JERRY GARCIA: UP FROM THE DEAD

David Gahr is already a half-block ahead of me up the street, bounding past the Navarro's sharpy redcap, shlepping all his cameras, and lights, and wires, brown chewed-up pipe sticking out from his pocket—Gahr looks like a Hal Roach version of what a harried photographer is supposed to look like who's on his way to take a picture or two of an old friend. A picture or two. Or three. Or fourteen rolls.

A half-hour before, Gahr, the dean of folk-rock photographers, was making his customary pass through my office, bored, checking me out, "Where ya going?"

"Over to the Navarro, Garcia's in town with the Legion of Mary, Merle Saunders, Martin Fierro, Kahn, Tutt— those guys, ya seen "em?"

"GARCIA!" he wails. ("Jeez, not so loud!") "JERRY GARCIA! I haven't seen his ass since last year—lemme Come, give me a minute to pick up my cameras." ("Nah, I'm late, I'll meet ya there—Jeez, are you a Deadhead or something?") "Are you kidding? I was there! 1965, with the Bus, and the Acid Tests, holy cow, GARCIA! He didn't even call me!"

So now me and Gahr are horsing around in the lobby of the Navarro, elevator up to the top floor digs of Garcia, door opened by a wispy shadow of a tall person named Ida, and Garcia is all smiles and the secret Deadhead handshakes all around. Meanwhile, Gahr is already re-arranging all the furniture in the room, raving, and slowly the whole scene is shifting into that delicate, subdued limbo that precedes the "interview", which begins with Robert Nelson's little seven-minute film of the Dead, making the rounds in NYC with the hour-long Merry Pranksters film.

Are you kidding? I was there! 1965, the Bus, the Acid Tests.

Garcia isn't crazy about the film; nor does he quite put it down. It was made sometime in 1967, when the Grateful Dead were getting it all started, "the period of time when we were writing some of the tunes for our second album, "Alligator" and that "Faster We Go the Rounder We Get".. ."The Other

One" we call it. We were staying at a friend's place up at Russian River for part of it and we were rehearsing at the Heliport in Sausalito. Nelson is sort of well-known in underground film circles, he made a real nice movie called the Great Blondinb about eight years ago, sort of a longer movie, and he also did this watermelon movie that used to be part of the Minstrel Show that the San Francisco Mime Troupe did years ago. And just other things, funny movies, stuff like that, he teaches film in places..."

At this point, Ron Rakow wanders into the suite. Rakow, a long-time Grateful Dead conspirator, sort of the Henry Kissinger of the Dead domain, is now the president of Grateful Dead Records and co-owner (with Garcia) of Round Records, the offshoot company that releases the Garcia "solo" projects, lyricist Robert Hunter's albums, Keith and Donna Godchaux, and (finally) Old and In the Way with Garcia, Peter Rowan, fiddler Vassar Clements, and David Grisman, which was recorded two years ago.

It is also a known fact that Rakow is a walking Gregorian calendar of Dead events of the last decade. "When was the last time I saw you?" he asks himself of me. "Aaah, the 21st of June, 1974, at the Miami Jai Alai Fronton," he recalls, when I can't even remember if I ate breakfast that morning.

Then he spots Gahr, who has taken advantage of the break in the action to physically manipulate Garcia's body closer to the window-light, Garcia submitting like a bemused invalid.

"Yeah," says Garcia, "I remember David from my folkie days, he was the hottest in town!"

"And he also does not take no for an answer—he'd crawl through a pile of shit to get his picture," says Rakow. "He's great!"

Anyway, Garcia inevitably dismisses Nelson's film as historical trivia, "extensive home movies by freaks, it's not worth seeing on any level...It'd be like having to judge what life in N.Y. was like from having torn-up fragments of a billboard," but I couldn't be sure if he meant the music trade or Donnelly & Co.

Even more dismissable, according to Garcia, is a feature-length movie touring around the country, done at a benefit concert in Oregon some time ago. "It was the hottest day of the year, three or four years back, and it's an awful movie...It's a performance, but the performance was bad cause it was so hot, we were just about comatose from sunstroke."

We're definitely outsiders. The Grateful Dead is like, /ear, man.

Rakow beams nonchalantly, "August 21, 1972," and without missing a stride, Gahr seizes the moment—"In the name of art," he says and turns Garcia no more than ten or fifteen degrees toward the window, better light, better angle. "He's come a long way," Rakow cracks up.

"Oh I don't screw around anymore," warns Gahr. "First of all, your nose don't look good from this angle"—this he says to Jerry Garcia, un-vain rockstar, dressed in customary tennis shoes, jeans, and an old blue BVD t-shirt, and Garcia actually agrees: "Yeah, this is my good angle, my good nose," gnd of course from out of the blue the old Garcia schnozz becomes the focus of attention.

This flurry of cinema activity of and about the Grateful Dead (Garcia only briefly mentions "our film," the real Dead film, which is still being worked on) is, of course, partly the result of this new (or not so new anymore) venture known as Grateful Dead Records which, knock on vinyl, is doing OK. After two years on the street, though, the original premise behind leaving Warner Bros. Records to go independent is a bit hazy, or at least no more or less exotic than any other similar decision/situation entered into by musical artists over the last fifty years. The Dead have had alrrtost two years to learn the ropes of independent record distribution, courting the bigmoney rack jobbers around the country, attracting the attention of promo-men who may be handling forty or fifty other record labels out of one centralized distributor, and of course the high art of selling to the straight record biz world anything with the stillfearful moniker "Grateful Dead" attached to it. "We're definitely outsiders," Garcia takes for granted, "We're definitely not part of the mainstream of the rock "n roll world or any of those things, which is neat." Yet there is always going to be social, or political, resistance. "More fear resistance," judges Garcia, "especially in the AM, soft world, the Grateful Dead is like, fear, man, They don't wanna hear about the Grateful Dead."

Rakow's approach is detached,, though, more clinical. "Dealers are cool," he says. "But what you're asking is-— are we being sabotaged on any level? And the answer is—I have run into instances where people were asked by major record companies not to play our records. Infrequently, but it's happened." Still, Rakow is so blatantly cooled-out about it all—it's just another ballgame, fans. "As a matter of fact," he says, "I consider it kind of an art form!"

"Well," huffs Garcia, "That's going kind of deep—hah!—there are things in my mind which, if you're talking about vulgarity, aesthetically, just as a gesture in the world—my feelings are that the whole record scene, manufacturing and all that could just be put in a hat somewhere. It's a drag, I really don't like it.

"That's one of the reasons why my trip is to push for a better—hipper— technology, to be able to do that in a way that makes more sense, ecologically, in terms of quality and all that stuff...In terms of the energy it takes to fun a record player, the materials it takes to make records and the conditions under which records are manufactured—they're all a bummer pretty much, on the face of it, on the face of the world and the shape it's in today. I think it's sort of wasteful. I'd like to see it go somewhere else. That would be the hippest contribution we could make to the whole thing.

"The idea of having our own company and gaining that independence is iike a step: the whole reason for trying to win that independence, ultimately, was not to have independence, but to fyid out what we could see after being released, you know what I mean? Once our energies and our consciousness aren't taken up with, ah—"

TURN TO PAGE 73.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 32.

"Fighting the whores," answers Gahr.

"Exactly," says Garcia, "and the big success nightmare, whatever those things are—then there's something else which we may be capable of doing beyond all that. So gaining all this independence just gives us a vantage point, a place to be able to look out from.

"Now that We know what the record business is like for ourselves, and the way all those things are structured, we're finding that they don't make it— even If it's us running tfie business, it still doesn't make it."

All this biz business has prompted a Dead sabbatical, which commenced last fall aftera week of "farewell" concerts at theWrnterland in San Francisco. Kind of a hibernation ("It's not exactly that inert," Garcia explains) that's developed into a half-dozen or so separate and/or overlapping projects, including (paraphrasing Garcia):

"... Wording on Grateful Dead aesthetics, if you will, having a long conversation regarding our own cliches and deciding what it is we,don't want to do again and defining what we've done...Trying to develop new musical language for ourselves—deciding how to change the music—throwing out our whole old book—to develop something that's coherent, and Hues, and really communicates properly.

"Being able to invent new organizations of note systems and then play them legitimately so that they are observing their own rules, then being able to shift and change those...Also redefining rhythm, time and all those things—what we're doing is ambitious for sure but that's what we're after."

Even more important than the interDead development would be the outside projects—B3bby Weir's Kingfish band, bassist Phil Lesh's electronic music (an album of which is out on Round Records), and the band being put together by Keith and Donna. But the most accessible, and the most interesting of all is Legion of Mary, the cryptically-named group that Garcia has put together with organist Merle Saunders, bassist John Kahn, Martin Fierro on horns, and drummer Ron Tutt. Garcia and Saunders have played together on several albums for Fantasy Records (under Saunders" name), which Garcia generally describes as "silly," compared to the band that is on the road now.

"See, for me playing with the Legion of Mary is really a cool learning experience cause I get to function as a guitarist in several roles—I get to play rhythm, a lot of chord stuff—which I don't normally play in the Grateful Dead, full-voice chords. The band is very comfortable for me to play in cause it's most like what I wold play if I were hot in the Grateful Dead, for example, that's who I would be—the guitarist in Legion of Mary.

"The thing the band doesn't have is the tension between the elements that the Grateful Dead has, which can be so vast at times. The Legion of Mary is a little bit more predictable than the Dead in a certain way. But in a lot of ways it's more articulate, more sensitive. I get off on it—I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't dig it, and I do dig it." And this is an actual tour, only 17 days long, but a tour nonetheless, ending up in Milwaukee towards the end of the month.

"Milwaukee!" cries Gahr, "The lowest!"

"Tough luck," nods Garda, on the edge of a good old Grateful Dead tour fable, "That's a slow scene, Milwaukee."

"The last time the Dead were there," he starts, "Was in the midst of the most outrageous scene, just before the last election trip, and we were staying at the same hoteh as George McGovern and his whole crew. This was after we'd been touring the midwest and scored billions of firecrackers.

"So in the middle of the night I'm sleeping and my phone rings and I pick it up and I hear this incredible distorted sound coming out—blam, blam, blam—and I could also hear the sound coming in through the window and I realize there's firecrackers going off all over the place—Kreutzman is juiced and a bunch of the guys are carrying on at three in the morning, and they're throwing firecrackers out the window! Four, five thousand of "em at a time!

"The Secret Service guys are swarming all over the place, they're sure McGovern's getting shot up in some kind of militant scene. They go up and bust the place up and the guys are in their room shooting bottle rockets to the hotel across the street, and they're hitting the windows exploding over there—this whole scene going on, it was amazing. Fuckin" Milwaukee.

"They came and made Kreutzman move to another hotel and they took Keith to jail."

By the time Gahr and I are packing it in, the next "interviewer" has already showed up ("a drag," as Garcia would say), following a journey down memory lane to the heydays of psychedelia. "Yeah, it's interesting," Garcia says, "My friend Robert Hunter, the guy I write with, we were going back, talking about the old days and stuff like that, and he said "Yeah, back in the old days there wa only a handful of us around, then Owsley went out and made it so that anybody could see God!" Now everybody's seen God and so, big deal, it ain't even cool anymore!" ®