Original subtitles

This was a new form.

♪ You make my heart sing

And it was very successful.

Monterey Pop made Jimi Hendrix and made Janis. That film.

Because it brought them to a mass audience.

♪ Wild thing

But the Grateful Dead were never really comfortable

with being in front of the camera.

For them, you know,

the meta-narrative of the Grateful Dead was that,

we're like you, we're freaks.

You know, we're not lookin' for a job.

We're not lookin' for a career.

We're not sure what we're fuckin' looking for.

In fact, we're not even sure if we're looking for anything.

In fact, we don't even know where we are.

Who are we?

We're the same as you.

You're the same as us.

There is no real distinction.

Six, take one. Tail slate.

Cutler: The camera validates that distinction.

Doesn't it? You know what I mean?

The camera's filming you, you know.

The camera's filming you, why?

Because you're more important

than anything else that it could film, you know.

And it's like this probing kind of eye.

Ha, you rat.

I mean, it took me 18 months to get the Grateful Dead

to agree to do a photograph.

Well, that is the gentleman who's taking a photograph.

There's the camera, here.

I kept saying to them, "Listen, we need a photograph.

"If we're going to do publicity for the Grateful Dead,

we need photographs of the Grateful Dead."

Garcia: Where's the fucking hotel at? Let's go to the hotel.

"No, we don't do photographs."

We're trying to do a group photo.

But, why don't you do photographs?

"Well, it's not important what we look like.

What's important is the music."

Hey! Fuck off!

Cutler: Trying to promote a band

that doesn't want to be filmed

or have their picture taken is very difficult.

Nice to see you today.

Cutler: And the people that were sent to film them

weren't the right people, were they?

Care for a beer?

Nobody had told them or warned them,

don't drink anything around the Grateful Dead.

Okay, cut.

Garcia: I remember that there was the Playboy After Hours show.

Cutler: In this time period,

the Grateful Dead were using LSD

not only to get high,

but also as a kind of defense mechanism.

I mean, giving people LSD when they didn't know that

that was what was gonna happen to 'em.

Garcia: The whole thing was just really weird, you know?

All the people who were at the party are extras, you know,

and they're from Central Casting.

You know, and they're sitting there

with glasses of ginger ale and all, you know.

It's laid out like an apartment,

but it's in a Hollywood sound stage.

And there's Hugh Hefner, you know,

and all these melons.

And, the union coffee pot there got dosed.

And the whole thing turned from an artificial party

into an authentic party.

I remember they had dosed the coffee with acid.

♪ Wishing well with a golden bell ♪

♪ Bucket hanging clear to hell

Smith: That night, I went over to see them.

♪ Stephen fill it up and lower ♪

Smith: And they were on a break upstairs,

and I came up the stairs and there they were.

And Jerry gave me a hug.

"How ya doin'? What's goin' on?

I'll get you some coffee."

I said, "No, no, no, no."

♪ Speeding arrow, sharp and narrow ♪

You see the situation we had.

I mean, their idea of it was all fun.

And that's what the Dead were.

- Lev: Fun. - Fun.

Weir: Holy Jesus. Wow.

Cutler: The word on Garcia's lips for four years with me was,

"Is it gonna be fun?"

Weir: Okay, this is London.

Cutler: I mean, the Grateful Dead were about fun.

Weir: This has never been seen. I don't know why.

Roll camera.

- "A" camera. - "A" camera.

And then we'll be on our way to Philadelphia.

Cutler: I mean, you can sit there and, yeah, we're makin' a film.

But the film's you know, next week, next year, who knows what.

But this is now.

Nice to see you today.

Cutler: They said, so you wanna make a film?

Fine, you know, we'll go for that.

Care for a beer?

Meanwhile, let's see if you can handle this

while it's all goin' on, 'cause we can.

This is what we like to do. So good luck.

- Man: We need a director. - Okay, cut.

Man: Forty-nine. Take one. Head slate.

This is the Grateful Dead.

Cutler: So the film crew

slowly came under

the influence of psychedelics.

Announcer: The Grateful Dead.

Man: Did you get that? What's happened?

♪ Driving that train

♪ High on cocaine

♪ Casey Jones you better

♪ Watch your speed

♪ Trouble ahead

♪ Trouble behind

♪ And you know that notion just crossed my mind ♪

Cutler: They start off with a very formal idea

of what you do to film a band,

and slowly it got weirder and weirder.

It's not easy, you know, to take a trip and sit there going,

"Now, I'm making a film here,

and I must ensure that I get everything in focus."

All that tends to go out the window.

Man: Here's roll two. Sound, roll two.

They just succumbed.

They didn't have sufficient psychedelic experience

to overcome the effect of the acid

and, you know, make a film.

Garcia: The thing I'm talking about is being able to handle

the environment that you're operating in when you're high.

Which is, like, a weird place to be,

and it takes a while to get into it.

Cutler: Jerry was of the opinion

that if people get high around your scene

then, you know, they need to be looked after.

Man: Jerry, we haven't got a director. We need a director.

Garcia: I'll tell you what it is.

It's the fact that these trucks are on either side of us,

making it seem as though the horizon were quite high.

It's kind of like being in a valley.

And the human response to being in a valley is to think

of "we're cornered."

But we're not really. It's only an illusion

because of these trucks.

And if you step out to where you can get

a little bit of air around you so the horizon is kind of,

like, below the center of your vision,

you'll feel much better.

Yeah, yeah.

Cutler: He was directing these people

to how they could have a better time.

That's it, man. That's all I know.

Cutler: And I think that was the protective armor at work.

Garcia sabotaged the film, in essence.

Hey, you guys can... You also must remember

that at any moment you can put down your equipment and split.

Cutler: And, in the end, the crew started to film themselves

instead of the band.

One guy, I noticed him,

it was like he was shootin' a gun.

He kept on triggering the camera,

It was like little shots. Boom, boom, boom.

In fact, if you give acid to people

and you ask them to paint or do creative things,

they mostly produce absolute chaos.

Are you getting emotional again?

The synapses or whatever

are suddenly speeded up, massively so.

And so, all of the sudden you can see a connection between

what's immediately in front of your eyes,

and something else that wasn't apparent.

What was hitherto coherent becomes incoherent.

They know that they're trying to make a film,

but now, what's going on in their heads is, like,

super fast episodic shit, you know?

Like, it's this, it's that; it's this, it's that;

it's this, it's that.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom,

boom, boom.

And then, it just disintegrates.

It's interesting, isn't it, to look back on it, you know?

How far out the Grateful Dead actually were

at that stage in their journey.

I mean, that was their sacred space.

Music for the Grateful Dead was a very sacred thing,

you know what I mean?

Not to be interfered with by me

or anybody else for that matter.

Garcia: Sure man, that's what playing is about.

That's what performing is about for us, you know?

See, music should be that sort of thing.

Music should be holy. It shouldn't be business.

And because music is business here,

it's awful,

'cause it's designed to make money,

not designed to do what music's supposed to do.

Cutler: So, in the end, the film never happened.

The remains get boxed up and forgotten about.

It's almost like a subliminal desire

not to be successful,

which actually redounded to their benefit and credit.

They worried that, you know, the more famous they were,

the less room for movement they would have.

And they were dead right.

Prankster: It's almost working.

I think that it is now working.

Prankster: Yay! We're back on the air again.

Woo-woo!

And, Gunther, your child is at the child care kiddie center.

Your child's name is Carl, Gunther,

if you've forgotten about him.

All little kiddies that are hurt and sick and lost,

over to the kiddie corral for their gathering.

Here he is now with the report on the... our water situation,

uh, which has become very dry in the area,

with probably another three hours to go with the intensity.

So there's gonna be, uh, according to his report,

as they get it going,

a fire truck will move slowly along there,

and spray out from its nozzle.

So here you go, the Grateful Dead.

Dennis McNally: Jerry regarded every day

that he didn't have to go out and find a job

as a miracle.

And as they looked up in the early '70s,

the Grateful Dead were kind of mildly amazed

that they had an audience.

That it had grown.

And they found that if they just kept touring,

they could make a living.

It wasn't a fancy living, it was just a living.

♪ All I know is something

♪ Like a bird within her sang ♪

♪ All I know she sang

♪ A little while and then flew on ♪

♪ Tell me all that you know ♪

♪ I'll show you

♪ Snow and rain

Phil Lesh: I think that one of the best things

the Grateful Dead ever did

was deciding in essence that we weren't gonna become recording artists.

You know, that we weren't gonna be pop stars.

I really don't believe any of us ever gave a shit about that.

We were a working band and we were gonna...

We're gonna... we're gonna go out and bring this to people,

bring this music to people, and bring 'em together.

I think that, uh... That kind of freed us up

to not be afraid to make a mistake.

Jerry Garcia: We make an effort to... to play honestly,

rather than put on a... Some sort of packaged, uh,

pre-arranged, pre-determined show.

We don't bring a set list on stage.

We don't plan things.

We want it to be more dynamic.

We want it to be more exciting.

We want it to be unexpected.

We want there to be surprises there.

We want the people to feel they're participating in it, you know?

And it... If you approach music from that point of view,

it becomes a very rich experience.

Dennis McNally: Committing to improvisation...

Wholly committing to improvisation...

Implies taking risks.

It's a philosophy of leaving yourself open to possibility,

and leaving yourself open to magic.

Donna Jean Godchaux: My husband and I,

we had been seeing the Grateful Dead whenever we could.

Total fans.

I was a singer and Keith was a trained classical pianist.

I came home one day and said,

"Let's listen to the Grateful Dead."

And Keith said,

"I don't wanna listen to it anymore.

"I want to play it."

He had never played rock and roll before.

And I said,

"Okay, well, let's go get in the band."

I mean, it was as simple as that.

That sounds so...

I don't know what it sounds like to you,

but at that time it was just normal.

And that's why I had the audacity

to come up to Garcia after a show and say,

"Keith is your next keyboard player."

♪ Some folks trust to reason ♪

♪ Others trust to might

Donna Jean Godchaux: Just like that.

♪ I don't trust to nothing

Donna Jean Godchaux: Keith was in the band.

♪ But I know... Let's do it again.

One more time.

Jerry Garcia: Donna. Where's Donna? Where's Donna?

- Come here. - We're gonna do...

We're gonna do "Playin' in The Band" again.

Donna Jean Godchaux: And then I started rehearsing with them,

and it was just like unreal.

I was getting to be a part of it.

I mean, I would go anywhere to see these guys,

and yet, I am singing with this band.

♪ Oh-oh, yeah

♪ Playin'

♪ Playin' in the band

♪ Daybreak

♪ Daybreak on the land

♪ Playin'

♪ Playin' in the band

♪ Daybreak

Donna Jean Godchaux: You know, to this day, I marvel

that it can be that inclusive.

♪ Daybreak

♪ Wanna play in the band

Donna Jean Godchaux: We're all playing in the band,

all of us.

If you were in the audience,

you were included in the experience.

You know, I'm a fan,

and now, I have the best seat in the house.

It was a magical thing, that's all I can say.

Steve Parish: Being a fan of the band,

which I was originally before I even started working for 'em,

I represent a guy who crossed over the barrier

into that world, into the heart of it.

There was no other band like the Grateful Dead,

and there was no other crew like the Grateful Dead's equipment crew.

We all slept with the same women.

We all got messed up together.

We knew everything about each other.

It was not a normal relationship

between a band and a crew.

You ever watch the movie "Air Force"?

You know, World War II,

and they would always show these bombers,

and the guys would be in the bomber,

and there was a guy from Brooklyn,

and there was a guy from Montana,

and there was a guy from Chicago.

That's how it was, kind of.

They were really what you would call the wild bunch,

they were older than me.

Sparky, Kidd,

there was Jackson and Ramrod, and Johnny Hagen.

These guys were real cowboys.

Jackson was quick with his fists.

He had this sense about him where he would knock a cop out.

And Ramrod, he never read a book in his life.

He told me he read two pages of "Tom Sawyer."

I would literally read to him, you know, and he liked that.

When Jackson and Ramrod told me how they had met in reform school,

I realized that I had

a common brotherhood of wildness with these guys.

They were the country version of the city boy that I was.

Steve Parish: We began to embrace this lifestyle

of all for one and one for all.

We always had that feeling in the Grateful Dead,

mostly emanating out of Jerry, and all of the guys,

that we were intricately a part of it,

helping them get down the road and to create the music.

♪ I can't stay much longer, Melinda ♪

♪ The sun is getting high

♪ I can't help you with your trouble ♪

♪ If you won't help with mine ♪

♪ I gotta get down

♪ I gotta get down

♪ I gotta get down to

♪ To the mine

Sam Cutler: The Grateful Dead's equipment crew

were famously, um... belligerent.

But, I mean...

we always got on well.

I didn't stand any bullshit.

Nobody stood any bullshit from anyone.

They were expected to, you know,

work like dogs and they did.

Steve Parish: To have this opportunity to work with this band,

to do this thing,

you realize that you were caught up in something

that was bigger than you.

When I was a kid, my father would say,

"Do I gotta hit you over the head

"with a bag of pennies every day

"to knock some sense into your head?"

I knew what he meant.

Because if you don't take that opportunity...

If you don't take it and use it...

You're wasting something.

What does the skull with the lightening bolt represent?

It meant, bang, man, you got enlightenment.

And you're gonna use it to change the world.

We were exploring Europe.

We were going to all these amazing places

in the history of my life I couldn't believe.

And for me, as a kid coming from New York City,

this was incredible.

♪ Gone are the days when the ox fall down ♪

♪ Take up the yoke and plow the fields around ♪

♪ Gone are the days when the ladies said please ♪

♪ Gentle Jack Jones won't you come to me ♪

Steve Parish: We were taking LSD every day.

And the LSD that Ramrod... God rest his soul...

Had mixed up, we only took one bottle

because we had to go through customs constantly.

That one bottle, he had made a mistake of,

and he didn't realize that it was ten times stronger than what we took at home.

And so it made for really an intense, intense psychedelic trip.

♪ Brown-eyed women and red grenadine ♪

♪ The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean ♪

♪ Sound of the thunder with the rain pourin' down ♪

♪ And it looks like the old man's gettin' on ♪

Magical stuff was constantly happening in '72.

Stuff that I... to this day...

I almost can't explain.

And they were pushing us into the light,

and the light was bright.

♪ Well my mama told me, my papa told me too ♪

♪ Now my mama told me, papa told me too ♪

♪ Well I shouldn't be here

♪ Tryin' to sing these railroad blues ♪

Steve Parish: We spent all that time

on the buses together, laughing.

We brought our girlfriends, we brought kids,

we brought 50 people with us.

Before you came, I was all alone.

It is bad to be alone.

Alone, bad.

Friend, good.

Man: We are friends, you and I.

Monster: Good.

- Friends. - Friends.

Joe Smith: They traveled in the phalanx.

Like a baby's soccer game, you know, the swarm.

Friends, wives, women nursing babies.

And it was how to get by on $50,000 a day in Europe.

Joe Smith: They'd have a truck there recording an album.

I said it's got to be a double album.

I got to get a shot to get back the money

you're spending on all this.

Dennis "Wiz" Leonard: One of the names that was considered for the album

was Back Home Broke...

'Cause it was true, you know, they had blown it.

Sam Cutler: Dennis Leonard,

Dennis "Wizard" Leonard, was a Deadhead

before joining the Grateful Dead on the Europe '72 tour,

and he was responsible for the recording of all the shows.

We recorded everything.

Because somehow or other, you know,

I mean, the bills had to be paid.

And so the Grateful Dead owed Warner Brothers a record.

Dennis "Wiz" Leonard: I sat in front of the multi-track.

MM 1000 Ampex machine. Gorgeous machine.

And, my world was this little truck

where I basically rode levels, watched the meters,

and essentially evaluated what they were doing.

If you look at the tape boxes, that's where I put my notes.

We had the star system. You know, like,

a star meant it was pretty good.

Two stars meant it was really good.

Three stars meant we thought it was stellar.

♪ Sugar Magnolia, blossom's blooming ♪

♪ Head's all empty and I don't care ♪

♪ Saw my baby down by the river ♪

♪ Knew she'd have to come up soon for air ♪

Dennis "Wiz" Leonard: So, it's the last night on the tour.

I'm stuck in the truck. Everybody was high as fuck.

No one else could be found.

And, you know, there was a problem with a microphone that, uh,

I talked to Parish about, and you know,

it just was, like, drooping on the stand, and I said,

"Can you put a coin in the screw slot and tighten it?"

And, you know, Steve was a piece of work back then.

He said, "Fuck you. Come out and fucking do it yourself."

Oh, jeez, so, you know, I look over at the tape machine,

and I had just put an hour and a half load of tape on the machine,

and... okay, I'm gonna lock the truck,

and I'm going inside,

and no one's gonna be in the truck.

Didn't feel great about that.

Got in, coin, tightened up the microphone,

and as I was walking back to the center of the stage,

the steps to go down,

the band dropped into "Morning Dew."

I said, "You know what? Fuck this.

"This is where I am."

And, you know, I made the decision there

that I had to be right there.

Sparky came over to me and said, "Are you okay?"

I said, "I'm okay."

Garcia just looked at me and shook his head, like, you know...

And in that instant, I knew that I was busted

because no one was in the truck.

The raised eyebrow over the eyeglasses,

it was saying, "I know who you are,

"I know what you're doing, and it's okay."

♪ Walk me out

♪ In the morning dew, my honey ♪

Dennis "Wiz" Leonard: Because no matter what,

they really wanted everybody to be there with them.

Their relationship with the music

was so dependent on the audience's relationship with the music.

That was the fuel that made it all work.

And recording even was a backburner to the music.

♪ Can't walk you out

♪ In the morning dew, my honey ♪

Dennis "Wiz" Leonard: "Morning Dew" is an old folk tune.

It's a post-apocalyptic commentary on a world

once people have all died off.

♪ I can't walk you out

"I can't walk you out in the morning dew."

"It doesn't matter anyway."

Sitting right behind Garcia,

he did a good part of his solo in that tune

with his back to the audience

with tears streaming down his face,

'cause he was right there.

He was playing for all of us, for all of humankind.

You know, he was like the storyteller.

The minister.

You know, I don't know what kind of label you want to put on him.

And, uh, finished the tune, I went back in the truck,

slowly opened the door and everything was just fine.

I finished the tour and went back to the states,

and my favorite image of Jerry Garcia was

bouncing out of the control room,

where he was mixing "Europe '72."

He looked at me and he said,

"Wiz, 'Morning Dew' from the Lyceum

"is 100 percent on the album."

And he looked at me, he said,

"And no one was in the truck."

And, you know, that was what the band was all about was,

you know, the... The tarot card, The Fool,

just blindly taking the trip off the cliff.

♪ I guess it doesn't really matter ♪

♪ Anyway

You know...

that which was the Grateful Dead

is the elephant with the 500 blind men and women in it.

I mean...

everybody's got a different understanding of what that thing was.

And...

I'm vain enough to think that mine might be better than some people's

since I did have this unique position

of being both inside and outside.

I just think that there's a lot of bullshit around the Grateful Dead.

We managed to create just about the most dysfunctional family

that's ever been created on this planet.

I remember just, like, the very beginning,

my first interactions with them.

I'd been hanging around

'cause Weir was my official best friend,

and we'd just started writing songs together.

And looking around I thought,

goddamn, these guys are like

a real swaggery, you know, macho lot.

The... The idea of somebody from...

From inside that scene crying,

just... you didn't do that.

Well, fuck, sometimes it's a good idea to cry.

And we've got a lot to cry about, frankly.

And, you know, it hasn't... it hasn't been properly wept over.

Very little of it.

Pigpen. Alas, I knew him well.

Oh, Pig.

Why the hell would people put guitar picks down

on the grave of the keyboard player?

Answer me that.

He was such a sweet man.

♪ Turn on your light

♪ Let it shine on me

John Perry Barlow: Pigpen was kind of like

the persona of the Grateful Dead.

♪ Let it shine, let it shine, let it... ♪

♪ All right

Mickey Hart: Pigpen would come out and he'd get people up.

We couldn't do that.

I mean, Jerry couldn't do it. Bob couldn't do it.

Phil certainly couldn't. You know?

But Pigpen could.

♪ I'll tell you one of the reasons why... ♪

As soon as Pig got up, everybody got up and danced.

He had that thing about him.

♪ Kind of thing that makes me feel so good ♪

When he sang, you had fun.

♪ And the reason

♪ And the reason

♪ And the reason

♪ All right

♪ And she's got box-back titties ♪

♪ And great big noble thighs ♪

♪ Working undercover with a boar hog's eye ♪

♪ And the people got up

♪ And the people slowed

♪ I got the people up

♪ Ahhhhhhhh

Mickey Hart: Pigpen was a blues guy.

And the Grateful Dead started as a blues band.

That's not where it wound up.

When the shuffle turned into a triplet,

Pigpen couldn't play those.

He just couldn't quite get that kind of thing.

Sam Cutler: Garcia and Pigpen started this band.

But a lot of people form bands that...

And fall by the wayside as the dream develops.

Of course, the Grateful Dead had the experience of the acid tests, right,

where they all took the same drug, acid,

and everyone got crazy together.

Everybody except Pigpen.

Pigpen: Hey, there ain't no power on the stage.

Sam Cutler: To Pigpen, it was ridiculous.

Pigpen: No electricity on the stage.

Fix it.

Prankster: This is the Captain speaking,

we have reached our first emergency.

Pigpen: Why don't you rectify it pretty damn quick.

Prankster: Let's everybody put their worries and frets to mind

to produce some electricity for the stage.

Pigpen: Hey, man, stop your babbling and fix these microphones.

We need some power. Power.

Loud! Loud!

That's better now.

Sam Cutler: Pigpen didn't grow with the band

because Pigpen was busy killing himself on alcohol.

You know, I mean, alcoholics don't like acid.

They're trying to close down the doors of perception,

not open them. You know what I mean?

Mickey Hart: When things started getting a little strange,

he kind of warped out, lost interest,

and just drank and drank and drank.

Finally, you know, it killed him.

John Perry Barlow: It was so sad.

I felt so bad for him, you know.

I just felt like they... they weren't actually making any effort

to keep him feeling incorporated.

It was heart rending because he was so sensitive and sweet,

and, uh, easily wounded.

Man 1: 48, take one, head slate. "A" camera.

Man 2: "A" camera.

Because nobody wants to look at me. Good grief.

Jerry Garcia: Everyone wants to look at you, Pig.

You're beautiful. Let's put it back a little bit.

Steve Parish: Pigpen was an amazing soul of a person,

and sometimes when you have

such a rare gem of a person in there,

and he's like... you're dealing with him everyday,

it becomes a task.

And so, when I was first around,

I was pushed together with him

because, on the road, nobody else wanted to room with him.

But, he was so soulful.

Man: He's all yours.

Steve Parish: And at night he would come alive,

and he drank, and he would teach you the blues.

♪ I said goodbye, goodbye, poor Katie ♪

♪ It's the last words I've got to say ♪

♪ And Na, Na, Na, Na, poor Katie ♪

♪ It's the last words I've got to say ♪

♪ 'Cause if I don't meet you tomorrow ♪

♪ I'm gonna getcha early in the next day ♪

John Perry Barlow: Looking back on 1973,

yeah, it was a huge turning point.

Though... though most people didn't recognize it as such at the time.

Uh, in fact, it became a line of demarcation.

After that, it seemed like there was

an awful lot of death taking place.

♪ Like a steam locomotive

♪ Rollin' down the track

♪ He's gone

♪ He's gone, and nothin's gonna bring him back ♪

♪ He's gone

♪ Ooh-ooh-ooh

♪ Nothin's gonna bring him back ♪

Sam Cutler: You look back on the life of the Grateful Dead,

and it is littered with dead people.

I remember my mother one time said...

I saw my mother, I went to England, and I was visiting,

I saw my mum and she was in her 70s...

I said, "You don't look very happy. You all right?"

She goes, "Oh I'm at that time in my life

"when all of my friends are dying."

I said, "Fuck! My friends are constantly fucking dying."

Steve Parish: When Pigpen died, the band sat around,

and everybody was wearing their dark glasses.

We were crying.

In the Grateful Dead sometimes you'd get that glimpse of

how fast we were moving through the world.

Rex Jackson,

the toughest motherfucker around,

gone.

And Ramrod and Johnny Hagen,

all these guys are dead now.

It was a hard life.

And it took its toll, you know,

and you had to understand that.

Man: Have your ticket out and ready! Let's go.

Must have a ticket.

Have 'em out and ready.

♪ Look for a while at the China Cat sunflower ♪

♪ Proud walking jingle in the midnight sun ♪

Lesh: Every time I go on stage,

I walk on stage with the knowledge

that anything can happen.

The important thing is to be open.

Not to go in with any preconceptions

about whether it's gonna be bad or good

depending on how the sound check went.

We always tried to keep it as open as possible,

and that's what we learned from the acid test.

Cutler: What the LSD experience teaches you

is that all things are possible.

And that's how the Grateful Dead played.

You know, Phil certainly doesn't play

what one would describe as a conventional bass.

And Bobby ended up inventing a whole way

of being the unique rhythm guitar player.

But there's nobody who ever came anywhere close to Jerry

in terms of being able to manifest

the psychedelic experience musically.

Having taken LSD,

you become this person who's aware of the fact

that life only has a certain amount of predictability to it.

Jerry was a master at setting up a kind of musical expectation

and then dragging you off in another direction.

McNally: The Grateful Dead went into the music for the adventure.

And they went into it having had that experience with the acid tests,

in which you treated your audience like partners.

That's why they did things like spend

an unconscionable amount of money on the sound system,

because that's the link between them and the audience.

It was the sound.

Parish: Jerry wanted to put a better quality of sound out to the people,

and all the guys did.

So we built this thing together

that became the most unbelievable PA

that you could imagine.

And we called it the Wall of Sound.

Lesh: The Wall of Sound?

I loved that thing.

I mean, it was the best PA ever.

It was the best sound I can possibly imagine.

And it was also the biggest.

It was absolutely apocalyptic.

It was like the voice of God.

Parish: Oh yeah. We built that PA.

We did that ourselves in our spare time

with our own two hands.

I learned to weld. Heely showed me.

We welded the first horns together

that we carried ourselves.

And at the heart of the dream of it was Owsley, or Bear,

and his sound design genius.

Weir: That's the gleeful sound of our PA as it warms up.

Pigpen: Hey Bear, there's not gonna be another fuckin' word sung

until them goddamn monitors work.

Weir: That, ladies and gentlemen, is Bear, none other.

Lesh: Bear was a mad scientist.

A little bit of a mad scientist among many other aspects.

Weir: Augustus Owsley Stanley,

or better known as The Bear,

made probably the best LSD that has ever been made.

Cutler: Oof, that was particularly powerful LSD,

you know, Jimi Hendrix wrote Purple Haze

in honor of a brand of LSD that The Bear made.

Weir: He more or less fueled the psychedelic revolution,

or whatever you wanted to call it.

Cutler: In a way, yeah, it changed the consciousness of the Western world.

Weir: It certainly fueled us in our little explorations.

Parish: When the Grateful Dead started,

Owsley bought 'em all their own equipment with his acid money.

Lesh: He had sort of adopted us

from the Fillmore Acid Test on.

He put a lot of energy and, yes, money, into the Grateful Dead.

Parish: In the early days,

what there was in P.A.s was just so inadequate.

Hart: We realized that if we were gonna play for larger crowds,

we were gonna need a real delivery system.

And, if sound was the product of all of this work,

it better be fucking good, man.

Lesh: Bear's dream was to have a system

that you could hear for a mile.

No distortion between the string and the speaker.

That was his holy grail.

At first, that was just a fantasy.

But then, Bear started

seriously thinking about how it could be done.

The first thing was,

he'd move all the speakers for everything behind the band

so we don't have any complicated interference.

He built differential microphones,

which are two microphones connected out of phase.

You sing into one of them, and the one that's out of phase

eliminates all of the feedback.

We found that dispersion of speakers is much better

if they're placed vertically together

than if they're spread out.

And so that lead to the thought of,

"Okay, it had to be large and tall to push air

so you that could hear it for a mile."

Parish: Phil Lesh, he had a stack 32 feet high.

Why was it 32 feet? Because that's a standing bass wave.

So everything was based on some kind of deep science thing.

We built this thing together

that became the most unbelievable PA

that you could imagine.

But, by the time we got to '74,

the Wall of Sound was making us crazy.

We had to get up at six in the morning.

Eight o'clock, we had to be at that hall...

convincing the union guys that what we were bringing in

was something that was needed.

They'd never saw rock and roll shows with these kind of things.

Three trucks full to the brim with all this heavy gear.

Ten o'clock, the trucks were empty.

It took us till noon to stack the 500 speakers.

Wired it up all afternoon.

The band came in about four o'clock

and sound checked.

And then the doors opened at seven.

And then they play till one or two in the morning.

It took us four hours to take it out.

Here's six a.m., we're driving to the next place.

Lesh: I'm sure we could have made it more efficient and easier

to set up and everything.

We didn't give a shit.

We were gonna do it, and we were gonna blow it out

until we couldn't do it anymore.

It doesn't matter when that happens.

While we got, it we were gonna do it.

The Grateful Dead are dumb.

You have to understand something.

They make fabulous music,

wonderful, amazing music,

the best music of any band I've ever been involved with.

Fabulous.

When it came to business decisions... stupid.

Sam brought a professionalism to the office,

which was needed at that time,

but he ran up against the fact that he was not

dealing with a hierarchical organization.

I was brought in to manage the publishing company,

but our roles within the Grateful Dead family

actually overlapped a lot.

We all did a little bit of everything.

And Sam found that he was dealing with a collective,

and these were not music business professionals.

It was a nightmare. Nightmare.

First off, they didn't know how to make decisions.

Trist: Everybody had a voice,

and everybody's voice was equally listened to.

Cutler: When I first went to a meeting with the Grateful Dead,

there was all these people there.

There was so many fuckin' people, it was ridiculous.

They were all part of this

amorphous blob of people called The Family.

Trist: It had the characteristics of an open system.

Cutler: I don't deal with families.

I deal with rock and roll bands, you know?

Trist: One that cared a lot about the employees.

Cutler: I don't deal with old ladies,

I don't deal with friends of the band.

Trist: One person says no,

then it's not on.

Whatever. I deal with musicians.

You want me to do this, I'll do it,

but I ain't gonna deal with all these other people.

McNally: When is the twelfth? Is it a Wednesday?

- Man: No, it's a Sunday. - Hart: The tenth.

Weir: I say, the twelfth.

Hart: What day is it? Cutler: What's a camel?

It's a horse designed by a committee.

Garcia: Why don't we make it one of those...

Man: Well, I didn't wanna fuckin' sit there anyway.

Parish: This is Steve. I'm at the meeting.

Everything's going to pieces, man.

People are screamin' out of turn.

The whole place is burning down, man.

Cutler: I'm a great believer in tellin' people,

"This is what needs to be done."

But of course, that didn't endear me

to a lot of people in the Grateful Dead.

So, eventually, I said "good luck" and left.

Parish: Sam knew how to treat the crew,

and he had the experience

to take us through those years

of our first growth spurt.

But by the time we got to '74, he was gone.

Lev: Who was in charge?

Well, I'm so glad you asked that

because I came up with this, man.

Because we would hear that a lot of times from promoters.

"Who's in charge here?"

We'd hear it from cops.

"Who's in charge here?"

And I came up with this saying.

I said, "The situation is the boss."

There were times when I was in charge of everything.

There were times when Jerry was in charge of everything.

And then, at another time, it would be somebody else.

It would be a truck that had a blown carburetor.

That carburetor was the boss at that moment.

♪ There's mosquitoes on the river ♪

♪ Fish are rising up like birds ♪

♪ It's been hot for seven weeks now ♪

♪ Too hot to even speak now

♪ Did you hear what I just heard? ♪

Say, it might have been a fiddle.

Parish: In '74, we took the Wall of Sound

over to Europe, and it was about impossible.

If you think the United States couldn't deal with it,

Europe, they couldn't deal with it at all.

They didn't know why you had to bring

this much sound equipment.

What were you thinking?

♪ There's a band out on the highway ♪

♪ They're high-stepping into town ♪

Parish: We worked so hard, exhaustion was setting in.

And cocaine was leading the pack now.

We were in such a drug fueled world.

We didn't have anybody telling us no.

And God forbid, if somebody did.

If it was your old lady or your wife, she was gone.

If she tried to do it as much as you did, she was gone.

You both were gone.

Everybody was crazy.

Hart: Oh, yeah. Backstage, it was total chaos.

People were doing heavier drugs, you know.

The cocaine came in.

The heroin came in.

The booze came in.

It was everywhere.

You realize, of course, that we're engaging in illicit activities here.

Hart: You had to have a lot of discipline.

We didn't have a lot of discipline in some ways.

Lesh: When we went to Europe in '74, it was...

It was gettin' really crazy.

And everybody, I think, was gettin' too deep

into the rock and roll fantasy, you know, world.

Parish: I don't give a hell what anybody believes, man.

Every drug that we took, we used for self exploration.

Nitrous Oxide puts you in that place

where you're at rapture of the deep, basically.

So your body is living off of nitrous,

but we're made to live off oxygen.

So your brain goes to this place where it's lettin' go...

of reality and consciousness, and you're dying.

You're gratefully dying.

That's why you laugh, because it's funny, man.

You understand everything at that moment, man.

Everything makes fuckin' sense. This thing happens...

Oh that, yeah, the music on this thing!

And you, your leg and your arm, bam!

And your mother's glasses, wow!

And then you come out of it, and you can't get back there.

You can't go back to that spot,

but yet you know for the rest of your life

that there is that high place.

If you're takin' drugs just to hide from the world,

you're gonna become a hidden person.

If you take drugs to find the world,

you're gonna become a vibrant human being.

Barlow: One of the things that I don't think

people have properly appreciated

about the culture of the Grateful Dead

is our utter comfort with paradox.

You know, we were never an either-or kind of a culture.

We were always both-and.

The Deadheads, you know, they had a very strong sense

that there were good guys and bad guys

and they knew who they were.

There is good, and there is bad.

Good, bad.

With us, it wasn't so clear.

You know, we had a...

We had Hell's Angels hanging around for ages.

You know, and those are people who don't even try to be good guys.

Sacramento's coming down, San Jose's coming up,

Davis City's coming in, Richmond, Frisco will be here.

And here's a good friend of ours right here from San Francisco.

Hey, how come we never cake fight, Bobby?

Man: Cake fight!

Is this your guitar?

Barlow: I mean, at one point I complained to Garcia

about what I thought was the unnecessary presence

of all the Angels thuggin' it up backstage,

making everybody kind of nervous,

and making it even harder for women in a scene that

was already misogynistic to the max.

And he said, "Well, you know,

I don't think that good means very much without evil."

Which is true.

But that doesn't necessarily mean

that you have to always have a seat for evil at the table.

♪ Ran into the Devil, baby

♪ He loaned me 20 bills

♪ Spent the night in Utah

♪ In a cave up in the hills

♪ Set out running but I take my time ♪

♪ A friend of the devil is a friend of mine ♪

♪ If I get home before daylight ♪

♪ Just might get some sleep tonight ♪

Garcia: Hell's Angels happened because of freedom.

They're free to happen.

And they're a manifestation of what freedom is in essence.

Reporter: And yet, you have an Altamont.

Somehow I feel that you're being, maybe, too forgiving.

Garcia: I'm not... I mean, you know, well, what's to forgive?

- There isn't any blame. - Reporter: There is no blame?

Garcia: No, man, there isn't any blame.

Because who're you gonna blame?

You'd have to blame everybody, you know?

We're all human beings,

we're all on this planet together,

and all the problems are all of ours.

Not, some are mine and some are theirs.

If there's a war going on, I'm as responsible as anybody is.

If somebody's murdered, I'm responsible for that, too.

At some point or another somebody has to say,

there can be no Hell's Angels, you know?

And who's gonna say that?

It's just, you know, it's not what I'm interested in doing.

The question is how to work it out, man?

How can you have freedom and still work it out?

There was a strong belief,

primarily on Garcia's part,

that it was important that it be leaderless.

He did not want to be the leader.

Never mind that he was,

and there was no way around it,

and, you know, often times bad things happened

because he wasn't willing to...

He wasn't willing to assert

what was basically pretty obvious.

Trist: Jerry once said to me,

when I was getting a little excited

about putting off some project or some idea,

he said, "You know,

don't try to do anything with the Grateful Dead."

That, you know, because the collective, in a way,

is a classic example of following the Tao.

The way things went down

were the way they were supposed to go down.

And, you know, nobody really knew what that was.

Barlow: Because nobody wanted to be in charge,

and nobody wanted to say no to anything,

it became pretty clear that...

we had become a fully dysfunctional family.

Godchaux: I don't want to get into the whole drugs thing,

but it just got unbearable.

It got unbearable on Keith and me as a husband and wife,

as a couple with a child,

and Keith and I were burning out.

Barlow: At one point,

Alan Trist went completely crazy.

I mean, the sanest guy in the whole scene, basically.

Trist: My susceptibility to what we call around here

the Marin Spin

was probably likely to kill me.

And I was out of Dodge for a period there,

until I became more connected

with gentler approaches to...

To self-abuse, if you're going to put it that way.

McNally: It was difficult just trying to limp along.

I mean, remember, they were spending incredible amounts

of money on the sound system.

And they paid the crew, which by now had gotten to be a respectable size...

Radically more than any other employees

in the history of rock and roll.

They were supporting lots of people,

including their own families.

And it's too much.

It's all too much.

That's not tenable.

Barlow: You know, and it finally just...

It reached a point where...

in late '74...

everybody sort of simultaneously came

to the conclusion that it just...

It just wasn't worth it.

Uh... and we broke up.

Lesh: It was decided somehow that we would take a break.

And, if you're gonna do that,

then it's probably a good idea to do some farewell shows.

♪ I know you rider

♪ Gonna miss me when I'm gone

Lesh: And so, we'd booked these last...

four, five shows at the Winterland.

♪ I know you rider

♪ Gonna miss me when I'm gone

♪ Gonna miss your baby

♪ From rolling in your arms

Lesh: And somebody on the management side came up with an idea,

"Well, let's make a movie out of it."

- Man: This is sound roll TH6. - Take one.

Lesh: Jerry really loved that 'cause he's always wanted to direct a movie,

so this was his chance, so he kind of jumped on that.

Barlow: We had something like eleven camera crews

ostensibly making a movie that was gonna sum up our work.

And that was gonna be the end of it.

♪ The sun will shine

♪ In my back door someday

But it was kind of fraught with weirdness

from the beginning, not surprisingly.

Our sound mixer kind of went belly up,

mentally speaking.

During our actual recording, at the end of the last show,

he was found cowering under the soundboard.

I don't know why, and I never have.

I'm not sure I even wanna speculate.

♪ I wish I was a headlight

♪ On a northbound train

♪ I wish I was a headlight

♪ On a northbound train

♪ I'd shine my light

♪ Through the cool Colorado rain ♪

Barlow: Something that wasn't in the movie was,

behind the scenes,

there was actually kind of a war going on

between the acid heads and the coke freaks.

You know, so, one of the manifestations of this

that was really hilarious

was that Rex Jackson positioned himself

right at the top of the stage stair,

and he wouldn't let you go on stage unless you took

another drop out of the Miriam bottle.

Parish: His thing was, "Well, I'll tell you what I'm gonna do tonight, Steve,

"I'm giving everybody who comes up these stairs,

they're gonna get acid, you know, they're gonna just get LSD up the ass,

and then they'd better fuckin' behave themselves, you know, whatever."

But it wasn't working, and it was getting crazier.

You see, he was trying to hold on to

the camaraderie of the early Grateful Dead.

Barlow: And sure, it was a great way to keep the coke freaks off the stage.

But it was also a great way to make the music become

increasingly more psychedelic.