THE GRATEFUL DEAD Remenbrance Of Hippies Past

"Huh? The Grateful Dead? Me? A think piece? I haven't thought about them since 1968. Whaddaya mean you'll give me all weekend to think about them? I don't wanna think about them. Why don't they go die, already? I ain't doin' no piece on the Gratef...How much? Oh, when do ya need it by again?"

* A Dead-Head I'm not; never was. But I used to like the band. I live in San Francisco now—guess that's why they're makin' me write this thing (which is ridiculous, since everybody knows the Dead's biggest audience has always been in N.Y.; they even had the premiere of their flick there last summer)—but I used to live in New York and I used to visit San Francisco a lot. I guess the first time I saw the Dead was in '66. My friend Bob and I had hitched down to Mexico where we got dysentery and had all our stuff stolen. We came up to San Francisco and love and acid vibes were cornin' outta the sidewalks and bouncin' off the buildings. (It was great —-no kidding—real nice; I especially loved panhandling. I was real good at it.) One day we wound updn an old school bus with a bunch of other smelly hippies wearing headbands and serapes and I was spaced out of my mind by the time we got up to the top (must've been) of Mount Tamlalpais. Someone said it was some kinda holy spiritual place or something and the Dead were playing. Don't remember a note of it. Musta passed out. Great time—knew I'd wanna come back to Frisco again.

And I did. Guess it was the next Easter vacation. Flights were a hundred bucks and so were pounds of Mexican. So I brought my girlfriend for a little combination vacation/business trip. (She even carried the stuff. Great chick.) I had met Bill Graham in N.Y. and he let us into a Dead show for free. I had never danced before in my whole life—always seemed that the only guys who danced wore powder-blue mohair sweaters and had their hair combed neat and knew all these fancy steps. But, wow, I danced to the Grateful Dead. Jesus, did we dance. We danced for hours; we danced 'til we fell down, which was when they finished. Don't remember a note of it. Great time, though—this was gonna be a favorite band of mine.

And I loved 'em when they came Jo New York. They played at the Cafe Au Go Go, a post-beatnik Village coffee house place which was about the most unlikely place in the world for a rock barfd to play. But no one seemed to know that there even was American rock back then. Like the Airplane was a buncha folkies-turned electric and the Dead had been Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. You know—like it was respectable for college kids to dig folk stuff, but rock...? A few kids liked it, even some smart ones, but even a lot of them tried to call it "blues." Even the Dead called it blues when they first electrified and changed their name t6 the Warlocks. By the time Kreutzmann and Lesh joined and the Dead became the Dead and signed with Warners, American rock was starting to get commercially exploitable. That first LP, Grateful Dead, came out in '67.1 loved it. It was kinda avant garde and it bombed. (It was rock 'n' roll a little too early for America.) But me—people at my school were calling me a hippie already. I liked Anthem of the Sun, too, but by '68 I was into Hendrix, the Doors, Aftermath and Between the Buttons. Real brief Dead period for this 'un—too fast for 'em.

I didn't stop calling myself a fuckin' hippie 'til a couple of years ago, but I got over the Dead real fast—too selfindulgent, uneconomical, plain boring. Stupid name, too. Confusing fucking band: made me think I was seein' some kinda light. Thanks a lot, guys. I even wound up working in a hippie meditation center for four years. Stupid Grateful Dead. Look what ya made me do. But I'm getting out of it now—I don't smoke pot anymore and I always keep a short haircut. And ya know what? The Dead have short haircuts now, too (relatively). Not as short as mine, but I'll betcha they visit stylists every few weeks. That's right. And dig this, baby: remember the half million dollar sound system? They sold it! And the between-the-numbers tune-ups are down to a mere five minutes and— try rationalizing this one away—Keith "Fleetwood Mac" Olsen just produced their new LP! Arista's calling it a Grateful Dead album, but is it really a Grateful Dead album? Sure they did the basic tracks but...You know, I heard Olsen ran off to Limeyland to finish the album and he got back to California and handed it to Garcia and he said, "Here's your album, Jer. I hope you like it." I'm not saying it's a bad album—this Terrapin Station thing— I'm just askin' if it's an album by the last of the great hippie bands. I mean, since when do the Dead borrow from Abbey Road, Procol Harum, E.L.O. or from Queen? That's right—Queen!

OK—I don't have anything to say about his band, right? But CREEM needs more words. Um, if only I knew Garcia's phone number...Let's see... uh; oh, yeah— you can hear drums on the new LP—and both , sets actually play together—which isn't exactly traditional Dead but I think even your typical brainless Dead Head will appreciate this little concession to this Era of Rampant Commercialism. Oh, the modern world. No Dead LP has ever gone Top Ten; they've never had a hit single and none of their record companies have ever really thought that they had any commercial potential outside of their own fervent undiminished following. The new album sold briskly and burned up the national charts for a couple of weeks but started dropping quickly. "We expected that," an1 Arista aide told me. "Now we've got to go out and convince the non-Dead Heads that this is a great album." More unlikely things have happened. In fact, I was pretty surprised when I went out into the streets of their old home town to ask people what they thought about the Dead. I drove down to the corner of—what else—Haight and Ashbury, the southwest corner, and I askejd the first eight people who looked uhder 35 what thoughts they had'about the Dead.

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"Their Importance was in being part of the counter-culture phenomena and reinforcing the values and life style of that culture. ..Man On The Street"

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Bobbi LeVie, a 22 year old waitress: "They're ugly. I don't know their music. They've had hits though, haven't they? I don't know how I missed 'em. I always liked the Velvet Underground."

Jim Capson, a 29-year-old psychiatrist: "I haven't thought of them in so long. They were sort of gentle people. I liked them. I liked that one with the long reddish-blonde hair. They played pretty good music didn't they?"

Randy Shilts, a 25-year-old local TV reporter: "I don't think they made any tremendous contributions to music— certainly nothing compared to the Airplane. Their importance was in being .part of the counter-culture phenomena and reinforcing the values and life styles of that culture. Because of that,, they will ultimately have a profound effect on American cultural history."

Lionel Jasper, a 27-year-old unemployed man: "I still like 'Cumberland Blues;' in fact, I was singing it yesterday."

Bruce Stevens, 29, a record store employee: "They're like nostalgia. They're caught in a time warp. What they did wasn't versatile or real enough to relate to a changing world. There was a time that I liked them—a short time."

Bob Jackson, 24, a writer: "Some of the best times I've had have been at Grateful Dead concerts and some of the worst concerts I've ever seen have been Grateful Dead concerts. When they're good, they're great and when they're bad—they're abysmal."

Janice Kyle, a 21-year-old florist: "Garcia's so bad he's great—a sort of rank hero. I heard he shaved off his beard 'cause he found a cockroach in it. He's really happening. That new album sounds like Queen and Genesis; next they'll do the Ramones. The Zippers have two guys with missing fingers and they're twice as good as the Dead—who only have one missing finger in the whole band."

Millie Pabst, 19, a student: "They're lame old hippie farts that'll play acid rock 'til they die. Buncha burn-outs."

Gee, they're not that bad.