The Shakedown Archives

Tonight, out to the high country: a cattle ranch in the far west of Wyoming, in Sublette County near the little town of Pinedale, where a ranch kid named John Perry Barlow grew up and a guitar player named Bob Weir once spent a summer driving a tractor into ditches. The man who wrote the words to Mexicali Blues and Cassidy and Estimated Prophet really did fix fences and move cattle and worry about the price of hay. A long, calm sto...

Tonight, one house: a tall old Victorian on Ashbury Street in San Francisco, a few blocks up the hill from the most famous corner of the sixties, where the Grateful Dead lived for a little while when the neighborhood around them was the center of everything. A kitchen, a crowded parlor, a flight of front steps. A hero of the Beat Generation slept in the attic, a Beatle knocked and found nobody home, and the people who lived there s...

Tonight, back before the beginning: a few small towns on the Peninsula south of San Francisco in the first years of the sixties, where young people with banjos, washboards and borrowed guitars slept in cars, crowded into coffeehouses, and played old songs for whoever would listen. Folk songs, bluegrass, and a jug band. A bookstore that let people stay all day, a room above a pizza parlor, and a music shop where a banjo teacher wait...

Tonight, two drummers: a boy in a garage in Palo Alto, and a boy in a closet in Brooklyn with his father's old sticks, who ended up side by side at the back of the same stage for the better part of thirty years. Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and the strange, rolling thing people came to call the Rhythm Devils. Almost nobody in this story agrees on who introduced them or what night the second drummer first sat down. A long, calm sto...

Tonight, an organ player: Merl Saunders, from the fog and the hills of San Francisco, and the guitar player who kept turning up at his side for twenty-five years, Jerry Garcia. Small clubs on weeknights, a pizza parlor where dancing was against the rules, and a bar in Berkeley where the band had to walk through the crowd to reach the stage. Two friends taught each other things neither could have learned alone, and years later, when...

Tonight, one man and the rooms he built around a band: Bill Graham, a promoter from San Francisco with a clipboard and a temper, and the Grateful Dead, who played his halls for most of their long working life. The Fillmore up its flight of stairs on Geary, the old ice rink called Winterland, and a great many New Year's Eves. He shouted, they wandered off, and for the better part of three decades they kept coming back to each other....

Tonight, the early summer of the Grateful Dead's first record, when the band stepped off a plane in New York for the very first time. A parade down St. Mark's Place, a key to the East Village made of white carnations, a free show in Tompkins Square Park, and two weeks in a low brick room on Bleecker Street. San Francisco gets the credit for that summer, but New York had its own version, older and louder and a good deal more nervous...

Tonight, one man who almost never stood in the middle of anything: John Kahn, the bass player at Jerry Garcia's left shoulder for twenty-five years, outside the Grateful Dead entirely. The Monday night jams, the bluegrass band, the organ trios, and the long nights at the Keystone and the Warfield, with a quiet man picking the songs. He hired the bands, chose the material, and held the floor, and he is the one standing just off to t...

Tonight, the winter the Grateful Dead made the Carousel Ballroom on Market Street their own room, and the night Jerry Garcia grabbed Phil Lesh at the top of a dressing-room stairwell. Lesh had frozen on stage, still grieving Neal Cassady, and nobody who was there agrees which night it was or what happened on those stairs. The tape was rolling, and those Carousel reels were spliced with studio sessions into Anthem of the Sun, the st...

Tonight, the quiet story of Keith Godchaux, the piano player who slipped into the Grateful Dead almost without anyone noticing and changed the whole sound of the band. A slow, calm story made for one thing, helping you fall asleep. Dim the lights, let the day go, and let it carry you off. CHAPTERS 0:00 Two jobs at the piano 6:56 Joining, the fall of 1971 13:04 What his playing changed 19:07 Europe, his peak 25:30 The argument in o...

Tonight, the story of Box of Rain, a song Phil Lesh wrote for his dying father, and the song the Grateful Dead chose, all the way at the end, for their very last goodbye. A slow, calm story made for one thing, helping you fall asleep. Dim the lights, let the day go, and let it carry you off. CHAPTERS 0:00 Phil Lesh's dying father 6:49 The lyrics, on many levels 13:08 American Beauty, 1970 19:15 Lesh's tender voice 25:20 Its rare p...

How Phil Lesh Quietly Rebuilt the Grateful Dead Sleep Story: after coming back from a liver transplant, instead of putting the old band back together, he gathered a pool of friends for a few nights on a San Francisco stage. Donna Jean Godchaux back after a long absence, Steve Kimock in the Garcia chair after Bob Weir first said no, and Trey Anastasio and Page McConnell of Phish crossing their own band's line. Soft sleep-story pacin...

Tonight we go to a racetrack in upstate New York in the summer of nineteen seventy-three, for the biggest concert anyone had ever seen, and for the story of the band that walked into it carrying more grief than most bands survive. A slow, calm story made for one thing, helping you fall asleep. Dim the lights, let the day go, and let it carry you off. CHAPTERS 0:00 Macon, the autumn of nineteen seventy-one 6:31 Scar tissue, and Wat...