June 3, 1977: First issue of Gusto -- Jerry Garcia interview
One
of the high points of my career. This interview was saved from back in early May
to be part of the first issue of the new entertainment magazine.
June 3, 1977 Gusto
Jerry Garcia
He talks about the Grateful Dead and New Directions
It has the air of an initiation.
Memorial Auditorium is half-dark and almost empty. The ringing notes of a
solitary electric guitar seem to dwarf the technicians on the floor. Then the
guitar stops. The sound check is over. It’s time.
“You here to talk to the band?” It’s
Danny Rifkin, road manager for the Grateful Dead. “There’s a reporter here from
another paper too. You want to do it together or by yourself? It’s up to you.”
It’s 90 minutes before showtime.
Already hundreds of faithful are milling about outside for what promises to be
a transcendental evening – as close as you’ll get these days to a 1967 San
Francisco Be-In.
“By yourself? OK, it’s up to you,”
Rifkin says. He’s small and Renaissance elegant and he strides briskly through
the dressing room doors and down a corridor.
Round a couple corners and then
straight through a doorway sits a familiar figure in black bushy hair, black
T-shirt and dark glasses. Holy mackerel. Jerry Garcia. Rifkin advances, makes
the introductions and disappears.
The Dead usually tell no tales. But
this time around, they’ve got a press agent. The story is that these lofty
counter-culturalists – so averse to corporate structure that they’ve created an
enormous support system in their own image – these pillars of hip integrity
have signed with Arista Records.
There’s also a Grateful Dead movie due
out soon. But neither of these avenues seems like a good way to get to know
each other.
The lead-off, a bit rambling and
nervous, goes after a deeper concern – a longstanding feeling that the Dead had
become too gargantuan and unwieldy an organization to be an effective creative
instrument. It turns out the Dead had come to the same conclusion.
“We’ve cut everything way back,” is
the reply. “It’s the only way we can do things practically and make it work.
What we’ve got now is our optimum configuration, with the two drummers.
“That’s one more than we used to have.
Mickey (Hart) and Bill (Kreutzmann) have a great relationship with each other.
It’s organic. It flows really well. There’s plenty of room for both of them to
be able to move.
“The other thing is that now we get a
huge agreement on the groove and you don’t have like a simple groove. It frees
the bass to be more melodic because the drummers are there to supply us that
big cushion of groove.”
He grins. It’s uncanny. It’s as if he’s
broken through to a new level of consciousness. There’s a matter-of-fact acceptance
of things the Dead used to disdain. For instance, “mega-gigs” in big arenas
like the Aud.
“This place is unfortunate,” he
concedes. “But we prefer to do it this way in most places. It’s a question of
how much time can you spend on the road and still be sane.”
Sanity has had much to do with the
streamlining of an entity which once included a record company, a booking
agency, a publicity outlet and fan club, plus a full crew of roadies to work
what four years ago was a state-of-the-art sound system.
There was too much hassle, he says,
and too much overhead. Another factor, left unspoken, is that he turns 35 on
Aug. 1. The Grateful Dead have shifted into middle-aged powerglide.
Consolidation and concentration.
“There’s no more Grateful Dead
Records. There’s no more Round Records,” he says, grinning more broadly at the
flat finality of it all.
“You can’t support a record company on
the basis of one record a year. We found out what we wanted to find out and we
found out what we needed to find out. Now we don’t have to spend a lot of our
time being businessmen, bird-dogging a huge organization.
“This way we concentrate on playing.
What we do is what we do best. We’re a more compact and generally efficient
unit. What’s the ideal size? The ideal size is whatever the traffic will bear.”
So the Dead has farmed out its
business. Major promoters Bill Graham and John Scher book the tours. Scher even
sends a cook out with them. Graham rents them the sound system. The group’s key
personnel, however, have been retained to command the controls.
They’ve even taken on an outside
producer for their first album for Arista Records – “Terrapin Station,” due out
this month. He’s Keith Olson, engineer and co-producer of Fleetwood Mac’s hit “Fleetwood
Mac” album.
“He helped us clarify our own ideas as
we went along,” he says. “He’s mixing it now and he’s adding string stuff and
some surprises. It’s not mushy. We got some real hard, young string players.
“Clive (
“We represent a certain amount of
integrity which he digs and he sees selling our records as a personal
challenge. He doesn’t understand how we can tour successfully all this time and
not sell more records.”
The movie, which was to open in
It’s footage from the Dead’s final
five performances in 1974, shot with nine cameras, filmed just before they took
two years off from touring to follow individual projects. Now the personal
pursuits are over, he says. The group is his main concern.
“The band is family to me. I don’t
have that much other family. I don’t have living parents. You do what you have
to do. Part of the problem is to survive all this. To try to survive the rock
and roll world and come to terms with all this.”
* *
* * *
IN
THE PHOTOS: First Gusto cover and Jerry Garcia.
* *
* * *
FOOTNOTE:
Although this tour was a triumph, the “Terrapin Station” album didn’t live up
to Clive Davis’ expectations. It hit No. 28 on the Billboard charts, but fell
short of the group’s previous studio effort, “Blues for Allah” in 1975, which got
to No. 12.
“The Grateful Dead Movie,” which consumed so much of
Jerry Garcia’s time during the two-year hiatus, was released June 1 and toured city-to-city, rather than hitting lots of screens at once. The
band wasn’t particularly fond of it. It became a midnight cult feature and
eventually found its way onto home video formats and soundtrack albums.
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