Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Inkwell welcomes Gary Lambert and David Gans, cohosts of TALES FROM
THE GOLDEN ROAD, a weekly talk show on SiriusXM's Grateful Dead
Channel.

Gary and David are living the dream, for sure. Both are musicians
and fans of the Grateful Dead who have made lives for themselves
doing what they love most.

The pair cohosted many live broadcasts and fund-raisers on
Berkeley's KPFA Radio; David served for several years as producer
for Rex Radio (later known as Eyes of Chaos/Veil of Order), a music
program on KPFA hosted by Gary with Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh;
since 2008 they have served as cohosts of TALES FROM THE GOLDEN
ROAD; and over the last three years they cohosted DEAD AIR, a series
of interviews broadcast on nugs.net between sets of Dead & Company
shows.

Having been music lovers and Deadheads since their teens, and having
forged paths through the broader counterculture and the wide musical
world of the Grateful Dead while also serving various roles in the
larger music world, they should have plenty to say about how we got
here and where the hell "here" is, anyway.
  

    
David Gans <tnf> did not plan to become a renowned expert on the
music and culture of the Grateful Dead. He didn't plan much of
anything, really - as reflected in the title of his latest book,
IMPROVISED LIVES: Grateful Dead 1972-1985, a collection of his
photos and stories. "I became a musician in 1969 when I picked up my
brother's guitar and started writing songs." Everything he has done
since then has been in service of the mission. "I wandered into
journalism as a way to get records and concert tickets, and I wound
up acquiring a priceless education along the way." He wrote for a
variety of music magazines from 1976 until 1985, when he published
his first book and made his first appearance on the KFOG Deadhead
Hour - which led to his becoming the host of that show. The radio
show grew into a national phenomenon, syndicated from coast to
coast, and continues weekly to this day. He was hired in 2007 to
consult on the creation of what is now known as SiriusXM's Grateful
Dead Channel, and when the company launched a weekly talk show he
brought Gary Lambert to cohost. Along the way, David has produced
several compilations of Dead-related music (and a boxed set of Jerry
Garcia's studio albums) and published six books (five on the
Grateful Dead, one on Talking Heads). He has also been a working
musician all this time, releasing more than a dozen recordings of
mostly original music.

Gary Lambert <almanac> has spent the entirety of what he laughingly
calls his "adult life" in and around the music business. Early on
this translated to every- thing from low-paying jobs at record
stores to nearly-no-paying jobs as a musician, in a succession of
bands that went nowhere. While continuing to play for pleasure and
gig occasionally, he resolved to learn more about the inner workings
of the industry, and wound up in the best school imaginable, landing
a job with Bill Graham Presents and working there in a variety of
roles for the last eight years of the great rock impresario's life.
In 1991, after many years in the orbit of the Grateful Dead, he
managed to get hired by the band - the closest thing imaginable to a
kid's dream of running away to join the circus not only coming true,
but kinda working out as a career move. He was writer-editor of the
band's official newsletter, The Grateful Dead Almanac, for 12 years,
co-hosted a radio show on KPFA-FM with bassist Phil Lesh from 1987
to 1995, and helped the Dead connect with such musical icons as
Babatunde Olatunji and Ornette Coleman. Since signing on (with the
inestimable help of David Gans) with SiriusXM's Grateful Dead
Channel and more recently submitting his face to public scrutiny as
a co-host of nugs.net's popular series of "Dead Air" interviews
during video livestreams of Dead & Company shows, he has experienced
a somewhat disorienting kind of Celebrity Deadhead status after
decades of contented anonymity. Took some getting used to, but hey,
there are worse fates in life.

Leading the conversation is Scott Underwood, cohost of the Well's
Music conference and an amateur bassist since he was in his teens.
Scott's initial relationship to the Grateful Dead's music (ignorance
and derision, tbh) began to change when he started participating at
the semi-regular Sing Things put on by David and his circle of
friends. His GD education continued when he met and later married
Susan Weiner (the erstwhile <gr8flred>), who preferred to dance to
the Dead rather than to talk about which guitar Jerry was playing.
Susan formerly worked for David answering letters from listeners to
his radio show, The Grateful Dead Hour, and she introduced Scott to
Gary in a memorable three-borough pizza safari in NYC. Scott
currently is a student at UC Berkeley (researching the history of
the banjo) and plays throughout the East Bay in a bluegrass band.
  

    
Thank you Jon, and hello David and Gary! I'm glad to be part of this
adventure, talking and learning about this unique band. As you are both
superb storytellers, my plan is to give you some easy lobs and kick back
a bit. Let us begin at the beginning:

When did you first hear the Grateful Dead, and when did you declare
yourself a fan?

What were the qualities of what you saw or heard that stood out for
you then? When did you realize they were doing something different from
their contemporaries?
  

    

Hi, Scott! I fondly remember that epic pizza tour with you and Susan!
Thank you for doing this, and thanks to the proprietors of the Inkwell
for having us. I look forward to the conversation.

Like a lot of people, I didn't fully "get" the Grateful Dead until I got
to experience them live. Living on the East Coast in my mid-teens in the
mid-60s, I was instantly intrigued by word of a new musical and
countercultural scene brewing in San Francisco. Around the same time,
the pioneering freeform FM rock radio stations began to challenge the
dominance of Top 40 AM, and I became a dedicated listener to some of the
New York stations that were part of that movement. But the Dead's first
album wasn't garnering a lot of airplay compared to, say, Jefferson
Airplane, which was the first of the Bay Area bands to have actual hit
singles. I'd catch bits of the Dead's debut LP and liked what I heard,
but wasn't compelled to run right out and buy a copy on my paltry record
budget, and missed their first couple of visits to my side of the
country in 1967.


When I had my first in-person encounter, it was by happy accident. On
the morning of May 5th, 1968, I got a phone call from my older brother,
telling me that he'd seen Jefferson Airplane the previous night at
Fillmore East, and they'd announced that they'd be doing a free concert
at the bandshell in Central Park. Having not yet seen the Airplane live,
I got it together as fast as I could and headed to the nearest subway
station for the hour-long Queens-to-Manhattan ride. What I didn't know
until I got to the bandshell was that the Airplane would not be alone. I
arrived in time to hear just the last couple of songs by the Paul
Butterfield Blues Band, and then after a brief gear changeover the
Airplane came on and delivered a splendid set of some of their best-
known tunes, mixed in with fine new material destined for their next
album "Crown of Creation." Very satisfied as the Airplane finished up, I
was getting ready to leave when Marty Balin returned to the mic and
said, "now, don't go away, because the Grateful Dead are comin' up
next!"

Well, I thought... Guess I'm not goin' way, then! Glad I didn't.

Another pause while gear got moved around - and some anti-war
exhortations were made over the P.A., actually inspiring a flurry of
draft card burnings. And the Dead straggled on - as random and
disheveled-looking a gaggle of humans as I'd ever seen on a stage - and
got right down to it with one of their songs I actually recognized:
their powerful electrification of Bonnie Dobson's folkie lament "Morning
Dew." I'm quite unclear as to exactly what they played after that, and
in what sequence - one of the ironies of my Deadhead life is that my
first show by arguably the most exhaustively, obsessively documented
bands of all time was so shockingly undocumented. No recording or
reliable setlist has turned up in the ensuing 57 years. To further
complicate things, they mostly played new stuff that wouldn't turn up on
their "Anthem of the Sun" album until later that year. I recognized some
of that stuff when I heard it later. I do remember Pigpen delivering
some killer moments, including the climactic version of Bobby Blue
Bland's "Turn On Your Lovelight," which segued into a cacophony of
feedback and gongs, at the end of which came an a cappella rendition of
the Bahamian lullaby "We Bid You Goodnight" (which I knew from the
Incredible String Band having covered it).

Despite my unfamiliarity with so much of what I'd heard, I was pretty
knocked out. If I didn't become a completely off-the-cliff Dead freak at
that moment (the coinage of "Dead Head" was still a few years in the
future), I think it was only because also seeing the Airplane and some
of Butterfield before the Dead (and all for the first time) put me in a
state of happy sensory overload... quite a bit to process. But I came
away feeling the Dead had been the highlight for me. The feral
intensity, the freewheeling collective improvisation, the two drummers
(!!!) - all of it was unlike anything I'd ever heard (at least in the
context of a rock band, although I had begun listening to and loving
some very adventurous jazz by then).

My complete, no-turning-back immersion, and a more detailed idea of just
what I so loved about the band - would happen in 1969. But I've jabbered
enough for now... let's have David tell his origin story!
  

    

Adapted from the intro to my new book, IMPROVISED LIVES:

I became a Deadhead almost against my will. In early 1972 I was a young
singer-songwriter in San Jose, smoking pot and writing songs and playing gigs
in wine bars and coffee houses. I was into the Beatles, Dylan, CSN, Cat
Stevens, Jackson Browne, Elton John, et al. What little I knew of the Grate-
ful Dead did not appeal to me, although I later figured out I had heard and
enjoyed some of their songs on the radio without knowing who it was. Song
titles like "Ripple" (a song about cheap wine? I think not!), "New Speedway
Boogie," and "Cumberland Blues" put me off, because I wasn't much interested
in blues and boogie. Imagine my surprise when I eventually heard those songs!

March 5, 1972: We arrived at Winterland after the show had started and as my
dose was kicking in hard. I was pretty overwhelmed, but I felt enough of the
magic to motivate myself to learn more. Various bits of music stuck in my
mind from that first show, and in the ensuing weeks I got hold of the records
and started to sort out what I'd heard.

It was the songwriting that grabbed me first. The Dead didn't sound or feel
much like the singer-songwriter stuff I was into; these were intriguing
lyrics, and every song was a world unto itself: the moods and emotional tones
were bittersweet, pretty at times, powerful but never brutal. These were
songs that didn't tell you everything they knew on first listen; you can come
back to these words and musical settings again and again without losing in-
terest, and you can learn something new at any time. How the singer delivers
the lyric, how the rhythm section defines the groove, how hard they hit the
climaxes, and how gentle the ballads. You could walk out of a Grateful Dead
concert with a new perspective on life, and I did on more than one occasion.
I got a lot of thinking done at Dead shows, and sometimes received useful
inspiration for projects I was working on.

The Dead's performances were different every time. These were not rote
rehashes of songs perfected in the studio; they were authentically fresh,
real-time examinations of the material in the moment. Because of this inten-
tional variability, and the lyrics that insinuate and sketch rather than
declare and define, we kept coming back for more and more.

In an interview some years later, David Crosby told me he thinks of Grateful
Dead music as "electronic Dixieland": every instrument has a place in the
pulse of the song, and everybody is "soloing" at once, listening and respond-
ing to the others, building something unique. When it's really working, musi-
cal expressions emerge from the discourse and take on a life of their own.

I think of it as "spontaneous midair architecture."
  

    
Susan says I could have just asked, "When did you get on the bus?"

Both of your responses speak to the primacy of the concert experience
to fully grokking the Dead. I remember the bumper stickers claiming,
"There Is Nothing Like a Grateful Dead Concert" -- looking back, I had
a FOMO envy of this shared experience. This was confirmed by another
insight I learned from Susan -- that the community of Deadheads was
a huge part of the appeal. It sounds like the ideal of a church, the
shared communion of sincere believers in a degree unmatched by other
bands, except perhaps the Beatles.

Was that aspect present for you early on? Did you always have the same
desire to, as we say now, process the experience with others?
  

    
And I'll set up another one:

The "intentional variability" is something I didn't understand until
much later; variability in the set list, in how the songs segued into
each other, or didn't; in how each song might be transformed musically,
rhythmically, emotionally -- and also in how well each of these decisions
might be executed night after night. There's a certain raggedness that
I was unable to appreciate then. It's a kind of bravery, the willingness
to go out on limb for the sake of doing something new, which Gary would
have experienced often in his jazz explorations, perhaps.

Consider that a prompt to write about spontaneous midair architecture
(which is like dancing about integrative biology, I hear).
  

    

At the time I first started falling for the Dead, I'm not sure that
their fans had started thinking of themselves as part of a discrete
community. If such a community existed at all, it was just a small
subset of a looser, more general community of like-minded
countercultural weirdos. I can say that when I started attending a
little alternative high school on the Upper West Side in the fall of
1967, there were maybe a dozen people toward whom I just naturally
gravitated, and I'd find out that quite a few if not most of them were
into that odd band from the Haight-Ashbury. But as I hadn't gotten the
Dead bug yet, that wasn't what drew me to them. They just happened to be
the sharpest, funniest, most authority-resistant people in the school,
whose off-the-wall sensibilities and eclectic cultural tastes overlapped
nicely with mine - people with whom a conversation could segue from The
Beatles to the films of Truffaut and Godard (or the Marx Brothers);
who got excited when Sonny Rollins walked into our regular lunchtime
burger joint. So, I was finding a kind of tribe, but an affinity for the
Dead didn't have much if anything to do with it.

As for "intentional variability" - yes, that became a huge part of what
I valued about the Dead once I reached the point in that Rubicon-
crossing year of 1969 where I got in the habit of attending multiple
shows in close proximity of one another. And that variability extended
to what people responded to in the music, which can have a lot to do
with the time and setting in which they first encountered it. David's
testimony that it was the songs that first grabbed him underscores a big
variation in his introduction to the Dead and mine, which has a lot to
do with simple chronology, but probably also with what our own
formative experiences had been leading up to our being seduced by this
music. The songs weren't as significant a factor in enticing me, because
songs simply weren't perceived as the Dead's strong suit prior to the
rapid period of growth in that department that had its first full
flowering with "American Beauty" and "Workingman's Dead." Their first
studio album had been mostly peppy rock reworkings of blues, folk and
jug band tunes, with a couple of rudimentry stabs at psychedelic pop
originals. Their second, "Anthem of the Sun," was a wildly eccentric
aural collage which musically referenced the decidedly non-pop likes of
John Cage, Henry Cowell and Charles Ives. Since I already had an
appetite for some pretty out-there, dissonant music, what initially drew
me in wasn't the songs - although when they got good at those in the
writing, playing and (sometimes) singing department, it only gave me one
more element to love.
  

    
A nice first set going on here. I can't wait for the drums and space!
  

    
Well everybody's dancin' in a ring around the sun
Nobody's finished, we ain't even begun.
So take off your shoes, child, and take off your hat.
Try on your wings and find our where it's at.

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Come and join the (party every day)...
  

    
I was there for the music at first, and only became aware of the size and
strength and specificity of the culture after a few years.

I didn't travel to shows all that music, and I never did a whole tour. I was
already into my own life and work.
  

    
Since I didn't have proximity, I first became a fan of the band
strictly through their recordings. I enjoyed the first two albums,
but the one that got me was Aoxomoxoa, especially the songs on side
1. By the time I saw a live show, I was into the music and ready to
roll. That was in 1970, a concert in San Antonio, Texas featuring
the Dead plus Quicksilver Messenger Service, It's a Beautiful Day,
and John Mayall.
  

    
One of the things that accounts for the Dead's longevity and popularity is
that their music evolved over the years, and their fans didn't age out. You
might graduate from headbanger music when the hormones subside and you're
exposed to other stuff - but most of the people who got on the bus during the
feral psychedelic period stayed with them when they started writing more
songlike songs, playing acoustic instuments, etc. Some complained about this
or that change along the way - and I suppose there are a few who declared
themselves done with it after Pigpen's demise, for example - but I think the
Dead's changes only expanded their universe without alienating older segments
of the audience.
  

    
Always a contingent at Deadco and Wolf Bros shows of young deadheads
who certainly weren't born until long after Jerry died.
  

    
It certainly seems that something in the band's music continued to attract
new fans in a way that other contemporary bands (thinking especially of
Jefferson Airplane/Starship) did not. It evolved without losing its core,
that continuing collective psychedelic boogie blues musical experiment.

Susan and I are a few years younger than what we might call the first
wave of fans; she first heard the Dead in high school in the late '70s and
saw her first show in 1980 in Boston. On the strength of that experience
decided to attend college in California to be nearer to the band. I
can't think of another band that held that kind of aura for people.
(It's our anniversary today; forgive me for continuing to evoke her
experience here.)

I wonder if for her then, and perhaps for the post-Jerry fans, there was
a sense of a romanticized view of the Summer of Love -- "I wasn't there,
but this is the next best thing" -- that still existed, at least for
the extended length of a Dead show?
  

    
And another slow-pitch:

Part of the band's continued growth of fans may be connected to the aura
of wonder around Jerry Garcia, which seemed to increase after his death.

How did Jerry figure in your early connections to the band and how did
you adjust those feelings through his life changes and ultimate demise?
  

    
I do think that much of the '60s culture survives in the Grateful Dead scene,
but I can't tell you who came for the music and who came for the scene.
Appreciable proportions of both, I'd guess. For me, it was first and foremost
the music.

Jerry's charisma was and is an undeniably major factor in the popularity of
the band and the music. He was a reliable source of incandescent inspiration
for much of his life, and it was ALL about the music with him; lord knows he
didn't dress loudly, nor did he do muh onstage other than play and sing.
  

    
muh -> much!
  

    
I could share my story of how I denied being on the bus until it was
inevitable that I was.  Grouch Marx Comes to mind.  "I wouldn't join
any group that would have me as a member."
  

    
Please do!
  

    
Yes, please!
  

    
I saw the Dead somewhere between 50 and 60 times.  This pleases no
one.  To Deadheads I'm not a real Deadhead, and everyone else thinks
I'm a lunatic!
  

    
Screw that. No one gets to decide whether you're a Deadhead or not, and the
number of shows you attended is irrelevant.
  

    
I’d love to hear more fan stories from Deadheads and lunatics,
either on or off the Well, either pre- or post-Jerry. What was a
peak moment? Or what caused you to move on? Or, because I know this
has happened, what brought you back? (Susan thoroughly enjoyed
watching videos fo the last run of shows by The Dead led by Bob Weir
and John Mayer, her first post-Jerry concert experience.)

This leads us into an important part of David and Gary’s recent
work: Tales from the Golden Road, part of which involves eliciting
interesting fan stories. You guys are tremendously patient and
generous with the call-ins -- talk about improvisation and being in
the moment!  
  

    
The peak moment that comes to me first was the concert at the Coliseum Arena
in Oakland -- site of several shows for me -- when Jerry returned to action
after his hospitalization. They led off with "Touch of Grey," with its
chorus of "I will get by / I will survive," and the whole house was
screaming and in tears.
  

    
That was quite a moment! And that whole three-day run was loaded with poig-
nant lines that the crowd responded to. "Hand me my old guitar... pass the
whiskey 'round... won't you tell everybody you meet that the candyman's in
town!"