Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead & the Rise of American Counterculture [Episode 316]

Author Jim Newton unravels the legendary story of the Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia, who embodied the essence of American counterculture. 

Purchase a copy of Here Beside the Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and an American Awakening

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Read Jim Newton's UCLA bio page

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Coming up on Booked on Rock. It's the story of
the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia and the lasting influence of
American counter culture with author Jim Newton, who we're totally
boomed rock and roll.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
I mean, I'll leave you. You're reading Little Hands says
it's time to rock and roll roll, I totally booked.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
Welcome back to Booked on Rock, the podcast for those
about to read and rock. Our guest is Jim Newton,
who is the author of the new book Here Beside
the Rising Tide Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead, and an
American Awakening. Welcome to the podcast, Jim.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
It's a real pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
We're recording on the last day of August. And Jerry
Garcia was born August first, nineteen forty two, passed away
August ninth, nineteen ninety five. The book is an in
depth look at Jerry's life The Grateful Dead, but also,
as it says in the title, an American Awakening, it's
an exploration of counts culture and it's importance right up
through to this day. So if you could talk about

(01:04):
what inspired you to tell Jerry's story, but also with
the sixties counter culture interwoven throughout.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeah, well again, thank you for having me. A couple
of ways to answer that question. The first one I
have been I was a fan of the Dead growing up.
I grew up in paul Alta, went high school in
pal Alto. They were sort of around me as long
as I could remember. But back in the ear late
seventies early eighties, I think is when the culture around
the Dead really made an impression on me, and I

(01:32):
really felt like it was something to take note of,
that it was something different about that music culture than
any other bands or any of the music that I
had encountered, at least up to that point and maybe
ever So that was kind of one thread of interest,
was to make sense of that culture and to try
to convey the power that it had on me and

(01:53):
so many other people. At the same time. You know,
my main sort of day job is writing about politics
and government, and I've been doing that for the Los
Angeles Times and Blueprint Magazine and a bunch of other
places for many, many years. So I was interested separately
in counterculture and in the ways that cultural figures move politics.

(02:17):
Someone once wrote that no one did more to end
the Vietnam more than Bob Dylan, which is an interesting
statement if you think about it, since Bob Dylan really
never even talked about the Vietnam War and certainly wasn't
in a position to end it in a way that
Richard Nixon was. And so that idea, that idea of
the interplay of culture and politics has long interested me,

(02:37):
and in fact, every other book that I've written is
about politics and culture. The big difference this time is
that the culture is kind of in the front of
the story and the politics are more behind the story. Anyway,
that's a long answer to your question, but I've been
interested in counterculture in politics and in Garcia separately and
relatedly for many years.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
I was fun or interesting because it depends on who's
in the white house. It does affect music that we hear.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
Yeah, sometimes bad white houses produced good music right the sixties,
and yeah, I mean music is good when it's speaking
out against some or reacting in opposition to something, even
if it's not directly addressing it, and that certainly describes
the grifful dead well.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
I think there are a couple painful moments in Jerry's
life early on that maybe casual fans listening may not
know the specifics about, so just if you could talk
about one the loss of his finger and the other
the emotional loss with the sudden death of his father.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
Two very traumatic episodes in back to back summers for
very young Jerry Garcia. In the first, he was in
the mountains in Santa Cruz at a cabin that his
family often vacationed in, and he and his brother were
playing around chopping wood. His older brother and Jerry Garcia
was Jerry was putting up little pieces of kindling on

(03:53):
a wooden sawhorse, and his brother was chopping them into
smaller pieces, and they were playing around with it, and
his brother accidentally chop Jerry's finger off. His mother, who
had been a nurse, tried to wrap it and rush
him to a hospital, but they were a long way away,
and he lost his finger. Of course, we all know
him now is iconically missing that middle finger of his
of the one hand. Yeah, not a great start for

(04:17):
a guitar player, obviously, but fortunately for him and for
all the rest of us, it was of not of
his fretting hand. It was his right hand, not his
left hand, and so he learned to play the guitar
without the finger he didn't never have to adjust to
not having a finger. But all of that, of course,
is in the future. In the moment, he's a four

(04:37):
year old boy who's just had his finger chopped off,
and so obviously a very rattling moment for him. And
then the far more traumatic moment the following summer, he
and his mother and father were up on a fishing
trip in northern California, and his father went out to fish,
slipped on a rock and drowned. A little bit of

(04:59):
conf fusion of memory as to whether Jerry actually witnessed
him drowning, but whether or not that's the case from
that point forward. Obviously he didn't have a father. His
mother was overwhelmed by the challenge of trying to raise
him and his brother, so she turned him the brothers
over to their grandparents. So he was separated from both
his mother and his father for a period. He developed asthma.

(05:21):
It was a very difficult young life for Jerry.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
His dad was just forty five, totally unexpected. It wasn't
like something that was coming. Yeah, that was traumatic. There's
a connection here with Frankenstein. When I read the book,
those two those two traumatic incidents kind of connect with this.
He had a fascination with Frankenston, and it just seems
like once he watched that movie, it was like he

(05:45):
was releasing all of that emotion in him that was
left by those events.

Speaker 2 (05:49):
Yeah, he saw the movie right about that time, and
it really touched that core of loss and of reinvention
and of magic, and to the very end of his
life regarded it as one of the most powerful movies
he'd ever seen. So, yeah, it made a real impression.
And you know that is the same. It's a little
bit after that period, but as he grows up on
the Peninsula in San Francisco, he discovers the arts and

(06:10):
community and I think he begins to find ways to
patch that real hole in his heart. And I think
it's no coincidence that the Grateful Dead Family as we
as it's often referred to, had a kind of a
familial structure. It felt like a community of artistic and
like minded folks, and so I think he very much,

(06:31):
maybe subconsciously, but built a community around him that, in
some ways, I think, patched the hole in his heart
left by those early days.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
Yeah, it's amazing. Ab and Costello meets Frankenstein that was
the first one he saw. Yeah, Dennis McNally was on here.
He was the publicist for the dead. He said, towards
the end of Jerry's life, he didn't want to do interviews.
He was just he was out of it at that point.
But the one time, the one time he did perk up.
Dennis said, there's a guy who wants to ask you

(06:59):
about Frankens. It was returning classics. WHOA And he immediately
woke up and he did the interview like that.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
You know, he loved it. It's one of the last
interviews of his life.

Speaker 1 (07:10):
I can't imagine Jerry Garcia in the military, but he
joined the army in February of nineteen sixty at the
age of seventeen, and he was discharged and then on
December twelfth, nineteen sixty he packs his things leaves the army.
And you're right that he went to Palo Alto with
a beat up car, which died on his way there.
But he soon settled in. Yet his life is without
a real purpose or focus, and that's until February twentieth,

(07:33):
nineteen sixty one. There's a moment in his early life
that has a profound impact on him. Again another moment
that impacts him. He later said that this is where
his life begins, and that was the slingshot. What happened.

Speaker 2 (07:47):
He was in a car with some friends. They were
living in and around Palo Alto at the time. They
got in the car late one night and as they
were driving one friend home, were in a terrible car accident.
The car flipped overturned through that most of the occupants
out of the car. One Paul Spiegel, remained with the

(08:07):
car and was killed, and it riveted Garcia's young Garcia's attention,
and it is looking back on his life, he often
pinpointed that is the moment where he realized that he
had been aimless and it was time to focus and
make something of his life. And obviously that lent itself

(08:28):
to music into what became a very compulsive need to
practice and to learn and to get better. But up
to that point, as you say, he'd really been sort
of drifting. He really made his way to the army
just because he had really no place else to go.
He was unsurprisingly a terrible soldier and didn't last long.
So he'd been kind of knocking around from one thing

(08:48):
to another. But he identified that car accident as a
moment where things began to take shape for him.

Speaker 1 (08:56):
Very anti authoritarian. So yeah again, seeing just picture him
in the army is just unbelievable. The formation of the
Grateful Dead, you write quote, their main singer didn't like
to perform, their bass player was still learning his instrument,
their leader hated to lead. They were the Warlocks, though
not for long. How did the Warlocks who eventually become

(09:16):
Grateful Dead come together?

Speaker 2 (09:17):
Yeah, you know. One of the many fun interviews I
got to do for this book was with Huey Lewis,
who grew up in the Brier music scene and knew
the members of the Grateful Dead, and also his mom
was connected to the beat Necks, and he has a
lot of connections to this story. And he pointed out
that something different about the way most musical enterprises come

(09:38):
together today and even in those days, from the way
the Dead did. So if you're forming a rock and
roll band or a country music band or whatever it
is today, you know, you would identify your musical needs,
you know, identify the best banjo player, you could find,
the best steel guitar player or whatever, and you'd build
it up that way as a musical enterprise. That's not

(09:59):
the way the Grateful Dead came together. The way the
Grateful Dead came together is a group of friends who
enjoyed each other, who discovered acid together and then learned
to play together. Garcia identified Phil Lesh as you know,
as a possible bass player, although Phil Lesh did not
play the bass when he identified him, so he liked him.
He was intrigued by Phil was a classical composer and

(10:22):
was trained in classical music. Bob Weird had been in
drug bands and was still a teenager at the time,
and so they all and Bill Kreutzman came to the
band as with a background in marching band music, so
they all brought their own sensibilities, but they didn't They

(10:43):
weren't picked because of their musual musical expertise. They were
picked because they fit together and they enjoyed each other.
And so the enterprise that developed the Great First of
Warlocks and then later changed their name to The Grateful
Dead is really a friendship model that became a musical enterprise,
not the other way around. And so in that sense,
I think it it helped give an atmosphere to the band,

(11:07):
and it helped them. I think identify with their audience.
They were. The early interplay with audiences was very much
less structure than we would think of today, so it
was the barrier between audience and and musician was much
more fluid. There is a casualness about their relationships, but
a seriousness about the music that is, if not unique

(11:31):
to the Gridful Dead, at least unusual to the Griffel Dead.

Speaker 1 (11:34):
What there differing accounts as far as when Jerry met
Bob Weir.

Speaker 2 (11:38):
There's a little confusion sometimes about it's a New Year's
it's New Year's Eve, but New Year's y's are always
hard to pin point because people always forget whether it's
which year is going into which?

Speaker 1 (11:47):
Right, Yeah, and they may have had a few two
in too many in them.

Speaker 2 (11:51):
Well, and also that too, which is by the way,
a problem with interviews throughout much of this but right,
Hitting people's memories down has been a little tricky. But
the fundamental story is everyone agrees on right, which is
that Weird was wandering around when New Year's Eve heard
music playing, was drawn to it, ended up playing that

(12:12):
evening with Garcia. They and then they played in various
musical configurations over the couple of years. Before they kind
of jailed first into the Warlocks and then the dead.
But that the basic story is sort of uncontested. It's
just exactly placing it in time and sometimes a little
tricky bo podcasts.

Speaker 1 (12:30):
We'll be back after this.

Speaker 2 (12:32):
We're going to take a break.

Speaker 1 (12:33):
I'll be back. One of the things I got out
of this book that I didn't know about from Dead
History is this lots towers in Los Angeles. This story
about is this in nineteen sixty six, and how Jerry
was impressed by the artistic expression by this one particular artist,
but he imagined an alternate version for his own artistic expression,

(12:56):
one that involved working with others rather than alone. And
this I found fascinating. First, could you explain what the
watch towers are were? And then can you talk about
how seeing the watch towers inspired Jerry?

Speaker 2 (13:08):
Yeah, Well, first of the watch towers are this very unusual,
very cool, odd structure set of structures here in Los
Angeles where I'm joining me from. They are It's ceramic
and rebar and they're tall and sort of ethereal and strange.
They've weathered a lot of attempts to tear them down
over the years. In more recent years they've been protected,

(13:31):
but early in their history they were built without any
real permission. And so one night after the wats asset test, Garcia,
who had been very high that night, he and other
members of the Grateful Dead and Mountain Girl and a
few others went out and saw the watch towers early
that morning the following morning, and he was trucked both

(13:52):
and anyone who sees them as struck by the sort
of beauty but also oddity of them, their very unusual
set of structures. But I think what seems to have
really made an impression with Garcia is the amount of
effort that went into building this edifice all alone, and
that that's really not the model that he wanted for

(14:14):
his artistic enterprise, not to spend his whole life laboring
on something that would be physical and iconic, but left
behind that. Instead, he was really interested in an experiential
model and something that the art would be the experience
of creating the art. And that I think, really as

(14:36):
well as anything can that really describes the Grateful Dead project. Right.
It's not albums, it's not edifices of music, it's the
experience of the music, and it goes a long way
I think toward explaining why they were always so powerfully
connected to audiences in live performance, and that they struggled

(14:58):
frankly to capture that on vinyl or later tape or
CD or whatever. But the point is they were that
the art really is in the relationship with the audience
as the music is coming a lot, and that's what
Garcia comprehended, probably for the first time that day and
really saw it. In contrast to the Watts, Towers.

Speaker 1 (15:20):
Just read a great book on The Wall of Sound,
which is about the band creating something for the audience
that everybody in the audience, no matter where they're sitting,
they're going to get the best listening experience in that
built and built and built until seventy four.

Speaker 2 (15:35):
Right, Yeah, The Wall Sound is a great book, by
the way, I just read it myself. But yeah, the
Wall Sound actually has a fairly short life in the
history of the day just because it was also extremely
cumbersome and really difficult to move from place to place.
But to your point, exactly right, I think it's a
manifestation of that commitment to providing audiences with as close

(16:01):
as they could to perfect sound. I never had the
opportunity to actually hear the wall sound. I came to
the Dead scene a couple of years after that, but
it is legendary.

Speaker 1 (16:10):
And history fantastic book Brian Anderson want to give due
credit to. The book is called Loud and Clear Griiffil
Dead's Wall of Sound in the Quest for Audio Perfection.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
Great title too, Yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:22):
How did LSD and ken Casey's acid test events in
the mid sixties and San Francisco have an effect on
the Dead's approach to playing and creating music?

Speaker 2 (16:30):
The acid tests are where the Dead takes shape. Really,
I think it's it is the formative moment for the Dead.
Up to that point, they were playing, learning their instruments,
playing a few small gigs Magoose Pizza or in Menlo
Park is a famous one or set of them. But
the acid tests are well, first of all, what they are.
They are. This is in a period where LSD was

(16:51):
popular and legal. LSTI didn't become illegal in California until
the end of nineteen sixty six, so starting in nineteen
sixty five. Kesey, who had experimented with LSD and other drugs,
and is of course the author of one flow of
the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion and several
other books after that. Kesey was interested in LSD and

(17:12):
the opportunities that created, visionary opportunities that created, and so
he created really what were parties initially where the Dead performed,
But that slightly misunderstands or mis COMPREHENSI I think what
they were doing. They arrived and played their instruments, sometimes
all evening, sometimes very briefly, but they weren't the main attraction.

(17:35):
People didn't come to hear the Grateful Dead. They came
to have this experience of LSD and lights and camaraderie
and enjoying each other and music. And so the Dead
would like everyone else, throw a dollar into the hat
and would participate in this event, in their case by performing.
But I think it's important both because it creates a

(17:59):
model of spontaneity and improvisation that of course becomes goes
on to define The Grateful Dead as a musical project.
But it also goes to this relationship that the Dead
had with its audience, with their audience, in that they're
wandering up and off on stage and off stage. There's
not a barrier between them and others who are participating.

(18:21):
That idea that the audience is fully participatory in the
experience define the Grateful Dead from that moment forward. I mean,
I can remember in the seventies and eighties and nineties
going to show as and if they didn't perform well,
feeling like I was partly responsible for that. I mean,
there is this sense that the audience was in on it, right,

(18:43):
that starts with the acid tests, and so I think
in many ways that's the most important contribution that the
Acid tests made to the Grateful Dead's history, is that
they imbued the dead with this sense of connection and
energy exchange with the audience.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
Jim Newton, he's the author of the new book Here
Beside the Rising Tide, Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead, and
an American Awakening. You have quotes from Jerry talking about
freedom in the book. He said, there is a lie
about what freedom is. What was his understanding of freedom?

Speaker 2 (19:14):
Yeah, I think he was trying to respond to the
idea that freedom was just licensed, that there was just
the just doing whatever you wanted whenever you wanted to
do it. And some of his notions about freedom also
grow up I think in opposition to this notion that
music ought to be free. The Grateful Dead probably performed

(19:35):
more free events than any band ever. Really, they were
constantly performing for free. But it was also important to
Garcia that people recognize that he and his bandmates needed
to make a living doing this, that it was it
was a work for them, that he had worked his
whole life to become good enough to perform for other
people and for people to enjoy it. So music isn't

(19:58):
free really, even if even if musicians sometimes make it
available for free, there's a cost to it, and there
is responsibility that goes with freedom too, however one defines it.
And so what I like about his reading back through
those interviews of that period is that it's a bit

(20:18):
of a response to what I think other people thought
that he thought about freedom. That people thought that people
outside the hate and outside the sort of hippie scene
in the nineteen sixties thought that all that freedom meant
to these young people was the opportunity to do drugs
and sort of cut loose from society, free of responsibility,
right and free of any obligations. That's not what he

(20:43):
meant by it, and you can hear him in those
interviews working his way to a more thoughtful and comprehensive
idea of freedom than just sort of dropping out.

Speaker 1 (20:54):
Yeah, that's what with counter culture. The beliefs of counter
culture started that way, and then as more people came
from outside of San Francisco and moved into San Francisco,
they just they clouded that whole belief up and they
were starting to believe, like, hey, I can just I
could be free of responsibility, free of and just have fun,

(21:14):
do whatever I want. And with the Dead becoming bigger
and bigger, they had to have a responsibility and they
had to make sure. Jerry, I'm sure this was not
something he enjoyed, but he had to understand this is
now a business.

Speaker 2 (21:30):
Yeah, Jerry Garcia's lifelong attempt to figure out what responsibility
meant for him. It was a real struggle. I mean,
in some ways he was irresponsible. He was not an
attentive father or husband. Of course, drugs eventually took a
very serious toll on him. He really did not want

(21:52):
to be regarded as the leader of the Grateful Dead,
hated to make decisions for the band, and yet every
other member of the band looked to him as their
central figure, if not exactly the leader. If you read
the memoirs of the other members of the Dead, it's
very tallying. They all are about their own experience of

(22:12):
the Dead and their relationship to Garcia, and so they
at least implicitly acknowledged Garcia, and sometimes explicitly acknowledged Garcia
as the central figure of their effort. Of course, the
Grateful Dead ended as the Grateful Dead per se when
Garcia died in ninety five. So in all those ways,
I think he spent a lifetime trying to avoid taking
responsibility for at least for certain things, but being drawn

(22:35):
back into it. It was especially by the nineties, when
the Dead was just this gigantic enterprise. It was very
difficult to avoid any responsibility for the band or for
its audience, and I think it wore him down. It
was really difficult for him to do that. He wanted
to be an artist, and he was an extraordinary artist.

(22:56):
He didn't want to be the leader of a California
corporation or of a movement, but sometimes he had to be,
and and did it kind of kicking and screaming, but
but did when he had.

Speaker 1 (23:08):
To, Like the Frankenstein Monster, it got out of control. Yeah,
Chapter seven is titled Summer of Love. You explore the
origins of counter culture, where did it originate? And what
is it?

Speaker 2 (23:18):
The core of.

Speaker 1 (23:19):
Counter culture beliefs, which you've touched upon already a little bit.

Speaker 2 (23:22):
But yeah, there's a lot of ways to think about counterculture,
and it really doesn't have to be limited to the
nineteen sixties either. But there were several ways to I
think attack that story. One is, there is a kind
of artistic progression, starting with Kerouac and Ginsburg and even
going back further to Whitman and others of artists who

(23:44):
see themselves as outside mainstream culture. Sometimes we think of
them as bohemians, artists not necessarily overtly political in their art,
but committed to challenging conventional or dominant main stream authority.
I think the Dead and Garcia fit very neatly into

(24:04):
that history of bohemian artists, again not necessarily political in
their rhetoric or or their confrontation with the mainstream authority,
but offering an alternative to that that's appealing to people.
To me, the Dead fit nicely into that history. But
then there's also a political history that comes to fruition

(24:28):
or begins to come to the fore. In the early
nineteen sixties, there's a major demonstration in San Francisco against
the House on American Activities in nineteen sixty or sixty one,
I think it's nineteen sixty. By nineteen sixty four, you
have the free speech movement in Berkeley that is little

(24:49):
incoherent at first, but begins to cohere around the idea
that students are going to play an active role in
fighting back against a administration and a government that they
see is out of touch. That, in turn, of course,
is much amplified by the Vietnam War, so by the
Summer of Love by the Human Being, which is the

(25:11):
January of the summer or January of nineteen sixty seven.
The Summer of Love is later that year by the
Human Being. You've got recognizable group parts of a counterculture.
You have a sort of artistic counterculture and then a
more political counterculture. And in fact, the Human Being was
billed as an opportunity for the tribes to gather, and

(25:32):
in some ways that refers to the political tribe and
the more artistic tribe. So all of that is swirling
together in the San Francisco Bay area in the early
nineteen sixties, and by the mid sixties, of course Ron
Reagan is elected governor. He becomes a real point of
opposition for that gathering counterculture, and so by nineteen sixty

(25:54):
seven the major pieces are in place. You have the
Berkeley radicals, you have the San Francisco hippies, you have
the artistic and the political movements of Reagan as governor.
It's then that you really start to feel this coalesce
into something rather than a bunch of different pieces, begins

(26:14):
to feel like an actual movement of actual counterculture.

Speaker 1 (26:18):
Book Don Rock Podcast. We'll be back after this.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
Well, this is heavy. There's that word again, heavy. Why
you think so heavy in the future? Is there a
probably yours gravitational pull?

Speaker 1 (26:30):
I love the quote from Jerry when Warner Brothers releases
the band's debut album in nineteen sixty seven, and Joe Smith,
who signed the band to Warner brother who says at
the record release party, and this is in the book quote,
I want to say what an honor it is for
Warner Brothers to be able to introduce The Grateful Dead
and its music to the world. Jerry then says, I
want to say what an honor it is for the

(26:50):
Grateful Dead to introduce Warner Brothers to the world.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
Jerry's got a good sense of hearing.

Speaker 1 (26:57):
He really had a great sense of humor and as
you know it in their own way, each of them
was right. Was it difficult in those early days for
the band and Jerry to be working for a record label?
Was it two corporate for them?

Speaker 2 (27:08):
They struggled throughout it, and they're not the only bands
to struggle with a label, as you well know. But yes,
they were committed to a kind of experimentalism they carried
over into the studio and they were wracked up a
lot of studio time playing with ideas. They got very
much in debt to Warner Brothers, Maxo Masella, What am

(27:28):
I doing with this? And I mean some of it
is brilliant, but very laborious. They go over hours and
hours and hours, and they could be difficult to work with.
At one point just and sends them a very cranky
letter telling them to shape up. And their response to
that is just to write fuck you on it and
post it on the wall.

Speaker 1 (27:46):
So fearless though, right, yeahs I how many bands would
do that to a label? They've been Most bands are
working their ass off to get signed by a label,
and they're going to do whatever they asked them to do.

Speaker 2 (27:56):
They were, They definitely did not feel constrained by it,
but they did end up in debt, which which then
put some some boundaries on their behavior, and they dreamed,
as many bands do, of forming their own label, breaking
free of the music industry. They ultimately did would mixed success,

(28:16):
But the so yes from the very beginning, I mean,
I think it's credit Joe Smith. He went out on
a limb to hire a band that was very much
at the edges of Warner Brothers universe and ultimately, of
course very successful. But it was not easy all the way.
There were definitely some clashes of cultural the way.

Speaker 1 (28:33):
And Joe Smith was an older guy, he was from
a different generation. Ye, well, he saw something in them.
He just he was tapping into something that the young
audience was was digging and he got definitely true.

Speaker 2 (28:45):
Yeah, I love the One of my favorite details in
the book is that when he attended his first Dad show.
He was there and his Carol and Company Blazer and
his wife was bearing pearls and you can just I
just have this image of the two of them.

Speaker 1 (28:58):
Everybody just turned you to look at it is this guy.

Speaker 2 (29:01):
Yeah, he did it, you know, I mean, he really
did get them on there. You know, he got them
into it. He's right when he says he's introducing the
Grateful Dead to the world, and Jerry's right that they're
introducing Warner Brothers to San Francisco. So that's what I
mean in the book by saying that they in their
own way, each of them was right.

Speaker 1 (29:16):
Dark Star, what a wonderful enigma this song is. There's
an early jam the band goes into on Dancing in
the Street where there's a moment where the music from
Dark Star originates, and then Jerry's longtime songwriting partner Robert Hunter.
Dead fans know him very well, he was there for
that show. The opening lyrics come pretty naturally afterwards. There's
also a ts Elliott influence. If you can talk about

(29:39):
the origins of the song and how it developed. The
single original singles like two minutes long, and it goes
on to become, you know, a twenty minute live jam.

Speaker 2 (29:47):
Oh and he's yeah, sometimes even longer.

Speaker 1 (29:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:50):
It becomes the iconic Grateful Dead, early Grateful Dead vehicle
for jamming and for experimenting. And I love that. It's
a real anido show that you're referring to there where
you can hear and dancing in the street. There's a moment.
I forget what the minute mark is, but I'm sure
your listeners can find it. It's widely available you you you

(30:11):
can hear the chords go back and forth between Garcia
and Lesh as they are dabbling in something they've clearly
been playing with elsewhere, but they're sort of beginning to
experiment with it on stage. And as you say, Hunter
was there, he heard that. He then composed a piece
of it right away, then composed some of it later

(30:31):
in Golden Gate Park. He draws he's such a widely
read intellectual, really, and so he draws pieces from T. S. Eliot,
pieces really just from his imagination. And even when he's
drawing from other writers, he's changing it in ways that
are very uniquely his own. So the result is either, well,

(30:55):
it's both brilliant and nonsensical at the same time. Right,
it's a it is a it's a flashing of images
more than a story. I mean. Hunter also wrote more
traditional story songs, Cumberland Blues or some of the other
pieces that have a character and a story that are
much more identifiably a song. This is much more of

(31:16):
an experiment. In fact, back to our earlier conversation, this
is the opposite of the Watts Towers right. This is
not a finished piece that has performed identically over and
over or that is well suited to an album. This
is a live experience. Each time is different and sometimes

(31:37):
radically different, just from night to night. So it becomes
the iconic grateful Dead song, particularly of the sixties and seventies.

Speaker 1 (31:45):
And what it means nobody knows. It's whatever you want
it to mean. And that is brilliant. And I'm sure
you've seen this clip where Robert Hunters asked about it
and he's lying down on the cause as many years
this is like just maybe a few years before he
passed away, but he's lying on the couch. Is what
are those lyrics means? Says Well, the duckstar crashing, pouring
it's light in to ashes, reason tatters, the forces tear

(32:05):
loose from the axis. I mean, just what it says.

Speaker 2 (32:10):
What's the question? Yeah, that's great, it's fun. Yeah, and
yeah it is uh and I think really importantly, even
when they performed it brilliantly. They didn't get frozen on
a version of it, right, So they would perform it
brilliantly one night and then come back the next night
and perform it all together differently, right. And so there's

(32:31):
something that to me is sort of the essence of
particularly that early Dead, of them feeling their way through it,
being willing to be bad, being willing to get it wrong,
or to have the audience not particularly enjoy it, or
but just because the experience of it was the point
of it.

Speaker 1 (32:47):
There's a pivotal meeting and Dead History in August of
nineteen sixty eight, the band, the managers, the band's engineer,
Alsie Stanley. They meet to discuss some simmering issues. And
another thing that's hard to imagine is Ron mccernon and
Bob we are being fired from the band, but they
were facing heat from Jerry and Phil Lesh. What happened?
And is there a tape of this meeting? Does it exist?

Speaker 2 (33:10):
Yeah? The tape is the meeting is as strange as
the fact that it was taped. Both are really odd.
And yes, the answer is there is a tape, and
I quoted a great length, in fact, almost all of it.
I think, is quoted in the book. Yeah, I mean,
I think this is a juncture. It's a pivotal moment
for the Grateful Dead. As you say, in the second

(33:31):
half of nine sixty eight, the coming off of some
of these more experimental efforts, Lesh and Garcia and some
of Tom Constantant, who was assisting on keyboards at that point,
all saw a very psychedelic, open ended future for the
Grateful Dead, and they felt that pig Pen and Bob

(33:55):
were were not keeping up, that they needed to develop
musically in order for them all to progress, and so
that had been a source of frustration through much of
nineteen sixty eight. This meeting that you're describing, and that
this tape memorializes, is of them there. As you say,
they're managers and engineers, essentially telling We're and a pig

(34:17):
Pen that they're out and that the band is going
to move on without them because they haven't been able
to keep up. Now that said, it's a firing, but
it's a Grateful Dead firing, and so they don't quite
pull it off.

Speaker 1 (34:29):
Yeah, I'm not sure if they were fired really right.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
Yeah, The fact is they almost really don't miss any shows.
There are a few performances after that of Garcia and
Lesh and the drummers playing together as Bobby in the midnights,
and those are in essence what the Dead might have
been had it gone on without Pigpen and We're but

(34:54):
a better sense intervened and Garcia and Lesh quickly realized
that they've made a mistake, realized it quickly enough that
they invited Weir and Pigpen to rejoin them. Very few,
if any, actual scheduled gigs were affected by it. Pickpin
missed a few gigs in the fall of sixty eight,

(35:15):
but it was really because his girlfriend was in the hospital,
not because he'd been fired. So they got their wits
back together and they went on and as as I
noted the book, the whole episode for me is interesting
for several reasons. One that it was recorded is strange. Obviously,
you know, this is not the kind of thing you
would expect to have a tape up. Another is that

(35:37):
it's the rare moment where you see Garcia really kind
of taking some responsibility. He has to be really pushed
into it. You can tell him the tape. He's not
enjoying this experience, nor would you expect him to. But
he does step up and follow through with what approximates
a firing or a break anyway. But then the other thing,

(35:59):
I would say, it's a bad idea. I mean, even
it's a difficult thing to do for friends, obviously, but
it ends up really not being a good musical idea
to dump pig Pen and Weird, because I do think
they saw they were Lessia and Garcia are mistaken, frankly
in that moment, and thinking that the Dead would be

(36:20):
better by shedding their kind of jug band blues wing
and focusing on a more experimental psychedelic wing. I mean,
there would have been a future. They're brilliant musicians, and
they would have made the most of it, of course,
But what ends up being the hallmark of the Grateful
Dead is that they don't choose between those styles, but

(36:41):
that they bring them all together. And had they shed
Weird and pig Pen at that early stage, I don't
know that they ever would have gotten back around to
that realization. So everyone is lucky that it didn't stick,
really and so better heads prevailed. But it didn't. In

(37:01):
that evening, it seemed like it was about to break
into pieces, and eventually it just obviously didn't.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
The last few years of the sixties turbulent for the Dead,
obviously turbulent for the country. Their appearance at Woodstock a disaster,
the pa issues of the rain, the Altamont debacle led
to tragedy, the Manson family murders. It seemed like the
message of the counterculture movement of the mid sixties that
came out of San Francisco had been distorted. That freedom
Jerry talked about turned dark. But you might quote the

(37:29):
counterculture itself continued, and it did so in no small
measure because the Dead survived. So talk about that and
the Dead's influence in the early seventies.

Speaker 2 (37:38):
Yeah, I think that the well particularly flashing forward even
further forward into the eighties and beyond. As the counterculture changed,
the Dead became more and more of a sort of
guardian of the values of that period. But even as
early as the nineteen seventies, as particularly as the much

(38:01):
of the counterculture turning much more violent, the students for
democratic society kind of migrated into the weathermen. There were
protests were increasingly violent, Bombings were more common in the
early seventies.

Speaker 3 (38:16):
The Dead resisted both the war and the kind of
mainstream refusal to accept them and the counterculture on one hand,
but the Dead also resisted the kind of didacticism of
the left.

Speaker 2 (38:36):
They were not fond of being told what to do
by either the left or the right. And so they
really are quite steady through the period. They stick to
their values, they stick to their art, and you know,
despite pressure from each side there certainly they are much
more associated with the left and properly so that's that's

(38:59):
really where they're situated, I think, in the cultural history
of all of this. But you know, they're not drawn
into a violent response to Vietnam, for instance, which much
of the counterculture was. They are they find there, they
find common cause with the Black Panthers and the Hell's
Angels or the rare, the rare people who saw a

(39:21):
value in both the Hell's Angels and the Black Panthers,
but not because of their politics or their violence, which
both of them engaged in, but more because of their
kind of community cohesion around those groups. And so they
knew what they liked and they and they were steadfast
about that. And so I think that's a big part
of why they remain a kind of touchstone of culture

(39:46):
over such a long period is that culture is swirling
and changing all around them, but they're pretty good about
steering a straight course through all of that.

Speaker 1 (39:54):
Book on Rock Podcasts will be back after this time
of lunch. There was a point in the mid seventies
where the Dead stop touring, but they re emerging. Seventy
six and seventy seven is a landmark year for the band.
Talk about that period of the Dead. It was like
a rebirth for them, a rebirth for counter culture with
Nixing being out of the White House, right.

Speaker 2 (40:15):
Yeah, Yeah, it's a real moment of kind of liberation.
I think. Yeah, they had well, as noted earlier, they
had formed their own record label. They had come off
the road and really kind of retreated back to North
of the Bay up in Marin County, San Rafel, where
they worked on solo projects and produced a Boost for

(40:38):
All At a Grateful Dead album that they produced while
they were on this hiatus. But you know, again, the
Grateful Dead is often successful sort of despite itself, and
in this sense, they I think they they didn't really
there's something ill conceived about the idea of the Grateful

(40:58):
Dead coming off the road because fundamentally, as we've already discussed,
The energy of the Grateful Dead was always on the road.
It was always in relation to audiences, and so the
idea that they would be some other kind of non
touring enterprise doesn't really make a lot of sense. And
I think gradually they came to see that as they
were off the road and doing their own projects, and

(41:20):
so eventually they realized that they wanted to be out
there again, they wanted to be together, and they did
so they come back out in seventy six, as you say,
seventy seven shows. The spring of seventy seven produced some
of those shows most revered by fans, Cornell's a Special

(41:40):
New Haven, New Haven, Victorium and Florida. A lot of
really great music in that period, and a sense that
they were at it again. They started small with a
lot of smaller venues, got bigger again. There's another through
line of the Grateful Dead, which is trying to keep
things small, and they struggle with that because they are

(42:04):
so popular that it's hard to keep it small. But
there are these interludes throughout their history where they sort
of ratchet back down. In this case, for instance, they
sold off the Wall of Sound. They came back out
as a smaller, more nimble enterprise. So they're always ratcheting
up and ratching down. The audiences are kind of pushing that.
But that period of seventy seven early seventy seven in particular,

(42:26):
I think as often regarded as a real Houseian moment
for them.

Speaker 1 (42:29):
We know the rebirth of the Dead's popularity in the
eighties because of Touch of Gray in nineteen eighty seven,
but it really was more than just that, right, I mean,
it was, like you say, in the coldness of the eighties,
the Dead offered warmth. So it was it that the
culture culture was that way of life that came out
of the sixties was now living on through new generations.

Speaker 2 (42:48):
Yeah, there's no way to prove this, but here's all
for you. My take on it anyway, which is that
and not uniquely mine. I mean other I've talked to
many other people I think buy into this. So it's
not I didn't invent this idea. But the nineteen eighties,
you know, the nineteen sixties, the Grateful Dead and Ronald

(43:08):
Reagan sort of spar in California and kind of circle
each other with competing values. In the nineteen eighties, they're
both they do the same thing again, but they just
do it on a national stage. This time Reagan runs
for and of course as elected president, and the Dead
emerges as this much bigger than California band, a much

(43:29):
really unnational phenomenon by then, And that's even before Touch
of Grave, which then puts them stratospherically into another level.
But I do think one thing that's going on there
is that Reagan and the culture around him were kind
of They were mean spirited, They were capitalistic, great as

(43:50):
good right. It was the sort of shorthand for the
early nineteen eighties in Grateful dead Land. Greed was not good.
The Dead and their values continued to be about kindness
and compassion and freedom and creativity and improvisation and living
in the moment, in tending to one's larger family of

(44:13):
a family of artists and others like you know, people,
creative people. They were not changed, but the culture around
them had changed and had really hardened from the sixties
and seventies into the eighties. And so I do think
part of what happened is that people who craved that,
people particularly young people, but not just young people, but

(44:35):
who were looking for something that was the opposite of
greed and the sort of maleve of the nuclear war
machine and the environmental dismissiveness of Washington. People who were sorry,
who were outside that foundly grateful Dead, and they're the

(44:55):
number of people who admired their music and the culture
around them grew and grew and grew, starting in the
early eighties and then really exploding with Touch of Gray
and MTV and and by the late eighties they are gigantic.

Speaker 1 (45:09):
Tape sharing was huge because my older brother gave me
New Haven seventy seven. I still have the Maxel cassette.
And I was a fan because of Touch of Gray
like so many but the moment I pressed play on
that it was life changing.

Speaker 2 (45:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:27):
So if they don't allow tape sharing, what is the
Grateful Dead today?

Speaker 2 (45:33):
Oh? Good question, right, Yeah, you know. The Well, as
with so many things, and we've already talked about a
few of them, the Dead was brilliant, sort of despite
itself or without a plan. Really, Tapers had been at
shows going way back, and the Dead never really cared.

(45:56):
Jerry famously he said, you know, once I'm done with
the notes there, I'm done with them. You can do
whatever you want with them. The music industry did not
love that approach. The music industry saw that as the
opportunity for bootlegging, which then it viewed as undermining album sales.
The Dead they had taped other artists, Jury himself, Bob
had taped artists, so they weren't offended by taping. And

(46:19):
they didn't make that much money off albums anyway, so
for them it really wasn't much of a hindrance, so
they were always very relaxed about it. By the eighties, though,
tapers had become a bit of a bother, and I
remember this from shows. I mean partly because they didn't
want people dancing around them. They didn't want people jostling

(46:41):
their equipment, and so the taping per se didn't bother
the band much, but the atmosphere around tapers was bothering
some members of the audience. So they created what they
called the tapester section later the taper section, which to
my knowledge anyway, at least certainly in those days, was
the only band to do this, where they moved it

(47:02):
around a little bit, eventually settled in just behind the soundboard,
and tapers could sit there. They could have their boom mics,
they could have their equipment, and there was no not
only were there there no penalty, they were openly allowed
to be there, so they didn't have to hide or
hide their equipment or shush people around them because they
had their own section. And then that of course fed

(47:24):
this community of taping. The only there were no real
enforced rules around taping or distribution of tapes. It was
understood that you weren't to sell them, that they were
to be traded, not non for profit. There are moments
where the Dead rose up to protect its copyright, usually
when someone tried to press vinyl, press tapes or something

(47:44):
into vinyl, or copied an album without permission, But for
the most part, they not only didn't discourage, but actually
encouraged taping of shows and trading of tapes, and it
became this whole other culture, I mean, this giant culture
on top of a grateful dead culture.

Speaker 1 (48:02):
That's what I was about to say. What fascinates me
is this idea that it doesn't matter the size of
your audience, not necessarily, because if you have one person
that buys a ticket on night one, that same person
buys a tickets on nights two and three, three tickets
are sold. Yeah, it's just one person, but three tickets
and you multiply that times how many other dead fans
are out there. That is something that I wonder why

(48:25):
other bands don't really pick up on. But then again,
it's not so easy to change up your set list
every night. But that's why people were coming back for
nights two and three. It wasn't the exact same set list,
and as we know, most bands are militant about that
the set list is exactly the same. Maybe we'll switch
a song out with another, but they did not do that,
and the song sounded differently every night, I mean, essentially

(48:47):
the same. But like you say with Dark Starm, maybe
this one has a little jazz jam inside of it.
Maybe in the next night it's got a little bluesy
thing going on. To me, it's brilliant, but it speaks
to the music. The musical talent that the band had
in order to do that not that easy.

Speaker 2 (49:01):
And the courage, I mean the courage, yeah, I mean
the idea that you're going out there without it. I
mean they always had a rough idea of you know
what was in you know what they were playing in
those months of any given tour. But where are you
gonna start? Where you're gonna end up with what's that?
How's that? Is the jam going to be ten minutes
or twenty or this commitment to listening to each other

(49:23):
and making it up as they went along, that takes
a lot of guts and and a willingness to fail.
And I would add an audience that permitted that, right,
I mean, so I'd never in the time. I mean
I didn't go to as many dead shows as many
people did, but I never once heard a person say, oh,
I want my money back, or that was a whole
you know, it was just part of it, right, It

(49:44):
was just that was it was the ride. And so
the fact that the audience enjoyed even those off nights
or was sort of interested in them allowed them to
be that, Yeah, there's a story to all those pieces
fit together, and.

Speaker 1 (49:59):
There's this story to be told within each show. And
I love watching the videos of each BIM member just
looking at each other, the maybe the nod you just
you're fast, like what is going on inside of their head?
Like John Mayer was talking about when he first joined,
and Bob Weir was like, yeah, we're gonna play such
and such song and and Mayer's like, all right, cool,
but he's like also on mid mid song he decides
to just change up the tempo and and he's and

(50:22):
he had to be ready, like he had to be
and he's and he's a top notch musician. Booked on
Rock Podcasts, We'll be back after this.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
Come out, Come out wherever you are.

Speaker 1 (50:34):
Find the bookdown Rock website at bookedown rock dot com.
There and can find all the back episodes of the show,
the latest episode in video and audio, links to all
of the platforms where you can listen to the podcast,
plus all the social media platforms were on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok,
and x. Also check out the book don Rock blog,
find your local independent bookstore, find out all the latest

(50:57):
hot rock book releases, and before you go, check out
the booked on Rock online store. Pick up some booked
on rock merch. It's all at booked on rock dot com.
You talked about how Jerry and the band wanted to
keep it small and in nineteen eighty one there was
a there was a reporter that pissed off or tried
to piss off Jerry, and he said, he said, he said,

(51:20):
you know, it was absurd and disastrous that the Dead
had been meandering along for sixteen years, and Jerry's response was,
I don't give a damn. In fact, I'd be afraid
if everybody liked us. I don't want the responsibility. But
that's what happens. By the end of the eighties, right,
there was a this was a burden for him. This
is when we start to get into the nineties, and
now he's not enjoying this as much.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
Right, Yeah. I think a lot of things come together
in that period, not most of them not good. But well,
first I mean decide. The first one is that they
became huge right between Toucher Gray in the Dark. The
album suddenly was a hit, the MT drew new fans
to them. Suddenly he showed people were coming to shows

(52:05):
with no tickets and not even with any intention of
getting in, just to be there and to sort of
experience the culture around it. And of course Garcia by
then was battling and increasingly losing struggle against heroin and
drugs generally, and so his enjoyment faded. I happened to
be at the show in nineteen eighty six at RFK

(52:27):
Stadium when they played with Bob Dylan. It was roastingly hot.
I mean, I can they say you can't remember pain,
I can remember a lot. It was that day and so,
and I was just in the audience. He looked, Garcia
looks terrible. People around me were talking about it. And
then the next day we went back to San Francisco,
and then soon after it fell into a coma, and

(52:49):
so his health was precarious, to say the least. He
did by the way, I should add, he did recover
from that and actually straight got cleaned for a while.
They produced some brilliant shows.

Speaker 1 (53:01):
And they had to learn how to play all over again.

Speaker 2 (53:04):
Yeah, I mean, it was a real, real comeback, and
it was exciting, Like the joy that people had in
his return was just lovely. But then he relapsed and
it caught up with him again. And so by the
end of the eighties and into the early nineties, it
was getting too big. He was overwhelmed, and you know,

(53:25):
like like the hate and the summer of love. Big
is not always great for counterculture or for music even,
and it just became harder and harder to keep it
going without the mishaps of a giant enterprise like that,
and so I think it became more of a burden
for him and I you know, I'll just one more

(53:45):
note on that. Other bands could have The Dead could
have stopped right, They could have said, you know, forget it,
we need to take six months off. But most bands
could do that because they were most revenue for most
bands is generated by albums. The Grateful that had this
huge community of people they they supported, who worked for them,

(54:09):
and if they stopped touring, the money stopped coming in.
So they felt a responsibility again back to this word
responsibility to keep that community alive and healthy. And so
to stop was not just to make a decision that
they could personally afford that by this point they were
all quite wealthy, but that would put people they cared

(54:29):
about out of work. That would have really ground the
enterprise to a halt. And so the pressure to go
on was immense, and so then they succumbed to it,
and they and that got harder and harder.

Speaker 1 (54:40):
In that documentary That Great Long, What a Long Strange
Ship It's been Chris Jerry's girlfriend it was. It was
a girlfriend from his early years and then they rekindled
their relationship later years, and she says Jerry pulled her
asign one day and he said, you know, I could.
I could just walk away and live off of the
Ben and Jerry's money, right, And she said, what do it?

(55:01):
He says, you don't get it. You don't get He said,
I've got fifty people road crew, band members that depend
on me, and I've got millions of fans who depend
on me to go out there every year, year after year,
ten months out of the year because they're looking to
have their good time for two three hours. Yeah, I can't.

(55:21):
And he couldn't go out for a walk, he couldn't
go to the store, he couldn't do what he wanted
to do, and thus you have the escape in the drugs,
and yeah, we lost.

Speaker 2 (55:33):
The paradox of it is awful. I mean, it's just
it's tragic. And for me, the most painful parts of
working on the book were watching that, watching him sort
of come apart in those later years. There's a I
was up at the archive at you see Santa Cruz,
which has a Grateful Dead archive, which is extremely important

(55:55):
to me and producing this book, and one day I
was going through bank records of the ban and it
has Christia's personal bank records or part of it from
the I think this is ninety three and ninety four,
and you see on several days of him making five,
six seven trips to the ATM to take out two
or three hundred dollars each time, and you can just

(56:15):
see the addiction working on him. And you know the
fact that at that point that he is successful beyond
any dream he had when he was fresh out of
the army in Palo Alto in nineteen sixty five or
sixty sixty sixty one. He's so far beyond that now,
and yet things are falling apart for him personally, and

(56:38):
it's really I mean, he died at age fifty three.
I mean, obviously, were it not for the drugs, he
would have presumably lived a lot longer. But it really
took a toll on him for sure.

Speaker 1 (56:49):
Yeah. She I can't remember her name. I apologize, but
she said bridget Meyer, right, And she's the one who said,
I know you, I know you're doing drugs again. That's fine,
but I need you to be open with me and
just tell me and so we can communicate. And there's
a pause and he looks right at her cold stare.
He says, thank you very much, you can leave. It

(57:10):
was great. We had a great time it's time to
go wow.

Speaker 2 (57:15):
I mean it was yeah, Well, I don't know. This
is not probably the forum to talk about it, but
the anyone who has dealt with an addict knows that
if you force him to choose, they will not always
make the right decision. I think for Garcia in that moment,
it's he's incapable of understanding what he's giving up. But

(57:37):
it was a heartbreaking, heavy price. It's heartbreaking. You're right.

Speaker 1 (57:42):
Book Down Rock Podcasts. We'll be back after this.

Speaker 2 (57:44):
During our brief indomation, let's take a flying crip from
Milanda Fantasy to everyday life.

Speaker 1 (57:52):
Hey guys, thanks so much for checking out the book
Down Rock podcast. If you've just found the podcast, welcome.
If you've been listening, thank you so much for your
and make sure you tell a friend, a family member,
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on Rock, And if you do like the podcast, make
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listen to the Booked on Rock podcast, We're on Amazon, Apple, iHeart, Spotify, Spreaker,

(58:16):
tune In, and on YouTube music. You can check out
the full episodes on video, along with video highlights from
episodes on the Booked on Rock YouTube channel Find it
at Booked on Rock. Thanks again for listening. Now back
to the show, so I finish with this. Obviously we
know the Grateful dead the music continued. I mean, your

(58:37):
epilogue says, quote, the Grateful did die with Jerry Garcia,
and sure did. But the members moved on and we
know they've different formations. But as for counter culture, you're
write that quote. It is unfair to those who participated
in the counterculture of the nineteen sixties or who have
joined it since to argue that simply because the movement
did not achieve what it set out to do, it

(58:58):
was inconsequential. In fact, the counterculture influences our lives today
in profound, broad and specific ways. Please can you expand
on that and we'll finish with that.

Speaker 2 (59:08):
Yeah, I mean, I think some of those ways are
very obvious. We are as a society, we're much more
accepting of Eastern religious practices, Buddhism, Hinduism, others that are
much more a part of our culture today than they
were before the sixties. Health foods, organic foods. There's a

(59:29):
whole ways in which the counterculture has infused itself into
our being really and into our politics. Some of the
things that we're contentious about that the counterculture confronted are
now beyond dispute. We don't genuinely dispute that segregation is
a desirable I mean, I'm sure there are some outliers,

(59:50):
but as a society we accept that racial equality is
an ambition of the society gender equality, So there are
respect for the environment, largely bipartisan consensus around that today.
In what fashion is something we still debate. But there
are big principles of the counterculture that have settled into

(01:00:11):
our lives that we no longer even think to argue about.
That's what I mean by it influencing us now. I
would also say there are things about the counterculture that
have affected our that didn't succeed, or that have affected
us in ways that we are not a success. So, yes,
the counterculture ended the Vietnam War. I mean, I think

(01:00:32):
that's a hallmark of its influence. It didn't fundamentally, though,
change the way we think about war. We still resort
to violence to solve problems between nations. That's a shortcoming,
I would say of the counterculture and its influence drugs.
You know, the counterculture celebrated drugs. You know, I'm not
here to proselytize about drugs one way or another, but

(01:00:54):
I would note that among others that killed Jerry Garcia
and the counterculture didn't have to wrestle with fentanyl or
some of the more dangerous drugs that we have today.
But it's celebrated and even glorified drugs in a way
that I think, in retrospect feels reckless. So there are
influences that they continue to shadow or affect our lives,

(01:01:21):
for better and for worse. And you know, I think
that that is a reminder that this was a powerful
was and is a powerful movement, a powerful current of
American life. I think for the most part we should
be happy about that. But that is not to say
that everything it did to turn.

Speaker 1 (01:01:42):
To gold here beside the rising Tide, Jerry Garcia, the
Grateful Dead, and an American awakening, and it is out now.
Find out where our books are sold. You can look
forward at your nearest bookstore. Find your nearest independent bookstore
at bookedown rock dot com. And Jim can people find
you online if they want to reach out to you.

Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
They can. You can find me at you see La
you can find me on Twitter or whatever the fun
we call it. Sorry, but I'm also on h on
threads and etcetera. I'm easily found, So look me up.
I'm happy to get a message.

Speaker 1 (01:02:12):
And did I see You're in one of the O. J.
Simpson documentaries, right.

Speaker 2 (01:02:16):
It was a reporter for the Other Times on the
edge of Wow, it's another life. That's another long conversation.

Speaker 1 (01:02:21):
Right, it's so funny. Yeah, once I saw you on
cameras and wait a minute, I've seen him before on TV. Yeah, yeah,
that's cool man, Jim. Thank you so much for doing this.
This is fantastic conversation and a topic that I can
talk forever about.

Speaker 2 (01:02:35):
Grateful dead you and me both, and I sure appreciate
the chance to talk with you. Thank you. That's it.
It's in the books.