Live vs. Studio Dead 1967-69

“Making a record is like building a ship in a bottle. Playing live music is like being in a rowboat in the ocean.” - Jerry Garcia

The Dead were known as live improvisers who could never quite pull it off in the studio – the magical jams that sustained their shows and wowed audiences were rarely found on their studio albums. As Phil Lesh said, “The Grateful Dead have always primarily been a live band; we’ve never quite managed to capture on record just exactly what it is that we do so well.” Weir agreed: “We just don’t play with the same fire in the studio.” And Garcia grumpily commented in 1974, “I hate all my records. The Grateful Dead don’t make good records.” By that time they were running on two different tracks - the ‘studio Dead’ focused merely on making radio-friendly pop albums, while the live band went on merrily expanding consciousness.
I thought I’d write about the Dead’s early albums, when they were still figuring out what would work in the studio environment, and still trying to capture that live aura on vinyl grooves. It’s not often mentioned that the early Dead could be quite ambitious and disciplined, in their own way – not in the sense of being conventionally ‘successful’ with hit singles & TV shows, or being able to play the same thing twice. But when they had an artistic vision, they would go after it with relentless rehearsals and patience; and when they had an album to make, they would stay in the studio month after month getting it right - only to proclaim disappointment once it was finally released. This was a band that listened to itself with very critical ears.
(I talked about this a little in an earlier post –
http://deadessays.blogspot.com/2009/08/did-dead-like-their-live-albums.html )

Garcia was asked in 1988 what he thought of his playing from 1969:
“It’s embarrassing to me! I studied all that stuff to improve what I found embarrassing about my own playing. To me it’s the thing of not being in tune a lot of the time…I meant to be in tune! I hear what I meant, as opposed to what I actually played… It’s not as embarrassing for me to listen to myself now.”
And in 1976, he said of the Dead’s albums, “Comparing the record to the vision, I always feel that it fails…it produces sort of a feeling of disappointment. You want it to work a certain way and sometimes it doesn’t work as well as you want… On our earlier records, if I listen to them now, they’re embarrassing for reasons like they’re out of tune.”
Even back in 1971, he felt the same:
“It’s hard for me to go back to the past in terms of the music, because for me it’s a continuum, and to stop it at one of those points, to me it always looks underdeveloped and not quite working… I think of it in terms of something we were trying to do but didn’t succeed in doing. I listen to what’s wrong with it.”

Garcia talked about the Dead’s first album in 1968: “We didn’t know anything about it, so we went down and ground out the first record in four nights. We were inexperienced about recording…there we were for the first time in the studio world – engineers looking at their watches [saying] ‘OK, what’s next?’ and that whole scene…”
He said a few years later, “At that time we had no real record consciousness… We were completely naïve… So in three nights we played some hyperactive music. That’s what’s embarrassing about that record now – the tempo was way too fast, we were all so speedy at the time. It has its sort of crude energy, but obviously it’s difficult for me to listen to it; I can’t enjoy it… Even as soon as we’d finish it there were things that we could hear… It was just simply what we were doing onstage. But in reality, the way we played was not really too much the way that record was. Usually we played tunes that lasted a long time…then we went down there and turned out songs real fast, less than three minutes…” (By ’71, apparently Garcia had forgotten that their early live shows were often even speedier and more hyper than the album!)
He dismissed the album as a product of low expectations: “We really didn’t much care about it while we were doing it. So we weren’t surprised when it didn’t quite sound like we wanted it to.”

The Dead weren’t complete strangers to the studio, though. They’d recorded a demo for Autumn Records in November ’65 at Golden State Recorders in San Francisco (probably a session of a couple hours with one engineer attending). This demo apparently went nowhere, and I’d imagine the Dead held it in some disdain.
They tried recording again for Scorpio Records in June ’66, at producer Gene Estribou’s home studio. There was even a single (Stealin’ b/w Don’t Ease Me In), which was barely released and they quickly disowned. The complete sessions have long circulated, and show the Dead quite patiently tackling multiple takes of each song. (A selection was released on the Birth of the Dead CD, omitting Cardboard Cowboy.)
But the Dead became disenchanted early on with the recording process. The producer recalled, “It was an effort to get out of the zone of indecision…Phil wanted to do one thing and Jerry wanted to do another… So it was frustrating for everybody, but we had to get something finished rather than nine thousand hours of shit that was unusable.”
Garcia summed up the single in August ’66: “We never got in on the mixing of it, and we didn’t really like the cuts, and the performances were bad, and the recordings were bad, and everything else was bad, so we didn’t want it out… It doesn’t sound like us.” The rest of the band shared his feelings.
Garcia: “It’s not that bad, but - ”
Pigpen: “Bullshit.”
Weir: “Go burn it.”

Come January ’67, the band was ready to try again, recording for Warner Bros in RCA Studios in Los Angeles. The Dead recorded their first album in just a few days, basically taping live with only the vocals overdubbed (just as they’d done at the Scorpio sessions). At this point the Dead thought of a studio record as just like a live set – the goal was to capture what they sounded like onstage.
The band picked their producer, Dave Hassinger, who was known for his recent work with the Stones. Garcia said, “We were impressed by him because he’d been the engineer on a couple of Rolling Stones records that we liked the sound of.” Hassinger, though, did little producing on this record. He admitted later, “That upset the band, because I had been primarily an engineer and that’s what the band wanted from me… They needed someone to help them get the record the way they wanted it to sound, and that’s what I would have liked to have done.” (The RCA engineers, of course, simply told the band to turn down! – causing Weir to comment that the band’s sound “didn’t fill out the same way.”)
Hassinger remembered, “We went in and did the first album very, very fast – less than a week… At that time I didn’t know them, and looking back I wish I could have had more time and done some things a little differently. But my understanding was that these were songs they’d played a lot, and they essentially wanted to get them down like they played them live. I’d made two or three trips up to the Bay Area and seen them at the Fillmore, and I thought they were dynamite. What I was after on the album was to capture as much of the energy as I could.”

http://www.archive.org/details/gd1966-12-05.sbd.kimbro.23064.sbeok.shnf
This is a (misdated) collection of mostly instrumental outtakes, showing how the Dead worked – they rushed through the tracks live, leaving just the vocals for later. (For such a speedy recording session, there were actually quite a few songs taped and then abandoned – I Know You Rider, King Bee, Stealin’, Alice D Millionaire, Overseas Stomp, Tastebud, and Death Don’t. Garcia also said that they taped a different Viola Lee Blues each day, in order to pick the best one for the album – indeed, a different version was used for the single edit.)
By the way, it’s worth noting that the Dead may have had little to do with the mixing of this album. It was standard before ’67 for the musicians to record the tracks and split; the producer would then spend a few hours (at most) mixing the album. (The 4-track mix in this case was quite simple anyway, with each instrument staying in its allotted place for the length of the album.) At any rate, the album was mixed on the fifth day of the session – McNally says the Dead were there, but they didn’t have much oversight over the process, as quite a few songs were considerably shortened for the record, eliminating the end jams (one thing Garcia later objected to!).
And ironically, once the band had finished recording, Warner Bros asked them for a single – “they said, ‘We still haven’t got anything here that’d be a strong single,’ so we said, ‘Ah, a strong single, sure!’” - so the Dead composed Golden Road to order and recorded it in San Francisco. The recording was more complex than their LA tapes, and they took more time on it with several overdubs - it was a highlight of the album, but didn’t fly up the charts! It’s easy to hear why this clean, zippy, somewhat restrained album would later sound strange to Garcia – it came out just when the band was turning the corner into a new musical dimension.
Crawdaddy magazine wrote a positive review of the album, but noted that it “disappoints fans of the live Dead. The more you’ve grown to love Grateful Dead live performances over the years, the more difficult it must be to accept an album which is (though very beautiful) something completely different. Only Viola Lee Blues has any of the fantastic ‘this is happening now!’ quality of a good Dead performance; only Viola Lee Blues takes you away as far as the longtime Dead fan has grown accustomed to being taken.”

On the album’s release in March ‘67, Garcia already sounded a bit skeptical about it: “I think our album is honest. It sounds just like us. It even has mistakes on it. But it also has a certain amount of excitement on it… It’s the material we’ve been doing onstage for quite a long time – it sounds like one of our good sets.”
But Garcia already realized that while the album accurately reflected their live show at the moment, they were quickly moving beyond that moment. “It isn’t as good as it could have been, but it’s still okay… After the fact of the recording, I don’t want to say too much about it – it’s finished and it’s sort of in the past. [The album had just been released!] None of the material we’re doing that was on the record is going to be much like the record from now on. Because now we feel we’ve done it that way. I’m even thinking perhaps there’s a possibility of re-recording some of this stuff in the future, just for the sake of how much it’s changed.”

By December ’68, Garcia was even more negative: “We felt very bad about it. We felt it was unfortunate… We did it, and that was it. We had all the time afterwards, and after it was released, and listening to it hundreds of times, to really regret it, because it was mediocre performances of material that we were able to do much better. It was uninspired completely. We’ll never go about it that way again.”
Back in March ’67, he’d started thinking about how their studio approach could be different than their live performances. “Being in a recording situation is really a lot different than playing. A recording situation brings out another side of creativity…something that you do over a long period of time… So when you get into a recording studio you begin to have a different feeling about what you’re doing. That’s something we’re just starting to get into. So the first album was essentially a live album.”
By April, Garcia was determined not to record in the same way again. “That was an attempt to try and sound like the way we do live - there's not really anything unconventional for us in there. So we're not going to bother doing that anymore... When we go and record, since the first album is doing so nicely, we hope they'll let us have a lot of time in the studio, and next time we'll do a lot more studio stuff.”

As he hoped, that’s exactly what happened. As he told the story later, “On the second record, we went the whole other way. We decided we’d spend time on our record: we’re going to work on it, we’re going to make sure it sounds good, we’re really going to get into recording and go on some trips with it. So our second record turned out to be a monumental project.”

In October ’67 the Dead went down to Los Angeles to work on recording their new album in RCA Studios. (They’d started work on Alligator and other tracks for a couple weeks in September, but didn’t get far – as Garcia said, “we accomplished absolutely nothing” - and after Mickey Hart joined that month, they probably decided to rehearse a little while before they continued recording!)
The October studio sessions went slowly, as they tried out Alligator and the newly written Other One suite. We have a set of outtakes from these sessions:
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1967-xx-xx.sbd.studio.81259.flac16 (identical to the “10/20/67” session)
In November they moved to the smaller American Studios in Hollywood, recording Dark Star and Born Cross-Eyed:
http://www.archive.org/details/gd67-11-14.sbd.unknown.17417.sbefail.shnf (though these tracks include later overdubs)
There’s also a tape of a long Lovelight rehearsal from November 19 (not on the Archive) – it might be surprising the Dead would consider Lovelight for their studio album, but at the time they’d only been playing it for a few months. They also tried taping Death Don’t, a reject from their first album (and one of their oldest numbers going back to ‘65), and New Potato, which they’d written just after the first album – though sadly we don’t have outtakes of it!

But the thought of recording a real live album had also crossed their minds. When asked in April ‘67 about capturing the Dead's live sound, Garcia stated, “You can't do it in a studio.” [It had taken just a few days in the studio to learn that!] But he theorized: “If you recorded us live, like at the Fillmore, maybe after two or three months....we'd start to get good cuts, good enough for an album in terms of how clean they were and how much we liked the performance on them. It would be such an expensive undertaking, and long....”

In November ’67, the Dead made their first attempt at professional live taping. While they were in the Los Angeles studios, the band brought a Warner Bros recording crew to tape a couple of their Shrine shows on 8-track. An LA Times reviewer at the November 10 show noticed that they were recording; and the two shows were kept in the Warner Bros vaults.
For me the mysterious question is, why were these shows taped? The Dead were not taping their shows in any format that year, let alone 8-track. (Many of our SBDs from ’67 apparently come from Bill Graham’s tapes; the Dead at the time were quite indifferent. David Lemieux says of the famed August ’67 Toronto tapes: “Unfortunately there are reels in the vault clearly marked with the date and venue of some of these shows, which has been scratched out, as the tapes were recorded over.”) As of November ’67, the band had only just started their long trek through the studios – and the idea to mix live & studio tracks together (born of desperation after Dave Hassinger quit) I don’t think had occurred yet.
Possibly Warner Bros, aware of the Dead’s live reputation, wanted to try recording a straight live album. (This may not be so far-fetched: remember that Hassinger considered their live show ‘dynamite’ and said of their first record, “What I was after on the album was to capture as much of the energy as I could.” So he may have been in favor of a live album, especially after seeing how slow their studio work had become.) If this was the case, the Dead clearly rejected this idea, either feeling these Shrine shows weren’t good enough, or having more ambitious ideas they wanted to get down.
The other scenario is that it was the Dead’s idea to record these shows for some undefined use on the album. A few months later, Cream would record an album split between live sides & studio sides, and the Dead might have had something like this in mind. Perhaps they were initially thinking of dubbing studio parts onto the basic live tracks, in an attempt to combine the live ‘excitement’ with studio trimmings (the way they would do with their ‘live’ albums in the early ‘70s).

In December, the Dead went to New York to try recording at Century and Olmstead studios there. Producer Hassinger finally quit, fed up with their inability to sing complicated songs like New Potato and Born Cross-Eyed, and tired of their insane production requests:
“I gave up in New York. We’d been working for a long time on that second album, and they had put down some new tracks in New York, and nobody could sing them, and at that point they were experimenting too much in my opinion. They didn’t know what the hell they were looking for…they were going from one end of the spectrum to the other… It was like pulling teeth, until finally I couldn’t take it anymore.”
Dan Healy recalled, “There was friction between the band and Hassinger – hassle hassle, back and forth. We were at the session one afternoon when we got into an argument with Hassinger about something he was doing in the mix. He jumped up, freaked out, and stomped out of the studio. Everybody just sat there. We were left there, halfway through finishing the record.”
Healy replaced Hassinger as the nominal ‘producer’, and the band saw a golden opportunity. Lesh realized, “We found ourselves with enough music on tape for maybe a third of an album, so we had to figure out what to do.” As Mickey Hart says, “It was our springboard to weirdness. We thought, ‘Now we’re not tethered by the engineers or the technology! We can fly the lofty peaks, man…’ And of course we knew nothing of the studio.”
Warner Bros president Joe Smith sent them a letter in late December insisting on a February ’68 release, saying they had “no time for delays or indecision as we must have the package on the market as quickly as possible… Now let’s get the album out on the streets without anymore fun and games.” The band, of course, ignored him - they now had bigger plans in mind.

In fact, they’d decided to record an entire live tour and blend the best performances with what studio tracks they had in an album-length symphonic collage. The famous Anthem tour followed in winter ’68, Dan Healy faithfully capturing the Dead’s shows on 2-track and 4-track tapes.
Garcia: “We recorded some of those shows using an 8-track machine for the band, and then using a 4-track machine for the room, so that we had 4 tracks of the room, various parts of the perspective of the room...one corner over here, one corner over here, one in the middle, done lots of different places... In mastering, we had the 8-track and the 4-track playing simultaneously. We'd mix them together and cross-fade them, so as to get partly the sound of the band, partly the sound of the hall, reverberating...it gives you a sense of enfolding space.”

It’s worth noting how overboard the Dead went, taping all those shows. They had a 40-minute album to make, much of which was already recorded in the studios over the months; simply mixing together the different live tracks was going to be a gargantuan job. And yet they taped over sixteen shows (probably more) from January through March ’68, in their search for just the right performances.
I think this tour definitely shows the Dead going after certain long album sequences, the same way they would do Live/Dead the following year – several planned medleys were done repeatedly. Of course with only two album-sides, some things had to go – the Dark Star>China Cat>Eleven medley was dropped and later dissolved into its separate songs. The Space>Spanish Jam that usually followed Born Cross-Eyed was also left unused, except for a bit of feedback on the single. (And it’s hard to say if Clementine or Lovelight were even considered, but probably not.)

Compared to our sparse knowledge of 1967 shows (where almost the whole year is missing), we have really good coverage for early 1968, thanks to these tapes. Here’s a rundown of the shows on the Anthem tour, noting what circulates (usually just partial sets), and also which shows were not listed in the Anthem CD liner notes (indicating that the Dead didn’t find them usable). What’s interesting is that our lost shows tend to be the ones that weren’t used for the album, suggesting that the Dead discarded those reels early on.
1/17 – complete tape; but not listed on album
1/20 – partial tape only
1/26 (aka “1/22”) – mostly complete
1/27 (aka “1/23”) – partial tape circulates; another set was found abandoned in studio
1/29 – lost; not listed
1/30 – lost except for one newly discovered song; not listed
2/2 – partial set only
2/3 – mostly complete set
2/4 – lost; not listed
2/14 – complete
2/17 – lost; not listed
2/22 – partial set in the Vault (vocals not recorded)
2/23-24 – mostly released on Dick’s Pick
Most of the Dead’s shows in March are lost – it looks like they only taped their Carousel shows that month:
3/15 – doesn’t circulate; but listed, and may still be in the Vault
3/16 – circulates complete
3/17 – didn’t circulate, but partially released in Download Series
3/29-3/31 – mostly circulates except for the 31st
After that, the Dead’s shows fade into darkness again for a few months….

One of these shows is famous for the incident where Lesh became so confused by the music he stopped playing for a little while. “For the first time I discovered that there were realms of music that we could play, that I couldn’t even imagine what was going on…it got more and more incomprehensible to me as the night wore on.” After the show, he tried to slink out in shame, but Garcia intercepted him. “He was so pissed, he just grabbed me and said, ‘You play, motherfucker!’ and sort of threw me down the stairs…”
There is actually some disagreement as to which show this was, though! Lesh’s original story was clear:
“The gig that became the core tape of Anthem in the Sun was the one Garcia talked about in the movie, where he ‘threw me down the stairs’ because I stopped playing… That was one night we weren’t high on acid; we were just playing. If you’re not on drugs and you play shit like that…maybe it makes you more edgy. We were trying too hard… That tape was so hot that we didn’t connect it with that incident for a while. I think Jerry was the first one who recognized it… Even after all that misunderstanding, we used those tapes of that night: St Valentine’s Day 1968, at the Carousel Ballroom. We used that for the core of the Other One and Alligator.”
Which sounds straightforward – yet in his book, Lesh says it didn’t happen at that Carousel show, but in one a month later, on the weekend of his birthday (during the March 15-17 run). And McNally’s bio offers yet a different date, saying it happened during the Carousel run from March 29-31…

Meanwhile, the album mixing commenced. I’m not sure how much new studio recording was done that year; some accounts suggest the Dead were still working on their studio material, though the CD liner notes state all the studio tracks were done in ’67. (It’s unclear, for instance, just when or where Tom Constanten contributed his noise piece to the end of the Other One, as different sources vary.) It’s also unclear just how long the mixing took; most of it seems to have been done in April and May, and it must have been finished before the summer. Most of the mixing was done at Columbus Recording in SF; but in April they also tried out Criteria Studios in Miami, with little result.
Garcia said, “We just worked and worked and worked for months – mostly Phil and I… We assembled an enormous amount of stuff…after an enormously complex period of time, we assembled the material that was on the master tape. Then we went through the mixing…” (Lesh has a good account of the mixing methods & process in his book.)
Healy described some of the tape problems: “We got all these tapes, and they were all recorded on different machines in different cities. The speeds were all different and weird and variable. There would be things wrong – the performance would be going along real good, and suddenly somebody would kick out a plug, or the power would go off and the performance would end prematurely… We got back to the studio, and it turned out there wasn’t one performance that played all the way through and did anything. We decided to just devise a way to be able to play them all by aligning and starting two different performances in the same place…”
Garcia spoke of not two, but “four stereo pairs of completely different shows that all started in the same meter and had about the same timing.” But he also said, “We selected, from various performances we did, the performance which seemed the most spaced, and we did that all the way through.” (This perhaps refers to the 2/14 Alligator, which does make for a spacy side B.)
“In a lot of those places, we have two or three different live performances all happening at the same time, and we’re cross-fading – that’s why some of that stuff is like a dream. You listen to a guitar run, and it goes somewhere, and all of a sudden there’s another part of it that’s almost a continuation but not quite, coming from another place. We did that a lot in the Other One, particularly.”
Lesh pointed out an example of the show combination in the Other One: “On tracks 1 and 2 we have the Grateful Dead at Kings Beach, California; on tracks 3 and 4 we have Eureka, California; and on 5, 6, 7, and 8 we have two different performances from Portland, Oregon.”
Of course, with just 8 tracks at their disposal, they had to do a lot of track-bouncing, as Garcia explained: “It was an 8-track tape, so we spent a lot of time crowding things down to one track, mixing down… A lot of stuff is dubbed off quarter-track…half-inch…4-track stuff…which we assembled in the hopes of producing a sound-collage symphonette or some damn thing.” Healy expanded on this: “We had to convert all the performances down to whatever tape machine was in the studio. Some of the performances we took down to 3-track, and some we took down to 2-track…then we transferred it all onto the 8-track.”
And throwing all these performances together required tons of edits, as Garcia said: “There are zillions…they’re everywhere…a lot of them are not in obvious places at all. There are things like three or four splices every two or three bars, and a couple of transitional places where we would have to piece things together to get it to work.” (On top of this, they’d have to edit together performances recorded at different speeds, and still get the tempos to match – you can hear an example of the speed shifting just before Pigpen sings “just a touch of mojo hand.”)
The final mix required numerous rehearsals to get right. “We shot at performances of the mix, rather than mixing little bits and tying them together. We ended up mixing almost the whole side in big flows, to get smoothness through the transitions. It was the most complicated fucking mixing you could imagine… It took a long time, but we took lots and lots of passes, and then went through the best of them.” (Lesh remembers, “I lost track of the number of times we performed this mix, trying to achieve just the right timing and balance.”)
This produced a very random yet open-ended album, full of mix collages and sonic jumps. “Each performance of the mix of those 8-tracks is like throwing the I Ching. You know it will all work – any possibility will work, any combination would produce a version of it that you could dig.”

Ihor Slabicky in his discography gives a rundown of some of the live tracks used, which I’ll list (I haven’t gone into the identifications myself, but have made some additions other listeners have found) -
The basic music for much of the album (Alligator and part of the Other One) was taken from February 14.
The Other One verses, and the first half of the New Potato Caboose jam are from March 17.
(It's been speculated that possibly some of the tracks for New Potato Caboose and Born Cross-Eyed come from February 3, but Born Cross-Eyed seems to be all-studio. I think the ending of New Potato is still unidentified?)
The jam sequence for side two has Alligator (from February 14, with the vocal reprise from November 10, 1967) into Caution (from November 10, and part of March 31), with some of Feedback from March 17.
A portion of Feedback is from January 22.
A short portion of Feedback from February 24 was used at the end of Caution.

Anthem of the Sun is a hybrid record, where songs like Cryptical, New Potato, and Alligator start out in ‘conventional’ studio guises and then suddenly lurch into jumbled-up live versions. It remains the Dead’s weirdest, most far-out statement. (In a way, they’d spend the rest of their career retreating from 1968.)
In the abstract, it appealed to Lesh & Garcia’s intellectual side: “We weren’t making a record in the normal sense, we were making a collage…more like electronic music or concrete music, where you are actually assembling bits and pieces toward an enhanced nonrealistic representation.”
And as an ‘acid’ record, it was very much designed for people’s mental trips. “We worked on it to get you high,” Garcia would say; or, “We mixed it for the hallucinations.”

At the same time, the record has a rather muffled quality, both in the sound and the performances. Today, a straight live tape from early ’68 can be more exciting, playing-wise, than this doctored melange (although perhaps the right hallucinations will hit me one day, and the full glory of Anthem will be revealed). But it still has the power to disturb. As Garcia said, “There are places of extreme awkwardness, but it wasn’t hurting for imagination.” What’s most notable about the album are the juxtapositions of moods, the feeling of disorientation and darkness, the heavy psychedelic atmosphere, the descent from the jaunty kazoos of Alligator to the apocalyptic ashes of Feedback.
McNally suggests the band wasn’t too thrilled with the album at the time, saying they “lost it in the mix.” Garcia said in 1971 that though he liked how far-out it was, “there’s parts of it that sound dated…in terms of the form and structure, it’s something which you can dig; but in terms of the way [it’s] performed, it’s a drag… We didn’t really succeed in getting [our ideas] onto tape too successfully.”
With Lesh and Garcia at the helm, some of the others in the band may have felt left out. Bill Kreutzmann later said, “There was a lot of layering and manipulation in the studio…I wasn’t all that involved with Anthem of the Sun. I didn’t feel like I participated that much in the music…it wasn’t my cup of tea particularly…I wasn’t that thrilled with it… Sometimes less is more.”

Aside from the rehearsal sessions I listed earlier where the band were initially running through their new repertoire, no outtakes have circulated from the later studio work. Part of this is because, as Lesh explains, “We didn’t have even one song complete; just a bunch of fragments.” And the CD liner notes clarify: “There don’t appear to be any completed outtakes from the sessions – most of what’s still in the vaults consists of instrumental backing tracks and separate vocal overdubs.”

Once the Anthem album was behind them (it was released in July ’68), the Dead were soon itching to get back into the studio. In the summer of ’68, they had one exciting new song (St Stephen), and a couple Anthem rejects from the dissolved Dark Star sequence (China Cat and the Eleven). Also, Robert Hunter was now writing songs with Garcia (starting with Cosmic Charlie).
One of the mysteries of Aoxomoxoa is just how the first months of sessions went – how much material did they have to work on? Several songs on the finished album – Mountains, Dupree’s, Rag - would not be written or played live until Dec ‘68/Jan ’69, which makes me wonder just what they’d been recording all the previous months. (Not only that, but the band was going through a crisis, as I’ll discuss below.)
I suspect they started the sessions simply jamming in the studio to see what turned up (the way they would start Blues for Allah sessions in 1975). The Aoxomoxoa CD reissue includes a Pacific Recording Studio session from August 13 ’68, where the band jams at length on a few themes.
There are also a couple too-brief tidbits on the Taper’s Section:
http://www.dead.net/features/tapers-section/january-22-january-28-2007 - a short instrumental studio Caution, “recorded sometime in 1968, likely the summer” (so it could actually be another Anthem outtake). This is just a loose rehearsal with Pigpen (sadly, the last minute before it cuts out is the best part!).
http://www.dead.net/features/tapers-section/september-17-september-23-2007-0 - a short Clementine jam from 9/21/68; Weir and Pigpen are absent, but the Hartbeats perform with a guest guitarist.
I believe they also worked more on Clementine in these early sessions. Not only do we have the 8/13 and 9/21 Clementine jams, but the Hartbeats also ran through it at the Matrix shows in October (with some new riffs), so I have to think they tried recording it around this time… It would be nice to know if more studio takes exist!

We do have one full studio rehearsal from these sessions:
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1968-11-06.StudioRehearsals.GEMS.82393.flac16
They start the session by warming up with a loose Lovelight (with Garcia singing the verse!) and Dark Star (very laid-back, and dominated by Pigpen’s little riff). Most of the session is devoted to exasperating stop-and-start attempts to get down St Stephen and the Eleven - the transition is especially troublesome. (They do manage one good full Eleven, though. This is one of the sessions where Lesh becomes quite bossy, as he mentions in his book – “I became insistent about going over and over these transitions…sometimes I’d start yelling at the drummers, ‘Let’s do it again – right this time.’”)
I used to think this session was from around September when they were just jamming in the studio; but now I think the labeled date is correct. Dark Star and St Stephen are slowed down from the summer versions, and Pigpen is still on organ, so a November date makes sense. What baffles me is why they’d have such trouble rehearsing a Stephen>Eleven segment they’d been performing for months, and why they taped it at all…. It’s unknown whether this rehearsal was for the album or some other purpose, but it may indicate that the full Stephen>Eleven medley was then planned for the album. (And indeed, a ‘finished’ version shows up on our outtakes tape.) The studio Eleven was dropped, though, when the Live/Dead shows were taped.

Just when they started the Aoxomoxoa sessions, the band again made professional 8-track recordings of some of their live shows – August 21 & 22 at the Fillmore West, and August 23 & 24, again at the Shrine in LA. Dan Healy notes in Two From the Vault, “Because our approach to recording was then considered controversial, Warner Bros would not entrust this new [8-track] equipment to us without their engineers chaperoning. The engineers they sent to us were accustomed to recording big-band style, and were not familiar with rock & roll close microphone techniques.”
So what was the Dead’s plan when they recorded these shows? I think clearly they had a live album in mind – why else would they drag skeptical Warner Bros engineers and their precious equipment to several shows? But it’s a strange move, when the largely live Anthem had been released just the month before. (Perhaps, as with Live/Dead the next year, the plan was to get an inexpensive live album out to pay for all the Anthem studio time, especially with a new studio album in the works.) Or perhaps the band felt there was more new live material, like the Dark Star medley, they wanted to release. It’s notable that the familiar Live/Dead sequence is already being played in August ’68 – in fact, the setlists for their shows would barely change over the next six months. As Garcia said, “We were after a certain sequence to the music - a serious, long composition, musically, and then a recording of it.”
But, just like the Nov ’67 Shrine shows, these tapes were rejected by the Dead. [The show from the 24th was finally released 24 years later.] Whether they were unhappy with the performances or felt the material needed more work, I’m not sure. But it’s probably not coincidental that right around this time, Garcia and Lesh started grumbling about getting rid of Weir and Pigpen.

Rock Scully says, “If the firing had to happen, it happened at a good time, because we were just sort of doodling in the studio, we weren’t making any money, we didn’t have any gigs booked…”
Garcia downplayed the firing later on, saying, “It didn’t take. We fired them, all right, but they just kept coming back.” He even said, “We never actually let [Pigpen] go; we just didn’t want him playing keyboard, because he just didn’t know what to do on the kind of material we were writing. It seemed we were heading someplace in a big way, and Pigpen just wasn’t open to it.”
According to McNally, it was in August that the band held a meeting to fire Weir and Pigpen (though I’m not sure if Pigpen was even there). They were planning to start recording their next album, and it seems they’d just taped and listened to the Shrine shows [or the earlier rehearsal jams] and were not too happy with them.
Scully: “We haven’t talked about anything more immediate than an EP and this record, in terms of Bob and Pig, and I think that you guys oughta make your intentions clear… The situation as it exists right now, musically, depends on four guys. The weight is on four cats in this band, not six… It seems like the music is being carried to a certain level, then staying there… You guys tire of music that has much more potential, many more possibilities, too soon…it never gets any better.”
Garcia: “All you gotta do is listen to the tapes there and test them.”
Lesh: “You can’t really get but two or three of them on, man; even those are with reservation…”
Garcia: “You guys know that the gigs haven’t been any fun, it hasn’t been any good playing it, because we’re at different levels of playing, we’re thinking different thoughts and we just aren’t playing together.”
As it turns out, Weir and Pigpen stayed with the band. Memories are vague here (Weir seems to feel he was out of the band for a couple months; and the band’s known gigs are notably sparse in September ’68, with only four dates in deadlists). But it seems Weir still kept playing at all the shows; Pigpen was absent for at least part of October, and mostly stayed out of the album sessions. I think the band found that it just wasn’t feasible to lose two of their key members (as the Hartbeats experiment showed), but what they could do was limit their input into the music.

Years later, Weir admitted, “I didn’t have all that great a vocabulary as a guitarist at that point. And my role…was a fairly difficult one. Being in-between the lead and the bass and intuiting where the hell they’re going to go, and being there. It took a while to work up a touch for that. I’d get hot and find myself moving pretty fluently in that role, then I’d lose my momentum and fall out of it. It’s a real difficult position to stay on top of… When TC was playing with us was an era when the music was its most cumbersome. It was hard to turn the corner, because it was a little too outside. For me, nowhere could I find a handle on the drift when it started to get spacy, well enough to intuit where it was going. It was accidental music…”

With Weir and Pigpen somewhat out of the picture, Aoxomoxoa turned into practically a solo Garcia album. I think the most obvious reason is because no one else was writing anything – but it’s a big shift from Anthem which was very much a full-band composition. It’s true that when Hunter arrived, he could churn out the songs and crowd the others out, but I don’t think the others tried either.
Pigpen, with his role in the band rather shaky, probably felt no need to participate in the studio - especially after Constanten replaced him on keyboards in November. Weir was not much of a songwriter at that point – he’d been dissatisfied with Born Cross-Eyed (which soon dropped out of their live sets), and combined with the criticism from the others, that pretty much shut him down for a couple years. (He said in December ’68, “My songwriting career has been slowed up because I can’t think of any decent words to sing. That’s kind of gotten to me after the last album…you’ve written a song, and you hear it on the album and the words are so nada, they don’t really say anything.”)
As for Lesh, it’s hard to say – he was a co-composer on St Stephen but otherwise gets no writing credits on Aoxomoxoa. His forte was more the jam-songs, which were left off that album – the Lesh/Hunter song Clementine was sadly dropped, and the Eleven (which was also a Lesh/Hunter collaboration) was picked for Live/Dead, so the the studio version was dropped from Aoxomoxoa. Lesh’s role at that point seems to have been something of an invisible arranger – Weir sang New Potato Caboose, and you’d never guess Clementine was Lesh’s as well, since Garcia sang it (Lesh has said he wasn’t ready to sing leads yet) - and the Eleven was very much driven by the whole band. As Lesh has said of New Potato, “It didn’t spring into being all at once, but rather amalgamated itself over time, with small but crucial contributions from the whole band.” But Lesh focused on developing the arrangements and jamming possibilities in these band collaborations. So, like Weir, it would be a couple years before we heard Lesh singing his own songs again.

Garcia himself later became unhappy with the batch of songs he and Hunter wrote for the album. “All those Aoxomoxoa songs, a lot of them are cumbersome to perform, overwritten. China Cat Sunflower is marginal. But a lot of tunes on there are just packed with lyrics, or packed with musical changes that aren’t worth it for what happens finally with the song. There isn’t a graceful way to perform them… Cosmic Charlie was really a recording song, and even when we did perform it, it always had its weaknesses…it’s not quite performable… At the time I wasn’t writing songs for the band to play; I was writing songs to be writing songs. Those were the first songs me and Hunter did together, and we didn’t have the craft of songwriting down.”
(He was talking after the band had turned toward simpler, easy-to-play songs; but the Dead in 1969 had no problem with tackling odd, complex tunes and demanding a lot of themselves!)

Serious album work commenced in September – the band was now able to drop out of the conventional studio system, and went to Pacific Recording in San Mateo, where Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor were recording engineers. Matthews says, “Aoxomoxoa was the first album they were allowed to do completely on their own…this was their opportunity to be in charge.”
They started with St Stephen, moved on to Cosmic Charlie (first heard live on October 8), and in October unveiled the Barbed Wire Whipping Party. (Which was probably an accurate picture of how they were spending their studio time!) Little did they know, all these early recordings would be abandoned.

Although Lesh doesn’t follow a strict chronology in his book, he says that the new 16-track was installed in the studio while the Dead were on their Nov/Dec ’68 midwest tour. (McNally says it was around Christmas.) When they came back to the studio in December, they decided to scrap everything they’d done and start over. As Bob Matthews said, when the new 16-track recorder arrived, “we fooled with it for a couple of hours and said ‘Fuck it, we’re redoing the album’… We all knew we could do it better.” It wasn’t entirely whimsical for the Dead to re-record the entire album, though – what most accounts leave out is that they now had a new player with them, Tom Constanten, who’d joined on November 23 and would play a central part in the recordings. In fact it’s hard to imagine what many of these songs sounded like without him! But the ‘first’ 8-track version of Aoxomoxoa has never been heard, not even as bonus tracks. (Possibly it was just erased, but I’ve never read what happened to it.)

We have one collection of Aoxomoxoa outtakes –
http://www.archive.org/details/gd69-xx-xx.sbd.dodd.16760.sbeok.shnf (I’ve posted a review there outlining the various tracks.)
The notes speculate these are from the original 8-track sessions. I’m not sure - some definitely are, some must be from ’69, but most of these tracks are noticeably lacking Constanten. In fact, some of these are missing any band members except for Garcia and Kreutzmann, who apparently laid down some basic tracks themselves (just like they’d do for Garcia’s first solo album). It’s evident that the Aoxomoxoa tracks were generally done piece-by-piece in a series of layered overdubs, though the finished mix disguised this somewhat by putting in bits of studio chatter and instrument doodles between tracks to make it sound more ‘live’. (And in turn, the CD remix does away with most of those to make it sound more ‘album-like’!)
Blair Jackson suggests that China Cat, Mountains, Dupree’s, and Doin’ That Rag weren’t recorded in the studio until January ’69, which makes sense since most of them had just debuted live. (According to McNally, the last three had only just been written, after Hunter moved in with Garcia.) But since that’s half the album songs (and Rosemary was simply a Garcia solo tape), it strongly indicates that most of fall ’68 had been spent tinkering and experimenting in the studio, rather than trying to finish any songs. Check out the bizarre version of St Stephen on the outtakes tape, which is stuffed with odd effects, to hear what the Dead were up to during those long weeks in the studio!
One engineer said of the Aoxomoxoa sessions, “It was like a circus in there,” as the band sipped STP and sucked on nitrous oxide to see how it might alter the music. (And imagine, if you will, the entire group of people on the album’s back cover crowding into the studio each day and camping out! It becomes no wonder the album work went rather slowly…)

Over the months recording Aoxomoxoa, as the Dead piled up their studio hours and worked out their disagreements, I think they had a dual strategy in mind. On the one hand, they were anxious to create a full studio album just the way they wanted. But I think they were also honing their live set with an eye to future live recording. Whether or not their debt to Warner Bros factored into their Live/Dead plans, on an artistic level, they’d clearly decided that ‘live Dead’ and ‘studio Dead’ were now going in two different directions.
Garcia said, “We knew that we weren’t going to be able to sound like we sounded onstage, in the studio – we just couldn’t do that. We haven’t ever been able to do that.”

Interviewed in December ’68, Garcia sounded quite bold and optimistic about the upcoming album (which at that point, was barely in shape at all) -
“This next album is going to have lots of songs on it, ‘cause we’ve been into lots of songs lately. It’s going to be mostly a vocal trip, really, just ‘cause we’ve gotten into lyrics this time. And, at this point it’s pretty amorphous. We have lots of material, and we have much of it recorded, but we haven’t decided exactly how to put it together…whether it’s gonna be a double album or a triple album or… We’ve got lots of different kinds of material. We have jam session stuff, we have all kinds of live scenes. Our material, at this point, is getting to be so interchangeable…we can do almost anything inside of anything else.”
He also talked about their plans for a live album:
“What would be nicest would be to take one complete show with no editing and just say, here it is, man. [Interviewer: “The perfect night!”] It could happen, and on the chance that it might happen sometime, we record.”
Weir: “And invariably, the really good, perfect performances are never on tape. Which is, of course, the way it should be.”
Garcia: “The latest trip that we’re on is to get some large room and say, we’re gonna do four hours, four or five hours of whatever we do, everything we can pull out of our hats; really do a huge number that just goes on and on, has millions of changes and goes millions of places.”

Once the Dead started using a 16-track in the studio, naturally they felt their live album had to be taped in 16-track, too. (‘The more tracks, the better!’ was their attitude.) At the time, the Ampex 16-track recorder was a large, expensive new item, and the idea of carting it to live shows frightened the manufacturer. According to Bob Matthews, “Ampex said, ‘You’re crazy; you can’t do that. It’s not portable’… They lost that round, and we put it in the back of the truck and took it over to Winterland for the Dead’s New Year’s Eve show.”
The first tryout did not work so well, as the recording turned out distorted. Dave Lemieux says this about the tape, the first live 16-track: "The reels of 12/31/68 were erased to record the January '69 Avalon shows (hey, tape was expensive!), with one lonely Midnight Hour left on tape, featuring all of the musicians who performed that night in an all-star jam. The sound on this 16-track recording is very poor, filled with distortion."
Unfazed, the Dead tried the 16-track again at their Avalon run from January 24-26: “We got ten people with ropes and we carried it like a sedan chair up the stairs into the Avalon.” Lesh tells the story of how (in the first set on the 25th), Weir’s guitar was lost in the mix, to the band’s great frustration. However, it appears our circulating copies come from Bear’s 2-track tapes, not the 16-tracks, as Lemieux notes: “the master 16-tracks from the first two Avalon shows were erased” to record the February Fillmore shows!
The Dead agreed that these shows weren’t quite right (except for the Eleven>Lovelight from the 26th) – a wise decision on their part, as Dark Star would mature immensely over the next month of touring. One interesting thing about their February touring is that they did not bring the 16-track; in fact, it was not used for any shows outside San Francisco, as far as I know. (Perhaps because it was too valuable or difficult to transport cross-country.)
However, on at least one night they did record on 8-track. The Fillmore East 2/11/69 album was recorded by Bob Matthews on 8-track, and I would presume he taped the next night as well. (Unfortunately, we only have an incomplete copy of Bear’s tape from the 12th.) If Matthews was with them in New York, I’d guess it was to get more recordings for the live album. It’s unknown whether Matthews brought the 8-track to other shows on the tour as well – perhaps they felt that the Fillmore East was where they’d get the best shows, despite the short sets. [Oddly, the pictures used in the 1997 CD release were from the January 1970 Fillmore East shows!]
Back in San Francisco, the Dead played the “Celestial Synapse” show at the Fillmore West on February 19. One newspaper wrote that they played “a set that ran for four hours or so with scarcely an interruption… The Dead played continuously, a flowing improvisatory set of new material. Originally the concert was to be recorded for inclusion on the next Dead album, but last-minute difficulties in setting up the recording equipment scotched that.” They must have had some trouble with the 16-track! It’s a great loss that this show is among the missing, but we can hope that perhaps a Bear tape is hiding in the Vault, waiting to be unveiled.
In any case, when they returned to the Fillmore West at the end of the month, the recording went smoothly. (Although in the middle of the first set on the 27th, the Dead seem a bit bewildered, with lots of chatter and mayhem. Garcia says, “It’s really too weird up here… If you’d like to spend an idle half hour sometime, you oughta come up here under these similar circumstances, and see what it’s like, it’s truly weird – utterly weird - beyond the pale.” But they calmed down in time for a more tranquil second set.)

Trivia note: In-between the majestic Dream Bowl show on Feb 22 and the Fillmore West run, there was another Mickey & the Hartbeats run at the Matrix! (The notorious Frumious Bandersnatch also played.) It’s interesting that they kept going with this setup even after Weir & Pigpen were fully reinstated in the band; so apparently Garcia & Lesh didn’t yet feel that it was a dead end, and these shows may well have been ‘open invitations’ for other musicians to come jam with them. It would be great to hear how the Garcia/Lesh jams had evolved since October ’68, but sadly there are no known tapes. (Matrix owner Peter Abram had to abandon or tape over many of his tapes, as he couldn’t keep everything, so quite a few Hartbeats shows are lost.)

Strangely, the band didn’t rush to release their live album. Instead, they sat on the tapes for months while they finished Aoxomoxoa. The studio album was finally finished in April and released in June - apparently only then did the Dead get around to mixing Live/Dead, which wasn’t released til November. As Garcia said, “When Live/Dead came out, it was about a year out of date.” (This is one reason I doubt the band planned the live album from the start to relieve their studio debt. Although most accounts like McNally’s suggest that “the fact that Live/Dead was in the can helped them finance the studio album,” I’m not sure just how an unheard, unreleased batch of live tapes convinced Warner Bros to keep giving the Dead advances for their never-ending studio work! The Dead had, after all, professionally recorded shows for Warner Bros twice before, but didn’t release anything from those.) Once Aoxomoxoa was finished, they were in debt to Warner Bros for about $180,000, but the success of Live/Dead helped pay some of that off.

Bob Matthews says that initially the Dead tried mixing Live/Dead themselves (as they’d done on Aoxomoxoa) – it was “from their perspective onstage, which is their mindset. It didn’t work…it didn’t have any dimension to it. I always listened to the band from the hall, so when I got the chance to mix Live/Dead, that was the perspective I was looking to recreate: how it felt to be in the hall.” Apparently there were no ‘room’ tracks used in the Live/Dead recordings (even with all the new tracks!) – and unlike later live albums, there were also no overdubs - although they did add some echo, the better to make it more grand and spacious. And it’s interesting that, just as on Anthem, they decided to end the record with a long bout of feedback – it worked well as a live closer, so why not use it again on the album?
In marked contrast to his complaints about the studio albums, Garcia liked Live/Dead: “It’s good… We only recorded a few gigs to get that album… It’s our music at one of its really good moments.” Even in the ‘80s, Garcia still said that album came closest to capturing the band’s essence.

It was probably a given that there would be no songs (except for St Stephen) repeated between Live/Dead and Aoxomoxoa. Live/Dead famously starts with a fade-in, cutting out Mountains of the Moon. Actually, they were only doing five of the Aoxomoxoa songs live – Rosemary and What’s Become of the Baby were probably never going to be live contenders! (Although we’re lucky to have one live Rosemary from 12/7/68, and one instance of Bear playing a Baby studio track under the feedback-encore of 4/26/69 – which sounds different from the released track, so they may have taken some work mixes on tour.) China Cat, oddly enough, had been dropped from their live shows after March ’68 and was not revived until April ‘69; so as far as we know it wasn’t played live the whole time they were recording it. (When they did start playing it again, it shared much of the shambolic energy of the album cut.)
Aoxomoxoa songs were done the same way live as they were in the studio, though of course without the extra instruments and overdubs. St Stephen for instance sounds more chaotic on Aoxomoxoa due to the additional parts (like the piano) – in contrast, the live versions sound more focused and pared-down, and can sometimes dig into the jam more.
(As for the other songs on Live/Dead, though they’d been tried out in the studio in ‘67/68, after that album they were ‘finished’, and the Dead never bothered with them in the studio anymore.)

Garcia later looked back with ‘90s hindsight on the Aoxomoxoa period: “The live show was what we did; it’s who we were. The record was like dicking around. It was like a day job or something; it wasn’t that relevant.” (This reflects his later distaste for the studio, but I’m not sure he felt that way in ’69 – and perhaps not for many years afterwards. He tended to put a lot of artistic effort into whatever he was working on.)
Garcia said in 1971, “We spent too much money and too much time on that record; we were trying to accomplish too much, and I was being really stupid about a lot of it, because it was some new tunes that I had written, that I hadn’t really bothered to teach anyone in the band, and I was trying to record them from the ground up, and everybody was coming in and doing overdubs… We went about it in a very fragmentary way; we didn’t go about it as a group at all.”
Nonetheless, he liked Aoxomoxoa for its weirdness and looseness – it “sounded like how I wanted…the tapes were well-recorded, and the music is well-played and everything on it is really right.” Unfortunately, “it’s been our most unsuccessful record. It was when Hunter and I were being more or less obscure…too far-out, really, for most people.” He sighed, “That record is one of my pets. I really like it. I was always sorry that it came out so fucked up and then didn’t sell.”
Mickey Hart said of the Aoxomoxoa mixing, “All those psychedelics clouded the lens…they’d give you great detail, but then you’d hear the most obscure aspect in the mix. [The music was] real fuzzy; you couldn’t find a real center.”
Garcia remixed the album in the summer of ’71: “I’m really happy with the remix… It was our first adventure with 16-track, and we tended to put too much on everything; we tended to use up every track…and then we were all of us trying to mix. Well, we couldn’t…it came out mixed by committee. A lot of the music was just lost in the mix…but I really had fun remixing it. The remixes are admittedly somewhat simpler…I dropped a lot of the junk off it. It sounds more like I hoped it would when we recorded it.”
In general, the ’71 remix presented clearer, more organized and stripped-down mixes of the songs, with many incidental ‘studio bits’ mixed out so that the album, though less cluttered, now had less of an atmospheric ‘live in the studio’ feel. (It’s telling that the original album has no fadeouts, while most of the remixed songs fade early.) Some songs were changed more than others - Mountains of the Moon was now minus its choir and ending; China Cat Sunflower was simplified and the 40-second jam at the end discarded; Doin’ That Rag was missing the vocal outro they did live; Cosmic Charlie was quieter, with drums much reduced and TC’s organ almost inaudible; What’s Become of the Baby was stripped of almost all the bizarre electronic effects that had made the original version at all interesting, and turned into a long bore. (The feedback-drenched 4/26/69 version is probably the ideal for what this song should have sounded like.)
The remix of Aoxomoxoa is what’s on CD now, and the original is out of print. Phil Lesh also got busy in 1971 remixing Anthem of the Sun, which had the opposite fate – it’s the original mix that’s now on CD, while Lesh’s remix has disappeared.

Once Aoxomoxoa was finished, new songs came pouring out of the Hunter/Garcia team, but the band didn’t rush to the studio right away, like they had in ’68.
Garcia said, “After Aoxomoxoa, we didn’t make a studio record for almost a year – Live/Dead came out in its place. We were anxious to go into the studio, but we didn’t want to incur an enormous debt making the record like we had been. When you make a record, you pay for the studio time out of your own royalties. That costs plenty. Live/Dead was not too expensive since it was recorded live. It ended up paying for the time on Aoxomoxoa… So when we were getting new material together, we thought, ‘Let’s try to make it cheap this time.’”
“We spent so much money on Aoxomoxoa – we spent almost a year working on it, and it was not that great of an album – that we had a huge deficit. So I was thinking, when we go into the studio next time, let’s try a real close-to-the-bone approach… ‘Let’s not spend a year, let’s do it all in three weeks and get it the hell out of the way. And that way, if the record does at all well, we will be able to pay off some of what we owe to the record company.”

The next album was recorded during a couple of weeks in February 1970 after the Fillmore East run, though the specific dates haven’t been revealed. According to Blair Jackson, "Shortly after the bust, the Dead went into Pacific High Recording and cut their studio album in just ten days." Steve Silberman’s CD liner notes agree: "The New Orleans bust went down two weeks before the Workingman's sessions began…and [the band] wrapped up the new album in a couple of weeks.” He even gives the recording date for one song: Dire Wolf was recorded on February 16.
This time around, most of the songs already had a long performing history behind them, and the Dead went through additional rehearsals to get them ready for a quick recording. Bob Matthews says, "We went into the studio first and spent a couple days rehearsing, performing all the tunes. When that was done I sat down and spliced together the tunes [in an album sequence]. We made a bunch of cassette copies and gave them to the band. They rehearsed some more in their rehearsal studio, and then they came in and recorded."
McNally's bio, though not date-specific, also puts the recording after the Fillmore East shows. "They went into Pacific High Recording, a tiny room half a block behind Fillmore West, and rehearsed for a week. Then [after Matthews gave them the album-sequence tape] the band rehearsed for another week... They went into Pacific High to record Workingman's Dead, and in about three weeks they had an album."
(As we know, Lenny Hart fled with the Dead’s bank accounts during the album sessions - McNally unfortunately doesn’t mention any dates, but he does say specifically that it was mid-March, whereas all other accounts put this in February.)

What these accounts make clear is that there were two separate studio sessions, the first one a kind of 'practice run', with perhaps a week of rehearsals in-between. In a way, this was a return to the brisk methods of their first album – the months of studio experimentation were through. Not only did the Dead’s perilous finances call for a short studio trip, their new material did not need much embellishment.
Garcia explained in ‘81, “We weren’t having much success getting that experimental stuff down in the studio, so we thought we’d strip it down to the bare bones and make a record of very simple music and see how that worked. Time was another factor. We’d been spending a long time in the studio with those exploratory albums, six to eight months apiece, and it was really eating up our lives.”
The new songs were quite a change from the strange, quirky material the Dead had been doing, and lent themselves to the much quicker, simpler recording process. “It was a chance to expose a side of us that we certainly hadn’t exposed very much,” Garcia said – in fact, it was a side they’d hardly exposed at all, save for a few hints on Aoxomoxoa. Listeners were surprised by this new, accessible sing-along country-rock Grateful Dead, with not an acid jam in sight.

One interviewer the next year asked Garcia if they had given up the long jams:
“We never really gave it up, we just didn’t put it out on that record. We still play that way, we still stretch out. It wasn’t meant to indicate any trend… We’ve never accepted any limitations. We don’t think of ourselves as a rock & roll band, an experimental band, this band or that band… We think of ourselves as musicians, who have lots of possibilities. [Each record] is one of the possibilities, and I expect in the course of a lifetime of music, we’ll have thrown out lots of possibilities.”

The Velvets and the Dead

Weary readers might wonder what connection the Velvet Underground had with the Grateful Dead. Weren’t they complete opposites? Didn’t the Velvet Underground hate hippies, psychedelia, and laughter? Sunny, pleasant acid trips for dancing hippies vs. dark, abrasive anti-life heroin dirges - could any two bands be more different?

The story isn’t so simple, though. In some strange ways, the two bands were like flip sides to each other. As Richie Unterberger says, “Both were once known as the Warlocks; both have made their music heavily associated with the ingestion of drugs; and both were prone to performing lengthy improvisations onstage that are comparable to those of few other bands.”

Lou Reed:
“Once when we were playing on a bill with the Grateful Dead, some reporter from the Daily News asked me what was the difference between us and the Dead. With a perfectly straight face, I told him, ‘The difference is that they take the kids backstage and turn them on – but we shoot ‘em up!’ Don’t you know, he actually believed me and printed that.”

Despite a totally different style and sensibility, their musical approach is closer than seems obvious at first. The Velvets were consistent in using songs as jumping-off places for extended improvs – Lou Reed was as much a fan of Coltrane and jazz horn players as the Dead were, though he favored the noisy ‘skronk’ style of Ornette Coleman & Albert Ayler. “When I started out I was inspired by people like Ornette Coleman. He was always a great influence.” He’s said that ‘European Son’ was his way of imitating Coleman with guitars.
Reed: “I had been listening to a lot of Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, and wanted to get something like that with a rock & roll feeling. And I think we were successful, but I also think we carried that about as far as we could, for our abilities as a basically rock & roll band. Later we continued to play that kind of music, and I was really experimenting a lot with guitar, but most of the audiences in the clubs just weren't receptive to it at all."
(The Dead’s admiration of Ornette was a quiet one, but acknowledged when he played with them in the ‘90s. Garcia said after working on one of Coleman’s albums, “When I hear his playing, I hear something that I always wish would be in mine – a kind of joy and beauty.”)

Both bands liked to take simple modal patterns of one or two chords and spin them out into long jams, though they took these in different directions. Both the Velvets and the Dead were innovators in using feedback as a meaningful musical statement (of course they weren't alone - the Who and Hendrix among others were doing the same – feedback was an exciting new thing in those days). If you’ve heard the Velvets’ early soundtracks for Warhol films, they’re freaky ambient noise not far removed from the Dead’s later ‘spaces’.
The Velvets were one of few rock bands I know of to do half-hour freeform improvisations in 1966. Rock music was stretching out and solos were getting wilder, but not many instrumentals had gone to such monstrous lengths yet. (The list of 20-minute live rock jams is a short one that year – there’s Moby Grape, ‘Dark Magic’ – Butterfield Blues Band, ‘East/West’ – Pink Floyd, ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ – readers can probably think of a few more.)
Improvisation is very much a live art, though, and was frowned upon in studio recordings of the time - as was any tune longer than three minutes. (A couple rare instances of rock album tracks over ten minutes in ’66 are Love’s ‘Revelations’, the Stones’ ‘Goin’ Home’, and the Blues Project’s ‘Two Trains Running’. Even on Cream’s first album, the longest track is six minutes!) As a result, there are many bands who were known for their exciting long jams onstage (like, later on in the ‘60s, Buffalo Springfield or Fairport Convention), who confined themselves to short pop material on their records – their live sound was never caught on tape. So people were probably hearing more live jamming in ’66 than we can recover today.

One recommended Velvets show is from October '66, a complete two-hour show (in poor sound, as usual) where they play no less than TWO half-hour improvs (called "The Nothing Song" and "Melody Laughter"), which don't sound quite like anything else. (Nico moans over the music, kind of like Donna...)
Then by '68, with Sister Ray they had a piece that could be transformed into something different each time they played it, and they were happy to stretch it out to thirty, forty minutes or more. There's one famous show from April '68 where just the INTRO to Sister Ray is a forty-minute quiet trance drone!
Other songs could sprout ten-minute guitar solos as well, depending on the band’s mood; long jams would develop in the sets and then disappear. (One example is the otherwise unheard, rambling ‘Follow the Leader’ on the Quine Tapes set.) And practically none of these were recorded by the band – just a few instances were captured by audience tapers.

And while the Dead had Phil Lesh to give them that avant-garde dissonant edge (especially apparent on Anthem), the early Velvets had John Cale who brought a quite different avant-garde slant from his previous noise/drone experiments. In much the same way as Lesh came to the Dead fresh from absorbing Luciano Berio and Stockhausen, John Cale had studied with LaMonte Young and brought that strong influence into their music. There's a 1965 recording from the Dream Syndicate (with Young & Tony Conrad) which is just ONE NOTE (on two or three violas) sustained for about a half-hour. Now that's a serious drone! (Cale has also released a 3-CD set of some of the noise/minimalist experiments he was doing in the '60s outside the Velvets.)
One thing about the Dead's music is that they did not like repetition too much in the jams - the music is always busy, restless. Lesh is not one to be pinned down to a single bassline for too long – and Garcia will often find some beautiful phrase, repeat it a couple times....and then drop it to do something else, never to be heard again. So, in spite of the Indian music they liked, we almost never get drones in their jams or 'trance Dead'.

The Velvets, of course, were sworn enemies of the Dead’s music.
In ’71 Maureen Tucker called the Dead the most boring band she’d ever heard. Sterling Morrison also loathed them, and despised San Francisco music in general. (But he did make an exception for Quicksilver Messenger Service, saying they sounded great and John Cipollina was a really good guitar player.) Lou Reed also had harsh things to say (although he did like the first Moby Grape album; and they were fans of LA bands Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds.)

Reed and Doug Yule, in a 1970 interview:
LOU: We had vast objections to the whole San Francisco scene. It's just tedious, a lie, and untalented. They can't play and they certainly can't write. The Airplane, the Dead, all of them...
DOUG: They lose track of where the music comes from - they start thinking it instead of playing it. Especially the Dead. Now I saw the Dead when they just started, and they were a bunch of scuzzy kids just having a ball playing rock & roll - they were a lot of fun. But then they started thinking about what they were doing too much.
LOU: I can get off understanding the kick it was to play Lovelight.... But they're amateur...they can't play. Jerry's not a good guitar player. It's a joke, and the Airplane is even worse, if that's possible.
DOUG: Jerry, he'll play the same solo for a half hour, but if he'd done it for just two minutes....he plays the same notes over and over again.
LOU: You listen to the Beatles, or you listen to 'Gimme Shelter' by the Stones, and Keith isn't playing many notes, but the notes he's playing are so thought out, so perfect...
Q: But don't you think a lot of people get off on something like the Dead because it's so loose?
LOU: It's what people are settling for....they're getting third-hand blues. It's a fad.... People like Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, all those people are the most untalented bores that have ever lived. Just look at them - can you take Grace Slick seriously? It's a joke. And the whole thing is, the kids are being hyped this on FM radio. Well, now finally it's dead, the whole San Francisco thing is dead.

The Velvets had first come to San Francisco in May ’66 - they played the Fillmore with the Mothers of Invention, and developed an instant mutual dislike for Bill Graham. (They also hated Frank Zappa – Lou Reed later called Zappa “the single most untalented person I’ve heard in my life – he’s two-bit, pretentious, academic, and he can’t play his way out of anything. He can’t play rock & roll.” Reportedly Reed also hated the Jefferson Airplane’s music so much that he refused to share a bill with them.)
Cale admitted that on this first San Francisco trip, “No one liked us much.” Audiences met them with bewilderment – one witness remembers, “they had this weird stuff onstage with some chick getting whipped, and I went, ‘Oh wow, this is music?’” Ralph Gleason wrote a very hostile review of their ‘sick, campy, dull, joyless, non-artistic’ show – “a bad condensation of all the bum trips of the Trips Festival… Opening night was really crowded, even though hippies were continually walking out shaking their heads and saying ‘Wow!’ in wonder that such a bore could be.”
The Velvets ended a Fillmore show by putting their guitars against the amps and letting the feedback howl as they left the stage. Bill Graham couldn’t stand this, or the rest of their stage act – he called them perverted, sickening, and negative, “the worst piece of entertainment I’ve ever seen in my life” - and they all agreed that the Velvets would never play any Fillmore show again. (The police in Los Angeles that month also found the Velvets’ show so offensive they shut down the club they were playing in!)
The Velvets later believed that Bill Graham had even stolen the idea of their light show – they found the Fillmore’s current light-shows laughable. Doug Yule said this was “one of Sterling’s rants…they felt that when they showed up with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, that Graham was doing kindergarten-level light shows, and they opened his eyes and then he ripped ‘em off, took all their ideas and put that out as his own.”

In any case, the Velvets didn’t return to California for two years. As Sterling said in his usual manner, “We left California alone for two years, because they’re so determined to do their own thing, their own San Francisco music. We were just rocking the boat – they don’t want to know about that. ‘There’s only one music, and we all know what that is…it’s what the Grateful Dead play. That’s the very best rock & roll can ever get…’ We said, ‘You’re full of shit, your city, your state, and everything else.’”
But they did come back. In fact, in ‘68/69, they played San Francisco more often than anywhere else except for Boston, playing numerous shows at the Avalon, Family Dog, and Matrix. One reason was that by then, the audience had caught up with them, and loud hard rock was the order of the day, so the Velvets were now well-received by enthusiastic fans. Peter Abrams liked them enough to record hours of their Matrix performances (“I wanted to get as many recordings of them as I could”), and Robert Quine was one fan who’d recently discovered the Velvets and also taped as many shows as he could. (Both of them, though, had to erase most of their recordings and keep only highlight reels, since they couldn’t afford all that tape.) But ironically, most of the Velvets’ live releases come from San Francisco!

One audience member saw a show with the Velvets and Quicksilver Messenger Service in ‘68, and noted the Velvets’ “depressing drug-type songs, very heavy, very dark, very heroin, with a dangerous underground feel…while Quicksilver was light and color and acid and mind-wandering.”
Some California newspaper reviewers tried to describe the Velvets’ sound in their shows:
“The band makes a sound that can only be compared to a railroad shunting yard, metal wheels screeching to a halt on the tracks. It’s music to go out of your mind to.”
“In the middle of Sister Ray, they created this harmonic that sounded like the roof of the building was cracking open! It was just wild; it went on for a long time. It was really the ultimate in trance music, even beyond what La Monte Young was doing, because it was so loud and there were so many instruments.”
“The Underground played an extremely involving two-hour set which completely destroyed the audience, left limp at its conclusion. The music was earthy with a heavy beat and moderate use of electronics and feedback. The sound it created was all-enveloping. Catharsis was particularly strong in Heroin and the 45-minute concluding number, which included electronic viola and organ as well as the guitars…they’re a heavy group.”
Doug Yule admits, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a recording that gives you the feeling that the group put out live. It was a locomotive.”

The Velvets and the Dead played together a couple times in 1969.
One remarkable night at the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh, February 7, the Fugs, the Velvets, and the Dead all played. One newspaper reviewer wrote, “Such a collection of freaks could hardly lead anywhere but up. The Velvet Underground…opened up the festivities with Heroin, one of their religious songs.” The Dead offered two typically intense hard-jamming sets.

They shared a bill again just a couple months later, at Chicago’s Electric Theater, April 25 & 26. (Detroit band SRC was the third band on the bill.) By then, the Dead’s live approach was much sloppier, with many new songs in the set.
It’s commonly believed among Dead fans that on the 25th, the Velvets opened and played a very long set, leaving the Dead only a short time to play. In revenge, when they switched and the Dead opened on the 26th, the Dead played for almost three hours, making the Velvets wait through their 40-minute wall-of-feedback encore.
This story is wrong, though! If you listen to the end of the Dead’s short set on the 25th, it’s clear that they were the opening act that night – when the audience cries for more, Weir says, “We’re gonna come back and do a second set in a little while, and we’re gonna bring on two other real good bands, and they’ll blow your minds anyway; so we’ll be back in just a short while.” (Which obviously raises the question, is there a whole second set from April 25 that we’ve never heard?)
Doug Yule reports that the first night “the Dead opened for us – we opened for them the next night so that no one could say they were the openers. As you know, the Grateful Dead play very long sets, and they were supposed to only play for an hour. We were up in the dressing room and they were playing for an hour and a half, an hour and 45 minutes. So the next day when we were opening for them, Lou says, ‘Watch this.’ We did Sister Ray for like an hour, and then a whole other show.”
(The entire tape we have of April 25, though, is only about an hour, and it sounds like the complete set. Did the Dead really open the show with two sets in a row? Or perhaps the Velvets found the Dead so awful their set just seemed to last forever!)
Apparently the theater had no time restrictions, so the Dead seem to have been encouraged by the Velvets’ long noisy set on the 26th to play for even longer! My theory is that listening to that long Sister Ray is what gave them the idea to close with a huge Viola Lee going into fifteen minutes of feedback mixed with What’s Become Of The Baby….they certainly didn’t do anything like this at any other ’69 shows!
One audience member says of this famous show, “I believe the Velvet Underground played first…then the Grateful Dead came out and played til about 2 or 3 in the morning. And literally, the only people left in attendance when the Dead were through playing were people that were laying on the floor. Eighty percent of the crowd had gone, and the Dead just kept on playing.” (What he doesn’t mention is that he must have lingered through the whole show, too! At one point he tried to talk to Owsley by the soundboard, but “the whole thing was up so loud that we couldn’t hear each other. We just looked at each other and shrugged.”)
It’s not known whether Bear taped the Velvets’ shows. But even if he did – between Bear hanging for life onto his journal tapes and never authorizing releases, and the Velvets also refusing to release any more live shows, we’d probably never hear them.

I’ll conclude with a quote from this interesting book review:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n06/mark-greif/the-right-kind-of-pain

“When you look at the state of both bands at their founding moments in 1965-66, you find that the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead started out, in an odd way, as basically the same band. In fact, both bands started with the same name in 1965: the Warlocks. And both were quickly taken up by other cultural movements and artists from other genres to furnish ‘house bands’ for collective projects.
On the West Coast, Ken Kesey hired the Dead to provide music for his acid tests... The Palo Alto acid test, the first to involve a real stage, took place in December 1965… In New York, meanwhile, Warhol took up the Velvets as a vehicle for his Factory events and a featured role in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which had various incarnations between January 1966 and its first broad public invitation in April, each of which also involved some combination of Warhol’s dancing fools, slide-projector gels, light shows, silent films and chaos. (Warhol took first billing in all advertisements, above the Velvets, though presumably he just stood around and watched.)
Both bands’ music depended on a tight association with drugs – LSD for the Dead, heroin for the Velvets (plus amphetamines) – but the musicians drew fewer distinctions in their personal lives...
Each band’s early development was paid for by benefactors from the scenes of communal presentation: the Velvets had Warhol; the Dead had Owsley Stanley, supplier of LSD for the acid tests…
Like the Grateful Dead, the Velvet Underground started out as a platform for extremely long, wandering, repetitive live improvisations, appropriate to multimedia events…. The Velvets’ principals insist in interviews that they were far better as a live band than in anything captured on record… Morrison, Reed and Tucker all complained about the failure to capture their live work… The Dead cultivated a ‘taping’ culture of audiophiles who recorded each and every performance…and, at the far extreme, created a unique audience of people willing to listen to forty performances of ‘Dark Star’ to find the passages of improvisational transcendence in each… Imagine that there could have been an alternate world in which people would have listened to forty versions of ‘Sister Ray’ for similar moments of transcendence, or to thirty-minute improvisations like ‘Melody Laughter’…made up of feedback, guitar, organ and vocals from Nico. But the Velvets had few tapers...
Both bands originally imagined themselves as the ‘Warlocks’ essentially because each had a vision of enchantment, underlaid with darkness. (They both had to choose a different name because it turned out that a third band had already put out a record as the Warlocks.) Cale says that the ‘aim of the band on the whole was to hypnotise audiences so that their subconscious would take over… It was an attempt to control the unconscious with the hypnotic.’ This accounts for the drone, and the songs built on long vamps of two chords… ‘We thought that the solution lay in providing hard drugs for everyone,’ Cale said, but ‘there is already a very strong psychedelic element in sustained sound, which is what we had … so we thought that putting viola [drones] behind guitars and echo was one way of creating this enormous space … which was itself a psychedelic experience.’
While both groups initially aimed to hypnotise with their music, lyrically they were worlds apart.”

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


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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.