Jerry Garcia's Advice To Bill Kreutzmann: 'Don't Rush'

Deal

My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs With the Grateful Dead

by Bill Kreutzmann and Benjy Eisen

Hardcover, 388 pagesnonfiction

• biography & memoir

In his new memoir, Deal, drummer Bill Kreutzmann tells a story about the Grateful Dead's tour of Egypt. Instead of filling hookahs with "black, gooey tobacco," the band "filled the entire hookah with hash. No tobacco!" In the midst of Middle East trouble, the Grateful Dead's members were unwitting ambassadors of American culture.

"Everybody had fun," Kreutzmann tells NPR's Steve Inskeep. "Yes, indeed."

Deal emerges just as the Grateful Dead is getting back together, with surviving members planning a concert in July. Of course they'll be missing lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, who died in 1995. Kreutzmann writes that he met Garcia when they were kids in California.

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Bill Kreutzmann lives in Hawaii.

Bob Minkin/Courtesy of St. Martin's Press

"My dad was going to play banjo and he never got into it, so he advertised in the Palo Alto newspaper: 'Banjo for sale,' " Kreutzmann says. "One night there's a knock on the door. I open the door and Jerry Garcia was standing there."

A number of years later, Kreutzmann saw Garcia again, playing with Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, and was "completely taken away." That night, he swore to follow Garcia everywhere. Two weeks later, Kreutzmann got a phone call from Garcia asking if he'd like to be in a band.

"I thought that was a very good idea," Kreutzmann says. "Turned out to be a pretty great idea, don't you think?"

'It Can Be Like Fractals'

In the band's beginnings, altered states of consciousness fueled the Grateful Dead's creativity.

"Well, acid was the most beneficial drug," Kreutzmann says. "I jokingly refer to it as my college education, my graduate school, whatever. If I hadn't taken acid, I just would not be here talking to you today. It opens you up; it lets you see that what you're taught in school or what your parents have taught you, or society lays on you, isn't necessarily all there is to see. Your art can flourish and flourish and flourish. It can be like fractals, your art; it can just keep growing. That's what LSD did for me."

But drugs ate away at the band, even as the Grateful Dead grew into the biggest touring attraction in America.

"When cocaine came into the Grateful Dead, it really hurt us," Kreutzmann says.

Kreutzmann says that 1995, when Jerry Garcia died, "was a terrible year for me. I moved to Hawaii to get healing. I was in a really bad way —"

After a moment, Kreutzmann composed himself.

'He Was My Best Music Teacher'

The drummer and the bandleader had once made a pact: If the Grateful Dead ever came to an end, Bill Kreutzmann and Jerry Garcia would move to the Hawaiian island of Kauai, clean up and go diving. In the end, Kreutzmann moved there alone.

"I thank him. He was my best music teacher," Kreutzmann says of Garcia. "He taught me more about music than anybody else. And not necessarily just in words, but how he played. The way he played, you can learn so much from it. Doesn't matter what instrument you play.

"I [was] a senior in high school when he asked me to join the band, when that phone call came in. I knew how to play the drums just a little bit. I had the desire. The thing he said was, 'Bill, play full value. Make four beats be a really full four beats. Don't rush to the end of the bar.' "

Police Investigating Theft of $75,000 in Grateful Dead Memorabilia

Police are investigating the theft of roughly $75,000 worth of Grateful Dead memorabilia that was awaiting transfer to its new owners following last month’s Grateful Dead Family Jubilee Auction. The Northwest Herald reports that the items were stolen from Donley’s Auction Services in Union, IL at some point on April 25 or 26.

According to the Northwest Herald, the items were being processed—and some of them were awaiting pickup by an armored car—when they were taken. Evidently, the most valuable item stolen was an original, hand-painted 1966 Stanley Mouse/Alton Kelley Family Dog skull and roses poster. The reserve price for the piece was listed at $25,000 for the auction.

Three other posters were reportedly stolen as well, including a 1986 original Russelheim, Germany poster, a 1986 original Statue of Liberty tour poster and a 1966 “The Quick and the Dead” serigraph signed by artist Wes Wilson. The latter poster was the 12th image in the Family Dog series and marked the Grateful Dead’s first use of skeleton iconography.

The McHenry County Sheriff’s Department is asking for the public’s help in solving the case. Those with info can call the Sherriff’s investigation division at 815-334-4750 or give an anonymous top via Crimestoppers at 1-800-762-7867.

Lyric Of The Week: The Grateful Dead, “China Cat Sunflower/ I Know You Rider”

The Grateful Dead, in 1970. Photo via Wikipedia. Public Domain.

Deadhead or not, you have to respect any band that had the impact on popular culture that theGrateful Dead did as the 50th anniversary of the group’s formation approaches. Even though several of the founding members, including Jerry Garcia, died long ago, the interest in the band continues, and you can still hear and see their influence in the music of jam bands like Phish and Widespread Panic. Songwriting-wise, though, it seems to have become less acceptable to write in the sometimes esoteric manner of the Grateful Dead’s extraordinary lyricist, Robert Hunter.

Most of the band’s classics are songs that Hunter wrote the lyrics for, like “Truckin’” and “Friend of the Devil.” Even 1987’s “Touch of Grey” became part of the fabric of life for so many counter-culturalists, some of whom actually were grey by the time “Touch of Grey” was recorded. One of Hunter’s most abstruse pieces, which became a staple of the Grateful Dead’s legendary hours-long concerts, was “China Cat Sunflower.” It was recorded for the band’s 1969 studio album Aoxomoxoa, and later released on the live Europe ’72 triple album set in a mash-up with the old blues number “I Know You Rider.” The two songs segued together perfectly, and the Grateful Dead performed the combination well over 500 times in live performances.

In his outstanding anthology A Box of Rain, Hunter wrote, “Nobody ever asked me the meaning of [“China Cat Sunflower”]. People seem to know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s good that a few things in this world are clear to all of us.” But with lines like Krazy Kat peeking through a lace bandana/ like a one-eyed Cheshire/ like a diamond-eyed jack/ A leaf of all colors plays/ a golden string fiddle/ to a double-e waterfall over my back, it may be wishful thinking to say that that the words were really “clear to all of us.” To this day, numerous faithful still debate the meaning of the lyric, as seen on a number of websites devoted to discussing the song.

“I Know You Rider,” meanwhile, is a traditional blues song of exact unknown origin, though the father-son folklorist team of John and Alan Lomax included the lyric in the 1930s book American Ballads and Folk Songs. Written in the standard AAB blues motif, the song was cut by Janis Joplin, Hot Tuna and others, but received the most attention when the Grateful Dead started playing it.

Much has been made of the lyrics of Hunter, Bob Dylan, and others whose work seems to be either pure genius or the channeling of some unseen supernatural force. And given the reputation of the Grateful Dead camp for ingesting psychedelics, it’s always been easy to say that such lyrics come from the minds of people who took too much of a particular drug. But the truth is usually that creative folk just tap into the hard-drives of life’s experiences and let their imaginations take flight. In the end, Hunter has become known as one of America’s great music industry poets and a real treasure, as he keeps on writing some pretty cool stuff with artists like Dylan and Jim Lauderdale.

Surviving members of the Grateful Dead will be performing this summer with Bruce Hornsby, Trey Anastasio and others to celebrate the band’s 50th anniversary. It remains to be seen if “China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider” will be on the set list.