It’s been said that one out of every three people aged 17-24 from New York and Boston was at Watkins Glen on July 28, 1973. Woodstock might have been the more iconic festival, but there was nothing quite like Summer Jam at Watkins Glen. And for some reason, much of what happened that day remains largely forgotten.
 
The Guinness Book of World Records recognized the Summer Jam, which took place in the town of Watkins Glen, New York, as the “Largest audience at a pop festival.” Over 600,000 people showed up to the event and there were only three performers: The Allman Brothers Band, The Band, and The Grateful Dead. For scale, only 400,000 people showed up to Woodstock. Event producers Shelly Finkel and Jim Koplik had previously promoted a Dead show in Hartford, where an onstage jam with a couple of the Allman Brothers took place. This prompted the formulation of Summer Jam and the event was organized by prominent Bay Area promoter, Bill Graham. Tickets for the show were sold for just $10, that is, until they capped-out at 150,000 and just stopped checking for tickets. It’s not called gatecrashing if the front door is left wide open.
 

 
Prior to the festival, the population of the town of Watkins Glen was approximately 2,700. Once the hippies started rolling in, however, businesses began to shut down and the local supply of beer and food seemingly disappeared. The traffic pileup headed toward the Grand Prix Raceway was so severe that fans ditched their vehicles and walked the remainder of the way. Concert Free Radio, a Hartford pirate radio station that disguised itself as a Canadian network for legal-purposes, broadcasted traffic and safety reports to the incoming masses. They also aired interviews with Bill Graham, Bob Weir, and live segments from the historic show. Many weren’t able to watch the concert due to the traffic, or simply because there were so-many-goddamn-people that no one could see the stage.
 

 
Even if you know absolutely nothing about The Grateful Dead, I’m certain you are aware that they are a band best enjoyed live. Even if “live” means by way of thousands of bootlegged (and otherwise) recordings of their sets from over the years. Many deadheads refer to the period surrounding Watkins Glen as being an exceptional one for their live performances. A valid sentiment considering it came just after Europe ‘72. The Dead played for between 3-5 hours at the Summer Jam and even made an appearance during The Allman Brothers’ encore for an impromptu finale.
 

 
But no one really talks that much about the actual Grateful Dead set of Summer Jam at Watkins Glen. It was during their soundcheck the day prior that has been viewed as almost mythical (for those real heads). Times were different back then and, although the one-day festival was scheduled for Saturday, thousands of fans showed up to the grounds days before. Soundcheck was to take place on Friday and Bill Graham allowed it continue, despite the growing crowd. The Band and Allman Brothers ran through a couple of numbers, much to the enjoyment of those actually there for the music. In true Grateful Dead fashion, Jerry & Co warmed up with two sets. Their soundcheck was nearly two hours long.
 
Among songs performed during the immortalized “Soundcheck at Summer Jam” were Grateful Dead favorites “Sugaree,” “Tennessee Jed,” and “Wharf Rat.” The most significant of which was one later known as “Soundcheck Jam.” The second set improvisational jam was entirely unique to this particular time-and-place at Watkins Glen and, as a result, its recording became highly sought after by The Dead’s audiophile, obsessive fanbase. The So Many Roads (1965-1995) boxset released in 1999 has since catalogued a recording of the performance, having made it widely-available for the first time since the Summer Jam. The entire soundcheck set from July 27th can be streamed here.
 
Listen to The Grateful Dead’s ‘Soundcheck Jam” after the jump…

 
Do the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan occupy opposite poles of some optimist/skeptic spectrum? I’ll allow that they just might. The two bands definitely have little in common aesthetically, what with the Dead’s trademark move being the lengthy improvised guitar jam and the Dan opting for a much tighter method that might just involve importing several seasoned sessionists in order to nail down a difficult solo, as famously happened with “Peg.”

If you picked lyrics from the two bands at random and presented them in the form of a quiz, most knowledgeable music fans would have little trouble telling the two apart.

Which brings us to the official Steely Dan website, which has an unusual status among such entities for two reasons: its existence runs back very nearly to the very dawn of the World Wide Web, and Becker and Fagen clearly perceived it as a potential venue for their own personal expression.

According to the Internet Archive, Steely Dan’s website first surfaced no later than April 11, 1997, which is two years after the accepted inception of the WWW but remarkably early for an act as established as Steely Dan. The site is so old that it was was and running several years in advance of Steely Dan’s return to presenting new studio material to its audience, namely Two Against Nature, released in 2000, and Everything Must Go, released in 2003, both of which events it duly documented and promoted, as well as the many tours the Dan has undertaken over the years (remember when Steely Dan didn’t tour?).

The website has an unmistakably personal touch. As stated, whoever is running the website is expansive and expressive, with all sorts of pages dedicated not only to their albums and tours but also to such matters as the Dan’s tongue-in-cheek letter campaign to get set the terms of the band’s inevitable induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which didn’t last long because it happened in 2001 (the Dead beat them by seven years).

Amusingly, much of the website is in straight HTML, enough so to make one positively nostalgic for an Internet without any way to spread the word to LinkedIn or whatever. One such page is an amazing guide for music lovers who aren’t yet sure if they can handle Steely Dan, with detailed instructions on how to make the leap from Grateful Dead fandom to Dan fan status.

The “Deadhead/Danfan Conversion Chart” offers detailed illustrations of how to shed the “rectangular granny glasses” favored by Deadheads in favor of the “LA Eyeworks clipons” that are more typical of the pussyhound/drugrunner characters one might encounter in Steely Dan songs. In each case there is a transitional item named, occupying the creepy and simultaneous “Deadfan/Danhead” category—in the aforementioned example of eyewear, “rayban knockoffs” occupies that slot.

There are 20 such triads (Deadhead—Deadfan/Danhead—Danfan) and nary a weak one on the list. As a kicker, the final entry offers the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan themselves as start and end points, but I won’t name which artist they picked to be the transitional figure. But it’s kind of genius.

Here it is, but you can see the original version here:
 

 
Thanks to Sydney Aja Peterson for the find.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Steely Dan’s hilarious tongue-in-cheek ‘open letter’ to Wes Anderson
The Donald Fagen song that’s so obscure, Donald Fagen himself probably doesn’t even remember it

 
Over the lengthy holiday weekend, a modest sheaf of photographs of the young Jerome John Garcia, more commonly known as Jerry, surfaced on the Internet. They date from 1959 and 1960 and depict a decidedly different man from the Haight-Ashbury counterculture hero who was so beloved by the Grateful Dead’s ardent fan base.

The photos depict Garcia surrounded by his family in San Francisco as well as hanging around with his buddies, who have a certain “Richie and Potsie” air about them. Although, you know, maybe that’s not the full picture. After all, it’s well documented that Garcia had been into weed for a couple of years by this time; he was into Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, and Hank Ballard; and he was already in a band.

Garcia never graduated from high school—as he told Jann Wenner and Charles Reich of Rolling Stone in 1972, “I went to a high school for about a year, did really badly, finally quit and joined the Army.” In early 1960 Garcia had the numbskulled idea of stealing his mother’s car, and his recompense was enforced enrollment in the army, where he was (surprise, surprise) an indifferent soldier. Garcia was given a general discharge in December 1960.

In the same interview, Garcia told Wenner and Reich of his first guitar, which object Garcia is pictured playing in one of the pictures:
 

I go down to the pawn shops on Market Street and Third Street and wander around the record stores, the music stores and look at the electric guitars and my mouth’s watering. God, I want that so bad! And on my 15th birthday my mother gave me an accordion. I looked at this accordion and I said, “God, I don’t want this accordion, I want an electric guitar.”

So we took it down to a pawn shop and I got this little Danelectro, an electric guitar with a tiny little amplifier and man, I was just in heaven. Everything! I stopped everything I was doing at the time.

 
It is said that this is the earliest picture of Jerry Garcia playing the guitar.
 

 
At Analy High School, in Sebastapol, California, Garcia had his first experiences playing in a band. The group was called the Chords and specialized in big-band standards from the 1940s. In A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead by Dennis McNally, Garcia calls it “kind of easy-listening stuff. Businessman’s bounce, high school version.” (“Businessman’s bounce” is a jazz term for a particularly desultory two-beat played at a jumpy tempo.)

On May 27 ‎John Simpson‎ posted the interesting pictures on the I Love The Grateful Dead! Facebook page. He wrote: “A friend whose father was close childhood friends with Jerry had these personal pics. They’ve never been shared publically to my knowledge. But I received a copy and a ‘feel free to share.’ Enjoy!”

Eric Schwartz, host of the radio program Lone Star Dead, which airs on KNON every Friday, tweaked the washed-out originals on Photoshop and shared them publicly on Facebook.

The identity of Garcia’s prom date has not been disclosed, if, indeed, anyone knows it.
 

 
More pics after the jump…....
 

 
In 1965, Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and Phil Lesh were in a Bay Area outfit called the Warlocks. (Quite astonishingly, the band that would become the Velvet Underground was also operating as the Warlocks at that exact same juncture.) The first show where the band performed as the Grateful Dead occurred on December 4, 1965, in San Jose, at one of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests.

The story of Jerry seeing the words “Grateful Dead” in a dictionary is a well-established part of Deadhead lore. Jerry saw the words in a dictionary and a sunbeam splashed on the page and the words on the page glowed in a beatific halo or whatnot.

Actually, here’s the story, as recounted in Blair Jackson’s Garcia: An American Life:
 

It was sometime in November 1965, while the band and a few friends were sitting around Phil’s apartment on High Street [Seriously, people? High Street??] in Palo Alto, smoking DMT and thumbing through a gargantuan Funk and Wagnalls dictionary, that the group’s name was revealed (cue biblical trumpets!). As Jerry said in his oft-quoted 1969 description of the episode, “There was ‘grateful dead,’ those words juxtaposed. It was one of those moments, y’know, like everything else on the page went blank, diffuse, just sort of oozed away, and there was grateful dead. Big black letters edged all around in gold, man, blasting out at me, such a stunning combination. So I said, ‘How about Grateful Dead?’ And that was it.” Later, he noted, “Nobody in the band liked it. I didn’t like it, either, but it got around that that was one of the candidates for our new name and everyone else said, “Yeah, that’s great.” It turned out to be tremendously lucky. It’s just repellent enough to filter curious onlookers and just quirky enough that parents don’t like it,” he added with a laugh.

 
But haven’t you ever wondered just what kind of dictionary has an entry for “Grateful Dead,” anyway? It seems like an awfully weird term to stick in on the same page as gravel.
 

The Warlocks in action, 1965
 
There’s a pretty solid piece of reporting on the Grateful Dead’s official website that does a good job of explaining how this came about. It’s not a straightforward story, and (as befits the mindset of, say, a lexicographer) the details matter.

Some Grateful Dead fans did spend significant time trying to track down the dictionary that Jerry might have been perusing, but to no avail. And in fact the lack of any such dictionary popping up in these searches may have led to the rise of an alternate theory about The Egyptian Book of the Dead, which does in fact feature the phrase “grateful dead” as well—but had nothing to do with Jerry’s idea for the name, at least not directly.

As the Dead’s website tells it, a Deadhead named Kimball Jones finally found the elusive dictionary, which turned out to be the 1955 edition of The Funk and Wagnalls New Practical Standard Dictionary, Britannica World Language Edition:
 

Jones contacted the band’s office, providing photocopies of the entry and title page; images of those pages would eventually appear in The Official Book of the Deadheads, finally laying the question to rest. Jones donated his copy of the dictionary to the Grateful Dead Archive, where it is currently on display.

 
As the article asks later, “The esoteric nature of the entry, and its rarity, raise an interesting question: how did such a specialized entry come to appear in a popular dictionary?”

The reason “Grateful Dead” was in the dictionary derives from a woman named Maria Leach, who worked for Funk and Wagnalls and had made lexicographical contributions “in the fields of folklore and mythology” and was also “the editor of the company’s Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, which has the other appearance of the grateful dead as an entry. ... in a real way, Maria Leach can be considered the godmother of the Grateful Dead.”

One wonders if Maria Leach ever even heard of the Grateful Dead before her death in 1977, when she was in her eighties. It seems quite likely that a lexicographer who was publishing books in 1949 (the year that Funk and Wagnalls came out with Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend) would almost certainly, twenty years later, not even be aware of all those “younguns” with their loud guitars and such. In fact, Maria Leach was born in 1892 and attended Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, whose curriculum was largely shaped by the teachings of the Quakers, so you know, it doesn’t seem too probable.

Even more interestingly, her (quite substantial) bio on Wikipedia does not mention her considerable role in the naming of one of the biggest acts in rock and roll history. Her Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, which sounds utterly fascinating, can be acquired on Amazon for a surprisingly reasonable sum.) 

Here’s a scan of the 1955 edition of the dictionary, followed by the text of the entry (click on the image for a larger view):
 

 

GRATEFUL DEAD: The motif of a cycle of folk tales which begin with the hero coming upon a group of people ill-treating or refusing to bury the corpse of a man who had died without paying his debts. He gives his last penny, either to pay the man’s debts or to give him a decent burial. Within a few hours he meets with a travelling companion who aids him in some impossible task, gets him a fortune or saves his life. The story ends with the companion disclosing himself as the man whose corpse the hero had befriended.(Funk & Wagnall’s Dictionary).

 
There’s a book that was written in 1908 by Gordon Hall Gerould under the title The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story that relates to this myth—occasionally people buy it with the idea that it’s about the band, but it still is probably a rewarding read.
 
via Little Hippie
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Grateful Dead guide to dealing with a bad LSD trip

 
My feelings about the Grateful Dead are not complicated. I like a lot of their music just fine, but it was their audience that turned me off.

I never got into that whole spinning hippies/Hacky Sack patchouli vibe, but I love the shit out of Workingman’s Dead, Anthem of the Sun, American Beauty, Live Dead and Terrapin Station. Notwithstanding the above, what I did like about Deadheads was when the tie-died circus came to the New York area, all of sudden there would be plentiful amounts of blotter acid, quality mescaline, DMT and opium around for weeks afterwards…

Drugs. Which brings me to the media below, recordings made of The Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters at the infamous San Francisco “Acid Tests,” as immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s classic book of “new journalism,” The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

This is the Dead in 1966, some of the earliest recordings that exist of the group, but what makes these tapes of even greater historical interest is that this is the soundtrack, essentially, of the “early adopters” of the psychedelic culture getting turned on together, as large groups gathered together in one place.

On that level, the recordings go from being merely an early period Grateful Dead bootleg and become something weirder, deeper and of Smithsonian Institute-level historical importance. Incidentally, today, April 16th,  is the 70th anniversary of Dr. Albert Hofmann’s 1943 discovery of LSD.

The sound can be ropey, but here it is…
 

 
This early film of the group playing at an “Acid Test” in Los Angeles on March 19, 1966 at Carthay Studio is some of the earliest footage that I’ve ever seen of the Grateful Dead:
 

 
“Hey, you got a hippie jam band in my punk rock peanut butter.”

Two great tastes that would taste terrible together in a Bay Area musical mash-up from Hell: Introducing “The Grateful Dead Kennedys” tee-shirt!

You can get one here for $20.00.

Via The World’s Best Ever

 
In this footage shot by the Maysles brothers on December 6, 1969 for the film Gimme Shelter, The Rolling Stones and The Grateful Dead wait for a helicopter on a pier in San Francisco to take them to the Altamont Speedway.

Jagger, in not so sympathetic devil-mode, foppishly preens and sashays like rock royalty, much to Jerry Garcia’s amusement, while attempting to force an unyielding Charlie Watts to bestow a kiss upon a groupie’s forehead. As Jagger continues to egg Watts on, Charlie responds with the classy retort “Love is much more of a deeper thing than that.. it is not flippant, to be thrown away on celluloid.”

Later that day, the whip would come down.

This footage never appeared in the final cut of Gimme Shelter. It did eventually turn up on DVD as part of the Get Yer Ya Ya Yas Out boxset.

Michael Azerrad has written an insightful piece on The Gimme Shelter outtakes on his blog.
 

 
Filmed during the Summer Of Love (1967) in the Haight-Ashbury, this groovy documentary features commentary from visionary poet Michael McClure, footage of The Grateful Dead hanging out at their Ashbury Street home, a visit to The Psychedelic Bookshop, The Straight Theater, scenes from McClure’s play The Beard and rare shots of the bard of The Haight, Richard Brautigan, walking through Panhandle Park in all of his glorious splendor.
 

 
Ken Kesey died 10 years ago this month, on the 10th November. In memory of the great man who was “too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie”, here is a brief film interview with the Merry Prankster, where he discusses the characters he met through the Acid Test; the Grateful Dead and The Beatles and the Power of Music; looking for the crack that brings the magic and the Deadheads - what Fame meant and their Legacy.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Ken Kesey: The Merry Pranksters’ Magic Trip

Ken Kesey hits back at critics of ‘One Flew Over the Cucloo’s Nest’