Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Tales is great fun. People tend to talk about how patient we are with the
rambling calls, but we don't get that many troublesome (in anyway) calls.
THe occasional wanderer in search of a punch line, and VERY rarely someone
who is clearly too high to be counted on. And I can think of maybe one or two
callers in the last few years who came in looking for trouble (of the "Jerry
would have supported Trump" ilk)...
  

    
One of my Deadheadiest moments happened in the Kaiser parking lot,
where I realized that the bemused hippie walking towards me was one
of the kids I went to elementary school with. Hadn’t seen him in
maybe 20 years.

Me: “Jeff? Jeffrey A******?”

He just cracked a slow smile, like it wasn’t a surprise to see me at
all. “Hey, Mary, how you doing?” And on he trucked.
  

    

Apologies for being out of the conversational loop for a bit. Have had a
couple of busy days and just now settling in at home for a bit. But I've
continued thinking about the topics under discussion here (well, much as
I've been doing for about 55 years!), so I'll try to catch up a bit.

Will talk about Tales in particular, but I want to circle back and
address some of Scott's excellent questions and observations nearer the
top of the conversation.

For example:

>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.

I'm not sure if Airplane/Starship is the best example, if only because
both those Jeffersons just didn't stick around as working entities as
long as the Dead. Indeed, just as the GD was starting to establish
itself outside San Francisco as anything more than an obscure band with
a tiny but loyal cult of fans, the Airplane, the first real breakout act
from the Bay Area scene, was already in the first throes of falling
apart, with drummer Spencer Dryden leaving early in 1970 and the band's
founder and one of its principal writers and singers, Marty Balin,
following later this year. After a couple more years generally
considered a big step down from the Airplane's best work, Jorma Kaukonen
and Jack Casady were also gone, turning Hot Tuna from side project into
their main gig. As for Jefferson Starship, that also started as a side
project - Paul Kantner gathering a bunch of his most talented pals to
make a solo record reflecting his sci-fi passions. When Jefferson
Starship was formed a few years later out of some of the ashes of the
Airplane's final crash, it was a much more polished enterprise not
bearing much resemblance to the fierce, feral power its predecessor
could display at its best, but managed to have a brief period of major
success, with Marty Balin returning to the fold to provide a massive hit
with the very un-Airplane-like "Miracles." After a few more albums of
similar material, relationships in the band began to fray again, Balin
exited once more, followed by Kantner and then the truly appalling
devolution into the band simply called "Starship," which hit it big for
awhile with L.A.-produced dreck like "We Built This City" and "Nothing's
Gonna Stop Us Now," and helped obliterate any residual affection that
fans of the old SF scene might have held for the band due to Grace
Slick's sticking around for what she came to acknowledge was too long.
So, the comparatively short duration of the Airplane's greatest period,
combined with the travesty that Starship campaign, had the unfortunate
effect of obscuring some of the original band's genuinely great work
apart from the handful of hits that continue to turn up on the playlists
of nostalgia-driven radio formats.

As for other bands that emerged in roughly the same period as the Dead
and proved at least somewhat similarly durable and capable of
maintaining considerable fan loyalty, I'm still not sure there's any
exactly comparable example. It occurs to me that if you look outside the
Bay Area scene, the closest you might come would be the Allman Brothers
Band, which formed a few years after the Dead and for at least a time in
the early 70s surpassed them in popularity. And you would hear of people
who would go to every single show in one of the ABB's marathon runs at
the Beacon Theatre - which was something I never quite got, because
while I always greatly respected the Allmans and acknowledged that they
were very, very good at what they did, whenever I'd catch them live, I'd
sense a sameness in not just their setlists but in the way they played
the songs on those lists - and not just over the course of a 15-night
stand or a tour, but over decades. When I saw them not long before they
disbanded in 2014, I was struck - and not in a great way - by how much a
performance of, say, "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" or "Whipping Post"
sounded *just* like it did the first time I heard them in 1970 at
Fillmore East - with no structural alteration or different chord
voicings, or breaking form into genuinely spontaneous collective
improvisation. In other words, no chance of failure, because no risk.
So, the Allmans seemed to me a band that mastered what they did well
very early on and stuck with it, not displaying much creative growth
beyond the mid-70s (a possible mitigating factor being the youthful
energy that somewhat revitalized the formula with the later introduction
of players like Jimmy Herring, Oteil Burbridge and Derek Trucks in the
band's last decade or so). Still, they managed to maintain a loyal
audience through the most tried-and-true fan service - giving an
audience pretty much exactly what they showed up expecting to hear.
Which is a perfectly fine way of doing business, but far less appealing
to me than what I and apparently many others valued most about the Dead.

It all comes down, I think, to that "intentional variability."
  

    

OK, I confess... in all that bloviation about why the appeal of
Jefferson Airplane and others didn't prove so durable, I didn't even
touch on - except maybe in that last line - about why the Dead's appeal
*did* endure, grow, and cross generational lines. So I guess I'd better
try!

More to come after I've had some dinner...
  

    
It must have been word of mouth for a long time. And then Deadheads became
an institution, maybe starting with the newsletter -- which I remember well.
And I believe I first heard of the Well in a handout at the old Bill Graham
Theater by City Hall. Grassroots stuff. The Dead were underground.
  

    
To pile on the metaphor, the Dead's appeal endured and grew because they
made good soil (the music), watered the ground well, and the community arose
like grass into the old-growth prairie it is today.
  

    
that is a great metaphor.

I grew up in San Francisco and had a sitter before I could be
trusted to be on own as a latch key kid who was much older than me. 
He took me to my 1st show in Golden gate park when I was 7 or 8 (so
'67 or '68).  I still don't know what show or date it was no matter
how much I rack my brain.  I like to guess, but I'm just note sure.
Growing up in the city and then moving down to Belmont when I was
10, I was surrounded by Grateful Dead music, and I really didn't
know it except everyone sang their song.  My summer day camp leaders
sang their songs, my friends' brothers and sisters sang their songs.
Heck, we even had had signals for some of the songs we learned in
camp.  As 

we moved again to San Jose as I was entering High School.  I went to
shows in the early and mid 70s and I thought, I really thought the
Dead were a Pop band, and being the rebellious kid, I went shows to
see them, but also to see Montrose, Bad Company, Santana, and Hot
Tuna and just about any Day on the Green.  I became a big Clapton
fan as well - and pretty much declined to see the popular band (in
my circles) Grateful Dead unless there were a bunch of us going.
In the later part of the 70s, I became a big blues fan and followed
the records and music of BB King, Freddy King, Muddy Watters, Bobbby
Blue Bland and the like.  I even worked at a small radio station for
a while that played a blues show while I was attending community
college in Cupertino CA. I took off after my 1st year of college for
the summer when I heard that the Dead were going to play in Oregon
at a stadium with Santana, the Outlaws, and Eddie Money... and it
was going to kick off a counterculture festival the next weekend
(these 2 things were not related, but the happenstance of them being
so close together on the Calander was my calling. - and I was in!  I
ended up hitching hiking up and down the west coast for the summer
picking up odd jobs and meeting new friends along the way. 

Things do change and I ended up joining the Army in '79.  When I got
to my first station at Fort Bragg NC, I finally realized there are
tons of folks that don't know the Grateful Dead or their music. Try
as I might to introduce the dead, there was only 1 other fellow in
my unit that got it and we both played albums and listened to the
music.
After active duty in 83, I drove back from Fort Bragg and caught a
show at the Nevada County Fairgrounds. I stayed in the Army Reserves
and would catch a dead show now and then, but still didn't call
myself a deadhead.  Reserve Duty asked me to become active again,
and as I worked in the Presidio and then Camp Parks in Dublin CA, I
found time to see shows on my meager salary by working for BGP.  I
think after a few shows working with BGP in the early 80s, I finally
realized that there was no denying it - yeah, I am a deadhead.
  

    

OK, I'm back *long* after dinner!

Andrew's correct about word-of-mouth playing a big role in creating that
fertile soil in which the Dead could flourish. But there was more in
play than that. At a critical - some might say make-or-break - point in
its history, the band, with a big assist from new management, devised
some conscious strategies that would effectively immunize it against
some of the music industry's most deeply entrenched rules about how
successful bands should conduct their careers.

The Dead spent 1968 and '69 making the most wildly experimental,
fearlessly transgressive music of their career. But they spent the same
period, well, just spending - digging themselves into a financial hole
that seemed to have no bottom. When they signed with Warner Bros in
1966, they had a unique clause written into their contract allowing them
unlimited time in the studio to make their records. That was no problem
with their first album, which they recorded and mixed very quickly, but
then came the next two - and especially their sophomore effort "Anthem
of the Sun," their huge ambitions for which were exceeded only by their
capacity for consuming massive amounts of studio hours that amounted to
on-the-job-training. What they apparently hadn't taken into account when
negotiating their record deal were two industry terms of art: "advance
against royalties" and "recoupable expenses" - meaning that when the
very large bill for all those hours came due, they'd have to pay it back
to Warners out of whatever profits the records generated. Which were
none. Unlike Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom in "The Producers," they could
*not* make more money with a flop than with a hit. The follow-up to
"Anthem," "AOXOMOXOA" was not quite as insane an indulgence and, unlike
its predecessor, contained some actual, recognizably cohesive songs,
albeit not commercial chartbusters. But the third record still cost too
much, in part because the band scrapped an early version they'd been
working on using an 8-track recorder, as 16-track machines had just
been introduced. So again, the album didn't make money, and the
hole got deeper. In truly desperate shape, the Dead resolved to reverse
course on two fronts: to learn how to make records more quickly, simply
and economically; and to apply themselves to creating songs that people
might actually enjoy listening to and, god forbid, radio stations might
even want to play. Fortunately, the band was already headed in the
latter direction by mid-1969. Garcia's longtime friend Robert Hunter had
been recruited as the Dead's in-house wordsmith. He'd contributed one
lyric to "Anthem" and all the words for "AOXOMOXOA," but the
collaboration really started to pay off as the Dead stepped ever-so-
slightly back from total experimental anarachy in their music and began
to revisit some of their earlier affinities for folk, bluegrass, country
and other American roots music, in part inspired by contemporaneous
works like The Band's "Music From Big Pink" and Dylan's "John Wesley
Harding" (and also by Garcia and Weir enjoying driving around together
and finding spots where they could pick up the signals of country
stations out of places like Bakersfield and Fresno. They were also avid
viewers of Porter Waggoner's TV show, in no small part because they had
huge crushes on Porter's protege and singing partner, the young Dolly
Parton). Through 1969, the Dead kept introducing and developing
excellent new songs (and expanding their repertoire of country and
related covers), while keeping focus on their greatest strength -
playing live shows for a still fairly small but devoted and steadily
growing group of fans - many of whom would prove to be repeat customers,
drawn by the band's increasingly diverse setlists and a reliance on
improvisation that made every performance a new experience. They also
took advantage of their reputation for great shows by fulfilling a
long-standing wish to make a live album that could encapsulate the feel
of those shows - and would also enable them to turn in a record to
Warners at minimal cost. Recorded at several San Francisco shows
concurrent with work on "AOXOMOXOA," Released that November, "Live/Dead"
got rave reviews, solidified the Dead's cred as one of the greatest live
rock acts, and drew more listeners to shows to check the band out, while
also representing a first step toward fiscal responsibility and
solvency.

The Dead entered 1970 with some much-needed positive momentum, armed
with a batch of fine new material and ready to get back to work both on
the road and in the studio.

But like the song says, when life looks like Easy Street, there is
danger at your door.

(To be continued...)
  

    
And here you are!!!
  

    
Gary slipped! Great stuff, but: paragraph breaks!!!
  

    
It would not have occurred to me how important the country music
scene of Bakersfield and Fresno would have been to their
development, but yeah, of course!
  

    

>Great stuff, but: paragraph breaks!!!

Yeah, I kinda realized that as I posted. OTOH, I am on record as calling
the Dead "the greatest run-on sentence in the history of music," so...
  

    
I've never thought of myself as a deadhead because I didn't feel the
need to go to all the shows in a run and I didn't listen to them in
a way that let me compare one performance to another. My listening
was in the moment. I'd imagine geometric patterns to make sense of
the ways the players interacted during jams. I'd be blown away by
the moments when they slipped into a beautifully intricate pattern
that seemed to elevate the whole audience, and those were what I
craved and what kept me coming back. That and the moments of all-out
rock and roll, like an encore of Johnny B. Good that made the band
seem larger than life or a Greatest Story with the vocals distorted
to enhance the lyrics.
  

    
I guess I'm a sucker for a song with a long introduction that builds
the expectation and the band energy for a breakout of musical
energy. One that has stayed with me for a long time is from my
second or third Dead show, "Good Lovin'" from 8/19/1970. I listened
to that yesterday to see whether it was as good as I remembered. It
was way better.
  

    

Now...

At the end of our last peril-filled chapter, things seemed to be looking
up for the Grateful Dead, with a growing book of accessible songs ready
to record, and their popularity as a touring draw steadily ascending.

But then, there was Lenny.

Lenny Hart.

Lenny is really a whole, long story unto himself, but I'll just give you
the basics:

In 1969 Lenny Hart, father of Mickey, persuaded the Dead to make him
their manager, promising to get them out of the dire financial straits
in which they'd found themselves. There were things about Lenny's past
that probably should have set off some alarms, but he also projected
an adult-in-the-room sort of vibe that perhaps the band thought it
needed after some ill-starred years of stoned self-governance, so they
gave him the job, and things seemed to go OK for awhile. But as the year
wore on, members of the band's crew started thinking something wasn't
right - that the net proceeds from the band's gigs weren't adding up as
they should. The band - once described by Garcia as "pathologically non-
confrontational" - was slow to act, until their most trusted roadie
Larry "Ram Rod" Shurtliff, delivered a him-or-me ulitimatum regarding
Lenny. They finally demanded that Lenny turn over the company's books
for perusal. He refused, they fired him, and Lenny skedaddled with over
150k of the band's earnings. A helluva blow just as the guys were
starting to climb out of their crater of debt to Warner Bros.

But the Dead resolved to keep moving forward, record those excellent new
songs and keep writing more, and continue their increasingly successful
touring endeavors. To replace Lenny (who was caught and eventually paid
back at least some of what he'd stolen), the Dead brought in an old an
trusted friend who had worked with them in various capacities, Jon
McIntire. And they added one more player to the team - the one primarily
responsible for devising the crucial strategy I hinted at earlier, which
would help increase the band's audience size and financial health
significantly: Sam Cutler.

A colorful British character, Cutler had spent 1969 as road manager for
the Rolling Stones, overseeing what had been far and away the most
successful tour of their career to that point... that is, until
Altamont. After that historic catastrophe, the Stones pretty much
completely left Cutler holding the bag, instructing him to stay in the
States to deal with the blowback and pretty much shoulder the blame
while they returned to the UK to disavow any responsibility. They
underscored how on his own Sam was by declining to provide him with
airfare home. After a short time the Dead - who themselves hadn't
escaped Altamont with their reputation unscathed - took Sam in and gave
him a job - one of the great frying-pan-to-fire career moves ever.

I turned out to be a very smart hire, as Cutler, with experience in
organizing and running a tour at the highest level, quickly started
perusing the Dead's tour history over previous years. What he saw was
kind of an alarming mess in the way the tours were routed, the amount of
time squandered in unpromising markets for the band, etc. But he saw a
way out. Almost immediately he started identifying certain regions in
the country in which the band's drawing power was strongest and getting
stronger - primarily in the Northeast, and especially in cities like
Philadelphia, Boston and what was becoming *the* East Coast epicenter of
Dead Freak activity, New York. As note had already been made of that
phenomenon of fans returning for multiple shows in a given town, Sam
advised that the band start hitting those target market multiple times a
year, and filling in other dates elsewhere in the region, especially
among the huge concentration of colleges in the Northeast.

The Dead agreed to the new strategy, and it proved quickly and
dramatically effective. To cite one example - in 1970, they played at
least once in New York City or its near suburbs in every month except
April, August and December (and they actually had some dates scheduled
for that last month that they wound up postponing). The only times they
didn't come back East were when they were in the process of recording or
mixing the albums that would become "Workingman's Dead" and "American
Beauty."

(I can testify that the Dead's new way of doing touring business worked
like a charm for this NYC boy and GD devotee. In that year, I saw 35 - I
think - shows, and only had to travel outside a 90-minute radius of the
city twice: one trip to Middletown, CT in May, and then my first trip to
the West Coast ever for New Year's Eve in San Francisco. Other than
that, it was mostly shows at Fillmore East, its recently opened
competitor in Port Chester, The Capitol, and other random spots in
around town.)

That the Dead were making themselves so available in the Northeast would
also spawn the phenomenon of people taking in shows in multiple cities -
kind of the birth of the tourhead in microcosm.
  

    
That post reminded me of the "new manager" scene in Almost Famous:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvIcvW1jkv0>

I'd not heard the Lenny Hart story before; what a shit. I'm fascinated
by peeks into the machine behind rock bands, the logistics of touring
and recording, the need for the "adult in the room," etc.

The Grateful Dead was a big band, with six, seven, even eight members
onstage if I read the history right (when Pigpen was still there and
the had joined). Seems like a difficult way to make money, make
decisions, plan tours, etc. 
  

    

>  I'd imagine geometric patterns to make sense of the ways the players in-
>  teracted during jams. I'd be blown away by the moments when they slipped
>  into a beautifully intricate pattern that seemed to elevate the whole
>  audience, and those were what I craved and what kept me coming back.

Yes! I have had distinctly visual responses to this music at times, too.
  

    

Gail Hellund Bowler was the office manager for the GD when Lenny's theft was
discovered. Her tale of that day is one of my favorite stories in THIS IS ALL
A DREAM WE DREAMED: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD.
  

    
Sam's version of the story in YOU CAN'T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT is a great
read, as well.
  

    
So, back to Gary and David: some more biography, please. A series of
interrelated questions:

How did you meet? Do I remember it was before the Well existed? 

How did you find the Well, and did one of you pull the other in? 

I have often heard the Dead, via the <gd.> conference and its later
spinoffs, was a strong factor in the early Well's success.

I've always been fascinated to read that before we had the abilitiy to
exchange MP3s, people were sharing text-only setlists! And I suppose
taping shows was also a factor -- do I remember the term "tape tree"?

And finally, how did you end up doing projects together -- I believe
you've been in bands and recording projects?
  

    

I'm vague on exactly when David and I met! We ran in overlapping circles
of friends and professional associates and lived not far from one
another, but I'm not sure when direct contact was established. But yes,
probably at least slightly pre-Well - or *way* pre-Well for me, because
while David is one of the true founding fathers of this community, I am
a relative bandwagon-jumping newbie - meaning I've been here a mere 29
years, hitting 30 next August. So, it was definitely David through whom
I first heard of The Well, and was most responsible for luring me down
this delightful rabbit hole - which took awhile in part because I didn't
even own a computer until the early 90s, although I'd learned some of
the bare rudiments in my work at BGP and Grateful Dead Merchandising.

If I'm remembering right - and there is NO guarantee of that - our first
substantive interactions happened through our shared friendship with the
wonderful and eccentric experimental guitarist Henry Kaiser. My first
firm memories of hanging with David are from a sushi bar we frequented
on Piedmont Avenue, the owner of which was a good friend of Henry's. I
knew of David through his journalistic pursuits, primarily with BAM (Bay
Area Music) magazine. Until I started at BGP in 1983, David probably
wouldn't have known of my pursuits at all, unless he'd been a customer
at one of the series of used record stores that provided me employment
in the late 70s/early 80s. But once we'd met, we quickly found the
common ground of Dead fandom, among other things. The relationship
became more solid by the mid-80s, when I was recruited, via some of my
BGP associations, to help put together KPFA's first fundraising marathon
day built around the Grateful Dead, and David came on board for the next
one.

After that came our first shared endeavors as musicians. Henry Kaiser,
it turned out, had been an avid Deadhead since his teens, but hadn't
revealed that side of himself in his own work until 1988, when he put
out an album called "Those Who Know History Are Doomed To Repeat It," a
collection of covers of songs he loved, in characteristically oddball
interpretations and a crazy range of selections, from Captain Beefheart
tunes to the "Andy Griffith Show" theme to "Ode To Billy Joe." Included
were two tracks of Grateful Dead material: a medley of "Dark Star/The
Other One," featuring Bill Frisell's band sans Frisell himself; and a
Dead rarity called "Mason's Children" - song they'd never released after
considering it for inclusion on "Workingman's Dead," and dropped from
their live repertoire rather quickly after just a handful of
performances in 1969 and '70. That track featured guitar and vocals by
one David Gans. Around the time of that release, Henry did some gigs
with David and others that featured GD material, and when the bass
player from that group departed, I was recruited to take over. We
adopted the name Crazy Fingers and our mission was to do some of the
most obscure Dead tunes we could find - things that had been out of the
GD live rotation for years - and to play them with as little reverence
as possible. Because of this approach, and because Dead cover bands
weren't nearly as ubiquitous as they would become, we got some notice
for this, and even got booked for what was for me by far the most
fulfilling gig we'd ever play - at the Knitting Factory, the then-
fairly-new epicenter of New York's emerging Downtown music scene - a
creative laboratory that was home to the brilliant experimentation of
people like John Zorn, John Lurie's Lounge Lizards, Medeski, Martin &
Wood, Bill Frisell and many others. Getting to put the Dead's music in
the context of the 20th Century Avant-Garde was my fondest wish come
true.

Will get to some of that other stuff momentarily!
  

    
I saw Henry Kaiser play once, probably in the late '80s. He opened for
The Bears, Adrian Belew's band after his first three albums with King
Crimson. I was kind of marvelling at Kaiser: a solo guitarist creating
a solid wall of noise, no songs, just experimental weirdness, while no
one seemed to pay attention to him.
  

    
Henry is one of a kind!

I once spent some quality time onstage at the old Sweetwater, between Henry
and saxophonist David Murray - two fire hydrants of sound! I thought about
how Bob Weir felt as a youngun, trying to find something meaningful to play
between Garcia and Lesh.

"Mason's Children" was my professional recording debut!

As Gary notes, we worked together on lots of KPFA stuff, including live
broadcasts from the Greek Theater and a series of fund-raising marathons.  In
'92, Gary suggested the theme "Grateful Dead in the Gone World" for our
winter marathon (16 hourrs!), and we interviewed several people on the topic
of improvisation.

Somewhere along the line, Gary and Phil Lesh asked me to take over producing
their monthly KPFA show, first known as Rex Radio and later rechristened Eyes
of Chaos/Veil of Order (inspired by a poem by Novalis).

Gary sat in on bass with my old band the Reptiles a few times, too.

So our friendship and collaboration are nearly 40 years old!

I was hired by Sirius Satellite Radio to consult on the creation of the
Grateful Dead Channel, which launched in the fall of 2007. In December of
that year the management suggested a "round-table" program, assembling some
experts to discuss some matter of interest.  I recommended Gary as my cohost.

For the first one, in January of 2008, we invited Eric Christensen to be our
guest. He was a longtime producer at Channel 7 here in the Bay Area, and
before that the PD of a music station - and he had just released a documen-
tary on the Trips Festival, a seminal event in hippie history. The broadcast
went VERY well, and the management decided to make it a weekly feature - and
we immediately dropped the single-theme idea and just opened the phones. We
have guests - mostly on the phone but occasionally in person - but the bulk
of our content is in the form of phone calls from random listeners.

I don't mind telling you right in front of him that I couldn't imagine a bet-
ter partner for this stuff. He knows a huge amount about our culture - not
just the Dead, but vast realms of music from all eras, and also film and
theater and television.
  

    

Well, thanks, pal! Feeling's mutual!

Yes, the notion of doing a primarily guest/interview-driven "roundtable"
show mostly went out the window pretty quickly once the rapid and
positive response to our first episode inspired our bosses to
immediately have the show go weekly rather than monthly as originally
planned. We had initially thought of punctuating the interviews with
maybe a few listener calls per show, but we found the phone lines
getting completely filled week after week, and that more or less became
the central format. I greatly enjoy the interactions with the callers
(although there are those rare exceptions!), but part of me has been
hoping for awhile that we can find our way back to some kind of middle
ground that would allow for more in-depth discussion. If I were to pick
a personal alltime favorite episode, right at the top or very near to it
would be one we did with two great musicians - Billy Martin (of Medeski,
himself and Wood) and Steven Bernstein (brilliant and subversive
trumpeter/arranger/bandleader from Millennial Territory Orchestra,
Sexmob and collaborations with everyone from Levon Helm to Lou Reed).
They were there specifically to promote a benefit for the Creative Music
Studio (co-founded by Ornette Coleman and Karl Berger) that was going to
feature some Dead-adjacent players, but the episode wound up being a
really deep dive into the nature of improvisation itself, with
prospective callers asked to stick to that general subject matter - not
a difficult thing for those in our audience who love that aspect of the
Dead's music. So, I'd like to create more opportunities for that kind of
thing to happen.
  

    
I admit I'm a little confused: there are/were several different radio
shows, I think:

The Grateful Dead Hour, first weekly on KFOG, later syndicated?

Eyes of Chaos/Veil of Order on KPFA -- monthly then weekly?

Tales from the Golden Road on SiriusXM -- weekly

Dead to the World Marathon -- yearly on KPFA

Is that roughly correct? Can you talk a bit about the different
approaches/audiences for each? Spirit of improvisation aside, you must
do some prep for each.