Grateful Dead

In 1938, when he first synthesized LSD in the Swiss laboratories of Sandoz, Albert Hofmann could hardly have imagined how much weight that discovery would carry in the evolution of rock. If LSD became a symbol of the counterculture, this was above all down to its capacity to expand the horizons of human consciousness beyond measure, turning it into a symbol of freedom and a byword for the rejection of every convention, at a time when, on one hand, as Paul Goodman would recall in his "Growing Up Absurd", young people sensed the emptiness and sterility lurking behind the facade of the American way of life, while on the other the Vietnam War confronted them with the nightmare of going off to fight far from home against an enemy they didn't even know.

When LSD became common currency, Jerry Garcia - one of the heroes of our story - would later recall that "it was the end of that whole world" which people believed was destined to keep turning in a certain way. Jerry had played banjo in bluegrass outfits such as the Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions and the Wildwood Boys, coming into contact, among others, with guitarist Bob Weir, harmonica player and singer Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, and poet and songwriter Robert Hunter, but he carried with him a deep passion for jazz, which allowed him to breathe freely that idea of expressive freedom he felt was part of who he was. From the ashes of those two bands, the Warlocks were born at the start of 1965, decidedly more tilted toward those electric, "acid" sonorities that would soon enable a host of bands to (attempt to) translate into music the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide on the psyche, becoming standard-bearers of psychedelia, whose Holy Grail was nothing less than the unveiling of the soul.

It was the "Acid Tests", organized by writer Ken Kesey (fresh off the extraordinary success of "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest"), that placed the Warlocks at the heart of the nascent American psychedelic scene, thanks to their sprawling, shapeless improvisations. It was the big bang of a sound - that of the future Grateful Dead - which Tom Wolfe, reporting live, described as an "immense vibrating underwater vibrato", something like "anguish-in-ecstasy (...) confused half the time, tremendously loud but like sitting under a waterfall", and so on along the tangents pursued by the eccentric author of "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test".
With those experiences etched into his mind, Jerry Garcia - lead guitar and vocals, and increasingly the band's spiritual and musical guide - Bob Weir (rhythm guitar and vocals), Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (organ, harmonica and vocals), Phil Lesh (bass) and Bill Kreutzmann (drums, percussion) recorded their first album proud and confident, but things didn't go as planned, since it wasn't easy to capture on tape what they were able to unleash live. So that debut - eponymous, no less - ended up, save for a couple of bolder moments, a genuine flop, squeezed between covers of traditional blues, folk and flashes of r'n'b.

Now, to understand how the Dead managed to go from that all-in-all conventional debut to the extraordinary experiment of "Anthem Of The Sun" (released on July 18, 1968, accompanied by the iconic mandala-shaped cover art created by Bill Walker after "a synesthetic experience" induced by a hallucinogenic trip), one must take into account not only the arrival of new members in the lineup, but also a more conscious approach to psychedelic material. Garcia and Lesh had already tipped their hand during an April 1967 radio interview: the new direction was one of limitless exploration. And so, holed up in their house-cum-headquarters at 710 Ashbury Street in San Francisco, the Dead threw themselves into ceaseless improvisation, ever more aware (with LSD in the control room) that if forms exist at all, it's only because they implicitly invite their own destruction, their shattering into a thousand rivulets.

We mentioned a moment ago the arrival of new members. Well: from September of that fateful 1967, Bill Kreutzmann had begun sharing drum duties with New York percussionist Mickey Hart, with whom he felt a deep connection after meeting him at a Count Basie concert and sharing an evening at the Matrix, where Big Brother and the Holding Company were playing. The first time Hart played with the Grateful Dead was during the second set at the Straight Theater, in early autumn '67, at the end of which an elated Jerry Garcia shouted: "This is the Grateful Dead!" "We went straight into the first number of the next set, a piece they'd been fooling around with called 'Alligator/Caution'", Kreutzmann recalls. The crowd went absolutely wild. "Suddenly", Hart continues, "with two drums hammering away underneath, we glimpsed the possibility of a groove so monstrous it could devour the audience".
Kreutzmann and Hart thus became the "Rhythm Devils", and the newcomer was baptized with a hefty dose of acid. No rock band before the Grateful Dead had ever had two drummers.
The other crucial addition for the band, determined to leave behind for good the uncertainties of their first record, was Tom Constanten, but we'll get to him later.

For the production of "Anthem Of The Sun", the band initially still relied on David Hassinger, who had a highly respectable résumé, having been, among other things, behind the desk for the Rolling Stones' single "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and for the Jefferson Airplane's album "Surrealistic Pillow". But the "new" Grateful Dead were determined to go their own way, well aware that they couldn't afford to miss the mark again.
Between the end of '67 and the start of that scorching 1968, they set to work tirelessly on new material, playing live all the while with the passion of people who know they're on a mission on behalf of some psychedelic god, and aware that they had also, in the meantime, perfected one of their most important portals for improvisation ever, that "Dark Star" whose relatively extended version (the single would clock in at a mere two minutes and forty-four seconds) they had first unveiled at the Shrine Exhibition Hall in Los Angeles on December 13, 1967.
Leaving Los Angeles's American Studios behind, the band moved to New York to continue recording on eight tracks, splitting their time between Olmstead on 48th Street and Century Sound Studios on 52nd. While Hassinger puffed away seemingly nonstop on his cigars, Jerry and the others seemed like kids who'd stumbled into a playground, aware that they understood little or nothing about the technical side and precisely for that reason free to dare anything, since they had no more use for the classic methods that had, on more than one occasion, made the fortunes of record labels and artists alike - being bound instead for "elsewhere", indeed "further", as their friends the Merry Pranksters had painted in that very categorical invitation ("Further"!) on their gaudy bus, driving around the States convinced, as Ken Kesey had decreed, that "you're either on the bus or off the bus" - meaning, in short, that either you're already projected toward where you necessarily need to go, or else all that's left for you is to stay put, in the place others have chosen for you.
 
Inevitably, at a certain point the break between Hassinger and the Dead became total. They were working on one of the new songs, "Born Cross-Eyed", and after the band's umpteenth refusal to follow his direction, the producer promptly went back to California, where he found support from Warner Bros.'s Joe Smith, for whom those unruly, more often than not completely stoned longhairs were lost in a fantasy world entirely their own, where sounds existed that were very often impossible to reproduce. In truth, according to what the Dead themselves maintained over the years, the final straw came when Bob Weir asked to try to achieve a "thick air" kind of effect, which, in the mind of the young guitarist - anything but a studio expert - simply meant a desire to carry over into the band's sound "the feeling", as Dennis McNally would write, "of a hot, humid summer night, created with an audio compressor that literally thickened the sound"...
Be that as it may, with Hassinger now out of the picture, the Dead spent a few weeks experimenting with the feeling - both unsettling and wonderful - of being adrift, while the Warner Bros. brass began making themselves heard with growing insistence, aware they'd stumbled onto the "most unreasonable project" of their lives.

1968 had barely begun when the Dead packed up and headed back to San Francisco. Across the States, the Vietnam War was stirring growing opposition, especially among the young, while the civil rights movement denounced racism and discrimination amid ever more frequent protests and clashes. The Johnson administration was under pressure from every direction, and distrust in institutions was growing across the country. Amid youthful rebellion, racial conflict and the uncertainties of war, the stars-and-stripes nation appeared deeply divided and in search of new cultural and social models. The Dead too were in flux, and the only way forward was to keep on playing shows, which, starting that very spring, began to be recorded in their entirety, inaugurating a practice that would stay with them for their whole career.
When the time came to head back into the studio, this time the choice fell on Columbus Recorders, one of the few studios in the Golden City equipped with an 8-track tape recorder. The new face was engineer Dan Healy, an open-minded guy willing to do whatever it took to keep the musicians happy. Garcia and company had a new, extraordinary idea in mind: blending live recordings with studio takes of all the material intended for their "Anthem Of The Sun": "Cryptical Envelopment", "The Other One", "New Potato Caboose", "Born Cross-Eyed", "Alligator" and "Caution".

Technically speaking, it was a genuine ordeal that lasted nearly a year, not least because it was first necessary to convert all the performances onto a single tape machine and then transfer the result onto an eight-track recorder. From that point on, forget the song as a closed unit: the method became one of collage, closer to musique concrète than to rock, even though here the material wasn't abstract but pulsed with blood and life. What the Dead and Healy achieved was what Garcia would call an "enhanced non-realistic depiction".
That ordeal turned the band into one of the most incredible sonic experiences of the late Sixties. "Phil and Jerry were the ones who understood that we could use studio technology to show how these songs were mirrors of infinity, even when they stuck to their established arrangements", Kreutzmann points out. "It's the old paradox of 'improvised compositions'. Jazz musicians understood well the balance between freedom and structure, but some rock bands were beginning to grasp it too. Most of them, however, tended to go in the opposite direction, frightened by the uncertainty of improvisation. We decided that 'Anthem Of The Sun' would be our manifesto on this very subject".

The uncertainty of improvisation is, in the end, the uncertainty of life itself. Yet at a certain point the Dead realized that out of that babel of versions they somehow had to pull a sonic image to hand down to posterity. In the end, after weeks of desperate attempts, it was Phil Lesh who found the key, thanks to a lightning-bolt intuition: that of “a thousand-petaled lotus that opens without ever ceasing to renew itself” — in short, the vision of a shape-shifting form in which multiple versions of the same piece, or of a section of it, could coexist without hierarchy, like currents flowing side by side in the same river.
The same music, played at different times and in different places, became a weave of layers that, starting from the same point, eventually drifted out of alignment, each one going its own way — because, in the end, the music of that reborn Dead now preferred, as if it were a river in flood, the bends to the mouth, preferred to lose itself further and further, only to find itself again and again in that place where, as the lysergic experience teaches, hierarchies between things no longer exist, only the absolute unity of the All. “For an instant,” Lesh explains, “you get the feeling of seeing all possible directions at the same moment, as if time had expanded and the music were speaking from a wider, suspended place. Then that vertigo fades, and what remains is a single version, bigger, denser, as if it had emerged naturally from all the possibilities that preceded it.”

"That's It For The Other One", the track in which this technique found its fullest expression, was essentially an expansion of "The Other One", which took shape in Weir's mind when, on his way to rehearsal one day, he heard a song by the Yardbirds on the radio, and which the Dead only managed to steer where they wanted once a second drummer came on board — they referred to it by that title because they already had another piece in the works, "Alligator". Crucial to making it the extraordinary, groundbreaking experiment it is was the avant-garde background of Tom Constanten.

Already a friend of Phil Lesh's (with whom he had taken a Luciano Berio course at Mills College in Oakland), the New Jersey-born pianist/keyboardist had also spent a year studying in Europe under composers of the caliber of Boulez, Stockhausen and Pousseur. When he got into rock, he saw it as an absolutely necessary step: "What made 60s rock interesting to me was that the mental leanings of experimental composers were reflected in the basic structure of rock & roll, making it, in a sense, conceptually electrified…"
The drum groove of "The Other One" had taken shape from the very first rehearsals with Hart, in that rehearsal space the band had carved out of an old synagogue, right next to the Fillmore. With Hart on board, the band had left the usual 4/4 behind, pushed both by Phil Lesh (who had given the new Dead member the record "Drums Of North And South India", featuring Allarakha Qureshi Khansaheb on tabla, a master with whom Hart would spend more than an hour of lessons during those weeks) and by a Kreutzmann who was growing ever more confident in his own abilities, especially after "freeing himself" further following his exposure to John Coltrane and his drummer Elvin Jones.
Drawing on the primordial beat made famous by Bo Diddley and defined by the man himself as "the sanctified rhythm" (essentially a syncopated boogie very close to the "clave rhythm" used in Afro-Cuban music), the Kreutzmann/Hart duo kept rock from marching on impassively in a straight line. The Bo Diddley 1-2-3-4 stopped being a rigid grid and opened up into a dialogue between four and six, between pulses chasing and overlapping one another. Shuffles intertwined with triplets, layers of rhythm coexisted. The center vanished, resurfaced, shifted position. The beat was no longer a fixed point but a field of forces in constant motion. Devoted to polyrhythm and carrying what Hart called a "license to travel", the Dead had finally left the uncertainties of the past behind. 

On "Anthem Of The Sun", "The Other One" — which is thought to correspond to the third of the four sections of "That's It For The Other One", namely "The Faster We Go, The Rounder We Get" (the uncertainty stems from the fact that the Dead never really clarified what corresponds to what in this kind of suite!) — is set between the two variants of "Cryptical Envelopment", a new piece that Garcia wrote conceiving it as an extension of his personal symbology drawn from "The Man Of Constant Sorrow", whose original 1913 version had first been published in Dick Burnett's six-song booklet titled "Songs Sung by R. D. Burnett – The Blind Man – Monticello, Kentucky", and which only found its definitive title in 1928, when it was recorded by Emry Arthur. For Garcia, that traditional song was "a kind of parable of Christ", although, as Christopher K. Coffman notes in an interesting study of his, the song is not without references to the equally mythical figure of Augustus Owsley Stanley III. A central figure of the Bay Area hippie scene in the 60s, "Bear" — as everyone called him — was not just a sound technician but a sort of architect of the American counterculture, one of those figures who seem to move along the thin line between music, creative chaos and psychedelic revolution. As the Dead's sound engineer, between 1965 and 1970 Bear not only oversaw some of the band's live recordings (gradually developing the Wall of Sound, one of the largest mobile sound-amplification systems ever built), but also co-designed, together with Robert Thomas, their iconic skull-and-lightning-bolt logo.
However — and this is what most interests us here — Bear was also one of the first people to privately manufacture LSD on a large scale, eventually earning the nickname "Acid King" from the press. Naturally, the authorities took notice and began keeping an eye on him. He became, in short, a true outlaw of another era, one who symbolically (though perhaps not only symbolically) had to "die" ("He has to die"), even as his own persecutors were themselves "burning" ("And all the children learning/ From books that they were burning"), swept up in the shockwave of a counterculture that still felt the possibility of overturning the status quo was alive.

Marked by "an enveloping space" (Garcia), created by mixing 8-track and 4-track recordings — the former for the instruments, the latter to capture the ambience of the studios — "Cryptical Envelopment" thus revolves around the idea of death as rebirth, a death to be understood not in a physical sense but a spiritual one, whereby both the death of Christ and the death of the Self (through the taking of psychedelic substances or, in any case, through immersion in the Dead's sonic flow) become emblems of a process of regenerative destruction.

The other day they waited
The sky was dark and faded 
Solemnly they stated
He has to die
You know he has to die

Preceded by the brief jam "Quadlibet For Tenderfeet", "The Other One", or "The Faster We Go, The Rounder We Get", gives full vent to the band's new rhythmic direction. In its earliest versions, the song reflected more directly a very brief stint in jail that Weir had served, the result of a water-balloon incident that didn't sit well with a policeman evidently lacking a sense of humor… In the definitive version, that episode instead surfaces in the line "But the heat came round and busted me for smiling on a cloudy day", while the opening lines contain a reference to a "Spanish lady", who was in fact a dancer of Balinese origin with whom Weir had had a romantic encounter in Seattle that left him with a rather unwelcome parting gift in the form of an illness.
Through a psychedelic prism, with fragments of memory and visions drawn from the life and most intimate experiences of the Dead's second guitarist, the song also evokes "lily fields", a reference to Olompali, the commune where the Dead had lived between May and June of 1966, immersed in the quiet of a still-unspoiled nature.
But at the heart of it all is essentially Neal Cassady, the immortal Dean Moriarty of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" and a pivotal figure of the Beat Generation and the Merry Pranksters, whose free and overwhelming spirit left an indelible mark on Weir. It would be Weir himself who associated the character of "Cowboy Neal" with Cassady, a man who radiated, there in the communal house on Haight-Ashbury, a pure and overwhelming energy. For Weir, being close to him (yet another variation on the countercultural "outlaw", much like Augustus Owsley Stanley III) meant "being close to the sun".

The line "The bus came by and I got on… that's when it all began" directly recalls the famous Merry Pranksters bus driven by Cassady, a symbol of a journey at once physical, mental and cultural: the start of an adventure both within and beyond the self. Incidentally, the recurring theme of the journey appears right in the chorus, "Comin', comin', comin' around/ Comin' around in a circle". The journey, to be precise, is cyclical, because the bus's ultimate destination is "never ever land", a phrase that evokes the imaginary island ("Neverland") where the character of Peter Pan, created in 1904 by James Matthew Barrie, roams. On that island, children never grow up, and their days are made of incredible adventures, far from the gaze of adults and the responsibilities that weigh down real life (there they are, the Merry Pranksters!).
In the world of the Grateful Dead too, "never ever land" is no longer a physical place to be found on a map, but a symbol of freedom, of infinite possibility, as well as of the potential that reality accumulates without ever managing to express it: it's no coincidence that "never ever land" alludes precisely to the fact that the bus — carrying possibility into reality (the former symbolized by "empty space", the latter by the explosion evoked in the line "It trembled and exploded, left a bus stop in its place") — can never fully complete its mission, just as, for that matter, the Dead's own music kept expanding live into improvisations that could, at least ideally, stretch on forever, in much the same way that, in the ancient form of the hymn, the endless attempt to name the ultimate name of God, and thus of things themselves, ends up resolving into ceaseless naming.

In the end, the lyrics of "The Other One" suggested that, in order to reach a state of total creativity and freedom, one had to consciously pass through a void. Only in this way was it possible to leave behind the old order, built on rules and limits imposed by those who, in the midst of the utopian storm unleashed by the counterculture, kept repeating that every rebel must die ("he has to die")…

Spanish lady come to me, she lays on me this rose
It rainbow spirals round and round, it trembles and explodes
It left a smoking crater of my mind I like to blow away
But the heat came round and busted me for smiling on a cloudy day

In its final section, titled "We Leave The Castle", "That's It For The Other One" reaches the peak of its sonic speculation, making Garcia's claim all the clearer: that in mixing the record, and this track above all, the Dead did nothing but think in terms of hallucinations. So, as the reprise of "Cryptical Envelopment" dissolves into the collision of several live performances, before derailing into a hallucinated vortex that conveys an extraordinary sense of depth, it's Tom Constanten who takes the reins, armed with old tape sections made in 1962 with a ring modulator, and a prepared piano, on whose soundboard he spun a gyroscope at full speed, producing a sound that, in his own words, resembles "a chainsaw". His job was essentially to "take this swirling maelstrom, build it up until it turns into an explosion, and, out of the wreckage, bring forth the bubbling springs of the next song". The impact is powerfully theatrical, much like that of an enormous gate slamming shut, sealing off the castle (of the mind?) from the rest of the world.

From the ashes of this first track (an enormous masterpiece that condenses an entire sonic universe into barely eight minutes of music) emerge the crystalline, rarefied notes of "New Potato Caboose", whose structure, far removed from the classic verse-chorus interplay, pushed the band to question further the possibilities of "the formless".
In the lyrics written by beatnik poet Bobby Petersen, a friend of Phil Lesh's (who handled the music, digging up a small harpsichord composition jotted down in the studio back in the days of the band's first album), some images still seem to evoke the theme of death and rebirth, but there's no shortage of references to love ("This ground on which the seed of love is sown/ All graceful instruments are known"), to loneliness ("When the windows all are broken and your love's become a toothless crone/ When the voices of the storm sound like a crowd/ Winter morning breaks, you're all alone") and to an alternative kind of spirituality ("Black Madonna two eagles hang against a cloud"), in a web of visionary, surreal suggestions that Garcia's splendid guitar flight — set off by a cosmic bass figure recalling the sound of a stormy sea swallowing and shaking everything in its path — pushes toward transcendent dimensions, echoing in the mind like dreamlike sparks adrift on the waves of San Francisco Bay.

To close side A, the band turned to "Born Cross-Eyed", written by Bob Weir, whose title alludes to being cross-eyed, when in fact he was dyslexic. Adopted by a well-off family that loved him, yet was never quite able to make him feel the real warmth of a home, Weir sought refuge among poorer friends and the young musicians he was growing up with. There, amid improvised notes and shared laughter, he discovered his true happiness, always following the pull of his own instinct and turning his back on the judgments of those who wanted to lock him into an already-written destiny. The then twenty-one-year-old guitarist (the youngest in the band), while not forgetting his roots ("I'll come back here now and again from time to time"), can do nothing but head toward his new life of freedom ("My how lovely you are my dear…").
Musically speaking, "Born Cross-Eyed" stands out, besides its explosive force, for a mariachi trumpet solo played by Phil Lesh, inspired here by his listening to Miles Davis's "Sketches Of Spain" (1960).

The Dead's jug-band roots surface in the (studio-recorded) intro of "Alligator", where the kazoos play like a horn section and one can also make out the vibraslap, an instrument the Dead were among the first to use, alongside the Lemon Pipers on "Green Tambourine" and Hendrix on "All Along The Watchtower".
Beyond its literal meaning of "alligator", the title also carries a symbolic value, referring to those white musicians accused of appropriating Black music and culture. In New Orleans jazz, the term refers specifically to white jazz musicians or fans who imitate African-American slang, style and dance moves without truly being part of that world.
On this second side of "Anthem Of The Sun", we're let into a small self-contained world, through a more or less direct tribute to Ron McKernan (known to everyone as "Pigpen") and his indomitable spirit. The Pigpen of "Alligator" resembles a legendary character, one with a tough hide but a heart in his chest capable of warming whoever listens. After all, even freshly out of jail, the only thing he really cares about is wagging his tail for some pretty lady ("Just out of prison on six dollars bail/ Mumbling at bitches and wagging his tail")…

When the band moves into the live performance, the mood shifts: Weir invites everyone to move, to let go ("Come on everybody, get up and dance – it won't ruin you!"), while the irregular rhythm driven by the double drums shakes everything around it, leading us into a tribal, corrosive frenzy whose intensity builds second by second, like "a groove so monstrous it devours the audience", while Garcia once again ferries us, in his own inimitable way, toward the stars, even hinting at that "Mountain Jam" (built from Donovan's "There Is A Mountain", Donovan) later stretched to enormous lengths by the Allman Brothers Band. Around the ten-minute mark, another live improvisation materializes, and so "Alligator" turns into a whirl of sound and ever-intense grooves, becoming one of the most powerful and exhilarating moments in the saga of the Grateful Dead.

The disintegration of "Alligator" gives rise to "Caution (Do Not Stop On The Tracks)", an expanded version of one of their earliest original songs, dating back to 1965 and born out of the desire to reproduce "the rhythm of the [train] wheels clicking over the rail joints" (Lesh). Often paired with "Feedback" (which a year later would close out the landmark "Live/Dead"), "Caution" soon became a regular set closer. On the whole, it's a one-chord railroad blues pierced by Pigpen's spoken word, in which he recounts going to a gypsy woman for advice on how to get back in sync with his own woman, receiving in return a "mojo hand" — essentially a magic potion — that likewise ends up sinking into a dark whirlpool, where the music loses itself among shadows and blends in with ghosts, dissolving into simulacra of timbres, noises, traces of unknown worlds, and finally into a silence that, in the spirit of John Cage, always awaits being crossed in order to reveal its sonic essence — and thus the impossibility of ever truly being itself.

I went down one day
I went down to see a gypsy woman just one day, yes I did
I wanna find out
What’s wrong with me and my baby
We ain’t been getting down like we used to do
I mean it’s pretty good now
But there was a time when it didn’t work out too well
I went down to see this gypsy woman, you understand
And I told her my story
I told her what was going on
And she turned to me and she said
All you need
All you gotta have
Just a touch, that’s all you gotta have
Just a touch of mojo hand
And it feels pretty good

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25/01/2026