks about in his book...)
"During my entire tenure as keyboardist with the Grateful Dead, I made a sincere attempt to...'try and make it without any chemical corn.' I wouldn't even take an over-the-counter headache pill. This only applied to myself, however. What someone else wanted to do was their business. Besides, I'd already experienced LSD, peyote, and psilocybin in the early '60s, and found them all profoundly entertaining."
(This may have been one reason he shared rooms with Pigpen, who was also a non-drug user!)

Scientology:
"I got into Scientology through drugs, and got out of it the same way. With some of the more powerful psychedelics, there were places you could hope to remain...and, so Scientology portrayed it, by means of clearing out a lot of unnecessary garbage from your head, you could arrive at a state like that. What I found out, especially from the times I got dosed on the road, was that yes, Scientology really worked wonders with my head - I wouldn't have stayed as long with them, otherwise. Except it really enhanced the drug experience."
"It made me a non-participant in the chemical sacraments of the time, and that offended Owsley greatly... I tried not to proselytize, but I'm sure there's a certain amount you can't resist, and that I regret. It probably must have rubbed some people the wrong way."

(However, the Dead actually played a Scientology benefit concert - the "Bobby Ace and His Cards from the Bottom of the Deck" show on 6/11/69, where they played what seems to have been a mainly acoustic/country show with John Dawson and David Nelson - who were then about to form the New Riders - and possibly Peter Grant. Garcia may well have been on pedal-steel. One can only imagine what TC sounded like in that context!)

Hart: "He never fit in. He couldn't let go. He thought too much...everybody else was strange, but I knew their strangeness. I couldn't connect with him."
Weir: "He, like I, had to invent his own style - but he didn't. He had no roots in African American music." "He has apparently no innate, and certainly no cultured understanding of the idioms that are responsible for rock & roll. And so it occurred to us and him at the same time that he wasn't really a rock & roll musician; and the whole group when we were playing with him sounded more like an experimental group than a rock & roll band... We all, TC included, decided that it was best that he either learn to play rock & roll, or continue what he had been doing."

TC's last show as a member of the Dead was in New Orleans on 1/30/70. In a meeting that day, everyone decided it was time for TC to leave the band. He says it was a cordial parting - he had many reasons for wanting to move on. (For one, the Dead were about to go back into the studio to record their new country-rock songs.)
As it happened, that night the New Orleans police came prowling around. TC was rooming with Pigpen during the bust, and they weren't arrested: "If they'd come to our room first, there would've been no bust. I got to talking with one of the sergeants about the Air Force and we got along fine. We would've talked them out of it!"

TC went on to be composer & music director of Tarot, a music/theater project in New York - "I wanted to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond, and Tarot was more edifying." The rest of his activities are outside my scope here, but he also worked on an Incredible String Band album in 1970, and played a few shows that year with the Rubber Duck Company - on 7/14/70 they even opened for the Dead in San Rafael!
And TC did rejoin the Dead onstage for one show on 4/28/71:
"I was living in Brooklyn, doing the Tarot show, and was going to see Pigpen when the band came to town. We met at the hotel, the Essex House... So I wound up going to the show, too."
"I didn't even go to the Fillmore East with the idea of playing. I just went to visit Pigpen and the others. I was backstage at the Fillmore East, and the next thing I knew I was sitting down at the keyboard."

Around that time, Constanten was recording his Tarot album - some outtakes are available here:
http://www.archive.org/details/gd73-11-28.sbd-seastones.finney.968.sbefail.shnf
(Garcia and Lesh are said to contribute, but I find this unlikely.)

"Ironically, it’s only in the past couple of decades I’ve got the hang of the "jamband" idiom. But then, the keyboards are better now, too."
"A lot of this is in my book." (Between Rock and Hard Places, 1992)

Main Sources:
http://www.digitalinterviews.com/digitalinterviews/views/constanten.shtml
http://www.pooterland.com/index2/looking_glass/tom_constanten/tom_constanten.html
One More Saturday Night (Sandy Troy) interview
Golden Road (summer 1984 issue) interview

***

My comments -

It's true TC was no rock & roller! His forte was more weird, baroque-style, classical-influenced instrumentation - which was perfect for Anthem & Aoxomoxoa.
But by the end of '69 they were pretty much done with Aoxomoxoa songs, and they were doing simpler songs where he couldn't really add much. In Dec '69 they were also putting more rock & roll songs in the set like Not Fade Away & Dancing in the Streets. Since they'd already tended to play at volumes that drowned him out (if he couldn't hear himself, they probably weren't listening to him either!) - this didn't help his cause. And when he became a scientologist and stopped taking LSD, there wasn't a meeting of minds there! So they had an amicable parting in Jan '70.

In his early shows, he sounds much quieter on organ than Pigpen was - he's submerged in many of the mixes, which makes him a sort of spectral presence in the music. Sometimes barely audible, except when the others quiet down! He has more texture to add, though, seeping in between the lines, and by '69 he's stretching out and blending in. (It's surprising that he keeps playing Pigpen's infamous Dark Star riff well into summer '69, but apparently the band wanted to keep that little bit, like an appendix - and he just uses it as a brief stepping-stone into the jam.)
He can be rather subdued in early '69, which makes sense - to hear him tell it, he had no rehearsals, bad instruments, no sound monitoring, a "sink or swim" band attitude... (Which sounds rather antagonistic actually, but I think perhaps it was a vote of confidence - "here, we know you're up to this" - after all, the Dead had a daredevil mentality in those days, and a limited budget. They became more professional later on, since we have pretour "break in the new guy" rehearsals for both Keith and Brent.)
At the start, the musical environment was completely new for him - and as he says, Garcia was never willing to step aside for very long in a solo! TC does get better & bolder through '69. (Although, with all those shows, it would be more surprising if he hadn't!) Two later shows where you can hear him clearly on his own channel are 8/23/69 and 1/2/70.

It's hard to say how much influence he had on the changing jams. The Dead would have kept heading in their particular direction without him, but I'm pretty certain his playing had an effect on the guitarists and the way they handled the jams - there's a lot more space and subtlety going on in early '69 than there was in '68. A tune like Dark Star, which kept growing into more meditative, abstract spaces over time, was perfect for his swirling backdrops.
But the timing was poor. He wasn't with the band long before they started going country on him! If not for that pesky military service, he undoubtedly would have joined the Dead when they were recording Anthem, and our '68 shows would sound very different... But the time where Constanten had any influence on the Dead lasted only a short while, with Aoxomoxoa and Live/Dead (and a couple points on Anthem) the only albums where he left a mark. I think once they started getting Workingman's songs together in mid-'69, he was pretty much left to himself after that.
When he joined the Dead, he probably thought they'd carry on Anthem-type work - yet only six months later, they'd started adding heaps of covers and country songs to their set, and were losing interest even in their "new" Aoxomoxoa album. He must have felt the ground shifting under him... So it's telling that he left the band just a couple weeks before they recorded Workingman's Dead! (Also telling that they started playing acoustic sets immediately after he left.)

Few of the Dead's keyboardists managed to stick with them through a change in style. Pigpen was just fine in '66, but couldn't keep up by '68. Constanten was just right for the Live/Dead period, but the band moved out of that phase pretty quickly. Keith transformed the jams in '71 and the next few years, but he was doing nothing for them by '77/78.
Of all their keyboardists, TC may have added the least to the Dead simply because he came in 'too little, too late'... Even Pigpen, of the dubious organ prowess, had an immense influence over the Dead's shows which no one after him could match.
In comparison, Keith's influence on the jams starting immediately in Oct '71 is tremendous - unlike Constanten who stayed on the sides, Keith played all the songs like he owned them. It's hard to imagine what their '72-74 shows would have sounded like without him. (More like '71, presumably!) Whereas Constanten's departure in early '70 had about as little effect on the Dead-sound as Mickey Hart's exit in early '71.

Bear at the Board

This is a brief outline of Bear's taping history. Bear was a compulsive taper (in fact, obsessed with capturing a complete 'journal' of all his shows), and the history of the Dead would be much different without his contribution. A book could be written about the relationship between Bear & the Dead, but I'll skip over his chemical experiments & sound systems & the history of Alembic, to focus on the tapes made by Bear and the other early sound-crew tapers.

Bear first encountered the Dead at an early Acid Test on December 11, 1965. Very impressed with them, he soon became their patron and soundman:
"The next time I saw them was at the Fillmore Acid Test, and I met Phil. I walked over to him and said, 'I'd like to work for you guys.' Because I had decided that this was the most amazing thing I'd ever run into. And he said, 'We don't have a manager.' I said, 'I don't think I want to be the manager.' He said, 'Well, we don't have a soundman.' And I said, 'Well, I don't know anything about that either, but I guess I could probably learn.'"

By Jan/Feb '66 Bear was already making journal tapes of their shows and rehearsals. He was the Dead's soundman until July '66 (he left after the Vancouver shows, when they were fed up with his system). So we have a bunch of SBDs from the first half of '66, and almost nothing from the second half, since nobody was recording after he left.
Aside from taping the Dead, Bear was also building a new sound system for them (with Tim Scully), which unfortunately turned out to be unwieldy & unreliable. As Garcia said: "We spent five hours setting up and five hours breaking down every time we played. Our hands were breaking and we were getting miserable, and the stuff never worked... Then we went to Vancouver, and that was the downfall... It was lousy, it was just bad...then we had to work until dawn to pack it up... We decided to disassociate from [Bear's] benevolence and his experiment."
Bear: "They decided that the system that Tim Scully and I built was too clumsy and wasn't doing what they wanted. So they wanted to go back to using standard amplifiers. I said, 'Go pick out any amps you want'...they did, and I ended up giving most of the old stuff away. By then I was out of money, so I went off."

Bear's first recordings with the Dead were pretty disorganized, with reels not dated and often having only the vaguest labels on them, when they were labeled at all. This set of '66 reels is an example of Bear's early taping work, from shows with unknown dates - his favored mix at the time was vocals in one channel, instruments in the other:
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1966-XX-XX.sbd.GEMS.81254.flac16
Much later, David Lemieux found a box of unlabeled '66 reels which was used for the Rare Cuts & Oddities release: "While poking around the Vault with Bear, he pointed to a large, brown, nondescript box amongst his other non-Grateful Dead tapes, and said, 'You ought to check that box out...' I opened the box to find about 15 reel-to-reel tapes, most of which were unlabeled, while some had the most rudimentary identifications, such as '3/2 LA rehearsal,' 'Trips '66 3rd night,' or 'February 23 practice.'"

Dan Healy became the soundman in '66 after Bear left - he had been working in a studio and was friends with Quicksilver Messenger Service. As Bear has said, "Healy is a very pragmatic kind of guy who liked to tinker with stuff and fix stuff...he was a consummate troubleshooter." When he first saw the Dead, not only did he fix a broken bass amp on the spot, he told them their speakers sucked and built a better sound system for their next show. The Dead were thrilled with his ability, and immediately hired him. He recorded and helped mix the Anthem of the Sun shows in early '68, but that was strictly for the album - at the time, he didn't record any other Dead shows, and seems to have discouraged anyone else from recording them. (Which accounts for so few Dead shows surviving from '67.)
The one show Bear taped in '67 was 9/3/67, when he happened to be visiting the band. "I was not on the Dead's crew, but I just came out to the show and taped it." I wish he'd dropped by more often!

From Jan/Feb '68, we have lots of 2-track reels from Healy's recordings that give a fairly complete picture of that tour - the trouble is the Dead did so much chopping-up in the studio, stray reels were left here & there, and a bunch of shows are lost. The new Road Trips snippets came from a couple mix compilations had been abandoned at a studio that was closing. Short of another miracle find like that, we're not likely to hear more new shows from '68. (I think it's possible the "lost" shows from that tour were already lost or discarded as useless by the time they mixed the album, as none of them are on the official Anthem "live tracks" list.)

Bear was busted with an LSD charge in December '67, but it didn't lead directly to any jail time or affect his Dead involvement, as he stayed out on appeal. (It did, however, increase the sentence he got when he was busted again in '70.)
In early '68 Bear became the soundman for the Carousel. "When the Dead played there, Healy mixed for them because he was their soundman. I mixed for a lot of bands that were there." Bear also recorded many of the bands that played there, though few if any of those tapes seem to survive. For instance in an interview, he specifically mentioned taping Fleetwood Mac, Thelonious Monk, and Johnny Cash, all now missing - and on his website he praises a Janis Joplin show he taped there. "Not all of the tapes managed to make it to the present, and I didn't have enough blank tape at the time to record all the shows."

In June '68 the Carousel closed. Dan Healy left the Dead to work for Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Bear rejoined the Dead as their soundman, at their request.
Our SBDs resume in June '68 (there's one fragment from the 6/14 Fillmore East show, and others from around that time). However, obviously, most of the '68 reels Bear must have taped are lost. Either a lot of them were taped over, or perhaps the Dead didn't start really organizing and archiving the tapes until Jan '69, when they started working on the live album.
Our '68 collection is pretty chaotic, with just a few shows (at most) surviving from each month, many of them incomplete. This collection gives a good idea of what the Dead's '68 collection must have looked like:
http://www.archive.org/details/gd68-xx-xx.sbd.vernon.9426.sbeok.shnf
Random, unlabeled reels - some shows are known, some aren't - everything's fragmentary, and we can only wonder where all the missing pieces went.

There is one mysterious exception - the Los Angeles Shrine shows from August 23-24 were apparently taped by Dan Healy with Warner Brothers engineers (so the Two From the Vault notes indicate). As "official" recordings (were the Dead already thinking of a live album?), these are excellent; but many of Bear's mixes of the time, as in the October Avalon shows, are also great. Dead tape collectors have long been spoiled, expecting that the band's live recordings should be studio-quality - but this tradition of excellence started with the band in '68, even with reference tapes that were only meant for after-show playbacks. (Yet the band never thought, until the '90s, that a mere two-track tape could be used for release!)

(I should also mention that Bear seemingly had little involvement with our circulating Hartbeats shows at the Matrix - these were taped by Matrix owner Peter Abram. He notes, "Owsley lent me his mikes", but since he was recording on worn-out tapeheads, his tapes are muffled. Deadlists notes: "Circulating recordings of the 1968 Matrix shows trace back to Bill Gadsden's reels. Bill and Peter Kafer made copies of Peter Abram's (owner of the Matrix) two track 7" reels in the summer of 1974. Peter Abram's reels were either masters or 1st gens. There are also multi-track masters of some of these shows in the vault." One exception is the 8/28/69 show with Howard Wales, which Bear taped on cassette.)

The first live 16-track recording was done for the live album on 12/31/68, though it turned out to be too distorted for use. Though Bear was in charge of the live sound, a couple new characters enter our story here with the multitracks - Bob Matthews, a Dead hand from their early days, and his assistant Betty Cantor. It's worth saying a few words about them -
Betty started out working at the Avalon, where Bob Cohen was the recording engineer who taped many of the bands there, including the Dead. (He taped the September '66 show we have, for instance; but other shows were lost or erased.) She went to work at the Carousel in '68, and became involved with Bob Matthews there. He'd been on the Dead's equipment crew in '67, and when he became a recording tech, he lured her with him: "It was my way of getting her to be my old lady." They started out recording the Dead by working on Aoxomoxoa in the studio; recorded and mixed the Live/Dead multitracks; and the next year produced Workingman's Dead. At first Betty was mainly Bob's clerical assistant, but through '69 she started working more on mixing and editing tapes. At that point she didn't usually go on tours, staying in the studio - later on she and Bob taped the multitracks for Skullfuck and Europe '72. By then she was mixing the tapes herself.
Also by that time, as we can see by her Betty Boards, she was often on the road with the band (she recorded the Academy of Music shows, for instance) - although she seems to have made the tapes for herself, more than for the band. One thing that happened in '72, she and Matthews split up - he was still on tour with them in late '72, but after that seems not to have been involved with taping. By '73, Betty was recording not only the Dead's shows, but Garcia's shows as well. (She'd also taken up with fellow crew-member Rex Jackson....)
One thing that's interesting, the Dead seem not to have consulted Bear much when it came to studio work. Or if they did, no one has talked about it. Though he's listed as a "consulting engineer" on Aoxomoxoa and Live/Dead, as far as I know, they used him mainly for live work or technical experiments - when it came to recording and mixing an album, they used engineers with previous studio experience like Healy, Bob and Betty, or others.

The bulk of our Bear tapes come from 1969 - he stayed with the band throughout the year, recording every show himself. The band seems to have regarded him with some exasperation, as the sound system was frequently still inadequate! (I suspect his main attachment with the band was through Jerry and Phil, who always had a yen for other abstract intellectuals, while Weir and the others simply tolerated him.)
I don't think his mixing approach was always perfect - most tapes are not like the famed February '70 recordings with their wide, clear stereo. A lot of those '69 shows are basically muddy mono, with maybe one drum over in one channel - maybe he only did spacious mixes when he had time for it? Many people who later worked for the Dead, like Betty or Kidd, also had high mixing standards and made consistently excellent tapes. Bear's prime value was that he was their first taper, and without him the Dead might not have gotten into the taping habit at all. (The second half of 1970 was the last time they didn't tape every show themselves, for whatever reason - after that, they consistently made reference tapes.)

I've mentioned in an earlier post (on 1970 AUDs) that Bear was completely opposed to audience taping. "I wasn't in favor of tapers...I didn't tolerate it." And he certainly never would've allowed people to plug into the soundboard! Much of this attitude, I think comes from his hatred of bootleggers - and the band also shared his fear that audience members might make money by selling albums of their shows. Up to '74 the band's crew often served as vigilantes, patrolling the crowd for reels and microphones to confiscate - not until after the hiatus did they become more tolerant of tapers.

From an interview:
Q: "At what point did the band start listening to tapes?"
Bear: "We listened from the beginning. 'What was it like?' We thought it might be good to hear what it really was like. Or someone might say, "Gee, I think that was terrible, let's listen and find out whether it really was." Back in those days after the show we were usually wired up and weren't ready to sleep anyway. Everyone was working to try to get better. How can you get better if you don't ever listen to yourself? The only way you could find out what you had done was to listen to it later. In the heat of the show, no one can tell."
More on taping:
"I turned it on and forgot about it - except for changing reels as needed... The tapes of a show were fairly complete so long as I was not too busy with some crisis or other in the hall to fail to notice the amount of tape left. And trust me, crises seemed to be an integral part of rock and roll as we knew it... If the recording was not perfect and complete it still fulfilled its purpose... After a while it got to where I rarely played a journal tape unless the musicians were interested, and very few were then."
"I learned to date the tapes more carefully after having to deal with tapes that said simply 'Saturday night' or 'second set' [as we saw in '66!]... For several years, when I went off to do my time, no one continued the practice, and for most of that time there were no tapes made from the board. That shows you how much interest everyone else had in taping - zilch." [He exaggerates here - it was really just a few months, the worst period was 3 years earlier - but I share his bitterness!]
"The tapes were stored in the basement of the house I was renting for a while. They were moved to Alembic studios when I went off to jail. I came back and found them on a huge pallet in the middle of a storage room. Tapes were missing. I've never recovered some of them."

One thing Bear and the Dead shared was a perfectionist streak. He's written that even into 1970, not only did the band frequently rehearse, they did sound checks at all the shows. ("Later they became lazier about both things.") We have hardly any taped soundchecks (mainly a few from the Wall of Sound days), but Bear says he still has the soundchecks for the Fillmore East shows in February '70....
"In those days, we rehearsed - we had sound checks. I insisted on it. I didn't like to go cold into a show. I wanted to make sure if the stuff worked - there had been a lot of times when it didn't work, and it was really embarrassing... We rehearsed not only to get the music together, but also to check on the band's gear - to check the guitars and the wires and to do maintenance, and to get together and throw ideas at each other. After every show, we'd gather in the hotel and play back the night's gigs. That's why I was recording all the time... There was always a tape being made. If it wasn't a reel-to-reel, it was a cassette. Something that could be played back. That's how I was learning.... They were critiquing their own performances. We would find a weakness and try to correct it."

Not only that, but in '69 he frequently taped shows on reels and cassettes at the same time! "I always tried to do simultaneous recordings on cassette.... There were a lot of shows that I couldn't afford [reel] tape for, so all we've got is cassettes." This turned out to be a boon for collectors - many of the shows of the time come only from cassette sources, but there are a few where we have both sources, and can patch the gaps in one with the other.
"I always recorded all the bands and all the sets I mixed on all my shows like some people keep a diary, at least so long as I had enough money to buy reels of blank tape - sometimes I didn't, but cassettes were also made of all shows." (Sometimes on the Taper's Section picks of '68 or '69 shows, Lemieux will mention whether a show was taped on reels, cassettes, or both; deadlists also often notes this.)
As a sidenote, a couple recent sources from early '69 (for 3/28/69 and 4/21/69) come from Bear's 120-minute cassettes. It seems at that time, he may have preferred using the longer tapes to avoid frequent tapeflips!

Bear also says, "Virtually every band that played on the same bill with the Grateful Dead during my years as soundman, and who did not bring their own soundman, was recorded." (Note that if the other band had their own sound mixer, Bear might not have been interested in taping as it wasn't 'his' work.) "Even when they had an objection, I still wanted to tape them - but I sometimes had to give them the tapes afterward."
That's how the tapes of the Flying Burrito Brothers (from the Avalon, April '69) and the Allman Brothers (Fillmore East, Feb '70) were made - and there must be many more. (He also taped the Stones' Altamont gig, even though the Dead walked out!) Many are in the Vault, and many in Bear's own collection. It would be nice if there were a listing of Bear's tapes....I've always wondered which other bands he taped in those years. (His website says he'll post a list someday, but that hasn't been updated for years.)

One band he mentions: "I've got lots of nice Jefferson Airplane tapes, good and even great shows, but they always turned all the amps up to ten. As a result, there was very little dynamic action in their performances [compared to the Dead], and a lot of the mikes were overloaded. These tapes are basically fuzzy and unusable for making records."

This statement about his non-Dead tapes seems disingenuous, though: "I hope that a way can be found to make more of them available. It will all depend on the bands." (And on his site he also says, "I would be very interested in working with any of the bands concerned to see if the tapes represent anything worth releasing.")
In reality, Bear seems to have difficult terms for releasing tapes. If you read the actual liner notes to the Burritos release, it says plainly that Bear never authorizes releases of his tapes these days, and talks at length about the rings the producer had to go through to get this tape out!

Bear's taping run came to an end in 1970. After the New Orleans bust, the Fillmore East shows in February were the last ones Bear could tape out-of-state, as he was confined to California after that. The Dead apparently kept taping themselves until June - Bob Matthews became the soundman and taped several shows we know of that May (5/1, 5/2, 5/14, 5/15), and probably many of their other spring shows as well. Presumably the Fillmore West tapes up to June are Bear's work. The last shows he recorded were at San Rafael in July '70, before going off to prison.

I've talked elsewhere about the Dead's lamentable decision to stop taping themselves in 1970; but by 1971 they were recording every show again. Rex Jackson was the taper through much of 1971 (for instance, he taped the 10/31/71 show).

I presume Bear got to see the band when they played at his prison on 8/4/71 (halfway through his sentence). Betty Cantor said she copied tapes of the Europe '72 shows for him - this also illustrates how many tape copies of shows could be floating around, since so many duplicates were made: "In Europe I was doing the 16-track and simultaneously running a 2-track of my monitor mix. I made cassettes at the same time, and I had been feeding these a few at a time to Bear while he was detained. He said he was wondering who had done the mixing - he didn't think it was Bob because he liked the mixes. 'They sound like my mixes,' he said."

Once Bear was released after a two-year term, his first show back mixing sound was Berkeley 8/20/72. By then there were more people working on the Dead's sound crew who'd joined in '71 & '72, and Bob Matthews was the crew chief. Dan Healy had also returned - after seeing one of the band's NYC Felt Forum shows in Dec '71, he told them their sound system was terrible (the same complaint he'd had in '66!) and he decided to rejoin the crew to improve things.

Bear has talked a lot about his mixed feelings, coming back to the band in '72 and seeing a big difference in their approach since the freewheeling acid days. After all, they'd spent two years becoming more 'professional', more people had joined the crew, and the scene was not as welcoming to him as he expected. He found that the soundcrew was, as he put it, compartmentalized & territorial, everyone doing their separate jobs - he felt they didn't work as a team anymore, and the crew certainly didn't welcome him back. (And, Bear being Bear, he also felt he could do their jobs better than they could! Often his comments boil down to, 'I tried to tell them how to get better sound but they were too pigheaded to listen...' The guy was/is a cantankerous control freak, with wide-eyed dreams hard to achieve in reality, and probably more difficult to work with than he realizes.)

In one interview he has this to say about his return:
"I came back to a crew that was totally different when I left, and the job that I had been doing was split up amongst three other people, none of whom were willing to yield the territory. I met a lot of resistance in the scene, and after you spend a couple of years locked up, your social adaptability is not very good."
And another comment on '72 in his site:
"I was having some problems with the crew, many of whom had come to work after I had gone, and resented my drive to improve things onstage and with the equipment, which I decided was obsolete for the most part. They preferred to let things stay the same - an attitude I thought was due to simple laziness. The various problems, particularly the one of getting those who did my job while I was away to back off and allow me to return to my work, eventually inspired me to design the Wall of Sound... The hassles however, did not interfere with my ability to mix, and the band played many fine shows during this period."
And in another interview:
"I found that the three things I did - recording, stage monitors, house mixing - there were three guys doing that! Each one fiercely defending his little territory. 'That's my job, that's your job'... There was a lot of cocaine and a lot of beer, and they were bitching at each other, and everything else. Lots of power trips. I was feeling very uncomfortable."

Bear taped most of the shows from August to December '72, as far as I know. Kidd Candelario started recording shows in late '72 or early '73, once Bear got tired of the hassles and stepped down - Kidd was an old roadie who'd been with the band since the Carousel days in early '68. (In fact, quite a few of the Dead's sound crew - Bear, Bob, Betty, and Kidd - had worked at the Carousel then; and by '72, with Healy now in the crew as well, there must have been quite a crowd behind the soundboard! Yet it's strange - in their interviews, they hardly ever refer to each other, so it's hard to tell who actually did what. Healy has said of Bear's involvement, "Bear had other things going on. He didn't really have that solid a role on a continuous basis.")

Bear recounts a mishap at the Vanderbilt University show on 10/21/72, when Bob Matthews didn't show up: "I had to recruit some of the kids from this college to carry the stuff back. Two of them took half our PA and split. At the next show, there's no PA. I said, 'I sent it to the truck.' A roadie picked me up and threw me into a water cooler."
Apparently some recording equipment was stolen as well, which may account for the rather poor mixes of many of the shows from 10/21 to the rest of the fall tour - either that, or personal squabbles & disputes at the board! (Did anybody listen to the 11/12 mix?) Some shows have missing or incomplete SBDs (from 10/21 to 11/13, though not everything could be in circulation). There are several shows where Bear actually resorted to "audience-taping", making nice room recordings of 10/27, 10/30, and 11/13.

None of our tapes from '73/74 seem to be Bear's work - apparently after the hassles of fall '72, Bear became more a 'behind-the-scenes' equipment tech rather than the on-site sound mixer. All of our tapes from '73 and '74 were made by Betty Cantor or Kidd Candelario. (Generally Kidd's tapes were kept by the Dead and went into the Vault; she kept her tapes from '73, and they were eventually salvaged by Dead traders.) Bob Matthews, no longer in the on-site sound crew, would travel to the band's venues before they played there to see how their sound system could best be set up. Meanwhile Bear spent 1973 offstage, gradually designing the Wall of Sound (along with Healy and others).
Bear did not tape any Garcia Band shows. (Betty generally did those - for instance she and Rex Jackson taped the July '73 Garcia & Saunders "Live at Keystone" shows, and many others thereafter). But in '73 Bear did tape the Old & In The Way shows, and these tapes were later used for release.

Kidd Candelario has said a lot about his practice of taping the band in those years, which illuminates how they thought of it:
"I wasn't taping for the sake of taping, but only so that the band could listen to the tapes later on. I was either working with Keith or Phil's bass. Sometimes if I wasn't doing anything, I could listen to the taping, and this allowed me to hear problems that were happening, like a blown speaker or something wrong with someone's pickup. So lots of times I'd have to run back and fix something, which meant the tape might run out while I was away from it. This accounts for many of the cuts and missing music out there. But then there's always the problem of when to change the tape..."
"After getting all the gear set up, I created a little room to listen to what I was recording. Gradually, everyone began hanging out in my little taping room. Jerry was usually there with us. It was hard to really fully enjoy the music - I had to listen to make sure the technical aspects were functioning. I had lots of dubbing duties cause lots of people wanted to hear the show later on. And they wanted to hear quality!" (David Lemieux has said that in backstage film outtakes from Winterland '74, the band praised the quality of Kidd's tapes from the September Europe tour, so they were still listening!)
"In those days we hustled from show to show. We got there, threw it up, went right to work, show was over, we packed it into a truck and took off for the next city... We'd drop the tapes off at the warehouse, because back then we really didn't have a vault or anything like that. [The Vault itself didn't exist til about '76.] For a long while I kept tapes at my house. There was no place yet in the warehouse to put things, so I would come home and leave that tapebox there and get a fresh tapebox, and then go about making tape copies for anyone who asked me. The first thing I usually had to do after a tour was sort out the requests and get taping for them. But when Bear was doing it, he, Bob, and Betty shared all the duties [in late '72]."
He mentions the Europe '72 tour, perhaps his taping debut - remember, this is on top of the duplicate tapes that Betty made! "Bob and Betty were out recording that whole tour. I still recorded, but it was just a secondary, cause they had multitracks going... Phil got tapes from me, Jerry got tapes from me, and anybody else who really wanted them. I had to make copies every night for everybody - all of the band members."

While Bear wasn't taping in '74, he did come to work on some notorious '74 tapes when it came time to work on the Steal Your Face album and the film soundtrack. For whatever reason, despite having so many expert tapers on-hand, the band decided that while filming their 'farewell' performances in October '74, the recording would be done by a clown named Bill Wolf, who had worked with the Rowan Brothers (a group Garcia liked).
Betty had just had a baby, and did not work on this project. She said, "The tapes were pretty awful. [Bill] used a lot of audience in the mix - I don't know why or how he recorded so much leakage." Bear has griped endlessly about it since then:
"The master tapes were a disaster of epic proportions, requiring a complete overdubbing of all the vocals and many of the instrumental tracks. I had absolutely nothing to do with the recording of the master tapes, and was called in to try to 'fix' it." "Donna's tracks were missing, Weir's signal was lost, Lagin wasn't recorded, and there were weird noises all over. Phil and I hated that stuff, but Rakow insisted we had to have them mixed in nine days, which was inconceivable. We worked for 18 days, and tried using delays, filters, tricks to overcome the sound - but the job was next to impossible... The finished work was garbage."
He had no kinder words for the film. "It was made from totally screwed-up master tapes... We spent months on it, almost overdubbing the entire multitrack tape in the studio. There was never any possibility to salvage any of it, and the movie was a total disaster as well as the album. The performances sucked, and no one could change that.... I was originally allowed to work on the film sound, but due to my criticism about the unsuitability of the performances, I was kicked off."

Aside from the technical aspect of the Wall of Sound, Bear seems to have found the Dead family circa '74 an unpleasant working environment:
"There was a lot of coke and a lot of booze and a lot of roughness, and there were too many people working, there was too much weird shit going on, and too many power struggles at the top... The brotherhood was gone... It was like a lot of guys protecting their territory... Eventually it collapsed, and the band just backed away from it suddenly... In this case they couldn't fire anybody...so they just stopped playing, hoping that the people would go off because they had to make a living.
"When the band was getting back together, I wasn't around. They started back up with the guys who hung in the tightest - Parish was working with the Garcia band, and Ramrod was involved in something - the core guys were the ones who had clung to the Dead and made something to do, and those were the guys who were there when they started back up. I didn't have the leisure or the money or ability to hang around."

From time to time Bear would still attend Dead shows - for instance, he taped the 5/10/78 New Haven show. He also went to Egypt that year, and has a long story about how disastrous the Dead's shows were since they wouldn't heed his advice. ("If they had done it the way I thought they should do it, it would've been dynamite and everything would've worked. Because everybody would've been there two weeks ahead....")

There are not many interviews with Bear - the best source is David Gans' book Conversations with the Dead, which has a long interview. In his interview in the Taping Compendium he also talks a lot about his miking & taping philosophy, as well as his history with the band.
For those who want to read Bear's notes, here's his page where he talks about the Dead releases from his tapes, including the liner notes he wrote for each Dick's Pick - he takes lots of opportunities to talk about his mixing approach.
http://www.thebear.org/albums.html